The Real Life of Sebastian Knight

by Vladimir Nabokov

  'What exactly was her name?' I asked.

  'Well, when I met her her name was Nina Toorovetz – but whether – No, I think, you won't find her. As a matter of fact, I often catch myself thinking that she has never existed. I told Varvara Mitrofanna about her, and she said it was merely a bad dream after seeing a bad cinema film. Oh, you are not going yet, are you? She'll be back in a minute….' He looked at me and laughed (I think he had had a little too much of that brandy).

  'Oh, I forget,' he said. 'It is not my present wife that you want to find. And by the way,' he added, 'my papers are in perfect order. I can show you my carte de travail. And if you do find her, I should like to see her before she goes to prison. Or perhaps better not.'

  'Well, thank you for our conversation,' I said, as we were, rather too enthusiastically, shaking hands – first in the room, then in the passage, then in the doorway.

  'I thank you,' Pahl Pahlich cried. 'You see, I quite like talking about her and I am sorry I did not keep any of her photographs.'

  I stood for a moment reflecting. Had I pumped him enough…. Well, I could always see him once more…. Might there not be a chance photo in one of those illustrated papers with cars, furs, dogs, Riviera fashions? I asked about that.

  'Perhaps,' he answered, 'perhaps. She got a prize once at a fancy-dress ball, but I don't quite remember where it happened. All towns seemed restaurants and dancing halls to me.

  He shook his head laughing boisterously, and slammed the door. Uncle Black and the child were slowly coming up the stairs as I went down.

  'Once upon a time,' Uncle Black was saying, 'there was a racing motorist who had a little squirrel; and one day…'

  16

  My first impression was that I had got what I wanted – that at least I knew who Sebastian's mistress had been; but presently I cooled down. Could it have been she, that windbag's first wife? I wondered as a taxi took me to my next address. Was it really worthwhile following that plausible, too plausible trail? Was not the image Pahl Pahlich had conjured up a trifle too obvious? The whimsical wanton that ruins a foolish man's life. But was Sebastian foolish? I called to mind his acute distaste for the obvious bad and the obvious good; for ready-made forms of pleasure and hackneyed forms of distress. A girl of that type would have got on his nerves immediately. For what could her conversation have been, if indeed she had managed to get acquainted with that quiet, unsociable, absent-minded Englishman at the Beaumont Hotel? Surely, after the very first airing of her notions, he would have avoided her. He used to say, I know, that fast girls had slow minds and that there could be nothing duller than a pretty woman who likes fun; even more: that if you looked well at the prettiest girl while she was exuding the cream of the commonplace, you were sure to find some minute blemish in her beauty, corresponding to her habits of thought. He would not mind perhaps having a bite at the apple of sin because, apart from solecisms, he was indifferent to the idea of sin; but he did mind apple-jelly, potted and patented. He might have forgiven a woman for being a flirt, but he would never have stood a sham mystery. He might have been amused by a hussy getting drunk on beer, but he could not have tolerated a grande cocotte hinting at a craving for bhang. The more I thought of it, the less possible it seemed…. At any rate, I ought not to bother about that girl until I had examined the two other possibilities.

  So it was with an eager step that I entered the very imposing house (in a very fashionable part of the town) at which my taxi had stopped. The maid said Madame was not in but, on seeing my disappointment, asked me to wait a moment and then returned with the suggestion that if I liked, I could talk to Madame von Graun's friend, Madame Lecerf. She turned out to be a small, slight, pale-faced young woman with smooth black hair. I thought I had never seen a skin so evenly pale; her black dress was high at the neck, and she used a long black cigarette holder.

  'So you would like to see my friend?' she said, and there was, I thought, a delightful old-world suavity in her crystal clear French.

  I introduced myself.

  'Yes,' she said, 'I saw your card. You are Russian, aren't you?'

  'I have come,' I explained, 'on a very delicate errand. But first tell me, am I right in assuming that Madame Graun is a compatriot of mine?'

