Vladimir Nabokov. Conversation Piece, 1945
© 1945 Copyright by Vladimir Nabokov
I happen to have a disreputable namesake, complete from
nickname to surname, a man whom I have never seen in the flesh
but whose vulgar personality I have been able to deduce from
his chance intrusions into the castle of my life. The tangle
began in Prague, where I happened to be living in the middle
twenties. A letter came to me there from a small library
apparently attached to some sort of White Army organization
which, like myself, had moved out of Russia. In exasperated
tones, it demanded that I return at once a copy of the
Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion. This book, which in
the old days had been wistfully appreciated by the Tsar, was a
fake memorandum the secret police had paid a semiliterate crook
to compile; its sole object was the promotion of pogroms. The
librarian, who signed himself "Sinepuzov" (a surname meaning
"blue belly, '" which affects a Russian imagination in much the
same way as Winterbottom does an English one), insisted that I
had been keeping what he chose to call "this popular and
valuable work" for more than a year. He referred to previous
requests addressed to me in Belgrade, Berlin, and Brussels,
through which towns my namesake apparently had been drifting.
I visualized the fellow as a young, very White emigre, of
the automatically reactionary type, whose education had been
interrupted by the Revolution and who was successfully making
up for lost time along traditional lines. He obviously was a
great traveler; so was I-- our only point in common. A Russian
woman in Strasbourg asked me whether the man who had married
her niece in Liиge was my brother. One spring day, in Nice, a
poker-faced girl with long earrings called at my hotel, asked
to see me, took one look at me, apologized, and went away. In
Paris, I received a telegram which jerkily ran, "NE VIENS PAS
ALPHONSE DE RETOUR SOUPCONNE SOIS PRUDENT JE T'ADORE
ANGOISSEE," and l admit deriving a certain grim satisfaction
from the vision of my frivolous double inevitably bursting in,
flowers in hand, upon Alphonse and his wife. A few years later,
when I was lecturing in Zurich, I was suddenly arrested on a
charge of smashing three mirrors in a restaurant-- a
kind of triptych featuring my namesake drunk (the first
mirror), very drunk (the second), and roaring drunk (the
third). Finally, in 1938, a French consul rudely refused to
stamp my tattered sea-green Nansen passport because, he said, I
had entered the country once before without a permit. In the
fat dossier which was eventually produced, I caught a glimpse
of my namesake's face. He had a clipped mustache and a crew
haircut, the bastard.
When, soon after that, I came over to the United States
and settled down in Boston, I felt sure I had shaken off my
absurd shadow. Then-- last month, to be precise-- there came a
telephone call.
In a hard and glittering voice, a woman said she was Mrs.
Sybil Hall, a close friend of Mrs. Sharp, who had written to
her suggesting that she contact me. I did know a Mrs.
Sharp and didn't stop to think that both my Mrs. Sharp and
myself might not be the right ones. Golden-voiced Mrs. Hall
said she was having a little meeting at her apartment Friday
night and would I come, because she was sure from what she had
heard about me that I would be very, very much interested in
the discussion. Although meetings of any kind are loathsome to
me, I was prompted to accept the invitation by the thought that
if I did not I might in some way disappoint Mrs. Sharp, a nice,
maroon-trousered, short-haired old lady whom I had met on Cape
Cod, where she shared a cottage with a younger woman; both
ladies are mediocre leftist artists of independent means, and
completely amiable.
Owing to a misadventure, which had nothing to do with the
subject of the present account, I arrived much later than I
intended at Mrs. Hall's apartment house. An ancient elevator
attendant, oddly resembling Richard Wagner, gloomily took me
up, and Mrs. Hall's unsmiling maid, her long arms hanging down
her sides, waited while I removed my overcoat and rubbers in
the hall. Here the chief decorative note was a certain type of
ornamental vase manufactured in China, and possibly of great
antiquity-- in this case a tall, sickly-colored brute of a
thing-- which always makes me abominably unhappy.
