NABOKOV Vladimir - Pale Fire

King's Alfin's absent-mindedness was strangely combined with a passion for
mechanical things, especially for flying apparatuses. In 1912, he managed to rise in an
umbrella-like Fabre "hydroplane" and almost got drowned in the sea between Nitra
and Indra. He smashed two Farmans, three Zemblan machines, and a beloved Santos
Dumont Demoiselle. A very special monoplane, Blenda IV, was built for him in 1916
by his constant "aerial adjutant." Colonel Peter Gusev (later a pioneer parachutist and,
at seventy, one of the greatest jumpers of all time), and this was his bird of doom. On
the serene, and not too cold, December morning that the angels chose to net his mild
pure soul, King Alfin was in the act of trying solo a tricky vertical loop that Prince
Andrey Kachurin, the famous Russian stunter and War One hero, had shown him in
Gatchina. Something went wrong, and the little Blenda was seen to go into an
uncontrolled dive. Behind and above him, in a Caudron biplane, Colonel Gusev (by
then Duke of Rahl) and the Queen snapped several pictures of what seemed at first a
noble and graceful evolution but then turned into something else. At the last moment,
King Alfin managed to straighten out his machine and was again master of gravity
when, immediately afterwards, he flew smack into the scaffolding of a huge hotel
which was being constructed in the middle of a coastal heath as if for the special
purpose of standing in a king's way. This uncompleted and badly gutted building was
ordered razed by Queen Blenda who had it replaced by a tasteless monument of
granite surmounted by an improbable type of aircraft made of bronze. The glossy
prints of the enlarged photographs depicting the entire caiastrophe were discovered
one day by eight-year-old Charles Xavier in the drawer of a secretary bookcase. In
some of these ghastly pictures one could make out the shoulders and leathern casque
of the strangely unconcerned aviator, and in the penultimate one of the series, just
before the white-blurred shattering crash, one distinctly saw him raise one arm in
triumph, and reassurance. The boy had hideous dreams after that but his mother never
found out that he had seen those infernal records.
Her he remembered - more or less: a horsewoman, tall, broad, stout, ruddy-faced. She
had been assured by a royal cousin that her son would be safe and happy under the
tutelage of admirable Mr. Campbell who had taught several dutiful little princesses to
spread butterflies and enjoy Lord Ronald's Coronach. He had immolated his life, so to
speak, at the portable altars of a vast number of hobbies, from the study of book mites
to bear hunting, and could reel off Macbeth from beginning to end during hikes; but
he did not give a damn for his charges' morals, preferred ladies to laddies, and did not
meddle in the complexities of Zemblan ingledom. He left, for some exotic court, after
a ten-year stay, in 1932 when our Prince, aged seventeen, had begun dividing his time
between the University and his regiment. It was the nicest period in his life. He never
could decide what he enjoyed more: the study of poetry - especially English poetry -
or attending parades, or dancing in masquerades with boy-girls and girl-boys. His
mother died suddenly on July 21, 1936, from an obscure blood ailment that had also
afflicted her mother and grandmother. She had been much better on the day before -
and Charles Xavier had gone to an all-night ball in the so-called Ducal Dome in
Grindelwood: for the nonce, a formal heterosexual affair, rather refreshing after some
previous sport. At about four in the morning, with the sun enflaming the tree crests
and Mt. Falk, a pink cone, the King stopped his powerful car at one of the gates of the
palace. The air was so delicate, the light so lyrical, that he and the three friends he had
with him decided to walk through the linden bosquet the rest of the distance to the
Pavonian Pavilion where guests were lodged. He and Otar, a platonic pal, wore tails
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