The Unreal Life of Sergey Nabokov (43 page)

Cocteau's voice buzzed in my ear. “
Mon cher
, I thought your charming stutter had abandoned you. Your brother sounds so very much like you, though his voice is less musical and, shall we say, more muscular. I prefer your own sweet tones. Unfortunately, I wish I were calling with sweet notes of my own, but I've simply run up against a brick wall—make that a paper wall, but no less formidable for being built of innumerable bureaucratic forms. Are you certain there's not some other way? And must she absolutely find work immediately? It seems to me that many Russians over the years have simply wandered into our fair city. One sees them everywhere—not necessarily thriving, as none of us do that anymore, but bearing up perfectly well without showing any evidence at all of having been officially ‘cleared.'

“So I'm afraid,
mon cher
, this means I've no help to offer. In the old days I would have called the Hugos, who are so efficient at everything worldly, but they've abandoned me, as has practically everyone else—even my own genius, I sometimes fear. But I cherish this opportunity to have gotten back in touch with
you
. I've missed you terribly, you know. You must grace me with your limpid presence soon.” He paused; then, like a naughty child who cannot help himself, he murmured, “Perhaps you'd like to smoke a pipe or two for old times' sake.”

 

By day Volodya worked on his novel
The Gift
, about which he would tell me only, “There's nothing like it in all of Russian literature.” At night he frequented those émigré circles I had long avoided. However, Paris is a small city, especially for exiles, and one could not avoid hearing gossip. Sirin was charming the women who fluttered mothlike around his flame. His literary judgments were provoking outrage. He had offended Sorokin. He had insulted Adamovich to his face. The very mention of his name made Nobel laureate Bunin livid. He was having an affair.

At first I dismissed this last rumor as both ridiculous and malicious, but I soon began to hear it from many sources, though two different women tended to be identified, Nina Berberova and Irina Guadanini.

Resolving to acquaint my brother with the various speculations being bandied about, I proposed that we see each other on March 28, the fifteenth anniversary of Father's death. He demurred, saying he had other obligations, but suggested we might meet the following afternoon. He showed up thoroughly out of sorts, and when I asked why, he said that he had waited all the previous day for a letter from Véra which had never arrived.

When I suggested her letter must have been delayed, and surely would arrive today, he reminded me that today's post
had already come. “She's not herself,” he told me. “For some reason she refuses to move to Paris. One week she suggests we try living in Belgium, the next she's fixated on Italy. She's even mentioned Austria. And now this new wrinkle—she insists she must first travel to Czechoslovakia, so that Mother can see Mitouchka, and so that she can take a rheumatism cure. As if there aren't rheumatism cures available in France! I understand her desire to show Mother her grandchild, because he's certainly a very splendid grandchild, but why now, of all times? Surely it can wait a few more months until we're settled.”

As he spoke, the troubling thought occurred to me: what if Véra had heard the rumors as well? What if that was the cause of her aversion to Paris?

“This may be neither here nor there,” I said. “But you should know that malicious gossip's afoot. I'm sure it's—”

“Nonsense,” he bellowed. “Of course it's nonsense. Nina Berberova's a very dear friend, and it's a difficult time for her, having separated from Khodasevich after so many years. So we're seen together in cafés. Does anyone really think I would jeopardize my relations with the greatest poet of our generation by having an affair with his estranged wife? I can assure you, Seryosha, there's nothing between us save friendship and our love of literature.”

Struck by the forthrightness of his denial, I told him that I was grateful for the clarification, and that I knew how trying this spring must have been for him.

“You needn't fuss over me so, you know. You start to suffocate me with the mothering touch.”

“But I haven't,” I said.

“Really. I appreciate your attentions, but I'm perfectly well taken care of these days.”

If I was a little wounded by that last bit, I tried not to show it, telling him instead that I was very much looking forward to
the luncheon we had planned to have when Hermann came to Paris the following week.

“Thank you for reminding me,” he said. “It had very nearly slipped my mind. I too shall look forward to it.”

Only some time later did I realize he had failed to say a word about Irina Guadanini.

THE LUNCHEON WAS NOT A SUCCESS. THE TWO men who meant the most in the world to me were polite and cautious with each other. And how very different they were: Hermann impeccably turned out, flirtatious and gay, Volodya brusque and even coarse in the presence of other men.

Volodya seemed amused by Hermann's vegetarianism—and my own recent conversion to it. He asked the kind of questions one might ask of a newly discovered tribe of heathens. Hermann answered patiently—yes, there was sufficient protein to be found in a variety of foods without recourse to meat; no, he did not believe vegetables felt pain—but that line of inquiry could only advance so far. Hermann had of course not read Sirin—or any other Russian writer—in the original, and Volodya quickly let it be known that he was not particularly interested in discussing Pushkin or any other writer in translation.

Volodya of course knew nothing about music, and was completely uninterested in politics, and ventured to opine that he found Roman Catholicism a baffling mythology. For the
duration of the meal I kept thinking there must be
something
they had in common other than the slender fact of me; the closest we came was when Hermann told Volodya about his father's passion for collecting alpine plants, and the herbarium where he raised them. Volodya tried to engage him in a discussion of which plants served as food for which butterflies, but in Oskar's absence that potentially promising topic went nowhere as well.

We did all manage to agree that it had been a particularly raw and rainy spring so far.

“I'd say that went off quite well,” Hermann pronounced after we had parted from Volodya.

“Well enough,” I told him with the sinking feeling that he was incapable of understanding the nature of my longing for Volodya. How
could
he, when after so many years I could not fully articulate it to myself?

“Let's take a turn into Saint-Roch,” I said. “Indulge me, will you? It's not far out of the way.”

A christening had just finished. A few people lingered, lighting candles in the side chapels, wandering about to look at the paintings and monuments. It was here I had first understood, with absolute clarity, how we are in the hands of God.

“Sometimes,” I told Hermann as we knelt midway among the ranks of wooden chairs, “I don't even know what I'm praying for.”

“I don't think there's anything wrong with that,” he said. “Especially not after lunching with your brother.”

 

Whether Volodya had an affair with Irina Guadanini I do not know, nor do I particularly care. That May, after much miserable wrangling, he finally joined Véra and Mitouchka in Prague, and from there went on to Menton in the south of France, where they would spend the next year.

I was relieved to see all this resolved, for his tumultuous spring had taken a bit of a toll on me as well.

In the fall of 1937 Chapter Two of Sirin's
The Gift
was published in
Contemporary Annals
. I read with trepidation. By the end of the chapter, my cheeks were streaked with tears. Through what superhuman discipline had my brother managed to set aside all the turbulence of his life in order to create the meltingly beautiful description of his young poet Fyodor's father? For Konstantin Kirillovich Godunov-Cherdyntsev (what a distinguished patrimony in that name!) was our own father.

How on earth could that be? Fyodor's father was neither a jurist nor a politician—he was instead an explorer and lepidopterist, “the conquistador of Russian entomology.” Away from his family for protracted periods of time, engaged in fabulous, dangerous exploits, he returned home carrying within him an unshakable solitude, whatever he had attempted to flee still within him.

How difficult this was to put into words, and yet how tenderly Volodya managed it. How lovingly detailed was Fyodor's recreation of Konstantin's final expedition, undertaken in 1917, just as everything began to fall apart. How painfully detailed was his litany of all the possible deaths his father might have suffered—from illness, from exposure, from accident, by the hand of man—ending with the mad possibility that he might not have died, that he might still somehow be alive somewhere, ill, wounded, imprisoned, struggling to contact us if we could only hold out hope for just a little while longer. That was the rub, of course, the heartbreaking rub, for we knew exactly how our own father had died. No need to speculate about his capture by the Reds, his execution by firing squad—in a garden, as Fyodor imagines, at night, where in his father's last instant of consciousness the moonlight reveals a whitish moth hovering in the shadows. No, we had seen Father's waxen face in the coffin. We had seen the coffin lowered into the ground. We had heard the stuttering thud as clods of earth were shoveled into
the grave. And yet—despite the facts, the immutable, incontrovertible, all too well understood facts—here Father lived again, here he shone, as enduring as those butterflies in display cases that outlast by centuries their long-forgotten collectors.

I saw now why Volodya had discouraged as foolish my notion of composing Father's biography. I knew this novel, his most humane and ambitious, had been under way for several years.

I had known, but never before so fully, the depths of Volodya's longing for Father—for his approval, his tutelage, his companionship. I understood now that the elusiveness my brother sensed in Father, and that I sensed in them both, was not a fault in either, but rather an essential element of their identity. And further, I understood that far from being an impediment to my love, their elusiveness was precisely the quality that had made me want to love them in the first place.

I saw now that Volodya, apparently so indifferent to me, had in reality all along been patiently teaching me that the only way to know him was through his art. Everything else was incidental; it was only in his books that he lived, intimately revealed, fully and forever available.

And I believe I have found something else as well—that we only, any of us, live in art. No matter whether it is in books, painting, music, or dance, it is there we flourish, there we survive. It has taken me many years to come to this realization.

Without my brother's pages I would never have been able to begin my own.

WE WERE NEITHER BLIND NOR DEAF NOR STUPID in Castle Weissenstein. We knew what was happening down below—how could we not? We frequently heard Hitler on the radio, and Hermann and Oskar would sometimes get into long, passionate discussions about the status of Austrian national identity after 1918. “Who are we, exactly?” Hermann would ask. “Are we German-Austrians, or Austro-Germans? Are we Tyroleans first and Austrians second? Or are we simply Germans in a second German state as mandated by the treaties of Versailles and Saint Germain?”

For his part, Oskar mourned the demise of the Austro-Hungarian Empire—the unnecessary demolition, he said, of a complex, many-tongued, many-peopled civilization, the felicitous marriage of East and West. In his study, he kept a portrait of Emperor Franz Joseph I; he was fond of reminding me that the sumptuous finale of the greatest symphony ever composed, by which he meant Bruckner's Eighth, was inspired by the historic meeting between Emperor Franz Joseph and Tsar
Alexander III, a confluence of histories, cultures, and languages he pronounced himself gratified to host in miniature every day under his own roof—a remark that never failed to elicit a raised eyebrow from Hermann.

In the beginning, Oskar was quite partial to Hitler; anyone who promised to bring an end to the conditions of near civil war that had prevailed throughout Germany for the last decade was to be welcomed, and besides, Oskar sensed the National Socialists, especially once they began to emphasize “National” at the expense of “Socialist,” would be good for both business and morale.

Hermann accurately predicted from the beginning that Hitler would be a disaster for Germany, yet at the same time maintained a complicated attitude toward Nazi rule. He was outraged by Germany's annexation of Austria in March 1938, but understood the logic of gathering the lost territories—the Rhineland, the Saar, the Sudetenland—into the Greater Reich. When war finally came, he did not support it, but neither did he wish to see Germany defeated. I think he very much wished that Castle Weissenstein might be fitted with the Tarnhelm and simply vanish for the duration of the troubles.

As for myself, I entertained a very short-lived fascination with Hitler and his movement. Yes, he was odious, he was dangerous, he was unbalanced, he was delusional, but there was about the whole National Socialist panoply, at least initially, something dreadfully stylish and beguiling—one need only look at those stunning black-and-white Hitler posters for the 1933 election to understand what I mean. And I must admit, sheepishly, that I was rather taken by the party's emphasis on youth, the placards of fresh-faced, strapping young men in their uniforms with their arms flung about each other's shoulders in comradely affection. If they were looking toward the future, it was a future I was at least curious to take a look at as well. All that changed, of course, and changed quickly. What had
seemed an idle spectacle with pleasingly erotic undertones soon became a full-fledged nightmare.