The Unreal Life of Sergey Nabokov (17 page)

Uncertain whether I could accurately recall the words to Uncle Ruka's barcarole, but reminding myself that, since the verses were in French, it did not particularly matter, I began the gently undulating figure in the left hand, then added the delicately scented melody, and as if by a miracle the words came: “
Un vol de tourterelles strie le ciel tendre / Les chrysanthèmes se parent pour la Toussaint
.” I held my own till the song had come to an end in a cadence of three bittersweet chords. Two of the sailors were sobbing like girls. “Again,” Ustin urged, and I complied. I believe I played and sang Uncle Ruka's unforgotten song half a dozen times before the sailors, almost comically unsteady on their feet, lurched at Ustin, my father, Volodya (the women in the house had hidden themselves upstairs), embracing each in turn with clumsy hugs and slobbering kisses. I remember meeting Volodya's eyes as he stood stoically, clasped by a lipsticked young murderer who insisted on kissing my brother's neck, his cheek, his bitterly compressed lips, leaving a blood mark everywhere his own rose-red lips touched. Then merrily, they staggered out of the house and down the road, hooting as they went their rough approximation of Uncle Ruka's fastidious melody.

Against such a baleful backdrop, I found myself from time to time slipping into one of Yalta's humble Orthodox chapels. I did not consider my impulse religious so much as the simple need for momentary refuge from too much reality. I knelt before gilded icons and tapers lit by pious old ladies. Always I left those dim, aromatic sanctuaries feeling as at peace as it was ever possible to feel in those distinctly unpeaceful days.

In the meantime, I had a brief and unhappy fling with a young dancer named Maxim, and an even briefer but rather more satisfactory liaison with a German officer. Volodya had more affairs than anyone could keep track of, lyrical spasms
he converted with great efficiency into the poems he regularly recited behind closed doors to my parents. Occasionally we would be visited by Yuri Rausch, who was with Deniken's army in the north as they attempted to stave off the Bolshevik effort to retake the peninsula. He was more charismatic than ever, but disappointingly aloof, on one occasion rudely rebuffing my attempt to resume our conversation about friendship from some years before. Instead he chose to spend his time discussing the volatile political situation with Father, or taking long walks with Volodya in the hills above Yalta. Then one terrible day came the news that he had been killed in action.

I remember knocking on the door of my brother's bedroom, expecting to find him sitting in the dark, perhaps gazing out the window, alone with his grief. Instead he was at his desk, intently fixing a butterfly specimen to a board, the beginnings of a new collection to replace the one he had been forced to leave behind.

“I'm very sorry,” I told him.

He did not turn to look at me, nor did he speak. With precision he pierced a beautiful brown-and-orange butterfly's thorax with a pin. I wondered whether I should continue with the course I had rehearsed. Foolishly I decided to.

In limpid, unstuttering, astutely memorized prose I recounted to him the story of my friendship with Davide Gornotsvetov, its shocking end, my grief, and how, over time, that grief had faded into a belief that the dead do not vanish entirely but remain with us, watching over us.

When I had finished, he turned around and looked at me strangely.

“Seryosha,” he said, his voice uncommonly gentle. “I appreciate your attempts to comfort me. Really I do. But please, don't persist in inventing a past for yourself.”

I asked him what on earth he meant.

“If what you say happened, why have none of us heard of
this Gornotsvetov? Did he ever come to our house? Was he ever introduced to our parents? How well could you have known him? And wouldn't you have at least mentioned his death at the time, if it indeed occurred as you say it did?”

It was true: suspecting they would not have pleased my parents, I had kept my friends to myself; I had suffered my grief in lonely silence. Still, I protested to Volodya that he had seen me with Davide any number of times. Our paths used to cross all the time in St. Petersburg, afternoons after school when he was out strolling with Valentina. Didn't he recall the tall, slender boy by my side? The Abyssinians, we called ourselves. The Left-Handed Abyssinians.

