A RUSSIAN BEAUTY by Vladimir Nabokov

Sugar and spice, but then what?

Olga, of whom we are about to speak, was born in the year 1900, in a wealthy,
carefree family of nobles. A pale little girl in a white sailor suit, with a side
parting in her chestnut hair and such merry eyes that everyone kissed her
there, she was deemed a beauty since childhood. The purity of her profile, the
expression of her closed lips, the silkiness of her tresses that reached to the
small of her back—all this was enchanting indeed.

Her childhood passed festively, securely, and gaily, as was the custom in our
country since the days of old. A sunbeam falling on the cover of a Bibliothèque
Rose volume at the family estate, the classical hoarfrost of the Saint
Petersburg public gardens. . . . A supply of memories, such as these, comprised
her sole dowry when she left Russia in the Spring of 1919. Everything
happened in full accord with the style of the period. Her mother died of
typhus, her brother was executed by the firing squad. All these are ready-made
formulae, of course, the usual dreary small talk, but it all did happen, there is
no other way of saying it, and it’s no use turning up your nose.

Well, then, in 1919 we have a grown-up young lady, with a pale, broad face
that overdid things in terms of the regularity of its features, but just the same
very lovely. Tall, with soft breasts, she always wears a black jumper and a scarf
around her white neck and holds an English cigarette in her slender-fingered
hand with a prominent little bone just above the wrist.

Yet there was a time in her life, at the end of 1916 or so, when at a summer
resort near the family estate there was no schoolboy who did not plan to shoot
himself because of her, there was no university student who would not. . . . In
a word, there had been a special magic about her, which, had it lasted, would
have caused . . . would have wreaked. . . . But somehow, nothing came of it.
Things failed to develop, or else happened to no purpose. There were flowers
that she was too lazy to put in a vase, there were strolls in the twilight now
with this one, now with another, followed by the blind alley of a kiss.
She spoke French fluently, pronouncing les gens (the servants) as if rhyming
with agence and splitting août (August) in two syllables (a-ou). She naively
translated the Russian grabezhi (robberies) as les grabuges (quarrels) and used
some archaic French locutions that had somehow survived in old Russian
families, but she rolled her r’s most convincingly even though she had never
been to France. Over the dresser in her Berlin room a postcard of Serov’s
portrait of the Tsar was fastened with a pin with a fake turquoise head. She
was religious, but at times a fit of giggles would overcome her in church. She
wrote verse with that terrifying facility typical of young Russian girls of her
generation: patriotic verse, humorous verse, any kind of verse at all.

For about six years, that is until 1926, she resided in a boardinghouse on the
Augsburgerstrasse (not far from the clock), together with her father, a broad-
shouldered, beetle-browed old man with a yellowish moustache, and with
tight, narrow trousers on his spindly legs. He had a job with some optimistic
firm, was noted for his decency and kindness and was never one to turn down
a drink.

In Berlin, Olga gradually acquired a large group of friends, all of them young
Russians. A certain jaunty tone was established. “Let’s go to the cinemonkey,”
or “That was a heely deely (German Diele, dancing hall).” All sorts of popular
sayings, cant phrases, imitations of imitations were much in demand. “I
wonder who’s kissing her now?” Or, in a hoarse, choking voice: “Mes-sieurs les
officiers. . . .”

At the Zotovs’, in their overheated rooms, she languidly danced the fox-trot to
the sound of the gramophone, shifting the elongated calf of her leg not
without grace and holding away from her the cigarette she had just finished
smoking, and when her eyes located the ashtray that revolved with the music
she would shove the butt into it, without missing a step. How charmingly, how
meaningfully she could raise the wine glass to her lips, secretly drinking to the
health of a third party as she looked through her lashes at the one who had
confided in her. How she loved to sit in the corner of the sofa, discussing with
this person or that somebody else’s affairs of the heart, the oscillation of
chances, the probability of a declaration—all this indirectly, by hints—and how
understanding her eyes would smile, pure, wide-open eyes with barely
noticeable freckles on the thin, faintly bluish skin underneath and around
them. But as for herself, no one fell in love with her, and this was why she long
remembered the boor who pawed her at a charity ball and afterwards wept on
her bare shoulder. He was challenged to a duel by the little Baron R., but
refused to fight. The word “boor,” by the way, was used by Olga on any and
every occasion. “Such boors,” she would sing out in chest tones, languidly and
affectionately. “What a boor. . . .” “Aren’t they boors?”

But presently her life darkened.

Something was finished, people were already getting up to leave. How quickly!
Her father died, she moved to another street. She stopped seeing her friends,
knitted the little bonnets in fashion and gave cheap French lessons at some
ladies’ club or other. In this way her life dragged on to the age of thirty.

