Vladimir Nabokov. Revenge
© Copyright 1924 by Vladimir Nabokov
© Copyright by Dmitry Nabokov, english translation
1
Ostend, the stone wharf, the gray strand, the distant row
of hotels, were all slowly rotating as they receded into the
turquoise haze of an autumn day.
The professor wrapped his legs in a tartan lap robe, and
the chaise tongue creaked as he reclined into its canvas
comfort. The clean, ochre-red deck was crowded but quiet. The
boilers heaved discreetly.
An English girl in worsted stockings, indicating the
professor with a motion of her eyebrow, addressed her brother
who was standing nearby: "Looks like Sheldon, doesn't he?"
Sheldon was a comic actor, a bald giant with a round,
flabby face. "He's really enjoying the sea," the girl added
sotto voce. Whereupon, I regret to say, she drops out of my
story.
Her brother, an ungainly, red-haired student on his way
back to his university after the summer holidays, took the pipe
out of his mouth and said, "He's our biology professor. Capital
old chap. Must say hello to him." He approached the professor,
who, lifting his heavy eyelids, recognized one of the worst and
most diligent of his pupils.
"Ought to be a splendid crossing," said the student,
giving a light squeeze to the large, cold hand that was
proffered him.
"I hope so," replied the professor, stroking his gray
cheek with his fingers. "Yes, I hope so," he repeated
weightily, "I hope so."
The student gave the two suitcases standing next to the
deck chair a cursory glance. One of them was a dignified
veteran, covered with the white traces of old travel labels,
like bird droppings on a monument. The other one--brand-new,
orange-colored, with gleaming locks--for some reason caught his
attention.
"Let me move that suitcase before it falls over," he
offered, to keep up the conversation.
The professor chuckled. He did look like that
silver-browed comic, or else like an aging boxer. . . .
"The suitcase, you say? Know what I have in it?" he
inquired, with a hint of irritation in his voice. "Can't guess?
A marvelous object! A special kind of coat hanger . . ."
"A German invention, sir?" the student prompted,
remembering that the biologist had just been to Berlin for a
scientific congress.
The professor gave a hearty, creaking laugh, and a golden
tooth flashed like a flame. "A divine invention, my
friend--divine. Something everybody needs. Why, you travel with
the same kind of thing yourself. Eh? Or perhaps you're a
polyp?" The student grinned. He knew that the professor was
given to obscure jokes. The old man was the object of much
gossip at the university. They said he tortured his spouse, a
very young woman. The student had seen her once. A skinny
thing, with incredible eyes. "And how is your wife, sir?" asked
the red-haired student.
The professor replied, "I shall be frank with you, dear
friend. I've been struggling with myself for quite some some
time, but now I feel compelled to tell you. . . . My dear
friend, I like to travel in silence. I trust you'll forgive
me."
But here the student, whistling in embarrassment and
sharing his sister's lot, departs forever from these pages.
The biology professor, meanwhile, pulled his black felt
hat down over his bristly brows to shield his eyes against the
sea's dazzling shimmer, and sank into a semblance of sleep. The
sunlight falling on his gray, clean-shaven face, with its large
nose and heavy chin, made it seem freshly modeled out of moist
clay. Whenever a flimsy autumn cloud happened to screen the
sun, the face would suddenly darken, dry out, and petrify. It
was all, of course, alternating light and shade rather than a
reflection of his thoughts. If his thoughts had indeed been
reflected on his face, the professor would have hardly been a
pretty sight. The trouble was that he had received a report the
other day from the private detective he had hired in London
that his wife was unfaithful to him. An intercepted letter,
written in her minuscule, familiar hand, began, "My dear
darling Jack, I am still all full of your last kiss." The
professor's name was certainly not Jack--that was the whole
point. The perception made him feel neither surprise nor pain,
not even masculine vexation, but only hatred, sharp and cold as
a lancet. He realized with utter clarity that he would murder
his wife. There could be no qualms. One had only to devise the
most excruciating, the most ingenious method. As he reclined in
the deck chair, he reviewed for the hundredth time all the
methods of torture described by travelers and medieval
scholars. Not one of them, so far, seemed adequately painful.
In the distance, at the verge of the green shimmer, the
sugary-white cliffs of Dover were materializing, and he had
still not made a decision. The steamer fell silent and, gently
rocking, docked. The professor followed his porter down the
gangplank. The customs officer, after rattling off the items
ineligible for import, asked him to open a suitcase--the new,
orange one. The professor turned the lightweight key in its
lock and swung open the leather flap. Some Russian lady behind
him loudly exclaimed, "Good Lord!" and gave a nervous laugh.
