Despair

is it a crime in itself for two people to be as alike as two drops of blood--and which of them was the impeccable hermann, which the ubiquitous felix?

Part Iof a novel

Foreword

The Russian text of Despair (Otchayanie--a far more sonorous howl) was written in 1932, in Berlin. The émigré review Sovremennye Zapiski, in Paris, serialized it in the course of 1934, and the émigré publishing house Petropolis, in Berlin, published the book in 1936. As has happened in the case of all my other works, Otchayanie (despite Hermann's conjecture) is banned in the prototypical police state.

At the end of 1936, while I was still living in Berlin--where another beastliness had started to megaphone--I translated Otchayanie for a London publisher. Although I had been scribbling in English all my literary life in the margin, so to say, of my Russian writings, this was my first serious attempt (not counting a wretched poem in a Cambridge University review, circa 1920) to use English for what may be loosely termed an artistic purpose. The result seemed to me stylistically clumsy, so I asked a rather grumpy Englishman, whose services I obtained through an agency in Berlin, to read the stuff; he found a few solecisms in the first chapter, but then refused to continue, saying he disapproved of the book; I suspect he wondered if it might not have been a true confession.

In 1937 John Long Limited, of London, brought out Despair in a convenient edition with a catalogue raisonné of their publications at the back. Despite that bonus, the book sold badly, and a few years later a German bomb destroyed the entire stock. The only copy extant is, as far as I know, the one I own--but two or three may still be lurking amidst abandoned reading matter on the dark shelves of seaside boardinghouses from Bournemouth to Tweedmouth.

For the present version I have done more than revamp my 30-year-old translation: I have revised Otchayanie itself. Lucky students who may be able to compare the three texts will also note the addition of an important passage which had been stupidly omitted in more timid times. Is this fair, is this wise from a scholar's point of view? I can readily imagine what Pushkin might have said to his trembling paraphrasts; but I also know how pleased and excited I would have been in 1935 had I been able to foreread this 1965 version. The ecstatic love of a young writer for the old writer he will be some day is ambition in its most laudable form. This love is not reciprocated by the older man in his larger library, for even if he does recall with regret a naked palate and a rheumless eye, he has nothing but an impatient shrug for the bungling apprentice of his youth.

Despair, in kinship with the rest of my books, has no social comment to make, no message to bring in its teeth. It does not uplift the spiritual organ of man, nor does it show humanity the right exit. It contains far fewer "ideas" than do those rich vulgar novels that are acclaimed so hysterically in the short echo-walk between the ballyhoo and the hoot. The attractively shaped object or Wiener Schnitzel dream that the eager Freudian may think he distinguishes in the remoteness of my wastes will turn out to be on closer inspection a derisive mirage organized by my agents. Let me add, just in case, that experts on literary "schools" should wisely refrain this time from casually dragging in "the influence of German Impressionists": I do not know German and have never read the Impressionists--whoever they are. On the other hand, I do know French and shall be interested to see if anyone calls my Hermann "the father of existentialism."

The book has less White-Russian appeal than have my other émigré novels*; hence it will be less puzzling and irritating to those readers who have been brought up on the leftist propaganda of the Thirties. Plain readers, on the other hand, will welcome its plain structure and pleasing plot--which, however, is not quite as familiar as the writer of a certain rude letter that appears later assumes it to be.

There are many entertaining conversations throughout the book, and the final scene with Felix in the wintry woods is of course great fun.

I am unable to foresee and to fend inevitable attempts to find in the alembics of Despair something of the rhetorical venom that I injected into the narrator's tone in a much later novel. Hermann and Humbert are alike only in the sense that two dragons painted by the same artist at different periods of his life resemble each thier. Both are neurotic scoundrels, yet there is a green lane in Paradise where Humbert is permitted to wander at dusk once a year; but Hell shall never parole Hermann.

The line and fragments of lines Hermann mutters in Chapter Four come from Pushkin's short poem addressed to his wife in the 1830s. I give it here in full, in my own translation, with the retention of measure and rhyme, a course that is seldom advisable--nay, admissible--except at a very special conjunction of stars in the firmament of the poem, as obtains here.

'Tis time, my dear, 'tis time. The heart demands repose.

Day after day flits by, and with each hour there goes

A little bit of life; but meanwhile you and I

Together plan to dwell ... yet lo! 'tis then we die.

There is no bliss on earth: there's peace and freedom, though.

An enviable lot I long have yearned to know:

Long have I, weary slave, been contemplating flight

To a remote abode of work and pure delight.

The "remote abode" to which mad Hermann finally scurries is economically located in the Roussillon where three years earlier I had begun writing my chess novel, The Defense. We leave Hermann there at the ludicrous height of his discomfiture. I do not remember what happened to him eventually. After all, 15 other books and twice as many years have intervened. I cannot even recall if that film he proposed to direct was ever made by him.

--Vladimir Nabokov

March 1, 1965, Montreux

If I were not perfectly sure of my power to write and of my marvelous ability to express ideas with the utmost grace and vividness ... So, more or less, I had thought of beginning my tale. Further, I should have drawn the reader's attention to the fact that had I lacked that power, that ability, et cetera, not only should I have refrained from describing certain recent events, but there would have been nothing to describe, for, gentle reader, nothing at all would have happened. Silly perhaps, but at least clear. The gift of penetrating life's devices, an innate disposition toward the constant exercise of the creative faculty could alone have enabled me ... At this point I should have compared the breaker of the law which makes such a fuss over a little spilled blood, with a poet or a stage performer. But as my poor left-handed friend used to put it: philosophic speculation is the invention of the rich. Down with it.

It may look as though I do not know how to start. Funny sight, the elderly gentleman who comes lumbering by, fowl flesh flopping, in a valiant dash for the last bus, which he eventually overtakes but is afraid to board in motion and so, with a sheepish smile, drops back, still going at a trot. Is it that I dare not make the leap? It roars, gathers speed, will presently vanish irrevocably around the corner, the bus, the motorbus, the might mortibus of my tale. Rather bulky imagery, this. I am still running.

My father was a Russian-speaking German from Reval, where he went to a famous agricultural college. My mother, a pure Russian, came from an old princely stock. On hot summer days, a languid lady in lilac silks, she would recline in her rocking chair, fanning herself, munching chocolate, all the blinds down, and the wind from some new-mown field making them billow like purple sails.

During the war, I was interned as a German subject ... jolly bad luck, considering that I had just entered the University of St. Petersburg. From the end of 1914 to the middle of 1919 I read exactly one thousand and eighteen books ... kept count of them. On my way to Germany I was stranded for three months in Moscow and got married there. Since 1920, I had been living in Berlin. On the ninth of May 1930, having passed the age of 35...

A slight digression: that bit about my mother was a deliberate lie. In reality, she was a woman of the people, simple and coarse, sordidly dressed in a kind of blouse hanging loose at the waist. I could, of course, have crossed it out, but I purposely leave it there as a sample of one of my essential traits: my lighthearted, inspired lying.

Well, as I was saying, the ninth of May 1930 found me on a business trip to Prague. My business was chocolate. Chocolate is a good thing. There are damsels who like only the bitter kind ... fastidious little prigs. (Don't quite see why I write in this vein.)

My hands tremble, I want to shriek or to smash something with a bang ... This mood is hardly suitable for the bland unfolding of a leisurely tale. My heart is itching, a horrible sensation. Must be calm, must keep my head. No good going on otherwise. Quite calm. Chocolate, as everybody knows ... (let the reader imagine here a description of its making). Our trademark on the wrapper showed a lady in lilac, with a fan. We were urging a foreign firm on the verge of bankruptcy to convert their manufacturing process to that of ours to supply Czechoslovakia, and so that was how I came to be in Prague. On the morning of the ninth of May I left my hotel in a taxi which took me ... Dull work recounting all this. Bores me to death. But yearn as I may to reach the crucial point quickly, a few preliminary explanations seem necessary. So (continued on page 202) despair (continued from page 108) let us have done with them: the firm's office happened to be on the very outskirts of the town and I did not find the fellow I wanted. They told me he would be back in an hour or so ...

