So off to my office I stalked, a happy amputee, more than ever eager to clean up drawers and shelves. I began, however, by dashing off a note to the President of the University, another new man, informing him with a touch of French malice, rather than English «malice,» that my entire set of one hundred lectures on European Masterpieces was about to be sold to a generous publisher who offered me an advance of half-a-million bucks (a salubrious exaggeration), thus making transmissions of my course no longer available to students, best regards, sorry not to have met you personally.
In the name of moral hygiene I had got rid long ago of my Bechstein desk. Its considerably smaller substitute contained note paper, scratch paper, office envelopes, photostats of my lectures, a copy of Dr. Olga Repnin (hard-back) which I had intended for a colleague (but had spoiled by misspelling his name), and a pair of warm gloves belonging to my
assistant (and successor) Exkul. Also three boxfuls of paper clips and a half-empty flask of whisky. From the shelves, I swept into the wastebasket, or onto the floor in its vicinity, heaps of circulars, separata, a displaced ecologist’s paper on the ravages committed by a bird of some sort, the Ozimaya Sovka («Lesser Winter-Crop Owl»?), and the tidily bound page proofs (mine always come in the guise of long, horribly slippery and unwieldy snakes) of picaresque trash, full of cricks and punts, imposed on me by proud publishers hoping for a rave from the lucky bastard. A mess of business correspondence and my tractatule on Space I stuffed into a large worn folder. Adieu, lair of learning!
Coincidence is a pimp and cardsharper in ordinary fiction but a marvelous artist in the patterns of fact recollected by a non-ordinary memoirist. Only asses and geese think that the re-collector skips this or that bit of his past because it is dull or shoddy (that sort of episode here, for example, the interview with the Dean, and how scrupulously it is recorded!). I was on the way to the parking lot when the bulky folder under my arm—replacing my arm, as it were—burst its string and spilled its contents all over the gravel and grassy border. You were coming from the library along the same campus path, and we crouched side by side collecting the stuff. You were pained you said later (zhalostno bylo) to smell the liquor on my breath. On the breath of that great writer.
I say «you» retroconsciously, although in the logic of life you were not «you» yet, for we were not actually acquainted and you were to become really «you» only when you said, catching a slip of yellow paper that was availing itself of a bluster to glide away with false insouciance:
«No, you don’t.»
Crouching, smiling, you helped me to cram everything again into the folder and then asked me how my daughter was—she and you had been schoolmates some fifteen years ago, and my wife had given you a lift several times. I then remembered your name and in a photic flash of celestial color saw you and Bel looking like twins, silently hating each other, both in blue coats and white hats, waiting to be driven somewhere by Louise. Bel and you would both be twenty-eight on January 1, 1970.
A yellow butterfly settled briefly on a clover head, then wheeled away in the wind.
«Metamorphoza,» you said in your lovely, elegant Russian.
Would I care to have some snapshots (additional snapshots) of Bel? Bel feeding a chipmunk? Bel at the school dance? (Oh, I remember that dance—she had chosen for escort a sad fat Hungarian boy whose father was assistant manager of the Quilton Hotel—I can still hear Louise snorting!)
We met next morning in my carrel at the College Library, and after that I continued to see you every day. I will not suggest, LATH is not meant to suggest, that the petals and plumes of my previous loves are dulled or coarsened when directly contrasted with the purity of your being, the magic, the pride, the reality of your radiance. Yet «reality» is the key word here; and the gradual perception of that reality was nearly fatal to me.
Reality would be only adulterated if I now started to narrate what you know, what I know, what nobody else knows, what shall never, never be ferreted out by a matter-of-fact, father-of-muck, mucking biograffitist. And how did your affair develop, Mr. Blong? Shut up, Ham Godman! And when did you decide to leave together for Europe? Damn you, Ham!
See under Real, my first novel in English, thirty-five years ago! One little item of subhuman interest I can disclose, however, in this
interview with posterity. It is a foolish, embarrassing trifle and I never told you about it, so here goes. It was on the eve of our departure, around March 15, 1970, in a New York hotel. You were out shopping. («I think»—you said to me just now when I tried to check that detail without telling you why—«I think I bought a beautiful blue suitcase with a zipper»—miming the word with a little movement of your dear delicate hand—«which proved to be absolutely useless.») I stood before the closet mirror of my bedroom in the north end of our pretty «suite,» and proceeded to take a final decision. All right, I could not live without you; but was I worthy of you—I mean, in body and spirit? I was forty-three years older than you. The Frown of Age, two deep lines forming a capital lambda, ascended between my eyebrows.
My forehead, with its three horizontal wrinkles that had not really overasserted themselves in the last three decades, remained round, ample and smooth, waiting for the summer tan that would scumble, I knew, the liver spots on my temples. All in all, a brow to be enfolded and fondled. A thorough haircut had done away with the leonine locks; what remained was of a neutral, grayish-dun tint. My large handsome glasses magnified the senile group of wart-like little excrescences under each lower eyelid. The eyes, once an irresistible hazel-green, were now oysterous. The nose, inherited from a succession of Russian boyars, German barons, and, perhaps (if Count Starov who sported some English blood was my real father), at least one Peer of the Realm, had retained its bone hump and tip rime, but had developed on the frontal flesh, within its owner’s memory, an aggravating gray hairlet that grew faster and faster between yanks. My dentures did not do justice to my former attractively irregular teeth and (as I told an expensive but obtuse dentist who did not understand what I meant) «seemed to ignore my smile.» A furrow sloped down from each nosewing, and a jowl pouch on each side of my chin formed in three-quarter-face the banal flexure common to old men of all races, classes, and professions. I doubted that I had been right in shaving off my glorious beard and the trim mustache that had lingered, on try, for a week or so after my return from Leningrad. Still, I passed my face, giving it a C-minus mark.
Since I had never been much of an athlete, the deterioration of my body was neither very marked, nor very interesting. I gave it a C plus, mainly for my routing tank after tank of belly fat in a war with obesity waged between intervals of retreat and rest since the middle Fifties. Apart from incipient lunacy (a problem with which I prefer to deal separately), I had been in excellent health throughout adulthood.
What about the state of my art? What could I offer to you there? You had studied, as I hope you recall, Turgenev in Oxford and Bergson in Geneva, but thanks to family ties with good old Quirn and Russian New York (where a last émigré periodical was still deploring, with idiotic innuendoes, my «apostasy») you had followed pretty closely, as I discovered, the procession of my Russian and English harlequins, followed by a tiger or two, scarlet-tongued, and a libellula girl on an elephant. You had also studied those obsolete photocopies—which proved that my method avait du bon after all—pace the monstrous accusations leveled at them by a pack of professors in envious colleges.
As I peered, stripped naked and traversed by opaline rays, into another, far deeper mirror, I saw the whole vista of my Russian books and was satisfied and even thrilled by what I saw: Tamara, my first novel (1925): a girl at sunrise in the mist of an orchard. A grandmaster betrayed in Pawn Takes Queen. Plenilune, a moonburst of verse. Camera Lucida, the spy’s mocking eye among the meek blind. The Red Top Hat of decapitation in a country of total injustice. And my best in the series: young poet writes prose on a Dare.
That Russian batch of my books was finished and signed and thrust back into the mind that had produced them. All of them had been gradually translated into English either by myself or under my direction, with my revisions. Those final English versions as well as the reprinted originals would be now dedicated to you. That was good. That was settled. Next picture:
My English originals, headed by the fierce See under Real (1940), led through the changing light of Esmeralda and Her Parandrus, to the fun of Dr. Olga Repnin and the dream of A Kingdom by the Sea.
