Vladimir Nabokov. First Love
© 1948 Copyright by Vladimir Nabokov
Рассказ "First Love" существует также под названием
"Colette"("The New Yorker", 31 июля 1948).
1
In the early years of this century, a travel agency on
Nevski Avenue displayed a three-foot-long model of an oak-brown
international sleeping car. In delicate verisimilitude it
completely outranked the painted tin of my clockwork trains.
Unfortunately it was not for sale. One could make out the blue
upholstery inside, the embossed leather lining of the
compartment walls, their polished panels, inset mirrors,
tulip-shaped reading lamps, and other maddening details.
Spacious windows alternated with narrower ones, single or
geminate, and some of these were of frosted glass. In a few of
the compartments, the beds had been made.
The then great and glamorous Nord Express (it was never
the same after World War I), consisting solely of such
international cars and running but twice a week, connected St.
Petersburg with Paris. I would have said: directly with Paris,
had passengers not been obliged to change from one train to a
superficially similar one at the Russo-German frontier
(Verzhbolovo-Eydtkuhnen), where the ample and lazy Russian
sixty-and-a-half-inch gauge was replaced by the
fifty-six-and-a-half-inch standard of Europe and coal succeeded
birch logs.
In the far end of my mind I can unravel, I think, at least
five such journeys to Paris, with the Riviera or Biarritz as
their ultimate destination. In 1909, the year I now single out,
my two small sisters had been left at home with nurses and
aunts. Wearing gloves and a traveling cap, my father sat
reading a book in the compartment he shared with our tutor. My
brother and I were separated from them by a washroom. My mother
and her maid occupied a compartment adjacent to ours. The odd
one of our party, my father's valet, Osip (whom, a decade
later, the pedantic Bolsheviks were to shoot, because he
appropriated our bicycles instead of turning them over to the
nation), had a stranger for companion.
In April of that year, Peary had reached the North Pole.
In May, Chaliapin had sung in Paris. In June, bothered by
rumors of new and better zeppelins, the United States War
Department had told reporters of plans for an aerial navy. In
July, Bleriot had flown from Calais to Dover (with a little
additional loop when he lost his bearings). It was late August
now. The firs and marshes of northwestern Russia sped by, and
on the following day gave way to German pine barrens and
heather.
At a collapsible table, my mother and I played a card game
called durachki. Although it was still broad daylight,
our cards, a glass, and on a different plane the locks of a
suitcase were reflected in the window. Through forest and
field, and in sudden ravines, and among scuttling cottages,
those discarnate gamblers kept steadily playing on for steadily
sparkling stakes.
"Ne budet-li, tо ved' ustal?" ("Haven't you had
enough, aren't you tired? '") my mother would ask, and then
would be lost in thought as she slowly shuffled the cards. The
door of the compartment was open and I could see the corridor
window, where the wires-- six thin black wires-- were doing
their best to slant up, to ascend skyward, despite the
lightning blows dealt them by one telegraph pole after another;
but just as all six, in a triumphant swoop of pathetic elation,
were about to reach the top of the window, a particularly
vicious blow would bring them down, as low as they had ever
been, and they would have to start all over again.
When, on such journeys as these, the train changed its
pace to a dignified amble and all but grazed housefronts and
shop signs, as we passed through some big German town, I used
to feel a twofold excitement, which terminal stations could not
provide. I saw a city with its toylike trams, linden trees, and
brick walls enter the compartment, hobnob with the mirrors, and
fill to the brim the windows on the corridor side. This
informal contact between train and city was one part of the
thrill. The other was putting myself in the place of some
passerby who, I imagined, was moved as I would be moved myself
to see the long, romantic, auburn cars, with their
intervestibular connecting curtains as black as bat wings and
their metal lettering copper-bright in the low sun, unhurriedly
negotiate an iron bridge across an everyday thoroughfare and
then turn, with all windows suddenly ablaze, around a last
block of houses.
