The Unreal Life of Sergey Nabokov (44 page)

 

By the autumn of 1938 my brother and his family were finally in Paris, living in squalid quarters on rue Boileau. I would visit them whenever I was in the city. Volodya was, as ever, hard at work, writing a new novel in Russian, and another, he told me, in English. In the meantime Mitouchka, though clearly quite clever, had become a little terror, and his doting parents did absolutely nothing to control his anarchic spirits.

Véra was hardly an easy case herself; I am afraid we never got past our initial suspicions of each other. Her head was full of the sort of prejudices that are all too common. She seemed to think that I secretly desired to be a woman, that at heart I was little more than a thwarted showgirl, that my mother had loved me too well and my father not enough. Perhaps most offensively, she seemed to think that all men of my kind were uncontrollably attracted to little boys. I do not forget—and certainly did not mishear—her fiercely whispered reproach to Volodya, one afternoon when he had inveigled me to watch Mitouchka for a hour while she was out and he needed to work: “What on earth were you thinking? He's not to be left alone with our son under any circumstances.”

Volodya was increasingly desperate to leave Paris in those years. I remember a conversation from the spring of 1939 in which he laid out his predicament in the starkest of terms. “I'm the best writer of my generation,” he told me, “but there's no future for the Russian novel. It's starving to death, while the Soviet novel is stillborn. I've dabbled in French, but it's English I pin my hopes on. It's been almost unimaginably difficult. And to give up my beautiful Russian…” He shook his head.

“Were I ever to write something,” I said in a misguided attempt to be helpful, “I would most certainly write in English. But then I shed Russia so much more quickly and easily than
you did. Perhaps we inverts must be above all adaptable; it's how we survive. I feel fairly certain I can adapt to anything.”

He laughed. “There's no end to your foolish notions, is there? In any event, you'll be much amused by the subject of my latest novel—which, as you may have surmised, I've composed in my benighted and stuttering English. It's about two brothers. One is a writer, the other is not. And yet, through a diverting set of circumstances, the other becomes a writer as well. I'm calling it
The Real Life of Sebastian Knight.
That's all I've got to say about it. Don't ask to read the manuscript. We'll see if anyone wants to publish it.”

Where, I wonder, is that novel now? That novel I shall never see. Has it found a publisher in dream-bright America?

“I'm thinking of writing my next novel,” he told me during that same conversation, “based on the life of that peculiar double monster I dream about now and then: how it runs away from home, its misadventures in the world, its various hapless loves, how the tragic death of one twin eventually liberates the other from his Siamese bondage. I've got so many more notions than I shall ever get down on paper, and always the clock is ticking, precious time slipping away. Even during this very conversation I'm wondering, Should I not be at my desk? I've got inside me a novel about an old man in hopeless, helpless, forbidden love with a young girl. Another about a distant northern land that resembles, in its fantastical tint and texture, our own hazy homeland. I'm urgently attempting to extract both, slowly, patiently, the way a robin pulls an earthworm from the soil. But I don't suppose you know the torment of that sort of careful urgency. Most people, happily, do not.”

I gazed across the crowded sidewalk to busy boulevard Montparnasse, the beckoning neon of Café du Dôme and La Coupole over the way, and said to Volodya, “I'm content with whatever time God wishes to allot me. I believe He created us in order that we might live our lives fully. Beyond that,
it's all a mystery we can't begin to solve on our own. That's why He gave us His church. So that we could have a means of believing, despite whatever evidence to the contrary, that a life beyond this one awaits us, a life that's loving and beautiful and everlasting. You believe in it as well, I think. Or at least your books do. And I have learned that it is your books I should trust, your secret truest self. Who can forget, in your unforgettable
Invitation to a Beheading
, the prisoner walking calmly away from his own death, toward those entirely real beings waiting for him beyond this shabby, fraudulent world? Or the way he longingly imagines that place—‘There …
tam
…
là-bas
…'—I quote your own words—where everything pleases the soul, and from which the occasional chance reflection comes our way, reminding us, like Vermeer's patch of yellow wall in Proust, that everything in this life is arranged as though we came into it bearing obligations from a former life—why else, against all odds in this depraved world, should we be good, be charitable to others, kind to animals, love each other?”

