The Gift (46 page)

“In other words the author is sneering throughout the whole of his book at the personality of one of the purest and most valorous sons of liberal Russia—not to speak of the passing kicks with which he rewards other progressive Russian thinkers, a respect for whom is in our consciousness an immanent part of their historical essence. In his book, which lies absolutely outside the humanitarian tradition of Russian literature and therefore outside literature in general, there are no factual untruths (if one does not count the fictitious ‘Strannolyubski’ already mentioned, two or three doubtful details, and a few slips of the pen), but that ‘truth’ which it contains is worse than the most prejudiced lie, for such a truth goes in direct contradiction to that noble and chaste truth (an absence of which deprives history of what the great Greek called
‘tropotos’)
which is one of the inalienable treasures of Russian social thought. In our day, thank God, books are not burned by bonfire, but I must confess that if such a custom were still in existence, Mr. Godunov-Cherdyntsev’s book could justifiably be considered the first candidate for fueling a public square.”

After that Koncheyev had his say in the literary annual
The Tower
. He began by drawing a picture of flight during an invasion
or an earthquake, when the escapers carry away with them everything that they can lay hands on, someone being sure to burden himself with a large, framed portrait of some long-forgotten relative. “Just such a portrait [wrote Koncheyev] is for the Russian intelligentsia the image of Chernyshevski, which was spontaneously but accidentally carried away abroad by the émigrés, together with other, more useful things,” and this is how Koncheyev explained the stupefaction occasioned by the appearance of Fyodor Konstantinovich’s book: “Somebody suddenly confiscated the portrait.” Further on, having finished once and for all with considerations of an ideological nature and embarked upon an examination of the book as a work of art, Koncheyev began to praise it in such a way that as he read the review Fyodor felt a burning radiance forming around his face and quicksilver racing through his veins. The article ended with the following: “Alas! Among the emigration one will hardly scrape up a dozen people capable of appreciating the fire and fascination of this fabulously witty composition; and I would maintain that in today’s Russia you could not find even one to appreciate it, if I had not happened to know of the existence of two such people, one living on the north bank of the Neva and the other—somewhere in distant Siberian exile.”

The monarchist organ
The Throne
devoted to
The Life of Chernyshevski
a few lines in which it pointed out that any sense or value in the unmasking of “one of the ideological mentors of Bolshevism” was completely undermined by “the cheap liberalizing of the author, who goes wholly over to the side of his sorry, but pernicious hero as soon as the long-suffering Russian Tsar finally has him safely tucked away.… And in general,” added the reviewer, Pyotr Levchenko, “it is high time one ceased writing about so-called cruelties of ‘the tsarist regime’ with regard to ‘pure souls’ who are of no interest to anybody. The Red Freemasonry will only rejoice over Count Godunov-Cherdyntsev’s work. It is lamentable that the bearer of such a name should engage in hymning ‘social ideals’ which have long since turned into cheap idols.”

The pro-Communist Russian-language daily in Berlin,
Up!
(this was the one which Vasiliev’s
Gazeta
invariably termed “the reptile”), had an article devoted to the celebration of the centenary of
Chernyshevski’s birth, and concluded thus: “They have also bestirred themselves in our blessed emigration: a certain Godunov-Cherdyntsev with swashbuckling brashness has hurried to concoct a booklet—for which he has dragged in material from all over the place—and has given out his vile slander as
The Life of Chernyshevski
. Some Prague professor or other has hastened to find this work ‘talented and conscientious’ and everyone chummily joined in. It is dashingly written and in no way differs in its internal style from Vasiliev’s leaders about ‘The imminent end of Bolshevism.’ ” The last dig was particularly amusing in view of the fact that in his
Gazeta
Vasiliev resolutely opposed the slightest reference to Fyodor’s book, telling him honestly (although the other had not asked) that had he not been on such friendly terms with him he would have printed a devastating review—“not even a damp spot would have remained” of the author of
The Life of Chernyshevski
. In short, the book found itself surrounded by a good, thundery atmosphere of scandal which helped sales; and at the same time, in spite of the attacks, the name of Godunov-Cherdyntsev immediately came to the fore, rising over the motley storm of critical opinion, in full view of everyone, vividly and firmly. But there was one man whose opinion Fyodor was no longer able to ascertain. Alexander Yakovlevich Chernyshevski had died not long before the book appeared.

