The Gift

by Vladimir Nabokov

  At home she was unhappy and this unhappiness she despised. She also despised her work, even though her boss was a Jew—however, a German Jew, i.e., first of all a German, so that she had no qualms about abusing him in Fyodor’s presence. So vividly, so bitterly and with such revulsion did she tell him about that lawyer’s office, where she had already been working for two years, that he saw and smelled everything as if he himself were there every day. The atmosphere of her office reminded him somehow of Dickens (in a German paraphrase, it is true)—a semi-insane world of gloomy lean men and repulsive chubby ones, subterfuge, black shadows, nightmare snouts, dust, stench and women’s tears. It began with a dark, steep, incredibly dilapidated staircase which was fully matched by the sinister decrepitude of the office premises, a state of affairs not true only of the chief barrister’s office with its overstuffed armchairs and giant glass-topped-table furnishings. The main office, large, plain, with bare, shuddering windows, was choked with an accumulation of dirty, dusty furniture—especially dreadful was the sofa, of a dull purple color with protruding springs, a horrible, obscene object dumped here after gradually passing through the offices of all three directors—Traum, Baum and Käsebier. The innumerable shelves blocking every inch of wall were crammed with grim blue folders that stuck out their long labels, along which from time to time crawled a hungry, litigious bedbug. By the windows worked four typists: one was a hunchback who spent her salary on clothes; the second was a slender, flighty little thing whose father, a butcher, had been killed with a meat hook by his hot-tempered son; the third was a defenseless young girl who was slowly collecting a trousseau, and the fourth was a married woman, a buxom blonde, whose soul was little more than a replica of her apartment and who recounted movingly how after a day of SPIRITUAL LABOR she felt such a thirst for the relaxation of physical work that upon coming home she would throw open all the windows and joyously set about the washing. The office manager, Hamekke (a fat, coarse animal with smelly feet and a perpetually oozing furuncle on the nape, who liked to recall how in his sergeant days he had made clumsy recruits clean the barrack-room floor with toothbrushes), used to persecute the latter two with particular pleasure—one because the loss of her job for her would have meant not getting married, the other because she forthwith began to cry—those abundant, noisy tears which were so easy to provoke afforded him wholesome pleasure. Hardly literate, but gifted with an iron grip, immediately able to grasp the most unsavory aspect of any case, he was highly prized by his employers, Traum, Baum and Käsebier (a complete German idyll, with little tables amid the greenery and a wonderful view). Baum was rarely to be seen; the office maidens found that he dressed marvelously, and in truth his suit was as rigid as on a marble statue, with everlastingly creased pants and a white collar attached to a colored shirt. Käsebier cringed before his prosperous clients (for that matter all three of them cringed), but when he grew angry with Zina he accused her of putting on airs. The boss, Traum, was a shortish man with hair distributed in such a way as to conceal his bald spot, with a profile like the outside of a half-moon, tiny hands and a shapeless body, more wide than it was fat. He loved himself with a passionate and completely reciprocated love, was married to a rich, elderly widow, and having something of the actor in his nature, strove to do everything in style, spending thousands for show and haggling with his secretary over a nickel; he demanded of his employees that they refer to his wife as “die gnädige Frau” (“the missus telephoned,” “the missus left a message”) and plumed himself on a sublime ignorance of what went on at the office, although in fact he knew everything through Hamekke, right down to the last blot. In his capacity as one of the legal consultants to the French Embassy he often traveled to Paris, and since his outstanding characteristic was a tremendously smooth effrontery in the pursual of advantages, he energetically struck up useful acquaintances while there, shamelessly asking for recommendations, badgering, foisting himself upon people without feeling the snubs—his skin was like the armor on a peba. In order to gain popularity in France he wrote little books in German on French themes (Three Portraits for example—the Empress Eugénie, Briand and Sarah Bernhardt), and in the course of their preparation, the collecting of materials turned into the collecting of connections. These hastily compiled works, in the terrible style moderne of the German republic (and essentially yielding little to the works of Ludwig and the Zweigs), were dictated by him to his secretary between business, when he suddenly feigned a flow of inspiration, which flow, incidentally, always coincided with a stretch of leisure time. Some French professor into whose friendship he had insinuated himself once answered a most tender epistle of his with (for a Frenchman) extremely blunt criticism: “You write the name Deschanel at times with an accent aigu and at others without it. Since a certain uniformity is necessary here it would be good if you were to take a firm decision as to which system you wish to adhere to, and then stick to it. If for any reason you should desire to write this name correctly, then write it without an accent.” Traum at once responded with a rapturously grateful letter, continuing at the same time to ask for favors. Oh, how well he could round out and sweeten his letters, what Teutonic warblings and whistlings there were in the endless modulation of his openings and conclusions, what courtesies: “Vous avez bien voulu bien vouloir.…”

  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 diminis
hing 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.”