“I remember no tall, slender boy. I've never heard of any Left-Handed Abyssinians. Please, Seryosha, you'll end up evaporating into thin air if you keep replacing reality with your own wistful inventions. Now, please, I've got some work still to do this evening. So if you wouldn't mind…”

Thus I was again left alone with my grief. Yuri Rausch had astonished me one summer afternoon, when he and my brother had bathed in the Oredezh. He had kissed me once. He had listened, sympathetically I thought, to my dream of friendship. And he had afterward neglected me so studiously that I came to suspect he knew my secret and was repulsed. He had been Volodya's great friend, never mine—but I wept tears for him that were as real as if he had been.

NOT LONG AFTER, AS THE SITUATION DETERIORATED into desperation, we exchanged Yalta for Sebastopol, but were soon forced to flee aboard a Greek steamer bound for Constantinople and thence Piraeus. After a sojourn of some weeks in bright, dusty Greece, during which Volodya managed to cultivate three separate love affairs and I none, we eventually made our way to London. Father's elder brother Konstantin, who had been the chargé d'affaires at the Russian Embassy until the Bolsheviks stripped him of his position, met us at Victoria Station, and set the family up in an alarmingly expensive flat in Kensington. Soon, Volodya and I were enrolled at Cambridge, he at Trinity and I at Christ's, thanks to a scholarship that had been established to aid indigent émigrés
.
Hard to believe that is what we had become.

But what a paradise my new home seemed! How I loved the mellowed stone, the venerable rituals. I loved the academic gowns worn by dons and undergraduates alike—as if we were all participants in a medieval pageant at once whimsical and
perfectly serious. I loved that pale, long-haired Milton, “the lady of Christ's,” had written poetry under the mulberry tree in the Fellows Garden. Even the battered old bicycle that served to transport me from lecture to lecture in halls scattered across the narrow-laned town seemed well-nigh timeless.

I found the English on the whole to be quite sympathetic, despite their tiresome desire to discuss “the Russian Crisis” with every Russian they came across. Most showed themselves to be hopelessly gullible; Bolshevik propaganda, crude though it was, found in them an ideal audience. But my only real complaint about England was this: I was cold all the time. It may seem an odd complaint for a denizen of arctic clime to lodge, but in Russian houses wood fires blazed warmly throughout the winter; I was woefully unprepared for how parsimonious the English were with their coals.

I quickly fell in with a very gay crowd, and if the world around me had admirable depth, my loves in those years were blessedly shallow. All that anguish expended on the likes of Oleg and Davide had taught me a valuable lesson. No more would I fall deeply for anyone—and since no one else in my set did either, all was well.

There are few things more heavenly than drifting in a punt on a lazy summer afternoon.
Hat Trick
,
Sheet to the Wind
,
Careless Destiny
: I still recall their whimsical names. My friend and I and a portable gramophone playing Al Jolson crooning “Coal Black Mammy” or that foxtrot we couldn't get enough of during 1921, “Forty-seven Ginger-headed Sailors.” My friend changed with the season: Francis Snell, so delightfully musical; brilliant Stanley Haycroft; Percy Duvall, who was, come to think of it, something of a bully; Maurice Upton-Grainger, exhibiting even then aspects of the dipsomania that would kill him prematurely; gallant Nigel Hebbelwaite. In those halcyon days, among that bright young crowd, an affair could mean anything from protracted deep gazing into another's pupils to
the full-throated reenactment of fondly remembered Etonian high jinks. I asked little of these charming and varied relationships, and I got exactly what I asked. Of them all, the loveliest was Hugh Bagley.

I fell in with Hugh one night at the Portland Arms, a pub forbidden to undergraduates (as they all were). A certain set I found congenial frequented its paneled rooms, drinking Brandy Alexanders and listening to jazz played on a phonograph set up behind the bar. Hugh's gray eyes and luscious lips immediately attracted me, as did the chic figure he cut in his black-and-white-checked “stovepipe” trousers. That he was quite drunk and had been stood up by a dear friend made my conquest of him, rather excitingly undertaken in a punt moored near the Trinity bridge, absurdly easy. That might well have been that, but he sent me the next day a vase of beautiful jonquils with a gallant card expressing the hope that he had not been too forward, and wondering if we might soon lunch together. Surprised that he even remembered my name, given his advanced state of inebriation, and frankly astonished to find that he thought
he
rather than I had been the aggressor, I accepted his invitation. We had just enough in common to ensure some jolly times together.

