The Unreal Life of Sergey Nabokov (36 page)

He was not only Catholic but devoutly so. He adored Baroque architecture, and I took great pleasure in being toured around La Madeleine and St.-Roch and St.-Sulpice, those great roiling testaments to divine ecstasy I already knew well. In the midst of dispensing a torrent of information he would suddenly become as self-conscious as a precocious schoolboy. At such moments he would emit a shy, nervous laugh; dimples would appear by magic in his cheeks. He'd blink several times, as if trying to refocus on the dull, ordinary world those eyes whose blue seemed in certain lights to overflow the iris and spill into the whites.

After his too brief Paris sojourns I reentered my own world with the noblest of intentions, resolved to live up to the high ideals of our relationship. When he was in town I had taken to eating opium rather than inhaling it, a despicable option but necessary, as I could not, obviously, shut myself in the lavatory, and indulge in a pipe or two while in his company. And I found that I missed Oleg—absurd as that may sound. I missed his dismissive but oddly caring “So, Nabokov, what new outrages have you been up to in that pompous world of yours?” I missed his caresses, made all the more poignant by their rough, clumsy reluctance which would suddenly, with a groan of surrender, yield to something more genuine, desperate, heartbreaking. He had become, over the years of our liaison, much more willing to reciprocate, though it was nothing we ever spoke of; it simply happened. And it meant the world to me.

I could not relinquish him, however much I wanted or needed to.

Hermann never asked about my old school friend. I told myself, “He'll expect me to have cleared that matter up.” That I was unable to do so only deepened the secret misery I felt.

 

After several months of seeing each other with some frequency—usually every fortnight—Hermann proposed that I accompany him back to Austria for a visit. I agreed, though inwardly I felt a little rumble of trepidation, not unlike the ominous trill in the bass that keeps interrupting that lovely opening melody in Schubert's B-flat Sonata.

We traveled—first class, of course; how long had it been since I last traveled first class?—on the Paris–Munich Express, and thence by chauffeured car into the Tyrolean Alps. Winter's first snows had fallen a few days earlier, thickly blanketing the countryside; it had been many years since I had seen so much snow. Matrei in Osttirol was situated at the convergence of three valleys, and guarded to the east and west by the
stupendous peaks of the Grossglockner and Grossvenediger, both barely visible that afternoon through lowering clouds. On a crag just beyond the village perched the squat, unprepossessing Castle Weissenstein.

“Not exactly Neuschwanstein,” said Hermann with a self-deprecating laugh, “but then what were you expecting?”

“What indeed?” I said. “It's magnificent. It's like a dream. I can't believe I'm here. Frankly, I'm terrified.”

“There's nothing to be terrified of. My parents are very old-fashioned, deeply warm-hearted, and adorably clueless. You don't have a thing in the world to worry about.”

Though he had affirmed that countless times, still I did worry. I should not have. His parents greeted me affectionately, as did two enthusiastic Alsatians that nearly knocked me to the ground.

“Sigmund! Sieglinde!” Herr Thieme called out, clapping his hands together briskly. “Don't murder the poor fellow with your kindness. You've got to press back against them. Stand your ground and you'll have won them over entirely.”

When they had exhausted what novelty I had to offer, they turned their attentions to Hermann, who had settled into a crouch, the better to receive their sloppy adulation full in the face. “Good dogs,” he cooed sentimentally. “Very, very good dogs.”

Once the canine introductions were over, I met the parents properly. Though both were white-haired and ruddy-cheeked, Anne Marie seemed a good deal younger than Oskar. She was dressed simply but smartly; he wore a rather shabby, out-of-fashion tweed jacket and a distinctly old-fashioned mustache. They beamed when Hermann called them “my beloved parents,” and nodded approvingly when he described me as “a great good friend.” When our luggage had been conveyed indoors, and Hermann and his mother had conspiratorially vanished, I found myself being led by Oskar on an elaborate
tour of the castle. The various buildings were a patchwork of egregious disrepair and elegant restoration. He took me though the history of the structure, from its modest twelfth-century origins through its enlargement in the fourteenth century, its decline into an almshouse in the eighteenth, its refurbishment in a romantic English style in the nineteenth, and its purchase by the Thiemes in 1921. We visited the cobbled courtyard with its ancient cistern, and the old stables where the family's automobiles now resided. We climbed the battlements and looked out over the village, the parish church of St. Alban, the much older St. Niklaus, the soul-stirring panorama of mountains.

