JК
The Real Life of Sebastian Knight :: Набоков Владимир Владимирович
Страница: 84 из 124'Is it true that you think you've fallen in love with that student chap? – vetovo studenta?' The seated girl's shape remains blank except for the arm and a thin brown hand toying with a bicycle pump. With the end of the holder it slowly writes on the soft earth the word 'yes', in I English, to make it gentler.
The curtain is rung down. Yes, that is all. It is very little but it is heartbreaking. Never more may he ask of the boy who sits daily at the next school desk, 'And how is your sister?' Nor must he ever question old Miss Forbes, who still drops in now and then, about the little girl to whom she had also given lessons. And how shall he tread again the same paths next summer, and watch the sunset and cycle down to the river? (But next summer was mainly devoted to the futurist poet Pan.)
By a chance conjuncture of circumstances it was Natasha Rosanov's brother that drove me to the Charlottenburg station to catch the Paris express. I said how curious it had been to have talked to his sister, now the plump mother of two boys, about a distant summer in the dreamland of Russia. He answered that he was perfectly content with his job in Berlin. I tried, as I had vainly tried before, to make him talk of Sebastian's school life. 'My memory is appallingly bad,' he replied, 'and anyway I am too busy to be sentimental about such ordinary things.'
'Oh, but surely, surely,' I said, 'you can recall some little outstanding fact, anything would be welcome….' Her laughed. 'Well,' he said, 'haven't you just spent hours talking to my sister? She adores the past, doesn't she? She says, you are going to put her in a book as she was in those days, she is quite looking forward to it, in fact.'
'Please, try and remember something,' I insisted, stubbornly.
'I am telling you that I do not remember, you queer person. It's useless, quite useless. There is nothing to relate except ordinary rot about cribbing and cramming and nicknaming teachers. We had quite a good time, I suppose…. But you know, your brother… how shall I put it?… your brother was not very popular at school….'
15
As the reader may have noticed, I have tried to put into this book as little of my own self as possible. I have tried not to allude (though a hint now and then might have made the background of my research somewhat clearer) to the circumstances of my life.
The curtain is rung down. Yes, that is all. It is very little but it is heartbreaking. Never more may he ask of the boy who sits daily at the next school desk, 'And how is your sister?' Nor must he ever question old Miss Forbes, who still drops in now and then, about the little girl to whom she had also given lessons. And how shall he tread again the same paths next summer, and watch the sunset and cycle down to the river? (But next summer was mainly devoted to the futurist poet Pan.)
By a chance conjuncture of circumstances it was Natasha Rosanov's brother that drove me to the Charlottenburg station to catch the Paris express. I said how curious it had been to have talked to his sister, now the plump mother of two boys, about a distant summer in the dreamland of Russia. He answered that he was perfectly content with his job in Berlin. I tried, as I had vainly tried before, to make him talk of Sebastian's school life. 'My memory is appallingly bad,' he replied, 'and anyway I am too busy to be sentimental about such ordinary things.'
'Oh, but surely, surely,' I said, 'you can recall some little outstanding fact, anything would be welcome….' Her laughed. 'Well,' he said, 'haven't you just spent hours talking to my sister? She adores the past, doesn't she? She says, you are going to put her in a book as she was in those days, she is quite looking forward to it, in fact.'
'Please, try and remember something,' I insisted, stubbornly.
'I am telling you that I do not remember, you queer person. It's useless, quite useless. There is nothing to relate except ordinary rot about cribbing and cramming and nicknaming teachers. We had quite a good time, I suppose…. But you know, your brother… how shall I put it?… your brother was not very popular at school….'
15
As the reader may have noticed, I have tried to put into this book as little of my own self as possible. I have tried not to allude (though a hint now and then might have made the background of my research somewhat clearer) to the circumstances of my life.