He made it quite clear from the beginning that his destiny, as the eldest scion of the Bagley clan, was marriage and family—the fortunate girl, one of the Morris-Stanhopes from Bucking-hamshire, having already been determined. Nonetheless, it is to Hugh that I owe one of the most deeply serious experiences of my life.

In 1921, toward the end of spring vacation, I traveled down to Somerset to stay with him for a few days at his family's Westbrook House. I had never ventured into England beyond Cambridge and London. We drove round to a couple of Norman churches, had pints in the local pub, visited an elderly friend of his who restored antique clocks and another who, though stone deaf, managed a lively conversation while serving
us crumpets and sherry. We took his Irish Wolfhounds, Hansel and Gretel, for long, muddy walks. On the final afternoon of my visit, informing me that he had saved a great treat for the very last, he walked me down to a small barn at the edge of a field. Two farmhands waited there. When they threw open the large double doors, Hugh invited me to peer inside.

In the semidarkness startled doves flapped. I was not at first sure what I was seeing.

“Her wings are folded. We'll put them right when we bring her outside.”

“She” turned out to be a de Havilland Moth—a handsome, bright red, two-seater biplane. Her attendants pushed her out into the sunlight and began the task of moving her wings into place.

“You're proposing we go up in this machine? Can you fly it?”

“Of course and of course. Unless you're too frightened. I've been up two dozen times or so, with nary a hitch.”

I told him the “nary” made me a bit anxious.

“I've gotten much, much better on landings. Trust me.”

He had thoughtfully brought along a flask of whisky for encouragement, and had halfway fitted me into a leather flight jacket, cap, and goggles before the enormity of what I had agreed to do fully struck me.

“You never told me you had an interest in aeroplanes,” I told him.

“I'm many-faceted, as I hope you know by now. It'll be surprisingly cold up there, and the wind is terrific. We won't be able to converse. So if you've any last words for me, say them now.”

I laughed nervously. Were the two young brutes not in attendance I would no doubt have told him, “I love you, crazy Hugh,” but in their presence I asked only, “Have you taken your betrothed up?”

“Never. She refuses to go. I suppose there really are certain pleasures one can only enjoy with other men!”

On that merry note, the laborers having secured the Moth's fragile-looking wings in place, we finished off the flask, climbed into our respective cockpits, and strapped ourselves in. The motor turned over, sputtered, caught. Hugh taxied slowly onto the grassy airstrip. With dashing sangfroid he gave a thumbs-up to his groundsmen and we were off, jostling along the uneven turf as the elms at the far end of the field rushed nearer (so this was how I would die), and unsteadily at first, then with more assurance, we found ourselves airborne. The air streamed past us, we climbed, we banked, the green earth upended itself, then straightened out. My heart was beating like a racing stallion's; any moment now it would burst. Fear did not leave me, but instead commingled with jubilation. The sky was a cloud-flecked blue. Below us lay the house, the gardens, the road leading to the village, the village itself, and beyond the pied roofs the irregular chessboard of fields dappled with earthbound sheep safely grazing, farther on the darker woods, purplish low hills, and in the far distance what must be the Bristol Channel and Wales: our world as angels see it.

As far as I knew, no one else in my family had flown—with the exception of Uncle Ruka, whom everyone thought was half mad. And so he was, I thought giddily, and so am I. What heights we had known, Ruka and I, what exhilarations—while all the proper, normal world slumbered unaware. Thus in his honor I said a little prayer to the martyred Saints Sergius and Bacchus, those secret Christians, soldier friends whom I had always imagined were lovers as well. For a few fanciful moments I pretended Hugh and I were Sergius and Bacchus ascending to our reward in heaven: at any moment the winged hosts would come down to welcome us. But then I remembered that Hugh, too, had chosen the proper, normal world; Uncle Ruka and I were alone in our fugitive ecstasy, and Uncle Ruka
of course was dead, so I was very much on my own. So be it. In my delirium I could practically imagine casting off the straps that secured me, hoisting myself out of my seat, perching for a moment on the wing, unnoticed by my pilot, before launching myself into the illimitable azure. Would God's hand gently lift me up? Rather than rush toward me, would the world recede, the fields and woods and rivers knitting together in a shrinking tapestry till the whole became a blue-green orb, a dot of dim light, then nothing at all?