Vladimir Nabokov. Gods
© Copyright 1924 by Vladimir Nabokov
© Copyright by Dmitry Nabokov, english translation
Here is what I see in your eyes right now: rainy night,
narrow street, streetlamps gliding away into the distance. The
water runs down the drainpipes from steeply sloping roofs.
Under the snake's-mouth of each pipe stands a green-hooped
bucket. Rows of buckets line the black walls on either side of
the street. I watch as they fill with cold mercury. The pluvial
mercury swells and overflows. The bareheaded lamps float in the
distance, their rays standing on end in the rainy murk. The
water in the buckets is overflowing.
Thus I gain entry to your overcast eyes, to a narrow alley
of black glimmer where the nocturnal rain gurgles and rustles.
Give me a smile. Why do you look at me so balefully and darkly?
It's morning. All night the stars shrieked with infant voices
and, on the roof, someone lacerated and caressed a violin with
a sharp bow. Look, the sun slowly crossed the wall like a
blazing sail. You emanate an enveloping smoky haze. Dust starts
swirling in your eyes, millions of golden worlds. You smiled!
We go out on the balcony. It's spring. Below, in the
middle of the street, a yellow-curled boy works lickety-split,
sketching a god. The god stretches from one sidewalk to the
other. The boy is clutching a piece of chalk in his hand, a
little piece of white charcoal and he's squatting, circling,
drawing with broad strokes. This white god has large white
buttons and turned-out feet. Crucified on the asphalt, he looks
skyward with round eyes. He has a white arc for a mouth. A
log-sized cigar has appeared in his mouth. With helical jabs
the boy makes spirals representing smoke. Arms akimbo, he
contemplates his work. He adds another button. . . . A window
frame clanked across the way; a female voice, enormous and
happy, rang out summoning him. The boy gave the chalk a punt
and dashed inside. On the purplish asphalt remained the white
geometric god, gazing skyward.
Your eyes again grew murky. I realized, of course, what
you were remembering. In a corner of our bedroom, under the
icon, there is a colored rubber ball. Sometimes it hops softly
and sadly from the table and rolls gently on the floor.
Put it back in its place under the icon, and then why
don't we go take a walk?
Spring air. A little downy. See those lindens lining the
street? Black boughs covered with wet green spangles. All the
trees in the world are journeying somewhere. Perpetual
pilgrimage. Remember, when we were on our way here, to this
city, the trees traveling past the windows of our railroad car?
Remember the twelve poplars conferring about how to cross the
river? Earlier, still, in the Crimea, I once saw a cypress
bending over an almond tree in bloom. Once upon a time the
cypress had been a big, tall chimney sweep with a brush on a
wire and a ladder under his arm. Head over heels in love, poor
fellow, with a little laundry maid, pink as almond petals. Now
they have met at last, and are on their way somewhere together.
Her pink apron balloons in the breeze; he bends toward her
timidly, as if still worried he might get some soot on her.
First-rate fable.
All trees are pilgrims. They have their Messiah, whom they
seek. Their Messiah is a regal Lebanese cedar, or perhaps he is
quite small, some totally inconspicuous little shrub in the
tundra. . , .
Today some lindens are passing through town. There was an
attempt to restrain them. Circular fencing was erected around
their trunks. But they move all the same. . . .
The roofs blaze like oblique, sun-blinded mirrors. A
winged woman stands on a windowsill washing the panes. She
bends over, pouts, brushes a strand offlaming hair from her
face. The air is faintly redolent of gasoline and lindens. Who
can tell, today, just what emanations gently greeted a guest
entering a Pompeian atrium? A half-century from now no one will
know the smells that prevailed in our streets and rooms. They
will excavate some military hero of stone, of which there are
hundreds in every city, and heave a sigh for Phidias of yore.
Everything in the world is beautiful, but Man only recognizes
beauty if he sees it either seldom or from afar. . . . Listen .
