Vladimir Nabokov - The Gift

In the morning the potato-hawker’s cry “Prima Kartoffel!” rang out in the street, in a high, disciplined singsong (but how the young vegetable’s heart throbs!) or else a sepulchral bass proclaimed “Blumenerde!” The thump of rugs being beaten was sometimes joined by a hurdy-gurdy, which was painted brown and mounted on squalid cart wheels, with a circular design on its front depicting an idyllic brook; and cranking now with his right hand, now with his left, the sharp-eyed organ-grinder pumped out a thick “O sole mio.” That sun was already inviting me into the square. In its garden a young chestnut tree, still unable to walk alone and therefore supported by a stake, suddenly came out with a flower bigger than itself. The lilacs, however, did not bloom for a long time; but when they finally made up their mind, then, within one night, which left a considerable number of cigarette butts under the benches, they encircled the garden with ruffled richness. In a quiet lane behind the church the locust trees shed their petals on a gray June day, and the dark asphalt next to the sidewalk looked as if cream of wheat had been spilled on it. In the rose beds around the statue of a bronze runner the Dutch Glory disengaged the corners of its red petals and was followed by General Arnold Janssen. One happy and cloudless day in July, a very successful ant flight was staged: the females would take to the air, and the sparrows, also taking to the air, would devour them; and in places where nobody bothered them they kept crawling along the gravel and shedding their feeble prop-room wings. From Denmark the papers reported that as a result of a heat wave there, numerous cases of insanity were being observed: people were tearing off their clothes and jumping into the canals. Male gypsy moths dashed about in wild zigzags. The lindens went through all their involved, aromatic, messy metamorphoses.

Fyodor, in his shirt-sleeves and with sneakers on his sockless feet, would spend the greater part of the day on an indigo bench in the public garden, a book in his long tanned fingers; and when the sun beat down too hard, he would lean his head on the hot back of the bench and shut his eyes for long periods; the ghostly wheels of the city day revolved through the interior bottomless scarlet, and the sparks of children’s voices darted past, and the book, open in his lap, became ever heavier and more unbooklike; but now the scarlet darkened under a passing cloud, and lifting his sweaty neck, he would open his eyes and once again see the park, the lawn with its marguerites, the freshly watered gravel, the little girl playing hopscotch with herself, the pram with the baby consisting of two eyes and a pink rattle, and the journey of the blinded, breathing, radiant disk through the cloud—then everything would blaze once again and along the dappled street, lined with restless trees, a coal truck would thunder by with the grimy driver on his high, bumpy seat, clenching the stalk of an emerald-bright leaf in his teeth.

In the late afternoon he would go to give a lesson—to a businessman with sandy eyelashes, who looked at him with a dull gaze of malevolent perplexity as Fyodor unconcernedly read him Shakespeare; or to a schoolgirl in a black jumper, whom he sometimes felt like kissing on her bent yellowish nape; or to a jolly thickset fellow who had served in the imperial navy, who said est’ (aye-aye) and obmozgovat’ (to dope it out), and was preparing dat’ drapu (to blow) to Mexico, escaping secretly from his mistress, a two-hundred-pound, passionate and doleful old woman who had happened to flee to Finland in the same sleigh as he and since then, in perpetual jealous despair, had been feeding him meat pies, cream pudding, pickled mushrooms…. Besides these English lessons there were lucrative commercial translations—reports on the low sound conductivity of tile floors or treatises about ball bearings; and finally, a modest but particularly precious income came from his lyrical poems, which he composed in a kind of drunken trance, and always with that same nostalgic, patriotic fervor; some of them did not materialize in final form, dissolving instead, fertilizing the innermost depths, while others, completely polished and equipped with all their commas, were taken to the newspaper office—first via a subway train with glinting reflections rapidly ascending its vertical stangs of brass, then in the strange emptiness of an enormous elevator to the ninth floor, where at the end of a corridor the color of gray modeling clay, in a narrow little room smelling of “the decaying corpse of actuality” (as the number one office comic used to crack), sat the secretary, a moonlike, phlegmatic person, ageless and virtually sexless, who had more than once saved the day when, angered by some item in Vasiliev’s liberal paper, menacing rowdies would come, German Trotskyists hired locally, or some robust Russian Fascist, a rogue and a mystic.

The telephone jangled; ripply proofs breezed past; the theater critic kept on reading a stray Russian newspaper from Vilna. “Why, do we owe you money? Nothing of the kind,” the secretary would say. When the door to the room on the right opened, one could hear the juicily dictating voice of Getz, or Stupishin clearing his throat, and among the clatter of several typewriters one could make out the swift rat-tat-tat of Tamara.

At the left was Vasiliev’s office; his lustrine jacket grew tight across his plump shoulders as, standing before the lectern he used as a writing table and puffing like some powerful machine, he wrote the leading article in his untidy handwriting with its schoolroom blots, headed: “No Improvement in Sight,” or “The Situation in China.” Suddenly stopping, lost in thought, he made a noise like a metal scraper as he scratched his large bearded cheek with one finger and narrowed his eye, overhung by a raffish black brow without a single gray hair in it—remembered in Russia to this day. By the window (outside which there was a similar multi-office building, with repairs going on so high in the sky that it seemed as though they might as well do something about the ragged rent in the gray cloud bank) stood a bowl with an orange and a half and an appetizing jar of yogurt, and in the bookcase, in its locked bottom compartment, forbidden cigars and a large blue-and-red heart were preserved. A table was cluttered with the old trash of Soviet newspapers, cheap books with lurid covers, letters—request-ind, reminding, rebuking—the squeezed-out half of an orange, a newspaper page with a window cut out and a portrait photograph of Vasiliev’s daughter, who lived in Paris, a young woman with a charming bare shoulder and smoky hair: she was an unsuccessful actress and there was frequent mention of her in the cinema column of the Gazeta: “… our talented compatriot Silvina Lee …”—although no one had ever heard of the compatriot.

Vasiliev would good-humoredly accept Fyodor’s poems and print them, not because he liked them (generally he did not even read them) but because it was absolutely immaterial to him what adorned the nonpolitical part of his paper. Having ascertained once for all the level of literacy below which a given contributor by nature could not fall, Vasiliev gave him a free hand, even if the given level barely rose above zero. And poems, since they were mere trifles, passed almost entirely without control, trickling through openings where rubbish of greater weight and volume would have got stuck. But what joyful, exciting squealing arose in all the peacock coops of our émigré poetry from Latvia to the Riviera! They’ve printed mine! And mine! Fyodor himself, who felt he had only one rival—Koncheyev (who, by the way, was not a contributor to the Gazeta)— did not concern himself with his neighbors in print and rejoiced over his poems no less than the others. There were times when he could not wait for the evening mail that brought his copy and instead would buy one half an hour earlier in the street, and shamelessly, scarcely having left the newsstand, catching the reddish light near the fruitstands where mountains of oranges glowed in the blue of early twilight, would unfold the paper—and sometimes find nothing: something else had squeezed it out; but if he found it, he would gather the pages more conveniently and, resuming his progress along the sidewalk, read his poem over several times, varying the inner intonations; that is, imagining one by one the various mental ways the poem would be read, perhaps was now being read, by those whose opinion he considered important—and with each of these different incarnations he would almost physically feel a change in the color of his eyes, and also in the color behind his eyes, and in the taste in his mouth, and the more he liked the chef-d’oeuvre du jour, the more perfectly and succulently he could read it through the eyes of others.