The Gift

Chapter Two

THE rain still fell lightly, but with the elusive suddenness of an angel, a rainbow had already appeared. In languorous self-wonder, pinkish-green with a purplish suffusion along its inner edge, it hung suspended over the reaped field, above and before a distant wood, one tremulous portion of which showed through it. Stray arrows of rain that had lost both rhythm and weight and the ability to make any sound, flashed at random, this way and that, in the sun. Up the rain-washed sky, from behind a raven cloud, a cloud of ravishing whiteness was extricating itself and shining with all the detail of a monstrously complicated molding.

“Well, well, it’s over,” he said in a low voice and emerged from under the shelter of aspens that crowded where the greasy, clayey zemskaya (rural district) road—and what a bump in this designation!—descended into a hollow, gathering there all its ruts into an oblong pit, full to the brim with thick café crème.

My darling! Pattern of Elysian hues! Once in Ordos my father, climbing a hill after a storm, inadvertently entered the base of a rainbow—the rarest occurrence!—and found himself in colored air, in a play of light as if in paradise. He took one more step—and left paradise.

The rainbow was already fading. The rain had quite stopped, it was scorching hot, a horsefly with satiny eyes settled on his sleeve. A cuckoo began to call in a copse, listlessly, almost questioningly: the sound swelled like a cupule, and again, like a cupule, unable to find a solution. The poor, fat bird probably flew further away, for everything was repeated from the beginning in the manner of a reduced reflection (it sought, who knows, a place for the best, the saddest effect). A huge butterfly, flat in flight, bluish-black with a white band, described a supernaturally smooth arc, settled on the damp earth, closed its wings and with that disappeared. This is the kind that now and then a panting peasant lad brings one, cramming it with both hands into his cap. This is the kind that soars up from under the mincing hooves of the doctor’s well-behaved little pony, when the doctor, holding the almost superflous reins in his lap or else simply tying them to the front board, pensively drives along the shady road to the hospital. But on occasion you find four black-and-white wings with brick-colored undersides scattered like playing cards over a forest footpath: the rest, eaten by an unknown bird.

He jumped a puddle where two dung-beetles had fastened onto a straw, getting in each other’s way, and printed his sole on the edge of the road: a highly significant footprint, ever looking upward and ever seeing him who has vanished. Walking through a field, alone, beneath the magnificently rushing clouds, he remembered how, with his first cigarettes in his first cigarette case, he had approached an old reaper here and asked for a light; the peasant had taken out a box from his gaunt breast and given it to him unsmilingly, but the wind was blowing, match after match went out before it had hardly flared and after every one he grew more ashamed, while the man watched with a kind of detached curiosity the impatient fingers of the wasteful young squire.

He went deeper into the wood; planks had been laid along the path, black and slimy, with reddish-brown aments and leaves that had stuck to them. Who was this had dropped a russula, breaking open its white fan? In reply came the sound of hallooing: girls were gathering mushrooms and bilberries, the latter seeming so much darker in the basket than on their stalks! Among the birches there was an old acquaintance, with a double trunk, a birch-lyre, and beside it an old post with a board on it; nothing could be made out on it except bullet marks; a Browning had once been fired at it by his English tutor—also Browning—and then Father had taken the pistol, swiftly and dexterously ramming bullets into the clip, and knocked out a smooth K with seven shots.

Farther on, a bog orchis bloomed unceremoniously in a patch of marshy ground, behind which he had to cross a back road, and off to the right a white wicket gate gleamed: the entrance to the park. Trimmed with ferns outside, luxuriantly lined with jasmine and honeysuckle inside, in places darkened by fir needles, in others lightened by birch leaves, this huge, dense and multipathed park stood poised in an equilibrium of sun and shadow, which formed from night to night a variable, but in its variability a uniquely characteristic harmony. If circles of warm light palpitated underfoot in the avenue, then a thick velvet stripe was sure to stretch across in the distance, behind it again came that tawny sieve, while further, at the bottom, there deepened a rich blackness that, transferred to paper, would satisfy the water colorist only as long as the paint remained wet, so that he would have to put on layer after layer to retain its beauty—which would immediately fade. All paths led to the house, but geometry notwithstanding, it seemed the quickest way was not by the straight avenue, slim and sleek with a sensitive shadow (rising like a blind woman to meet you and touch your face) and with a burst of emerald sunlight at the very end, but by any of its tortuous and unweeded neighbors. He walked along his favorite one toward the still invisible house, past the bench on which according to established tradition his parents used to sit on the eve of his father’s regular departures on his travels: Father, knees apart, twirling his spectacles or a carnation in his hands, had his head lowered, with a boater tipped onto the back of it and with a taciturn almost mocking smile around his puckered eyes and in the soft corners of his mouth, somewhere in the very roots of his trimmed beard; and Mother was telling him something, from the side, from below, from beneath her large, trembling white hat; or was pressing out crunchy little holes in the dumb sand with the tip of her parasol. He walked past a boulder with rowan saplings clambering onto it (one had turned to offer a hand to the younger), past a small grass-grown plat which had been a pond in Grandfather’s time and past some shortish fir trees which used to become quite round in winter under their burden of snow: the snow used to fall straight and slow, it could fall like that for three days, five months, nine years—and already, ahead, in a clear space traversed by white specks, one glimpsed a dim yellow blotch approaching, which suddenly came into focus, shuddered, thickened and turned into a tramcar, and the wet snow drifted slantingly, plastering over the left face of a pillar of glass, the tram stop, while the asphalt remained black and bare, as if incapable by nature of accepting anything white, and among the signs over chemists’ shops, stationers’ and grocers’, which swam before the eyes and, at first, were even incomprehensible, only one could still appear to be written in Russian: Kakao. Meanwhile, around him everything that had just been imagined with such pictorial clarity (which in itself was suspicious, like the vividness of dreams at the wrong time of day or after a soporific) paled, corroded, disintegrated, and if one looked around, then (as in a fairy tale the stairs disappear behind the back of whoever is mounting them) everything collapsed and disappeared, a farewell configuration of trees, standing like people come to see someone off and already swept away, a scrap of rainbow faded in the wash, the path, of which there remained only the gesture of a turn, a butterfly on a pin with only three wings and no abdomen, a carnation in the sand, by the shade of the bench, the very last most persistent odds and ends, and in another moment all this yielded Fyodor without a struggle to his present, and straight out of his reminiscence (swift and senseless, visiting him like an attack of a fatal illness at any hour, in any place), straight from the hothouse paradise of the past, he stepped onto a Berlin tramcar.

He was going to a lesson, was late as usual, and as usual there grew in him a vague, evil, heavy hatred for the clumsy sluggishness of this least gifted of all methods of transport, for the hopelessly familiar, hopelessly ugly streets going by the wet window, and most of all for the feet, sides and necks of the native passengers. His reason knew that they could also include genuine, completely human individuals with unselfish passions, pure sorrows, even with memories shining through life, but for some reason he got the impression that all these cold, slippery eyes, looking at him as if he were carrying an illegal treasure (which his gift was, essentially), belonged only to malicious hags and crooked hucksters. The Russian conviction that the German is in small numbers vulgar and in large numbers—unbearably vulgar was, he knew, a conviction unworthy of an artist; but nonetheless he was seized with a trembling, and only the gloomy conductor with hunted eyes and a plaster on his finger, eternally and painfully seeking equilibrium and room to pass amidst the convulsive jolts of the car and the cattle-like crowding of standing passengers, seemed outwardly, if not a human being, then at least a poor relation to a human being. At the second stop a lean man in a short coat with a fox-fur collar, wearing a green hat and frayed spats, sat down in front of Fyodor. In settling down he bumped him with his knee and with the corner of a fat briefcase with a leather handle, and this trivial thing turned his irritation into a kind of pure fury, so that, staring fixedly at the sitter, reading his features, he instantly concentrated on him all his sinful hatred (for this poor, pitiful, expiring nation) and knew precisely why he hated him: for that low forehead, for those pale eyes; for Vollmilch and Extra-stark, implying the lawful existence of the diluted and the artificial; for the Punchinello-like system of gestures (threatening children not as we do—with an upright finger, a standing reminder of Divine Judgment—but with a horizontal digit imitating a waving stick); for a love of fences, rows, mediocrity; for the cult of the office; for the fact that if you listen to his inner voice (or to any conversation on the street) you will inevitably hear figures, money; for the lavatory humor and crude laughter; for the fatness of the backsides of both sexes, even if the rest of the subject is not fat; for the lack of fastidiousness; for the visibility of cleanliness—the gleam of saucepan bottoms in the kitchen and the barbaric filth of the bathrooms; for the weakness for dirty little tricks, for taking pains with dirty tricks, for the abominable object stuck carefully on the railings of the public gardens; for someone else’s live cat, pierced through with wire as revenge on a neighbor, and the wire cleverly twisted at one end; for oruelty in everything, self-satisfied, taken for granted; for the unexpected, rapturous helpfulness with which five passersby help you to pick up some dropped farthings; for…. Thus he threaded the points of his biased indictment, looking at the man who sat opposite him—until the latter took a copy of Vasiliev’s newspaper from his pocket and coughed unconcernedly with a Russian intonation.

That’s wonderful, thought Fyodor, almost smiling with delight. How clever, how gracefully sly and how essentially good life is! Now he made out in the newspaper reader’s features such a compatriotic softness—in the corners of the eyes, large nostrils, a Russian-cut mustache—that it became at once both funny and incomprehensible how anyone could have been deceived. His thoughts were cheered by this unexpected respite and had already taken a different turn. The pupil he was visiting was a scantily educated but inquisitive old Jew who the previous year had conceived a sudden desire to learn how to “chat in French,” which seemed to the old man both more attainable and more becoming to his years, character, and experience of life than the dry study of the grammar of a language. Invariably at the beginning of the lesson, groaning and mixing a multitude of Russian and German words with a pinch of French, he described his exhaustion after the day’s work (he was manager of a sizable paper factory), and went from these lengthy complaints to a discussion—in French!—landing immediately up to the ears in hopeless darkness, of international politics, and with this demanded miracles: that all this wild, viscous and ponderous stuff, comparable to the transportation of stones over a washed-out road, should turn suddenly into filigreed speech. Entirely lacking in the ability to remember words (and liking to talk of this not as a shortcoming but as an interesting characteristic of his nature), he not only made no progress but even managed in a year of studying to forget those few French phrases with which Fyodor had found him, and on the basis of which the old man had thought to construct in three or four evenings his own animated, light, portable Paris. Alas, the time passed fruitlessly, proving the futility of the effort and the impossibility of the dream—and then the instructor turned out to be inexperienced, completely lost when the unfortunate factory manager suddenly needed exact information (what’s “dandy roll” in French?) which, out of delicacy, the questioner immediately renounced, and both were momentarily embarrassed, like an innocent youth and maiden in some old idyll who inadvertently touch one another. It gradually became unendurable. Since the pupil referred more and more despondently to the tiredness of his brain and more and more often postponed the lessons (his secretary’s heavenly voice on the telephone was the melody of happiness!), it seemed to Fyodor that the latter had finally become convinced of his teacher’s ineptitude, but that he was prolonging the mutual torment out of pity for his worn trousers, and would continue to do so to the grave.

And now, sitting in the tramcar, he saw with ineffable vividness how in seven or eight minutes he would enter the familiar study, furnished in Berliner animal luxury, would settle in the deep leather armchair beside the low, metal table with its glass cigarette box opened for him, and its lamp fashioned like a terrestrial globe, would light a cigarette, cross his legs with cheap gaiety and come face to face with the agonized, submissive gaze of his hopeless pupil, would hear so clearly his sigh and the ineradicable “Nu, voui” with which he interlarded his answers; but suddenly the unpleasant feeling of lateness was replaced in Fyodor’s soul by a distinct and somehow outrageously joyful decision not to appear at all for the lesson—to get off at the next stop and return home to his half-read book, to his unworldly cares, to the blissful mist in which his real life floated, to the complex, happy, devout work which had occupied him for about a year already. He knew that today he would receive payment for several lessons, knew that otherwise he would have to smoke and eat again on credit, but he was quite reconciled to this for the sake of that energetic idleness (everything is here, in this combination), for the sake of the lofty truancy he was allowing himself. And he was allowing it not for the first time. Shy and exacting, living always uphill, spending all his strength in pursuit of the innumerable beings that flashed inside him, as if at dawn in a mythological grove, he could no longer force himself to mix with people either for money or for pleasure, and therefore he was poor and solitary. And, as if to spite common fate, it was pleasant to recall how once in the summer he had not gone to a party in a “suburban villa” solely because the Chernyshevskis had warned him that a man would be there who “perhaps could help him”; or how the previous autumn he had not found time to communicate with a divorce bureau which needed a translator—because he was composing a verse drama, because the lawyer promising him this income was importunate and stupid, because, finally, he put it off too long and then was unable to make up his mind.

He worked his way out onto the car’s platform. Just then the wind searched him cruelly after which Fyodor drew the belt of his mackintosh tighter and adjusted his scarf, but the small amount of tram warmth had already been taken away from him. The snow had ceased falling, but where it went no one knew; there remained only a ubiquitous dampness which was evidenced both in the swishing sound of motor tires and in the piglike sharpness of the ear-torturing, ragged squeal of car horns, and in the darkness of the day, shivering with cold, with sadness, with loathing for itself, and in the particular shade of yellow of the already lighted shop windows, in the reflections and refractions, in the liquid lights, in all this sick irretention of electric light. The tram came out on the square and, braking excruciatingly, stopped, but it was only a preliminary stop, because in front, by the stone island crowded with people standing by to board, two other trams had got stuck, both with cars coupled on, and this inert agglomeration was also evidence somehow of the disastrous imperfection of the world in which Fyodor still continued to reside. He could stand it no longer, he jumped out and strode across the slippery square to another tramline on which, by cheating, he could return to his own district on the same ticket—good for one transfer but not at all for a return journey; but the honest, official calculation that a passenger would travel in one direction only was undermined in certain cases by the fact that, knowing the routes, one could turn a straight journey imperceptibly into an arc, bending back to the point of departure. This clever system (pleasant evidence of a certain purely German flaw in the planning of tram routes) was willingly followed by Fyodor; from absentmindedness however, from an incapacity to cherish a material advantage for any length of time, and already thinking of something else, he paid automatically for the new ticket he had intended to save on. And even then the cheat prospered, even then not he but the city transport department proved to be out of pocket, and furthermore for a much, much greater sum (the price of a Nord Express ticket!) than could have been expected: crossing the square and turning into a side street, he walked toward the tram stop through a small, at first glance, thicket of fir trees, gathered here for sale on account of the approach of Christmas; they formed between them a kind of small avenue; swinging his arms as he walked he brushed his fingertips against the wet needles; but soon the tiny avenue broadened out, the sun burst forth and he emerged onto a garden terrace where on the soft red sand one could make out the sigla of a summer day: the imprints of a dog’s paws, the beaded tracks of a wagtail, the Dunlop stripe left by Tanya’s bicycle, dividing into two waves at the turn, and a heel dent where with a light, mute movement containing perhaps a quarter of a pirouette she had slid off it to one side and started walking, keeping hold of the handlebars. An old wooden house in the so-called “abietineous” style, painted a pale green, with like-colored drainpipes, carved designs under the roof and a high stone foundation (where in the gray putty one could fancy one saw the round pink cruppers of walled-up horses), a large, sturdy and extraordinarily expressive house, with balconies on a level with the lime branches, and verandas decorated with precious glass, sailed forward to meet him in a cloud of swallows, with a full spread of awnings, its lightning conductor cleaving through the blue sky and the bright white clouds extending an endless embrace. Sitting on the stone steps of the foremost veranda, illuminated squarely by the sun, are: Father, obviously just back from a swim, turbaned in a shaggy towel so that one cannot see—and how one would like to!—his dark crop, streaked with gray and tapering to a peak on his forehead; Mother, all in white, staring straight in front of her and somehow so youthfully hugging her knees; next to her—Tanya, in an ample blouse, the end of her black braid lying on her collarbone, her smooth parting lowered, holding in her arms a fox terrier whose mouth is creased in a wide smile from the heat; higher up—Yvonna Ivanovna, who for some reason has not come out, her features blurred but her slim waist, her belt and her watch chain clearly visible; to one side, lower down, reclining and resting his head in the lap of the round-faced girl (velvet neck-ribbon, silk bows) who gave Tanya music lessons, his father’s brother, a stout army doctor, a joker and a very handsome man; lower still, two sour little glowering schoolboys, Fyodor’s cousins: one in a school cap, the other without—the one without to be killed seven years later in the battle of Melitopol; at the very bottom, on the sand, in exactly the same pose as his mother—Fyodor himself, as he was then, though he had changed little since that time, white teeth, black brows, short hair, wearing an open shirt. One forgot who had taken it, but this transient, faded and generally insignificant (how many others and better were there) photograph, unsuitable even for copying, had alone been saved by a miracle and had become priceless, reaching Paris among his mother’s belongings and brought by her to Berlin last Christmas; for now, choosing her son a present, she was guided not by what was most costly to get but by what was most difficult to part with.