  'Mais oui, elle est tout ce qu'il y a de plus russe,' she answered in her soft tinkling voice. 'Her husband was German, but he spoke Russian, too.'

  'Ah,' I said, 'the past tense is most welcome.'

  'You may be quite frank with me,' said Madame Lecerf. 'I rather like delicate errands.'

  'I am related,' I went on, 'to the English author, Sebastian Knight, who died two months ago; and I am attempting to work out his biography. He had a close friend whom he met at Blauberg where he stayed in 1929. I am trying to trace her. This is about all.'

  'Quelle drфle d'histoire!' she exclaimed. 'What a curious story. And what do you want her to tell you?'

  'Oh, anything she pleases…. But am I to understand…. Do you mean that Madame Graun is the person in question?'

  'Very possibly,' she said, 'though I don't think I ever heard her mentioning that particular name…. What did you say it was?'

  'Sebastian Knight.'

  'No. But still it's quite possible. She always picks up friends at the places where she stays. Il va sans dire,' she added, 'that you ought to speak to her personally. Oh, I'm sure you'll find her charming. But what a strange story: she repeated looking at me with a smile. 'Why must you write a book about him, and how is it you don't know the woman's name?'

  'Sebastian Knight was rather secretive,' I explained. 'And that lady's letters which he kept…. Well, you see – he wished them destroyed after his death.'

  'That's right,' she said cheerfully, 'I quite understand him. By all means, burn love-letters. The past makes noble fuel. Would you like a cup of tea?'

  'No,' I said. 'What I would like is to know when I can see Madame Graun.'

  'Soon,' said Madame Lecerf. 'She is not in Paris for the moment, but I think you might call again tomorrow. Yes, that'll be all right, I suppose. She may even return tonight.'

  'Might I ask you,' I said, 'to tell me more about her?'

  'Well, that's easy,' said Madame Lecerf. 'She is quite a good singer, tzigan songs, you know, that kind. She is extraordinarily beautiful. Elle fait des passions. I like her awfully and I have a room at this flat whenever I say in Paris. Here is her picture, by the way.'

  Slowly and noiselessly she moved across the thick carpeted drawing-room, and took a large framed photograph which was standing on the piano. I stared for a moment at an exquisite face half turned away from me. The soft curve of the cheek and the upward dart of the ghostly eyebrow were very Russian, I thought. There was a gleam on the lower eye-lid, and a gleam on the full dark lips. The expression seemed to me a strange mixture of dreaminess and cunning.

  'Yes,' I said 'yes….'

  'Why, is it she?' asked Madame Lecerf inquisitively.

  'It might be,' I replied, 'and I am much looking forward to meeting her.'

  'I'll try to find out myself,' said Madame Lecerf with a charming air of conspiracy. 'Because, you see, I think writing a book about people you know is so much more honest than making a hash of them and then presenting it as your own invention!'

  I thanked her and made my adieux as the French have it. Her hand was remarkably small, and as I inadvertently pressed it too hard, she winced, for there was a big sharp ring on the middle finger. It hurt me too a little.

  'Tomorrow at the same time,' she said and laughed gently. A nice quiet, quietly moving person.

  I had learnt nothing as yet, but I felt I was proceeding successfully. Now it remained to set my mind at ease in regard to Lydia Bohemsky. When I called at the address I had, I was told by the concierge that the lady had moved some months ago. He said he thought she lived at a small hotel across the street. There I was told that she had gone three weeks ago and was living at the other end of the town. I asked my informant whether he thought she was Russian. H
e said she was. 'A handsome dark woman?' I suggested, using an old Sherlock Holmes stratagem. 'Exactly,' he replied rather putting me off (the right answer would have been: Oh, no, she is an ugly blonde). Half an hour later, I entered a gloomy-looking house not far from the Santй prison. My ring was answered by a fat elderly woman with waved bright orange hair, purplish jowls and some dark fluff over her painted lip.

