The Gift (13 page)

And now, sitting in the tramcar, he saw with ineffable vividness how in seven or eight minutes he would enter the familiar study, furnished in Berliner animal luxury, would settle in the deep leather armchair beside the low, metal table with its glass cigarette box opened for him, and its lamp fashioned like a terrestrial globe, would light a cigarette, cross his legs with cheap gaiety and come face to face with the agonized, submissive gaze of his hopeless pupil, would hear so clearly his sigh and the ineradicable
“Nu, voui”
with which he interlarded his answers; but suddenly the unpleasant feeling of lateness was replaced in Fyodor’s soul by a distinct and somehow outrageously joyful decision not to appear at all for the lesson—to get off at the next stop and return home to his half-read book, to his unworldly cares, to the blissful mist in which his real life floated, to the complex, happy, devout work which had occupied him for about a year already. He knew that today he would receive payment for several lessons, knew that otherwise he would have to smoke and eat again on credit, but he was quite reconciled to this for the sake of that energetic idleness (everything is here, in this combination), for the sake of the lofty truancy he was allowing himself. And he was allowing it not for the first time. Shy and exacting, living always uphill, spending all his strength in pursuit of the innumerable beings that flashed inside him, as if at dawn in a mythological grove, he could no longer force himself to mix with people either for money or for pleasure, and therefore he was poor and solitary. And, as if to spite common fate, it was pleasant to recall how once in the summer he had not gone to a party in a “suburban villa” solely
because the Chernyshevskis had warned him that a man would be there who “perhaps could help him”; or how the previous autumn he had not found time to communicate with a divorce bureau which needed a translator—because he was composing a verse drama, because the lawyer promising him this income was importunate and stupid, because, finally, he put it off too long and then was unable to make up his mind.

He worked his way out onto the car’s platform. Just then the wind searched him cruelly after which Fyodor drew the belt of his mackintosh tighter and adjusted his scarf, but the small amount of tram warmth had already been taken away from him. The snow had ceased falling, but where it went no one knew; there remained only a ubiquitous dampness which was evidenced both in the swishing sound of motor tires and in the piglike sharpness of the ear-torturing, ragged squeal of car horns, and in the darkness of the day, shivering with cold, with sadness, with loathing for itself, and in the particular shade of yellow of the already lighted shop windows, in the reflections and refractions, in the liquid lights, in all this sick irretention of electric light. The tram came out on the square and, braking excruciatingly, stopped, but it was only a preliminary stop, because in front, by the stone island crowded with people standing by to board, two other trams had got stuck, both with cars coupled on, and this inert agglomeration was also evidence somehow of the disastrous imperfection of the world in which Fyodor still continued to reside. He could stand it no longer, he jumped out and strode across the slippery square to another tramline on which, by cheating, he could return to his own district on the same ticket—good for one transfer but not at all for a return journey; but the honest, official calculation that a passenger would travel in one direction only was undermined in certain cases by the fact that, knowing the routes, one could turn a straight journey imperceptibly into an arc, bending back to the point of departure. This clever system (pleasant evidence of a certain purely German flaw in the planning of tram routes) was willingly followed by Fyodor; from absentmindedness however, from an incapacity to cherish a material advantage for any length of time, and already thinking of something else, he paid automatically for the new ticket
