Free Look at the Harlequins! by Vladimir Nabokov

letter and suggest, as an experienced writer, what might be the next development or disaster.
    Beloved!
    I am not capable to represent to myself that you really desire to tear up any connection with me. God sees, I love you more than life—more than two lives, your and my, together taken. Are you not ill? Or maybe you have found another? Another lover, yes? Another victim of your attraction? No, no, this thought is too horrible, too humiliating for us both
.
    My supplication is modest and just. Give only one more interview to me! One interview! I am
prepared to meet with you it does not matter where—on the street, in some café, in the Forest of Boulogne—but I must see you, must speak with you and open to you many mysteries before I will die. Oh, this is no threat! I swear that if our interview will lead to a positive result, if, otherwise speaking, you will permit me to hope, only to hope, then, oh then, I will consent to wait a little. But you must reply to me without retardment, my cruel, stupid, adored little girl!
    Your Jules
     
    “There’s one thing,” I said, carefully folding the sheet and pocketing it for later study, “one thing the little girl should know. This is not a romantic Corsican writing a
crime passionnel
letter; it is a Russian blackmailer knowing just enough English to translate into it the stalest Russian locutions. What puzzles me is how did you, with your three or four words of Russian—
kak pozhivaete
and
do svidaniya
—how did you, the author, manage to think up those subtle turns, and imitate the mistakes in English that only a Russian would make? Impersonation, I know, runs in the family, but still—”
    Iris replied (with that quaint
non sequitur
that I was to give to the heroine of my
Ardis
forty years later) that, yes, indeed, I was right, she must have had too many muddled lessons in Russian and she would certainly correct that extraordinary impression by simply giving the whole letter in French—from which, she had been told, incidentally, Russian
had
borrowed a lot of clichés.
    “But that’s beside the point,” she added. “You don’t understand—the point is what should happen next—I mean, logically? What should my poor girl do about that bore, that brute? She is uncomfortable, she is perplexed, she is frightened. Should this situation end in slapstick or tragedy?”
    “In the wastepaper basket,” I whispered, interrupting my work to gather her small form onto my lap as I often did, the Lord be thanked, in that fatal spring of 1930.
    “Give me back that scrap,” she begged gently, trying to thrust her hand into the pocket of my dressing gown, but I shook my head and embraced her closer.
    My latent jealousy should have been fanned up to a furnace roar by the surmise that my wife had been transcribing an authentic letter—received, say, from one of the wretched, unwashed
émigré
poeticules, with smooth glossy hair and eloquent liquid eyes, whom she used to meet in the salons of exile. But after reexamining the thing, I decided that it just might be her own composition with some of the planted faults, borrowed from the French (
supplication, sans tarder
), while others could be subliminal echoes of the Volapük she had been exposed to, during sessions with Russian teachers, through bilingual or trilingual exercises in tawdry textbooks. Thus, instead of losing myself in a jungle of evil conjectures, all I did was preserve that thin sheet with its unevenly margined lines so characteristic of her typing in the faded and cracked briefcase before me, among other mementos, other deaths.

13
    On the morning of April 23, 1930, the shrill peal of the hallway telephone caught me in the act of stepping into my bathwater.
    Ivor! He had just arrived in Paris from New York for an important conference, would be busy all afternoon, was leaving tomorrow, would like to—
    Here intervened naked Iris, who delicately, unhurriedly, with a radiant smile, appropriated the