Symbols and Signs
By Vladimir Nabokov
For the fourth time in as many years, they were
confronted with the problem of what birthday present to take to a young man who
was incurably deranged in his mind. Desires he had none. Man-made objects were
to him either hives of evil, vibrant with a malignant activity that he alone
could perceive, or gross comforts for which no use could be found in his
abstract world. After eliminating a number of articles that might offend him or
frighten him (anything in the gadget line, for instance, was taboo), his
parents chose a dainty and innocent trifle—a basket with ten different fruit
jellies in ten little jars.
At the time of his birth, they had already been married
for a long time; a score of years had elapsed, and now they were quite old. Her
drab gray hair was pinned up carelessly. She wore cheap black dresses. Unlike
other women of her age (such as Mrs. Sol, their next-door neighbor, whose face
was all pink and mauve with paint and whose hat was a cluster of brookside
flowers), she presented a naked white countenance to the faultfinding light of
spring. Her husband, who in the old country had been a fairly successful
businessman, was now, in New York, wholly dependent on his brother Isaac, a
real American of almost forty years’ standing. They seldom saw Isaac and had
nicknamed him the Prince.
That Friday, their son’s birthday, everything went wrong.
The subway train lost its life current between two stations and for a quarter
of an hour they could hear nothing but the dutiful beating of their hearts and
the rustling of newspapers. The bus they had to take next was late and kept
them waiting a long time on a street corner, and when it did come, it was
crammed with garrulous high-school children. It began to rain as they walked up
the brown path leading to the sanitarium. There they waited again, and instead
of their boy, shuffling into the room, as he usually did (his poor face sullen,
confused, ill-shaven, and blotched with acne), a nurse they knew and did not
care for appeared at last and brightly explained that he had again attempted to
take his life. He was all right, she said, but a visit from his parents might
disturb him. The place was so miserably understaffed, and things got mislaid or
mixed up so easily, that they decided not to leave their present in the office
but to bring it to him next time they came.
Outside the building, she waited for her husband to open
his umbrella and then took his arm. He kept clearing his throat, as he always
did when he was upset. They reached the bus-stop shelter on the other side of
the street and he closed his umbrella. A few feet away, under a swaying and
dripping tree, a tiny unfledged bird was helplessly twitching in a puddle.
During the long ride to the subway station, she and her
husband did not exchange a word, and every time she glanced at his old hands,
clasped and twitching upon the handle of his umbrella, and saw their swollen
veins and brown-spotted skin, she felt the mounting pressure of tears. As she
looked around, trying to hook her mind onto something, it gave her a kind of
soft shock, a mixture of compassion and wonder, to notice that one of the
passengers—a girl with dark hair and grubby red toenails—was weeping on the
shoulder of an older woman. Whom did that woman resemble? She resembled Rebecca
Borisovna, whose daughter had married one of the Soloveichiks—in Minsk, years
ago.
The last time the boy had tried to do it, his method had
been, in the doctor’s words, a masterpiece of inventiveness; he would have
succeeded had not an envious fellow-patient thought he was learning to fly and
stopped him just in time. What he had really wanted to do was to tear a hole in
his world and escape.
The system of his delusions had been the subject of an
elaborate paper in a scientific monthly, which the doctor at the sanitarium had
given to them to read. But long before that, she and her husband had puzzled it
out for themselves. “Referential mania,” the article had called it. In these
very rare cases, the patient imagines that everything happening around him is a
veiled reference to his personality and existence. He excludes real people from
the conspiracy, because he considers himself to be so much more intelligent
than other men. Phenomenal nature shadows him wherever he goes. Clouds in the
staring sky transmit to each other, by means of slow signs, incredibly detailed
information regarding him. His in- most thoughts are discussed at nightfall, in
manual alphabet, by darkly gesticulating trees. Pebbles or stains or sun flecks
form patterns representing, in some awful way, messages that he must intercept.
