Despair (Vintage International) by Vladimir Nabokov

Author:Vladimir Nabokov [Nabokov, Vladimir]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-02-16T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seven

To begin with, let us take the following motto (not especially for this chapter, but generally): Literature is Love. Now we can continue.

It was darkish in the post office; two or three people stood at every counter, mostly women; and at every counter, framed in his little window, like some tarnished picture, showed the face of an official. I looked for number nine.… I wavered before going up to it.… There was, in the middle of the place, a series of writing desks, so I lingered there, pretending, in front of my own self, that I had something to write: on the back of an old bill which I found in my pocket, I began to scrawl the very first words that came. The pen supplied by the State screeched and rattled, I kept thrusting it into the inkwell, into the black spit therein; the pale blotting paper upon which I leaned my elbow was all crisscrossed with the imprints of unreadable lines. Those irrational characters, preceded as it were by a minus, remind me always of mirrors: minus X minus = plus. It struck me that perhaps Felix too was a minus I, and that was a line of thought of quite astounding importance, which I did wrong, oh, very wrong, not to have thoroughly investigated.

Meanwhile the consumptive pen in my hand went on spitting words: can’t stop, can’t stop, cans, pots, stop, he’ll to hell. I crumpled the slip of paper in my fist. An impatient fat female squeezed in and snatched up the pen, now free, shoving me aside as she did so with a twist of her sealskin rump.

All of a sudden I found myself standing at counter nine. A large face with a sandy moustache glanced at me inquiringly. I breathed the password. A hand with a black cot on the index finger gave me not one but three letters. It now seems to me to have all happened in a flash; and the next moment I was walking along the street with my hand pressed to my heart. As soon as I reached a bench I sat down and tore the letters open.

Put up some memorial there; for instance, a yellow signpost. Let that particle of time leave a mark in space as well. There I was, sitting and reading—and then suddenly choking with unexpected and irrepressible laughter. Oh, courteous reader, those were letters of the blackmailing kind! A blackmailing letter, which none perhaps will ever unseal, a blackmailing letter addressed P.O. till called for, under an agreed cipher, to boot, i.e., with the candid confession that its sender knows neither the name nor the address of the person he writes to—that is a wildly funny paradox indeed!

In the first of those three letters (middle of November) the blackmail theme was merely foreshadowed. It was much offended with me, that letter, it demanded explanations, it seemed verily to elevate its eyebrows, as its author did, ready at a moment’s notice to smile his

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