The Gift

by Vladimir Nabokov

  One or two more refining touches, one more verification—and the problem was ready. The key to it, White’s first move, was masked by its apparent absurdity—but it was precisely by the distance between this and the dazzling denouement that one of the problem’s chief merits was measured; and in the way that one piece, as if greased with oil, went smoothly behind another after slipping across the whole field and creeping up under its arm, constituted an almost physical pleasure, the titillating sensation of an ideal fit. Now on the board there shone, like a constellation, a ravishing work of art, a planetarium of thought. Everything here cheered the chess player’s eye: the wit of the threats and defenses, the grace of their interlocked movement, the purity of the mates (so many bullets for exactly so many hearts); every polished piece seemed to be made especially for its square; but perhaps the most fascinating of all was the fine fabric of deceit, the abundance of insidious tries (the refutation of which had its own accessory beauty), and of false trails carefully prepared for the reader.

  The third lesson that Friday was with Vasiliev. The editor of the Berlin émigré daily had established relations with an obscure English periodical and now contributed a weekly article to it on the situation in Soviet Russia. Having a smattering of the language, he wrote his article out in rough, with gaps and Russian phrases interspersed, and demanded from Fyodor a literal translation of the usual phrases found in leaders: you’re only young once, wonders never cease, this is a lion and not a dog (Krïlov), troubles never come singly, Peter’s been paid without robbing Paul, jack of all trades, master of none, you can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, necessity is the mother of invention, it’s only a lover’s tiff, hark at the pot calling the kettle black, birds of a feather flock together, the poor man always gets the blame, it’s no use crying over spilt milk, we need Reform, not reforms. And very often there occurred the expression “it produced the impression of an exploding bomb.” Fyodor’s task consisted in dictating from Vasiliev’s rough copy Vasiliev’s article in its corrected form direct into the typewriter—this seemed extraordinarily practical to Vasiliev, but actually the dictation was monstrously dragged out as a result of the agonizing pauses. But oddly enough, the method of using old saws and fables turned out to be a condensed way of conveying something of the “moralités” characteristic of all conscious manifestations of the Soviet authorities: reading through the finished article which had seemed rubbish as he dictated it, Fyodor detected under the clumsy translation and the author’s journalistic effects the movement of a logical and forceful idea, which progressed steadily toward its goal—and calmly produced a mate in the corner.

  Accompanying him afterwards to the door, Vasiliev with a sudden fierce knitting of his bristly brows said quickly:

  “Well, did you see what they have done to Koncheyev? I can imagine how it affected him, what a blow, what a flop.”

  “He couldn’t care less, I know that,” replied Fyodor, and an expression of momentary disappointment appeared on Vasiliev’s face.

  “Oh, he’s just putting it on,” he retorted resourcefully, cheering up again. “In reality he’s sure to be stunned.”

  “I don’t think so,” said Fyodor.

  “In any case I’m sincerely grieved for him,” ended Vasiliev, with the look of one who had no wish at all to part with his grief.

  Somewhat weary but glad of the fact that his working day was over, Fyodor Konstantinovich boarded a tram and opened his magazine (again that glimpse of Chernyshevski’s inclined face—all I know about him is that he was “a syringe of sulphuric acid,” as Rozanov, I think, says somewhere, and that he wrote the novel What to Do?, which blends in my mind with another social writer’s Whose Fault?). He became absorbed in an examination of the problems and soon satisfied himself that if it had not been for two end-games of genius by an old Russian master plus several interesting reprints from foreign publications, this 8 × 8 would not have been worth buying. The conscientious student exercises of the young Soviet composers were not so much “problems” as “tasks”: cumbrously they treated of this or that mechanical theme (some kind of “pinning” and “unpinning”) without a hint of poetry; these were chess comic strips, nothing more, and the shoving and jostling pieces did their clumsy work with proletarian seriousness, reconciling themselves to the presence of double solutions in the flat variants and to the agglomeration of police pawns.