I think I ought to inform the reader that there has just been a long interval. The sun has had time to set, touching up on its way down with sanguine the clouds above the Pyrenean mountain that so resembles Fujiyama. I have been sitting in a queer state of exhaustion, now listening to the rushing and crashing of the wind, now drawing noses in the margin of the page, now slipping into a vague slumber, and then starting up all aquiver. And again there would grow in me that prickly feeling, that unendurable twitter ... and my will lay limp in an empty world ... I had to make a great effort in order to switch on the light and stick in a new nib. The old one had got chipped and bent and now looks like the beak of a bird of prey. No, these are not the throes of creation ... but something quite different.

Well, as I was saying, the man was out, would be back in an hour. Having nothing belter to do I went for a stroll. It was a last, fresh, blue-dappled day; the wind, a distant relation of the one here, winged its course along the narrow streets; a cloud every now and then palmed the sun, which reappeared like a conjurer's coin. The public garden, where invalids were hand-pedaling about, was a storm of heaving lilac bushes. I looked at shop signs: picked out some word concealing a Slav root familiar to me, though overgrown with an unfamiliar meaning. I wore new yellow gloves and kept swinging my arms as I rambled on aimlessly. Then all of a sudden the row of houses broke, disclosing a vast stretch of land that at first glance seemed to me most rural and alluring.

After passing some barracks, in front of which a soldier was exercising a white horse, I trod upon soft sticky soil; dandelions trembled in the wind and a shoe with a hole in it was basking in the sunshine under a fence. Farther on, a hill, splendidly steep, sloped up into the sky. Decided to climb it. Its splendor proved to be a deception. Among stunted beeches and elder shrubs a zigzag path with steps hewn into it went up and up. I fancied at first that after the very next turning I should reach a spot of wild and wonderful beauty, but it never showed itself. That drab vegetation could not satisfy me. The shrubs straggled on bare ground, polluted all over with scraps of paper, rags, battered tins. One could not leave the steps of the path, for it dug very deep into the incline, and on either side tree roots and scrags of rotting moss stuck out of its earthen walls like the broken springs of decrepit furniture in a house where a madman had dreadfully died. When at last I reached the summit I found there a few shacks standing awry, a washing line, and on it some pants bloated with the wind's sham life.

I put both elbows on the gnarled wooden railing and, looking down, saw, far below and slightly veiled by mist, the city of Prague; shimmering roofs, smoking chimneys, the barracks I had just passed, a tiny white horse.

Resolving to descend by another way, I took the highroad which I found beyond the shacks. The only beautiful thing in the landscape was the dome of a gasholder on a hill: round and ruddy against the blue sky, it looked like a huge football. I left the road and began to climb again, this time up a thinly turfed slope. Dreary and barren country. The rattle of a truck came from the road, then a cart passed in the opposite direction, then a cyclist, then, vilely painted rainbowwise, the motor van of a firm of varnishers. In those rascals' spectrum the green band adjoined the red.

For some time I remained gazing at the road from the slope; then turned, went on, found a blurry trail running between two humps of bald ground, and after a while looked about for a place to rest. At some distance from me under a thorn-bush, flat on his back and with a cap on his face, there sprawled a man. I was about to pass, but something in his attitude cast a queer spell over me: the emphasis of that immobility, the lifelessness of those widespread legs, the stiffness of that half-bent arm. He was dressed in a dark coat and worn corduroy trousers.

"Nonsense," I told myself. "Asleep, merely asleep. No reason for me to intrude. " But nevertheless I approached, and with the toe of my elegant shoe flicked the cap off his face.

Trumpets, please! Or still better, that tattoo which goes with a breathless acrobatic stunt. Incredible! I doubted the reality of what I saw, doubted my own sanity, felt sick and faint--honestly I was forced to sit down, my knees were shaking so.

Now, if another had been in my place and had seen what I saw, he might perhaps have burst into roars of laughter. As for me I was too dazed by the mystery implied. While I looked, everything within me seemed to lose hold and come hurtling down from a height of ten stories. I was gazing at a marvel. Its perfection, its lack of cause and object, filled me with a strange awe.

At this point, now that I have got to the important part and quenched the fire of that itching, it is meet, I presume, that I should bid my prose stand at ease and, quietly retracing my steps, try to define my exact mood that morning, and the way my thoughts wandered when, after not finding the firm's agent in, I went for that walk, scaled that hill, stared at the red rotundity of that gasholder against the blue background of a breezy May day. Let us, by all means, settle that matter. So behold me once again before the encounter, bright-gloved but hatless still loitering aimlessly. What was going on in my mind? Nothing at all, oddly enough, I was absolutely empty and thus comparable to some translucid vessel doomed to receive contents as yet unknown. Whiffs of thoughts relating to the business in hand, to the car I had recently acquired, to this or that feature of the surrounding country, played, as it were, on the outside of my mind, and if anything did echo in my vast inward wilderness it was merely the dim sensation of some force driving me along.

A clever Lett whom I used to know in Moscow in 1919 said to me once that the clouds of brooding which occasionally and without any reason came over me were a sure sign of my ending in a madhouse. He was exaggerating, of course; during this last year I have thoroughly tested the remarkable qualities of clarity and cohesion exhibited by the logical masonry in which my strongly developed but perfectly normal mind indulged. Frolics of the intuition, artistic vision, inspiration, all the grand things which have lent my life such beauty, may, I expect, strike the layman, clever though he be, as the preface of mild lunacy. But don't you worry; my health is perfect, my body both clean within and without, my gait easy; I neither drink nor smoke excessively, nor do I live in riot. Thus, in the pink of health, well dressed and young-looking, I roved the countryside described above; and the secret inspiration did not deceive me. I did find the thing that I had been unconsciously tracking. Let me repeat--incredible! I was gazing at a marvel, and its perfection, its lack of cause and object filled me with a strange awe. But perhaps already then, while I gazed, my reason had begun to probe the perfection, to search for the cause, to guess at the object.

He drew his breath in with a sharp sniff: his face broke into ripples of life--this slightly marred the marvel, but still it was there. He then opened his eyes, blinked at me askance, sat up, and with endless yawns--could not get his fill of them--started scratching his scalp, both hands deep in his brown greasy hair.

He was a man of my age, lank, dirty, with a three days' stubble on his chin; there was a narrow glimpse of pink flesh between the lower edge of his collar (soft, with two round slits meant for an absent pin) and the upper end of his shirt. His thin-knitted tie dangled sideways, and there was not a button to his shirt front. A few pale violets were fading in his buttonhole; one of them had got loose and hung head downward. Near him lay a shabby knapsack; an opened flap revealed a pretzel and the greater part of a sausage with the usual connotations of illtimed lust and brutal amputation. I sat examining the tramp with astonishment; (continued on page 287) despair (continued from page 202) he seemed to have donned that gawky disguise for an old-fashioned slumkin-lumpkin fancy dress ball.

"I could do with a smoke," said he in Czech. His voice turned out to be unexpectedly low-tuned, even sedate, and with two forked fingers he made the gesture of holding a cigarette. I thrust toward him my large cigarette case; my eyes did not once leave his face. He bent a little nearer, pressing his hand against the earth as he did so, and I took the opportunity of inspecting his ear and hollow temple.

