The Gift Read online

  Taken by itself, all this was a view, just as the room was itself a separate entity; but now a middleman had appeared, and now that view became the view from this room and no other. The gift of sight which it now had received did not improve it. It would be hard, he mused, to transform the wallpaper (pale yellow, with bluish tulips) into a distant steppe. The desert of the desk would have to be tilled for a long time before it could sprout its first rhymes. And much cigarette ash would have to fall under the armchair and into its folds before it would become suitable for traveling.

  The landlady came to call him to the telephone, and he, politely stooping his shoulders, followed her into the dining room. “In the first place, my dear sir,” said Alexander Yakovlevich Chernyshevski, “why are they so reluctant at your old boardinghouse to divulge your new number? Left there with a bang, didn’t you? In the second place, I want to congratulate you.… What, you haven’t heard yet? Honestly?” (“He hasn’t heard anything about it yet,” said Alexander Yakovlevich, turning the other side of his voice toward someone out of the range of the telephone). “Well, in that case get a firm grip on yourself and listen to this—I’m going to read it to you: ‘The newly published collection of poems by the hitherto unknown author Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev strikes one as such a brilliant phenomenon, and the poetic talent of the author is so indisputable.…’ You know what, I shan’t go on, but you come over to our place tonight. Then you will get the whole article. No, Fyodor Konstantinovich, my good friend, I won’t tell you anything now, neither who wrote this review, nor in what émigré Russian-language paper it appeared, but if you want my personal opinion, then don’t be offended, but I think the fellow is treating you much too kindly. So you’ll come? Excellent. We’ll be expecting you.”

  As he hung up the receiver Fyodor nearly knocked the stand with flexible steel rod and attached pencil off the table; he tried to catch it, and it was then that he did knock it off; then he bumped his hip against the corner of the sideboard; then he dropped a cigarette that he was pulling out of the pack as he walked; and finally he miscalculated the swing of the door which flew open so resonantly that Frau Stoboy, just then passing along the corridor with a saucer of milk in her hand, uttered an icy “Oops!” He wanted to tell her that her pale yellow dress with bluish tulips was beautiful, that the parting in her frizzled hair and the quivering bags of her cheeks endowed her with a George-Sandesque regality; that her dining room was the height of perfection; but he limited himself to a beaming smile and nearly tripped over the tiger stripes which had not kept up with the cat as it jumped aside; after all, though, he had never doubted that it would be this way, that the world, in the person of a few hundred lovers of literature who had left St. Petersburg, Moscow and Kiev, would immediately appreciate his gift.

  We have before us a thin volume entitled Poems (a plain swallow-tailed livery, which in recent years has become just as much de rigueur as the braiding of not long ago—from “Lunar Reveries” to symbolic Latin), containing about fifty twelve-line poems all devoted to a single theme: childhood. In fervently composing them, the author sought on the one hand to generalize reminiscenses by selecting elements typical of any successful childhood—hence their seeming obviousness; and on the other hand he has allowed only his genuine quiddity to penetrate into his poems—hence their seeming fastidiousness. At the same time he had to take great pains not to lose either his control of the game, or the viewpoint of the plaything. The strategy of inspiration and the tactics of the mind, the flesh of poetry and the specter of translucent prose—these are the epithets that seem to us to characterize with sufficient accuracy the art of this young poet.… And, having locked his door, he took out his book and threw himself on the couch—he had to reread it right away, before the excitement had time to cool, in order to check the superior quality of the poems and fore-fancy all the details of the high approbation given them by the intelligent, delightful, as yet unnamed reviewer. And now, as he sampled and tested them, he was doing the exact opposite of what he had done a short time ago, when he had skimmed over the book in one instantaneous thought. Now he read in three dimensions, as it were, carefully exploring each poem, lifted out like a cube from among the rest and bathed from all sides in that wonderful, fluffy country air after which one is always so tired in the evening. In other words, as he read, he again made use of all the materials already once gathered by his memory for the extraction of the present poems, and reconstructed everything, absolutely everything, as a returning traveler sees in an orphan’s eyes not only the smile of its mother, whom he had known in his youth, but also an avenue ending in a burst of yellow light and that auburn leaf on the bench, and everything, everything. The collection opened with the poem “The Lost Ball,” and one felt it was beginning to rain. One of those evenings, heavy with clouds, that go so well with our northern firs, had condensed around the house. The avenue had returned from the park for the night, and its entrance was shrouded in dusk. Now the unfolding white shutters separate the room from the exterior darkness, whither the brighter portions of various household objects have already crossed to take up tentative positions on different levels of the helplessly black garden. Bedtime is now at hand.

