Pale Fire - Vladimir Nabokov [74]
“What are your plans?” she inquired. “Why can’t you stay here as long as you want? Please do. I’ll be going to Rome soon, you’ll have the whole house to yourself. Imagine, you can bed here as many as forty guests, forty Arabian thieves.” (Influence of the huge terracotta vases in the garden.)
He answered he would be going to America some time next month and had business in Paris tomorrow.
Why America? What would he do there?
Teach. Examine literary masterpieces with brilliant and charming young people. A hobby he could now freely indulge.
“And, of course, I don’t know,” she mumbled looking away, “I don’t know but perhaps if you’d have nothing against it, I might visit New York—I mean, just for a week or two, and not this year but the next.”
He complimented her on her silver-spangled jacket. She persevered: “Well?” “And your hairdo is most becoming.” “Oh, what does it matter,” she wailed, “what on earth does anything matter!” “I must be on my way,” he whispered with a smile and got up. “Kiss me,” she said, and was like a limp, shivering ragdoll in his arms for a moment.
He walked to the gate. At the turn of the path he glanced back and saw in the distance her white figure with the listless grace of ineffable grief bending over the garden table, and suddenly a fragile bridge was suspended between waking indifference and dream-love. But she moved, and he saw it was not she at all but only poor Fleur de Fyler collecting the documents left among the tea things. (See note to line 80.)
When in the course of an evening stroll in May or June, 1959, I offered Shade all this marvelous material, he looked at me quizzically and said: “That’s all very well, Charles. But there are just two questions. How can you know that all this intimate stuff about your rather appalling king is true? And if true, how can one hope to print such personal things about people who, presumably, are still alive?”
“My dear John,” I replied gently and urgently, “do not worry about trifles. Once transmuted by you into poetry, the stuff will be true, and the people will come alive. A poet’s purified truth can cause no pain, no offense. True art is above false honor.”
“Sure, sure,” said Shade. “One can harness words like performing fleas and make them drive other fleas. Oh, sure.”
“And moreover,” I continued as we walked down the road right into a vast sunset, “as soon as your poem is ready, as soon as the glory of Zembla merges with the glory of your verse, I intend to divulge to you an ultimate truth, an extraordinary secret, that will put your mind completely at rest.”
Line 469: his gun
Gradus, as he drove back to Geneva, wondered when he would be able to use it, that gun. The afternoon was unbearably hot. The lake had developed a scaling of silver and a touch of reflected thunderhead. As many old glaziers, he could deduce rather accurately water temperature from certain indices of brilliancy and motion, and now judged it to be at least 23°. As soon as he got back to his hotel he made a long-distance call to headquarters. It proved a terrible experience. Under the assumption that it would attract less attention than a BIC language, the conspirators conducted telephone conversations in English—broken English, to be exact, with one tense, no articles, and two pronunciations, both wrong. Furthermore, by their following the crafty system (invented in the chief BIC country) of using two different sets of code words—headquarters, for instance, saying “bureau” for “king,” and Gradus saying “letter,” they enormously increased the difficulty of communication. Each side, finally, had forgotten the meaning of certain phrases pertaining to the other’s vocabulary so that in result, their tangled and expensive talk combined charades with an obstacle race in the dark. Headquarters thought it understood that letters from the King divulging his whereabouts could be obtained by breaking into Villa Disa and rifling the Queen’s bureau; Gradus, who had said nothing of the sort, but had merely tried to convey the results of his Lex visit, was chagrined to learn