According to Kinbote (in VN’s novel Pale Fire, 1962, Shade’s mad commentator who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla), to the King’s question "how long will you be absent" the guard replied "yeg ved ik [I know not]:"
Somewhere an iron curtain had gone up, baring a painted one, with nymphs and nenuphars. "I shall bring you your flute tomorrow," cried Odon meaningfully in the vernacular, and smiled, and waved, already bemisted, already receding into the remoteness of his Thespian world.
The fat guard led the King back to his room and turned him over to handsome Hal. It was half past nine. The King went to bed. The valet, a moody rascal, brought him his usual milk and cognac nightcap and took away his slippers and dressing gown. The man was practically out of the room when the King commanded him to put out the light, upon which an arm re-entered and a gloved hand found and turned the switch. Distant lightning still throbbed now and then in the window. The King finished his drink in the dark and replaced the empty tumbler on the night table where it knocked with a subdued ring against a steel flashlight prepared by the thoughtful authorities in case electricity failed as it lately did now and then.
He could not sleep. Turning his head he watched the line of light under the door. Presently it was gently opened and his handsome young jailer peeped in. A bizarre little thought danced through the King's mind; but all the youth wanted was to warn his prisoner that he intended to join his companions in the adjacent court, and that the door would be locked until he returned. If, however, the ex-King needed anything, he could call from his window. "How long will you be absent?" asked the King.
"Yeg ved ik [I know not]," answered the guard. "Good night, bad boy," said the King. (note to Line 130)
Zemblan for “I know not,” yeg ved ik seems to hint at jeg ved det ikke (“I do not know” in Danish). In his monologue in Shakespeare’s Hamlet (4.4) Hamlet (the Prince of Denmark) says: “I do not know / Why yet I live to say 'This thing's to do':”
Now, whether it be
Bestial oblivion, or some craven scruple
Of thinking too precisely on the event,
A thought which, quarter'd, hath but one part wisdom
And ever three parts coward, I do not know
Why yet I live to say 'This thing's to do;'
Sith I have cause and will and strength and means
To do't.
The ex-King tells to handsome Hal (btw., in Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part 1 and Henry IV, Part 2, Falstaff calls Prince Henry "Prince Hal") "good night, bad boy." This brings to mind Horatio's farewell to Hamlet at the end of Shakespeare's play (5.2), “Good night, sweet prince:”
Hamlet
O, I die, Horatio,
The potent poison quite o’er-crows my spirit.
I cannot live to hear the news from England,
But I do prophesy th’ election lights
On Fortinbras, he has my dying voice.
So tell him, with th’ occurrents more and less
Which have solicited—the rest is silence.
Dies.
Horatio
Now cracks a noble heart. Good night, sweet prince,
And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!
At the end of his essay on Viktor Gofman (in the “Silhouettes of Russian Writers”) Yuli Ayhenvald quotes the words of Horatio and calls Gofman (who committed suicide in 1911, at the age of twenty-seven, in Paris) “the sweet Prince of poetry:”
"Покойной ночи, милый принц!" - такими словами напутствовал Горацио в могилу своего друга Гамлета. Покойной ночи и тебе, милый принц поэзии, Виктор Гофман!..
At the beginning of his essay Ayhenvald calls Gofman poet-pazh (a poet page) and uses the phrase ya ne znal (I did not know [that you will go so early]):
...Виктор Гофман, я когда-то подарил Вам свою книгу с надписью: Будущему обитателю моих Силуэтов. Вот я сдержал свое слово и, как сумел, зарисовал Ваш поэтический облик в свой литературный альбом. Но только я опоздал, - я в том отношении опоздал, что Вы сами, Виктор Гофман, поэт-паж, не прочтете уже о себе моих обещанных страниц. Я не знал, что Вы не дождетесь меня и уйдёте так рано, - Виктор Гофман, мне очень грустно, что я опоздал...
