Vladimir Nabokov - The Gift

“When my eyes opened to the alphabet. Sorry, that sounds pretentious, but the fact is, since childhood I have been afflicted with the most intense and elaborate audition colorée.”

“So that you too, like Rimbaud, could have—”

“Written not a mere sonnet but a fat opus, with auditive hues he never dreamt of. For instance, the various numerous ‘a’s of the four languages which I speak differ for me in tinge, going from lacquered-black to splintery-gray—like different sorts of wood. I recommend to you my pink flannel ‘ m .’ I don’t know if you remember the insulating cotton wool which was removed with the storm windows in spring? Well, that is my Russian ‘y,’ or rather ‘ugh,’ so grubby and dull that words are ashamed to begin with it. If I had some paints handy I would mix burnt-sienna and sepia for you so as to match the color of a gutta-percha ‘ch’ sound; and you would appreciate my radiant ‘ s ’ if I could pour into your cupped hands some of those luminous sapphires that I touched as a child, trembling and not understanding when my mother, dressed for a ball, uncontrollably sobbing, allowed her perfectly celestial treasures to flow out of their abyss into her palm, out of their cases onto black velvet, and then suddenly locked everything up and did not go anywhere after all, in spite of the impassioned persuasions of her brother, who kept pacing up and down the rooms giving fillips to the furniture and shrugging his epaulets, and if one turned the curtain slightly on the side window of the oriel, one could see, along the receding riverfront, façades in the blue-blackness of the night, the motionless magic of an imperial illumination, the ominous blaze of diamond monograms, colored bulbs in coronal designs …”

“Buchstaben von Feuer , in short… Yes, I know what is coming. Shall I finish this banal and soul-rending tale for you? How you delighted in any poem that happened along. How at ten you were writing dramas, and at fifteen elegies—and all about sunsets, sunsets… Blok’s ‘Incognita’ who ‘passed slowly in between the drunkards.’ By the way, who was she?”

“A young married woman. It lasted a little less than two years, until my escape from Russia. She was lovely and sweet—you know, with large eyes and slightly bony hands—and somehow I have remained faithful to her even to this day. Her taste in poetry was limited to fashionable gypsy lyrics, she adored poker and she died of typhus—God knows where, God knows how.”

“And what comes now? Would you say it’s worth going on writing verse?”

“Oh, decidedly! To the very end. Even at this moment I am happy, in spite of the degrading pain in my pinched toes. To tell the truth, I again feel that turbulence, that excitement…. Once again I shall spend the whole night …”

“Show me. Let’s see how it works: It is with this , that from the slow black ferry… No, try again: Through snow that falls on water never freezing… Keep trying: Under the vertical slow snow in gray-enjambment-Lethean weather, in the usual season, with this I’ll step upon the shore some day. That’s better but be careful not to squander the excitement.”

“Oh that’s all right. My point is that one cannot help being happy with this tingling sensation in the skin of your brow….”

“…as from an excess of vinegar in chopped beet. Do you know what has just occurred to me? That river is not the Lethe but rather the Styx. Never mind. Let’s proceed: And now a crooked bough looms near the ferry, and Charon with his boathook, in the dark, reaches for it, and catches it, and very …”

“…slowly the bark revolves, the silent bark. Homeward, homeward! I feel tonight like composing with pen in hand. What a moon! What a black smell of leaves and earth from behind those railings.”

“And what a pity no one has overheard the brilliant colloquy that I would have liked so much to hold with you.”

Never mind, it won’t be wasted. In fact, I’m glad it turned out this way. Whose business is it that actually we parted at the very, first corner, and that I have been reciting a fictitious dialogue with myself as supplied by a self-teaching handbook of literary inspiration?

THE rain still fell lightly, but with the elusive suddenness of an angel, a rainbow had already appeared. In languorous self-wonder, pinkish-green with a purplish suffusion along its inner edge, it hung suspended over the reaped field, above and before a distant wood, one tremulous portion of which showed through it. Stray arrows of rain that had lost both rhythm and weight and the ability to make any sound, flashed at random, this way and that, in the sun. Up the rain-washed sky, from behind a raven cloud, a cloud of ravishing whiteness was extricating itself and shining with all the detail of a monstrously complicated molding.

“Well, well, it’s over,” he said in a low voice and emerged from under the shelter of aspens that crowded where the greasy, clayey zemskaya (rural district) road—and what a bump in this designation!—descended into a hollow, gathering there all its ruts into an oblong pit, full to the brim with thick café crème.

My darling! Pattern of Elysian hues! Once in Ordos my father, climbing a hill after a storm, inadvertently entered the base of a rainbow—the rarest occurrence!—and found himself in colored air, in a play of light as if in paradise. He took one more step—and left paradise.

The rainbow was already fading. The rain had quite stopped, it was scorching hot, a horsefly with satiny eyes settled on his sleeve. A cuckoo began to call in a copse, listlessly, almost questioningly: the sound swelled like a cupule, and again, like a cupule, unable to find a solution. The poor, fat bird probably flew further away, for everything was repeated from the beginning in the manner of a reduced reflection (it sought, who knows, a place for the best, the saddest effect). A huge butterfly, flat in flight, bluish-black with a white band, described a supernaturally smooth arc, settled on the damp earth, closed its wings and with that disappeared. This is the kind that now and then a panting peasant lad brings one, cramming it with both hands into his cap. This is the kind that soars up from under the mincing hooves of the doctor’s well-behaved little pony, when the doctor, holding the almost superflous reins in his lap or else simply tying them to the front board, pensively drives along the shady road to the hospital. But on occasion you find four black-and-white wings with brick-colored undersides scattered like playing cards over a forest footpath: the rest, eaten by an unknown bird.

He jumped a puddle where two dung-beetles had fastened onto a straw, getting in each other’s way, and printed his sole on the edge of the road: a highly significant footprint, ever looking upward and ever seeing him who has vanished. Walking through a field, alone, beneath the magnificently rushing clouds, he remembered how, with his first cigarettes in his first cigarette case, he had approached an old reaper here and asked for a light; the peasant had taken out a box from his gaunt breast and given it to him unsmilingly, but the wind was blowing, match after match went out before it had hardly flared and after every one he grew more ashamed, while the man watched with a kind of detached curiosity the impatient fingers of the wasteful young squire.

He went deeper into the wood; planks had been laid along the path, black and slimy, with reddish-brown aments and leaves that had stuck to them. Who was this had dropped a russula, breaking open its white fan? In reply came the sound of hallooing: girls were gathering mushrooms and bilberries, the latter seeming so much darker in the basket than on their stalks! Among the birches there was an old acquaintance, with a double trunk, a birch-lyre, and beside it an old post with a board on it; nothing could be made out on it except bullet marks; a Browning had once been fired at it by his English tutor—also Browning—and then Father had taken the pistol, swiftly and dexterously ramming bullets into the clip, and knocked out a smooth K with seven shots.