The Gift

by Vladimir Nabokov

  Time to get up. The stove-heater pats

  The glistening facings

  Of the stove to determine

  If the fire has grown to the top.

  It has. And to its hot hum

  The morning responds with the silence of snow,

  Pink-shaded azure,

  And immaculate whiteness.

  It is strange how a memory will grow into a wax figure, how the cherub grows suspiciously prettier as its frame darkens with age-strange, strange are the mishaps of memory. I emigrated seven years ago; this foreign land has by now lost its aura of abroadness just as my own ceased to be a geographic habit. The Year Seven. The wandering ghost of an empire immediately adopted this system of reckoning, akin to the one formerly introduced by the ardent French citizen in honor of newborn liberty. But the years roll on, and honor is no consolation; recollections either melt away, or else acquire a deathly gloss, so that instead of marvelous apparitions we are left with a fan of picture postcards. Nothing can help here, no poetry, no stereoscope—that gadget which in ominous bug-eyed silence used to endow a cupola with such convexity and surround mug-carrying Karlsbad promenaders with such a diabolical semblance of space that I was tormented by nightmares after this optical diversion far more than after tales of Mongolian tortures. The particular stereo camera I remember adorned the waiting room of our dentist, an American named Law-son, whose French mistress Mme. Ducamp, a gray-haired harpy, seated at her desk among vials of blood-red Lawson mouthwash, pursed her lips and nervously scratched her scalp as she tried to find an appointment for Tanya and me, and finally, with an effort and a screech, managed to push her spitting pen between la Princesse Toumanoff, with a blot at the end, and Monsieur Danzas, with a blot at the beginning. Here is the description of a drive to this dentist, who had warned the day before that “this one will have to come out.” …

  What will it be like to be sitting

  Half an hour from now in this brougham?

  With what eyes shall I look at these snowflakes

  And black branches of trees?

  How shall I follow again with my gaze

  That conical curbstone

  In its cottonwool cap? How recall

  On my way back my way there?

  (While with revulsion and tenderness

  Constantly feeling the handkerchief

  Wherein carefully folded is something

  Like an ivory watch charm.)

  That “cottonwool cap” is not only ambiguous but does not even begin to express what I meant—namely, the snow piled caplike on granite cones joined by a chain somewhere in the vicinity of the statue of Peter the Great. Somewhere! Alas, it is already difficult for me to gather all the parts of the past; already I am beginning to forget relationships and connections between objects that still thrive in my memory, objects I thereby condemn to extinction. If so, what insulting mockery to affirm smugly that

  Thus a former impression keeps living

  Within harmony’s ice.

  What, then, compels me to compose poems about my childhood if in spite of everything, my words go wide of the mark, or else slay both the pard and the hart with the exploding bullet of an “accurate” epithet? But let us not despair. The man says I am a real poet—which means that the hunt was not in vain.

  Here is another twelve-line poem about boyhood torments. It deals with the ordeals of winter in town when, for example, ribbed stockings chafe behind the knees, or when the shopgirl pulls an impossibly flat kid glove onto your hand, laid on the counter as if on an executioner’s block. There is more: the hook’s double pinch (the first time it slipped off) while you stand with outspread arms to have your fur collar fastened; but in compensation for this, what an amusing change in acoustics, how rounded all sounds become when the collar is raised; and since we have touched upon ears, how unforgettable the silky, taut, buzzing music while the strings of your cap’s earflaps are being tied (raise your chin).