As I crossed a self-conscious, small room that fairly
brimmed with symbols of what advertisement writers call
"gracious living" and was being ushered-- theoretically, for
the maid had dropped away-- into a large, mellow, bourgeois
salon, it gradually dawned upon me that this was exactly the
sort of place where one would expect to be introduced to some
old fool who had had caviar in the Kremlin or to some wooden
Soviet Russian, and that my acquaintance Mrs. Sharp, who had
for some reason always resented my contempt for the Party line
and for the Communist and his Master's Voice, had decided, poor
soul, that such an experience might have a beneficial influence
upon my sacrilegious mind.
From a group of a dozen people, my hostess emerged in the
form of a long-limbed, flat-chested woman with lipstick on her
prominent front teeth. She introduced me rapidly to the guest
of honor and her other guests, and the discussion, which had
been interrupted by my entrance, was at once resumed. The guest
of honor was answering questions. He was a fragile-looking man
with sleek, dark hair and a glistening brow, and he was so
brightly illumined by the long-stalked lamp at his shoulder
that one could distinguish the specks of dandruff on the collar
of his dinner jacket and admire the whiteness of his clasped
hands, one of which I had found to be incredibly limp and
moist. He was the type of fellow whose weak chin, hollow
cheeks, and unhappy Adam's apple reveal, a couple of hours
after shaving, when the humble talcum powder has worn off, a
complex system of pink blotches overlaid with a stipple of
bluish gray. He wore a crested ring, and for some odd reason I
recalled a swarthy Russian girl in New York who was so troubled
by the possibility of being mistaken for her notion of a Jewess
that she used to wear a cross upon her throat, although she had
as little religion as brains. The speaker's English was
admirably fluent, but the hard "djair" in his
pronunciation of "Germany" and the persistently recurring
epithet "wonderful," the first syllable of which sounded like
"wan, -"proclaimed his Teutonic origin. He was, or had
been, or was to become, a professor of German, or music, or
both, somewhere in the Middle West, but I did not catch his
name and so shall call him Dr. Shoe.
"Naturally he was mad!" exclaimed Dr. Shoe in
answer to something one of the ladies had asked. "Look, only a
madman could have messed up the war the way he did. And I
certainly hope, as you do, that before long, if he should turn
out to be alive, he will be safely interned in a sanatorium
somewhere in a neutral country. He has earned it. It was
madness to attack Russia instead of invading England. It was
madness to think that the war with Japan would prevent
Roosevelt from participating' energetically in European
affairs. The worst madman is the one who fails to consider the
possibility of somebody else's being mad too."
"One cannot help feeling," said a fat little lady called,
I think, Mrs. Mulberry, "that thousands of our boys who have
been killed in the Pacific would still be alive if all those
planes and tanks we gave England and Russia had been used to
destroy Japan."
"Exactly," said Dr. Shoe. "And that was Adolf Hitler's
mistake. Being mad, he failed to take into account the scheming
of irresponsible politicians. Being mad, he believed that other
governments would act in accordance with the principles of
mercy and common sense."
"I always think of Prometheus," said Mrs. Hall.
"Prometheus, who stole fire and was blinded by the angry gods."
An old lady in a bright blue dress, who sat knitting in a
corner, asked Dr. Shoe to explain why the Germans had not risen
against Hitler.
Dr. Shoe lowered his eyelids for a moment. "The answer is
a terrible one," he said with an effort. "As you know, I am
German myself, of pure Bavarian stock, though a loyal citizen
of this country. And nevertheless, I am going to say something
very terrible about my former countrymen. Germans"-- the
soft-lashed eyes were half-closed again-- "Germans are
dreamers."
By this time, of course, I had fully realized that Mrs.
