The Unreal Life of Sergey Nabokov (41 page)

“The air's increasingly foul,” he went on. “Often smells like a pigsty, in fact. Don't even think of giving them money.” As he spoke, he ignored the youths completely, even when the one with the tin box rattled it ominously beside his ear. The room had become completely quiet; all eyes were on us. I dared not look at the youths hovering over us; I dared look only at my brother's neutral expression as he continued to talk in a perfectly normal, and therefore perfectly eerie, tone of voice.

“It's a dreadful bore only to go on about the weather, don't you think? I once heard of a man who recorded thrice daily
in his notebook the temperature and barometric pressure. He left behind no other record of his life save that meticulous accounting of the weather. Particular highs or lows he notated with an exclamation mark. His marriage, the births of his children, the death of his wife, his own eventual illness—nothing intruded on that seamless journal of his real life, his life in weather, so to speak.”

Sweat crawled down my rib cage. With a harrumph, the lout abruptly lowered his collection tin and turned aside. “There're plenty of patriots elsewhere,” he said. “Who needs to wait around this dump?” Casting a last baleful look in our direction, the disappointed threesome stumbled out the door. As soon as they were gone, the room erupted in nervous applause.

Volodya took a cigarette from his pocket, lit it, and blew out a long satisfied plume of smoke.

“Was that advisable?” I sputtered.

“Not at all. Entirely reckless, in fact. But I know their type. They're cowards, and easily cowed.”

“Bring enough cowards together,” I told him, “and you've got a mob, and we know what mobs can do. I'd be more careful if I were you.”

Without a word he pulled from his pocket the set of brass knuckles that had somehow managed to accompany him through all his years of wandering.

“I'm just not sure how much good they'll do against a whole gang. You're going to get hurt one day, Volodya.”

“Véra says the same. That's why
she
carries a pistol in her handbag.”

“Really?” Parisian gossip, which I had always thought highly improbable, held that Véra had finally nabbed her future husband by pointing a gun at his chest and demanding, “Marry me or I'll kill you!” Now I was no longer quite so sure.

“A very handsome Browning 1900. ‘My chum,' she calls it. Most efficient little device.”

“This is madness,” I said. “You must leave Berlin.”

“I tell you, she won't leave. She's fearless that way. And I'm lethargic. So what can I do?”

I had never seen my brother in thrall before. Granted, I had not known most of his many girlfriends, with the notable exception of Svetlana Siewert, but I had always had the distinct impression that they were adoring followers and that he blithely accepted their adoration. But here seemed the hint of something quite different.

Many rumors circulated about Véra Nabokov, née Slonim. Was she the reason behind the distinctly “un-Russian” character of Sirin's work? Did she purposely isolate him from his fellow exiles? Was she a Bolshevik spy? Knowing my brother better than most of the rumormongers, I had privately figured Véra to be a version of the well-intentioned young wife in
Luzhin's Defense
who inadvertently sabotages the chess player's queer genius by insisting on bringing him out of the penumbra of his precious inner solitude and into the sunlit “normal” world. I imagined Volodya's portrait of such a wife was his means of pushing back at Véra's attempts to socialize him. But perhaps that was not the case. In any event, I was eager—if also somewhat anxious—to meet her.

“She won't be home till quite late,” he told me as we walked toward their lodgings. “And she must leave in the mornings at an ungodly hour. She's not a morning person. She's practically blind till noon. Fortunately, tomorrow is her day off. So the three of us should manage to have some fun.”

In the meantime, Volodya was having his own peculiar fun. To the evident consternation of passersby, he made a point of entering each shop that had been marked with a yellow Star of David. He bought nothing, but he browsed, he made himself visible, a Gentile publicly flaunting the boycott. I understood why he did what he did, but for the second time in the space of a half hour he made me very nervous indeed.

He and Véra lived in two large rooms they rented in an apartment on Nestorstrasse, not far from where our parents had lived in Berlin. Their landlady was an amiable Russian Jew named Anna Feigen, who immediately brought out the samovar for us.

