Lolita / Лолита. Книга для чтения на английском языке

My judges will regard all this as a piece of mummery on the part of a madman with a gross liking for the fruit vert[57 - fruit vert – (фр.) незрелый плод]. Au fond, ça m’est bien egal.[58 - Au fond, ça m’est bien egal. – (фр.) В конце концов, мне это совершенно все равно.] All I know is that while the Haze woman and I went down the steps into the breathless garden, my knees were like reflections of knees in rippling water, and my lips were like sand, and —

�That was my Lo,’ she said, �and these are my lilies.

’ �Yes,’ I said, �yes. They are beautiful, beautiful, beautiful!’

11

Exhibit number two is a pocket diary bound in black imitation leather, with a golden year, 1947, en escalier[59 - en escalier – (фр.) лесенкой], in its upper left-hand corner. I speak of this neat product of the Blank Blank Go, Blankton, Mass, as if it were really before me.

Actually, it was destroyed five years ago and what we examine now (by courtesy of a photographic memory) is but its brief materialization, a puny unfledged phoenix.

I remember the thing so exactly because I wrote it really twice. First I jotted down each entry in pencil (with many erasures and corrections) on the leaves of what is commercially known as a �typewriter tablet’; then, I copied it out with obvious abbreviations in my smallest, most satanic, hand in the little black book just mentioned.

May 30 is a Fast Day[60 - Fast Day – Постный день] by Proclamation in New Hampshire but not in the Carolinas. That day an epidemic of �abdominal flu’ (whatever that is) forced Ramsdale to close its schools for the summer. The reader may check the weather data in the Ramsdale Journal for 1947. A few days before that I moved into the Haze house, and the little diary which I now propose to reel off (much as a spy delivers by heart the contents of the note he swallowed) covers most of June.

Thursday. Very warm day. From a vantage point (bathroom window) saw Dolores taking things off a clothes line in the apple-green light behind the house. Strolled out. She wore a plaid shirt, blue jeans and sneakers. Every movement she made in the dappled sun plucked at the most secret and sensitive chord of my abject body.