The Enchanter

the translucent bifurcation of a vein, the mosquito was hard at work. He jealously shooed it away, inadvertently contributing to the fall of a flap that had long been in the way, and there they were, those strange, sightless little breasts, swollen with what seemed two tender abscesses, and now a thin, still childlike muscle was bared, and next to it the stretched, milk-white hollow of her armpit with five or six diverging, silky-dark streaks, and down there, too, obliquely flowed the golden little stream of chain (with a cross, probably, or a charm at its end), and then once again there was cotton—the sleeve of her sharply thrown-back arm.

Yet another truck hurtled past, howling and filling the room with a tremor. He paused in his perlustration, leaning awkwardly over her, involuntarily pressing into her with his gaze, feeling the adolescent scent of her skin mingle with that of the russet hair and penetrate his blood like a gnawing itch. What am I to do with you, what am I to—

The girl heaved a sigh in her sleep, opening her tightly shut navel like an eye, then slowly, with a cooing moan, breathed out, and that was all she needed to glide on in her previous torpor. He carefully pulled the crushed black cap out from under her heel and froze again, his temples throbbing, the ache of his tension pounding. He dared not kiss those angular nipples, those long toes with their yellowish nails. His eyes returned from everywhere else to converge on the same suedelike fissure, which somehow seemed to come alive under his prismatic stare. He still did not know what to undertake, afraid of missing something, of not taking full advantage of the fairy-tale firmness of her sleep.

The stuffy air and his excitement were growing unbearable. He slightly loosened his pajama drawstring, which had been cutting into his belly, and a tendon emitted a squeak as his lips almost incorporeally brushed the spot where a birthmark was visible beneath her rib…. But he was uncomfortable and hot, and the congestion of his blood demanded the impossible. Then, starting little by little to cast his spell, he began passing his magic wand above her body, almost touching the skin, torturing himself with her attraction, her visible proximity, the fantastic confrontation permitted by the slumber of this naked girl, whom he was measuring, as it were, with an enchanted yardstick—until she made a faint motion, and turned her face away with a barely audible, somnolent smack of her lips. Everything again froze still, and now, amid her brown locks, he could make out the crimson border of her ear and the palm of her liberated hand, forgotten in its previous position. Onward, onward. In parenthetical flashes of consciousness, as though on the verge of oblivion, he had fleeting glimpses of incidental ephemera—some bridge over speeding railway cars, an air bubble in the glass of some window, the dented fender of a car, some other object, a waffle-patterned towel seen somewhere not long ago—and meanwhile, slowly, with baited breath, he was inching closer and then, coordinating all his movements, he began molding himself to her, testing the fit…. A spring apprehensively yielded under his side; his right elbow, cautiously cracking, sought a support; his sight was clouded by a secret concentration…. He felt the flame of her shapely thigh, felt that he could restrain himself no longer, that nothing mattered now, and, as the sweetness came to a boil between his woolly tufts and her hip, how joyously his life was emancipated and reduced to the simplicity of paradise—and having barely had time still to think, “No, I beg you, don’t take it away!” he saw that she was fully awake and looking wild-eyed at his rearing nudity.

For an instant, in the hiatus of a syncope, he also saw how it appeared to her: some monstrosity, some ghastly disease—or else she already knew, or it was all of that together. She was looking and screaming, but the enchanter did not yet hear her screams; he was deafened by his own horror, kneeling, catching at the folds, snatching at the drawstring, trying to stop it, hide it, snapping with his oblique spasm, as senseless as pounding in place of music, senselessly discharging molten wax, too late to stop it or conceal it. How she rolled from the bed, how she was shrieking now, how the lamp scampered off in its red cowl, what a thundering came from outside the window, shattering, destroying the night, demolishing everything, everything…. “Be quiet, it’s nothing bad, it’s just a kind of game, it happens sometimes, just be quiet,” he implored, middle-aged and sweaty, covering himself with a raincoat he had glimpsed in passing, shuddering, donning it, missing the armhole. Like a child in a screen drama, she shielded herself with her sharp little elbow, tearing from his grasp and still yelling senselessly, and somebody was pounding on the wall, demanding inconceivable silence. She tried to run out of the room, could not unlock the door, he could not catch hold of anything or anyone, she was growing lighter, becoming slippery as a purple- buttocked foundling, with a distorted infant’s face, scuttling from the threshold to the crib and crawling backward from the crib into the womb of a tempestuously resurrected mother. “I’ll make you quiet down!” he was shouting (to a spasm, to the dotlike final drop, to nothingness). “All right, I’ll leave, I’ll make you—” He overcame the door, rushed out, deafeningly locked it behind him, and, still listening, gripping the key in his palm, barefoot and with a cold smear beneath his raincoat, stood where he was, gradually sinking.