  'May I speak to Mademoiselle Lydia Bohemsky?' I said.

  'C'est moi,' she replied with a terrific Russian accent.

  'Then I'll bring the things,' I muttered and hurriedly left the house. I sometimes think that she may be still standing in the doorway.

  When next day I called again at Madame von Graun's flat, the maid showed me into another room – a kind of boudoir doing its best to look charming. I had already noticed on the day before the intense warmth in the flat – and as the weather outside was, though decidedly damp, yet hardly what you would call chilly, this orgy of central heating seemed rather exaggerated. I was kept waiting a long time. There were several oldish French novels on the console; most of them by literary prizewinners, and a well thumbed copy of Dr Axel Munthe's San Michele. A bunch of carnations stood in a self-conscious vase. There were a few other fragile knick-knacks about – probably quite nice and expensive, but I always have shared Sebastian's almost pathological dislike for anything made of glass or china. Last but not least, there was a sham piece of polished furniture, containing, I felt, that horror of horrors: a radio set Still, all things considered, Helene von Graun seemed to be a person of 'taste and culture'.

  At last, the door opened and the lady I had seen on the previous day sidled in – I say sidled because she was turning her head back and down, talking to what turned out to be a frog-faced, wheezing, black bulldog, which seemed reluctant to waddle in.

  'Remember my sapphire,' she said giving me her little cold hand. She sat down on the blue sofa and pulled up the heavy bulldog. 'Viens, mon vieux,' she panted, 'viens. He is pining away without Helene,' she said when the beast was made comfortable among the cushions. 'It's a shame, you know, I thought she would be back this morning, but she rang up from Dijon and said she would not arrive till Saturday (today was Tuesday). I'm dreadfully sorry. I did not know where to reach you. Are you 'very disappointed?' – and she looked at me with her chin on her clasped hands and her sharp elbows in close-fitting velvet propped on her knees.

  'Well,' I said, 'if you tell me something more about Madame Graun, perhaps I may be consoled.'

  I don't know why, but the atmosphere of the place drove me somehow to affected speech and manner.

  'And what is more,' she said, lifting a sharp-nailed finger, 'j'ai une petite surprise pour vous. But first we'll have tea.' I saw that I could not avoid the farce of tea this time; indeed, the maid had already wheeled in a movable table with glittering tea things.

  'Put it here, Jeanne,' said Madame Lecerf. 'Yes, that will do.'

  'Now you must tell me as explicitly as possible,' said Madame Lecerf, 'tout ce que vous croyez raisonnable de demander а une tasse de thй. I suspect you would like some cream in it, if you have lived in England. You look English, you know.'

  'I prefer looking Russian,' I said.

  'I'm afraid I don't know any Russians, except Helene, of course. These biscuits, I think, are rather amusing.'

  'And what is your surprise?' I asked.

  She had a funny manner of looking at you intently – not into your eyes though, but at the lower pan of your face, as if you had got a crumb or something that ought to be wiped off. She was very lightly made up for a French woman, and I thought her transparent skin and dark hair quite attractive.

  'Ah!' she said. 'I asked her something when she telephoned, and – ' she stopped and seemed to enjoy my impatience.

  'And she replied,' I said, 'that she had never heard the name.'

  'No,' said Madame Lecerf, 'she just laughed, but I know that laugh of hers.'

  I got up, I think, and walked up and down the room.

  'Well,' I said at length, 'it is not exactly a laughing matter, is it? Doesn't she know that Sebastian Knight is dead?'

  Madame Lecerf closed her dark velvety eyes in a silent 'yes' and then looked again at my chin.

  'Have you seen her lately – I mean did you see her in January when the news of his death was in the papers? Wasn't she sorry?'