"German ones," said he and smiled--showed his gums. This disappointed me, but happily his smile vanished immediately. (By this time I was loath to part with the marvel.)

"German yourself?" he inquired in that language, his fingers twirling and pressing the cigarette. I said Yes and clicked my lighter under his nose. He greedily joined his hands roofwise above the trembling flame. Blue-black, square fingernails.

"I'm German, too" said he, puffing smoke. "That is, my father was German, but my mother was Czech, came from Pilsen."

I kept expecting from him an outburst of surprise, great laughter perhaps, but he remained impassive. Only then did I realize what an oaf he was.

"Slept like a top," said he to himself in a tone of fatuous complacency, and spat with gusto.

"Out of work?" I asked.

Mournfully he nodded several times and spat again. It is always a wonder to me the amount of saliva that simple folk seem to possess.

"I can walk more than my boots can," said he looking at his feet. Indeed, he was sadly shod.

He rolled slowly onto his belly and, as he surveyed the distant gasworks and a skylark that soared up from a furrow, he went on musingly:

"That was a good job I had last year in Saxony, not far from the frontier. Gardening. Best thing in the world! Later on I worked in a pastry shop. Every night after work, me and my friend used to cross the frontier for a pint of beer. Seven miles there and as many back. The Czech beer was cheaper than ours and the wenches fatter. There was a time, too, when I played the fiddle and kept a white mouse."

Now let us glance from the side, but just in passing, without any physiognomizing; not too closely, please, gentlemen, or you might get the shock of your lives. Or perhaps you might not. Alas, after all that has happened I have come to know the partiality and fallaciousness of human eyesight. Anyhow, here is the picture: two men reclining on a patch of sickly grass; one, a smartly dressed fellow, slashing his knee with a yellow glove; the other, a vague-eyed vagabond, lying full length and voicing his grievances against life. Crisp rustle of neighboring thorn-bush. Flying clouds. A windy day in May with little shivers like those that run along the coat of a horse. Rattle of a motor lorry from the highroad. A lark's small voice in the sky.

The tramp had lapsed into silence; then spoke again, pausing to expectorate. One thing and another. On and on. Sighed sadly. Lying prone, bent his legs back till the calves touched his bottom, and then again stretched them out.

"Look here, you." I blurted. "Don't you really see anything?"

He rolled over and sat up.

"What's the idea?" he asked, a frown of suspicion darkening his face.

I said: "You must be blind."

For some ten seconds we kept looking into each other's eyes. Slowly I raised my right arm, but his left did not rise, as I had almost expected it to do. I closed my left eye, but both his eyes remained open. I showed him my tongue. He muttered again:

"What's up? What's up?"

I produced a pocket mirror. Even as he took it, he pawed at his face, then glanced at his palm, but found neither blood nor bird spat. He looked at himself in the sky-blue glass. Gave it back to me widi a shrug.

"You fool." I cried. "Don't you see that we two--don't you see that we are--Now listen--take a good look at me ..."

I drew his head sideways to mine, so that our temples touched; in the glass two pairs of eyes danced and swam.

When he spoke his tone was condescending:

"A rich man never quite resembles a poor one, but I dare say you know better. Now I remember once seeing a pair of twins at a fair, in August 1926--or was it September? Now let me see. No. August. Well, that was really some likeness. Nobody could tell the one from the other. You were promised a hundred marks if you spotted the least difference. 'All right,' says Fritz (Big Carrot, we called him) and lands one twin a wallop on the ear. 'There you are,' he says, 'one of them has a red ear, and the other hasn't, so just hand over the money if you don't mind.' What a laugh we had!"

His eyes sped over the dove-gray cloth of my suit; slid down the sleeve: tripped and pulled up at the gold watch on my wrist.

"Couldn't you find some work for me?" he asked, cocking his head.

Note: It was he and not I who first perceived the masonic bond in our resemblance; and as the resemblance itself had been established by me, I stood toward him--according to his subconscious calculation--in a subtle state of dependence, as if I were the mimic and he the model. Naturally, one always prefers people to say: "He resembles you," and not the other way round. In appealing to me for help this petty scoundrel was just feeling the ground in view of future demands. At the back of his muddled brain there lurked, maybe, the reflection that I ought to be thankful to him for his generously granting me, by the mere fact of his own existence, the occasion of looking like him. Our resemblance struck me as a freak bordering on the miraculous. What interested him was mainly my wishing to see any resemblance at all. He appeared to my eyes as my double, that is, as a creature bodily identical with me. It was this absolute sameness which gave me so piercing a thrill. He on his part saw in me a doubtful imitator. I wish to lay stress, however, on the dimness of those ideas of his. He would certainly not have understood my comments upon them, the dullard.

"I am afraid there is not much I can do for you at the moment," I answered coldly. "But leave me your address."

I took out my notebook and silver pencil.

He smiled ruefully: "No good saying I live in a villa; better to sleep in a hayloft than on moss in a wood, but better to sleep on moss than on a hard bench."

"Still, I should like to know where to find you."

He thought this over and then said: "This autumn I am sure to be at the same village where I worked last year. You might send a line to the post office there. It is not far from Tarnitz. Here, let me write it down for you."

His name turned out to be Felix, "the happy one." What his surname was, gentle reader, is no business of yours. His awkward handwriting seemed to creak at every turning. He wrote with his left hand. It was time for me to go. I put ten crowns into his cap. With a condescending grin he offered his hand, hardly bothering to sit up. I grasped it only because it provided me with the curious sensation of Narcissus fooling Nemesis by helping his image out of the brook.

Then almost at a run I returned the way I had come. When I looked over my shoulder I saw his dark lank figure among the bushes. He was lying supine, his legs crossed in the air and his arms under his head.

Suddenly I felt limp, dizzy, dead tired, as after some long and disgusting orgy. The reason for this sickly-sweet afterglow was that he had, with a cool show of absent-mindedness, pocketed my silver pencil. A procession of silver pencils marched down an endless tunnel of corruption. As I followed the edge of the road I now and then closed my eyes till I all but tumbled into the ditch. Then afterward, at the office, in the course of a business conversation, I simply craved to tell my interlocutor: "Queer thing has just happened to me! Now you would hardly believe ..." But I said nothing, thus setting a precedent for secrecy.

When at last I got back to my hotel room, I found there, amid mercurial shadows and framed in frizzly bronze, Felix awaiting me. Pale-faced and solemn he drew near. He was now well-shaven; his hair was smoothly brushed back. He wore a dove-gray suit with a lilac tie. I took out my handkerchief; he took out his handkerchief too. A truce, parleying.

Some of the countryside had got into my nostrils. I blew my nose and sat down on the edge of the bed, continuing the while to consult the mirror. I remember that the small marks of conscious existence such as the dust in my nose, the black dirt between the heel and the shank of one shoe, hunger, and presently the rough brown taste tinged with lemon of a large flat veal cutlet in the grillroom, strangely absorbed my attention as if I were looking for, and finding (and still doubting a little) proofs that I was I, and that this I (a second-rate businessman with ideas) was really at a hotel, dining, reflecting on business matters, and had nothing in common with a certain tramp who, at the moment, was lolling under a bush. And then again, the thrill of that marvel made my heart miss a beat. That man, especially when he slept, when his features were motionless, showed me my own face, my mask, the flawlessly pure image of my corpse--I use the latter term merely because I wish to express with the utmost clarity--express what? Namely this: that we had identical features, and that, in a state of perfect repose, this resemblance was strikingly evident, and what is death, if not a face at peace--its artistic perfection? Life only marred my double thus a breeze dims the bliss of Narcissus; thus, in the painter's absence, there comes his pupil and by the superfluous flush of unbidden tints disfigures the portrait painted by the master.