As Volodya had predicted, it was late when Véra returned. My brother having retreated to the other room several hours before with the excuse that a recalcitrant sentence urgently claimed his attention, I was left to my own devices. Perusing the contents of his bookshelf I discovered, among the usual suspects, a distinct oddity given my brother's tastes: the complete works of Nicolay Chernyshevsky. With nothing better to do, I dipped into the old reformer's once popular novel
What Is to Be Done?
but was soon bored by its well-intentioned sermonizing. I was beginning to wonder whether I should check myself into a pension for the night when the door opened and in walked a petite, strikingly beautiful woman. Removing her beret to shake out a mass of wavy, prematurely graying hair, she seemed unfazed by my presence.

“He's neglecting you, of course.”

“Of course,” I told her. “He's my brother. What should I expect?”

“Perhaps rather too much of him, given the constraints on his time. He warned me you might be demanding.”

“Oh, I'm hardly demanding at all,” I said, a little nonplussed. “I've just been sitting here reading. Quite contentedly, as a matter of fact.”

“Nonsense,” she said. “You're reading Chernyshevsky. That can't be very pleasurable.”

I had to laugh. “Well, actually…”

“See? No need to stand on niceties. I'm Véra, as I'm sure you've guessed.” She shook my hand briskly. “Welcome to Berlin. May you never have to spend a moment longer in this wretched city than absolutely necessary.”

“I wasn't contemplating moving back, if that's what you're suggesting.”

“I'm glad to hear that.”

Volodya poked his head through the door. “Ah, my Happiness, they've deigned to set you free at last. One never knows,” he said to me. “I send her out in the morning, little knowing whether they'll allow her to return in the evening. But every night, somehow, she convinces them to release her. Despite everything”—he now addressed his wife—“I've managed to have a fairly productive day. I've left the pages out for you. Whenever you're ready.”

That their manner with each other should be at once so arch and businesslike struck me as odd, and perhaps depressing. I suggested we might go to a restaurant for dinner. “I'll pay, of course. And I need to check into a pension.”

“My goodness,” said Véra. “You'll do no such thing. Did he suggest you should?”

“Not at all,” Volodya and I both said at once.

“We haven't discussed…” said he.

“I just assumed…” said I.

“There's a perfectly adequate sofa. We insist you stay with us. We wouldn't think of you spending money on a hotel. Ridiculous.”

“You won't win an argument with Véra; don't even try,” said Volodya.

“As for dinner, Anieta has made some soup. There are sausages. Restaurants in Berlin are dreadful anymore. And we don't like to go out at night.”

“Unless one's well armed,” I said.

She shot Volodya a reproachful look. “You talk too much for all our sakes,” she told him.

He made a humorous, self-deprecating shrug. “My Love hopes that eventually I will confine my utterances exclusively to paper. Perhaps she has a point.”

“Talking, sometimes, can be a waste of time,” she said.

Over soup and execrable sausage (“Only the finest sawdust!” Volodya claimed), I ribbed my brother: “So. Chernyshevsky. Your tastes have certainly changed.”

“Research.”

“A new novel?”

“Yes,” he said, chewing stolidly. “But that's all you'll get out of me.”

I told him I could see he was beginning to take Véra's advice.

The remainder of the evening was spent in polite conversation. Financial worries were foremost, to the extent that I decided I would leave them the balance of my reichsmarks when I departed. Volodya expressed his usual exasperation with Olga and her husband, the unhelpful ways they meddled in Mother's affairs. He was concerned about our brother Kirill's lack of direction with his studies. He worried that Elena was not as happy as she should be in her recent marriage.

Wishing to move our talk into richer realms, I ventured that I was curious to know how Volodya and Véra had met. “Suddenly, out of the blue, you were married. No one knew.”

The two looked at each other.

“Surely there must be a story,” I prompted.

“There's no story,” Véra asserted.

