The Unreal Life of Sergey Nabokov (40 page)

“It's one of those particularly horrible dreams in which one dreams that one is asleep and then one wakes, but only within the dream, though it passes for reality. In this case I rather unpleasantly ‘wake' to find myself lying facedown on top of someone. I attempt to roll off, but find I cannot, because I'm joined at the navel, see, face to face, nose to nose, lips to lips, with my twin, who turns out, Seryosha, to be you. For a moment I'm confused, but then in the next moment comes the
terrible realization that this is a normal state of affairs, however revolting—that you and I have always been conjoined, that only in sleep is it possible to escape for a few hours that almost unendurable attachment. You're still sleeping when I ‘wake,' and I examine your too familiar face for the millionth time, knowing each pore and nostril hair and pimple, feeling your breath, breathing in your odor and spittle—and then suddenly your eyes spring open, and I stare full into them. I try to wrest myself away but we're permanently attached, remember, there's no turning away, this is our life and will be our life day after day till the end of our days.” A fastidious shudder coursed through him.

“For what it's worth, I've never had a similar dream,” I told him.

“I'm relieved to hear that. It would have been too hideous if you had. One of the awful aspects of the dream is my knowledge that the shared blood coursing in our veins forces us to share the same dreams, the same thoughts, the same emotions. Or at the very least makes us susceptible… I'm not, by the way, in the least interested in what the Viennese witch doctor and his disciples might make of the random firings of my cerebral cortex, nor should you be.”

It was my turn to smile—though admittedly it was a troubled smile. A thought had occurred to me. Struck me, rather, with considerable force. “In the meantime,” I said, “I've had dreams as well—dreams I never fully understood until this moment. But now they make a certain kind of sense.”

As I spoke I was aware that a certain someone had entered the dining room, as planned, and seated himself at the next table. My back was to him, but he had a clear bead on Volodya—as Volodya, were he so inclined, would have on him.

“It's a very curious dream,” I went on, “arriving in a number of guises. It wasn't so much a recurring dream as an unfolding dream—unfolding, that is, over many years, unsystematically.
In short, from time to time, I dream I'm in the presence of God. He's always disguised: once he looked like Michel Fokine,”—that provoked a chuckle from Volodya—“once he wore Father's imperial uniform, another time he sported a smoking jacket. He spoke evasively, as God always seems to speak. But the general theme in those dreams remained the same. He wished to apologize for having run out of souls when it came to making me, for having bestowed on me a counterfeit soul, a negligent act even He could not undo.

“I've never believed that it was actually God who appeared to me in those dreams. Sometimes I've thought it some diabolical trickster. At other times I presume we merely dream what our natures incline us to dream. But now I wonder whether I wasn't, all the time, dreaming about you.”

“What a peculiar thought,” Volodya observed.

“Not really. The longing to fully know you—and its subsequent impossibility. My sense, which reading your astonishing body of work only confirms, that you too are always in one disguise or another. And if I can't know you, my dearest brother, flesh of my flesh, heart of my heart, spirit of my spirit, then what in the universe can I ever hope to know? For you see, from the very beginning my attempts at knowledge were fully, repeatedly, devastatingly thwarted—”

Volodya looked at his watch. “Fascinating as this is, Seryosha, I fear my departure looms. I've got to get out to Nika's, retrieve my luggage, and make my way to the Gare du Nord. The human mind's a thicket where a bird sits camouflaged. Sometimes ‘reality' loses its quotation marks. I've very much enjoyed our conversation. When I return to Paris, which I hope shall be very soon, and with Véra, whom you will meet at last, I trust we'll continue our friendly banter.”

He laid his crumpled napkin on the table and made to rise from the table. “You'll pay the receipt?”

“Wait,” I told him. “Of course, but…” A jumble of half-completed,
passionate thoughts filled me, an acute consciousness of all we had not yet touched on, thirty years of silence and neglect and misunderstanding. “There's something else. Spare me five more minutes of your time. I said earlier my fondest wish is that you know me as you'd know anyone—”

“I'm not particularly famous for my friendships,” he said.