She had come to him for two weeks, after a three-year separation, and in the first moment when, powdered to a deathly pallor, wearing black gloves and black stockings and an old sealskin coat thrown open, she had descended the iron steps of the coach, glancing with equal quickness first at him and then at what was underfoot, and the next moment, her face twisted with the pain of happiness, was clinging to him, blissfully moaning, kissing him anywhere—ear, neck—it had seemed to him that the beauty of which he had been so proud had faded, but as his vision adjusted itself to the twilight of the present, so different at first from the distantly receding light of memory, he again recognized in her everything that he had loved: the pure outline of her face, narrowing down to the chin, the changeful play of those green, brown, yellow, entrancing eyes under their velvet brows, the long, light stance, the avidity with which she lit a cigarette in the taxi, the attention with which she suddenly looked—unblinded, therefore, by the excitement of the meeting, as any other would have been—at the grotesque scene noticed by both of them: an imperturbable motorcyclist carrying a bust of Wagner in his sidecar; and already by the time they were coming up to the house the light of the past had overtaken the present, had soaked it to saturation point, and everything became the same as it had been in this very Berlin three years previously, as it had once been in Russia, as it had been, and would be, forever.

A spare room was found at Frau Stoboy’s place and there, on the first evening (an opened dressing case, rings taken off and laid on the marble washstand), lying on the sofa and ever so quickly eating raisins, without which she could not pass a single day, she spoke of what she had constantly returned to for almost nine years now, repeating over again—incoherently, gloomily, ashamedly, turning her eyes away, as if confessing to something secret and terrible—that she believed more and more that Fyodor’s father was alive, that her mourning was ridiculous, that the vague news of his death had never been confirmed by anyone, that he was somewhere in Tibet, in China, in captivity, in prison, in some desperate quagmire of troubles and privations, that he was convalescing after some long, long illness—and suddenly, flinging open the door noisily, stamping on the step, he would enter. And to an even greater degree than before these words made Fyodor feel both happier and more frightened. Accustomed willy-nilly to consider his father dead all these years, he sensed something grotesque in the possibility of his return. Was it admissible that life could perform not only miracles, but miracles necessarily deprived (otherwise they would be unbearable) of even the tiniest hint of the supernatural? The miracle of this return would consist in its earthly nature, in its compatibility with reason, in the swift introduction of an incredible event into the accepted and comprehensible linkage of ordinary days; but the more the necessity for such naturalness grew with the years, the more difficult it became for life to meet it, and now what frightened him was not simply the imagining of a ghost, but the imagining of one that would not be frightening. There were days when it seemed to Fyodor that suddenly on the street (in Berlin there are little cul-de-sacs where at dusk the soul seems to dissolve) he would be approached by an old man of seventy, in fairy-tale rags, shrouded to the eyes in beard, who would wink and say, as he had once been wont to: “Hello, Son!” His father often appeared to him in dreams, as if just returned from some monstrous penal servitude, having experienced physical tortures which it was forbidden to mention, now changed into clean linen—it was impossible to think of the body underneath—and with a completely uncharacteristic expression of unpleasant, momentous sullenness, with a sweaty brow and slightly bared teeth, sitting at table in the circle of his hushed family. But when, overcoming his sensation of the spuriousness of the very style foisted on fate, he nevertheless forced himself to imagine the arrival of a live father, aged but undoubtedly his, and the most complete, most convincing possible explanation of his silent absence, he was seized, not by happiness, but by a sickening terror—which, however, immediately disappeared and yielded to a feeling of satisfied harmony when he removed this meeting beyond the boundary of earthly life.

But on the other hand…. It happens that over a long period you are promised a great success, in which from the very start you do not believe, so dissimilar is it from the rest of fate’s offerings, and if from time to time you do think of it, then you do so as it were to indulge your fantasy—but when, at last, on a very ordinary day with a west wind blowing, the news comes—simply, instantaneously and decisively destroying any hope in it—then you are suddenly amazed to find that although you did not believe in it, you had been living with it all this time, not realizing the constant, close presence of the dream, which had long since grown fat and independent, so that now you cannot get it out of your life without making a hole in that life. Thus had Fyodor, in spite of all logic and not daring to envision its realization, lived with the familiar dream of his father’s return, a dream which had mysteriously embellished his life and somehow lifted it above the level of surrounding lives, so that he could see all sorts of distant and interesting things, just as, when a little boy, his father used to lift him by his elbows thus enabling him to see what was interesting over a fence.

After the first evening, when she had renewed her hope and become convinced that the same hope was alive in her son, Elizaveta Pavlovna no longer referred to it in words, but as usual, it was taken for granted in all their conversations, especially since they did not converse much aloud: frequently, after several minutes of animated silence, Fyodor would suddenly notice that the whole time they both knew very well what it was about, this double, almost subgramineal speech which emerged as a single stream, as a word understood to both of them. And sometimes they would play like this: sitting side by side and silently imagining to themselves that each was taking the same Leshino walk, they went out of the park, took the path along the field (there was a river to the left behind the alders), across the shady graveyard where sun-flecked crosses were measuring something terribly large with their arms and where it was somehow awkward to pick the raspberries, across the river, upwards again, through the wood, to another bend of the river, to the Pont des Vaches and farther, through the pines and along the Chemin du Pendu—familiar nicknames, not grating to their Russian ears but thought up when their grandfathers had been children. And suddenly, in the middle of this silent walk being performed by two minds, using according to the rules of the game the rate of a human footstep (although they could have flown over their whole domains in a single instant), both stopped and said where they had got to, and when it turned out, as it often did, that neither one had outpaced the other, having halted in the same coppice, the same smile flashed upon mother and son and shone through their common tear.

Very soon they again got into their inner rhythm of intercourse, for there was little new that they did not know already from letters. She told him in great detail about the recent wedding of Tanya, who had now gone off to Belgium until January with a husband still unknown to Fyodor, an agreeable, quiet, very polite and completely unremarkable gentleman “working in the field of radio”; and that when they returned she would move into a new flat with them in an enormous house near one of the Paris gates: she was glad to be leaving the small hotel with the steep dark staircase, where she had been living with Tanya in a tiny but many-cornered room completely swallowed up by a mirror and visited by bedbugs of various caliber—from transparent pink baby ones to leathery brown fatties—which congregated first behind the wall calendar with a Russian landscape by Levitan on it and then closer to the field of action, in the inside pocket of the torn wallpaper, directly above the double bed; but the pleasant prospect of a new home was not unmixed with dread: she had an antipathy to her son-in-law and there was something forced in Tanya’s brisk, showy happiness—“You see, he’s not quite our set,” she confessed, stressing this with a certain tightening of the jaws and a downward look; but that was not all, and anyway Fyodor had already heard about that other man whom Tanya loved but who did not love her.

They went out quite often; as always Elizaveta Pavlovna seemed to be looking for something, rapidly spanning the world with a skimming glance of her shimmery eyes. The German holiday proved wet, puddles made the sidewalks seem full of holes, the Christmas tree lights burned dully in the windows, and here and there at street corners a commercial Santa Claus in a red stormcoat and with hungry eyes was distributing handbills. In the windows of a department store some villain had had the idea of setting up dummy skiers on artificial snow beneath the Star of Bethlehem. Once, they saw a modest Communist procession walking through the slush—with wet flags—most of the marchers battered by life, some crookbacked, others lame or sickly, a lot of plain-looking women and several sedate petty-bourgeois. Fyodor and his mother went to have a look at the apartment house where the three of them had lived for two years, but the janitor had already changed, the former proprietor had died, strange curtains hung in the familiar windows, and somehow there was nothing their hearts could recognize. They visited a cinema where a Russian film was being shown which conveyed with particular brio the globules of sweat rolling down the glistening faces of the factory workers—while the factory owner smoked a cigar all the time. And of course he took her to see Mme. Chernyshevski.

The introduction was not altogether a success. Mme. Chernyshevski met her guest with a doleful tenderness meant to show that the experience of grief had linked them long and closely; but Elizaveta Pavlovna was most of all interested in what the other woman thought of Fyodor’s verses and in why no one was writing about them. “May I embrace you before you go?” asked Mme. Chernyshevski, preparatorily rising on tiptoe—she was a head shorter than Elizaveta Pavlovna, who bent down toward her with an innocent and radiant smile which quite destroyed the meaning of the embrace. “It’s all right, one must be brave,” said the lady, letting them out onto the stairs and covering her chin with the end of the downy shawl in which she was wrapped. “One must be brave; I’ve learned to be so brave that I could give lessons in endurance, but I think you’ve also come well through this school.”

“You know,” said Elizaveta Pavlovna, stepping lightly but cautiously down the stairs and not turning her lowered head toward her son, “I think I’ll just buy cigarette papers and tobacco, otherwise it comes out so dear,” and immediately she added in the same voice: “Goodness, how sorry I am for her.” And indeed, it was impossible not to pity Mme. Chernyshevski. Her husband had been kept over three months already in an institute for the mentally ailing, in “the semi-loony bin” as he himself playfully expressed it in moments of lucidity. As long ago as October Fyodor had once visited him there. In the sensibly furnished ward sat a fatter, rosier, beautifully shaven and completely insane Chernyshevski, in rubber slippers and a waterproof cloak with a hood. “Why, are you dead?” was the first thing he asked, more discontent than surprised. In his capacity as “Chairman of the Society for Struggle With the Other World” he was continually devising methods to prevent permeation by ghosts (his doctor, employing a new system of “logical connivance,” did not oppose this) and now, probably on the basis of its nonconductive quality in another sphere, he was trying out rubber, but evidently the results achieved so far were mainly negative since, when Fyodor was about to take a chair for himself which was standing to one side, Chernyshevski said irritably: “Leave it alone, you see very well there are two sitting on it already,” and this “two,” and the rustling cloak which plashed up with every movement, and the wordless presence of the attendant, as if this had been a meeting in prison, and the whole of the patient’s conversation seemed to Fyodor an unbearable, caricatured vulgarization of that complex, transparent and still noble though half-insane state of mind in which Chernyshevski had so recently communicated with his lost son. With the broad-comedy inflections he had formerly reserved for jokes—but which he now used in earnest—he launched into extensive lamentations, all for some reason in German, over the fact that people were wasting money to invent antiaircraft guns and poison gases and not caring at all about the conduct of another, million times more important, struggle. Fyodor had a healed-over scrape on the side of his temple—that morning he had knocked it against one of the ribs of a radiator in hastily recovering the top of a toothpaste tube which had rolled underneath it. Suddenly breaking off his speech, Chernyshevski pointed squeamishly and anxiously at his temple. “Was haben Sie da?” he asked, with a grimace of pain, and then smiled unpleasantly, and growing more and more angry and agitated, began to say that you could not get by him—he had recognized right away, he said, a recent suicide. The attendant came up to Fyodor and asked him to leave. And walking through the funereally luxuriant garden, past unctuous beds in which bass-toned, dark crimson dahlias were blooming in blessed sleep and eternal repose, toward the bench where he was awaited by Mme. Chernyshevski (who never went in to her husband but spent whole days in the immediate vicinity of his quarters, preoccupied, brisk, always with packages)—walking over the variegated gravel between myrtle shrubs resembling furniture and taking the visitors he passed for paranoiacs, troubled Fyodor kept pondering over the fact that the misfortune of the Chernyshevskis appeared to be a kind of mocking variation on the theme of his own hope-suffused grief, and only much later did he understand the full refinement of the corollary and all the irreproachable compositional balance with which these collateral sounds had been included in his own life.

Three days before his mother’s departure, in a large hall which was well known to Berlin Russians and which belonged to a society of dentists, judging by the portraits of venerable tooth doctors that looked down from the walls, an open literary evening was held in which Fyodor Konstantinovich also took part. Few people had turned up and it was cold; by the doors the same a thousand times seen representatives of the local Russian intelligentsia stood around smoking, and as usual, catching sight of some familiar, friendly face, Fyodor hurried toward it with sincere pleasure, only to have it replaced by boredom after the first burst of conversation. Elizaveta Pavlovna was joined in the first row by Mme. Chernyshevski; and from the fact that his mother occasionally turned her head this way and that while adjusting her hairdo from behind, Fyodor, hovering about the hall, concluded that she was little interested in the society of her neighbor. At last the program began. First to read was a name writer who in his time had appeared in all the Russian reviews, a gray-haired, clean-shaven old man rather resembling a hoopoe, with eyes which were too good-natured for literature; in a sensibly everyday kind of voice he read a tale of Petersburg life on the eve of the revolution, with an ether-sniffing vamp, chic spies, champagne, Rasputin and apocalyptically apoplectic sunsets over the Neva. After him a certain Kron, writing under the pseudonym of Rostislav Strannyy (Rostislav the Strange), gladdened us with a long story about a romantic adventure in the town of a hundred eyes, beneath skies unknown; for the sake of beauty his epithets were placed after the nouns, his verbs had also flown off somewhere or other and for some reason the word storozhko, “warily,” was repeated about a dozen times. (“She warily let fall a smile”; “The chestnuts broke warily into blossom.”) After the interval poets came thick and fast: a tall youth with a buttonlike face, another, shortish but with a large nose, an elderly lady wearing pince-nez, another, younger, one—and finally Koncheyev, who, in contrast to the triumphant precision and polish of the others, muttered his verses in a low tired voice; but there dwelt independently in them such music, in the seemingly dark verse such a chasm of meaning yawned at one’s feet, so convincing were the sounds and so unexpectedly, out of the very same words every poet was stringing together, there sprang up, played, and slipped away without ever quenching one’s thirst a unique perfection, bearing no resemblance to words and in no need of words, that for the first time that evening the applause was not feigned. Last to appear was Godunov-Cherdyntsev. From the poems written during the summer he read those which Elizaveta Pavlovna liked so much—on Russia:

and on Berlin, beginning with the stanza:

and the one which moved her most of all, although she did not think to connect it with the memory of a young woman, long dead, whom Fyodor had loved when sixteen:

But it was getting late, many people were moving toward the exit, one lady was putting on her coat with her back to the platform, the applause was sparse…. The damp night gleamed black on the street, with a raging wind: never, never will we reach home. But nonetheless a tram came, and hanging on a strap in the gangway over his mother sitting by the window, Fyodor thought with heavy revulsion of the verses he had written that day, of word-fissures, of the leakage of poetry, and at the same time, with proud, joyous energy, with passionate impatience, he was already looking for the creation of something new, something still unknown, genuine, corresponding fully to the gift which he felt like a burden inside himself.

