The Unreal Life of Sergey Nabokov (35 page)

Other novels followed swiftly:
The Eye
, a macabre riff on Gogol;
Glory,
with its romantic Cantabrigian ethos in which Bobby de Calry is to be found unexpectedly memorialized as “kindly, ethereal Teddy” who has a “graceful, delicate fluttery something about him”; the darkly cinematic
Camera Obscura,
whose opening paragraph rivals anything in Dickens or Tolstoy.

I read them with bemusement. In their pages I found—or imagined—odd coincidences and correspondences, the stray shared memory, queer borrowings as if from my own most secret soul. The
artist
my brother had become I could see perfectly well, but beyond the tricky elisions, the diabolical fracturings and grotesque recastings, the beautiful outpouring of words, I wished to glimpse the
man
he had become. I did not succeed.

In defiance of social and economic reality, Nicki de Gunzburg's parties grew more extravagant. “The Country Ball” took place in June 1931, at a pavilion in the Bois de Boulogne. As usual, his instructions were explicit. Guests were to be costumed in accordance with the rustic theme. They were to be suitably masked. They must arrive by horse-drawn carriage or bicycle. They must be witty and gay at all times. Any hint of reality would mean instant expulsion.

Boris Kochno and his new lover Bébé Bérard had shrouded the pavilion in shimmering silks, littered the gardens with tissue-paper poppies, papier-mâché farm animals, huge wire-and-fabric vegetables, even a full-size hay wagon. Bathed in beams of light, the scene had all the enchantment of one of the more elaborate Ballets Russes sets.

Kochno had dressed as Little Bo Peep, Bérard as Shakespeare's Bottom (a notion with which those who spoke English had great fun). Elsie Maxwell came as a Breton milkmaid. Mr. and Mrs. Cole Porter arrived in a Sicilian donkey cart festooned with orchids and gardenias. Jean and Valentine Hugo were sunflowers. Coco Chanel and Anna de Noailles looked adorable as two matching lambs, which Boris quickly claimed as his own. Edmée, duchesse de La Rochefoucauld and Comtesse Marthe de Fels seemed to have stepped directly out of a Watteau canvas. Tchelitchew and Tanner impersonated two barefoot farm boys—“Hucklesberries Finns,” according to Pavlik's colorful English—while the English poetess Edith Sitwell, who was carrying on a mad platonic affair with the painter, much to Allen's consternation, looked more like a Plantagenet queen than the American Gothic farmwife she claimed to be.

Nicki de Gunzburg was resplendent in a thematically inexcusable toreador costume. “I made the rules, I break the rules,” he explained with an exquisite shrug of his shoulders.

Misia Sert attended as Misia Sert.

I had originally contemplated transforming myself into a muzhik with a scythe, but then in Poupineau, the lovely circus shop by the Musée Grévin, I discovered a yellowed wedding gown of provincial vintage. A wig, tiara, and Venetian-style mask completed my disguise. Helena Rubinstein did the rest. In case anyone asked, I was the Sleeping Princess.

A gasp from the crowd marked the arrival of Serge Lifar, mounted on a white stallion and wearing nothing but a leather girdle, his muscular body covered entirely in a sheen of gold paint.

A Negro jazz orchestra played. Sitting wonderfully erect on a garden stool, Edith Sitwell narrated to anyone who would listen an implausibly Dickensian version of her childhood. Bérard nudged me aside in order to begin a separate conversation. He had removed his ass's head, and held it under his arm. I saw that some green oil paint remained encrusted in his reddish beard.

“Cocteau sends you greetings. I saw him in Toulon, where I smoked with him and
l'enfant
Desbordes.”

I asked his impressions of Desbordes, whom I hardly knew.

