The Gift

by Vladimir Nabokov

  “Well—our last evening!” said Boris Ivanovich, having laughed to his heart’s content. “May you prosper, signor. Someone told me the other day that you dashed off a pretty nasty paper on Petrashevski. Very laudable. Listen, Mamma, there’s another bottle there, no point in taking it with us, give it to the Kasatkins.”

  “… so you’re going to remain an orphan [he continued, starting on the Italian salad and devouring it with the utmost sloppiness]. I don’t think our Zinaida Oscarovna will look after you too well. Eh, princess?”

  “… Yes, that’s how it is, my dear chap, one twist of fate, and the king is mate. I never thought that fortune would smile on me—touch wood, touch wood. Why, only last winter I was wondering what to do: tighten my belt or sell Marianna Nikolavna for scrap? You and I had a year and a half of cohabitation, if you’ll excuse the expression, and tomorrow we part—probably forever. Man is fate’s plaything. Happy today, pappy tomorrow.”

  When supper was over and Zina had gone down to let the guests in, Fyodor retreated noiselessly to his room, where everything was animated by rain and wind. He half-closed the casements of his window, but a moment later the night said: “No,” and with a kind of wide-eyed insistence, disdaining blows, entered again. “I was so tickled to learn that Tanya has a little girl, and I am terribly glad for her and for you. The other day I wrote Tanya a long, lyrical letter, but I have an uncomfortable feeling that I put the wrong address on it: instead of ‘122’ I put some other number, without thinking, just as I did once before, I don’t know why this happens—one writes an address heaps of times, automatically and correctly, and then all of a sudden one hesitates, one looks at it consciously, and one sees you’re not sure of it, it seems unfamiliar—very queer … You know, like taking a simple word, say ‘ceiling’ and seeing it as ‘sealing’ or ‘sea-ling’ until it becomes completely strange and feral, something like ‘iceling’ or ‘inglice.’ I think that some day that will happen to the whole of life. In any case wish Tanya from me everything gay, green and Leshino-summery. Tomorrow my landlord and landlady are going away and I am beside myself with joy: beside myself—a very pleasant situation, like on a rooftop at night. I’ll stay at Agamemnonstrasse another month and then move. I don’t know how things will work out. By the way, my Chernyshevski is selling rather well. Who exactly was it told you that Bunin praised it? They already seem ancient history to me now, my exertions over the book, and all those little storms of thought, those cares of the pen—and now I am completely empty, clean, and ready to receive new lodgers. You know, I’m black as a gypsy from the Grunewald sun. Something is beginning to take shape—I think I’ll write a classical novel, with ‘types,’ love, fate, conversations …”

  The door suddenly opened, Zina half entered and without letting go of the door handle threw something on his desk.

  “Pay this to Mamma,” she said; she glanced at him through slitted eyes and disappeared.

  He unfolded the banknote. Two hundred marks. The amount seemed colossal, but a moment’s calculation showed that it would only just suffice for the two past months—eighty plus eighty, and thirty-five for the coming one, from now on without board. But everything grew confused when he began to consider that for the past month he had not been taking lunch, but on the other hand had been receiving bigger suppers; besides that he had contributed during that time ten (or fifteen?) marks, and on the other hand he owed for telephone conversations and for one or two other trifles, such as today’s taxi. The solution to the problem was beyond him, it bored him; he thrust the money beneath a dictionary.

  “… and with descriptions of nature. I am very glad that you’re reading my thing over again, but now it’s time to forget it—it was only an exercise, a tryout, an essay before the school holidays. I have missed you a great deal and perhaps (I repeat, I don’t know how it will work out …) I’ll visit you in Paris. Generally speaking I’d abandon tomorrow this country, oppressive as a headache—where everything is alien and repulsive to me, where a novel about incest or some brash trash, some cloyingly rhetorical, pseudobrutal tale about war is considered the crown of literature; where in fact there is no literature, and hasn’t been for a long time; where sticking out of the fog of a most monotonous democratic dampness—also pseudo—you have the same old jackboot and helmet; where our native enforced ‘social intent’ in literature has been replaced by social opportunity—and so on, and so on … I could go on much longer—and it is amusing that fifty years ago every Russian thinker with a suitcase used to scribble exactly the same—an accusation so obvious as to have become even banal. Earlier, on the other hand, in the golden middle of last century, goodness, what transports! ‘Little gemütlich Germany’—ach, brick cottages, ach, the kiddies go to school, ach, the peasant doesn’t beat his horse with a club! … Never mind-he has his own German way of torturing it, in a cozy nook, with red-hot iron. Yes, I would have left long ago, but there are certain personal circumstances (not to mention my wonderful solitude in this country, the wonderful, beneficient contrast between my inner habitus and the terribly cold world around me; you know, in cold countries houses are warmer than in the south, better insulated and heated), but even these personal circumstances are capable of taking such a turn that soon, perhaps, I’ll leave the Fetterland and bring them with me. And when will we return to Russia? What idiotic sentimentality, what a rapacious groan must our innocent hope convey to people in Russia. But our nostalgia is not historical—only human—how can one explain this to them? It’s easier for me, of course, than for another to live outside Russia, because I know for certain that I shall return—first because I took away the keys to her, and secondly because, no matter when, in a hundred, two hundred years—I shall live there in my books—or at least in some researcher’s footnote. There; now you have a historical hope, a literary-historical one … ‘I lust for immortality—even for its earthly shadow!’ Today I am writing you non-stop nonsense (non-stop trains of thought) because I am well and happy—and besides that, all this has something to do in a roundabout way with Tanya’s baby.

