Read The Gift for Free Online

with the shape of a victoria; but if this was indeed an attempt at mimicry then it was totally destroyed by the roar of the motor with the muffler bypass opened, a roar so ferocious that long before we came in sight a peasant on a hay wagon coming the other way would jump off and try to hood his horse with a sack—after which he and his cart would often end up in the ditch or even in the field; where, a minute later, having already forgotten us and our dust, the rural stillness would collect again, cool and tender, with only the tiniest aperture left for the song of a skylark.
    Perhaps one day, on foreign-made soles with heels long since worn down, feeling myself a ghost despite the idiotic substantiality of the insulators, I shall again come out of that station and without visible companions walk along the footpath that accompanies the highway the ten or so versts to Leshino. One after another the telegraph poles will hum at my approach. A crow will settle on a boulder—settle and straighten a wing that has folded wrong. The day will probably be on the grayish side. Changes in the appearance of the surrounding landscape that I cannot imagine, as well as some of the oldest landmarks that somehow I have forgotten, will greet me alternately, even mingling from time to time. I think that as I walk I shall utter something like a moan, in tune with the poles. When I reach the sites where I grew up and see this and that—or else, because of fires, rebuilding, lumbering operations or the negligence of nature, see neither this nor that (but still make out something infinitely and unwaveringly faithful to me, if only because my eyes are, in the long run, made of the same stuff as the grayness, the clarity, the dampness of those sites), then, after all the excitement, I shall experience a certain satiation of suffering—perhaps on the mountain pass to a kind of happiness which it is too early for me to know (I know only that when I reach it, it will be with pen in hand). But there is one thing I shall definitely not find there awaiting me—the thing which, indeed, made the whole business of exile worth cultivating: my childhood and the fruitsof my childhood. Its fruits—here they are, today, already ripe; while my childhood itself has disappeared into a distance even more remote than that of our Russian North.
    The author has found effective words to describe sensations experienced upon making the transition to the countryside. How much fun it is, says he, when
    No longer one needs to put on
A cap, or change one’s light shoes,
In order to run out again in the spring
On the brick-colored sand of the garden.
    At the age of ten a new diversion was added. We were still in the city when the marvel rolled in. For quite a time I led it around by its ram horns from room to room; with what bashful grace it moved along the parquet floor until it impaled itself on a thumbtack! Compared to my old, rattling and pitiful little tricycle, whose wheels were so thin that it would get stuck even in the sand of the garden terrace, the newcomer possessed a heavenly lightness of movement. This is well expressed by the poet in the following lines:
    Oh that first bicycle!
Its splendor, its height,
“Dux” or
“Pobéda”
inscribed on its frame,
The quietness of its tight tire!
The wavers and weavers in the green avenue
Where sun macules glide up one’s wrists
And where molehills loom black
And threaten one’s downfall!
But next day one skims over them,
And support as in dreamland is lacking,
And trusting in this dream simplicity,
The bicycle does not collapse.
    And the day after that there inevitably come thoughts of “freewheeling”—a word which to this day I cannot hear without seeing a strip of smooth, sloping, sticky ground glide past, accompanied by a barely audible murmur of rubber and an ever-so-gentle lisp ofsteel. Bicycling and riding, boating and bathing, tennis and croquet; picnicking under the pines; the lure of the water mill and