. . today, we are gods! Our blue shadows are enormous. We move
in a gigantic, joyous world. A tall pillar on the corner is
tightly swathed in wet canvases, across which a paintbrush has
scattered colored whirlwinds. The old woman who sells papers
has curling gray hairs on her chin, and mad light-blue eyes.
Unruly newspapers stick chaotically out of her pouch. Their
large type makes me think of flying zebras. A bus stops at its
signpost. Upstairs the conductor ba-bangs with his palm on the
iron gunwale. The helmsman gives his huge wheel a mighty turn.
A mounting, labored moan, a brief grinding sound. The wide
tires have left silver imprints on the asphalt. Today, on this
sunny day, anything is possible. Look--a man has jumped from a
roof onto a wire and is walking on it, splitting with laughter,
his arms wide-spread, high over the rocking street. Look--two
buildings have just had a harmonious game of leapfrog; number
three ended up between one and two; it did not fully settle
right away--1 saw a gap below it, a narrow band of sunlight.
And a woman stopped in the middle of a square, threw back her
head, and started singing; a crowd gathered around her, then
surged back: an empty dress lies on the asphalt, and up in the
sky there's a transparent cloudlet.
You're laughing. When you laugh, I want to transform the
entire world so it will mirror you. But your eyes are instantly
extinguished. You say, passionately, fearfully, "Would you like
to go . . . there? Would you? It's lovely there today,
everything's in bloom. . . ."
Certainly it's all in bloom, certainly we'll go. For
aren't you and I gods? . . . I sense in my blood the rotation
of unexplorable universes. . . .
Listen--1 want to run all my life, screaming at the top of
my lungs. Let all of life be an unfettered howl. Like the crowd
greeting the gladiator.
Don't stop to think, don't interrupt the scream, exhale,
release life's rapture. Everything is blooming. Everything is
flying. Everything is screaming, choking on its screams.
Laughter. Running. Let-down hair. That is all there is to life.
They are leading camels along the street, on the way from
the circus to the zoo. Their plump humps list and sway. Their
long, gentle faces are turned up a little, dreamily. How can
death exist when they lead camels along a springtime street? At
the corner, an unexpected whiff of Russian foliage; a beggar, a
divine monstrosity, turned all inside out, feet growing out of
armpits, proffers, with a wet, shaggy paw, a bunch of greenish
lilies-of-the-val . . . I bump a passerby with my shoulder. . .
. Momentary collision of two giants. Merrily, magnificently, he
swings at me with his lacquered cane. The tip, on the
backswing, breaks a shopwindow behind him. Zigzags shoot across
the shiny glass. No--it's only the splash of mirrored sunlight
in my eyes. Butterfly, butterfly! Black with scarlet bands. . .
. A scrap of velvet. . . . It swoops above the asphalt, soars
over a speeding car and a tall building, into the humid azure
of the April sky. Another, identical butterfly once settled on
the white border of an arena; Lesbia, senator's daughter,
gracile, dark-eyed, with a gold ribbon on her forehead,
entranced by the palpitating wings, missed the split second,
the whirlwind of blinding dust, in which the bull-like neck of
one combatant crunched under the other's naked knee.
Today my soul is filled with gladiators, sunlight, the
world's din. .. .
We descend a wide staircase into a long, dim underground
chamber. Flagstones resound vibrantly under our steps.
Representations of burning sinners adorn the gray walls. Black
thunder, in the distance, swells in velvet folds. It bursts
forth all around us. We rush headlong, as if awaiting a god. We
are packed inside a glassy glitter. We gather momentum. We
hurtle into a black chasm and speed with a hollow din far
underground, hanging on to leather straps. With a pop the amber
lamps are extinguished for an instant, during which flimsy
globules burn with a hot light in the dark--the bulging eyes of
demons, or perhaps our fellow passengers' cigars.
The lights come back on. Look, over there--the tall man in
a black overcoat standing by the car's glass door. I faintly
recognize that narrow, yellowish face, the bony hump of his
nose. Thin lips compressed, attentive furrow between heavy
brows, he listens to something being explained by another man,
pale as a plaster mask, with a small, circular, sculpted beard.
