Ultima Thule, Vladimir Nabokov
DO YOU remember the day you and I were lunching (partaking of nourishment) a couple of years before
your death? Assuming, of course, that memory can live without its headdress? Let us imagine—just an
«apropositional» thought—some totally new handbook of epistolary samples. To a lady who has lost her
right hand: I kiss your ellipsis. To a deceased: Respecterfully yours. But enough of these sheepish
vignettes. If you don’t remember, then I remember for you: the memory of you can pass, grammatically
speaking at least, for your memory, and I am perfectly willing to grant for the sake of an ornate phrase
that if, after your death, I and the world still endure, it is only because you recollect the world and me. I
address you now for the following reason. I address you now on the following occasion. I address you
now simply to chat with you about Falter. What a fate! What a mystery! What a handwriting! When I
tire of trying to persuade myself that he is a half-wit or a kvak (as you used to Russianize the English
synonym for «charlatan»), he strikes me as a person who… who, because he survived the bomb of truth
that exploded in him… became a god! Beside him, how paltry seem all the bygone clairvoyants: the dust
raised by the herd at sunset, the dream within a dream (when you dream you have awakened), the
crack students in this our institute of learning hermetically closed to outsiders; for Falter stands outside
our world, in the true reality. Reality!—that is the pouter-pigeon throat of the snake that fascinates me.
Remember the time we lunched at the hotel managed by Falter near the luxuriant, many-terraced
Italian border, where the asphalt is infinitely exalted by the wisteria, and the air smells of rubber and
paradise? Adam Falter was still one of us then, and, if nothing about him presaged… what shall I call
it?—say, seerhood—nevertheless his whole strong cast (the caromlike coordination of his bodily
movements, as though he had ball bearings for cartilages, his precision, his aquiline aloofness) now, in
retrospect, explains why he survived the shock: the original figure was large enough to withstand the
subtraction.
Oh, my love, how your presence smiles from that fabled bay—and nevermore!—oh, I bite my
knuckles so as not to start shaking with sobs, but there is no holding them back; down I slide with locked
brakes, making «hoo» and «boohoo» sounds, and it is all such humiliating physical nonsense: the hot
blinking, the feeling of suffocation, the dirty handkerchief, the convulsive yawning alternating with the
tears—I just can’t, can’t live without you. I blow my nose, swallow, and then all over again try to
persuade the chair which I clutch, the desk which I pound, that I can’t boohoo without you. Are you able
to hear me? That’s from a banal questionnaire, which ghosts do not an-swer, but how willingly our
death-cell-mates respond for them; «I know!» (pointing skyward at random), «I’ll be glad to tell you!»
Your darling head, the hollow of your temple, the forget-me-not gray of an eye squinting at an incipient
kiss, the placid expression of your ears when you would lift up your hair… how can I reconcile myself to
vour disappearance, to this gaping hole, into which slides everything—my whole life, wet gravel, objects,
and habits—and what tombal tailings can prevent me from tumbling, with silent relish, into this abyss?
Vertigo of the soul. Remember how, right after you died, I hurried out of the sanatorium, not walking
but sort of stamping and even dancing with pain (life having got jammed in the door like a finger), alone
on that winding road among the exaggeratedly scaly pines and rhe prickly shields of agaves, in a green
armored world that quietly drew in its feet so as not to catch the disease. Ah, yes—everything around
me kept warily, attentively silent, and only when I looked at something did that something give a start
and begin ostentatiously to move, rustle, or buzz, pretending not to notice me. «Indifferent nature,» says
Pushkin. Nonsense! A continuous shying-away would be a more accurate description.
What a shame, though. You were such a darling. And, holding on to vou from within by a little
button, our child went with you. But, my poor sir, one does not make a child to a woman when she has
tuberculosis of the throat. Involuntary translation from French into Ha-dean. You died in your sixth
month and took the remaining twelve weeks with you, not paying off your debt in full, as it were. How
much I wanted her to bear me a child, the red-nosed widower informed the walls. Etes-vous tout a fait
certain, docteur, que la science ne connait pas de ces cas exceptionnels ou Venfant nait dans la tombe?
And the dream I had: that garlicky doctor (who was at the same time Falter, or was it Alexander
Vasilievich?) replying with exceptional readiness, that yes, of course it sometimes did happen, and that
such children (i.e., the posthumously born) were known as cadaverkins.