Everything is a cipher and of everything he is the theme. All around him, there
are spies. Some of them are detached observers, like glass surfaces and still
pools; others, such as coats in store windows, are prejudiced witnesses,
lynchers at heart; others, again (running water, storms), are hysterical to the
point of insanity, have a distorted opinion of him, and grotesquely
misinterpret his actions. He must be always on his guard and devote every
minute and module of life to the decoding of the undulation of things. The very
air he exhales is indexed and filed away. If only the interest he provokes were
limited to his immediate surroundings, but, alas, it is not! With distance, the
torrents of wild scandal increase in volume and volubility. The silhouettes of
his blood corpuscles, magnified a million times, flit over vast plains; and
still farther away, great mountains of unbearable solidity and height sum up,
in terms of granite and groaning firs, the ultimate truth of his being.
When they emerged from the thunder and foul air of the
subway, the last dregs of the day were mixed with the street lights. She wanted
to buy some fish for supper, so she handed him the basket of jelly jars,
telling him to go home. Accordingly, he returned to their tenement house,
walked up to the third landing, and then remembered he had given her his keys
earlier in the day.
In silence he sat down on the steps and in silence rose
when, some ten minutes later, she came trudging heavily up the stairs, smiling
wanly and shaking her head in deprecation of her silliness. They entered their
two-room flat and he at once went to the mirror. Straining the corners of his
mouth apart by means of his thumbs, with a horrible, mask-like grimace, he
removed his new, hopelessly uncomfortable dental plate. He read his
Russian-language newspaper while she laid the table. Still reading, he ate the
pale victuals that needed no teeth. She knew his moods and was also silent.
When he had gone to bed, she remained in the living room
with her pack of soiled playing cards and her old photograph albums. Across the
narrow courtyard, where the rain tinkled in the dark against some ash cans,
windows were blandly alight, and in one of them a black-trousered man, with his
hands clasped under his head and his elbows raised, could he seen lying supine
on an untidy bed. She pulled the blind down and examined the photographs. As a
baby, he looked more surprised than most babies. A photograph of a German maid
they had had in Leipzig and her fat-faced fiancé fell out of a fold of the
album. She turned the pages of the book: Minsk, the Revolution, Leipzig,
Berlin, Leipzig again, a slanting house front, badly out of focus. Here was the
boy when he was four years old, in a park, shyly, with puckered forehead,
looking away from an eager squirrel, as he would have from any other stranger.
Here was Aunt Rosa, a fussy, angular, wild-eyed old lady, who had lived in a
tremulous world of bad news, bankruptcies, train accidents, and cancerous
growths until the Germans put her to death, together with all the people she
had worried about. The boy, aged six—that was when he drew wonderful birds with
human hands and feet, and suffered from insomnia like a grown-up man. His
cousin, now a famous chess player. The boy again, aged about eight, already
hard to understand, afraid of the wallpaper in the passage, afraid of a certain
picture in a book, which merely showed an idyllic landscape with rocks on a
hillside and an old cart wheel hanging from the one branch of a leafless tree.
Here he was at ten—the year they left Europe. She remembered the shame, the
pity, the humiliating difficulties of the journey, and the ugly, vicious,
backward children he was with in the special school where he had been placed
after they arrived in America. And then came a time in his life, coinciding
with a long convalescence after pneumonia, when those little phobias of his,
which his parents had stubbornly regarded as the eccentricities of a
prodigiously gifted child, hardened, as it were, into a dense tangle of
logically interacting illusions, making them totally inaccessible to normal
minds.
All this, and much more, she had accepted, for, after
all, living does mean accepting the loss of one joy after another, not even
joys in her case, mere possibilities of improvement. She thought of the
recurrent waves of pain that for some reason or other she and her husband had
had to endure; of the in visible giants hurting her boy in some unimaginable
fashion; of the incalculable amount of tenderness contained in the world; of
the fate of this tenderness, which is either crushed or wasted, or transformed into
madness; of neglected children humming to themselves in unswept corners; of
beautiful weeds that cannot hide from the farmer.
