NABOKOV Vladimir - Pale Fire

In the Foreword to this work I have had occasion to say something about the
amenities of my habitation. The charming, charmingly vague lady (see note to line
691), who secured it for me, sight unseen, meant well, no doubt, especially since it
was widely admired in the neighborhood for its "old-world spaciousness and
graciousness." Actually, it was an old, dismal, white-and-black, half-timbered house,
of the type termed wodnaggen in my country, with carved gables, drafty bow
windows and a so-called "semi-noble" porch, surmounted by a hideous veranda.
Judge Goldsworth had a wife, and four daughters. Family photographs met me in the
hallway and pursued me from room to room, and although I am sure that Alphina (9),
Betty (10), Candida (12), and Dee (14) will soon change from horribly cute little
schoolgirls to smart young ladies and superior mothers, I must confess that their pert
pictures irritated me to such an extent that finally I gathered them one by one and
dumped them all in a closet under the gallows row of their cellophane-shrouded
winter clothes. In the study I found a large picture of their parents, with sexes
reversed, Mrs. G. resembling Malenkov, and Mr. G. a Medusa-locked hag, and this I
replaced by the reproduction of a beloved early Picasso: earth boy leading raincloud
horse. I did not bother, though, to do much about the family books which were also all
over the house - four sets of different Children's Encyclopedias, and a stolid grown-up
one that ascended all the way from shelf to shelf along a flight of stairs to burst an
appendix in the attic. Judging by the novels in Mrs. Goldsworth's boudoir, her
intellectual interests were fully developed, going as they did from Amber to Zen. The
head of this alphabetic family had a library too, but this consisted mainly of legal
works and a lot of conspicuously lettered ledgers. All the layman could glean for
instruction and entertainment was a morocco-bound album in which the judge had
lovingly pasted the life histories and pictures of people he had sent to prison or
condemned to death: unforgettable faces of imbecile hoodlums, last smokes and last
grins, a strangler's quite ordinary-looking hands, a self-made widow, the close-set
merciless eyes of a homicidal maniac (somewhat resembling, I admit, the late Jacques
d'Argus), a bright little parricide aged seven ("Now, sonny, we want you to tell us -"),
and a sad pudgy old pederast who had blown up his blackmailer. What rather
surprised me was that he, my learned landlord, and not his "missus," directed the
household. Not only had he left me a detailed inventory of all such articles as cluster
around a new tenant like a mob of menacing natives, but he had taken stupendous
pains to write out on slips of paper recommendations, explanations, injunctions and
supplementary lists. Whatever I touched on the first day of my stay yielded a
specimen of Goldsworthiana. I unlocked the medicine chest in the second bathroom,
and out fluttered a message advising me that the slit for discarded safety blades was
too full to use. I opened the icebox, and it warned me with a bark that "no national
specialties with odors hard to get rid of" should be placed therein. I pulled out the
middle drawer of the desk in the study - and discovered a catalogue raisonné of its
meager contents which included an assortment of ashtrays, a damask paperknife
(described as "one ancient dagger brought by Mrs. Goldsworth's father from the
Orient"), and an old but unused pocket diary optimistically maturing there until its
calendric correspondencies came around again. Among various detailed notices
affixed to a special board in the pantry, such as plumbing instructions, dissertations on
electricity, discourses on cactuses and so forth, I found the diet of the black cat that
came with the house:
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