“I hope the dear man hasn't exhausted you,” Hermann said when at last I found him in his bedroom. A fire danced in the hearth to the strains of Bix Beiderbecke on the gramophone.

“Not at all,” I told him. “He was thoroughly charming. He even showed me the trophy head of the first boar you ever shot. You never told me my favorite vegetarian was once a keen hunter.”

He sighed. “The first of many embarrassing secrets that will no doubt come to light. I
was
, actually, quite the huntsman. Bear, boar, deer. I can't set foot in that room these days. But I loved being in the forest with Father at dawn on cold November mornings. I've never felt so close to him as I did then. My decision to abstain from meat—and, obviously, hunting—quite puzzles him. I think he's never gotten over the disappointment, but I'd like to think that's the worst disappointment I've given him. Well, that and my bachelorhood, which I've sustained about as long as is feasible. You'd be doing me a grand favor if you occasionally mentioned Sophie.”

“And who's Sophie?”

“The nicest thing about her is she doesn't exist. Other than that, she's the cold-hearted woman in Munich I've been desperately in love with for several years, and who simply will not
return my affections. Don't you think I'm coping well with my disappointment?”

“Admirably,” I said. “Strange coincidence, though. I once had a Sophie myself. Cultivated her to excellent effect for the sake of the physician who was attempting to ‘cure' me at the time. But that does beg the question, doesn't it? Eventually you'll have to get over dear Sophie and find someone else.”

His merriness left him. “I'm well aware of that. If my parents were ever to discover their son is a nancy boy, it would kill them.”

“Well, if it's any consolation, there's nothing about you that seems the least bit nancyish. You could almost fool me. Aren't you worried my presence here will compromise you?”

“No. As you can see, my parents are the gentlest of creatures. They'd never think unkind thoughts about anyone I brought home.”

He had spoken before of his friends—Karl the mathematical wunderkind from university, Marco the clock restorer, Herbert the pianist. Each episode had come to an amiable conclusion, and he continued to maintain cordial relations with them all. At least, that was his story. I could so scarcely believe my illustrious predecessors had somehow fallen by the wayside that I suspected, in my darker moments, that some flaw must exist in Hermann which I had not yet detected. My occasional query would elicit only a shrug: “Who knows?” he would say. “There's luck, and then there's luck. And then there's you.”

But how lucky was he to have me? I wondered, as I calculated anxiously whether I had brought enough opium to get me through the visit. Given that I was to be under constant observation for the week, I had purposely cut back as much as I dared, and already was feeling a maddening restlessness in my limbs, a disagreeable sensation in my chest. Nights were the worst; I suffered indescribable dreams—wonderful, deranged, epic—that seemed to last for hours, but when I woke with a
start I would discover that scarcely a quarter hour had elapsed. I was perversely grateful that Hermann thought it imprudent for us to spend the night in the same bed, and it was with relief that I retreated to the privacy of my own room once our nightly session of tenderness had concluded. My fairly consistent failures to perform did not humiliate me as much as they should have, for he insisted, no doubt disingenuously, that “simply to have you in my arms” satisfied him sufficiently.

 

By day we traipsed about the snowy village accompanied by Sigmund and Sieglinde; attended mass in the parish church of St. Alban (one glimpse of Zeiller's marvelous ceiling frescoes and I understood whence came my friend's love of the Baroque); sipped Italian coffee and ate beautiful but tasteless pastries in the konditorei. We strapped on skis, and under Hermann's expert tutelage I was soon able to enjoy off-piste forays into the silent countryside.

The Austrian Alps were not nearly so cold as the Russian flatlands, and did not resemble the landscape of my childhood, though among Matrei's traditional Tyrolean timbered houses, a Baroque building glimpsed out of the corner of my eye would sometime conjure a half-remembered Petersburgian scene. At such moments it seemed not impossible that Oleg would come around the corner—not the ruined Oleg of today but Oleg as he was at fifteen or sixteen or seventeen.

