vladimir nabokov black stone of seven deaths

Her legs, her lovely live legs, were not too close together, and when my hand located what it sought, a dreamy and eerie expression, half-pleasure, half-pain, came over those childish features. I saw her face in the sky, strangely distinct, as if it emitted a faint radiance of its own. A cluster of stars palely glowed above us between the silhouettes of long thin leaves that vibrant sky seemed as naked as she was under her light frock. She trembled and twitched as I kissed the corner of her parted lips and the hot lobe of her ear. “In a nervous and slender-leaved mimosa grove at the back of their villa we found a perch on the ruins of a low stone wall. The album of the distraught family contains a faded study of Aunt Rosa, a fussy, angular, wild-eyed old lady, who had lived in a tremulous world of bad news, bankruptcies, train accidents, cancerous growths-until the Germans put her to death, together with all the people she had worried about.” You wish to have one more reflection on what it is to have been made the object of a 'clean' sweep? Try Vladimir Nabokov's microcosmic miniature story 'Signs and Symbols,' which is about angst and misery in general but also succeeds in placing it in what might be termed a starkly individual perspective. I think of this every time I hear of the callow ambition to 'make a new start' or to be 'born again': Do those who talk this way truly wish for the slate to be wiped? Genocide means not just mass killing, to the level of extermination, but mass obliteration to the verge of extinction. She went on living, but with a tabula rasa as her diary and calendar and notebook. All her birthdays, exam results, illnesses, friendships, kinships-gone. No one who remembered her girlhood and her early mischief and family lore no sibling or boon companion who could tease her about that first romance no lover or pal with whom to reminisce.

“I once spoke to someone who had survived the genocide in Rwanda, and she said to me that there was now nobody left on the face of the earth, either friend or relative, who knew who she was.

Vladimir nabokov black stone of seven deaths