I am certain they are speaking in terza rima. And your
neighbor, that lady in the pale-yellow coat sitting with
lowered lashes--could that be Dante's Beatrice? Out of the dank
nether world we emerge anew into the sunlight. The cemetery is
on the distant outskirts. Edifices have grown sparser. Greenish
voids. I recall how this same capital looked on an old print.
We walk against the wind along imposing fences. On the
same kind of sunny, tremulous day as this we'll head back
north, to Russia. There will be very few flowers, only the
yellow stars of dandelions along the ditches. The dove-gray
telegraph poles will hum at our approach. When, beyond the
curve, my heart is jabbed by the firs, the red sand, the corner
of the house, I shall totter and fall prone.
Look! Above the vacant green expanses, high in the sky, an
airplane progresses with a bassy ring like an aeolian harp. Its
glass wings are glinting. Beautiful, no? Oh, listen--here is
something that happened in Paris, about 150 years ago. Early
one morning--it was autumn, and the trees floated in soft
orange masses along the boulevards into the tender sky--early
one morning, the merchants had assembled in the marketplace;
the stands filled with moist, glistening apples; there were
whiffs of honey and damp hay. An old fellow with white down in
his auricles was unhurriedly setting up cages containing
various birds that fidgeted in the chilly air; then he sleepily
reclined on a mat, for the auroral fog still obscured the gilt
hands on the town hall's black dial. He had scarcely gone to
sleep when someone started tugging at his shoulder. Up jumped
the oldster, and saw before him an out-of-breath young man. He
was lanky, skinny, with a small head and a pointed little nose.
His waistcoat--silvery with black stripes--was buttoned askew,
the ribbon on his pigtail had come undone, one of his white
stockings was sagging in bunched wrinkles. "I need a bird, any
bird--a chicken will do," said the young man, having given the
cages a cursory, agitated glance. The old man gingerly
extracted a small white hen, which put up a fluffy struggle in
his swarthy hands. "What's wrong--is it sick?" asked the young
man, as if discussing a cow. "Sick? My little fish's belly!"
mildly swore the oldster.
The young man flung him a shiny coin and ran off amid the
stands, the hen pressed to his bosom. Then he stopped, turned
abruptly with a whip of his pigtail, and ran back to the old
vendor. "I need the cage too," he said.
When he went off at last, holding the chicken with the
cage in his outstretched hand and swinging the other arm, as if
he were carrying a bucket, the old man gave a snort and lay
back down on his mat. How business went that day and what
happened to him afterwards is of no concern to us at all,
As for the young man, he was none other than the son of
the renowned physicist Charles. Charles glanced over his
spectacles at the little hen, gave the cage a flick of his
yellow fingernail, and said, "Fine--now we have a passenger as
well." Then, with a severe glint of his eyeglasses, he added,
"As for you and me, my boy, we'll take our time. God only knows
what the air is like up there in the clouds."
The same day, at the appointed hour on the Champs de Mars,
before an astonished crowd, an enormous, lightweight dome,
embroidered with Chinese arabesques, with a gilded gondola
attached by silken cords, slowly swelled as it filled with
hydrogen. Charles and his son busied themselves amid streams of
smoke blown sideways by the wind. The hen peered through the
wire netting of her cage with one beady eye, her head tilted to
one side. All around moved colorful, spangled caftans, airy
women's dresses, straw hats; and, when the sphere lurched
upward, the old physicist followed it with his gaze, then broke
into tears on his son's shoulder, and a hundred hands on every
side began waving handkerchiefs and ribbons. Fragile clouds
floated through the tender, sunny sky. The earth receded,
quivery, light-green, covered with scudding shadows and the
fiery splashes of trees. Far below some toy horsemen hurtled
past--but soon the sphere rose out of sight. The hen kept
peering downward with one little eye.