Describing the King's escape from Zembla, Kinbote mentions young Baron Mandevil who was the King’s throne page on Coronation Day:
It was a lovely breezy afternoon with a western horizon like a luminous vacuum that sucked in one’s eager heart. The King, now at the most critical point of his journey, looked about him, scrutinizing the few promenaders and trying to decide which of them might be police agents in disguise, ready to pounce upon him as soon as he vaulted the parapet and made for the Rippleson Caves. Only a single sail dyed a royal red marred with some human interest the marine expanse. Nitra and Indra (meaning “inner” and “outer”), two black islets that seemed to address each other in cloaked parley, were being photographed from the parapet by a Russian tourist, thickset, many-chinned, with a general’s fleshy nape. His faded wife, wrapped up floatingly in a flowery écharpe, remarked in singsong Moscovan “Every time I see that kind of frightful disfigurement I can’t help thinking of Nina’s boy. War is an awful thing.” “War?” queried her consort. “That must have been the explosion at the Glass Works in 1951—not war.” They slowly walked past the King in the direction he had come from. On a sidewalk bench, facing the sea, a man with his crutches beside him was reading the Onhava Post which featured on the first page Odon in an Extremist uniform and Odon in the part of the Merman. Incredible as it may seem the palace guard had never realized that identity before. Now a goodly sum was offered for his capture. Rhythmically the waves lapped the shingle. The newspaper reader’s face had been atrociously injured in the recently mentioned explosion, and all the art of plastic surgery had only resulted in a hideous tessellated texture with parts of pattern and parts of outline seeming to change, to fuse or to separate, like fluctuating cheeks and chins in a distortive mirror.
The short stretch of beach between the restaurant at the beginning of the promenade and the granite rocks at its end was almost empty: far to the left three fishermen were loading a rowboat with kelp-brown nets, and directly under the sidewalk, an elderly woman wearing a polka-dotted dress and having for headgear a cocked newspaper (Ex-King Seen--) sat knitting on the shingle with her back to the street. Her bandaged legs were stretched out on the sand; on one side of her lay a pair of carpet slippers and on the other a ball of red wool, the leading filament of which she would tug at ever now and then with the immemorial elbow jerk of a Zemblan knitter to give a turn to her yarn clew and slacken the thread. Finally, on the sidewalk a little girl in a ballooning skirt was clumsily but energetically clattering about on roller skates. Could a dwarf in the police force pose as a pigtailed child?
Waiting for the Russian couple to recede, the King stopped beside the bench. The mosaic-faced man folded his newspaper, and one second before he spoke (in the neutral interval between smoke puff and detonation), the King knew it was Odon.
"All one could do at short notice," said Odon, plucking at his cheek to display how the varicolored semi-transparent film adhered to his face, altering its contours according to stress. "A polite person," he added, "does not, normally, examine too closely a poor fellow's disfigurement."
"I was looking for shpiks [plainclothesmen]" said the King. "All day," said Odon, "they have been patrolling the quay. They are dining at present."
"I'm thirsty and hungry," said the King. "That's young Baron Mandevil - chap who had that duel last year. Let's go now."
"Couldn't we take him too?"
"Wouldn't come - got a wife and a baby. Come on, Charlie, come on, Your Majesty."
"He was my throne page on Coronation Day."
Thus chatting, they reached the Rippleson Caves. I trust the reader has enjoyed this note. (note to Line 149)
The King’s words "I'm thirsty and hungry" bring to mind Gut mag alkan, Pern dirstan" (God makes hungry, the Devil thirsty), a Zemblan saying quoted by Kinbote at the end of his Commentary:
Many years ago - how many I would not care to say - I remember my Zemblan nurse telling me, a little man of six in the throes of adult insomnia: "Minnamin, Gut mag alkan, Pern dirstan" (my darling, God makes hungry, the Devil thirsty). Well, folks, I guess many in this fine hall are as hungry and thirsty as me, and I'd better stop, folks, right here.
Yes, better stop. My notes and self are petering out. Gentlemen, I have suffered very much, and more than any of you can imagine. I pray for the Lord's benediction to rest on my wretched countrymen. My work is finished. My poet is dead.
"And you, what will you be doing with yourself, poor King, poor Kinbote?" a gentle young voice may inquire.
