Набоков Владимир - Conversation Piece, 1945

Vladimir Nabokov. Conversation Piece, 1945

© 1945 Copyright by Vladimir Nabokov

I happen to have a disreputable namesake, complete from
nickname to surname, a man whom I have never seen in the flesh
but whose vulgar personality I have been able to deduce from
his chance intrusions into the castle of my life. The tangle
began in Prague, where I happened to be living in the middle
twenties. A letter came to me there from a small library
apparently attached to some sort of White Army organization
which, like myself, had moved out of Russia. In exasperated
tones, it demanded that I return at once a copy of the
Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion. This book, which in
the old days had been wistfully appreciated by the Tsar, was a
fake memorandum the secret police had paid a semiliterate crook
to compile; its sole object was the promotion of pogroms. The
librarian, who signed himself "Sinepuzov" (a surname meaning
"blue belly, `" which affects a Russian imagination in much the
same way as Winterbottom does an English one), insisted that I
had been keeping what he chose to call "this popular and
valuable work" for more than a year. He referred to previous
requests addressed to me in Belgrade, Berlin, and Brussels,
through which towns my namesake apparently had been drifting.
I visualized the fellow as a young, very White emigre, of
the automatically reactionary type, whose education had been
interrupted by the Revolution and who was successfully making
up for lost time along traditional lines. He obviously was a
great traveler; so was I-- our only point in common. A Russian
woman in Strasbourg asked me whether the man who had married
her niece in Liиge was my brother. One spring day, in Nice, a
poker-faced girl with long earrings called at my hotel, asked
to see me, took one look at me, apologized, and went away. In
Paris, I received a telegram which jerkily ran, "NE VIENS PAS
ALPHONSE DE RETOUR SOUPCONNE SOIS PRUDENT JE T`ADORE
ANGOISSEE," and l admit deriving a certain grim satisfaction
from the vision of my frivolous double inevitably bursting in,
flowers in hand, upon Alphonse and his wife. A few years later,
when I was lecturing in Zurich, I was suddenly arrested on a
charge of smashing three mirrors in a restaurant-- a
kind of triptych featuring my namesake drunk (the first
mirror), very drunk (the second), and roaring drunk (the
third). Finally, in 1938, a French consul rudely refused to
stamp my tattered sea-green Nansen passport because, he said, I
had entered the country once before without a permit. In the
fat dossier which was eventually produced, I caught a glimpse
of my namesake`s face. He had a clipped mustache and a crew
haircut, the bastard.
When, soon after that, I came over to the United States
and settled down in Boston, I felt sure I had shaken off my
absurd shadow. Then-- last month, to be precise-- there came a
telephone call.
In a hard and glittering voice, a woman said she was Mrs.
Sybil Hall, a close friend of Mrs. Sharp, who had written to
her suggesting that she contact me. I did know a Mrs.
Sharp and didn`t stop to think that both my Mrs. Sharp and
myself might not be the right ones. Golden-voiced Mrs. Hall
said she was having a little meeting at her apartment Friday
night and would I come, because she was sure from what she had
heard about me that I would be very, very much interested in
the discussion. Although meetings of any kind are loathsome to
me, I was prompted to accept the invitation by the thought that
if I did not I might in some way disappoint Mrs. Sharp, a nice,
maroon-trousered, short-haired old lady whom I had met on Cape
Cod, where she shared a cottage with a younger woman; both
ladies are mediocre leftist artists of independent means, and
completely amiable.
Owing to a misadventure, which had nothing to do with the
subject of the present account, I arrived much later than I
intended at Mrs. Hall`s apartment house. An ancient elevator
attendant, oddly resembling Richard Wagner, gloomily took me
up, and Mrs. Hall`s unsmiling maid, her long arms hanging down
her sides, waited while I removed my overcoat and rubbers in
the hall. Here the chief decorative note was a certain type of
ornamental vase manufactured in China, and possibly of great
antiquity-- in this case a tall, sickly-colored brute of a
thing-- which always makes me abominably unhappy.
As I crossed a self-conscious, small room that fairly
brimmed with symbols of what advertisement writers call
"gracious living" and was being ushered-- theoretically, for
the maid had dropped away-- into a large, mellow, bourgeois
salon, it gradually dawned upon me that this was exactly the
sort of place where one would expect to be introduced to some
old fool who had had caviar in the Kremlin or to some wooden
Soviet Russian, and that my acquaintance Mrs. Sharp, who had
for some reason always resented my contempt for the Party line
and for the Communist and his Master`s Voice, had decided, poor
soul, that such an experience might have a beneficial influence
upon my sacrilegious mind.
From a group of a dozen people, my hostess emerged in the
form of a long-limbed, flat-chested woman with lipstick on her
prominent front teeth. She introduced me rapidly to the guest
of honor and her other guests, and the discussion, which had
been interrupted by my entrance, was at once resumed. The guest
of honor was answering questions. He was a fragile-looking man
with sleek, dark hair and a glistening brow, and he was so
brightly illumined by the long-stalked lamp at his shoulder