  Merrily, to coin a phrase, youngsters romp on a frosty day. At the entrance to the public park we have the balloon vendor; above his head, three times his size, an enormous rustling cluster. Look, children, how they billow and rub against each other, all full of God’s sunshine, in red, blue and green shades. A beautiful sight! Please, Uncle, I want the biggest (the white one with the rooster painted on it and the red embryo floating inside, which, when its mother is destroyed, will escape up to the ceiling and a day later will come down, all wrinkled and quite tame). Now the happy children have bought their ruble balloon and the kindly hawker has pulled it out of the jostling bunch. Just a minute, my lad, don’t grab, let me cut the string. After which he puts on his mittens again, checks the string around his waist, from which his scissors dangle, and pushing off with his heel, slowly begins to rise in an upright position, higher and higher into the blue sky: look, his cluster is no larger now than a bunch of grapes, while beneath him lies hazy, gilded, berimed St. Petersburg, a little restored here and there, alas, according to the best pictures of our national painters.

  But joking aside, it really was all very beautiful, very quiet. The trees in the park mimed their own ghosts and the whole effect revealed immense talent. Tanya and I would make fun of the sleds of our coevals, especially if they were covered with fringed, carpet-like stuff and had a high seat (equipped even with a back) and reins that the rider held as he braked with his felt boots. This kind never made it all the way to the final snowdrift, but instead went off course almost immediately and began to spin helplessly while continuing to descend, carrying a pallid, intent child who was obliged, when the sled’s momentum was spent, to work with his feet in order to reach the end of the icy run. Tanya and I had weighty belly sleds from Sangalli’s: such a sled consisted simply of a rectangular velvet cushion on iron runners curved at each end. You did not have to pull it on the way to the slide—it glided with so little effort and so impatiently along the snow, sanded in vain, that it bumped against your heels. Here we are at the hill.

  One climbed up a sparkle-splashed platform.… (Water carried up in buckets to pour on the slide had splashed over the wooden steps so that they were coated with sparkling ice, but the well-meaning alliteration had not been able to get all this in.)

  One climbed a sparkle-splashed platform,

  One dashingly fell belly first

  On the sled, and it rattled

  Down the blueness; and then

  When the scene underwent a grim change,

  And there somberly burned in the nursery

  Scarlet fever on Christmas,

  Or, on Easter, diphtheria,

  One rocketed down the bright, brittle,

  Exaggerated ice hill

  In a kind of half-tropical,

  Half-Tavricheski park

  where, by the power of delirium, General Nikolai Mihailovich Przhevalski was transferred, together with his stone camel, from the Alexandrovski park near us, and where he immediately turned into a statue of my father who was at that moment somewhere between Kokand and Ashkhabad, for example, or else on a slope of the Tsinin Range. What illnesses Tanya and I went through! Now together, now by turns; and how I would suffer when I heard, between the slam of a distant door and the restrained quiet sound of another one, her footfall and laughter bursting through, sounding celestially indifferent to me, unaware of me, infinitely distant from my fat compress with its tawny oilcloth filling, my aching legs, my bodily heaviness and constriction; but if it was she who was sick, how earthly and real, how like a crisp soccer ball I felt when I saw her lying in bed with an air of remoteness about her as if she had turned toward the other world, with only the limp lining of her being toward me! Let us describe the last stand before the capitulation when, not yet having stepped out of the normal course of the day, concealing from your own self the fever, the ache in your joints, and wrapping yourself up Mexican fashion, you disguise the claims of fever’s chill as the demands of the game; and when, a half hour later, you have surrendered and ended up in bed, your body no longer b
elieves that just a short time ago it was playing, crawling on all fours along the floor of the hall, along the parquet, along the quarpet. Let us describe Mother’s questioning smile of alarm when she has just put the thermometer in my armpit (a task she would not entrust either to the valet or to the governess). “Well, you’ve got yourself into a nice fix, haven’t you?” says she, still trying to joke about it. Then a minute later: “I knew it yesterday, I knew you had a fever, you can’t fool me.” And after another minute: “How much do you think you have?” And finally: “I think we can take it out now.” She brings the incandescent glass tube close to the light and, drawing together her lovely sealskin eyebrows—which Tanya has inherited—she looks for a long time … and then without saying anything she unhurriedly shakes the thermometer and slips it back into its case, looking at me as if not quite recognizing me, while my father rides his horse at a walk across a vernal plain all blue with irises; let us describe also the delirious state in which one feels huge numbers grow, inflating one’s brain, accompanied by someone’s incessant patter quite unrelated to you, as if in the dark garden adjoining the madhouse of the book-of-sums several of its characters, half out (or more precisely, fifty-seven one-hundred-and-elevenths out) of their terrible world of increasing interests, appeared in their stock parts of apple-woman, four ditchdiggers and a Certain Person who has bequeathed his children a caravan of fractions, and chatted, to the accompaniment of the nocturnal sough of trees, about something extremely domestic and silly, but therefore all the more awful, all the more doomed to turn into those very numbers, into that mathematical universe expanding endlessly (an expansion which for me sheds an odd light on the macrocosmic theories of today’s physicists). Let us describe finally the recovery, when there is no longer any point in shaking the mercury down, and the thermometer is carelessly left lying on the bedtable, where an assembly of books that has come to congratulate you and a few playthings (idle onlookers) are crowding out the half-empty bottles of turbid potions.

