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Half an hour later, Joan glanced over the moribund cactuses in the sun-porch window and saw a raincoated, hatless man, with a head like a polished globe of copper, optimistically ringing at the front door of her neighbour's beautiful brick house. The old Scotty stood beside him in much the same candid attitude as he. Miss Dingwall came out with a mop, let the slowpoke, dignified dog in, and directed Pnin to the Clements' clapboard residence.
Timofey Pnin settled down in the living-room, crossed his legs po amerikanski (the American way), and entered into some unnecessary detail. It was a curriculum vitae in a nutshell--a coconut shell. Born in St Petersburg in 1898. Both parents died of typhus in 1917. Left for Kiev in 1918. Was with the White Army five months, first as a 'field telephonist', then at the Military Information Office. Escaped from Red-invaded Crimea to Constantinople in 1919. Completed university education-- 'Say, I was there as a child exactly the same year,' said pleased Joan. 'My father went to Turkey on a government mission and took us along. We might have met! I remember the word for water. And there was a rose garden--'
'Water in Turkish is "su",' said Pnin, a linguist by necessity, and went on with his fascinating past: Completed university education in Prague. Was connected with various scientific institutions. Then--'Well, to make a long story very short: habitated in Paris from 1925, abandoned France I at beginning of Hider war. Is now here. Is American citizen. Is teaching Russian and such subjects at Vandal College. From Hagen, Head of German Department, obtainable all references. Or from the College Home for Single Instructors.'
Hadn't he been comfortable there?
'Too many people,' said Pnin. 'Inquisitive people. Whereas special privacy is now to me absolutely necessary.' He coughed into his fist with an unexpected cavernous sound (which somehow reminded Joan of a professional Don Cossack she had once met) and then took the plunge: 'I must warn: will have all my teeth pulled out. It is a repulsive operation.'
'Well, come upstairs,' said Joan brightly.
Pnin peered into Isabel's pink-walled, white-flounced room. It had suddenly begun to snow, though the sky was pure platinum, and the slow scintillant downcome got reflected in the silent looking glass. Methodically Pnin inspected Hoecker's 'Girl with a Cat' above the bed, and Hunt's 'The Belated Kid' above the bookshelf. Then he held his hand at a little distance from the window.
'Is temperature uniform?'
Joan dashed to the radiator.
'Piping hot,' she retorted.
'I am asking--are there currents of air?'
'Oh yes, you will have plenty of air. And here is the bathroom--small, but all yours.'
'No douche?' inquired Pnin, looking up. 'Maybe it is better so. My friend, Professor Chateau of Columbia, once broke his leg in two places. Now I must think. What price are you prepared to demand? I ask it, because I will not give more than a dollar per day--not including, of course, nootrition.
'All right,' said Joan with that pleasant, quick laugh of hers.
The same afternoon, one of Pnin's students, Charles McBeth ('A madman, I think, judging by his compositions,' Pnin used to say), zestfully brought over Pnin's luggage in a pathologically purplish car with no fenders on the left side, and after an early dinner at The Egg and We, a recently inaugurated and not very successful little restaurant which Pnin frequented from sheer sympathy with failure, our friend applied himself to the pleasant task of Pninizing his new quarters. Isabel's adolescence had gone with her, or, if not, had been eradicated by her mother, but traces of the girl's childhood somehow had been allowed to remain, and before finding the most advantageous situations for his elaborate sun-lamp, huge Russian-alphabet typewriter in a broken coffin fixed with Scotch tape, five pairs of handsome, curiously small shoes with ten shoe trees rooted in them, a coffee grinding-and-boiling contraption which was not quite as good as the one that had exploded last year, a couple of alarm clocks running the same race every night, and seventy-four library books, mainly old Russian periodicals solidly bound by WCL, Pnin delicately exiled to a chair on the landing half a dozen forlorn volumes, such as Birds at Home, Happy Days in Holland, and My First Dictionary (' With more than 600 illustrations depicting zoos, the human body, farms, fires--all scientifically chosen'), and also a lone wooden bead with a hole through the centre.
Joan, who used the word 'pathetic' perhaps a little too often, declared she would ask that pathetic savant for a drink with their guests, to which her husband replied he was also a pathetic savant and would go to a movie if she carried out her threat. However, when Joan went up to Pnin with her offer he declined the invitation, saying, rather simply, he had resolved not to use alcohol any more. Three couples and Entwistle arrived around nine, and by ten the little party was in full swing, when suddenly Joan, while talking to pretty Gwen Cockerell, noticed Pnin, in a green sweater, standing in the doorway that led to the foot of the stairs and holding aloft, for her to see, a tumbler. She sped toward him--and simultaneously her husband almost collided with her as he trotted across the room to stop, choke, abolish Jack Cockerell, head of the English Department, who, with his back to Pnin, was entertaining Mrs Hagen and Mrs Blorenge with his famous act--he being one of the greatest, if not the greatest, mimics of Pnin on the campus. His model, in the meantime, was saying to Joan: 'This is not a clean glass in the bathroom, and there exist other troubles. It blows from the floor, and it blows from the walls--' But Dr Hagen, a pleasant, rectangular old man, had noticed Pnin, too, and was greeting him joyfully, and the next moment Pnin, his tumbler replaced by a highball, was being introduced to Professor Entwistle.
'Zdrastvuyte kak pozhivaete horosho spasibo, Entwistle rattled off in excellent imitation of Russian speech--and indeed he rather resembled a genial Tsarist colonel in mufti. 'One night in Paris,' he went on, his eyes twinkling, 'at the Ougolok cabaret, this demonstration convinced a group of Russian revellers that I was a compatriot of theirs--posing as an American, don't you know.'
'In two-three years,' said Pnin, missing one bus but boarding the next, 'I will also be taken for an American,' and everybody roared except Professor Blorenge.
'We'll get you an electric heater,' Joan told Pnin confidentially, as she offered him some olives.
'What make heater?' asked Pnin suspiciously.
'That remains to be seen. Any other complaints?'
'Yes--sonic disturbance,' said Pnin. 'I hear every, every sound from downstairs, but now it is not the place to discuss it, I think.'
3
The guests started to leave. Pnin trudged upstairs, a clean glass in his hand. Entwistle and his host were the last to come out on the porch. Wet snow drifted in the black night.
'It's such a pity,' said Professor Entwistle, 'that we cannot tempt you to come to Goldwin for good. We have Schwarz and old Crates, who are among your greatest admirers. We have a real lake. We have everything. We even have a Professor Pain on our staff.'
'I know, I know,' said Clements, 'but these offers I keep getting are coming too late. I plan to retire soon, and till then I prefer to remain in the musty but familiar hole. How did you like'--he lowered his voice--'Monsieur Blorenge?'
'Oh, he struck me as a capital fellow. In some ways, however, I must say he reminded me of that probably legendary figure, the Chairman of French, who thought Chateaubriand was a famous chef'.
'Careful,' said Cements. 'That story was first told about Blorenge, and is true.'
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