The Unreal Life of Sergey Nabokov (27 page)

The effect proved subtler than I might have expected. I felt a comfortable torpor, both mental and physical. My eyes had not closed, but before me appeared a scene as palpable as if it really were there. Behold the Oredezh, speckled with nenuphars, on which blue demoiselles alighted, resting motionless before resuming flight. The landscape was caught in a lovely pause, as if something were about to happen—stallions, perhaps, were about to thunder into the shallow waters—but I was able to prolong the moment indefinitely, and savor the stillness, the languor, the burning midday scene before me.

Not for an instant did I take the hallucination for anything other than what it was, and I was rather proud of myself for maintaining my mental clarity throughout.

When I told Cocteau that it had been quite interesting, though not so remarkable that I intended to pursue it as an avocation, he hastened to declare, “Then we needn't repeat this experiment. I've no wish for anyone to accuse me of attempting to ruin you.”

AS NEVER BEFORE, I MUST EARN MY KEEP. AN occasional review for Miliukov's
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brought in spare change, but most of my meager income derived from English lessons. For several months I shared with the painter Pavel Tchelitchew and an American pianist named Allen Tanner an apartment in rue Copernic so tiny we called it “The Doll's House.” They were amusing company—Pavlik high-strung, paranoid, exuberantly ambitious; Allen self-effacing to a fault but indispensible to his companion, who was far more concerned with Kabbalah than with paying the rent. We were a threadbare lot, but soon mastered the fine art of making a brandy and coffee last a whole evening in the cafés at the Raspail corner. We became expert at “dining on fumes,” as Pavlik dubbed the practice of absorbing the delicious aroma of a proper meal being consumed at the next table. Once or twice a week we would pool our scant resources and venture to Madame Wassilieff's
cantine
on the avenue du Maine, where four francs bought cabbage soup, vegetable pie, a glass of white
wine, and a cigarette. The day after our feast, we would fast.

As Pavlik had no money to pay for models, I posed for him on occasion.

He talked as he worked.

“There's the most scrumptious boy lingering at the street corner,” he informed me, dancing back to the window. “He's a leopard in boy form. No, don't move. It's what Diaghilev must have seen when he first glimpsed Nijinsky.”

He improvised a pirouette. “What I wouldn't have given to see him dance. They say Diaghilev keeps him locked away in a guarded flat in Passy. The clown of God, he calls himself these days. He's quite mad. Be still, kitten. I like that look on your face just now. Resolute but bored. What's the color of your soul, I wonder? Like me, you're part woman. Isn't that true? But don't answer. Don't say a word.”

For a full minute he painted, then leapt back to the window.

“Oh, dear God, that boy makes me so hungry. The only boys more scrumptious than French boys are the American ones, don't you think? But this one's so purely French. Surely he senses the gratitude streaming down on him from this window. See? I myself am sometimes like the famous faun.
Sans pitié du sanglot dont j'étais encore ivre
. There's something wrong with this painting. Or perhaps I'm what's wrong. It should be possible, you know, to execute an entire painting without the tip of the brush ever leaving the surface. That's how God created the world. But we poor humans must dip and dip, and dawdle, and go again and again to the window.

“No, don't say a word. You'll ruin that beautiful look on your face. You're quite the Russian princeling. Don't look at me that way. Why, the Nabokovs are nearly as old a family as we Tchelitchews. Next to us, the Romanovs were johnnies-come-lately. Do you know that when Grand Duchess Marie saw my father at the theater, she exclaimed to a friend, ‘Now
there's someone who's even nobler than we.' It's a fact. Our line traces itself back to a brother of Caesar Augustus. And I hear that you're descended from a great Tatar warrior. Tell me, Seryodushka, is it true what I've also heard—that the blood of Peter the Great flows in your veins? Speak. I've granted you permission.”

“It's old family gossip,” I admitted with a trace of a stutter. “Grandmother Nabokova conducted her amours at the very highest levels of the imperium. Alexander the Liberator was a particular friend.”

“And here we are, penniless, desperate, in exile. And longing for a boy who won't even look this way.”

When he had finished the painting, I was a bit chagrined by the image the canvas conveyed: a figure ridiculously gaunt, more jester than princeling. Nonetheless I felt gratitude, even a strange sense of relief, that I had been recorded. Unfortunately, as Pavlik had no money for new canvases, that portrait was soon covered over by a new painting—an arrestingly garish basket of strawberries.

Later, when Pavlik was famous and I no longer knew him as well, I regretted that none of my portraits survived. But no matter.

Though my poverty was dreary beyond description, my reviews did afford me the luxury of otherwise unaffordable seats at symphony concerts or my beloved Ballets Russes. And I was not without other diversions. For a while I took up with Claude, a sweetly pathetic, big-bottomed lad from Reims. When that faded, I spent several weeks achingly enamored of Hervé, a handsome mannequin maker's apprentice, only to discover, upon finally attaining his bed, that he was entirely impotent.

After each of these episodes I was left feeling somehow duller than before.

Then, in the fall of 1925, I met an American from Cleveland.
Heir to a department store fortune, Weldon Bryce III was keen on jazz, French cuisine, and Byzantine icons, roughly in that order. I seemed to fall under the latter category, and he was happy enough to add me to the collection of smoke-darkened saints and martyrs that adorned his well-appointed chambers in rue Montparnasse. That they had mostly been looted from churches by the Bolsheviks gave me pause, but not enough to reject his advances. He had a large mouth and delicious lips, and he turned out to be well endowed in more respects than one.

