The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov Read Online Free PDF Page A

hurricane of foul language. I cannot repeat the man’s obscenities; I shall limit myself to saying that he placed my dear late mother in the most curious situations. It was decided to inculcate in him thoroughly the nature of his legal status. I explained that he would remain imprisoned until the end of his days; that if I died first I would transmit him to Petya like a bequest; that my son in his turn would transmit him to my future grandson and so forth, causing him to become a kind of family tradition. A family jewel. I mentioned in passing that, in the unlikely eventuality of our having to move to a different Berlin flat, he would be tied up, placed in a special trunk, and would make the move with us easy as pie. I went on to explain to him that in one case only would he be granted amnesty. Namely, he would be released the day the Bolshevik bubble burst. Finally I promised that he would be well fed—far better thanwhen, in my time, I had been locked up by the Cheka—and that, by way of special privilege, he would receive books. And in fact, to this day I don’t believe he has once complained about the food. True, at first Petya proposed that he be fed dried roach, but search as he might, that Soviet fish was unavailable in Berlin. We are obliged to give him bourgeois food. Exactly at eight every morning Petya and I go in and place by his tub a bowl of hot soup with meat and a loaf of gray bread. At the same time we take out the chamber pot, a clever apparatus we acquired just for him. At three he gets a glass of tea, at seven some more soup. This nutritional system is modeled on the one in use in the best European jails.
    “The books were more of a problem. We held a family council, for starters, and stopped at three titles:
Prince Serebryanïy
, Krylov’s
Fables
, and
Around the World in Eighty Days
. He announced that he would not read those ‘White Guard pamphlets,’ but we left him the books, and we have every reason to believe that he read them with pleasure.
    “His mood was changeable. He grew quiet. Evidently he was cooking up something. Maybe he hoped the police would start looking for him. We checked the papers, but there was not a word about the vanished Cheka agent. Most likely the other representatives had decided the man had simply defected, and had preferred to bury the affair. To this pensive period belongs his attempt to slip away, or at least to get word to the outside world. He trudged about his cell, probably reached for the window, tried to pry the planks loose, tried pounding, but we made some threat or other and the pounding ceased. And once, when Petya went in there alone, the man lunged at him. Petya grabbed him in a gentle bear hug and sat him back in the tub. After this occurrence he underwent another change, became very good-natured, even joked on occasion, and finally attempted to bribe us. He offered us an enormous sum, promising to obtain it through somebody. When this did not help either, he started whimpering, then went back to swearing worse than before. At the moment he is at a stage of grim submissiveness, which, I’m afraid, bodes no good.
    “We take him for a daily walk in the corridor, and twice a week we air him out by an open window; naturally we take all necessary precautions to prevent him from yelling. On Saturdays he takes a bath. We ourselves have to wash in the kitchen. On Sundays I give him short lectures and let him smoke three cigarettes—in my presence, of course. What are these lectures about? All sorts of things. Pushkin, for instance, or Ancient Greece. Only one subject is omitted—politics. He is totally deprived of politics. Just as if such a thing did not exist on the face of the earth. And you know what? Ever since I have kept one Sovietagent locked up, ever since I have served the Fatherland, I am simply a different man. Jaunty and happy. And business has looked up, so there is no great problem supporting him either. He costs me twenty marks or so a