A Reading of Nabokov's "That in Aleppo Once..."
by Alexander N. Drescher
page two of three

The difficulties of emigration are addressed. A suggestion of the wife's unreliability is offered which may be no more than a misunderstanding. There is a cynical comment concerning the loyalty of friends in German-occupied Paris and the German dictatorship is cast less as an evil in itself than as a symbol of a malignant Fate. Then, in a startling shift, the wife is reported as hysterically mourning a setter which was left behind, later admitting that the dog is a fantasy, never existed, and much later questioning the constancy of her own reality:

"You will think me crazy," she said with a vehemence that, for a second, almost made a real person of her, "but I didn't -- I swear that I didn't. Perhaps I live several lives at once. Perhaps I wanted to test you. Perhaps this bench is a dream and we are in Saratov or on some star." (565)

I should also not like to forget a certain stretch of highroad and the sight of a family of refugees (two women, a child) whose old father, or grandfather, had died on the way. The sky was a chaos of black and flesh-colored clouds with an ugly sunburst beyond a hooded hill, and the dead man was lying on his back under a dusty plane tree. With a stick and their hands the women had tried to dig a roadside grave, but the soil was too hard; they had given it up and were sitting side by side, among the anemic poppies, a little apart from the corpse and its upturned beard. But the little boy was still scratching and scraping and tugging until he tumbled a flat stone and forgot the object of his solemn exertions as he crouched on his haunches, his thin, eloquent neck showing all its vertebrae to the headsman, and watched with surprise and delight thousands of minute brown ants seething, zigzagging, dispersing, heading for places of safety in the Gard, and the Aude, and the Drome, and the Var, and the Basses-Pyrenees -- we two paused only in Pau. (562)

When the plot separates the couple, "a lone piece of orange peel" (563) confirms the connection of the wife with Nina, also encountered in association with orange peel and fruit (413-4). In his search for the wife, her husband encounters several Jewish refugees engaged in a more foreboding version of an on-going conversation about visas begun in "Vasily Shiskov" (494, 498). The reference darkly places the narrator between artists like V. who have escaped to America and others destined to join the many who have disappeared into the camps. The Shiskov allusion also points to another connection: poets and hoaxes.

When the couple reunite (the wife hoping to buy oranges) she tells a believable story of the intervening days, full of the minor details that only a talented fictionalist might manufacture, and then recants this explanation in favor of a stilted confession of sordid adultery. The letter responds to this revelation by quoting Othello, with no indication that two separate speeches have been fused in a puzzling sequence (564):

The time, the place, the torture. Her fan, her gloves, her mask.

............................To you, lord governor,
Remains the censure of this hellish villain;
The time, the place, the torture: O, enforce it!
(Act V. Scene 2)

A cruel, obsessive inquisition follows, searching for details of the adultery, an inquiry which discards the plausible explanation that the infidelity is a fiction to avenge suspected desertion. The questioning becomes progressively crueler (565), frighteningly violent and conflated with the frustration encountered in obtaining visas to leave France. As both near exhaustion, the wife reverses her story again and a reconciliation of sorts occurs: she servile, he petulant and drinking.

I clasped her one day to my groaning breast, and we went for a week to Caboule and lay on the round pink pebbles of the narrow beach. Strange to say, the happier our new relations seemed, the stronger I felt an undercurrent of poignant sadness, but I kept telling myself that this was an intrinsic feature of all true bliss.

I returned and tramped up the stairs. I saw a rose in a glass on the table -- the sugar pink of its obvious beauty, the parasitic air bubbles clinging to its stem. Her two spare dresses were gone, her comb was gone, her checkered coat was gone, and so was the mauve hairband with a mauve bow that had been her hat. There was no note pinned to the pillow, nothing at all in the room to enlighten me, for of course the rose was merely what French rhymesters call une cheville. (566)

"Wait! Holmes, you have skipped right over the part about the rose being 'une cheville'."

"Excuse me, Watson. You are quite right. Nabokov signaled the importance of this in opening his story , '...a rose ... a rhyme'. You will remember also that V. had learned from our friend Stevenson about this peg which fills an otherwise empty hole.6 This letter-writer had a problem, the necessity to report something about his wife's disappearance. Obviously she did not return from Caboule, if they ever went. In fact Watson, unlike the Gard, the Aude, the Drome, Pau and Faugères, there is no place named Caboule.7 Once they were reunited, she turned out to be as difficult as when he deserted her the first time. It is not the rose that is the cheville, but the entire paragraph."

"That is rather much, Holmes! Why makes it so obvious she did not return from wherever they may have gone?"

"Watson, you can not possibly believe that a man who does not remember the color of his wife's eyes could catalogue her entire absented wardrobe! Of course not! it is a different kind of list … the items of which he had to dispose. His story substitutes rhyme for reason, fakery for truth, and artfulness for Art. He murdered the woman and scuttled the lot!"

