Pnin

were to her the tremendous porcupines that came to gnaw at the delicious, gamy old wood of the house, or the elegant, eerie little skunks that sampled the cat's milk in the backyard. She was nonplussed and enchanted by the number of plants and creatures she could not identify, mistook Yellow Warblers for stray canaries, and on the occasion of Susan's birthday was known to have brought, with pride and panting enthusiasm, for the ornamentation of the dinner table, a profusion of beautiful poison-ivy leaves, hugged to her pink, freckled breast.

3
    The Bolotovs and Madam Shpolyanski, a little lean woman in slacks, were the first people to see Pnin as he cautiously turned into a sandy avenue, bordered with wild lupins, and, sitting very straight, stiffly clutching the steering-wheel as if he were a farmer more used to his tractor than to his car, entered, at ten miles an hour and in first gear, the grove of old, dishevelled, curiously authentic-looking pines that separated the paved road from Cook's Castle.
    Varvara buoyantly rose from the seat of the pavilion - where she and Roza Shpolyanski had just discovered Bolotov reading a battered book and smoking a forbidden cigarette. She greeted Pnin with a clapping of hands, while her husband showed as much geniality as he was capable of by slowly waving the book he had closed on his thumb to mark the place. Pnin killed the motor and sat beaming at his friends. The collar of his green sport shirt was undone; his partly unzipped windbreaker seemed too tight for his impressive torso; his bronzed bald head, with the puckered brow and conspicuous vermicular vein on the temple, bent low as he wrestled with the door handle and finally dived out of the car.
    'Avtomobil', kostyum - nu pryamo amerikanets (a veritable American), pryamo Ayzenhauer!' said Varvara, and introduced Pnin to Roza Abramovna Shpolyanski.
    'We had some mutual friends forty years ago,' remarked that lady, peering at Pnin with curiosity.
    'Oh, let us not mention such astronomical figures,' said Bolotov, approaching and replacing with a grass blade the thumb he had been using as a bookmarker. 'You know,' he continued, shaking Pnin's hand, 'I am rereading Anna Karenina for the seventh time and I derive as much rapture as I did, not forty, but sixty, years ago, when I was a lad of seven. And, every time, one discovers new things - for instance, I notice now that Lyov Nikolaich does not know on what day his novel starts: it seems to be Friday because that is the day the clockman comes to wind up the clocks in the Oblonski house, but it is also Thursday as mentioned in the conversation at the skating rink between Lyovin and Kitty's mother.'
    'What on earth does it matter,' cried Varvara. 'Who on earth wants to know the exact day?'
    'I can tell you the exact day,' said Pnin, blinking in the broken sunlight and inhaling the remembered tang of northern pines. 'The action of the novel starts in the beginning of 1872, namely on Friday, February the twenty-third by the New Style. In his morning paper Oblonski reads that Beust is rumoured to have proceeded to Wiesbaden. This is of course Count Friedrich Ferdinand von Beust, who had just been appointed Austrian Ambassador to the Court of St James's. After presenting his credentials, Beust had gone to the continent for a rather protracted Christmas vacation - had spent there two months with his family, and was now returning to London, where, according to his own memoirs in two volumes, preparations were under way for the thanksgiving service to be held in St Paul's on February the twenty-seventh for the recovering from typhoid fever of the Prince of Wales. However (odnako), it really is hot here (i zharko the u vas)! I think I shall now present myself before the most luminous orbs (presvetlïe ochi, jocular) of Alexandr Petrovich and then go for a dip (okupnutsya, also jocular) in the river he so vividly describes in his letter.'
    'Alexandr Petrovich is away till Monday, on business or pleasure,' said Varvara Bolotov, 'but I think you will find Susanna Karlovna sun-bathing on her favourite lawn behind the house. Shout before you approach too near.'

4
    Cook's Castle was a three-storey brick-and-timber mansion built around 1860 and partly rebuilt half a century later, when Susan's father purchased it from the Dudley-Greene family in order to make of it a select resort hotel for the richer patrons of the curative Onkwedo Springs. It was an elaborate and ugly building in a mongrel