There were drawbacks to those optical amalgamations. The
wide-windowed dining car, a vista of chaste bottles of mineral
water, miterfolded napkins, and dummy chocolate bars (whose
wrappers-- Cailler, Kohler, and so forth-- enclosed nothing but
wood) would be perceived at first as a cool haven beyond a
consecution of reeling blue corridors; but as the meal
progressed toward its fatal last course, one would keep
catching the car in the act of being recklessly sheathed,
lurching waiters and all, in the landscape, while the landscape
itself went through a complex system of motion, the daytime
moon stubbornly keeping abreast of one's plate, the distant
meadows opening fanwise, the near trees sweeping up on
invisible swings toward the track, a parallel rail line all at
once committing suicide by anastomosis, a bank of nictitating
grass rising, rising, rising, until the little witness of mixed
velocities was made to disgorge his portion of omelette aux
confitures de fraises.
It was at night, however, that the Compagnie
Internationale des Wagons-Lits et des Grands Express
Europиens lived up to the magic of its name. From my bed
under my brother's bunk (Was he asleep? Was he there at all?),
in the semidarkness of our compartment, I watched things, and
parts of things, and shadows, and sections of shadows
cautiously moving about and getting nowhere. The woodwork
gently creaked and crackled. Near the door that led to the
toilet, a dim garment on a peg and, higher up, the tassel of
the blue, bivalved night-light swung rhythmically. It was hard
to correlate those halting approaches, that hooded stealth,
with the headlong rush of the outside night, which I knew
was rushing by, spark-streaked, illegible.
I would put myself to sleep by the simple act of
identifying myself: with the engine driver. A sense of drowsy
well-being invaded my veins as soon as I had everything nicely
arranged-- the carefree passengers in their rooms enjoying the
ride I was giving them, smoking, exchanging, knowing smiles,
nodding, dozing; the waiters and cooks and train guards (whom I
had to place somewhere) carousing in the diner; and myself,
goggled and begrimed, peering out of the engine cab at the
tapering track, at the ruby or emerald point in the black
distance. And then, in my sleep, I would see something totally
different-- a glass marble rolling under a grand piano or a toy
engine lying on its side with its wheels still working gamely.
A change in the speed of the train sometimes interrupted
the current of my sleep. Slow lights were stalking by; each, in
passing, investigated the same chink, and then a luminous
compass measured the shadows. Presently, the train stopped with
a long-drawn Westinghousian sigh. Something (my brother's
spectacles, as it proved next day) fell from above. It was
marvelously exciting to move to the foot of one's bed, with
part of the bedclothes following, in order to undo cautiously
the catch of the window shade, which could be made to slide
only halfway up, impeded as it was by the edge of the upper
berth.
Like moons around Jupiter, pale moths revolved about a
lone lamp. A dismembered newspaper stirred on a bench.
Somewhere on the train one could hear muffled voices,
somebody's comfortable cough. There was nothing particularly
interesting in the portion of station platform before me, and
still I could not tear myself away from it until it departed of
its own accord.
Next morning, wet fields with misshapen willows along the
radius of a ditch or a row of poplars afar, traversed by a
horizontal band of milky-white mist, told one that the train
was spinning through Belgium. It reached Paris at four p.m.;
and even if the stay was only an overnight one, I had always
time to purchase something-- say, a little brass Tour
Eiffel, rather roughly coated with silver paint-- before we
boarded at noon on the following day the Sud Express, which, on
its way to Madrid, dropped us around ten p.m. at the La
Nиgresse station of Biarritz, a few miles from the Spanish
frontier.
2
Biarritz still retained its quiddity in those days. Dusty
blackberry bushes and weedy terrains ю vendre bordered
the road that led to our villa. The Cariton was still being
built. Some thirty-six years had to elapse before Brigadier
General Samuel McCroskey would occupy the royal suite of the
Hotel du Palais, which stands on the site of a former palace,
where, in the sixties, that incredibly agile medium, Daniel
Home, is said to have been caught stroking with his bare foot
(in imitation of a ghost hand) the kind, trustful face of
Empress Eugenic. On the promenade near the Casino, an elderly
flower girl, with carbon eyebrows and a painted smile, nimbly
slipped the plump torus of a carnation into the buttonhole of
an intercepted stroller whose left jowl accentuated its royal
fold as he glanced down sideways at the coy insertion of the
flower.
