Владимир Набоков: Vladimir Nabokov Pnin

The bells, under the enthusiastic direction of Dr Robert Trebler, active member of the Music Department, were still going strong in the angelic sky, and over a frugal breakfast of oranges and lemons Laurence, blondish, baldish, and unwholesomely fat, was criticizing the head of the French Department, one of the people Joan had invited to meet Professor Entwistle of Goldwin University at their house that evening. 'Why on earth,' he fumed, 'did you have to ask that fellow Blorenge, a mummy, a bore, one of the stucco pillars of education? '

'I like Ann Blorenge,' said Joan, stressing her affirmation and affection with nods. 'A vulgar old cat I' cried Laurence. 'A pathetic old cat,' murmured Joan--and it was then that Dr Trebler stopped and the hallway telephone took over.

Technically speaking, the narrator's art of integrating telephone conversations still lags far behind that of rendering dialogues conducted from room to room, or from window to window across some narrow blue alley in an ancient town with water so precious, and the misery of donkeys, and rugs for sale, and minarets, and foreigners and melons, and the vibrant morning echoes. When Joan, in her brisk long-limbed way, got to the compelling instrument before it gave up, and said hullo (eyebrows up, eyes roaming), a hollow quiet greeted her; all she could hear was the informal sound of a steady breathing; presently the breather's voice said, with a cosy foreign accent: 'One moment, excuse me'--this was quite casual, and he continued to breathe and perhaps hem and hum or even sigh a lime to the accompaniment of a crepitation that evoked the turning over of small pages.

'Hullo!' she repeated.

'You are,' suggested the voice warily, 'Mrs Fire?'

'No,' said Joan, and hung up. 'And besides,' she went on, swinging back into the kitchen and addressing her husband who was sampling the bacon she had prepared for herself, 'you cannot deny that Jack Cockerell considers Blorenge to be a first-rate administrator.'

'What was that telephone call?'

'Somebody wanting Mrs Feuer or Fayer. Look here, if you deliberately neglect everything George--' [Dr O. G. Helm, their family doctor].

'Joan,' said Laurence, who felt much better after that opalescent rasher, 'Joan, my dear, you are aware aren't you, that you told Margaret Thayer yesterday you wanted a roomer?'

'Oh, gosh,' said Joan--and obligingly the telephone rang again.

'It is evident,' said the same voice, comfortably resuming the conversation, 'that I employed by mistake the name of the informer. I am connected with Mrs Cement?'

'Yes, this is Mrs Cements,' said Joan.

'Here speaks Professor--' There followed a preposterous little explosion. 'I conduct the classes in Russian. Mrs Fire, who is now working at the library part-time--'

'Yes--Mrs Thayer, I know. Well, do you want to see that room?'

He did. Could he come to inspect it in approximately half an hour? Yes, she would be in. Untenderly she cradled the receiver.

'What was it this time?' asked her husband, looking back, pudgy freckled hand on banister, on his way upstairs to the security of his study.

'A cracked ping-pong ball, Russian.'

'Professor Pnin, by God!' cried Laurence. "'I know him well: he is the brooch--" Well, I flatly refuse to have that freak in my house.'

He trudged up, truculently. She called after him: 'Lore, did you finish writing that article last night?'

'Almost.' He had turned the comer of the stairs--she heard his hand squeaking on the banisters, then striking them. 'I will today. First I have that damned EOS examination to prepare.'

This stood for the Evolution of Sense, his greatest course (with an enrolment of twelve, none even remotely apostolic) which had opened and would close with the phrase destined to be over-quoted one day: The evolution of sense is, in a sense, the evolution of nonsense.

2

Half an hour later, Joan glanced over the moribund cactuses in the sun-porch window and saw a raincoated, hatless man, with a head like a polished globe of copper, optimistically ringing at the front door of her neighbour's beautiful brick house. The old Scotty stood beside him in much the same candid attitude as he. Miss Dingwall came out with a mop, let the slowpoke, dignified dog in, and directed Pnin to the Clements' clapboard residence.

Timofey Pnin settled down in the living-room, crossed his legs po amerikanski (the American way), and entered into some unnecessary detail. It was a curriculum vitae in a nutshell--a coconut shell. Born in St Petersburg in 1898. Both parents died of typhus in 1917. Left for Kiev in 1918. Was with the White Army five months, first as a 'field telephonist', then at the Military Information Office. Escaped from Red-invaded Crimea to Constantinople in 1919. Completed university education-- 'Say, I was there as a child exactly the same year,' said pleased Joan. 'My father went to Turkey on a government mission and took us along. We might have met! I remember the word for water. And there was a rose garden--'

'Water in Turkish is "su",' said Pnin, a linguist by necessity, and went on with his fascinating past: Completed university education in Prague. Was connected with various scientific institutions. Then--'Well, to make a long story very short: habitated in Paris from 1925, abandoned France I at beginning of Hider war. Is now here. Is American citizen. Is teaching Russian and such subjects at Vandal College. From Hagen, Head of German Department, obtainable all references. Or from the College Home for Single Instructors.'

Hadn't he been comfortable there?

'Too many people,' said Pnin. 'Inquisitive people. Whereas special privacy is now to me absolutely necessary.' He coughed into his fist with an unexpected cavernous sound (which somehow reminded Joan of a professional Don Cossack she had once met) and then took the plunge: 'I must warn: will have all my teeth pulled out. It is a repulsive operation.'

'Well, come upstairs,' said Joan brightly.

Pnin peered into Isabel's pink-walled, white-flounced room. It had suddenly begun to snow, though the sky was pure platinum, and the slow scintillant downcome got reflected in the silent looking glass. Methodically Pnin inspected Hoecker's 'Girl with a Cat' above the bed, and Hunt's 'The Belated Kid' above the bookshelf. Then he held his hand at a little distance from the window.

'Is temperature uniform?'

Joan dashed to the radiator.

'Piping hot,' she retorted.

'I am asking--are there currents of air?'

'Oh yes, you will have plenty of air. And here is the bathroom--small, but all yours.'

'No douche?' inquired Pnin, looking up. 'Maybe it is better so. My friend, Professor Chateau of Columbia, once broke his leg in two places. Now I must think. What price are you prepared to demand? I ask it, because I will not give more than a dollar per day--not including, of course, nootrition.

'All right,' said Joan with that pleasant, quick laugh of hers.

The same afternoon, one of Pnin's students, Charles McBeth ('A madman, I think, judging by his compositions,' Pnin used to say), zestfully brought over Pnin's luggage in a pathologically purplish car with no fenders on the left side, and after an early dinner at The Egg and We, a recently inaugurated and not very successful little restaurant which Pnin frequented from sheer sympathy with failure, our friend applied himself to the pleasant task of Pninizing his new quarters. Isabel's adolescence had gone with her, or, if not, had been eradicated by her mother, but traces of the girl's childhood somehow had been allowed to remain, and before finding the most advantageous situations for his elaborate sun-lamp, huge Russian-alphabet typewriter in a broken coffin fixed with Scotch tape, five pairs of handsome, curiously small shoes with ten shoe trees rooted in them, a coffee grinding-and-boiling contraption which was not quite as good as the one that had exploded last year, a couple of alarm clocks running the same race every night, and seventy-four library books, mainly old Russian periodicals solidly bound by WCL, Pnin delicately exiled to a chair on the landing half a dozen forlorn volumes, such as Birds at Home, Happy Days in Holland, and My First Dictionary (' With more than 600 illustrations depicting zoos, the human body, farms, fires--all scientifically chosen'), and also a lone wooden bead with a hole through the centre.