NABOKOV Vladimir - Pale Fire

many of the statements made in this work will be brushed aside by the guilty parties
when it is out. Mrs. Shade will not remember having been shown by her husband
"who showed her everything" one or two of the precious variants. The three students
lying on the grass will turn out to be totally amnesic. The desk girl at the Library will
not recall (will have been told not to recall) anybody asking for Dr. Kinbote on the
day of the murder. And I am sure that Mr. Emerald will interrupt briefly his
investigation of some mammate student's resilient charms to deny with the vigor of
roused virility that he ever gave anybody a lift to my house that evening. In other
words, everything will be done to cut off my person completely from my dear friend's
fate.
Nevertheless, I have had my little revenge: public misapprehension indirectly helped
me to obtain the right of publishing Pale Fire. My good gardener, when
enthusiastically relating to everybody what he had seen, certainly erred in several
respects - not so much perhaps in his exaggerated account of my "heroism" as in the
assumption that Shade had been deliberately aimed at by the so-called Jack Grey; but
Shade's widow found herself so deeply affected by the idea of my having "thrown
myself" between the gunman and his target that during a scene I shall never forget,
she cried out, stroking my hands: "There are things for which no recompense in this
world or another is great enough." That "other world" comes in handy when
misfortune befalls the infidel but I let it pass of course, and, indeed, resolved not to
refute anything, saying instead: "Oh, but there is a recompense, my dear Sybil. It may
seem to you a very modest request but - give me the permission, Sybil, to edit and
publish John's last poem." The permission was given at once, with new cries and new
hugs, and already next day her signature was under the agreement I had a quick little
lawyer draw up. That moment of grateful grief you soon forgot, dear girl. But I assure
you that I do not mean any harm, and that John Shade perhaps, will not be too much
annoyed by my notes, despite the intrigues and the dirt.
Because of these machinations I was confronted with nightmare problems in my
endeavors to make people calmly see - without having them immediately scream and
hustle me - the truth of the tragedy - a tragedy in which I had been not a "chance
witness" but the protagonist, and the main, if only potential, victim. The hullabaloo
ended by affecting the course of my new life, and necessitated my removal to this
modest mountain cabin; but I did manage to obtain, soon after his detention, an
interview, perhaps even two interviews, with the prisoner. He was now much, more
lucid than when he cowered bleeding on my porch step, and he told me all I wanted to
know. By making him believe I could help him at his trial I forced him to confess his
heinous crime - his deceiving the police and the nation by posing as Jack Grey,
escapee from an asylum, who mistook Shade for the man who sent him there. A few
days later, alas, he thwarted justice by slitting his throat with a safety razor blade
salvaged from an unwatched garbage container. He died, not so much because having
played his part in the story he saw no point in existing any longer, but because he
could not live down this last crowning botch - killing the wrong person when the right
one stood before him. In other words, his life ended not in a feeble splutter of the
clockwork but in a gesture of humanoid despair. Enough of this. Exit Jack Grey.
I cannot recall without a shudder the lugubrious week that I spent in New Wye before
leaving it, I hope, forever. I lived in constant fear that robbers would deprive me of
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