The Gift Read Free Page A

thought. Now he read in three dimensions, as it were, carefully exploring each poem, lifted out like a cube from among the rest and bathed from all sides in that wonderful, fluffy country air after which one is always so tired in the evening. In other words, as he read, he again made use of all the materials already once gathered by his memory for the extraction of the present poems, and reconstructed everything, absolutely everything, as a returning travelersees in an orphan’s eyes not only the smile of its mother, whom he had known in his youth, but also an avenue ending in a burst of yellow light and that auburn leaf on the bench, and everything, everything. The collection opened with the poem “The Lost Ball,” and one felt it was beginning to rain. One of those evenings, heavy with clouds, that go so well with our northern firs, had condensed around the house. The avenue had returned from the park for the night, and its entrance was shrouded in dusk. Now the unfolding white shutters separate the room from the exterior darkness, whither the brighter portions of various household objects have already crossed to take up tentative positions on different levels of the helplessly black garden. Bedtime is now at hand.
    Games grow halfhearted and somewhat callous. She is old and she groans painfully as she kneels in three laborious stages.
    My ball has rolled under Nurse’s commode.
On the floor a candle
Tugs at the ends of the shadows
This way and that, but the ball is gone.
Then comes the crooked poker.
It potters and clatters in vain,
Knocks out a button
And then half a zwieback.
Suddenly out darts the ball
Into the quivering darkness,
Crosses the whole room and promptly goes under
The impregnable sofa.
    Why doesn’t the epithet “quivering” quite satisfy me? Or does the puppeteer’s colossal hand appear here for an instant among the creatures whose size the eye had come to accept (so that the spectator’s first reaction at the end of the show is “How big I have grown!”)? After all the room really
was
quivering, and that flickering, carrousel-like movement of shadows across the wall when the light is being carried away, or the shadowy camel on the ceiling with its monstrous humps heaving when Nurse wrestles with the bulky and unstable reed screen (whose expansion is inversely proportional to its degree of equilibrium)—these are all my very earliestmemories, the ones closest to the original source. My probing thought often turns toward that original source, toward that reverse nothingness. Thus the nebulous state of the infant always seems to me to be a slow convalescence after a dreadful illness, and the receding from primal nonexistence becomes an approach to it when I strain my memory to the very limit so as to taste of that darkness and use its lessons to prepare myself for the darkness to come; but, as I turn my life upside down so that birth becomes death, I fail to see at the verge of this dying-in-reverse anything that would correspond to the boundless terror that even a centenarian is said to experience when he faces the positive end; nothing, except perhaps the aforementioned shadows, which, rising from somewhere below when the candle takes off to leave the room (while the shadow of the left brass knob at the foot of my bed sweeps past like a black head swelling as it moves), assume their accustomed places above my nursery cot,
    And in their corners grow brazen
Bearing only a casual likeness
To their natural models.
    In a whole set of poems, disarming by their sincerity … no, that’s nonsense—Why must one “disarm” the reader? Is he dangerous? In a whole set of excellent … or, to put it even more strongly, remarkable poems the author sings not only of these frightening shadows, but of brighter moments as well. Nonsense, I say! He does not write like that, my nameless, unknown eulogist, and it was only for his sake that I poetized the memory of two precious, and, I think, ancient toys.