And then, thought I, was not I, who knew and liked my own face, in a better position than others to notice my double, for it is not everyone who is so observant; and it often happens that people comment upon the striking resemblance between two persons, who, though acquainted, do not suspect their own likeness (and who start denying it hotly if told). All the same, I had never before supposed it possible that there could exist such perfect resemblance as that between Felix and me. I have seen brothers resembling each other, twins. On the screen I have seen a man meeting his double; or better to say an actor playing two parts with, as in our case, the difference of social standing naïvely stressed, so that in one part he was a slinking rough, and in the other a staid bourgeois in a car--as if, really, a pair of identical tramps, or a pair of identical gents, would have been less fun. Yes, I have seen all that, but the likeness between twin brothers is spoiled like an equiradical rhyme by the stamp of kinship, while a film actor in a double part can hardly deceive anyone, for even if he does appear in both impersonations at once, the eye cannot help tracing a line down the middle where the halves of the picture have been joined.

Our case, however, was neither that of identical twins (sharing blood meant for one) nor of a stage wizard's trickery.

How I long to convince you! And I will, I will convince you! I will force you all, you rogues, to believe ... though I am afraid that words alone, owing to their special nature, are unable to convey visually a likeness of that kind: the two faces should be pictured side by side, by means of real colors, not words, then and only then would the spectator see my point. Any author's fondest dream is to turn the reader into a spectator; is this ever attained? The pale organisms of literary heroes feeding under the author's supervision swell gradually with the reader's lifeblood; so that the genius of a writer consists in giving them the faculty to adapt themselves to that--not very appetizing--food and thrive on it, sometimes for centuries. But at the present moment it is not literary methods that I need, but the plain, crude obviousness of the painter's art.

Look, this is my nose; a big one of the northern type, with a hard bone somewhat arched and the fleshy part tipped up and almost rectangular. And that is his nose, a perfect replica of mine. Here are the two sharply drawn furrows on both sides of my mouth with lips so thin as to seem licked away. He has got them, too. Here are the cheekbones--but this is a passport list of facial features meaning nothing; an absurd convention. Somebody told me once that I looked like Amundsen, the polar explorer. Well, Felix, too, looked like Amundsen. But it is not every person that can recall Amundsen's face. I myself recall it but faintly, nor am I sure whether there had not been some mix-up with Nansen. No, I can explain nothing.

Simpering, that is what I am. Well do I know that I have proved my point. Going on splendidly. You now see both of us, reader. Two, but with a single face. You must not suppose, however, that I am ashamed of possible slips and type errors in the book of nature. Look nearer: I possess large yellowish teeth; his are whiter and set more closely together, but is that really important? On my forehead a vein stands out like a capital M imperfectly drawn, but when I sleep my brow is as smooth as that of my double. And those ears ... the convolutions of his are but very slightly altered in comparison with mine: here more compressed, there smoothed out. We have eyes of the same shape, narrowly slit with sparse lashes, but his iris is paler than mine.

This was about all in the way of distinctive markings that I discerned at that first meeting. During the following night my rational memory did not cease examining such minute flaws, whereas with the irrational memory of my senses I kept seeing, despite everything, myself, my own self, in the sorry disguise of a tramp, his face motionless, with chin and cheeks bristle-shaded, as happens to a dead man overnight.

Why did I tarry in Prague? I had finished my business. I was free to return to Berlin. Why did I go back to those slopes next morning, to that road? I had no trouble in finding the exact spot where he had sprawled the day before. I discovered there a golden cigarette-end, a dead violet, a scrap of Czech newspaper, and--that pathetically impersonal trace which the unsophisticated wanderer is wont to leave under a bush: one large, straight, manly piece and a thinner one coiled over it. Several emerald flies completed the picture. Whither had he gone? Where had he passed the night? Empty riddles. Somehow I felt horribly uncomfortable in a vague heavy way, as if the whole experience had been an evil deed.

I returned to the hotel for my suitcase and hurried to the station. There, at the entrance to the platform, were two rows of nice low benches with backs carved and curved in perfect accordance with the human spine. Some people were sitting there; a few were dozing. It occurred to me that I should suddenly see him there, fast asleep, hands open and one last violet still in his buttonhole. People would notice us together; jump up, surround us, drag us to the police station ... why? Why do I write this? Just the usual rush of my pen? Or is it indeed a crime in itself for two people to be as alike as two drops of blood?

• • •

I have grown much too used to an outside view of myself, to being both painter and model, so no wonder my style is denied the blessed grace of spontaneity. Try as I may I do not succeed in getting back into my original envelope, let alone making myself comfortable in my old self; the disorder there is far too great; things have been moved, the lamp is black and dead, bits of my past litter the floor.

Quite a happy past, I dare say. I owned in Berlin a small but attractive flat, three and a half rooms, sunny balcony, hot water, central heating; Lydia, my 30-year-old wife, and Elsie, our 17-year-old maid. Close at hand was the garage where stood that delightful little car--a dark-blue two-seater, paid for in installments. On the balcony, a bulging round-headed hoary cactus grew bravely though slowly. I got my tobacco always at the same shop, and was greeted there by a radiant smile. A similar smile welcomed my wife at the store which supplied us with eggs and butter. On Saturday nights we went to a café or to the pictures. We belonged to the cream of the smug middle class, or so it would seem. I did not, however, upon coming home from office, take off my shoes to lie down on the couch with the evening paper. Nor did conversation with my wife consist solely of smallish numerals. Nor again did my thoughts always stick to the adventures of the chocolate I made. I may even confess that certain Bohemian tastes were not entirely foreign to my nature.

As to my attitude toward new Russia, let me declare straightaway that I did not share my wife's views. Coming from her painted lips, the term "Bolshevik" acquired a note of habitual and trivial hatred--no, "hatred" is, I am afraid, too strong a word here. It was something homely, elementary, womanish, for she disliked Bolsheviks as one dislikes rain (on Sundays especially) or bedbugs (especially in new lodgings), and Bolshevism meant to her a nuisance akin to the common cold. She took it for granted that facts confirmed her opinion; their truth was too obvious to be discussed. Bolsheviks did not believe in God; that was naughty of them, but what else could one expect from sadists and hooligans?

When I used to say that Communism in the long run was a great and necessary thing; that young, new Russia was producing wonderful values, although unintelligible to Western minds and unacceptable to destitute and embittered exiles; that history had never yet known such enthusiasm, asceticism, and unselfishness, such faith in the impending sameness of us all--when I used to talk like this, my wife would answer serenely: "I think you are saying it to tease me, and I think it's not kind." But really I was quite serious for I have always believed that the mottled tangle of our elusive lives demands such essential change; that Communism shall indeed create a beautifully square world of identical brawny fellows, broad-shouldered and microcephalous; and that a hostile attitude toward it is both childish and preconceived, reminding me of the face my wife makes--nostrils strained and one eyebrow lifted (the childish and preconceived idea of a vamp) every time she catches sight of herself in the mirror.

Now that is a word I loathe, the ghastly thing! I have had none of the article ever since I stopped shaving. Anyway, the mere mention of it has just given me a nasty shock, broken the flow of my story (please imagine what should follow here--the history of mirrors); then, too, there are crooked ones, monsters among mirrors: a neck bared, no matter how slightly, draws out suddenly into a downward yawn of flesh, to meet which there stretches up from below the belt another marchpane-pink nudity and both merge into one; a crooked mirror strips its man or starts to squash him, and lo! there is produced a man-bull, a man-toad, under the pressure of countless glass atmospheres; or else, one is pulled out like dough and then torn into two.

