Free The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov by Vladimir Nabokov Page A

spacious, illuminated bedroom was wide open. On the wide bed, in open-collared yellow pajamas, Isabel lay supine. A pale hand drooped, with a smouldering cigarette between its fingers. Sleep must have overcome her without warning.
    Kern approached the bed. He banged his knee against a chair, on which a guitar uttered a faint twang. Isabel’s blue hair lay in tight circles on the pillow. He took a look at her dark eyelids, at the delicateshadow between her breasts. He touched the blanket. Her eyes opened immediately. Then, in a hunchbacked kind of stance, Kern said: “I need your love. Tomorrow I shall shoot myself.”
    He had never dreamt that a woman, even if taken by surprise, could be so startled. First Isabel remained motionless, then she lunged, looking back at the open window, slipping instantly from the bed, and rushed past Kern with bowed head, as if expecting a blow from above.
    The door slammed. Some sheets of letter paper fluttered from the table.
    Kern remained standing in the middle of the spacious bright room. Some grapes glowed purple and gold on the night table.
    “Madwoman,” he said aloud.
    He laboriously shifted his shoulders. Like a steed he trembled with a prolonged shiver from the cold. Then, suddenly, he froze motionless.
    Outside the window, swelling, flying, a joyous barking sound approached by agitated jolts. In a wink the square of black night in the window opening filled and came aboil with solid, boisterous fur. In one broad and noisy sweep this roughish fur obscured the night sky from one window frame to the other. Another instant and it swelled tensely, obliquely burst in, and unfolded. Amid the whistling spread of agitated fur flashed a white face. Kern grabbed the guitar by its finger-board and, with all his strength, struck the white face flying at him. Like some fluffy tempest, the giant wing’s rib knocked him off his feet. He was overwhelmed by an animal smell. Kern rose with a lurch.
    In the center of the room lay an enormous angel.
    He occupied the entire room, the entire hotel, the entire world. His right wing had bent, leaning its angle against the mirrored dresser. The left one swung ponderously, catching on the legs of an overturned chair. The chair banged back and forth on the floor. The brown fur of the wings steamed, iridescent with frost. Deafened by the blow, the angel propped itself on its palms like a sphinx. Blue veins swelled on its white hands, and hollows of shadow showed on its shoulders next to the clavicles. Its elongated, myopic-looking eyes, pale-green like predawn air, gazed at Kern without blinking from beneath straight, joined brows.
    Suffocating from the pungent odor of wet fur, Kern stood motionless in the apathy of ultimate fear, examining the giant, steamy wings and the white face.
    A hollow din began beyond the door in the corridor, and Kern was overcome by a different emotion: heart-rending shame. He was ashamed to the point of pain, of horror, that in a moment someone might come in and find him and this incredible creature.
    The angel heaved a noisy breath, moved. But his arms had grown weak, and he collapsed on his chest. A wing jerked. Grinding his teeth, trying not to look, Kern stooped over him, took hold of the mound of damp, odorous fur and the cold, sticky shoulders. He noticed with sickening horror that the angel’s feet were pale and boneless, and that he would be unable to stand on them. The angel did not resist. Kern hurriedly pulled him toward the wardrobe, flung open the mirrored door, began pushing and squeezing the wings into the creaking depths. He seized them by their ribs, trying to bend them and pack them in. Unfurling flaps of fur kept slapping him in the chest. At last he closed the door with a solid shove. At that instant there came a lacerating, unbearable shriek, the shriek of an animal crushed by a wheel. He had slammed the door on one of the wings, that was it. A small corner of the wing protruded from the crack. Opening the