“Still, if I could introduce you to my—my—my husband.” (In humiliating haste, for lack of a better word.)

I saw I had thoroughly taken him off guard. “Who? Where?” It was his turn to sputter as I turned and gestured toward the man who had taken a seat at the next table.

“What? He's been eavesdropping all this time?” Volodya asked irritably.

“Not at all. He only just arrived. And he doesn't speak a word of Russian.”

“
A u vas na sheike pauk
,” Volodya said to Hermann.
There is a spider on your neck.
Of course, understanding nothing, Hermann had no reaction at all other than to thrust his hand forward in friendly greeting. Volodya did not respond in kind, though he seemed satisfied. I wondered where he'd learned
that
spyworthy trick.

“All right. What does he speak, then? French?”

“French,” I said, “and German. His name's Hermann Thieme.”

Hermann's hand remained outstretched, and an awkward smile had fixed itself on his face.

“Really,” Volodya said, still in Russian. “A German. First you become a Roman Catholic. Now a hausfrau. You're full of surprises, aren't you?” He turned his attention to Hermann, who was by now rather deflated looking. In his badly accented French, he said, “How are you, then?”

“I'm very pleased to meet you,
cher maître
,” Hermann said, rather resembling our canine Volsungs in his eagerness.

“Likewise,” Volodya told him.

“You see, I've long admired your work. What little of it I've been able to find in German.”

“I'm told they're wretched translations.”

“Perhaps. They read impressively enough.”

“Soon you'll have the opportunity to see them mangled in French as well. If you have a genuine interest in my work, though, I suggest you learn Russian. I'm sure my brother would be quite pleased to teach you. But what brings you to Paris, Herr Thieme?”

My brother had retreated to his remotest manner. I felt sheepish about having ambushed him not only with the fact but with the presence of Hermann.

Hermann seemed undeterred by Volodya's icy politeness. “Business brings me here quite often,” he explained.

“And business is good at the moment? You seem rather well off. Much better off than the run-of-the-mill German I encounter these days in Berlin.”

“I'm Austrian, actually. Not that it makes that much difference.”

“No, I suppose it doesn't. Still, am I to gather that you're the one to whom I'm indebted for this excellent meal? If so, I thank you. It's…” He seemed to search for the word; his French was not particularly good. “It's reassuring to find my younger brother so well looked after. One worries. See that his talents don't drift too far into indolence.” He looked once more at his watch. “Now, if you'll excuse me, I really must be getting along.”

He shook Hermann's hand, then turned to me for what I fondly imagined might be an old-fashioned Russian kiss-and-embrace, but a shrill voice arrested him mid-gesture.

“
Mon cher!
At last I've tracked you down. Is this the new lair where you've been hiding? Is Le Sélect no longer select enough?”

Cocteau clung to the arm of muscular Desbordes, who
despite his poetic inclinations was really little more than an amiable teenaged thug. Beside them stood Bébé Bérard, merry, tousle-haired, paint-spattered. They shared a sleepy, gauzy look.

“It's the German's doing.” Cocteau extended his walking stick in Hermann's direction. “I wish formally to accuse you of leading our darling astray. We'll meet at dawn in the Tuileries. Choose your second. Perhaps this elegant fellow… Wait! The angels vouchsafe me a revelation. You must be none other than the famous brother. Rumor had it you were in Paris wowing the émigrés. Word spreads quickly. Paris is a very small town.”

I could see Volodya squirm under the assault of Cocteau's charm; how well I knew that look of discomfort.

“You surmise correctly,” said Volodya. “I regret I cannot spare the time to make your acquaintance, but I have a train to catch. Good-bye, Seryosha. I leave you now to your friends.”

Much like a respectable family man who finds he has mistakenly ventured into a brothel, he fled. No embrace, no kiss, not so much as a friendly touch.

“Is he always that skittish?” Cocteau asked.

“Our kind make him nervous,” I explained. “Sometimes I wonder whether some experience in his past made him this way. If anything, he may have mellowed a bit over the years.”

