The Gift (8 page)

These two stood for a long time waiting for the shot. They had no cigarettes with them, but Rudolf was clever enough to feel in the pocket of Yasha’s raincoat where he found an unopened pack. The sky had grown overcast, the pines were rustling cautiously and it seemed from below that their blind branches were groping for something. High above and fabulously fast, their long necks extended, two wild ducks flew past, one slightly behind the other. Afterwards Yasha’s mother used to show the visiting card, D
IPL
. I
NG
. J
ULIUS
P
OSNER
, on the reverse of which Yasha had written in pencil,
Mummy, Daddy, I am still alive, I am very scared, forgive me
. Finally Rudolf could stand it no longer and climbed down to see what was the matter with him. Yasha was sitting on a log among last year’s still unanswered leaves, but he did not turn; he only said: “I’ll be ready in a minute.” There was something tense about his back, as if he were controlling an acute pain. Rudolf rejoined Olya, but no sooner had he reached her than both of them heard the dull pop of the shot, while in Yasha’s room life went on for a few more hours as if nothing had happened—the cast-off banana skin on a plate, the volume of Annenski’s poems
The Cypress Chest
and that of Khodasevich’s
The Heavy Lyre
on the chair by the bed, the ping-pong bat on the couch; he was killed outright; to revive him, however, Rudolf and Olya dragged him through the bushes to the reeds and there desperately sprinkled him and rubbed him, so that he was all smudged with earth, blood and silt when the police later found the body. Then the two began calling for help, but nobody came: architect Ferdinand Stockschmeisser had long since left with his wet setter.

They returned to the place where they had waited for the shot and here dusk begins to fall on the story. The one clear thing is that Rudolf, whether because a certain terrestrial vacancy had opened for him or because he was simply a coward, lost all desire to shoot himself, and Olya, even if she had persisted in her intention, could do nothing since he had immediately hidden the revolver. In the woods, where it had grown cold and dark, with a blind drizzle crepitating around, they remained for a long time
until a stupidly late hour. Rumor has it that it was then that they became lovers, but this would be really too flat. At about midnight, at the corner of a street poetically named Lilac Lane, a police sergeant listened skeptically to their horrible, voluble tale. There is a kind of hysterical state that assumes the semblance of childish swaggering.

If Mme. Chernyshevski had met Olya immediately after the event then perhaps some kind of sentimental sense would have come of it for them both. Unfortunately the meeting occurred only several months later, because, in the first place, Olya went away, and in the second, Mme. Chernyshevski’s grief did not immediately take on that industrious, and even enraptured, form that Fyodor found when he came on the scene. Olya was in a certain sense unlucky: it so happened that Olya had come back for her stepbrother’s engagement party and the house was full of guests; and when Mme. Chernyshevski arrived without warning, beneath a heavy mourning veil, with a choice selection from her sorrowful archives (photographs, letters) in her handbag, all prepared for the rapture of shared tears, she was met by a morosely polite, morosely impatient young woman in a semitransparent dress, with blood-red lips and a fat white-powdered nose, and one could hear from the little side room where she took her guest the wailing of a phonograph, and of course no communion of souls came of it. “All I did was to take a long look at her,” recounted Mme. Chernyshevski—after which she carefully snipped off, on many little snapshots, both Olya and Rudolf; the latter, however, had visited her at once and had rolled at her feet and pounded his head on the soft corner of the divan, and then had walked off with his wonderful bouncy stride down the Kurfürstendamm, which glistened after a spring shower.

