Vladimir Nabokov - The Gift

As he walked now across the park with Shirin, Fyodor derived disinterested pleasure from the amusing thought that he had for companion a deaf and blind man with blocked nostrils who regarded this state with complete indifference, although he was not averse at times to sighing naively about the intellectual’s alienation from nature: recently Lishnevski had related that Shirin had arranged to meet him about some business in the Zoological Garden and when after an hour’s conversation Lishnevski had casually drawn his attention to a hyena in its cage, it transpired that Shirin had hardly realized that one keeps animals in a zoological garden, and glancing briefly at the cage had remarked automatically: “Yes, the likes of us don’t know much about the animal world,” and immediately continued discussing that which particularly disturbed him in life: the activities and composition of the Committee of the Society of Russian Writers in Germany. And now he was in an extreme degree of agitation since “a certain event had come to a head.”

Chairman of the Committee was Georgiy Ivanovich Vasiliev, and for this of course there were good reasons: his pre-Soviet reputation, his many years of editorial activity, and most important—that inexorable almost awesome honesty for which his name was famous. On the other hand, his bad temper, polemical harshness, and (despite great public experience) complete ignorance of people, not only did not harm this honesty but on the contrary imparted a certain tang to it. Shirin’s dissatisfaction was directed not against him but against the five remaining members of the Committee, first because not one of them (as two-thirds, incidentally, of the whole membership of the society) was a professional writer, and secondly because three of them (including the treasurer and the vice-president) were—if not scoundrels as the partial Shirin maintained—then at least shade-lovers in their bashful but deft activities. For some time past now a rather comical (in Fyodor’s opinion) and absolutely outrageous (in Shirin’s terminology) affair had been going on with the Union’s funds. Every time a member asked for a loan or a grant (the difference between which was about the same as that between a ninety-nine-year lease and life ownership) one had to track down these funds which at the least attempt to catch up with them became amazingly fluid and ethereal, as if they were always situated equidistantly between three points represented by the treasurer and two members of the Committee. The chase was complicated by the fact that for a long time now Vasiliev had not been on speaking terms with these three members, refusing even to communicate with them in writing, and in recent times had been dispensing loans and grants out of his own pocket, leaving others to get the money from the Union to repay him. In the end the money would be extracted in dribs and drabs, but then it usually turned out that the treasurer had borrowed it from an outsider, so that transactions never caused any change in the phantasmal state of the exchequer. Lately members of the Society who appealed particularly often for aid had begun to grow visibly nervous. A general meeting had been called for next month and Shirin had prepared for it a plan of resolute action.

“There was a time,” he said, striding down a path in the park with Fyodor and automatically following its cunningly unobstrusive convolutions, “there was a time when all the people who went on the Committee of our Union were highly respectable, like Podtyagin, Ivan Luzhin, Zilanov, but some died and others are in Paris. Somehow Gurman oozed through into it and then gradually pulled his pals in. For this trio the passive participation of the extremely decent—I’m saying nothing—but completely inert Kern and Goryainov is a convenient cover, a kind of camouflage. And Gurman’s strained relations with Georgiy Ivanovich is a guarantee of inactivity on his part also. The ones to blame for all this are us, the members of the Union. If it were not for our idleness, carelessness, lack of organization, indifferent attitude to the Union and flagrant impracticality in social work it would never have happened that Gurman and his chums from year to year elected either themselves or else people congenial to them. It is time to put an end to this. Their list as always will be circulated at the coming elections… But we will then put out our own, one hundred percent professional: president—Vasiliev, vice-president—Getz, members of the board: Lishnevski, Shahmatov, Vladimirov, you and I—and then we’ll reconstitute the Inspection Committee, the more so since Belenki and Chernyshevski have dropped out.”

“Oh no, please,” said Fyodor (admiring in passing Shirin’s definition of death), “don’t count on me. I never went and never will go on any committee.”