  Having missed his stop he still managed to jump off at the public garden, turning at once on his heels as a man usually does after abruptly leaving a tram, and went by the church along Agamemnonstrasse. It was early evening, the sky was cloudless and the motionless and quiet sunshine endowed every object with a peaceful, lyrical air of festivity. A bicycle, leaned against a yellow-lit wall, was slightly bent outwards, like one of the side horses of a troika, but even more perfect in shape was its transparent shadow on the wall. An elderly, stoutish gentleman, waggling his rear, was hurrying to tennis, wearing a fancy shirt and city trousers and carrying three gray balls in a net, and beside him walking swiftly on rubber soles was a German girl of the sporting sort, with an orange face and golden hair. Behind the brightly painted pumps a radio was singing in a gas station, while above its pavilion vertical yellow letters stood against the light blue of the sky—the name of a car firm—and on the second letter, on the “E” (a pity that it was not on the first, on the “B”—would have made an alphabetic vignette) sat a live blackbird, with a yellow—for economy’s sake—beak, singing louder than the radio. The house in which Fyodor lived was a corner one and stuck out like a huge red ship, carrying a complex and glassy turreted structure on its bow, as if a dull, sedate architect had suddenly gone mad and made a sally into the sky. On all the little balconies which girdled the house in tier after tier there was something green blossoming, and only the Shchyogolevs’ was untidily empty, with an orphaned pot on the parapet and a corpse hung out in moth-eaten furs to air.

  Right at the very beginning of his stay in this flat Fyodor, supposing that he would need complete peace in the evenings, had reserved himself the right to have supper in his room. On the table among his books there now awaited him two gray sandwiches with a glossy mosaic of sausage, a cup of stale tea and a plate of pink kissel (from the morning). Chewing and sipping, he again opened 8 × 8 (he was again glared at by a butting N. G. Ch.) and began to enjoy quietly a study in which the few white pieces seemed to be hanging over an abyss and yet won the day. Then he found a charming four-mover by an American master, the beauty of which consisted not only of the cleverly hidden mating device but also of the fact that in reply to a tempting but incorrect attack, Black, by drawing in and blocking his own pieces, managed to construct just in time a hermetic stalemate. Then in one of the Soviet productions (P. Mitrofanov, Tver) a beautiful example turned up of how to come a cropper: Black had NINE pawns—the ninth having evidently been added at the last minute, in order to cure a cook, as if a writer had hastily changed “he will surely be told” in the proofs to the more correct “he will doubtless be told” without noticing that this was immediately followed by: “of her doubtful reputation.”

  Suddenly he felt a bitter pang—why had everything in Russia become so shoddy, so crabbed and gray, how could she have been so befooled and befuddled? Or had the old urge “toward the light” concealed a fatal flaw, which in the course of progress toward the objective had grown more and more evident, until it was revealed that this “light” was burning in the window of a prison overseer, and that was all? When had this strange dependence sprung up between the sharpening of thirst and the muddying of the source? In the forties? in the sixties? and “what to do” now? Ought one not to reject any longing for one’s homeland, for any homeland besides that which is with me, within me, which is stuck like the silver sand of the sea to the skin of my soles, lives in my eyes, my blood, gives depth and distance to the background of life’s every hope? Some day, interrupting my writing, I will look through the window and see a Russian autumn.

 
Some friends of the Shchyogolevs, gone to Denmark for the summer, had recently left Boris Ivanovich a radio. One could hear him diddling with it, strangling squeakers and creakers, moving ghostly furniture. An odd pastime!

  The room meanwhile had grown dark; above the blackened outlines of the houses beyond the yard, where the windows were already alight, the sky had an ultramarine shade and in the black wires between black chimneys there shone a star—which, like any star, could only properly be seen by switching one’s vision, so that all the rest moved away out of focus. He propped his cheek on his fist and sat there at the table, looking through the window. In the distance a large clock (whose position he was always promising himself to define, but always forgot, the more so since it was never audible under the layer of daytime sounds) slowly chimed nine o’clock. It was time to go and meet Zina.