She was still the same beauty, with that enchanting slant of the widely spaced
eyes and with that rarest line of lips into which the geometry of the smile
seems to be already inscribed. But her hair lost its shine and was poorly cut.
Her black tailored suit was in its fourth year. Her hands, with their glistening
but untidy fingernails, were roped with veins and were shaking from
nervousness and from her wretched continuous smoking. And we’d best pass
over in silence the state of her stockings. . . .

Olga would occasionally be tormented by the luxury of certain advertisements,

written in the saliva of Tantalus, imagining herself wealthy, wearing that dress,
sketched with the aid of three or four insolent lines, on that shipdeck, under
that palm tree, at the balustrade of that white terrace.
Now, when the silken insides of her handbag were in tatters (at least there was
always the hope of finding a stray coin); now, when she was so tired; now,
when putting on her only pair of shoes she had to force herself not to think of
their soles, just as when, swallowing her pride, she entered the tobacconist’s,
she forbade herself to think of how much she already owed there; now that
there was no longer the least hope of returning to Russia, and hatred had
become so habitual that it almost ceased to be a sin; now that the sun was
getting behind the chimney, Olga would occasionally be tormented by the
luxury of certain advertisements, written in the saliva of Tantalus, imagining
herself wealthy, wearing that dress, sketched with the aid of three or four
insolent lines, on that shipdeck, under that palm tree, at the balustrade of that
white terrace. And then there was also another thing or two that she missed.

One day, almost knocking her off her feet, her onetime friend Vera rushed like
a whirlwind out of a telephone booth, in a hurry as always, loaded with
parcels, with a shaggy-eyed terrier, whose leash immediately became wound
twice around her skirt. She pounced upon Olga, imploring her to come and stay
at their summer villa, saying that it was Fate itself, that it was wonderful and
how have you been and are there many suitors. “No, my dear, I’m no longer
that age,” answered Olga, “and besides. . . .” She added a little detail and Vera
burst out laughing, letting her parcels sink almost to the ground. “No,
seriously,” said Olga, with a smile. Vera continued coaxing her, pulling at the
terrier, turning this way and that. Olga, starting all at once to speak through
her nose, borrowed some money from her.

Vera adored arranging things, be it a party with punch, a visa or a wedding.

Now she avidly took up arranging Olga’s fate. “The matchmaker within you has
been aroused,” joked her husband, an elderly Balt (shaven head, monocle).
Olga arrived on a bright August day. She was immediately dressed in one of
Vera’s frocks, her hairdo and makeup were changed. She swore languidly, but
yielded, and how festively the floorboards creaked in the merry little villa! How
the little mirrors, suspended in the green orchard to frighten off birds, flashed
and sparkled!

A Russified German named Forstmann, a well-off athletic widower, author of

books on hunting, came to spend a week. He had long been asking Vera to find
him a bride, “a real Russian beauty.” He had a massive, strong nose with a fine
pink vein on its high bridge. He was polite, silent, at times even morose, but
knew how to form, instantly and while no one noticed, an eternal friendship
with a dog or with a child. With his arrival Olga became difficult. Listless and
irritable, she did all the wrong things and she knew that they were wrong.
When the conversation turned to old Russia (Vera tried to make her show off
her past), it seemed to her that everything she said was a lie and that everyone
understood that it was a lie, and therefore she stubbornly refused to say the
things that Vera was trying to extract from her and in general would not
cooperate in any way.

On the veranda, they would slam their cards down hard. Everyone would go
off together for a stroll through the woods, but Forstmann conversed mostly
with Vera’s husband, and, recalling some pranks of their youth, the two of
them would turn red with laughter, lag behind, and collapse on the moss. On
the eve of Forstmann’s departure they were playing cards on the veranda, as
they usually did in the evening. Suddenly, Olga felt an impossible spasm in her
throat. She still managed to smile and to leave without undue haste. Vera
knocked on her door but she did not open. In the middle of the night, having
swatted a multitude of sleepy flies and smoked continuously to the point
where she was no longer able to inhale, irritated, depressed, hating herself and
everyone, Olga went into the garden. There, the crickets stridulated, the
branches swayed, an occasional apple fell with a taut thud, and the moon
performed calisthenics on the whitewashed wall of the chicken coop.

Early in the morning, she came out again and sat down on the porch step that
was already hot. Forstmann, wearing a dark blue bathrobe, sat next to her and,
clearing his throat, asked if she would consent to become his spouse—that was
the very word he used: “spouse.” When they came to breakfast, Vera, her
husband, and his maiden cousin, in utter silence, were performing nonexistent
dances, each in a different corner, and Olga drawled out in an affectionate
voice “What boors!” and next summer she died in childbirth.

That’s all. Of course, there may be some sort of sequel, but it is not known to
me. In such cases, instead of getting bogged down in guesswork, I repeat the
words of the merry king in my favorite fairy tale: Which arrow flies for ever?
The arrow that has hit its mark.