N O V E M B E R 1 9 4 1
by Vladimir Nabokov
Luring aside one of the trolley-car numbers, the street started at the corner
of a crowded avenue. For a long time it crept on in obscurity, with no shop
windows or any such joys. Then came a small square (four benches, a bed of
pansies) round which the trolley steered with rasping disapproval. Here the
street changed its name, and a new life began. Along the right side, shops
appeared: a fruiterer's, with vivid pyramids of oranges; a tobacconist's, with
the picture of a voluptuous Turk; a delicatessen, with fat brown and gray coils
of sausages; and then, all of a sudden, a butterfly store. At night, and
especially when it was damp, with the asphalt shining like the back of a seal,
passers-by would stop for a second before that symbol of fair weather. The
insects on exhibit were huge and gorgeous. People would say to themselves,
'What colors -- amazing!' and plod on through the drizzle. Eyed wings wide open
in wonder, shimmering blue satin, black magic -- these lingered for a while,
floating in one's vision, until one boarded the trolley or bought a newspaper.
And, just because they were together with the butterflies, a few other objects
would remain in one's memory: a globe, pencils, and a monkey's skull on a pile
of copybooks.
As the street
blinked and ran on, there followed again a succession of ordinary shops --
soap, coal, bread -- with another pause at the corner where there was a small
bar. The bartender, a dashing fellow in a starched collar and a green sweater,
was deft at shaving off with one stroke the foam topping the glass under the
beer tap; he also had a well-earned reputation as a wit. Every night, at a
round table by the window, the fruiterer, the baker, an unemployed man, and the
bartender's first cousin played cards with great gusto. As the winner of the
current stake immediately ordered four drinks, none of the players could ever
get rich.
On Saturdays, at an
adjacent table, there would sit a flabby elderly man with a florid face, lank
hair, and a grayish moustache, carelessly clipped. When he appeared, the
players greeted him noisily without looking up from their cards. He invariably
ordered rum, filled his pipe, and gazed at the game with pink-rimmed watery
eyes. The left eyelid drooped slightly.
Occasionally someone
turned to him, and asked how his shop was doing; he would be slow to answer,
and often did not answer at all. If the bartender's daughter, a pretty freckled
girl in a polka-dotted frock, happened to pass close enough, he had a go at her
elusive hip, and, whether the slap succeeded or not, his gloomy expression
never changed, although the veins on his temple grew purple. Mine host very
humorously called him 'Herr Professor.' 'Well, how is the Herr Professor
tonight?' he would ask, coming over to him, and the man would ponder for some
time in silence and then, with a wet underlip pushing out from under the pipe
like that of a feeding elephant, he would answer something neither funny nor
polite. The bartender would counter briskly, which made the players at the next
table, though seemingly absorbed in their cards, rock with ugly glee.
The man wore a roomy
gray suit with great exaggeration of the vest motif, and when the cuckoo popped
out of the clock he ponderously extracted a thick silver watch and gazed at it
askance, holding it in the palm of his hand and squinting because of the smoke.
Punctually at eleven he knocked out his pipe, paid for his rum, and, after
extending a flaccid hand to anyone who might choose to shake it, silently left.
He walked awkwardly,
with a slight limp. His legs seemed too thin for his body. Just before the
window of his shop he turned into a passage, where there was a door on the
right with a brass plate: PAUL PILGRAM. This door led into his tiny dingy
apartment, which could also be reached by an inner corridor at the back of the
shop. Eleanor was usually asleep when he came home on those festive nights.
Half a dozen faded photographs of the same clumsy ship, taken from different
angles, and of a palm tree that looked as bleak as if it were growing on
Helgoland, hung in black frames above the double bed. Muttering to himself,
Pilgram limped away into bulbless darkness with a lighted candle, came back
with his suspenders dangling, and kept muttering while sitting on the edge of
the bed and slowly, painfully, taking off his shoes. His wife, half-waking,
moaned into her pillow and offered to help him; and then, with a threatening
rumble in his voice, he would tell her to keep quiet, and repeated that
guttural 'Ruhe!' several times, more and more fiercely.
