NABOKOV Vladimir - Pale Fire

ut they had lost their top hats to the highway winds. A strange something struck all
four of them as they stood under the young limes in the prim landscape of scarp and
counterscarp fortified by shadow and countershadow. Otar, a pleasant and cultured
adeling with a tremendous nose and sparse hair, had his two mistresses with him,
eighteen-year-old Fifalda (whom he later married) and seventeen-year-old Fleur
(whom we shall meet in two other notes), daughters of Countess de Fyler, the Queen's
favorite lady in waiting. One involuntarily lingers over that picture, as one does when
standing at a vantage point of time and knowing in retrospect that in a moment one's
life would undergo a complete change. So here was Otar, looking with a puzzled
expression at the distant window's of the Queen's quarters, and there were the two
girls, side by side, thin-legged, in shimmering wraps, their kitten noses pink, their
eyes green and sleepy, their earrings catching and loosing the fire of the sun. There
were a few people around, as there always were, no matter the hour, at this gate, along
which a road, connecting with the eastern highway, ran. A peasant woman with a
small cake she had baked, doubtlessly the mother of the sentinel who had not yet
come to relieve the unshaven dark young nattdett (child of night) in his dreary sentry
box, sat on a spur stone watching in feminine fascination the luciola-like tapers that
moved from window to window; two workmen, holding their bicycles, stood staring
too at those strange lights; and a drunk with a walrus mustache kept staggering around
and patting the trunks of the lindens. One picks up minor items at such slowdowns of
life. The King noticed that some reddish mud flecked the frames of the two bicycles
and that their front wheels were both turned in the same direction, parallel to one
another. Suddenly, down a steep path among the lilac bushes - a short cut from the
Qucen's quarters - the Countess came running and tripping over the hem of her quilted
robe, and at the same moment, from another side of the palace, all seven councilors,
dressed in their formal splendor and carrying like plum cakes replicas of various
regalia, came striding down the stairs of stone, in dignified haste, but she beat them by
one alin and spat out the news. The drunk started to sing a ribald ballad about "Karlie-
Garlie" and fell into the demilune ditch. It is not easy to describe lucidly in short notes
to a poem the various approaches to a fortified castle, and so, in my awareness of this
problem, I prepared for John Shade, some time in June, when narrating to him the
events briefly noticed in some of my comments (see note to line 130, for example), a
rather handsomely drawn plan of the chambers, terraces, bastions and pleasure
grounds of the Onhava Palace. Unless it has been destroyed or stolen, this careful
picture in colored inks on a large (thirty by twenty inches) piece of cardboard might
still be where I last saw it in mid-July, on the top of the big black trunk, opposite the
old mangle, in a niche of the little corridor leading to the so-called fruit room. If it is
not there, it might be looked for in his upper-floor study. I have written about this to
Mrs. Shade but she does not reply to my letters. In case it still exists, I wish to beg her,
without raising my voice, and very humbly, as humbly as the lowliest of the King's
subjects might plead for an immediate restitution of his rights (the plan is mine and is
clearly signed with a black chess-king crown after "Kinbote"), to send it, well packed,
marked not to be bent on the wrapper, and by registered mail, to my publisher for
reproduction in later editions of this work. Whatever energy I possessed has quite
ebbed away lately, and these excruciating headaches now make impossible the
mnemonic effort and eye strain that the drawing of another such plan would demand.
The black trunk stands on another brown or brownish even larger one, and there is I
think a stuffed fox or coyote next to them in their dark corner.
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