The Gift (48 page)

When a secretary had also been elected, Professor Kraevich proposed that all should stand to honor the memory of the two deceased members of the Society; and during this five-second petrification the excommunicated waiter scanned the tables, having forgotten who had ordered the ham sandwich he had just brought in on a tray. Everyone stood as he could. Gurman, for example, his skew-bald head lowered, was holding his hand palm upwards on the table, as if he had just cast the dice and had frozen in astonishment at his loss.

“Allo! Hier!” shouted Shahmatov, who had been waiting anxiously for the moment when with a clatter of relief life would be seated again—and then the waiter quickly raised his index finger (he had remembered), glided over to him, and with a tinkle put the plate down on the imitation marble. Shahmatov immediately began to cut the sandwich, holding his knife and fork crosswise; on the edge of the plate a yellow blob of mustard projected, as is usually the case, a yellow horn. Shahmatov’s complaisantly Napoleonic face with its strand of steely-blue hair slanting toward the temple appealed particularly to Fyodor at these gastronomic moments. Next to him, drinking tea with lemon, and himself very lemony, with sadly arched eyebrows, sat the satirist from the
Gazeta
, whose pseudonym, Foma Mur, contained according to his own assertion “a complete French novel
(femme, amour)
, a page of English literature (Thomas Moore), and a touch of Jewish skepticism (Thomas the Apostle).” Shirin was sharpening a pencil over
an ashtray: he was very much offended at Fyodor for refusing “to figure” in the election list. Of the writers, there were also: Rostislav Strannyy—a rather dreadful person with a bracelet on his hairy wrist; the parchment-pale, raven-haired poetess, Anna Aptekar; a theater critic—a skinny, singularly quiet young man with an elusive something about him recalling a daguerreotype of the Russian forties; and, of course, kindly Busch, his eyes resting paternally on Fyodor, who, with half an ear cocked to the Society president’s report, had now transferred his gaze from Busch, Lishnevski, Shirin and the other writers to the general mass of those present, among whom were several journalists, as for instance old Stupishin, whose spoon was working its way through a wedge of mocha cake, many reporters, and—sitting alone and admitted here on God knows what basis—Lyubov Markovna in her timorously gleaming pince-nez; and in general there was a large number of those whom Shirin severely termed “the outside element”: the imposing lawyer Charski, holding his fourth cigarette of the night in his white, always trembling hand; a bearded little jobber who had once published an obituary notice in a Bundist paper; a gentle, pale old man, tasting of apple paste, who enthusiastically discharged his duties as the precentor of a church choir; an enormous, enigmatic fat man who lived as a hermit in a pine wood near Berlin, some said in a cave, and had there compiled a collection of Soviet anecdotes; a separate group of rowdies, conceited failures; a pleasant young man of unknown means and position (“a Soviet agent,” said Shirin simply and darkly); another lady—someone’s former secretary; her husband—the brother of a well-known publisher; and all these people, from the illiterate bum with a heavy, drunken gaze, who wrote denunciatorily mystical verses which not a single newspaper had yet agreed to publish, to the repulsively small, almost portable lawyer, Poshkin, who when talking to people said “I pot” for “I put” and “coshion” for “cushion” as if establishing an alibi for his name; all of these, in Shirin’s opinion, damaged the Society’s dignity and were liable to immediate expulsion.

“And now,” said Vasiliev, after finishing his report, “I bring to the notice of the meeting that I resign as Chairman of the Society and will not stand for re-election.”

He sat down. A little chill ran through the assembly. Beneath the burden of sorrow, Gurman closed his heavy lids. An electric train slid bowlike over a bass string.

“Next comes …” said Professor Kraevich, raising his pince-nez to his eyes and looking at the agenda, “the treasurer’s report. If you please.”

Gurman’s resilient neighbor, immediately adopting a challenging tone of voice, flashing his good eye and powerfully twisting his valuable-crammed mouth, commenced to read … figures were emitted like sparks, metallic words bounced … “entered the current year” … “debited” … “audited” … while Shirin, in the meantime, swiftly began to note something on the reverse side of a cigarette pack, added it up, and triumphantly exchanged glances with Lishnevski.

Having read to the end, the treasurer shut his mouth with a click, while some distance off a member of the Auditorial Committee had already risen, a Georgian socialist with a pockmarked face and black hair like a shoe-brush, and briefly enumerated his favorable impressions. After this Shirin asked for the floor and at once there was a whiff of something jolly, alarming, and improper.

