Vladimir Nabokov - The Gift

Farther on, a bog orchis bloomed unceremoniously in a patch of marshy ground, behind which he had to cross a back road, and off to the right a white wicket gate gleamed: the entrance to the park. Trimmed with ferns outside, luxuriantly lined with jasmine and honeysuckle inside, in places darkened by fir needles, in others lightened by birch leaves, this huge, dense and multipathed park stood poised in an equilibrium of sun and shadow, which formed from night to night a variable, but in its variability a uniquely characteristic harmony. If circles of warm light palpitated underfoot in the avenue, then a thick velvet stripe was sure to stretch across in the distance, behind it again came that tawny sieve, while further, at the bottom, there deepened a rich blackness that, transferred to paper, would satisfy the water colorist only as long as the paint remained wet, so that he would have to put on layer after layer to retain its beauty—which would immediately fade. All paths led to the house, but geometry notwithstanding, it seemed the quickest way was not by the straight avenue, slim and sleek with a sensitive shadow (rising like a blind woman to meet you and touch your face) and with a burst of emerald sunlight at the very end, but by any of its tortuous and unweeded neighbors. He walked along his favorite one toward the still invisible house, past the bench on which according to established tradition his parents used to sit on the eve of his father’s regular departures on his travels: Father, knees apart, twirling his spectacles or a carnation in his hands, had his head lowered, with a boater tipped onto the back of it and with a taciturn almost mocking smile around his puckered eyes and in the soft corners of his mouth, somewhere in the very roots of his trimmed beard; and Mother was telling him something, from the side, from below, from beneath her large, trembling white hat; or was pressing out crunchy little holes in the dumb sand with the tip of her parasol. He walked past a boulder with rowan saplings clambering onto it (one had turned to offer a hand to the younger), past a small grass-grown plat which had been a pond in Grandfather’s time and past some shortish fir trees which used to become quite round in winter under their burden of snow: the snow used to fall straight and slow, it could fall like that for three days, five months, nine years—and already, ahead, in a clear space traversed by white specks, one glimpsed a dim yellow blotch approaching, which suddenly came into focus, shuddered, thickened and turned into a tramcar, and the wet snow drifted slantingly, plastering over the left face of a pillar of glass, the tram stop, while the asphalt remained black and bare, as if incapable by nature of accepting anything white, and among the signs over chemists’ shops, stationers’ and grocers’, which swam before the eyes and, at first, were even incomprehensible, only one could still appear to be written in Russian: Kakao. Meanwhile, around him everything that had just been imagined with such pictorial clarity (which in itself was suspicious, like the vividness of dreams at the wrong time of day or after a soporific) paled, corroded, disintegrated, and if one looked around, then (as in a fairy tale the stairs disappear behind the back of whoever is mounting them) everything collapsed and disappeared, a farewell configuration of trees, standing like people come to see someone off and already swept away, a scrap of rainbow faded in the wash, the path, of which there remained only the gesture of a turn, a butterfly on a pin with only three wings and no abdomen, a carnation in the sand, by the shade of the bench, the very last most persistent odds and ends, and in another moment all this yielded Fyodor without a struggle to his present, and straight out of his reminiscence (swift and senseless, visiting him like an attack of a fatal illness at any hour, in any place), straight from the hothouse paradise of the past, he stepped onto a Berlin tramcar.