Holmes, concerned with the physical evidence, has passed by the rose as a meta-fictional marker, forgetting that dishonored Lucrece, who killed herself, innocent Desdemona wrongly stabbed and Nina, dying in an (unnecessary?) auto crash, all had this botanical identification. The rapist Tarquin compares his victim to roses red and white in five stanzas (lines 65, 71, 258-9, 479, 490). Othello mourns the wife he is about to murder as a rose (Act V, Scene II):

...When I have pluck'd the rose,
I cannot give it vital growth again.
It must needs wither: I'll smell it on the tree

On the fourth morning of a long and dismal sea voyage, I met on the deck a solemn but pleasant old doctor with whom I had played chess in Paris ... I answered that I had sailed alone; where-upon he looked taken aback and then said he had seen her a couple of days before going on board...

This is, I gather, the point of the whole story -- although if you write it, you had better not make him a doctor, as that kind of thing has been overdone. (567)

"A good point, Watson. But, he told us that this physician was a chess-player, presumably Dr. Gambit, whose services all must refuse if they wish to solve puzzles. You may recall he assisted our friend, Anna Sergeyevna before that sort of thing had become 'overdone'."9

"My God! Holmes. You are right! But what about the two visas and tickets, the French nobleman, the château, the cuckold father, the Grand Dame, the horse faced woman10 and the....."

"More good points, you are coming along Watson! Definite evidence that the man's lies are as conventional as his poetry. Yet he does seem to have been quite sufficiently original..."

"...and the DOG?"

"...No, not the dog ... quite sufficiently original in his monstrosity!"

Thank you, Gentlemen! The letter ends with two further allusions to Othello:

Yet the pity of it. Curse your art, I am hideously unhappy. She keeps on walking to and fro where the brown nets are spread to dry on the hot stone slabs and the dappled light of the water plays on the side of a moored fishing boat. Somewhere, somehow, I have made some fatal mistake. There are tiny pale bits of broken fish scales glistening here and there in the brown meshes. It may all end in Aleppo if I am not careful. Spare me, V.: you would load your dice with an unbearable implication if you took that for a title. (568)

IAGO
She's the worse for all this.
OTHELLO
O, a thousand thousand times: and then, of so gentle a condition!
IAGO
Ay, too gentle.
OTHELLO
Nay, that's certain: but yet the pity of it, Iago!
O Iago, the pity of it, Iago!
IAGO
If you are so fond over her iniquity, give her patent to offend;
for, if it touch not you, it comes near nobody.
OTHELLO
I will chop her into messes: cuckold me!
(Act IV, Sc. 1)

V.'s art is cursed as the letter-writer sees through the conceit, that he has taken part in exposing himself. Death has hung on this story like "fish scales on a net"; not death as in "Fialta," an opening to the transcendent, creative memory of fiction, but death as an evil abrogation of a benevolent, cosmic design. The letter-writer is rightly condemned.. There is no heroism, no pathos. Nabokov enacted in this fiction a fatidic justice which he believed to be present in the everyday world.

"Holmes, pardon this piddling intrusion. Is Nabokov not considered one of the greatest stylists to have followed us?"

"I would like to think so, Watson. Why do you ask?"

"No beating the bush, Holmes, 'the side of a moored fishing vessel' is an outrageous pun!"

"Aah, you must forgive him, Watson" the detective said, holding a bit of gauze to his arm, "he wants you alert to the triple that follows , for it does seem that everywhere, no matter how, homicide is a fatal mistake."

7. In "Fialta," all the place names are fictionalized.

8. Nabokov, translating "Fialta" several years after Aleppo, may have wished to make the Aleppo puzzle less obvious. The other two roses relate to the possibly homosexual sycophant, Segur. (Segur is a partial reverse anagram for rouges.)

dapper, doll-like, rosy Segur, a lover of art and a perfect fool... (422)
Segur mentioned Ruby Rose, the lady who painted flowers on her breast... (427)

his big blue eye straining at its crimson canthus (414)
a red barn in a white wilderness (415)
prominent cheekbones and dark-red lips (417)
fingered some red leather purses (417)
circus billboard which depicted a red hussar... (417)
bouquet--in the original Russian, the line reads in part "ia uvidel Ninu, okunuvshuiu litso v rozy" = "I saw Nina, her face buried in roses." (418)
as some Frenchmen ... a little red ribbon or something on his coat lapel... (422)
pink ankles above swan's-down trimming of high-heeled slippers... (424)
painting with creamy lines the red smoothness of tennis courts (426)
tomato-nosed clown was walking a tightrope... (426)
Englishman ... a long glass containing a bright crimson drink ... In his eyes... the same bloodshot desire ... (426)
Ferdinand......his dull eyes toward barbarous Moscow (427)
"I would like some of that pigeon's blood too," he continued... (427)
a file of four mediocre Indians ... (Midi-ochre?)... (428)

10. (567). Perhaps an acquaintance of the equally slurred equestrienne, Mme D'V. in "Fialta" (427).