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Authors: Vladimir Nabokov
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the focal point of happiness, did not know where to begin, what one could touch, and how, within the realm of her repose, in order to savor this hour to the fullest. So. To start with, proceeding with clinical caution, he removed from his wrist the walleye of time and, reaching over her head, placed it on the bedside table between a glistening drop of water and the empty glass.
So. A priceless original: sleeping girl, oil. Her face in its soft nest of curls, scattered here, wadded together there, with those little fissures on her parched lips, and that special crease in the eyelids over the barely joined lashes, had a russet, roseate tint where the lighted cheek—whose Florentine outline was a smile in itself—showed through. Sleep, my precious, don’t listen to me.
Already his gaze (the self-aware gaze of one who isobserving an execution or a point at the bottom of an abyss) was creeping downward along her form and his left hand was in motion—but here he gave a start as if someone had moved in the room, at the edge of his field of vision, for he had not immediately recognized the reflection in the wardrobe mirror (his pajama stripes, receding into the shadow, and an indistinct glint on the lacquered wood, and something black under her pink ankle).
Finally making up his mind, he gently stroked her long, just slightly parted, faintly sticky legs, which grew cooler and a little coarser on the way down, and progressively warmer farther up. He recalled, with a furious sense of triumph, the roller skates, the sun, the chestnut trees, everything—while he kept stroking with his fingertips, trembling and casting sidelong looks at the plump promontory, with its brand-new downiness, which, independently but with a familial parallel, embodied a concentrated echo of something about her lips and cheeks. A little higher, at the translucent bifurcation of a vein, the mosquito was hard at work. He jealously shooed it away, inadvertently contributing to the fall of a flap that had long been in the way, and there they were, those strange, sightless little breasts, swollen with what seemed two tender abscesses, and now a thin, still childlike muscle was bared, and next to it the stretched, milk-white hollow of her armpit with five or six diverging, silky-dark streaks,and down there, too, obliquely flowed the golden little stream of chain (with a cross, probably, or a charm at its end), and then once again there was cotton—the sleeve of her sharply thrown-back arm.
Yet another truck hurtled past, howling and filling the room with a tremor. He paused in his perlustration, leaning awkwardly over her, involuntarily pressing into her with his gaze, feeling the adolescent scent of her skin mingle with that of the russet hair and penetrate his blood like a gnawing itch. What am I to do with you, what am I to—
The girl heaved a sigh in her sleep, opening her tightly shut navel like an eye, then slowly, with a cooing moan, breathed out, and that was all she needed to glide on in her previous torpor. He carefully pulled the crushed black cap out from under her heel and froze again, his temples throbbing, the ache of his tension pounding. He dared not kiss those angular nipples, those long toes with their yellowish nails. His eyes returned from everywhere else to converge on the same suedelike fissure, which somehow seemed to come alive under his prismatic stare. He still did not know what to undertake, afraid of missing something, of not taking full advantage of the fairy-tale firmness of her sleep.
The stuffy air and his excitement were growing unbearable. He slightly loosened his pajama drawstring, which had been cutting into his belly, and a tendon emitted asqueak as his lips almost incorporeally brushed the spot where a birthmark was visible beneath her rib.… But he was uncomfortable and hot, and the congestion of his blood demanded the impossible. Then, starting little by little to cast his spell, he began passing his magic wand
So. A priceless original: sleeping girl, oil. Her face in its soft nest of curls, scattered here, wadded together there, with those little fissures on her parched lips, and that special crease in the eyelids over the barely joined lashes, had a russet, roseate tint where the lighted cheek—whose Florentine outline was a smile in itself—showed through. Sleep, my precious, don’t listen to me.
Already his gaze (the self-aware gaze of one who isobserving an execution or a point at the bottom of an abyss) was creeping downward along her form and his left hand was in motion—but here he gave a start as if someone had moved in the room, at the edge of his field of vision, for he had not immediately recognized the reflection in the wardrobe mirror (his pajama stripes, receding into the shadow, and an indistinct glint on the lacquered wood, and something black under her pink ankle).
Finally making up his mind, he gently stroked her long, just slightly parted, faintly sticky legs, which grew cooler and a little coarser on the way down, and progressively warmer farther up. He recalled, with a furious sense of triumph, the roller skates, the sun, the chestnut trees, everything—while he kept stroking with his fingertips, trembling and casting sidelong looks at the plump promontory, with its brand-new downiness, which, independently but with a familial parallel, embodied a concentrated echo of something about her lips and cheeks. A little higher, at the translucent bifurcation of a vein, the mosquito was hard at work. He jealously shooed it away, inadvertently contributing to the fall of a flap that had long been in the way, and there they were, those strange, sightless little breasts, swollen with what seemed two tender abscesses, and now a thin, still childlike muscle was bared, and next to it the stretched, milk-white hollow of her armpit with five or six diverging, silky-dark streaks,and down there, too, obliquely flowed the golden little stream of chain (with a cross, probably, or a charm at its end), and then once again there was cotton—the sleeve of her sharply thrown-back arm.
Yet another truck hurtled past, howling and filling the room with a tremor. He paused in his perlustration, leaning awkwardly over her, involuntarily pressing into her with his gaze, feeling the adolescent scent of her skin mingle with that of the russet hair and penetrate his blood like a gnawing itch. What am I to do with you, what am I to—
The girl heaved a sigh in her sleep, opening her tightly shut navel like an eye, then slowly, with a cooing moan, breathed out, and that was all she needed to glide on in her previous torpor. He carefully pulled the crushed black cap out from under her heel and froze again, his temples throbbing, the ache of his tension pounding. He dared not kiss those angular nipples, those long toes with their yellowish nails. His eyes returned from everywhere else to converge on the same suedelike fissure, which somehow seemed to come alive under his prismatic stare. He still did not know what to undertake, afraid of missing something, of not taking full advantage of the fairy-tale firmness of her sleep.
The stuffy air and his excitement were growing unbearable. He slightly loosened his pajama drawstring, which had been cutting into his belly, and a tendon emitted asqueak as his lips almost incorporeally brushed the spot where a birthmark was visible beneath her rib.… But he was uncomfortable and hot, and the congestion of his blood demanded the impossible. Then, starting little by little to cast his spell, he began passing his magic wand
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