Authors: Vladimir Nabokov
He shook his head, his lower lip drooped; I had long observed that he breathed preferably through his mouth—his nose being stuffed up, or something.
“If you don’t, let me explain. Imagine that the manager of a film company—you have been to the cinema, haven’t you?”
“Well, yes.…”
“Good. So imagine that such a manager or director … Excuse me, friend, you seem to be wanting to say something?”
“Well, I haven’t been
often
. When I want to spend money I find something better than pictures.”
“Agreed, but there are people who think differently—if there weren’t, then there wouldn’t be such a profession as mine, would there? So, as I was saying, a director has offered me, for a small remuneration—something like ten thousand dollars—just a trifle, certainly, just air, but prices have dropped nowadays—to act in a film where the hero is a musician. This suits me admirably, as in real life I love music too, and can play several instruments. On summer evenings I sometimes take my violin to the nearest grove—but to get back to the point—an understudy, Felix, is a person who can, in case of emergency, replace a given actor.
“The actor plays his part, with the camera shooting him; an insignificant little scene remains to be done; the hero, say, is to drive past in his car; but he can’t, he is in bed with a bad cold. There is no time to be lost, and so his double takes over and coolly sails past in the car (splendid that you can manage cars) and when at last the film is shown, not a single spectator is aware of the substitution. The better the likeness, the dearer its price. There even exist special companies whose business consists in supplying movie stars with star ghosts. And the life of the ghost is fine, seeing he gets a fixed salary but has to work only occasionally, and not much of work either—just putting on exactly the same clothes as the hero, and whizzing past in a smart car, in the hero’s stead, that’s all! Naturally an understudy ought not to blab about his job; there would be the hell of a row if some reporter
got wind of the stratagem and the public learned that a bit of its pet actor’s part had been faked. You understand now why I was so delightfully excited at finding in you an exact replica of myself. That has always been one of my fondest dreams. Just think how much it means to me—especially at present when the filming has started, and I, a man of delicate health, am cast for the leading part. If anything happens to me they at once call you, you arrive—”
“Nobody calls me and I arrive nowhere,” interrupted Felix.
“Why do you speak like that, my dear chap?” said I, with a note of gentle rebuke.
“Because,” said Felix, “it is unkind of you to pull a poor man’s leg. First I believed you. I thought you’d offer me some honest work. It’s been a long dreary tramp coming here. Look at the state of my soles … and now, instead of work—no, it doesn’t suit me.”
“I’m afraid there is a slight misunderstanding,” I said softly. “What I’m offering you is neither debasing, nor unduly complicated. We’ll sign an agreement. You’ll get a hundred marks per month from me. Let me repeat: the job is ridiculously easy; child’s play—you know the way children dress up to represent soldiers, ghosts, aviators. Just think: you’ll be getting a monthly salary of a hundred marks solely for putting on—very rarely, once a year perhaps—exactly the same clothes I am wearing at present. Now, do you know what we ought to do? Let us fix some date to meet and rehearse some little scene, just to see what it looks like …”
“I don’t know a thing about such matters, and don’t care to know,” objected Felix rather rudely. “But I’ll tell you something; my aunt had a son who played the buffoon at
fairs, he boozed and was too fond of girls, and my aunt broke her heart over him until the day when, thank God, he dashed his brains out by missing a flying swing and his wife’s hands. All those picture houses and circuses—”
Did it actually go on like this? Am I faithfully following the lead of my memory, or has perchance my pen mixed the steps and wantonly danced away? There is something a shade too literary about that talk of ours, smacking of thumb-screw conversations in those stage taverns where Dostoevski is at home; a little more of it and we should hear that sibilant whisper of false humility, that catch in the breath, those repetitions of incantatory adverbs—and then all the rest of it would come, the mystical trimming dear to that famous writer of Russian thrillers.
