The Unreal Life of Sergey Nabokov (32 page)

“You'd make a dreadful spy,” I told him. “You must have learned your tricks from the Tsar's secret police.”

That made him smile.

“What is it you wish?” I continued.

During the weeks following our initial meeting, Oleg had sent me various scrawled notes I had been reluctant to answer. What, after all, was the point? Our friendship, as he liked to call it, had never existed. Our acquaintanceship had consisted of half a dozen brutalizing encounters.

He seemed agitated. “You see, my old friend, it's like this. Driving a taxi day in and day out, thoughts get inside a fellow's head and he can't get them out—like mealybugs in the flour.”

“I imagine that's so,” I told him.

“Well, it so happens you're one of those more persistent thoughts, Seryosha.”

“I see,” I said, failing to resist the little leap of excitement those words stirred in me. Had he ever called me Seryosha before?

“I'll admit it. I've not been decent toward you in the past.” He stared down at the sidewalk. “In fact, I see now how beastly I've behaved. I'd like to make it up to you.”

I was surprised to find him meeting my gaze at those last words.

I spoke very carefully. “And how does one, as you say, ‘make up' the past?”

“If only I knew how.” He laughed—though it was clear his derision was directed solely at himself.

“You're in quite a mood today,” I ventured.

“I've been in quite a mood for some time now. I've made a decision. I wish to teach you how to drive.”

Now it was my turn to laugh.

“That's very kind of you, but really, I have no need of driving lessons.”

He leaned in close. “Still,” he murmured, “I'd like to teach you.”

How absurd! I glanced from Oleg to his ancient taxi and back to his lovely imploring eyes, and fully conscious that I was taking my life in my hands in more ways than one, I acquiesced.

On Sunday afternoons he would pick me up in front of my building and drive us out of Paris, to Fontainebleau, or Rambouillet, where on empty country lanes he would instruct me in the fine art of motoring. To my surprise, he proved a patient teacher, and I a quick learner.

Sometimes we brought with us bread and pickles and a bottle of wine and made a picnic in some tranquil spot we found. Our conversations seldom touched on our past, dwelling mostly on our current lives. He talked incessantly of Valechka, her cunning intelligence, her voluptuous charms. For my part, I narrated the latest goings-on at 27 rue de Fleurus: how Pavlik, thwarted in his desire to paint a portrait of Gertrude to rival Picasso's masterpiece, had painted Alice instead. How he insisted to everyone that Alice despised the result but Gertrude adored it, when in reality Alice liked the way he depicted her and it was Gertrude who found the result objectionable. “He's painted Pussy without a mouth,” she complained. “Everyone knows Pussy has a mouth, and a very intelligent mouth full of very intelligent words. Why, I wouldn't be surprised if Pussy wrote her own autobiography one of these days. What things she would say! Everyone would be very surprised.”

“Tchelitchew.” Oleg spat. “I had some encounters with him in Constantinople. Conceited snob. A charlatan if ever I met one. I don't understand why you would want to spend evenings with the likes of him—or any of them for that matter. They seem a ghastly crew.”

It took me a few moments to formulate an answer. “You're absolutely correct,” I told him. “What happens there for the most part is simply rot. Nothing anyone does in that room matters. What matters happens elsewhere, in the solitude of painters' studios, at writers' desks. Gertrude and Alice's salon is merely where they come afterward, after the holy tasks are done, to burn off excess energy, to flush from their system all
the petty grievances and anxieties that are the furnace slag of the creative process. Of course there's always the hope Gertrude may somehow ‘make' them, as she's believed to have made Picasso and Matisse and Gris, all that earlier generation who are now banished from her good graces. Of course I know perfectly well what you'll ask: ‘But
you
don't paint,
you
don't write,
you
don't compose operas with cheeky titles like
Four Saints in Three Acts
. So why do
you
go there?' Well, I'm very conscious of my failings. With a brother like mine, how could I not be? I'll only say this: I go to pay homage to those who are greater than I can ever hope to be.”

“Did you once have artistic aspirations, Nabokov? Is that your secret?”

We reclined on a patch of long grass that sloped down to a pond where five identical ducks floated above their reflections. We had finished our bread, our pickles, our bottle of wine.

I thought for a moment of telling him I had once, as a schoolboy, in a world that had since disappeared, begun a novel in the style of Bely. Instead I said, “I wished to be like Volodya. I adored him so. Not just for himself, but for how much he was loved. I wrote my own verse, thinking I might duplicate his standing with our parents. But then I realized it wasn't his gift alone that endeared him to them. It was something else; the gift was merely the expression of that other unaccountable thing. I could compose all the verse I might and I'd still never succeed in unraveling the mystery of it. But you've turned me quite philosophical. You once warned me of the dangers of being too philosophical. Besides, you were only supposed to give me driving lessons, not a session on Doctor Freud's couch.”

“You never know, with me, what you might get,” Oleg said. He reached over and stroked the threadbare cuff of my jacket. “That's what's always intrigued you, isn't it? It's what's kept you coming back.”

“As I remember it, I didn't so much keep coming back as you kept turning up.”

“And I've turned up again, haven't I?”

“You've turned up again,” I said, understanding perfectly well how dangerous the moment had become.

“Then perhaps it's my turn to take the couch. I might as well begin by confessing: my marriage has seen better days. Valechka's making a cuckold out of me—perhaps even as we speak. There, I've said it. The ugly truth's out in the open. And on top of it all, I owe astonishing sums of money to my friends and acquaintances. Let's just say, most of my former friends are now acquaintances, and my former acquaintances no longer speak to me. As you can see, life's taught me bitter lessons. I'm not the boy who used to treat you cruelly. Still, I wager your own needs haven't changed. Am I right? Look: my wife's often out for hours—where, I don't even like to think. The flat's empty in the afternoons. Can you picture some arrangement that might be mutually agreeable? What do you say, Nabokov? For old times' sake? We could get up to things properly, for once.”

In those gold-flecked eyes was a plea I could scarcely ignore. How much I would have given in 1915 to witness this abjection, but it was no longer 1915, and as Oleg was fond of observing, the world had changed. With a cruelty all my own I savored the moment.

“You're quite a handsome fellow,” I told him. “Can't you find a mistress? I'd think there'd be plenty of prospects for someone like you.”

“Sometimes a man doesn't want a mistress. Sometimes a man needs something else.”

Remarkably enough, I laughed. “As I've told you before, I've got quite the life these days—”

He lunged toward me, and before I could register what had happened he had kissed me on the lips.

Five identical white ducks floated above five reflections.
From the Paris–Fontainebleau road, one would have seen only them, and a battered old Taxi de la Marne parked at an angle on an unkempt bit of grass.

 

At 27 rue de Fleurus, Alice served thimbles of a liqueur she had made herself. Pavlik was purring at Gertrude, who was purring back. Despite everything, she had purchased his portrait of Alice for a considerable sum.

Alice was in a friendly mood as well. She beckoned me over, pulled from the large Spanish armoire a blue
cahier
, the kind schoolchildren use, and said, “Tonight Lovey wishes you to have a look at what she is writing when she is writing.”

I told Alice how very honored I was. Though I seldom talked to Gertrude, Alice assured me that the great woman found me to be a nice young man, and that she very much liked nice young men.

“It's a lecture she's intending to give at Oxford,” Alice explained, handing me the notebook with all the care of a priest handling a reliquary. “You've studied at Oxford. You must tell me exactly what you think of the insights she is proposing.”

“Actually, Cambridge,” I told her, “Not that it makes a bit of difference. But yes, certainly, I'll tell you what I think.”

“You have an honest stutter,” Alice said. “And we are always counting on you for that.”

I opened the notebook and began to read the surprisingly childish scrawl:
Composition is the thing seen by every one living in the living that they are doing, they are composing of the composition that at the time they are living is the composition of the time in which they are living. It is that that makes living a thing they are doing.
I wondered whether Alice had perhaps substituted absinthe for her homemade liqueur. Several times I read the sentences, but they made no sense to me whatsoever.

I could hear Gertrude chastising a young man Virgil Thomson had brought; he had committed the unforgivable sin
of admitting that he was reading—and even worse, liking—
Ulysses
. “Why do you waste your time?” Gertrude asked, her lovely volubility gone steely. “That Irish drunk—he's nothing but a second-rate politician masquerading as a fifth-rate novelist. Why are all the young men still reading him? Can anyone tell me?”

The young man was blushing, but naively determined to hold fast to his opinion. “Surely, Miss Stein, you must—”

“Good evening to you,” Gertrude told him.

Nonplussed, the young man remained seated.

“Don't you understand? I said ‘Good evening to you.'” He did not, in fact, seem to understand until Thomson whispered in his ear, took him by the arm, led him to the door—which Alice had leapt up to hold open for him.

“We do not wish to see you again,” she said, her unpainted mouth a grim flat line. “People must understand. We do not sanction impertinence or stupidity in this house. You are guilty of both.”

Barely had the poor American gotten through the door before she shut it with a loud report.

It so happened that I too had read
Ulysses
, and thought it a most remarkable novel, but I knew well enough when to keep my honest stutter to myself.

Thus reminded of the delicacy of the task at hand, I turned back to Gertrude's pages. They seemed to me at best inspired gibberish, at worst an amateur con job. I desperately formulated what I might say to Alice.

Fortunately, she conferred for quite a while with Virgil Thomson, who kept shaking his head and holding out his hands in a gesture of bewilderment, and then with Gertrude, whom the incident had clearly plunged into a dour mood.

When at last Alice returned to her favorite chair and had taken up her needlework she asked, “So what has the bright young man made of Lovey's thoughts?”

I laughed nervously. “The bright young man is not so very bright tonight, I'm afraid.”

“Isn't what she has written perfectly clear?”

“Clear? Yes, well, perfectly clear. Beautifully, magnificently clear. Would that an Oxford audience were half so clear.”

“She is taking elocution lessons to improve her delivery.”

“Yes,” I stuttered less than honestly, “the delivery is no doubt very important. I would say, much depends on the delivery.”

“Yes, indeed,” Alice confirmed, wresting the notebook from my hands. “When the time comes, I can assure you, Lovey's delivery will be absolutely perfect.”

 

That spring of 1927 I received two letters, only days apart, both written on black-edged stationery. The first came from my mother, who passed along the news that my grandmother had died—had in fact been dead for nearly a year, though word from Romania had only now reached her circuitously, via our former Berlin address.

She wrote:
Maria Ferdinandovna was a most extraordinary—and extraordinarily difficult—lady, an unrepentant relic of an era whose time will never come again. It is hardly a secret that we found each other trying, and I have often contemplated the extent to which your long-suffering father did his best to keep the peace between us, and to honor his mother who persisted in criticizing nearly everything he attempted in his noble career. With each year that passes, I understand his selfless generosity more and more deeply, and I trust you appreciate how fortunate you were to have had his unerring guidance when you were young.