Free The Eye by Vladimir Nabokov Page B

the subject has come up quite by chance … Are you listening?”
    “Go on,” says Khrushchov, snuggling in his fur.
    “Good. Let us think back, Filip Innokentievich. Let us recall the silver miniature. You asked me to show it to Weinstock. Listen carefully. As I left you I was holding it in my hand. No, no, please don’t recite the alphabet. I can communicate with you perfectly well without the alphabet. And I swear, I swear by Vanya, I swear by all the women I have loved, I swear that every word of the person whose name I cannot utter—since otherwise you willthink I read other people’s mail, and am therefore capable of thievery as well—I swear that every word of his is a lie: I really did lose it. I came home, and I no longer had it, and it is not my fault. It is just that I am very absent-minded, and love her so much.”
    But Khrushchov does not believe Smurov; he shakes his head. In vain does Smurov swear, in vain does he wring his white, glittering hands-it is no use, words to convince Khrushchov do not exist. (Here my dream exhausted its meager supply of logic: by now the staircase on which the conversation took place was standing all by itself in open country, and below there were terraced gardens and the haze of trees in blurry bloom; the terraces stretched away into the distance, where one seemed to distinguish cascades and mountain meadows.) “Yes, yes,” said Khrushchov in a hard menacing voice. “There was something inside that box, therefore it is irreplaceable. Inside it was Vanya—yes, yes, this happens sometimes to girls … A very rare phenomenon, but it happens, it happens …”
    I awoke. It was early morning. The window-panes were trembling from a passing truck. They had long ceased to be frosted with a mauve film, for spring was near. I paused tothink how much had happened lately, how many new people I had met, and how enthralling, how hopeless was this house-to-house search, this quest of mine for the real Smurov. There is no use to dissemble—all these people I met were not live beings but only chance mirrors for Smurov; one among them, though, and for me the most important, the brightest mirror of all, still would not yield me Smurov’s reflection. Hosts and guests at 5 Peacock Street move before me from light to shade, effortlessly, innocently, created merely for my amusement. Once again Mukhin, rising slightly from the sofa, stretches his hand across the table toward the ashtray, but I see neither his face, nor that hand with the cigarette; I see only his other hand, which (already unconsciously!) rests momentarily on Vanya’s knee. Once again Roman Bogdanovich, bearded and with a pair of red apples for cheeks, bends his congested face to blow on the tea, and again Marianna sits down and crosses her legs, thin legs in apricot-colored stockings. And, as a joke—it was Christmas Eve, I think—Khrushchov pulls on his wife’s fur coat, assumes mannequin attitudes before the mirror, and walks about the room to general laughter, which gradually begins to growforced, because Khrushchov always overdoes his jokes. Evgenia’s lovely little hand, with its nails so glossy they seem moist, picks up a table-tennis paddle, and the little celluloid ball pings dutifully back and forth across the green net. Again in the semidarkness Weinstock floats by, seated at his planchette table as if at a steering wheel; again the maid—Hilda or Gretchen—passes dreamily from one door to another, and suddenly begins to whisper and wriggle out of her dress. Whenever I wish, I can accelerate or retard to ridiculous slowness the motions of all these people, or distribute them in different groups, or arrange them in various patterns, lighting them now from below, now from the side … For me, their entire existence has been merely a shimmer on a screen.
    But wait, life did make one last attempt to prove to me that it was real—oppressive and tender, provoking excitement and torment, possessed of