I do not know whether Nabokov — another authentic specimen of homo occidentalis who was traveling across the American Midwest in a beautiful PACKARD driven by his wife during that period — greased his hair or wore tortoiseshell glasses. But I take it for granted that he was very well acquainted with the memoirs of Avdotya Panaeva. I read them because they offer curious glimpses of the figures who visited her salon (a young F.M., madly in love with the hostess, Turgenev and Chadeyev, each the epitome of the dandy). Panaeva writes that, as a girl, she once saw Pushkin at the opera. Nothing in her description of him supports Nabokov’s assertion that Pushkin would have avoided “anything marked.”. . однажды, в театре, сидела я в ложе с сестрами и братьями и с одной из теток. Почти к последнему акту в соседнюю ложу, где сидели две дамы и старичок, вошел курчавый, бледный и худощавый мужчина. Я сейчас же заметила, что у него на одном пальце надето что-то вроде золотого наперстка. Это меня заинтересовало. Мне казалось, что его лицо мне знакомо. Курчавый господин зевал, потягивался и не смотрел на сцену, а глядел больше на ложи, отвечал нехотя, когда с ним заговаривали дамы по-французски. Вдруг я припомнила, где я его видела, и, дернув тетку за рукав, шепнула ей: “сзади нас сидит Пушкин”. Я потому его не сразу узнала, что никогда не видела его без шляпы. Но Пушкин скоро ушел изложи. Более мне не удалось его видеть. Уже взрослой я узнала значение золотого наперстка на его пальце. Он отрастил себе большой ноготь и, чтоб последний не сломался, надевал золотой футляр. Once I was sharing a box at the opera with my sisters and one of my aunts. Before the last act, a slender gentleman, very pale and with curly hair, made an entrance into the neighboring box. Immediately I noticed a kind of golden thimble on one of his fingers that greatly intrigued me. Moreover, his face seemed familiar. The gentleman with curly hair yawned and stretched, gazing at the other boxes, paying no attention to what was happening onstage, and answering listlessly when the ladies spoke to him in French. Suddenly, I remembered where I had seen him. I tugged at my aunt’s arm and whispered: “We have Pushkin behind us.” I hadn’t recognized him because it was the first time I’d seen him without a hat. After a while Pushkin left the box and I never saw him again. As an adult, I learned what he used that thimble for. He had let the nail of his pinky finger grow long and used the golden thimble to protect it.
M
MAGNUS, ALBERTUS. At seven p.m. I proceeded downstairs to the Astoria’s restaurant to finalize the details of our dinner. I found the waiter who would be serving us that night in the kitchen, shining his shoes. He answered to the alias of RUDI and I spoke with him a while to make sure he would know how to play his role. He listened to me with his face turned toward the floor, spying on me through his thick eyebrows: RUDI, a HAM of the Transcaucasus. In the dining room, I showed him a table for six next to a large window and told him I expected a fresh tablecloth. I removed a heavy candlestick from the center of the table and in its place arranged pieces of glass fruit next to every setting. For the time being, only LINDA and I were on the guest list, but it’s an easy matter to assemble six people around a table in the Grand Duchy of Muscovy: Russian spontaneity.
I. Back in the lobby — hands in my pockets — I was struck by one of those flat, two-dimensional mannequins made from a photo blown up to life size that a travel agency was exhibiting in the corridor. It seemed to be part of a campaign to promote tourism in Southeast Asia. The model’s makeup was powerfully exotic: a white mask, pale as plaster, lips of the most vivid violet, a penciled-on beauty spot. From afar, the woman seemed to be offering something (a pair of tickets?) in her extended right hand. As I approached the mannequin I bent forward to study it, my eyes fixed on its eyes, which were staggeringly realistic. In the dim light of that hour, they had the translucent green of those unfathomable human gazes in which we lose our way, wavering between the eyes and the point of light reflected within them, or else they were as vacant as the holes that serve as the eyes of a fairground colossus, filled in by the faces of tourists who are the iris and the pupils. I discovered that what she had in her hand was one of the heavy knobs to which the hotel’s room keys were attached, and immediately the smiling girl became a Japanese reminder placed there by the hotel management to admonish forgetful guests who would sometimes leave the hotel still carrying their keys. Calmer now, I lowered my eyes and brought them to rest on her chest and its admirably lifelike flesh color (but why admirable? a mere photographic illusion). Still half-leaning toward her, I suddenly perceived a growing flutter, a slight agitation, a crinkle of printed silk, and my ear captured the faint whistle of air expanding through her breast. Then, into the heart of the mystery, breaking the shell of air that surrounded me, a vox descended and called my name: “JOSUÉ! JOSUÉ! Wake up for God’s sake!” In a flash I thought, “Yes, wake up to reality, to real life! Now, and for all time!” Shaken by this truth, I rose through the clots of air, raised my eyes and. . it was LINDA! For the love of God! LINDA! I stared at her another fraction of a second without understanding a thing, still shaken (to the very core of my being), reorganizing my hemispheres, returning the scattered blocks of consciousness to their place. Back in the lobby of the Astoria, in Saint Petersburg, in 1991, I understood that LINDA was seeking to put my nerves to the test with her disconcerting rediscovery of the polychromatic nature of ancient Greek statuary. But how many years would it be before the rest of us caught up to the daring color combination that LINDA was trying out that evening?
Many, many years. Her taste was astonishingly developed, as I already knew (it wasn’t a question of having or not having good taste). She’d imagined I would scold her in annoyance: “My God, you’ve been playing the flute since you were seven but you still don’t know how to put makeup on?” It surprised her when I explained patiently how futile her little last-minute protest was.
“LINDA, the dress is yours, it’s a gift.”
“You’re completely inconsistent! Your thesis. . The novel you say you’re writing. .”
“It’s because I had warmer tones in mind for you. Look at this print. Why do you need more color? I’ll wait for you to change your makeup, but you must do it quickly. It’s almost eight.”