When the French thinker Delalande was asked at somebody’s funeral why he did not uncover himself
(ne se découvre pas)
, he replied: “I am waiting for death to do it first”
(qu’elle se découvre la première)
. There is a lack of metaphysical gallantry in this, but death deserves no more. Fear gives birth to sacred awe, sacred awe erects a sacrificial altar, its smoke ascends to the sky, there assumes the shape of wings, and bowing fear addresses a prayer to it. Religion has the same relation to man’s heavenly condition that mathematics has to his earthly one: both the one and the other are merely the rules of the game. Belief in God and belief in numbers: local truth and truth of location. I know that death in itself is in no way connected with the topography of the hereafter, for a door is merely the exit from the house and not a part of its surroundings, like a tree or a hill. One has to get out somehow, “but I refuse to
see in a door more than a hole, and a carpenter’s job”
(Delalande, Discours sur les ombres
, p. 45). And then again: the unfortunate image of a “road” to which the human mind has become accustomed (life as a kind of journey) is a stupid illusion: we are not going anywhere, we are sitting at home. The other world surrounds us always and is not at all at the end of some pilgrimage. In our earthly house, windows are replaced by mirrors; the door, until a given time, is closed; but air comes in through the cracks. “For our stay-at-home senses the most accessible image of our future comprehension of those surroundings which are due to be revealed to us with the disintegration of the body is the liberation of the soul from the eye-sockets of the flesh and our transformation into one complete and free eye, which can simultaneously see in all directions, or to put it differently: a supersensory insight into the world accompanied by our inner participation.” (Ibid. p. 64). But all this is only symbols—symbols which become a burden to the mind as soon as it takes a close look at them.…

Is it not possible to understand more simply, in a way more satisfying to the spirit without the aid of this elegant atheist and equally without the aid of popular faiths? For religion subsumes a suspicious facility of general access that destroys the value of its revelations. If the poor in spirit enter the heavenly kingdom I can imagine how gay it is there. I have seen enough of them on earth. Who else makes up the population of heaven? Swarms of screaming revivalists, grubby monks, lots of rosy, shortsighted souls of more or less Protestant manufacture—what deathly boredom! I am running a high temperature for the fourth day now, and can no longer read. Strange—I used to think before that Yasha was always near me, that I had learned to communicate with ghosts, but now, when I am perhaps dying, this belief in ghosts seems to me something earthly, linked with the very lowest earthly sensations and not at all the discovery of a heavenly America.

Somehow simpler. Somehow simpler. Somehow at once! One effort—and I’ll understand all. The search for God: the longing of any hound for a master; give me a boss and I shall kneel at his enormous feet. All this is earthly. Father, headmaster, rector, president of the board, tsar, God. Numbers, numbers—and one wants so
much to find the biggest number, so that all the rest may mean something and climb somewhere. No, that way you end up in padded dead ends—and everything ceases to be interesting.

Of course I am dying. These pincers behind and this steely pain are quite comprehensible. Death steals up from behind and grasps you by the sides. Funny that I have thought of death all my life, and if I have lived, have lived only in the margin of a book I have never been able to read. Now who was it? Oh, years ago in Kiev … Goodness, what was his name? Would take out a library book in a language he didn’t know, make notes in it and leave it lying about so visitors would think: He knows Portuguese, Aramaic.
Ich habe dasselbe getan
. Happiness, sorrow—exclamation marks
en marge
, while the context is absolutely unknown. A fine affair.

It is terribly painful to leave life’s womb. The deathly horror of birth.
L’enfant qui naît ressent les affres de sa mère
. My poor little Yasha! It is very queer that in dying I get further away from him, when the opposite should have been true—ever nearer and nearer.… His first word was
muha
, a fly. And immediately afterwards there was a telephone call from the police: to come and identify the body. How will I leave him now? In these rooms … He will have nobody to haunt … Because
she
would not notice … Poor girl. How much? Five thousand eight hundred … plus that other money … which makes, let me see … And afterwards? David might help—but then he might not.

 … In general, there has been nothing in life except getting ready for an examination—which all the same nobody can get ready for. “Dreadful is death to man and mite alike.” Will all my friends go through it? Incredible!
Eine alte Geschichte:
the name of a film Sandra and I went to see the day before his death.

Oh, no. Under no circumstances. She can keep talking about it as much as she pleases. Was it yesterday that she talked about it? Or ages ago? No, they won’t be taking me to any hospital. I’ll lie here. I’ve had enough of hospitals. It would mean to go mad again just before the end. No, I’ll stay here. How difficult it is to turn one’s thoughts over: like logs. I feel much too ill to die.

“What did he write his book about, Sandra? Well, tell me, you
should remember! We talked about it once. About some priest—no? Oh, you never … anything … Bad, difficult …”

After this he hardly spoke, having fallen into a twilight condition; Fyodor was admitted to him and forever remembered the white bristle on his sunken cheeks, the dull shade of his bald head, and the hand crusted with gray eczema, stirring like a crawfish on the sheet. The following day he died, but before that he had a moment of lucidity, complaining of pains and then saying (it was darkish in the room because of the lowered blinds): “What nonsense. Of course there is nothing afterwards.” He sighed, listened to the trickling and drumming outside the window and repeated with extreme distinctness: “There is nothing. It is as clear as the fact that it is raining.”