  They usually met on the other side of the railway bridge, on a quiet street in the vicinity of Grunewald, where the massifs of the houses (dark crossword puzzles, in which not everything was yet filled in by yellow light) were interrupted by waste plots, kitchen gardens and coal-houses (“the ciphers and sighs of the darkness”—a line of Koncheyev’s), where there was, by the way, a remarkable fence made out of another one which had been dismantled somewhere else (perhaps in another town) and which had previously surrounded the camp of a wandering circus, but the boards had now been placed in senseless order, as if nailed together by a blind man, so that the circus beasts once painted on them, and reshuffled during transit, had disintegrated into their component parts—here there was the leg of a zebra, there a tiger’s back, and some animal’s haunch appeared next to another creature’s reversed paw: life’s promise of a life to come had been kept with respect to the fence, but the rupture of the earthly images on it destroyed the earthly value of immortality; at night, however, little could be made out of it, while the exaggerated shadows of the leaves (nearby there was a streetlight) lay on the boards quite logically, in perfect order—this served as a kind of compensation, the more so since it was impossible to transfer them to another place, with the boards, having broken up and mixed the pattern: they could only be transferred in toto, together with the whole night.

  Waiting for her arrival. She was always late—and always came by another road than he. Thus it transpired that even Berlin could be mysterious. Within the linden’s bloom the streetlight winks. A dark and honeyed hush envelops us. Across the curb one’s passing shadow slinks: across a stump a sable ripples thus. The night sky melts to peach beyond that gate. There water gleams, there Venice vaguely shows. Look at that street—it runs to China straight, and yonder star above the Volga glows! Oh, swear to me to put in dreams your trust, and to believe in fantasy alone, and never let your soul in prison rust, nor stretch your arm and say: a wall of stone.

  She always unexpectedly appeared out of the darkness, like a shadow leaving its kindred element. At first her ankles would catch the light: she moved them close together as if she walked along a slender rope. Her summer dress was short, of night’s own color, the color of the streetlights and the shadows, of tree trunks and of shining pavement—paler than her bare arms and darker than her face. This kind of blank verse Blok dedicated to Georgi Chulkov. Fyodor kissed her on her soft lips, she leaned her head for a moment on his collarbone and then, quickly freeing herself, walked beside him, at first with such sorrow on her face as if during their twenty hours of separation an unheard-of disaster had taken place, but then little by little she came to herself and now smiled—smiled as she never did during the day. What was it about her that fascinated him most of all? Her perfect understanding, the absolute pitch of her instinct for everything that he himself loved? In talking to her one could get along without any bridges, and he would barely have time to notice some amusing feature of the night before she would point it out. And not only was Zina cleverly and elegantly made to measure for him by a very painstaking fate, but both of them, forming a single shadow, were made to the measure of something not quite comprehensible, but wonderful and benevolent and continuously surrounding them.

