Read The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov for Free Online

something in your muted voice. Outside the window, the trees breathed and dripped with a contented rustle. And I, smiling at that rustle, lightly and unavidly embraced you.
    It happened like this. On one bank of the river was your park, your meadows, and on the other stood the village. The highway was deeply rutted in places. The mud was a lush violet, and the grooves contained bubbly, café-au-lait water. The oblique shadows of black log isbas extended with particular clarity.
    We walked in the shade along a well-trodden path, past a grocery, past an inn with an emerald sign, past sun-filled courtyards emanating the aromas of manure and of fresh hay.
    The schoolhouse was new, constructed of stone, with maples planted around it. On its threshold a peasant woman’s white calves gleamed as she wrung out a rag into a bucket.
    You inquired, “Is Pal Palych in?” The woman, with her freckles and braids, squinted against the sun. “He is, he is.” The pail tinkledas she pushed it with her heel. “Come in, ma’am. They’ll be in the workshop.”
    We creaked along a dark hallway, then through a spacious classroom.
    I glanced in passing at an azure map, and thought, That’s how all of Russia is—sunlight and hollows.… In a corner sparkled a crushed piece of chalk.
    Farther on, in the small workshop, there was a pleasant smell of carpenter’s glue and pine sawdust. Coatless, puffy, and sweaty, his left leg extended, Pal Palych was planing away appetizingly at a groaning white board. His moist, bald pate rocked to and fro in a dusty ray of sunlight. On the floor under the workbench, the shavings curled like flimsy locks.
    I said loudly, “Pal Palych, you have guests!”
    He gave a start, immediately got flustered, bestowed a polite smack on the hand you raised with such a listless, familiar gesture, and for an instant poured his damp fingers into my hand and gave it a shake. His face looked as if it had been fashioned of buttery modeling clay, with its limp mustache and unexpected furrows.
    “Sorry—I’m not dressed, you see,” he said with a guilty smile. He grabbed a pair of shirt cuffs that had been standing like cylinders side by side on the windowsill, and pulled them on hastily.
    “What are you working on?” you asked with a glint of your bracelet. Pal Palych was struggling into his jacket with sweeping motions. “Nothing, just puttering,” he sputtered, stumbling slightly on the labial consonants. “It’s a kind of little shelf. Haven’t finished yet. I still have to sand and lacquer it. But take a look at this—I call it the Fly.…” With a spinning rub of his joined palms, he launched a miniature wooden helicopter, which soared with a buzzing sound, bumped on the ceiling, and dropped.
    The shadow of a polite smile flitted across your face. “Oh, silly me,” Pal Palych started again. “You were expected upstairs, my friends.… This door squeaks. Sorry. Allow me to go first. I’m afraid my place is a mess.…”
    “I think he forgot he invited me,” you said in English as we began climbing the creaky staircase.
    I was watching your back, the silk checks of your blouse. From somewhere downstairs, probably the courtyard, came a resonant peasant-woman voice, “Gerosim! Hey, Gerosim!” And suddenly it was supremely clear to me that, for centuries, the world had been blooming, withering, spinning, changing solely in order that now, at this instant,it might combine and fuse into a vertical chord the voice that had resounded downstairs, the motion of your silken shoulder blades, and the scent of pine boards.
    Pal Palych’s room was sunny and somewhat cramped. A crimson rug with a yellow lion embroidered in its center was nailed to the wall above the bed. On another wall hung a framed chapter from
Anna Karenin
, set in such a way that the interplay of dark and light type together with the clever placement of the lines formed Tolstoy’s face.
    Rubbing his hands together, our host seated you. As he did