Describing the king’s escape from Zembla, Kinbote (in VN’s novel Pale Fire, 1962, Shade’s mad commentator who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla) mentions lazy Garh, the farmer's daughter who shows to the king the shortest way to the pass:
The gnarled farmer and his plump wife who, like personages in an old tedious tale offered the drenched fugitive a welcome shelter, mistook him for an eccentric camper who had got detached from his group. He was allowed to dry himself in a warm kitchen where he was given a fairy-tale meal of bread and cheese, and a bowl of mountain mead. His feelings (gratitude, exhaustion, pleasant warmth, drowsiness and so on) were too obvious to need description. A fire of larch roots crackled in the stove, and all the shadows of his lost kingdom gathered to play around his rocking chair as he dozed off between that blaze and the tremulous light of a little earthenware cresset, a beaked affair rather like a Roman lamp, hanging above a shelf where poor beady baubles and bits of nacre became microscopic soldiers swarming in desperate battle. He woke up with a crimp in the neck at the first full cowbell of dawn, found his host outside, in a damp corner consigned to the humble needs of nature, and bade the good grunter (mountain farmer) show him the shortest way to the pass. "I'll rouse lazy Garh," said the farmer.
A rude staircase led up to a loft. The farmer placed his gnarled hand on the gnarled balustrade and directed toward the upper darkness a guttural call: "Garh! Garh!" Although given to both sexes, the name is, strictly speaking, a masculine one, and the King expected to see emerge from the loft a bare-kneed mountain lad like a tawny angel. Instead there appeared a disheveled young hussy wearing only a man's shirt that came down to her pink shins and an oversized pair of brogues. A moment later, as in a transformation act, she reappeared, her yellow hair still hanging lank and loose, but the dirty shirt replaced by a dirty pullover, and her legs sheathed in corduroy pants. She was told to conduct the stranger to a spot from which he could easily reach the pass. A sleepy and sullen expression blurred whatever appeal her snub-nosed round face might have had for the local shepherds; but she complied readily enough with her father's wish. His wife was crooning an ancient song as she busied herself with pot and pan.
Before leaving, the King asked his host, whose name was Griff, to accept an old gold piece he chanced to have in his pocket, the only money he possessed. Griff vigorously refused and, still remonstrating, started the laborious business of unlocking and unbolting two or three heavy doors. The King glanced at the old woman, received a wink of approval, and put the muted ducat on the mantelpiece, next to a violet seashell against which was propped a color print representing an elegant guardsman with his bare-shouldered wife - Karl the Beloved, as he was twenty odd years before, and his young queen, an angry young virgin with coal-black hair and ice-blue eyes.
The stars had just faded. He followed the girl and a happy sheepdog up the overgrown trail that glistened with the ruby dew in the theatrical light of an alpine dawn. The very air seemed tinted and glazed. A sepulchral chill emanated from the sheer cliff along which the trail ascended; but on the opposite precipitous side, here and there between the tops of fir trees growing below, gossamer gleams of sunlight were beginning to weave patterns of warmth. At the next turning this warmth enveloped the fugitive, and a black butterfly came dancing down a pebbly rake. The path narrowed still more and gradually deteriorated amidst a jumble of boulders. The girl pointed to the slopes beyond it. He nodded. "Now go home," he said. "I shall rest here and then continue alone."
