The Gift

taken off for questioning. She caught cold and died. A few days after that, on one of those terrible winter evenings, hungry and hopeless, which played such an ominously close part in the civil disorder, an unknown youth visited me, in pince-nez, unprepossessing and uncommunicative, and asked me to call immediately on his uncle, the geographer Berezovski. He did not know or did not want to say what for, but suddenly everything somehow crumbled inside me and I began to live mechanically. Nowadays, several years later, I sometimes meet this Misha in the Russian bookshop in Berlin where he works—and every time I see him, although we talk little, I feel a hot shiver run down the whole of my spinal column and my whole being relives our brief road together. My mother was not there when this Misha came (this name I shall also remember forever) but we met her on our way downstairs; not knowing my companion she anxiously asked where I was going. I replied I was going for some hair clippers of which we had happened to be speaking a few days beforehand. Later I often dreamed about them, those nonexistent clippers, which took the most unexpected forms—mountains, landing stages, coffins, hand organs—but I always knew with a dreamer’s instinct that it was clippers. “Wait,” cried Mother, but we were already downstairs. We walked along the street quickly and silently, he slightly ahead of me. I looked at the masks of the houses, at the humps of the snowdrifts, and I tried to outwit fate by imagining to myself (and thus destroying its possibility in advance) the still uncomprehended, black, fresh grief which I would carry back home. We entered a room which I recall as being completely yellow, and there an old man with a pointed beard, wearing a field jacket and jackboots, informed me without preamble that according to still unverified information my father was no longer living. Mother was waiting for me below, on the street.

During the next six months (until Uncle Oleg almost forcibly took us abroad) we tried to find out how, and where, he had perished—and indeed whether he had perished at all. Apart from the fact that it happened in Siberia (Siberia is a big place!) on the return journey from Central Asia, we found out nothing at all. Can it be that they hid from us the place and circumstances of his mysterious death and have continued to hide them to this day? (His biography in the Soviet Encyclopaedia ends simply with the words: He died in 1919.) Or did the contradictoriness of the vague evidence truly rule out any explicitness in their answers? Once in Berlin we learned one or two supplementary things from various sources and from various people, but these supplements turned out to be nothing but new layers of uncertainty rather than glimpses through it. Two shaky versions, both more or less of a deductive nature (and telling us nothing, moreover, about the most important point: how exactly did he die—if he died), were entangled in one another and mutually contradictory. According to one of them, news of his death was brought to Semipalatinsk by a Kirghiz; according to the other, it was brought by a Cossack to Ak- Bulat. What was my father’s route? Was he going from Semirechie to Omsk (by way of the feather-grass steppe, with the guide on a piebald pony) or from the Pamirs to Orenburg through the Turgay region (by way of the sandy steppe, with the guide on a camel, he himself on a horse, birchbark-stirruped, from well to well, avoiding villages and railway lines)? How did he pass through the storm of the peasant war, how did he steer clear of the Reds? I cannot make anything out. And then, what kind of shapka-nevidimka, “invisible-making cap,” could have fitted him, who would have worn even that at a rakish angle? Did he hide in fishermen’s huts (as Kruger supposes) at the post “Aralskoye more” among the stolid Urals Old-Believers? And if he died, how did he die? “What is your profession?” Pugachyov asked the astronomer Lowitz. “Counting the stars.” Whereupon they hanged him so he could be nearer the stars. Oh, how did he die? From illness? From exposure? From thirst? By the hand of man? And if—by somebody’s hand, can that hand be still living, taking bread, raising a glass, chasing flies, stirring, pointing, beckoning, lying motionless, shaking other hands? Did he return their fire for a long time? Did he save a last bullet for himself? Was he taken alive? Did they bring him to the parlor car at the railway headquarters of some punitive detachment (I can see its hideous locomotive stoked with dried fish), having suspected him of being a White spy (and not without reason: he knew well the White general, Lavr Kornilov, with whom once in his youth he had traveled over the Steppe of Despair and whom in later years he had seen in China)? Did they shoot him in the ladies’ room of some godforsaken station (broken looking glass, tattered plush), or did they lead him out into some kitchen garden one dark night and wait for the moon to peep out? How did he wait with them in the dark? With a smile of disdain? And if a whitish moth had hovered among the shadowy burdocks he would, even at that moment, I know, have followed it with that same glance of encouragement with which, on occasion, after evening tea, smoking his pipe in our Leshino garden, he used to greet the pink hawks sampling our lilacs.

