The Gift

by Vladimir Nabokov

  Fyodor, in his shirt-sleeves and with sneakers on his sockless feet, would spend the greater part of the day on an indigo bench in the public garden, a book in his long tanned fingers; and when the sun beat down too hard, he would lean his head on the hot back of the bench and shut his eyes for long periods; the ghostly wheels of the city day revolved through the interior bottomless scarlet, and the sparks of children’s voices darted past, and the book, open in his lap, became ever heavier and more unbooklike; but now the scarlet darkened under a passing cloud, and lifting his sweaty neck, he would open his eyes and once again see the park, the lawn with its marguerites, the freshly watered gravel, the little girl playing hopscotch with herself, the pram with the baby consisting of two eyes and a pink rattle, and the journey of the blinded, breathing, radiant disk through the cloud—then everything would blaze once again and along the dappled street, lined with restless trees, a coal truck would thunder by with the grimy driver on his high, bumpy seat, clenching the stalk of an emerald-bright leaf in his teeth.

  In the late afternoon he would go to give a lesson—to a businessman with sandy eyelashes, who looked at him with a dull gaze of malevolent perplexity as Fyodor unconcernedly read him Shakespeare; or to a schoolgirl in a black jumper, whom he sometimes felt like kissing on her bent yellowish nape; or to a jolly thickset fellow who had served in the imperial navy, who said est’ (aye-aye) and obmozgovat’ (to dope it out), and was preparing dat’ drapu (to blow) to Mexico, escaping secretly from his mistress, a two-hundred-pound, passionate and doleful old woman who had happened to flee to Finland in the same sleigh as he and since then, in perpetual jealous despair, had been feeding him meat pies, cream pudding, pickled mushrooms.… Besides these English lessons there were lucrative commercial translations—reports on the low sound conductivity of tile floors or treatises about ball bearings; and finally, a modest but particularly precious income came from his lyrical poems, which he composed in a kind of drunken trance, and always with that same nostalgic, patriotic fervor; some of them did not materialize in final form, dissolving instead, fertilizing the innermost depths, while others, completely polished and equipped with all their commas, were taken to the newspaper office—first via a subway train with glinting reflections rapidly ascending its vertical stangs of brass, then in the strange emptiness of an enormous elevator to the ninth floor, where at the end of a corridor the color of gray modeling clay, in a narrow little room smelling of “the decaying corpse of actuality” (as the number one office comic used to crack), sat the secretary, a moonlike, phlegmatic person, ageless and virtually sexless, who had more than once saved the day when, angered by some item in Vasiliev’s liberal paper, menacing rowdies would come, German Trotskyists hired locally, or some robust Russian Fascist, a rogue and a mystic.

  The telephone jangled; ripply proofs breezed past; the theater critic kept on reading a stray Russian newspaper from Vilna. “Why, do we owe you money? Nothing of the kind,” the secretary would say. When the door to the room on the right opened, one could hear the juicily dictating voice of Getz, or Stupishin clearing his throat, and among the clatter of several typewriters one could make out the swift rat-tat-tat of Tamara.

  At the left was Vasiliev’s office; his lustrine jacket grew tight across his plump shoulders as, standing before the lectern he used as a writing table and puffing like some powerful machine, he wrote the leading article in his untidy handwriting with its schoolroom blots, headed: “No Improvement in Sight,” or “The Situation in China.” Suddenly stopping, lost in thought, he made a noise like a metal scraper as he scratched his large bearded cheek with one finger and narrowed his eye, overhung by a raffish black brow without a single gray hair in it—remembered in Russia to this day. By the window (outside which there was a similar multi-office building, with repairs going on so high in the sky that it seemed as though they might as well do something about the ragged rent in the gray cloud bank) stood a bowl with an orange and a half and an appetizing jar of yogurt, and in the bookcase, in its locked bottom compartment, forbidden cigars and a large blue-and-red heart were preserved. A table was cluttered with the old trash of Soviet newspapers, cheap books with lurid covers, letters—request-ind, reminding, rebuking—the squeezed-out half of an orange, a newspaper page with a window cut out and a portrait photograph of Vasiliev’s daughter, who lived in Paris, a young woman with a charming bare shoulder and smoky hair: she was an unsuccessful actress and there was frequent mention of her in the cinema column of the Gazeta: “… our talented compatriot Silvina Lee …”—although no one had ever heard of the compatriot.