Enough--let us get on--roars of laughter are not in my line! Enough, it is not all so simple as you seem to think, you swine, you! Oh, yes, I am going to curse at you, none can forbid me to curse. And not to have a looking glass in my room--that is also my right! True, even in the event of my being confronted by one (bosh, what have I to fear?) it would reflect a bearded stranger--for that beard of mine has done jolly well, and in such a short time too! I am disguised so perfectly, as to be invisible to my own self. Hair comes sprouting out of every pore. There must have been a tremendous stock of shag inside me. I hide in the natural jungle that has grown out of me. There is nothing to fear. Silly superstition!

See here, I am going to write that word again. Mirror. Mirror. Well, has anything happened? Mirror, mirror, mirror. As many times as you like--I fear nothing. A mirror. To catch sight of oneself in a mirror. I was referring to my wife when speaking of that. Difficult to talk if one is constantly interrupted.

By the way, she, too, was given to superstition. The "touchwood" fad. Hurriedly, with an air of decision, her lips compressed, she would glance about for some bare, unpolished timber, find only the underside of a table, then touch it with her stumpy fingers (little cushions of flesh round the strawberry-bright nails which, though lacquered, were never quite clean; the nails of a child)--touch it quickly whilst the mention of happiness still hung warm in the air. She believed in dreams: to dream you had lost a tooth portended the death of someone you knew; and if there came blood with the tooth, then it would be the death of a relative. A field of daisies foretold meeting again one's first lover. Pearls stood for tears. It was very bad to see oneself all in white sitting at the head of the table. Mud meant money; a cat--treason; the sea--trouble for the soul. She was fond of recounting her dreams, circumstantially and at length. Alas! I am writing of her in the past tense. Let me brace up the buckle of my story one hole tighter.

She hates Lloyd George; had it not been for him, the Russian Empire would not have fallen; and--generally: "I could strangle those English with my own hands." Germans get their due for that sealed train in which Bolshevism was tinned, and Lenin imported to Russia. Speaking of the French: "Do you know, Ardalion [a cousin of hers who had fought with the White Army] says they behaved like downright cads in Odessa during the evacuation." At the same time she considers the English type of face to be (after mine) the handsomest on earth; respects Germans because they are musical and steady; and declares she adores Paris, where we once happened to spend a few days. These opinions of hers stand as stiff as statues in their niches. On the contrary, her position in respect to the Russian folk has, on the whole, undergone a certain evolution. In 1920 she was still saying: "The genuine Russian peasant is a monarchist"; now she says: "The genuine Russian peasant is extinct."

She is little educated and little observant. We discovered one day that to her the term "mystic" was somehow dimly connected with "mist" and "mistake" and "stick," but that she had not the least idea what a mystic really was. The only kind of tree she is capable of identifying is the birch: reminds her of her native woodland, she says.

She is a great gobbler of books, but reads only trash, memorizing nothing and leaving out the longer descriptions. She goes for her books to a Russian library; there she seats herself down and is a long time choosing; fumbles at books on the table; takes one, turns its pages, peers into it sideways, like an investigative hen; puts it away, takes up another, opens it--all of which is performed on the table's surface and with the help of one hand only; she notices that she has opened the book upside down, whereupon it is given a turn of 90 degrees--not more, for she discards it to make a dash at the volume which the librarian is about to offer to another lady; the whole process lasts more than an hour, and I do not know what prompts her final selection. Perhaps the title.

Once I brought back from a railway journey some rotten detective novel with a crimson spider amid a black web on its cover. She dipped into it and found it terribly thrilling--felt that she simply could not help taking a peep at the end, but as that would spoil everything, she shut her eyes tight and tore the book in two down its back and hid the second, concluding, portion; then, later, she forgot the place and was a long, long time searching the house for the criminal she herself had concealed, repeating the while in a small voice: "It was so exciting, so terribly exciting; I know I shall die if I don't find out----"

She has found out now. Those pages that explained everything were securely hidden; still, they were found--all of them except one, perhaps. Indeed, a lot of things have happened; now duly explained. Also that came to pass which she feared most. Of all omens it was the weirdest. A shattered mirror. Yet, it did happen, although not quite in the ordinary way. The poor dead woman.

Tum-tee-tum. And once more--Tum! No, I have not gone mad. I am merely producing gleeful little sounds. The kind of glee one experiences upon making an April fool of someone. And a damned good fool I have made of someone. Who is he? Gentle reader, look at yourself in the mirror, as you seem to like mirrors so much.

And now, all of a sudden I feel sad--the real thing, this time. I have just visualized, with shocking vividness, that cactus on the balcony, those blue rooms, that flat of ours in one of those newfangled houses built in the modern boxlike, space-cheating, let-us-have-no-nonsense style. And there, in my world of neatness and cleanliness, the disorder Lydia spread, the sweet vulgar tang of her perfume. But her faults, her innocent dullness, her school-dormitory habit of having the giggles in bed, did not really annoy me. We never quarreled, never did I make a single complaint to her--no matter what piffle she spouted in public, or how tastelessly she dressed. She was anything but good at distinguishing shades, poor soul. She thought it just right if the main colors matched, this satisfying thoroughly her sense of tone, and so she would flaunt a hat of grass-green felt with an olive-green or eau de Nil dress. She liked everything "to be echoed." If, for instance, the sash was black, then she found it absolutely necessary to have some little black fringe or little black frill about her throat. In the first years of our married life she used to wear linen with Swiss embroidery. She was perfectly capable of putting on a wispy frock together with thick autumn shoes; no, decidedly, she had not the faintest notion of the mysteries of harmony, and this was connected with her being wretchedly untidy. Her slovenliness showed in the very way she walked, for she had a knack of treading her left shoe down at heel.

It made me shudder to glance into her chest of drawers where there writhed higgledy-piggledy a farrago of rags, ribbons, bits of silk, her passport, a wilted tulip, some pieces of moth-eaten fur, sundry anachronisms (gaiters for example, as worn by girls ages ago) and suchlike impossible rubbish. Quite often, too, there would dribble into the cosmos of my beautifully arranged things some tiny and very dirty lace handkerchief or a solitary stocking, torn. Stockings seemed positively to burn on those brisk calves of hers.

Not a jot did she understand of household matters. Her receptions were dreadful. There would always be, in a little dish, broken bars of milk chocolate as offered in poor provincial families. I sometimes used to ask myself, what on earth did I love her for? Maybe for the warm hazel iris of her fluffy eyes, or for the natural side wave of her brown hair, done anyhow, or again for that movement of her plump shoulders. But probably the truth was that I loved her because she loved me. To her I was the ideal man: brains, pluck. And there was none dressed better. I remember, once, when I first put on that new dinner jacket, with the vast trousers, she clasped her hands, sank down on a chair and murmured: "Oh, Hermann ..." It was ravishment bordering upon something like heavenly woe.

With, perhaps, the ill-defined feeling that by further embellishing the image of the man she loved, I was meeting her halfway, and doing her and her happiness a good turn, I took advantage of her confidence and during the ten years we lived together told her such a heap of lies about myself, my past, my adventures, that it would have been beyond my powers to hold it all in my head, always ready for reference. But she used to forget everything. Her umbrella stayed with all our acquaintances in turn; her lipstick turned up incomprehensible places such as her cousin's shirtpocket; the thing she had read in the morning paper would be told me at night somewhat as follows: "Let me see, where did I read it, and what was it exactly? ... I just had it by the tail--oh, please, do help me!" Giving her a letter to post was equal to throwing it into the river, leaving the rest to the acumen of the stream and the recipient's piscatorial leisure.

