Pnin

over-quoted one day: The evolution of sense is, in a sense, the evolution of nonsense.

2
    Half an hour later, Joan glanced over the moribund cactuses in the sun-porch window and saw a raincoated, hatless man, with a head like a polished globe of copper, optimistically ringing at the front door of her neighbour's beautiful brick house. The old Scotty stood beside him in much the same candid attitude as he. Miss Dingwall came out with a mop, let the slowpoke, dignified dog in, and directed Pnin to the Clements' clapboard residence.
    Timofey Pnin settled down in the living-room, crossed his legs po amerikanski (the American way), and entered into some unnecessary detail. It was a curriculum vitae in a nutshell - a coconut shell. Born in St Petersburg in 1898. Both parents died of typhus in 1917. Left for Kiev in 1918. Was with the White Army five months, first as a 'field telephonist', then at the Military Information Office. Escaped from Red-invaded Crimea to Constantinople in 1919. Completed university education -
    'Say, I was there as a child exactly the same year,' said pleased Joan. 'My father went to Turkey on a government mission and took us along. We might have met! I remember the word for water. And there was a rose garden -'
    'Water in Turkish is "su",' said Pnin, a linguist by necessity, and went on with his fascinating past: Completed university education in Prague. Was connected with various scientific institutions. Then - 'Well, to make a long story very short: habitated in Paris from 1925, abandoned France I at beginning of Hitler war. Is now here. Is American citizen. Is teaching Russian and such subjects at Vandal College. From Hagen, Head of German Department, obtainable all references. Or from the College Home for Single Instructors.'
    Hadn't he been comfortable there?
    'Too many people,' said Pnin. 'Inquisitive people. Whereas special privacy is now to me absolutely necessary.' He coughed into his fist with an unexpected cavernous sound (which somehow reminded Joan of a professional Don Cossack she had once met) and then took the plunge: 'I must warn: will have all my teeth pulled out. It is a repulsive operation.'
    'Well, come upstairs,' said Joan brightly.
    Pnin peered into Isabel's pink-walled, white-flounced room. It had suddenly begun to snow, though the sky was pure platinum, and the slow scintillant downcome got reflected in the silent looking glass. Methodically Pnin inspected Hoecker's 'Girl with a Cat' above the bed, and Hunt's 'The Belated Kid' above the bookshelf. Then he held his hand at a little distance from the window.
    'Is temperature uniform?'
    Joan dashed to the radiator.
    'Piping hot,' she retorted.
    'I am asking - are there currents of air?'
    'Oh yes, you will have plenty of air. And here is the bathroom - small, but all yours.'
    'No douche?' inquired Pnin, looking up. 'Maybe it is better so. My friend, Professor Chateau of Columbia, once broke his leg in two places. Now I must think. What price are you prepared to demand? I ask it, because I will not give more than a dollar per day - not including, of course, nootrition.
    'All right,' said Joan with that pleasant, quick laugh of hers.
    The same afternoon, one of Pnin's students, Charles McBeth ('A madman, I think, judging by his compositions,' Pnin used to say), zestfully brought over Pnin's luggage in a pathologically purplish car with no fenders on the left side, and after an early dinner at The Egg and We, a recently inaugurated and not very successful little restaurant which Pnin frequented from sheer sympathy with failure, our friend applied himself to the pleasant task of Pninizing his new quarters. Isabel's adolescence had gone with her, or, if not, had been eradicated by her mother, but traces of the girl's childhood somehow had been allowed to remain, and before finding the most advantageous situations for his elaborate sun-lamp, huge Russian-alphabet typewriter in a broken coffin fixed with Scotch tape, five pairs of handsome, curiously small shoes with ten shoe trees rooted in them, a coffee grinding-and-boiling contraption which was not quite as good as the one that had exploded last year, a couple of alarm clocks running the same race every night, and seventy-four library books, mainly old Russian periodicals solidly bound by WCL, Pnin delicately exiled to a chair on the landing half a dozen forlorn volumes, such as Birds at Home, Happy Days in Holland, and My First Dictionary ('With more than 600 illustrations