JК
The Real Life of Sebastian Knight :: Набоков Владимир Владимирович
Страница: 82 из 124Yes… the Rosanovs…. They knew your family and all that….'
'My brother had a school-fellow called Rosanov,' I said.
'You'll find them in the telephone book,' she went on rapidly, 'you see, I don't know them very well, and I am quite incapable just now of looking up anything.'
She was called away and I wandered alone toward the hall. There I found an elderly gentleman pensively sitting on my overcoat and smoking a cigar. At first he could not quite make out what I wanted but then was effusively apologetic.
Somehow I felt sorry it had not been Helene Grinstein. Although of course she never could have been the woman who had made Sebastian so miserable. Girls of her type do not smash a man's life – they build it. There she had been steadily managing a house that was bursting with grief and had found it possible to attend to the fantastic affairs of a completely superfluous stranger. And not only had she listened to me, she had given me a tip which I then and there followed, and though the people I saw had nothing to do with Blauberg and the unknown woman, I collected one of the most precious pages of Sebastian's life. A more systematic mind than mine would have placed them in the beginning of this book, but my quest had developed its own magic and logic and though I sometimes cannot help believing that it had gradually grown into a dream, that quest, using the pattern of reality for the weaving of its own fancies, I am forced to recognize that I was being led right, and that in striving to render Sebastian's life I must now follow the same rhythmical interlacements.
There seems to have been a law of some strange harmony in the placing of a meeting relating to Sebastian's first adolescent romance in such close proximity to the echoes of his last dark love. Two modes of his life question each other and the answer is his life itself, and that is the nearest one ever can approach a human truth. He was sixteen and so was she. The lights go out, the curtain rises and a Russian summer landscape is disclosed; the bend of a river half in the shade because of the dark fir trees growing on one steep clay bank and almost reaching out with their deep black reflections to the other side which is low and sunny and sweet, with marsh-flowers and silver-tufted grass. Sebastian, his close-cropped head hatless, his loose silk blouse now clinging to his shoulder-blades, now to his chest according to whether he bends or leans back, is lustily rowing in a boat painted a shiny green. A girl is sitting at the helm, but we shall let her remain achromatic: a mere outline, a white shape not filled in with colour by the artist.
'My brother had a school-fellow called Rosanov,' I said.
'You'll find them in the telephone book,' she went on rapidly, 'you see, I don't know them very well, and I am quite incapable just now of looking up anything.'
She was called away and I wandered alone toward the hall. There I found an elderly gentleman pensively sitting on my overcoat and smoking a cigar. At first he could not quite make out what I wanted but then was effusively apologetic.
Somehow I felt sorry it had not been Helene Grinstein. Although of course she never could have been the woman who had made Sebastian so miserable. Girls of her type do not smash a man's life – they build it. There she had been steadily managing a house that was bursting with grief and had found it possible to attend to the fantastic affairs of a completely superfluous stranger. And not only had she listened to me, she had given me a tip which I then and there followed, and though the people I saw had nothing to do with Blauberg and the unknown woman, I collected one of the most precious pages of Sebastian's life. A more systematic mind than mine would have placed them in the beginning of this book, but my quest had developed its own magic and logic and though I sometimes cannot help believing that it had gradually grown into a dream, that quest, using the pattern of reality for the weaving of its own fancies, I am forced to recognize that I was being led right, and that in striving to render Sebastian's life I must now follow the same rhythmical interlacements.
There seems to have been a law of some strange harmony in the placing of a meeting relating to Sebastian's first adolescent romance in such close proximity to the echoes of his last dark love. Two modes of his life question each other and the answer is his life itself, and that is the nearest one ever can approach a human truth. He was sixteen and so was she. The lights go out, the curtain rises and a Russian summer landscape is disclosed; the bend of a river half in the shade because of the dark fir trees growing on one steep clay bank and almost reaching out with their deep black reflections to the other side which is low and sunny and sweet, with marsh-flowers and silver-tufted grass. Sebastian, his close-cropped head hatless, his loose silk blouse now clinging to his shoulder-blades, now to his chest according to whether he bends or leans back, is lustily rowing in a boat painted a shiny green. A girl is sitting at the helm, but we shall let her remain achromatic: a mere outline, a white shape not filled in with colour by the artist.