On the eve of her departure they both sat up late in his room, she, in the armchair, easily and skillfully (whereas formerly she could not sew a button on) darning and mending his pitiful things, while he, on the sofa, biting his nails, was reading a thick battered book; earlier, in his youth, he had skipped some of the pages—“Angelo,” “Journey to Arzrum”—but lately it was precisely in these that he had found particular pleasure. He had only just got to the words: “The frontier held something mysterious for me; to travel had been my favorite dream since childhood,” when suddenly he felt a sweet, strong stab from somewhere. Still not understanding, he put the book to one side and slipped blind fingers into a boxful of homemade cigarettes. At that moment his mother said without raising her head: “What did I just remember! Those funny rhymes about butterflies and moths which you and he composed together when we were out walking, you remember. ‘Your blue stripe, Catocalid, shows from under its gray lid.’ ” “Yes,” replied Fyodor, “some were downright epics: ‘A dead leaf is not hoarier than a newborn arborea.’ “ (What a surprise it had been! Father had only just brought back the very first specimen from his travels, having found it during the initial trek through Siberia—he had not even had time to describe it yet—and on the first day after his return, in the Leshino park, two paces from the house, with no thought of lepidoptera, while strolling with his wife and children, throwing a tennis ball for the fox terriers, basking in his return, in the balmy weather and the health and gaiety of his family, but unconsciously noting with the experienced eye of a hunter every insect along his path, he had suddenly pointed out to Fyodor with the tip of his cane a plump reddish-gray Epicnaptera moth, with sinuate margins, of the leaf-mimicking kind, hanging asleep from a stalk under a bush; he had been about to walk on (the members of this genus look very much alike) but then squatted down, wrinkled his forehead, inspected his find and suddenly said in a bright voice: “Well, I’m damned! I need not have gone so far!” “I always said so,” interposed his wife with a laugh. The furry little monster in his hand belonged to the new species he had just brought back—and now it had cropped up here, in the Province of St. Petersburg, whose fauna had been so well investigated! But, as often happens, the momentum of mighty coincidence did not stop there, it was good for one more stage: only a few days later his father learned that this new moth had just been described from St. Petersburg specimens by a fellow scientist, and Fyodor cried all night long: they had beaten Father to it!

And now Elizaveta Pavlovna was about to return to Paris. They stood for a long time on the narrow platform waiting for the train, next to the luggage elevator, while on the other lines the sad city trains stopped for a moment, hastily banging their doors. The Paris express rushed in. His mother boarded and immediately thrust her head through the window, smiling. By the neighboring opulent sleeping car, seeing off an unpretentious old lady, stood a couple: a pale, red-lipped beauty in a black silk coat with a high fur collar, and a famous stunt flyer; everyone was staring at him, at his muffler, at his back, as if expecting to find wings on it.

“I have a suggestion to make,” said his mother gaily as they parted. “I have about seventy marks left which are quite useless to me, and you must eat better. I can’t look at you, you’re so thin. Here, take them.” “Avec joie,” he replied, instantly envisioning a year’s pass to the state library, milk chocolate and some mercenary young German girl whom, in his baser moments, he kept planning to get for himself.

Pensive, abstracted, vaguely tormented by the thought that somehow in his talks with his mother he had left the main thing untold, Fyodor returned home, took off his shoes, broke off the corner of a chocolate bar together with its silver paper, moved the book left open on the sofa closer…. “The harvest rippled, awaiting the sickle.” Again that divine stab! And how it called, how it prompted him, the sentence about the Terek (“In faith, the river was awesome!”) or—even more fitly, more intimately—about the Tartar women: “They were sitting on horseback, swathed in yashmaks: all one could see were their eyes and the heels of their shoes.”

Thus did he hearken to the purest sound from Pushkin’s tuning fork—and he already knew exactly what this sound required of him. Two weeks after his mother’s departure he wrote her about what he had conceived, what he had been helped to conceive by the transparent rhythm of “Arzrum,” and she replied as if she had already known about it:

He continued, however, to wait—the planned work was a wafture of bliss, and he was afraid to spoil that bliss by haste and moreover the complex responsibility of the work frightened him, he was not ready for it yet. Continuing his training program during the whole of spring, he fed on Pushkin, inhaled Pushkin (the reader of Pushkin has the capacity of his lungs enlarged). He studied the accuracy of the words and the absolute purity of their conjunction; he carried the transparency of prose to the limits of blank verse and then mastered it: in this he was served by a living example in the prose of Pushkin’s History of the Pugachyov Rebellion:

To strengthen the muscles of his muse he took on his rambles whole pages of Pugachyov learned by heart as a man using an iron bar instead of a walking stick. Toward him out of a Pushkin tale came Karolina Schmidt, “a girl heavily rouged, of meek and modest appearance,” who acquired the bed in which Schoning died. Beyond Grunewald forest a postmaster who resembled Simeon Vyrin (from another tale) was lighting his pipe by the window, and there also stood pots with balsam flowers. The sky-blue sarafan of the Damsel turned Peasant could be glimpsed among the alder bushes. He was in that state of feeling and mind “when reality, giving way to fancies, blends with them in the nebulous visions of first sleep.”

Pushkin entered his blood. With Pushkin’s voice merged the voice of his father. He kissed Pushkin’s hot little hand, taking it for another, large hand smelling of the breakfast kalach (a blond roll). He remembered that his and Tanya’s nurse hailed from the same place that Pushkin’s Arina came from—namely Suyda, just beyond Gatchina: this had been within an hour’s ride of their area—and she had also spoken “singsong like.” He heard his father on a fresh summer morning as they walked down to the river bathhouse, on whose plank wall shimmered the golden reflection of the water, repeating with classic fervor what he considered to be the most beautiful not only of Pushkin’s lines but of all the verses ever written in the world: “Tut Apollon-ideal, tarn Niobeya-pechal’” (Here is Apollo-ideal, there is Niobe-grief) and the russet wing and mother-of-pearl of a Niobe fritillary flashed over the scabiosas of the riverside meadow, where, during the first days of June, there occurred sparsely the small Black Apollo.

Indefatigably, in ecstasy, he was really preparing his work now (in Berlin with an adjustment of thirteen days it was also the first days of June), collected material, read until dawn, studied maps, wrote letters and met with the necessary people. From Pushkin’s prose he had passed to his life, so that in the beginning the rhythm of Pushkin’s era commingled with the rhythm of his father’s life. Scientific books (with the Berlin Library’s stamp always on the ninety-ninth page), such as the familiar volumes of The Travels of a Naturalist in unfamiliar black and green bindings, lay side by side with the old Russian journals in which he sought Pushkin’s reflected light. There, one day, he stumbled over the remarkable Memoirs of the Past of A. N. Suhoshchokov, in which there were among other things two or three pages concerning his grandfather, Kirill Ilyich (his father had once referred to them—with displeasure), and the fact that the writer of these memoirs mentioned him incidentally in connection with his thoughts on Pushkin now seemed somehow to have particular significance, even though he portrayed Kirill Ilyich as a gay dog and a good-for-nothing.

Suhoshchokov wrote:

I do not think one could find any other poet who peered so often—now in jest, now superstitiously, or with inspired seriousness—into the future. Right to this day there lives in the Province of Kursk, topping the hundred mark, an old man whom I remember as being already elderly, stupid and malicious—but Pushkin is no longer with us. Meeting in the course of my long life with remarkable talents and living through remarkable events, I have often meditated on how he would have reacted to this and that: why, he could have seen the emancipation of the serfs and could have read Anna Karenin!… Returning now to these reveries of mine I recall that once in my youth I had something in the nature of a vision. This psychological episode is closely linked with the recollection of a personage still thriving to this very day, whom I shall call Ch.—I trust he will not blame me for this revival of a distant past. We were acquainted through our families—my grandfather had once been friendly with his father. In 1836, while abroad, this Ch. who was then quite young—barely seventeen—quarreled with his family (and in so doing hastened, so they say, the decease of his sire, a hero of the Napoleonic War), and in the company of some Hamburg merchants sailed nonchalantly off to Boston, from there landing in Texas where he successfully took up cattle breeding. In that manner twenty years passed. The fortune he had made he lost playing écarté on a Mississippi keel-boat, won it back in the gaming houses of New Orleans, blued it all over again, and after one of those scandalously prolonged, noisy, smoky duels on closed premises which were then fashionable in Louisiana—and after many other adventures—he became homesick for Russia where, conveniently, a demesne was awaiting him, and with the same carefree easiness with which he had left it, he returned to Europe. Once, on a winter’s day in 1858, he visited us unexpectedly at our house on the Moyka, in St. Petersburg; Father was away and the guest was received by us youngsters. As we looked at this outlandish fop in his soft black hat and black clothes, the romantic gloom of which caused his silk shirt with its sumptuous pleats, and his blue, lilac and pink waistcoat with diamond buttons to stand out particularly dazzlingly, my brother and I could hardly contain our laughter and decided there and then to take advantage of the fact that during all these years he had heard absolutely nothing of his homeland, as if it had fallen through some trap door, so that now, like a forty-year-old Rip van Winkle waking up in a transformed St. Petersburg, Ch. was hungry for any news, the which we undertook to give him plenty of, mixed with our outrageous fabrications. To the question, for instance, was Pushkin alive and what was he writing, I blasphemously replied, “Why, he came out with a new poem the other day.” That night we took our guest to the theater. It did not turn out too well, however. Instead of treating him to a new Russian comedy we showed him Othello with the famous black tragedian Aldridge. At first our American planter seemed to be highly amused by the appearance of a genuine Negro on the stage. But he remained indifferent to the marvelous power of his acting and was more taken up with examining the audience, especially our St. Petersburg ladies (one of whom he soon afterwards married), who were devoured at that moment with envy for Desdemona.

“Look who’s sitting next to us,” my brother suddenly said to Ch. in a low voice, “There, to our right.”

In the neighboring box there sat an old man…. Of shortish stature, in a worn tailcoat, with a sallow and swarthy complexion, disheveled ashen side-whiskers, and sparse, gray-streaked tousled hair, he was taking a most eccentric delight in the acting of the African: his thick lips twitched, his nostrils were dilated, and at certain bits he even jumped up and down in his seat and banged with delight on the parapet, his rings flashing.

“Who’s that?” asked Ch.

“What, don’t you recognize him? Look closer.”

“I don’t recognize him.”

Then my brother made big eyes and whispered, “Why, that’s Pushkin!”

Ch. looked again… and after a minute became interested by something else. It seems funny now to recall what a strange mood came upon me then: the prank, as happens from time to time, rebounded, and this frivolously summoned ghost did not want to disappear: I was quite incapable of tearing myself away from the neighboring box; I looked at those harsh wrinkles, that broad nose, those large ears… shivers ran down my back, and not all of Othello’s jealousy was able to drag me away. What if this is indeed Pushkin, I mused, Pushkin at sixty, Pushkin spared two decades ago by the bullet of the fatal coxcomb, Pushkin in the rich autumn of his genius…. This is he; this yellow hand grasping those lady’s opera glasses wrote Anchar, Graf Nulin, The Egyptian Nights…. The act finished; applause thundered. Gray-haired Pushkin stood up abruptly, and still smiling, with a bright sparkle in his youthful eyes, quickly left his box.

Suhoshchokov errs in depicting my grandfather as an empty-headed rake. It was simply that the latter’s interests were situated on a different plane from the intellectual habitus of a young dilettante, member of the St. Petersburg literary set which our memoirist was then. Even if Kirill Ilyich had been pretty wild in his youth, once married he not only settled down but also entered government service, simultaneously doubling his inherited fortune by successful operations and later retiring to his country place, where he manifested extraordinary skill in farming, produced a new sort of apple on the side, left a curious “Discours” (the fruit of winter leisure) on the “Equality Before the Law in the Animal Kingdom” plus a proposal for a clever reform under the kind of intricate title that was fashionable then, “Visions of an Egyptian Bureaucrat,” and as an old man accepted an important consular post, in London. He was kind, brave and truthful, and had his quirks and passions—what more could be needed? A tradition has subsisted in the family that, having sworn not to game, he was physically incapable of remaining in a room where there was a pack of cards. An ancient Colt revolver that had served him well and a medallion with the portrait of a mysterious lady attracted indescribably my boyhood dreams. His life, which had retained to the end the freshness of its stormy beginning, ended peacefully. He returned to Russia in 1883, no longer a Louisiana duelist but a Russian dignitary, and on a July day, on the leather sofa in the little blue corner room where I later kept my collection of butterflies, he expired without suffering, talking all the while in his deathbed delirium about a big river and the music and lights.

My father was born in 1860. A love of lepidoptera was inculcated into him by his German tutor. (By the way: what has happened to those originals who used to teach natural history to Russian children—green net, tin box on a sling, hat stuck with pinned butterflies, long, learned nose, candid eyes behind spectacles—where are they all, where are their frail skeletons—or was this a special breed of Germans, for export to Russia, or am I not looking properly?) After completing early (in 1876) his schooling in St. Petersburg, he received his university education in England, at Cambridge, where he studied biology under Professor Bright. His first journey, around the world, he made while my grandfather was still alive, and from then until 1918 his whole life consisted of traveling and the writing of scientific works. The main ones among them are: Lepidoptera Asiatica (8 volumes published in parts from 1890 to 1917), The Butterflies and Moths of the Russian Empire (the first four out of six proposed volumes came out 1912–1916) and, best known to the general public, The Travels of a Naturalist (7 volumes 1892–1912). These works were unanimously recognized as classics and he was still a young man when his name occupied one of the first places in the study of the Russo-Asiatic fauna, side by side with the names of its pioneers, Fischer von Waldheim, Menetriés, Eversmann.

