The Unreal Life of Sergey Nabokov (37 page)

He said all this with such poise and assurance that all my shored-up bulwarks gave way, and I burst into tears. He put his arms around me, and I put my arms around him, and we both sobbed and bawled and eventually, yes, even laughed brokenly there on the landing outside my room. I saw the concierge stick her head out her door to see what the ruckus was and abruptly withdraw.

“Say you'll consent,” he said after several minutes had gone by.

“Yes. Yes, of course, by all means. Let's go at once, without another thought.”

“The taxi,” he said, “is waiting downstairs.”

I packed a small bag and we descended to the street. As promised, a Taxi de la Marne idled at the curb. Oleg Danchenko was not behind the wheel.

 

Every hellish thing Cocteau had told me about the cure was true. Constipation, diarrhea, sleeplessness, nightmares, cold sweats. Purges, enemas, electric baths. The doctors were unfeeling brutes, the nurses bullies, the orderlies sadistic—and to them all I owe a great debt of gratitude. I have undergone other tribulations—five months in an Austrian jail, for instance—and I fear even worse adversities ahead, but what I discovered in that hospital of God's grace and mercy will see me through whatever lies in store for me. That I know, even in my present abject terror.

I was in for eight weeks. Allowed no visitors, I could nonetheless receive mail. Though for obvious reasons I wished the
news kept from my mother, I told Hermann to otherwise make no secret of my rehabilitation. Besides his own letters, which arrived sometimes twice or even thrice daily—charming little notes that he often illustrated with amusing drawings—my only other regular communication was with my cousin Nika and the American Allen Tanner. Seeing his days with Tchelitchew numbered, Tanner still—out of habit, I suppose—continued to report his beloved's activities as if they were transcendent events: Pavlik was painting scenes from the circus; he had rediscovered the secrets of magenta; he was reading Horapallo and rereading the Kabbalah; he had still not forgiven Cocteau for having exclaimed, at his latest exhibition, “This isn't painting, this is puzzle making.” I read all this with indifference.

That Cocteau never once wrote disappointed me, but I knew that he was having difficulties of his own, smoking in Toulon with Desbordes and Bérard and mourning the continuing financial
crise
that had turned his once gay world gray. According to Hermann, Cocteau was miffed because I had missed the January première of
Le Sang d'un Poète
. That by then I had already entered the hospital made no difference. “It's quite simple to let oneself out,” Cocteau was reported to have said. “What are bed linens for but to make a rope from which to swing down from a high window?” I do not know if any of this was true; it is quite possible Hermann had already begun his campaign to separate me from Cocteau's influence. If that is the case, I forgive him.

 

I emerged in March, marvelously renewed. I could urinate without difficulty, my nerves had calmed, my pupils had redi-lated, my libido had returned. Hermann whisked me away to Matrei for several calm weeks. We took long hikes along verdant valleys and rocky ridges. As the weather warmed we ascended higher into the mountains, reaching vertiginous heights from which the serrated Alps lay all before us, a panorama unequaled
since my aerial adventure over the gentle swales of Somerset.

Hermann asked many questions about my boyhood, made me recall things I had hidden away. He flushed with anger when I told him about Dr. Bekhetev and my “treatments.” He laughed at my exploits with the Left-Handed Abyssinians.

The only topic I avoided was Oleg. Several times I came right up to the precipice and stared down, but I could not take the plunge. And the more I filled out the story of my life, the less easily I could double back and include this essential item I had so inexplicably omitted.

On the subject of Volodya Hermann was delicately circumspect, sensing my reluctance to probe the tender bruise of our estrangement. Father, on the other hand, stirred his imagination. An avid reader of history and politics, Hermann suggested that I should write the biography of Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov. Who, after all, was in a better position to do so than I?

I was much taken by this idea, though my congenital indolence kept delaying the actual commencement of that noble exercise.

