NABOKOV Vladimir - Pale Fire

once hung in the nursery whose sleepy denizens had always taken it to depict foamy
waves in the foreground instead of the blurry shapes of melancholy sheep that it now
revealed.
The King sighed and began to undress. His camp bed and a bedtable had been placed,
facing the window, in the northeast corner. East was the turquoise door; north, the
door of the gallery; west, the door of the closet; south, the window. His black blazer
and white trousers were taken away by his former valet's valet. The King sat down on
the edge of the bed in his pajamas. The man returned with a pair of morocco bed
slippers, pulled them on his master's listless feet, and was off with the discarded
pumps. The King's wandering gaze stopped at the casement which was half open. One
could see part of the dimly lit court where under an enclosed poplar two soldiers on a
stone bench were playing lansquenet. The summer night was starless and stirless, with
distant spasms of silent lightning. Around the lantern that stood on the bench a batlike
moth blindly flapped - until the punter knocked it down with his cap. The King
yawned, and the illumined card players shivered and dissolved in the prism of his
tears. His bored glance traveled from wall to wall. The gallery door stood slightly ajar,
and one could hear the steps of the guard coming and going. Above the closet, Iris
Acht squared her shoulders and looked away. A cricket cricked. The bedside light was
just strong enough to put a bright gleam on the gilt key in the lock of the closet door.
And all at once that spark on that key caused a wonderful conflagration to spread in
the prisoner's mind.
We shall now go back from mid-August 1958 to a certain afternoon in May three
decades earlier when he was a dark strong lad of thirteen with a silver ring on the
forefinger of his sun-tanned hand. Queen Blenda, his mother, had recently left for
Vienna and Rome. He had several dear playmates but none could compete with Oleg,
Duke of Rahl. In those days growing boys of high-born families wore on festive
occasions-of which we had so many during our long northern spring-sleeveless
jerseys, white anklesocks with black buckle shoes, and very tight, very short shorts
called hotinguens. I wish I could provide the reader with cut-out figures and parts of
attire as given in paper-doll charts for children armed with scissors. It would brighten
a little these dark evenings that are destroying my brain. Both lads were handsome,
long-legged specimens of Varangian boyhood. At twelve, Oleg was the best center
forward at the Ducal School. When stripped and shiny in the mist of the bath house,
his bold virilia contrasted harshly with his girlish grace. He was a regular faunlet. On
that particular afternoon a copious shower lacquered the spring foliage of the palace
garden, and oh, how the Persian lilacs in riotous bloom tumbled and tossed behind the
green-streaming, amethyst-blotched windowpanes! One would have to play indoors.
Oleg was late. Would he come at all?
It occurred to the young Prince to disinter a set of precious toys (the gift of a foreign
potentate who had.recently been assassinated) which had amused Oleg and him
during a previous Easter, and then had been laid aside as happens with those special,
artistic playthings which allow iheir bubble of pleasure to yield all its tang at once
before retreating into museum oblivion. What he particularly desired to rediscover
now was an elaborate toy circus contained in a box as big as a croquet case. He craved
for it; his eyes, his brain, and that in his brain which corresponded to the ball of his
thumb, vividly remembered the brown boy acrobats with spangled nates, an elegant
http://www.en8848.com.cn/『原版英语』