The Unreal Life of Sergey Nabokov (34 page)

Lifar laughed with a sort of ghastly mirth as, discreetly, he stubbed out his cigarette. “Of course I didn't become a monk. The very next time I saw Diaghilev he said to me, ‘You must do what you must do, my dear boy. But I'm going to Italy next month, and if you wish to accompany, you may.' In an instant it was all settled.

“And now, in spite of his diabetes, he's determined to tour Germany with little Markevitch, even though his doctors
have warned against travel. I wish the boy well. He has no idea what he's in for, but I wish him every happiness. It won't be easy, but it will be worthwhile, for his life will have been changed forever. I hope he finds a tenth of the happiness Sergey Pavlovich afforded me.”

Lifar had scarcely left me before the great man himself, entrusting his “favorite” to Mme. Sert, walked over to where I stood sipping a newly refilled glass of champagne. He no longer intimidated me as he once had; I had come to see the fundamental sweetness, generosity, and civility his haughty manner and famous tantrums sometimes masked. He always inquired after my mother, always had a kind remembrance of Father, and always asked, at some point, “What news of Russia?” though it had long since become apparent that I had no news whatsoever of Russia anymore.

“I saw you talking to Lifar,” Diaghilev said. “Did he smoke a cigarette? He's forbidden to smoke! I shall speak with him later. In any event, what on earth was he going on about? He looked quite unusually earnest. But don't be deceived. There's not a single thought in his beautiful head. Oh, he's a superb beast, an athlete of the highest caliber—but you don't go to our Lifar for any ideas!”

“He was talking of you,” I said. “Of all you did for him.”

“I'm a great fool!” he exclaimed, his large doleful eyes welling up at once with tears. “Of course he loves me. He's always loved me. And I love him. I love all my dancers, my musicians, my artists, without whom none of this”—he gestured around the beautiful room as if to indicate how easily it might vanish into thin air—“none of this would exist.”

“But the great miracle is that it
does
exist,” I said.

“Ah, the great miracle.” For a moment Diaghilev seemed at a loss. We stood in silence. Then he said, with an anguish that took me aback, “The Markevitch boy is simply madness, I'm afraid. Especially at my age. What scandal! Even I know it. How
people must laugh behind my back. Yes, I don't mind if I do have another”—he plucked a petit four from a tray offered him by a servant—“and I'll have more champagne if any can be found.” His eyelids half closed in pleasure as he bit into the sweet. “And yet there it is,” he went on, “the pure hopeless blissful reality of the situation. So very beautiful. So very talented as well. I've scheduled him to perform his Piano Concerto in London next month. And I've commissioned him to write a ballet for me. His music is the music of the future. Even Stravinsky has acknowledged that. Mark my word, without a doubt Markevitch is the next Stravinsky.”

He gazed longingly in his beloved's direction. “My God, look at him. And he's only sixteen!”

I did look at him; the youngster stood next to a potted palm, a glass of orangeade in hand, and chatted up the Princesse de Noailles. Clearly he was charming her. Clearly he was entirely normal, not a bit of the invert in him. And for Diaghilev—I could see this with such bittersweet clarity—there would be only heartbreak ahead. He was simply lying down on the tracks, like the heroine from one of yesteryear's silent movies, sans villain, sans ropes, sans struggle, in order to await the arrival of the oncoming locomotive.

The final encounter of that evening occurred as I waited in the foyer for the servant to bring me my trilby and walking stick. One of the Germans whom I had seen earlier in Count Kessler's company arrived to retrieve his items as well.

“Retiring early?” I asked.

“No earlier than you, it would appear.”

“But I've come alone. Your comrades…”

He ignored my stutter. “You're mistaken. I've come alone as well.”

“Forgive me. I assumed you were with Count…” My affliction had never been worse.

“With the Germans?” He laughed. “No, I'm afraid I'm from
the other Germany—the new, artificial one the war created. I mean Austria, of course. I'm old friends with Nicki; that's why I was invited. I'm just up to Paris on business. I wouldn't, by the way, have guessed you were Russian from your accent.”

“But how then did you know I was Russian?”

“Let's just say I made a few discreet inquiries. I'm Hermann Thieme. You're Serge Nabokov. I'm very pleased to meet you.”