  Games grow halfhearted and somewhat callous. She is old and she groans painfully as she kneels in three laborious stages.

  My ball has rolled under Nurse’s commode.

  On the floor a candle

  Tugs at the ends of the shadows

  This way and that, but the ball is gone.

  Then comes the crooked poker.

  It potters and clatters in vain,

  Knocks out a button

  And then half a zwieback.

  Suddenly out darts the ball

  Into the quivering darkness,

  Crosses the whole room and promptly goes under

  The impregnable sofa.

  Why doesn’t the epithet “quivering” quite satisfy me? Or does the puppeteer’s colossal hand appear here for an instant among the creatures whose size the eye had come to accept (so that the spectator’s first reaction at the end of the show is “How big I have grown!”)? After all the room really was quivering, and that flickering, carrousel-like movement of shadows across the wall when the light is being carried away, or the shadowy camel on the ceiling with its monstrous humps heaving when Nurse wrestles with the bulky and unstable reed screen (whose expansion is inversely proportional to its degree of equilibrium)—these are all my very earliest memories, the ones closest to the original source. My probing thought often turns toward that original source, toward that reverse nothingness. Thus the nebulous state of the infant always seems to me to be a slow convalescence after a dreadful illness, and the receding from primal nonexistence becomes an approach to it when I strain my memory to the very limit so as to taste of that darkness and use its lessons to prepare myself for the darkness to come; but, as I turn my life upside down so that birth becomes death, I fail to see at the verge of this dying-in-reverse anything that would correspond to the boundless terror that even a centenarian is said to experience when he faces the positive end; nothing, except perhaps the aforementioned shadows, which, rising from somewhere below when the candle takes off to leave the room (while the shadow of the left brass knob at the foot of my bed sweeps past like a black head swelling as it moves), assume their accustomed places above my nursery cot,

  And in their corners grow brazen

  Bearing only a casual likeness

  To their natural models.

  In a whole set of poems, disarming by their sincerity … no, that’s nonsense—Why must one “disarm” the reader? Is he dangerous? In a whole set of excellent … or, to put it even more strongly, remarkable poems the author sings not only of these frightening shadows, but of brighter moments as well. Nonsense, I say! He does not write like that, my nameless, unknown eulogist, and it was only for his sake that I poetized the memory of two precious, and, I think, ancient toys. The first was an ample painted flowerpot containing an artificial
plant from a sunny land, on which was perched a stuffed tropical songbird, so astonishingly lifelike that it seemed about to take wing, with black plumage and an amethyst breast; and, when the big key had been wheedled from the housekeeper Yvonna Ivanovna, inserted in the side of the pot and given several tight, vivifying turns, the little Malayan nightingale would open its beak … no, it would not even open its beak, for something odd had happened to the clockworn mechanism, to some spring or other, which, however, stored up its action for later: the bird would not sing then, but if one forgot about it and a week later happened to walk past its lofty wardrobe-top perch, then some mysterious tremor would suddenly make it emit its magical warbling—and how marvelously, how long it would trill, puffing out its ruffled little breast; it would finish; then, on your way out, you would tread on another floorboard and in special response it would utter a final whistle, and grow silent halfway through the note. The other of the poetized toys, which was in another room, also on a high shelf, behaved in similar fashion, but with a zany suggestion of imitation—as the spirit of parody always goes along with genuine poetry. This was a clown in satin plus fours who was propping himself on two whitewashed parallel bars and who would be set in motion by an accidental jolt,

  To the sound of a miniature music

  With a comical pronunciation

  tinkling somewhere beneath his little platform, as he lifted his legs in white stockings and with pompons on the shoes, higher and higher with barely perceptible jerks—and abruptly everything stopped and he froze in an angular attitude. And perhaps it is the same with my poems? But the truthfulness of juxtapositions and deductions is sometimes better preserved on the near side of the verbal fence.

