For more than a week now, Pnin had had the run of the house: Joan Clements had left by plane for a Western state to visit her married daughter, and a couple of days later, at the very beginning of his spring course in philosophy, Professor Clements, summoned by a telegram, had flown West too.
Our friend had a leisurely breakfast, pleasantly based on the milk that had not been discontinued, and at half-past nine prepared for his usual walk to the campus.
It warmed my heart, the Russian-intelligentski way he had of getting into his overcoat: his inclined head would demonstrate its ideal baldness, and his large, Duchess of Wonderland chin would firmly press against the crossed ends of his green muffler to hold it in place on his chest while, with a jerk of his broad shoulders, he contrived to get into both armholes at once; another heave and the coat was on.
He picked up his portfel’ (briefcase), checked its contents, and walked out.
He was still at a newspaper’s throw from his porch when he remembered a book the college library had urgently requested him to return, for the use of another reader. For a moment he struggled with himself; he still needed the volume; but kindly Pnin sympathized too much with the passionate clamor of another (unknown) scholar not to go back for the stout and heavy tome: It was Volume 18—mainly devoted to Tolstoyana—of Sovetskiy Zolotoy Fond Literaturï (Soviet Gold Fund of Literature), Moskva-Leningrad, 1940.
3
The organs concerned in the production of English speech sounds are the larynx, the velum, the lips, the tongue (that punchinello in the troupe), and, last but not least, the lower jaw; mainly upon its overenergetic and somewhat ruminant motion did Pnin rely when translating in class passages in the Russian grammar or some poem by Pushkin. If his Russian was music, his English was murder. He had enormous difficulty (“dzeefeecooltsee” in Pninian English) with depalatization, never managing to remove the extra Russian moisture from t’s and d’s before the vowels he so quaintly softened. His explosive “hat” (“I never go in a hat even in winter”) differed from the common American pronunciation of “hot” (typical of Waindell townspeople, for example) only by its briefer duration, and thus sounded very much like the German verb hat (has). Long o’s with him inevitably became short ones: his “no” sounded positively Italian, and this was accentuated by his trick of triplicating the simple negative (“May I give you a lift, Mr. Pnin?” “No-no-no, I have only two paces from here”). He did not possess (nor was he aware of this lack) any long oo: all he could muster when called upon to utter “noon” was the lax vowel of the German “nun” (“I have no classes in after-nun on Tuesday. Today is Tuesday.”)
Tuesday—true; but what day of the month, we wonder. Pnin’s birthday for instance fell on February 3, by the Julian calendar into which he had been born in St. Petersburg in 1898. He never celebrated it nowadays, partly because, after his departure from Russia, it sidled by in a Gregorian disguise (thirteen—no, twelve days late), and partly because during the academic year he existed mainly on a motuweth frisas basis.
On the chalk-clouded blackboard, which he wittily called the grayboard, he now wrote a date. In the crook of his arm he still felt the bulk of Zol. Fond Lit. The date he wrote had nothing to do with the day this was in Waindell:
December 26, 1829
He carefully drilled in a big white full stop, and added underneath:
3:03 P.M. St. Petersburg
Dutifully this was taken down by Frank Backman, Rose Balsamo, Frank Carroll, Irving D. Herz, beautiful, intelligent Marilyn Hohn, John Mead, Jr., Peter Volkov, and Allan Bradbury Walsh.
Pnin, rippling with mute mirth, sat down again at his desk: he had a tale to tell. That line in the absurd Russian grammar, “Brozhu li ya vdol’ ulits shumnïh (Whether I wander along noisy streets),” was really the opening of a famous poem. Although Pnin was supposed in this Elementary Russian class to stick to language exercises (“Mama, telefon! Brozhu li ya vdol’ ulits shumnïh. Ot Vladivostoka do Vashingtona 5000 mil’.”), he took every opportunity to guide his students on literary and historical tours.
In a set of eight tetrametric quatrains Pushkin described the morbid habit he always had—wherever he was, whatever he was doing—of dwelling on thoughts of death and of closely inspecting every passing day as he strove to find in its cryptogram a certain “future anniversary”: the day and month that would appear, somewhere, sometime upon his tombstone.
“ ‘And where will fate send me’, imperfective future, ‘death,’ ” declaimed inspired Pnin, throwing his head back and translating with brave literality, “ ‘in fight, in travel, or in waves? Or will the neighboring dale’—dolina, same word, ‘valley’ we would now say—‘accept my refrigerated ashes’, poussière, ‘cold dust’ perhaps more correct. ‘And though it is indifferent to the insensible body …’ ”
Pnin went on to the end and then, dramatically pointing with the piece of chalk he still held, remarked how carefully Pushkin had noted the day and even the minute of writing down that poem.
“But,” exclaimed Pnin in triumph, “he died on a quite, quite different day! He died—” The chair back against which Pnin was vigorously leaning emitted an ominous crack, and the class resolved a pardonable tension in loud young laughter.
(Sometime, somewhere—Petersburg? Prague?—one of the two musical clowns pulled out the piano stool from under the other, who remained, however, playing on, in a seated, though seatless, position, with his rhapsody unimpaired. Where? Circus Busch, Berlin!)
4
Pnin did not bother to leave the classroom between his dismissed Elementary and the Advanced that was trickling in. The office where Zol. Fond Lit. now lay, partly enveloped in Pnin’s green muffler, on the filing case, was on another floor, at the end of a resonant passage and next to the faculty lavatory. Till 1950 (this was 1953—how time flies!) he had shared an office in the German Department with Miller, one of the younger instructors, and then was given for his exclusive use Office R, which formerly had been a lumber room but had now been completely renovated. During the spring he had lovingly Pninized it. It had come with two ignoble chairs, a cork bulletin board, a can of floor wax forgotten by the janitor, and a humble pedestal desk of indeterminable wood. He wangled from the Administration a small steel file with an entrancing locking device. Young Miller, under Pnin’s direction, embraced and brought over Pnin’s part of a sectional bookcase. From old Mrs. McCrystal, in whose white frame house he had spent a mediocre winter (1949–50), Pnin purchased for three dollars a faded, once Turkish rug. With the help of the janitor he screwed onto the side of the desk a pencil sharpener—that highly satisfying, highly philosophical implement that goes ticonderoga-ticon-deroga, feeding on the yellow finish and sweet wood, and ends up in a kind of soundlessly spinning ethereal void as we all must. He had other, even more ambitious plans, such as an armchair and a tall lamp. When, after a summer spent teaching in Washington, Pnin returned to his office, an obese dog lay asleep on his rug, and his furniture had been moved to a darker part of the office, so as to make room for a magnificent stainless-steel desk and a swivel chair to match, in which sat writing and smiling to himself the newly imported Austrian scholar, Dr. Bodo von Falternfels; and thenceforth, so far as Pnin was concerned, Office R had gone to seed.
5
At noon, as usual, Pnin washed his hands and head.
He picked up in Office R his overcoat, muffler, book, and brief case. Dr. Falternfels was writing and smiling; his sandwich was half unwrapped; his dog was dead. Pnin walked down the gloomy stairs and through the Museum of Sculpture. Humanities Hall, where, however, Ornithology and Anthropology also lurked, was connected with another brick building, Frieze Hall, which housed the dining rooms and the Faculty Club, by means of a rather rococo openwork gallery: it went up a slope, then turned sharply and wandered down toward a routine smell of potato chips and the sadness of balanced meals. In summer its trellis was alive with quivering flowers; but now through its nakedness an icy wind blew, and someone had placed a found red mitten upon the spout of the dead fountain that stood where one branch of the gallery led to the President’s House.
President Poore, a tall, slow, elderly man wearing dark glasses, had started to lose his sight a couple of years before and was now almost totally blind. With solar regularity, however, he would be led every day by his niece and secretary to Frieze Hall; he came, a figure of antique dignity, moving in his private darkness to an invisible luncheon, and although everybody had long grown accustomed to his tragic entrance, there was in-variably the shadow of a hush while he was being steered to his carved chair and while he groped for the edge of the table; and it was strange to see, directly behind him on the wall, his stylized likeness in a mauve double-breasted suit and mahogany shoes, gazing with radiant magenta eyes at the scrolls handed him by Richard Wagner, Dostoevski, and Confucius, a group that Oleg Komarov, of the Fine Arts Department, had painted a decade ago into Lang’s celebrated mural of 1938, which carried all around the dining room a pageant of historical figures and Waindell faculty members.
