Vladimir Nabokov: The Enchanter

On the asphalt lane there was a deafening clatter of roller skates. A private game of hopscotch was in progress at its curb. And there, waiting her turn, with one foot extended to the side, her blazing arms crossed on her chest, her misty head inclined, emanating a fierce, chestnut heat, losing, losing the layer of violet that disintegrated into ashes under his terrible, unnoticed gaze… Never before, though, had the subordinate clause of his fearsome life been complemented by the principal one, and he walked past with clenched teeth, stifling his exclamations and his moans, then gave a passing smile to a toddler who had run between his scissorlike legs.

“Absentminded smile,” he thought pathetically. “Then again, only humans are capable of absentmindedness.”

AT DAYBREAK HE DROWSILY laid down his book like a dead fish folding its fin, and suddenly began berating himself: why, he demanded, did you succumb to the doldrums of despair, why didn’t you try to get a proper conversation going, and then make friends with that knitter, chocolate-woman, governess or whatever; and he pictured a jovial gentleman (whose internal organs only, for the moment, resembled his own) who could thus gain the opportunity—thanks to that very joviality—to collect you-naughty-little-girl-you onto his lap. He knew that he was not very sociable, but also that he was resourceful, persistent, and capable of ingratiating himself; more than once, in other areas of his life, he had had to improvise a tone or apply himself tenaciously, undismayed that his immediate target was at best only indirectly related to his more remote goal. But when the goal blinds you, suffocates you, parches your throat, when healthy shame and sickly cowardice scrutinize your every step…

She was clattering across the asphalt amid the others, leaning well forward and rhythmically swinging her relaxed arms, hurtling past with confident speed. She turned deftly, and her thigh was bared by the flip of her skirt. Then her dress clung so closely in back that it outlined a small cleft as, with a barely perceptible undulation of her calves, she rolled slowly backward. Was it concupiscence, this torment he experienced as he consumed her with his eyes, marveling at her flushed face, at the compactness and perfection of her every movement (particularly when, having barely frozen motionless, she dashed off again, pumping swiftly with her prominent knees)? Or else was it the anguish that always accompanied his hopeless yearning to extract something from beauty, to hold it still for an instant, to do something with it—no matter what, provided there were some kind of contact, that somehow, no matter how, could quench that yearning? Why puzzle over it? She’d gather speed again and vanish—and tomorrow a different one would flash by, and thus, in a succession of disappearances, his life would pass.

Or would it? He saw the same woman knitting on the same bench and, sensing that, instead of a gentlemanly smile, he had leered and flashed a tusk from beneath a bluish lip, sat down. His uneasiness and the trembling of his hands did not last long. A conversation developed, which in itself gave him a strange satisfaction; the weight on his chest dissolved, and he began to feel almost merry. She appeared, clamping along on her skates, as she had the previous day. Her light-gray eyes dwelled on him for an instant, even though it was not he but the knitter who was speaking, and, having accepted him, she turned insouciantly away. Then she was sitting beside him, holding onto the edge of the seat with rosy, sharp-knuckled hands, on which shifted now a vein, now a deep dimple near the wrist while her hunched shoulders remained motionless, and her dilating pupils followed someone’s ball rolling across the gravel. As the day before, his neighbor, reaching across him, handed a sandwich to the girl, who began tapping her somewhat scarred knees together lightly as she ate.

“…it’s healthier, of course, and, most important of all, we have a first-rate school,” a distant voice was saying when he suddenly noticed that the auburn-curled head on his left had silently bent low over his hand.

“You lost the hands of your watch,” said the girl.

“No,” he answered, clearing his throat, “that’s the way it’s supposed to be. It’s a rarity.”

Reaching across with her left hand (the right one was holding the sandwich) she caught hold of his wrist and examined the blank, centerless dial beneath which the hands were inserted, revealing only their very tips, like two black droplets, amid the silvery digits. A shriveled leaf trembled in her hair, very near her neck above the delicate projection of a vertebra—and during his next spell of insomnia he kept yanking off the ghost of that leaf, grasping and yanking, with two fingers, with three, then with all five.

The day after, and the days that followed, he sat in the same place, doing an amateurish but quite tolerable imitation of an eccentric loner: the usual hour, the usual place. The girl’s arrival, her breathing, her legs, her hair, everything she did, whether it was scratching a shin and leaving white marks on it, or throwing a small black ball high in the air, or brushing against him with a bare elbow as she seated herself on the bench—all of it (while he appeared engrossed in pleasant conversation) evoked an intolerable sensation of sanguine, dermal, multivascular communion with her, as if the monstrous bisector pumping all the juices from the depths of his being extended into her like a pulsating dotted line, as if this girl were growing out of him, as if, with every carefree movement, she tugged and shook her vital roots implanted in the bowels of his being, so that, when she abruptly changed position or rushed off, he felt a yank, a barbarous pluck, a momentary loss of equilibrium: suddenly you are traveling through the dust on your back, banging the back of your head, on your way to being strung up by your insides. And all the while he calmly sat listening, smiling, nodding his head, pulling at a pant leg to free his knee, scrabbling lightly in the gravel with his walking stick, and saying, “Is that so?” or “Yes, it happens sometimes, you know…,” but comprehending his neighbor’s words only when the girl was nowhere nearby. He learned from this circumstantiating chatterbox that between her and the girl’s mother, a forty-two-year-old widow, there existed a five-year friendship (her own husband’s honor had been saved by the widow’s late spouse); that last spring this widow had, after a long illness, undergone a serious operation of the intestine; that, having long since lost all her family, she had promptly and tenaciously clutched at the kind couple’s suggestion that the girl move in with them in their provincial town; and that now she had been brought for a visit with her mother, as the garrulous lady’s husband had a bit of bothersome business to attend to in the capital, but that soon it would be time to head home—the sooner the better, for the girl’s presence only irritated the widow, who was exceptionally decent but had grown somewhat self-indulgent.

“Say, didn’t you mention that she was selling off some sort of furniture?”

This question (with its continuation) he had prepared during the night and tried out sotto voce on the ticking silence; having convinced himself that it sounded natural, he repeated it the next day to his newfound acquaintance. She replied affirmatively and explained in no uncertain terms that it wouldn’t be a bad idea if the widow made a little money—her medical care was costing and would continue to cost a lot, her resources were very limited, she insisted on paying for her daughter’s upkeep but did so rather sporadically—and we’re not rich either—in a word, the debt of honor, apparently, was considered already extinguished.