The Gift

by Vladimir Nabokov

  “Oh, that is less interesting,” said Fyodor, who during this tirade (as Turgenev, Goncharov, Count Salias, Grigorovich and Boborykin used to write) had been nodding his head with an approving mien. “You diagnosed my shortcomings very well,” he continued, “and they correspond to my own complaints against myself, although, of course, I put them in a different order—some of the points run together while others are subdivided further. But besides the defects you have noted in my book, I am aware of at least three more—they, perhaps, are the most important of all. Only I’ll never tell you them—and they won’t be there in my next book. Do you want to talk about your poetry now?”

  “No thank you, I’d rather not,” said Koncheyev fearfully. “I have reasons for thinking that you like my work, but I am organically averse to discussing it. When I was small, before sleep I used to say a long and obscure prayer which my dead mother—a pious and very unhappy woman—had taught me (she, of course, would have said that these two things are incompatible, but even so it’s true that happiness doesn’t take the veil). I remembered this prayer and kept saying it for years, almost until adolescence, but one day I probed its sense, understood all the words—and as soon as I understood I immediately forgot it, as if I had broken an unrestorable spell. It seems to me that the same thing might happen to my poems—that if I try to rationalize them I shall instantly lose my ability to write them. You, I know, corrupted your poetry long ago with words and meaning—and you will hardly continue writing verse now. You are too rich, too greedy. The Muse’s charm lies in her poverty.”

  “You know, it’s odd,” said Fyodor, “once, about three years ago, I imagined most vividly a conversation with you on these subjects—and you know it came out somewhat similar! Although, of course, you shamelessly played up to me and all that. The fact that I know you so well without knowing you makes me unbelievably happy, for that means there are unions in the world which don’t depend at all on massive friendships, asinine affinities or ‘the spirit of the age,’ nor on any mystical organizations or associations of poets, where a dozen tightly knit mediocrities ‘glow’ by their common efforts.”

  “At all events I want to warn you,” said Koncheyev frankly, “not to flatter yourself as regards our similarity: you and I differ in many things, I have different tastes, different habits; your Fet, for instance, I can’t stand, and on the other hand I am an ardent admirer of the author of The Double and The Possessed, whom you are disposed to slight.… There is much about you I don’t like—your St. Petersburg style, your Gallic taint, your neo-Voltaireanism and weakness for Flaubert—and I find, forgive me, your obscene sporty nudity simply offensive. But then, with these reservations, it would be true probably to say that somewhere—not here but on another plane, of whose angle, by the way, you have an even vaguer idea than I—somewhere on the outskirts of our existence, very far, very mysteriously and inexpressibly, a rather divine bond is growing between us. But perhaps you feel and say all this because I praised your book in print—that also happens, you know.”

  “Yes, I know. I thought of that myself. Especially since formerly I used to envy your fame. But in all conscience—”

  “Fame?” interrupted Koncheyev. “Don’t make me laugh. Who knows my poems? A thousand, a thousand five hundred, at the very outside two thousand intelligent expatriates, of whom again ninety percent don’t understand them. Two thousand out of three million refugees! That’s provincial success, but not fame. In the future, perhaps, I shall recoup, but a great deal of time will have to elapse before the Tungus and the Kalmuk of Pushkin’s ‘Exegi monumentum’ begin to tear out of each other’s hands my ‘Communication,’ with the Finn looking enviously on.”

  “But there is a comforting feeling,” said Fyodor meditatively. “One can borrow on the strength of the legacy. Doesn’t it amuse you to imagine that one day, on this very spot, on this lakeside, beneath this oak tree, a visiting dreamer will come and sit and imagine in his turn that you and I once sat here?”

  “And the historian will dryly tell him that we never took a walk together, that we were hardly acquainted and that if we did meet we only talked about routine trifles.”

  “But nevertheless try! Try to experience that strange, future, retrospective thrill.… All the little hairs on the soul stand on end! It would be a good thing in general to put an end to our barbaric perception of time; I find it particularly charming when people talk about the earth freezing in a trillion years and everything disappearing unless our printing shops are moved in good time to a neighboring star. Or the drivel about eternity: so much time has been allotted to the universe that the date of its end should already have come, just as it is impossible in a single segment of time to imagine whole an egg lying on a road along which an army is endlessly marching. How stupid! Our mistaken feeling of time as a kind of growth is a consequence of our finiteness which, being always on the level of the present, implies its constant rise between the watery abyss of the past and the aerial abyss of the future. Existence is thus an eternal transformation of the future into the past—an essentially phantom process—a mere reflection of the material metamorphoses taking place within us. In these circumstances the attempt to comprehend the world is reduced to an attempt to comprehend that which we ourselves have deliberately made incomprehensible. The absurdity at which searching thought arrives is only a natural, generic sign of its belonging to man, and striving to obtain an answer is the same as demanding of chicken broth that it began to cluck. The theory I find most tempting—that there is no time, that everything is the present situated like a radiance outside our blindness—is just as hopeless a finite hypothesis as all the others. ‘You will understand when you are big,’ those are really the wisest words that I know. And if one adds to this that nature was seeing double when she created us (oh, this accursed pairing which is impossible to escape: horse-cow, cat-dog, rat-mouse, flea-bug), that symmetry in the structure of live bodies is a consequence of the rotation of worlds (a top that spins for sufficiently long will begin, perhaps, to live, grow and multiply), and that in our straining toward asymmetry, toward inequality, I can detect a howl for genuine freedom, an urge to break out of the circle.…”

  “Herrliches Wetter—in der Zeitung steht es aber, dass es morgen bestimmt regnen wird,” said finally the young German who was sitting beside Fyodor on the bench and who had seemed to him to resemble Koncheyev.

