The furnished apartment we finally rented on the upper floor of a handsome house (10 Buffalo St.) was much to my liking because of an exceptionally comfortable study with a great bookcase full of works on American lore including an encyclopedia in twenty volumes. Annette would have preferred one of the dacha-like structures which the Administration also showed us; but she gave in when I pointed out to her that what looked snug and quaint in summer was bound to be chilly and weird the rest of the year.
Annette’s emotional health caused me anxiety: her graceful neck seemed even longer and thinner. An expression of mild melancholy lent a new, unwelcome, beauty to her Botticellian face: its hollowed outline below the zygoma was accentuated by her increasing habit of sucking in her cheeks when hesitative or pensive. All her cold petals remained closed in our infrequent lovemaking. Her abstraction grew perilous: stray cats at night knew that the same erratic deity that had not shut the kitchen window would leave ajar the door of the fridge; her bath regularly overflowed while she telephoned, knitting her innocent brows (what on earth did she care for my pains, my welling insanity!), to find out how the first-floor person’s migraine or menopause was faring; and that vagueness of hers in relation to me was also responsible for her omitting a precaution she was supposed to take, so that by the autumn, which followed our moving into the accursed Langley house, she informed me that the doctor she had just consulted looked the very image of Oksman and that she was two-months pregnant.
An angel is now waiting under my restless heels. Doomful despair would invade my poor Annette when she tried to cope with the intricacies of an American household. Our landlady, who occupied the first floor, resolved her perplexities in a jiffy. Two ravishing wiggly-bottomed Bermudian coeds, wearing their national costume, flannel shorts and open shirts, and practically twins in appearance, who took the celebrated «Hotel» course at Quirn, came to cook and char for her, and she offered to share with us their services.
«She’s a veritable angel,» confided Annette to me in her touchingly phony English.
I recognized in the woman the Assistant Professor of Russian whom I had met in a brick building on the campus when the head of her remarkably dreary department, meek myopic old Noteboke, invited me to attend an Advanced Group Class (My govorim po-russki. Vy govorite? Pogovorimte togda—that kind of awful stuff). Happily I had no connection whatever with Russian grammar at Quirn—except that my wife was eventually saved from utter boredom by being engaged to help beginners under Mrs. Langley’s direction.
Ninel Ilinishna Langley, a displaced person in more senses than one, had recently left her husband, the «great» Langley, author of A Marxist History of America, the bible (now out of print) of a whole generation of morons. I do not know the reason of their separation (after one year of American Sex, as the woman told Annette, who relayed the information to me in a tone of idiotic condolence); but I did have the occasion of seeing and disliking Professor Langley at an official dinner on the eve of his departure for Oxford. I disliked him for his daring to question my teaching Ulysses my way—in a purely textual light, without organic allegories and quasi-Greek myths and that sort of tripe; his «Marxism,» on the other hand, was a pleasantly comic and very mild affair (too mild, perhaps, for his wife’s taste) compared to the general attitude of ignorant admiration which American intellectuals had toward Soviet Russia. I remember the sudden hush, and furtive exchange of incredulous grimaces, when at a party, given for me by the most eminent member of our English department, I described the Bolshevist state as Philistine in repose and bestial in action; internationally vying in rapacious deceit with the praying mantis; doctoring the mediocrity of its literature by first sparing a few talents left over from a previous period and then blotting them out with their own blood. One professor, a left-wing moralist and dedicated muralist (he was experimenting that year with automobile paint), stalked out of the house.
He wrote me next day, however, a really magnificent, larger-than-nature letter of apology saying that he could not be really cross with the author of Esmeralda and Her Parandrus (1941), which despite its «motley style and baroque imagery» was a masterpiece «pinching strings of personal poignancy which he, a committed artist, never knew could vibrate in him.» Reviewers of my books took the same line, chiding me formally for underestimating the «greatness» of Lenin, yet paying me compliments of a kind that could not fail to touch, in the long run, even me, a scornful and austere author, whose homework in Paris had never received its due. Even the President of Quirn, who timorously sympathized with the fashionable Sovietizers, was really on my side: he told me when he called on us (while Ninel crept up to grow an ear on our landing) that he was proud, etc., and had found my «last (?) book very interesting» though he could not help regretting that I took every opportunity of criticizing «our Great Ally» in my classes. I answered, laughing, that this criticism was a child’s caress when set alongside the public lecture on «The Tractor in Soviet Literature» that I planned to deliver at the end of the term. He laughed, too, and asked Annette what it was like to live with a genius (she only shrugged her pretty shoulders). All this was trхs amиricain and thawed a whole auricle in my icy heart.
But to return to good Ninel.
She had been christened Nonna at birth (1902) and renamed twenty years later Ninel (or Ninella), as petitioned by her father, a Hero of Toil and a toady. She wrote it Ninella in English but her friends called her Ninette or Nelly just as my wife’s Christian name Anna (as Nonna liked to observe) turned into Annette and Netty.
Ninella Langley was a stocky, heavily built creature with a ruddy and rosy face (the two tints unevenly distributed), short hair dyed a mother-in-law ginger, brown eyes even madder than mine, very thin lips, a fat Russian nose, and three or four hairs on her chin. Before the young reader heads for Lesbos, I wish to say that as far as I could discover (and I am a peerless spy) there was nothing sexual in her ludicrous and unlimited affection for my wife. I had not yet acquired the white Desert Lynx that Annette did not live to see, so it was Ninella who took her shopping in a dilapidated jalopy while the resourceful lodger, sparing the copies of his own novels, would autograph for the grateful twins old mystery paperbacks and unreadable pamphlets from the Langley collection in the attic whose dormer looked out obligingly on the road to, and from, the Shopping Center. It was Ninella who kept her adored «Netty» well supplied with white knitting wool. It was Ninella who twice daily invited her for a cup of coffee or tea in her rooms; but the woman made a point of avoiding our flat, at least when
we were at home, under the pretext that it still reeked of her husband’s tobacco: I rejoined that it was my own pipe—and later, on the same day, Annette told me I really ought not to smoke so much, especially indoors; and she also upheld another absurd complaint coming from downstairs, namely, that I walked back and forth too late and too long, right over Ninella’s forehead. Yes—and a third grievance: why didn’t I put back the encyclopedia volumes in alphabetic order as her husband had always been careful to do, for (he said) «a misplaced book is a lost book»—quite an aphorism.
Dear Mrs. Langley was not particularly happy about her job. She owned a lakeside bungalow («Rustic Roses») thirty miles north of Quirn, not very far from Honeywell College, where she taught summer school and with which she intended to be even more closely associated, if a «reactionary» atmosphere persisted at Quirn. Actually, her only grudge was against decrepit Mme. de Korchakov, who had accused her, in public, of having a sdobnyy («mellow») Soviet accent and a provincial vocabulary—all of which could not be denied, although Annette maintained I was a heartless bourgeois to say so.
2
The infant Isabel’s first four years of life are so firmly separated in my consciousness by a blank of seven years from Bel’s girlhood that I seem to have had two different children, one a cheerful red-cheeked little thing, and the other her pale and morose elder sister.
I had laid in a stock of ear plugs; they proved superfluous: no crying came from the nursery to interfere with my work—Dr. Olga Repnin, the story of an invented Russian professor in America, which was to be published (after a bothersome spell of serialization entailing endless proofreading) by Lodge in 1946, the year Annette left me, and acclaimed as «a blend of humor and humanism» by alliteration-prone reviewers, comfortably unaware of what I was to prepare some fifteen years later for their horrified delectation.
I enjoyed watching Annette as she took color snapshots of the baby and me in the garden. I loved perambulating a fascinated
