The Gift

by Vladimir Nabokov

  Farther on it became very nice: the pines had come into their own, and between their pinkish, scaly trunks the feathery foliage of low rowans and the vigorous greenery of oaks broke the stripiness of the pinewood sun into an animated dapple. In the density of an oak, when you looked from below, the overlapping of shaded and illumined leaves, dark green and bright emerald, seemed to be a jigsaw fitting together of their wavy edges, and on these leaves, now letting the sun caress its yellow-brown silk and now tightly closing its wings, there settled an Angle Wing butterfly with a white bracket on its dark mottled underside; suddenly taking off it alighted on my bare chest, attracted by human sweat. And still higher above my upturned face, the summits and trunks of the pines participated in a complex exchange of shadows, and their leafage reminded me of algae swaying in transparent water. And if I tilted my head back even farther, so that the grass behind (inexpressibly, primevally green from this point of upturned vision) seemed to be growing downward into empty, transparent light, I experienced something similar to what must strike a man who has flown to another planet (with a different gravity, different density and a different stress on the senses)—especially when a family out for a stroll went by upside down, with every step they took becoming a strange, elastic jerk, and a lobbed ball seemed to be falling—ever more slowly—into a dizzy abyss.

  If one advanced even further—not to the left where the pinewood stretched endlessly, and not to the right where it was interrupted by a coppice of young birches, freshly and childishly smelling of Russia—the forest again thinned out, lost its undergrowth and straggled down sandy inclines at the foot of which the broad lake rose in pillars of light. The sun changefully illuminated the opposite bank, and when with the onset of a cloud the very air seemed to close, like a great blue eye and then slowly open again, one shore always lagged behind the other in the process of gradually fading and lighting up. There was practically no sandy border on the other side, and the trees descended all together to the dense reeds, while higher up one could find hot, dry slopes overgrown with clover, sorrel and spurge, and fringed with the rich dark green of oaks and beeches, that went trembling down to the damp hollows below, in one of which Yasha Chernyshevski had shot himself.

  When in the mornings I entered this world of the forest, whose image I had raised as it were by my own efforts above the level of those artless Sunday impressions (paper trash, a crowd of picnickers) out of which the Berliners’ conception of “Grunewald” was composed; when on these hot, summer weekdays I walked over to its southern side, into its depths, to wild secret spots, I felt as much delight as if this was a primeval paradise within two miles from Agamemnonstrasse. Coming to a favorite nook of mine which magically combined a free flow of sunshine with protection by the shrubbery, I would strip to the skin and lie down supine on the rug, placing my unnecessary trunks beneath my head. Thanks to the suntan coating my entire body (so that only my heels, palms and the raylike lines around my eyes kept their natural tint), I felt myself an athlete, a Tarzan, an Adam, anything you like, only not a naked town-dweller. The awkwardness with which nakedness is usually accompanied depends upon the awareness of our defenseless whiteness, which has long since lost all connection with the colors of the surrounding world and for that reason finds itself in artificial disharmony with it. But the sun’s impact restores the deficiency, makes us equal in our naked rights with nature, and the brazen body no longer experiences shame. All this sounds like a nudist brochure—but one’s own truth is not to blame if it coincides with the truth some poor fellow has borrowed.

  The sun bore down. The sun licked me all over with its big, smooth tongue. I gradually felt that I was becoming moltenly transparent, that I was permeated with flame and existed only insofar as it did. As a book is translated into an exotic idiom, so was I translated into sun. The scrawny, chilly, hiemal Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev was now as remote from me as if I had exiled him to the Yakutsk province. He was a pallid copy of me, whereas this aestival one was his magnified bronze replica. My personal I, the one that wrote books, the one that loved words, colors, mental fireworks, Russia, chocolate and Zina—had somehow disintegrated and dissolved; after being made transparent by the strength of the light, it was now assimilated to the shimmering of the summer forest with its satiny pine needles and heavenly-green leaves, with its ants running over the transfigured, most radiant-hued wool of the laprobe, with its birds, smells, hot breath of nettles and spermy odor of sun-warmed grass, with its blue sky where droned a highflying plane that seemed filmed over with blue dust, the blue essence of the firmament: the plane was bluish, as a fish is wet in water.

