The Gift (22 page)

“Good-by” said Fyodor Konstantinovich.

“Wait,” cried Alexandra Yakovlevna, “please don’t ring off.”

The next morning when he arrived at the stipulated address—in an irritable mood, with a woolly brain and with only half of him functioning (as if the other half of him had still not opened on account of the earliness of the hour)—it turned out that Tamara Grigorievna not only was not there but had rung to say she could not come. He was received by Shchyogolev himself (no-one else was at home), who turned out to be a bulky, chubby man whose
outline reminded one of a carp, about fifty years old, with one of those open Russian faces whose openness is almost indecent. It was a fairly full face of oval cut, with a tiny black tuft just under the lower lip. He had a remarkable hair style that was also somehow indecent: thin black hair evenly smoothed down and divided by a parting which was not quite in the middle of the head and yet not quite to one side either. Big ears, simple male eyes, a thick yellowish nose and a moist smile completed the general pleasant impression. “Godunov-Cherdyntsev,” he repeated, “of course, of course, an extremely well-known name. I once knew … let me see—isn’t your father Oleg Kirillovich? Aha, uncle. Where’s he living now? In Philadelphia? Hm, that’s quite a way. Just look where we émigrés get to! Amazing. And are you in touch with him? I see, I see. Well, never put off to tomorrow what you have already done—ha-ha! Come. I’ll show you your quarters.”

To the right of the hallway there was a short passage immediately turning right again at a right-angle to become another embryo corridor that terminated in the half-open door of the kitchen. The left wall had two doors, the first of which, with an energetic intake of breath, Shchyogolev threw back. Turning its head, there froze before us a small oblong room with ochered walls, a table by the window, a couch along one wall and a wardrobe by the other. To Fyodor, it seemed repellent, hostile, completely “unhandy” in regard to his life, as if positioned several fateful degrees out of true (with a dusty sunbeam representing the dotted line that marks the bias of a geometric figure when it is revolved) in relation to that imaginary rectangle within whose limits he might be able to sleep, read and think; but even if by a miracle he had been able to adjust his life to fit the angle of this deviant box, nevertheless its furniture, color, view onto the asphalt yard—everything about it was unendurable, and he decided at once that he would not take it.

“Well, here it is,” said Shchyogolev jauntily, “and here’s the bathroom next door. It needs a little cleaning up in here. Now, if you don’t mind …” He bumped violently into Fyodor in turning around in the narrow corridor and uttering an apologetic “Och!” grasped him by the shoulder. They returned to the entrance
hall. “Here is my daughter’s room, here is ours,” he said, pointing to two doors on the left and right. “And here’s the dining room,” and opening a door in the depths, he held it in that position for several seconds, as if taking a time exposure. Fyodor passed his eyes over the table, a bowl of nuts, a sideboard.… By the far window, near a small bamboo table, stood a high-backed armchair: across its arms there lay in airy repose a gauze dress, pale bluish and very short (as was worn then at dances), and on the little table gleamed a silvery flower and a pair of scissors.

“That’s all,” said Shchyogolev, carefully closing the door, “you see—cozy, homely; everything we have is small, but we do have everything. If you wish to have your grub with us you’re very welcome, we’ll talk to my missus about that; between you and me she’s not a bad cook. Since you’re Mrs. Abramov’s friend, we’ll charge you the same as her, we won’t ill-treat you, you’ll live snug as a thug in the jug,” and Shchyogolev laughed fruitily.

“Yes, I think the room will suit me,” said Fyodor, trying not to look at him. “In fact, I would like to move in on Wednesday.”

“Please yourself,” said Shchyogolev.

Have you ever happened, reader, to feel that subtle sorrow of parting with an unloved abode? The heart does not break, as it does in parting with dear objects. The humid gaze does not wander around holding back a tear, as if it wished to carry away in it a trembling reflection of the abandoned spot; but in the best corner of our hearts we feel pity for the things which we did not bring to life with our breath, which we hardly noticed and are now leaving forever. This already dead inventory will not be resurrected later in one’s memory: the bed will not follow us, shouldering its own self; the reflection in the dresser will not rise from its coffin; only the view from the window will abide for a while, like the faded photograph, fitted into a cemetery cross, of a trim-haired, steady-eyed gentleman in a starched collar. I would like to wish you good-by, but you would not even hear my greeting. Nevertheless, good-by. I lived here exactly two years, thought here about many things, the shadows of my caravan passed over this wallpaper, lilies grew out of the cigarette ash on the carpet—but now the journey is over. The torrents of books have gone back to the
ocean of the library. I do not know if I shall ever read the drafts and extracts rammed under the linen in my suitcase, but I do know that I will never look in here again.

