The Gift

by Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

  His secretary, Dora Wittgenstein, who had worked for him for fourteen years, shared a small musty office with Zina. This aging woman with bags under her eyes, smelling of carrion through her cheap eau de cologne, who worked for any number of hours and who had dried up in the service of Traum, resembled an unfortunate, worn-out horse whose whole muscular system had been displaced, leaving only a few iron tendons. She was little educated, organized her life according to two or three generally accepted concepts and in her dealings with French was guided by certain private rules of her own. When Traum was writing his periodic “book” he would call her to his house on Sundays, haggle over her payment and keep her for extra time; and sometimes she would proudly inform Zina that his chauffeur had driven her home—or at least as far as the tram stop.

  Zina had to work not only at translations but also, as did all the other typists, at copying out the long applications presented at court. Frequently she also had to take down in shorthand, in the presence of a client, the circumstances of his case, very often dealing with divorce. These cases were all fairly sordid—lumps of all sorts of muck and stupidity stuck together. A person from Kottbus, divorcing a wife who, according to him, was abnormal, accused her of consorting with a great Dane; the chief witness was the janitress, who through the door had allegedly heard the wife talking to the hound and expressing delight concerning certain details of its organism.

  “To you it’s only funny,” said Zina crossly, “but honestly I can’t go on, I can’t, and I would abandon all this scum right away if I didn’t know that another office would have the same scum, or worse. This worn-out feeling in the evening is something phenomenal, it baffles any description. What am I good for now? My spine aches so much from that typewriter that I feel like howling. And the main thing is that this will never end, because if it came to an end there’d be nothing to eat—Mother can’t do anything, she can’t even work as a cook because she’d only sob in her employer’s kitchen and break the dishes, and her filthy husband only knows how to go bankrupt—in my opinion he was already bankrupt when he was born. You’ve no idea how I hate him, he’s a swine, a swine, a swine….”

  “One could make ham out of him” said Fyodor. “I also had a fairly hard day. I wanted to write a poem for you, but somehow it hasn’t quite cleared up yet.”

  “My darling, my joy,” she exclaimed, “can all this be true—this fence and that blurry star? When I was little I didn’t like drawing anything that didn’t finish, so I didn’t draw fences because they don’t finish on paper; you can’t imagine a fence that finishes, but I always did something complete, a pyramid, or a house on a hill.”

  “And I liked horizons most of all, and diminishing dashes beneath it—to represent the wake of the sun setting beyond the sea. And the greatest childhood torment of all was an unsharpened or broken crayon pencil.”

  “But then the sharpened ones…. Do you remember the white one? Always the longest—not like the red and blue ones—because it didn’t do much work, do you remember?”

  “But how much it wanted to please! The drama of the albino. L’inutile beauté. Anyhow, later I let it have its fill. Precisely because it drew the invisible and one could imagine lots of things. In general there await us unlimited possibilities. Only no angels, or if there must be an angel, then with a huge chest cavity, and wings like a hybrid between a bird of paradise and a condor, and talons to carry the young soul away—not ‘embraced’ as Lermontov has it.”

  “Yes, I also think that we can’t end here. I can’t imagine that we could cease to exist. In any case I wouldn’t like to turn into anything.”

  “Into diffused light? What do you think of that? Not too good, I’d say. I am convinced that extraordinary surprises await us. It’s a pity one can’t imagine what one can’t compare to anything. Genius is an African who dreams up snow. Do you know what it was that most amazed the very first Russian pilgrims when they were crossing Europe?”

  “The music?”

  “No, the fountains in the cities, the wet statues.”

  “It sometimes annoys me that you have no feeling for music. My father had such an ear that sometimes he would lie on the sofa and hum a whole opera, from beginning to end. Once he was lying like that and someone came into the next room and began talking to Mother—and he said to me: That voice belongs to so-and-so, I saw him twenty years ago in Carlsbad and he promised to come and see me one day.’ That’s what his ear was like.”

  “And I met Lishnevski today and he mentioned a friend of his who complained that Carlsbad was no longer what it used to be. Those were the days! he said: you stand with your mug of water and there next to you is King Edward… handsome, imposing man… suit of real English cloth…. Now why are you offended? What’s the matter?”

  “Never mind. There are some things you’ll never understand.”

  “Don’t say that. Why is your skin hot here and cold there? You are not cold? Better take a look at that moth by the lamp.”

  “I saw it long ago.”

  “Do you want me to tell you why moths fly toward the light? No one knows that.” “And you know?”

