The Gift

apocalyptically apoplectic sunsets over the Neva. After him a certain Kron, writing under the pseudonym of Rostislav Strannyy (Rostislav the Strange), gladdened us with a long story about a romantic adventure in the town of a hundred eyes, beneath skies unknown; for the sake of beauty his epithets were placed after the nouns, his verbs had also flown off somewhere or other and for some reason the word storozhko, “warily,” was repeated about a dozen times. (“She warily let fall a smile”; “The chestnuts broke warily into blossom.”) After the interval poets came thick and fast: a tall youth with a buttonlike face, another, shortish but with a large nose, an elderly lady wearing pince-nez, another, younger, one—and finally Koncheyev, who, in contrast to the triumphant precision and polish of the others, muttered his verses in a low tired voice; but there dwelt independently in them such music, in the seemingly dark verse such a chasm of meaning yawned at one’s feet, so convincing were the sounds and so unexpectedly, out of the very same words every poet was stringing together, there sprang up, played, and slipped away without ever quenching one’s thirst a unique perfection, bearing no resemblance to words and in no need of words, that for the first time that evening the applause was not feigned. Last to appear was Godunov-Cherdyntsev. From the poems written during the summer he read those which Elizaveta Pavlovna liked so much—on Russia:

The yellow birches, mute in the blue sky…

and on Berlin, beginning with the stanza:

Things here are in a sorry state;
Even the moon is much too rough
Though it is rumored to come straight
From Hamburg where they make the stuff…

and the one which moved her most of all, although she did not think to connect it with the memory of a young woman, long dead, whom Fyodor had loved when sixteen:

One night between sunset and river
On the old bridge we stood, you and I.
Will you ever forget it, I queried,
—That particular swift that went by?
And you answered, so earnestly: Never!

And what sobs made us suddenly shiver,
What a cry life emitted in flight!
Till we die, till tomorrow, for ever,
You and I on the old bridge one night.

But it was getting late, many people were moving toward the exit, one lady was putting on her coat with her back to the platform, the applause was sparse…. The damp night gleamed black on the street, with a raging wind: never, never will we reach home. But nonetheless a tram came, and hanging on a strap in the gangway over his mother sitting by the window, Fyodor thought with heavy revulsion of the verses he had written that day, of word- fissures, of the leakage of poetry, and at the same time, with proud, joyous energy, with passionate impatience, he was already looking for the creation of something new, something still unknown, genuine, corresponding fully to the gift which he felt like a burden inside himself.

On the eve of her departure they both sat up late in his room, she, in the armchair, easily and skillfully (whereas formerly she could not sew a button on) darning and mending his pitiful things, while he, on the sofa, biting his nails, was reading a thick battered book; earlier, in his youth, he had skipped some of the pages —“Angelo,” “Journey to Arzrum”—but lately it was precisely in these that he had found particular pleasure. He had only just got to the words: “The frontier held something mysterious for me; to travel had been my favorite dream since childhood,” when suddenly he felt a sweet, strong stab from somewhere. Still not understanding, he put the book to one side and slipped blind fingers into a boxful of homemade cigarettes. At that moment his mother said without raising her head: “What did I just remember! Those funny rhymes about butterflies and moths which you and he composed together when we were out walking, you remember. ‘Your blue stripe, Catocalid, shows from under its gray lid.’ ” “Yes,” replied Fyodor, “some were downright epics: ‘A dead leaf is not hoarier than a newborn arborea.’ “ (What a surprise it had been! Father had only just brought back the very first specimen from his travels, having found it during the initial trek through Siberia—he had not even had time to describe it yet—and on the first day after his return, in the Leshino park, two paces from the house, with no thought of lepidoptera, while strolling with his wife and children, throwing a tennis ball for the fox terriers, basking in his return, in the balmy weather and the health and gaiety of his family, but unconsciously noting with the experienced eye of a hunter every insect along his path, he had suddenly pointed out to Fyodor with the tip of his cane a plump reddish-gray Epicnaptera moth, with sinuate margins, of the leaf-mimicking kind, hanging asleep from a stalk under a bush; he had been about to walk on (the members of this genus look very much alike) but then squatted down, wrinkled his forehead, inspected his find and suddenly said in a bright voice: “Well, I’m damned! I need not have gone so far!” “I always said so,” interposed his wife with a laugh. The furry little monster in his hand belonged to the new species he had just brought back—and now it had cropped up here, in the Province of St. Petersburg, whose fauna had been so well investigated! But, as often happens, the momentum of mighty coincidence did not stop there, it was good for one more stage: only a few days later his father learned that this new moth had just been described from St. Petersburg specimens by a fellow scientist, and Fyodor cried all night long: they had beaten Father to it!

And now Elizaveta Pavlovna was about to return to Paris. They stood for a long time on the narrow platform waiting for the train, next to the luggage elevator, while on the other lines the sad city trains stopped for a moment, hastily banging their doors. The Paris express rushed in. His mother boarded and immediately thrust her head through the window, smiling. By the neighboring opulent sleeping car, seeing off an unpretentious old lady, stood a couple: a pale, red-lipped beauty in a black silk coat with a high fur collar, and a famous stunt flyer; everyone was staring at him, at his muffler, at his back, as if expecting to find wings on it.

“I have a suggestion to make,” said his mother gaily as they parted. “I have about seventy marks left which are quite useless to me, and you must eat better. I can’t look at you, you’re so thin. Here, take them.” “Avec joie,” he replied, instantly envisioning a year’s pass to the state library, milk chocolate and some mercenary young German girl whom, in his baser moments, he kept planning to get for himself.

Pensive, abstracted, vaguely tormented by the thought that somehow in his talks with his mother he had left the main thing untold, Fyodor returned home, took off his shoes, broke off the corner of a chocolate bar together with its silver paper, moved the book left open on the sofa closer…. “The harvest rippled, awaiting the sickle.” Again that divine stab! And how it called, how it prompted him, the sentence about the Terek (“In faith, the river was awesome!”) or—even more fitly, more intimately—about the Tartar women: “They were sitting on horseback, swathed in yashmaks: all one could see were their eyes and the heels of their shoes.”

Thus did he hearken to the purest sound from Pushkin’s tuning fork—and he already knew exactly what this sound required of him. Two weeks after his mother’s departure he wrote her about what he had conceived, what he had been helped to conceive by the transparent rhythm of “Arzrum,” and she replied as if she had already known about it: