In VN’s story Signs and Symbols (1947) the boy’s inmost thoughts are discussed at nightfall, in manual alphabet, by darkly gesticulating trees:
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 inmost 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. (1)
In his post of March 12, 2014, Abdellah Bouazza pointed out that in his novel The Woodlanders (1887) Thomas Hardy mentions “those remoter signs and symbols which, seen in few, are of runic obscurity, but all together make an alphabet:”
The casual glimpses which the ordinary population bestowed upon that wondrous world of sap and leaves called the Hintock woods had been with these two, Giles and Marty, a clear gaze. They had been possessed of its finer mysteries as of commonplace knowledge; had been able to read its hieroglyphs as ordinary writing; to them the sights and sounds of night, winter, wind, storm, amid those dense boughs, which had to Grace a touch of the uncanny, and even the supernatural, were simple occurrences whose origin, continuance, and laws they foreknew. They had planted together, and together they had felled; together they had, with the run of the years, mentally collected those remoter signs and symbols which, seen in few, were of runic obscurity, but all together made an alphabet. From the light lashing of the twigs upon their faces, when brushing through them in the dark, they could pronounce upon the species of the tree whence they stretched; from the quality of the wind's murmur through a bough they could in like manner name its sort afar off. They knew by a glance at a trunk if its heart were sound, or tainted with incipient decay, and by the state of its upper twigs, the stratum that had been reached by its roots. The artifices of the seasons were seen by them from the conjuror's own point of view, and not from that of the spectator's. (Chapter XLIV)
“Runic obscurity” brings to mind Hardy’s novel Jude the Obscure (1895). A character in Hardy's novel, Arabella traps Jude into marriage by pretending to be pregnant. In VN's novel Podvig ("Glory," 1932) Rose (a waitress at Cambridge with whom Martin has a very brief affair) blackmails Martin by faking pregnancy. A basket with ten different fruit jellies in ten little jars (the birthday present for the boy in Signs and Symbols) brings to mind a tea shop where Rose works. The number of the fruit jellies seems to correspond to ten fingers (used in two-handed manual alphabet). The characters in VN's story Kartofel'nyi El'f ("The Potato Elph," 1924) include Zita and Arabella, the sister acrobats who tease Fred Dobson (the Potato Elph), and Shock, the conjuror. Fred Dobson is a dwarf. On his deathbed Conmal (in VN's novel Pale Fire, 1962, the King's uncle, Zemblan translator of Shakespeare) calls his nephew Karlik (dwarf).
In Jude the Obscure Jude's and Arabella's son Jude (nicknamed "Little Father Time" because of his intense seriousness and lack of humour) comes to believe that he and his half-siblings are the source of the family's woes and, after murdering Jude's and Sue's two children, kills himself by hanging. He leaves behind a note that simply reads, "Done because we are too menny." The boy in Signs and Symbols does not leave behind a note, but the three telephone calls at the end of the story seem to signal his death. By committing suicide the boy manages to become fully incarnated in Sirin (the bird of Russian fairy tales and VN's Russian nom de plume) and, by means of a medium (the girl who wants to speak to Charlie over the 'phone), tries to tell his parents that he is all right and that he is still with them. The characters in VN's novel Lolita (1955) include Charlie Holmes (Lolita's first lover who "has been just killed in Korea," as Mrs. Chatfield puts it) and Clare Quilty, a playwright whom Humbert Humbert calls "Clare Obscure." Little Father Time (the young killer and suicide in Jude the Obscure) brings to mind "a watchman, Father Time, all gray and bent" mentioned by John Shade (the poet in Pale Fire) in Canto Two of his poem. In his Commentary Kinbote (Shade’s mad commentator who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla) mentions Hardy's poem Friends Beyond (1898) in which he has encountered the word "stillicide" (note to Lines 34-35: "Stilettos of a frozen stillicide"). According to Kinbote, he once heard Shade's voice say: "Come tonight, Charlie" but, when he looked around him, saw that he was quite alone. (note to Line 802)
The boy and his parents in Signs and Symbols are Jewish. In German Jude means “Jew.” In the album of the boy’s mother there is a photograph of Aunt Rosa who was put to death by the Germans:
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. (2)
It seems that the boy in VN’s story was born on March 28, 1926, in Leipzig (four days later, on April 1, the action in VN's novel The Gift begins). In 1936, when the boy was ten, the family moved to America. The action in Signs and Symbols takes place on March 28, 1947 (a week before Good Friday), the boy’s twenty-first birthday. It is a rainy day:
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 sanatorium. 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. (1)
In his poem Rain (1956) whose title brings to mind VN's poem Dozhd' proletel ("The Rain has Flown," 1914) and VN's story Paskhal'nyi dozhd' ("The Easter Rain," 1924) VN mentions "nights of gesticulating trees:"
How mobile is the bed on these
nights of gesticulating trees
when the rain clatters fast,
the tin-toy rain with dapper hoof
trotting upon an endless roof,
traveling into the past.
