Chapter 2 second quarter

Whitchurch showed up on time.The sun shone down on a hot and dull concrete floor, and the train cast black shadows in sharp geometric shapes on this platform.In October, the local climate is as hot as summer, which is really unbelievable.Pnin walked cautiously into a makeshift waiting room with a spare stove in the middle, and glanced around.In a remote corner, a sweaty young man was sitting behind a wide wooden counter filling out forms, with the upper half of his body exposed. "Excuse me," said Pnin, "where does the four o'clock bus to Cremona stop?" "Just across the road." The employee replied briskly without even looking up.

"Where can I temporarily store my travel bag?" "Is this the bag? Leave it to me." The young man, with that unceremonious national character that always troubled Pnin, stuffed the traveling bag carelessly into his hidden nook. "And the receipt?" Pnin asked, anglicizing the Russian word kvitantsiya. "what?" "Number?" Pnin tried again. "No need for a number," said the fellow, continuing to write. Pnin left the station, satisfied that he knew where the bus was, and went into a café.He finished one ham sandwich, asked for another, and ate it too.At exactly 3:55, after paying for the meal, Puning carefully selected a free toothpick from a small clean pine cone-shaped cup next to the counter, and went back to the station to pick up his travel bag.

At this time another person was on duty.The previous one was called home and needed to send his wife to the obstetrics hospital as soon as possible.He'll be back in a few minutes. "But I must get my bag!" cried Pnin. The substitute was sorry, but there was nothing he could do. "There it is!" cried Pnin, jumping on the counter and pointing. Too bad luck.He was still pointing, only to realize that he was going for the wrong bag.His index finger dangled.The indecision was terrible. "The car for Cremona is leaving!" cried Pnin. "There's another one at eight o'clock," said the man.

What about our poor friend?Terrible situation!He looked down the street.The bus has just arrived.This invitation means an extra income of fifty yuan.His hand swung to the right.The bag is there! slava Bogu (thank God)!Come on!He simply didn't wear that black suit - vot I vsyo (that's it).Just pick it up when you come back.He no longer knows how many more valuable things he has lost, abandoned, and thrown away in his life.So Pnin boarded the bus refreshed, almost lighthearted. He had just passed a few streets in this town on this new journey when a thought that worried him suddenly flashed into his mind.After he parted from the travel bag, the tip of his left index finger and the inside of the crook of his right elbow have been alternately checking whether the precious item in the inner pocket of his jacket is there.He jerked it out.Oops, it was Betty's paper.

Pnin uttered what he considered an internationally recognized exclamation of anxiety and pleading, and staggered to his feet from his seat.He staggered to the door of the car, and the driver squeezed out a handful of coins from the cash drawer with one hand in annoyance, paid him back the fare, and stopped the car.Poor Pnin landed in the middle of a strange town. His body and bones are not as strong as his chest and belly show, a kind of fatigue caused by disappointment, like a tidal wave, submerged his top-heavy body, isolating him from reality, this kind of The feeling was nothing new to him.He found himself in a well-planned and gloomy park, green, purple, and wet, dominated by melancholy rhododendrons, bare laurels, shady trees, and short-cut The lawn; the driver of the car had just briefly reminded him to go back to the train station through the alley lined with chestnut and oak trees. As soon as he turned into the alley, that strange feeling, that alienation from reality The excitement suddenly broke him completely.Did you eat something unclean just now?Pickles and ham?Did he suffer from a strange disease that several of his doctors haven't detected for him so far?My friend wondered, and so did I.