  'Look here, my dear friend, you are strangely naпve,' said Madame Lecerf. 'There are many kinds of love and many kinds of sorrow. Let us assume that Helene is the person you are seeking. But why ought we to assume that she loved him enough to be upset by his dying? Or perhaps she did love him, but held special views about death which excluded hysterics? What do we know of such matters? It's her personal affair. She'll tell you, I suppose, but until then it's hardly fair to insult her.'

  'I did not insult her,' I cried. 'I am sorry if I sounded unfair. But do talk about her. How long have you known her?'

  'Oh, I haven't seen much of her these last years until this one – she travels a lot, you know – but we used to go to the same school – here in Paris. Her father was a Russian painter, I believe. She was still very young when she married that fool.'

  'What fool?' I queried.

  'Well, her husband, of course. Most husbands are fools, but that one was hors concours. It didn't last long, happily. Have one of mine.' She handed me her lighter too. The bulldog growled in its sleep. She moved and curled up on the sofa, making room for me. 'You don't seem to know much about women, do you?' she asked, stroking her own heel.

  'I'm only interested in one,' I answered.

  'And how old are you?' she went on. 'Twenty-eight? Have I guessed? No? Oh, well, then you're older than me. But no matter. What was I telling you?… I know a few things about her – what she told me herself and what I have picked up. The only man she really loved was a married man and that was before her marriage, and she was a mere slip of a girl then, mind you – and he got tired of her or something. She had a few affairs after that, but it didn't much matter really. Un coeur de femme ne ressuscite jamais. Then there was one story which she told me in full – it was rather a sad one.'

  She laughed. Her teeth were a little too large for her small pale mouth.

  'You look as if my friend were your own sweetheart,' she said teasingly. 'By the way, I wanted to ask you how did you come to this address – I mean, what led you to look up Helene?'

  I told her about the four addresses I had obtained in Blauberg. I mentioned the names,

  'That's superb,' she cried, 'that's what I call energy! Voyez vous зa! And you went to Berlin? She was a Jewess? Adorable! And you have found the others too?'

  'I saw one,' I said, 'and that was enough,'

  'Which?' she asked with a spasm of uncontrollable mirth. 'Which? The Rechnoy woman?'

  'No,' I said, 'Her husband has married again, and she has vanished,'

  'You are charming, charming,' said Madame Lecerf, wiping her eyes and rippling with new laughter, 'I can see you crashing in and being confronted by an innocent couple, Oh, I never heard anything so funny, Did his wife throw you downstairs, or what?'

  'Let us drop the matter,' I said rather curtly, I had had enough of that girl's merriment. She had, I am afraid, that French sense of humour in connexion with connubial matters, which at another moment might have appealed to me too; but just now I felt that the flippantly indecent view she took of my inquiry was somehow slighting Sebastian's memory, As this feeling deepened, I found myself thinking all of a sudden that perhaps the whole thing was indecent and that my clumsy efforts to hunt down a ghost had swamped any idea that I might ever form of Sebastian's last love. Or would Sebastian have been tickled at the grotesque side of the quest I had undertaken for his sake? Would the biographee have found that special 'Knightian twist' about it which would have fully compensated the blundering biographer?

  'Please, forgive me,' she said, putting her ice-cold hand on mine and looking at me from under her brows, 'You must not be so touchy,
you know,'

  She got up quickly and went to the mahogany affair in the corner. I looked at her thin girlish back as she bent down – and I guessed what she was about to do.

  'No, not that, for God's sake!' I cried.

  'No?' she said, 'I thought a little music might soothe you. And generally create the right atmosphere for our talk. No? Well, just as you like.'

  The bulldog shook himself and lay down again.

  'That's right,' she said in a coaxing-and-pouting voice.

  'You were about to tell me,' I reminded her.