He worked in close touch with his remarkable Russian contemporaries. Kholodkovski calls him “the conquistador of Russian entomology.” He collaborated with Charles Oberthur, Grand Duke Nikolai Mihailovich, Leech and Seitz. Scattered throughout entomological journals are hundreds of his papers, of which the first—“On the peculiarities of the occurrence of certain butterflies in the Province of St. Petersburg” (Horae Soc. Ent. Ross.)—is dated 1877, and the last—“Austautia simonoides n. sp., a Geometrid Moth Mimicking a Small Parnassius” (Trans. Ent. Soc. London)—is dated 1916. He conducted a weighty and acrimonious polemic with Staudinger, author of the notorious Katalog. He was vice-president of the Russian Entomological Society, Full Member of the Moscow Soc. of Investigators of Nature, Member of the Imperial Russian Geographical Soc, and Honorary Member of a multitude of learned societies abroad.

Between 1885 and 1918 he covered an incredible amount of territory, making surveys of his route on a three-mile scale for a distance of many thousands of miles and forming astounding collections. During these years he completed eight major expeditions which in all lasted eighteen years; but between them there was also a multitude of minor journeys, “diversions” as he called them, considering as part of these minutiae not only his trips to the less-well-investigated countries of Europe but also the journey around the world he had made in his youth. Tackling Asia in earnest he investigated Eastern Siberia, Altai, Fergana, the Pamirs, Western China, “the islands of the Gobi Sea and its coasts,” Mongolia, and “the incorrigible continent” of Tibet—and described his travels in precise, weighty words.

Such is the general scheme of my father’s life, copied out of an encyclopedia. It still does not sing, but I can already hear a living voice within it. It remains to be said that in 1898, at thirty-eight years of age, he married Elizaveta Pavlovna Vezhin, the twenty-year-old daughter of a well-known statesman; that he had two children by her; that in the intervals between his journeys….

An agonizing, somehow sacrilegious question, hardly expressible in words: was her life with him happy, together and apart? Shall we disturb this inner world or shall we limit ourselves to a mere description of routes—arida quaedam viarum descripto? “Dear Mamma, I now have a great favor to ask of you. Today is the 8th of July, his birthday. On any other day I could never bring myself to ask you. Tell me something about you and him. Not the sort of thing I can find in our shared memories but the sort of thing you alone have gone through and preserved.” And here is part of the reply:

No—somehow it seems to me that I do remember all this, perhaps because it was subsequently often mentioned. In general our whole daily life was permeated with stories about Father, with worry about him, expectations of his return, the hidden sorrow of farewells and the wild joy of welcomings. His passion was reflected in all of us, colored in different ways, apprehended in different ways, but permanent and habitual. His home museum, in which stood rows of oak cabinets with glassed drawers, full of crucified butterflies (the rest—the plants, beetles, birds, rodents and reptiles—he gave to his colleagues to study), where it smelled as it probably smells in Paradise, and where the laboratory assistants worked at tables along the one-piece windows, was a kind of mysterious central hearth, illuminating from inside the whole of our St. Petersburg house—and only the noonday roar of the Petro-pavlovsk cannon could invade its quiet. Our relatives, non-entomological friends, the servants and the meekly touchy Yvonna Ivanovna talked of butterflies not as of something really existing but as of a certain attribute of my father, which existed only insofar as he existed, or as of an ailment with which everybody had long since got used to coping, so that with us entomology turned into some sort of routinary hallucination, like a harmless domestic ghost that sits down, no longer surprising anyone, every evening by the fireside. At the same time, none of our countless uncles and aunts took any interest in his science and had hardly even read his popular work, read and reread by dozens of thousands of cultured Russians. Of course Tanya and I had learned to appreciate Father from earliest childhood and he seemed even more enchanting to us than, say, that Harold about whom he told stories to us, Harold who fought with the lions in the Byzantine arena, who pursued brigands in Syria, bathed in the Jordan, took eighty fortresses by storm in Africa, “the Blue Land,” saved the Icelanders from starvation—and was famed from Norway to Sicily, from Yorkshire to Novgorod. Then, when I fell under the spell of butterflies, something unfolded in my soul and I relived all my father’s journeys, as if I myself had made them: in my dreams I saw the winding road, the caravan, the many-hued mountains, and envied my father madly, agonizingly, to the point of tears—hot and violent tears that would suddenly gush out of me at table as we discussed his letters from the road or even at the simple mention of a far, far place. Every year, with the approach of spring, before moving to the country, I would feel within me a pitiful fraction of what I would have felt before departing for Tibet. On the Nevski Avenue, during the last days of March, when the wooden blocks of the spacious street pavements gleamed dark blue from the damp and the sun, one might see, flying high over the carriages, along the façades of the houses, past the city hall, past the lindens in the square, past the statue of Catherine, the first yellow butterfly. In the classroom the large window was open, sparrows perched on the windowsill and teachers let lessons go by, leaving in their stead squares of blue sky, with footballs falling down out of the blueness. For some reason I always had bad marks in geography and what an expression our geography teacher would have when he used to mention my father’s name, how the inquisitive eyes of my comrades turned on me at this point and how within me the blood rose and fell from suppressed rapture and from fear of expressing that rapture—and now I think of how little I know, how easy it is for me to make some idiotic blunder in describing my father’s researches.

At the beginning of April, to open the season, the members of the Russian Entomological Society used to make a traditional trip to the other side of Black River, in a suburb of St. Petersburg, where in a birch grove which was still naked and wet, still showing patches of holey snow, there occurred on the trunks, its feeble transparent wings pressed flat against the papery bark, our favorite rarity, a specialty of the province. Once or twice they took me with them too. Among these elderly family men cautiously, tensely practicing sorcery in an April wood, there was an old theater critic, a gynecologist, a professor of international law and a general—for some reason I can recall especially clearly the figure of this general (X. B. Lambovski—there was something Paschal about him), his fat back bending low, with one arm placed behind it, next to the figure of my father, who had sunk on his haunches with a kind of Oriental ease—both were carefully examining in search of pupae a handful of reddish earth dug up with a trowel—and even to this day I am wondering what the coachmen waiting on the road made of all this.

Sometimes, in the country, Grandmother would sail into our schoolroom, Olga Ivanovna Vezhin, plump, fresh-complexioned, in mittens and lace: “Bonjour les enfants,” she would sing out sonorously and then, heavily accenting the prepositions, she informed us: “Je viens de voir DANS le jardin, PRÈS du cèdre, SUR une rose un papillon de toute beauté: il était bleu, vert, pourpre, doré—et grand comme ça.” “Quickly take your net,” she continued, turning to me, “and go into the garden. Perhaps you can still catch it.” And she sailed out, completely oblivious to the fact that if such a fabulous insect were to come my way (it was not even worth a guess as to what banal garden visitor her imagination had so adorned), I would have died of heartbreak. Sometimes, to give me special pleasure, our French governess would choose a certain fable of Florian’s for me to learn by heart, about another impossibly gaudy petit-maître butterfly. Sometimes some aunt or other would give me a book by Fabre, whose popular works, full of chitchat, inaccurate observations and downright mistakes, my father treated with scorn. I also remember this: one day, upon missing my net I went out to look for it on the veranda and met my uncle’s orderly returning from somewhere with it on his shoulder, all flushed and with a kindly and shy smile on his rosy lips: “Just see what I’ve caught for you,” he proclaimed in a satisfied voice, dumping the net on the floor; the mesh was secured near the frame by a bit of string, so that a bag was formed in which a variety of live matter swarmed and rustled—and good heavens, what rubbish there was in it: thirty-odd grasshoppers, the head of a daisy, a couple of dragon-flies, ears of wheat, some sand, a cabbage butterfly crushed out of all recognition, and finally, an edible toadstool noticed on the way and added just in case. The Russian common people know and love their country’s nature. How many jeers, how many conjectures and questions have I had occasion to hear when, overcoming my embarrassment, I walked through the village with my net! “Well, that’s nothing,” said my father, “you should have seen the faces of the Chinese when I was collecting once on some holy mountain, or the look the progressive schoolmistress in a Volga town gave me when I explained to her what I was doing in that ravine.”

How to describe the bliss of our walks with Father through the woods, the fields and the peat bogs, or the constant summer thought of him if he was away, the eternal dream of making some discovery and of meeting him with this discovery—How to describe the feeling I experienced when he showed me all the spots where in his own childhood he had caught this and that—the beam of a half-rotted little bridge where he had caught his first peacock butterfly in 71, the slope of the road down to the river where he had once fallen on his knees, weeping and praying (he had bungled his stroke, it had flown for ever!). And what fascination there was in his words, in the kind of special fluency and grace of his style when he spoke about his subject, what affectionate precision in the movements of his fingers turning the screw of a spreading board or a miscroscope, what a truly enchanting world was unfolded in his lessons! Yes, I know this is not the way to write—these exclamations won’t take me very deep—but my pen is not yet accustomed to following the outlines of his image, and I myself abominate these accessory curlicues. Oh, don’t look at me, my childhood, with such big, frightened eyes.

The sweetness of the lessons! On a warm evening he would take me to a certain small pond to watch the aspen hawk moth swing over the very water, dipping in it the tip of its body. He showed me how to prepare genital armatures to determine species which were externally indistinguishable. With a special smile he brought to my attention the black Ringlet butterflies in our park which with mysterious and elegant unexpectedness appeared only in even years. He mixed beer with treacle for me on a dreadfully cold, dreadfully rainy autumn night in order to catch at the smeared tree trunks that glistened in the light of a kerosene lamp a multitude of large, banded moths, silently diving and hurrying toward the bait. He variously warmed and cooled the golden chrysalids of my tortoiseshells so that I was able to get from them Corsican, arctic and entirely unusual forms looking as if they had been dipped in tar and had silky fuzz sticking to them. He taught me how to take apart an ant-hill and find the caterpillar of a Blue which had concluded a barbaric pact with its inhabitants, and I saw how an ant, greedily tickling a hind segment of that caterpillar’s clumsy, sluglike little body, forced it to excrete a drop of intoxicant juice, which it swallowed immediately. In compensation it offered its own larvae as food; it was as if cows gave us Chartreuse and we gave them our infants to eat. But the strong caterpillar of one exotic species of Blue will not stoop to this exchange, brazenly devouring the infant ants and then turning into an impenetrable chrysalis which finally, at the time of hatching, is surrounded by ants (those failures in the school of experience) awaiting the emergence of the helplessly crumpled butterfly in order to attack it; they attack—and nevertheless she does not perish: “I have never laughed so much,” said my father, “as when I realized that nature had supplied her with a sticky substance which caused the feelers and feet of those zealous ants to get stuck together, so that they rolled and writhed all around her while she herself, calm and invulnerable, let her wings strengthen and dry.”

He told me about the odors of butterflies—musk and vanilla; about the voices of butterflies; about the piercing sound given out by the monstrous caterpillar of a Malayan hawkmoth, an improvement on the mouselike squeak of our Death’s Head moth; about the small resonant tympanum of certain tiger moths; about the cunning butterfly in the Brazilian forest which imitates the whir of a local bird. He told me about the incredible artistic wit of mimetic disguise, which was not explainable by the struggle for existence (the rough haste of evolution’s unskilled forces), was too refined for the mere deceiving of accidental predators, feathered, scaled and otherwise (not very fastidious, but then not too fond of butterflies), and seemed to have been invented by some waggish artist precisely for the intelligent eyes of man (a hypothesis that may lead far an evolutionist who observes apes feeding on butterflies); he told me about these magic masks of mimicry; about the enormous moth which in a state of repose assumes the image of a snake looking at you; of a tropical geometrid colored in perfect imitation of a species of butterfly infinitely removed from it in nature’s system, the illusion of the orange abdomen possessed by one being humorously reproduced in the other by the orange-colored inner margins of the secondaries; and about the curious harem of that famous African swallowtail, whose variously disguised females copy in color, shape and even flight half a dozen different species (apparently inedible), which are also the models of numerous other mimics. He told me about migrations, about the long cloud consisting of myriads of white pierids that moves through the sky, indifferent to the direction of the wind, always at the same level above the ground, rising softly and smoothly over hills and sinking again into valleys, meeting perhaps another cloud of butterflies, yellow, filtering through it without stopping and without soiling its own whiteness—and floating further, to settle on trees toward nighttime which stand until morning as if bestrewn with snow—and then taking off again to continue their journey—whither? Why? A tale not yet finished by nature or else forgotten. “Our thistle butterfly,” he said, “the ‘painted lady’ of the English, the ‘belle dame’ of the French, does not hibernate in Europe as related species do; it is born on the African plains; there, at dawn, the lucky traveler may hear the whole steppe, glistening in the first rays, crackle with an incalculable number of hatching chrysalids.” From there, without delay it begins its journey north, reaching the shores of Europe in early spring, suddenly enlivening the gardens of the Crimea and the terraces of the Riviera; without lingering, but leaving individuals everywhere for summer breeding, it proceeds further north and by the end of May, by now in single specimens, it reaches Scotland, Heligoland, our parts and even the extreme north of the earth: it has been caught in Iceland! With a strange crazy flight unlike anything else the bleached, hardly recognizable butterfly, choosing a dry glade, “wheels” in and out of the Leshino firs, and by the end of the summer, on thistleheads, on asters, its lovely pink-flushed offspring is already reveling in life. “Most moving of all,” added my father, “is that on the first cold days a reverse phenomenon is observed, the ebb: the butterfly hastens southward, for the winter, but of course it perishes before it reaches the warmth.”

Simultaneously with the Englishman Tutt, who observed the same thing in the Swiss Alps as he in the Pamirs, my father discovered the true nature of the corneal formation appearing beneath the abdomen in the impregnated females of Parnassians, and explained how her mate, working with a pair of spatulate appendages, places and molds on her a chastity belt of his own manufacture, shaped differently in every species of this genus, being sometimes a little boat, sometimes a helical shell, sometimes—as in the case of the exceptionally rare dark-cinder gray orpheus Godunov—a replica of a tiny lyre. And as a frontispiece to my present work I think I would like to display precisely this butterfly—for I can hear him talk about it, can see the way he took the six specimens he had brought back out of their six thick triangular envelopes, the way he lowered his eyes with the field magnifier close to the abdomen of the only female—and how reverently his laboratory assistant relaxed in a damp jar the dry, glossy, tightly folded wings in order later to drive a pin smoothly through the insect’s thorax, stick it in the cork groove of the spreading board, hold down flat upon it by means of broad strips of semitransparent paper its open, defenseless, gracefully expanded beauty, then slip a bit of cotton wool under its abdomen and straighten its black antennae—so that it dried that way forever. Forever? In the Berlin museum there are many of my father’s captures and these are as fresh today as they were in the eighties and nineties. Butterflies from Linnaeus’ collection now in London have subsisted since the eighteenth century. In the Prague museum one can see that same example of the showy Atlas moth that Catherine the Great admired. Why then do I feel so sad?

