The Unreal Life of Sergey Nabokov (33 page)

She then ended with a familiar complaint.
The Miliukovs, the Gippiuses, Benois—they tell me no one ever sees you. They miss you, dear Seryosha. They worry that you have cut ties entirely with your fellow countrymen. Please do call on them and assure them their fears are unfounded.

I expected the second letter—from my Aunt Nadezhda in London, also written on black-bordered notepaper—to reiterate
the news contained in my mother's letter, but my aunt seemed curiously unaware that her mother had died; I could only conclude that my mother's missive and hers had crossed somewhere in the English Channel. Instead, shockingly, my aunt informed me that her brother Konstantin had recently been taken ill with a liver complaint and admitted as a precaution to Charing Cross Hospital, where he promptly caught pneumonia and died.

He was a very lonely man
, she wrote obtusely,
a bachelor to the end of his days. It was a life I'd have wished on no one. Now I have the sad duty of settling his affairs, disposing of his furniture and photographs, burning his diaries and correspondence. He never recovered from the loss of his beloved Russia; nowhere else did he ever feel the least bit at home. But then how true that is of so many of us. Can my heart ever forget St. Petersburg under snow on a winter's day, when everyone went out driving in a sleigh along the Neva quay, past the magnificent Senate Building, and Falconet's statue of Peter the Great riding his wild horse, and the Winter Palace, the Admiralty, the dear jardin d'été with its lovely old paths and trees, and, embracing everything, the red winter sun setting toward the Islands behind the outline of the Fortress of St. Peter and Paul, the clear frosty air and scurry of falling snowflakes…

My aunt always did fancy herself a writer.

One never chooses one's allies, at least not within a family. But these two, La Generalsha and Uncle Kostya, had been mine. Both had been intimidating, and eccentric, but they had not shunned me upon learning my secret. Their deaths left me feeling alone in a way I could not have anticipated.

 

He called me his afternoon wife. I would come to his shabby flat in Passy once or twice a week. The single room was made even smaller by the imposing matrimonial bed which, along with a table and two unsteady chairs, constituted its only real furniture. When winter came, a small black stove in the corner kept the temperature just above freezing.

How curious to possess, finally and fully, the object of one's dreams. Was there a sense of fulfillment? Absolutely. Was that longing which seems the very condition of the heart assuaged? Not in the least.

In bed Oleg was robust, rather unimaginative, endearingly clumsy—exactly what I might have suspected. He was always the husband, which suited me perfectly well, though every once in a while I would be struck by the suspicion that he secretly wished to be mastered. But to ask for that was beyond his courage.

He talked endlessly of Valechka.

“She's so untidy,” he complained, holding up a stocking latticed with tears. “And forgetful, too. She goes out shopping, and returns having failed to purchase half what she intended, so out again she goes. You're better off without them, Sergey. You're lucky that way.”

I was not particularly surprised when, one dismal drizzling afternoon, he produced a cheap opium kit from underneath the bed.

“I suppose you must know Shanghai Jimmy,” I said.

“Of course. Everybody knows Shanghai Jimmy. But how do you know him?”

When I failed to answer, he punched me lightly in the shoulder. “You bastard,” he said. “You too, eh? What do you know? We
are
the queer pair, aren't we? Imagine that.”

I asked him if Valechka was aware of his habit.

“Oh, Valechka doesn't mind at all. I could go to hell for all she cares.”

We lay curled on our sides on his matrimonial bed, the opium lamp between us; lazily we passed the pipe back and forth, holding it over the coal, letting the ravishing smoke drift up to our nostrils. It was stupidly dangerous, the lamp was unsteady, a sudden movement could tip the whole thing and the bed would instantly be in flames. As such, it was oddly
emblematic. We would smoke in contented silence. I would feel a closeness to him I had never felt before, not even in the most physically intimate of moments.

 

 

 

A DREADFUL THING HAS HAPPENED—OR PERHAPS it is the answer to my prayers.

Last night the skies were clear, a bright moon out, the waves of bombers relentless. From night to night the RAF refine their diabolical repertory, whose signatures we have learned to recognize—the sharp crack of canister explosives, the doves' rustle of magnesium stick bombs, the wet smack of the phosphorous incendiaries spreading their inextinguishable green lava across roofs and down walls. The suction pressure is almost unbearable; it takes the air right out of our lungs.