He was going to a lesson, was late as usual, and as usual there grew in him a vague, evil, heavy hatred for the clumsy sluggishness of this least gifted of all methods of transport, for the hopelessly familiar, hopelessly ugly streets going by the wet window, and most of all for the feet, sides and necks of the native passengers. His reason knew that they could also include genuine, completely human individuals with unselfish passions, pure sorrows, even with memories shining through life, but for some reason he got the impression that all these cold, slippery eyes, looking at him as if he were carrying an illegal treasure (which his gift was, essentially), belonged only to malicious hags and crooked hucksters. The Russian conviction that the German is in small numbers vulgar and in large numbers—unbearably vulgar was, he knew, a conviction unworthy of an artist; but nonetheless he was seized with a trembling, and only the gloomy conductor with hunted eyes and a plaster on his finger, eternally and painfully seeking equilibrium and room to pass amidst the convulsive jolts of the car and the cattle-like crowding of standing passengers, seemed outwardly, if not a human being, then at least a poor relation to a human being. At the second stop a lean man in a short coat with a fox-fur collar, wearing a green hat and frayed spats, sat down in front of Fyodor. In settling down he bumped him with his knee and with the corner of a fat briefcase with a leather handle, and this trivial thing turned his irritation into a kind of pure fury, so that, staring fixedly at the sitter, reading his features, he instantly concentrated on him all his sinful hatred (for this poor, pitiful, expiring nation) and knew precisely why he hated him: for that low forehead, for those pale eyes; for Vollmilch and Extra-stark , implying the lawful existence of the diluted and the artificial; for the Punchinello-like system of gestures (threatening children not as we do—with an upright finger, a standing reminder of Divine Judgment—but with a horizontal digit imitating a waving stick); for a love of fences, rows, mediocrity; for the cult of the office; for the fact that if you listen to his inner voice (or to any conversation on the street) you will inevitably hear figures, money; for the lavatory humor and crude laughter; for the fatness of the backsides of both sexes, even if the rest of the subject is not fat; for the lack of fastidiousness; for the visibility of cleanliness—the gleam of saucepan bottoms in the kitchen and the barbaric filth of the bathrooms; for the weakness for dirty little tricks, for taking pains with dirty tricks, for the abominable object stuck carefully on the railings of the public gardens; for someone else’s live cat, pierced through with wire as revenge on a neighbor, and the wire cleverly twisted at one end; for oruelty in everything, self-satisfied, taken for granted; for the unexpected, rapturous helpfulness with which five passersby help you to pick up some dropped farthings; for…. Thus he threaded the points of his biased indictment, looking at the man who sat opposite him—until the latter took a copy of Vasiliev’s newspaper from his pocket and coughed unconcernedly with a Russian intonation.

That’s wonderful, thought Fyodor, almost smiling with delight. How clever, how gracefully sly and how essentially good life is! Now he made out in the newspaper reader’s features such a compatriotic softness—in the corners of the eyes, large nostrils, a Russian-cut mustache—that it became at once both funny and incomprehensible how anyone could have been deceived. His thoughts were cheered by this unexpected respite and had already taken a different turn. The pupil he was visiting was a scantily educated but inquisitive old Jew who the previous year had conceived a sudden desire to learn how to “chat in French,” which seemed to the old man both more attainable and more becoming to his years, character, and experience of life than the dry study of the grammar of a language. Invariably at the beginning of the lesson, groaning and mixing a multitude of Russian and German words with a pinch of French, he described his exhaustion after the day’s work (he was manager of a sizable paper factory), and went from these lengthy complaints to a discussion—in French!—landing immediately up to the ears in hopeless darkness, of international politics, and with this demanded miracles: that all this wild, viscous and ponderous stuff, comparable to the transportation of stones over a washed-out road, should turn suddenly into filigreed speech. Entirely lacking in the ability to remember words (and liking to talk of this not as a shortcoming but as an interesting characteristic of his nature), he not only made no progress but even managed in a year of studying to forget those few French phrases with which Fyodor had found him, and on the basis of which the old man had thought to construct in three or four evenings his own animated, light, portable Paris. Alas, the time passed fruitlessly, proving the futility of the effort and the impossibility of the dream—and then the instructor turned out to be inexperienced, completely lost when the unfortunate factory manager suddenly needed exact information (what’s “dandy roll” in French?) which, out of delicacy, the questioner immediately renounced, and both were momentarily embarrassed, like an innocent youth and maiden in some old idyll who inadvertently touch one another. It gradually became unendurable. Since the pupil referred more and more despondently to the tiredness of his brain and more and more often postponed the lessons (his secretary’s heavenly voice on the telephone was the melody of happiness!), it seemed to Fyodor that the latter had finally become convinced of his teacher’s ineptitude, but that he was prolonging the mutual torment out of pity for his worn trousers, and would continue to do so to the grave.