  From the accumulating poetical pieces in the book we gradually obtain the image of an extremely receptive boy, living in extremely favorable surroundings. Our poet was born on July 12, 1900, in the Leshino manor, which for generations had been the country estate of the Godunov-Cherdyntsevs. Even before he reached school age the boy read through a considerable number of books from his father’s library. In his interesting reminiscences so-and-so recalls how enthusiastically little Fedya and his sister Tanya, who was two years his elder, engaged in amateur theatricals, and how they would even write plays themselves for their performances.… That, my good man, may be true of other poets but in my case it is a lie. I have always been indifferent to the theater; although I remember that we did have a puppet theater with cardboard trees and a crenellated castle with celluloid windows the color of raspberry jelly through which painted flames like those on Vereshchagin’s picture of the Moscow Fire flickered when a candle was lighted inside—and it was this candle which, not without our participation, eventually caused the conflagration of the entire building. Oh, but Tanya and I were fastidious when it came to toys! From indifferent givers on the outside we would often receive quite wretched things. Anything that came in a flat carton with an illustrated cover boded ill. To one such cover I tried to devote my stipulated twelve lines, but somehow the poem did not rise. A family, seated around a circular table illuminated by a lamp: the boy is dressed in an impossible sailor suit with a red tie, the girl wears laced boots, also red; both, with expressions of sensuous delectation, are stringing beads of various colors on straw-like rods, making little baskets, birdcages and boxes; and, with similar enthusiasm, their half-witted parents take part in the same pastime—the father with a prize growth on his pleased face, the mother with her imposing bosom; the dog is also looking at the table, and envious Grandma can be seen ensconced in the background. Those same children have now grown up and I often run across them in advertisements: he, with his glossy, sleekly tanned cheeks, is puffing voluptuously on a cigarette or holding in his brawny hand, with a carnivorous grin, a sandwich containing something red (“eat more meat!”); she is smiling at a stocking she herself is wearing, or, with depraved delight, pouring artificial cream on canned fruit; and in time they will become sprightly, rosy, gormandizing oldsters—and still have ahead of them the infernal black beauty of oaken caskets in a palm-decked display window.… Thus a world of handsome demons develops side by side with us, in a cheerfully sinister relationship to our everyday existence; but in the handsome demon there is always some secret flaw, a shameful wart on the behind of this semblance of perfection: the glamorous glutton of the advertisement, gorging himself on gelatin, can never know the quiet joys of the gourmet, and his fashions (lingering on the billboard while we move onward) are always just a little behind those of real life. Some day I shall come back to a discussion of this nemesis, which finds a soft spot for its blow exactly where the whole sense and power of the creature it strikes seem to lie.

  In general Tanya and I preferred sweaty games to quiet ones—running, hide-and-seek, battles. How remarkably the word “battle” (srazhenie) suggests the sound of springy compression when one rammed into the toy gun its projectile—a six-inch stick of colored wood, deprived of its rubber suction cup in order to increase the impact with which it struck the gilt tin of a breastplate (worn by a cross between a cuirassier and a redskin), making in it a respectable little dent.

  … You reload to the bottom the barrel,

  With a creaking of springs

  Resiliently pressing it down on the floor,

  And you see, half concealed by the door,

  That your double has stopped in the mirror,

  Rainbow feathers in head band

  Standing on end.

