NABOKOV Vladimir - Pale Fire

He strolled back and paid the equivalent of three thousand Zemblan crowns for his
short but nice stay at Beverland Hotel. With the illusion of practical foresight he
transferred his fiber suitcase and - after a moment of hesitation - his raincoat to the
anonymous security, of a station locker - where, I suppose, they are still lying as snug
as my gemmed scepter, ruby necklace, and diamond-studded crown in - no matter,
where. On his fateful journey he took only the battered black briefcase we know: it
contained a clean nylon shirt, a dirty pajama, a safety razor, a third petit-beurre, an
empty cardbox box, a thick illustrated paper he had not quite finished with in the park,
a glass eye he once made for his old mistress, and a dozen syndicalist brochures, each
in several copies, printed with his own hands many years ago.
He had to check in at the airport at 2 P.M. The night before, when making his
reservation, he had not been able to get a seat on the earlier flight to New Wye
because of some convention there. He had fiddled with railway schedules, but these
had evidently been arranged by a practical joker since the only available direct train
(dubbed the Square Wheel by our jolted and jerked students) left at 5:13 A.M.,
dawdled at flag stations, and took eleven hours to cover the four hundred miles to
Exton; you could try to cheat it by going via Washington but then you had to wait
there at least three hours, for a sleepy local. Buses were out so far as Gradus was
concerned since he always got roadsick in them unless he drugged himself with
Fahrmamine pills, and that might affect his aim. Come to think of it, he was not
feeling too steady anyway.
Gradus is now much nearer to us in space and time than he was in the preceding
cantos. He has short upright black hair. We can fill in the bleak oblong of his face
with most of its elements such as thick eyebrows and a wart on the chin. He has a
ruddy but unhealthy complexion. We see, fairly in focus, the structure of his
somewhat mesmeric organs of vision. We see his melancholy nose with its crooked
ridge and grooved tip. We see the mineral blue of his jaw and the gravelly pointillé of
his suppressed mustache.
We know already some of his gestures, we know the chimpanzee slouch of his broad
body and short hindlegs. We have heard enough about his creased suit. We can at last
describe his tie, an Easter gift from a dressy butcher, his brother-in-law in Onhava:
imitation silk, color chocolate brown, barred with red, the end tucked into the shirt
between the second and third buttons, a Zemblan fashion of the nineteen thirties - and
a father-waistcoat substitute according to the learned. Repulsive black hairs coat the
back of his honest rude hands, the scrupulously clean hands of an ultra-unionized
artisan, with a perceptible deformation of both thumbs; typical of bobêchemakers. We
see, rather suddenly, his humid flesh. We can even make out (as, head-on but quite
safely, phantom-like, we pass through him, through the shimmering, propeller of his
flying machine, through the delegates waving and grinning at us) his magenta and
mulberry insides, and the strange, not so good sea swell undulating in his entrails.
We can now go further and describe, to a doctor or to anybody else willing to listen to
us, the condition of this primate's soul. He could read, write and reckon, he was
endowed with a modicum of self-awareness (with which he did not know what to do),
some duration consciousness, and a good memory for faces, names, dates and the like.
Spiritually he did not exist. Morally he was a dummy pursuing another dummy. The
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