She mixed dates, names, faces. After having invented something I never returned to it; she soon forgot, the story sank to the bottom of her consciousness, but there remained on the surface the ever-renewed rings of humble wonder. Her love almost crossed the boundary limiting all the rest of her feelings. On certain nights, when June and moon rhymed, her most settled thoughts turned into timid nomads. It did not last, they did not wander far, the world was locked again; and a very simple world it was, with the greatest complication in it amounting to a search for the telephone number which she had jotted down on one of the pages of a library book, borrowed by the very person whom she wished to ring up.

She was plump, short, rather formless, but then pudgy women alone rouse me. I simply have no use for the long young lady, the scrawny flapper, the proud smart whore who struts up and down Tauentzienstrasse in her shiny tight-laced boots. Not only had I always been eminently satisfied with my meek bedmate and her cherubic charms, but I had noticed lately, with gratitude to nature and a thrill of surprise, that the violence and the sweetness of my nightly joys were being raised to an exquisite vertex owing to a certain aberration which, I understand, is not as uncommon as I thought at first among high-strung men in their middle 30s. I am referring to a well-known kind of "dissociation." With me it started in fragmentary fashion a few months before my trip to Prague. For example, I would be in bed with Lydia, winding up the brief series of preparatory caresses she was supposed to be entitled to, when all at once I would become aware that imp Split had taken over. My face was buried in the folds of her neck, her legs had started to clamp me, the ashtray toppled off the bed table, the universe followed--but at the same time, incomprehensibly and delightfully, I was standing naked in the middle of the room, one hand resting on the back of the chair where she had left her stockings and panties. The sensation of being in two places at once gave me an extraordinary kick; but this was nothing compared to later developments. In my impatience to split I would bundle Lydia to bed as soon as we had finished supper. The dissociation had now reached its perfect phase. I sat in an armchair half a dozen paces away from the bed upon which Lydia had been properly placed and distributed. From my magical point of vantage I watched the ripples running and plunging along my muscular back, in the laboratorial light of a strong bed lamp that picked out a mother-of-pearl glint in the pink of her knees and a bronze gleam in her hair spread on the pillow--which were about the only bits of her I could see while that big back of mine had not yet slid off to prop up again its panting front half in the audience. The next phase came when I realized that the greater the interval between my two selves the more I was ecstasied; therefore I used to sit every night a few inches farther from the bed, and soon the back legs of my chair reached the threshold of the open door. Eventually I found myself sitting in the parlor--while making love in the bedroom. It was not enough. I longed to discover some means to remove myself at least a hundred yards from the lighted stage where I performed; I longed to contemplate that bedroom scene from some remote upper gallery in a blue mist under the swimming allegories of the starry vault; to watch a small but distinct and very active couple through opera glasses, field glasses, a tremendous telescope, or optical instruments of yet unknown power that would grow larger in proportion to my increasing rapture. Actually, I never got farther back than the console in the parlor, and even so found my view of the bed cut off by the doorjamb unless I opened the wardrobe in the bedroom to have the bed reflected in the oblique speculum or spiegel. Alas, one April night, with the harps of rain aphrodisiacally burbling in the orchestra, as I was sitting at my maximum distance of 15 rows of seats and looking forward to an especially good show--which, indeed, had already started, with my acting self in colossal form and most inventive--from the distant bed, where I thought I was, came Lydia's yawn and voice stupidly saying that if I were not yet coming to bed, I might bring her the red book she had left in the parlor. It lay, in fact, on the console near my chair, and rather than bring it I threw it bedward with a windmill flapping of pages. This strange and awful jolt broke the spell. I was like an insular species of bird that has lost the knack of rising into the air and, like the penguin, flies only in its sleep. I tried hard to recapture the split, and perhaps would have at last succeeded, had not a new and wonderful obsession obliterated in me all desire to resume those amusing but rather banal experiments.

Otherwise, my connubial bliss was complete. She loved me without reservations, without retrospection; her devotion seemed part of her nature. I do not know why I have lapsed again into the past tense; but never mind, my pen finds it more convenient so. Yes, she loved me, loved me faithfully. She liked to examine my face this way and that; with finger and thumb, compasswise, she measured my features; the somewhat prickly area above the upper lip, with the longish groove down the middle; the spacious forehead with its twin swellings above the brows; and the nail of her index finger would follow the lines on both sides of my mouth, which was always shut tight and insensitive to tickling. A big face and none too simple; modeled by special order; with a gloss on the cheekbones, the cheeks themselves slightly hollowed and, on the second shaveless day, overspread with a brigandish growth, reddish in certain lights, exactly the same as his beard. Our eyes alone were not quite identical but what likeness did exist between them was a mere luxury; for his were closed as he lay on the ground before me, and though I have never really seen, only felt, my eyelids when shut, I know that they differed in nothing from his eye-eaves--a good word, that! Ornate, but good, and a welcome guest to my prose. No, I am not getting in the least excited; my self-control is perfect. If every now and again my face pops out, as from behind a hedge, perhaps to the prim reader's annoyance, it is really for the latter's good: let him get used to my countenance; and in the meantime I shall be chuckling quietly over his not knowing whether it was my face or that of Felix. Here I am! and now--gone again; or maybe it was not I! Only by this method can I hope to teach the reader a lesson, demonstrating to him that ours was not an imaginary resemblance, but a real possibility, even more--a real fact, yes, a fact, however fanciful and absurd it might seem.

On coming back from Prague to Berlin, I found Lydia in the kitchen engaged in beating an egg in a glass--"goggle-moggle," we called it. "Throaty aches," she said in a childish voice; then put down the glass upon the edge of the stove, wiped her yellow lips with the back of her wrist and proceeded to kiss my hand. She had on a pink frock, pinkish stockings, dilapidated slippers. The evening sun checkered the kitchen. Again she started to turn the spoon in the thick yellow stuff, grains of sugar crunched slightly, it was still clammy, the spoon did not move smoothly with the velvety ovality that was required. On the stove lay open a battered book. There was a note scribbled in the margin by some person unknown, with a blunt pencil: "Sad, but true" followed by three exclamation marks with their respective dots skidding. I perused the phrase that had appealed so much to one of my wife's predecessors: "Love thy neighbor," said Sir Reginald, "is nowadays not quoted on the stock exchange of human relations."

"Well--had a good trip?" asked Lydia as she went on energetically turning the handle, with the box part held firm between her knees. The coffee beans crackled, richly odorous; the mill was still working with a rumbling and creaking effort; then came an easing, a yielding; gone all resistance; empty.

I have got muddled somehow. As in a dream. She was making that goggle-moggle--not coffee.

"Could have been worse," I said, referring to the trip. "And you, how are you getting on?"

Why did I not tell her of my incredible adventure? I, who would fake wonders for her by the million, seemed not to dare, with those polluted lips of mine, tell her of a wonder that was real. Or maybe something else withheld me. An author does not show people his first draft; a child in the womb is not referred to as Tiny Tom or Belle; a savage refrains from naming objects of mysterious import and uncertain temper; Lydia herself disliked my reading a book she had not yet finished.

For several days I remained oppressed by that meeting. It oddly disturbed me to think that all the time my double was trudging along roads unknown to me, and that he was underfed and cold and wet--and perhaps had caught a chill. I longed for him to find work: it would have been sweeter to know that he were snug and warm--or at least safe in prison. All the same it was not at all my intention to undertake any such measures as might improve his circumstances. I was not in the least keen to pay for his upkeep, and it would have been impossible to find him a job in Berlin, swarming as it was with ragamuffins. Indeed, to be quite frank, I found it somehow preferable to hold him at a certain distance from me as though any proximity would have broken the spell of our likeness. From time to time I might send him a little money lest he should slip and perish in the course of his far wanderings and thus cease to be my faithful representative, a live circulating copy of my face ... Kind but idle thoughts, for the man had no permanent address. So let us tarry (thought I) until, on a certain autumn day, he calls at that village post office somewhere in Saxony.

