The Real Life of Sebastian Knight

by Vladimir Nabokov

I replied rather foolishly that I was afraid I had called at the wrong moment.

  'Oh,' she said, 'I thought…' She looked at me. 'Sit down,' she said, 'I thought I saw your face just now at the funeral…. No? Well, you see, my brother-in-law has died and…. No, no, sit down. It has been an awful day.'

  'I don't want to disturb you,' I said, 'I'd better go… I only wanted to talk to you about a relation of mine… whom I think you knew… at Blauberg… but it does not matter….

  'Blauberg? I have been there twice,' she said and her face twitched as the telephone began ringing somewhere.

  'His name was Sebastian Knight,' I said looking at her unpainted tender trembling lips.

  'No, I have never heard that name,' she said, 'no.'

  'He was half-English,' I said, 'be wrote books.'

  She shook her head and then turned to the door which had been opened by the sullen boy, her nephew.

  'Sonya is coming up in half an hour,' he said. She nodded and he withdrew.

  In fact I did not know anyone at the hotel,' she continued. I bowed and apologized again.

  'But what is your name,' she asked peering at me with her dim soft eyes which somehow reminded me of Clare. 'I think you mentioned it, but today my brain seems to be in a daze…. Ach,' she said when I had told her. 'But that sounds familiar. Wasn't there a man of that name killed in a duel in St Petersburg? Oh, your father? I see. Wait a minute. Somebody… just the other day… somebody had been recalling the case. How funny…. It always happens like that, in heaps. Yes… the Rosanovs…. They knew your family and all that….'

  'My brother had a school-fellow called Rosanov,' I said.

  'You'll find them in the telephone book,' she went on rapidly, 'you see, I don't know them very well, and I am quite incapable just now of looking up anything.'

  She was called away and I wandered alone toward the hall. There I found an elderly gentleman pensively sitting on my overcoat and smoking a cigar. At first he could not quite make out what I wanted but then was effusively apologetic.

  Somehow I felt sorry it had not been Helene Grinstein. Although of course she never could have been the woman who had made Sebastian so miserable. Girls of her type do not smash a man's life – they build it. There she had been steadily managing a house that was bursting with grief and had found it possible to attend to the fantastic affairs of a completely superfluous stranger. And not only had she listened to me, she had given me a tip which I then and there followed, and though the people I saw had nothing to do with Blauberg and the unknown woman, I collected one of the most precious pages of Sebastian's life. A more systematic mind than mine would have placed them in the beginning of this book, but my quest had developed its own magic and logic and though I sometimes cannot help believing that it had gradually grown into a dream, that quest, using the pattern of reality for the weaving of its own fancies, I am forced to recognize that I was being led right, and that in striving to render Sebastian's life I must now follow the same rhythmical interlacements.

  There seems to have been a law of some strange harmony in the placing of a meeting relating to Sebastian's first adolescent romance in such close proximity to the echoes of his last dark love. Two modes of his life question each other and the answer is his life itself, and that is the nearest one ever can approach a human truth. He was sixteen and so was she. The lights go out, the curtain rises and a Russian summer landscape is disclosed; the bend of a river half in the shade because of the dark fir trees growing on one steep clay bank and almost reaching out with their deep black reflections to the other side which is low and sunny and sweet, with marsh-flowers and silver-tufted grass. Sebastian, his close-cropped head hatless, his loose silk blouse now clinging to his shoulder-blades, now to his chest according to whether he bends or leans back, is lustily rowing in a boat painted a shiny green. A girl is sitting at the helm, but we shall let her remain achromatic: a mere outline, a white shape not filled in with colour by the artist. Dark blue dragonflies in a slow skipping flight pass hither and thither and alight on the flat waterlily leaves. Names, dates, and even faces have been hewn in the red clay of the steeper bank and swifts dart in and out of holes therein. Sebastian's teeth glisten. Then, as he pauses and looks back, the boat with a silky swish slides into the rushes.

  'You're a very poor cox,' he says.

  The picture changes: another bend of that river. A path leads to the water edge, stops, hesitates, and turns to loop around a rude bench. It is not quite evening yet, but the air is golden and midges are performing a primitive native dance in a sunbeam between the aspen leaves which are quite, quite still at last, forgetful of Judas.