It even torments me in a way; that is, it does not only torment me, but quite, quite muddles my mind and, I dare say, is fatal to me—the thought that I have somehow been too cocksure about the power of my pen—do you recognize the modulations of that phrase? You do. As for me, I seem to remember that talk of ours admirably, with all its innuendoes, and
vsyu podnogotnuyu
, “the whole subunguality,” the secret under the nail (to use the jargon of the torture chamber, where fingernails were prized off, and a favorite term—enhanced by italics—with our national expert in soul ague and the aberrations of human self-respect). Yes, I remember that talk, but am unable to render it exactly, something clogs me, something hot and abhorrent and quite unbearable, which I cannot get rid of because it is as sticky as a sheet of flypaper into which one has walked naked in a pitch-dark room. And, what is more, you cannot find the light.
No, our conversation was not such as is set down here; that is, the
words
maybe were exactly as stated (again that little
gasp), but I have not managed or not dared to render the special noises accompanying it; there occurred queer fadings or clottings of sound; and then again that muttering, that susurration, and, suddenly, a wooden voice clearly pronouncing: “Come, Felix, another drink.”
The brown floral design on the wall; an inscription explaining testily that the house was not responsible for lost property; the cardboard rounds serving as bases for beer (with a hurriedly penciled sum across one of them); and the distant bar at which a man drank, legs twisted into a black scroll, and smoke encircling him; all these were commentative notes to our discourse, as meaningless, however, as those in the margins of Lydia’s trashy books.
Had the trio sitting by the bloodred window curtain, far from us, had they turned and looked at us, those three quiet and morose carousers, they would have seen: the fortunate brother and the luckless brother: one with a small mustache and sleek hair, the other clean-shaven, but needing a haircut (that ghostly little mane down the scruff of his lean neck); facing each other, both sitting alike; elbows on the table and fists at the cheekbones. Thus we were reflected by the misty and, to all appearances, sick mirror, with a freakish slant, a streak of madness, a mirror that surely would have cracked at once had it chanced to reflect one single genuine human countenance.
Thus we sat and I kept up my persuasive drone; I am a bad speaker, and the oration which I seem to render word by word did not flow with the lissom glide it has on paper. Indeed, it is not really possible to set down my incoherent speech, that tumble and jumble of words, the forlornness of subordinated clauses, which have lost their masters and strayed away, and all the superfluous gibber that gives words
a support or a creep hole; but my mind worked so rhythmically and pursued its quarry at such a steady pace, that the impression now left me by the trend of my own words is anything but tangled or garbled. My object, however, was still out of reach. The fellow’s resistance, proper to one of limited intelligence and timorous humor, had to be broken down somehow. So seduced was I by the neat naturalness of the theme, that I overlooked the probability of its being distasteful to him and even of its frightening him off as naturally as it had appealed to my fancy.
I do not mean, by that, that I have ever had the least connection with the screen or the stage; in point of fact, the only time I performed was a score of years ago, in a little amateur affair at our squire’s country seat (which my father managed). I had to speak only a few words: “The prince bade me announce that he would be here presently. Ah! here he comes,” instead of which, full of exquisite delight and all aquiver with glee, I spoke thus: “The prince cannot come: he has cut his throat with a razor”; and, as I spoke, the gentleman in the part of the prince was already coming, with a beaming smile on his gorgeously painted face, and there was a moment of general suspense, the whole world was held up—and to this day I remember how deeply I inhaled the divine ozone of monstrous storms and disasters. But although I have never been an actor in the strict sense of the word, I have nevertheless, in real life, always carried about with me a small folding theatre and have appeared in more than one part, and my acting has always been superfine; and if you think that my prompter’s name was Gain—capital G
not
C—then you are mightily mistaken. It is all not so simple, my dear sirs.
In the case of my talk with Felix, however, my performance
proved to be merely a loss of time, for I suddenly realized that if I went on with that monologue about filming, he would get up and leave, returning the ten marks I had sent him; (no, on second thought I believe he would not have returned them—no, never!) The weighty German word for “money” (money in German being gold, in French, silver, in Russian, copper) was mouthed by him with extraordinary reverence, which, curiously, could turn into brutal lust. But he would have certainly gone away, with an I-shan’t-be-insulted air!