His captures, his observations, the sound of his voice in scientific words, all this, I think, I will preserve. But that is still so little. With the same relative permanence I would like to retain what it was, perhaps, that I loved most of all about him: his live masculinity, inflexibility and independence, the chill and the warmth of his personality, his power over everything that he undertook. As if playing a game, as if wishing in passing to imprint his force on everything, he would pick out here and there something from a field outside entomology and thus he left his mark upon almost all branches of natural science: there is only one plant described by him out of all those he collected, but that one is a spectacular species of birch; one bird—a most fabulous pheasant; one bat-but the biggest one in the world. And in all parts of nature our name echoes a countless number of times, for other naturalists gave his name either to a spider, or to a rhododendron, or to a mountain ridge—the latter, by the way, made him angry: “To ascertain and preserve the ancient native name of a pass,” he wrote, “is always both more scientific and more noble than to saddle it with the name of a good acquaintance.”

I liked—I only now understood how much I liked it—that special easy knack he showed in dealing with a horse, a dog, a gun, a bird or a peasant boy with a two-inch splinter in his back—he was constantly being brought people who were wounded, maimed, even infirm, even pregnant women, who probably took his mysterious occupation for voodoo practice. I liked the fact that, in contradistinction to the majority of non-Russian travelers, Sven Hedin for example, he never changed his clothes for Chinese ones on his wanderings; in general he kept aloof, was severe and resolute in the extreme in his relations with the natives, showing no indulgence to mandarins and lamas; and in camp he practiced shooting, which served as an excellent precaution against any importuning. He was entirely uninterested in ethnography, a fact that for some reason greatly irritated certain geographers, and his great friend, the Orientalist Krivtsov, almost wept when reproaching him: “If only you had brought back one wedding song, Konstantin Kirillovich, had described one local dress!” There was one professor at Kazan who attacked him especially; proceeding from some sort of humanitarian-liberal premises he convicted him of scientific aristocratism, of a haughty contempt for Man, of disregard for the reader’s interests, of dangerous eccentricity—and of much more. And once at an international banquet in London (and this episode pleases me most of all), Sven Hedin, sitting next to my father, asked him how it had happened that, traveling with unprecedented freedom over the forbidden parts of Tibet, in the immediate vicinity of Lhasa, he had not gone to look at it, to which my father replied that he had not wanted to sacrifice even one hour’s collecting for the sake of visiting “one more filthy little town”—and I can see so clearly how his eyes must have narrowed as he spoke.

He was endowed with an even temper, self-control, strong willpower and a vivid sense of humor; but when he became angry his wrath was like a sudden stroke of frost (Grandmother said behind his back: “All the clocks in the house stopped”), and I can well remember those sudden silences at table and the kind of absentminded look that immediately appeared on Mother’s face (ill-wishers among our female kin maintained that she “trembled before Kostya”), and how one of the governesses at the end of the table would hastily place her palm on a glass which was on the point of tinkling. The cause of his wrath could be a blunder by someone, a miscomputation by the steward (Father was well versed in the estate affairs), a flippant remark made about an intimate of his, trite political sentiments in the spirit of soapbox patriotism brought out by some ill-starred guest, or finally some misdemeanor or other of mine. He who in his time had slaughtered countless multitudes of birds, he who had once brought the newly wed botanist Berg the complete vegetable covering of a motley little mountain meadow in one piece, the size of a room in area (I imagined it rolled up in a case like a Persian carpet), which he had found somewhere at some fantastic height among bare cliffs and snow—he could not forgive me a Leshino sparrow wantonly shot down with a Montecristo rifle or the young pondside aspen I had slashed with a sword. He could not stand procrastination, hesitation, the blinking eyes of a lie, could not stand hypocrisy or syrupiness—and I am sure that had he caught me out in physical cowardice he would have laid a curse on me.

I have not said everything yet; I am coming up to what is perhaps most important. In and around my father, around this clear and direct strength, there was something difficult to convey in words, a haze, a mystery, an enigmatic reserve which made itself felt sometimes more, sometimes less. It was as if this genuine, very genuine man possessed an aura of something still unknown but which was perhaps the most genuine of all. It had no direct connection either with us, or with my mother, or with the externals of life, or even with butterflies (the closest of all to him, I daresay); it was neither pensiveness nor melancholy—and I have no means of explaining the impression his face made on me when I looked through his study window from outside and saw how, having suddenly forgotten his work (I could feel inside me how he had forgotten it—as if something had fallen through or trailed off), his large wise head turned slightly away from the desk and resting on his fist, so that a wide crease was raised from his cheek to his temple, he sat for a minute without moving. It sometimes seems to me nowadays that—who knows—he might go off on his journeys not so much to seek something as to flee something, and that on returning, he would realize that it was still with him, inside him, unriddable, inexhaustible. I cannot track down a name for his secret, but I only know that that was the source of that special—neither glad nor morose, having indeed no connection with the outward appearance of human emotions—solitude to which neither my mother nor all the entomologists of the world had any admittance. And strange: perhaps the estate watchman, a crooked old man who had twice been singed by night lightning, the sole person among our rural retainers who had learned without my father’s help (who had taught it to a whole regiment of Asian hunters) to catch and kill a butterfly without mangling it (which, of course, did not stop him advising me with a businesslike air not to be in a hurry to catch small butterflies, “tiddlers” as he expressed it, in spring, but to wait till summer when they would have grown up), namely he, who frankly and with no fear or surprise considered that my father knew a thing or two that nobody else knew, was in his own way right.

However that may have been, I am convinced now that our life then really was imbued with a magic unknown in other families. From conversations with my father, from daydreams in his absence, from the neighborhood of thousands of books full of drawings of animals, from the precious shimmer of the collections, from the maps, from all the heraldry of nature and the cabbalism of Latin names, life took on a kind of bewitching lightness that made me feel as if my own travels were about to begin. Thence, I borrow my wings today. Among the old, tranquil, velvet-framed family photographs in my father’s study there hung a copy of the picture: Marco Polo leaving Venice. She was rosy, this Venice, and the water of her lagoon was azure, with swans twice the size of the boats, into one of which tiny violet men were descending by way of a plank, in order to board a ship which was waiting a little way off with sails furled—and I cannot tear myself away from this mysterious beauty, these ancient colors which swim before the eyes as if seeking new shapes, when I now imagine the outfitting of my father’s caravan in Przhevalsk, where he used to go with post-horses from Tashkent, having dispatched in advance by slow convoy a store of supplies for three years. His Cossacks went round the neighboring villages buying horses, mules and camels; they prepared the pack boxes and pouches (what was there not in these Sartish yagtans and leather bags tried by centuries, from cognac to pulverized peas, from ingots of silver to nails for horseshoes); and after a requiem on the shore of the lake by the burial rock of the explorer Przhevalski, crowned with a bronze eagle—around which the intrepid local pheasants were wont to roost—the caravan took the road.

After that I see the caravan, before it gets drawn into the mountains, winding among hills of a paradisean green shade, depending both on their grassy raiment and on the apple-bright epidotic rock, of which they are composed. The compact, sturdy Kalmuk ponies walk in single file forming echelons: the paired packloads of equal weight are seized twice with lariats so that nothing can shift and a Cossack leads every echelon by the bridle. In front of the caravan, a Berdan rifle over his shoulder and a butterfly net at the ready, wearing spectacles and a nankin blouse, Father rides on his white trotter accompanied by a native horseman. Closing the detachment comes the geodesist Kunitsyn (this is the way I see it), a majestic old man who has spent half a lifetime in imperturable wanderings, with his instruments in cases—chronometers, surveying compasses, an artifical horizon—and when he stops to take a bearing or to note down azimuths in his journal, his horse is held by an assistant, a small anemic German, Ivan Ivanovich Viskott, formerly chemist at Gatchina, whom my father had once taught to prepare bird skins and who took part from then on in all the expeditions, until he died of gangrene in the summer of 1903 in Dyn-Kou.

Further I see the mountains: the Tyan-Shan range. In search of passes (marked on the map according to oral data but first explored by my father) the caravan ascended over steep slopes and narrow ledges, slipped down to the north, to the steppe teeming with saigas, ascended again to the south, here fording torrents, there trying to get across high water—and up, up, along almost impassable trails. How the sunlight played! The dryness of the air produced an amazing contrast between light and shadow: in the light there were such flashes, such a wealth of brilliance, that at times it became impossible to look at a rock, at a stream; and in the shadow a darkness which absorbed all detail, so that every color lived a magically multiplied life and the coats of the horses changed as they entered the cool of the poplars.

The boom of water in the gorge was enough to stun a man; head and breast filled with an electric agitation; the water rushed with awesome force—as smooth, however, as molten lead—then suddenly swelled out monstrously as it reached the rapids, its varicolored waves piling up and falling over the lustrous brows of the stones with a furious roar; and then, crashing from a height of twenty feet, out of a rainbow and into darkness, it ran further, now changed: seething, smoke-blue and snowlike from the foam, it struck first one side and then the other of the conglomeratic canyon in such a way that it seemed the reverberating mountain fastness could never withstand it; on its banks, meanwhile, in blissful quiet, the irises were in bloom—and suddenly a herd of marais dashed out of a black firwood onto a dazzling Alpine meadow and halted, quivering. No, it was only the air quivering… they had already vanished.

I can conjure up with particular clarity—in this transparent and changeable setting—my father’s principal and constant occupation, the occupation for whose only sake he undertook these tremendous journeys. I see him leaning down from the saddle amid a clatter of sliding stones to sweep in with a swing of his net on the end of its long handle (a twist of the wrist causing the end of the muslin bag, full of rustling and throbbing, to flip across the ring, thus preventing escape) some royal relative of our Apollos, which had been skimming with a ranging flight over the dangerous screes; and not only he but also the other riders (the Cossack corporal Semyon Zharkoy, for example, or the Buryat Buyantuyev, or else that representative of mine whom I sent in the wake of my father throughout my boyhood) work their way fearlessly up the rocks, in pursuit of the white, richly ocellated butterfly which they catch at last; and here it is in my father’s fingers, dead, its hairy yellowish incurved body resembling a willow catkin, and the glazy underside of its crisp folded wings showing the blood-red maculation at their roots.

He avoided dawdling in Chinese roadhouses, especially overnight, because he disliked them for their “bustle devoid of feeling” that consisted solely of shouting without the slightest hint of laughter; but strangely enough, in his memory later the smell of these inns, that special air belonging to any place where Chinese dwell—a rancid mixture of kitchen fumes, smoke from burned manure, opium and the stable—spoke more to him of his beloved hunting than the recollected fragrancy of mountain meadows.

Moving across the Tyan-Shan with the caravan I can now see evening approaching, drawing a shadow over the mountain slopes. Postponing until the morning a difficult crossing (a ramshackle bridge has been thrown across the turbulent river, consisting of stone slabs on top of brushwood, but the way up on the other side is steepish, and, moreover, as smooth as glass), the caravan settles down for the night. While the colors of sunset still linger in the aerial tiers of the sky, and supper is being prepared, the Cossacks, having first taken off the animals’ sweatcloths and felt under-blankets, wash the wounds made by the packs. In the darkling air the clear ring of shoeing resounds above the ample noise of water. It has grown quite dark. Father has climbed a rock looking for a place to suit his calcium lamp for catching moths. Thence one can see in Chinese perspective (from above), in a deep gully, the redness, transparent in the darkness, of the campfire; through the edges of its breathing flame seem to float the broad-shouldered shadows of men, endlessly changing their outlines, and a red reflection trembles, without moving from the spot, on the seething water of the river. But above, all is quiet and dark, only rarely does a bell tinkle: the horses, who have already stood to receive their portion of dry fodder, are now roaming among the granite debris. Overhead, frighteningly and entrancingly close, the stars have come out, each conspicuous, each a live orbicle, clearly revealing its globular essence. Moths begin to come to the lure of the lamp: they describe crazy circles around it, hitting the reflector with a ping; they fall, they crawl over the spread sheet into the circle of light, gray, with eyes like burning coals, vibrating, flying up and falling again—and a large, brightly illumined, unhurriedly skillful hand, with almond-shaped fingernails, rakes noctuid after noctuid into the killing jar.

Sometimes he was quite alone, without even this nearness of men sleeping in camp tents, on felt mattresses, around the camel bedded down on the campfire ashes. Taking advantage of lengthy halts in places with abundant food for the caravan animals, Father would go away for several days on reconnaissance, and in doing so, carried away by some new pierid, more than once ignored the rule of mountain hunting: never to follow a path of no return. And now I continually ask myself what did he use to think about in the solitary night: I try fervently in the darkness to divine the current of his thoughts, and I have much less success with this than with my mental visits to places which I have never seen. What did he think about? About a recent catch? About my mother, about us? About the innate strangeness of human life, a sense of which he mysteriously transmitted to me? Or perhaps I am wrong in retrospectively forcing upon him the secret which he carries now, when newly gloomy and preoccupied, concealing the pain of an unknown wound, concealing death as something shameful, he appears in my dreams, but which then he did not have—but simply was happy in that incompletely named world in which at every step he named the nameless.

After spending the whole summer in the mountains (not one summer but several, in different years, which are superimposed one on another in translucent layers) our caravan moved east through a gulch into a stony desert. We saw gradually disappear both the bed of the stream as it split and fanned out, and those plants that to the last remain faithful to travelers: stunted ammodendrons, lasiagrostis, and ephedras. Having loaded the camels with water we plunged into spectral wilds where here and there big pebbles covered completely the yielding, reddish-brown clay of the desert, in places mottled with crusts of dirty snow and outcrops of salt, which we took in the distance for the walls of the town we sought. The way was dangerous as a result of the terrible storms, during which at midday everything was blanketed in a salty brown fog; the wind roared, granules of gravel lashed one’s face, the camels lay down and our tarpaulin tent was torn to shreds. Because of these storms the surface of the land has changed unbelievably, presenting the fantastic outlines of castles, colonnades and staircases; or else the hurricane would scour out a hollow—as if here in this desert the elemental forces that had fashioned the world were still furiously in action. But there were also days of a wonderful lull, when horned larks (Father aptly called them “gigglers”) poured forth their mimetic trills and flocks of ordinary sparrows accompanied our emaciated animals. On occasion we would pass the day in isolated settlements consisting of two or three homesteads and a ruined temple. At other times we would be attacked by Tanguts in sheepskin coats and red-and-blue woolen boots: a brief colorful episode on the way. And then there were the mirages—the mirages where nature, that exquisite cheat, achieved absolute miracles: visions of water were so clear that they reflected the real rocks nearby!

Further came the quiet sands of the Gobi, dune after dune went by like waves revealing short ocher horizons, and all that was audible in the velvet air was the labored, quickened breathing of the camels and the scrape of their broad feet. The caravan went onward, now ascending to the crest of a dune now plunging downward, and by the evening its shadow had attained gigantic proportions. The five-carat diamond of Venus disappeared in the west together with the glow of the sunset, which distorted everything in its blanched, orange and violet light. And Father loved to recall how once at such a sunset, in 1893, in the dead heart of the Gobi desert he had met with—taking them at first for phantoms projected by the prismatic rays—two cyclists in Chinese sandals and round felt hats, who turned out to be the Americans Sachtleben and Allen, riding all across Asia to Peking for fun.