I found myself involuntarily revisiting Volodya and Bobby de Calry's alpine vacation as well.

Now and again I would catch Hermann looking at me strangely, as if he sensed my unease.

In the evenings we dined with his parents. Despite my first impression, Oskar turned out to be rather reticent unless he had something strictly material he wished to discuss—a range of paneling that needed to be replaced, a particular bird he had observed, thoughts about the menu for the coming week.
Anne Marie, however, was a prodigious talker on a variety of subjects, and I listened with interest to the stories she told of Hermann—how, for instance, he had rescued Sigmund and Sieglinde as puppies from the village tobacconist, who intended to drown them since they were not pure-blooded Alsatians. Her accent, and on occasion her choice of words, betrayed a humble upbringing; her father had been a farmer, she was the youngest of seven children. She had moved to Linz at nineteen, found a job as a secretary, and surprised everyone, herself most of all, by becoming engaged to her employer, eleven years her senior. “Can you imagine?” she would say with a mirthful smile, tapping Oskar reprovingly on his wrist. “He married his secretary. It's truly the worst thing I know about him!”

After dinner we played cards as Sigmund and Sieglinde slumbered at our feet. I have never been much of a card player, but neither was Hermann's mother, and thus we made common cause while Hermann and his father battled it out with great intensity and verve.

Watching the two of them spar could put me in a wistful mood, and I found myself recalling those poker games my mother and Uncle Ruka would play late into the night at Vyra, as well those drives home from the opera in St. Petersburg when Father and I would argue spiritedly about music. All vanished—and yet here I was, disorientingly welcomed into the bosom of this contented Alpine family.

One evening, after poker had ended and the Thiemes had gone off to bed, I remarked on the marvelous harmony between son and parents. Unexpectedly, my remark plunged Hermann into gloom.

“You don't know how I envy you,” he told me. “Nothing I have is substantial. It's all based on lies. You may rue your poverty, your estrangements, but at least, Sergey, you've nothing to hide.”

I was on the verge of confessing my own dissimulations
when we both heard a sound outside the door of his bedroom, as if someone had dropped something in the corridor,

“That's strange. There shouldn't be anyone about at this hour,” he said.

“It's a gnome,” I whispered. “At night those hideous little statues I see in all the gardens come to life.”

“Don't laugh. The villagers actually believe the gnomes are descendants of the Nibelungs. There are spots in the mountains they're said to haunt, certain grottoes behind waterfalls. You'll come across little mounds of stones the locals have built in order to appease them. If you haven't noticed, the place flickers with magic.”

“Hermann,” I said, “we don't believe in gnomes or Nibelungs or anything like that.”

He laughed. “Of course we don't. Still, I do wonder what that noise was. I would like to investigate.”

The corridor, however, was empty.

AT THE END OF THE FORTNIGHT I RETURNED TO Paris alone—though still first class; kind Hermann had seen to that. He could not, alas, relieve me of the headache of my Nansen passport. I spent the journey mired in grief, certain that there was only one course of action available to me. The next day I wrote him a careful letter in which I explained that his parents had been wonderfully welcoming, his dogs memorable, the castle a thing of beauty, his own behavior toward me loving, kind, impeccable, but that I regretted beyond words that I would be unable to see him again.

Two days later Hermann stood on my doorstep.

“What a great waste of time,” I told him. “I've made my decision. Please have the decency to respect it.”

He smiled. Those wonderful eyes never left mine. “What's time for, if not to waste? The only question is how. In any event, I understand perfectly well that it's not you who made this decision. I may be quite the provincial, but I spend enough time in Parisian circles to know what's what. I refuse to allow
myself to be bested by some beastly flower from the Orient. It's a dreadful scourge, and I don't blame you in the least. I don't even blame Cocteau. He's as much in its thrall as anyone. In any event, I've made some inquiries. There's a hospital in Meudon willing to receive you this very evening if you'll consent to come with me.”