  The author had occasion to hide (we are now in the Godunov-Cherdyntsevs’ mansion on the English Quay of the Neva, where it stands even today) among draperies, under tables, behind the upright cushions of silk divans, in a wardrobe, where moth crystals crunched under one’s feet (and whence one could observe unseen a slowly passing manservant, who would seem strangely different, alive, ethereal, smelling of apples and tea) and also

  Under a helical staircase,

  Or behind a lonely buffet

  Forgotten in a bare room

  on whose dusty shelves vegetated such objects as: a necklace made of wolf’s teeth; a small bare-bellied idol of almatolite; another, of porcelain, its black tongue stuck out in national greeting; a chess set with camels instead of bishops; an articulated wooden dragon; a Soyot snuffbox of clouded glass; ditto, of agate; a shaman’s tambourine and the rabbit’s foot going with it; a boot of wapiti leather with an innersole made from the bark of the blue honeysuckle; an ensiform Tibetan coin; a cup of Kara jade; a silver brooch with turquoises; a lama’s lampad; and a lot of similar junk which—like dust, like the postcard from a German spa with its mother-of-pearl “Gruss”—my father, who could not stomach ethnography, somehow happened to bring back from his fabulous travels. The real treasures—his butterfly collection, his museum—were preserved in three locked halls; but the present book of poems contains nothing about that: a special intuition forewarned the young author that some day he would want to speak in quite another way, not in miniature verse with charms and chimes but in very, very different, manly words about his famous father.

  Again something has gone wrong, and one hears the flippantly flat little voice of the reviewer (perhaps even of the female sex). With warm affection the poet recalls the rooms of the family house where it (his childhood) was spent. He has been able to imbue with much lyricism the poetic descriptions of objects among which it was spent. When you listen closely … We all, attentively and piously … The strains of the past … Thus, for instance, he depicts lampshades, lithographs on the walls, his schoolroom desk, the weekly visit of the floor-polishers (who leave behind an odor compounded of “frost, sweat, and mastic”), and the checking of the clocks:

  On Thursdays there comes from the clock shop

  A courteous old man who proceeds

  To wind with a leisurely hand

  All the clocks in the house.

  He steals at his own watch a glance

  And sets the clock on the wall.

  He stands on a chair, and he waits

  For the
clock to discharge its noon

  Completely. Then, having done well

  His agreeable task,

  He soundlessly puts back the chair,

  And with a slight whir the clock ticks.

  Giving an occasional tongue clack with its pendulum and making a strange pause, as if to gather its strength, before striking. Its ticking, like an unrolled tape divided by stripes into inches, served as an endless measure of my insomnias. It was just as hard for me to fall asleep as to sneeze without having tickled with something the inside of a nostril, or to commit suicide by resorting to means at the body’s disposal (swallowing my tongue, or something like that). At the beginning of the agonizing night I could still play for time by subsisting on conversations with Tanya, whose bed stood in the next room; despite rules, we would open the door slightly, and then, when we heard our governess going to her own room, which was adjacent to Tanya’s, one of us would gently shut it: a lightning barefoot sprint and then a dive into bed. While the door was ajar we would exchange conundrums from room to room, every now and then lapsing into silence (I can still hear the tone of this twin silence in the dark), she to guess mine, I to think of another. Mine were always on the fantastic and silly side, while Tanya adhered to classical models:

  mon premier est un métal précieux,

  mon second est un habitant des cieux,

  et mon tout est un fruit délicieux.

  Sometimes she would fall asleep while I waited patiently, thinking that she was struggling with my riddle, and neither my pleading nor my imprecations would succeed in reviving her. After this I would voyage for more than an hour through the dark of my bed, arching the bedclothes over myself, so as to form a cavern, at whose distant exit I glimpsed a bit of oblique bluish light that had nothing in common with my bedroom, with the Neva night, with the rich, darkly translucent flounces of the window curtains. The cave I was exploring held in its folds and fissures such a dreamy reality, brimmed with such oppressive mystery, that a throbbing, as of a muted drum, would begin in my chest and in my ears; in there, in its depths, where my father had discovered a new species of bat, I could make out the high cheekbones of an idol hewn from the rock; and, when I finally dozed off, a dozen strong hands would overturn me and, with an awful silk-ripping sound, someone would unstitch me from top to bottom, after which an agile hand would slip inside me and powerfully squeeze my heart. Or else I would be turned into a horse, screaming in a Mongolian voice: shamans yanked at its hocks with lassos, so that its legs would break with a crunch and collapse at right angles to the body—my body—which lay with its chest pressed against the yellow ground, and, as a sign of extreme agony, the horse’s tail would rise fountain-like; it dropped back, and I awoke.