Spring awaited us in the mountains of Nan-Shan. Everything foretold it: the babbling of the water in the brooks, the distant thunder of the rivers, the whistle of the creepers which lived in holes on the slippery wet hillsides, the delightful singing of the local larks, and “a mass of noises whose origins are hard to explain” (a phrase from the notes of a friend of my father’s, Grigoriy Efimovich Grum-Grzhimaylo, which is fixed in my mind forever and full of the amazing music of truth because written not by an ignorant poet but by a naturalist of genius). On the southern slopes we had already met our first interesting butterfly—Potanin’s subspecies of Butler’s pierid—and in the valley to which we descended by way of a torrent bed we found real summer. All the slopes were studded with anemones and primulae. Przhevalski’s gazelle and Strauch’s pheasant tempted the hunters. And what sunrises there were! Only in China is the early mist so enchanting, causing everything to vibrate, the fantastic outlines of hovels, the dawning crags. As into an abyss, the river runs into the murk of the prematutinal twilight that still hangs in the gorges, while higher up, along flowing waters, all glimmers and scintillates, and quite a company of blue magpies has already awakened in the willows by the mill.

Escorted by fifteen Chinese foot soldiers armed with halberds and carrying enormous, absurdly bright banners, we crossed passes through the ridge a number of times. In spite of it being the middle of summer, night frosts were so bad there that in the morning the flowers were filmed with rime and had become so brittle that they snapped underfoot with a surprising, gentle tinkle; but two hours later, just as soon as the sun began to be warm, the wonderful Alpine flora again resplended, again scented the air with resin and honey. Clinging to steep banks we made our way under the hot blue sky; grasshoppers shot from under our feet, the dogs ran with their tongues hanging out, seeking refuge from the heat in the short shadows thrown by the horses. The water in the wells smelled of gunpowder. The trees seemed to be a botanist’s delirium: a white rowan with alabaster berries or a birch with red bark!

Placing one foot on a fragment of rock and leaning slightly on the handle of his net, my father looks down from a high spur, from the glacier boulders of Tanegma, at the lake Kuka-Nor—a huge spread of dark blue water. There down below on the golden steppes a herd of kiangs rushes past, and the shadow of an eagle flicks across the cliffs; overhead there is perfect peace, silence, transparency… and again I ask myself what Father is thinking about when he is not busy collecting and stands there like that, quite still… appearing as it were on the crest of my recollection, torturing me, enrapturing me—to the point of pain, to an insanity of tenderness, envy and love, tormenting my soul with his inscrutable solitariness.

There were the times when going up the Yellow River and its tributaries, on some splendid September morning, in the lily thickets and hollows on the banks, he and I would take Elwes’ Swallowtail—a black wonder with tails in the shape of hooves. On inclement evenings, before sleeping, he would read Horace, Montaigne, and Pushkin—the three books he had brought with him. One winter when crossing the ice of a river I noticed in the distance a line of dark objects strung across it, the large horns of twenty wild yaks which had been caught in crossing by the suddenly forming ice; through its thick crystal the immobilization of their bodies in a swimming attitude was clearly visible; the beautiful heads lifted above the ice would have seemed alive if the birds had not already pecked out their eyes; and for some reason I recalled the tyrant Shiusin, who used to cut open pregnant women out of curiosity and who, one cold morning, seeing some porters fording a stream, ordered their legs to be amputated at the shin in order to inspect the condition of the marrow in their bones.

In Chang during a fire (some wood prepared for the construction of a Catholic mission was burning) I saw an elderly Chinese at a safe distance from the fire throwing water assiduously, determinedly and without tiring over the reflection of the flames on the walls of his dwelling; convinced of the impossibility of proving to him that his house was not burning we abandoned him to his fruitless occupation.

Frequently we had to push our way through, ignoring Chinese intimidation and interdictions: good marksmanship is the best passport. In Tatsien-Lu shaven-headed lamas roamed about the crooked, narrow streets spreading the rumor that I was catching children in order to brew their eyes into a potion for the belly of my Kodak. There on the slopes of a snowy range, which were drowned in the rich, rosy foam of great rhododendrons (we used their branches at night for our campfires), I looked in May for the slate-gray, orange-spotted larvae of the Imperatorial Apollo and for its chrysalis, fastened by means of a silk thread to the underside of a stone. That same day, I remember, we glimpsed a white Tibetan bear and discovered a new snake: it fed on mice, and the mouse I extracted from its stomach also turned out to be an undescribed species. From the rhododendrons and from the pines draped in lacy lichen came a heady smell of resin. In my vicinity some witch doctors with the wary and crafty look of competitors were collecting for their mercenary needs Chinese rhubarb, whose root bears an extraordinary resemblance to a caterpillar, right down to its prolegs and spiracles—while I, in the meantime, found under a stone the caterpillar of an unknown moth, which represented not in a general way but with absolute concreteness a copy of that root, so that it was not quite clear which was impersonating which—or why.

Everyone tells lies in Tibet: it was devilishly hard to obtain the exact names of places or directions for the right roads; involuntarily I too deceived them: since they were unable to distinguish a light-haired European from a white-haired one they took me, a young chap with hair bleached in the sun, for an ancient old man. Everywhere on the masses of granite one could read the “mystic formula,” a shamanic jumble of words which certain poetic travelers “translate” prettily as: oh, jewel in the lotus, oh! Some kind of officials were sent out to me from Lhasa who conjured me not to do something and threatened to do something to me—I paid little attention to them; however, I remember one idiot, particularly tiresome, in yellow silk under a red umbrella; he was sitting astride a mule whose natural dolefulness was doubled by the presence under its eyes of thick icicles formed from frozen tears.

From a great height I saw a dark marshy depression all trembling from the play of innumerable springs, which recalled the night sky with stars scattered over it—and that is what it was called: the Starry Steppe. The passes ascended beyond the clouds, marches were tough. We rubbed the pack animals’ wounds with a mixture of iodoform and vaseline. On occasion, having camped in a completely deserted spot, I would suddenly see in the morning that around us during the night a wide circle of brigands’ tents had grown up like black toadstools—which, however, very quickly disappeared.

Having explored the uplands of Tibet I headed for Lob-Nor in order to return from there to Russia. The Tarym, overcome by the desert, exhausted, forms with its last waters an extensive reedy swamp, the present-day Kara-Koshuk-Kul, Przhevalski’s Lob-Nor—and Lob-Nor at the time of the Khans, whatever Ritthofen might say. It is fringed with salt marshes but the water is salt only at the edges—for those rushes would not grow around a salt lake. One spring I was five days going round it. There in twenty-foot-high reeds I had the luck to discover a remarkable semi-aquatic moth with a rudimentary system of veins. The bunchy salt marsh was strewn with the shells of mollusks. In the evenings the harmonious, melodic sounds of swan flights reverberated through the silence; the yellow of the rushes distinctly brought out the lusterless white of the birds. In 1862, sixty Russian Old-Believers with their wives and children lived for half a year in these parts, after which they went to Turfan, and where they went thence nobody knows.

Further on comes the desert of Lob: a stony plain, tiers of clay precipices, glassy salt ponds; that pale fleck in the gray air is a lone individual of Roborovski’s White, carried away by the wind. In this desert are preserved traces of an ancient road along which Marco Polo passed six centuries before I did: its markers are piles of stones. Just as I had heard in a Tibetan gorge the interesting drum-like roar which had frightened our first pilgrims, so in the desert during the sandstorms I also saw and heard the same as Marco Polo: “the whisper of spirits calling you aside” and the queer flicker of the air, an endless progression of whirlwinds, caravans and armies of phantoms coming to meet you, thousands of spectral faces in their incorporeal way pressing upon you, through you, and suddenly dispersing. In the twenties of the fourteenth century when the great explorer was dying, his friends gathered by his bedside and implored him to reject what in his book had seemed incredible to them—to water down its miracles by means of judicious deletions; but he responded that he had not recounted even a half of what he had in fact seen.

All this lingered bewitchingly, full of color and air, with lively movement in the foreground and a convincing backdrop; then, like smoke from a breeze, it shifted and dispersed—and Fyodor saw again the dead and impossible tulips of his wallpaper, the crumbling mound of cigarette butts in the ashtray, and the lamp’s reflection in the black windowpane. He threw open the window. The written-up sheets of paper on his desk started; one folded over, another glided onto the floor. The room immediately turned damp and cold. Down below, an automobile went slowly along the dark empty street—and, strangely enough, this very slowness reminded Fyodor of a host of petty, unpleasant things—the day just past, the missed lesson—and when he thought that next morning he would have to phone the deceived old man, his heart was oppressed by an abominable despondency. But once the window was closed again, already feeling the void between his bunched fingers, he turned to the patiently waiting lamp, to the scattered first drafts, to the still-warm pen which now quietly slipped back into his fingers (explaining the void and filling it) and returned at once to that world which was as natural to him as snow to the white hare or water to Ophelia.

He remembered with incredible vividness, as if he had preserved that sunny day in a velvet case, his father’s last return, in July 1912. Elizaveta Pavlovna had already gone the six miles to the station to meet her husband: she always met him alone and it always happened that no one knew with any clearness which side they would return on, to the right or left of the house, since there were two roads, one longer and smoother—along the highway and through the village; the other shorter and bumpier—through Peshchanka. Fyodor put on his riding breeches just in case and ordered his horse saddled, but nonetheless he could not make up his mind to ride out and meet his father because he was afraid of missing him. He tried vainly to come to terms with inflated, exaggerated time. A rare butterfly taken a day or two before among the blueberries of a peat bog had not yet dried on the spreading board: he kept touching its abdomen with the end of a pin—alas it was still soft, and this meant it was impossible to take off the paper strips completely covering the wings which he was so keen to show his father in all their beauty. He loafed about the manor, feeling the weight and pain of his agitation, and envying the way the others got through these big, empty minutes. From the river came the desperately ecstatic shrieks of the village boys bathing, and this hubbub, playing constantly in the depths of the summer day, sounded like distant ovations. Tanya was swinging enthusiastically and powerfully on the swing in the garden, standing on the seat; the violet shadow of the foliage swept over her flying white skirt in variegations that made one blink, and her blouse now lagged behind, now clung to her back, designating the hollow between her drawn-back shoulders; beneath her, one fox terrier was barking at her, another was chasing a wagtail; the ropes creaked joyfuly and it seemed that Tanya was soaring up like that in order to see over the trees into the road. Our French governess, under her moiré parasol, with rare politeness was sharing her misgivings (“the train was two hours late or else would not come at all”) with Mr. Browning, whom she hated, while the latter stood slapping his gaiters with a riding stick—he was no polyglot. Yvonna Ivanovna kept visiting first one and then the other veranda with that discontented expression on her small face with which she greeted all joyful events. Around the outbuildings there was especial animation: servants pumped water, hacked firewood, and the gardener came bringing two oblong, red-stained baskets of strawberries. Zhaksybay, an elderly Kirghiz, thickset, fat-faced, with intricate wrinkles around his eyes, who had saved Konstantin Kirillovich’s life in ’92 (he had shot a she-bear that was mauling him) and who now lived in peace, nursing his hernia, in their Leshino house, had put on his blue beshmet with half-moon pockets, polished boots, red skullcap with spangles and silk, tasseled sash, and settled down on a bench near the kitchen porch, where by now he had been sitting for quite a time sunning himself, a silver watch chain gleaming on his chest, in quiet and festive expectation.

Suddenly, running heavily up the curved path which led down to the river, there appeared out of deep shadow, with a wild glint in his eyes and with a mouth that was already shaped for a shout though still silent, the old, gray, side-whiskered footman Kazimir: he was running with the news that beyond the nearest bend, the sound of hooves had been heard on the bridge (a swift wooden drumming which was immediately cut off)—a guarantee that the victoria was about to come bowling next minute along the dirt road parallel to the park. Fyodor rushed in that direction—between the tree trunks, over the moss and bilberries—and there beyond the marginal path one could see, as they skimmed above the level of the young firs, the driver’s head and indigo sleeves sweeping by with the impetuosity of a vision. He dashed back—and the abandoned swing was still quivering in the garden, while by the porch stood the empty victoria with its crumpled traveling rug; his mother was walking up the steps, trailing behind her a smoke-colored scarf—and Tanya was hanging on the neck of her father, who had taken a watch from his pocket with his free hand and was looking at it, for he always liked to know how fast he had got home from the station.

The following year, busy with scientific work, he did not go anywhere, but by the spring of 1914 he had already begun to prepare for a new expedition to Tibet together with the ornithologist Petrov and the English botanist Ross. War with Germany suddenly canceled all this.

He looked upon the war as a tiresome obstacle which became more and more tiresome as time went on. His kinsfolk were for some reason certain that Konstantin Kirillovich would volunteer and set off right away at the head of a detachment: they considered him an eccentric, but a manly eccentric. Actually, Konstantin Kirillovich, who was now over fifty but had retained untapped reserves of health, agility, freshness and strength—and perhaps was even more ready than before to overcome mountains, Tanguts, bad weather and a thousand other dangers undreamt of by stay-at-homes—now not only stayed at home but tried not to notice the war, and if he ever spoke about it, he did so only with angry contempt. “My father,” wrote Fyodor, recalling that time, “not only taught me a great deal but also trained my very thoughts, as a voice or hand is trained, according to the rules of his school. Thus I was rather indifferent to the cruelty of war; I even conceded that one could take a certain delight in the accuracy of a shot, in the danger of a reconnaissance or in the delicacy of a maneuver; but these little pleasures (which are better represented moreover in other special branches of sport, such as: tiger hunting, noughts and crosses, professional boxing) in no way compensated for that touch of dismal idiocy which is inherent in any war.”

