The Gift

she would soon go out or that the Shchyogolevs would come home. And at the very moment when he decided to stop listening and give his undivided attention to Gogol, Fyodor quickly got up and went into the dining room.

She was sitting by the door to the balcony and with her gleaming lips half parted was aiming a thread at a needle. Through the open door one could see the little sterile balcony and hear the tinny ringing and clicking of leaping raindrops—it was a heavy, warm, April shower.

“Sorry, I didn’t know you were here,” said mendacious Fyodor. “I only wanted to say something about that book of mine: it’s not the real thing, the poems are bad, I mean, they’re not all bad, but generally speaking. Those I’ve been publishing these last two years in the Gazeta are much better.”

“I liked very much the one you recited at that evening of poetry,” she said. “The one about the swallow that cried out.”

“Oh, were you there? Yes. But I have even better ones, I assure you.”

She suddenly jumped up from her chair, threw her darning on the seat, and with her arms dangling, leaned forward, taking quick small gliding steps, she sped into her room and returned with some newspaper clippings—his and Koncheyev’s poems.

“But I don’t think I have everything here,” she remarked.

“I didn’t know that such things happened,” said Fyodor and added awkwardly: “Now I’ll ask them to make little holes around them with a perforator—you know, like coupons, so that you can tear them out more easily.”

She continued to busy herself with a stocking stretched over a wooden mushroom and without lifting her eyes, but smiling quickly and slyly, she said:

“I also know that you used to live at seven Tannenberg Street, I often went there.”

“You did?” said Fyodor, amazed.

“I used to know Lorentz’s wife in St. Petersburg—she gave me drawing lessons.”

“How queer,” said Fyodor.

“Romanov is now in Munich,” she continued. “A most objectionable character, but I always liked his things.”

They talked about Romanov and about his pictures. He had reached full maturity. Museums were buying his stuff. Having passed through everything, loaded with rich experience, he had returned to an expressive harmony of line. You know his “Footballer”? There’s a reproduction in this magazine, here it is. The pale, sweaty, tensely distorted face of a player depicted from top to toe preparing at full speed to shoot with terrible force at the goal. Tousled red hair, a burst of mud on his temple, the taut muscles of his bare neck. A wrinkled, soaking wet, violet singlet, clinging in spots to his body, comes down low over his spattered shorts, and is crossed with the wonderful diagonal of a mighty crease. He is in the act of hooking the ball sideways; one raised hand with wide-splayed fingers is a participant in the general tension and surge. But most important, of course, are the legs: a glistening white thigh, an enormous scarred knee, boots swollen with dark mud, thick and shapeless, but nevertheless marked by an extraordinarily precise and powerful grace. The stocking has slipped down one vigorously twisted calf, one foot is buried in rich mud, the other is about to kick—and how!—the hideous, tar-black ball—and all this against a dark gray background saturated with rain and snow. Looking at this picture one could already hear the whiz of the leather missile, already see the goalkeeper’s desperate dive.

“And I know something else,” said Zina. “You were supposed to help me with a translation, Charski told you about it, but for some reason you didn’t turn up.”

“How queer,” repeated Fyodor.

There was a bang in the hall—that was Marianna Nikolavna returning—and Zina deliberately got up, gathered the cuttings together and went to her room—only later did Fyodor understand why she considered it necessary to act that way, but at the moment it seemed to him like discourtesy—and when Mrs. Shchyogolev came into the dining room the result was as if he had been stealing sugar out of the sideboard.

One evening a few days later he overheard an angry conversation from his room—the gist of which was that guests were due to arrive and that it was time for Zina to go downstairs with the key. He heard her go, and after a brief inner struggle, he thought himself up a walk—say to the slot machine by the public garden for a postage stamp. To complete the illusion, he put on a hat, although he practically never wore one. The minute light went out while he was on his way down but immediately there was a click and it went on again: that was she downstairs who had pressed the button. He found her standing by the glass door, playing with the key looped on her finger, the whole of her brightly illuminated, everything glistened—the turquoise knit of her jumper, her fingernails and the even little hairs on her forearm.

“It’s unlocked,” she said, but he stopped, and both of them began to look through the glass at the dark, mobile night, at the gas lamp, at the shadow of the railings.

“It doesn’t look as if they’re coming,” she muttered, softly clinking the keys.

“Have you been waiting long?” he asked. “If you like I’ll take a turn,” and at that moment the light went out. “If you like I’ll stay here all night.” he added in the darkness.

She laughed, and then sighed abruptly, as if fed up with waiting. Through the glass the ashen light from the street fell on both of them and the shadow of the iron design on the door undulated over her and continued obliquely over him, like a shoulder-belt, while a prismatic rainbow lay on the wall. And, as often happened with him—though it was deeper this time than ever before—Fyodor suddenly felt—in this glassy darkness—the strangeness of life, the strangeness of its magic, as if a corner of it had been turned back for an instant and he had glimpsed its unusual lining. Close to his face there was her soft cinereous cheek cut across by a shadow, and when Zina suddenly, with mysterious bewilderment and a mercurial sparkle in her eyes, turned toward him and the shadow lay across her lips, oddly changing her, he took advantage of the absolute freedom in this world of shadows to take her by her ghostly elbows; but she slipped out of the pattern and with a quick jab of her finger restored the light.

“Why?” he asked.

“I’ll explain it some other time,” replied Zina, not taking her eyes off him.

“Tomorrow,” said Fyodor.

“All right, tomorrow. Only I want to warn you that there is not going to be any conversation between you and me at home. That’s final and for good.”

“Then let’s …” he began, but at this point stocky Colonel Kasatkin and his tall, faded wife loomed on the other side of the door.

“A very good evening to you, my pretty,” said the colonel, cleaving the night at a single stroke. Fyodor went out into the street.

The next day he contrived to catch her on the corner as she returned from work. They arranged to meet after supper by a bench which he had spied out the night before.

“Well, why?” he asked when they had sat down.

“For five reasons,” she said. “In the first place because I’m not a German girl, in the second place because only last Wednesday I broke up with my fiance, in the third place because it would be—well, pointless, in the fourth place because you don’t know me at all, and in the fifth place …” She fell silent, and Fyodor cautiously kissed her burning, melting, sorrowing lips. “That’s why,” she said, her fingers running over his and strongly compressing them.

Thereforth they met every evening. Marianna Nikolavna, who never dared to ask her about anything (the very hint of a question would draw forth the familiar storm), guessed that her daughter was meeting someone, the more so since she knew of the mysterious fiance. He was a strange, sickly, unbalanced person (that, at least, is how Fyodor imagined him from Zina’s description—and, of course, those described people are usually endowed with one basic characteristic: they never smile) whom she had met when she was sixteen, three years before, he being twelve years older than she, and in this seniority there was also something dark, unpleasant and embittered. Then again, according to her account, their meetings had taken place without any sentiments of love being expressed, and because she never made reference to even a single kiss, the impression was given that this had been simply an endless succession of tedious conversations. She resolutely refused to reveal his name or even his type of work (although she gave him to understand that he had been, in a sense, a man of genius) and Fyodor was secretly grateful to her for this, realizing that a ghost with neither name nor environment would fade out more easily—but neverthless he experienced pangs of disgusting jealousy which he strove not to probe, but this