  Sebastian is sitting upon the bench and reading aloud some English verse from a black copybook. Then he stops suddenly: a little to the left a naiad's head with auburn hair is seen just above the water, receding slowly, the long tresses floating behind. Then the nude bather emerges on the opposite bank, blowing his nose with the aid of his thumb; it is the long-haired village priest. Sebastian goes on reading to the girl beside him. The painter has not yet filled in the white space except for a thin sunburnt arm streaked from wrist to elbow along its outer side with glistening down.

  As in Byron's dream, again the picture changes. It is night. The sky is alive with stars. Years later Sebastian wrote that gazing at the stars gave him a sick and squeamish feeling, as for instance when you look at the bowels of a ripped-up beast. But at the time, this thought of Sebastian's had not yet been expressed. It is very dark. Nothing can be discerned of what is possibly an alley in the park. Sombre mass on sombre mass and somewhere an owl hooting. An abyss of blackness where all of a sudden a small greenish circle moves up: the luminous dial of a watch (Sebastian disapproved of watches in his riper years).

  'Must you go?' asks his voice.

  A last change: a V-shaped flight of migrating cranes; their tender moan melting in a turquoise-blue sky high above a tawny birch-grove. Sebastian, still not alone, is seated on the white-and-cinder-grey trunk of a felled tree. His bicycle rests, its spokes a-glitter among the bracken. A Camberwell Beauty skims past and settles on the kerf, fanning its velvety wings. Back to town tomorrow, school beginning on Monday.

  'Is this the end? Why do you say that we shall not see each other this winter?' he asks for the second or third time. No answer. 'Is it true that you think you've fallen in love with that student chap? – vetovo studenta?' The seated girl's shape remains blank except for the arm and a thin brown hand toying with a bicycle pump. With the end of the holder it slowly writes on the soft earth the word 'yes', in I English, to make it gentler.

  The curtain is rung down. Yes, that is all. It is very little but it is heartbreaking. Never more may he ask of the boy who sits daily at the next school desk, 'And how is your sister?' Nor must he ever question old Miss Forbes, who still drops in now and then, about the little girl to whom she had also given lessons. And how shall he tread again the same paths next summer, and watch the sunset and cycle down to the river? (But next summer was mainly devoted to the futurist poet Pan.)

  By a chance conjuncture of circumstances it was Natasha Rosanov's brother that drove me to the Charlottenburg station to catch the Paris express. I said how curious it had been to have talked to his sister, now the plump mother of two boys, about a distant summer in the dreamland of Russia. He answered that he was perfectly content with his job in Berlin. I tried, as I had vainly tried before, to make him talk of Sebastian's school life. 'My memory is appallingly bad,' he replied, 'and anyway I am too busy to be sentimental about such ordinary things.'

  'Oh, but surely, surely,' I said, 'you can recall some little outstanding fact, anything would be welcome….' Her laughed. 'Well,' he said, 'haven't you just spent hours talking to my sister? She adores the past, doesn't she? She says, you are going to put her in a book as she was in those days, she is quite looking forward to it, in fact.'

  'Please, try and remember something,' I insisted, stubbornly.

  'I am telling you that I do
not remember, you queer person. It's useless, quite useless. There is nothing to relate except ordinary rot about cribbing and cramming and nicknaming teachers. We had quite a good time, I suppose…. But you know, your brother… how shall I put it?… your brother was not very popular at school….'

  15

  As the reader may have noticed, I have tried to put into this book as little of my own self as possible. I have tried not to allude (though a hint now and then might have made the background of my research somewhat clearer) to the circumstances of my life. So at this point of my story I shall not dwell upon certain business difficulties I experienced on my arrival in Paris, where I had a more or less permanent home; they were in no way related to my quest, and if I mention them in passing, it is only to stress the fact that I was so engrossed in the attempt to discover Sebastian's last love that I cheerfully dismissed any personal troubles which my taking such a long holiday might entail.