He began by seizing on the fact that the expenditure for the New Year’s charity dance was inexplicably large; Gurman wanted to reply … the chairman, aiming his pencil at Shirin, asked him if he had finished.… “Let him speak, no cutting short!” shouted Shahmatov from his seat—and the chairman’s pencil, quivering like a serpent’s tongue, was aimed at him before returning to Shirin, who, however, bowed and sat down. Gurman rose heavily, carrying his sorrowful burden with disdain and resignation, and began to speak … but Shirin soon interrupted him and Kraevich grasped his bell. Gurman finished, after which the treasurer instantly asked for the floor, but Shirin was already up and continuing: “The explanation of the honorable gentleman from the stock exchange …” The chairman rang his bell and requested more moderation, threatening to refuse permission to speak. Shirin again bowed and said that he had only one question: in the funds, according to the treasurer’s words, there were three thousand and seventy-six marks and fifteen pfennigs—could he see this money right now?

“Bravo,” shouted Shahmatov—and the least attractive member of the Union, the mystical poet, guffawed, applauded and almost fell off his chair. The treasurer, paling to a snowy shine, began to speak in a rapid patter … While he was speaking and being interrupted by impossible exclamations from the audience, a certain Shuf, lean, clean-shaven, looking somewhat like a Red Indian, left his corner, went up to the committee table unnoticed on his rubber soles, and suddenly slammed his red fist down on it, so that even the bell gave a jump. “You’re lying,” he bellowed and returned to his seat.

A row was breaking out on all sides when to Shirin’s chagrin it transpired that there was yet another faction wishing to seize power—namely the group that was always left out, and that included both the mystic and the Red Indian, as well as the little bearded fellow and several seedy and unbalanced individuals, one of whom suddenly began to read from a piece of paper a list of candidates for election to the committee, all of whom were completely unacceptable. The battle took a new turn, sufficiently tangled, now that there were three warring sides. Such expressions flew about as “black marketeer,” “you’re not fit to duel” and “you’ve already been thrashed.” Even Busch spoke, trying to drown insulting ejaculations, but because of the natural obscurity of his style no one could understand what he was talking about until, sitting down, he explained that he was fully in agreement with the preceding speaker. Gurman, his nostrils alone expressing sarcasm, busied himself with his cigarette holder. Vasiliev left his seat and retired to a corner, where he pretended to read a newspaper. Lishnevski delivered a crushing speech directed mainly against the board member resembling a peaceful toad, who merely spread his hands and directed a helpless glance at Gurman and the treasurer, both of whom tried not to look at him. Finally, when the poet-mystic stood up, shakily swaying, and with a highly promising smile on his sweaty, leathery face began to speak in verse, the chairman furiously rang his bell and announced an interval, after which the elections were due to be held. Shirin flew over to Vasiliev and commenced to talk to him persuasively, while Fyodor, feeling suddenly bored, found his mackintosh and made his way out onto the street.

He was angry with himself: fancy sacrificing for the sake of this preposterous divertissement the fixed star of his nightly meeting with Zina! The desire to see her at once tortured him with its paradoxical impossibility: if she had not slept six yards from the head of his bed, access to her would have been much easier. A train stretched over the viaduct: the yawn begun by a woman in the lighted window of the first car was completed by another woman—in the last one. Fyodor Konstantinovich strolled toward the tram stop along an oily-black, blaring street. The illuminated sign of a music hall ran up the steps of vertically placed letters, they went out all together, and the light again scrambled up: what Babylonian word would reach up to the sky? … a compound name for a trillion tints: diamondimlunalilithlilasafieryviolentviolet and so on—and how many more! Perhaps he should try to phone? He only had a dime in his pocket and he had to decide: to phone meant that in any case he would not be able to take the tram, but to phone for nothing, that is not to get Zina herself (to get her through her mother was not permitted by the code) and then to return on foot would be a bit too galling. I’ll risk it. He went into a beerhouse, rang, and everything was over in a twinkle! he got the wrong number, that very number which the anonymous Russian was always trying to get who always got the Shchyogolevs. So what—he would have to hoof it, as Boris Ivanovich would say.

