The Gift

by Vladimir Nabokov

  There proved to be no cabs at the stand, all had been taken, and he was forced to cross the square and look there. When he finally drove up to the house the Shchyogolevs were already standing below, having carried their suitcases down themselves (the “heavy luggage” had been dispatched the day before).

  “Well, God take care of you,” said Marianna Nikolavna, and kissed him with gutta-percha lips on the forehead.

  “Sarotska, Sarotska, send us a telegramotska!” cried Boris the parodist, waving his hand, and the taxi turned and sped away.

  Forever, thought Fyodor with relief and whistling went upstairs.

  Only here did he realize that he was unable to enter the apartment. It was particularly galling to raise the brass postal shutter and look through at a bunch of keys lying starwise on the hall floor: Marianna Nikolavna had pushed them back in after locking the door behind her. He went down the stairs much more slowly than he had gone up. Zina, he knew, was planning to go from work to the station: considering that the train would be leaving in about two hours, and that the bus ride would take an hour, she (and the keys) would not be back in less than three hours. The streets were windy and gray: he had no one to go to, and he never went alone into pubs or cafés, he hated them fiercely. In his pocket there were three and a half marks; he bought some cigarettes, and since the gnawing need to see Zina (now, when everything was allowed) was really what was taking away all light and sense from the street, from the sky and the air, he hastened to the corner where the necessary bus stopped. The fact that he was wearing bedroom slippers and an ancient crumpled suit, spotted in front, with trousers a button short on the fly, baggy knees and a patch of his mother’s making on the bottom, did not disturb him in the least. His tan and the open collar of his shirt gave him a certain pleasant immunity.

  It was some kind of a national holiday. Three kinds of flags were sticking out of the house windows: black-yellow-red, black-white-red, and plain red; each one meant something, and funniest of all, this something was able to excite pride or hatred in someone. There were large flags and small flags, on short poles and on long ones, but none of this exhibitionism of civic excitement made the city any more attractive. On the Tauentzienstrasse the bus was held up by a gloomy procession; policemen in black leggings brought up the rear in a slow truck and among the banners there was one with a Russian inscription containing two mistakes: serb instead of serp (sickle) and molt instead of molot (hammer). Suddenly he imagined official festivals in Russia, soldiers in long-skirted overcoats, the cult of firm jaws, a gigantic placard with a vociferous cliché clad in Lenin’s jacket and cap, and amidst the thunder of stupidities, the kettledrums of boredom, and slave-pleasing splendors—a little squeak of cheap truth. There it is, eternalized, ever more monstrous in its heartiness, a repetition of the Hodynka coronation festivities with its free candy packages—look at the size of them (now much bigger than the original ones)—and with its superbly organized removal of dead bodies … Oh, let everything pass and be forgotten—and again in two hundred years’ time an ambitious failure will vent his frustration on the simpletons dreaming of a good life (that is if there does not come my kingdom, where everyone keeps to himself and there is no equality and no authorities—but if you don’t want it, I don’t insist and don’t care).

  The Potsdam square, always disfigured by city work (oh, those old postcards of it where everything is so spacious, with the droshki drivers looking so happy, and the trains of tight-belted ladies brushing the dust—but with the same fat flower-girls). The pseudo-Parisian character of Unter-den-Linden. The narrowness of the commercial streets beyond it. Bridge, barge, sea gulls. The dead eyes of old hotels of the second, third, hundredth class. A few more minutes of riding, and there was the station.

  He caught sight of Zina in a beige georgette dress and a white little hat running up the steps. She was running with her pink elbows pressed to her sides, holding her handbag under her arm—and when he caught up with her and half embraced her, she turned round with that tender, blurry smile, with that happy sadness in her eyes with which she always greeted him when they met alone. “Listen,” she said, in a flurried voice, “I’m late, let’s run.” But he replied that he had already said good-by to them and would wait for her outside.

  The low sun settling behind the rooftops seemed to have fallen out of the clouds that covered the rest of the sky (but they were by now quite soft and aloof, as if painted in melting undulations upon a greenish ceiling); there, in that narrow slit, the sky was on fire, and opposite, a window and some metallic letters shone like copper. A porter’s long shadow, pushing the shadow of a barrow, sucked in that shadow, but at the turning it protruded again at a sharp angle.

  “We’ll miss you, Zina,” said Marianna Nikolavna, from the window of the carriage. “But in any case take your vacation in August and come over—we’ll see if you can’t perhaps stay for good.”

  “I don’t think so,” said Zina. “Ah yes, I gave you my keys today. Don’t take them with you, please.”

  “I left them in the hall … And Boris’s are in the desk … Never mind: Godunov will let you in,” added Marianna Nikolavna appeasingly.

