Chapter 31 Section five

Supper was served on the screened porch.Sitting next to Brotov, Pnin began to stir the sour cream in the botvinia (cold cabbage soup), pink ice cubes clinked in the soup bowl, and he automatically picked up the topic that he hadn't finished talking about in the morning. "You must have noticed," he said, "that there is a clear gap between Levin's spiritual time and Vronsky's physical time. In the middle of the novel, Levin and Kitty are more important than Vronsky and Vronsky. Anna was a full year behind in time. When Anna threw herself under the train wheel on a Sunday evening in May 1876, she had already lived for more than four years since the novel began. The same period, 1872 to 1876, barely passed three years. It is the best example of the theory of relativity in literature that I know of."

After dinner a game of croquet was suggested.As for how to place the bow-shaped iron gates, everyone agreed with the long-standing and technically substandard method of placing two out of ten crossed in the center of the field to form the so-called "cage" or "mouse trap". clamp".Pnin, in company with Madame Brotov, soon proved to be far superior to his opponents Spoorianski and Countess Porosin at the ball.As soon as the stakes were nailed and the play began, the man changed.He was a slow, clumsy, rather stiff man, and suddenly he became a lively, silent, sly hunchback.It seemed like it was always his turn to play.Pnin held the mallet low and let it dangle gracefully between his long, split legs (he caused a little stir by changing into Bermuda shorts for the game), Aiming and aiming before each hit, he dexterously shook the mallet twice, and then hit the ball accurately, and the ball rolled forward, and he kept up with his waist and quickly followed, until he reached the place where the ball was expected to stop.With that geometric energy, he slammed the ball through each of the arched iron gates, to the envious cheers of the onlookers.Even the young man Igor Porosin, skulking past here with two cans of beer on his way to a secret reception, stopped for a second, shook his head appreciatively, and then slipped into the bushes.Pnin nonchalantly collided, or rather rocketed a ball, and the murmurs and protests were mixed with applause.He put his ball next to his opponent's, stomped on his own ball with his ridiculously small foot, and then gave a hard blow that sent the other ball far away.Suzanne was asked to comment, and she said it was totally foul, but Mrs Spoorianski said it was perfectly permissible, and said that when she was a child her English nanny called it "slapping". a Hong Kong".

Pnin's ball hit the finish line, and the game was over; Varvara accompanied Susan to prepare tea, and Pnin quietly sat down on a bench under a pine tree to rest.He suddenly felt himself suffering again from that uncomfortable, frightening heart attack he had suffered so many times in his adult life.It was neither heartache nor palpitations, but rather an awe-inspiring feeling of sinking and melting into one's surroundings—the setting sun, the red tree trunks, the yellow sand, the still air.At this moment Rosa Spooriansky noticed Pnin sitting there alone, took the opportunity to go up to him ("sidite, sidite!" Don't get up), and sat down on the bench next to him.

"In 1916, maybe 1917," she said, "you might have heard my maiden name—Gile—from some of your best friends." "No, I can't remember," said Pnin. "Anyway, it doesn't matter much. We don't seem to have met before. But you know my cousins ​​Grisha and Myla Belushkin very well. They often mention you. Grisha lives now. Sweden, I think—you must have heard what happened to his poor sister..." "Yes, I heard," said Pnin. "Her husband," said Mrs. Spoorianski, "was a very pleasant man. Samuel Lovevich and I joined him and his first wife, the pianist Svetlana Chertok was very nice. The Nazis imprisoned him and Mira in two separate places, and he and my brother Misha later died in the same concentration camp. You don't know Misha, do you? He had a period Loved Mira too."

"Tshay gotoff (tea is ready)," Susan called from the porch in her ridiculously effective Russian accent, "Timophy, Roshashka! Tshay!" Pnin let Madame Sporianski go ahead, and he followed; after she had gone, he continued to sit in the shade of the evening tree, clutching the gavel that was still in his hands. Two kerosene lamps comfortably light the porch of this country house.Timofey's father, Dr. Pavel Antonovich Pnin, an ophthalmologist, and Mila's father, Dr. Yakov Grigorievich Belushkin, a pediatrician, were in a corner of the balcony They were playing chess and could not bear to leave the board, so Mrs. Belushkin had to ask the maid to bring tea and put it on a small Japanese coffee table next to the table where they played chess. There are cream pastries, black bread, garden plum zemlyanika and another cultivated variety klubnika ("musk strawberry" or "green strawberry"), golden jam, assorted biscuits, pancakes, Pretzels, toast; and here, except for the two doctors who were absorbed in playing chess, the rest of the family and guests were sitting around the big table at the other end of the corridor, some silhouetted Quite clearly, some appear blurred in the flickering light.