Yasha’s death had its most painful effect on his father. He had to spend the whole summer in a sanatorium and he never really recovered: the partition dividing the room temperature of reason from the infinitely ugly, cold ghostly world into which Yasha had passed suddenly crumbled, and to restore it was impossible, so that the gap had to be draped in makeshift fashion and one tried not to look at the stirring folds. Ever since that day the other world began
to seep into his life; but there was no way of resolving this constant intercourse with Yasha’s spirit and he finally told his wife about it, in the vain hope that he might thus render harmless a phantom that secrecy had nurtured: the secrecy must have grown back, for soon he again had to seek the tedious, essentially mortal, glass-and-rubber help of doctors. Thus he lived only half in our world, at which he grasped the more greedily and desperately, and when one listened to his sprightly speech and looked at his regular features, it was difficult to imagine the unearthly experiences of this healthy-looking, plump little man, with his bald spot and the thin hair on either side, but then all the more strange was the convulsion that suddenly disfigured him; also the fact that sometimes for weeks on end he wore a gray cloth glove on his right hand (he suffered from eczema) hinted eerily at a mystery, as if, repelled by life’s unclean touch, or burned by another life, he was reserving his bare handclasp for inhuman, hardly imaginable meetings. Meanwhile nothing stopped with Yasha’s death and many interesting things were happening: in Russia one observed the spread of abortions and the revival of summer houses; in England there were strikes of some kind or other; Lenin met a sloppy end; Duse, Puccini and Anatole France died; Mallory and Irvine perished near the summit of Everest; and old Prince Dolgorukiy, in shoes of plaited leather thong, secretly visited Russia to see again the buckwheat in bloom; while in Berlin three-wheeled taxis appeared, only to disappear again shortly afterwards, and the first dirigible slowly stepped across the ocean and papers spoke a great deal about Coué, Chang Tso-lin and Tutankhamen, and one Sunday a young Berlin merchant with his locksmith friend set out on a trip to the country in a large, four-wheel cart with only the slightest smell of blood, rented from his neighbor, a butcher: two fat servant maids and the merchant’s two small children sat in plush chairs set on the wagon, the children cried, the merchant and his pal guzzled beer and drove the horses hard, the weather was beautiful so that, in their high spirits, they deliberately hit a cleverly cornered cyclist, beat him up violently in the ditch, tore his portfolio to bits (he was an artist) and rolled on, very happy, and when he had come to his senses, the artist overtook them in a
tavern garden, but the policeman who tried to establish their identities was also beaten up, after which they very happily rolled on along the highway, and when they saw that police motorcycles were gaining on them, they opened fire with revolvers and in the ensuing gunplay a bullet killed the merry merchant’s three-year-old son.

“Listen, we ought to change the subject,” Mme. Chernyshevski said softly. “I am afraid to have my husband listen to things like that. You do have a new poem, don’t you? Fyodor Konstantinovich is going to read us a poem,” she proclaimed loudly, but Vasiliev, half reclining, having in one hand a monumental cigarette holder with a nicotineless cigarette, and with the other absentmindedly tousling the doll, which was executing all kinds of emotional evolutions in his lap, nevertheless went on for a good half minute about how that gay incident had been investigated in court the previous day.

“I haven’t got anything with me, and I don’t know anything by heart,” Fyodor repeated several times.

Chernyshevski quickly turned to him and put his small hairy hand on his sleeve. “I have a feeling you are still cross with me. You’re not? Word of honor? I realized afterwards what a cruel joke it was. You don’t look well. How are things going? You never really did explain to me why you changed your lodgings.”

He explained: at the boardinghouse where he had lived for a year and a half people he knew had suddenly moved in, very kind, innocently intrusive bores who kept “dropping in for a chat.” Their room was near his and before long Fyodor had the feeling that the wall between them had crumbled and he was defenseless. Of course, in the case of Yasha’s father no change of residence could possibly have helped.

Vasiliev had got up. Whistling softly, his huge back bent slightly, he was examining the books on the shelves; he pulled one out, opened it, stopped whistling and, wheezing instead, began reading the first page to himself. His place on the couch was taken by Lyubov Markovna and her large purse: now that her tired eyes were naked, her expression grew softer, as with a seldom humored hand she stroked the golden back of Tamara’s head.

“Yes!” Vasiliev said abruptly, slamming the book shut and cramming it into the first available opening. “All things in the world must end, comrades. As for me, I must get up at seven tomorrow.”

Engineer Kern took a look at his wrist.

“Oh, stay a while longer,” said Mme. Chernyshevski, her blue eyes beaming imploringly, and turning to the engineer, who had risen and stood behind his empty chair which he slightly moved to one side (thus a Russian merchant who has drunk his fill of tea might turn his glass upside down on its saucer), she started talking about the lecture he had agreed to deliver at the next Saturday meeting—its title was “Alexander Blok in the War.”

