Vladimir Nabokov. Scenes from the Life of a Double Monster
© 1958 Copyright by Vladimir Nabokov
Some years ago Dr. Fricke asked Lloyd and me a question
that I shall try to answer now. With a dreamy smile of
scientific delectation he stroked the fleshy cartilaginous band
uniting us-- omphalopagus diaphragmo-xiphodidymus, as
Pancoast has dubbed a similar case-- and wondered if we could
recall the very first time either of us, or both, realized the
peculiarity of our condition and destiny. All Lloyd could
remember was the way our Grandfather Ibrahim (or Ahim, or
Ahem-- irksome lumps of dead sounds to the ear of today!) would
touch what the doctor was touching and call it a bridge of
gold. I said nothing.
Our childhood was spent atop a fertile hill above the
Black Sea on our grandfather's farm near Karaz. His youngest
daughter, rose of the East, gray Ahem's pearl (if so, the old
scoundrel might have taken better care of her) had been raped
in a roadside orchard by our anonymous sire and had died soon
after giving birth to us-- of sheer horror and grief, I
imagine. One set of rumors mentioned a Hungarian peddler;
another favored a German collector of birds or some member of
his expedition-- his taxidermist, most likely. Dusky, heavily
necklaced aunts, whose voluminous clothes smelled of rose oil
and mutton, attended with ghoulish zest to the wants of our
monstrous infancy.
Soon neighboring hamlets learned the astounding news and
began delegating to our farm various inquisitive strangers. On
feast days you could see them laboring up the slopes of our
hill, like pilgrims in bright-colored pictures. There was a
shepherd seven feet tall, and a small bald man with glasses,
and soldiers, and the lengthening shadows of cypresses.
Children came too, at all times, and were shooed away by our
jealous nurses; but almost daily some black-eyed,
cropped-haired youngster in dark-patched, faded-blue pants
would manage to worm his way through the dogwood, the
honeysuckle, the twisted Judas trees, into the cobbled court
with its old rheumy fountain where little Lloyd and Floyd (we
had other names then, full of corvine aspirates-- but no
matter) sat quietly munching dried apricots under a whitewashed
wall. Then, suddenly, the aitch would see an eye, the Roman two
a one, the scissors a knife.
There can be, of course, no comparison between this impact
of knowledge, disturbing as it may have been, and the emotional
shock my mother received (by the way, what clean bliss there is
in this deliberate use of the possessive singular!). She must
have been aware that she was being delivered of twins; but when
she learned, as no doubt she did, that the twins were conjoined
ones-- what did she experience then? With the kind of
unrestrained, ignorant, passionately communicative folks that
surrounded us, the highly vocal household just beyond the
limits of her tumbled bed must, surely, have told her at once
that something had gone dreadfully wrong; and one can be
certain that her sisters, in the frenzy of their fright and
compassion, showed her the double baby. I am not saying that a
mother cannot love such a double thing-- and forget in this
love the dark dews of its unhallowed origin; I only think that
the mixture of revulsion, pity, and a mother's love was too
much for her. Both components of the double series before her
staring eyes were healthy, handsome little components, with a
silky fair fuzz on their violet-pink skulls, and well-formed
rubbery arms and legs that moved like the many limbs of some
wonderful sea animal. Each was eminently normal, but together
they formed a monster. Indeed, it is strange to think that the
presence of a mere band of tissue, a flap of flesh not much
longer than a lamb's liver, should be able to transform joy,
pride, tenderness, adoration, gratitude to God into horror and
despair.
In our own case, everything was far simpler. Adults were
much too different from us in all respects to afford any
analogy, but our first coeval visitor was to me a mild
revelation. While Lloyd placidly contemplated the awestruck
child of seven or eight who was peering at us from under a
humped and likewise peering fig tree, I remember appreciating
in full the essential difference between the newcomer and me.