Dr. Belushkin fumbled with a piece of pretzel; Dr. Pnin concentrated on moving a cart.Dr. Belushkin chewed and gazed at the empty squares on his side of the board; Dr. Pnin absently dipped a piece of toast into his teacup. The dacha rented by the Belushkins in the Baltic summer resort that summer was close to the cottage-style cottage that General N.'s widow had rented to the Pnins on her large, swampy, rugged land. The edge of a desolate estate surrounded by uneven, black woods.Timofey Pnin was the clumsy, shy, stubborn eighteen-year-old who waited for Meera in the dark, even though real life had put light bulbs in gaslights and shuffled people like cards Over and over, making them all elderly exiles, the lighted porch has been firmly and hopelessly partitioned off forever, and our poor Pnin has a vivid vision that Mi From there La was sneaking into the garden, coming towards him through the tall tobacco flowers, her white blouse mingling with the dull white flowers.This feeling somehow coincided with the feeling that was spreading in his chest.Gently putting the mallet aside, he walked across the quiet pine forest towards the opposite side of the house in order to dispel the anguish.From a car parked near the garden tool shed came the steady bursts of music on the radio, presumably containing the children of at least two visitors like himself.

"Jazz, jazz, they're old enough to listen to their jazz, young men," muttered Pnin, turning again to the path that led to the woods and the creek.He thought back to his and Meera's youthful pursuits of fashion, amateur gigs, gypsy ballads, her passion for photography.Those artistic snapshots she took—the pets, the clouds, the flowers, an April bog and the black shadows of birches against the sugar-white wet snow, Where are the soldiers in pose, the horizon at sunset, a hand holding a book?He recalled the last time they had met on the banks of the Neva in Petrograd, the tears, the stars, and the rose-coloured silk lining of her warm muff.The civil war of 1918-1922 tore them apart: history annulled their engagement.Timofey wandered south and joined Denikin's army for a while, while Mira's family fled the Bolsheviks to Sweden and then settled in Germany, where she ended up marrying a furrier of Russian descent. .In the early 1930s, Pnin also married, accompanied his wife to Berlin because she wanted to attend a conference of psychotherapists, and one evening he met Mila again in a Russian restaurant on Elector Strasse.They exchanged only a few words, and she smiled at him from under her bushy brows with her usual coy evasiveness; The neck is the same as before, and it will never change.Then she went off with her husband, who went to fetch his coat from the cloakroom, and that was it—but there was still the faint pang of feeling, like the vagueness of a verse you know so well but can't remember Like flash.

The memory of the gossip-loving Mrs. Spooriansky conjured up the image of Mira with uncommon force.This is really upsetting.Only when one is rid of an incurable disease, only in the moment of lucidity before death can one overcome this emotion for a moment.For the past ten years, in order to survive sanely, Pnin has refrained from thinking about Mira Belushkin forever, not because he is afraid that the memories of a dull and short-lived love affair in his youth will disturb his thoughts. (Alas, the memories of his marriage to Lisa are enough to crowd out any other past romance), but because, in a world where such a thing as Mira's death could happen, a If a person is sincere to himself, it is impossible to expect any conscience, let alone any feeling, to continue to exist.One has to forget the past--because you can't live thinking of this gentle, delicate, gentle girl, with those beautiful eyes, that sweet smile, with gardens and snow in the background, To be put in a cattle truck and taken to a dehumanizing concentration camp, where someone injected lime acid into her heart, the heart that you could hear beating when you kissed her in the evenings past And let it be killed.Since there is no official record of exactly how Mira died, she dies over and over again in your mind's eye, only to die over and over again: she is pulled away by a trained female nurse , was injected with the broken glass tube that contained the dirty tetanus bacillus; Burned alive in the pit.The only reliable evidence, based on an occasional conversation that Pnin had with an investigator in Washington, was that she was too weak to do the drudgery (although she still smiled and could help other Jewish women) and arrived at Buchenwald, They were singled out and cremated a few days after arriving in that beautiful wooded area loudly called "Great Edtersburg."It was only an hour's walk from Weimar, and literary figures such as Goethe, Herder, Schiller, Wieland and the unparalleled Kotzebug used to stroll here. "Aber warum—but why—" the kindest Dr. Hagen in the world would lament, "why put that terrible concentration camp so close there!" Because it is very close—from the cultural center of Germany Only five miles away.The dean of Wendell College, who has always been known for his precise words, recently reviewed the situation in Europe in a speech at a graduation ceremony, and he also very politely called Germany "that country with many universities", and he also praised it. Another torture chamber: "Russia, the homeland of Tolstoy, Stanislavsky, Raskolnikov and other great and good men."

Pnin strolled under the stately pine trees.It was getting darker and darker.He doesn't believe in a dictatorial God.He had a vague belief in the democracy of ghosts.Perhaps the spirits of the dead have formed associations, and in successive meetings tended to the fate of mortal creatures. Mosquitoes are getting more and more annoying.It's time for tea.It's time to play a game of chess with Sha Duo.The strange fit of emotion was gone, and I could breathe again.On a distant hill, where Graminiev had placed his easel a few hours earlier, two figures were silhouetted against the dark red sky.They huddled together and stood facing each other.One can't tell from the trail whether it's Porosin's daughter and her boyfriend, or Nina Brotov and little Porosin, or maybe just a symbolic couple, in a light-hearted art form Draw on the last pages of Pnin's fading days.