God will help me, I trust, to rid myself of any desire to follow the example of two other characters in this work. I shall continue to exist. I may assume other disguises, other forms, but I shall try to exist. I may turn up yet, on another campus, as an old, happy, healthy, heterosexual Russian, a writer in exile, sans fame, sans future, sans audience, sans anything but his art. I may join forces with Odon in a new motion picture: Escape from Zembla (ball in the palace, bomb in the palace square). I may pander to the simple tastes of theatrical critics and cook up a stage play, an old-fashioned Melodrama with three principals: a lunatic who intends to kill an imaginary king, another lunatic who imagines himself to be that king, and a distinguished old poet who stumbles by chance into the line of fire, and perishes in the clash between the two figments. Oh, I may do many things! History permitting, I may sail back to my recovered kingdom, and with a great sob greet the gray coastline and the gleam of a roof in the rain. I may huddle and groan in a madhouse. But whatever happens, wherever the scene is laid, somebody, somewhere, will quietly set out - somebody has already set out, somebody still rather far away is buying a ticket, is boarding a bus, a ship, a plane, has landed, is walking toward a million photographers, and presently he will ring at my door - a bigger, more respectable, more competent Gradus. (note to Line 1000)
In VN’s story Signs and Symbols (1948) the boy, aged six, suffered from insomnia like a grown-up man:
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. (2)
Shade’s murderer, Gradus is a cross between bat and crab. At the end of Signs and Symbols the boy's father has got to the crab apple when the telephone rings again:
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. (3)
“What number,” “the wrong number” and “the incorrect number” seem to hint "I'm ill at these numbers," a phrase used by Hamlet in his letter to Ophelia:
Doubt thou the stars are fire;
Doubt that the sun doth move;
Doubt truth to be a liar;
But never doubt I love.
'O dear Ophelia, I am ill at these numbers; I have not art to reckon my groans: but that I love thee best, O most best, believe it. Adieu.
'Thine evermore most dear lady, whilst
this machine is to him, HAMLET.' (Act II, scene 2)
We may doubt that the stars are fire, that the sun doth move, that truth is a liar, but we should not doubt VN's love. All three telephone calls at the end of Signs and Symbols are from VN himself (the sweet-voiced Sirin is a woman). When the telephone rings again, it is the reader who must respond. Similarly, it is up to the reader of Pale Fire to complete Shade’s almost finished poem. VN's bird-like voice (that Kinbote mistakes for Shade's voice) can be also heard in Pale Fire:
The passage 797 (second part of line)-809, on the poet's sixty-fifth card, was composed between the sunset of July 18 and the dawn of July 19. That morning I had prayed in two different churches (on either side, as it were, of my Zemblan denomination, not represented in New Wye) and had strolled home in an elevated state of mind. There was no cloud in the wistful sky, and the very earth seemed to be sighing after our Lord Jesus Christ. On such sunny, sad mornings I always feel in my bones that there is a chance yet of my not being excluded from Heaven, and that salvation may be granted to me despite the frozen mud and horror in my heart. As I was ascending with bowed head the gravel path to my poor rented house, I heard with absolute distinction, as if he were standing at my shoulder and speaking loudly, as to a slightly deaf man, Shade's voice say: "Come tonight, Charlie." I looked around me in awe and wonder: I was quite alone. I looked around me in awe and wonder: I was quite alone. I at once telephoned. The Shades were out, said the cheeky ancillula, an obnoxious little fan who came to book for them on Sundays and no doubt dreamt of getting the old poet to cuddle her some wifeless day. I retelephoned two hours later; got, as usual, Sybil; insisted on talking to my friend (my "messages" were never transmitted), obtained him, and asked him as calmly as possible what he had been doing around noon when I had heard him like a big bird in my garden. He could not quite remember, said wait a minute, he had been playing golf with Paul (whoever that was), or at least watching Paul play with another colleague. I cried that I must see him in the evening and all at once, with no reason at all, burst into tears, flooding the telephone and gasping for breath, a paroxysm which had not happened to me since Bob left me on March 30. There was a flurry of confabulation between the Shades, and then John said: "Charles, listen. Let's go for a good ramble tonight, I'll meet you at eight." It was my second good ramble since July 6 (that unsatisfactory nature talk); the third one, on July 21, was to be exceedingly brief. (note to Line 802)