This must be one of the most-chosen stories in the archives of A Personal Anthology and I didn’t want to choose it for the sake of variety. But in the weeks that I was re-reading my possible selections and mulling them over, I taught this story and when I re-read it, remembered how much I love it and felt that I couldn’t leave it out.
An elderly couple, Russian-Jewish emigres in New York, are visiting their son on his birthday. He is confined to a psychiatric hospital on account of his “referential mania”, a rare condition that causes the patient to imagine “everything happening around him is a veiled reference to his personality and existence”. Upon arriving, they learn that their son has tried again to take his own life and are sent home, disappointed. While her husband tries to sleep, the boy’s mother examines some old photographs and a second story briefly overtakes the first, the story of their emigration from Revolutionary Russia to Germany, and from Nazi Germany to America, but this story is interrupted when the father emerges, crying in pain and full of resolve to rescue their son from the hospital. Then comes the enigmatic conclusion. The phone rings and the mother answers to a girl asking for Charlie. She has the wrong number. It rings again, and the elderly woman dismisses the girl, telling her that she is dialling ‘o’ instead of zero. Then the phone rings for a third time and the story ends. Surely, it can only be the girl, once again dialling the wrong number, and yet somehow, we believe that this time, it must be the hospital calling to tell the boy’s parents that he has escaped – from this life, from the hospital. There is no logical reason but in the overdetermined circumstances of the story, it seems to make a kind of intuitive, aesthetic sense, and so we are exposed as sharing something of the boy’s referential mania, examining a random event as though it must be full of meaning. Somehow – I’ve never quite understood why – this is extremely moving.
First published as ‘Symbols and Signs’ in The New Yorker, 1948, and available to subscribers to read here. Collected in Nabokov’s Dozen, Doubleday, 1958
A Personal Anthology 