He held my gaze. His eyes were rather wonderfully blue, lavender, periwinkle, lilac. I had no sense that there was any particular intent in his gaze. It is a manner some men have, and in their presence one becomes aware just how seldom one actually looks one's interlocutor directly in the eye.

He was tall, very slender, impeccably dressed in a bespoke suit with lemon necktie. He wore ivory spats. He and Nicki would make a very handsome pair, and I wondered, idly, whether they ever had.

From the salon came the lilt of a waltz: Nika had seated himself at the piano. Hermann hesitated at the open door.

“Very nice,” he said. “Very apt. Do you recognize it?”

I did not immediately, though I told him it sounded incongruously old-fashioned and Viennese in this Parisian setting.

“Precisely,” he said. “It's
Der Rosenkavalier
. It was Count Kessler who first passed on to Hoffmannsthal that wisp of an anecdote about the Marschallin who renounces her love for a younger man so that he might be free to pursue a clueless girl his own age. Of course Hofmannsthal and Strauss turned it into their masterpiece. Few know the Count's part in it. What a lovely tribute. The Count must be very pleased.”

We emerged onto the street. A pleasant light rain was falling. Our destinations lay in opposite directions—his the Hotel Bristol on the Champs-Elysées, mine rue St.-Jacques in the Latin Quarter—but he seemed oddly unwilling to part just yet. I, on the other hand, was dying for my first pipe.

“By the way,” he said, “I've been reading a novel by one
of your countrymen. Not in Russian, of course—my Russian is nonexistent—but in German translation. It's quite good. Perhaps you know it. It's by a writer named—”

I knew the instant before Hermann named him who it would be. Mother had recently written me that Volodya had sold the German rights to
King, Queen, Knave
for a small but very welcome sum of money.

“Actually, I know V. Sirin quite well,” I said. “He's my brother. Sirin's a pseudonym, obviously.”

“Someone told me it meant ‘firebird.'”

“No,” I said, feeling a spasm of dread. “More like ‘siren,' though the Russian siren has wings and lives in the forest rather than on the rocks of the seacoast. I thought it quite an unpleasant novel, actually. Perhaps it reads better in German.”

“Perhaps. It's what Germans say about Shakespeare as well. What's he like, your brother? On the basis of this piece of evidence I'd say he's fiercely intelligent, an exemplary stylist, a coolly detached observer of the human condition, an uncompromising moralist. Am I at all on the mark? I'm fascinated by what a writer reveals about himself in his work, whether consciously or unconsciously. Is there any correspondence between the author of those bracing pages and the brother you know in real life?”

As he spoke, my anxiety had increased exponentially. My underarms went clammy, sweat dampened my brow. “I'm sorry to disappoint you,” I said, hearing a hardened tone come into my voice. “I haven't seen my brother in several years. I probably wouldn't even recognize him if I did see him. Indeed, I recognized very little of him in those heartless pages.”

My anxiety all at once swelled into full-fledged distress. I was already late for my pipes. The street started to spin, my stomach heaved, and with no warning I was bent double, spilling a noxious mess onto the sidewalk. Poor Hermann took it with gallant aplomb, touching my shoulder sympathetically, sliding
his hand beneath my elbow to steady me when I straightened back up. As I wiped my befouled mouth with a handkerchief he asked gently, Did I need to sit down on the curb? Was I feeling faint?

I shook my head. “I've got to go now,” I told him. “I'm sorry.”

He hailed a cab—one of the Taxis de la Marne that still plied the streets. The evening having rapidly degenerated into grotesque farce, I was certain the shabby vehicle that pulled to the curb couldn't possibly be piloted by anyone other than Oleg.

But Fate had already had its fun; the driver turned out to be a crusty old man with a thick Breton accent. I failed to dissuade Hermann from paying my fare, and reassured him that I would be quite all right, he shouldn't concern himself any further on my account.

“Well, that's someone I'll see no more of,” I told myself with a strange sensation of relief, as the taxi pulled away.

The next day I received a note, written on letterhead from “Castle Weissenstein,” expressing Hermann's great pleasure in meeting me, and looking forward to our seeing each other again in the near future. There was nothing in the note that was not polite, even charming—but it provoked in me such unreasonable dread that I could not bring myself to reply.

