The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov Read Online Free PDF

month, counting the electric bill: it’s completely dark in there, so from eight a.m. to eight p.m. one weak lightbulb is left on.
    “You ask, what milieu is he from? Well, how shall I put it.… He is twenty-four years old, he is a peasant, it is unlikely that he finished even a village school, he was what is called ‘an honest Communist,’ studied only political literacy, which in our book signifies trying to make blockheads out of knuckleheads—that’s all I know. Oh, if you want I’ll show him to you, only remember, mum’s the word!”
    Martin went into the corridor. Petya and I followed. The old man in his cozy house jacket really did look like a prison warden. He produced the key as he walked, and there was something almost professional in the way he inserted it in the lock. The lock crunched twice, and Martin threw open the door. Far from being some ill-lit hole, it was a splendid, spacious bathroom, of the kind one finds in comfortable German dwellings. Electric light, bright yet pleasing to the eye, burned behind a merry, ornate shade. A mirror glistened on the left-hand wall. On the night table by the bathtub there were books, a peeled orange on a lustrous plate, and an untouched bottle of beer. In the white bathtub, on a mattress covered with a clean sheet, with a large pillow under the back of his head, lay a well-fed, bright-eyed fellow with a long growth of beard, in a bathrobe (a hand-me-down from the master) and warm, soft slippers.
    “Well, what do you say?” Martin asked me.
    I found the scene comical and did not know what to answer. “That’s where the window used to be,” Martin indicated with his finger. Sure enough, the window was boarded up to perfection.
    The prisoner yawned and turned toward the wall. We went out. Martin fondled the bolt with a smile. “Fat chance he’ll ever escape,” he said, and then added pensively, “I would be curious to know, though, just how many years he’ll spend in there.…”
    * Lenin’s real name.—D.N.
    *In this narrative, all traits and distinguishing marks that might hint at the identity of the real Martin are of course deliberately distorted. I mention this so that curiosity seekers will not search in vain for the “tobacco shop in the corner building.”— V.N.

SOUNDS
    I T WAS necessary to shut the window: rain was striking the sill and splashing the parquet and armchairs. With a fresh, slippery sound, enormous silver specters sped through the garden, through the foliage, along the orange sand. The drainpipe rattled and choked. You were playing Bach. The piano had raised its lacquered wing, under the wing lay a lyre, and little hammers were rippling across the strings. The brocade rug, crumpling into coarse folds, had slid partway off the piano’s tail, dropping an opened opus onto the floor. Every now and then, through the frenzy of the fugue, your ring would clink on the keys as, incessantly, magnificently, the June shower slashed the windowpanes. And you, without interrupting your playing, and slightly tilting your head, were exclaiming, in time to the beat, “The rain, the rain … I am go-ing to drown it out.…”
    But you could not.
    Abandoning the albums that lay on the table like velvet coffins, I watched you and listened to the fugue, the rain. A feeling of freshness welled in me like the fragrance of wet carnations that trickled down everywhere, from the shelves, from the piano’s wing, from the oblong diamonds of the chandelier.
    I had a feeling of enraptured equilibrium as I sensed the musical relationship between the silvery specters of rain and your inclined shoulders, which would give a shudder when you pressed your fingers into the rippling luster. And when I withdrew deep into myself the whole world seemed like that—homogeneous, congruent, bound by the laws of harmony. I myself, you, the carnations, at that instant all became vertical chords on musical staves. I realized that everything in the world was an interplay of