Volodya had other ideas. “But my Rose Blossom, there's a marvelous story. When I first met my wife-to-be, she was wearing a black satin mask. Our meeting was by prior arrangement, on a bridge over a canal. She recited my poems to me. She had copied them from various journals into an album and learnt them all by heart. She never once removed her mask. She said she didn't want her beauty to distract me from her recitation, but I was already quite distracted! All I could see were her bright blue eyes. Afterward I wrote a poem. ‘And night flowed,'” he began to declaim, more to Véra than to me, “‘and silent
there floated / Into its satin stream / That black mask's wolflike profile / And those tender lips of yours.'”

Véra seemed put off by this display of sentiment.

“That's enough,” she said. “It wasn't like that at all.”

“Then let me hear your version,” I teased.

But she only held up both her hands, palms out to me, shut her eyes, and shook her head.

“My wife's a great romantic,” Volodya explained. “Not an exhibitionist: a great romantic. Most people fail to understand the difference.”

That evening I fell asleep to the muffled clatter of Véra's typewriter in the adjoining room.

We occupied the next morning with a long walk around Wilmersdorf and Charlottenburg. The clouds had opened up, and Berlin showed a rare sunny aspect, and there, in the middle of a block of shops hunkered down behind their metal grates, was one storefront exposed to the world, its front windows shattered, its façade daubed with yellow Stars of David and JUDEN RAUS! It had been a pleasingly polyglot bookshop, I recalled—French, Russian, Italian, and Yiddish commingled with the smell of old paper and pipe smoke and a friendly tabby napping on the counter.

“Our latest bit of ugliness,” Volodya said. “The hooligans made a pile of books in the middle of the street, set them on fire, and sang patriotic anthems and presumably felt better about themselves as Germans afterward.”

I took the opportunity to bring up again—this time in Véra's presence—my conviction that the two of them might wish to follow the example of most other Russians and leave Berlin to its ugliness.

“We've nothing to fear,” Volodya assured me once more. “True, I've been called a ‘half-kike' by certain members of the émigré community who have been driven insane by my talents. Those of our countrymen who are still left in Berlin
are the worst sort; they've practically embraced Hitler and his ilk in their desire to get back at the Jews who, they believe, stole Russia from them. They're a farcical bunch, hardly worth taking seriously. As for the homegrown German idiots, they're little more than comic bullies better suited to one of Mister Chaplin's movies than to real life.”

His assessment of the situation struck me as somewhat delusional. “But surely, Véra,” I implored, “it can't be very comfortable for you.”

“Fortunately I pass easily for non-Jewish,” she said. “I'm mistaken for a Gentile all the time. No, I have to agree with Volodya. We're perfectly safe for the time being.”

“For the time being,” I echoed dubiously.

“Come,” Volodya said, “let's not trouble ourselves with shadows. Look!” He gestured toward a circus poster affixed to a kiosk, a forlorn enticement to enchantment nearly crowded out by the surrounding cacophony of National Socialist exhortations. “Isn't it marvelous?” He pointed to the variously colored letters spelling out ZIRKUS BELLI that arched above a roiling scene of elephants and camels, clowns and showgirls. “They've got it practically dead on. How extraordinary. Some poor, anonymous artist after my own sensibility. Look, my Peach. The drama of ‘ZIRKUS,' beginning so stormily, with those lurid flashes of
I
and
U
separated by the sooty hues of
R
and
K
, and then clearing into the pale blue of that final
S
. Followed by such a lovely ‘BELLI,' with its buttercups and creams and burnt siennas, a word of very pleasing chromatic integrity.” Delicately he kissed the tips of his fingers in appreciation.

I had always known of my brother's strange ability to “see” the colors of the alphabet, though I confess I had more or less considered it an affectation. Thus I was unprepared for Véra's response.

“I agree with you entirely about ‘ZIRKUS,'” she said, “but to my eye ‘BELLI' is more a jumble. That double
L
is a livid
green, velvety in texture, quite at odds with the marble-smooth tones that cradle it.”

“Livid green? Extraordinary.
F
,
P
,
T
—now those are my shades of green.”