The Eye by Vladimir Nabokov Page B

composure.
    “Love is a great thing,” said Uncle Pasha, and Smurov smiled politely. “This girl is a treasure. And you, you’re a young engineer, aren’t you? Your job coming along well?”
    Without going into details Smurov said he was doing all right. Roman Bogdanovich suddenly slapped his knee and grew purple.
    “I’ll put in a good word for you in London,”Uncle Pasha said. “I have many connections. Yes, I’m off, I’m off. Right now, as a matter of fact.”
    And the astounding old fellow glanced at his watch and proffered us both hands. Smurov, overcome with love’s bliss, unexpectedly embraced him.
    “How do you like that? … There is a queer one for you!” said Roman Bogdanovich, when the door had closed behind Uncle Pasha.
    Evgenia came back into the parlor. “Where is he?” she asked with surprise: there was something magical about his disappearance.
    She hastened up to Smurov. “Please, excuse my uncle,” she began. “I was foolish enough to tell him about Vanya and Mukhin. He must have got the names mixed up. At first I did not realize how gaga he was——”
    “And I listened and thought I was going crazy,” Roman Bogdanovich put in, spreading his hands.
    “Oh, come on, come on, Smurov,” Evgenia went on. “What’s the matter with you? You must not take it to heart like that. After all, it’s no insult to you.”
    “I’m all right, I just did not know,” Smurov said hoarsely.
    “What do you mean you did not know?Everybody knows … It’s been going on for ages. Yes, of course, they adore each other. It’s almost two years now. Listen, I’ll tell you something amusing about Uncle Pasha: once, when he was still relatively young—no, don’t you turn away, it’s a very interesting story—one day, when he was relatively young he happened to be walking along Nevski Avenue——”
    There follows a brief period when I stopped watching Smurov: I grew heavy, surrendered again to the gnawing of gravity, donned anew my former flesh, as if indeed all this life around me was not the play of my imagination, but was real, and I was part of it, body and soul. If you are not loved, but do not know for sure whether a potential rival is loved or not, and, if there are several, do not know which of them is luckier than you; if you subsist on that hopeful ignorance which helps you to resolve in conjecture an otherwise intolerable agitation; then all is well, you can live. But woe when the name is at last announced, and that name is not yours! For she was so enchanting, it even brought tears to one’s eyes, and, at the merest thought of her, a moaning, awful, salty night would well up within me. Her downy face, nearsighted eyes and tender unpainted lips,which grew chapped and a little swollen from the cold, and whose color seemed to run at the edges, dissolving in a feverish pink that seemed to need so badly the balm of a butterfly kiss; her short bright dresses: her big knees, which squeezed together, unbearably tight, when she played skat with us, bending her silky black head over her cards; and her hands, adolescently clammy and a little coarse, which one especially longed to touch and kiss—yes, everything about her was excruciating and somehow irremediable, and only in my dreams, drenched with tears, did I at last embrace her and feel under my lips her neck and the hollow near the clavicle. But she would always break away, and I would awaken, still throbbing. What difference did it make to me whether she were stupid or intelligent, or what her childhood had been like, or what books she read, or what she thought about the universe? I really knew nothing about her, blinded as I was by that burning loveliness which replaces everything else and justifies everything, and which, unlike a human soul (often accessible and possessable), can in no way be appropriated, just as one cannot include among one’s belongings the colors of ragged sunset clouds above black houses, or a flower’s smell