We quickly settled into a pleasant enough routine. He was always immaculately clad in strange American threads, and inordinately fond of the expression “Wow!”—which Paris evoked in him with some regularity.

My friends found Weldon impossibly handsome and hopelessly naive. “I am mesmerized by
l'américanisme
,” Cocteau confessed to me after meeting him, “as by a man pointing a revolver directly at me.”

 

A tender day in early spring. Standing at a third-floor window of the Thermes Urbains, ashen and gaunt, clothed in a robe of regal purple, Cocteau bestowed on us an unhurried papal wave, his long slender fingers held rigidly together.

“
Mes enfants!
” he cried. “So heavenly of you to come. But do not approach. You must remain at a distance. The wise doctors insist.”

For a moment I could not repress the sense that he was being held in quarantine—the
homme fatal
at last found out by the authorities. In reality, he had checked himself into the clinic for an opium cure—a brutal regime, if his occasional notes to me could be believed, of purges, cathartics, and enemas, all paid for by the indispensible Coco Chanel.

“But tell us how you are,” Weldon called out.

Cocteau cupped his left hand to his ear while continuing to wave with his right.

“How
are
you?” Weldon repeated, responding in kind by cupping his hands around his mouth like a megaphone.

“Marvelous,” Cocteau told us. “My memory is returning. I can remember…telephone numbers! And bits of poetry I thought I'd lost forever. An angel comes every night and sits on my chest as I sleep, though the nurses claim this can't be so. But what do they know? He touches my lips with his fingers which are feathered like the wings of birds.”

A nurse appeared by his side. “Monsieur Cocteau,” she urged. “You're disturbing the other patients. Perhaps you could return to your bed. You need your rest.”

“I'm so invigorated,” Cocteau told us—and the nurse as well. “All my sexual energy has returned. I sweat, I piss, I ejaculate. These are miracles.” At this the nurse looked positively miserable. She was joined by a second, even more formidable sister. Firmly they took our frail friend in hand. “
Adieu, mes amis,
” he cried like a child carried off to bed. “
Adieu, adieu.
” Then he disappeared. The window shut behind him. We remained where we were, looking up at the spot he had vacated.

Then the window opened, just barely, and out sailed a flimsy aeroplane of folded paper. The breeze caught it, sustained it till it landed almost at our feet. Unfolded, the page torn from a notebook revealed an alarming sketch: Cocteau, his eyeballs protruding at the ends of long stems, his slender fingers likewise stems, as if his whole body were in the process of metamorphosing into a grotesque bouquet of opium pipes.

His own antique pipe and lamp he had bequeathed to me on his entry into the asylum. Even as I scrutinized that horrible drawing, a part of me longed to be out of the wonderful sunlight and sequestered in my wretched room in rue St.-Jacques. I had not counted on succumbing so readily to the drug's lures. I reassured myself that my habit was hardly regular enough to be habit—an indulgence, rather; a sometime refuge from the dull daily march toward oblivion.

It was the only cause for quarrel between me and Weldon. Indeed, I suspected he had brought me to the Thermes Urbains to absorb in full the terrible, disfiguring vision Cocteau had sketched for our benefit. It struck me that my desire for opium mimicked my other desires: my thirst for the ballet, my hunger for old books, my fevered quest for various ill-starred loves. Weldon, for instance: I loved the mere fact of his skin. But what, in the end, did I wish from him? What did I want from any of them? It was a conundrum I pondered increasingly.

After a hearty meal at the Closerie des Lilas, we parted at the corner of boulevard Montparnasse and the boul' Mich. I am loath to admit it, but I remained with Weldon in part because he was happy to treat me to dinner at such restaurants, and I was tired of dining on fumes.

When I arrived home, the concierge handed me a letter from my mother.

My dearest Seryosha
, she wrote from Prague,

I had become used to following my brother's life from afar, whether through Mother's missives or the increasingly frequent appearances of “V. Sirin” in émigré journals. The news was not so much startling as melancholy, and I realized how I still grieved the silence that had become so entrenched between us. If only he had married Svetlana Siewert—
she
would not have allowed this estrangement to continue.

Before retiring to my bed to enjoy a consoling smoke, I wrote my brother a friendly and congratulatory note. Several weeks later I received in return a printed announcement:

The handwriting on the envelope was unfamiliar—Véra's, no doubt. No personal message was attached.

 

Weldon and I got on famously. In August we traveled south to the Côte d'Azur, where Cocteau had established himself at the Hotel Welcome in the small harbor town of Villefranche-sur-mer. There, cured, he was writing and drawing by day, and by night invoking the god of music by playing jazz in the hotel bar.

We arrived early in the morning, having taken the night express from Paris, the
train bleu
that he had recently immortalized in his ballet for Diaghilev. A stern-faced concierge—one
of those formidable women one seems to meet behind every counter in France—took us up to Cocteau's rooms, but to her repeated knocking there came no response. She opened the door onto a familiar scene of chaos—books, papers, sketches everywhere, but no Cocteau.

We returned to the lobby, where a lugubrious young Algerian woman appeared from the kitchen to inform us, “He is out there.” We followed her pointing arm to the lapis lazuli ocean and there he was indeed, seated in a small dinghy and rowing madly. In the prow of the boat stood a bare-chested lad no older than twelve; from his frantic gestures, he appeared to be urging Cocteau, who was clad in a terry cloth robe, to apply himself more forcefully to the oars. Behind them loomed an immense American warship—as if bearing down on them in hot pursuit. That was an illusion, of course; the ship was still far out and no doubt unaware of the small craft making for shore.