He sank down on the grass near a patch of matted elfinwood and inhaled the bright air. The panting dog lay down at his feet. Garh smiled for the first time. Zemblan mountain girls are as a rule mere mechanisms of haphazard lust, and Garh was no exception. As soon as she had settled beside him, she bent over and pulled over and off her tousled head the thick gray sweater, revealing her naked back and blancmange breasts, and flooded her embarrassed companion with ail the acridity of ungroomed womanhood. She was about to proceed with her stripping but he stopped her with a gesture and got up. He thanked her for all her kindness. He patted the innocent dog; and without turning once, with a springy step, the King started to walk up the turfy incline. (note to Line 149)
Lazy Garh seems to blend lenivyi popyonok (the priest's lazy boy) in Pushkin’s poem Rumyanyi kritik moy, nasmeshnik tolstopuzyi… (“My ruddy-cheeked critic, pot-bellied scoffer,” 1830) with Hemming Gadh (c. 1450 – 16 December 1520), a Swedish Roman Catholic priest and Bishop of the Diocese of Linköping. A staunch ally of Sten Sture (regent of Sweden from 1470-97 and 1501-03) and a fierce opponent of Denmark and the Kalmar Union, Hemming Gadh was beheaded by order of King Christian II of Denmark. Hemming Gadh was a contemporary of Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519). A happy sheepdog that accompanies lazy Garh and the king brings to mind Leonardo’s drawings of dogs. The muted ducat left by the king on the mantelpiece makes one think of "Dead, for a ducat, dead!", Hamlet's exclamation in Shakespeare's Hamlet (3.4), and of 200 000 ducats mentioned by Merezhkovski in his novel Leonardo da Vinci, ili Voskresshie bogi (“Leonardo da Vinci, or Resurrected Gods,” 1900):
Еще в молодости мечтал он о сооружении канала, который сделал бы Арно судоходным от Флоренции до Пизанского моря и, оросив поля сетью водяных питательных жил и увеличив плодородие земли, превратил бы Тоскану в один цветущий сад. "Прато, Пистойя, Пиза, Лукка, - писал он в своих заметках, - приняв участие в этом предприятии, возвысили бы свой ежегодный оборот на 200 000 дукатов. Кто сумеет управлять водами Арно в глубине и на поверхности, тот приобретет в каждой десятине земли сокровище". Леонардо казалось, что теперь, перед старостью, судьба дает ему, быть может, последний случай исполнить на службе народа то, что не удалось на службе государей, - показать людям власть науки над природою. (Book Fourteen “Mona Lisa Gioconda”)
Leonardo wanted to turn Tuscany into a garden in bloom. Describing the fourty days after the death of Queen Blenda (Charles Xavier's mother), Kinbote mentions a whole mountain of gift boys from Troth, and Tuscany, and Albanoland:
Her presence at night did not kill insomnia, but at least kept at bay the strong ghost of Queen Blenda. Between exhaustion and drowsiness, he trifled with paltry fancies, such as getting up and pouring out a little cold water from a decanter onto Fleur's naked shoulder so as to extinguish upon it the weak gleam of a moonbeam. Stentoriously the Countess snored in her lair. And beyond the vestibule of his vigil (here he began falling asleep), in the dark cold gallery, lying all over the painted marble and piled three or four deep against the locked door, some dozing, some whimpering, were his new boy pages, a whole mountain of gift boys from Troth, and Tuscany, and Albanoland. (note to Line 80)
Fleur de Fyler is Queen Disa's favorite lady-in-waiting. Duchess of Payn, of Great Payn and Mone, Queen Disa (the wife of Charles the Beloved) seems to be a cross between Leonardo’s Mona Lisa and Desdemona, Othello’s wife in Shakespeare’s Othello. The name of Garh’s father, Griff may hint at Griffith, Queen Katherine’s Gentleman Usher in Henry VIII, a history play written by William Shakespeare and John Fletcher. It is based on the life of Henry VIII (whose second wife, Anne Boleyn was beheaded), and its alternative title is All is True.
The good grunter (mountain farmer) may hint at “To grunt and sweat under a weary life,” a line in Hamlet’s famous monologue in Shakespeare’s Hamlet (3.1):
To be, or not to be, that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles
And by opposing end them. To die—to sleep,
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to: 'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep;
To sleep, perchance to dream—ay, there's the rub:
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause—there's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life.
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
Th'oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of dispriz'd love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of th'unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? Who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscovere'd country, from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience doth make cowards of us all,
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry
And lose the name of action.
In his Index entry Botkin V. Kinbote mentions botkin or bodkin, a Danish stiletto:
Botkin, V., American scholar of Russian descent, 894; king-bot, maggot of extinct fly that once bred in mammoths and is thought to have hastened their phylogenetic end, 247; bottekin-maker, 71; bot, plop, and boteliy, big-bellied (Russ.); botkin or bodkin, a Danish stiletto.