The Gift

by Vladimir Nabokov

  Further came the quiet sands of the Gobi, dune after dune went by like waves revealing short ocher horizons, and all that was audible in the velvet air was the labored, quickened breathing of the camels and the scrape of their broad feet. The caravan went onward, now ascending to the crest of a dune now plunging downward, and by the evening its shadow had attained gigantic proportions. The five-carat diamond of Venus disappeared in the west together with the glow of the sunset, which distorted everything in its blanched, orange and violet light. And Father loved to recall how once at such a sunset, in 1893, in the dead heart of the Gobi desert he had met with—taking them at first for phantoms projected by the prismatic rays—two cyclists in Chinese sandals and round felt hats, who turned out to be the Americans Sachtleben and Allen, riding all across Asia to Peking for fun.

  Spring awaited us in the mountains of Nan-Shan. Everything foretold it: the babbling of the water in the brooks, the distant thunder of the rivers, the whistle of the creepers which lived in holes on the slippery wet hillsides, the delightful singing of the local larks, and “a mass of noises whose origins are hard to explain” (a phrase from the notes of a friend of my father’s, Grigoriy Efimovich Grum-Grzhimaylo, which is fixed in my mind forever and full of the amazing music of truth because written not by an ignorant poet but by a naturalist of genius). On the southern slopes we had already met our first interesting butterfly—Potanin’s subspecies of Butler’s pierid—and in the valley to which we descended by way of a torrent bed we found real summer. All the slopes were studded with anemones and primulae. Przhevalski’s gazelle and Strauch’s pheasant tempted the hunters. And what sunrises there were! Only in China is the early mist so enchanting, causing everything to vibrate, the fantastic outlines of hovels, the dawning crags. As into an abyss, the river runs into the murk of the prematutinal twilight that still hangs in the gorges, while higher up, along flowing waters, all glimmers and scintillates, and quite a company of blue magpies has already awakened in the willows by the mill.

  Escorted by fifteen Chinese foot soldiers armed with halberds and carrying enormous, absurdly bright banners, we crossed passes through the ridge a number of times. In spite of it being the middle of summer, night frosts were so bad there that in the morning the flowers were filmed with rime and had become so brittle that they snapped underfoot with a surprising, gentle tinkle; but two hours later, just as soon as the sun began to be warm, the wonderful Alpine flora again resplended, again scented the air with resin and honey. Clinging to steep banks we made our way under the hot blue sky; grasshoppers shot from under our feet, the dogs ran with their tongues hanging out, seeking refuge from the heat in the short shadows thrown by the horses. The water in the wells smelled of gunpowder. The trees seemed to be a botanist’s delirium: a white rowan with alabaster berries or a birch with red bark!

  Placing one foot on a fragment of rock and leaning slightly on the handle of his net, my father looks down from a high spur, from the glacier boulders of Tanegma, at the lake Kuka-Nor—a huge spread of dark blue water. There down below on the golden steppes a herd of kiangs rushes past, and the shadow of an eagle flicks across the cliffs; overhead there is perfect peace, silence, transparency … and again I ask myself what Father is thinking about when he is not busy collecting and stands there like that, quite still … appearing as it were on the crest of my recollection, torturing me, enrapturing me—to the point of pain, to an insanity of tenderness, envy and love, tormenting my soul with his inscrutable solitariness.

  There were the times when going up the Yellow River and its tributaries, on some splendid September morning, in the lily thickets and hollows on the banks, he and I would take Elwes’ Swallowtail—a black wonder with tails in the shape of hooves. On inclement evenings, before sleeping, he would read Horace, Montaigne, and Pushkin—the three books he had brought with him. One winter when crossing the ice of a river I noticed in the distance a line of dark objects strung across it, the large horns of twenty wild yaks which had been caught in crossing by the suddenly forming ice; through its thick crystal the immobilization of their bodies in a swimming attitude was clearly visible; the beautiful heads lifted above the ice would have seemed alive if the birds had not already pecked out their eyes; and for some reason I recalled the tyrant Shiusin, who used to cut open pregnant women out of curiosity and who, one cold morning, seeing some porters fording a stream, ordered their legs to be amputated at the shin in order to inspect the condition of the marrow in their bones.