  'Yes,' she said sitting down again at my side and pulling at the hem of her skirt, as she curled one leg under her. 'Yes. You see, I don't know who the man was, but I gathered he was a difficult sort of man. She says she liked his looks and his hands and his manner of talking, and she thought it would be rather good fun to have him make love to her – because, you see, he looked so very intellectual, and it is always entertaining to see that kind of refined, distant – brainy fellow suddenly go on all fours and wag his tail What's the matter now, cher Monsieur?'

  'What on earth are you talking about?' I cried, 'When…. When and where did it happen, that affair?'

  'Ah non merci, je ne suis pas le calendrier de mon amie. Vous ne voudriez pas! I didn't bother about asking her dates and names, and if she told me them herself, I have forgotten. Now, please don't ask me any more questions: I am telling you what I know, and not what you'd like to know. I don't think he was a relation of yours, because he was so unlike you – of course, as far as I can judge by what she told me and by what I have seen of you, You are a nice eager boy – and he, well, he was anything but nice – he got positively wicked when he found out that he was falling in love with Helene, Oh no, he did not turn into a sentimental pup, as she had expected, He told her bitterly that she was cheap and vain, and then he kissed her to make sure that she was not a porcelain figure. Well, she wasn't. And presently he found out that he could not live without her, and presently she found out that she had had quite enough of hearing him talk of his dreams, and the dreams in his dreams, and the dreams in the dreams of his dreams. Mind you, I do not condemn either. Perhaps both were right and perhaps neither – but, you see, my friend was not quite the ordinary woman he thought she was – oh, she was something quite different, and she knew a bit more about life and death and people than he thought he knew. He was the kind of man, you know, who thinks all modem books are trashy, and all modern young people fools, merely because he is much too preoccupied with his own sensations and ideas to understand those of others. She says, you can't imagine his tastes and his whims, and the way he spoke of religion – it must have been appalling, I suppose. And my friend, you know, is, or rather was, very gay, trиs vive, and all that, but she felt she was getting old and sour whenever he arrived. Because he never stayed long with her, you know – he would come а l'improviste and plump down on a pouf with his hands on the knob of a cane, without taking off his gloves – and stare gloomily. She got friendly with another man soon, who worshipped her and was oh, much, much more attentive and kind and thoughtful than the man you wrongly suppose to have been your brother (don't scowl, please), but she did not much care for either and she says it was a scream to see the way they were polite to each other when they met. She liked travelling, but whenever she found some really nice place, where she could forget her troubles and everything, there he would blot out the landscape again, and sit down on the terrace at her table, and say that she was vain and cheap, and that he .could not live without her. Or else, he would make a long speech in front of her friends – you know, des jeunes gens qui aiment а rigoler – some long and obscure speech about the form of an ashtray or the colour of time – and there he would be left on that chair all alone, smiling foolishly to himself, or counting his own pulse. I'm sorry if he really turns out to be your relative because I don't think that she has retained a particularly pleasant souvenir of those days. He became quite a pest at last, she says, and she didn't even let him touch her any more, because he would have a fit or something when he got excited. One day, at last, when she knew he was going to arrive by the night train, she asked a young man who would do anything to please her, to meet him and tell him that she did not want to see him ever again, and that if he attempted to see her, he would be regarded by her friends as a troublesome stranger and dealt with accordingly. It was not very nice of her, I think, but she supposed it would be better for him in the long' run. And it worked. He did not even send her any more of his usual entreating letters, which she never read, anyway. No, no, really, I don't think it can be the man in question – if I tell you all this it is merely because I want to give you a portrait of Helene – and not of her lovers. She was so full of life, so ready to be sweet to everybody, so brimming with that vitalitй joyeuse qui est, d'ailleurs, tout-а-fait conforme а une philosophie innйe, а un sens quasi-religieux des phйnomиnes de la vie. And what did it amount to? The men she liked proved dismal disappointments, all women with a very few exceptions were nothing but cats, and she spent the best part of her life in trying to be happy in a world which did its best to break her. Well, you'll meet her and see for yourself whether the world has succeeded.'