He cast a short blue shadow on the ground, and so did I; but in
addition to that sketchy, and flat, and unstable companion
which he and I owed to the sun and which vanished in dull
weather I possessed yet another shadow, a palpable reflection
of my corporal self, that I always had by me, at my left side,
whereas my visitor had somehow managed to lose his, or had
unhooked it and left it at home. Linked Lloyd and Floyd were
complete and normal; he was neither. But perhaps, in order to
elucidate these matters as thoroughly as they deserve, I should
say something of still earlier recollections. Unless adult
emotions stain past ones, I think I can vouch for the memory of
a faint disgust. By virtue of our anterior duplexity, we lay
originally front to front, joined at our common navel, and my
face in those first years of our existence was constantly
brushed by my twin's hard nose and wet lips. A tendency to
throw our heads back and avert our faces as much as possible
was a natural reaction to those bothersome contacts. The great
flexibility of our band of union allowed us to assume
reciprocally a more or less lateral position, and as we learned
to walk we waddled about in this side-by-side attitude, which
must have seemed more strained than it really was, making us
look, I suppose, like a pair of drunken dwarfs supporting each
other. For a long time we kept reverting in sleep to our fetal
position; but whenever the discomfort it engendered woke us up,
we would again jerk our faces away, in regardant revulsion,
with a double wail.
I insist that at three or four our bodies obscurely
disliked their clumsy conjunction, while our minds did not
question its normalcy. Then, before we could have become
mentally aware of its drawbacks, physical intuition discovered
means of tempering them, and thereafter we hardly gave them a
thought. All our movements became a judicious compromise
between the common and the particular. The pattern of acts
prompted by this or that mutual urge formed a kind of gray,
evenly woven, generalized background against which the discrete
impulse, his or mine, followed a brighter and sharper course;
but (guided as it were by the warp of the background pattern)
it never went athwart the common weave or the other twin's
whim.
I am speaking at present solely of our childhood, when
nature could not yet afford to have us undermine our hard-won
vitality by any conflict between us. In later years I have had
occasion to regret that we did not perish or had not been
surgically separated, before we left that initial stage at
which an ever-present rhythm, like some kind of remote tom-tom
beating in the jungle of our nervous system, was alone
responsible for the regulation of our movements. When, for
example, one of us was about to stoop to possess himself of a
pretty daisy and the other, at exactly the same moment, was on
the point of stretching up to pluck a ripe fig, individual
success depended upon whose movement happened to conform to the
current ictus of our common and continuous rhythm, whereupon,
with a very brief, chorealike shiver, the interrupted gesture
of one twin would be swallowed and dissolved in the enriched
ripple of the other's completed action. I say "enriched"
because the ghost of the unpicked flower somehow seemed to be
also there, pulsating between the fingers that closed upon the
fruit.
There might be a period of weeks and even months when the
guiding beat was much more often on Lloyd's side than on mine,
and then a period might follow when I would be on top of the
wave; but I cannot recall any time in our childhood when
frustration or success in these matters provoked in either of
us resentment or pride.
Somewhere within me, however, there must have been some
sensitive cell wondering at the curious fact of a force that
would suddenly sweep me away from the object of a casual desire
and drag me to other, uncoveted things that were thrust into
the sphere of my will instead of being consciously reached for
and enveloped by its tentacles. So, as I watched this or that
chance child which was watching Lloyd and me, I remember
pondering a twofold problem: first, whether, perhaps, a single
bodily state had more advantages than ours possessed; and
second, whether all other children were single. It
occurs to me now that quite often problems puzzling me were
twofold: possibly a trickle of Lloyd's cerebration penetrated
my mind and one of the two linked problems was his.
