Vladimir Nabokov: The Enchanter

A car materialized behind the foliage. In we get! The familiar black cap, coat over her arm, a small suitcase, help from red-handed Maria. Just wait, you’ll see the things I’ll buy for you…. She insisted on sitting next to the driver, and he had to consent, concealing his chagrin. The woman, whom we shall never see again, was waving good-bye with an apple-tree branch. Maria was shooing the chicks in. We’re off, we’re off.

He sat leaning back, holding his stick—a very valuable, antique thing with a thick coral head—between his knees, gazing through the glass partition at the beret and the contented shoulders. The weather was exceptionally warm for June, a stream of heat rushed in through the window, and soon he took off his tie and unbuttoned his collar.

After an hour the girl looked around at him (she was pointing at something beside the road but, although he turned, open-mouthed, he was too late to see anything—and, for some reason, with no logical connection, the thought crossed his mind that there was, after all, an age difference of nearly thirty years). At six they stopped for ice cream, while the talkative chauffeur drank beer at the next table, sharing various considerations with his client.

On we go. He looked at the forest that kept approaching in undulating hops from hillside to hillside until it slid down an incline and tripped over the road, where it was counted and stored away. “Shall we take a break here?” he wondered. “We could have a short walk, sit for a while on the moss among the mushrooms and the butterflies….” But he could not bring himself to stop the chauffeur: there was something unbearable about the idea of a suspicious car standing idle on the highway.

Then it got dark and their headlights imperceptibly came on. They stopped for dinner at the first roadside eatery, the philosophizer again sprawled nearby, and seemed to be glancing over less at his employer’s steak and potato croquettes than at the profile of the hair screening her face and at her exquisite cheek…. My darling is tired and flushed from the trip, the rich meat course, the drop of wine. The sleepless night with the rosy glow of the fire in the darkness is taking its toll, her napkin is slipping off the soft hollow of her skirt…. And now all this is mine…. He asked if they had rooms available—no, they did not.

In spite of her increasing lassitude she resolutely refused to exchange her seat in front for support in the car’s cosy depths, saying she would get carsick in back. At last, at last, lights began ripening and bursting amid the hot, black void, a hotel was immediately selected and the agonizing journey paid for, and that part was done with. She was half asleep as she crawled out onto the sidewalk, halting numbly amid the bluish, coarse-grained darkness, the warm burnt fragrance, the roar and throb of two, three, four trucks taking advantage of the deserted nighttime street to descend with appalling speed from behind a bend that concealed a whining, straining, grinding upgrade.

A short-legged, macrocephalous old fellow in an unbuttoned waistcoat—sluggish, dawdling, explaining at length and with guilty benevolence that he was only standing in for the owner who was his eldest son and who had had to leave to attend to family matters—searched for a long time in a black book, then announced that he did not have a free room with twin beds (there was a flower show in town, and many visitors) but that there was one with a double bed, “which amounts to the same thing, you and your daughter will be even more—” “All right, all right,” interrupted the traveler, as the hazy child stood off by herself, blinking and trying to focus her languishing gaze on a doubling cat.

They headed upstairs. The help apparently went to bed early, or else they were absent too. Meanwhile, the stooping, groaning gnome tried one key after another; an old woman with curly gray hair, in azure pajamas, her face tanned to a nutlike hue, emerged from the toilet next door with an admiring glance at this tired, pretty girl in the obedient pose of tender victim, whose dark dress stood out against the ocher of the wall where she leaned her shoulderblades, her tousled head thrown slightly back and slowly turning from side to side, and her eyelids twitching as though she were trying to unravel her excessively thick lashes. “Come on, get it open,” irritably said her father, a balding gentleman, also a tourist.

“Is this where I’m going to sleep?” the girl asked indifferently, and when, struggling with the shutters, squeezing tight their eyelike chinks, he replied affirmatively, she took a look at the cap she was holding and limply tossed it on the wide bed.

“There we are,” said he after the old man had dragged in their suitcases and left, and there remained in the room only the pounding of his heart and the distant throbbing of the night. “There, now it’s time for bed.”

Reeling with sleepiness, she bumped into the corner of an armchair, at which point he, simultaneously sitting down in it, took her by the hip and drew her close. She straightened, stretching up like an angel, for a split second tensed every muscle, took another half step, and softly descended onto his lap. “My sweetheart, my poor little girl,” he spoke in a kind of general mist of pity, tenderness, and desire, as he observed her drowsiness, her wooziness, her diminishing smile, palpating her through the dark dress, feeling, through the thin wool, the band of the orphan’s garter on her bare skin, thinking how defenseless, abandoned, warm she was, reveling in the animate weight of her legs as they slithered apart and then, with the faintest corporeal rustle, recrossed at a slightly higher level. She slowly entwined a somnolent arm, in its snug little sleeve, around his nape, engulfing him with the chestnut fragrance of her soft hair, but her arm slid down, and she sleepily nudged with the sole of her sandal the bag standing next to the armchair…. A rumbling approached and receded beyond the window. Then, in the silence, the whine of a mosquito became audible, and for some reason it evoked a fleeting memory of something infinitely remote, late bedtimes in his childhood, a dissolving lamp, the hair of his sister, his coeval, who had died long, long ago. “My sweetheart,” he repeated, and, nuzzling a curl out of the way, cuddling mussily, he tasted, exerting almost no pressure, her hot silky neck near the chill of the chain; then, taking her by the temples so that her eyes lengthened and narrowed, he began kissing her parting lips, her teeth…. She slowly wiped her mouth with bent knuckles, her head collapsed onto his shoulder, and between her eyelids there showed only a narrow, sunset-hued luster, for she was virtually asleep.

There was a knock at the door. He gave a violent start (hurriedly withdrawing his hand from her belt without having figured out how to unhook it). “Wake up, get off,” he said, giving her a quick shake. She opened her vacant eyes wide and slithered down over the hummock of his knee. “Come in,” he said.

The old fellow peeked in and announced that the gentleman was wanted downstairs, that there was somebody from the police station to see him.

“The police?” he asked, grimacing with bewilderment. “The police?… All right, you can go—I’ll be right down,” he added without getting up. He lit a cigarette, blew his nose and carefully refolded his handkerchief, squinting through the smoke. “Listen,” he said before going out, “your bag is over here. I’ll open it for you and you take out whatever you need, get undressed and go to bed in the meantime. The bathroom is the first door on the left.”

“Why the police?” he thought as he descended the badly lit staircase. “What do they want?”

“What’s the matter?” he asked sharply upon reaching the entrance hall and seeing an already restive gendarme, a swarthy giant with a cretin’s eyes and chin.