Free Glory by Vladimir Nabokov Page B

bright-purple socks, his orange-yellow knobby-capped shoes, bought in Athens. “These are American,” said Martin with a studied calm.
    “The Americans make them specially to sell to Negroes and Russians,” glibly replied Sonia. Furthermore, it turned out that Martin had not brought a dressing gown with him, and when, in the mornings, he would go to the bathroom proudly wrapped in his bedclothes, Sonia would say that this reminded her of her cousins and their chums at the Lyceum school who, when visiting the Zilanovs’ country house, slept naked, walked around in the morning draped in bedsheets, and relieved themselves in the garden. In the end Martin made so many purchases in London that ten pounds was not enough, and he had to write to his uncle, which was particularly unpleasant because of the hazy explanations necessitated by the disappearance of the other ten pounds. Yes, it was a hard, unfortunate week. Even his English accent, on which Martin quietly prided himself, proved to be an occasion forderisive corrections on Sonia’s part. Thus Martin quite unexpectedly found himself classified as ignorant, adolescent, and a mamma’s boy. He felt this was unfair, that he had had infinitely more experiences and adventures than a sixteen-year-old maiden. It was therefore with a certain malicious glee that he drubbed some young men of hers at tennis, and on his last night had a chance to show he could dance an impeccable two-step (which he had learned back in Mediterranean days) to Hawaiian wails from the phonograph.
    At Cambridge he felt still more foreign. Upon talking to his English fellow students he noted with wonder his unmistakably Russian essence. From his semi-English childhood he retained only such things as had been relegated by native Englishmen of his age, who had read the same books as children, into the dimness of the past properly allotted to nursery things, while Martin’s life at a certain point had made an abrupt turn and taken a different course, and for this very reason his childhood surroundings and habits had assumed a certain fairy-tale flavor, and a book he had been fond of in those days was now more enchanting and vivid in his memory than the same book in the memory of his English coevals. He remembered various expressions that ten years ago had been current among English schoolboys, but now were considered either vulgar or ridiculously old-fashioned. Plum pudding, blazing with a blue flame, was served in St. Petersburg not only at Christmas, as in England, but any day of the year, and, in the opinion of many people, the Edelweiss chef made a better one than could be bought in a store. Petersburgers played soccer on hard ground, not on turf, and the penalty kick was called “pendel,” a term unknown in England. No longer would Martin dare wear the colors of the striped jersey bought once, long ago, at Drew’s, the English shop on the Nevski, for they corresponded to the athletic uniformof a public school he had never attended. In truth, all this English-ness, really of a rather haphazard nature, was filtered through his motherland’s quiddity and suffused with peculiar Russian tints.

13
    The splendid autumn he had just seen in Switzerland somehow kept lingering in the background of his first Cambridge impressions. In the mornings a delicate haze would enshroud the Alps. A broken cluster of rowan berries lay in the middle of the road, whose ruts were filmed with micalike ice. Despite the absence of wind the bright-yellow birch leafage thinned out with every passing day, and the turquoise sky gazed through it with pensive gaiety. The luxuriant ferns grew reddish; iridescent shreds of spiderweb, which Uncle Henry called “the Virgin’s hair,” floated about. Martin would look up, thinking that he heard the remote blare of migrating cranes, but no cranes were to be seen. He used to wander around a great deal, as if searching for something; he rode the dilapidated bicycle belonging to one of