The Gift

blanks of support pawns, struggling with duals, he achieved the utmost accuracy of expression, the utmost economy of harmonious forces. If he had not been certain (as he also was in the case of literary creation) that the realization of the scheme already existed in some other world, from which he transferred it into this one, then the complex and prolonged work on the board would have been an intolerable burden to the mind, since it would have to concede, together with the possibility of realization, the possibility of its impossibility. Little by little the pieces and squares began to come to life and exchange impressions. The crude might of the queen was transformed into refined power, restrained and directed by a system of sparkling levers; the pawns grew cleverer; the knights stepped forth with a Spanish caracole. Everything had acquired sense and at the same time everything was concealed. Every creator is a plotter; and all the pieces impersonating his ideas on the board were here as conspirators and sorcerers. Only in the final instant was their secret spectacularly exposed.

One or two more refining touches, one more verification—and the problem was ready. The key to it, White’s first move, was masked by its apparent absurdity—but it was precisely by the distance between this and the dazzling denouement that one of the problem’s chief merits was measured; and in the way that one piece, as if greased with oil, went smoothly behind another after slipping across the whole field and creeping up under its arm, constituted an almost physical pleasure, the titillating sensation of an ideal fit. Now on the board there shone, like a constellation, a ravishing work of art, a planetarium of thought. Everything here cheered the chess player’s eye: the wit of the threats and defenses, the grace of their interlocked movement, the purity of the mates (so many bullets for exactly so many hearts); every polished piece seemed to be made especially for its square; but perhaps the most fascinating of all was the fine fabric of deceit, the abundance of insidious tries (the refutation of which had its own accessory beauty), and of false trails carefully prepared for the reader.

The third lesson that Friday was with Vasiliev. The editor of the Berlin emigre daily had established relations with an obscure English periodical and now contributed a weekly article to it on the situation in Soviet Russia. Having a smattering of the language, he wrote his article out in rough, with gaps and Russian phrases interspersed, and demanded from Fyodor a literal translation of the usual phrases found in leaders: you’re only young once, wonders never cease, this is a lion and not a dog (Krilov), troubles never come singly, Peter’s been paid without robbing Paul, jack of all trades, master of none, you can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, necessity is the mother of invention, it’s only a lover’s tiff, hark at the pot calling the kettle black, birds of a feather flock together, the poor man always gets the blame, it’s no use crying over spilt milk, we need Reform, not reforms. And very often there occurred the expression “it produced the impression of an exploding bomb.” Fyodor’s task consisted in dictating from Vasiliev’s rough copy Vasiliev’s article in its corrected form direct into the typewriter—this seemed extraordinarily practical to Vasiliev, but actually the dictation was monstrously dragged out as a result of the agonizing pauses. But oddly enough, the method of using old saws and fables turned out to be a condensed way of conveying something of the “moralites” characteristic of all conscious manifestations of the Soviet authorities: reading through the finished article which had seemed rubbish as he dictated it, Fyodor detected under the clumsy translation and the author’s journalistic effects the movement of a logical and forceful idea, which progressed steadily toward its goal—and calmly produced a mate in the corner.

Accompanying him afterwards to the door, Vasiliev with a sudden fierce knitting of his bristly brows said quickly:

“Well, did you see what they have done to Koncheyev? I can imagine how it affected him, what a blow, what a flop.”

“He couldn’t care less, I know that,” replied Fyodor, and an expression of momentary disappointment appeared on Vasiliev’s face.

“Oh, he’s just putting it on,” he retorted resourcefully, cheering up again. “In reality he’s sure to be stunned.”

“I don’t think so,” said Fyodor.

“In any case I’m sincerely grieved for him,” ended Vasiliev, with the look of one who had no wish at all to part with his grief.