I don't know if anyone has noticed before that one of the great features of life is the discrete state.Unless a thin layer of flesh envelops us, we die.Man exists only when he is free from his surroundings.The skull is the same as the astronaut's helmet.Stay inside or you will kill yourself.Death is like a deprivation, death is like a participation.It is good that people and natural scenery become one with each other, but in that way, the subtle self will disappear.What poor Pnin experienced felt a little like that deprivation, like that participation.He felt weak and weak.He was sweating.He was terrified.A stone bench among the laurel bushes saved him from collapsing on the pavement.Did he have a heart attack?I don't believe it, because I'm his doctor right now, and let me say it again, I don't believe it.My patient was one of those unique, unfortunate monsters who look upon their hearts with uneasy dread, neurotic revulsion, and morbid loathing (according to the new edition of Webster's Webster's in Pnin's discarded travel bag). University Dictionary’s repulsive definition: the heart is “a hollow muscular organ”), alas, as if the heart were some sturdy, slimy, intangible monster that one had to live on.Sometimes, puzzled by Pnin's jittery pulse, the doctor would examine him thoroughly, and the absurd mountain ranges shown on the electrocardiogram showed that he had committed a dozen mutually exclusive fatal diseases.He was afraid to touch his wrist.He had never dared to sleep on the left side. People with insomnia often tried both sides at night and still couldn't sleep. They really wished for a third side. Even in such melancholy moments, Pnin never dared to sleep on the left side.

Now, in Whitchurch Park, Pnin experienced himself again on July 4, 1920, May 18, 1929, February 15, 1937 (his birthday) and on August 10, 1942, this nasty automatic thing in his body developed a very self-consciousness, and after a while it would have an attack, not only very active, but also And torment him, and make him terrified.He pushed the poor bald head against the stone back of the bench, recalling similar uneasy and disappointing scenes in the past.Could it be pneumonia this time?Two days ago, on a windy night, he participated in a sumptuous American-style reception, and after the host gave the second toast, he felt bitingly chilled.Then Pnin suddenly felt like he was slipping back to his childhood (Don't you want to die?).All the details that came to mind seemed clear to him, and it was said that this feeling was a dramatic privilege enjoyed by drowning people, especially those in the Russian Navy in the past—a phenomenon of suffocation. The old psychoanalyst, whose name I forget, described this phenomenon as akin to the subconscious shock induced by baptism, which makes all the events between the first and the last baptism suddenly blurred. It burst out, making people think of it all.All this happened in an instant, but it cannot be described in a few words.

Timofey Pnin was born in Petersburg in a respectable family of considerable wealth.Father Pavel Pnin was a prestigious ophthalmologist and had the honor of treating Leo Tolstoy for conjunctivitis.Timofey's mother, a thin, nervous woman with a slender wasp waist and curly hair, was the daughter of the once-famous revolutionary Zumov (which rhymes with "Zoom off") and a Riga native. Daughter of a German girl.In a semi-conscious state, Pu Ning saw his mother's eyes approaching gradually.It was a Sunday in midwinter.He was eleven years old, went to the No. 1 High School, and had been preparing for Monday's homework when he suddenly felt extremely cold all over his body.The mother quickly took his temperature, stared at the child dumbfounded, and immediately invited her husband's good friend, the pediatrician Belushkin.He was a small man with bushy, bulging eyebrows, a short beard, and short hair.He relaxed the hem of his dress and sat on the edge of Timofey's bed.A race began between the doctor's fat gold watch and Timofey's pulse (the latter won easily), and then Timofey was stripped naked, and Belushkin rubbed his cold ear with sandpaper. Her cheeks were pressed against his body.The ear moved across Timofey's back and chest like the flat base of a stethoscope, stuck to one piece of skin or that, then thumped on to another.As soon as the doctor left, Timofey's mother and a sturdy nurse with a safety pin in her mouth wrapped up the poor little patient tightly.This straitjacket, like that of a convict or a madman, consisted of a layer of soaked sackcloth, a layer of thicker absorbent cotton, and a layer of tight fleece, and a layer of devilish oilcloth—the color of urine in a fever— —wrapped in the torturous cold wet linen and the uncomfortably squeaky cotton in the flannelette.Timosa (Tim) was like a poor cocooned chrysalis, lying on the bed, covered with some blankets; but it was all in vain, still unable to resist the creeping feeling that spread from his cold spine to the sides. Cold to the ribs.He couldn't close his eyes because the eyelids were also stinging.There are only obnoxious flat circles and oblique rays of light in the hallucinations; the familiar objects become a breeding ground for disgusting illusions.Beside the bed was a shiny four-leaf wooden screen, on which a bridle path full of fallen leaves was etched, a pond of water lilies, an old man sitting hunched up on a bench, and holding a red rose in one front paw. Toy squirrel.Timosa, who was a well-organized kid, often wondered what those things were (hard nuts or pine cones?), and now that he has nothing else to do, let's solve this boring riddle. But the fever made the buzzing in the head melon seeds, painful, unsteady, and all efforts were in vain.Even more depressing was a fight he had with the wallpaper.He had always seen the exact repetition of a pattern of three different clusters of purple flowers and seven different oak leaves on the vertical plane of the paper; He couldn't figure out how the patterns on the cross-section of the flower paper were arranged. He picked out individual components of the pattern from the head of the bed to the wardrobe, from the stove to the door here and there on the wall, and proved that there was indeed a sequence. Whenever his eyes moved to the right or left from any group of three-blossoms and seven-leaves, he was instantly lost in the tangle of rhododendrons and oaks.There is a clear reason for this, if the evil designer--the chaotic guy, the hot-headed friend-- is so cunning and careful to hide the door key to the mystery of this trick, then, This key must be as precious as life itself, and if found it would restore Timofey Pnin to his daily little world; We must continue this struggle.

