Владимир Набоков: Vladimir Nabokov Pnin

Pnin, in silence, his face working, one palm still on the wet bar, had started to slither clumsily off his uncomfortable mushroom seat, but Wind put five long sensitive fingers on his sleeve.

'Lasse mich, lasse mich,' wailed Pnin, trying to beat off the limp fawning hand.

'Please!' said Dr Wind. 'Be just. The prisoner has always the last word; it is his right. Even the Nazis admit it. And first of all--I want you to allow me to pay at least one-half of the lady's passage.'

'Ach nein, nein, nein,' said Pnin. 'Let us finish this nightmare conversation (diese koschmarische Sprache).'

'As you like,' said Dr Wind, and proceeded to impress upon pinned Pnin the following points: That it had all been Liza's idea--'simplifying matters, you know, for the sake of our child' (the 'our' sounded tripersonal); that Liza should be treated as a very sick woman (pregnancy being really the sublimation of a death wish); that he (Dr Wind) would marry her in America--'where I am also going,' Dr Wind added for clarity; and that he (Dr Wind) should at least be permitted to pay for the beer. From then on to the end of the voyage that had turned from green and silver to a uniform grey, Pnin busied himself overtly with his English-language manuals, and although immutably meek with Liza, tried to see her as little as he could without awakening her suspicions. Every now and then Dr Wind would appear from nowhere and make from afar signs of recognition and reassurance. And at last, when the great statue arose from the morning haze where, ready to be ignited by the sun, pale, spellbound buildings stood like those mysterious rectangles of unequal height that you see in bar graph representations of compared percentages (natural resources, the frequency of mirages in different deserts), Dr Wind resolutely walked up to the Pnins and identified himself--'because all three of us must enter the land of liberty with pure hearts.' And after a bathetic sojourn on Ellis Island, Timofey and Liza parted.

There were complications--but at last Wind married her. In the course of the first five years in America, Pnin glimpsed her on several occasions in New York; he and the Winds were naturalized on the same day; then, after his removal to Waindell in 1945, half a dozen years passed without any meetings or correspondence. He heard of her, however, from time to time. Recently (in December 1951) his friend Chateau had sent him an issue of a journal of psychiatry with an article written by Dr Albina Dunkelberg. Dr Eric Wind, and Dr Liza Wind on 'Group Psychotherapy Applied to Marriage Counselling'. Pnin used to be always embarrassed by Liza's 'psihooslinпe' ('psychoasinine') interests, and even now, when he ought to have been indifferent, he felt a twinge of revulsion and pity. Eric and she were working under the great Bernard Maywood, a genial giant of a man--referred to as 'The Boss' by over-adaptive Eric--at a Research Bureau attached to a Planned Parenthood centre. Encouraged by his and his wife's protector, Eric evolved the ingenious idea (possibly not his own) of sidetracking some of the more plastic and stupid clients of the Centre into a psychotherapeutic trap--a 'tension-releasing' circle on the lines of a quilting bee, where young married women in groups of eight relaxed in a comfortable room amid an atmosphere of cheerful first-name informality, with doctors at a table facing the group, and a secretary unobtrusively taking notes, and traumatic episodes floating out of everybody's childhood like corpses. At these sessions, the ladies were made to discuss among themselves with absolute frankness their problems of marital maladjustment, which entailed, of course, comparing notes on their mates, who later were interviewed, too, in a special' husband group', likewise very informal, with a great passing around of cigars and anatomic charts. Pnin skipped the actual reports and case histories--and there is no need to go here into those hilarious details. Suffice it to say that already at the third session of the female group, after this or that lady had gone home and seen the light and come back to describe the newly discovered sensation to her still blocked but rapt sisters, a ringing note of revivalism pleasingly coloured the proceedings ('Well, girls, when George last night--') And this was not all. Dr Eric Wind hoped to work out a technique that would allow bringing all those husbands and wives together in a joint group. Incidentally, it was deadening to hear him and Liza smacking their lips over the word 'group'. In a long letter to distressed Pnin, Professor Chateau affirmed that Dr Wind even called Siamese twins 'a group'. And indeed progressive, idealistic Wind dreamed of a happy world consisting of Siamese centuplets, anatomically conjoined communities, whole nations built around a communicating liver. 'It is nothing but a kind of microcosmos of Communism--all that psychiatry,' rumbled Pnin, in his answer to Chateau. 'Why not leave their private sorrows to people? Is sorrow not, one asks, the only thing in the world people really possess?'

6

'Look,' said Joan on Saturday morning to her husband, 'I have decided to tell Timofey they will have the house to themselves today from two to five. We must give those pathetic creatures every possible chance. There are things I can do in town, and you will be dropped at the library.'

'It so happens,' answered Laurence, 'that I have not the least intention to be dropped or otherwise moved anywhere today. Besides, it is highly improbable they will need eight rooms for their reunion.'

Pnin put on his new brown suit (paid for by the Cremona lecture) and, after a hurried lunch at The Egg and We, walked through the snow-patched park to the Waindell bus station, arriving there almost an hour too early. He did not bother to puzzle out why exactly Liza had felt the urgent need to see him on her way back from visiting St Bartholomew's, the preparatory school near Boston that her son would go to next fall: all he knew was that a flood of happiness foamed and rose behind the invisible barrier that was to burst open any moment now. He met five buses, and in each of them clearly made out Liza waving to him through a window as she and the other passengers started to file out, and then one bus after another was drained and she had not turned up. Suddenly he heard her sonorous voice ('Timofey, zdrastvuy!') behind him, and, wheeling around, saw her emerge from the only Greyhound he had decided would not bring her. What change could our friend discern in her? What change could there be, good God! There she was. She always felt hot and buoyant, no matter the cold, and now her sealskin coat was wide open on her frilled blouse as she hugged Pnin's head and he felt the grapefruit fragrance of her neck, and kept muttering: 'Nu, nu, vot i horosho, nu vot'--mere verbal heart props--and she cried out: 'Oh, he has splendid new teeth!' He helped her into a taxi, her bright diaphanous scarf caught on something, and Pnin slipped on the pavement, and the taximan said 'Easy,' and took her bag from him, and everything had happened before, in this exact sequence.

It was, she told him as they drove up Park Street, a school in the English tradition. No, she did not want to eat anything, she had had a big lunch at Albany. It was a 'very fancy' school--she said this in English--the boys played a kind of indoor tennis with their hands, between walls, and there would be in his form a--(she produced with false nonchalance a well-known American name which meant nothing to Pnin because it was not that of a poet or a president). 'By the way,' interrupted Pnin, ducking and pointing, 'you can just see a corner of the campus from here.' All this was due ('Yes, I see, vizhu, vizhu, kampus kak kampus: The usual kind of thing'), all this, including a scholarship, was due to the influence of Dr Maywood ('You know, Timofey, some day you should write him a word, just a little sign of courtesy'). The Principal, a clergyman, had shown her the trophies Bernard had won there as a boy. Eric of course had wanted Victor to go to a public school but had been overruled. The Reverend Hopper's wife was the niece of an English Earl.