  In Chang during a fire (some wood prepared for the construction of a Catholic mission was burning) I saw an elderly Chinese at a safe distance from the fire throwing water assiduously, determinedly and without tiring over the reflection of the flames on the walls of his dwelling; convinced of the impossibility of proving to him that his house was not burning we abandoned him to his fruitless occupation.

  Frequently we had to push our way through, ignoring Chinese intimidation and interdictions: good marksmanship is the best passport. In Tatsien-Lu shaven-headed lamas roamed about the crooked, narrow streets spreading the rumor that I was catching children in order to brew their eyes into a potion for the belly of my Kodak. There on the slopes of a snowy range, which were drowned in the rich, rosy foam of great rhododendrons (we used their branches at night for our campfires), I looked in May for the slate-gray, orange-spotted larvae of the Imperatorial Apollo and for its chrysalis, fastened by means of a silk thread to the underside of a stone. That same day, I remember, we glimpsed a white Tibetan bear and discovered a new snake: it fed on mice, and the mouse I extracted from its stomach also turned out to be an undescribed species. From the rhododendrons and from the pines draped in lacy lichen came a heady smell of resin. In my vicinity some witch doctors with the wary and crafty look of competitors were collecting for their mercenary needs Chinese rhubarb, whose root bears an extraordinary resemblance to a caterpillar, right down to its prolegs and spiracles—while I, in the meantime, found under a stone the caterpillar of an unknown moth, which represented not in a general way but with absolute concreteness a copy of that root, so that it was not quite clear which was impersonating which—or why.

  Everyone tells lies in Tibet: it was devilishly hard to obtain the exact names of places or directions for the right roads; involuntarily I too deceived them: since they were unable to distinguish a light-haired European from a white-haired one they took me, a young chap with hair bleached in the sun, for an ancient old man. Everywhere on the masses of granite one could read the “mystic formula,” a shamanic jumble of words which certain poetic travelers “translate” prettily as: oh, jewel in the lotus, oh! Some kind of officials were sent out to me from Lhasa who conjured me not to do something and threatened to do something to me—I paid little attention to them; however, I remember one idiot, particularly tiresome, in yellow silk under a red umbrella; he was sitting astride a mule whose natural dolefulness was doubled by the presence under its eyes of thick icicles formed from frozen tears.

  From a great height I saw a dark marshy depression all trembling from the play of innumerable springs, which recalled the night sky with stars scattered over it—and that is what it was called: the Starry Steppe. The passes ascended beyond the clouds, marches were tough. We rubbed the pack animals’ wounds with a mixture of iodoform and vaseline. On occasion, having camped in a completely deserted spot, I would suddenly see in the morning that around us during the night a wide circle of brigands’ tents had grown up like black toadstools—which, however, very quickly disappeared.

  Having explored the uplands of Tibet I headed for Lob-Nor in order to return from there to Russia. The Tarym, overcome by the desert, exhausted, forms with its last waters an extensive reedy swamp, the present-day Kara-Koshuk-Kul, Przhevalski’s Lob-Nor—and Lob-Nor at the time of the Khans, whatever Ritthofen might say. It is fringed with salt marshes but the water is salt only at the edges—for those rushes would not grow around a salt lake. One spring I was five days going round it. There in twenty-foot-high r
eeds I had the luck to discover a remarkable semi-aquatic moth with a rudimentary system of veins. The bunchy salt marsh was strewn with the shells of mollusks. In the evenings the harmonious, melodic sounds of swan flights reverberated through the silence; the yellow of the rushes distinctly brought out the lusterless white of the birds. In 1862, sixty Russian Old-Believers with their wives and children lived for half a year in these parts, after which they went to Turfan, and where they went thence nobody knows.

