JM: While sorting out my small treasures from “The Gift” I remembered a scene which I was unable to find as it was not underlined in my old copy [   ] “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.” [  ]Unfortunately there were no further references to locate it in the printed novel and a curious illustration was appended to the quote, since it offered a rainbow in which the blue was lying close to the red. [Cf. https://beingsakin.wordpress.com/2011/05/09/the-miracle-is-the-shortest-time/]  This mixture of colors led me to a description in “Despair”: “I left the road and began to climb again, this time up a thinly turfed slope. Dreary and barren country.  The rattle of a truck came from the road, then a cart passed in the opposite direction, then a cyclist, then, a vilely painted rainbow-wise, the motor van of a firm of varnishers. In those rascal’s spectrum the green band adjoined the red.”
A.Bouazza:  The quote from The Gift is in the third paragraph of Chapter Two.

Jansy Mello:  Thank you for the reference, AB.  I realized that I hadn’t underlined this particular sentence because I chose to pencil a soft circle around the entire page, for VN had carefully built up the scene, starting with:

“The rain still fell lightly, but with the elusive suddenness of an angel, a rainbow had already appeared [   ] it hung suspended over the reaped field [  ]. 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 [   ] The rainbow was already fading…”

You helped me to recover it. And I also got to another mark that echoes the clumsily painted rainbow on the van from Despair, a second unexpected connection. It is to be found in Chapter One from The Gift (p.34):

“While he had been musing over his poems, rain had lacquered the street from end to end. The van had gone and in the spot where its tractor had recently stood, there remained next to the sidewalk a rainbow of oil,with the purple predominant and a plumelike twist. Asphalt’s parakeet. And what had been the name of the moving company? Max Lux. Mac’s luck.”

It must have been the same moving van that appears in the very first paragraph of The Gift (p.11): “One cloudy but luminous day…a moving van very long and very yellow, hitched to a tractor [  ] a dishonest attempt to climb into the next dimension …”  In the next paragraph Fyodor states: “Some day, he thought, I must use such a scene to start a good thick old-fashioned novel.”

Btw: Despair begins in an almost similar (metafictional) way as The Gift: “ If I were not perfectly sure of my power to write and of my marvelous ability to express ideas with the utmost grace and vividness … So, more or less, I had thought of beginning my tale.”

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