Pnin, who wanted to ask his compatriot something, sat down beside him. This Komarov, a Cossack’s son, was a very short man with a crew cut and a death’s-head’s nostrils. He and Serafima, his large, cheerful, Moscow-born wife, who wore a Tibetan charm on a long silver chain that hung down to her ample, soft belly, would throw Russki parties every now and then, with Russki hors d’oeuvres and guitar music and more or less phony folk songs—occasions at which shy graduate students would be taught vodka-drinking rites and other stale Russianisms; and after such feasts, upon meeting gruff Pnin, Serafima and Oleg (she raising her eyes to heaven, he covering his with one hand) would murmur in awed self-gratitude: “Gospodi, skol’ko mï im dayom! (My, what a lot we give them!)”—“them” being the benighted American people. Only another Russian could understand the reactionary and Sovietophile blend presented by the pseudo-colorful Komarovs, for whom an ideal Russia consisted of the Red Army, an anointed monarch, collective farms, anthroposophy, the Russian Church and the Hydro-Electric Dam. Pnin and Oleg Komarov were usually in a subdued state of war, but meetings were inevitable, and such of their American colleagues as deemed the Komarovs “grand people” and mimicked droll Pnin were sure the painter and Pnin were excellent friends.
It would be hard to say, without applying some very special tests, which of them, Pnin or Komarov, spoke the worse English; probably Pnin; but for reasons of age, general education, and a slightly longer stage of American citizenship, he found it possible to correct Komarov’s frequent English interpolations, and Komarov resented this even more than he did Pnin’s antikvarnïy liberalizm.
“Look here, Komarov (Poslushayte, Komarov”—a rather discourteous manner of address)—said Pnin. “I cannot understand who else here might want this book; certainly none of my students; and if it is you, I cannot understand why you should want it anyway.”
“I don t,” answered Komarov, glancing at the volume. “Not interested,” he added in English.
Pnin moved his lips and lower jaw mutely once or twice, wanted to say something, did not, and went on with his salad.
6
This being Tuesday, he could walk over to his favorite haunt immediately after lunch and stay there till dinner time. No gallery connected Waindell College Library with any other buildings, but it was intimately and securely connected with Pnin’s heart. He walked past the great bronze figure of the first president of the college, Alpheus Frieze, in sports cap and knickerbockers, holding by its horns the bronze bicycle he was eternally about to mount, judging by the position of his left foot, forever glued to the left pedal. There was snow on the saddle and snow in the absurd basket that recent pranksters had attached to the handle bars. “Huliganï,” fumed Pnin, shaking his head—and slipped slightly on a flag of the path that meandered down a turfy slope among the leafless elms. Besides the big book under his right arm, he carried in his left hand his brief case, an old, Central European-looking, black portfel’, and this he swung rhythmically by its leathern grip as he marched to his books, to his scriptorium in the stacks, to his paradise of Russian lore.
An elliptic flock of pigeons, in circular volitation, soaring gray, flapping white, and then gray again, wheeled across the limpid, pale sky, above the College Library. A train whistled afar as mournfully as in the steppes. A skimpy squirrel dashed over a patch of sunlit snow, where a tree trunk’s shadow, olive-green on the turf, became grayish blue for a stretch, while the tree itself, with a brisk, scrabbly sound, ascended, naked, into the sky, where the pigeons swept by for a third and last time. The squirrel, invisible now in a crotch, chattered, scolding the delinquents who would pot him out of his tree. Pnin, on the dirty black ice of the flagged path, slipped again, threw up one arm in an abrupt convulsion, regained his balance, and, with a solitary smile, stooped to pick up Zol. Fond Lit., which lay wide open to a snapshot of a Russian pasture with Lyov Tolstoy trudging across it toward the camera and some long-maned horses behind him, their innocent heads turned toward the photographer too.
V boyu li, v stranstvii, v volnah? In fight, in travel, or in waves? Or on the Waindell campus? Gently champing his dentures, which retained a sticky layer of cottage cheese, Pnin went up the slippery library steps.
Like so many aging college people, Pnin had long ceased to notice the existence of students on the campus, in the corridors, in the library—anyhere, in brief, save in functional classroom concentrations. In the beginning, he had been much upset by the sight of some of them, their poor young heads on their forearms, fast asleep among the ruins of knowledge; but now, except for a girl’s comely nape here and there, he saw nobody in the Reading Room.
Mrs. Thayer was at the circulation desk. Her mother and Mrs. Clements’ mother had been first cousins.
“How are you today, Professor Pnin?”
“I am very well, Mrs. Fire.”
“Laurence and Joan aren’t back yet, are they?”
“No. I have brought this book back because I received this card—”
“I wonder if poor Isabel will really get divorced.”
“I have not heard. Mrs. Fire, permit me to ask—”
“I suppose we’ll have to find you another room, if they bring her back with them.”
“Mrs. Fire, permit me to ask something or other. This card which I received yesterday—could you maybe tell me who is the other reader?”
“Let me check.”