  I was not sorry that I had started off with the Berlin clue. It had at least led me to obtain an unexpected glimpse of another chapter of Sebastian's past. And now one name was erased, and I had three more chances before me. The Paris telephone directory yielded the information that 'Graun (von), Helene' and 'Rechnoy, Paul' (the 'de', I noticed, was absent) corresponded to the addresses I possessed. The prospect of meeting a husband was unpleasant but unavoidable. The third lady, Lydia Bohemsky, was ignored by both directories, that is the telephone book and that other Bottin masterpiece, where addresses are arranged according to streets. Anyway, the address I had might help me to get at her. I knew my Paris well, so that I saw at once the most time-saving sequence in which to dispose my calls if I wanted to have done with them in one day. Let it be added, in case the reader be surprised at the rough-and-ready style of my activity, that I dislike telephoning as much as I do writing letters.

  The door at which I rang was opened by a lean, tall, shock-headed man in his shirtsleeves and with a brass stud at his collarless throat. He held a chessman – a black knight – in his hand. I greeted him in Russian.

  'Come in, come in,' he said cheerfully, as if he had been expecting me.

  'My name is so-and-so,' I said.

  'And mine,' he cried, 'is Pahl Pahlich Rechnoy' – and he guffawed heartily as if it were a good joke. 'If you please,' he said, pointing with the chessman to an open door.

  I was ushered into a modest room with a sewing machine standing in one corner and a faint smell of ribbon-and-linen in the air. A heavily built man was sitting sideways at a table on which an oilcloth chessboard was spread, with pieces too large for the squares. He looked at them askance while the empty cigarette holder in the corner of his mouth looked the other way. A pretty little boy of four or five was kneeling on the floor, surrounded by tiny motor cars. Pahl Pahlich chucked the black knight on to the table and its head came off. Black carefully screwed it on again.

  'Sit down,' said Pahl Pahlich. 'This is my cousin,' he added. Black bowed. I sat down on the third (and last) chair. The child came up to me and silently showed me a new red-and-blue pencil.

  'I could take your rook now if I wished,' said Black darkly, 'but I have a much better move.'

  He lifted his queen and delicately crammed it into a cluster of yellowish pawns – one of which was represented by a thimble.

  Pahl Pahlich made a lightning swoop and took the queen with his bishop. Then he roared with laughter.

  'And now,' said Black calmly, when White had stopped roaring, 'now you are in the soup. Check, my dove.'

  While they were arguing over the position, with White trying to take his move back, I looked round the room. I noted the portrait of what had been in the past an Imperial Family. And the moustache of a famous general, moscowed a few years ago. I noted, too, the bulging springs of the bug-brown couch, which served, I felt, as a triple bed – for husband and wife and child. For a minute, the object of my coming seemed to be madly absurd. Somehow, too, I remembered Chichikov's round of weird visits in Gogol's Dead Souls. The little boy was drawing a motor car for me.

  'I am at your service,' said Pahl Pahlich (he had lost, I saw, and Black was putting the pieces back into an old card-board box – all except the thimble). I said what I had carefully prepared beforehand: namely that I wanted to see his wife, because she had been friends with some… well, German friends of mine. (I was afraid of mentioning Sebastian's name too soon.)

  'You'll have to wait a bit then,' said Pahl Pahlich. 'She is busy in town, you see. I think, she'll be back in a moment.'

  I made up my mind to wait, although I felt that today I should hardly manage to see his wife alone. I hoped however that a little deft questioning might at once settle whether she had known Sebastian; then, by and by, I could make her talk.

  'In the meantime,' said Pahl Pahlich, 'we shall clap down a little brandy – cognachkoo.'

  The child, finding that I had been sufficiently interested in his pictures, wandered off to his uncle, who at once took him on his knee and proceeded to draw with incredible rapidity and very beautifully a racing car.

  'You are an artist,' I said – to say something.

  Pahl Pahlich, who was rinsing glasses in the tiny kitchen, laughed and shouted over his shoulder: 'Oh, he's an all-round genius. He can play the violin standing upon his head, and he can multiply one telephone number by another in three seconds, and he can write his name upside down in his ordinary hand.'

  'And he can drive a taxi,' said the child, dangling its thin, dirty little legs.

  'No, I shan't drink with you,' said Uncle Black, as Pahl Pahlich put the glasses on the table. 'I think I shall take the boy out for a walk. Where are his things?'