“Stop it!” exclaimed Shirin, frowning. “That’s not fair.”

“On the contrary, very fair. And anyway—if I am a member of the Union it’s only out of absentmindedness. To tell the truth, Koncheyev is right to stand aside from all this.”

“Koncheyev!” said Shirin angrily. “Koncheyev is an absolutely useless handicraftsman working on his own, and is completely devoid of any general interests. But you ought to be interested in the fate of the Union if only because you—excuse my directness—borrow money from it.”

“That’s just it. You can see for yourself that if I go on the Committee I shan’t possibly be able to give handouts to myself.”

“Bosh. Why not? It’s a completely legal procedure. You will simply get up and go to the lavatory—and so become for a moment, so to speak, an ordinary member, while your colleagues discuss your request. All these are empty excuses that you’ve just thought up.”

“How’s your new novel?” asked Fyodor. “Is it nearly finished?”

“We’re not talking about my novel now. I ask you very seriously to give your assent. We need young blood. Lishnevski and I have given much thought to this list.”

“Under no circumstances,” said Fyodor. “I don’t want to play the fool.”

“Well, if you call your public duty playing the fool …”

“If I go on the Committee I shall certainly be playing the fool, so I am refusing precisely out of respect for duty.”

“Very sad,” said Shirin. “Will we really have to take Rostislav Strannyy instead of you?”

“Of course! Wonderful! I adore Rostislav.”

“Actually I had reserved him for the Inspection Committee. There’s also Busch, of course… But do think it over, please. It’s not a trifling matter. We shall have a regular battle with these gangsters. I am preparing a speech that will really make them sit up. Think it over, do, you still have a whole month.”

During that month Fyodor’s book came out and two or three notices had had time to appear, so that he set off for the general meeting with the pleasant feeling that he would find more than one enemy reader there. It took place as usual in the upper premises of a large café, and when he arrived everybody was already there. A phenomenally dexterous waiter with darting eyes was serving beer and coffee. The members of the Society were seated at little tables. The creative writers formed a close-knit group, and one could already hear the energetic “psst, psst” of Shahmatov, who had been served the wrong order. In the back behind a long table sat the Committee: the bulky, extremely gloomy Vasiliev, with Goryainov and engineer Kern on his right, and the three others on his left. Kern, whose main interest was turbines but who had once been on friendly terms with Alexander Blok, and the former official of a former government department, Goryainov, who could recite marvelously “Woe from Wit” as well as Ivan the Terrible’s dialogue with the Lithuanian ambassador (when he used to do a splendid imitation of a Polish accent), bore themselves with quiet distinction: they had betrayed long ago their three unrighteous colleagues. Of these, Gurman was a fat man with a bald head half occupied by a coffee-colored birthmark, massive sloping shoulders, and a disdainfully offended expression on his thick, purplish lips. His relationship to literature was limited to a brief and entirely commercial connection with some German publisher of technical guides; the principal theme of his personality, the pith of his existence, was speculation—he was particularly keen on Soviet bills of exchange. Next to him sat a small but sturdily resilient barrister, with a jutting jaw, a rapacious gleam in his right eye (the left one was half-closed by nature), and a whole store of metal in his mouth—an alert, fiery man, something of a swashbuckler in his own way, who was always challenging people to arbitration, and he would talk of this (I called him out, he refused) with the precise severity of a hardened duelist. Gurman’s other friend, loose-fleshed, gray-skinned, languid, wearing horn-rimmed spectacles, his whole aspect resembling a peaceful toad that wants only one thing—to be left in complete peace in a damp place—had somewhen somewhere written notes on economic questions, although the evil-tongued Lishnevski denied him even this, swearing that his sole printed effort was a letter in pre-Revolution days to the editor of an Odessa newspaper in which he had indignantly dissociated himself from a villainous namesake, who subsequently turned out to be his relative, then his double, and finally himself, as if there was in action here the irrevocable law of capillary attraction and fusion.