Free Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov

Anthropology also lurked, was connected with another brick building, Frieze Hall, which housed the dining-rooms and the Faculty Club, by means of a rather rococo openwork gallery: it went up a slope, then turned sharply and wandered down toward a routine smell of potato chips and the sadness of balanced meals. In summer its trellis was alive with quivering flowers; but now through its nakedness an icy wind blew, and someone had placed a found red mitten upon the spout of the dead fountain that stood where one branch of the gallery led to the President's House.
    President Poore, a tall, slow, elderly man wearing dark glasses, had started to lose his sight a couple of years before and was now almost totally blind. With solar regularity, however, he would be led every day by his niece and secretary to Frieze Hall; he came, a figure of antique dignity, moving in his private darkness to an invisible luncheon, and although everybody had long grown accustomed to his tragic entrance, there was invariably the shadow of a hush while he was being steered to his carved chair and while he groped for the edge of the table; and it was strange to see, directly behind him on the wall, his stylized likeness in a mauve double-breasted suit and mahogany shoes, gazing with radiant magenta eyes at the scrolls handed him by Richard Wagner, Dostoyevsky, and Confucius, a group that Oleg Komarov, of the Fine Arts Department, had painted a decade ago into Lang's celebrated mural of 1938, which carried all around the dining-room a pageant of historical figures and Waindell faculty members.
    Pnin, who wanted to ask his compatriot something, sat down beside him. This Komarov, a Cossack's son, was a very short man with a crew cut and a death's-head's nostrils. He and Serafima, his large, cheerful, Moscow-born wife, who wore a Tibetan charm on a long silver chain that hung down to her ample, soft belly, would throw Russki parties every now and then, with Russki hors d'oeuvres and guitar music and more or less phony folk-songs - occasions at which shy graduate students would be taught vodka-drinking rites and other stale Russianisms; and after such feasts, upon meeting gruff Pnin, Serafima and Oleg (she raising her eyes to heaven, he covering his with one hand) would murmur in awed self-gratitude: 'Gospodi, skol'ko mï im dayom! (My, what a lot we give them!)' - 'them' being the benighted American people. Only another Russian could understand the reactionary and Sovietophile blend presented by the pseudo-colourful Komarovs, for whom an ideal Russia consisted of the Red Army, an anointed monarch, collective farms, anthroposophy, the Russian Church, and the Hydro-Electric Dam. Pnin and Oleg Komarov were usually in a subdued state of war, but meetings were inevitable, and such of their American colleagues as deemed the Komarovs 'grand people' and mimicked droll Pnin were sure the painter and Pnin were excellent friends.
    It would be hard to say, without applying some very special tests, which of them, Pnin or Komarov, spoke the worse English; probably Pnin; but for reasons of age, general education, and a slightly longer stage of American citizenship, he found it possible to correct Komarov's frequent English interpolations, and Komarov resented this even more than he did Pnin's antikvarnïy liberalizm.
    'Look here, Komarov (Poslushayte, Komarov' - a rather discourteous manner of address) - said Pnin. 'I cannot understand who else here might want this book; certainly none of my students; and if it is you, I cannot understand why you should want it anyway.'
    'I don't,' answered Komarov, glancing at the volume. 'Not interested,' he added in English.
    Pnin moved his lips and lower jaw mutely once or twice, wanted to say something, did not, and went on with his salad.

6
    This being Tuesday, he could walk over to his favourite haunt immediately after lunch and stay there till dinner time. No gallery connected Waindell College Library with any other buildings, but it