The Gift by Vladimir Nabokov Read Free Book Online Page B

went on with the jaunty banter behind which he tried to conceal his mental sickness.
    “Don’t worry, there’ll be reviews,” he said to Fyodor, winking involuntarily. “You can be sure the critics will squeeze out your blackheads.”
    “By the way,” asked his wife, “what do those ‘weavers and wavers’ mean exactly—in the poem about the bicycle?”
    Fyodor explained, relying more on gestures than on words: “You know, when you are learning to ride a bike and you sort of swerve from side to side.”
    “Doubtful expression,” remarked Vasiliev.
    “My favorite is the one about children’s diseases, yes,” said Alexandra Yakovlevna, nodding to herself, “that’s good: Christmastime scarlet fever and Eastertime diphtheria.”
    “Why not the other way around?” inquired Tamara.
    Oh, how the boy had loved poetry! The glass-doored bookcase in the bedroom was full of his books: Gumilyov and Hérédia, Blok and Rilke—and how much he knew by heart! And the notebooks.… One day she and I will have to sit down and go throughit all. She has the strength to do it, I don’t. Strange how one keeps postponing things. One would think it would be a pleasure—the only, the bitter pleasure—to go through the belongings of the dead, yet his stuff goes on lying there, untouched (the provident laziness of one’s soul?); it is unthinkable that a stranger should touch it, but what a relief it would be if an accidental fire were to destroy that precious little cabinet. Chernyshevski abruptly got up and, as if by chance, moved the chair by the desk in such a way that neither it nor the shadows of the books could serve as a theme for the phantom.
    By then the talk had shifted to some unlamented Soviet politician who had fallen from power after Lenin’s death. “Oh, in the years I knew him he was at the ‘height of glory and good deeds,’ “the journalist Vasiliev was saying, professionally misquoting Pushkin (who has “hope,” not “height”).
    The boy who looked like Fyodor (to whom the Chernyshevskis had become so attached for this very reason) was now by the door, where he paused before leaving the room, half turning toward his father—and, despite his purely imaginary nature, how much more substantial he was than all those sitting in the room! The sofa could be seen through Vasiliev and the pale girl! Kern, the engineer, was represented only by the glint of his pince-nez; so was Lyubov Markovna; and Fyodor himself existed only because of a vague congruity with the deceased—while Yasha was perfectly real and live, and only the instinct of self-preservation prevented one from taking a good look at his features.
    But perhaps, thought Fyodor, perhaps, this is all wrong, perhaps he [Alexander Yakovlevich Chernyshevski] is not imagining his dead son at all right now as I imagine him doing. He may be really occupied with the conversation and if his eyes are wandering it may be only because he has always been fidgety, poor soul. I am unhappy, I am bored, nothing rings true here and I don’t know why I keep sitting here, listening to nonsense.
    However he still continued to sit there and smoke and gently swing the toe of his foot—and while the others talked on and he talked on himself, he tried as he did everywhere and always to imagine the inner, transparent motion of this or that other person.He would carefully seat himself inside the interlocutor as in an armchair, so that the other’s elbows would serve as armrests for him, and his soul would fit snugly into the other’s soul—and then the lighting of the world would suddenly change and for a minute he would actually become Alexander Chernyshevski, or Lyubov Markovna, or Vasiliev. Sometimes a sporting excitement would be added to the seltzerlike effervescence of the transformation, and he felt flattered when a chance word aptly confirmed the train of thought he was divining in the other. He, to whom so-called politics (that ridiculous sequence of pacts,