  A writing case with my note paper

  Is what I most vividly see:

  The leaves are adorned with a horseshoe

  And my monogram. I had become

  Quite an expert in twisted initials,

  Intaglio seals, dry flattened flowers

  (Which a little girl sent me from Nice)

  And sealing wax, red and bronze-gleaming.

  None of the poems in the book alludes to a certain extraordinary thing that happened to me as I was recovering from a particularly severe case of pneumonia. When everyone had moved into the drawing room (to use a Victorian cliché), one of the guests who (to go on with it) had been silent all evening.… The fever had ebbed away during the night and I had finally scrambled ashore. I was, let me tell you, weak, capricious and transparent—as transparent as a cut-glass egg. Mother had gone to buy me—I did not know what exactly—one of those freakish things that from time to time I coveted with the greed of a pregnant woman, afterwards forgetting them completely; but my mother made lists of these desiderata. As I lay flat in bed among bluish layers of indoor twilight I felt myself evolving an incredible lucidity, as when a distant stripe of radiantly pale sky stretches between long vesperal clouds and you can make out the cape and shallows of God knows what far-off islands—and it seems that if you release your volatile glance just a little further you will discern a shining boat drawn up on the damp sand and receding footsteps filled with bright water. In that minute, I think, I attained the highest limit of human health: my mind had been dipped and rinsed only recently in a dangerous, supernaturally clean blackness; and now, lying still and not even shutting my eyes, I mentally saw my mother, in chinchilla coat and black-dotted veil, getting into the sleigh (which always seemed in old Russia so small compared to the tremendous stuffed bottom of the coachman) and holding her dove-gray fluffy muff to her face as she sped behind a pair of black horses covered with a blue net. Street after street unfolded without any effort on my part; lumps of coffee-colored snow pounded against the sleigh’s front. Now it has stopped. Vasiliy the footman steps down from his footboard, in the same motion unfastening the bearskin lap robe, and my mother walks briskly toward a shop whose name and display I do not have time to identify, since just at that instant my uncle, her brother, passes by and hails her (but she has already disappeared), and for several steps I involuntarily accompany him, trying to make out the face of the gentleman with whom he is chatting as they both walk away, but catching myself, I turn back and hastily flow, as it were, into the store, where my mother is already paying ten rubles for a perfectly ordinary green Faber pencil, which is then lovingly wrapped in brown paper by two clerks and handed to Vasiliy, who is already carrying it behind my mother to the sleigh, which now speeds along anonymous streets back to our house, now advancing to meet it; but here the crystalline course of my clairvoyance was interrupted by Yvonna Ivanovna’s arrival with broth and toast. I needed her help to sit up in bed. She gave the pillow a swat and placed the bed tray (with its midget feet and a perpetually sticky area near its southwestern corner) across the animated blanket before me. Suddenly the door opened and Mother came in, smiling and holding a long, brown paper package like a halberd. From it emerged a Faber pencil a yard long and of corresponding thickness: a display giant that had hung horizontally in the window as an advertisement and had once happened to arouse my whimsical greed. I must still have been in that blissful state when any oddity descends among us like a demigod to mingle unrecognized with the Sunday crowd, since at that moment I felt no amazement at what had happened to me, but only remarked to myself in passing how I had been mistaken in regard to the object’s size; but later, when I had grown stronger and plugged up certain chinks with bread, I would ponder with superstitious pangs about my clairvoyant spell (the only one I ever experienced), of which I was so ashamed that I concealed it even from Tanya; and I nearly burst into tears from embarrassment when we happened to meet, on my very first trip outdoors, a distant relative of Mother’s, one Gaydukov, who said to her: “Your brother and I saw you the other day near Treumann’s.”

