I couldn’t tolerate a vile insult like that to a dead writer and threw the whip down on the floor. I mean I didn’t just stop making Pavel Ivanovich think he was being flogged, I made him see the whip hit the floor so hard that it left a dent in the parquet. I had to scrape it out afterwards by hand, when he went to the shower. I always avoid arguing with people, but this time I just exploded and started talking seriously, as if I was with another fox:
‘I feel insulted when someone confuses Nabokov with his characters. Or calls him the godfather of American paedophilia. That’s such a profoundly mistaken view of the writer. Remember this - Nabokov isn’t speaking for himself when he describes the forbidden charms of a nymphet at such length. He speaks for himself when he describes in meagre terms, in the very merest hint, the impressive financial resources that allow Humbert to freewheel round America with Lolita. A writer’s true heart speaks out very furtively . . .’
I remembered where I was and stopped. I took Lolita’s story very personally and very seriously. For me Dolores Haze was a symbol of the soul, eternally young and pure, and Humbert Humbert was the metaphorical chairman of this world’s board of directors. Apart from that, in the line of verse describing Lolita’s age (‘Age: five thousand three hundred days’) it was enough to replace the word ‘days’ with ‘years’ and it would more or less fit me. Naturally, I didn’t share that observation with Pavel Ivanovich.
‘Go on, go on,’ he said in amazement.
‘Of course, what the writer was dreaming about wasn’t a green young schoolgirl, but the modest financial security that would allow him to catch butterflies in peace somewhere in Switzerland. I see nothing shameful in such a dream for a Russian nobleman who has realized the vanity of the heroic feat of a human life. And the choice of subject for the book intended to provide that security offers less insight into the secret aspirations of his heart than what he thought about his new fellow-countrymen and just how indifferent he was to what they thought about him. And the fact that the book turned out to be a masterpiece isn’t hard to explain either - talent is hard to conceal . . .’
As I concluded this tirade, in my own mind I cursed myself, and with good reason.
I’m a professional impersonator of an adolescent girl with big innocent eyes. Creatures like that don’t utter long sentences about the work of writers from the last century. They talk simply in monosyllables, mostly about material, visible things. And now . . .
‘Well, didn’t you get carried away,’ Pavel Ivanovich muttered in astonishment. ‘Eyes blazing, eh? Where did you pick up all that stuff?’
‘Here and there,’ I said in a morose voice.
I swore a solemn oath to myself never to get into an argument about culture with him again, but only to exploit him for his proper purpose, as a gymnastic apparatus for developing my spiritual strength. But it was too late.
In modern society it is fatal to give way to social instincts acquired in other times, and in a culture that was very dissimilar. They’re like gyroscopes trained on a planet which was blown to bits: it’s best not to think where the course they indicate might lead to.
The people who lived in ancient China were highly spiritual. If I’d demonstrated that kind of knowledge of the classical canon to any scholar then, he’d have gone into debt in order to reward me with double pay and he would have sent a letter in verse to my home, bound to a branch of plum blossom. Perhaps my old memories had led me to expect something similar when I started talking to Pavel Ivanovich about Nabokov. But the result was quite different.
The next time we met, Pavel Ivanovich asked me to conduct the session on credit because he’d just bought a refrigerator. He expressed this request in the spirit of a secret accomplice, an old comrade tried and tested in journeys to the heights of the spirit. A poet borrowing a bottle of ink from a colleague might have spoken like that. I couldn’t refuse.
The new refrigerator took up almost half his kitchen, it looked like the tip of an iceberg that had broken through the side of a ship and smashed into the hold. But nonetheless the captain of the ship was drunk and jolly. I’d noticed a long time before that nothing delights a member of the Russian intelligentsia (Pavel Ivanovich could hardly make the grade as an intellectual) as the purchase of a new electrical household appliance.
I don’t like drunks, so I was acting a bit sullen. No doubt he put that down to the fact that the session was being conducted on credit, and he wasn’t particularly demanding. We got down to work in silence, like a pair of Estonian yachtsmen who have sailed together for ages: he handed me the tattered knout that he kept in the tennis bag with Boris Becker’s signature on it, got undressed, lay down on the sofa and opened a fresh copy of Expert magazine.
I guessed that what was going on had nothing to do with his disdainful attitude to my art, or even his love for the printed word. Clearly his contrition before Young Russia coexisted in his heart with other vibes about which I knew nothing, and he hadn’t revealed all of his secrets to me. But I felt no urge to penetrate his inner world beyond the depth that had been paid for, and so I didn’t ask any questions. Everything was going as usual - I was lashing his backside with an imaginary knout, thinking my own thoughts, and he was muttering quietly. Sometimes he would start to groan, sometimes to laugh. It was boring, and I felt like some odalisque in an oriental harem, waving away the flies from her master’s fat carcass with regular sweeps of a fan. Then suddenly he said:
‘Would you believe it, what a name for a lawyer - Anton Drill. How did he manage to survive with that . . . I bet the kids gave him hell in school . . . People with names like that grow up psychological deviants, it’s a fact. They all need help from a psychotherapist. Any expert can tell you that.’
Of course, I shouldn’t have got involved in the conversation - there was absolutely no point in taking the situation beyond the limitations of our professional relationship. The reason I didn’t hold back is that names are a sore point with me.
‘That’s simply not true,’ I said. ‘It doesn’t matter what name anybody has. I have a girlfriend, for instance, and she has a name that sounds very, very crude. So crude you’d laugh out loud if I told you it. It’s almost a swearword, you could say, that kind of name. But she’s a beautiful girl, clever and kind. A name’s not a prison sentence.’
‘Perhaps, my dear, you don’t know your friend very well. If her name has an obscene meaning, then it will come out in her life. Just you wait, it will manifest itself yet. Everything depends on the name. There’s a scientific hypothesis that every person’s name is a primary suggestive command that contains the entire script of their life in highly concentrated form. Do you understand what a suggestive command is? Do you at least have some idea about hypnotic suggestion?’
‘In general terms,’ I replied, and mentally lashed him a bit harder.
‘Ooh . . . According to this point of view, there is only a limited number of names, because society only needs a limited number of human types. Just a few models of worker and warrior ants, if I could put it like that. And everybody’s psyche is programmed at a basic level by the associative semantic fields that their first name and surname activate.’
‘Nonsense,’ I said irritably. ‘No two people in the world with identical names are the same.’