  One might dissolve completely that way. Fyodor raised himself and sat up. A streamlet of sweat flowed down his clean-shaven chest and fell into the reservoir of his navel. His flat belly had a brown and mother-of-pearl sheen to it. Over the glistening black ringlets of his pubic hair a lost ant scrambled nervously. His shins shone glossily. Pine needles had got stuck between his toes. With his bathing trunks he wiped his short-cropped head, sticky nape and neck. A squirrel with an arched back loped across the turf, from tree to tree, in a wavy and almost clumsy course. The scrub oaks, elder shrubs, pine trunks—everything was dazzlingly spotted, and a small cloud, in no way defiling the face of the summer day, felt its way slowly past the sun.

  He got up, took a step—and immediately the weightless paw of a leafy shadow descended upon his left shoulder; it slipped off again at the next step. Fyodor consulted the position of the sun and dragged his rug a yard or so aside to prevent the shade of the leaves from encroaching upon him. To move around naked was astonishing bliss—the freedom around his loins especially pleased him. He walked between the bushes, listening to the vibration of insects and the rustling of the birds. A wren crept like a mouse through the foliage of a small oak; a sand wasp flew by low down, carrying a benumbed caterpillar. The squirrel he had just seen climbed up the bark of a tree with a spasmodic, scrabbly sound. Somewhere in the vicinity sounded girlish voices, and he stopped in a pattern of shadow, which stayed motionless along his arm but palpitated rythmically on his left side, between the ribs. A golden, stumpy little butterfly, equipped with two black commas, alighted on an oak leaf, half opening its slanting wings, and suddenly shot away like a golden fly. And as often happened on these woodland days, especially when he glimpsed familiar butterflies, Fyodor imagined his father’s isolation in other forests—gigantic, infinitely distant, in comparison with which this one was but brushwood, a tree stump, rubbish. And yet he experienced something akin to that Asiatic freedom spreading wide on the maps, to the spirit of his father’s peregrinations—and here it was most difficult of all to believe that despite the freedom, despite the greenery and the happy, sun-shot dark shade, his father was nonetheless dead.

  The voices sounded closer and then receded. A horsefly that had settled unnoticed on his thigh managed to jab him with its blunt proboscis. Moss, turf, sand, each in its own way communicated with the soles of his bare feet, and each in its own way the sun and the shade stroked the hot silk of his body. His senses sharpened by the unrestricted heat were tantalized by the possibility of sylvan encounters, mythical abductions. Le sanglot dont j’étais encore ivre. He would have given a year of his life, even a leap-year, for Zina to be here—or any of her corps de ballet.

  He again lay flat, then again got up; with a beating heart he listened to sly, vague, vaguely promising noises; then, pulling on only his trunks and hiding laprobe and clothes under a bush, he went off to wander through the woods around the lake.

  Here and there, thinly on weekdays, there occurred more or less orange bodies. He avoided looking closely for fear of switching from Pan to Punch. But sometimes, next to a school satchel and beside her shiny bicycle propped against a tree trunk, a lone nymph would sprawl, her legs bared to the crotch and suede-soft to the eye, and her elbows thrown back, with the hair of her armpits glistening in the sun; temptation’s arrow had hardly had time to sing out and pierce him before he noticed,
a short distance away at three equidistant points, forming a magic triangle (around whose prize?) and strangers to one another, three motionless hunters visible in between the tree trunks: two young fellows (one lying prone, the other on his side) and an elderly man, coatless, with armbands on his shirt-sleeves, sitting solidly on the grass, motionless and eternal, with sad but patient eyes; and it seemed that these three pairs of eyes striking the same spot would finally, with the help of the sun, burn a hole in the black bathing tights of that poor little German girl, who never raised her ointment-smeared lids.