When greedy Grandfather Ahem decided to show us to
visitors for money, among the flocks that came there was always
some eager rascal who wanted to hear us talk to each other. As
happens with primitive minds, he demanded that his ears
corroborate what his eyes saw. Our folks bullied us into
gratifying such desires and could not understand what was so
distressful about them. We could have pleaded shyness; but the
truth was that we never really spoke to each other, even
when we were alone, for the brief broken grunts of infrequent
expostulation that we sometimes exchanged (when, for instance,
one had just cut his foot and had had it bandaged and the other
wanted to go paddling in the brook) could hardly pass for a
dialogue. The communication of simple essential sensations we
performed wordlessly: shed leaves riding the stream of our
shared blood. Thin thoughts also managed to slip through and
travel between us. Richer ones each kept to himself, but even
then there occurred odd phenomena. This is why I suspect that
despite his calmer nature, Lloyd was struggling with the same
new realities that were puzzling me. He forgot much when he
grew up. I have forgotten nothing.
Not only did our public expect us to talk, it also wanted
us to play together. Dolts! They derived quite a kick from
having us match wits at checkers or muzla. I suppose had
we happened to be opposite-sex twins they would have made us
commit incest in their presence. But since mutual games were no
more customary with us than conversation, we suffered subtle
torments when obliged to go through the cramped motions of
bandying a ball somewhere between our breastbones or making
believe to wrest a stick from each other. We drew wild applause
by running around the yard with our arms around each other's
shoulders. We could jump and whirl.
A salesman of patent medicine, a bald little fellow in a
dirty-white Russian blouse, who knew some Turkish and English,
taught us sentences in these languages; and then we had to
demonstrate our ability to a fascinated audience. Their ardent
faces still pursue me in my nightmares, for they come whenever
my dream producer needs supers. I see again the gigantic
bronze-faced shepherd in multicolored rags, the soldiers from
Karaz, the one-eyed hunchbacked Armenian tailor (a monster in
his own right), the giggling girls, the sighing old women, the
children, the young people in Western clothes-- burning eyes,
white teeth, black gaping mouths; and, of course. Grandfather
Ahem, with his nose of yellow ivory and his beard of gray wool,
directing the proceedings or counting the soiled paper money
and wetting his big thumb. The linguist, he of the embroidered
blouse and bald head, courted one of my aunts but kept watching
Ahem enviously through his steel-rimmed spectacles.
By the age of nine, I knew quite clearly that Lloyd and I
presented the rarest of freaks. This knowledge provoked in me
neither any special elation nor any special shame; but once a
hysterical cook, a mustachioed woman, who had taken a great
liking to us and pitied our plight, declared with an atrocious
oath that she would, then and there, slice us free by means of
a shiny knife that she suddenly flourished (she was at once
overpowered by our grandfather and one of our newly acquired
uncles); and after that incident I would often dally with an
indolent daydream, fancying myself somehow separated from poor
Lloyd, who somehow retained his monsterhood.
I did not care for that knife business, and anyway the
manner of separation remained very vague; but I distinctly
imagined the sudden melting away of my shackles and the feeling
of lightness and nakedness that would ensue. I imagined myself
climbing over the fence-- a fence with bleached skulls of farm
animals that crowned its pickets-- and descending toward the
beach. I saw myself leaping from boulder to boulder and diving
into the twinkling sea, and scrambling back onto the shore and
scampering about with other naked children. I dreamt of this at
night-- saw myself fleeing from my grandfather and carrying
away with me a toy, or a kitten, or a little crab pressed to my
left side. I saw myself meeting poor Lloyd, who appeared to me
in my dream hobbling along, hopelessly joined to a hobbling
twin while I was free to dance around them and slap them on
their humble backs.
I wonder if Lloyd had similar visions. It has been
suggested by doctors that we sometimes pooled our minds when we
dreamed. One gray-blue morning he picked up a twig and drew a
ship with three masts in the dust. I had just seen myself
drawing that ship in the dust of a dream I had dreamed the
preceding night.