Hall's Mrs. Sharp was as totally distinct from my Mrs. Sharp as
I was from my namesake. The nightmare into which I had been
propelled would probably have struck him as a cozy evening with
kindred souls, and Dr. Shoe might have seemed to him a most
intelligent and brilliant causeur. Timidity, and perhaps
morbid curiosity, kept me from leaving the room. Moreover, when
I get excited, I stammer so badly that any attempt on my part
to tell Dr. Shoe what I thought of him would have sounded like
the explosions of a motorcycle which refuses to start on a
frosty night in an intolerant suburban lane. I looked around,
trying to convince myself that these were real people and not a
Punch-and-Judy show.
None of the women were pretty; all had reached or
overreached forty-five. All, one could be certain, belonged to
book clubs, bridge clubs, babble clubs, and to the great, cold
sorority of inevitable death. All looked cheerflilly sterile.
Possibly some of them had had children, but how they had
produced them was now a forgotten mystery; many had found
substitutes for creative power in various aesthetic pursuits,
such as, for instance, the beautifying of committee rooms. As I
glanced at the one sitting next to me, an intense-looking lady
with a freckled neck, I knew that, while patchily listening to
Dr. Shoe, she was, in all probability, worrying about a bit of
decoration having to do with some social event or wartime
entertainment the exact nature of which I could not determine.
But I did know how badly she needed that additional touch.
Something in the middle of the table, she was thinking. I need
something that would make people gasp-- perhaps a great big
huge bowl of artificial fruit. Not the wax kind, of course.
Something nicely marbleized.
It is most regrettable that I did not fix the ladies'
names in my mind when I was introduced to them. Two willowy,
interchangeable maiden ladies on hard chairs had names
beginning with W, and, of the others, one was certainly
called Miss Bissing. This I had heard distinctly, but could not
later connect with any particular face or facelike object.
There was only one other man besides Dr. Shoe and myself. He
turned out to be a compatriot of mine, a Colonel Malikov or
Melnikov; in Mrs. Hall's rendering it had sounded more like
"Milwaukee."' While some soft, pale drinks were being passed
around, he leaned toward me with a leathery, creaking sound, as
if he wore a harness under his shabby blue suit, and informed
me in a hoarse Russian whisper that he had had the honor of
knowing my esteemed uncle, whom I at once visualized as a ruddy
but unpalatable apple on my namesake's family tree. Dr. Shoe,
however, was becoming eloquent again, and the Colonel
straightened up, revealing a broken yellow tusk in his
retreating smile and promising me by means of discreet gestures
that we would have a good talk later on.
"The tragedy of Germany," said Dr. Shoe as he carefully
folded the paper napkin with which he had wiped his thin lips,
"is also the tragedy of cultured America. I have spoken at
numerous women's clubs and other educational centers, and
everywhere I have noted how deeply this European war, now
mercifully ended, was loathed by refined, sensitive souls. I
have also noted how eagerly cultured Americans revert in memory
to happier days, to their traveling experiences abroad, to some
unforgettable month or still more unforgettable year they once
spent in the country of art, music, philosophy, and good humor.
They remember the dear friends they had there, and their season
of education and well-being in the bosom of a German nobleman's
family, the exquisite cleanness of everything, the '..songs at
the close of a perfect day, the wonderful little towns, and all
that world of kindliness and romance they found in Munich or
Dresden." "My Dresden is no more," said Mrs. Mulberry.
"Our bombs have destroyed it and everything it stands for."
"British ones, in this particular case," said Dr. Shoe
gently. "But, of course, war is war, although I admit one finds
it difficult to imagine German bombers deliberately selecting
for their target some sacred historical spot in Pennsylvania or
Virginia. Yes, war is terrible. In fact, it becomes almost
intolerably so when it is forced upon two nations that have so
many things in common. It may strike you as a paradox, but
really, when one thinks of the soldiers slaughtered in Europe,
one says to oneself that they are at least spared the terrible
misgivings which we civilians must suffer in silence."
"I think that is very true," remarked Mrs. Hall, slowly
nodding her head.
"What about those stories?" asked an old lady who was
knitting. "Those stories the papers keep printing about the
German atrocities. I suppose all that is mostly propaganda?"
Dr. Shoe smiled a tired smile. "I was expecting that
question," he said with a touch of sadness in his voice.