he had intended to save on. And even then the cheat prospered, even then not he but the city transport department proved to be out of pocket, and furthermore for a much, much greater sum (the price of a Nord Express ticket!) than could have been expected: crossing the square and turning into a side street, he walked toward the tram stop through a small, at first glance, thicket of fir trees, gathered here for sale on account of the approach of Christmas; they formed between them a kind of small avenue; swinging his arms as he walked he brushed his fingertips against the wet needles; but soon the tiny avenue broadened out, the sun burst forth and he emerged onto a garden terrace where on the soft red sand one could make out the sigla of a summer day: the imprints of a dog’s paws, the beaded tracks of a wagtail, the Dunlop stripe left by Tanya’s bicycle, dividing into two waves at the turn, and a heel dent where with a light, mute movement containing perhaps a quarter of a pirouette she had slid off it to one side and started walking, keeping hold of the handlebars. An old wooden house in the so-called “abietineous” style, painted a pale green, with like-colored drainpipes, carved designs under the roof and a high stone foundation (where in the gray putty one could fancy one saw the round pink cruppers of walled-up horses), a large, sturdy and extraordinarily expressive house, with balconies on a level with the lime branches, and verandas decorated with precious glass, sailed forward to meet him in a cloud of swallows, with a full spread of awnings, its lightning conductor cleaving through the blue sky and the bright white clouds extending an endless embrace. Sitting on the stone steps of the foremost veranda, illuminated squarely by the sun, are: Father, obviously just back from a swim, turbaned in a shaggy towel so that one cannot see—and how one would like to!—his dark crop, streaked with gray and tapering to a peak on his forehead; Mother, all in white, staring straight in front of her and somehow so youthfully hugging her knees; next to her—Tanya, in an ample blouse, the end of her black braid lying on her collarbone, her smooth parting lowered, holding in her arms a fox terrier whose mouth is creased in a wide smile from the heat; higher up—Yvonna Ivanovna, who for some reason has not come out, her features blurred but her slim waist, her belt and her watch
chain clearly visible; to one side, lower down, reclining and resting his head in the lap of the round-faced girl (velvet neck-ribbon, silk bows) who gave Tanya music lessons, his father’s brother, a stout army doctor, a joker and a very handsome man; lower still, two sour little glowering schoolboys, Fyodor’s cousins: one in a school cap, the other without—the one without to be killed seven years later in the battle of Melitopol; at the very bottom, on the sand, in exactly the same pose as his mother—Fyodor himself, as he was then, though he had changed little since that time, white teeth, black brows, short hair, wearing an open shirt. One forgot who had taken it, but this transient, faded and generally insignificant (how many others and better were there) photograph, unsuitable even for copying, had alone been saved by a miracle and had become priceless, reaching Paris among his mother’s belongings and brought by her to Berlin last Christmas; for now, choosing her son a present, she was guided not by what was most costly to get but by what was most difficult to part with.