“In a word, infantile,” pronounced Bérard. “Cocteau praises him to the heavens, but there's nothing there. His so-called poetry's simply embarrassing, a snail's trail of semen on a mirror that has been gazed into far too admiringly. Really, our brilliant friend's judgment these days has gone steeply into decline. I understand he's made a movie, though no one's seen it yet. Or if there's been a screening,
I
haven't been invited. Have
you
?” he asked with suspicion.

I told him I had not, though Cocteau had enlisted me to help paint the stage sets for
Le Sang d'un Poète
, which I had done with a rare sense of accomplishment.

“Well, either it'll resuscitate his fading career or be the end of him. Movies! What on earth is he thinking! Of all his
enfants
, the one I wish I'd known is Radiguet. I've read his two marvelous novels. Such promise—though he's already totally
forgotten. I wonder which of us from this generation will be remembered? Perhaps we'll all be forgotten, and this era will be seen as little more than a wasteland.”

There had been a momentary lull in the music. Now through the humid night air came the sound of a soprano saxophone eerily usurping the voluptuous flute melody that begins
L'Après-midi d'un Faune
. The queerness of the arrangement—Debussy was really quite ill-suited to jazz band transcription—made the music sound crudely rather than shimmeringly seductive. Still, it cast its pagan spell.

A dais had been set up—and there, languorously reclining, near-naked and fully golden, head tilted back, his thumb held to his lips as if to sip that longed-for elixir that never quenches thirst, was Lifar. He stretched sumptuously, rose on his haunches—the immortal, aching, libidinous faun in the heat of the midday sun.

A crowd had gathered. Misia Sert, looking pensive, stood apart from the others. An emptiness opened in me. Even at the Murphy's barge fête, nearly ten years ago now, there had seemed something vaguely corrupt about Lifar's appropriation of Nijinsky's famous role. Cocteau had pointed out the sheer cheekiness of it. But I had been younger then, and his performance had not struck me as nearly so crass as it did now.

“What a beast,” I heard Boris tell Bérard. “Lifar has no morals whatsoever. He'll sleep with anyone if it'll advance his career. Right now he's trying to sleep with us all.”

Strangely disconsolate, I withdrew into a shadowy corner of the garden, where roses bloomed in beds quadrisected by sandy paths. Though it was night, their scent still lingered. The reds were lost to darkness, but the whites floated mothlike out of the obscurity.

I could hear the orchestra as it ardently scaled its summit, then descended in those ravishing triplets, but the sound was distant, as if the rose garden had walls which shielded its
occupant from the disappointing world without. A spider had begun to spin a web from one rose bush to another, across the path, and as I brushed against it I broke its fragile, clinging filaments. Presently I realized I was not alone.

A fellow I had noted earlier—a strapping young man dressed in a Tyrolean cap, open shirt, colorful braces, and lederhosen which exposed, beginning mid-thigh, the muscular legs of a cyclist—had quietly entered the garden.

The orchestra and Lifar having finished their sultry desecration, fireworks lit up the sky, like petals borne aloft and then spilled down upon us.

“So, at last,” said the stranger. “I thought I might find you here.”

He strode over to me and before I could say a word, planted a kiss on my lips.

He wore a black half mask. As he removed it, a burst of gold and green spangled the sky and I found myself looking into a pair of eyes the most exquisite shade of blue.

“Oh,” I said.

“Don't act so startled,” said Hermann Thieme. “I'm not going to scold you, though it
was
rather rude never to respond to my notes.”

 

“Why did you run from me?” he asked later, as we lay together in the matrimonial bed in the Hotel Bristol.

“There's no guarantee I won't run again,” I told him. “No guarantee at all.”

“I won't lock you in a tower and throw away the key,” he said. “If you wish to flee me once again, now that you've seen I'm not an ogre, I won't stand in your way.”

“You're certainly not an ogre. It's never been the ogre I've feared; it's the prince that might break my heart.”

“Well, if it eases things between us, I'm no prince either, even though my parents own a castle. Quite a modest castle.
My father bought it a few years ago, not so much because he desired a castle as because it was in dire need of restoration, and he couldn't bear to see it decline any further.”