"Unfortunately, propaganda, exaggeration, faked photographs,
and so on are the tools of modern war. I should not be
surprised if the Germans themselves had made up stories about
the cruelty of the American troops to innocent civilians. Just
think of all the nonsense which was invented about the
so-called German atrocities in the First World War-- those
horrible legends about Belgian women being seduced, and so on.
Well, immediately after the war, in the summer of 1920, if I am
not mistaken, a special committee of German democrats
thoroughly investigated the whole matter, and we all know how
pedantically thorough and precise German experts can be. Well,
they did not find one scintilla of evidence to prove that
Germans had not acted like soldiers and gentlemen."
One of the Misses W. ironically remarked that foreign
correspondents must make a living. Her remark was witty.
Everybody appreciated her ironical and witty remark.
"On the other hand," continued Dr. Shoe when the ripples
had subsided, "let us forget propaganda for a moment and turn
to dull facts. Allow me to draw you a little picture from the
past, a rather sad little picture, but perhaps a necessary one.
I will ask you to imagine German boys proudly entering some
Polish or Russian town they had conquered. They sang as they
marched. They did not know that their Fuhrer was mad; they
innocently believed that they were bringing hope and happiness
and wonderful order to" the fallen town. They could not know
that owing to subsequent mistakes and delusions on the part of
Adolf Hitler, their conquest would eventually lead to the
enemy's making a flaming battlefield of the very cities to
which they, those German boys, thought they were bringing
everlasting peace. As they bravely marched through the streets
in all their finery, with their wonderful war machines and
their banners, they smiled at everybody and everything because
they were pathetically good-natured and well-meaning. They
innocently expected the same friendly attitude on the part of
the population. Then, gradually, they realized that the streets
through which they so boyishly, so confidently, marched were
lined with silent and motionless crowds of Jews, who glared at
them with hatred and who insulted each passing soldier, not by
words-- they were too clever for that-- but by black looks and
ill-concealed sneers."'
"I know that kind of look," said Mrs. Hall grimly.
"But they did not,"' said Dr. Shoe in plaintive
tones. "That is the point. They were puzzled. They did not
understand, and they were hurt. So what did they do? At first
they tried to fight that hatred with patient explanations and
little tokens of kindness. But the wall of hatred surrounding
them only got thicker. Finally they were forced to imprison the
leaders of the vicious and arrogant coalition. What else could
they do?"
"I happen to know an old Russian Jew," said Mrs. Mulberry.
"Oh, just a business acquaintance of Mr. Mulberry's. Well, he
confessed to me once that he would gladly strangle with his own
hands the very first German soldier he met. I was so shocked
that I just stood there and did not know what to answer."
"I would have," said a stout woman who sat with her knees
wide apart. "As a matter of fact, one hears much too much about
punishing the Germans. They, too, are human beings. And any
sensitive person will agree with what you say about their not
being responsible for those so-called atrocities, most of which
have probably been invented by the Jews. I get mad when I hear
people still jabbering about furnaces and torture houses which,
if they existed at all, were operated by only a few men as
insane as Hitler."
"Well, I am afraid one must be understanding," said Dr.
Shoe, with his impossible smile, "and take into account the
workings of the vivid Semitic imagination which controls the
American press. And one must remember, too, that there were
many purely sanitary measures which the orderly German troops
had to adopt in dealing with the corpses of the elderly who had
died in camp, and, in some cases, in disposing of the victims
of typhus epidemics. I am quite free from any racial prejudices
myself, and I can't see how these age-old racial problems have
anything to do with the attitude to be adopted toward Germany
now that she has surrendered. Especially when I remember the
way the British treat natives in their colonies."
"Or how the Jewish Bolsheviks used to treat the Russian
people-- ai-ai-ai!" remarked Colonel Melnikov.
"Which is no more the case, is it?" asked Mrs. Hall.
