Vladimir Nabokov - Speak, Memory

In August 1910, my brother and I were in Bad Kissingen with our parents and tutor (Lenski); after that my father and mother traveled to Munich and Paris, and back to St. Petersburg, and then to Berlin where we boys, with Lenski, were spending the autumn and the beginning of the winter, having our teeth fixed. An American dentist—Lowell or Lowen, I do not remember his name exactly—ripped some of our teeth out and trussed up others with twine before disfiguring us with braces. Even more hellish than the action of the rubber pear pumping hot pain into a cavity were the cotton pads—I could not endure their dry contact and squeak—which used to be thrust between gum and tongue for the operator’s convenience; and there would be, in the windowpane before one’s helpless eyes, a transparency, some dismal seascape or gray grapes, shuddering with the dull reverberations of distant trams under dull skies. “In den Zelten achtzehn A” — the address comes back to me dancing trochaically, immediately followed by the whispery motion of the cream-colored electric taxi that took us there. We expected every possible compensation in atonement for those dreadful mornings. My brother loved the museum of wax figures in the Arcade off the Unter den Linden—Friedrich’s grenadiers, Bonaparte communing with a mummy, young Liszt, who composed a rhapsody in his sleep, and Marat, who died in a shoe; and for me (who did not know yet that Marat had been an ardent lepidopterist) there was, at the corner of that Arcade, Gruber’s famous butterfly shop, a camphoraceous paradise at the top of a steep, narrow staircase which I climbed every other day to inquire if Chapman’s new Hairstreak or Mann’s recently rediscovered White had been obtained for me at last. We tried tennis on a public court; but a wintry gale kept chasing dead leaves across it, and, besides, Lenski could not really play, although insisting on joining us, without removing his overcoat, in a lopsided threesome. Subsequently, most of our afternoons were spent at a roller-skating rink in the Kurfürstendamm. I remember Lenski rolling inexorably toward a pillar which he attempted to embrace while collapsing with a dreadful clatter; and after persevering awhile he would content himself with sitting in one of the loges that flanked the plush parapet and consuming there wedges of slightly salty mokka torte with whipped cream, while I kept self-sufficiently overtaking poor gamely stumbling Sergey, one of those galling little pictures that revolve on and on in one’s mind. A military band (Germany, at the time, was the land of music), manned by an uncommonly jerky conductor, came to life every ten minutes or so but could hardly drown the ceaseless, sweeping rumble of wheels.

There existed in Russia, and still exists no doubt, a special type of school-age boy who, without necessarily being athletic in appearance or outstanding in mental scope, often having, in fact, no energy in class, a rather scrawny physique, and even, perhaps, a touch of pulmonary consumption, excels quite phenomenally at soccer and chess, and learns with the utmost ease and grace any kind of sport or game of skill (Borya Shik, Kostya Buketov, the famous brothers Sharabanov—where are they now, my teammates and rivals?). I was a good skater on ice and switching to rollers was for me not more difficult than for a man to replace an ordinary razor by a safety one. Very quickly I learned two or three tricky steps on the wooden floor of the rink and in no ballroom have I danced with more zest or ability (we, Shiks and Buketovs, are poor ballroom dancers, as a rule). The several instructors wore scarlet uniforms, half hussar and half hotel page. They all spoke English, of one brand or another. Among the regular visitors, I soon noticed a group of American young ladies. At first, they all merged in a common spin of bright exotic beauty. The process of differentiation began when, during one of my lone dances (and a few seconds before I came the worst cropper that I ever came on a rink), somebody said something about me as I whirled by, and a wonderful, twangy feminine voice answered, “Yes, isn’t he cunning?”

I can still see her tall figure in a navy-blue tailor-made suit. Her large velvet hat was transfixed by a dazzling pin. For obvious reasons, I decided her name was Louise. At night, I would lie awake and imagine all kinds of romantic situations, and think of her willowy waist and white throat, and worry over an odd discomfort that I had associated before only with chafing shorts. One afternoon, I saw her standing in the lobby of the rink, and the most dashing of the instructors, a sleek ruffian of the Calhoun type, was holding her by the wrist and interrogating her with a crooked grin, and she was looking away and childishly turning her wrist this way and that in his grasp, and the following night he was shot, lassoed, buried alive, shot again, throttled, bitingly insulted, coolly aimed at, spared, and left to drag a life of shame.