  Vasiliev would good-humoredly accept Fyodor’s poems and print them, not because he liked them (generally he did not even read them) but because it was absolutely immaterial to him what adorned the nonpolitical part of his paper. Having ascertained once for all the level of literacy below which a given contributor by nature could not fall, Vasiliev gave him a free hand, even if the given level barely rose above zero. And poems, since they were mere trifles, passed almost entirely without control, trickling through openings where rubbish of greater weight and volume would have got stuck. But what joyful, exciting squealing arose in all the peacock coops of our émigré poetry from Latvia to the Riviera! They’ve printed mine! And mine! Fyodor himself, who felt he had only one rival—Koncheyev (who, by the way, was not a contributor to the Gazeta)—did not concern himself with his neighbors in print and rejoiced over his poems no less than the others. There were times when he could not wait for the evening mail that brought his copy and instead would buy one half an hour earlier in the street, and shamelessly, scarcely having left the newsstand, catching the reddish light near the fruitstands where mountains of oranges glowed in the blue of early twilight, would unfold the paper—and sometimes find nothing: something else had squeezed it out; but if he found it, he would gather the pages more conveniently and, resuming his progress along the sidewalk, read his poem over several times, varying the inner intonations; that is, imagining one by one the various mental ways the poem would be read, perhaps was now being read, by those whose opinion he considered important—and with each of these different incarnations he would almost physically feel a change in the color of his eyes, and also in the color behind his eyes, and in the taste in his mouth, and the more he liked the chef-d’oeuvre du jour, the more perfectly and succulently he could read it through the eyes of others.

  Having thus dawdled away the summer, having given birth to, raised, and stopped loving forever some two dozen poems, he went out one clear and cool day, a Saturday (tonight is the meeting), to make an important purchase. The fallen leaves lay not flat on the sidewalk but warped and stiffly crumpled so that from under each protruded a blue corner of shadow. Carrying a broom, the little old woman in a clean apron, with a small sharp face and disproportionately large feet, came out of her gingerbread cottage with its candy windows. Yes, it was autumn! He walked happily; everything was fine: morning had brought a letter from his mother, who was planning to come and visit him at Christmas, and through his deteriorating summer footwear he felt the ground with extraordinary sensitivity when he walked across an unpaved section, next to deserted vegetable-garden plots with their faint burnt odor, between houses which turned the sliced-off blackness of their outer walls toward them, and there, in front of lacy bowers, grew cabbages beaded with large bright drops, and the bluish stalks of withered carnations, and sunflowers, their heavy bulldog faces bowed. For a long time he had wanted to express somehow that it was in his feet that he had the feeling of Russia, that he could touch and recognize all of her with his soles, as a blind man feels with his palms. And it was a pity when he reached the end of that stretch of rich brown earth and once again had to step along the resonant sidewalk.

  A young woman in a black dress, with a shiny forehead and quick, wandering eyes, sat down at his feet for the eighth time, sideways on a stool, nimbly extracted a narrow shoe from the rustling interior of its box, spread her elbows apart as she slackened the edg
es, glanced abstractedly aside as she loosened the laces, and then, producing a shoehorn from her bosom, addressed Fyodor’s large, shy, poorly darned foot. Miraculously the foot fitted inside, but having done so, went completely blind: the wiggling of toes inside had no effect on the exterior smoothness of the taut black leather. With phenomenal speed the salesgirl tied the lace ends and touched the tip of the shoe with two fingers. “Just right,” she said. “New shoes are always a little …” she went on rapidly, raising her brown eyes. “Of course if you wish, we can make some adjustments. But they fit perfectly, see for yourself!” And she led him to the X-ray gadget and showed him where to place his foot. Looking down in the glass aperture he saw, against a luminous background, his own dark, neatly separated phalanges. With this, with this I’ll step ashore. From Charon’s ferry. Putting on the other shoe as well, he walked along the carpet the length of the store and back, glancing sideways at the ankle-high mirror which reflected his beautified step and his trouser leg, now looking twice its age. “Yes, they’re fine,” he said cravenly. When he was a child they used to scrape the glossy black sole with a buttonhook so it would not be slippery. He carried them off to his lesson under his arm, came home, ate, put them on, admiring them apprehensively, and left for the meeting.