  “The literary review you ask about is called The Tower. I don’t have it but I think you’ll find it in any Russian bookshop. Nothing came from Uncle Oleg. When did he send it? I think you’ve mixed something up. Well, that’s it. Keep well, je t’embrasse. Night, rain quietly falling—it has found its nocturnal rhythm, and can now go on for infinity.”

  He heard the hall fill with departing voices, heard somebody’s umbrella fall and the elevator summoned by Zina rumble and come to a halt. All was still again. Fyodor went into the dining room where Shchyogolev sat cracking the last nuts, chewing on one side, and Marianna Nikolavna was clearing the table. Her plump, dark pink face, the glossy wings of her nose, violet eyebrows, apricot hair turning to bristly blue on her fat shaven nape, her azure orb with its mascara-fouled canthus, momentarily immersing its gaze in the dreggy ooze on the bottom of the teapot, her rings, her garnet brooch, the flowery shawl on her shoulders—all this together constituted a crudely but richly daubed picture in a somewhat hackneyed genre. She put on her spectacles and took out a sheet with figures on it when Fyodor asked how much he owed her. At this Shchyogolev raised his eyebrows in surprise: he had been sure that they would not get another penny from their lodger, and being essentially a kindly man he had advised his wife only yesterday not to press Fyodor but to write him a week or two later from Copenhagen with a threat to approach his relatives. After settling up, Fyodor retained three and a half marks out of the two hundred and went off to bed. In the hallway he met Zina returning from below. “Well?” she said, holding her finger on the switch—a half-interrogative, half-urging interjection which meant approximately: “Are you coming this way? I’m putting out the light here, so hurry up.” The dimple on her naked arm, pale-silk-clad legs in velvet slippers, lowered face. Darkness.

