Pnin

Thenceforth they would often 'devise', as they met and stopped on thresholds, on landings, on two different levels of staircase steps (exchanging altitudes and turning to each other anew), or as they walked in opposite directions up and down a room which at the moment existed for them only as an espace meublé, to use a Pninian term. It soon transpired that Timofey was a veritable encyclopedia of Russian shrugs and shakes, had tabulated them, and could add something to Laurence's files on the philosophical interpretation of pictorial and non-pictorial, national and environmental gestures. It was very pleasant to see the two men discuss a legend or a religion, Timofey blossoming out in amphoric motion, Laurence chopping away with one hand. Laurence even made a film of what Timofey considered to be the essentials of Russian 'carpalistics', with Pnin in a polo shirt, a Gioconda smile on his lips, demonstrating the movements underlying such Russian verbs - used in reference to hands - as mahnut', vsplesnut', razvesti: the one-hand downward loose shake of weary relinquishment; the two-hand dramatic splash of amazed distress; and the 'disjunctive' motion - hands travelling apart to signify helpless passivity. And in conclusion, very slowly, Pnin showed how, in the international 'shaking the finger' gesture, a half turn, as delicate as the switch of the wrist in fencing, metamorphosed the Russian solemn symbol of pointing up, 'the Judge in Heaven sees you!' into a German air picture of the; stick - 'something is coming to you!' 'However,' added objective Pnin, 'Russian metaphysical police can break physical bones also very well.'
    With apologies for his 'negligent toilet', Pnin showed the film to a group of students - and Betty Bliss, a graduate working in Comparative Literature where Pnin was assisting Dr Hagen, announced that Timofey Pavlovich looked exactly like Buddha in an oriental moving picture she had seen in the Asiatic Department. This Betty Bliss, a plump maternal girl of some twenty-nine summers, was a soft thorn in Pnin's ageing flesh. Ten years before she had had a handsome heel for a lover, who had jilted her for a little tramp, and later she had had a dragging, hopelessly complicated, Chekhovian rather than Dostoyevskian affair with a cripple who was now married to his nurse, a cheap cutie. Poor Pnin hesitated. In principle, marriage was not excluded. In his new dental glory, he went so far one seminar session, after the rest had gone, as to hold her hand on his palm and pat it while they were sitting together and discussing Turgenev's poem in prose: 'How fair, how fresh were the roses.' She could hardly finish reading, her bosom bursting with sighs, the held hand aquiver. 'Turgenev,' said Pnin, putting the hand back on the table, 'was made by the ugly, but adored by him, singer Pauline Viardot to play the idiot in charades and tableaux vivants, and Madam Pushkin said: "You annoy me with your verses, Pushkin" - and in old age - to think only! - the wife of colossus, colossus Tolstoy liked much better than him a stoopid moozishan with a red noz!'
    Pnin had nothing against Miss Bliss. In trying to visualize a serene senility, he saw her with passable clarity bringing him his lap robe or refilling his fountain pen. He liked her all right - but his heart belonged to another woman.
    The cat, as Pnin would say, cannot be hid in a bag. In order to explain my poor friend's abject excitement one evening in the middle of term - when he received a certain telegram and then paced his room for at least forty minutes - it should be stated that Pnin had not always been single. The Clementses were playing Chinese chequers among the reflections of a comfortable fire when Pnin came clattering downstairs, slipped, and almost fell at their feet like a supplicant in some ancient city full of injustice, but retrieved his balance - only to crash into the poker and tongs.
    'I have come,' he said, panting, 'to inform, or more correctly ask you, if I can have a female visitor Saturday - in the day, of course. She is my former wife, now Dr Liza Wind - maybe you have heard in psychiatric circles.'

5
    There are some beloved women whose eyes, by a chance blend of brilliancy and shape, affect us not directly, not at the moment of shy perception, but in a delayed and cumulative burst of light when the heartless person is absent, and the magic agony abides, and its lenses and lamps are installed in the dark. Whatever eyes Liza Pnin, now