But sometimes I get the impression that all this is a rubbishy rumor, a tired legend, that it has been created out of those same suspicious granules of approximate knowledge that I use myself when my dreams muddle through regions known to me only by hearsay or out of books, so that the first knowledgeable person who has really seen at the time the places referred to will refuse to recognize them, will make fun of the exoticism of my thoughts, the hills of my sorrow, the precipices of my imagination, and will find in my conjectures just as many topographical errors as he will anachronisms. So much the better. Once the rumor of my father’s death is a fiction, must it not then be conceded that his very journey out of Asia is merely attached in the shape of a tail to this fiction (like that kite which in Pushkin’s story young Grinyov fashioned out of a map), and that perhaps, if my father even did set out on this return journey (and was not dashed to pieces in an abyss, not held in captivity by Buddhist monks) he chose a completely different road? I have even had occasion to hear surmises (sounding like belated advice) that he could well have proceeded west to Ladakh in order to go south into India, or why could he not have pushed on to China and from there, on any ship to any port in the world?

“Whether it was this way or that, Mother, all material connected with his life is now collected at my place. Out of swarms of drafts, long manuscript extracts from books, indecipherable jottings on miscellaneous sheets of paper, penciled remarks straggling over the margins of other writings of mine; out of half-crossed-out sentences, unfinished words, and improvidently abbreviated, already forgotten names, hiding from full view among my papers; out of the fragile staticism of irredeemable information, already destroyed in places by a too swift movement of thought, which in turn dissolved into nothingness; out of all this I must now make a lucid, orderly book. At times I feel that somewhere it has already been written by me, that it is here, hiding in this inky jungle, that I have only to free it part by part from the darkness and the parts will fall together of themselves…. But what is the use of that to me when this labor of liberation now seems to me so difficult and complicated and when I am so much afraid I might dirty it with a flashy phrase, or wear it out in the course of transfer onto paper, that I already doubt whether the book will be written at all. You yourself wrote to me of the demands which in such a task should be presupposed. But now I am of the opinion that I would fulfill them badly. Do not scold me for weakness and cowardice. Sometime I shall read you at random disjointed and inchoate extracts from what I have written: how little it resembles my statuesque dream! All these months while I was making my research, taking notes, recollecting and thinking, I was blissfully happy: I was certain that something unprecedentedly beautiful was being created, that my notes were merely small props for the work, trail-marks, pegs, and that the most important thing was developing and being created of itself, but now I see, like waking up on the floor, that besides these pitiful notes there is nothing. What shall I do? You know, when I read his or Grum’s books and I hear their entrancing rhythm, when I study the position of the words that can neither be replaced nor rearranged, it seems to me a sacrilege to take all this and dilute it with myself. If you like I’ll admit it: I myself am a mere seeker of verbal adventures, and forgive me if I refuse to hunt down my fancies on my father’s own collecting ground. I have realized, you see, the impossibility of having the imagery of his travels germinate without contaminating them with a kind of secondary poetization, which keeps departing further and further from that real poetry with which the live experience of these receptive, knowledgeable and chaste naturalists endowed their research.”

“Of course I understand and sympathize,” answered his mother. “It is a pity you cannot manage it, but of course you must not force yourself. On the other hand I am convinced that you are exaggerating a little. I am convinced that, if you thought less about style, about difficulties, about the poetaster’s cliche that ‘with a kiss starts the death of romance,’ etc., you would produce something very good, very true and very interesting. Only if you imagine him reading your book and you feel it grates upon him, and makes you ashamed, then, of course, give it up, give it up. But I know this cannot be, I know he would tell you: well done. Even more: I am convinced that some day you shall yet write this book.”

The external stimulus to the cancel of his work was provided for Fyodor by his removal to another lodging. To his landlady’s credit it must be said that she had put up with him for a very long time, for two years. But when she was offered the chance of obtaining an ideal roomer in April—an elderly spinster rising at seven thirty, working in an office till six, dining at her sister’s and retiring at ten—Frau Stoboy requested Fyodor to find himself another roof within the month. He continually postponed his inquiries, not only out of laziness and an optimistic tendency to endow a stretch of granted time with the rounded shape of eternity, but also because he found it unbearably nasty