Somewhat weary but glad of the fact that his working day was over, Fyodor Konstantinovich boarded a tram and opened his magazine (again that glimpse of Chernyshevski’s inclined face—all I know about him is that he was “a syringe of sulphuric acid,” as Rozanov, I think, says somewhere, and that he wrote the novel What to Do?, which blends in my mind with another social writer’s Whose Fault?). He became absorbed in an examination of the problems and soon satisfied himself that if it had not been for two end-games of genius by an old Russian master plus several interesting reprints from foreign publications, this 8 ? 8 would not have been worth buying. The conscientious student exercises of the young Soviet composers were not so much “problems” as “tasks”: cumbrously they treated of this or that mechanical theme (some kind of “pinning” and “unpinning”) without a hint of poetry; these were chess comic strips, nothing more, and the shoving and jostling pieces did their clumsy work with proletarian seriousness, reconciling themselves to the presence of double solutions in the flat variants and to the agglomeration of police pawns.

Having missed his stop he still managed to jump off at the public garden, turning at once on his heels as a man usually does after abruptly leaving a tram, and went by the church along Agamemnonstrasse. It was early evening, the sky was cloudless and the motionless and quiet sunshine endowed every object with a peaceful, lyrical air of festivity. A bicycle, leaned against a yellow-lit wall, was slightly bent outwards, like one of the side horses of a troika, but even more perfect in shape was its transparent shadow on the wall. An elderly, stoutish gentleman, waggling his rear, was hurrying to tennis, wearing a fancy shirt and city trousers and carrying three gray balls in a net, and beside him walking swiftly on rubber soles was a German girl of the sporting sort, with an orange face and golden hair. Behind the brightly painted pumps a radio was singing in a gas station, while above its pavilion vertical yellow letters stood against the light blue of the sky—the name of a car firm—and on the second letter, on the “E” (a pity that it was not on the first, on the “B”—would have made an alphabetic vignette) sat a live blackbird, with a yellow—for economy’s sake—beak, singing louder than the radio. The house in which Fyodor lived was a corner one and stuck out like a huge red ship, carrying a complex and glassy turreted structure on its bow, as if a dull, sedate architect had suddenly gone mad and made a sally into the sky. On all the little balconies which girdled the house in tier after tier there was something green blossoming, and only the Shchyogolevs’ was untidily empty, with an orphaned pot on the parapet and a corpse hung out in moth-eaten furs to air.

Right at the very beginning of his stay in this flat Fyodor, supposing that he would need complete peace in the evenings, had reserved himself the right to have supper in his room. On the table among his books there now awaited him two gray sandwiches with a glossy mosaic of sausage, a cup of stale tea and a plate of pink kissel (from the morning). Chewing and sipping, he again opened 8 ? 8 (he was again glared at by a butting N. G. Ch.) and began to enjoy quietly a study in which the few white pieces seemed to be hanging over an abyss and yet won the day. Then he found a charming four-mover by an American master, the beauty of which consisted not only of the cleverly hidden mating device but also of the fact that in reply to a tempting but incorrect attack, Black, by drawing in and blocking his own pieces, managed to construct just in time a hermetic stalemate. Then in one of the Soviet productions (P. Mitrofanov, Tver) a beautiful example turned up of how to come a cropper: Black had NINE pawns—the ninth having evidently been added at the last minute, in order to cure a cook, as if a writer had hastily changed “he will surely be told” in the proofs to the more correct “he will doubtless be told” without noticing that this was immediately followed by: “of her doubtful reputation.”

Suddenly he felt a bitter pang—why had everything in Russia become so shoddy, so crabbed and gray, how could she have been so befooled and befuddled? Or had the old urge “toward the light” concealed a fatal flaw, which in the course of progress toward the objective had grown more and more evident, until it was revealed that this “light” was burning in the window of a prison overseer, and that was all? When had this strange dependence sprung up between the sharpening of thirst and the muddying of the source? In the forties? in the sixties? and “what to do” now? Ought one not to reject any longing for one’s homeland, for any homeland besides that which is with me, within me, which is stuck like the silver sand of the sea to the skin of my soles, lives in my eyes, my blood, gives depth and distance to the background of life’s every hope? Some day, interrupting my writing, I will look through the window and see a Russian autumn.

Some friends of the Shchyogolevs, gone to Denmark for the summer, had recently left Boris Ivanovich a radio. One could hear him diddling with it, strangling squeakers and creakers, moving ghostly furniture. An odd pastime!