The Unreal Life of Sergey Nabokov (38 page)

Eventually dark settles. No Felix. I am cold, and hungry, and absurdly disappointed, and in fact begin to cry like a frustrated child. The prospect of a very long walk back to Onya's is disheartening, but I realize I have nowhere else to go.

But I do not return immediately to Onya's; instead I make my way to the Milchbar. My parting from Hansel the swing boy was studiously casual—“See you around, Blisters,” he said with weary glamour, hitching up his tight trousers. Why raise any hopes? One must remind oneself daily: to hope is to be crushed. Still, the prospect of seeing him again stirs me.

When I reach the Milchbar I see that it is utterly gone, the entire street reduced to rubble. Soon enough the air-raid sirens on the city's outskirts begin to keen like Valkyries. It is not too many blocks to an S-Bahn shelter, and those have held up remarkably well during the bombardment.

 

 

 

 

AN EVENING IN LATE NOVEMBER 1932. THE MAIN hall of the Musée Social on rue Las Cases filled to capacity with Russian literary Paris: Khodasevich, Berberova, Aldanov, Bunin, Adamovich, Zinaida Gippius. After a longish wait, V. Sirin entered.

By sheer accident Hermann and I had been in town and seen the announcement in a bookshop window. At first I was hesitant about attending—after all, I had not seen my brother in nearly a decade—but Hermann was adamant. “By all means we must go. I'm most curious to hear your brother read, even if I won't understand a word of it! You'll have to translate for me afterward.”

In the end, of course, I was even more curious than Hermann to hear Volodya read.

Balding but otherwise looking fit, my brother sauntered to
the lectern, arranged his papers, paused, looked beneath the lectern, cleared his throat. Could a glass of water be made available? Another longish wait (staring at the ceiling) while water was brought. He sipped. Stirred his papers. Looked straight ahead—defiantly, as if somehow daring the audience to attend. An anticipatory hush fell over the hall.

Never looking down, Sirin began to recite in a strong, even-keeled voice. I held my breath. He held his audience rapt. When he had ended the poem, rapturous applause ensued. He looked about, now seeming a bit abashed at the intensity of the response he had provoked. He sipped once again from his water glass. Again he brought forth a poem. Again the tempest of approval. After several poems he seemed to relax. He could see he had his audience firmly in hand.

He sipped more water. I studied him avidly. He looked handsome, confident, worldly in his ill-fitting dinner jacket. The lights gleamed on his balding forehead. His cheeks sagged, pulling down the corners of his mouth, making his eyes droop. He looked like a sad but still regal hound.

I used to hear him, through a closed door, reciting his latest melodious effort to our parents. The poems were still melodious, but they were no longer parlor songs: they were by turns stern, powerful, hypnotic, ironic. Like Pushkin, they sparkled. Like Fet, they sang. Like Blok, they delved wondrously deep.

After another swell of applause he mumbled what I presumed was meant to be a transition or explanation or joke—something to do with the water he had been sipping, and the title of the story, “Music,” he proposed now to read—but few if any in the audience seemed to grasp his intent, so diffident was his delivery of his impromptu lines. Nonetheless, as soon as he dove into the first sentence of the story he was once more in his element. He read, he declaimed, he chanted—clearly he retained the story fully in his head, glancing only occasionally at the pages before him, perhaps to assure the audience
that the words had actually been written down, butterflies seized out of thin air, deftly ethered, pinned permanently to the page.

The reader will recall that Volodya had no ear for music. Neither does the protagonist of “Music.” In a salon he sits, indifferent as a pianist storms through his flurry of meaningless notes. As his gaze travels around the room he realizes to his dismay that his former wife, whom he has not seen in two years, is in the audience as well. Tender, painful memories of their brief marriage ensue. He feels imprisoned by the music, the room, her presence. He will not look her way. He recalls his discovery of her infidelity, his decision to live without her. It is all simply intolerable. But now a wholly surprising tenderness replaces his feeling of entrapment.
Come, look at me
, he thinks.
I implore you, please, please look. I'll forgive you everything, because someday we all must die, and then we shall know everything, and everything will be forgiven—so why put it off?

