The Gift

by Vladimir Nabokov

  She was sitting by the door to the balcony and with her gleaming lips half parted was aiming a thread at a needle. Through the open door one could see the little sterile balcony and hear the tinny ringing and clicking of leaping raindrops—it was a heavy, warm, April shower.

  “Sorry, I didn’t know you were here,” said mendacious Fyodor. “I only wanted to say something about that book of mine: it’s not the real thing, the poems are bad, I mean, they’re not all bad, but generally speaking. Those I’ve been publishing these last two years in the Gazeta are much better.”

  “I liked very much the one you recited at that evening of poetry,” she said. “The one about the swallow that cried out.”

  “Oh, were you there? Yes. But I have even better ones, I assure you.”

  She suddenly jumped up from her chair, threw her darning on the seat, and with her arms dangling, leaned forward, taking quick small gliding steps, she sped into her room and returned with some newspaper clippings—his and Koncheyev’s poems.

  “But I don’t think I have everything here,” she remarked.

  “I didn’t know that such things happened,” said Fyodor and added awkwardly: “Now I’ll ask them to make little holes around them with a perforator—you know, like coupons, so that you can tear them out more easily.”

  She continued to busy herself with a stocking stretched over a wooden mushroom and without lifting her eyes, but smiling quickly and slyly, she said:

  “I also know that you used to live at seven Tannenberg Street, I often went there.”

  “You did?” said Fyodor, amazed.

  “I used to know Lorentz’s wife in St. Petersburg—she gave me drawing lessons.”

  “How queer,” said Fyodor.

  “Romanov is now in Munich,” she continued. “A most objectionable character, but I always liked his things.”

  They talked about Romanov and about his pictures. He had reached full maturity. Museums were buying his stuff. Having passed through everything, loaded with rich experience, he had returned to an expressive harmony of line. You know his “Footballer”? There’s a reproduction in this magazine, here it is. The pale, sweaty, tensely distorted face of a player depicted from top to toe preparing at full speed to shoot with terrible force at the goal. Tousled red hair, a burst of mud on his temple, the taut muscles of his bare neck. A wrinkled, soaking wet, violet singlet, clinging in spots to his body, comes down low over his spattered shorts, and is crossed with the wonderful diagonal of a mighty crease. He is in the act of hooking the ball sideways; one raised hand with wide-splayed fingers is a participant in the general tension and surge. But most important, of course, are the legs: a glistening white thigh, an enormous scarred knee, boots swollen with dark mud, thick and shapeless, but nevertheless marked by an extraordinarily precise and powerful grace. The stocking has slipped down one vigorously twisted calf, one foot is buried in rich mud, the other is about to kick—and how!—the hideous, tar-black ball—and all this against a dark gray background saturated with rain and snow. Looking at this picture one could already hear the whiz of the leather missile, already see the goalkeeper’s desperate dive.

  “And I know something else,” said Zina. “You were supposed to help me with a translation, Charski told you about it, but for some reason you didn’t turn up.”

  “How queer,” repeated Fyodor.

  There was a bang in the hall—that was Marianna Nikolavna returning—and Zina deliberately got up, gathered the cuttings together and went to her room—only later did Fyodor understand why she considered it necessary to act that way, but at the moment it seemed to him like discourtesy—and when Mrs. Shchyogolev came into the dining room the result was as if he had been stealing sugar out of the sideboard.

  One evening a few days later he overheard an angry conversation from his room—the gist of which was that guests were due to arrive and that it was time for Zina to go downstairs with the key. He heard her go, and after a brief inner struggle, he thought himself up a walk—say to the slot machine by the public garden for a postage stamp. To complete the illusion, he put on a hat, although he practically never wore one. The minute light went out while he was on his way down but immediately there was a click and it went on again: that was she downstairs who had pressed the button. He found her standing by the glass door, playing with the key looped on her finger, the whole of her brightly illuminated, everything glistened—the turquoise knit of her jumper, her fingernails and the even little hairs on her forearm.

  “It’s unlocked,” she said, but he stopped, and both of them began to look through the glass at the dark, mobile night, at the gas lamp, at the shadow of the railings.

  “It doesn’t look as if they’re coming,” she muttered, softly clinking the keys.

  “Have you been waiting long?” he asked. “If you like I’ll take a turn,” and at that moment the light went out. “If you like I’ll stay here all night.” he added in the darkness.

  She laughed, and then sighed abruptly, as if fed up with waiting. Through the glass the ashen light from the street fell on both of them and the shadow of the iron design on the door undulated over her and continued obliquely over him, like a shoulder-belt, while a prismatic rainbow lay on the wall. And, as often happened with him—though it was deeper this time than ever before—Fyodor suddenly felt—in this glassy darkness—the strangeness of life, the strangeness of its magic, as if a corner of it had been turned back for an instant and he had glimpsed its unusual lining. Close to his face there was her soft cinereous cheek cut across by a shadow, and when Zina suddenly, with mysterious bewilderment and a mercurial sparkle in her eyes, turned toward him and the shadow lay across her lips, oddly changing her, he took advantage of the absolute freedom in this world of shadows to take her by her ghostly elbows; but she slipped out of the pattern and with a quick jab of her finger restored the light.