Along the back line of the plage, various seaside
chairs and stools supported the parents of straw-hatted
children who were playing in front on the sand. I could be seen
on my knees trying to set a found comb aflame by means of a
magnifying glass. Men sported white trousers that to the eye of
today would look as if they had comically shrunk in the
washing; ladies wore, that particular season, light coats with
silk-faced lapels, hats with big crowns and wide brims, dense
embroidered white veils, frill-fronted blouses, frills at their
wrists, frills on their parasols. The breeze salted one's lips.
At a tremendous pace a stray golden-orange butterfly came
dashing across the palpitating plage.
Additional movement and sound were provided by vendors
hawking cacahuхtes, sugared violets, pistachio ice cream
of a heavenly green, cachou pellets, and huge convex pieces of
dry, gritty, waferlike stuff that came from a red barrel. With
a distinctness that no later superpositions have dimmed, I see
that waffleman stomp along through deep mealy sand, with the
heavy cask on his bent back. When called, he would sling it off
his shoulder by a twist of its strap, bang it down on the sand
in a Tower of Pisa position, wipe his face with his sleeve, and
proceed to manipulate a kind of arrow-and-dial arrangement with
numbers on the lid of the cask. The arrow rasped and whirred
around. Luck was supposed to fix the size of a sou's worth of
wafer. The bigger the piece, the more I was sorry for him.
The process of bathing took place on another part of the
beach. Professional bathers, burly Basques in black bathing
suits, were there to help ladies and children enjoy the terrors
of the surf Such a baigneur would place you with your
back to the incoming wave and hold you by the hand as the
rising, rotating mass of foamy, green water violently descended
upon you from behind, knocking you off your feet with one
mighty wallop. After a dozen of these tumbles, the baigneur,
glistening like a seal, would lead his panting, shivering,
moistly snuffling charge landward, to the flat foreshore, where
an unforgettable old woman with gray hairs on her chin promptly
chose a bathing robe from several hanging on a clothesline. In
the security of a little cabin, one would be helped by yet
another attendant to peel off one's soggy, sand-heavy bathing
suit. It would plop onto the boards, and, still shivering, one
would step out of it and trample on its bluish, diffuse
stripes. The cabin smelled of pine. The attendant, a hunchback
with beaming wrinkles, brought a basin of steaming-hot water,
in which one immersed one's feet. From him I learned, and have
preserved ever since in a glass cell of my memory, that
"butterfly" in the Basque language is misericoletea-- or
at least it sounded so (among the seven words I have found in
dictionaries the closest approach is micheletea).
3
On the browner and wetter part of the plage, that
part which at low tide yielded the best mud for castles, I
found myself digging, one day, side by side with a little
French girl called Colette.
She would be ten in November, I had been ten in April.
Attention was drawn to a jagged bit of violet mussel shell upon
which she had stepped with the bare sole of her narrow
long-toed foot. No, I was not English. Her greenish eyes seemed
flecked with the overflow of the freckles that covered her
sharp-featured face. She wore what might now be termed a
playsuit, consisting of a blue jersey with rolled-up sleeves
and blue knitted shorts. I had taken her at first for a boy and
then had been puzzled by the bracelet on her thin wrist and the
corkscrew brown curls dangling from under her sailor cap.
She spoke in birdlike bursts of rapid twitter, mixing
governess English and Parisian French. Two years before, on the
same plage, I had been much attached to the lovely,
suntanned little daughter of a Serbian physician; but when I
met Colette, I knew at once that this was the real thing.
Colette seemed to me so much stranger than all my other chance
playmates at Biarritz! I somehow acquired the feeling that she
was less happy than I, less loved. A bruise on her delicate,
downy forearm gave rise to awful conjectures. "He pinches as
bad as my mummy," she said, speaking of a crab. I evolved
various schemes to save her from her parents, who were "des
bourgeois lie Paris" as I heard somebody tell my mother
with a slight shrug. I interpreted the disdain in my own
fashion, as I knew that those people had come all the way from
Paris in their blue-and-yellow limousine (a fashionable
adventure in those days) but had drably sent Colette with her
dog and governess by an ordinary coach train. The dog was a
female fox terrier with bells on her collar and a most waggly
behind. From sheer exuberance, she would lap up salt water out
of Colette's toy pail. I remember the sail, the sunset, and the
lighthouse pictured on that pail, but I cannot recall the dog's
name, and this bothers me.