It was nearly midnight when, from the living room, she
heard her husband moan, and presently he staggered in, wearing over his
nightgown the old overcoat with the astrakhan collar that he much preferred to
his nice blue bathrobe.
“I can’t sleep!” he cried.
“Why can’t you sleep?” she asked. “You were so tired.”
“I can’t sleep because I am dying,” he said, and lay down
on the couch.
“Is it your stomach? Do you want me to call Dr. Solov?”
“No doctors, no doctors,” he moaned. “To the devil with
doctors! We must get him out of there quick. Otherwise, we’ll be responsible….
Responsible!” He hurled himself into a sitting position, both feet on the
floor, thumping his forehead with his clenched fist.
“All right,” she said quietly. “We will bring him home
tomorrow morning.”
“I would like some tea,” said her husband and went out to
the bathroom.
Bending with difficulty, she retrieved some playing cards
and a photograph or two that had slipped to the floor—the knave of hearts, the
nine of spades, the ace of spades, the maid Elsa and her bestial beau. He
returned in high spirits, saying in a loud voice, “I have it all figured out.
We will give him the bedroom. Each of us will spend part of the night near him
and the other part on this couch. We will have the doctor see him at least
twice a week. It does not matter what the Prince says. He won’t have much to
say anyway, because it will come out cheaper.”
The telephone rang. It was an unusual hour for it to
ring. He stood in the middle of the room, groping with his foot for one slipper
that had come off, and childishly, toothlessly, gaped at his wife. Since she
knew more English than he, she always attended to the calls.
” Can I speak to Charlie?” a girl’s dull little voice
said to her now.
“What number do you want? . . . No. You have the wrong
number.”
She put the receiver down gently and her hand went to her
heart. “It frightened me,” she said.
He smiled a quick smile and immediately resumed his
excited monologue. They would fetch him as soon as it was day. For his own
protection, they would keep all the knives in a locked drawer. Even at his
worst, he presented no danger to other people.
The telephone rang a second time.
The same toneless, anxious young voice asked for Charlie.
“You have the incorrect number. I will tell you what you
are doing. You are turning the letter ‘o’ instead of the zero.” She hung up
again.
They sat down to their unexpected, festive midnight tea.
He sipped noisily; his face was flushed; every now and then he raised his glass
with a circular motion, so as to make the sugar dissolve more thoroughly. The
vein on the side of his bald head stood out conspicuously, and silvery bristles
showed on his chin. The birthday present stood on the table. While she poured
him another glass of tea, he put on his spectacles and reexamined with pleasure
the luminous yellow, green, and red little jars. His clumsy, moist lips spelled
out their eloquent labels—apricot, grape, beach plum, quince. He had got to
crab apple when the telephone rang again.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
"Signs and Symbols" is a short story by
Vladimir Nabokov, written in English and first published, May 15, 1948 in The
New Yorker and then in Nabokov's Dozen (1958: Doubleday & Company, Garden
City, New York).
In The New Yorker, the story was published under the
title "Symbols and Signs", a decision by the editor Katharine White.
Nabokov returned the title to his original "Signs and Symbols" when
republishing the story.
In a letter to Katharine White, Nabokov said that
"Signs and Symbols", like "The Vane Sisters", was a story
"wherein a second (main) story is woven into, or placed behind, the
superficial semitransparent one." He did not say what the main story was.
Some critics have argued the story's many details can be
deciphered into a message—for instance that the son has committed suicide, or
that he is in an afterlife and free from his torments, or that the third phone
call is from him, saying that he has escaped from the asylum. However, the
predominant interpretation is that the story inveigles the reader into an
attempt at deciphering the details and thus "over-reading", which is
"another, milder form of referential mania".
(From Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signs_and_Symbols)