I fear I did not say it half so eloquently at the time, or perhaps not at all, but never mind. I say it here.

 

One particular advantage of Matrei was its proximity to Prague, and I was thus able to visit Mother in her years of declining health with much greater frequency (and less difficulty, as there was but one border to cross with my “Nansensical” passport) than I ever could have managed had I remained in Paris. Her financial situation remained dire but was no longer dangerous, and Hermann insisted on contributing funds now and again, despite recent troubles in the family business. Mother had always been a chronic worrier (and how much life had given her, after all, to worry about), but whether it was her age—she was now in her early sixties—or the comforts of Christian Science, she had achieved some degree of serenity.

The end came on May 2, 1939, after a brief illness. Upon
receipt of Evgenia's telegram, I left as soon as possible for the Protectorate, as Czechoslovakia had been lovingly renamed by its Nazi occupiers. To his great regret, Volodya was unable to attend the funeral; neither was Elena, who was still weak after a torturous labor. The telegram to Kirill in Brussels was returned. Thus I found myself on my own with Olga, who had only grown stranger and more obstreperous with the years. She announced immediately upon my arrival that I was not to fear, she had already burnt all of our letters to Mother—Father's included. Her husband, who had abetted her in that evil deed, deferred obsequiously to each of his wife's bizarre requests. Would he mail an envelope to her friend Natasha from a particular post office halfway across the city? Would he go home and fetch her black umbrella which she had decided she must carry to the cemetery, even though no rain threatened that day? They might, on stage, have been a comic pair; in real life they were unbearable. Throughout these unbecoming antics, Evgenia displayed her usual calm and dignity, reminding me why Mother had so cherished her companionship.

One guest at the sparsely attended funeral whom I had not expected to encounter, and whom I did not at first recognize, so ancient, frail and shrunken did he appear, was my hated adversary of old, Dr. Bekhetev. His eyes were rheumy, his hands trembled. He did not have any idea who I was, or if he did have an idea, it was that I was my brother Kirill.

Dr. Bekhetev did not wish to speak of the past. He talked instead of pigeons. There were too many pigeons in Prague. Had I noticed? The city government refused to do anything about them. Not only were they a threat to the health of the general population, their excrement was fouling the lovely monuments to be found everywhere in the city. For Prague was such a charming place; didn't I agree? It very much behooved the city fathers to care for its fabric. Would I be interested in
penning a letter urging—nay, demanding—that such a course of protection be implemented immediately?

He was as light as a ghost; one could almost see straight through him. I could easily have accused him of the considerable damage he once did to a boy so much more vulnerable than stone monuments. I could very easily have picked him up and tossed him across the room. I could very, very easily have thrashed him to within an inch of his life. But I did none of those things. I too had no wish to dwell on the past. All I felt was a keen eagerness to return as soon as possible to my beloved Hermann, whose exquisite presence in my own life Dr. Bekhetev had once done everything in his power to prevent.

 

 

 

I HAVE NOT BEEN OUT HALF AN HOUR, AND IN THAT interval Felix has stopped by and left a note for me with Onya:

Like a child called to bed who must leave the house of cards he has patiently been building, and thus in a single impatient gesture collapses all his careful handiwork, so I must scatter these final years before me.

In the spring of 1940, those months of the so-called phony war, Volodya informed me that he had finally received very good news: an offer from an American university, Stanford, to
teach a course in Russian literature. Like the elegant solution to a vexing chess problem, the once apparently insurmountable difficulty of obtaining a U.S. visa was suddenly overcome.

We sat for one last time in Le Sélect. “America!” he exclaimed. Did I remember, so many years ago, how he and I had attempted our escape? How we had fled that wretched hotel and boarded that lovely steamer, and how as it pulled away from the dock into the gray current of the Rhine, it seemed possible we were on our way to unimaginable adventures.

“I seem to remember you were a rather reluctant accomplice,” he said with a laugh.

“Nor do I intend to accompany you now into one more exile,” I told him. “I've thought things through, considered my options, and for better or worse I'm staying put.”

“Pah!” he said. “You'll soon enough be staring a full-fledged war in the face. I seriously advise you, Seryosha: Get out while you can.”

“And if everyone flees, who will remain to turn the tide? Didn't Father always tell us the only way to defeat the bullies was to stand up to them? It's taken me far too long to learn that lesson, but now that I've learned it, I've no intention of disregarding it. I trust God's love won't abandon me. This is a test, you see. Do I have the courage to stay with Hermann, or do I seek only to save myself?”

“You speak with great courage,” said my brother. “Still, this is madness. Surely your Hermann has enough connections to devise some plan of escape for the both of you. No? Then so be it, at least for now. I wish you well, my Sergeyushka. I wish you the very best.”

Then he did something extraordinary. He made over me the sign of the Greek cross, as Father once had done, in another city, in another dangerous time of departures.

I did not see my brother again. The next time I was in Paris I called at his flat, but the concierge informed me that
the Nabokov family had gone—without, it seemed, paying the final installment of their rent.

 

Beginning as early as the summer of 1934, when in the aftermath of the SA purge homosexuals were first declared
Volks-feinde
by the Reich, Hermann and I had exercised caution. Over the next years many of Hermann's German friends fled abroad, went into hiding, or were arrested. We heard rumors of internment camps. After 1938 we seldom appeared together in public, and my intermittent stays at Castle Weissenstein, where I arrived and departed under cover of darkness, began to resemble an incarceration—albeit a comfortable one.

Once war broke out, even secret visits became dangerous. Weeks would go by without our seeing each other, and then usually in Paris, where eyes were less prying. Still, things that have been seen cannot be unseen, and over the years in Matrei there were enough awkward incidents lingering in the villagers' minds: the odd amorous embrace, the peck on the cheek, the too familiar bit of touching observed by three peasant women who clucked disapprovingly. There was the unpleasant clutch of schoolboys who, arm in arm, paraded down the street in a parody of our stroll, lisping and stammering, and the guileless young automotive mechanic with whom we became perhaps a bit too friendly. There were the servants who professed perplexity at finding an item of Herr Nabokov's clothing in Herr Thieme's room, or vice versa.

Any of these could have been the culprit. Or none. It does not matter. I forgive them all, for what else can I do? Hermann and I were arrested in flagrante delicto early one morning in October 1941, scarcely ten hours after my arrival from Paris. We had dined with his parents, romped with Sigmund and Sieglinde, and retired to his bedchamber for a somewhat difficult reunion. He was not pleased with the risk I had taken in returning. He even suggested that it might be best for me to
refrain from any future visits to Austria “until this mess clears up.” He would see me when in Paris. Though we had not quarreled, exactly, our conversation was vexed. Nonetheless, by small degrees, we warmed again to each other. Had I chosen to return to my own bed an hour earlier, I am sure it would not have made any difference. When the police came, they already knew what they were looking for.

How I hate to write what I now must write, for I cannot ever forget the sight of Oskar and Anne Marie, carrying across the courtyard—Anne Marie tearfully staggering under her burden, Oskar bearing his with stoic grief—the limp bodies of Sigmund and Sieglinde, whose exuberance had “threatened” the officers' safety when they broke down the door.

The last time I saw Hermann was in Matrei's little police station. The police had not given us time to dress properly: my love was still wearing his lavender silk pajamas and, incongruously, a pair of black oxfords without socks. His face was pale and expressionless, his eyes without their customary luster. He did not look at me as he was led away into a back room for interrogation. I am quite certain I shall never see him again.