Free The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov by Vladimir Nabokov Page B

door slightly, Kern shoved the curly wedge in with his hand. He turned the key.
    It grew very quiet. Kern felt hot tears running down his face. He took a breath and rushed for the corridor. Isabel lay next to the wall, a cowering heap of black silk. He gathered her in his arms, carried her into his room, and lowered her onto the bed. Then he snatched from his suitcase the heavy Parabellum, slammed the clip home, ran out holding his breath, and burst into Room 35.
    The two halves of a broken plate lay, all white, on the carpet. The grapes were scattered.
    Kern saw himself in the mirrored door of the wardrobe: a lock of hair fallen over an eyebrow, a starched dress shirtfront spattered with red, the lengthwise glint of the pistol’s barrel.
    “Must finish it off,” he exclaimed tonelessly, and opened the wardrobe.
    There was nothing but a gust of odorous fluff. Oily brown tufts eddying about the room. The wardrobe was empty. On its floor lay a white squashed hatbox.
    Kern approached the window and looked out. Furry little clouds were gliding across the moon and breathing dim rainbows around it. He shut the casements, put the chair back in its place, and kicked some brown tufts under the bed. Then he cautiously went out into the corridor. It was quiet as before. People sleep soundly in mountain hotels.
    And when he returned to his room what he saw was Isabel with her bare feet hanging from the bed, trembling, with her head between her hands. He felt ashamed, as he had, not long ago, when the angel was looking at him with its odd greenish eyes.
    “Tell me, where is he?” asked Isabel breathlessly.
    Kern turned away, went to the desk, sat down, opened the blotter, and replied, “I don’t know.”
    Isabel retracted her bare feet onto the bed.
    “May I stay here with you for now? I’m so frightened.…”
    Kern gave a silent nod. Dominating the tremor of his hand, he started writing. Isabel began speaking again, in an agitated, toneless voice, but for some reason it appeared to Kern that her fright was of the female, earthly variety.
    “I met him yesterday as I was flying on my skis in the dark. Last night he came to me.”
    Trying not to listen, Kern wrote in a bold hand:
    “My dear friend, this is my last letter. I could never forget how you helped me when disaster crashed down on me. He probably lives on a peak where he hunts alpine eagles and feeds on their meat.…”
    Catching himself, he slashed that out and took another sheet. Isabel was sobbing with her face buried in the pillow.
    “What shall I do now? He’ll come after me for revenge.… Oh, my God.…”
    “My dear friend,”
Kern wrote quickly,
“she sought unforgettable caresses and now she will give birth to a winged little beast.…”
Oh, damn! He crumpled the sheet.
    “Try to get some sleep,” he addressed Isabel over his shoulder, “and leave tomorrow. For a monastery.”
    Her shoulders shook rapidly. Then she grew still.
    Kern wrote. Before him smiled the eyes of the one person in the world with whom he could freely speak or remain silent. He wrote to that person that life was finished, that he had begun feeling of late that, in place of the future, a black wall was looming ever closer, and that now something had happened after which a man cannot and must not continue living.
“At noon tomorrow I shall die,” wrote
Kern,
“tomorrow, because I want to die in full command of my faculties, in the sober light of day. And right now I am in too deep a state of shock.”
    When he had finished he sat down in the armchair by the window. Isabel was sleeping, her breathing barely audible. An oppressive fatigue girdled his shoulders. Sleep descended like a soft fog.
3

    He was awakened by a knock on the door. Frosty azure was pouring through the window.
    “Come in,” he said, stretching.
    The waiter noiselessly set a tray with a cup of tea on the table and exited with a bow.
    Laughing to himself, Kern thought, “And here I am in a rumpled dinner