After the stroke
which had almost killed him some time ago (like a mountain falling upon him
from behind just as he had bent towards his shoestrings), he now undressed
reluctantly, growling until he got safely into bed, and then growling again if
the faucet happened to drip in the adjoining kitchen. Eleanor would roll out of
bed and totter into the kitchen and totter back with a dazed sigh, her small
face wax-pale and shiny, and the plastered corns on her feet showing from under
her dismally long nightgown. They had married in 1905, almost a quarter of a
century before, and were childless because Pilgram had always thought that
children would be merely a hindrance to the realization of what had been in his
youth a delightfully exciting plan but had now gradually become a dark,
passionate obsession.
He slept on his back
with an old-fashioned nightcap coming down on his forehead; it was to all
appearances the solid and sonorous sleep that might be expected in an elderly
German shopkeeper, and one could readily suppose that his quilted torpor was
entirely devoid of visions; but actually this churlish, heavy man, who fed
mainly on Erbswurst and boiled potatoes, placidly believing in his newspaper
and quite ignorant of the world (in so far as his secret passion was not
involved), dreamed of things that would have seemed utterly unintelligible to
his wife or his neighbors; for Pilgram belonged, or rather was meant to belong
(something -- the place, the time, the man -- had been ill-chosen), to a
special breed of dreamers, such dreamers as used to be called in the old days
'Aurelians' -- perhaps on account of those chrysalids, those 'jewels of
Nature,' which they loved to find hanging on fences above the dusty nettles of
country lanes.
On Sundays he drank
his morning coffee in several sloppy sessions, and then went out for a walk
with his wife, a slow silent stroll which Eleanor looked forward to all week.
On workdays he opened his shop as early as possible because of the children who
passed by on their way to school; for lately he had been keeping school
supplies in addition to his basic stock. Some small boy, swinging his satchel
and chewing a sandwich, would slouch past the tobacconist's (where a certain
brand of cigarettes offered airplane pictures), past the delicatessen (which
rebuked one for having eaten that sandwich long before lunchtime), and then,
remembering he wanted an eraser, would enter the next shop. Pilgram would
mumble something, sticking out his lower lip from under the stem of his pipe,
and, after a listless search, would plump down an open carton on the counter.
The boy would feel and squeeze the virgin-pale India rubber, would not find the
sort he favored, and would leave without even noticing the principal wares in
the store.
'These modern
children!' Pilgram would think with disgust, and he recalled his own boyhood.
His father --a sailor, a rover, a bit of a rogue -- married late in life a
sallow-skinned, light-eyed Dutch girl whom he brought from Java to Berlin, and
opened a shop of exotic curios. Pilgram could not remember now when, exactly,
butterflies had begun to oust the stuffed birds of paradise, the stale
talismans, the fans with dragons, and the like; but as a boy he already
feverishly swapped specimens with collectors, and after his parents died
butterflies reigned supreme in the dim little shop. Up to 1914 there were
enough amateurs and professionals about to keep things going in a mild, very
mild, way; later on, however, it became necessary to make concessions, a
display case with the biography of the silkworm furnishing a transition to
school supplies, just as in the old days pictures ignominiously composed of
sparkling wings had probably been a first step towards lepidopterology.
Now the window
contained, apart from penholders, mainly showy insects, popular stars among
butterflies, some of them set on plaster and framed -- intended merely for
ornamenting the home. In the shop itself, permeated with the pungent odor of a
strong disinfectant, the real, the precious collections were kept. The whole
place was littered with various cases, cartons, cigar boxes. Tall cabinets
contained numerous glass-lidded drawers filled with ordered series of perfect
specimens impeccably spread and labeled. A dusty old shield or something (last
remnant of the original wares) stood in a dark corner. Now and then livestock
would appear: loaded brown pupae with a symmetrical confluence of delicate
lines and grooves on the thorax, showing how the rudimentary wings, feet,
antennue, and proboscis were packed. If one touched such a pupa as it lay on
its bed of moss, the tapering end of the segmented abdomen would start jerking
this way and that like the swathed limbs of a baby. The pupae cost a Reichsmark
apiece and in due time yielded a limp, bedraggled, miraculously expanding moth.
