Vladimir Nabokov - The Gift

“I put ‘Blok and War’ on the announcements by mistake,” she said, “but it doesn’t make any difference, does it?”

“On the contrary, it certainly does make a difference,” replied Kern with a smile on his thin lips, but with murder behind his thick eyeglasses, without unclasping his hands which were joined on his abdomen. “ ‘Blok in the War’ conveys the proper meaning—the personal nature of the speaker’s own observations, while ‘Blok and War,’ if you will excuse me, is philosophy.”

And now they all began gradually to grow less distinct, to ripple with the random agitation of a fog, and then to vanish altogether; their outlines, weaving in figure-eight patterns, were evaporating, though here and there a bright point still glowed—the cordial glint in an eye, the gleam of a bracelet; there was also a momentary reappearance of the intently furrowed forehead of Vasiliev, who was shaking somebody’s already dissolving hand, and at the very last there was a floating glimpse of pistachio-colored straw, decorated with silk roses (Lyubov Markovna’s hat), and now everything was gone, and into the smoky parlor, without a sound, in his bedroom slippers, came Yasha, thinking that his father had already retired, and with a magic tinkling, by the light of crimson lanterns, dim beings were repairing the pavement at the corner of the square, and Fyodor, who did not have money for the streetcar, was walking home. He had forgotten to borrow from the Chernyshevskis those two or three marks that would have tided him over until he got paid for a lesson or translation: this thought alone would not have disturbed him had he not been possessed by a general feeling of wretchedness consisting of that rotten disappointment (he had imagined so vividly the success of his book), and a chill leak in his left shoe, and fear of the imminent night in a new place. He was tired, he was dissatisfied with himself for wasting the tender beginning of the night, and he was tormented by the feeling that there was some line of thought he had not pursued to its conclusion that day and now could never finish.

He was walking along streets that had already long since insinuated themselves into his acquaintance—and as if that were not enough, they expected affection; they had even purchased in advance, in his future memories, space next to St. Petersburg, an adjacent grave; he walked along these dark, glossy streets and the blind houses retreated, backing or sidling into the brown sky of the Berlin night, which, nevertheless, had its soft spots here and there, spots that would melt under one’s gaze, allowing it to obtain a few stars. Here at last is the square where we dined and the tall brick church and the still quite transparent poplar, resembling the nervous system of a giant; here, also, is the public toilet, reminiscent of Baba Yaga’s gingerbread cottage. In the gloom of the small public garden crossed obliquely by the faint light of a streetlamp, the beautiful girl who for the last eight years had kept refusing to be incarnated (so vivid was the memory of his first love), was sitting on a cinder-gray bench, but when he got closer he saw that only the bent shadow of the poplar trunk was sitting there. He turned into his street, plunging in it as in cold water—he was so loath to go back, such melancholy was promised him by that room, that malevolent wardrobe, that daybed. He located his front door (disguised by darkness) and pulled out his keys. None of them would open the door.

“What’s this …” he muttered crossly, looking at the key bit, and then furiously began jamming it in again. “What the hell!” he exclaimed and retreated one step in order to throw back his head and make out the house number. Yes, it was the right house. He was just about to bend over the lock once more when a sudden truth dawned upon him: these were, of course, the boardinghouse keys, which he had carried away in his raincoat pocket by mistake when he moved today, and the new ones must have remained in the room that he now wanted to get into much more than a moment ago.

In those days Berlin janitors were for the most part opulent bullies who had corpulent wives and belonged, out of petty bourgeois considerations, to the Communist Party. White Russian tenants quailed before them: accustomed to subjection, we everywhere appoint over ourselves the shadow of supervision. Fyodor understood perfectly well how stupid it was to be afraid of an old fool with a bobbing Adam’s apple, but still he could not bring himself to wake him up after midnight, to summon him up out of his giant featherbed, to perform the act of pushing the button (even though it was more than likely that no one would answer, squeeze as he might); he could not bring himself to do it, especially because he did not have that ten-pfennig coin without which it was unthinkable to walk past the palm, grimly cupped at hip level, confident of receiving its tribute.

“What a mess, what a mess” he whispered, stepping away and feeling, from behind, the weight of a sleepless night settling on him from head to heels, a leaden twin whom he must carry somewhere or other. “How stupid, kak glupo,” he added, pronouncing the Russian glupo with a soft French “I” as his father used to do in a mildly jocular absentminded way, when perplexed.

He wondered what to do next. Wait for somebody to come out? Try to find the black-caped night watchman who looked after door locks on residential streets? Force himself after all to blow up the house by ringing the bell? Fyodor began pacing the sidewalk to the corner and back. The street was echoic and completely empty. High above it milk-white lamps were suspended, each on its own transverse wire; beneath the closest one a ghostly circle swung with the breeze across the wet asphalt. And this swinging motion, which had no apparent relation to him, with a sonorous tambourine-like sound nevertheless nudged something off the brink of his soul where that something had been resting, and now, no longer with the former distant call but reverberating loudly and close by, rang out “Thank you, my land, for your remotest …” and immediately, on a returning wave, “most cruel mist my thanks are due….” And again, flying off in search of an answer: “… by you unnoticed….” He was somnambulistically talking to himself as he paced a nonexistent sidewalk; his feet were guided by local consciousness, while the principal Fyodor Konstantinovich, and in fact the only Fyodor Konstantinovich that mattered, was already peering into the next shadowy strophe, which was swinging some yards away and which was destined to resolve itself in a yet-unknown but specifically promised harmony. “Thank you, my land …” he began again, aloud, gathering momentum afresh, but suddenly the sidewalk turned back to stone under his feet, everything around him began speaking at once, and, instantly sobered, he hurried to the door of his house, for now there was a light behind it.

A middle-aged woman with high cheekbones, a karakul jacket over her shoulders, was letting a man out and had paused together with him at the door. “So don’t forget to do it, dear,” she was saying in a drab, everyday voice, when Fyodor arrived grinning and immediately recognized her: that morning she and her husband had been meeting their furniture. But he also recognized the visitor who was being let out—it was the young painter Romanov, whom he had run into a couple of times at the editorial offices of the Free Word . With an expression of surprise on his delicate face, whose Hellenic purity was spoiled by dull, crooked teeth, he greeted Fyodor; the latter awkwardly bowed to the lady, who was rearranging the jacket slipping from her shoulder, and then bounded up the stairs with enormous strides, tripped horribly at the bend and climbed on holding the banister. Bleary-eyed Frau Stoboy in her dressing gown was awesome, but that did not last long. In his room he groped for the light and found it with difficulty. On the table he saw the glistening keys and the white book. That’s already all over, he thought. Such a short time ago he had been giving copies to friends with pretentious or platitudinous inscriptions and now he was ashamed to recall those dedications and how all these last few days he had been nurtured by the joy of his book. But after all, nothing much had happened: today’s deception did not exclude a reward tomorrow or after tomorrow; somehow, however, the dream had begun to cloy and now the book lay on the table, completely enclosed within itself, delimited and concluded, and no longer did it radiate those former powerful, glad rays.