“The process of bathing took place on another part of the beach. Professional bathers, burly Basques in black bathing suits, were there to help ladies and children enjoy the terrors of the surf. Such a baigneur would place the client with his back to the incoming wave and hold him by the hand as the rising, rotating mass of foamy, green water violently descended from behind, knocking one off one’s feet with a mighty wallop. After a dozen of these tumbles, the baigneur, glistening like a seal, would lead his panting, shivering, moistly snuffling charge landward, to the flat foreshore, where an unforgettable old woman with gray hairs on her chin promptly chose a bathing robe from several on a clothesline. In the security of a little cabin, one would be helped by yet another attendant to peel off one’s soggy, sand-heavy bathing suit. It would plop onto the boards, and, still shivering, one would step out of it and trample on it’s bluish, diffuse stripes. The cabin smelled of pine. The attendant, a hunchback with beaming wrinkles, brought a basin of steaming-hot water, in which one immersed one’s feet. From him I learned, that “butterfly” in the Basque language is misericoletea-- or at least sounded so (among the seven words I have found in dictionaries the closest apporach is micheletea)” (p. 138, iBook edition).
In this passage, Nabokov describes being in Biarritz on vacation as a child. It reads as an almost allegory for his experience with the coming revolution-- he is the “client,” and his father is the “baigneur,” leading him through the revolution and keeping him safe in the “terrors of the surf.” The “rotating mass of foamy, green water violently descended from behind,” echoes the sentiments felt during the revolution, a red “mass of foamy... water” that surprises the family. “After a dozen of these tumbles,” or, after being forced into exile, eventually settling in western europe, “the baigneur,” or Nabokov’s father, “would lead his panting, shivering, moistly snuffling charge landward,” or out of Russia, to somewhere safe. The Nabokovs fled from place to place, like in this passage, from the ocean to the shore to the changing cabin.