Some things demanded punctuality, and as annoyingly accurate as it was to go to class, eat, or sleep, a sense of fear of missing an appointment added an element of urgency and uneasiness to the difficult quest that was slipping into a coma.The leaves and flowers, arranged in an orderly manner according to their intricate patterns, seemed to bulge out of the pale blue background, which also lost the flatness of the paper and appeared bulging, making the person looking at it follow the rhythm of the scene. It was so swollen that my heart almost jumped out.He was dazed, but he could still make out some parts of the nursery among the independent floral decorations, such as the lacquered screen, a shiny tumbler, the brass ball on the bed frame, They seemed to him more indelible than anything else, and yet they seemed so incongruous with the oak leaves and the blooming flowers, but so incongruously with the scene outside the window as the image of something inside the house reflected in the window. To a much lesser degree.Although the witness and victim of the phantom was lying on the bed covered with a quilt, due to the duality of his environment, he also felt that he was sitting on a bench in a green and purple park.At the moment of fusion, he felt that he had finally found the key he was looking for; but a gust of wind rustled from afar, and it blew harder and harder, making the rhododendrons that had not yet bloomed sway, and Timofey Pnin Any reasonable pattern once formed by the surrounding environment was disrupted.He's alive, that's enough.He was still slouching against the back of the bench, and it felt as real to him as his clothes, the wallet, and the date of the Great Fire of Moscow—1812—feeled to him.

A gray squirrel crouched comfortably in front of him, tasting a peach pit.The wind stopped for a moment, then stirred the leaves again. This attack made him a little frightened and trembling, but he convinced himself that if it was really a heart attack he would be more uneasy, and this roundabout reasoning swept away his fear.It's twenty past four.He blew his nose and staggered toward the station. The earlier employee is back. "Here's your bag," he said cheerfully. "I'm sorry to have missed your train to Cremona." "At least"—what solemn irony our unfortunate friend wanted to inject into the word "at least"—"I hope your Madam is all right?"

"It's all right. I guess she won't have the baby until tomorrow." "Well," said Pnin, "then where is the public telephone?" The guy didn't move, leaned over and pointed with a pencil in the distance.Pnin walked over there with his travel bag, but was called back again.The pencil now points to the street. "Hey, see those two lads over there loading up the truck? They're going to Cremona. Tell 'em it's Bob Horne who sent you, and they'll give you a lift."