However, in spite of “Kostya’s unpatriotic position” as Aunt Ksenia expressed it (solidly and skillfully using “high connections” to hide her officer-husband away in the shadows of the rear) the house was penetrated by the cares of war. Elizaveta Pavlovna was drawn into Red Cross work, which had people comment that her energy “was making up for her husband’s idleness,” he being “more concerned with Asian bugs than with the glory of Russian arms” as was actually pointed out, by the way, in one jaunty newspaper. Phonograph records revolved with the words of the love song “The Sea Gull” reclad in khaki (… here’s a young ensign with an infantry section …); coy nurses appeared in the house with little curls peeping out from under their regulation headdress and a deft way of tapping cigarettes on their cigarette cases before lighting up; the doorkeeper’s son ran away to the front and Konstantin Kirillovich was asked to assist his return; Tanya began visiting her mother’s military hospital to give Russian grammar lessons to a placid, bearded Oriental whose leg was being cut off ever higher in an attempt to overtake the gangrene; Yvonna Ivanovna knit woolen wrist-warmers; on holidays the variety artist Feona entertained the soldiers with vaudeville songs; the hospital staff staged Vova Makes the Best of It, a play on draft dodgers; and the newspapers printed versicles dedicated to the war:

In the spring of 1915, instead of getting ready to move from St. Petersburg to Leshino, which always seemed as natural and unshakable as the succession of months in the calendar, we went for the summer to our Crimean estate—on the coast between Yalta and Alupka. On the sloping lawns of the heavenly-green garden, his face distorted with anguish, his hands trembling with happiness, Fyodor boxed southern butterflies; but the genuine Crimean rarities were to be found not here among the myrtles, wax shrubs, and magnolias but much higher, in the mountains, among the rocks of Ai-Petri and on the grassy plateau of the Yayla; more than once that summer his father accompanied him up a trail through the pinewoods in order to show him, with a smile of condescension for this European trifle, the Satyrid recently described by Kuznetsov, which was flitting from stone to stone in the very place where some vulgar daredevil had carved his name in the sheer rock. These walks were Konstantin Kirillovich’s only distraction. It was not that he was gloomy or irritable (these limited epithets did not tally with his spiritual style) but that, putting it simply, he was fretting—and Elizaveta Pavlovna and the children were perfectly aware of what it was he wanted. Suddenly in August he went away for a short time; where he went no one except those closest to him knew; he covered up his journey so thoroughly as to excite the envy of any traveling terrorist; it was funny and frightening to imagine how Russian public opinion would have wrung its little hands had it learned that at the height of the war Godunov-Cherdyntsev had traveled to Geneva to meet a fat, bald, extraordinarily jovial German professor (a third conspirator was also present, an old Englishman wearing thin-rimmed spectacles and a roomy gray suit), that they had come together there in a small room in a modest hotel for a scientific consultation, and that having discussed what was necessary (the subject was a work of many volumes, stubbornly continuing publication in Stuttgart with longstanding cooperation of foreign specialists on separate groups of butterflies) they peaceably parted—each in his own direction. But this trip did not cheer him up; on the contrary, the constant dream weighing on him even increased its secret pressure. In the autumn they returned to St. Petersburg; he worked strenuously on the fifth volume of Butterflies and Moths of the Russian Empire, went out rarely and—fuming more at his opponent’s blunders than at his own—played chess with the recently widowed botanist Berg. He would look through the daily papers with an ironical smile; he would take Tanya on his knees, then lapse into pensiveness, and his hand on Tanya’s round shoulder would grow pensive too. Once in November he was given a telegram at table; he unsealed it, read it to himself, read it again to judge by the second movement of his eyes, laid it aside, took a sip of port wine from a ladle-shaped goblet of gold, and imperturbably continued his conversation with a poor relative of ours, a little old man with freckles all over his skull who came to dinner twice a month and invariably brought Tanya soft, sticky toffees—tyanushki. When the guests had departed he sank into an armchair, took off his glasses, passed his palm from top to bottom over his face and announced in an even voice that Uncle Oleg had been dangerously wounded in the stomach by a grenade fragment (while working at a first-aid post under fire)—and immediately there stood out in Fyodor’s soul, tearing it with its sharp edges, one of those numberless deliberately grotesque dialogues that the brothers had still so recently indulged in at table:

That same night he set out for Galicia to get him, brought him back extremely quickly and comfortably, obtained the best of the best doctors, Gershenzon, Yezhov, Miller-Melnitski, and himself attended two protracted operations. By Christmas his brother was well. And then something suddenly changed in Konstantin Kirillovich’s mood: his eyes came to life and softened, one again heard that musical humming which he used to emit on the move when he was particularly pleased about something, he went off somewhere, certain boxes arrived and departed and in the house, around all this mysterious gaiety of the master’s, one could sense a growing feeling of indefinite, expectant perplexity—and once when Fyodor happened to be passing through the gilt reception hall, bathed in spring sunshine, he suddenly noticed the brass handle of the white door leading into Father’s study jiggle but not turn, as if someone was limply fingering it without opening the door; but then it quietly opened and Mother came out with a vague meek smile on her tear-stained face, making an odd gesture of helplessness as she went past Fyodor. He knocked on his father’s door and entered the study. “What do you want?” asked Konstantin Kirillovich without looking up or stopping writing. “Take me with you,” said Fyodor.

The fact that at the most alarming time, when Russia’s borders were crumbling and her inner flesh was being eaten away, Konstantin Kirillovich suddenly planned to abandon his family for two years for the sake of a scientific expedition into a remote country, struck most people as a wild caprice, a monstrous frivolity. There was even talk that the government “would not permit purchase of provision,” that “the madman” would get neither traveling companions nor pack animals. But no further away than in Turkestan the peculiar smell of the epoch was hardly perceptible; practically the only reminder of it was a reception organized by some district administrators to which the guests brought gifts to aid the war (a little later a rebellion broke out among the Kirghiz and the Cossacks in connection with the summons to do war work). Just before his departure in June 1916, Godunov-Cherdyntsev came from town to Leshino to bid his family farewell. Until the very last minute Fyodor dreamed that his father would take him with him—once he had said he would do so as soon as his son was fifteen—“At any other time I would take you,” he said now, as if forgetting that for him time was always another one.

In itself this last farewell was in no way different from preceding ones. After the orderly succession of embraces worked out by family custom, both parents, donning identical amber goggles with suede blinkers, settled themselves in a red touring car; all around stood the servants; leaning on his stick, the old watchman remained at a distance by the lightning-split poplar; the driver, a short, fat, round little man in velveteen livery and orange gaiters—with a carroty nape and a topaze on his pudgy hand—straining horribly, jerked, jerked again, started the engine (Mother and Father began to vibrate in their seats), got quickly behind the steering wheel, shifted a lever on it, pulled on his gauntlets, and turned his head. Konstantin Kirillovich gave him a pensive nod and the car moved off; the fox terrier choked with barking as it squirmed wildly in Tanya’s arms, turning over onto its back and twisting its head over her shoulder; the red back of the car disappeared round the bend and then, from behind the fir trees, on top of a rising whine there sounded the sharp change of gears, followed by a comfortably receding murmur; all was still, but a few moments later, from the village beyond the river came again the triumphant roar of the engine, which gradually faded away—forever. Yvonna Ivanovna, weeping profusely, went for some milk for the cat. Tanya, affecting to sing, returned to the cool, resonant, empty house. The shade of Zhaksybay, who had died the preceding autumn, slipped off the porch bench and went back to its quiet, handsome paradise, rich in roses and sheep.

Fyodor walked across the park, opened the tuneful wicket gate and cut across the road where the thick tires had just imprinted their tracks. A familiar black-and-white beauty rose smoothly off the ground and described a wide circle, also taking part in the seeing-off. He turned into the trees and came by way of a shady path, where golden flies hung aquiver in transversal sunbeams, to his favorite clearing, boggy, blooming, moistly glistening in the hot sun. The divine meaning of this wood meadow was expressed in its butterflies. Everyone might have found something here. The holidaymaker might have rested on a stump. The artist might have screwed up his eyes. But its truth would have been probed somewhat deeper by knowledge-amplified love: by its “wide-open orbs”—to paraphrase Pushkin.

Freshly emerged and because of their fresh, almost orange coloration, merry-looking Selene Fritillaries floated with a kind of enchanting demureness on outstretched wings, flashing ever so rarely, like the fins on a goldfish. An already rather bedraggled but still powerful Swallowtail, minus one spur and flapping its panoply, descended on a camomile, took off as if backing from it, and the flower it left straightened up and started to sway. A few Black-veined Whites flew about lazily; one or two were spattered with bloodlike pupal discharge (spots of which on the white walls of cities predicted to our ancestors the fall of Troy, plagues, earthquakes). The first chocolate Aphantopus Ringlets were already fluttering, with a bouncy, unsteady motion over the grass, and pale micros rose from it, immediately falling again. A blue-and-red Burnet moth with blue antennae, resembling a beetle in fancy dress, was settled on a scabiosa in company with a midge. Hastily abandoning the meadow to alight on an alder leaf, a female cabbage butterfly by means of an odd upturn of her abdomen and the flat spread of her wings (somewhat reminiscent of flattened-back ears), informed her badly rubbed pursuer that she was already impregnated. Two violet-tinged Coppers (their females were not yet out) tangled in lightning-swift flight in midair, zoomed, spinning one around the other, scrapping furiously, ascending ever higher and higher—and suddenly shot apart, returning to the flowers. An Amandus Blue in passing annoyed a bee. A dusky Freya Fritillary flicked by among the Selenas. A small hummingbird moth with a bumblebee’s body and glasslike wings, beating invisibly, tried from the air a flower with its long proboscis, darted to another and then to a third. All this fascinating life, by whose present blend one could infallibly tell both the age of the summer (with an accuracy almost to within one day), the geographical location of the area, and the vegetal composition of the clearing—all this that was living, genuine and eternally dear to him, Fyodor perceived in a flash, with one penetrating and experienced glance. Suddenly he placed a fist against the trunk of a birch tree and leaning on it, burst into tears.

Although his father had no liking for folklore, he used to cite one remarkable Kirghiz fairy tale. The only son of a great khan, having lost his way during a hunt (thus begin the best fairy tales and thus end the best lives), caught sight among the trees of something sparkling. Coming closer he saw it was a girl gathering brushwood, in a dress made of fish-scales; however, he could not decide what precisely was sparkling so much, the girl’s face or her clothing. Going with her to her old mother, the young prince offered to give her as bride-money a nugget of gold the size of a horse’s head. “No,” said the girl, “but here, take this tiny bag—it’s little bigger than a thimble as you can see—go and fill it.” The prince, laughing (“Not even one,” he said, “will go in”), threw in a coin, threw in another, a third, and then all that he had with him. Extremely puzzled, he went off to consult his father.

They summoned the old woman. “That,” she said, “is a human eye—it wants to encompass everything in the world”; then she took a pinch of earth and filled up the bag immediately.

The last reliable evidence concerning my father (not counting his own letters) I found in some notes by the French missionary (and learned botanist) Barraud, who in the summer of 1917 chanced to meet him in the mountains of Tibet, near the village of Chetu. “I was amazed to see,” writes Barraud (Exploration catholique for 1923), “a saddled white horse grazing in a mountain meadow. Presently a man in European dress appeared, descending from the rocks; he greeted me in French and turned out to be the famous Russian traveler Godunov. I had not seen a European for over eight years. We passed several delightful minutes on the sward in the shade of a rock, discussing a fine nomenclatorial point in connection with the scientific name of a tiny, light blue iris which grew in the vicinity, and then, exchanging an amicable farewell, we parted, he to his companions calling him from a ravine and I to Father Martin, dying in a remote hostelry.”

Beyond this there is fog. Judging by my father’s last letter, brief as usual but unusually alarmed, which was delivered to us by a miracle at the beginning of 1918, he was preparing soon after he met Barraud to make the return journey. Having heard of the revolution he asked us in it to move to Finland, where our aunt had a country house, and he wrote that according to his calculations he would be home “with the maximum haste” by the summer. We waited two summers for him, until the winter of 1919. We lived some of the time in Finland and some in St. Petersburg. Our house had long since been plundered but Father’s museum, the heart of the house, as if retaining the invulnerability inherent in sacred objects, survived whole (later coming under the jurisdiction of the Academy of Sciences), and this joy completely compensated for the demise of chairs and tables familiar since childhood. We lived in St. Petersburg in two rooms in Grandmother’s flat. For some reason or other she was twice taken off for questioning. She caught cold and died. A few days after that, on one of those terrible winter evenings, hungry and hopeless, which played such an ominously close part in the civil disorder, an unknown youth visited me, in pince-nez, unprepossessing and uncommunicative, and asked me to call immediately on his uncle, the geographer Berezovski. He did not know or did not want to say what for, but suddenly everything somehow crumbled inside me and I began to live mechanically. Nowadays, several years later, I sometimes meet this Misha in the Russian bookshop in Berlin where he works—and every time I see him, although we talk little, I feel a hot shiver run down the whole of my spinal column and my whole being relives our brief road together. My mother was not there when this Misha came (this name I shall also remember forever) but we met her on our way downstairs; not knowing my companion she anxiously asked where I was going. I replied I was going for some hair clippers of which we had happened to be speaking a few days beforehand. Later I often dreamed about them, those nonexistent clippers, which took the most unexpected forms—mountains, landing stages, coffins, hand organs—but I always knew with a dreamer’s instinct that it was clippers. “Wait,” cried Mother, but we were already downstairs. We walked along the street quickly and silently, he slightly ahead of me. I looked at the masks of the houses, at the humps of the snowdrifts, and I tried to outwit fate by imagining to myself (and thus destroying its possibility in advance) the still uncomprehended, black, fresh grief which I would carry back home. We entered a room which I recall as being completely yellow, and there an old man with a pointed beard, wearing a field jacket and jackboots, informed me without preamble that according to still unverified information my father was no longer living. Mother was waiting for me below, on the street.

During the next six months (until Uncle Oleg almost forcibly took us abroad) we tried to find out how, and where, he had perished—and indeed whether he had perished at all. Apart from the fact that it happened in Siberia (Siberia is a big place!) on the return journey from Central Asia, we found out nothing at all. Can it be that they hid from us the place and circumstances of his mysterious death and have continued to hide them to this day? (His biography in the Soviet Encyclopaedia ends simply with the words: He died in 1919.) Or did the contradictoriness of the vague evidence truly rule out any explicitness in their answers? Once in Berlin we learned one or two supplementary things from various sources and from various people, but these supplements turned out to be nothing but new layers of uncertainty rather than glimpses through it. Two shaky versions, both more or less of a deductive nature (and telling us nothing, moreover, about the most important point: how exactly did he die—if he died), were entangled in one another and mutually contradictory. According to one of them, news of his death was brought to Semipalatinsk by a Kirghiz; according to the other, it was brought by a Cossack to Ak-Bulat. What was my father’s route? Was he going from Semirechie to Omsk (by way of the feather-grass steppe, with the guide on a piebald pony) or from the Pamirs to Orenburg through the Turgay region (by way of the sandy steppe, with the guide on a camel, he himself on a horse, birchbark-stirruped, from well to well, avoiding villages and railway lines)? How did he pass through the storm of the peasant war, how did he steer clear of the Reds? I cannot make anything out. And then, what kind of shapka-nevidimka, “invisible-making cap,” could have fitted him, who would have worn even that at a rakish angle? Did he hide in fishermen’s huts (as Krüger supposes) at the post “Aralskoye more” among the stolid Urals Old-Believers? And if he died, how did he die? “What is your profession?” Pugachyov asked the astronomer Lowitz. “Counting the stars.” Whereupon they hanged him so he could be nearer the stars. Oh, how did he die? From illness? From exposure? From thirst? By the hand of man? And if—by somebody’s hand, can that hand be still living, taking bread, raising a glass, chasing flies, stirring, pointing, beckoning, lying motionless, shaking other hands? Did he return their fire for a long time? Did he save a last bullet for himself? Was he taken alive? Did they bring him to the parlor car at the railway headquarters of some punitive detachment (I can see its hideous locomotive stoked with dried fish), having suspected him of being a White spy (and not without reason: he knew well the White general, Lavr Kornilov, with whom once in his youth he had traveled over the Steppe of Despair and whom in later years he had seen in China)? Did they shoot him in the ladies’ room of some godforsaken station (broken looking glass, tattered plush), or did they lead him out into some kitchen garden one dark night and wait for the moon to peep out? How did he wait with them in the dark? With a smile of disdain? And if a whitish moth had hovered among the shadowy burdocks he would, even at that moment, I know, have followed it with that same glance of encouragement with which, on occasion, after evening tea, smoking his pipe in our Leshino garden, he used to greet the pink hawks sampling our lilacs.