To be perfectly frank, I do not quite see why everything linked with the theatre or cinema seemed so utterly atrocious to him; strange, foreign—yes, but … atrocious? Let us try to explain it by the German plebeian’s backwardness. The German peasant is old-fashioned and prudish; just try, one day, to walk through a village in nothing but swimming trunks. I
have
tried, so I know what happens; the men stand stock-still, the women titter, hiding their faces, quite like parlor maids in old-world comedies.
I fell silent. Felix was silent too, tracing lines on the table with his finger. He had probably expected me to offer him a gardener’s job or that of a chauffeur, and was now disappointed and sulky. I called the waiter and paid. Once again we were pacing the streets. It was a sharp bleak night. Among small clouds curled like astrakhan, a shiny flat moon kept sliding in and out.
“Listen, Felix. Our talk is not finished. We cannot leave it like that. I’ve booked a room in a hotel; come along, you’ll spend the night with me.”
He accepted this as his due. Slow as his wits were, he understood that I needed him, and that it was unwise to break off
our relations without having arrived at something definite. We again walked past the duplicate of the Bronze Rider. Not a soul did we meet on the boulevard. Not a gleam was there in the houses; had I noticed a single lighted window, I should have supposed that somebody had hanged himself there and left the lamp burning—so unwonted and unwarranted would a light have seemed. We reached the hotel in silence. A collar-less sleepwalker let us in. Upon entering the room I again had that sensation of something very familiar; but other matters engaged my mind.
“Sit down.” He did so with his fists on his knees; his mouth half opened. I removed my coat and thrusting both hands into my trouser pockets and clinking small change in them, started walking to and fro. I wore, by the bye, a lilac tie flecked with black, which blew up every time I turned on my heel. For some while it continued like that; silence, my pacing, the wind of my motion.
All of a sudden Felix, as if shot dead, let his head fall and began unlacing his shoes. I glanced at his unprotected neck, at the wistful expression of his first vertebra, and it made me feel queer to think that I was about to sleep with my double in one room, under one blanket almost, for the twin beds stood side by side, quite close. Then, too, there came, with a pang, the dreadful idea that his flesh might be tainted by the scarlet blotches of a skin disease or by some crude tattooing; I demanded of his body a minimum of resemblance to mine; as to his face, there was no trouble about
that
.
“Yes, go on, take your things off,” said I, walking and veering.
He lifted his head, a nondescript shoe in his hand.
“It is a long while since I’ve slept in a bed,” he said with a smile (don’t show your gums, fool). “In a real bed.”
“Take off everything,” I said impatiently. “You are surely dirty, dusty. I’ll give you a shirt to sleep in. But first wash.”
Grinning and grunting, perhaps a trifle shy of me, he stripped to the skin and proceeded to douche his armpits over the basin of the cupboardlike washstand. I shot glances at him, examining eagerly that stark-naked man. His back was about as muscular as mine, with a pinker coccyx and uglier buttocks. When he turned I could not help wincing at the sight of his big knobbed navel—but then mine is no beauty either. I doubt he had ever in his life washed his animal parts: they looked fairly plausible as these things go but did not invite close inspection. His toenails were much less abominable than I had expected. He was lean and white, much whiter than his face, thus making it seem that it was my face, still retaining its summer tan, that was affixed to his pale trunk. You could even discern the line round his neck where the head adhered. I derived a keen pleasure from that survey; it set my mind at ease; no special marks stigmatized him.
When, having pulled on the clean shirt I issued him from my suitcase, he went to bed, I sat down at his feet and fixed him with a frank sneer. I do not know what he thought, but that unusual cleanness had mollified him, and in a bashful gush of something, which for all its repulsive sentimentality was quite a tender gesture, he stroked my hand and said—I translate literally: “You’re a good fellow.”
Without unclenching my teeth I went into shivers of laughter; then, I suppose, the expression of my face struck him as odd, for his eyebrows climbed up and he cocked his head. No longer suppressing my mirth I poked a cigarette into his mouth. It fairly made him choke.
“You ass!” I exclaimed. “Haven’t you really guessed that
if I made you come here it was for some important, terribly important matter?” and producing a thousand-mark note from my wallet, and still shaking with merriment, I held it up before the fool’s face.