  They do seem all right after all—for an agonizing beginning.

  The meeting was at the smallish, pathetically ornate flat of some relatives of Lyubov Markovna’s. A red-haired girl in a green dress that ended above her knees was helping the Estonian maid (who was conversing with her in a loud whisper) to serve the tea. Among the familiar crowd, which contained few new faces, Fyodor at once descried Koncheyev, who was attending for the first time. He looked at the round-shouldered, almost humpbacked figure of this unpleasantly quiet man whose mysteriously growing talent could have been checked only by a ringful of poison in a glass of wine—this all-comprehending man with whom he had never yet had a chance to have the good talk he dreamt of having some day and in whose presence he, writhing, burning and hopelessly summoning his own poems to come to his aid, felt himself a mere contemporary. That young face was of the Central-Russian type and seemed a little common, common in a kind of oddly old-fashioned way; it was bounded above by wavy hair and below by starched collar wings, and at first in the presence of this man, Fyodor experienced a glum discomfort.… But three ladies were smiling at him from the sofa, Chernyshevski was salaaming to him from afar, Getz was raising like a banner a magazine he had brought for him, which contained Koncheyev’s “Beginning of a Long Poem” and an article by Christopher Mortus entitled “The Voice of Pushkin’s Mary in Contemporary Poetry.” Behind him somebody pronounced with the intonation of an explanatory response, “Godunov-Cherdyntsev.” Never mind, never mind, Fyodor thought rapidly, smiling to himself, looking around and tapping the end of a cigarette against his eagle-emblazoned cigarette case, never mind, we’ll still clink eggs some day, he and I, and we’ll see whose will crack.

  Tamara was indicating a vacant chair to him, and as he made his way to it he again thought he heard the sonorous ring of his name. When young people of his age, lovers of poetry, followed him on occasion with that special gaze that glides like a swallow across a poet’s mirrory heart, he would feel inside him the chill of a quickening, bracing pride; it was the forerunner of his future fame; but there was also another, earthly fame—the faithful echo of the past: he was proud of the attention of his young coevals, but no less proud of the curiosity of older people, who saw in him the son of a great explorer, a courageous eccentric who had discovered new animals in Tibet, the Pamirs and other blue lands.

  “Here,” said Mme. Chernyshevski with her dewy smile, “I want you to meet.…” She introduced him to one Skvortsov, who had recently escaped from Moscow; he was a friendly fellow, had raylike lines around his eyes, a pear-shaped nose, a thin beard and a dapper, youthful, melodiously talkative little wife in a silk shawl—in short, a couple of that more or less academic type that was so familiar to Fyodor through his memory of the people who used to flicker around his father. Skvortsov in courteous and correct terms began by expressing his amazement at the total lack of information abroad about the circumstances surrounding the death of Konstantin Kirillovich: “We’d thought,” his wife put in, “that if nobody knew anything back home, that was to be expected.” “Yes,” Skvortsov continued, “I recall terribly clearly how one day I happened to be present at a dinner in honor of your father, and how Kozlov—Pyotr Kuzmich—the explorer, remarked wittily that Godunov-Cherdyntsev looked upon Central Asia as his private game reserve. Yes … That was quite a time ago, I don’t think you were born then.”

