The Gift Read online

  Showed a blue that was bluer than blue

  And was hardly inferior in blueness

  To my present remembrance of it.

  And in the evening he gazes with the same screwed-up eyes at the field, one side of which is already in shadow, while the other, farther one

  Is illumed, from its central big boulder

  To the edge of the forest beyond it

  And is bright as by day.

  It would seem to us that perhaps it was really not literature but painting for which he was destined from childhood, and while we know nothing of the author’s present condition, we can nevertheless clearly picture a straw-hatted boy, sitting very uncomfortably on a garden bench with his watercolor paraphernalia and painting the world bequeathed him by his forebears:

  Cells of white porcelain

  Contain blue, green, red honey.

  First, out of pencil lines,

  On rough paper a garden is formed.

  The birches, the balcony of the outbuilding,

  All is spotted with sunlight. I soak

  And twirl tight the tip of my paintbrush

  In rich orange yellow;

  And, meantime, within the full goblet,

  In the radiance of its cut glass,

  What colors have blazed,

  What rapture has bloomed!

  This, then, is Godunov-Cherdyntsev’s little volume. In conclusion let us add… What else? What else? Imagination, do prompt me! Can it be true that all the enchantingly throbbing things of which I have dreamt and still dream through my poems have not been lost in them and have been noticed by the reader whose review I shall see before the day is over? Can it really be that he has understood everything in them, understood that besides the good old “picturesqueness” they also contain special poetic meaning (when one’s mind, after going around itself in the subliminal labyrinth, returns with newfound music that alone makes poems what they should be)? As he read them, did he read them not only as words but as chinks between words, as one should do when reading poetry? Or did he simply skim over them, like them and praise them, calling attention to the significance of their sequence, a feature fashionable in our time, when time is in fashion: if a collection opens with a poem about “A Lost Ball,” it must close with “The Found Ball.”

  Only pictures and ikons remained

  In their places that year

  When childhood was ended, and something

  Happened to the old house: in a hurry

  All the rooms with each other

  Were exchanging their furniture,

  Cupboards and screens, and a host

  Of unwieldy big things:

  And it was then that from under a sofa,

  On the suddenly unmasked parquet,

  Alive, and incredibly dear,

  It was revealed in a corner.

  The book’s exterior appearance is pleasing.

  Having squeezed the final drop of sweetness from it, Fyodor stretched and got up from his couch. He felt very hungry. The hands of his watch had lately begun to misbehave, now and then starting to move counterclockwise, so that he could not depend on them; to judge by the light, however, the day, about to leave on a journey, had sat down with its family for a pensive pause. When Fyodor went outside he felt immersed in a damp chill (it’s a good thing I put that on): while he had been musing over his poems, rain had lacquered the street from end to end. The van had gone and in the spot where its tractor had recently stood, there remained next to the sidewalk a rainbow of oil, with the purple predominant and a plumelike twist. Asphalt’s parakeet. And what had been the name of the moving company? Max Lux. Mac’s luck.

  Did I take the keys? Fyodor suddenly thought, stopping and thrusting his hand into his raincoat pocket. There he located a clinking handful, weighty and reassuring. When, three years ago, still during his existence here as a student, his mother had moved to Paris to live with Tanya, she had written that she just could not get used to being liberated from the perpetual fetters that chain a Berliner to the door lock. He imagined her joy upon reading the article about him and for an instant he felt maternal pride toward himself; not only that but a maternal tear burned the edge of his eyelids.

  But what do I care whether or not I receive attention during my lifetime, if I am not certain that the world will remember me until its last darkest winter, marveling like Ronsard’s old woman? And yet… I am still a long way from thirty, and here today I am already noticed. Noticed! Thank you, my land, for this remotest… A lyric possibility flitted past, singing quite close to his ear. Thank you, my land, for your most precious… I no longer need the sound “oticed”: the rhyme has kindled life, but the rhyme itself is abandoned. And maddest gift my thanks are due… I suppose “meshes” waits in the wings. Did not have time to make out my third line in that burst of light. Pity. All gone now, missed my cue.

  He bought some piroshki (one with meat, another with cabbage, a third with tapioca, a fourth with rice, a fifth… could not afford a fifth) in a Russian foodshop, which was a kind of wax museum of the old country’s cuisine, and quickly finished them off on a damp bench in a small public garden.

  The rain began coming down faster: someone had suddenly tilted the sky. He had to take cover in the circular shelter at the streetcar stop. There on the bench two Germans with briefcases were discussing a deal and endowing it with such dialectic details that the nature of the merchandise was lost, as when you are looking through an article in Brockhaus’ Encyclopedia and lose its subject, indicated in the text only by its initial letter. Shaking her bobbed hair a girl entered the shelter with a small, wheezing, toadlike bulldog. Now this is odd: “remotest” and “noticed” are together again and a certain combination is ringing persistently. I will not be tempted.