And sometimes other creatures would be temporarily on sale: just then there
happened to be a dozen lizards, natives of Majorca, cold, black, blue-bellied
things, which Pilgram fed on meal worms for the main course and grapes for
dessert.
II
He had spent all his life in Berlin and its suburbs; had never traveled
farther than Peacock Island on a neighboring lake. He was a first-class
entomologist. Dr. Rebel of Vienna had named a certain rare moth Agrotis
pilgrami; and Pilgram himself had published several descriptions. His boxes
contained most of the countries of the world, but all he had ever seen of it
was the dull sand-and-pine scenery of an occasional Sunday trip; and he would
be reminded of captures that had seemed to him so miraculous in his boyhood as
he melancholically gazed at the familiar fauna about him, limited by a familiar
landscape, to which it corresponded as hopelessly as he to his street. From a
roadside shrub he would pick up a large turquoise-green caterpillar with a
china-blue horn on the last ring; there it lay quite stiff on the palm of his hand,
and presently, with a sigh, he would put it back on its twig as if it were some
dead trinket.
Although once or
twice he had had the chance to switch to a more profitable business -- selling cloth,
for instance, instead of moths -- he stubbornly held on to his shop as the
symbolic link between his dreary existence and the phantom of perfect
happiness. What he craved for, with a fierce, almost morbid intensity, was to
net himself the rarest butterflies of distant countries, to see them in flight
with his own eyes, to stand waist-deep in lush grass and feel the
follow-through of the swishing net and then the furious throbbing of wings
through a clutched fold of the gauze.
Every year it seemed
to him stranger that last year he had not managed somehow to lay aside enough
money for at least a fortnight's collecting trip abroad, but he had never been
thrifty, business had always been slack, there was always a gap somewhere, and,
even if luck did come his way now and then, something was sure to go wrong at
the last moment. He had married counting heavily on a share in his
father-in-law's business, but a month later the man had died, leaving nothing
but debts. Just before the war, an unexpected deal brought a journey to Algeria
so near that he even acquired a sun helmet. When all travel stopped, he still
consoled himself with the hope that he might be sent to some exciting place as
a soldier; but he was clumsy, sickly, not very young, and thus saw neither
active service nor exotic Lepidoptera. Then, after the war, when he had managed
again to save a little money (for a week in Zermatt, this time), the inflation
suddenly turned his meagre hoard into something less than the price of a
trolley-car ticket.
After that he gave
up trying. He grew more and more depressed as his passion grew stronger. When
some entomological acquaintance happened to drop in, Pilgram was only annoyed.
'That fellow,' he would think, 'may be as learned as the late Dr. Staudinger, but
he has no more imagination than a stamp collector.' The glass-lidded boxes over
which both were bending gradually took up the whole counter, and the pipe in
Pilgram's sucking lips kept emitting a wistful squeak. Pensively he gazed at
the serried rows of delicate insects, all alike to you or me, and now and then
he tapped on the glass with a stubby forefinger, stressing some special rarity.
'That's a curiously dark aberration,' the learned visitor might say. 'Eisner
got one like that at an auction in London, but it was not so dark, and it cost
him fourteen pounds.' Painfully sniffling with his extinguished pipe, Pilgram
would raise the box to the light, which made the shadows of the butterflies
slip from beneath them across the papered bottom; then he would put it down
again, and, working in his nails under the tight edges of the lid, would shake
it loose with a jerk and smoothly remove it. 'And Eisner's female was not so
fresh,' the visitor would add, and some eavesdroppers coming in for a copybook
or a postage stamp might well wonder what on earth these two were talking
about.