  Further on comes the desert of Lob: a stony plain, tiers of clay precipices, glassy salt ponds; that pale fleck in the gray air is a lone individual of Roborovski’s White, carried away by the wind. In this desert are preserved traces of an ancient road along which Marco Polo passed six centuries before I did: its markers are piles of stones. Just as I had heard in a Tibetan gorge the interesting drum-like roar which had frightened our first pilgrims, so in the desert during the sandstorms I also saw and heard the same as Marco Polo: “the whisper of spirits calling you aside” and the queer flicker of the air, an endless progression of whirlwinds, caravans and armies of phantoms coming to meet you, thousands of spectral faces in their incorporeal way pressing upon you, through you, and suddenly dispersing. In the twenties of the fourteenth century when the great explorer was dying, his friends gathered by his bedside and implored him to reject what in his book had seemed incredible to them—to water down its miracles by means of judicious deletions; but he responded that he had not recounted even a half of what he had in fact seen.

  All this lingered bewitchingly, full of color and air, with lively movement in the foreground and a convincing backdrop; then, like smoke from a breeze, it shifted and dispersed—and Fyodor saw again the dead and impossible tulips of his wallpaper, the crumbling mound of cigarette butts in the ashtray, and the lamp’s reflection in the black windowpane. He threw open the window. The written-up sheets of paper on his desk started; one folded over, another glided onto the floor. The room immediately turned damp and cold. Down below, an automobile went slowly along the dark empty street—and, strangely enough, this very slowness reminded Fyodor of a host of petty, unpleasant things—the day just past, the missed lesson—and when he thought that next morning he would have to phone the deceived old man, his heart was oppressed by an abominable despondency. But once the window was closed again, already feeling the void between his bunched fingers, he turned to the patiently waiting lamp, to the scattered first drafts, to the still-warm pen which now quietly slipped back into his fingers (explaining the void and filling it) and returned at once to that world which was as natural to him as snow to the white hare or water to Ophelia.

  He remembered with incredible vividness, as if he had preserved that sunny day in a velvet case, his father’s last return, in July 1912. Elizaveta Pavlovna had already gone the six miles to the station to meet her husband: she always met him alone and it always happened that no one knew with any clearness which side they would return on, to the right or left of the house, since there were two roads, one longer and smoother—along the highway and through the village; the other shorter and bumpier—through Peshchanka. Fyodor put on his riding breeches just in case and ordered his horse saddled, but nonetheless he could not make up his mind to ride out and meet his father because he was afraid of missing him. He tried vainly to come to terms with inflated, exaggerated time. A rare butterfly taken a day or two before among the blueberries of a peat bog had not yet dried on the spreading board: he kept touching its abdomen with the end of a pin—alas it was still soft, and this meant it was impossible to take off the paper strips completely covering the wings which he was so keen to show his father in all their beauty. He loafed about the manor, feeling the weight and pain of his agitation, and envying the way the others got through these big, empty minutes. From the river came the desperately ecstatic shrieks of the village boys bathing, and this hubbub, playing constantly in the depths of the summer day, sounded like distant ovations. Tanya was swinging enthusiastically and powerfully on the swing in the garden, standing on the seat; the violet shadow of the foliage swept over her flying white skirt in variegations that made one blink, and her blouse now lagged behind, now clung to her back, designating the hollow between her drawn-back shoulders; beneath her, one fox terrier was barking at her, another was chasing a wagtail; the ropes creaked joyfuly and it seemed that Tanya was soaring up like that in order to see over the trees into the road. Our French governess, under her moiré parasol, with rare politeness was sharing her misgivings (“the train was two hours late or else would not come at all”) with Mr. Browning, whom she hated, while the latter stood slapping his gaiters with a riding stick—he was no polyglot. Yvonna Ivanovna kept visiting first one and then the other veranda with that discontented expression on her small face with which she greeted all joyful events. Around the outbuildings there was especial animation: servants pumped water, hacked firewood, and the gardener came bringing two oblong, red-stained baskets of strawberries. Zhaksybay, an elderly Kirghiz, thickset, fat-faced, with intricate wrinkles around his eyes, who had saved Konstantin Kirillovich’s life in ’92 (he had shot a she-bear that was mauling him) and who now lived in peace, nursing his hernia, in their Leshino house, had put on his blue beshmet with half-moon pockets, polished boots, red skullcap with spangles and silk, tasseled sash, and settled down on a bench near the kitchen porch, where by now he had been sitting for quite a time sunning himself, a silver watch chain gleaming on his chest, in quiet and festive expectation.