Two Belgians standing on either side of the professor cocked
their heads and gave a kind of upward glance. One shrugged his
shoulders and the other gave a soft whistle, while the English
turned away with indifference. The official, dumbfounded,
goggled his eyes at the suitcase's contents. Everybody felt
very creepy and uncomfortable. The biologist phlegmatically
gave his name, mentioning the university museum. Expressions
cleared up. Only a few ladies were chagrined to learn that no
crime had been committed.
"But why do you transport it in a suitcase?" inquired the
official with respectful reproach, gingerly lowering the flap
and chalking a scrawl on the bright leather. "I was in a
hurry," said the professor with a fatigued squint. "No time to
hammer together a crate. In any case it's a valuable object and
not something I'd send in the baggage hold." And, with a
stooped but springy gait, the professor crossed to the railway
platform past a policeman who resembled a gargantuan toy. But
suddenly he paused as if remembering something and mumbled with
a radiant, kindly smile, "There--1 have it. A most clever
method." Whereupon he heaved a sigh of relief and purchased two
bananas, a pack of cigarettes, newspapers reminiscent of
crackling bedsheets, and, a few minutes later, was speeding in
a comfortable compartment of the Continental Express along the
scintillating sea, the white cliffs, the emerald pastures of
Kent.
2
They were wonderful eyes indeed, with pupils like glossy
inkdrops on dove-gray satin. Her hair was cut short and
golden-pale in hue, a luxuriant topping of fluff. She was
small, upright, flat-chested. She had been expecting her
husband since yesterday, and knew for certain he would arrive
today. Wearing a gray, open-necked dress and velvet slippers,
she was sitting on a peacock ottoman in the parlor, thinking
what a pity it was her husband did not believe in ghosts and
openly despised the young medium, a Scot with pale, delicate
eyelashes, who occasionally visited her. After all, odd things
did happen to her. Recently, in her sleep, she had had a vision
of a dead youth with whom, before she was married, she had
strolled in the twilight, when the blackberry blooms seem so
ghostly white. Next morning, still aquiver, she had penciled a
letter to him--a letter to her dream. In this letter she had
lied to poor Jack. She had, in fact, nearly forgotten about
him; she loved her excruciating husband with a fearful but
faithful love; yet she wanted to send a little warmth to this
dear spectral visitor, to reassure him with some words from
earth. The letter vanished mysteriously from her writing pad,
and the same night she dreamt of a long table, from under which
Jack suddenly emerged, nodding to her gratefully. Now, for some
reason, she felt uneasy when recalling that dream, almost as if
she had cheated on her husband with a ghost.
The drawing room was warm and festive. On the wide, low
win-dowsill lay a silk cushion, bright yellow with violet
stripes.
The professor arrived just when she had decided his ship
must have gone to the bottom. Glancing out the window, she saw
the black top of a taxi, the driver's proffered palm, and the
massive shoulders of her husband who had bent down his head as
he paid. She flew through the rooms and trotted downstairs
swinging her thin, bared arms.
He was climbing toward her, stooped, in an ample coat.
Behind him a servant carried his suitcases.
She pressed against his woolen scarf, playfully bending
back the heel of one slender, gray-stockinged leg. He kissed
her warm temple. With a good-natured smile he lifted away her
arms. "I'm covered with dust. . . . Wait. . . . ," he mumbled,
holding her by the wrists. Frown-ing, she tossed her head and
the pale conflagration of her hair. The professor stooped and
kissed her on the lips with another little grin.
At supper, thrusting out the white breastplate of his
starched shirt and energetically moving his glossy cheekbones,
he recounted his brief journey. He was reservedly jolly. The
curved silk lapels of his dinner jacket, his bulldog jaw, his
massive bald head with ironlike veins on its temples--all this
aroused in his wife an exquisite pity: the pity she always felt
because, as he studied the minutiae of life, he refused to
enter her world, where the poetry of de la Mare flowed and
infinitely tender astral spirits hurtled. "Well, did your
ghosts come knocking while I was away?" he asked, reading her
thoughts. She wanted to tell him about the dream, the letter,
but felt somehow guilty.
"You know something," he went on, sprinkling sugar on some
pink rhubarb, "you and your friends are playing with fire.