Grunting, Pilgram
plucked at the gilded head of the black pin upon which the silky little
creature was crucified, and took the specimen out of the box. Turning it this
way and that, he peered at the label pinned under the body. 'Yes -- Tatsienlu,
East Tibet,' he read. 'Taken by the native collectors of Father Dejean' (which
sounded almost like 'Prester John') -- and he would stick the butterfly back
again, right into the same pinhole. His motions seemed casual, even careless,
but this was the unerring nonchalance of the specialist: the pin, with the
precious insect, and Pilgram's fat fingers were the correlated parts of one and
the same flawless machine. It might happen, however, that some open box, having
been brushed by the elbow of the visitor, would stealthily begin to slide off
the counter -- to be stopped just in the nick of time by Pilgram, who would
then calmly go on lighting his pipe; only much later, when busy elsewhere, he would
suddenly produce a moan of retrospective anguish.
But not only averted
crashes made him moan. Father Dejean, stout-hearted missionary climbing among
the rhododendrons and snows, how enviable was thy lot! And Pilgram would stare
at his boxes and puff and brood and reflect that he need not go so far: that
there were thousands of hunting grounds all over Europe. Out of localities
cited in entomological works he had built up a special world of his own, to
which his science was a most detailed guidebook. In that world there were no
casinos, no old churches, nothing that might attract a normal tourist. Digne in
Southern France, Ragusa in Dalmatia, Sarepta on the Volga, Abisko in Lapland --
those were the famous sites dear to butterfly collectors, and this is where
they had poked about, on and off, since the fifties of the last century (always
greatly perplexing the local inhabitants). And as clearly as if it were a
reminiscence Pilgram saw himself troubling the sleep of a little hotel by
stamping and jumping about a room through the wide-open window of which, out of
the black generous night, a whitish moth had dashed in and was kissing its
shadow all over the ceiling.
In these impossible
dreams of his he visited the Islands of the Blessed, where in the hot ravines
that cut the lower slopes of the chestnut- and laurel-clad mountains there
occurs a weird local race of the Cabbage White; and also that other island,
those railway banks near Vizzavona and the pine woods farther up, which are the
haunts of the squat and dusky Corsican Swallowtail. He visited the far North,
the arctic bogs that produced such delicate downy butterflies. He knew the high
Alpine pastures, with those flat stones lying here and there among the slippery
matted grass; for there is no greater delight than to lift such a stone and
find beneath it a plump sleepy moth of a still undescribed species. He saw
glazed Apollo butterflies, ocellated with red, float in the mountain draft
across the mule track that ran between a steep cliff and an abyss of wild white
waters. In Italian gardens in the summer dusk, the gravel crunched invitingly
underfoot, and Pilgram gazed through the growing darkness at clusters of
blossoms in front of which suddenly there appeared an Oleander Hawk, which
passed from flower to flower, humming intently and stopping at the corolla, its
wings vibrating so rapidly that nothing but a ghostly nimbus was visible about
its streamlined body. And best of all, perhaps, were the white heathered hills
near Madrid, the valleys of Andalusia, fertile and wooded Albarracin, whither a
little bus driven by the forest guard's brother groaned up a twisted road.
He had more
difficulty in imagining the tropics, but experienced still keener pangs when he
did, for never would he catch the loftily flapping Brazilian Morphos, so ample
and radiant that they cast an azure reflection upon one's hand, Dever come upon
those crowds of African butterflies closely stuck like innumerable fancy flags
into the rich black mud and rising in a colored cloud when his shadow
approached -- a long, very long, shadow.
III
'Ja, ja, ja,' he would mutter, nodding his heavy head, and holding the
case before him as if it were a beloved portrait. The bell over the door would
tinkle, his wife would come in with a wet umbrella and a shopping bag, and
slowly he would turn his back to her as he inserted the case into the cabinet.
So it went on, that obsession and that despair and that nightmarish
impossibility to swindle destiny, until a certain first of April, of all dates.
For more than a year he had had in his keeping a cabinet devoted solely to the
genus of those small clear-winged moths that mimic wasps or mosquitoes. The
widow of a great authority on that particular group had given Pilgram her
husband's collection to sell on commission. He hastened to tell the silly woman
that he would not be able to get more than seventy-five marks for it, although
he knew very well that, according to catalogue prices, it was worth fifty times
more, so that the amateur to whom he would sell the lot for, say, a thousand
marks would consider it a good bargain. The amateur, however, did not appear,
though Pilgram had written to all the wealthiest collectors. So he had locked
up the cabinet, and stopped thinking about it.