Had my brother any inkling I might be in the audience? All I could know was that the author of those imploring words could not be altogether heartless, that at the very least he must see their relevance to his own estranged brother.

The music ceases. The protagonist notices, with a pang, that his former wife is taking an early leave of their hostess; clearly she has seen him as well. And suddenly the music, which had seemed such a prison, becomes a magic glass dome under which he and she have lived together, breathed together for a short blissful time that is now ending, that is now, since she has left the room, gone forever.

The switch from poetry to prose had not diminished the audience's enthusiasm for Sirin's art. Beside me, Hermann too applauded energetically, though I knew he had not understood a word.

“Marvelous. It's like listening to Boris Godunov,” he confided, his face flushed, his forehead glistening with sweat.
(The hall was quite overheated; the crowd had been much larger than anticipated that evening.)

There followed a half hour's intermission. If I had thought to speak to the acclaimed author, the spectacle of dozens of people crowding around him quelled that notion. Only at one point, near the end of intermission, did the mob subside, and I saw my chance—but at that instant a woman rushed up to him and began to harangue him fiercely. I could not hear what she was saying, but she seemed to be lecturing him with great agitation. Clearly she had once been a great beauty, but her looks now were coarsened. Though she seemed vaguely familiar, try as I might I could not place her. He withstood her onslaught impassively, finally directing his eyes heavenward and lifting his upturned palms before him in a gesture of helpless if amused surrender.

“He certainly seems to be getting an earful,” Hermann observed. “One hardly needs words when a pantomime's as expressive as that.”

The second part of the reading consisted of the first two chapters of his latest novel,
Despair.
He read with ironic detachment, deliciously emphasizing the cluelessness of the narrator (named Hermann!) as he confidently, hilariously misconstrues everything in the world around him. That the whole was headed for heartbreak somewhere down the line quickly became apparent, but the astute clowning of those opening pages—the narrator's spectacular inability to begin his tale, his mad dash to arrive at his meeting with his supposed double Felix (a kind of premature ejaculation in narrative terms, masterfully managed for full psychological effect), the slow hatching of Hermann's odious and improbable scheme—provided the audience with considerable opportunity for merriment, with only the occasional sensation of the bottom dropping out from underneath everything.

It was splendid, it was triumphant. It was a quarter till midnight. He had read for more than two and a half hours, and
had kept his audience spellbound the entire time. As far as I could see, the only ones in the whole hall who defected midway through were Adamovich, Ivanov, and Gippius—no surprise there, as they regularly savaged Sirin in print—as well as the mystery woman whose scolding my brother had endured.

Seeing that his band of admirers was not likely to disperse anytime soon, I told Hermann we should leave. I rather fancied a drink.

“No,” Hermann said. “Speak to him, by all means. Stay as long as you need. Trust me, he'll be very pleased that you came. I'll just be outside having a cigarette. And then we can go get that drink you crave.”

I waited. I spoke briefly with Miliukov, whom I had not seen in months, much to Mother's consternation, and who always seemed to feel it his duty to commune with me. I spoke at greater length with Nika, which was always a pleasure. “There's talk of adjourning to a café afterward,” he told me.

“You'll join us, I hope.”

“I've got a friend waiting outside. I think he's made plans for us. Tell Volodya I'm sorry to have missed him, but by all means congratulate him on his reading.”

“It
was
quite brilliant, wasn't it? I somehow feel we've been present at a historic occasion. But will the greater world take any note? There wasn't a single non-Russian in the whole hall.”

“Well… One, actually,” I said. “My friend Hermann.”

“And what did he think?”

“He couldn't understand a word. Otherwise I think he quite enjoyed it. Take care, Nika.” I kissed him affectionately on both cheeks. “No doubt we'll see each other soon.”

As I turned to leave, Volodya came bearing down on me.

“Ah,” he said. “Planning to sneak away like the guilty fox? How very nice to see you.”

“I wouldn't have missed it,” I stammered. “You were superb.”

His face registered the old involuntary dismay he used to show whenever a word would catch me up. “That's very kind of you,” he said. “It did go off quite well, didn't it?

“Absolutely.”

For a moment we stared at each other, both at an awkward loss.

“Well,” he said. “I find these occasions very tiring. Necessary, I suppose, but tiring. I'm very much looking forward to heading straight back to Nika's and getting a good night's sleep.”

I took a deep breath. “Look, Volodya. Things have been very bad between us for a very long time. Perhaps they're fated to remain so. But as you yourself so beautifully wrote,
‘
Someday we all must die, and then we shall know everything, and everything will be forgiven—so why put it off?
'
If you'd only give me the chance to explain myself, to see if by some means we can find our way past the obstacles that have divided us for so long. I have to think that our estrangement would have saddened Father, as I know it saddens Mother. I think this is something Father would have wished. Just one meeting. The two of us.”

He studied me coolly. “My schedule's very crowded,” he told me. “I leave tomorrow afternoon for Berlin.” He coughed, scratched his forehead distractedly, took a deep reluctant breath and said, “Still, I will meet you for lunch. On one condition. You must pay. I'm afraid I have no funds at all at the moment.”

WE MET AT MICHAUD'S, ON THE CORNER OF RUE Jacob and rue des Saints-Pères, in part because Hermann was underwriting the meal, but also because, as I told Volodya once we were seated, James Joyce and his family could often be seen dining at that table in the corner.

“Mr. Leopold Bloom,” said my brother, “who eats with relish the inner organs of beast and fowl, is the most thoroughly decent figure to stroll through literature since Lyovin, though his sexual tastes are far more depraved. As for myself, I must confess I'm entirely indifferent to food in all its remarkable forms, beast, fowl or otherwise. As far as I'm concerned, it's fuel—necessary, but hardly to be praised or pampered or paraded, which I sense the French are inclined to do. Left to my own devices, I'd be perfectly content to eat scrambled eggs three times a day. I do like champagne, though.”

With a satisfying
pop!
our waiter uncorked the bottle I had ordered.

“Yes, I like champagne very much,” he repeated. “This is
so much better than the sweet Russian stuff, which is fit for children and old ladies and no one else.”

I told him he must find Berlin congenial, then, given its undistinguished cuisine.

“Berlin doesn't exist,” he said, “any more than a movie exists. Unreal City, as Eliot calls London in that flimsy pastiche of his.
That's
why I find Berlin, as you say, ‘congenial.' I needn't bother with it at all. Some would say we émigrés live as ghosts amid the cities we find ourselves in. I assert the opposite—it's
we
who are real. Yes,” he said, seeming to warm to that line of thought, “that's our predicament. We're real citizens doomed to inhabit phantom cities. A parable, really: the fate of rich, real consciousness in a sham-material world.”

To draw his attention a little closer to earth, I congratulated him once again on the previous night's triumph.

“I presume you noticed who stalked out? At least Bunin stayed to the end. He even managed to find one or two vaguely complimentary things to say, much as I'm sure it pained him. He's really the dullest man alive. As for the others, Ivanov is a complete nobody; someone should seal him into his mousehole for good. And that grotesque old fool Gippius never liked my work, nor did her husband, despite his claim that he taught me all I know about literature; besides, she's a lesbian, or hermaphrodite, or some such unpleasant thing. As for Sodomovitch, the less said the better.”

“And there was another,” I said. “The woman who accosted you at intermission. She seemed vaguely familiar. I've been trying ever since to place her.”

My brother laughed. “Oh,” he said. “I'm astonished you remember her at all, since your memory's so often faulty. But yes, you did meet her once—rather embarrassing circumstances. The Acropolis…”

At once I remembered: it had been during our short stay in Piraeus, an interval of repose between Crimea and England. I
had gone with Nika and Onya to see the Parthenon by moonlight. All at once a voice rose from amid the ruins, singing first a pulsing aria from Verdi, then a plaintive Russian song. We later learned it was the celebrated diva Cherkasskaya, serenading the stone maidens of the Erechtheum. At almost the same time, as if stage-managed by an invisible hand, there emerged from other shadows my brother and a strikingly beautiful young woman whom I did not know, and whom I was not to see again in Piraeus, but whose moonlit looks and poise in a potentially embarrassing moment must have imprinted themselves in the nether regions of my consciousness.