May passed, and in my mind the memory of Felix healed up. I note for my own pleasure the smooth run of that sentence: the banal narratory tone of the first two words, and then that long sigh of imbecile contentment. Sensation lovers, however, might be interested to observe that, generally speaking, the term "heal up" is employed only when alluding to wounds. But this is only mentioned in passing; no harm meant. Now there is something else I should like to note--namely, that writing with me has become an easier matter: my tale has gained impetus. I have now boarded that bus (mentioned at the beginning), and, what is more, I have a comfortable window seat. And thus, too, I used to drive to my office, before I acquired the car.

That summer it had to work pretty hard, the shiny blue little Icarus. Yes, I was quite taken by my new toy. Lydia and I would often buzz away for the whole day to the country. We always took with us that cousin of hers called Ardalion, who was a painter: a cheery soul, but a rotten painter. By all accounts he was as poor as a sparrow. If people did have their portraits done by him, it was sheer charity on their part, or weakness of character (the man could be hideously insistent). From me, and probably also from Lydia, he used to borrow small cash; and of course he contrived to stay for dinner. He was always behind with his rent, and when he did pay it, he paid it in kind. In still life to be precise ... square apples on a slanting cloth, or phallic tulips in a leaning vase. All this his landlady would frame at her own cost, so that her dining room made one think of an avant-garde, Philistine exhibition. He fed at a little Russian restaurant which, he said, he had once "slapped up" (meaning that he had decorated its walls); he used an even richer expression, for he hailed from Moscow, where people are fond of waggish slang full of lush trivialities (I shall not attempt to render it). The funny part was, that in spite of his poverty, he had somehow managed to purchase a piece of ground, a three hours' drive from Berlin--that is, he had somehow managed to make a down payment of a hundred marks, and did not bother about the rest; in fact, never meant to disgorge another penny, as he considered that the land, fertilized by his first payment, was hence-forth his own till doomsday. It measured, that land, about two and a half tennis courts in length, and abutted on a rather beautiful little lake. A Y-stemmed couple of inseparable birches grew there (or a couple of couples, if you counted their reflections); also several black-alder bushes; a little farther off stood five pine trees and still farther inland one came upon a patch of heather, courtesy of the surrounding wood. The ground was not fenced--there had not been money enough for that. I strongly suspected Ardalion of waiting for the two adjacent allotments to get fenced first, which would automatically legitimate the boundaries of his property and give him an enclosure gratis; but the neighboring bits were still unsold. On the shores of that lake business was slack, the place being damp, mosquito-infested, and far from the village; then also there was no road connecting it with the highway, and nobody knew when that road would be made.

It was, I remember, on a Sunday morning in mid-June that, yielding to Ardalion's rapturous persuasions, we went there for the first time. On our way we stopped to pick up the fellow. Long did I keep toot-tooting, with my eyes fixed on his window. That window slept soundly. Lydia put her hands to her mouth and cried out in a trumpet voice: "Ardally-o-o!" In one of the lower windows, just above the signboard of a pub (which by its look, somehow suggested that Ardalion owed money there) a curtain was dashed aside furiously and a Bismarcklike worthy in frogged dressing gown glanced out with a red trumpet in his hand.

Leaving Lydia in the car, which by now had stopped throbbing, I went up to arouse Ardalion. I found him asleep. He slept in his one-piece bathing suit. Rolling out of bed, he proceeded with silent rapidity to slip on sandals, a blue shirt, and flannel trousers; then he snatched up a briefcase (with a suspicious lump in its cheek) and we went down. A solemn and sleepy expression did not exactly add charm to his fat-nosed face. He was put in the rumble seat.

I did not know the way. He said he knew it as well as he knew his Pater Noster. No sooner had we left Berlin than we went astray. The rest of our drive consisted of making inquiries.

"A glad sight for a landowner!" exclaimed Ardalion, when about noon we passed Koenigsdorf and then sped along the stretch of road he knew. "I shall tell you when to turn. Hail, hail, my ancient trees!"

"Don't play the fool, Ardy dear," said Lydia placidly.

On either side there stretched rough wasteland, the sand-and-heather variety, with a sprinkling of young pines. Then, farther on, the country changed a little; we had now an ordinary field on our right, darkly bordered at some distance by a forest. Ardalion began to fuss anew. On the right-hand side of the highway a bright yellow post grew up and at that spot there branched out at right angles a scarcely discernible road, the ghost of some obsolete road, which presently expired among burdocks and oat grass.

"This is the turning," said Ardalion grandly and then, with a sudden grunt, pitched forward into me, for I had put on the brakes.

You smile, gentle reader? And indeed, why should you not smile? A pleasant summer day and a peaceful countryside; a good-natured fool of an artist and a roadside post ... That yellow post ... Erected by the man selling the allotments, sticking up in brilliant solitude, an errant brother of those other painted posts, which, 17 kilometers farther toward the village of Waldau, stood sentinel over more tempting and expensive acres, that particular landmark subsequently became a fixed idea with me. Cut out clearly in yellow, amid a diffuse landscape, it stood up in my dreams. By its position my fancies found their bearings. All my thoughts reverted to it. It shone, a faithful beacon, in the darkness of my speculations. I have the feeling today that I recognized it, when seeing it for the first time: familiar to me as a thing of the future. Perhaps I am mistaken; perhaps the glance I gave it was quite an indifferent one, my sole concern being not to scrape the mudguard against it while turning; but all the same, today as I recall it, I cannot separate that first acquaintanceship from its mature development.

The road, as already mentioned, lost itself, faded away; the car creaked crossly, as it bounced on the bumpy ground; I stopped it and shrugged my shoulders.

Lydia said: "I suggest, Ardy dear, we push on to Waldau instead; you said there was a large lake there and a cafe or something."

"That's out of the question," retorted Ardalion excitedly. "Firstly, because the café is only just being planned, and secondly, because I have a lake, too. Come on, my dear fellow," he continued, turning to me, "make the old bus move, you won't be sorry."

In front of us, on higher ground, at a distance of some 300 feet, a pine forest began. I looked at it and ... well, I can swear that I felt as if I had known it already. Yes, that's it, now I am getting it clear--I certainly did have that queer sensation; it has not been added as an aftertouch. And that yellow post ... How meaningly it looked at me, when I glanced back--as if it were saying: "I am here, I am at your service ..." And those pines facing me, with their bark resembling reddish snakeskin drawn on tight, and their green fur which the wind was stroking the wrong way; and that bare birch tree on the forest's edge (now, why did I write "bare"? It was not winter yet, winter was still remote), and the day so balmy and almost cloudless, and the little stammering crickets zealously trying to say something beginning with z ... Yes, it all meant something--no mistake.

"May I ask, where you want me to move? I can't see any road."

"Oh, don't be so particular," said Ardalion. "Go ahead, old son. Why, yes, straight on. There, where you see the break. We can just manage it, and once in the wood, it's quite a short run to my place."

"Hadn't we better get out and walk?" proposed Lydia.

"Right you are," I replied, "nobody would dream of stealing a new car abandoned here."

"Yes, much too risky," she admitted at once, "but couldn't you two go along" (Ardalion groaned), "let him show you his place while I wait for you here and then we can proceed to Waldau and swim in the lake and sit in the café?"

"How beastly of you," said Ardalion with great feeling. "Can't you see that I wanted to welcome you on my own land? There were some nice surprises in store for you. I am now very hurt."

I started the car, saying as I did so: "Well, if we smash it you pay for repairs."