  He went to bed and began to fall asleep to the whisper of the rain. As always on the border between consciousness and sleep all sorts of verbal rejects,
sparkling and tinkling, broke in: “The crystal crunching of that Christian night beneath a chrysolitic star” … and his thought, listening for a moment, aspired to gather them and use them and began to add of its own: Extinguished, Yasnaya Polyana’s light, and Pushkin dead, and Russia far … but since this was no good, the stipple of rhymes extended further: “A falling star, a cruising chrysolite, an aviator’s avatar …” His mind sank lower and lower into a hell of alligator alliterations, into infernal cooperatives of words. Through their nonsensical accumulation a round button on the pillowcase prodded him in the cheek; he turned on his other side and against a dark backdrop naked people ran into the Grunewald lake, and a monogram of light resembling an infusorian glided diagonally to the highest corner of his subpal-pebral field of vision. Behind a certain closed door in his brain, holding on to its handle but turning away from it, his mind commenced to discuss with somebody a complicated and important secret, but when the door opened for a minute it turned out that they were talking about chairs, tables, stables. Suddenly in the thickening mist, by reason’s last tollgate, came the silver vibration of a telephone bell, and Fyodor rolled over prone, falling … The vibration stayed in his fingers, as if a nettle had stung him. In the hall, having already put back the receiver into its black box, stood Zina—she seemed frightened. “That was for you,” she said in a low voice. “Your former landlady, Frau Stoboy. She wants you to come over immediately. There’s somebody waiting for you at her place. Hurry.” He pulled on a pair of flannel trousers and gasping for breath went along the street. At this time of year in Berlin there is something similar to the St. Petersburg white nights: the air was transparently gray, and the houses swam past like a soapy mirage. Some night workers had wrecked the pavement at the corner, and one had to creep through narrow passages between planks, everyone being given at the entrance a small lamp which at the exit was to be left on a hook screwed into a post or else simply on the sidewalk next to some empty milk bottles. Leaving his bottle as well he ran further through the lusterless streets, and the premonition of something incredible, of some impossible superhuman surprise splashed his heart with a snowy mixture of happiness and horror. In the gray murk, blind children wearing dark spectacles came out of a school building in pairs and walked past him; they studied at night (in economically dark schools which in the daytime housed seeing children), and the clergyman accompanying them resembled the Leshino village schoolmaster, Bychkov. Leaning against a lamppost and hanging his tousled head, his scissor-like legs in striped pantaloons splayed wide and his hands stuffed in his pockets, a lean drunkard stood as if just come from the pages of an old Russian satirical rag. There was still light in the Russian bookstore—they were serving books to the night taxi-cab drivers and through the yellow opacity of the glass he noticed the silhouette of Misha Berezovski who was handing out Petrie’s black atlas to someone. Must be hard to work nights! Excitement lashed him again as soon as he reached his former haunts. He was out of breath from running, and the rolled-up laprobe weighed heavy on his arm—he had to hurry, but he could not recall the layout of the streets, and the ashy night confused everything, changing as in a negative image the relationship between dark and light parts, and there was no one to ask, everybody was asleep. Suddenly a poplar loomed and behind it a tall church with a violet-red window divided into harlequin rhombuses of colored light: inside a night service was in progress, and an old lady in mourning with cotton-wool under the bridge of her spectacles hastened to mount the steps. He found his street, but at the end of it a post with a gauntleted hand on it indicated that one had to enter from the other end where the post office was, since at this end a pile of flags had been prepared for tomorrow’s festivities. But he was afraid of losing it in the course of a detour and moreover the post office—that would come afterwards—if Mother had not already been sent a telegram. He scrambled over boards, boxes and a toy grenadier in curls, and caught sight of the familiar house, and there the workmen had already stretched a red strip of carpet across the sidewalk from door to curb, as it used to be done in front of their house on the Neva Embankment on ball nights. He ran up the stairs and Frau Stoboy immediately let him in. Her cheeks glowed and she wore a white hospital overall—she had formerly practiced medicine. “Only don’t get all worked up,” she said. “Go to your room and wait there. You must be prepared for anything,” she added with a vibrant note in her voice and pushed him into the room which he had thought he would never in his life enter again. He grasped her by the elbow, losing control over himself, but she shook him off. “Somebody has come to see you,” said Stoboy, “he’s resting … Wait a couple of minutes.” The door banged shut. The room was exactly as if he had been still living in it: the same swans and lilies on the wallpaper, the same painted ceiling wonderfully ornamented with Tibetan butterflies (there, for example, was Thecla bieti). Expectancy, awe, the frost of happiness, the surge of sobs merged into a single blinding agitation as he stood in the middle of the room incapable of movement, listening and looking at the door. He knew who would enter in a moment, and was amazed now that he had doubted this return: doubt now seemed to him to be the obtuse obstinacy of one half-witted, the distrust of a barbarian, the self-satisfaction of an ignoramus. His heart was bursting like that of a man before execution, but at the same time this execution was such a joy that life faded before it, and he was unable to understand the disgust he had been wont to experience when, in hastily constructed dreams, he had evoked what was now taking place in real life. Suddenly, the door shuddered (another, remote one had opened somewhere beyond it) and he heard a familiar tread, an indoor Morocco-padded step. Noiselessly but with terrible force the door flew open, and on the threshold stood his father. He was wearing a gold embroidered skullcap and a black Cheviot jacket with breast pockets for cigarette case and magnifying glass; his brown cheeks with their two sharp furrows running down from both sides of his nose were particularly smoothly shaven; hoary hairs gleamed in his dark beard like salt; warmly, shaggily, his eyes laughed out of a network of wrinkles. But Fyodor stood and was unable to take a step. His father said something, but so quietly that it was impossible to make anything out, although one somehow knew it to be connected with his return, unharmed, whole, human, and real. And even so it was terrible to come closer—so terrible that Fyodor felt he would die if the one who had entered should move toward him. Somewhere in the rear rooms sounded the warningly rapturous laughter of his mother, while his father made soft chucking sounds hardly parting his lips, as he used to do when taking a decision or seeking something on the page of a book … then he spoke again—and this again meant that everything was all right and simple, that this was the true resurrection, that it could not be otherwise, and also: that he was pleased—pleased with his captures, his return, his son’s book about him—and then at last everything grew easy, a light broke through, and his father with confident joy spread out his arms. With a moan and a sob Fyodor stepped toward him, and in the collective sensation of woolen jacket, big hands and the tender prickle of trimmed mustaches there swelled an ecstatically happy, living, enormous, paradisal warmth in which his icy heart melted and dissolved.