  Imagination again—but what a pity! I had even thought up a dead mother for him in order to trap truth.… Why can a conversation with him never blossom out into reality, break through to realization? Or is this a realization, and nothing better is needed … since a real conversation would be only disillusioning—with the stumps of stuttering, the chaff of hemming and hawing, the debris of small words?

  “Da kommen die Wolken schon,” continued the Koncheyevoid German, pointing his finger at a full-breasted cloud rising in the west. (A student, most probably. Perhaps with a philosophical or musical vein. Where is Yasha’s friend now? He would hardly be likely to come here.)

  “Halb fünf ungefähr,” he added in response to Fyodor’s question, and gathering his cane he left the bench. His dark, stooping figure receded along the shady footpath. (Perhaps a poet? After all, there must be poets in Germany. Puny ones, local ones—but all the same not butchers. Or only a garnish for the meat?)

  He was too lazy to swim back to the other side; he followed leisurely the trail that skirted the lake along its northern edge. At the spot where a wide sandy declivity reached the water, with the uncovered roots of apprehensive pines supporting the sliding bank, there were some more people, and down below on a strip of grass lay three naked corpses, white, pink and brown, like a triple sample of the sun’s action. Further on, along the bend of the lake, there was a marshy stretch, and the dark almost black soil of the path stuck refreshingly to his bare heels. He went upwards again over a needle-scattered slope, and walked through the speckled forest toward his lair. All was cheerful, sad, sunny, shady—he did not
feel like returning home but it was time. For a moment he lay down by an old tree that had seemed to have beckoned to him—“Show you something interesting.” A little song sounded among the trees, and presently there came into view, walking at a brisk pace, five nuns—round-faced, wearing black dresses and white coifs—and the little song, half schoolgirlish, half angelic, hovered about them the whole time, while first one and then another bent down on the move to pluck a modest flower (invisible to Fyodor, although he was lying close by) and then straightened up very nimbly, simultaneously drawing level with the others, taking up the rhythm and adding this ghost-flower to a ghostly nosegay with an idyllic gesture (the thumb and index touching for an instant, the other fingers delicately curved)—and it all looked so much like a staged scene—and how much skill there was in everything, what an infinity of grace and art, what a director lurked behind the pines, how well everything was calculated—their walking slightly out of order and then leveling out again, three in front and two behind, and the fact that one of the girls behind giggled briefly (a very cloistral sense of humor) because suddenly one of those in front had, with a touch of expansiveness, almost splashed her hands over a particularly heavenly note, and the way the song dwindled as it receded, while a shoulder continued to stoop and fingers sought a stalk of grass (but the latter, merely swaying, remained to gleam in the sun … where had this happened before—what had straightened up and started to sway? …)—and now they all departed through the trees on quick feet in button shoes, and some half-naked little boy, pretending to seek a ball in the grass, rudely and automatically repeated a snatch of their song (in what musicians call a “clowning refrain”). How it had been mounted! How much labor had gone into this light, swift scene, into this deft traverse, what muscles there were beneath that heavy-looking, black cloth, which would be exchanged after the intermission for gossamer ballet skirts!

  A cloud blocked the sun, the light in the forest drifted and gradually faded. Fyodor walked to the clearing where he had left his clothes. In the hole beneath a bush which always sheltered them so obligingly he now found only a single sneaker; his rug, his shirt and his trousers had vanished. There is a story to the effect that a passenger who inadvertently dropped his glove out of a train window promptly threw out its mate so that at least the person who found them should have a pair. In this case the thief had acted the other way: the old, badly worn sneakers were probably no good to him, but in order to make fun of his victim he had separated the pair. Furthermore, a scrap of newspaper had been left in the sneaker with a penciled inscription: “Vielen Dank.”

  Fyodor wandered all around finding no one and nothing. The shirt was frayed and he did not mind losing it, but he was somewhat grieved about the plaid laprobe (brought all the way from Russia) and the good flannel pants quite recently bought. Together with the trousers had gone twenty marks, obtained two days before for at least partial payment of his room. Also gone were a small pencil, a handkerchief, and a bunch of keys. The latter somehow was worst of all. If nobody happened to be at home, which might easily be the case, it would be impossible to get into the apartment.

  The edge of a cloud dazzlingly caught fire, and the sun slipped out. It emitted such hot, blissful strength that forgetting his vexation Fyodor lay down on the moss and began to watch the next snowy colossus draw near, eating up the blue as it advanced: the sun slid into it smoothly, its rim of funeral fire quivering and splitting as it glided through the white cumulus—and then, finding a way out, it first threw out three rays and then expanded, filling the eyes with spotted fire, blackballing them (so that no matter where you looked domino patterns glided past)—and as the light got stronger or died away, all the shadows in the forest breathed and did push-ups.