  Meanwhile the air in the poems has grown warmer and we are preparing to return to the country, where we might move as early as April in the years before I began school (I began it only at the age of twelve).

  The snow, gone from the slopes, lurks in ravines,

  And the Petersburg spring

  Is full of excitement and of anemones

  And of the first butterflies.

  But I don’t need last year’s Vanessas,

  Those bleached hibernators,

  Or those utterly battered Brimstones,

  Through transparent woods flying.

  I shall not fail, though, to detect

  The four lovely gauze wings

  Of the softest Geometrid moth in the world

  Spread flat on a mottled pale birchtrunk.

  This poem is the author’s own favorite, but he did not include it in the collection because, once again, the theme is connected with that of his father and economy of art advised him not to touch that theme before the right time came. Instead he reproduced such spring impressions as the first sensation immediately upon walking out of the station: the softness of the ground, its kindred proximity to your foot, and around your head the totally unrestrained flow of air. Vying with each other, furiously lavishing invitations, standing up on their boxes, flourishing their free hand and mingling their uproar with exaggerated “whoas,” the droshky drivers called to the early arrivals. A little way off an open motorcar, crimson both inside and out, awaited us: the idea of speed had already given a slant to the steering wheel (sea-cliff trees will understand what I mean), while its general appearance still retained—out of a false sense of propriety, I suppose—a servile link with the shape of a victoria; but if this was indeed an attempt at mimicry then it was totally destroyed by the roar of the motor with the muffler bypass opened, a roar so ferocious that long before we came in sight a peasant on a hay wagon coming the other way w
ould jump off and try to hood his horse with a sack—after which he and his cart would often end up in the ditch or even in the field; where, a minute later, having already forgotten us and our dust, the rural stillness would collect again, cool and tender, with only the tiniest aperture left for the song of a skylark.

  Perhaps one day, on foreign-made soles with heels long since worn down, feeling myself a ghost despite the idiotic substantiality of the insulators, I shall again come out of that station and without visible companions walk along the footpath that accompanies the highway the ten or so versts to Leshino. One after another the telegraph poles will hum at my approach. A crow will settle on a boulder—settle and straighten a wing that has folded wrong. The day will probably be on the grayish side. Changes in the appearance of the surrounding landscape that I cannot imagine, as well as some of the oldest landmarks that somehow I have forgotten, will greet me alternately, even mingling from time to time. I think that as I walk I shall utter something like a moan, in tune with the poles. When I reach the sites where I grew up and see this and that—or else, because of fires, rebuilding, lumbering operations or the negligence of nature, see neither this nor that (but still make out something infinitely and unwaveringly faithful to me, if only because my eyes are, in the long run, made of the same stuff as the grayness, the clarity, the dampness of those sites), then, after all the excitement, I shall experience a certain satiation of suffering—perhaps on the mountain pass to a kind of happiness which it is too early for me to know (I know only that when I reach it, it will be with pen in hand). But there is one thing I shall definitely not find there awaiting me—the thing which, indeed, made the whole business of exile worth cultivating: my childhood and the fruits of my childhood. Its fruits—here they are, today, already ripe; while my childhood itself has disappeared into a distance even more remote than that of our Russian North.