That April morning a sunburned,
bespectacled man in an old mackintosh and without any hat on his brown bald
head sauntered in, and asked for some carbon paper. Pilgram slipped the small
coins paid for the sticky violet stuff he so hated to handle into the slit of a
small clay money pot, and, sucking on his pipe, fixed his stare into space. The
man cast a rapid glance round the shop, and remarked upon the extravagant
brilliancy of an iridescent green insect with many tails. Pilgram mumbled
something about Madagascar. 'And that -- that's not a butterfly, is it?' said
the man, indicating another specimen. Pilgram slowly replied that he had a
whole collection of that special kind. 'Ach, was!' said the man. Pilgram
scratched his bristly chin, and limped into a recess of the shop. He pulled out
a case, and laid it on the counter. The man pored over those tiny vitreous
creatures with bright orange feet and belted bodies. Pilgram pointed with the
stem of his pipe to one of the rows, and simultaneously the man exclaimed:
'Good God -- uralensis!' and that ejaculation gave him away. Pilgram heaped box
after box on the counter as it dawned upon him that the visitor knew perfectly
well of the existence of this collection, had come for its sake, was, as a
matter of fact, the rich amateur Sommer, to whom he had written and who had
just returned from a trip to Venezuela; and finally, when the question was
carelessly put, -- 'Well, and what would the price be?' -- Pilgram smiled.
He knew it was madness; he knew he was
leaving a helpless Eleanor, debts, unpaid taxes, a store at which only trash
was bought; he knew that the nine hundred and fifty marks he might get would
permit him to travel for no longer than a few months; and still he accepted it
all as a man who felt that tomorrow would bring dreary old age and that the
good fortune which now beckoned would never again repeat its invitation. When
finally Sommer said that on the fourth he would give a definite answer, Pilgram
decided that the dream of his life was about to break at last from its old
crinkly cocoon. He spent several hours examining a map, choosing a route,
estimating the time of appearance of this or that species, and suddenly
something black and blinding welled before his eyes, and he stumbled about his
shop for quite a while before he felt better. The fourth came and Sommer failed
to turn up, and, after waiting all day, Pilgrain retired to his bedroom and
silently lay down. He refused his supper, and for several minutes, with his
eyes closed, nagged his wife, thinking she was still standing near; then he
heard her sobbing softly in the kitchen, and toyed with the idea of taking an
axe and splitting her pale-haired head. Next day he stayed in bed, and Eleanor
took his place in the shop and sold a box of water colors. And after still
another day, when the whole thing seemed merely delirium, Sommer, a carnation
in his buttonhole and his mackintosh on his arm, entered the store. And when he
took out a wad, and the banknotes rustled, Pilgram's nose began to bleed violently.
The delivery of the cabinet and a visit
to the credulous old woman, to whom he reluctantly gave fifty marks, were his
last business in town. The much more expensive visit to the traveling agency
already referred to his new existence, where only butterflies mattered.
Eleanor, though not familiar with her husband's transactions, looked happy,
feeling that he had made a good profit, but fearing to ask how much. That
afternoon a neighbor dropped in to remind them that tomorrow was the wedding of
his daughter. So next morning Eleanor busied herself with brightening up her
silk dress and pressing her husband's best suit. She would go there about five,
she thought, and he would follow later, after closing time. When he looked up
at her with a puzzled frown and then flatly refused to go, it did not surprise
her, for she had long become used to all sorts of disappointments. 'There might
be champagne,' she said, when already standing in the doorway. No answer --
only the shuffling of boxes. She looked thoughtfully at the nice clean gloves
on her hands, and went out.