  A small incidental relief was supplied by the fact that thanks to the Shchyogolevs’ going away the following day to Denmark there would be an extra set of keys—which meant he could keep quiet about the loss of his bunch. Going away, going away, going away! He imagined what he had constantly been imagining during the past two months-the beginning (tomorrow night!) of his full life with Zina-the release, the slaking- and meanwhile a sun-charged cloud, filling up, growing, with swollen, turquoise veins, with a fiery itch in its thunder-root, rose in all its turgid, unwieldy magnificence and embraced him, the sky and the forest, and to resolve this tension seemed a monstrous joy incapable of being borne by man. A ripple of wind ran over his chest, his excitement slowly subsided, the air grew dark and sultry, it was necessary to hurry home. Once more he searched under the bushes, then shrugged his shoulders, pulled the elastic belt of his trunks tighter—and set out on his way back.

  When he left the forest and started to cross a street, the tarry stickiness of the asphalt under his bare foot proved to be a pleasant novelty. It was also interesting to walk on the sidewalk. Dream lightness. An elderly passerby in a black felt hat stopped, looked back after him and made a coarse remark—but immediately, by way of happy compensation, a blind man, sitting with a concertina against a stone wall, mumbled his small request for alms and squeezed out a polygon of music as if there were nothing out of the way (it was odd, though—surely he must have heard that I was barefoot). Two schoolboys shouted at the naked passerby as they rode past clinging to the back of a tram, and then the sparrows returned to the turf between the rails whence they had been frightened by the clattering yellow car. Drops of rain had begun to fall, and it was as if someone were applying a silver coin to different parts of his body. A young policeman detached himself from a newspaper stand and came over to him.

  “It’s forbidden to walk about the city like that,” he said, looking Fyodor in the navel.

  “Everything’s been stolen,” explained Fyodor briefly.

  “That mustn’t happen,” said the policeman.

  “Yes, but it happened all the same,” said Fyodor nodding (several people had already stopped by them and were following the dialogue with curiosity).

  “Whether you’ve been robbed or not, you can’t go about the streets naked,” said the policeman, growing angry.

  “Quite, but I have to get somehow to the taxi stand—see?”

  “You can’t in that state.”

  “Unfortunately I am unable to turn into smoke or grow a suit.”

  “And I’m telling you you can’t walk about like that,” said the policeman. (“Unheard-of shamelessness,” commented someone’s thick voice from the back.)

  “In that case,” said Fyodor, “it remains for you to fetch me a taxi while I stand here.”

  “Standing in the nude is also impossible,” said the policeman.

  “I’ll take off my trunks and imitate a statue,” suggested Fyodor.

  The policeman took out his notebook and so fiercely tore the pencil out of the pencil-hold that he dropped it on the sidewalk. Some workman or other servilely picked it up.

  “Name and address,” said the policeman, boiling.

  “Count Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev,” said Fyodor.

  “Stop being funny and tell me your name,” roared the policeman.

  Another one came up, with a higher rank, and inquired what the matter was.

  “My clothes were stolen in the forest,” said Fyodor patiently and suddenly felt that he was completely wet from the rain. One or two standers-by had run beneath the shelter of an awning and an old woman standing by his elbow put up her umbrella, nearly gouging his eye out.

  “Who stole them?” asked the sergeant.

  “I don’t know and what’s more, I don’t care,” said Fyodor. “Right now I want to go home and you are detaining me.”

  The rain suddenly grew heavier and swept across the asphalt; the whole of its surface seemed to be covered with jumping little candles. The policemen (all matted and blackened by the damp) probably considered the cloudburst to be an element in which bathing trunks were, if not appropriate, then at least permissible. The younger one again tried to obtain Fyodor’s address, but his senior waved his hand, and the two of them, slightly qu
ickening their sedate pace, retreated under the awning of a grocer’s shop. The glistening Fyodor Konstantinovich ran through the noisy splashing of the rain, turned a corner, and shot into an automobile.

  Arriving home and telling the driver to wait, he pressed the button which until 8 P.M. automatically opened the front door and hurled himself up the stairs. He was let in by Marianna Nikolavna; the hall was full of people and things: Shchyogolev in his shirt-sleeves, two fellows struggling with a box (in which, it seems, Was the radio), a comely milliner with a hatbox, a coil of wire, a pile of linen from the laundry …

  “You’re crazy!” cried Marianna Nikolavna.

  “For God’s sake pay the taxi,” said Fyodor, wriggling his cold body through the people and things—and finally, over a barricade of trunks, he crashed his way through to his room.

  They had supper all together that evening, and later on were to come the Kasatkins, the Baltic baron, another person or two.… At table Fyodor gave an embellished account of his misadventure, and Shchyogolev laughed heartily, while Marianna Nikolavna wanted to know (not without reason) how much cash there had been in the pants. Zina only shrugged her shoulders and with unusual frankness urged Fyodor to help himself to the vodka, obviously fearing that he had caught a chill.