The flight lasted all day. The day concluded with an
ample, vivid sunset. When night fell, the sphere began slowly
descending. Once upon a time, in a village on the shore of the
Loire, there lived a gentle, wily-eyed peasant. Out he goes
into the field at dawn. In the middle of the field he sees a
marvel: an immense heap of motley silk. Nearby, overturned, lay
a little cage. A chicken, all white, as if modeled out of snow,
was thrusting its head through mesh and intermittently moving
its beak, as it searched for small insects in the grass. At
first the peasant had a fright, but then he realized that it
was simply a present from the Virgin Mary, whose hair floated
through the air like autumn spider-webs. The silk his wife sold
off piecemeal in the nearby town, the little gilded gondola
became a crib for their tightly swaddled firstborn, and the
chicken was dispatched to the backyard. Listen on.
Some time elapsed, and then one fine day, as he passed a
hillock of chaff at the barn gate, the peasant heard a happy
clucking. He stooped. The hen popped out of the green dust and
hawked at the sun as she waddled rapidly and not without some
pride. While, amid the chaff, hot and sleek, glowed four golden
eggs. And no wonder. At the wind's mercy, the hen had traversed
the entire flush of the sunset, and the sun, a fiery cock with
a crimson crest, had done some fluttering over her.
I don't know if the peasant understood. For a long time he
stood motionless, blinking and squinting from the brilliance
and holding in his palms the still warm, whole, golden eggs.
Then, his sabots rattling, he rushed across the yard with such
a howl that his hired hand thought he must have lopped off a
finger with his axe. . . .
Of course all this happened a long, long time ago, long
before the aviator Latham, having crashed in mid-Channel, sat,
if you will, on the dragonfly tail of his submerging
Antoinette, smoking a yellowed cigarette in the wind,
and watching as, high in the sky, in his little stubby-winged
machine, his rival Bleriot flew for the first time from Calais
to England's sugary shores.
But I cannot overcome your anguish. Why have your eyes
again filled with darkness? No, don't say anything. I know
everything. You mustn't cry. He can hear my fable, there's no
doubt at all he can hear it. It is to him that it's addressed.
Words have no borders. Try to understand! You look at me so
balefully and darkly. I recollect the night after the funeral.
You were unable to stay home. You and I went out into the
glossy slush. Lost our way. Ended up in some strange, narrow
street. I did not make out its name, but could see it was
inverted, mirrorlike, in the glass of a streetlamp. The lamps
were floating off into the distance. Water dripped from the
roofs. The buckets lining both sides of the street, along black
walls, were filling with cold mercury. Filling and overflowing.
And suddenly, helplessly spreading your hands, you spoke:
"But he was so little, and so warm. - . ."
Forgive me if I am incapable of weeping, of simple human
weeping, but instead keep singing and running somewhere,
clutching at whatever wings fly past, tall, disheveled, with a
wave of suntan on my forehead. Forgive me. That's how it must
be.
We walk slowly along the fences. The cemetery is already
near. There it is, an islet of vernal white and green amid some
dusty vacant land. Now you go on alone. I'll wait for you here.
Your eyes gave a quick, embarrassed smile. You know me well. .
. . The wicket-gate squeaked, then banged shut. I sit alone on
the sparse grass. A short way off there is a vegetable garden
with some purple cabbage. Beyond the vacant lot, factory
buildings, buoyant brick behemoths, float in the azure mist. At
my feet, a squashed tin glints rustily inside a funnel of sand.
Around me, silence and a kind of spring emptiness. There is no
death. The wind comes tumbling upon me from behind like a limp
doll and tickles my neck with its downy paw. There can be no
death.
My heart, too, has soared through the dawn. You and I
shall have a new, golden son, a creation of your tears and my
fables. Today I understood the beauty of intersecting wires in
the sky, and the hazy mosaic of factory chimneys, and this
rusty tin with its inside-out, semidetached, serrated lid. The
wan grass hurries, hurries somewhere along the dusty billows of
the vacant lot. I raise my arms. The sunlight glides across my
skin. My skin is covered with multicolored sparkles.
And I want to rise up, throw my arms open for a vast
embrace, address an ample, luminous discourse to the invisible
crowds. I would start like this: "O rainbow-colored gods . . ."