Upon old roads the steeds of rain
Slip and slow down and speed again
through many a tangled year;
but they can never reach the last
dip at the bottom of the past
because the sun is there.
The poem's last line recalls Mrs. Sol, the old couple’s next-door neighbor whose name means in Latin "sun:"
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. (1)
The poem's first line evokes the beginning of VN's poem Rasstrel ("The Execution," 1927):
Бывают ночи: только лягу,
в Россию поплывёт кровать,
и вот ведут меня к оврагу,
ведут к оврагу убивать.
Проснусь, и в темноте, со стула,
где спички и часы лежат,
в глаза, как пристальное дуло,
глядит горящий циферблат.
Закрыв руками грудь и шею,-
вот-вот сейчас пальнёт в меня -
я взгляда отвести не смею
от круга тусклого огня.
Оцепенелого сознанья
коснётся тиканье часов,
благополучного изгнанья
я снова чувствую покров.
Но сердце, как бы ты хотело,
чтоб это вправду было так:
Россия, звезды, ночь расстрела
и весь в черёмухе овраг.
On certain nights as soon as I lie down
my bed starts drifting into Russia,
and presently I’m led to a ravine,
to a ravine led to be killed.
I wake—and in the darkness, from a chair
where watch and matches lie,
into my eyes, like a gun’s steadfast muzzle,
the glowing dial stares.
With both hands shielding breast and neck—
now any instant it will blast!—
I dare not turn my gaze away
from that disk of dull fire.
The watch’s ticking comes in contact
with frozen consciousness;
the fortunate protection
of my exile I repossess.
But how you would have wished, my heart,
that thus it all had really been:
Russia, the stars, the night of execution
and full of racemosas the ravine!
V ovrage (“In the Ravine,” 1899) is a story by Chekhov. In a letter of June 28, 1888, to Pleshcheev Chekhov compares the little naked soloveichiki (nightingales) that just hatched out from the eggs to undressed Jewish babies:
Именье Смагиных велико и обильно, но старо, запущено и мертво, как прошлогодняя паутина. Дом осел, двери не затворяются, изразцы на печке выпирают друг друга и образуют углы, из щелей полов выглядывают молодые побеги вишен и слив. В той комнате, где я спал, между окном и ставней соловей свил себе гнездо, и при мне вывелись из яиц маленькие, голенькие соловейчики, похожие на раздетых жиденят. На риге живут солидные аисты. На пасеке обитает дед, помнящий царя Гороха и Клеопатру Египетскую.
The Smagins’ estate is “great and fertile,” but old, neglected, and dead as last year’s cobwebs. The house has sunk, the doors won’t shut, the tiles in the stove squeeze one another out and form angles, young suckers of cherries and plums peep up between the cracks of the floors. In the room where I slept a nightingale had made herself a nest between the window and the shutter, and while I was there little naked nightingales, looking like undressed Jew babies, hatched out from the eggs. Sedate storks live on the barn. At the beehouse there is an old grandsire who remembers the King Gorokh [Translator’s Note: The equivalent of Old King Cole.] and Cleopatra of Egypt.
One of the old couple’s fellow travelers in the subway resembles Rebecca Borisovna, whose daughter had married one of the Soloveichiks—in Minsk, years ago:
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. (1)
Let me also draw your attention to the updated (much more interesting!) version of my previous post, "The Merman & three decades in Pale Fire."