As to you, never once since you died have you appeared in my dreams. Perhaps the authorities
intercept you, or you yourself avoid such prison visits with me. At first, base ignoramus that I was, I
feared—superstitiously, humiliatingly—the small cracklings that a room always emits at night, but that
were now reflected within me by terrifying flashes which made my clucking heart scuttle away faster
with low-spread wings. Even worse, however, was the nighttime waiting, when I would lie in bed, trying
not to think how you might suddenly give me an answering knock if I thought about it, but this only
meant complicating the mental parenthesization, placing brackets within braces (thinking about trying
not to think), and the fear within them grew and grew. Oh, how awful was the dry tap of the phantasmal
fingernail inside the tabletop, and how little it resembled, of course, the intonation of your soul, of your
life. A vulgar ghost with the tricks of a woodpecker, a disincarnate humorist, a corny cobold taking
advantage of my stark-naked grief! In the daytime, on the other hand, I was fearless, and would
challenge you to manifest your responsiveness in any way you liked, as I sat on the pebbles of the beach,
where once your golden legs had been extended; and, as before, a wave would arrive, all out of breath,
but, as it had nothing to report, it would disperse in apologetic salaams. Pebbles like cuckoo eggs, a
piece of tile shaped like a pistol clip, a fragment of topaz-colored glass, something quite dry resembling a
whisk of bast, my tears, a microscopic bead, an empty cigarette package with a yellow-bearded sailor in
the center of a life buoy, a stone like a Pompeian’s foot, some creature’s small bone or a spatula, a
kerosene can, a shiver of garnet-red glass, a nutshell, a nondescript rusty thingum related to nothing, a
shard of porcelain, of which the companion fragments must inevitably exist somewhere—and I imagined
an eternal torment, a convict’s task, that would serve as the best punishment for such as I, whose
thoughts had ranged too far during their life span: namely, to find and gather all these parts, so as to re-
create that gravy boat or soup tureen—hunchbacked wanderings along wild, misty shores. And, after all,
if one is supremely lucky, one might restore the dish on the first morning instead of the trillionth— and
there it is, that most agonizing question of luck, of Fortune’s Wheel, of the right lottery ticket, without
which a given soul might be denied eternal felicity beyond the grave.
On these early spring days the narrow strip of shingle is unadorned and forlorn, but strollers
would pass along the promenade above, and this person or that, no doubt, must have said, on observing
my shoulder blades, «There’s Sineusov, the artist—lost his wife the other day.» And I would probably
have sat like that forever, picking at the desiccated jetsam, watching the stumbling foam, noting the
sham tenderness of elongated serial cloudlets all along the horizon and the wine-dark washes of warmth
in the chill blue-green of the sea, if someone indeed had not recognized me from the sidewalk.
However (as I fumble among the torn silks of phrase), let me re-turn to Falter. As you have by
now remembered, we went there once, on a torrid day, crawling like two ants up a flower-basket
ribbon, because I was curious to take a look at my former tutor (whose lessons were limited to witty
polemics with the compilers of my manuals), a resilient-looking, well-groomed man with a large white
nose and a flossy parting in his hair; and it was along this straight line that he later traveled to business
success, while his father, Ilya Falter, was only the senior chef at Menard’s in St. Petersburg: il y a pauvre
Ilya, turn-Ing on povar, which is «man cook» in Russian. My angel, oh my angel, perhaps our whole
earthly existence is now but a pun to you, or a grotesque rhyme, something like «dental» and
«transcendental» (remember?), and the true meaning of reality, of that piercing term, purged of all our
strange, dreamy, masquerade interpretations, now sounds so pure and sweet that you, angel, find it
amusing that we could have taken the dream seriously (although you and I did have an inkling of why
everything disintegrated at one furtive touch—words, conventions of everyday life, systems, persons—
so, you know, I think laughter is some chance little ape of truth astray in our world).
I was now seeing him after an interval of twenty years; and how right I had been, when
approaching the hotel, to construe all of its classical ornaments—the cedar of Lebanon, the eucalyptus,
the banana tree, the terra-cotta tennis court, the enclosure for cars beyond the lawn—as a ceremonial
of fortunate fate, as a symbol of the corrections that the former image of Falter now required! During
our years of separation (quite painless for us both) he had changed from a poor, wiry student with
animated night-dark eyes and a