But from a nearby room there had already appeared two robed old women; one of them—thickset, resembling a white-haired negro, wearing azure pajama bottoms, with the breathless, jerky cadence of a distant continent, suggesting animal defense leagues and women’s clubs—was giving orders (at-once, eroffnen, et-tout-de-suite!) and, clawing at the palm of his hand, nimbly knocked the key to the floor. For several elastic seconds he and she had a hip-shoving match, but in any event it was all over; heads emerged from every direction, a bell was clanging somewhere, behind a door a melodious voice seemed to be finishing a nursery tale (Mr. White-Tooth in the bed, the hoodlum brothers with their little red rifles), the old woman conquered the key, he gave her a quick swat on the cheek, and, with his whole body ringing, went running down the sticky steps. Toward him briskly clambered a dark-haired fellow with a goatee, clad only in underpants; after him wriggled a puny harlot. He rushed past them. Farther down came a specter in tan shoes, farther still the old man climbed bow-legged, followed by the avid gendarme. Past them. Leaving behind a multitude of synchronized arms extended over the banister in a splashlike gesture of invitation, he pirouetted into the street, for all was over, and it was imperative, by any stratagem, by any spasm, to get rid of the no-longer-needed, already-looked-at, idiotic world, on whose final page stood a lonely streetlamp with a shaded-out cat at its base. Already interpreting his sensation of barefootedness as a plunge into another element, he rushed off along the ashen sidewalk, pursued by the pounding footfalls of his already outdistanced heart. His desperate need for a torrent, a precipice, a railroad track—no matter what, but instantly—made him appeal for the very last time to the topography of his past. And when, in front of him, a grinding whine came from behind the hump of the side street, swelling to full growth when it had overcome the grade, distending the night, already illuminating the descent with two ovals of yellowish light, about to hurtle downward—then, as if it were a dance, as if the ripple of that dance had carried him to stage center, under this growing, grinning, megathundering mass, his partner in a crashing cracovienne, this thundering iron thing, this instantaneous cinema of dismemberment—that’s it, drag me under, tear at my frailty—I’m traveling flattened, on my smacked-down face—hey, you’re spinning me, don’t rip me to pieces—you’re shredding me, I’ve had enough…. Zigzag gymnastics of lightning, spectrogram of a thunderbolt’s split seconds—and the film of life had burst.

On a Book Entitled The Enchanter by Dmitri Nabokov

THE TITLE FOR THE FOLLOWING brief notes, which may interest the reader and perhaps answer a few questions, was chosen with the half-serious thought that a small echo of Father’s postface to Lolita may amuse his shade wherever it may be.

In both translation and commentary I have tried hard to stick to the Nabokov rules: precision, artistic fidelity, no padding, no ascribing. Any conjecture beyond what I have ventured would violate those rules.

The translation itself reflects my intent to be faithful to VN in both the general and the specific, textual, senses. Many years of translating for and with Father instilled in me those categorical requirements of his. The only cases where he considered departures admissable were untranslatable expressions and revisions of the text itself, in the translated version, by the original author. It is possible that VN, were he alive, might have exercised his authorial license to change certain details of The Enchanter; I believe, though, that he would have chosen to leave intact this model of conciseness and multilevel meaning. The rare instances where I have taken the liberty of making minor adjustments occur precisely where the technique—as in the telescoped Little Red Riding Hood wordplays (this page; this page) or the high-speed imagery of the finale—would have made a totally literal rendering meaningless in English. Elsewhere, on occasion,