  When he had first moved in with the Shchyogolevs and seen her for the first time he had had the feeling that he already knew a great deal about her, that even her name had been long familiar to him, and certain characteristics of her life, but until he spoke to her he was unable to make out whence and how he knew it. At first he saw her only at dinner and he watched her carefully, studying her every movement. She hardly spoke to him, although by certain signs—not so much by the pupils of her eyes as by their luster that seemed slanted at him—he felt that she was noticing every glance of his and that all her movements were restricted by the lightest shrouds of that very impression she was producing on him; and because it seemed completely impossible to him that he should have any part in her life, he suffered when he detected something particularly enchanting in her and was glad and relieved when he glimpsed some flaw in her beauty. Her pale hair which radiantly and imperceptibly merged into the sunny air around her head, the light blue vein on her temple, another on her long, tender neck, her delicate hand, her sharp elbow, the narrowness of her hips, the weakness of her shoulders and the peculiar forward slant of her graceful body, as if the floor over which, gathering speed like a skater, she hastened, was always gently sloping away toward the haven of the chair or table on which lay the object she sought—all this was perceived by him with agonizing distinctness and then, during the day, was repeated an infinity of times in his memory, returning ever more lazily, pallidly and jerkily, losing life and dwindling as a result of the automatic repetitions of the disintegrating image to a mere sketch broken and blurred, in which nothing of the original life subsisted; but as soon as he saw her again, all this subconscious work directed at the destruction of her image, whose power he feared more and more, went by the board, and beauty again flared forth—her nearness, her frightening accessibility to his gaze, the reconstituted union of all the details. If, during those days, he had had to answer before some pretersensuous court (remember how Goethe said, pointing with his cane at the starry sky: “There is my conscience!”) he would scarcely have decided to say that he loved her—for he had long since realized that he was incapable of giving his entire soul to anyone or anything: its working capital was too necessary to him for his own private affairs; but on the other hand, when he looked at her he immediately reached (in order to fall off again a minute later) such heights of tenderness, passion and pity as are reached by few loves. And at night, especially after long periods of mental work, half coming out of sleep not by the way of reason as it were, but through the back door of delirium, with a mad, long-drawn-out rapture, he felt her presence in the room on a camp-bed hastily and carelessly prepared by a property man, two paces away from him, but while he nursed his excitement and reveled in the temptation, in the shortness of the distance, in the heavenly possibilities, which, incidentally, had nothing of the flesh (or rather, had some blissful replacement for the flesh, expressed in semi-dreamlike terms), he was enticed back into the oblivion of sleep whence he hopelessly retreated, thinking he still continued to hold his prize. Actually she never appeared in his dreams, remaining content to delegate various representatives of hers and confidantes, who bore no resemblance to her but who produced sensations that made a fool of him—to which the bluish dawn was a witness.

  And then, waking completely to the sounds of the morning, he immediately landed in the very thick of the happiness sucking at his heart, and it was good to be alive, and there glimmered in the mist some exquisite event which was just about to happen. But on trying to imagine Zina all he saw was a faint sketch which her voice behind the wall was incapable of igniting with life. And an hour or two later he met her at table and everything was renewed, and he again understood that without her there would not be any morning mist of happiness.

  One evening, a fortnight after he had moved in, she knocked on his door and with a haughtily resolute step, and an almost contemptous expression on her face, entered, h
olding in her hand a small volume hidden in a pink cover. “I have a request,” she said briskly and curtly. “Will you sign this for me?” Fyodor took the book—and recognized in it a pleasantly worn, pleasantly softened up by two years of use (this was something quite new to him) copy of his collection of poems. He began very slowly to unstopper his bottle of ink—although at other times, when he wanted to write, the cork would pop out as that in a bottle of champagne; meanwhile, Zina, watching his fingers fumbling the cork, added hastily: “Only your name, please, only your name.” F. Godunov-Cherdyntsev signed his name and was about to put the date, but thought better of it, fearing she might detect in this some vulgar emphasis. “That’s fine, thank you,” she said and went out, blowing on the page.

  The next day but one was Sunday, and around four it suddenly became clear that she was alone at home; he was reading in his room; she was in the dining room and kept making short expeditions from time to time into her own room across the hall, whistling as she went, and in her light crisp footfalls there was a topographical enigma since a door from the dining room led straight into her room. But we are reading and we will keep on reading. “Longer, longer, and for as long as possible, shall I be in a strange country. And although my thoughts, my name, my works will belong to Russia, I myself, my mortal organism, will be removed from it” (and at the same time, on his walks in Switzerland, the man who could write thus, used to strike dead with his cane the lizards running across his path—“the devil’s brood”—as he said with the squeamishness of a Ukrainian and the hatred of a fanatic). An unimaginable return! The régime; what do I care! Under a monarchy—flags and drums, under a republic—flags and elections.… Again she went by. No, reading was out—too excited, too full of the feeling that another in his place would have sauntered out and addressed her with casual savoir-faire; but when he imagined himself sailing out and butting into the dining room and not knowing what to say, he began to wish that she would soon go out or that the Shchyogolevs would come home. And at the very moment when he decided to stop listening and give his undivided attention to Gogol, Fyodor quickly got up and went into the dining room.