Free The Gift by Vladimir Nabokov Page B

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 beganto 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 atavern 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