Pilgram, having put the more valuable
collections in order, looked at his watch and saw it was time to pack: his
train left at 8:29. He locked the shop, dragged out of the corridor his
father's old checkered suitcase, and packed the hunting implements first: a
folding net, killing jars, pillboxes, a lantern for mothing at night on the
sierras, and a few packages of pins. As an afterthought he put in a couple of
spreading boards and a cork-bottomed box, though in general he intended to keep
his captures in papers, as is usually done when going from place to place. Then
he took the suitcase into the bedroom and threw in some thick socks and
underwear. He added two or three things that might be sold in an extremity,
such as, for instance, a silver tumbler and a bronze medal in a velvet case,
which had belonged to his father-in-law.
Again he looked at his watch, and then
decided it was time to start for the station. 'Eleanor!' he called loudly,
getting into his overcoat. As she did not reply, he looked into the kitchen.
No, she was not there; and then vaguely he remembered something about a
wedding. Hurriedly he got a scrap of paper and scribbled a few words in pencil.
He left the note and the keys in a conspicuous place, and with a chill of
excitement, a sinking feeling in the pit of the stomach, verified for the last
time whether the money and tickets were in his wallet. 'Also los' said Pilgram,
and gripped the suitcase.
But, as it was his first journey, he
still kept worrying nervously whether there was anything he might have
forgotten; then it occurred to him that he had no small change, and he
remembered the clay money pot where there might be a few coins. Groaning and
knocking the heavy suitcase against corners, he returned to his counter. In the
twilight of the strangely still shop, eyed wings stared at him from all sides,
and Pilgram perceived something almost appalling in the richness of the huge
happiness that was leaning towards him like a mountain. Trying to avoid the
knowing looks of those numberless eyes, he drew a deep breath and, catching
sight of the hazy money pot, which seemed to hang in mid-air, reached quickly
for it. The pot slipped from his moist grasp and broke on the floor with a dizzy
spinning of twinkling coins; and Pilgram bent low to pick them up.
IV
Night came; a slippery polished moon sped, without the
least friction, in between chinchilla clouds, and Eleanor returning from the
wedding supper, and still all atingle from the wine and the juicy jokes,
recalled her own wedding day as she leisurely walked home. Somehow all the
thoughts now passing through her brain kept turning so as to show their
moon-bright, attractive side; she felt almost light-hearted as she entered the
gateway and proceeded to open the door, and she caught herself thinking that it
was surely a great thing to have an apartment of one's own, stuffy and dark
though it might be. Smiling, she turned on the light in her bedroom, and saw at
once that all the drawers had been pulled open; she hardly had time to imagine
burglars, for there were those keys on the night table and a bit of paper
propped against the alarm clock. The note was brief: 'Off to Spain. Don't touch
anything till I write. Borrow from Sch. or W. Feed the lizards.'
The faucet was
dripping in the kitchen. Unconsciously she picked up her silver bag where she
had dropped it, and then kept on sitting on the edge of the bed, quite straight
and still, with her hands in her lap as if she were having her photograph
taken. After a time someone got up, walked across the room, inspected the
bolted window, came back again, while she watched with indifference, not
realizing that it was she who was moving. The drops of water plopped in slow
succession, and suddenly she felt terrified at being alone in the house. The
man whom she had loved for his mute omniscience, stolid coarseness, grim
perseverance in work, had stolen away.... She felt like howling, running to the
police, showing her marriage certificate, insisting, pleading; but still she
kept on sitting, her hair slightly ruffled, her hands in white gloves.
Yes, Pilgram had
gone far, very far. Most probably he visited Granada and Murcia and Albarracin,
and then traveled farther still, to Surinam or Taprobane; and one can hardly
doubt that he saw all the glorious bugs he had longed to see -- velvety black
butterflies soaring over the jungle, and a tiny moth in Tasmania, and that
Chinese 'Skipper' said to smell of crushed roses when alive, and the
short-clubbed beauty that a Mr. Baron had just discovered in Mexico. So, in a
certain sense, it is quite irrelevant that some time later, upon wandering into
the shop, Eleanor saw the checkered suitcase, and then her husband, sprawling
on the floor with his back to the counter, among scattered coins, his livid
face knocked out of shape by death.
Copyright
© 1941 by Vladimir Nabokov. All rights reserved. The Atlantic Monthly; November
1941; The Aurelian - 1941.11.
http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/41nov/aurelian.htm