There can be really terrifying occurrences. One Viennese doctor
told me about some incredible metamorphoses the other day. Some
woman--some kind of fortune-telling hysteric--died, of a heart
attack I think, and, when the doctor undressed her (it all
happened in a Hungarian hut, by candlelight), he was stunned at
the sight of her body; it was entirely covered with a reddish
sheen, was soft and slimy to the touch, and, upon closer
examination, he realized that this plump, taut cadaver
consisted entirely of narrow, circular bands of skin, as if it
were all bound evenly and tightly by invisible strings,
something like that advertisement for French tires, the man
whose body is all tires. Except that in her case these tires
were very thin and pale red. And, as the doctor watched, the
corpse gradually began to unwind like a huge ball of yarn. . .
. Her body was a thin, endless worm, which was disentangling
itself and crawling, slithering out through the crack under the
door while, on the bed, there remained a naked, white, still
humid skeleton. Yet this woman had a husband, who had once
kissed her--kissed that worm,"
The professor poured himself a glass of port the color of
mahogany and began gulping the rich liquid, without taking his
narrowed eyes off his wife's face. Her thin, pale shoulders
gave a shiver. "You yourself don't realize what a terrifying
thing you've told me," she said in agitation. "So the woman's
ghost disappeared into a worm. It's all terrifying. . . ."
"I sometimes think," said the professor, ponderously
shooting a cuff and examining his blunt fingers, "that, in the
final analysis, my science is an idle illusion, that it is we
who have invented the laws of physics, that
anything--absolutely anything--can happen. Those who abandon
themselves to such thoughts go mad. . . ." He stifled a yawn,
tapping his clenched fist against his lips. "What's come over
you, my dear?" his wife exclaimed softly. "You never spoke this
way before. . . . I thought you knew everything, had everything
mapped out. . . ."
For an instant the professor's nostrils flared
spasmodically, and a gold fang flashed. But his face quickly
regained its flabby state. He stretched and got up from the
table. "I'm babbling nonsense," he said calmly and tenderly.
"I'm tired. I'll go to bed. Don't turn on the light when you
come in. Get right into bed with me--with me," he repeated
meaningfully and tenderly, as he had not spoken for a long
time.
These words resounded gently within her when she remained
alone in the drawing room.
She had been married to him for five years and, despite
her husband's capricious disposition, his frequent outbursts of
unjustified jealousy, his silences, sullenness, and
incomprehension, she felt happy, for she loved and pitied him.
She, all slender and white, and he, massive, bald, with tufts
of gray wool in the middle of his chest, made an impossible,
monstrous couple--and yet she enjoyed his infrequent, forceful
caresses.
A chrysanthemum, in its vase on the mantel, dropped
several curled petals with a dry rustle. She gave a start and
her heart jolted disagreeably as she remembered that the air
was always filled with phantoms, that even her scientist
husband had noted their fearsome apparitions.
She recalled how Jackie had popped out from under the
table and started nodding his head with an eerie tenderness. It
seemed to her that all the objects in the room were watching
her expectantly. She was chilled by a wind of fear. She quicidy
left the drawing room, restraining an absurd cry. She caught
her breath and thought. What a silly thing I am, really. . . .
In the bathroom she spent a long time examining the sparkling
pupils of her eyes. Her small face, capped by fluffy gold,
seemed unfamiliar to her.
Feeling light as a young girl, with nothing on but a lace
nightgown, trying not to brush against the furniture, she went
to the darkened bedroom. She extended her arms to locate the
headboard of the bed, and lay down on its edge. She knew she
was not alone, that her husband was lying beside her. For a few
instants she motionlessly gazed upward, feeling the fierce,
muftled pounding of her heart.
When her eyes had become accustomed to the dark,
intersected by the stripes of moonlight pouring through the
muslin blind, she turned her head toward her husband. He was
lying with his back to her, wrapped in the blanket. All she
could see was the bald crown of his head, which seemed
extraordinarily sleek and white in the puddle of moonlight.
He's not asleep, she thought affectionately. If he were,
he would be snoring a little.
She smiled and, with her whole body, slid over toward her
husband, spreading her arms under the covers for the familiar
embrace. Her fingers felt some smooth ribs. Her knee struck a
smooth bone. A skull, its black eye sockets rotating, rolled
from its pillow onto her shoulder.
Electric light flooded the room. The professor, in his
crude dinner jacket, his starched bosom, eyes, and enormous
forehead glistening, emerged from behind a screen and
approached the bed.
The blanket and sheets, jumbled together, slithered to the
rug. His wife lay dead, embracing the white, hastily cobbled
skeleton of a hunchback that the professor had acquired abroad
for the university museum.