  At this point Fyodor suddenly noticed that Mme. Chernyshevski was directing a sorrowful, meaningful, sympathy-laden gaze at him. Curtly interrupting Skvortsov, he began questioning him, without much interest, about Russia. “How shall I put it …” replied the latter. “You see it’s like this …”

  “Hello, hello, dear Fyodor Konstantinovich!” A fat lawyer who resembled an overfed turtle shouted this over Fyodor’s head, although already shaking his hand while pushing through the crowd, and by now he was already greeting someone else. Then Vasiliev rose from his seat and leaning lightly on the table for a moment with splayed fingers, in a position peculiar to shopkeepers and orators, announced that the meeting was opened. “Mr. Busch,” he added, “will now read us his new, philosophical tragedy.”

  Herman Ivanovich Busch, an elderly, shy, solidly built, likable gentleman from Riga, with a head that looked like Beethoven’s, seated himself at the little Empire table, emitted a throaty rumble and unfolded his manuscript; his hands trembled perceptibly and continued to tremble throughout the reading.

  From the very beginning it was apparent that the road led to disaster. The Rigan’s farcical accent and bizarre solecisms were incompatible with the obscurity of his meaning. When, already in the Prologue, there appeared a “Lone Companion” (odinokiy sputnik instead of odinokiy putnik, lone wayfarer) walking along that road, Fyodor still hoped against hope that this was a metaphysical paradox and not a traitorous lapsus. The Chief of the Town Guard, not admitting the traveler, repeated several times that he “would not pass definitely” (rhyming with “nightly”). The town was a coastal one (the lone companion was coming from the Hinterland) and the crew of a Greek vessel was carousing there. This conversation went on in the Street of Sin:

  FIRST PROSTITUTE

  All is water. That is what my client Thales says.

  SECOND PROSTITUTE

  All is air, young Anaximenes told me.

  THIRD PROSTITUTE

  All is number. My bald Pythagoras cannot be wrong.

  FOURTH PROSTITUTE

  Heraclitus caresses me whispering “All is fire.”

  LONE COMPANION (enters)

  All is fate.

  There were also two choruses, one of which somehow managed to represent the de Broglie’s waves and the logic of history, while the other chorus, the good one, argued with it. “First Sailor, Second Sailor, Third Sailor,” continued Busch, enumerating the conversing characters in his nervous bass voice edged with moisture. There also appeared three flower vendors: a “Lilies’ Woman,” a “Violets’ Woman” and a “Woman of Different Flowers.” Suddenly something gave: little landslides began among the audience.

  Before long, certain power lines formed in various directions all across the room—a network of exchanged glances between three or four, then five or six, then ten people, which represented a third of the gathering. Koncheyev slowly and carefully took a large volume from the bookshelf near which he was sitting (Fyodor noticed that it was an album of Persian miniatures), and just as slowly turning it this way and that in his lap, he began to glance through it with myopic eyes. Mme. Chernyshevski wore a surprised and hurt expression, but in keeping with her secret ethics, somehow tied up with the memory of her son, she was forcing herself to listen. Busch was reading rapidly, his glossy jowls gyrated, the horseshoe in his black tie sparkled, while bene
ath the table his feet stood pigeon-toed—and as the idiotic symbolism of the tragedy became ever deeper, more involved and less comprehensible, the painfully repressed, subterraneously raging hilarity more and more desperately needed an outlet, and many were already bending over, afraid to look, and when the Dance of the Maskers began in the square, someone—Getz it was—coughed, and together with the cough there issued a certain additional whoop, whereupon Getz covered his face with his hands and after a while emerged again with a senselessly bright countenance and humid, bald head, while on the couch Tamara had simply lain down and was rocking as if in the throes of labor, while Fyodor, who was deprived of protection, shed floods of tears, tortured by the forced noiselessness of what was going on inside him. Unexpectedly Vasiliev turned in his chair so ponderously that a leg collapsed with a crack and Vasiliev lurched forward with a changed expression, but did not fall, and this event, not funny in itself, served as a pretext for an elemental, orgiastic explosion to interrupt the reading, and while Vasiliev was transferring his bulk to another chair, Herman Ivanovich Busch, knitting his magnificent but quite unfruitful brow, jotted something on the manuscript with a pencil stub, and in the relieved calm an unidentified woman uttered something in a separate final moan, but Busch was already going on: