The Unreal Life of Sergey Nabokov (30 page)

We ended up out in Passy, at a bar filled with émigrés smoking, playing chess, killing time. I so seldom came out here to the so-called Russian suburbs that I felt strangely alien among my countrymen.

“I'm really very happy to see you,” I told Oleg. “I always wondered whether you'd made it out alive.”

“Yes, we got out, even my aunt in Smolny. Then my father had a heart attack a month later in Constantinople. Dropped dead in Taksim Square. Probably for the best. It would've killed him to have to live like this. After Constantinople we were in Sofia for two years, and now here since the spring of twenty-four. And what about you? What exciting adventures do you have to tell me about?”

The exchange of escape tales is de rigueur whenever émigrés meet, and I narrated my own, including my current straitened financial circumstances.

“Have you heard the joke?” he said. “Two men are sitting at a café. One of them says, See that bartender? Well, he used to be a banker in Moscow. And the other one says, See that waiter? He used to be a colonel in the Russian Army. And the first one says, See that dachshund? It used to be a Great Dane back in Ukraine.” He laughed. “We've all sunk low. I feel like a paper doll here, a thing of no substance at all. I often go to the Russian church on rue Daru. How that takes me back! And yet I doubt I'll ever be going home. It's all gone, you know. Leningrad isn't Petrograd. In Leningrad they've been burning books and furniture for fuel. That would never have happened
in Petrograd. There's nothing in Leningrad but misery and suffering. And all because of Germany and the Jews.”

Wishing to head off
that
tiresome topic, I said, innocently enough, “So you're married. Congratulations are in order. Since when? And who's the lucky girl?”

“Nearly five years. Can you believe it? Valechka Nikolaevna. An adorable little kitten I fell in with after my father prudently recalled me from Petrograd to the family farm. You'll meet her soon enough. She's vivacious, a good head on her shoulders—a heart of gold, as they say, somewhere underneath that sarcastic wit. We'll have you to dinner very soon. She'll be pleased to meet one of my oldest friends. She's heard lots about those days, all my school pals, but so few of them are still around. So few made it out. Ilya, Vassily, Lev: all gone. Butchered like animals. I think Valechka sometimes doubts whether I even have a past. But what about your pals—what did you call yourselves, the Assyrians?”

“Abyssinians,” I said, surprised and touched he remembered. “Likewise dead.”

He slid his large hand over my own. I noted that his thumbnail was blackened, a detail I found at once repellent and arousing. “We've truly suffered, haven't we?” he said. “And yet here we are, you and I. It's quite mad when you think of it.”

For a moment there was a lull. He did not remove his hand. I dared not look him in the eyes.

When I could stand the silence no more I withdrew my hand and said, with forced gaiety, “But we forge on, don't we? I have quite a few friends these days. Rather well-known friends, in fact. Cocteau, Diaghilev, Stravinsky. Gertrude Stein. Our illustrious compatriot Tchelitchew, who will soon be quite a famous painter—famous enough to rival Picasso, whom I also happen to know.” When I had finished reciting these preposterous boasts I was thoroughly ashamed of myself.

“Half those names mean nothing to me, and the other half
I'd call a real rogues' gallery. Do you really go about with the likes of Picasso?”

“He's a difficult man to know well,” I fabricated. “Once, at a dinner party, I watched him create a most marvelous sculpture from a pile of children's toys. It was like watching a magician at work.”

“I was never much for art of any kind, I must say,” Oleg said. “Give me something practical to do: that's all I've ever asked. Why, I should be overseeing the most productive wheat fields in all of Ukraine right now. But you're right. We forge on. And I suppose I've done well enough. I have a respectable wife, I keep my head above water, I haven't lost my self-respect. And today I've discovered an old friend I thought I'd never see again.”

He had drunk several glasses of wine in quick succession, and now called for vodka. I told him I had an English lesson scheduled for four o'clock, and asked if he would mind giving me a lift back to the Latin Quarter.

He seemed disappointed, but said, “Right you are, we mustn't piss the afternoon away. We've all got to earn our keep these days. But we'll be seeing each other again, won't we? We'll exchange addresses.”

He hesitated before climbing into his ancient Taxi de la Marne. “Perhaps you'd like to drive,” he offered. “Would that amuse you?”

I told him I had never learned to drive.

“What a shame. It's one of life's great pleasures. I'll teach you one of these days.” I noted, with some bemusement, that he kept trying to contrive future opportunities for us to meet. How satisfying it would be to tell him, once and for all, “I've got quite the life myself these days. I'm not sure I can find room for a distant acquaintance from the past.” But I resisted the temptation to be cruel.

When he dropped me off on rue de Vaugirard, he reached
out and grasped my arm. “I'm glad Fate has thrown us back together, Nabokov. You'll be hearing from me soon. My wife is quite the cook!”

I gave his hand a quick, friendly pat and turned away toward the crowded sidewalk. There was a small florist's on the corner selling lilies for Easter, and on impulse I squandered several precious francs in honor of the approaching Holy Week.

 

And thus the happy day arrived—the happiest of my entire life. I woke at dawn eager as a schoolboy; all day I was good for nothing, so focused was my soul on the evening ahead. When night finally fell I put on my most exquisite makeup, wore my opera cloak, and took along my fanciest walking stick. I was, after all, going to be received into the House of the Lord.

Cocteau and his claque of six or seven
enfants
joined me at a café near St.-Séverin. It quickly became apparent that some or all of them had smoked beforehand, and though I felt momentarily bereft, I soon decided that that was their affair, not mine. I would stand before the Lord with clean heart and clear conscience.

“Isn't it grand?” said Cocteau, thrumming his long fingers on the tabletop as if it were a keyboard. “It's like attending some young girl's
début
. So seldom do we have an opportunity in this life to become virginal again!”

“I haven't been so excited,” Bourgoint admitted, “since the première of
L'Enfant et les Sortilèges
.”

“But confess: you thought Ravel's opera was going to be about you,” said Sachs.

“I still do,” Bourgoint told him.

Having entered the Carmelite seminary some weeks before, Sachs wore a soutane. When, in all seriousness, I told him how becoming it looked on him, he sighed and said, “Yes, black
is
slimming, isn't it?”

“When we learned you were at the seminary, we thought it
must be a new nightclub,” opined a languid, curly-haired
enfant
whose name I have forgotten.

“
I
always thought you were Jewish,” sniffed Bourgoint.

“Well I was,” Sachs told him. “I was born Maurice Etting-hausen. So there.”

What followed was pure enchantment: the hushed procession of the Paschal candle through the darkened church, the celebrant stopping three times to intone “
Lumen Christi
,” the congregation responding “
Deo Gratia
” as each of us received his own candle so that gradually the darkness was beaten back, the church filled with light and life, which is of course Christ Himself. Then the magisterial Liturgy of the Word, followed by the Mass of the Resurrection with the singing, for the first time since Lent, of the
Gloria in Excelsis Deo
. The organ and church bells pealed joyously, and the statues that had been draped during Passiontide were one by one unveiled. The first solemn Alleluia since Septuagesima led to the Gospel of the Resurrection, and then it was time for my confirmation.

All the jumbled pieces of my life arranged themselves into a kind of whole—and the whole, I saw clearly, was love. I thought of my mother, and La Karsavina, and I consecrated the moment to Davide Gornotsvetov. All my prayers were for the salvation of his soul.

They flanked me at all times, my lovely brothers in Christ. Cocteau kept murmuring, at intervals, “I love you, oh, how I love you.” Bourgoint, on my immediate left, sweetly clasped my hand through most of the ceremony.

Never had I felt so protected by so many disparate forces.

It was theater of the highest order.

NEVER WILL I FORGET THE AFTERNOON IN LATE spring 1926 when I espied, prominently displayed in the window of the Russian bookshop on rue Pierre-le-Grand, a poster advertising MARY—A NOVEL OF ÉMIGRÉ LIFE BY V. SIRIN
.
Never will I forget the excitement with which I carried away my precious copy, the avidity with which I devoured those pages.

I of course recognized immediately the bitter world of present-day émigré Berlin our hero Ganin inhabits: even more did I recognize the sweet world of his memories, the happy summer of 1915, a boy and girl's first ardors amid the arbors of a family estate. Here was the delicious heart of the novel, and I relived with strange intensity that adolescent romance on whose edges I had often inadvertently found myself. Yet certain details perturbed me. There was that tryst—which I had quite unintentionally witnessed—“on the six-columned porch of a stranger's closed mansion.” To demote our uncle Ruka to the status of a mere stranger—well, I did not much like that.
Nor did I particularly like Sirin's description of a “lecher who was always crossing their path in avenues of the park.” True, the wretch is described as foul-mouthed, orange-haired, and twenty, the son of the watchman; still, I winced to see myself thus transmuted.

It was all fiction, I reminded myself. Volodya certainly had never bestowed on me the swift punishment our hero Ganin metes out, sans brass knuckles, to the cowardly voyeur. But the dark question lingered: had he on occasion wished to?

A tricky thing, this parsing of reality and invention.

But a far greater shock lay in wait. The room adjacent to Ganin's in that sordid Berlin pension is occupied by two ballet dancers: mannered, mincing nancies, both giggly as women. We see one of them, Kolin, as he applies coral varnish to his fingernails, splashes himself with sickly-sweet toilet water, powders his face and makes up his eyes, then flicks the tip of his fancy cane up and down as he goes for a walk. Of the other, who bears the heart-stopping name Gornotsvetov, we read: “His features were dark and very regular, and long curled eyelashes gave his eyes a clear, innocent expression. He had short, black, slightly frizzled hair; he shaved the back of his neck like a Russian coachman and had grown sideburns which curved past his ears in two dark strips.”

A deep flush came to my cheeks. I found it difficult to breathe. This was, of course, none other than Davide Gornotsvetov who had tutored me in the use of nail varnish, Davide Gornotsvetov who had showed me how to employ a fancy walking stick, Davide Gornotsvetov in whose very existence Volodya had once refused to believe and whose likeness he had now transferred to the page!

It left me with a nasty feeling of sham and mockery, of stale unreality that a long nocturnal walk in a very real Paris under a lightly falling rain did little to dispel.

That summer of 1926, enduring the tiresome nonsense that always accrues to anyone cursed with a Nansen passport, I traveled to Prague, where my mother and younger brother Kirill shared with the ever-loyal Evgenia Hofeld a small flat on the west bank of the Vltava. I had not seen my mother in three years, and though she was but fifty, I was shocked by how diminished she seemed. Her hair had gone completely gray. Her mouth quavered, as if she were never far from tears. The flat, with its shabby furniture and unemptied ashtrays, was crowded with mementos—the books Father had written, the journals he had edited, albums in which she had lovingly copied out my brother's poems, framed photographs of all of us on every surface.

Volodya and his new wife had visited some weeks earlier. Mother reported, “I've never seen your brother looking happier or more content. Finally he's settling down. Still, I would never have imagined such a one for him! I know, mothers are always critical of their son's choices. You may have guessed that your grandmother Nabokova never entirely approved of
me
. I've heard from her, by the way, six months ago now. She's left Dresden for Romania, at the invitation of Queen Marie. I didn't even know they were friends. But then your grandmother enjoyed cultivating her secrets. Evgenia, if you'd be so kind, I believe the letter's on the stand beside our bed. Really, she's a most extraordinary woman, this Véra Slonim. Very intelligent, very literate, but then the Jews have always been so, haven't they? That's why they're so envied, which is the real reason they're so despised. Would I have chosen her for my son? No. Has he chosen well? Yes, certainly. She adores him, and he adores her. I know from my own marriage what a happy state of affairs that is. Oh, thank you, dear. Now if you could find my specs, I think I left them over there—really, Seryosha, I've gotten very forgetful recently—thank you again, my dear—let's see, ah,
here it is. Your grandmother writes, ‘Khristina is impossible. She still forgets to flush the toilet. I think it's from spite. But then everything is spiteful here. Get me out of this gypsy hole. Romania is not a nation, it's a profession.' As you can see, she remains in inimitable form. I can only imagine what mischief she's getting up to.”