  He descended to the sandy shore of the lake and here in the roar of voices the charmed fabric which he himself had so carefully spun completely fell to pieces, and he saw with revulsion the crumpled, twisted, deformed by life’s nor’easter, more or less naked or more or less clothed—the latter were the more terrible—bodies of bathers (petty bourgeois, idle workers) stirring on the dirty-gray sand. At the point where the shore road went along the lake’s narrow lip, the latter was fenced off by stakes supporting tortured-looking remnants of sagging wire, and the place by these stakes was particularly valued by the beach habitués—partly because trousers could be conveniently hung by their suspenders on them (while underwear was laid on the dusty nettles) and partly because of the vague feeling of security from having a fence at one’s back.

  Old men’s gray legs covered with growths and swollen veins; flat feet; the tawny crust of corns; pink porcine paunches; wet, shivering, pale, hoarse-voiced adolescents; the globes of breasts; voluminous posteriors; flabby thighs; bluish varices; gooseflesh; the pimply shoulder blades of bandy-legged girls; the sturdy necks and buttocks of muscular hooligans; the hopeless, godless vacancy of satisfied faces; romps, guffaws, roisterous splashing—all this formed the apotheosis of that renowned German good-naturedness which can turn so easily at any moment into frenzied hooting. And over all this, especially on Sundays when the crowding was vilest of all, there reigned an unforgettable smell, the smell of dust, of sweat, of aquatic slime, of unclean underwear, of aired and dried poverty, the smell of dried, smoked, potted souls a penny a piece. But the lake itself, with vivid green clumps of trees on the other side and a rippling wake of sunshine in the middle, bore itself with dignity.

  Having selected a private little creek among the bulrushes, Fyodor took to the water. Its warm opacity enveloped him, sparks of sunshine danced before his eyes. He swam for a long time, half an hour, five hours, twenty-four, a week, another. Finally, on the twenty-eighth of June around three P.M., he came out on the other shore.

  Having made his way out of the lakeside spinach he at once found himself in a grove and from there he climbed onto a hot slope where he quickly dried in the sun. On the right was a ravine overgrown with oakbrush and bramble. And today, just as every time that he came here, Fyodor descended into that hollow which always attracted him, as if he had been somehow guilty of the death of the unknown youth who had shot himself here—precisely here. He reflected that Alexandra Yakovlevna used to come here as well, rummaging purposefully among the bushes with her tiny black-gloved hands.… He had not known her then and could not have seen it—but from her account of her multiple pilgrimages he felt it had been exactly like that: the search for something, the rustling of leaves, the prodding umbrella, the radiant eyes, the lips trembling with sobs. He recalled how he had met her this spring—for the last time—after her husband’s death, and the strange sensation that overwhelmed him when looking at her lowered face with its unworldly frown, as if he had never really seen her before and was now making out on her face the resemblance to her deceased husband, whose death was expressed on it through some hitherto concealed, funereal blood relationship. A day later she went away to some relatives in Riga, and already her face, the stories about her son, the literary evenings at her house, and Alexander Yakovlevich’s mental illness—all this that had served its time—now rolled up of its own accord and came to an end, like a bundle of life tied up crosswise, which will long be kept but which will never again be untied by our lazy, procrastinating, ungrateful hands. He was seized by a panicky desire not to allow it to close and get lost in a corner of his soul’s lumber room, a desire to apply all this to himself, to his eternity, to his truth, so as to enable it to sprout up in a new way. There is a way—the only way.

  He ascended another slope and there at the top by a path which descended again, sitting on a bench beneath an oak tree, and slowly, pensively tracing the sand with his cane, was a round-shouldered young man in a black suit. How hot he must be, thought the naked Fyodor. The sitter looked up … The sun turned and slightly raised his face with a photographer’s delicate gesture, a bloodless face with wide-set, myopically gray eyes. Between the corners of his starched collar (the type once called in Russia “dog’s delight”) a stud gleamed above the slack knot of his tie.

  “How sunburned you are,” said Koncheyev, “it can hardly be good for you. And where, pray, are your clothes?”

  “Over there,” said Fyodor, “on the other side, in the woods.”