And meanwhile outside the spring sun was playing on the roof tiles, the sky was dreamy and cloudless, the tenant upstairs was watering the flowers on the edge of her balcony, and the water trickled down with a drumming sound.

In the window of the mortician’s on the corner of Kaiserallee there was exhibited as an enticement (just as Cook’s exhibits a Pullman model) a miniature crematorium interior: rows of little chairs before a little pulpit, little dolls sitting on them the size of a bent auricular finger, and in front, and somewhat apart, one could recognize the little widow by the square inch of handkerchief she had raised to her face. The German seductivity of this model had always amused Fyodor, so that now it was somewhat disgusting to enter a real crematorium, where from beneath laurels in tubs a real coffin with a real body was lowered to the sounds of heavyweight organ music into exemplary nether regions, right into the incinerator. Mme. Chernyshevski did not hold a handkerchief but sat motionless and straight, her eyes shimmering through the black crepe veil. The faces of friends and acquaintances bore the guarded expressions usual in such cases: a mobility of the pupils accompanied by a certain tension in the muscles of the neck. The lawyer Charski sincerely blew his nose; Vasiliev, who as a public figure had had a great deal of funeral experience, carefully followed the parson’s pauses (Alexander Yakovlevich had turned out at the last minute to be a Protestant). Engineer Kern flashed the lenses of his pince-nez
impassively. Goryainov repeatedly freed his fat neck from its collar but did not go so far as to clear his throat; the ladies who had used to visit the Chernyshevskis all sat together; the writers also sat together—Lishnevski, Shahmatov and Shirin; there were many people whom Fyodor did not know—for instance, a prim gentleman with a blond little beard and unusually red lips (a cousin, it seemed, of the dead man), and also some Germans with top hats on their knees, who tactfully sat in the back row.

Upon the conclusion of the service the mourners, according to the scheme of the crematorium’s master of ceremonies, were supposed to go up to the widow one at a time and offer words of condolence, but Fyodor resolved to avoid this and went out onto the street. Everything was wet, sunny and somehow nudely bright; on a black football field trimmed with young grass, schoolgirls in shorts were doing calisthenics. Behind the crematorium’s shiny, gutta-percha gray dome one could see the turquoise turrets of a mosque, and on the other side of the square gleamed the green cupolas of a white Pskovan-type church, which had recently grown up out of the corner house and thanks to architectural camouflage seemed almost detached. On a terrace by the entrance to the park two badly wrought bronze boxers, also recently erected, had frozen in attitudes that completely disagreed with the reciprocal harmony of pugilism: instead of its collected, crouched, round-muscled grace there were two naked soldiers scrapping in a bathhouse. A kite being flown from an open space behind some trees made a red little rhombus high in the blue sky. With surprise and vexation Fyodor noticed that he was unable to keep his thoughts on the image of the man who had just been reduced to ashes and gone up in smoke; he tried to concentrate, to imagine to himself the recent warmth of their live relationship, but his soul refused to budge and lay there, sleepy eyes shut, content with its cage. The braked line from
King Lear
, consisting entirely of five “nevers”—that was all he could think of. “And so I’ll never see him again,” he told himself, unoriginally, but this thin goad snapped without displacing his soul. He tried to think about death, but reflected instead that the soft sky, edged on one side with a long cloud like a pale and tender border of fat, would have resembled a slice of ham had the blue
been pink. He tried to imagine some kind of extension of Alexander Yakovlevich beyond the corner of life—but at the same time could not help noticing through the window of a cleaning and pressing shop near the Orthodox church, a worker with devilish energy and an excess of steam, as if in hell, torturing a pair of flat trousers. He tried to confess something to Alexander Yakovlevich, and repent at least for the cruel mischievous thoughts he had fleetingly had (concerning the unpleasant surprise he was preparing for him with his book)- and suddenly he recalled a vulgar triviality: how Shchyogolev had once said in some connection or other: “When good friends of mine die, I always think that up there they will do something to improve my destiny here, ho, ho, ho!” He was in a troubled and obscured state of mind which was incomprehensible to him, just as everything was incomprehensible, from the sky to that yellow tram rumbling along the clear track of the Hohenzollerdamm (along which Yasha had once gone to his death), but gradually his annoyance with himself passed and with a kind of relief—as if the responsibility for his soul belonged not to him but to someone who knew what it all meant—he felt that all this skein of random thoughts, like everything else as well—the seams and sleaziness of the spring day, the ruffle of the air, the coarse, variously intercrossing threads of confused sounds—was but the reverse side of a magnificent fabric, on the front of which there gradually formed and became alive images invisible to him.