Chapter 45 first quarter

My recollection of meeting Timofey Pnin for the first time is related to the fact that I squinted a soot in my left eye one Sunday in the spring of 1911. It was a cold, windy morning in St. Petersburg, and the last clear ice of Lake Ladoga had been washed into the bay by the Neva, and the indigo waves lapped against the granite of the lake's banks, where tugboats and large barges were moored. The pier, with its rhythmic creaking and rattling, and several motorboats moored, their mahogany and brass gleaming in the timid sun.I'm trying out a beautiful new British bike my parents gave me for my twelfth birthday, on the smooth, paneled sidewalk, toward our family's Rose House on Morskaya Street. I rode to the Seishi House, feeling uneasy because I seriously violated the rules of my governess, but this feeling was far less serious than a grain of soot stinging my cornea.Home remedies like cold compresses and tri-k-nosu (rubbing towards the nose) with a small piece of cotton soaked in herbal tea just made things worse; when I woke up the next morning, The little thing lurking inside my upper eyelid was like a hard, angular lump, and as I blinked tearfully, it sank further in.In the afternoon I was taken to Dr. Pavel Pnin, a renowned ophthalmologist.

One of the foolish things that a child's sensitive mind tends to stick to its permanent memory is what happened during the time I sat with my governess in Dr. Pnin's sunny, luxuriously beautiful waiting room.There, on the mantelpiece, stood a gilt clock whose round glass shade reflected a dimmed blue shadow of a window, and two flies were slowly drawing a square around the lifeless chandelier. .A lady in a feathered hat and her husband in dark glasses sat silently on a divan; then an officer of the cavalry came in and sat down at the window to read a newspaper; My husband came into Dr. Pnin's consulting room; and it was only then that I noticed a curious expression on the face of my governess.

I followed his line of sight with my good eye.The officer was turning towards the lady.He spoke brisk French, complaining about something she did or didn't do the day before.She held out one of her gloved hands for him to kiss.He dipped his mouth into the mesh of the glove--then got up and went away, and what was wrong with him was suddenly cured. In his gentle features, strong frame, lean thighs, ape-like ears and upper lip, Dr. Pawell Pnin looked a lot like Tim Murphy, who would not be until thirty or forty years later. Be that way.On the father's side, however, a strand of straw-coloured hair moderated the spread of alopecia; he wore black-rimmed pince-nez with a black ribbon of the kind worn by the late Dr. Chekhov; He stuttered a bit, and his voice was very different from his son's later speech.The gentle doctor picked out the stinging black particles in my eyes with a small instrument like a drumstick of an elf. He is really a god of medicine, and the pain was relieved immediately!I don't know where is that little dust now?The amazingly tedious fact is that it exists out there.

Perhaps because of my frequent visits to schoolmates' houses, I had seen other middle-class apartments, and so unconsciously imprinted in my memory the general reality of the Pnins' house.So, I can say that it roughly consists of two rows of rooms with a long corridor in the middle; on one side is the waiting room, the doctor's office, and then maybe the dining room and living room; on the other side are two or three bedrooms, a classroom, a bathroom, a maid's room and a kitchen.I was leaving with a little bottle of eye-drops, when my governess took the opportunity to ask Dr. Pnin whether eyestrain might cause stomach problems, when the outside front door opened and shut.Dr. Pnin walked briskly into the passage, asked a question, received a soft answer, and came back with his son Timofey.Timothy is a thirteen-year-old gimnazist (classical high school student) in his school uniform - black jacket, black shorts, shiny black belt (I went to a more liberal school, what do I like to wear? go to school).

Do I remember his crew cut, his puffy pale face, his red ears?Yes, crystal clear.I even remember the proud father saying: "This kid just got a five plus (A) in algebra", but how he got rid of his shoulders from his proud father's hands without anyone noticing.There was a strong smell of shredded cabbage pie from the end of the corridor, and through the open door of the classroom, I could see a map of Russia on the wall, a shelf of books, a stuffed room. Puffy squirrels and a monoplane with linen wings and rubber band motors.I have one too, exactly like his, but twice the size, bought in Biarritz.You turn the propeller a little while, and the rubber band twists in the opposite direction, creating the pleasingly dense corkscrew that belies a limited range of flight.