The Unreal Life of Sergey Nabokov (26 page)

And then I see him, standing alone, one elbow resting on the bar. For a moment I am certain I am mistaken. But there is that lock of hair hanging down over his eyes. He is still wearing his waiter's uniform; he must have come directly from work. I have learned not to question Fate's strange mercies. Without a moment's hesitation I take my place at his side.

“Hello,” he says in lightly accented English.

“Hello yourself,” I tell him.

With a little laugh, he reverts to German. “My English is really very terrible. I only know song lyrics, and it's rather difficult to string them together into much of a conversation, don't you think?” He peers at me in the dim light. “Do I know you?”

“No,” I tell him. “But I've seen you at the Eden.”

“I seem to remember. Well, actually, I don't, but I believe you.”

“I suppose the obvious question is, what's a fit young man like you doing working in a hotel?”

“I'm not so fit, actually. I've a bad heart. I used to think it doomed me. Now, what do you know? It might actually save
my life, at least in the short term. There really isn't any long term anymore, is there?”

Unable to resist, I brush his hair from his eye.

“Hangman's lock,” he says in English.

“Very nice,” I tell him. “Very handsome. Are there others of your kind around? Or are you the only one who hasn't been arrested?”

“Swing boys?” he says. “Oh, there's a few of us left. No one seems to care anymore.”

“Do you have a name?”

“Let's call me Hansel, shall we? And you?”

I think for a moment. “Svetlana will do.”

“I see.” He runs an inquisitive hand up my arm and then down again. I take his hand in mine and examine his tidy, lacquered nails. His lips are plummy, and there is a dark beauty mark just above, on the left. He removes his hand from mine and slides it down the front of my trousers. “So, is Svetlana feeling a bit romantic?”

It seems a miracle I can be aroused, given my daily quotient of terror.

“You're trembling,” he says.

“I know.”

“I'm trembling as well.”

“I know.”

He takes me by the hand and leads me down a short, darkened corridor. Suddenly we are outside in the cold air, and I realize that the entire back of the Milchbar has been sheared away. We stand amid rubble, shattered furniture, a shredded mattress. We are not alone. In the darkness I can make out other figures, can hear murmurs and groans as men grapple together in a tableau of the damned. A bit of commotion near my feet causes me to look down: an obese rat scuttles out of sight. At least someone is living well these days. Then Hansel the swing boy's lips are pressed to mine, his hands roaming
restlessly, grabbing, caressing, tugging, all of which I meet in full. His breath is quite noxious but I do not care in the least. I revel in all his odors. How my heart goes out to him, this Abyssinian in all but name whose very doubtful future I take gratefully in my traitorous mouth. As I receive his gift I am as certain as I can be that I shall never on this earth taste love again.

 

 

 

THOUGH MY FRIENDSHIP WITH COCTEAU blossomed like an origami flower, I soon came to understand that our romp in the Tuileries had been more a welcoming handshake than anything else. His real love he reserved for an erratic young man still in his teens named Raymond Radiguet.

I met this Radiguet only rarely when visiting Cocteau in the flat he shared with his mother on rue d'Anjou. My friend would usually still be in bed, in his lilac pajamas—this was his preferred way of receiving guests. The room was awash in stray papers, curios, sketches, little abstract sculptures he would devise from pipe cleaners while he chatted with you. Without any announcement, a young ruffian would barge in to borrow whisky money or read aloud a review he'd just penned for the
Nouvelle Revue Française
. He looked as if he had been discovered asleep in a stable and subsequently manhandled by the groom.
His lips were chapped, his fingernails unkempt, his haircut atrocious. But he had written a novel,
Le Diable au Corps
, which had been a succès de scandale; Cocteau had christened it “the greatest masterpiece in French literature since
La Princesse de Clèves.
”

He talked of Radigo constantly, a steady stream of latest news and well-founded apprehensions. “Radigo's lately becoming much more regular in his habits,” he reported, “though he's not renounced whisky, and spends too much of his time with eager American pederasts and egregious French aristocrats. I suspect he's sniffing out ideas for a new book, about which he tells me nothing, but which I sense will be more brilliant than anything he's accomplished so far. He's borrowed Georges Auric's typewriter and spends hours clattering away.”

Or: “He's been telling everyone he plans to marry that girl he keeps out in Clichy. He claims to be terrified of waking up one day as a forty-year-old ‘Madame Jean Cocteau.' How ridiculous! I fear he's dreadfully unhappy, but his work goes well, which is all that really matters. He's at last becoming less stupid in his habits. He's numbering his pages, he's copying out legible drafts. What people don't understand is this: art's only half intoxication; the rest is paperwork. Only a fine line separates the artist from the accountant—but as in drawing, the placement of that line is everything.”

And then one day—quite suddenly, at the age of twenty—Radigo was dead.

Cocteau was beyond devastation. He kept to his bedchamber. He answered no one's letters. He rebuffed any attempt to visit; only Maman was allowed to tend to him. Finally, after weeks of this tombal silence he summoned me.

The room was darkened. He lay propped on his side, thin legs folded under a coverlet. An elusive odor hung in the air: grass and damp earth. He held his pipe over the opium lamp and breathed in the delicate fumes that wafted toward his nostrils.

“How very nice of you to come,” he said. “Most people avoid ghosts out of superstitious fear, but you,
mon cher
, are supernaturally brave. Tell me: do they still speak of me in the world beyond these walls? Or have they already forgotten that a beautiful genius has simply ceased to exist?”

For a moment I could not tell whether he referred to Radiguet or to himself. I did not volunteer the news that the smart set at his nightclub had taken to calling him, this sad spring of 1924, “
le veuf sur le toit”
—the widower on the roof. It seemed too cruel. The young man's death had disconcerted everyone, even those ill-disposed toward him. But in Paris tongues will wag, and fingers point, and I was beginning to learn that cruelty is everywhere, especially among the great and talented. It was whispered that Radiguet should have known better, that it was common knowledge Cocteau spelled doom for young men, that this was hardly the first time such a tragedy had happened on his watch. With a shudder I remembered Goncharova's “
C'est un homme fatal
.”

He seemed well aware of the scurrilous gossip.

“You needn't worry,” he told me. “No one should. I've put myself under quarantine—
lifelong
quarantine. I've drawn too many young men. Who knew I was such a lethal candle, I whose flame is so very dim? But my beautiful moths, those with the hyperacuity to detect my pale flickering fire—they plunge headlong. No more. Never again. Only those who are already doomed shall be allowed to remain close to deadly Narcisse.”

He packed another opium pellet into the bowl of his pipe and rocked it gently over the flame.

“Listen to something terrible. These were Radigo's last words to me: ‘In three days God's firing squad will execute me.' I told him, nonsense, the doctors had said there was an excellent chance the fever would break. Despite his weakness, he interrupted me with such anger in his voice that it took me aback. ‘Your information's a lot less good than mine,' he told me. ‘The
order's been given. I heard the order given.' Three days later he was dead. No one was with him at the end. That's the worst of it. He told us all that what he feared most was the prospect of dying alone. Then he banished us and did just that. I couldn't bear to go to the funeral. I knew his beautiful corpse would sit up in the coffin and ask, ‘What on earth have you done to me?' I know too well what I've done to him.”

“But that's absurd,” I told him. “Everyone knows he died of typhoid. There was nothing you could have done.”

“All those months he was ill—in secret. How could I
not
have known? Perhaps whisky masked the symptoms. Perhaps opium prolonged the veneer of health. I never smoked while he was alive, you know. It's only to soothe my grief that I indulge now. Do this in remembrance, as our Savior said.”

He inhaled the rising smoke. I contemplated his pipe, a finely made item with a bulb of blue-and-white porcelain. Of course: even in the mindlessness of grief Cocteau would be mindful enough to use only the most pleasing of artifacts to court forgetfulness.

He murmured, “Do you know what Picasso says? ‘Opium is the least stupid smell in the world.'”

Several minutes drifted by.

“It's a living organism, you know. The person who doesn't smoke will never comprehend what kind of beautiful flower opium might have unfolded within him.

“But you listen so patiently. Really, your stutter has blessed you. It's bestowed on you the genius of listening, a much under-appreciated gift in our noisy times.”

I laughed nervously.

“Of course you're right to laugh. But you're very good for me,
mon cher
. I feel great affection for you. In the old days I'd have invited you to share my bed. But the genius of opium is that it clears away the sexual instinct. Come now, kiss me. With lips parted. Just so.”

I leaned close, touched my open lips to his. He breathed into my mouth a delicate fume of smoke.

 

Not long after, having received an urgent summons—
Expedition necessary. Yr. expertise required. Total secrecy essential—
I found myself accompanying my convalescent friend to Boulogne-Billancourt, where he had an appointment with one of my countrymen who went by the name of Shanghai Jimmy.

When I told him that the name hardly sounded Russian, he clucked at me. “It's clear you don't understand the first thing about espionage!”

What was abundantly clear, however, once we arrived at Shanghai Jimmy's spacious but dismal rooms, was that they doubled as some sort of laboratory. He and two coarse-skinned babushkas were so engaged in their work that they scarcely looked up when we entered. Poured into a fantastical assortment of vessels—trays, bowls, casseroles, even a chamber pot—fragrant, brownish residue steamed above spirit lamps. One of the women was straining the material through a cloth. The smell was so fresh and exciting, the sight of the opium fudge, especially in the chamber pot, so suggestive and nauseating that my head was instantly light.

“Shanghai Jimmy spent many years in Irkutsk, where he studied and perfected certain venerable practices of the Chinaman,” Cocteau said by way of explanation.

“That's as good a story as any,” averred Shanghai Jimmy, noticing us at last. His brusque manner seemed to indicate a military background; an imperial double-headed eagle tattooed on his left bicep confirmed it.

“You'll only acquire the finest from me,” he told us. “No adulterants here. Only the purest stuff: poppy and good, rich earth. See for yourself.”

As he and Cocteau conducted their transaction, I wandered about the high-ceilinged rooms. It seemed this building had
once been a factory, and artifacts from its former incarnation, hulking metal skeletons and curious small wooden gadgets, lay all about, though I found it impossible to determine what, exactly, had ever been produced here.

“I am but a simple soldier,” Shanghai Jimmy was saying when I returned, “loyal to the last to my dead Tsar and his family, God rest their martyred souls. Still, desperate times call for visionary solutions. If we can't return to our homeland by ordinary means, then we must coax it to come to us. Imagine: a hundred, no, a thousand chambers in which we émigrés lie dreaming our lost motherland. Who can say that the force of all those dreams won't alter reality itself? Who can say for certain that one day a new Russia—the only real Russia—may not be observed floating in the blue skies above Paris for all to see? We'll wave to the Parisians, bless their souls, and they'll wave to us, and then our sainted Russia will slowly drift heavenward, out of sight of the sad old earth entirely. The Bolsheviks can continue their murderous rampage. We won't care at all. God will be so surprised when we draw near His heavenly throne.”

I was relieved when we were once more in the street, and yet saddened by this latest evidence of my fellow exiles' ongoing refusal to face reality. It was why I avoided the émigré salons hosted by Miliukov, the Vinavers, the Gippiuses—all family friends whose havens of Russian culture and politics I might have been expected to frequent as soothing reminders of home. Mother often asked after them in her letters, but I had nothing to report to her. I could not bear the endless talk of “how Russia was lost.” I saw no point to the question “Which is preferable, Russia without freedom or freedom without Russia?” Seven years into our new lives, my countrymen still circled around that old, useless quandary.

Once we were in his bedchamber, Cocteau wasted no time in lighting his lamp and packing his pipe. “It's the least addictive of substances,” he assured me. “So have no fear,
mon
cher
. You're perfectly safe—in fact, safer than safe, as taken in moderation opium is the healthiest of practices. I know doctors who recommend it to their patients. You'd be surprised who smokes. The Princesse de Noailles, for instance. The Comtesse de La Rochefoucauld. Coco Chanel, who I believe is
centuries
old by now, and doesn't look a day over twenty-nine. Come,
mon petit
. Inhale.”