VLADIMIR NABOKOV
355
I don ' t know if you read a couple of years ago in the papers about
that teenage girl and boy who murdered the girl's mother. It starts with
a very Kafkaesque scene: the girl's mother has come home and found
her daughter and the boy in the bedroom, and the boy has hit the
mother with a hammer-several times-and dragged her away. But the
woman is still thrashing and groaning in the kitchen , and the boy says
to his sweetheart, "Gimme that hammer. I think I'll have to knock her
again." But the girl gives her mate a knife instead and he stabs the girl's
mother many, many times, to death-under the impression, probably ,
that this all is a comic strip: you hit a person, the person sees lots of
stars and exclamation marks but revives by and by, in the next
installment. Physical life however has no next installment, and soon
boy and girl have
to
do something with dead mother. "Oh, plaster of
paris, it will dissolve her completely!" Of course, it will-marvelous
idea-place body in bathtub, cover with plaster, and that's all. Mean–
while, .with mother under the plaster (which does not work-wrong
plaster, perhaps) boy and girl throw several beer parties. What fun!
Lovely canned music, and lovely canned beer. "But you can't go, fellas ,
to
the bathroom. The bathroom is a mess."
I'm trying to show you that in so-called real life we find sometimes
a great resemblance to the situation in Kafka's fantastic story. Mark the
curious mentality of the morons in Kafka who enjoy their evening
paper despite the fantastic horror in the middle of their apartment.
"'What a quiet life our family has been leading,' said Gregor to
himself, and as he sat there motionless staring into the darkness he felt
great pride in the fact that he had been able to provide such a life for his
parents and sister in such a fine flat." The room is lofty and empty and
the beetle begins to dominate the man. The high room "in which he
had to lie flat on the floor filled him with an apprehension he could
not account for, since it had been his very own room for the past five
years-and with a half-unconscious action, not without a slight feeling
of shame, he scuttled under the couch, where he felt comfortable at
once, although his back was a little cramped and he could not lift his
head up, and his only regret was that his body was too broad to get the
whole of it under the couch."
Scene III:
Gregor's sister brings a selection of foods . She removes
the basin of milk, not by means of her bare hands but with a cloth, for
it has been touched by the disgusting monster. However, she is a clever
little creature, that sister, and brings a whole selection-rotten vege–
tables, old cheese, bones glazed with dead white sauce-and Gregor
whizzed towards this feast. "One after another and with tears of
satisfaction in his eyes he quickly devoured the cheese, the vegetables