  “Someone might steal them,” remarked Koncheyev. “It’s not for nothing there’s a proverb: Freehanded Russian, light-fingered Prussian.”

  Fyodor sat down and said: “There is no such proverb. By the way, do you know where we two are? Beyond those blackberry bushes, down below, is the place where the Chernyshevski boy, the poet, shot himself.”

  “Oh, was it here?” said Koncheyev without especial interest. “You know, his Olga recently married a furrier and went off to the United States. Not quite the lancer whom Pushkin’s Olga married, but still …”

  “Aren’t you hot?” asked Fyodor.

  “Not a bit. I have a weak chest and I always freeze. But of course when one sits next to a naked man one is physically aware that there exist men’s outfitters, and one’s body feels blind. On the other hand it seems to me that any mental work must be completely impossible for you in such a denuded state.”

  “A good point,” grinned Fyodor. “One seems to live more superficially—on the surface of one’s own skin.…”

  “That’s it. All you’re concerned with is patrolling your body and trailing the sun. But thought likes curtains and the camera obscura. Sunlight is good in the degree that it heightens the value of shade. A jail with no jailer and a garden with no gardener—that is I think the ideal arrangement. Tell me, did you read what I said about your book?”

  “I did,” replied Fyodor, watching a little geometrid caterpillar that was checking the number of inches between the two writers. “I did indeed. At first I wanted to write you a letter of thanks—you know, with a touching reference to undeservingness and so on—but then I thought that this would have introduced an intolerable human smell into the domain of free opinion. And besides—if I produced a good book I should thank myself and not you, just as you have to thank yourself and not me for understanding what was good—isn’t that true? If we start bowing to one another, then, as soon as one of us stops the other will feel hurt and depart in a huff.”

  “I didn’t expect truisms from you,” said Koncheyev with a smile. “Yes, all that is so. Once in my life, only once, I thanked a critic, and he replied: ‘Well, as a matter of fact, I really liked your book!’ and that really’ sobered me forever. By the way, I didn’t say everything I could have said about you … You were so taken to task for nonexistent defects that I no longer wanted to harp on those that were obvious to me. Furthermore, in your next work you will either get rid of them or they will develop into special virtues all your own, the way a speck on an embryo turns into an eye. You are a zoologist, aren’t you?”

  “In a way—as an amateur. But what are those defects? I wonder if they coincide with the ones I know.”

  “First, an excessive trust in words. It sometimes happens that your words in order to introduce the necessary thought have to smuggle it in. The sentence may be excellent, but still it is smuggling, and moreover gratuitous smuggling, since the lawful road is open. But your smugglers under
the cover of an obscure style, with all sorts of complicated contrivances, import goods that are duty free anyway. Secondly, there is a certain awkardness in the reworking of the sources: You seem to be undecided whether to enforce your style upon past speeches and events or to make their own more salient. I took the trouble to confront one or two passages in your book with the context in the complete edition of Chernyshevski’s works, same copy you must have used: I found your cigarette ash between the pages. Thirdly, you sometimes bring up parody to such a degree of naturalness that it actually becomes a genuine serious thought, but on this level it suddenly falters, lapsing into a mannerism that is yours and not a parody of a mannerism, although it is precisely the kind of thing you are ridiculing—as if somebody parodying an actor’s slovenly reading of Shakespeare had been carried away, had started to thunder in earnest, but had accidentally garbled a line. Fourthly, one observes in one or two of your transitions something mechanical, if not automatic, which suggests you are pursuing your own advantage, and taking the course you find easier. In one passage, for example, a mere pun serves as such a transition. Fifthly and finally, you sometimes say things chiefly calculated to prick your contemporaries, but any woman will tell you that nothing gets lost so easily as a hairpin—not to speak of the fact that the least swerve of fashion may make pins obsolete: think how many sharp little objects have been dug up whose exact use not a single archaeologist can tell! The real writer should ignore all readers but one, that of the future, who in his turn is merely the author reflected in time. That, I think, is the sum of my complaints against you and generally speaking they are trivial. They are completely eclipsed by the brilliance of your achievements—about which I could still say a fair bit.”