Fyodor sat on his suitcase and locked it; went around the room; gave a final check to the drawers, and found nothing: corpses do not steal. A fly climbed up the windowpane, impatiently slipped, half fell and half flew downwards, as if shaking something, and started to crawl again. The house opposite, which he had found in scaffolding the April before last, was evidently in need of repairs again now: prepared boards were stacked by the sidewalk. He carried his things out, went to say good-by to the landlady, for the first and last time shaking her hand, which turned out to be dry, strong and cold, gave her back the keys and left. The distance from the old residence to the new was about the same as, somewhere in Russia, that from Pushkin Avenue to Gogol Street.

E
VERY
morning just after eight he was guided out of his slumber by the same sound behind the thin wall, two feet from his temple. It was the clean, round-bottomed ring of a tumbler being replaced on a glass shelf; after which the landlord’s daughter cleared her throat. Then came the spasmodic
trk-trk
of a revolving cylinder, then the sound of flushed water, choking, groaning and abruptly ceasing, then the bizarre internal whine of a bath tap that finally turned into the rustle of a shower. A slip-bolt clacked and footsteps receded past his door. From an opposite direction came other footsteps, dark and heavy, with a slight shuffle: that was Marianna Nikolavna hurrying to the kitchen to get some coffee for her daughter. One could hear the gas at first refusing with noisy bursts to catch light; subdued, it flared and hissed steadily. The first footsteps returned, now heeled; in the kitchen a fast, angrily agitated conversation started up. Just as some people speak with a southern or Moscow pronunciation so did mother and daughter invariably speak to one another in the accents of a quarrel. Their voices were similar, both swarthy and smooth, but one more coarse and somehow cramped, the other freer and purer. In the rumble of the mother’s there was a pleading, even a guilty pleading; in the daughter’s increasingly short replies there rang
hostility. To the accompaniment of this indistinct morning storm Fyodor Konstantinovich would again fall peacefully asleep.

Through his patchily thinning slumber he made out the sounds of cleaning; the wall would suddenly collapse on him: that meant a mop handle that had been insecurely leaning against his door. Once a week the janitor’s wife, fat, heavily breathing, reeking of stale sweat, came with a vacuum cleaner, and then all hell broke loose, the world was shattered to bits, a hellish grinding pervaded one’s very soul, destroying it, and drove Fyodor out of his bed, out of his room and out of the house. But usually, around ten o’clock, Marianna Nikolavna took her turn in the bathroom and after her came, hawking up phlegm as he went, Ivan Borisovich. He flushed the toilet as many as five times but did not use the bath, contenting himself with the murmur of the little washbasin. By half past ten everything in the house was quiet: Marianna Nikolavna had gone away to do her shopping, Shchyogolev on his shady affairs. Fyodor Konstantinovich descended into a blissful abyss where the warm remnants of his slumber mingled with a feeling of happiness, both from the previous day and still to come.

Quite often now he began the day with a poem. Lying supine with the first satisfyingly tasty, large and long-lasting cigarette between his parched lips, he again after a break of almost ten years was composing that particular kind of poem of which a gift is made in the evening so as to be reflected in the wave that has carried it out. He compared the structure of these verses with that of the others. The words of the others had been forgotten. Only here and there among the erased letters had rhymes been preserved, rich ones interspersed with poor ones: kiss-bliss, wind in—linden—leaves—grieves. During that sixteenth summer of his life he had first taken up the serious writing of poetry; before that, except for entomological doggerel, there had been nothing. But a certain atmosphere of composition had been long known and familiar to him: at home, everyone did some scribbling—Tanya wrote in a little album with a little key to it; Mother wrote touchingly unpretentious prose-poems about the beauty of the native weald; Father and Uncle Oleg made up occasional verses—and these occasions were not infrequent; and Aunt Ksenya—she wrote
poems only in French, temperamental and “musical” ones, with a complete disregard for the subtleties of syllabic verse; her outpourings were very popular in St. Petersburg society, particularly the long poem “La Femme et la Panthère,” and also a translation of Apukhtin’s “A Pair of Bays”—one stanza of which went:

Finally there had been one “real” poet, Mother’s cousin, Prince Volkhovskoy, who had published on velvety paper an exquisitely printed, thick, expensive volume of languorous poems
Auroras and Stars
, all in Italian viny vignettes, with a portrait photograph of the author in the front and a monstrous list of misprints at the back. The verses were broken up into departments: Nocturnes, Autumn Motifs, The Chords of Love. Most of them were emblazoned with a motto and under all there was the exact date and place:
Sorrento, Ai-Todor
, or
In the Train
. I do not remember anything of these pieces except the oft-repeated word “transport”: which even then sounded to me like a means of moving from one place to another.

My father took little interest in poetry, making an exception only for Pushkin: he knew him as some people know the liturgy, and liked to declaim him while out walking. I sometimes think that an echo of Pushkin’s “The Prophet” still vibrates to this day in some resonantly receptive Asian gully. He also quoted, I remember, the incomparable “Butterfly” by Fet, and Tyutchev’s “Now the dim-blue shadows mingle”; but that which our kinsfolk liked, the watery, easily memorized poesy of the end of the last century, avidly waiting to be set to music as a cure for verbal anemia, he ignored utterly. As to avant-garde verse, he considered it rubbish—and in his presence I did not publicize my own enthusiasms in this sphere. Once when with a smile of irony already prepared he leafed through the books of poets scattered on my desk and as luck would have it happened on the worst item by the
best of them (that famous poem by Blok where there appears an impossible, unbearable
dzhentelmen
representing Edgar Poe, and where
kovyor
, carpet, is made to rhyme with the English “Sir” transliterated as
syor)
, I was so annoyed that I quickly pushed Severyanin’s
The Thunder-Bubbling Cup
into his hand so that he could better unburden his soul upon it. In general I considered that if he would forget for the nonce the kind of poetry I was silly enough to call “classicism” and tried without prejudice to grasp what it was I loved so much, he would have understood the new charm that had appeared in the features of Russian poetry, a charm that I sensed even in its most absurd manifestations. But when today I tote up what has remained to me of this new poetry I see that very little has survived, and what has is precisely a natural continuation of Pushkin, while the motley husk, the wretched sham, the masks of mediocrity and the stilts of talent—everything that my love once forgave or saw in a special light (and that seemed to my father to be the true face of innovation—“the mug of modernism” as he expressed it), is now so old-fashioned, so forgotten as even Karamzin’s verses are not forgotten; and when on someone else’s shelf I come across this or that collection of poems which had once lived with me as brother, I feel in them only what my father then felt without actually knowing them. His mistake was not that he ran down all “modern poetry” indiscriminately, but that he refused to detect in it the long, life-giving ray of his favorite poet.

I met her in June 1916. She was twenty-three. Her husband, a distant relative of ours, was at the front. She lived in a small villa inside the boundaries of our estate and often used to visit us. Because of her I almost forgot butterflies and completely overlooked the revolution. In the winter of 1917 she went away to Novorossisk—and it was only in Berlin that I accidentally heard about her terrible death. She was a thin little thing, with chestnut hair combed high, a gay look in her big black eyes, dimples on her pale cheeks, and a tender mouth which she made up out of a flacon of fragrant ruby-red liquid by putting the glass stopper to her lips. In all her ways there was something I found lovable to the point of tears, something indefinable at the time, but now
appearing to me as a kind of pathetic insouciance. She was not intelligent, she was poorly educated and banal, that is, your exact opposite … no, no, I do not mean at all that I loved her more than you, or that those assignations were happier than my evening meetings with you … but all her shortcomings were concealed in such a tide of fascination, tenderness and grace, such enchantment flowed from her most fleeting, irresponsible word, that I was prepared to look at her and listen to her eternally—but what would happen now if she were resurrected—I don’t know, you should not ask stupid questions. In the evenings I used to see her home. Those walks will come in handy sometime. In her bedroom there was a little picture of the Tsar’s family and a Turgenevian odor of heliotrope. I used to return long after midnight (my tutor, fortunately, had gone back to England), and I shall never forget that feeling of lightness, pride, rapture and wild night hunger (I particularly yearned for curds-and-whey with black bread) as I walked along our faithfully and even fawningly soughing avenue toward the dark house (only Mother had a light on) and heard the barking of the watchdogs. It was then also that my versificatory illness began.