  “Well, well. Good luck to it,” said Boris Ivanovich from behind his wife’s plump shoulder and rolled his eyes. “Ah, Zinka, Zinka, just you come over and you shall ride a bicycle and swill milk—that’s the life!”

  The train gave a shudder and started to move. Marianna Nikolavna kept waving for a long time. Shchyogolev drew in his head like a tortoise (and having sat down, probably emitted a Russian grunt).

  She skipped down the steps—her bag now hung from her fingers, and the last rays of the sun caused a bronze gleam to dance in her eyes as she flew up to Fyodor. They kissed as ardently as if she had just arrived from far off, after a long separation.

  “And now let’s go and have some supper,” she said, taking his arm. “You must be starved.”

  He nodded. Now how to explain it? Why this strange embarrasment—instead of the exultant, voluble freedom I had been so eagerly looking forward to? It was as if I had grown disused from her, or else was unable to adjust myself and her, the former her, to this freedom.

  “What’s the matter with you—you seem out of sorts?” she asked observantly after a silence (they were walking toward the bus stop).

  “It’s sad to part with Boris the Brisk,” he replied, trying to see if a joke would resolve his emotional constraint.

  “And I think it’s yesterday’s escapade,” said Zina, smiling, and he detected in her tone of voice a high-strung ring, which in its own way corresponded to his own confusion and thus both stressed and augmented it.

  “Nonsense. The rain was warm. I feel wonderful.”

  The bus rolled up, they boarded it. Fyodor paid for two tickets from his palm. Zina said: “I get my wages only tomorrow, so that all I have now is two marks. How much do you have?”

  “Very little. Out of your two hundred I was left only three-fifty and more than a half of that I have blowed.”

  “We have enough for supper, though,” said Zina.

  “Are you quite sure you like the idea of a restaurant? Because I don’t too much.”

  “Never mind, resign yourself. In general now it’s all over with healthy home cooking. I can’t even make an omelette. We must think about how to manage things. But for now I know an excellent place.”

  Several minutes of silence. The streetlamps and shop windows were beginning to light up; the streets had grown pinched and gray from that immature light, but the sky was radiant and wide, and the sunset cloudlets were trimmed with flamingo down.

  “Look, the photos are ready.”

  He took them from her cold fingers. Zina standing in the street before her office, with legs placed tightly together and the shadow of a lime trunk crossing the sidewalk, like a boom lowered in front of her; Zina sitting sideways on a windowsill with a crown of sunshine around her head; Zina at work, badly taken, dark-faced—but to compensate this, her regal typew
riter enthroned in the foreground, with a gleam on its carriage lever.

  She thrust them back in her bag, took out and put back her monthly tram ticket in its cellophane holder, took out a small mirror, looked into it, baring the filling in her front tooth, replaced the mirror inside, clicked the bag shut, lowered it onto her knees, looked at her shoulder, brushed off a bit of fluff, put on her gloves, turned her head to the window—doing all this in rapid succession, with her features in motion, her eyes blinking and a kind of inner biting and sucking in of her cheeks. But now she sat motionless, looking away, the sinews in her pale neck stretched tight and her white-gloved hands lying on the glossy leather of her handbag.

  The defilé of the Brandenburg Gate.

  Beyond the Potsdam square, just as they were approaching the canal, an elderly lady with prominent cheekbones (where had I seen her?) and with a goggle-eyed, trembling little dog under her arm made a dive for the exit, swaying and struggling with phantoms, and Zina looked up at her with a fleeting, heavenly glance.

  “Did you recognize her?” she asked. “That was Lorentz. I think she’s mad at me because I never ring her up. Quite a superfluous woman, really.”

  “There’s a smut on your cheek,” said Fyodor. “Careful, don’t smear it.”

  Again the handbag, handkerchief, mirror.

  “We soon have to get out,” she said presently. “What?”

  “Nothing. I agree. Let’s get out where you like.”

  “Here,” she said two stops later, taking his elbow, sitting again from a jolt, rising finally and fishing out her bag as if from water.

  The lights had already taken shape; the sky was quite faint. A truck went by with a load of young people returning from some civic orgy, waving something or other and shouting something or other. In the middle of a treeless public garden consisting of a large oblong flower-bed rimmed by a footpath, an army of roses was in bloom. The small, open enclosure of a restaurant (six little tables) opposite this garden was separated from the sidewalk by a whitewashed barrier topped with petunias.

  Beside them a boar and his sow were feeding, the waiter’s black fingernail dipped into the sauce, and yesterday a lip with a sore on it had been pressed to the gold border of my beer glass.… The mist of some sorrow had enveloped Zina—her cheeks, her narrowed eyes, her throat pit, her fragile clavicle—and this was somehow enhanced by the pale smoke from her cigarette. The scuffing of passersby seemed to stir up the thickening darkness.