  The boy's coat was found, and Black led him away. Pahl Pahlich poured out the brandy and said: 'You must excuse me for these glasses. I was rich in Russia and I got rich again in Belgium ten years ago, but then I went broke. Here's to yours.'

  'Does your wife sew?' I asked, so as to set the ball rolling.

  'Oh, yes, she has taken up dressmaking,' he said with a happy laugh. 'And I'm a type-setter, but I have just lost my job. She's sure to be back in a moment. I did not know she had German friends,' he added.

  'I think,' I said, 'they met her in Germany, or was it Alsace?' He had been refilling his glass eagerly, but suddenly he stopped and looked at me agape.

  'I'm afraid, there's some mistake,' he exclaimed. 'It must have been my first wife. Varvara Mitrofanna has never been out of Paris – except Russia, of course – she came here from Sebastopol via Marseilles.' He drained his glass and began to laugh.

  'That's a good one,' he said eyeing me curiously. 'Have I met you before? Do you know my first one personally?'

  I shook my head.

  'Then you're lucky,' he cried. 'Damned lucky. And your German friends have sent you upon a wild goose chase because you'll never find her.'

  'Why?' I asked getting more and more interested.

  'Because soon after we separated, and that was years ago, I lost sight of her absolutely. Somebody saw her in Rome, and somebody saw her in Sweden – but I'm not sure even of that. She may be here, and she may be in hell. I don't care.'

  'And you could not suggest any way of finding her?'

  'None,' he said.

  'Mutual acquaintances?'

  They were her acquaintances, not mine,' he answered with a shudder.

  'You haven't got a photo of her or something?'

  'Look here,' he said, 'what are you driving at? Are the police after her? Because, you know, I shouldn't be surprised if she turned out to be an international spy. Mata Hari! That's her type. Oh, absolutely. And then…. Well, she's not a girl you can easily forget once she's got into your system. She sucked me dry, and in more ways than one. Money and soul, for instance. I would have killed her… if it had not been for Anatole.'

  'And who's that?' I asked.

  'Anatole? Oh, that's the executioner. The man with the guillotine here. So you're not of the police, after all. No? Well it's your own business, I suppose.
But, really, she drove me mad. I met her, you know, in Ostende, that must have been, let me see, in 1927 – she was twenty then, no, not even twenty. I knew she was another fellow's mistress and all that, but I did not care. Her idea of life was drinking cocktails, and eating a large supper at four o'clock in the morning, and dancing the shimmy or whatever it was called, and inspecting brothels because that was fashionable among Parisian snobs, and buying expensive clothes, and raising hell in hotels when she thought the maid had stolen her small change which she afterwards found in the bathroom…. Oh, and all the rest of it – you may find her in any cheap novel, she's a type, a type. And she loved inventing some rare illness and going to some famous kurort, and…'

  'Wait a bit,' I said. 'That interests me. In June 1929, she was alone in Blauberg:

  'Exactly, but that was at the very end of our marriage. We were living in Paris then, and soon after we separated, and I worked for a year at a factory in Lyon. I was broke, you see.'

  'Do you mean to say she met some man in Blauberg?'

  'No, that I don't know. You see, I don't think she really went very far in deceiving me, not really, you know, not the whole hog – at least I tried to think so, because there were always lots of men around her, and she didn't mind being kissed by them, I suppose, but I should have gone mad, had I let myself brood over the matter. Once, I remember…'

  'Pardon me,' I interrupted again, 'but are you quite sure you never heard of an English friend of hers?'

  'English? I thought you said German. No, I don't know. There was a young American at Ste Maxime in 1928, I believe, who almost swooned every time Ninka danced with him – and, well, there may have been Englishmen at Ostende and elsewhere, but really I never bothered about the nationality of her admirers.'

  'So you are quite, quite sure that you don't know about Blauberg and… well, about what happened afterwards?'

  'No,' he said. 'I don't think that she was interested in anybody there. You see, she had one of her illness-phases at the time – and she used to eat only lemon-ice and cucumbers, and talk of death and the Nirvana or something – she had a weakness for Lhassa – you know what I mean…'