“That was decent of him.”

“Father's a decent man. I'm lucky that way.”

“My own father—” I began to say, but Hermann put a finger to my lips.

“Your father was a very
great
man. I already know a good deal about him.”

“But how?”

“I was curious. It wasn't difficult to find out. There are many people eager to share their memories of him. And your brother's fame doesn't hurt.”

There it pounced again: that panic that had seized me on the street outside Nicki's town house. Feeling very much the cornered animal I looked about the opulent room half convinced that it was about to dissolve before my eyes, and that the handsome man next to me would in the next instant tear off his human mask to reveal a gloating demon. But of course none of that happened.

“What's wrong?” Hermann asked, placing his palm on my bare chest. “I can feel your heart thumping.”

“It's nothing. It's just that—there are moments when everything seems completely unreal to me.”

“And this is one of those moments?”

“Yes,” I said. “It is.”

He nestled in close to me, spoke with his lips against my ear. “But I'm quite real, Nabokov. This room is quite real. The city outside the windows is indisputably real.”

“I don't doubt those things at all. It's my own unreality that frightens me.”

“But that's absurd!” Herman exclaimed. “I need another cigarette for this.” He reached to the nightstand to fumble with his pack.

“Do you really,” he asked, exhaling a wraith of torpid smoke, “think I would have pursued a phantasm for two years? Yes, that's how long it's been. You may not have been counting, but I have. And now to have you here, flesh and blood, body and spirit…” He inserted his cigarette between my lips, and I took a puff. “If you're not real, Nabokov, then I'm utterly mad. And I've never once in my life been even tempted to consider I might be mad. So there. It's settled.”

To prove it he stubbed out our cigarette, and the passionate empiricist in him began once again to investigate my reality.

THERE WAS NOT TO BE A LILAC FAIRY'S MAGIC wand. A lifetime of unreality is a devilish legacy to undo.

I did not attempt to hide my vices entirely. I confessed to smoking opium—on occasion. (“A nasty habit!” Hermann exclaimed. “We'll have to see what we can do about that.”) I confessed to an occasional bit of afternoon naughtiness with a Russian schoolmate—for old times' sake. (“I promise I won't hire a gangster to do him in!”) I confessed to my very serious lapses as a Roman Catholic (“And I'd assumed you were Russian Orthodox. Well, that's a bright bit of news. All is not lost after all.”)

Our first weeks together were exhilarating. Business brought him frequently to Paris, and the Hotel Bristol became my home away from home. Not since Russia had I found myself in such luxury, and though I had told myself again and again I did not miss all that, to find myself coddled was delightful. It was always a shock to return to my own flat whenever, after a magic week, Hermann traveled back to his parents' castle in the Tyrolean Alps.

Had I fallen in love? Yes, indubitably. Though he assured me that his parents were perfectly ordinary
bürgherliches Volk
, that the family business, which involved the manufacture of wooden cigar boxes, was as humdrum as could be, nonetheless Hermann's taste and manners were exquisitely refined. He was erudite and kind. At university, he had become vegetarian. He was a great champion of animal welfare, and though he was the most mild-mannered of men, I once witnessed him fly into an astonishing rage upon seeing a farmer beat an emaciated donkey that had fallen and could not rise to its feet. Though fit, he was hardly a fighter and the farmer was a red-faced ox of a man, yet Hermann thrashed him so thoroughly that the fellow soon fled the scene entirely while the donkey, having finally hoisted itself up, munched on some roadside clover.

When he was in Paris we dined superbly, spent our evenings at the ballet or opera, and afterward made the rounds of the jazz clubs. He loved Django Reinhardt, and thought Josephine Baker extraordinary. I very much enjoyed these diversions as well.

He had always been an avid athlete—swimming, cycling, skiing, tennis. I was no match for Hermann much of the time, but on the court I managed to surprise him enough to make things competitive.