“I retract my challenge, by the way,” Cocteau told Hermann. “A bit of Gallic wit. Do you Germans have a sense of humor? I didn't wish to leave you waiting for me in the cold fog at dawn, alone with a brace of well-oiled pistols and a heart of lead.”

“Trust me,” said Hermann, smiling pacifically, his lilac eyes aglow. “I would not have been there.”

AND THUS HERMANN AND I LIVED HAPPILY EVER after—or at least for a few happy years. I will not bore my reader with a honeyed account of that time. As Tolstoy knew well, there was no story to tell in Eden—only afterward, once it had all come to ruin, once history had begun. For the most part, we remained contentedly ensconced in our aerie at Castle Weissenstein during those years. I grew accustomed to the fairy-tale village nestled beneath the uncanny looming peaks; no longer did it seem a place of vaguely sinister magic, but rather a cozy haven immune to the world's heartbreak.

Hermann's parents must have had some inkling of the nature of our relationship, though they gave no outward sign of it. Hermann insisted that I had charmed them thoroughly.

As I would have suspected, my prolonged removal from the Parisian scene caused little stir—except from Cocteau, who wrote me a note deploring my decision in terms which, far from giving umbrage, renewed my belief in his wisdom: “I fear your love for this Hermann is an abstract principle that will only
lead you to the false haven of the settled, the bourgeois, the safe. There's no refuge,
mon cher
. Art, the church, opium, the love of boys: it's all temporary sanity that masks the madness beneath. Forget that at your peril.”

Eventually a letter arrived from Volodya in response to several missives I had sent his way—perfectly friendly though not particularly forthcoming. Undeterred, I answered expansively, and gradually a somewhat regular correspondence ensued, each of my heartfelt and candid missives matched by a reply of reserved but undeniable affection. When I suggested that I might visit him and Véra in Berlin, he wrote back that I would be welcome, as long as my stay was brief.

It was not until January 1934 that I was finally able to arrange that visit.

Volodya was late to meet me at the station. I distracted myself by watching an old crone conjure a storm of pigeons out of thin air by dispersing breadcrumbs on the pavement before her, while several brutally disfigured war veterans looked on hungrily from their begging station on the sidewalk. I had just begun to rue having come all this way when at last I saw my brother walking briskly toward me. He was properly apologetic, claiming he had completely lost track of time.

“I'm surprised you'd want to come back here,” he said. “Everyone else is trying to get out. There are virtually no Russians left anymore, except a few anti-Semites who seem to enjoy the current atmosphere.”

I had not set foot in Berlin in a decade. The city seemed poorer and grimier than when I left, and at the same time more colorful, owing to the ubiquitous Nazi banners and posters which seemed more an instance of inspired graphic design than ominous symbol. By the end of my brief visit they would no longer appear to me in quite the same festive light.

It was late afternoon. Gloom was already settling in. He took me to a sparsely populated Russian café. Four stolid matrons
occupied one table, and in a corner, two old men hunkered over a chess game. “Véra won't be home until late. She works far too much. Her hours are cruel, and leave her very little time to type for me. She had quite a good job before, but the firm was Jewish and was forced to dissolve. She now makes half what she once did. She doesn't complain, but she's very low these days, and her health is fragile. My own health has not been particularly good either. Even now I've got a cold which I can't manage to shake off. Everything here is much worse than it used to be. One tries not to notice, one tries to treat the place as a wretched rented room in which one resides for a short spell, but increasingly it's just impossible. See what I mean?”

Three youths in SA uniforms had entered the café. One held a tin box. They went first to the matrons' table, where the four women unhappily fished in their handbags for bills they stuffed in the proffered collection tin. The employees of the café were next, and they too surrendered their contributions. Then the trio—two brutish, one barely handsome, his looks sabotaged by an eruption of acne about his mouth—approached our table. “Even the weather around here stinks,” Volodya said—with needless provocation, it seemed to me, though I knew the chances of our visitors understanding a word of Russian were nil.