  At first the superposition of a thingummy on a thingabob and the pale, palpitating stripe that went upwards were utterly incomprehensible, like words in a forgotten language or the parts of a dismantled engine—and this senseless tangle sent a shiver of panic running through him: I have woken up in the grave, on the moon, in the dungeon of dingy non-being. But something in his brain turned, his thoughts settled and hastened to paint over the truth—and he realized that he was looking at the curtain of a half-open window, at a table in front of the window: such is the treaty with reason—the theater of earthly habit, the livery of temporary substance. He lowered his head onto the pillow and tried to overtake a fugitive sense—warm, wonderful, all-explaining—but the new dream he dreamt was an uninspired compilation, stitched together out of remnants of daytime life and fitted to it.

  The morning was overcast a
nd cool, with gray-black puddles on the yard’s asphalt, and one could hear the nasty flat thumping of carpets being beaten. The Shchyogolevs had finished their packing; Zina had gone off to work and at one o’clock was due to meet her mother for lunch at the Vaterland. Luckily they had not suggested that Fyodor join them—on the contrary, Marianna Nikolavna, as she warmed up some coffee for him in the kitchen where he sat in his dressing gown, disconcerted by the bivouac-like atmosphere in the apartment, warned him that a little Italian salad and some ham had been left in the larder for lunch. It turned out, incidentally, that the luckless person who was getting their number by mistake, had rung up the previous night: this time he had been tremendously agitated, something had happened—something which remained unknown.

  For the tenth time Boris Ivanovich transferred from one valise to another a pair of shoes on shoe trees, all clean and shiny—he was unusually meticulous over footwear.

  Then they dressed and went out, while Fyodor shaved, carried out long and successful ablutions, and cut his toenails—it was especially pleasant to get under a tight corner, and clip!— the parings shot all over the bathroom. The janitor knocked but was unable to enter because the Shchyogolevs had locked the hall door on the American lock, and Fyodor’s keys had gone forever. Through the letter-box, clacking the shutter, the mailman threw in the Belgrade newspaper For Tsar and Church, to which Boris Ivanovich subscribed, and later someone thrust in (leaving it to stick out boatlike) a leaflet advertising a new hairdresser’s. At exactly half past eleven there came a loud barking from the stairs and the agitated descent of the Alsatian which was taken for a walk at this time. With a comb in his hand he went out onto the balcony to see if the weather was clearing up, but although it did not rain, the sky remained hopelessly and wanly white—and one could not believe that yesterday it had been possible to lie in the forest. The Shchyogolevs’ bedroom was cluttered up with paper rubbish, and one of the suitcases was open—at the top a pear-shaped object of rubber was lying on a wafer towel. An itinerant mustache came into the yard with cymbals, a drum, a saxophone—completely hung with metallic music, with bright music on his head, and with a monkey in a red jersey—and sang for a long time, tapping his foot and jangling—without managing, however, to drown out the volleying at the carpets on their trestles. Cautiously pushing the door, Fyodor visited Zina’s room, where he had never been before, and with the bizarre sensation of a glad moving in he looked for a long time at the briskly ticking alarm clock, at the rose in a glass with its stem all studded with bubbles, at the divan that became a bed at night and at the stockings drying on the radiator. He had a bite to eat, sat down at his desk, dipped his pen, and froze over a blank sheet. The Shchyogolevs returned, the janitor came, Marianna Nikolavna broke a bottle of scent—and he still sat over the glowering sheet and only came to himself when the Shchyogolevs were getting ready to go to the station. There were still two hours until the train’s departure, but then the station was a long way off. “I must confess—I like to get there on the cock,” said Boris Ivanovich buoyantly as he took hold of his shirt cuff and sleeve in order to climb into his overcoat. Fyodor tried to help him (the other with a polite exclamation, still only halfway in, shied away and suddenly, in the corner, turned into a horrible hunchback), and then went to say good-bye to Marianna Nikolavna, who with an oddly altered expression (as if she were dimming and coaxing her reflection) was in the act of putting on a blue hat with a blue veil before the wardrobe mirror. All at once Fyodor felt strangely sorry for her and after a moment’s thought he offered to go to the stand for a taxi. “Yes, please,” said Marianna Nikolavna and rushed ponderously to the sofa for her gloves.