Vladimir Nabokov - The Gift

The newspapers diagnosed the still young summer as being exceptionally hot, and indeed there was a long dotted line of beautiful days, interrupted from time to time by the interjection of a thunderstorm. In the morning, while Zina was wilting from the stinking heat in the office (the sweaty armpits of Hamekke’s jacket alone were more than enough… and what about the typists’ necks melting like wax, what about the sticky blackness of carbon paper?), Fyodor would go to spend the whole day in Grunewald, abandoning his lessons and trying not to think of the long-since-due payment for his room. Never before had he got up at seven, it would have seemed monstrous—but now in life’s new light (in which blended somehow the maturing of his gift, a premonition of new labors, and the approach of complete happiness with Zina) he experienced a direct pleasure from the speed and lightness of these early risings, from that burst of motion, from the ideal simplicity of three-second dressing: shirt, trousers and sneakers on bare feet—after which he took a laprobe under his arm, with his swim-trunks wrapped in it, thrust on his way through the hall an orange and a sandwich into his pockets and was already running down the stairs.

A turned-back doormat held the door in a wide-open position while the janitor energetically beat the dust out of another mat by slapping it against the trunk of an innocent lime tree: what have I done to deserve this? The asphalt was still in the dark blue shadow of the houses. On the sidewalk gleamed the first, fresh excrements of a dog. A black hearse, which yesterday had been standing outside a repair shop, rolled cautiously out of a gate and turned down the empty street, and inside it, behind the glass and among artificial white roses, in place of a coffin, lay a bicycle: whose? why? The dairy was already open, but the lazy tobacconist was still asleep. The sun played on various objects along the right side of the street, like a magpie picking out the tiny things that glittered; and at the end of it, where it was crossed by the wide ravine of a railroad, a cloud of locomotive steam suddenly appeared from the right of the bridge, disintegrated against its iron ribs, then immediately loomed white again on the other side and wavily streamed away through the gaps in the trees. Crossing the bridge after this, Fyodor, as usual, was gladdened by the wonderful poetry of railroad banks, by their free and diversified nature: a growth of locusts and sallows, wild grass, bees, butterflies—all this lived in isolation and unconcern in the harsh vicinity of coal dust glistening below between the five streams of rails, and in blissful estrangement from the city coulisses above, from the peeled walls of old houses toasting their tattooed backs in the morning sunshine. Beyond the bridge, near the small public garden, two elderly postal workers, having completed their check of a stamp machine and grown suddenly playful, were stealing up from behind the jasmine, one behind the other, one imitating the other’s gestures, toward a third—who with eyes closed was humbly and briefly relaxing on a bench before his working day—in order to tickle his nose with a flower. Where shall I put all these gifts with which the summer morning rewards me—and only me? Save them up for future books? Use them immediately for a practical handbook: How to Be Happy? Or getting deeper, to the bottom of things: understand what is concealed behind all this, behind the play, the sparkle, the thick, green greasepaint of the foliage? For there really is something, there is something! And one wants to offer thanks but there is no one to thank. The list of donations already made: 10,000 days—from Person Unknown.

He walked farther, past iron railings, past the deep gardens of bankers’ villas with their grotto shadows, boxwood, ivy and lawns pearled with watering—and there among the elms and limes the first pines already appeared, sent out far ahead by the Grunewald pinewoods (or, on the contrary: stragglers behind the regiment?). Whistling loudly and rising (uphill) on the pedals of his three-wheeled bicycle, a baker’s roundsman went by; a water-sprayer crawled slowly by with a wet hissing sound—a whale on wheels generously irrigating the asphalt. Someone with a briefcase slammed a vermilion-painted garden gate and set off for some unknown office. Fyodor emerged on his heels onto the boulevard (still the same Hohenzollerdamm at whose beginning they burned poor Alexander Yakovlevich), and there, its lock flashing, the briefcase ran for a tram. Now it was not far to the forest and he quickened his step, already feeling the sun’s hot mask on his upturned face. The pickets of a fence flicked by, speckling his vision. On yesterday’s vacant lot a small villa was being built, and since the sky was looking in through the gaps of future windows, and since burdocks and sunlight had taken advantage of the slowness of the work to make themselves comfortable within the unfinished white walls, these had acquired the pensive cast of ruins, like the word “sometime,” which serves both the past and the future. Toward Fyodor came a young girl with a bottle of milk; she bore some resemblance to Zina—or, rather, contained a particle of that fascination, both special and vague, which he found in many girls, but with particular fullness in Zina, so that they all possessed some mysterious kinship with Zina, about which he alone knew, although he was completely incapable of formulating the indicia of this kinship (outside of which women evoked painful disgust in him)—and now, as he looked back at her and caught her long familiar, golden, fugitive outline that promptly vanished forever, he felt for a moment the impact of a hopeless desire, whose whole charm and richness was in its unquenchability. Oh trite demon of cheap thrills, do not tempt me with the catchword “my type.” Not that, not that, but something beyond that. Definition is always finite, but I keep straining for the faraway; I search beyond the barricades (of words, of senses, of the world) for infinity, where all, all the lines meet.

At the end of the boulevard the green edge of the pinewood came into sight, with the gaudy portico of a recently constructed pavilion (in whose atrium was to be found an assortment of rest-rooms—men’s, women’s and children’s), through which—according to the scheme of the local Lenôtres—one had to go in order to enter at first a newly laid-out rock garden, with Alpine flora along geometric paths, which served—still according to that same scheme—as a pleasant threshold to the forest. But Fyodor turned to the left, avoiding the threshold: it was nearer that way. The still wild edge of the pinewood stretched endlessly along an avenue for automobiles, but the next step on the part of the city fathers was inevitable: fence the whole of this free access with endless railings, so that the portico became the entrance of necessity (in the most literal, elementary sense). I built this ornamental thing for you but you weren’t attracted; so now if you please: it is ornamental and regimental. But (by a mental jump back again: f3—gl) it could hardly have been better when this forest—now retreated, now crowded around the lake (and like us, in our own departure from hairy ancestors, having kept only a marginal vegetation)—used to stretch to the very heart of the present city, and a noisy, princely rabble galloped among its wilds with horns and hounds and beaters.

The forest as I found it was still alive, rich, full of birds. There occurred orioles, pigeons and jays; a crow flew by, its wings panting: kshoo, kshoo, kshoo; a redheaded woodpecker was rapping against a pine trunk—and sometimes, I presume, imitating its own rap vocally whereupon it came out particularly loud and convincingly (for the female’s benefit); for there is nothing in nature more bewitchingly divine than her ingenious deceptions cropping up in unexpected places: thus a forest grasshopper (starting his little motor but never able to get it going: tsig-tsig-tsig— and breaks off), having jumped and landed, immediately readjusts the position of his body by turning in such a way as to make the direction of his dark stripes coincide with those of the fallen needles (or with their shadows!). But careful: I like to recall what my father wrote: “When closely—no matter how closely—observing events in nature we must, in the very process of observation, beware of letting our reason—that garrulous dragoman who always runs ahead—prompt us with explanations which then begin imperceptibly to influence the very course of observation and distort it: thus the shadow of the instrument falls upon the truth.”