  “Why?” he asked.

  “I’ll explain it some other time,” replied Zina, not taking her eyes off him.

  “Tomorrow,” said Fyodor.

  “All right, tomorrow. Only I want to warn you that there is not going to be any conversation between you and me at home. That’s final and for good.”

  “Then let’s …” he began, but at this point stocky Colonel Kasatkin and his tall, faded wife loomed on the other side of the door.

  “A very good evening to you, my pretty,” said the colonel, cleaving the night at a single stroke. Fyodor went out into the street.

  The next day he contrived to catch her on the corner as she returned from work. They arranged to meet after supper by a bench which he had spied out the night before.

  “Well, why?” he asked when they had sat down.

  “For five reasons,” she said. “In the first place because I’m not a German girl, in the second place because only last Wednesday I broke up with my fiancé, in the third place because it would be—well, pointless, in the fourth place because you don’t know me at all, and in the fifth place …” She fell silent, and Fyodor cautiously kissed her burning, melting, sorrowing lips. “That’s why,” she said, her fingers running over his and strongly compressing them.

  Thereforth they met every evening. Marianna Nikolavna, who never dared to ask her about anything (the very hint of a question would draw forth the familiar storm), guessed that her daughter was meeting someone, the more so since she knew of the mysterious fiancé. He was a strange, sickly, unbalanced person (that, at least, is how Fyodor imagined him from Zina’s description—and, of course, those described people are usually endowed with one basic characteristic: they never smile) whom she had met when she was sixteen, three years before, he being twelve years older than she, and in this seniority there was also something dark, unpleasant and embittered. Then again, according to her account, their meetings had taken place without any sentiments of love being expressed, and because she never made reference to even a single kiss, the impression was given that this had been simply an endless succession of tedious conversations.
She resolutely refused to reveal his name or even his type of work (although she gave him to understand that he had been, in a sense, a man of genius) and Fyodor was secretly grateful to her for this, realizing that a ghost with neither name nor environment would fade out more easily—but neverthless he experienced pangs of disgusting jealousy which he strove not to probe, but this jealousy was always present just around the corner, and the thought that somewhere, somewhen, for all he knew, he might meet the anxious, mournful eyes of this gentleman, caused everything around him to assume nocturnal habits of life, like nature during an eclipse. Zina swore that she had never loved him, that from lack of willpower she had been dragging out a tired romance with him and would have continued to do so had it not been for Fyodor coming along; but he was unable to discern any particular lack of willpower in her, rather he noticed a mixture of feminine shyness and unfeminine resoluteness in everything. Despite the complexity of her mind, a most convincing simplicity was natural to her, so that she could permit herself much that others would be unable to get away with, and the very speed of their coming together seemed to Fyodor completely natural in the sharp light of her directness.

  At home she behaved in such a way that it was monstrous to imagine an evening rendezvous with this alien, sullen young lady; but it was not pretense, rather it was also an idiosyncratic form of directness. When he once jokingly stopped her in the little corridor she paled with anger and did not come to meet him that evening, and later she forced him to swear on oath that he would never do that again. Very soon he understood why this was so: the domestic situation was of such a low-grade variety that with it as a background the fugitive touching of hands between a boarder and the landlord’s daughter would have been turned simply into “goings on.”

  Zina’s father, Oscar Grigorievich Mertz, had died of angina pectoris in Berlin four years ago, and immediately after his death Marianna Nikolavna had married a man whom Mertz would not have allowed over his threshold, one of those cocky and corny Russians who, when the occasion presents itself, savor the word “Yid” as if it were a fat fig. But whenever good Shchyogolev was away, there quite simply appeared in the house one of his fishy business friends, a skinny Baltic baron with whom Marianna Nikolavna deceived him—and Fyodor, who had happened to see the baron once or twice, could not help wondering with a shudder of disgust what they could find in one another, and, if they found anything, what procedure did they adopt, this elderly, fleshy woman with a toad’s face and this old skeleton with decaying teeth.

  If it was sometimes agonizing to know that Zina was alone in the flat and that their agreement prevented him talking to her, it was agonizing in a totally different way when Shchyogolev remained alone at home. No lover of solitude, Boris Ivanovich would soon begin to get bored, and from his room Fyodor would hear the rustling growth of this boredom, as if the flat were slowly being overgrown with burdocks—which had now grown up to his door. He would pray to fate that something might distract Shchyogolev, but (until he got the radio) salvation was not forthcoming. Inevitably came the ominous, tactful knock and Boris Ivanovich, horribly smiling, squeezed sideways into the room. “Were you asleep? Did I disturb you?” he would ask, seeing Fyodor flat on his back on the sofa, and then, ingressing entirely, he would shut the door tightly behind him and sit by Fyodor’s feet, sighing. “It’s deadly dull, deadly dull,” he would say, and would launch upon some pet subject. In the realm of literature he had a high opinion of L’homme qui assassina by Claude Farrère, and in the realm of philosophy he had studied the Protocols of the Sages of Zion. He could discuss these two books for hours and it seemed that he had read nothing else in his life. He was generous with stories of judicial practice in the provinces and with Jewish anecdotes. Instead of “we had some champagne and set out” he expressed himself as follows: “We cracked a bottle of fizz—and hup.” As with most babblers, his reminiscences always contained some extraordinary conversationalist who told him endless things of interest (“I’ve never met another as clever as he in all my life,” he would remark somewhat uncivilly)—and since it was impossible to imagine Boris Ivanovich in the role of a silent listener, one had to allow that this was a special form of split personality.