  “It always seems to me that in a minute I’ll guess if I just think hard enough. My father used to say that it resembled most of all a loss of equilibrium, as when learning to ride a bike you are lured by a ditch. Light in comparison with darkness is a void. Look at it circling! But there’s something deeper here—in a minute I’ll get it.”

  “I’m sorry that you didn’t write your book after all. Oh, I have a thousand plans for you. I have such a clear feeling that one day you’ll really lash out. Write something huge to make everyone gasp.”

  “I’ll write,” said Fyodor Konstantinovich jokingly, “a biography of Chernyshevski.”

  “Anything you like. But it must be quite, quite genuine. I don’t need to tell you how much I like your poems, but they are never quite up to your measure, all the words are one size smaller than your real words.”

  “Or a novel. It’s queer, I seem to remember my future works, although I don’t even know what they will be about. I’ll recall them completely and write them. Tell me, by the way, how do you tend to see it: are we going to meet all our lives like this, side by side on a bench?”

  “Oh no,” she replied in a musically dreamy voice. “In the winter we’ll go to a dance, and this summer, when I have my holiday, I’ll go to the sea for two weeks and send you a postcard of the breakers.”

  “I’ll also go to the sea for two weeks.”

  “I don’t think so. And then don’t forget that we must meet sometime in the Tiergarten in the rosarium, where the statue of the princess is with the stone fan.”

  “Pleasant prospects,” said Fyodor.

  But a few days later he happened to come across that same copy of 8 × 8; he leafed through it, looking for unfinished bits, and when all the problems turned out to be solved, he ran his eyes over the two-column extract from Chernyshevski’s youthful diary; he glanced through it, smiled, and began to read it over with interest. The drolly circumstantial style, the meticulously inserted adverbs, the passion for semicolons, the bogging down of thought in midsentence and the clumsy attempts to extricate it (whereupon it got stuck at once elsewhere, and the author had to start worrying it out all over again), the drubbing-in, rubbing-in tone of each word, the knight-moves of sense in the trivial commentary on his minutest actions, the viscid ineptitude of these actions (as if some workshop glue had got onto the man’s hands, and both were left), the seriousness, the limpness, the honesty, the poverty—all this pleased Fyodor so much, he was so amazed and tickled by the fact that an author with such a mental and verbal style was considered to have influenced the literary destiny of Russia, that on the very next morning he signed out the complete works of Chernyshevski from the state library. And as he read, his astonishment grew, and this feeling contained a peculiar kind of bliss.

  When, a week later, he accepted a telephone invitation from Alexandra Yakovlevna (“Why does
one never see you? Tell me, are you free tonight?”), he did not take 8 × 8 with him to show to his friends: this little magazine now had a sentimental value for him, the memory of an encounter. Among the guests there he found the engineer Kern and a capacious, very smooth-cheeked and taciturn gentleman with a fat, old-fashioned face, by the name of Goryainov, who was well known for the fact that being able to imitate beautifully (by stretching his mouth wide, making moist ruminant sounds, and speaking in falsetto) a certain unfortunate, cranky journalist with a poor reputation, he had grown so accustomed to this image (which thus had its revenge on him) that not only did he also pull down the corners of his mouth when imitating other of his acquaintances, but even began to look like it himself in normal conversation. Alexander Chernyshevski, grown thinner and quieter after his illness—this being the price of redeeming his health for a while—seemed that evening quite lively again, and even his familiar tic had returned; but Yasha’s ghost no longer sat in the corner, leaning on his elbow among disarrayed books.

  “Are you still pleased with your lodgings?” asked Alexandra Yakovlevna. “Well, I’m very glad. You don’t flirt with the daughter? No? Apropos, I remembered the other day that at one time Mertz and I had some common acquaintances—he was a wonderful man, a gentleman in all senses of the word—but I don’t think she cares very much to admit her origins. She does admit them? Well, I don’t know. I suspect you don’t quite understand these matters.”

  “In any case she’s a girl with character,” said the engineer Kern. “I once saw her at a meeting of the dance committee. She looked down her nose at everything.”

  “And what’s her nose like?” asked Alexandra Yakovlevna.

  “You know, to tell you the truth I didn’t look at it very carefully, and in the final analysis all girls aspire to be beauties. Let’s not be catty.”