An ample black shepherd's cloak covered our shoulders,
and, as we squatted on the ground, all but our heads and
Lloyd's hand was concealed within its falling folds. The sun
had just risen and the sharp March air was like layer upon
layer of semitransparent ice through which the crooked Judas
trees in rough bloom made blurry spots of purplish pink. The
long, low white house behind us, full of fat women and their
foul-smelling husbands, was fast asleep. We did not say
anything; we did not even look at each other; but, throwing his
twig away, Lloyd put his right arm around my shoulder, as he
always did when he wished both of us to walk fast; and with the
edge of our common raiment trailing among dead weeds, while
pebbles kept running from under our feet, we made our way
toward the alley of cypresses that led down to the shore.
It was our first attempt to visit the sea that we could
see from our hilltop softly glistening afar and leisurely,
silently breaking on glossy rocks. I need not strain my memory
at this point to place our stumbling flight at a definite turn
in our destiny. A few weeks before, on our twelfth birthday.
Grandfather Ibrahim had started to toy with the idea of sending
us in the company of our newest uncle on a six-month tour
through the country. They kept haggling about the terms, and
had quarreled and even fought, Ahem getting the upper hand.
We feared our grandfather and loathed Uncle Novus.
Presumably, after a dull forlorn fashion (knowing nothing of
life, but being dimly aware that Uncle Novus was endeavoring to
cheat Grandfather) we felt we should try to do something in
order to prevent a showman from trundling us around in a moving
prison, like apes or eagles; or perhaps we were prompted merely
by the thought that this was our last chance to enjoy by
ourselves our small freedom and do what we were absolutely
forbidden to do; go beyond a certain picket fence, open a
certain gate.
We had no trouble in opening that rickety gate, but did
not manage to swing it back into its former position. A
dirty-white lamb, with amber eyes and a carmine mark painted
upon its hard flat forehead, followed us for a while before
getting lost in the oak scrub. A little lower but still far
above the valley, we had to cross the road that circled around
the hill and connected our farm with the highway running along
the shore. The thudding of hooves and the rasping of wheels
came descending upon us; and we dropped, cloak and all, behind
a bush. When the rumble subsided, we crossed the road and
continued along a weedy slope. The silvery sea gradually
concealed itself behind cypresses and remnants of old stone
walls. Our black cloak began to feel hot and heavy but still we
persevered under its protection, being afraid that otherwise
some passerby might notice our infirmity.
We emerged upon the highway, a few feet from the audible
sea-- and there, waiting for us under a cypress, was a carriage
we knew, a cartlike affair on high wheels, with Uncle Novus in
the act of getting down from the box. Crafty, dark, ambitious,
unprincipled little man! A few minutes before, he had caught
sight of us from one of the galleries of our grandfather's
house and had not been able to resist the temptation of taking
advantage of an escapade which miraculously allowed him to
seize us without any struggle or outcry. Swearing at the two
timorous horses, he roughly helped us into the cart. He pushed
our heads down and threatened to hurt us if we attempted to
peep from under our cloak. Lloyd's arm was still around my
shoulder, but a jerk of the cart shook it off. Now the wheels
were crunching and rolling. It was some time before we realized
that our driver was not taking us home.
Twenty years have passed since that gray spring morning,
but it is much better preserved in my mind than many a later
event. Again and again I run it before my eyes like a strip of
cinematic film, as I have seen great jugglers do when reviewing
their acts. So I review all the stages and circumstances and
incidental details of our abortive flight-- the initial shiver,
the gate, the lamb, the slippery slope under our clumsy feet.
To the thrushes we flushed we must have presented an
extraordinary sight, with that black cloak around us and our
two shorn heads on thin necks sticking out of it. The heads
turned this way and that, warily, as at last the shoreline
highway was reached. If at that moment some adventurous
stranger had stepped onto the shore from his boat in the bay,
he would have surely experienced a thrill of ancient
enchantment to find himself confronted by a gentle mythological
monster in a landscape of cypresses and white stones. He would
have worshipped it, he would have shed sweet tears. But, alas,
there was nobody to greet us there save that worried crook, our
nervous kidnapper, a small doll-faced man wearing cheap
spectacles, one glass of which was doctored with a bit of tape.