She had come to him for two weeks, after a three-year separation, and in the first moment when, powdered to a deathly pallor, wearing black gloves and black stockings and an old sealskin coat thrown open, she had descended the iron steps of the coach, glancing with equal quickness first at him and then at what was underfoot, and the next moment, her face twisted with the pain of happiness, was clinging to him, blissfully moaning, kissing him anywhere—ear, neck—it had seemed to him that the beauty of which he had been so proud had faded, but as his vision adjusted itself to the twilight of the present, so different at first from the distantly receding light of memory, he again recognized in her everything that he had loved: the pure outline of her face, narrowing down to the chin, the changeful play of those green, brown, yellow, entrancing eyes under their velvet brows, the long, light stance, the avidity with which she lit a cigarette in the taxi, the attention with which she suddenly looked—unblinded, therefore, by the excitement of the meeting, as any other would have been—at the grotesque scene noticed by both of them: an imperturbable motorcyclist carrying a bust of Wagner in his sidecar; and already by the time they were coming up to the house the light of the past had
overtaken the present, had soaked it to saturation point, and everything became the same as it had been in this very Berlin three years previously, as it had once been in Russia, as it had been, and would be, forever.

A spare room was found at Frau Stoboy’s place and there, on the first evening (an opened dressing case, rings taken off and laid on the marble washstand), lying on the sofa and ever so quickly eating raisins, without which she could not pass a single day, she spoke of what she had constantly returned to for almost nine years now, repeating over again—incoherently, gloomily, ashamedly, turning her eyes away, as if confessing to something secret and terrible—that she believed more and more that Fyodor’s father was alive, that her mourning was ridiculous, that the vague news of his death had never been confirmed by anyone, that he was somewhere in Tibet, in China, in captivity, in prison, in some desperate quagmire of troubles and privations, that he was convalescing after some long, long illness—and suddenly, flinging open the door noisily, stamping on the step, he would enter. And to an even greater degree than before these words made Fyodor feel both happier and more frightened. Accustomed willy-nilly to consider his father dead all these years, he sensed something grotesque in the possibility of his return. Was it admissible that life could perform not only miracles, but miracles necessarily deprived (otherwise they would be unbearable) of even the tiniest hint of the supernatural? The miracle of this return would consist in its earthly nature, in its compatibility with reason, in the swift introduction of an incredible event into the accepted and comprehensible linkage of ordinary days; but the more the necessity for such naturalness grew with the years, the more difficult it became for life to meet it, and now what frightened him was not simply the imagining of a ghost, but the imagining of one that would not be frightening. There were days when it seemed to Fyodor that suddenly on the street (in Berlin there are little cul-de-sacs where at dusk the soul seems to dissolve) he would be approached by an old man of seventy, in fairy-tale rags, shrouded to the eyes in beard, who would wink and say, as he had once been wont to: “Hello, Son!” His father often appeared to him in dreams, as if just returned from
some monstrous penal servitude, having experienced physical tortures which it was forbidden to mention, now changed into clean linen—it was impossible to think of the body underneath—and with a completely uncharacteristic expression of unpleasant, momentous sullenness, with a sweaty brow and slightly bared teeth, sitting at table in the circle of his hushed family. But when, overcoming his sensation of the spuriousness of the very style foisted on fate, he nevertheless forced himself to imagine the arrival of a live father, aged but undoubtedly his, and the most complete, most convincing possible explanation of his silent absence, he was seized, not by happiness, but by a sickening terror—which, however, immediately disappeared and yielded to a feeling of satisfied harmony when he removed this meeting beyond the boundary of earthly life.

But on the other hand.… It happens that over a long period you are promised a great success, in which from the very start you do not believe, so dissimilar is it from the rest of fate’s offerings, and if from time to time you do think of it, then you do so as it were to indulge your fantasy—but when, at last, on a very ordinary day with a west wind blowing, the news comes—simply, instantaneously and decisively destroying any hope in it—then you are suddenly amazed to find that although you did not believe in it, you had been living with it all this time, not realizing the constant, close presence of the dream, which had long since grown fat and independent, so that now you cannot get it out of your life without making a hole in that life. Thus had Fyodor, in spite of all logic and not daring to envision its realization, lived with the familiar dream of his father’s return, a dream which had mysteriously embellished his life and somehow lifted it above the level of surrounding lives, so that he could see all sorts of distant and interesting things, just as, when a little boy, his father used to lift him by his elbows thus enabling him to see what was interesting over a fence.

After the first evening, when she had renewed her hope and become convinced that the same hope was alive in her son, Elizaveta Pavlovna no longer referred to it in words, but as usual, it was taken for granted in all their conversations, especially since they did not converse much aloud: frequently, after several minutes of
animated silence, Fyodor would suddenly notice that the whole time they both knew very well what it was about, this double, almost subgramineal speech which emerged as a single stream, as a word understood to both of them. And sometimes they would play like this: sitting side by side and silently imagining to themselves that each was taking the same Leshino walk, they went out of the park, took the path along the field (there was a river to the left behind the alders), across the shady graveyard where sun-flecked crosses were measuring something terribly large with their arms and where it was somehow awkward to pick the raspberries, across the river, upwards again, through the wood, to another bend of the river, to the Pont des Vaches and farther, through the pines and along the Chemin du Pendu—familiar nicknames, not grating to their Russian ears but thought up when their grandfathers had been children. And suddenly, in the middle of this silent walk being performed by two minds, using according to the rules of the game the rate of a human footstep (although they could have flown over their whole domains in a single instant), both stopped and said where they had got to, and when it turned out, as it often did, that neither one had outpaced the other, having halted in the same coppice, the same smile flashed upon mother and son and shone through their common tear.