Each time during the next several months Hermann announced an upcoming business trip to Paris and his desire to see me, I shied away with all my heart. Perhaps I sensed I was wholly unworthy of the gift Fate proposed—or threatened—to bestow on me. I found myself returning again and again to the devastating realization: were anything to be possible between us, I would first have to change. I could not face Hermann Thieme as the man I presently was.

ONE SWELTERING AFTERNOON IN AUGUST 1929, the concierge handed me a telegram:
Diaghilev est mort ce matin. Lifar.

Later I would learn the details: how the great man had gone to Venice, broken after the failure of his trip with Markevitch; how Lifar and Kochno tended to him in his last days; how Coco Chanel and Misia Sert arrived just before the final curtain fell. Sergey Pavlovich Diaghilev, whom the gypsy had long ago predicted would die on the water, had breathed his last in that city known as Serenissima, Queen of the Sea.

As I read the telegram, the memory that came to me was of the evening in 1928 after the triumphant première of
Apollon Musagète
, when Diaghilev had fallen to his knees before Lifar, who was still costumed in his tunic. Solemnly he kissed the dancer's bare thighs, saying, “Remember this always. I am kissing a dancer's leg for the second time in my life. The last was Nijinsky's, after
Le Spectre de la Rose!
” And I remembered Lifar looking pleased and proud and a touch uncomfortable, for
he loved Diaghilev, but never in a way that could be in the least commensurate with Diaghilev's electrifying, abysmal, impossible love for him.

Diaghilev's death announced the end of an era two months short of the collapse of financial markets. As with the arrival of the evil Carabosse at Aurora's christening ceremony, the effects were instantaneous. Overnight the Americans disappeared, scurrying back to their wounded republic. Shops, cafés, hotels, restaurants that had depended on their largesse went dark. In what clubs remained open (Le Boeuf did not) the jazz turned melancholy. At 27 rue de Fleurus, Gertrude and Alice cast out the few young men who remained in the charmed circle, turned out the lights, and abandoned Paris for a country house in Bilignin. Lifar, Kochno, and Balanchine struggled to keep the Ballets Russes afloat, but it was as if the troupe had lost its heart.

The only one who seemed to profit was Shanghai Jimmy. “You can't imagine the clients I see these days,” he told me in his brusque way. “Businessmen, lawyers, bankers flock to me to assuage their well-earned misery. The times have turned spiritual on us. It's a great blessing.”

Cocteau was particularly despondent. “It's all been for nothing,” he said. “As far ahead as I can see stretches only a gray, featureless landscape, uninterrupted by any flash of beauty, tenderness, kindness. There must be a new art for this desolation, but I have yet to find it within me. I invented the twenties. Must I invent this new decade as well?”

 

As the world flagged, my brother thrived. From some insatiable hunger in him poems, short stories, novels poured forth as never before. Even though I avoided émigré literary circles, I heard his name spoken with reverence in bookshops and cafés; he had become the hope of the emigration, the figure who would save us from ruin, obscurity, futility, even from ourselves. My
brother! I scarcely recognized him in all the delirious talk. With each new production he won over powerful new admirers: Fondaminsky, Aldanov, Khodasevich, Berberova.

In the fall of 1929
Luzhin's Defense
began to appear in installments in Fondaminsky's
Contemporary Annals
. I read it with unmitigated awe. How wonderfully Sirin manages his plot; how nimbly he evokes a sense of lives overheard, urgent voices in other rooms, a slammed door somewhere, confirming one's nagging suspicion that life's real narrative, its fateful pattern, is always going on in secret, only vaguely apprehended by its human participants. And how marvelous the series of happy near misses—the mysterious pleasure of a conjuror's trick, the fantastical misbehavior of numbers, the brain-twisting challenge of jigsaw puzzles—by which young Luzhin, our strange but sympathetic protagonist, is gradually brought to the fateful harmonies of chess. Here was my astonishing, maddening brother's promise utterly fulfilled, a tale throbbing with all the life, tenderness, perplexity and, yes, transcendent beauty that had been so furiously scrubbed from his previous novel.