  Suddenly, in the frank evening sky, very high …

  “Look,” he said. “What a beauty!”

  A brooch with three rubies was gliding over the dark velvet—so high that not even the hum of the engine was audible.

  She smiled, parting her lips and looking upwards.

  “Tonight?” he asked, also looking upwards.

  Only now had he entered into the order of feelings he used to promise himself, when formerly he imagined how they would slip together out of a thralldom that had gradually asserted itself in the course of their meetings, and grown habitual, even though it was based on something artificial, something unworthy, in fact, of the significance it had acquired: now it seemed incomprehensible why on any of those four hundred and fifty-five days she and he had not simply moved out of the Shchyogolev’s apartment to dwell together; but at the same time he knew subrationally that this external obstacle was merely a pretext, merely an ostentatious device on the part of fate, which had hastily put up the first barrier to come to hand in order to engage meantime in the important, complicated business that secretly required the very delay in development which had seemed to depend on a natural obstruction.

  Pondering now fate’s methods (in this white, illuminated little enclosure, in Zina’s golden presence and with the participation of the warm, concave darkness immediately behind the carved radiance of the petunias), he finally found a certain thread, a hidden spirit, a chess idea for his as yet hardly planned “novel,” to which he had glancingly referred yesterday in the letter to his mother. It was of this that he spoke now, spoke in such a way as if it were really the best and most normal expression of his happiness—which was also expressed in a more accessible edition by such things as the velvetiness of the air, three emerald lime leaves that had got into the lamplight, the icy cold beer, the lunar volcanoes of mashed potato, vague voices, footfalls, the stars among the ruins of clouds.…

  “Here is what I’d like to do,” he said. “Something similar to destiny’s work in regard to us. Think how fate started it three and a half odd years ago.… The first attempt to bring us together was crude and heavy! That moving of furniture, for example: I see something extravagant in it, a ‘no-holds-barred’ something, for it was quite a job moving the Lorentzes and all their belongings into the house where I had just rented a room! The idea lacked subtlety: to have us meet through Lorentz’s wife. Wishing to speed things up, fate brought in Romanov, who rang me up and invited me to a party at his place. But at this point fate blundered: the medium chosen was wrong, I disliked the man and a reverse result was achieved: because of him I began to avoid an acquaintance with the Lorentzes—so that all this cumbersome construction went to the devil, fate was left with a furniture van on her hands and the expenses were not recovered.”

  “Watch out,” said Zina, “she might take offense at this criticism now and revenge herself.”

  “Listen further. Fate made a second attempt, simpler this time but promising better success, because I was in need of money and should have grasped at the offer of work—helping an unknown Russian girl to translate some documents; but this also failed. First because the lawyer Charski also turned out to be an unsuitable middleman, and secondly because I hate working on translations into German—so that it again miscarried. Then finally, after this failure, fate decided to take no chances, to install me directly in the place where you lived. As a go-between she chose not the first person to come along, but someone I liked who energetically took the matter in hand and did not allow me to dodge it. At the last minute, true, there occurred a hitch that almost ruined everything: in her haste—or from stinginess—destiny did not produce you at the time of my visit; of course, after talking five minutes to your stepfather—whom fate had been careless enough to let out of his cage—I decided not to take the unattractive room I had glimpsed over his shoulder. And then, at the end of her tether, unable to show me you immediately, fate showed me as a last desperate maneuver your bluish ball dress on the chair—and strange to say, I myself don’t know why but the maneuver worked, and I can imagine what a sigh of relief fate must have heaved.”

  “Only that wasn’t my dress, it was my cousin Raissa’s—she’s very nice but a perfect fright—I think she left it for me to take something off or sew something on.”

  “Then it was still more ingenious. What resourcefulness! The most enchanting things in nature and art are based on deception. Look, you see—it began with a reckless impetuosity and ended with the finest of finishing touches. Now isn’t that the plot for a remarkable novel? What a theme! But it must be built up, curtained, surrounded by dense life—my life, my professional passions and cares.”

  “Yes, but that will result in an autobiography with mass executions of good acquaintances.”

  “Well, let’s suppose that I so shuffle, twist, mix, rechew and rebelch everything, add such spices of my own and impregnate things so much with myself that nothing remains of the autobiography but dust—the kind of dust, of course, which makes the most orange of skies. And I shan’t write it now, I’ll be a long time preparing it, years perhaps … In any case I’ll do something else first—I want to translate something in my own manner from an old French sage—in order to reach a final dictatorship over words, because in my Chernyshevski they are still trying to vote.”

  “That’s all marvelous,” said Zina. “I like it all immensely. I think you’ll be such a writer as has never been before, and Russia will simply pine for you—when she comes to her senses too late.… But do you love
me?”