Pnin

persistence of memory, 'I still hear the trakh! the crack when one hit the wooden pieces and they jumped in the air. Will you not finish the meat? You do not like it?'
    'It's awfully good,' said Victor, 'but I am not very hungry.'
    'Oh, you must eat more, much more if you want to be a footballist.'
    'I'm afraid I don't care much for football, In fact, I hate football. I'm not very good at any game, really,'
    'You are not a lover of football?' said Pnin, and a look of dismay crept over his large expressive face. He pursed his lips, He opened them - but said nothing. In silence he ate his vanilla ice-cream, which contained no vanilla and was not made of cream.
    'We will now take your luggage and a taxi,' said Pnin.
    As soon as they reached the Sheppard House, Pnin ushered Victor into the parlour and rapidly introduced him to his landlord, old Bill Sheppard, formerly superintendent of the college grounds (who was totally deaf and wore a white button in one ear), and to his brother, Bob Sheppard, who had recently come from Buffalo to live with Bill after the latter's wife died. Leaving Victor with them for a minute, Pnin hastily stomped upstairs. The house was a vulnerable construction, and objects in the rooms downstairs reacted with various vibrations to the vigorous footsteps on the upper landing and to the sudden rasp of a window sash in the guest room.
    'Now that picture there,' deaf Mr Sheppard was saying, pointing with a didactic finger at a large muddy water colour on the wall, 'represents the farm where my brother and I used to spend summers fifty years ago. It was painted by my mother's schoolmate, Grace Wells: her son, Charlie Wells, owns that hotel in Waindellville - I am sure Dr Neen has met him - a very, very fine man. My late wife was an artist too. I shall show you some works of hers in a moment. Well, that tree there, behind that barn - you can just make it out -
    A terrible clatter and crash came from the stairs: Pnin, on his way down, had lost his footing.
    'In the spring of 1905,' said Mr Sheppard, wagging his index at the picture, 'under that cottonwood tree -'
    He noticed that his brother and Victor had hurried out of the room to the foot of the stairs. Poor Pnin had come down the last steps on his back. He lay supine for a moment, his eyes moving to and fro. He was helped to his feet. No bones were broken.
    Pnin smiled and said: 'It is like the splendid story of Tolstoy - you must read one day, Victor - about Ivan Ilyich Golovin who fell and got in consequence kidney of the cancer. Victor will now come upstairs with me.'
    Victor followed, with grip. There was a reproduction of Van Gogh's 'La Berceuse' on the landing and Victor, in passing, acknowledged it with a nod of ironic recognition. The guest room was full of the noise of the rain falling on fragrant branches in the framed blackness of the open window. On the desk lay a wrapped-up book and a ten-dollar bill. Victor beamed and bowed to his gruff but kindly host. 'Unwrap,' said Pnin.
    With courteous eagerness, Victor obeyed. Then he sat down on the edge of the bed and, his auburn hair coming down in glossy lanks over his right temple, his striped tie dangling out of the front of his grey jacket, his bulky grey flannelled knees parted, zestfully opened the book. He in. tended to praise it - first, because it was a gift, and second, because he believed it to be a translation from Pnin's mother tongue. He remembered there had been at the Psychotherapeutic Institute a Dr Yakov London from Russia. Rather unfortunately, Victor lit upon a passage about Zarinska, the Yukon Indian Chief's daughter, and light-heartedly mistook her for a Russian maiden. 'Her great black eyes were fixed upon her tribesmen in fear and in defiance. So extreme the tension, she had forgotten to breathe...'
    'I think I'm going to like this,' said polite Victor. 'Last summer I read Crime and -' A young yawn distended his staunchly smiling mouth. With sympathy, with approval with heartache Pnin looked at Liza yawning after one of those long happy parties at the Arbenins' or the Polyanskis' in Paris, fifteen, twenty, twenty-five years ago.
    'No more reading today,' said Pnin. 'I know that it is a very exciting book but you will read and read tomorrow. I wish you good night. The bathroom is across the landing.'
    He shook hands with Victor and marched to his own room.

9
    It still rained. All the lights in the Sheppard house were out. The brook in the gully behind the garden, a