An elliptic flock of pigeons, in circular volitation, soaring grey, flapping white, and then grey again, wheeled across the limpid, pale sky, above the College Library. A train whistled afar as mournfully as in the steppes. A skimpy squirrel dashed over a patch of sunlit snow, where a tree trunk's shadow, olive-green on the turf, became greyish blue for a stretch, while the tree itself, with a brisk, scrabbly sound, ascended, naked, into the sky, where the pigeons swept by for a third and last time. The squirrel, invisible now in a crotch, chattered, scolding the delinquents who would pot him out of his tree. Pnin, on the dirty black ice of the flagged path, slipped again, threw up one arm in an abrupt convulsion, regained his balance, and, with a solitary smile, stooped to pick up Zol. Fond Lit., which lay wide open to a snapshot of a Russian. pasture with Lyov Tolstoy trudging across it toward the camera and some long-maned horses behind him, their innocent heads turned toward the photographer too.
V boyu li, v stranstvii, v volnah? In fight, in travel, or in waves? Or on the Waindell campus? Gently champing his dentures, which retained a sticky layer of cottage cheese, Pnin went up the slippery library steps.
Like so many ageing college people, Pnin had long ceased to notice the existence of students on the campus, in the corridors, in the library--anywhere, in brief, save in functional classroom concentrations. In the beginning, he had been much upset by the sight of some of them, their poor young heads on their forearms, fast asleep among the ruins of knowledge; but now, except for a girl's comely nape here and there, he saw nobody in the Reading Room.
Mrs Thayer was at the circulation desk. Her mother and Mrs Clements' mother had been first cousins.
'How are you today, Professor Pnin?'
'I am very well, Mrs Fire.'
'Laurence and Joan aren't back yet, are they?'
'No. I have brought this book back because I received this card--'
'I wonder if poor Isabel will really get divorced.'
'I have not heard. Mrs Fire, permit me to ask--'
'I suppose we'll have to find you another room, if they bring her back with them.'
'Mrs Fire, permit me to ask something or other. This card which I received yesterday--could you maybe tell me who is the other reader?'
'Let me check.'
She checked. The other reader proved to be Timofey Pnin; Volume 18 had been requested by him the Friday before. It was also true that this Volume 18 was already charged to this Pnin, who had had it since Christmas and now stood with his hands upon it, like an ancestral picture of a magistrate.
'It can't be!' cried Pnin. 'I requested on Friday Volume 19, year 1947, not 18, year 1940'
'But look--you wrote Volume 18. Anyway, 19 is still being processed. Are you keeping this?'
'18, 19,' muttered Pnin. 'There is not great difference! I put the year correctly, that is important! Yes, I still need 18--and send to me a more effishant card when 19 available.'
Growling a little, he took the unwieldy, abashed book to his favourite alcove and laid it down there, wrapped in his muffler.
They can't read, these women. The year was plainly inscribed.
As usual he marched to the Periodicals Room and there glanced at the news in the latest (Saturday, February 12--and this was Tuesday, O Careless Reader!) issue of the Russian-language daily published, since 1918, by an йmigrй group in Chicago. As usual, he carefully scanned the advertisements. Dr Popov, photographed in his new white smock, promised elderly people new vigour and joy. A music corporation listed Russian phonograph records for sale, such as 'Broken Life, a Waltz' and 'The Song of a Front-Line Chauffeur'. A somewhat Gogolian mortician praised his hearses de luxe, which were also available for picnics. Another Gogolian person, in Miami, offered 'a two-room apartment for non-drinkers (dlya trezvпh), among fruit trees and flowers', while in Hammond a room was wistfully being let' in a small quiet family'--and for no special reason the reader suddenly saw, with passionate and ridiculous lucidity, his parents, Dr Pavel Pnin and Valeria Pnin, he with a medical journal, she with a political review, sitting in two armchairs, facing each other in a small, cheerfully lighted drawing room on Galernaya Street, St Petersburg, forty years ago.
He also perused the current item in a tremendously long and tedious controversy between three йmigrй factions. It had started by Faction A's accusing Faction B of inertia and illustrating it by the proverb. 'He wishes to climb the fir tree but is afraid to scrape his shins.' This had provoked an acid Letter to the Editor from' An Old Optimist', entitled 'Fir Trees and Inertia' and beginning: 'There is an old American saying "He who lives in a glass house should not try to kill two birds with one stone".' In the present issue, there was a two-thousand-word feuilleton contributed by a representative of Faction C and headed 'On Fir Trees, Glass Houses, and Optimism', and Pnin read this with great interest and sympathy.
He then returned to his carrell for his own research.
He contemplated writing a Petite Histoire of Russian culture, in which a choice of Russian Curiosities, Customs, Literary Anecdotes, and so forth would be presented in such a way as to reflect in miniature la Grande Histoire--Major Concatenations of Events. He was still at the blissful stage of collecting his material; and many good young people considered it a treat and an honour to see Pnin pull out a catalogue drawer from the comprehensive bosom of a card cabinet and take it, like a big nut, to a secluded corner and there make a quiet mental meal of it, now moving his lips in soundless comment, critical, satisfied, perplexed, and now lifting his rudimentary eyebrows and forgetting them there, left high upon his spacious brow where they remained long after all trace of displeasure or doubt had gone. He was lucky to be at Waindell. Sometime in the nineties the eminent bibliophile and Slavist John Thurston Todd (his bearded bust presided over the drinking fountain) had visited hospitable Russia, and after his death the books he had amassed there quietly chuted into a remote stack. Wearing rubber gloves so as to avoid being stung by the amerikanski electricity in the metal of the shelving, Pnin would go to those books and gloat over them: obscure magazines of the Roaring Sixties in marbled boards; century-old historical monographs, their somnolent pages foxed with fungus spots; Russian classics in horrible and pathetic cameo bindings, whose moulded profiles of poets reminded dewy-eyed Timofey of his boyhood, when he could idly palpate on the book cover Pushkin's slightly chafed side whisker or Zhukovski's smudgy nose.
Today from Kostromskoy's voluminous work (Moscow, 1855) on Russian myths--a rare book, not to be removed from the library--Pnin, with a not unhappy sigh, started to copy out a passage referring to the old pagan games that were still practised at the time, throughout the woodlands of the Upper Volga, in the margins of Christian ritual. During a festive week in May--the so-called Green Week which graded into Whitsuntide--peasant maidens would make wreaths of buttercups and frog orchises; then, singing snatches of ancient love chants, they hung these garlands on riverside willows; and on Whit Sunday the wreaths were shaken down into the river, where, unwinding, they floated like so many serpents while the maidens floated and chanted among them.
A curious verbal association struck Pnin at this point; he could not catch it by its mermaid tail but made a note on his index card and plunged back into Kostromskoy.
When Pnin raised his eyes again, it was dinner-time.
Doffing his spectacles, he rubbed with the knuckles of the hand that held them his naked and tired eyes and, still in thought, fixed his mild gaze on the window above, where, gradually, through his dissolving meditation, there appeared the violet-blue air of dusk, silver-tooled by the reflection of the fluorescent lights of the ceiling, and, among spidery black twigs, a mirrored row of bright book spines.