  The shower ended. With perfect simplicity—no dramatics, no tricks—all the streetlamps came on. He decided he could already set off for the Chernyshevskis’ so as to be there towards nine, Rhine, fine, cline. As happens with drunks, something preserved him when he crossed streets in this state. Illuminated by a street-lamp’s humid ray, a car stood at the curb with its motor running: every single drop on its hood was trembling. Who could have written it? Fyodor could not make a final choice among several émigré critics. This one was scrupulous but untalented; that one, dishonest but gifted; a third wrote only about prose; a fourth only about his friends; a fifth… and Fyodor’s imagination conjured up this fifth one: a man the same age as he or even, he thought, a year younger, who had published during those same years in those same émigré papers and magazines, no more than he (a poem here, an article there), but who in some incomprehensible manner, which seemed as physically natural as some kind of emanation, had unobtrusively clothed himself in an aura of indefinable fame, so that his name was uttered not necessarily especially often, but quite differently from all the other young names; a man whose every new searing line he, Fyodor, despising himself, quickly and avidly devoured in a corner, trying by the very act of reading to destroy the marvel of it—after which for two days or so he could not rid himself either of what he had read or of his own feeling of debility or of a secret ache, as if while wrestling with another he had injured his own innermost, sacrosanct particle; a lonely, unpleasant, myopic man, with some kind of unpleasant defect in the reciprocal position of his shoulder blades. But I shall forgive everything if it is you.

  He thought he was keeping his pace to a dawdle, yet the clocks that he came across on the way (the emergent giants of watchmakers’ shops) advanced even more slowly and when, almost at his destination, he overtook in one stride Lyubov Markovna, who was going to the same place, he understood that he had been borne along throughout his journey by his impatience, as by an escalator that transforms even a motionless man into a runner.

  Why did this flabby, unloved, elderly woman still make up her eyes when she already wore a pince-nez? The lenses exaggerated the unsteadiness and crudity of the amateurish ornamentation and as a result, her perfectly innocent gaze became
so ambiguous that one could not break away from it: the hypnosis of error. In fact nearly everything about her seemed based on an unfortunate misunderstanding—and one wondered if it was not even a form of insanity when she thought that she spoke German like a native, that Galsworthy was a great writer, or that Georgiy Ivanovich Vasiliev was pathologically attracted to her. She was one of the most faithful frequenters of the literary parties that the Chernyshevskis, together with Vasiliev, a fat old journalist, organized every other Saturday; today was only Tuesday; and Lyubov Markovna was still living on her impressions from the previous Saturday, sharing them generously. Men fatally became absentminded boors in her company. Fyodor himself felt he was slipping too, but fortunately they were coming to the front door and there the Chernyshevskis’ maid already stood waiting, keys in hand; actually, she had been sent to meet Vasiliev, who suffered from an extremely rare disease of the heart valves—he had, in fact, made a hobby of it and sometimes arrived at the home of friends with an anatomical model of the heart and demonstrated everything very clearly and lovingly. “We don’t need the elevator,” said Lyubov Markovna and started up the stairs with a strong plodding gait which turned to a curiously smooth and silent swing on the landings; Fyodor had to zigzag behind her at a reduced pace, as you sometimes see a dog do, weaving and shoving its nose past its master’s heel now on the right, now on the left.

  They were admitted by Alexandra Yakovlevna herself. Fyodor had scarcely time to notice her unusual expression (as if she disapproved of something or wanted to avert something quickly), when her husband darted into the hallway on his short plump legs, waving a newspaper as he ran.

  “Here it is,” he shouted, the corner of his mouth violently jerking downward (a tic acquired since the death of his son). “Look, here it is!”

  “When I married him,” observed Mme. Chernyshevski, “I expected his humor to be more subtle.”

  Fyodor saw with surprise that the paper he uncertainly took from his host was a German one.

  “The date!” shouted Chernyshevski. “Go ahead, look at the date, young man!”

  “April 1,” said Fyodor with a sigh, and unconsciously he folded up the paper. “Yes, of course, I should have remembered.”

  Chernyshevski began to guffaw ferociously.

  “Don’t be cross with him, please,” said his wife in an indolently sorrowful tone, slightly rolling her hips and gently taking the young man by the wrist.

  Lyubov Markovna clicked her purse shut and sailed off toward the parlor.