But sometimes I get the impression that all this is a rubbishy rumor, a tired legend, that it has been created out of those same suspicious granules of approximate knowledge that I use myself when my dreams muddle through regions known to me only by hearsay or out of books, so that the first knowledgeable person who has really seen at the time the places referred to will refuse to recognize them, will make fun of the exoticism of my thoughts, the hills of my sorrow, the precipices of my imagination, and will find in my conjectures just as many topographical errors as he will anachronisms. So much the better. Once the rumor of my father’s death is a fiction, must it not then be conceded that his very journey out of Asia is merely attached in the shape of a tail to this fiction (like that kite which in Pushkin’s story young Grinyov fashioned out of a map), and that perhaps, if my father even did set out on this return journey (and was not dashed to pieces in an abyss, not held in captivity by Buddhist monks) he chose a completely different road? I have even had occasion to hear surmises (sounding like belated advice) that he could well have proceeded west to Ladakh in order to go south into India, or why could he not have pushed on to China and from there, on any ship to any port in the world?

“Whether it was this way or that, Mother, all material connected with his life is now collected at my place. Out of swarms of drafts, long manuscript extracts from books, indecipherable jottings on miscellaneous sheets of paper, penciled remarks straggling over the margins of other writings of mine; out of half-crossed-out sentences, unfinished words, and improvidently abbreviated, already forgotten names, hiding from full view among my papers; out of the fragile staticism of irredeemable information, already destroyed in places by a too swift movement of thought, which in turn dissolved into nothingness; out of all this I must now make a lucid, orderly book. At times I feel that somewhere it has already been written by me, that it is here, hiding in this inky jungle, that I have only to free it part by part from the darkness and the parts will fall together of themselves…. But what is the use of that to me when this labor of liberation now seems to me so difficult and complicated and when I am so much afraid I might dirty it with a flashy phrase, or wear it out in the course of transfer onto paper, that I already doubt whether the book will be written at all. You yourself wrote to me of the demands which in such a task should be presupposed. But now I am of the opinion that I would fulfill them badly. Do not scold me for weakness and cowardice. Sometime I shall read you at random disjointed and inchoate extracts from what I have written: how little it resembles my statuesque dream! All these months while I was making my research, taking notes, recollecting and thinking, I was blissfully happy: I was certain that something unprecedentedly beautiful was being created, that my notes were merely small props for the work, trail-marks, pegs, and that the most important thing was developing and being created of itself, but now I see, like waking up on the floor, that besides these pitiful notes there is nothing. What shall I do? You know, when I read his or Grum’s books and I hear their entrancing rhythm, when I study the position of the words that can neither be replaced nor rearranged, it seems to me a sacrilege to take all this and dilute it with myself. If you like I’ll admit it: I myself am a mere seeker of verbal adventures, and forgive me if I refuse to hunt down my fancies on my father’s own collecting ground. I have realized, you see, the impossibility of having the imagery of his travels germinate without contaminating them with a kind of secondary poetization, which keeps departing further and further from that real poetry with which the live experience of these receptive, knowledgeable and chaste naturalists endowed their research.”

“Of course I understand and sympathize,” answered his mother. “It is a pity you cannot manage it, but of course you must not force yourself. On the other hand I am convinced that you are exaggerating a little. I am convinced that, if you thought less about style, about difficulties, about the poetaster’s cliché that ‘with a kiss starts the death of romance,’ etc., you would produce something very good, very true and very interesting. Only if you imagine him reading your book and you feel it grates upon him, and makes you ashamed, then, of course, give it up, give it up. But I know this cannot be, I know he would tell you: well done. Even more: I am convinced that some day you shall yet write this book.”

The external stimulus to the cancel of his work was provided for Fyodor by his removal to another lodging. To his landlady’s credit it must be said that she had put up with him for a very long time, for two years. But when she was offered the chance of obtaining an ideal roomer in April—an elderly spinster rising at seven thirty, working in an office till six, dining at her sister’s and retiring at ten—Frau Stoboy requested Fyodor to find himself another roof within the month. He continually postponed his inquiries, not only out of laziness and an optimistic tendency to endow a stretch of granted time with the rounded shape of eternity, but also because he found it unbearably nasty to invade alien worlds for the purpose of discovering a place for himself. Mme. Chernyshevski, however, promised him her assistance. March was drawing to an end when, one evening, she said to him:

“I think I have something for you. You once saw here Tamara Grigorievna, the Armenian lady. She has had a room in the flat of a Russian family but now wants to turn it over to somebody.”

“Which means it’s a bad room if she wants to get rid of it,” remarked Fyodor carelessly.

“No, it’s simply that she’s going back to her husband. However, if you don’t like it in advance then I won’t do anything about it.”

“I didn’t mean to offend you,” said Fyodor. “I like the idea very much, really I do.”

“Naturally, there’s no guarantee the room is not already disposed of, but still I would advise you to give her a ring.”

“Oh, of course,” said Fyodor.

“Since I know you,” continued Mme. Chernyshevski, already leafing through a black notebook, “and since I know you’ll never ring yourself …”

“I’ll do it first thing tomorrow,” said Fyodor.

“… since you will never do it—Uhland forty-eight thirty-one—I’ll do it myself. I’ll get her right now and you can ask her everything.”

“Stop, wait a minute,” said Fyodor anxiously. “I have no idea what I have to ask.”

“Don’t worry, she’ll tell you herself.” And Mme. Chernyshevski, rapidly repeating the number under her breath, stretched her hand toward the little table with the telephone.

As soon as she put the receiver to her ear her body assumed its usual telephone posture on the sofa; from a sitting attitude she slipped into a reclining one, adjusted her skirt without looking, and her blue eyes wandered here and there as she waited to be connected. “It would be nice—” she began, but then the girl answered and Mme. Chernyshevski said the number with a kind of abstract exhortation in her tone and a special rhythm in her pronunciation of the figures—as if 48 was the thesis and 31 the antithesis—adding in the shape of a synthesis: ja wohl.

“It would be nice,” she re-addressed Fyodor, “if she went there with you. I’m sure you’ve never in your life …” Suddenly, with a smile, dropping her eyes, moving a plump shoulder and slightly crossing her outstretched legs: “Tamara Grigorievna?” she asked in a new voice, suave and inviting. She laughed softly as she listened, pinching a fold in her skirt. “Yes, it’s me, you’re right. I thought that as always you wouldn’t recognize me. All right—let’s say often.” Settling her tone even more comfortably: “Well, what’s new?” She listened to what was new, blinking; as if in parenthesis she pushed a box of fruit-paste bonbons in Fyodor’s direction; then the toes of her small feet in their shabby velvet slippers began to rub gently against one another; they stopped. “Yes, so I’ve heard, but I thought he had a permanent practice.” She continued to listen. One could make out in the silence the infinitely small drumming of the voice from another world. “Well, that’s ridiculous,” said Alexandra Yakovlevna, “oh, that’s ridiculous.”… “So that’s how things are with you,” she drawled after a moment, and then, to a quick question which sounded to Fyodor like a microscopic bark, she replied with a sigh: “Yes, more or less, nothing new. Alexander Yakovlevich is well, keeps himself busy, he’s at a concert now, and I have nothing to report, nothing special. Right now I have here… Well, of course, it amuses him, but you can’t imagine how I sometimes dream of going away somewhere with him, even if only for a month. What’s that? Oh, anywhere. Generally speaking, things get a little depressing at times, but otherwise there’s nothing new.” She slowly inspected her palm and remained like that with her hand before her. “Tamara Grigorievna, I have Godunov-Cherdyntsev here. By the way, he’s looking for a room. Do those people of yours…. Oh, that’s wonderful. Wait a minute, I’m passing him the receiver.”

“How do you do?” said Fyodor, bowing to the telephone. “I’ve been told by Alexandra Yakovlevna—”

Loudly, so that it even tickled his middle ear, an extraordinarily nimble and distinct voice took over the conversation. “The room’s not yet rented,” began the almost unknown Tamara Grigorievna, “and as it happens they would very much like to have a Russian boarder. I’ll tell you right away who they are. The name is Shchyogolev, that tells you nothing, but in Russia he was a public prosecutor, a very, very cultured and pleasant gentleman…. Then there is his wife, who is also extremely nice, and a daughter from the first marriage. Now listen: they live at 15 Agamemnonstrasse, a wonderful district, in a small flat but hoch-modern, central heating, bath—in short, everything you could wish for. The room you’ll live in is delightful, but [with a retractive intonation] it looks out onto the yard, that of course is a small minus. I’ll tell you how much I paid for it, I paid thirty-five marks a month. It is quiet and has a fine daybed. Well, there we are. What else can I tell you? I had my meals there and I must confess the food was excellent, excellent, but you must ask them the price yourself. I was on a diet. Here’s what we’ll do now. I have to be there in any case tomorrow morning, about half past eleven, I’m very punctual, so you come there too.”

“Wait a second,” said Fyodor (for whom to rise at ten was the equivalent of rising at five for anyone else). “Wait a second. I’m afraid that tomorrow… Perhaps it might be better if I …”

He wanted to say: “give you a ring,” but Mme. Chernyshevski, who was sitting nearby, made such eyes that with a gulp he instantly corrected himself: “Yes, I think on the whole I can,” he said without animation, “thank you, I’ll come.”

“Well then [in a narrative tone], it’s 15, Agamemnonstrasse, third floor, with an elevator. So that’s what we’ll do. Until tomorrow then, I shall be very glad to see you.”

“Good-by” said Fyodor Konstantinovich.

“Wait,” cried Alexandra Yakovlevna, “please don’t ring off.”

The next morning when he arrived at the stipulated address—in an irritable mood, with a woolly brain and with only half of him functioning (as if the other half of him had still not opened on account of the earliness of the hour)—it turned out that Tamara Grigorievna not only was not there but had rung to say she could not come. He was received by Shchyogolev himself (no-one else was at home), who turned out to be a bulky, chubby man whose outline reminded one of a carp, about fifty years old, with one of those open Russian faces whose openness is almost indecent. It was a fairly full face of oval cut, with a tiny black tuft just under the lower lip. He had a remarkable hair style that was also somehow indecent: thin black hair evenly smoothed down and divided by a parting which was not quite in the middle of the head and yet not quite to one side either. Big ears, simple male eyes, a thick yellowish nose and a moist smile completed the general pleasant impression. “Godunov-Cherdyntsev,” he repeated, “of course, of course, an extremely well-known name. I once knew… let me see—isn’t your father Oleg Kirillovich? Aha, uncle. Where’s he living now? In Philadelphia? Hm, that’s quite a way. Just look where we émigrés get to! Amazing. And are you in touch with him? I see, I see. Well, never put off to tomorrow what you have already done—ha-ha! Come. I’ll show you your quarters.”

To the right of the hallway there was a short passage immediately turning right again at a right-angle to become another embryo corridor that terminated in the half-open door of the kitchen. The left wall had two doors, the first of which, with an energetic intake of breath, Shchyogolev threw back. Turning its head, there froze before us a small oblong room with ochered walls, a table by the window, a couch along one wall and a wardrobe by the other. To Fyodor, it seemed repellent, hostile, completely “unhandy” in regard to his life, as if positioned several fateful degrees out of true (with a dusty sunbeam representing the dotted line that marks the bias of a geometric figure when it is revolved) in relation to that imaginary rectangle within whose limits he might be able to sleep, read and think; but even if by a miracle he had been able to adjust his life to fit the angle of this deviant box, nevertheless its furniture, color, view onto the asphalt yard—everything about it was unendurable, and he decided at once that he would not take it.

“Well, here it is,” said Shchyogolev jauntily, “and here’s the bathroom next door. It needs a little cleaning up in here. Now, if you don’t mind …” He bumped violently into Fyodor in turning around in the narrow corridor and uttering an apologetic “Och!” grasped him by the shoulder. They returned to the entrance hall. “Here is my daughter’s room, here is ours,” he said, pointing to two doors on the left and right. “And here’s the dining room,” and opening a door in the depths, he held it in that position for several seconds, as if taking a time exposure. Fyodor passed his eyes over the table, a bowl of nuts, a sideboard…. By the far window, near a small bamboo table, stood a high-backed armchair: across its arms there lay in airy repose a gauze dress, pale bluish and very short (as was worn then at dances), and on the little table gleamed a silvery flower and a pair of scissors.

“That’s all,” said Shchyogolev, carefully closing the door, “you see—cozy, homely; everything we have is small, but we do have everything. If you wish to have your grub with us you’re very welcome, we’ll talk to my missus about that; between you and me she’s not a bad cook. Since you’re Mrs. Abramov’s friend, we’ll charge you the same as her, we won’t ill-treat you, you’ll live snug as a thug in the jug,” and Shchyogolev laughed fruitily.

“Yes, I think the room will suit me,” said Fyodor, trying not to look at him. “In fact, I would like to move in on Wednesday.”

“Please yourself,” said Shchyogolev.

Have you ever happened, reader, to feel that subtle sorrow of parting with an unloved abode? The heart does not break, as it does in parting with dear objects. The humid gaze does not wander around holding back a tear, as if it wished to carry away in it a trembling reflection of the abandoned spot; but in the best corner of our hearts we feel pity for the things which we did not bring to life with our breath, which we hardly noticed and are now leaving forever. This already dead inventory will not be resurrected later in one’s memory: the bed will not follow us, shouldering its own self; the reflection in the dresser will not rise from its coffin; only the view from the window will abide for a while, like the faded photograph, fitted into a cemetery cross, of a trim-haired, steady-eyed gentleman in a starched collar. I would like to wish you good-by, but you would not even hear my greeting. Nevertheless, good-by. I lived here exactly two years, thought here about many things, the shadows of my caravan passed over this wallpaper, lilies grew out of the cigarette ash on the carpet—but now the journey is over. The torrents of books have gone back to the ocean of the library. I do not know if I shall ever read the drafts and extracts rammed under the linen in my suitcase, but I do know that I will never look in here again.

Fyodor sat on his suitcase and locked it; went around the room; gave a final check to the drawers, and found nothing: corpses do not steal. A fly climbed up the windowpane, impatiently slipped, half fell and half flew downwards, as if shaking something, and started to crawl again. The house opposite, which he had found in scaffolding the April before last, was evidently in need of repairs again now: prepared boards were stacked by the sidewalk. He carried his things out, went to say good-by to the landlady, for the first and last time shaking her hand, which turned out to be dry, strong and cold, gave her back the keys and left. The distance from the old residence to the new was about the same as, somewhere in Russia, that from Pushkin Avenue to Gogol Street.