“I put ‘Blok and War’ on the announcements by mistake,” she said, “but it doesn’t make any difference, does it?”

“On the contrary, it certainly does make a difference,” replied Kern with a smile on his thin lips, but with murder behind his thick eyeglasses, without unclasping his hands which were joined on his abdomen. “ ‘Blok in the War’ conveys the proper meaning—the personal nature of the speaker’s own observations, while ‘Blok and War,’ if you will excuse me, is philosophy.”

And now they all began gradually to grow less distinct, to ripple with the random agitation of a fog, and then to vanish altogether; their outlines, weaving in figure-eight patterns, were evaporating, though here and there a bright point still glowed—the cordial glint in an eye, the gleam of a bracelet; there was also a momentary reappearance of the intently furrowed forehead of Vasiliev, who was shaking somebody’s already dissolving hand, and at the very last there was a floating glimpse of pistachio-colored straw, decorated with silk roses (Lyubov Markovna’s hat), and now everything was gone, and into the smoky parlor, without a sound, in his bedroom slippers, came Yasha, thinking that his father had already retired, and with a magic tinkling, by the light of crimson lanterns, dim beings were repairing the pavement at the corner of the square, and Fyodor, who did not have money for the streetcar, was walking home. He had forgotten to borrow from the Chernyshevskis those two or three marks that would have tided him over until he got paid for a lesson or translation: this thought alone would not have disturbed him had he not been possessed
by a general feeling of wretchedness consisting of that rotten disappointment (he had imagined so vividly the success of his book), and a chill leak in his left shoe, and fear of the imminent night in a new place. He was tired, he was dissatisfied with himself for wasting the tender beginning of the night, and he was tormented by the feeling that there was some line of thought he had not pursued to its conclusion that day and now could never finish.

He was walking along streets that had already long since insinuated themselves into his acquaintance—and as if that were not enough, they expected affection; they had even purchased in advance, in his future memories, space next to St. Petersburg, an adjacent grave; he walked along these dark, glossy streets and the blind houses retreated, backing or sidling into the brown sky of the Berlin night, which, nevertheless, had its soft spots here and there, spots that would melt under one’s gaze, allowing it to obtain a few stars. Here at last is the square where we dined and the tall brick church and the still quite transparent poplar, resembling the nervous system of a giant; here, also, is the public toilet, reminiscent of Baba Yaga’s gingerbread cottage. In the gloom of the small public garden crossed obliquely by the faint light of a streetlamp, the beautiful girl who for the last eight years had kept refusing to be incarnated (so vivid was the memory of his first love), was sitting on a cinder-gray bench, but when he got closer he saw that only the bent shadow of the poplar trunk was sitting there. He turned into his street, plunging in it as in cold water—he was so loath to go back, such melancholy was promised him by that room, that malevolent wardrobe, that daybed. He located his front door (disguised by darkness) and pulled out his keys. None of them would open the door.

“What’s this …” he muttered crossly, looking at the key bit, and then furiously began jamming it in again. “What the hell!” he exclaimed and retreated one step in order to throw back his head and make out the house number. Yes, it was the right house. He was just about to bend over the lock once more when a sudden truth dawned upon him: these were, of course, the boardinghouse keys, which he had carried away in his raincoat pocket by mistake
when he moved today, and the new ones must have remained in the room that he now wanted to get into much more than a moment ago.

In those days Berlin janitors were for the most part opulent bullies who had corpulent wives and belonged, out of petty bourgeois considerations, to the Communist Party. White Russian tenants quailed before them: accustomed to subjection, we everywhere appoint over ourselves the shadow of supervision. Fyodor understood perfectly well how stupid it was to be afraid of an old fool with a bobbing Adam’s apple, but still he could not bring himself to wake him up after midnight, to summon him up out of his giant featherbed, to perform the act of pushing the button (even though it was more than likely that no one would answer, squeeze as he might); he could not bring himself to do it, especially because he did not have that ten-pfennig coin without which it was unthinkable to walk past the palm, grimly cupped at hip level, confident of receiving its tribute.