"No, no," said the Colonel. "The great Russian people has
waked up and my country is again a great country. We had three
great leaders. We had Ivan, whom his enemies called Terrible,
then we had Peter the Great, and now we have Joseph Stalin. I
am a White Russian and have served in the Imperial Guards, but
also I am a Russian patriot and a Russian Christian. Today, in
every word that comes out of Russia, I feel the power, I feel
the splendor of old Mother Russia. She is again a country of
soldiers, religion, and true Slavs. Also, I know that when the
Red Army entered German towns, not a single hair fell from
German shoulders."
"Head," said Mrs. Hall.
"Yes," said the Colonel. "Not a single head from their
shoulders."
"We all admire your countrymen," said Mrs. Mulberry. "But
what about Communism spreading to Germany?"
"If I may be permitted to offer a suggestion," said Dr.
Shoe, "I would like to point out that if we are not careful,
there will be no Germany. The main problem which this country
will have to face is to prevent the victors from enslaving the
German nation and sending the young and hale and the lame and
old-- intellectuals and civilians-- to work like convicts in
the vast area of the East. This is against all the principles
of democracy and war. If you tell me that the Germans did the
same thing to the nations they conquered, I will remind you of
three things: first, that the German State was not a democracy
and couldn't be expected to act like one; secondly, that most,
if not all, of the so-called slaves came of their own free
will; and in the third place-- and this is the most important
point-- that they were well fed, well clothed, and lived in
civilized surroundings which, in spite of all our natural
enthusiasm for the immense population and geography of Russia,
Germans are not likely to find in the country of the Soviets.
"Neither must we forget," continued Dr. Shoe, with a
dramatic rise in his voice, "that Nazism was really not a
German but an alien organization oppressing the German people.
Adolf Hitler was an Austrian, Lev a Jew, Rosenberg half-French,
half-Tartar. The German nation has suffered under this
non-German yoke just as much as other European countries have
suffered from the effects of the war waged on their soil. To
civilians, who not only have been crippled and lulled but whose
treasured possessions and wonderful homes have been annihilated
by bombs, it matters little whether those bombs were dropped by
a German or an Allied plane. Germans, Austrians, Italians,
Rumanians, Greeks, and all the other peoples of Europe are now
members of one tragic brotherhood, all are equal in misery and
hope, all should be treated alike, and let us leave the task of
finding and judging the guilty to future historians, to
unbiased old scholars in the immortal centers of European
culture, in the serene universities of Heidelberg, Bonn, Jena,
Leipzig, Munchen. Let the phoenix of Europe spread its eagle
wings again, and God bless America."
There was a reverent pause while Dr. Shoe tremulously
lighted a cigarette, and then Mrs. Hall, pressing the palms of
her hands together in a charming, girlish gesture, begged him
to round out the meeting with some lovely music. He sighed, got
up, trod upon my foot in passing, apologetically touched my
knee with the tips of his fingers, and, having sat down before
the piano, bowed his head and remained motionless for several
audibly silent seconds. Then, slowly and very gently, he laid
his cigarette on an ashtray, removed the ashtray from the piano
into Mrs. Hall's helpful hands, and bent his head again. At
last he said, with a little catch in his voice, "First of all,
I will play 'The Star-Spangled Banner. ' "
Feeling that this was more than I could stand-- in fact,
having reached a point where I was beginning to feel physically
sick-- 1 got up and hurriedly left the room. As I was
approaching the closet where I had seen the maid store my
things, Mrs. Hall overtook me, together with a billow of
distant music.
"Must you leave?" she said. "Must you really leave?"
I found my overcoat, dropped the hanger, and stamped into
my rubbers.
"You are either murderers or fools," I said, "or both, and
that man is a filthy German agent."
As I have already mentioned, I am afflicted with a bad
stammer at crucial moments and therefore the sentence did not
come out as smooth as it is on paper. But it worked. Before she
could gather herself to answer, I had slammed the door behind
me and was carrying my overcoat downstairs as one carries a
child out of a house on fire. I was in the street when I
noticed that the hat I was about to put on did not belong to
me.