  Goryainov, who sat with his hands clasped on his stomach, was silent except that occasionally he lifted his fleshy chin with a bizarre jerk and shrilly cleared his throat, as if calling to someone. “Yes, thank you, I would indeed,” he said with a bow whenever he was offered jam or a glass of tea, and if he wished to impart something to his neighbor he did not turn toward him but moved his head closer, still looking ahead, and having imparted it or asked a question, slowly moved away again. In a conversation with him there were strange gaps because he did not back your speeches in any way and did not look at you, but would let the brown gaze of his small, elephant eyes stray around the room, and would convulsively clear his throat. When he spoke of himself it was always in a gloomily humorous vein. His whole appearance evoked for some reason such obsolete associations as, for example: department of the interior, cold vegetable soup, glossy rubbers, stylized snow falling outside the window, stolidity, Stolypin, statist.

  “Well, my friend,” said Chernyshevski vaguely, moving to a seat by Fyodor, “what have you got to say for yourself? You don’t look too well.”

  “You remember,” said Fyodor, “once about three years ago you gave me the happy advice to describe the life of your renowned namesake?”

  “Absolutely not,” said Alexander Yakovlevich.

  “A pity—because now I’m thinking of getting down to it.”

  “Oh, really? Are you serious?”

  “Quite serious,” said Fyodor.

  “But how did such a wild thought get into your head?” chimed in Mme. Chernyshevski. “Why, you ought to write—I don’t know—say, the life of Batyushkov or Delvig, something in the orbit of Pushkin—but what’s the point of Chernyshevski?”

  “Firing practice,” said Fyodor.

  “An answer which is, to say the least, enigmatic,” remarked the engineer Kern, and the rimless glass of his pince-nez gleamed as he attempted to crack a nut with his palms. Dragging them by one leg, Goryainov passed him the crackers.

  “Why not,” said Alexander Yakovlevich, coming out of a brief spell of musing, “I begin to like the idea. In our terrible times when individualism is trampled underfoot and thought is stifled it must be a great joy for a writer to immerse himself in the bright era of the sixties. I welcome it.”

  “Yes, but it’s so distant from him!” said Mme. Chernyshevski. “There’s no continuity, no tradition. Frankly speaking, I myself wouldn’t be very interested in resuscitating everything that I felt in this connection when I was a college student in Russia.”

  “My uncle,” said Kern, cracking a nut, “was thrown out of school for reading What to Do?”

  “And what is your opinion?” said Alexandra Yakovlevna addressing Goryainov.

  Goryainov spread his hands. “I don’t have any particular one,” he said in a thin voice, as if mimicking someone. “I’ve never read Chernyshevski, but when I come to think of it… A most boring, Lord forgive me, figure!”

  Alexander Yakovlevich leaned back slightly in his armchair, blinking, twitching, his face alternately lighting up in a smile and then fading again, and said:

  “Nevertheless I welcome Fyodor Konstantinovich’s idea. Of course a lot strikes us today as both comic and boring. But in that era there is something sacred, something eternal. Utilitarianism, the negation of art and so on—all this is merely an accidental wrapping, under which it is impossible not to distinguish its basic features: reverence for the whole human race, the cult of freedom, ideas of equality—equality of rights. It was an era of great emancipations, the peasants from the landowners, the citizen from the state, women from domestic bondage. And don’t forget that not only were the best principles of the Russian liberation movement born then—a thirst for knowledge, steadfastness of spirit, heroic self-sacrifice—but also it was precisely in this era, fed by it in one way or another, that such giants as Turgenev, Nekrasov, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky were developing. Moreover it goes without saying that Nikolai Gavrilovich Chernyshevski himself was a man with a vast, versatile mind, with enormous, creative willpower, and the fact that he endured dreadful sufferings for the sake of his ideology, for the sake of humanity, for the sake of Russia, more than redeems a certain harshness and rigidity in his critical views. Moreover I maintain that he was a superb critic—penetrating, honest, brave…. No, no, it’s wonderful, you must certainly write it!”

  The engineer Kern had already been on his feet for some time, walking about the room, shaking his head and bursting to say something.

  “What are we talking about?” he suddenly exclaimed, taking hold of the back of a chair. “Who cares what Chernyshevski thought of Pushkin? Rousseau was a lousy botanist, and I wouldn’t have been treated by Dr. Chekhov for anything in the world. Chernyshevski was first of all a learned economist and that’s how he should be regarded—and with all my respect for Fyodor Konstantinovich’s poetic talents, I am somewhat doubtful that he is capable of appreciating the merits and demerits of his man’s Commentaries on John Stuart Mill.”