The Gift (54 page)

“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?”

“What I am saying is in fact a kind of declaration of love,” replied Fyodor.

“A ‘kind of’ is not enough. You know at times I shall probably be wildly unhappy with you. But on the whole it does not matter, I’m ready to face it.”

She smiled, opening her eyes wide and raising her eyebrows, and then she leaned slightly backwards in her chair and began to powder her chin and nose.

“Ah, I must tell you—this is magnificent—he has a famous passage which I think I can say by heart if I go right on, so don’t interrupt me, it’s an approximate translation: there was once a man … he lived as a true Christian; he did much good, sometimes by word, sometimes by deed, and sometimes by silence; he observed the fasts; he drank the water of mountain valleys (that’s good, isn’t it?); he nurtured the spirit of contemplation and vigilance; he lived a pure, difficult, wise life; but when he sensed the approach of death, instead of thinking about it, instead of tears of repentance and sorrowful partings, instead of monks and a notary in black, he invited guests to a feast, acrobats, actors, poets, a crowd of dancing girls, three magicians, jolly Tollenburg students, a traveler from Taprobana, and in the midst of melodious verses, masks and music he drained a goblet of wine and died, with a carefree smile on his face.… Magnificent, isn’t it? If I have to die one day that’s exactly how I’d like it to be.”

“Only minus the dancing girls,” said Zina.

“Well, that’s only a symbol of gay company.… Perhaps, now, we can go?”

“We have to pay,” said Zina. “Call him over.”

After this they were left with eleven pfennigs, counting the blackened coin which she had picked up a day or two before from the sidewalk: it would bring luck. As they walked down the street he felt a quick tremor along his spine, and again that emotional constraint, but now in a different, languorous form. It was a twenty minutes’ slow walk to the house, and the air, the darkness and the honeyed scent of blooming lindens caused a sucking ache at the base of the chest. This scent evanesced in the stretch from linden to linden, being replaced there by a black freshness, and then again, beneath the next canopy, an oppressive and heady cloud would accumulate, and Zina would say, tensing her nostrils: “Ah, smell it,”
and again the darkness would be drained of savor and again would be heavy with honey. Will it really happen tonight? Will it really happen now? The weight and the threat of bliss. When I walk with you like this, ever so slowly, and hold you by the shoulder, everything slightly sways, my head hums, and I feel like dragging my feet; my left slipper falls off my heel, we crawl, dawdle, dwindle in a mist—now we are almost all melted.… And one day we shall recall all this—the lindens, and the shadow on the wall, and a poodle’s unclipped claws tapping over the flagstones of the night. And the star, the star. And here is the square and the dark church with the yellow light of its clock. And here, on the corner, the house.

Good-by, my book! Like mortal eyes, imagined ones must close some day. Onegin from his knees will rise—but his creator strolls away. And yet the ear cannot right now part with the music and allow the tale to fade; the chords of fate itself continue to vibrate; and no obstruction for the sage exists where I have put The End: the shadows of my world extend beyond the skyline of the page, blue as tomorrow’s morning haze—nor does this terminate the phrase.

The End

Vladimir Nabokov was born in St. Petersburg on April 23, 1889. His family fled to Germany in 1919, during the Bolshevik Revolution. Nabokov studied French and Russian literature at Trinity College, Cambridge, from 1919 to 1923, then lived in Berlin (1923–1937) and Paris (1937–1940), where he began writing, mainly in Russian, under the pseudonym Sirin. In 1940 he moved to the United States, where he pursued a brilliant literary career (as a poet, novelist, critic, and translator) while teaching literature at Stanford, Wellesley, Cornell, and Harvard. The monumental success of his novel
Lolita
(1955) enabled him to give up teaching and devote himself fully to his writing. In 1961 he moved to Montreux, Switzerland, where he died in 1977. Recognized as one of this century’s master prose stylists in both Russian and English, he translated a number of his original English works—including
Lolita
—into Russian, and collaborated on English translations of his original Russian works.

ADA, OR ARDOR

Ada, or Ardor
tells a love story troubled by incest, but is also at once a fairy tale, epic, philosophical treatise on the nature of time, parody of the history of the novel, and erotic catalogue.

Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-72522-0

BEND SINISTER

While it is filled with veiled puns and characteristically delightful wordplay,
Bend Sinister
is first and foremost a haunting and compelling narrative about a civilized man and his child caught up in the tyranny of a police state.

Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-72727-9

DESPAIR

Extensively revised by Nabokov in 1965, thirty years after its original publication,
Despair
is the wickedly inventive and richly derisive story of Hermann, a man who undertakes the perfect crime: his own murder.

Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-72343-1

THE ENCHANTER

The Enchanter
is the precursor to Nabokov’s classic novel,
Lolita
. At once hilarious and chilling, it tells the story of an outwardly respectable man and his fatal obsession with certain pubescent girls.

Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-72886-3

THE EYE

The Eye
is as much farcical detective story as it is a profoundly refractive tale about the vicissitudes of identities and appearances. Smurov is a lovelorn, self-conscious Russian émigré living in prewar Berlin who commits suicide after being humiliated by a jealous husband, only to suffer greater indignities in the afterlife.

Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-72723-1

THE GIFT

The Gift
is the last of the novels Nabokov wrote in his native language and the crowning achievement of that period of his literary career. It is the story of Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev, an impoverished émigré who dreams of the book he will someday write.

Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-72725-5

GLORY

Glory
is the wryly ironic story of Martin Edelweiss, a young Russian émigré of no account, who is in love with a girl who refuses to marry him. Hoping to impress his love, he embarks on a “perilous, daredevil” project to illegally reenter the Soviet Union.

Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-72724-8

INVITATION TO A BEHEADING

Invitation to a Beheading
embodies a vision of a bizarre and irrational world; in an unnamed dream country, the young man Cincinnatus C. is condemned to death by beheading for “gnostical turpitude.”

Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-72531-2

KING, QUEEN, KNAVE

Dreyer, a wealthy and boisterous proprietor of a men’s clothing store, is ruddy, self-satisfied, and masculine, but repugnant to his exquisite but cold middle-class wife, Martha. Attracted to his money but repelled by his oblivious passion, she longs for their nephew instead.