- Not only do children love wheeled things, they also love "reshaping the earth," AKA, digging.
- Vladimir's son isn't an exception, and loves to dig in the dirt.
- While he does so, Vladimir sits on benches beside him, patiently, in parks all over Europe.
- "Never in my life have I sat on so many benches and park chairs, stone slabs and stone steps, terrace parapets and brims of fountain basins as I did in those days." (15.3.1)
- In one such park, Vladimir finds a broken mirror leaning up against a tree.
- The parks in Nazi-run Berlin, in those days, are buttoned-up, and everything is clean and grim.
- Nabokov wishes he could remember each park that was visited during that era.
- With a bit of detective work, geographical clues in pictures or in his memory, he may sometimes be able to determine which park they visit and when.
- Sometimes a particular feature of the park will give away its location, but ultimately what Nabokov remembers from those parks is his son, digging in the ground.
- In Berlin, he remembers giggling with his three-year-old son, comparing bobby daffodils to little Hitlers.
- In Paris, in '38 or '39, he remembers noticing a grubby little girl holding a butterfly by a string, and to him, it felt like a mean game.
- Still: in these years, with cruelty all around, Vladimir and his wife try to instill in their son a value of giving people the benefit of the doubt.
- Throughout these final European years, their son grows, and they moves from parks to Nabokov's beloved beaches, stopping to look at sea glass and pebbles and shells.
- In this pass-time, Nabokov sees a connection through the generations:
- "I do not doubt that among those slightly convex chips of majolica ware found by our child there was one whose border of scrollwork fitted exactly, and continued, the pattern of a fragment I had found in 1903 on the same shore, and that the two tallied with a third my mother had found on that Mentone beach in 1882, and with a fourth piece of the same pottery that had been found by her mother a hundred years ago—and so on, until this assortment of parts, if all had been preserved, might have been put together to make the complete, the absolutely complete, bowl, broken by some Italian child, God knows where and when, and now mended by these rivets of bronze." (15.3.6)
- In the fall of 1939, the little family returns to Paris, and then sets off for another seaside on the western coast of France.
- The two parents walk their son through a geometrically-patterned garden, toward down the docks, toward the ship that will take them to the States.
- It is the last European park, and when they get to the end of its path, both Vladimir and his wife decide not to point out their ship, now in view.
- The parents believe their six-year-old needs to see it for himself, for the first time, in order to discover it and meet it on his own terms.