During the two months of our stay at Biarritz, my passion
for Colette all but surpassed my passion for butterflies. Since
my parents were not keen to meet hers, I saw her only on the
beach; but I thought of her constantly. If I noticed she had
been crying, I felt a surge of helpless anguish that brought
tears to my own eyes. I could not destroy the mosquitoes that
had left their bites on her frail neck, but I could, and did,
have a successful fistfight with a red-haired boy who had been
rude to her. She used to give me warm handfuls of hard candy.
One day, as we were bending together over a starfish, and
Colette's ringlets were tickling my ear, she suddenly turned
toward me and kissed me on the cheek. So great was my emotion
that all I could think of saying was, "You little monkey."
I had a gold coin that I assumed would pay for our
elopement. Where did I want to take her? Spain? America? The
mountains above Pau?" "Lю-bas, lю-bas, dans la
montagne," as I had heard Carmen sing at the opera. One
strange night, I lay awake, listening to the recurrent thud of
the ocean and planning our flight. The ocean seemed to rise and
grope in the darkness and then heavily fall on its face.
Of our actual getaway, I have little to report. My memory
retains a glimpse of her obediently putting on rope-soled
canvas shoes, on the lee side of a flapping tent, while I
stuffed a folding butterfly net into a brown paper bag. The
next glimpse is of our evading pursuit by entering a pitch-dark
cinema near the Casino (which, of course, was absolutely out of
bounds). There we sat, holding hands across the dog, which now
and then gently jingled in Colette's lap, and were shown a
jerky, drizzly, but highly exciting bullfight at San Sиbastian.
My final glimpse is of myself being led along the promenade by
my tutor. His long legs move with a kind of ominous briskness
and I can see the muscles of his grimly set jaw working under
the tight skin. My bespectacled brother, aged nine, whom he
happens to hold with his other hand, keeps trotting out forward
to peer at me with awed curiosity, like a little owl.
Among the trivial souvenirs acquired at Biarritz before
leaving, my favorite was not the small bull of black stone and
not the sonorous sea-shell but something which now seems almost
symbolic-- a meerschaum penholder with a tiny peephole of
crystal in its ornamental part. One held it quite close to
one's eye, screwing up the other, and when one had got rid of
the shimmer of one's own lashes, a miraculous photographic view
of the bay and of the line of cliffs ending in a lighthouse
could be seen inside.
And now a delightful thing happens. The process of
re-creating that penholder and the microcosm in its eyelet
stimulates my memory to a last effort. I try again to recall
the name of Colette's dog-- and, sure enough, along those
remote beaches, over the glossy evening sands of the past,
where each footprint slowly fills up with sunset water, here it
comes, here it comes, echoing and vibrating: Floss, Floss,
Floss!
Colette was back in Paris by the time we stopped there for
a day before continuing our homeward journey; and there, in a
fawn park under a cold blue sky, I saw her (by arrangement
between our mentors, I believe) for the last time. She carried
a hoop and a short stick to drive it with, and everything about
her was extremely proper and stylish in an autumnal, Parisian,
tenue-de-ville-pour-fillettes way. She took from her
governess and slipped into my brother's hand a farewell
present, a box of sugar-coated almonds, meant, I knew, solely
for me; and instantly she was off, tap-tapping her glinting
hoop through light and shade, around and around a fountain
choked with dead leaves near which I stood. The leaves mingle
in my memory with the leather of her shoes and gloves, and
there was, I remember, some detail in her attire (perhaps a
ribbon on her Scottish cap, or the pattern of her stockings)
that reminded me then of the rainbow spiral in a glass marble.
I still seem to be holding that wisp of iridescence, not
knowing exactly where to fit it, while she runs with her hoop
ever faster around me and finally dissolves among the slender
shadows cast on the graveled path by the interlaced arches of
its low looped fence.