I returned to Paris in late summer to put my affairs in order. After much discussion, I had decided to forsake cosmopolitan toil and hardship for life in the gentle provinces. I was not without doubts, but I was in love—and perhaps more to the point, I was loved, as I had never before felt loved. It was a bit unnerving, to tell the truth. For so long I had sought just such a relationship. Now I found myself gasping for breath. Something Father Maritain had once said haunted me: “God's love can be an awful thing to bear. And just think: in Paradise, there'll be nothing but God's love. Perhaps that's why so many people spend their lives on earth doing everything they can to sabotage that daunting prospect.”

This, in other words, was a rehearsal. Thus I screwed up my courage and paid a visit to Oleg. The weather had turned sultry. I mounted the narrow staircase to the fifth floor and with no
little trepidation knocked on his door. There was no answer. My heart leapt at the prospect of a reprieve. At least I had tried. I knocked once more, and then a third time, just to be sure, and as in the darkest of fairy tales the door swung open.

He had neither bathed nor shaved recently. Within their still gorgeous irises his pupils were pinpricks. But he seemed overjoyed to see me, embracing me affectionately and covering my face with rough kisses.

“Nabokov! You devil! I've been worried out of my mind. I thought, Surely something nasty must have happened to him. But here you are, looking fit as a fiddle. How could you abandon me like that?”

“I was kidnapped by fairies,” I told him. “Held captive by a ring of fire.”

He stared at me. “For once,” he said, “I choose to believe you. Otherwise I'd have to thrash you.”

The least stupid smell in the world hung in the close air.

“Look,” I said, “Are you hungry? Let me take you to a café.”

“I'll have to make myself respectable. I've been ill the last few days. I haven't been able to work for a week.”

I sat on his bed and smoked a cigarette as he stripped, washed himself, shaved while peering into a smudged bit of mirror. His hair was sorely in need of a trim.

“Here,” I said impulsively, going over to him. “You're a bit untidy. Do you have a pair of scissors?”

“Somewhere,” he said, and after a moment's search found a pair.

He chafed a bit as I snipped stray strands. “Careful,” I said. “I don't want to cut your ear off.”

Slivers of auburn hair fell to the floor. I brushed a couple of wisps from his bare shoulders. I touched his neck, where a vein throbbed. Through the open window came the sounds of traffic. Oleg whistled a bit of melody as I clipped. Something
seemed wrong, out of place—I kept glancing about the room, trying to make out what was missing.

Having put on a clean shirt, decent trousers, a frayed but presentable summer jacket, he proclaimed himself ready to venture forth. Flush with Hermann's money, I proposed Le Sélect, where the artists and writers went, where I had once, in another life, been an habitué.

“It's not really the sort of place I fancy.”

“It's August. There'll be no one there. I'd like to treat you.”

Despite the season, he wanted oysters, so willfully we settled in to two dozen marrenes and a bottle of Pouilly-Fuissé, followed by tournedos béarnaise, and a bottle of Châteauneuf-du-Pape.

He ate ravenously. I have never in my life so enjoyed seeing someone eat. As he feasted I told him of my weeks in the hospital, my recuperation in the Alps. I told him of Hermann's affection for me, and mine for him.

Oleg grunted noncommittally. When he had finished devouring his meal, he leaned back in his chair, patted his belly, and said, “You know, you needn't see me anymore if you don't want to.”

“What's wrong?” I asked.

“Nothing at all,” he said.

“Something's wrong,” I insisted. “I know you well enough.”

“You don't know me at all. No one does. But if you must know, Valechka's left me.”

“For all practical purposes Valechka left you a long time ago,” I told him.

“You've never been married,” he said. “You've never loved a woman. You've no idea what it's like.”

A prolonged bout of coughing seized him. “My lungs are shredded,” he said with a ghastly grin. “But my heart's shredded
as well, so what's the difference? And about my soul I dare no longer inquire. I pawned it some time ago, along with anything of else of value.”

“You really needn't talk like that,” I told him. “It doesn't do anyone any good.”