It was a well-worn fedora, of a deeper shade of gray than
my own and with a narrower brim. The head it was meant for was
smaller than mine. The inside of the hat carried the label
"Werner Bros. Chicago" and smelled of another man's hairbrush
and hair lotion. It could not belong to Colonel Melnikov, who
was as bald "as a bowling ball, and I assumed that Mrs. Hall's
husband was either dead or kept his hats in another place. It
was a disgusting object to carry about, but the night was rainy
and cold, and I used the thing as a kind of rudimentary
umbrella. As soon as I got home, I started writing a letter to
the Federal Bureau of Investigation, but did not get very far.
My inability to catch and retain names seriously impaired the
quality of the information I was trying to impart, and since I
had to explain my presence at the meeting, a lot of diffuse and
vaguely suspicious matter concerning my own namesake had to be
dragged in. Worst of all, the whole affair assumed a dreamlike,
grotesque aspect when related in detail, whereas all I really
had to say was that a person from some unknown address in the
Middle West, a person whose name I did not even know, had been
talking sympathetically about the German people to a group of
silly old women in a private house. Indeed, judging by the
expression of that same sympathy continuously cropping up in
the writings of certain well-known columnists, the whole thing
might be perfectly legal, for all I knew.
Early the next morning I opened the door in answer to a
ring, and there was Dr. Shoe, bareheaded, raincoated, silently
offering me my hat, with a cautious half-smile on his
blue-and-pink face. I took the hat and mumbled some thanks.
This he mistook for an invitation to come in. I could not
remember where I had put his fedora, and the feverish search I
had to conduct, more or less in his presence, soon became
ludicrous.
"Look here," I said. "I shall mail, I shall send, I shall
forward you that hat when I find it, or a check, if I don't."
"But I'm leaving this afternoon," he said gently, "and
moreover, I would like to have a little explanation of the
strange remark you addressed to my very dear friend Mrs. Hall."
He waited patiently while I tried to tell him as neatly as
I could that the police, the authorities, would explain that to
her.
"You do not understand," he said at length. "Mrs. Hall is
a very well-known society lady and has numerous connections in
official circles. Thank God we live in a great country, where
everybody can speak his mind without being insulted for
expressing a private opinion."
I told him to go away.
When my final splutter had petered out, he said, "I go
away, but please remember, in this country-- " and he shook his
bent finger at me sidewise, German fashion, in facetious
reproof.
Before I could decide where to hit him, he had glided out.
I was trembling all over. My inefficiency, which at times has
amused me and even pleased me in a subtle way, now
appeared atrocious and base. All of a sudden I caught sight of
Dr. Shoe's hat on a heap of old magazines under the little
telephone table in my hall. I hurried to a front window, opened
it, and, as Dr. Shoe emerged four stories below, tossed the hat
in his direction. It described a parabola and made a pancake
landing in the middle of the street. There it turned a
somersault, missed a puddle by a matter of inches, and lay
gaping, wrong side up. Dr. Shoe, without looking up, waved his
hand in acknowledgment, retrieved the hat, satisfied himself
that it was not too muddy, put it on, and walked away, jauntily
wiggling his hips. I have often wondered why is it that a thin
German always manages to look so plump behind when wearing a
raincoat.
All that remains to be told is that a week later I
received a letter the peculiar Russian of which can hardly be
appreciated in translation. "Esteemed Sir," it read.
"You have been pursuing me all my life. Good, friends of
mine, after reading your books, have turned, away from me
thinking that I was the author of those deprayed,, decadent
writings. In 1941, and again in 1943, I was arrested in trance
by the Germans for things I never had. said or thought. Now in
America, not content with having caused me all sorts of
troubles in other countries, you have the arrogance to
impersonate me and to appear in a drunken condition at the
house of a highly respected person. This I will not tolerate. I
could have you jailed and branded as an impostor, but I suppose
you would not like that, and, so I suggest that by way of
indemnity. . . " The sum he demanded was really a most
modest one.