Vladimir Nabokov - The Gift

Fyodor wandered all around finding no one and nothing. The shirt was frayed and he did not mind losing it, but he was somewhat grieved about the plaid laprobe (brought all the way from Russia) and the good flannel pants quite recently bought. Together with the trousers had gone twenty marks, obtained two days before for at least partial payment of his room. Also gone were a small pencil, a handkerchief, and a bunch of keys. The latter somehow was worst of all. If nobody happened to be at home, which might easily be the case, it would be impossible to get into the apartment.

The edge of a cloud dazzlingly caught fire, and the sun slipped out. It emitted such hot, blissful strength that forgetting his vexation Fyodor lay down on the moss and began to watch the next snowy colossus draw near, eating up the blue as it advanced: the sun slid into it smoothly, its rim of funeral fire quivering and splitting as it glided through the white cumulus—and then, finding a way out, it first threw out three rays and then expanded, filling the eyes with spotted fire, blackballing them (so that no matter where you looked domino patterns glided past)—and as the light got stronger or died away, all the shadows in the forest breathed and did push-ups.

A small incidental relief was supplied by the fact that thanks to the Shchyogolevs’ going away the following day to Denmark there would be an extra set of keys—which meant he could keep quiet about the loss of his bunch. Going away, going away, going away! He imagined what he had constantly been imagining during the past two months-the beginning (tomorrow night!) of his full life with Zina-the release, the slaking- and meanwhile a sun-charged cloud, filling up, growing, with swollen, turquoise veins, with a fiery itch in its thunder-root, rose in all its turgid, unwieldy magnificence and embraced him, the sky and the forest, and to resolve this tension seemed a monstrous joy incapable of being borne by man. A ripple of wind ran over his chest, his excitement slowly subsided, the air grew dark and sultry, it was necessary to hurry home. Once more he searched under the bushes, then shrugged his shoulders, pulled the elastic belt of his trunks tighter—and set out on his way back.

When he left the forest and started to cross a street, the tarry stickiness of the asphalt under his bare foot proved to be a pleasant novelty. It was also interesting to walk on the sidewalk. Dream lightness. An elderly passerby in a black felt hat stopped, looked back after him and made a coarse remark—but immediately, by way of happy compensation, a blind man, sitting with a concertina against a stone wall, mumbled his small request for alms and squeezed out a polygon of music as if there were nothing out of the way (it was odd, though—surely he must have heard that I was barefoot). Two schoolboys shouted at the naked passerby as they rode past clinging to the back of a tram, and then the sparrows returned to the turf between the rails whence they had been frightened by the clattering yellow car. Drops of rain had begun to fall, and it was as if someone were applying a silver coin to different parts of his body. A young policeman detached himself from a newspaper stand and came over to him.

“It’s forbidden to walk about the city like that,” he said, looking Fyodor in the navel.

“Everything’s been stolen,” explained Fyodor briefly.

“That mustn’t happen,” said the policeman.

“Yes, but it happened all the same,” said Fyodor nodding (several people had already stopped by them and were following the dialogue with curiosity).

“Whether you’ve been robbed or not, you can’t go about the streets naked,” said the policeman, growing angry.

“Quite, but I have to get somehow to the taxi stand—see?”

“You can’t in that state.”

“Unfortunately I am unable to turn into smoke or grow a suit.”

“And I’m telling you you can’t walk about like that,” said the policeman. (“Unheard-of shamelessness,” commented someone’s thick voice from the back.)

“In that case,” said Fyodor, “it remains for you to fetch me a taxi while I stand here.”

“Standing in the nude is also impossible,” said the policeman.

“I’ll take off my trunks and imitate a statue,” suggested Fyodor.

The policeman took out his notebook and so fiercely tore the pencil out of the pencil-hold that he dropped it on the sidewalk. Some workman or other servilely picked it up.

“Name and address,” said the policeman, boiling.

“Count Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev,” said Fyodor.

“Stop being funny and tell me your name,” roared the policeman.

Another one came up, with a higher rank, and inquired what the matter was.

“My clothes were stolen in the forest,” said Fyodor patiently and suddenly felt that he was completely wet from the rain. One or two standers-by had run beneath the shelter of an awning and an old woman standing by his elbow put up her umbrella, nearly gouging his eye out.

“Who stole them?” asked the sergeant.

“I don’t know and what’s more, I don’t care,” said Fyodor. “Right now I want to go home and you are detaining me.”

The rain suddenly grew heavier and swept across the asphalt; the whole of its surface seemed to be covered with jumping little candles. The policemen (all matted and blackened by the damp) probably considered the cloudburst to be an element in which bathing trunks were, if not appropriate, then at least permissible. The younger one again tried to obtain Fyodor’s address, but his senior waved his hand, and the two of them, slightly quickening their sedate pace, retreated under the awning of a grocer’s shop. The glistening Fyodor Konstantinovich ran through the noisy splashing of the rain, turned a corner, and shot into an automobile.

Arriving home and telling the driver to wait, he pressed the button which until 8 P.M. automatically opened the front door and hurled himself up the stairs. He was let in by Marianna Nikolavna; the hall was full of people and things: Shchyogolev in his shirt-sleeves, two fellows struggling with a box (in which, it seems, Was the radio), a comely milliner with a hatbox, a coil of wire, a pile of linen from the laundry …

“You’re crazy!” cried Marianna Nikolavna.

“For God’s sake pay the taxi,” said Fyodor, wriggling his cold body through the people and things—and finally, over a barricade of trunks, he crashed his way through to his room.

They had supper all together that evening, and later on were to come the Kasatkins, the Baltic baron, another person or two…. At table Fyodor gave an embellished account of his misadventure, and Shchyogolev laughed heartily, while Marianna Nikolavna wanted to know (not without reason) how much cash there had been in the pants. Zina only shrugged her shoulders and with unusual frankness urged Fyodor to help himself to the vodka, obviously fearing that he had caught a chill.

“Well—our last evening!” said Boris Ivanovich, having laughed to his heart’s content. “May you prosper, signor. Someone told me the other day that you dashed off a pretty nasty paper on Petrashevski. Very laudable. Listen, Mamma, there’s another bottle there, no point in taking it with us, give it to the Kasatkins.”

“… so you’re going to remain an orphan [he continued, starting on the Italian salad and devouring it with the utmost sloppiness]. I don’t think our Zinaida Oscarovna will look after you too well. Eh, princess?”

“… Yes, that’s how it is, my dear chap, one twist of fate, and the king is mate. I never thought that fortune would smile on me—touch wood, touch wood. Why, only last winter I was wondering what to do: tighten my belt or sell Marianna Nikolavna for scrap? You and I had a year and a half of cohabitation, if you’ll excuse the expression, and tomorrow we part—probably forever. Man is fate’s plaything. Happy today, pappy tomorrow.”