“And who are you to talk? What's any better about your life? Oh, you've won yourself a temporary stay of execution—but for how long, Nabokov? We've both wrecked ourselves, though I daresay it's not entirely our fault. Do you know a single Russian who isn't ruined in one way or another? We who escaped are every bit as doomed as the ones we left behind. Maybe
they
were the luckier ones, in fact. At least for them, the end came quickly. They didn't have to wait around fooling themselves that everything was going to be fine again one day. No, when the patient's doomed, it's best to put him down immediately. Anyone who knows horses knows that.”

“I should be perfectly honest with you,” I said, “It's the least I owe you. I'm in love with this Hermann Thieme.”

“I'm not an idiot, Nabokov. Of course you are. Don't you think I can see that? And do you think I care anymore than you care that Valechka left me? I admire you, my friend, really I do. If anyone knows when to jump ship, it's you, old chum.”

“I'm not jumping ship. I'm simply telling you something I should have told you some months ago. I owe you that.”

He looked at me intently across the table. “But you've never owed me a thing, Nabokov. For better or worse, you've never owed me a single thing.”

Strange how a very long chapter in one's life can finally close. We parted on friendly terms, if one can be said to part from a ghost on friendly terms. On the corner of the boulevard Montparnasse and the boul' Mich, Steerforth held out his hand. Copperfield returned the gesture. Neither drew the other into an embrace; no bright tear glistened in either's eye.

“For a pair of outlaws,” Oleg said, “we've been brilliant.”
Then he bestowed on me, one last time, that unforgettable smile.

I watched his figure disappear down the glittering street. He did not look back.

 

 

 

“EXPECT TO HEAR FROM ME SOON,” FELIX SILBER has said, but that now presents a grave difficulty. I have no way of contacting him save through the Ministry, which would be madness, and to chalk my new address on a ruined wall on Ravensbergerstrasse for everyone, including the Gestapo, to see would be madness as well. So I am stymied. I have moved into a room in Onya's comfortable villa in a relatively unscathed neighborhood past the Grunewald, in the direction of Potsdam. There is a bomb shelter dug in the back garden, but we have not so far had to seek shelter in it. At night the bombers come—we hear their rumble in the distance, we see the sky to the northeast lit up in an infernal glow. One morning we emerge to find the ground littered with strips of tinsel the RAF has begun dropping to confuse the German radar; it looks as if the whole
neighborhood has been decorated for Christmas. And there has been snow as well. It would all be oddly festive were it not for the reality of everything.

I tell Onya that I have quit my job at the Ministry. No more ration coupons, she points out. I tell her I may be in some difficulty with the police. She frowns, but says nothing. I offer to find other lodging, but she tells me, “Don't think of it. We are Nabokovs.” I do what I can to make myself useful. I spend one morning scavenging coal from a bin up the road, and come back with my last suit thoroughly ruined.

One day, as she is attempting to eke some tea from thrice-before brewed leaves, she says, “I'm so thankful Nika moved to America when he did. And Volodya. We all had the chance. What were the rest of us thinking?”

I contemplate that question for a moment. “We were certain we were loved,” I tell her. “I refuse to think we were wrong.”

After several days I can stand this hiatus no longer, and make my way into the battered city, nearly a two-hour ordeal, as very few trams or buses run any longer. When I pass POW cleanup crews I scrutinize their faces, though I know Hugh will not be among them. What would I do if he were? My intention is to catch Felix as he leaves the Ministry without attracting the attention of any of my other former colleagues. I muffle my face in my scarf and loiter in the vicinity as inconspicuously as possible. At least the bitter cold subdues the pervasive odor of death. Funny that I should come to have some sympathy for the Tsar's secret police who used to stand outside our house on Morskaya Street on winter afternoons. A steady stream of people comes and goes from the Ministry building. I realize I have no idea what entrance or exit Felix uses, which way he turns as he leaves the building, where he might be lodging now that his home has been destroyed. I realize once again how very, very little I know about this unassuming man to whom I have become so oddly attached. I am fully aware that my
attempts to assist Hugh Bagley are pure folly—as Felix must have been aware all along. But without the distraction of these attempts I should soon yield to complete despair, for I realize that my obsession with aiding Hugh is in part a substitute for my utter helplessness with regard to Hermann's terrible fate.