Once more the sweep of the firestorm. Once more the benumbed relief afterward. When we emerge from our cellar at dawn, we see the most astonishing sight: the rear of our building remains; the façade is completely sheared away. One can observe
the contents of the building's various floors. There is the sofa in the parlor. There is the floor lamp. There is the kitchen, with its scrubbed pots hanging above the sink. There is Frau Schlegel's ironing board, still upright. But of stoic Frau Schlegel who ironed her way through many a raid, there is no sign.

Her daughter is distraught. Well, we are all distraught. Theodor and I climb the precarious, mangled staircase to search the floors one by one, but she has vanished without a trace. Frau Schlegel—imperious, intrusive, opinionated, resourceful. Our lives have depended on her, and now she is gone.

We shall have to find other lodgings. And in this I detect—though I may simply have lost my mind—the hand of God scattering the chess pieces that would have led all too quickly to checkmate. Now the Gestapo will have difficulty tracking me down. I am unexpectedly afforded an extra chapter, and I will prove a fool if I do not hasten my narrative along as the clock, blessedly reset, begins once again to tick.

 

 

 

LIKE THE PRINCESS, I HAD FALLEN INTO A DEEP slumber, watched over by spiders, protected by thorns, concealed in a fog of opium. How to convey how weeks, months, even years disappeared? Much happened, but nothing changed. My finances remained as precarious as ever, and though I found myself remembering Weldon and his American dollars with great fondness, I made no attempt to find myself a benefactor. Indeed, the effects of opium had so suppressed my libido that weeks would go by without my registering a single throb of desire. As Oleg found himself in the same foundering boat, we came to resemble, in our desultory exertions, nothing so much as two castaways seeking in each other the battered mast that might keep them afloat after the ship has disappeared beneath the waves.

My attendance at 27 rue de Fleurus began to flag, till
there came the inevitable moment when Alice, at the end of an evening, took me aside and asked pointedly, “Why are you here at all?”

I told her—with an impertinence that would have been unthinkable two years before—that I had lately been wondering the same thing.

“Perhaps a young man shouldn't any longer come to a place he wonders whether he should be.”

I bowed politely. I thanked Alice for her wisdom. On my way out I thanked Gertrude for a magical evening, as ever. That great inscrutable shameless pretender inclined her head, assessing me one final time. In her eyes I could see that I had already disappeared.

My expulsion distressed Pavlik and Allen, who were ready to campaign for my reinstatement.

“I'm no match for the ambitions of that world. I'll be content to hear about it from afar,” I told them. What I did not say was that I would rather spend my Saturday nights smoking a few pipes in the indolent solitude of my room, and attend mass at St.-Séverin the following morning in order to repent my sins.

As it happened, Pavlik and Allen did not last much longer at Miss Stein's salon either; in the spring of 1928, the pair was informed that their presence was no longer welcome.

Though ever on the verge of bankruptcy, the Ballets Russes thrived as never before in those years. Diaghilev scooped up talent like a giant child gorging himself on sweets: Balanchine, Lifar, Dolin, Markova; even Pavlik, who had always expressed a fear of becoming decorative, got swept into the fold, designing overwrought sets for
Ode,
whose pleasantly forgettable music my cousin Nika composed.

In the fall of 1928 Sirin's second novel,
King, Queen, Knave,
was published. I had not seen my brother in five years, and increasingly I resigned myself to the possibility that our paths might never again cross. The novel was a brilliant performance,
but very cold. That self-portrait toward the end, inserted in the manner of old Flemish painters, lingered in my mind: the girl with the delicately painted mouth and tender gray-blue eyes, her husband elegantly balding, contemptuous of everything on earth but her. Mother had said she feared Véra brought out some of Volodya's worst traits. Unkind thoughts, courtesy of Aunt Nadezhda and Uncle Kostya, crowded around me, and the more I thought about it, the more I began to fear for my ensnared brother's soul.

