The Gift

by the lamp.”

“I saw it long ago.”

“Do you want me to tell you why moths fly toward the light? No one knows that.” “And you know?”

“It always seems to me that in a minute I’ll guess if I just think hard enough. My father used to say that it resembled most of all a loss of equilibrium, as when learning to ride a bike you are lured by a ditch. Light in comparison with darkness is a void. Look at it circling! But there’s something deeper here—in a minute I’ll get it.”

“I’m sorry that you didn’t write your book after all. Oh, I have a thousand plans for you. I have such a clear feeling that one day you’ll really lash out. Write something huge to make everyone gasp.”

“I’ll write,” said Fyodor Konstantinovich jokingly, “a biography of Chernyshevski.”

“Anything you like. But it must be quite, quite genuine. I don’t need to tell you how much I like your poems, but they are never quite up to your measure, all the words are one size smaller than your real words.”

“Or a novel. It’s queer, I seem to remember my future works, although I don’t even know what they will be about. I’ll recall them completely and write them. Tell me, by the way, how do you tend to see it: are we going to meet all our lives like this, side by side on a bench?”

“Oh no,” she replied in a musically dreamy voice. “In the winter we’ll go to a dance, and this summer, when I have my holiday, I’ll go to the sea for two weeks and send you a postcard of the breakers.”

“I’ll also go to the sea for two weeks.”

“I don’t think so. And then don’t forget that we must meet sometime in the Tiergarten in the rosarium, where the statue of the princess is with the stone fan.”

“Pleasant prospects,” said Fyodor.

But a few days later he happened to come across that same copy of 8 ? 8; he leafed through it, looking for unfinished bits, and when all the problems turned out to be solved, he ran his eyes over the two-column extract from Chernyshevski’s youthful diary; he glanced through it, smiled, and began to read it over with interest. The drolly circumstantial style, the meticulously inserted adverbs, the passion for semicolons, the bogging down of thought in midsentence and the clumsy attempts to extricate it (whereupon it got stuck at once elsewhere, and the author had to start worrying it out all over again), the drubbing-in, rubbing-in tone of each word, the knight-moves of sense in the trivial commentary on his minutest actions, the viscid ineptitude of these actions (as if some workshop glue had got onto the man’s hands, and both were left), the seriousness, the limpness, the honesty, the poverty—all this pleased Fyodor so much, he was so amazed and tickled by the fact that an author with such a mental and verbal style was considered to have influenced the literary destiny of Russia, that on the very next morning he signed out the complete works of Chernyshevski from the state library. And as he read, his astonishment grew, and this feeling contained a peculiar kind of bliss.

When, a week later, he accepted a telephone invitation from Alexandra Yakovlevna (“Why does one never see you? Tell me, are you free tonight?”), he did not take 8 ? 8 with him to show to his friends: this little magazine now had a sentimental value for him, the memory of an encounter. Among the guests there he found the engineer Kern and a capacious, very smooth-cheeked and taciturn gentleman with a fat, old-fashioned face, by the name of Goryainov, who was well known for the fact that being able to imitate beautifully (by stretching his mouth wide, making moist ruminant sounds, and speaking in falsetto) a certain unfortunate, cranky journalist with a poor reputation, he had grown so accustomed to this image (which thus had its revenge on him) that not only did he also pull down the corners of his mouth when imitating other of his acquaintances, but even began to look like it himself in normal conversation. Alexander Chernyshevski, grown thinner and quieter after his illness—this being the price of redeeming his health for a while—seemed that evening quite lively again, and even his familiar tic had returned; but Yasha’s ghost no longer sat in the corner, leaning on his elbow among disarrayed books.

“Are you still pleased with your lodgings?” asked Alexandra Yakovlevna. “Well, I’m very glad. You don’t flirt with the daughter? No? Apropos, I remembered the other day that at one time Mertz and I had some common acquaintances—he was a wonderful man, a gentleman in all senses of the word—but I don’t think she cares very much to admit her origins. She does admit them? Well, I don’t know. I suspect you don’t quite understand these matters.”

“In any case she’s a girl with character,” said the engineer Kern. “I once saw her at a meeting of the dance committee. She looked down her nose at everything.”

“And what’s her nose like?” asked Alexandra Yakovlevna.

“You know, to tell you the truth I didn’t look at it very carefully, and in the final analysis all girls aspire to be beauties. Let’s not be catty.”

Goryainov, who sat with his hands clasped on his stomach, was silent except that occasionally he lifted his fleshy chin with a bizarre jerk and shrilly cleared his throat, as if calling to someone. “Yes, thank you, I would indeed,” he said with a bow whenever he was offered jam or a glass of tea, and if he wished to impart something to his neighbor he did not turn toward him but moved his head closer, still looking ahead, and having imparted it or asked a question, slowly moved away again. In a conversation with him there were strange gaps because he did not back your speeches in any way and did not look at you, but would let the brown gaze of his small, elephant eyes stray around the room, and would convulsively clear his throat. When he spoke of himself it was always in a gloomily humorous vein. His whole appearance evoked for some reason such obsolete associations as, for example: department of the interior, cold vegetable soup, glossy rubbers, stylized snow falling outside the window, stolidity, Stolypin, statist.

“Well, my friend,” said Chernyshevski vaguely, moving to a seat by Fyodor, “what have you got to say for yourself? You don’t look too well.”

“You remember,” said Fyodor, “once about three years ago you gave me the happy advice to describe the life of your renowned namesake?”

“Absolutely not,” said Alexander Yakovlevich.

“A pity—because now I’m thinking of getting down to it.”

“Oh, really? Are you serious?”

“Quite serious,” said Fyodor.

“But how did such a wild thought get into your head?” chimed in Mme. Chernyshevski. “Why, you ought to write—I don’t know—say, the life of Batyushkov or Delvig, something in the orbit of Pushkin—but what’s the point of Chernyshevski?”

“Firing practice,” said Fyodor.

“An answer which is, to say the least, enigmatic,” remarked the engineer Kern, and the rimless glass of his pince-nez gleamed as he attempted to crack a nut with his palms. Dragging them by one leg, Goryainov passed him the crackers.

“Why not,” said Alexander Yakovlevich, coming out of a brief spell of musing, “I begin to like the idea. In our terrible times when individualism is trampled underfoot and thought is stifled it must be a great joy for a writer to immerse himself in the bright era of the sixties. I welcome it.”

“Yes, but it’s so distant from him!” said Mme. Chernyshevski. “There’s no continuity, no tradition. Frankly speaking, I myself wouldn’t be very interested in resuscitating everything that I felt in this connection when I was a college student in Russia.”

“My uncle,” said Kern, cracking a nut, “was thrown out of school for reading What to Do?”

“And what is your opinion?” said Alexandra Yakovlevna addressing Goryainov.

Goryainov spread his hands. “I don’t have any particular one,” he said in a thin voice, as if mimicking someone. “I’ve never read Chernyshevski, but when I come to think of it… A most boring, Lord forgive me, figure!”

Alexander Yakovlevich leaned back slightly in his armchair, blinking, twitching, his face alternately lighting up in a smile and then fading again, and said:

“Nevertheless I welcome Fyodor Konstantinovich’s idea. Of course a lot strikes us today as both comic and boring. But in that era there is something sacred, something eternal. Utilitarianism, the negation of art and so on— all this is merely an accidental wrapping, under which it is impossible not to distinguish its basic features: reverence for the whole human race, the cult of freedom, ideas of equality—equality of rights. It was an era of great