The Real Life of Sebastian Knight   ::   Набоков Владимир Владимирович

Pahl Pahlich made a lightning swoop and took the queen with his bishop. Then he roared with laughter.

'And now,' said Black calmly, when White had stopped roaring, 'now you are in the soup. Check, my dove.'

While they were arguing over the position, with White trying to take his move back, I looked round the room. I noted the portrait of what had been in the past an Imperial Family. And the moustache of a famous general, moscowed a few years ago. I noted, too, the bulging springs of the bug-brown couch, which served, I felt, as a triple bed – for husband and wife and child. For a minute, the object of my coming seemed to be madly absurd. Somehow, too, I remembered Chichikov's round of weird visits in Gogol's Dead Souls. The little boy was drawing a motor car for me.

'I am at your service,' said Pahl Pahlich (he had lost, I saw, and Black was putting the pieces back into an old card-board box – all except the thimble). I said what I had carefully prepared beforehand: namely that I wanted to see his wife, because she had been friends with some… well, German friends of mine. (I was afraid of mentioning Sebastian's name too soon.)

'You'll have to wait a bit then,' said Pahl Pahlich. 'She is busy in town, you see. I think, she'll be back in a moment.'

I made up my mind to wait, although I felt that today I should hardly manage to see his wife alone. I hoped however that a little deft questioning might at once settle whether she had known Sebastian; then, by and by, I could make her talk.

'In the meantime,' said Pahl Pahlich, 'we shall clap down a little brandy – cognachkoo.'

The child, finding that I had been sufficiently interested in his pictures, wandered off to his uncle, who at once took him on his knee and proceeded to draw with incredible rapidity and very beautifully a racing car.

'You are an artist,' I said – to say something.

Pahl Pahlich, who was rinsing glasses in the tiny kitchen, laughed and shouted over his shoulder: 'Oh, he's an all-round genius. He can play the violin standing upon his head, and he can multiply one telephone number by another in three seconds, and he can write his name upside down in his ordinary hand.'

'And he can drive a taxi,' said the child, dangling its thin, dirty little legs.

'No, I shan't drink with you,' said Uncle Black, as Pahl Pahlich put the glasses on the table. 'I think I shall take the boy out for a walk. Where are his things?'

The boy's coat was found, and Black led him away. Pahl Pahlich poured out the brandy and said: 'You must excuse me for these glasses.