At the next corner his approach automatically triggered off the doll-like mechanism of the prostitutes who always patrolled there. One of them even tried to look like somebody lingering by a shop window, and it was sad to think that these pink corsets on their golden dummies were known to her by heart, by heart.… “Sweety,” said another with a questioning smile. The night was warm with a dusting of stars. He walked at a swift pace and his bared head felt light from the narcotic night air—and further on when he walked along gardens there came floating to him phantoms of lilacs, the darkness of foliage, and wonderful naked odors spreading on the lawns.

He was hot, and his forehead was burning when finally, quietly clicking the door shut behind him, he found himself in the dark hall. The opaque glass in the upper part of Zina’s door resembled
a radiant sea: she must be reading in bed, he thought, but while he stood and looked at this mysterious glass she coughed, rustled, and the light went out. What an absurd torture. Go in there, go in … Who would know? People like her mother and stepfather sleep with insensible, hundred percent sleep of peasants. Zina’s punctiliousness: she would never open at the clinking tap of a fingernail. But she knows I am standing in the dark hall and suffocating. This forbidden room during recent months had become a sickness, a burden, a part of himself, but inflated and sealed off: the pneumothorax of the night.

He stood for another moment—and on tiptoe stole into his room. All in all, French emotions. Fama Mour. Sleep, sleep—the heaviness of spring is utterly untalented. Take oneself in hand: a monastic pun. What next? What exactly are we waiting for? In any case I won’t find a better wife. But do I need a wife at all? “Put that lyre away, I’ve no room to move …” No, I would never hear that from her—that’s the point.

And a few days later, simply and even somewhat sillily, a solution was indicated to a problem which had seemed so complex that one could not help wondering if there was not a mistake in its construction. Boris Ivanovich, whose affairs during recent years had been getting worse and worse, was most unexpectedly offered by a Berlin firm quite a respectable representative’s position in Copenhagen. In two months, by the first of July, he had to move there for at least a year, and perhaps forever if all went well. Marianna Nikolavna who for some reason loved Berlin (familiar haunts, excellent sanitary arrangements—she herself, though, was filthy) felt sad at going away, but when she thought of the improvements in life awaiting her, her grief was dispersed. Thus it was decided that from July Zina would remain alone in Berlin, continuing to work for Traum, until Shchyogolev “had found her a job” in Copenhagen, where Zina would go “at the first summons” (i.e., that is what the Shchyogolevs thought—Zina had decided quite, quite differently). It remained to regulate the question of the apartment. The Shchyogolevs did not want to sell it, so they began to seek somebody to let it to. They found such a person. A young German with a great commercial future, accompanied by his fiancée—a plain,
unmade-up, domestically sturdy girl in a green coat—inspected the apartment—dining room, bedroom, kitchen, Fyodor in bed—and was satisfied. However, he was taking the apartment only from August, so that for another month after the Shchyogolevs’ departure Zina and the lodger would be able to stay there. They counted the days: fifty, forty-nine, thirty, twenty-five—every one of these numbers had its own face: a beehive, a magpie in a tree, the silhouette of a knight, a young man. Their evening meetings had since spring gone beyond the shores of their initial street (lamp, lime, fence), and now their restless wanderings carried them in ever widening circles into distant and ever new corners of the city. Now it was a bridge over a canal, then a trellised bosket in a park, behind which lights ran past, then an unpaved street between misty wastes where dark vans were standing, then some strange arcades which were impossible to find during the daytime. Change of habits before migration; excitement; a languorous pain in the shoulders.

The newspapers diagnosed the still young summer as being exceptionally hot, and indeed there was a long dotted line of beautiful days, interrupted from time to time by the interjection of a thunderstorm. In the morning, while Zina was wilting from the stinking heat in the office (the sweaty armpits of Hamekke’s jacket alone were more than enough … and what about the typists’ necks melting like wax, what about the sticky blackness of carbon paper?), Fyodor would go to spend the whole day in Grunewald, abandoning his lessons and trying not to think of the long-since-due payment for his room. Never before had he got up at seven, it would have seemed monstrous—but now in life’s new light (in which blended somehow the maturing of his gift, a premonition of new labors, and the approach of complete happiness with Zina) he experienced a direct pleasure from the speed and lightness of these early risings, from that burst of motion, from the ideal simplicity of three-second dressing: shirt, trousers and sneakers on bare feet—after which he took a laprobe under his arm, with his swim-trunks wrapped in it, thrust on his way through the hall an orange and a sandwich into his pockets and was already running down the stairs.