The jolts made me jump in my seat, beside me Lydia jumped, behind us Ardalion jumped and kept speaking: "We shall soon (bump) get into the wood (bump) and then (bump-bump) the heather will make it easier (bump)."

We did get in. First of all we stuck in deep sand, the motor roared, the wheels kicked; at last we wrenched ourselves free; then branches came brushing against the car's body, scratching its paint. Some sort of path did finally show itself, now getting smothered in a dry crackle of heather, now emerging again to meander between the close-set trunks.

"More to the right," said Ardalion, "a little more to the right. Well, what d'you say to the smell of pines? Gorgeous, eh? I told you so. Absolutely gorgeous. You may stop here while I go investigating."

He got out and marched away with, at every step, an inspired waggle of his hindquarters.

"Hey, I'm coming too," cried Lydia, but he was going full sail and presently the dense undergrowth hid him.

The engine clicked a little and was still.

"What a creepy spot," said Lydia. "Really, I'd be afraid to stay here all by myself. One could get robbed, murdered--anything ..."

A lonely spot, quite so! The pines soughed gently, snow lay about, with bald patches of soil showing black. What nonsense! How could there be snow in June? Ought to be crossed out, were it not wicked to erase; for the real author is not I, but my impatient memory. Understand it just as you please; it is none of my business. And the yellow post had a skullcap of snow too. Thus the future shimmers through the past. But enough, let that summer day be in focus again: spotty sunlight; shadows of branches across the blue car; a pine cone upon the footboard, where someday the most unexpected of objects will stand; a shaving brush.

"Is it Tuesday that they are coming?" asked Lydia.

I replied: "No, Wednesday night."

A silence.

"I do only hope," said my wife, "they don't bring it with them as last time."

"And even if they do ... Why should you bother?"

A silence. Small blue butterflies settling on thyme.

"I say, Hermann, are you quite certain it was Wednesday night?"

(Is the hidden sense worth disclosing? We were talking of trifles, alluding to some people we knew, to their dog, a vicious little creature, which engaged the attention of all present at parties; Lydia only cared for "large dogs with pedigrees"; pronouncing "pedigrees" made her nostrils quiver.)

"Why doesn't he come back?" she said. "He's sure to have lost himself."

I got out of the car and walked around it. Paint scratched everywhere.

Having nothing better to do, Lydia busied herself with Ardalion's lumpy briefcase: felt it, then opened it. I walked off a few steps (no, no--I cannot recall what it was I was brooding over); surveyed some broken twigs that lay at my feet; then turned back again. Lydia was now sitting on the footboard and whistling gently. We both lit cigarettes. Silence. She had a way of letting out smoke sideways, her mouth awry.

From afar came Ardalion's lusty bawl. A minute later he appeared in a clearing and brandished his arms, beckoning us on. We drove slowly after him, circumnavigating the tree trunks. Ardalion strode in front, his manner resolute and businesslike. Something flashed--the lake.

I have already described his lot. He was unable to show me its exact limits. With great stamping steps he measured the meters, stopped, looked back, half bending the leg supporting his weight; then shook his head and went to find a certain tree stump which marked something or other.

The two enlaced birches looked at themselves in the water; there was some fluff floating on its surface, and the rushes gleamed in the sun. The surprise promised us by Ardalion turned out to be a bottle of vodka, which, however, Lydia had already managed to hide. She laughed and she gamboled, for all the world like a croquet ball in her beige bathing costume with that double, red and blue stripe round the middle. When, after having had her fill of riding on Ardalion's back as he slowly swam about ("Don't pinch me, woman, or down you go!"), after much shrieking and spluttering, she came out of the water, her legs looked decidedly hairy, but soon they got dry, and a little bright bloom was all that showed. Before taking a header Ardalion would cross himself; there was, along his shin, a great ugly scar left by the civil war; from the opening in his repulsively flabby bathing suit the silver cross, of muzhik pattern, that he wore next to his skin, kept jumping out when he jumped in.

Lydia dutifully besmeared herself with cold cream and lay down on her back placing herself at the disposal of the sun. A few feet away, Ardalion and I made ourselves comfortable in the shade of his best pine tree. From his sadly shrunken briefcase he produced a sketchbook, pencils; and presently I noticed that he was drawing me.

"You've a tricky face," he said, screwing up his eyes.

"Oh, do show me!" cried Lydia without stirring a limb.

"Head a bit higher,"' said Ardalion. "Thanks, that will do."

"Oh, do show me," she cried again a minute later.

"You first show me where you've chucked my vodka," muttered Ardalion.

"No fear," she replied. "I won't have you drinking when I'm about."

"The woman is dotty! Now, should you suppose, old man, that she has actually buried it? I intended, as a matter of fact, quaffing the cup of brotherhood with you."

"I'll have you stop drinking altogether," cried Lydia, without lifting her greasy eyelids.

"Damned cheek," said Ardalion.

"Tell me," I asked him, "what makes you say I have a tricky face? Where is the snag?"

"Don't know. Lead doesn't get you. Next time I must try charcoal or oil." He erased something; flicked away the rubber dust with the joints of his fingers; cocked his head.

"Funny, I always thought I had a most ordinary face. Try, perhaps, drawing it in profile?"

"Yes, in profile!" cried Lydia (as before: spread-eagled on the sand).

"Well, I shouldn't exactly call it ordinary. A little higher, please. No, if you ask me, I find there is something distinctly rum about it. All your lines sort of slip from under my pencil, slip and are gone."

"Such faces, then, occur seldom, that's what you mean?"

"Every face is unique," pronounced Ardalion.

"Lord, I'm roasting," moaned Lydia, but did not move.

"Well, now, really--unique! ... Isn't that going too far? Take for instance the definite types of human faces that exist in the world; say, zoological types. There are people with the features of apes; there is also the rat type, the swine type. Then take the resemblance to celebrities--Napoleons among men, Queen Victorias among women. People have told me I reminded them of Amundsen. I have frequently come across noses à la Leo Tolstoy. Then, too, there is the type of face that makes you think of some particular picture. Iconlike faces, madonnas! And what about the kind of resemblance due to some fashion of life or profession? ..."

"You'll say next that all Chinamen are alike. You forget, my good man, that what the artist perceives is, primarily, the difference between things. It is the vulgar who note their resemblance. Haven't we heard Lydia exclaim at the talkies: 'Oo! Isn't she just like our maid?' "

"Ardy, dear, don't try to be funny," said Lydia.

"But you must concede," I went on, "that sometimes it is the resemblance that matters."

"When buying a second candlestick," said Ardalion.

There is really no need to go on taking down our conversation. I longed passionately for the fool to start talking about doubles, but he simply did not. After a while he put up his sketchbook. Lydia implored him to show her what he had done. He said he would if she gave him back his vodka. She refused and was not shown the sketch. The memory of that day ends in a sunshiny haze, or else mingles with the recollections of later trips. For that first one was followed by many others. I developed a somber and painfully acute liking for that lone wood with the lake shining in its midst. Ardalion tried hard to bully me into making me meet the manager and acquire the piece of land next to his, but I was firm; and even had I been anxious to buy land, I should have failed all the same to make up my mind, as my business had taken a sorry turn that summer and I was fed up with everything: that filthy chocolate of mine was ruining me. But I give you my word, gentlemen, my word of honor: not mercenary greed, not merely that, not merely the desire to improve my position ... It is, however, unnecessary to forestall events.

*This did not prevent a Communist reviewer (J.-P. Sartre), who devoted in 1939 a remarkably silly article to the French translation of "Despair," from saying that "both the author and the main character are the victims of the war and the emigration."

This is the first installment of a major novel by Vladimir Nabokov. Part II will appear next month.