High-principled but rather simple Lenski, who was abroad for the first time, had some trouble keeping the delights of sightseeing in harmony with his pedagogical duties. We took advantage of this and guided him toward places where our parents might not have allowed us to go. He could not resist the Wintergarten, for instance, and so, one night, we found ourselves there, drinking ice-chocolate in an orchestra box. The show developed on the usual lines: a juggler in evening clothes; then a woman, with flashes of rhinestones on her bosom, trilling a concert aria in alternating effusions of green and red light; then a comic on roller skates. Between him and a bicycle act (of which more later) there was an item on the program called “The Gala Girls,” and with something of the shattering and ignominious physical shock I had experienced when coming that cropper on the rink, I recognized my American ladies in the garland of linked, shrill-voiced, shameless “girls,” all rippling from left to right, and then from right to left, with a rhythmic rising of ten identical legs that shot up from ten corollas of flounces. I located my Louise’s face—and knew at once that it was all over, that I had lost her, that I would never forgive her for singing so loudly, for smiling so redly, for disguising herself in that ridiculous way so unlike the charm of either “proud Creoles” or “questionable señoritas.” I could not stop thinking of her altogether, of course, but the shock seems to have liberated in me a certain inductive process, for I soon noticed that any evocation of the feminine form would be accompanied by the puzzling discomfort already familiar to me. I asked my parents about it (they had come to Berlin to see how we were getting along) and my father ruffled the German newspaper he had just opened and replied in English (with the parody of a possible quotation—a manner of speech he often adopted in order to get going): “That, my boy, is just another of nature’s absurd combinations, like shame and blushes, or grief and red eyes.” “Tolstoy vient de mourir,” he suddenly added, in another, stunned voice, turning to my mother.

“Da chto tï [something like “good gracious”]!” she exclaimed in distress, clasping her hands in her lap. “Pora domoy [Time to go home],” she concluded, as if Tolstoy’s death had been the portent of apocalyptic disasters.

And now comes that bicycle act—or at least my version of it. The following summer, Yuri did not visit us at Vyra, and I was left alone to cope with my romantic agitation. On rainy days, crouching at the foot of a little-used bookshelf, in a poor light that did all it could to discourage my furtive inquiry, I used to look up obscure, obscurely tantalizing and enervating terms in the Russian eighty-two-volume edition of Brockhaus’ Encyclopedia , where, in order to save space, the title word of this or that article would be reduced, throughout a detailed discussion, to its capitalized initial, so that the columns of dense print in minion type, besides taxing one’s attention, acquired the trumpery fascination of a masquerade, at which the abbreviation of a none too familiar word played hide and seek with one’s avid eyes: “Moses tried to abolish P. but failed… In modern times, hospitable P. flourished in Austria under Maria Theresa… In many parts of Germany the profits from P. went to the clergy… In Russia, P. has been officially tolerated since 1843… Seduced at the age of ten or twelve by her master, his sons or one of his menials, an orphan almost invariably ends in P.”—and so forth, all of which went to enrich with mystery, rather than soberly elucidate, the allusions to meretricious love that I met with during my first immersions in Chekhov or Andreev. Butterfly hunting and various sports took care of the sunny hours, but no amount of exercise could prevent the restlessness which, every evening, launched me on vague voyages of discovery. After riding on horseback most of the afternoon, bicycling in the colored dusk was a curiously subtle, almost discarnate feeling. I had turned upside down and lowered to subsaddle level the handlebars of my Enfield bicycle, converting it into my conception of a racing model. Along the paths of the park I would skim, following yesterday’s patterned imprint of Dunlop tires; neatly avoiding the ridges of tree roots; selecting a fallen twig and snapping it with my sensitive front wheel; weaving between two flat leaves and then between a small stone and the hole from which it had been dislodged the evening before; enjoying the brief smoothness of a bridge over a brook; skirting the wire fence of the tennis court; nuzzling open the little whitewashed gate at the end of the park; and then, in a melancholy ecstasy of freedom, speeding along the hard-baked, pleasantly agglutinate margins of long country roads.