NABOKOV Vladimir - Pale Fire

This barn, or rather shed, where "certain phenomena" occurred in October 1956 (a
few months prior to Hazel Shade's death) had belonged to one Paul Hentzner, an
eccentric farmer of German extraction, with old-fashioned hobbies such as taxidermy
and herborizing. Through an odd trick of atavism, he was (according to Shade who
liked to talk about him - the only time, incidentally, when my sweet old friend became
a tiny bit of a bore!) a throwback to the "curious Germans" who three centuries ago
had been the fathers of the first great naturalists. Although by academic standards an
uneducated man, with no real knowledge of far things in space or time, he had about
him a colorful and earthy something that pleased John Shade much better than the
suburban refinements of the English Department. He who displayed such fastidious
care in his choice of fellow ramblers liked to trudge with the gaunt solemn German,
every other evening, up the wood path to Dulwich, and all around his acquaintance's
fields. Delighting as he did in the right word, he esteemed Hentzner for knowing "the
names of things" - though some of those names were no doubt local monstrosities, or
Germanisms, or pure inventions on the old rascal's part.
Now he was walking with another companion. Limpidly do I remember one perfect
evening when my friend sparkled with quips, and marrowskies, and anecdotes, which
I gallantly countered with tales of Zembla and hairbreadth escapes! As we were
skirting Dulwich Forest, he interrupted me to indicate a natural grotto in the mossy
rocks by the side of the path under the flowering dogwoods. This was the spot where
the good farmer invariably stopped, and once, when they happened to be accompanied
by his little boy, the latter, as he trotted beside them, pointed and remarked
informatively: "Here Papa pisses." Another, less pointless, story awaited me at the top
of the hill, where a square plot invaded with willow herb, milkweed and ironweed,
and teeming with butterflies, contrasted sharply with the goldenrod all around it. After
Hentzner's wife had left him (around 1950) taking with her their child, he sold his
farmhouse (now replaced by a drive-in cinema) and went to live in town; but on
summer nights he used to take a sleeping bag to the barn that stood at the far end of
the land he still owned, and there one night he passed away.
That barn had stood on the weedy spot Shade was poking at with Aunt Maud's
favorite cane. One Saturday evening a young student employee from the campus hotel
and a local hoyden went into it for some purpose or other and were chatting or dozing
there when they were frightened out of their wits by rattling sounds and flying lights
causing them to flee in disorder. Nobody really cared what had routed them - whether
it was an outraged ghost or a rejected swain. But the Wordsmith Gazette ("The oldest
student newspaper in the USA") picked up the incident and started to worry the
stuffing out of it like a mischievous pup. Several self-styled psychic researchers
visited the place and the whole business was so blatantly turning into a rag, with the
participation of the most notorious college pranksters, that Shade complained to the
authorities with the result that the useless barn was demolished as constituting a fire
hazard.
From Jane P. I obtained however a good deal of quite different, and much more
pathetic information - which explained to me why my friend had thought fit to regale
me with commonplace student mischief, but also made me regret that I prevented him
from getting to the point he was confusedly and self-consciously making (for as I
have said in an earlier note, he never cared to refer to his dead child) by filling in a
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