  Once, when he had noticed some written-up sheets of paper on Fyodor’s desk, he said, adopting a new heartfelt tone of voice: “Ah, if only I had a tick or two, what a novel I’d whip off! From real life. Imagine this kind of thing: an old dog—but still in his prime, fiery, thirsting for happiness—gets to know a widow, and she has a daughter, still quite a little girl—you know what I mean—when nothing is formed yet but already she has a way of walking that drives you out of your mind—A slip of a girl, very fair, pale, with blue under the eyes—and of course she doesn’t even look at the old goat. What to do? Well, not long thinking, he ups and marries the widow. Okay. They settle down the three of them. Here you can go on indefinitely—the temptation, the eternal torment, the itch, the mad hopes. And the upshot—a miscalculation. Time flies, he gets older, she blossoms out—and not a sausage. Just walks by and scorches you with a look of contempt. Eh? D’you feel here a kind of Dostoevskian tragedy? That story, you see, happened to a great friend of mine, once upon a time in fairyland when Old King Cole was a merry old soul,” and Boris Ivanovich, turning his dark eyes away, pursed his lips and emitted a melancholy, bursting sound.

  “My better half,” he said on another occasion, “was for twenty years the wife of a kike and got mixed up with a whole rabble of Jew in-laws. I had to expend quite a bit of effort to get rid of that stink. Zina [he alternately called his stepdaughter either this or Aïda, depending on his mood], thank God, doesn’t have anything specific—you should see her cousin, one of these fat little brunettes, you know, with a fuzzy upperlip. In fact, it has occurred to me that my Marianna, when she was Madam Mertz, might have had other interests—one can’t help being drawn to one’s own people, you know. Let her tell you herself how she suffocated in that atmosphere, what relatives she acquired—oh, my Gott—all gabbling at table and she pouring out the tea. And to think that her mother was a lady-in-waiting of the Empress and that she herself had gone to the Smolny School for young ladies—and then she went and married a yid—to this very day she can’t explain how it happened: he was rich, she says, and she was stupid, they met in Nice, she eloped to Rome with him—in the open air, you know, it all looked different—well, but when afterwards the little clan closed upon her, she saw she was stuck.”

  Zina told it quite differently. In her version the image of her father took on something of Proust’s Swann. His marriage to her mother and their subsequent life were tinted with a romantic haze. Judging by her words and judging also by the photographs of him, he had been a refined, noble, intelligent and kindly man—even in these stiff St. Petersburg cabinet pictures with a gold stamped signature on the thick cardboard, which she showed Fyodor at night under a streetlamp, the old-fashioned luxuriance of his blond mustache and the height of his collars did nothing to spoil his delicate features and direct, laughing gaze. She told him about his scented handkerchief, and his passion for trotting races and music, and that time in his youth when he had routed a visiting grand master of chess, and the way he recited Homer by heart: in talking of him she selected things that might touch Fyodor’s imagination, since it seemed to her she detected something sluggish and bored in his reaction to her reminiscences of her father, that is to the most precious thing she had to show him. He himself noticed this strangely delayed responsiveness of his. Zina had one quality which embarrassed him: her home life had developed in her a morbidly acute pride, so that even when talking to Fyodor she referred to her race with challenging emphasis, as if stressing the fact that she took for granted (a fact which its stressing denied) that he regarded Jews, not only without the hostility present to a greater or lesser degree in the majority of Russians, but did so without the chilly smile of forced goodwill. In the beginning she drew these strings so taut that he, who in general did not give a damn about the
classification of people according to race, or racial interrelations, began to feel a bit awkward for her, and on the other hand, under the influence of her burning, watchful pride, he became aware of a kind of personal shame for listening silently to Shchyogolev’s loathesome rot and to his trick of garbling Russian, in imitation of a farcical Jewish accent as when he said, for instance, to a wet guest who had left traces on the carpet: “Oy, vat a mudnik!”

  For a certain time after her father’s death their former friends and relatives from his side had automatically continued to visit her mother and her; but little by little they thinned out and fell away, and only one old couple for a long time continued to come, feeling sorry for Marianna Nikolavna, feeling sorry for the past and trying to ignore Shchyogolev’s retreating to his bedroom with a cup of tea and a newspaper. But Zina had continued to preserve her connection with the world her mother had betrayed, and on visits to these former family friends she changed extraordinarily, grew softer and kinder (she herself remarked upon this), as she sat at the tea table among the quiet conversations of old people about illnesses, weddings and Russian literature.