  It was a smallish, rather tastelessly furnished, badly lighted room with a shadow lingering in one corner and a pseudo-Tanagra vase standing on an unattainable shelf, and when at last the final guest had arrived and Mme. Chernyshevski, becoming for a moment—as usually happens—remarkably similar to her own (blue, gleaming) teapot, began to pour tea, the cramped quarters assumed the guise of a certain touching, provincial coziness. On the sofa, among cushions of various hue—all of them unappetizing and blurry—a silk doll with an angel’s limp legs and a Persian’s almond-shaped eyes was being squeezed alternately by two comfortably settled persons: Vasiliev, huge, bearded, wearing prewar socks arrowed above the ankle; and a fragile, charmingly debilitated girl with pink eyelids, in general appearance rather like a white mouse; her first name was Tamara (which would have better suited the doll), and her last was reminiscent of one of those German mountain landscapes that hang in picture-framing shops. Fyodor sat by the bookshelf and tried to simulate good spirits, despite the lump in his throat. Kern, a civil engineer, who prided himself on having been a close acquaintance of the late Alexander Blok (the celebrated poet), was producing a gluey sound as he extracted a date from an oblong carton. Lyubov Markovna carefully examined the pastries on a large plate with a poorly pictured bumblebee and, suddenly botching her investigation, contented herself with a bun—the sugar-powdered kind that always bears an anonymous fingerprint. The host was telling an ancient story about a medical student’s April Fool’s prank in Kiev…. But the most interesting person in the room sat a little distance apart, by the writing desk, and did not take part in the general conversation—which, however, he followed with quiet attention. He was a youth somewhat resembling Fyodor—not so much in facial features (which at that moment were difficult to distinguish) but in the tonality of his general appearance: the dunnish auburn shade of the round head which was closely cropped (a style which, according to the rules of latter-day St. Petersburg romanticism, was more becoming to a poet than shaggy locks); the transparency of the large, tender, slightly protruding ears; the slenderness of the neck with the shadow of a hollow at its nape. He sat in the same pose Fyodor sometimes assumed—head slightly lowered, legs crossed, arms not so much crossed as hugging each other, as if he felt chilled, so that the repose of the body was expressed more by angular projections (knee, elbow, thin shoulder) and the contraction of all the members rather than by the general softening of the frame when a person is relaxing and listening. The shadows of two volumes standing on the desk mimicked a cuff and the corner of a lapel, while the shadow of a third volume, which was leaning against the others, might have passed for a necktie. He was about five years younger than Fyodor and, as far as the face itself was concerned, if one judged by the photographs on the walls of the room and in the adjacent bedroom (on the little table between twin beds that wept at night), there was perhaps no resemblance at all, if you discounted a certain elongation of outline combined with prominent frontal bones and the dark depth of the eye sockets—Pascal-like, according to the physiognomists—and also there might have been something in common in the breadth of the eyebrows… but no, it was not a matter of ordinary resemblance, but of generic spiritual similarity between two angular and sensitive boys, each odd in his own way. This youth sat with downcast eyes and a trace of mockery on his lips, in a modest, not very comfortable position, on a chair along whose seat copper tacks glinted, to the left of the dictionary-cluttered desk; and Alexander Yakovlevich Chernyshevski, with a convulsive effort, as if regaining lost balance, would tear his gaze away from that shadowy youth, as he went on with the jaunty banter behind which he tried to conceal his mental sickness.

  “Don’t worry, there’ll be reviews,” he said to Fyodor, winking involuntarily. “You can be sure the critics will squeeze out your blackheads.”

  “By the way,” asked his wife, “what do those ‘weavers and wavers’ mean exactly—in the poem about the bicycle?”

  Fyodor explained, relying more on gestures than on words: “You know, when you are learning to ride a bike and you sort of swerve from side to side.”

  “Doubtful expression,” remarked Vasiliev.

  “My favorite is the one about children’s diseases, yes,” said Alexandra Yakovlevna, nodding to herself, “that’s good: Christmastime scarlet fever and Eastertime diphtheria.”

  “Why not the other way around?” inquired Tamara.

  Oh, how the boy had loved poetry! The glass-doored bookcase in the bedroom was full of his books: Gumilyov and Hérédia, Blok and Rilke—and how much he knew by heart! And the notebooks…. One day she and I will have to sit down and go through it all. She has the strength to do it, I don’t. Strange how one keeps postponing things. One would think it would be a pleasure—the only, the bitter pleasure—to go through the belongings of the dead, yet his stuff goes on lying there, untouched (the provident laziness of one’s soul?); it is unthinkable that a stranger should touch it, but what a relief it would be if an accidental fire were to destroy that precious little cabinet. Chernyshevski abruptly got up and, as if by chance, moved the chair by the desk in such a way that neither it nor the shadows of the books could serve as a theme for the phantom.

  By then the talk had shifted to some unlamented Soviet politician who had fallen from power after Lenin’s death. “Oh, in the years I knew him he was at the ‘height of glory and good deeds,’ “the journalist Vasiliev was saying, professionally misquoting Pushkin (who has “hope,” not “height”).

&n
bsp; The boy who looked like Fyodor (to whom the Chernyshevskis had become so attached for this very reason) was now by the door, where he paused before leaving the room, half turning toward his father—and, despite his purely imaginary nature, how much more substantial he was than all those sitting in the room! The sofa could be seen through Vasiliev and the pale girl! Kern, the engineer, was represented only by the glint of his pince-nez; so was Lyubov Markovna; and Fyodor himself existed only because of a vague congruity with the deceased—while Yasha was perfectly real and live, and only the instinct of self-preservation prevented one from taking a good look at his features.

  But perhaps, thought Fyodor, perhaps, this is all wrong, perhaps he [Alexander Yakovlevich Chernyshevski] is not imagining his dead son at all right now as I imagine him doing. He may be really occupied with the conversation and if his eyes are wandering it may be only because he has always been fidgety, poor soul. I am unhappy, I am bored, nothing rings true here and I don’t know why I keep sitting here, listening to nonsense.