I considered sending him a letter; I sat down on several occasions to write one, but my attempts were mawkish. Who was I, after all, to lecture anyone on the state of his soul? Thus, with a dejected groan, I lit myself a pipe instead.

 

Then everything changed—not all at once, of course; many months were to pass before I would finally muster the courage to seize Fate's invitation.

It all began inauspiciously enough at a reception in June 1929, given by fellow-exile Nicolas de Gunzburg at his
hôtel particulier
in the faubourg St.-Germain.

His Jewish father having prudently moved both family and bank accounts abroad some years before the Bolshevist debacle, the Gunzburgs' wealth survived where sturdier fortunes had evaporated. As the adored son and heir, witty, erudite, spectacularly handsome Nicki cultivated a dizzying cast of friends and hosted extravagant costume balls that rivaled those of Étienne de Beaumont. A few years later he would star in Dreyer's celebrated horror film
Vampyr
. He had a serious side as well, and was one of the Ballets Russes' more generous patrons. It was to honor Diaghilev, in fact, that he had arranged this particular occasion.

Among those in attendance: the Princesse Anna de Noailles, Coco Chanel, Grock the clown, a young American acrobat named Barbette whose transvestite performances at the Casino
de Paris had been enthralling audiences; Jean and Valentine Hugo; the painter Bébé Bérard, whose presence was certain to infuriate his rival Pavlik, who had not been invited; a fat, ebullient gossip columnist from America named Elsie Maxwell; Count Harry Kessler, a dapper German diplomat, along with an entourage of his fellow countrymen; my cousin Nika; and another composer, the sympathetic and touchingly unhandsome Henri Sauguet.

Misia Sert arrived with Serge Lifar; she could often be seen promenading him around Paris the way others might go about with a leopard on a leash. Stravinsky had been invited but declined, as he and Diaghilev were currently not on speaking terms. (Stravinsky had committed the unpardonable sin of composing a bit of music for a rival company.)

Cocteau sent his regrets from Villefranche, where he and his current
enfant,
Jean Desbordes, were summering.

As usual, the guest of honor arrived very late. When he finally made his entrance he was accompanied by the indispensible Boris Kochno on one arm and a feral-looking youngster named Igor Markevitch on the other. Even if one had missed the latest rumors about Markevitch's adoption into Diaghilev's inner circle, a quick glance at his outfit—the white tuberose in his buttonhole, the walking stick, the homburg—would have revealed all.

Though I spent much of the evening in those gilded chambers longing to be free of that urbane crowd and shut away with three or four heavenly pipes, the reception produced three memorable encounters.

The first was with Lifar. I had never had much to do with him. He had grown as a dancer—a stunning Apollo in the 1928 season, and most recently a transcendently abject
fils prodigue
. Still, I had always found him unnerving offstage. There was a bored patience in his gaze that reminded me of a sleek racehorse that submits patiently to being petted.

On this evening, however, he seemed in an uncommonly communicative mood. Nodding in Diaghilev's direction, he said, “He's not looking well, do you notice?” The master was showing off Markevitch to the Germans. “He's fifty-seven years old. His debts are enormous. The money's already spent long before it comes to him. He has one suit only, and if you look closely you'll notice how threadbare the cuffs are. Art, beauty, and youth are the only things he's ever cared about. Thirty years of living in hotels, and being turned out of many: it's taken a toll, even on one so resilient as he.

“And yet, what an epoch-making life he's led. To have been even a small part of that is a very great honor for me. And it almost didn't happen. Please, do me a favor. Let's switch places. I'll stand with my back to the man. I'm craving a cigarette. I can ash in the potted palm. He forbids me cigarettes, you see. He'd forbid me every pleasure not connected with dance, if he could! How I remember those early days in the company, when he showered me with such kind words—‘little flower,' ‘little berry,' ‘my darling boy.' I could scarcely imagine my luck. I'd heard whispers about his unusual life, his ‘favorites' and so forth. Could it be possible, I said to myself, that I was to be one of those favorites? I remembered the girl I'd left behind in Kiev, to whom I'd promised to be faithful. Would I remain faithful if Diaghilev were to choose me? There was only one solution. I'd abandon the Ballets Russes
.
I'd abandon dance, the dream for which I'd abandoned
her
, and become a monk.”