  Suddenly, running heavily up the curved path which led down to the river, there appeared out of deep shadow, with a wild glint in his eyes and with a mouth that was already shaped for a shout though still silent, the old, gray, side-whiskered footman Kazimir: he was running with the news that beyond the nearest bend, the sound of hooves had been heard on the bridge (a swift wooden drumming which was immediately cut off)—a guarantee that the victoria was about to come bowling next minute along the dirt road parallel to the park. Fyodor rushed in that direction—between the tree trunks, over the moss and bilberries—and there beyond the marginal path one could see, as they skimmed above the level of the young firs, the driver’s head and indigo sleeves sweeping by with the impetuosity of a vision. He dashed back—and the abandoned swing was still quivering in the garden, while by the porch stood the empty victoria with its crumpled traveling rug; his mother was walking up the steps, trailing behind her a smoke-colored scarf—and Tanya was hanging on the neck of her father, who had taken a watch from his pocket with his free hand and was looking at it, for he always liked to know how fast he had got home from the station.

  The following year, busy with scientific work, he did not go anywhere, but by the spring of 1914 he had already begun to prepare for a new expedition to Tibet together with the ornithologist Petrov and the English botanist Ross. War with Germany suddenly canceled all this.

  He looked upon the war as a tiresome obstacle which became more and more tiresome as time went on. His kinsfolk were for some reason certain that Konstantin Kirillovich would volunteer and set off right away at the head of a detachment: they considered him an eccentric, but a manly eccentric. Actually, Konstantin Kirillovich, who was now over fifty but had retained untapped reserves of health, agility, freshness and strength—and perhaps was even more ready than before to overcome mountains, Tanguts, bad weather and a thousand other dangers undreamt of by stay-at-homes—now not only stayed at home but tried not to notice the war, and if he ever spoke about it, he did so only with angry contempt. “My father,” wrote Fyodor, recalling that time, “not only taught me a great deal but also trained my very thoughts, as a voice or hand is trained, according to the rules of his school. Thus I was rather indifferent to the cruelty of war; I even conceded that one could take a certain delight in the accuracy of a shot, in the danger of a reconnaissance or in the delicacy of a maneuver; but these little pleasures (which are better represented moreover in other special branches of sport, such as: tiger hunting, noughts and crosses, profession
al boxing) in no way compensated for that touch of dismal idiocy which is inherent in any war.”

  However, in spite of “Kostya’s unpatriotic position” as Aunt Ksenia expressed it (solidly and skillfully using “high connections” to hide her officer-husband away in the shadows of the rear) the house was penetrated by the cares of war. Elizaveta Pavlovna was drawn into Red Cross work, which had people comment that her energy “was making up for her husband’s idleness,” he being “more concerned with Asian bugs than with the glory of Russian arms” as was actually pointed out, by the way, in one jaunty newspaper. Phonograph records revolved with the words of the love song “The Sea Gull” reclad in khaki (… here’s a young ensign with an infantry section …); coy nurses appeared in the house with little curls peeping out from under their regulation headdress and a deft way of tapping cigarettes on their cigarette cases before lighting up; the doorkeeper’s son ran away to the front and Konstantin Kirillovich was asked to assist his return; Tanya began visiting her mother’s military hospital to give Russian grammar lessons to a placid, bearded Oriental whose leg was being cut off ever higher in an attempt to overtake the gangrene; Yvonna Ivanovna knit woolen wrist-warmers; on holidays the variety artist Feona entertained the soldiers with vaudeville songs; the hospital staff staged Vova Makes the Best of It, a play on draft dodgers; and the newspapers printed versicles dedicated to the war: