The Unreal Life of Sergey Nabokov

by Paul Russell

  He pauses, and I think he has fulfilled whatever obscure purpose drew him here. But he speaks again.

  “I happen to know you were making inquiries,” he says. “Before you left.”

  Once again my heart freezes. “How do you know that?”

  “One does not survive very long in the Ministry without remaining on one’s toes. Why do you wish to discover the whereabouts of Flight Sergeant Hugh Bagley?”

  “I predict you’ve a very long career ahead of you,” I tell him.

  He receives the compliment with a remarkably sad smile.

  “Since you seem interested,” I continue, “Hugh Bagley’s an old pal of mine from university. By chance I heard one of those monstrous downed-pilot broadcasts we send to England. I recognized his voice at once. He was shot down in July, over Hamburg. He said he’d been wounded but was being attended to. If I remember correctly, he said something very obviously scripted, along the lines of ‘Despite the fact that I am a murderer of children, a destroyer of cities, I am being treated well. The German people display a compassion unknown to the British and their Jewish masters.’ Perhaps you yourself authored those words. Who knows? In any event, I could tell from his voice that he was extremely frightened. If I’m cross with myself for speaking out, it’s for having thereby sabotaged my quest to discover his whereabouts.”

  “You knew how utterly inadvisable such a course of inquiry was when you undertook it?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “And that didn’t deter you?

  “No, Herr Silber, it did not. Am I being interrogated?”

  “No, no, nothing of the kind.” He laughs. “After all, I’m the one putting myself at risk by contacting you. And please call me Felix. I’m just curious. What would you have done with any information that happened to come your way?”

  “Frankly, I have no idea at all. I suppose I hadn’t even gotten that far in my thinking. But why are you interested?”

  He looks at me steadily. “As you say, I too have no idea.”

  We eye each other. He takes from his breast pocket a single bent cigarette and offers it to me. I accept, light it gratefully from the spirit lamp, take a drag, and then pass it to him. For several minutes we pass that precious bit of solace back and forth between us.

  “I offer nothing,” he says.

  “And I certainly wouldn’t ask,” I tell him.

  “My son died at Dnepropetrovsk, you know.”

  “I didn’t know that. I’m very sorry.”

  “I used to consider myself a Christian, but no more. You, on the other hand, seem quite devout. I’ve seen the cross you continue to wear around your neck.”

  Herr Silber is more observant than I have ever given him credit for.

  “This may sound very odd coming from someone like me,” he continues, “especially at this particularly difficult moment. But I believe I envy you, Nabokov. How absurd that is! You’ve nothing left to fear. Your fate’s almost certain. You must feel wonderfully free.”

  “I’d be quite happy to trade places with you at the moment,” I confess.

  “No, I don’t think you would. I won’t come here again. If it’s possible, meet me in three days in the restaurant at the Hotel Eden. One o’clock. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  “Three days seems a very long time under the circumstances.”

  “So it is,” he replies. “So it is. A very long time for all of us. Heil Hitler, for what it’s worth.”

  I look at him in surprise. He shrugs. “Good luck,” he says. “With the cloud cover lifting, they’ll hit us hard tonight.”

  After he has left I am perplexed, then increasingly alarmed. It seems impossible that Herr Silber would have paid me this visit on his own. Clearly, he is a dangerously canny individual. Now that I think of it, how did he find my address? Or more to the point, who might have given it to him? The more I think it through, the more convinced I am that such a cautious man would never have risked seeking me out merely to hear me reaffirm an observation the mere whisper of which is a death sentence.

  And yet: do I not witness all the time the most surprising instances of the forbidden? When I accompany Frau Schlegel to the black market, have I not heard women in line pass information back and forth? “So-and-so has been arrested.” “The air-raid shelter at Alexanderplatz was hit last night. Many casualties.” “An allied force is preparing to storm the Atlantic Wall.” All the news unavailable on the surrealistically optimistic Wehrmachtsbericht everyone ritually listens to in the evenings, before the air-raid sirens begin. There is no information to be had, and yet information is everywhere. The only trouble is that it is impossible to say which, if any, is true.

  All that I have said about Hugh Bagley is, strictly speaking, true—but as usual there are many truths. True, Hugh was a great friend at Cambridge; he was also for a brief and happy spell my lover, though our love was of the amiable rather than passionate sort, and eventually evolved into a friendship that proved more lasting than I think either of us had expected. I have seen him only once in the years since, though we corresponded regularly until recent events severed all communication between the British Isles and Fortress Europa. In his last letter, which miraculously found its way to me in occupied Paris in the summer of 1940, he informed me he was joining the RAF, and would I say an occasional prayer for him. In fact, I prayed for him more often than he might have imagined, fixing his airborne figure in my imagination not so much as a relic of memory but as a nostalgia for all the many might-have-beens that fill out a life. When I heard his harrowed voice broadcast on the radio, not only did a whole past come flooding back to me, but a host of extinguished futures as well.

  I have no real hope of aiding him in his nightmarish circumstances—just as I have no hope of helping the love of my life, whom the Nazis took from me early one morning two years ago, from an all-too-pregnable castle in the Tyrolean Alps. The truth is that both Hugh Bagley and Hermann Thieme are completely beyond my reach.

  4

  ST. PETERSBURG

  MY LOVES HAVE ALWAYS AMBUSHED ME.

  That winter of 1915 we were a country at war. My father’s reserve unit had been mobilized. Patriotic fervor had renamed St. Petersburg Petrograd. In theaters, before the regular concert could commence, the orchestra played the national anthems of each of the allied nations. Wagner and Beethoven and Brahms disappeared from the repertory. Signs in shop windows requested, comically enough, BITTE KEIN DEUTSCH! The German Embassy, three doors down from our house, had been sacked.

  None of that mattered. The clock on the nightstand informed me I had a full hour before Ivan would come to rouse me for school. As I lay abed in the boreal gloom, what had seemed entirely trivial the day before—my schoolmate Oleg Danchenko tossing me a tangerine while saying, offhandedly, “I detest tangerines”—now seemed an inexplicable act of kindness, completely overshadowing the world gone mad around us.

  “I detest tangerines,” he said.

  That was all.

  Why had he pitched it my way? And how could I have received it so thoughtlessly, without inquiring what he had meant by the gesture? I had taken the gift and shoved it in the pocket of my overcoat, where it remained even now. Now that I realized its significance, I needed to see it once again, needed to touch it, assure myself I had not dreamt this mysterious exchange. What a clever gesture it had been on his part: a secret sign passing beneath everyone else’s clueless gaze.

  All this excited my young body as thoroughly as it did my imagination, and as I dressed myself in the Gymnasium’s regulation black uniform, a desperate inspiration came to me. I slipped a smashing pair of dove-gray, pearl-buttoned silk spats over my regular shoes. For this breach of rules I knew I would almost certainly be punished, but that morning the donning of those illegal spatterdashes seemed utterly necessary, a way of announcing—but what did I wish to announce?

  I hardly dared explore that question as I went downstairs to delicious hot cocoa and buttered bread—and the vile
yeast concoction I was forced to drink daily in the latest attempt to cure my stutter. I prayed no one would notice what I was up to, though to be noticed was precisely the point. From Father’s study came the familiar sounds of his morning fencing lesson with Monsieur Loustalot. Volodya, as usual, came down late, no doubt having hastily completed homework he’d neglected the night before. Downing his cup of lukewarm cocoa, he ignored me completely. Then Ivan bustled us into our overcoats and we were out the door, climbing into the waiting Benz that would carry us to our respective schools.

  That gray morning, as we headed up Morskaya, past the gilt dome of St. Isaac’s and onto the Nevsky Prospect, our chauffeur Volkov weaving our formidable auto in and out of the sleighs that thronged the streets, what did I imagine would happen? Would Oleg be waiting there for me, outside the school, cigarette at his lips, his pals conveniently absent? Now that we had shared that tangerine, would he greet me as a friend and comrade? But a dark little doubt had begun to flicker inside me. Perhaps it had all been some obscure joke at my expense. By the time we turned onto Gagarin Street I was in a state of abjection. But by then it was too late. With a queasy mix of satisfaction and alarm I heard Volodya’s voice, just as the car door closed behind me: “Where are your boots? And spats? You’re wearing spats? You’re going to get in trouble, Seryosha! What are you thinking?”

  Oleg was of course nowhere to be seen, and I realized that my imagination, in placing him so conveniently in front of the school, had overstepped the bounds of memory, for I did not, now that I thought of it, recall that I ever saw him when I arrived in the morning. I began to consider the possibility that days might go by without our encountering each other at all.

  That realization threatened everything. Already I was aware that the bright nimbus surrounding yesterday’s encounter was beginning to fade; it was essential that we see each other again as soon as possible lest the flame that had so unexpectedly flared between us be allowed to flicker out. I scanned the crowded corridor, finding in turn his friends Lev, and Vassily, and Ilya, but nowhere was there a sign of Oleg.

  In my anxiety, I entirely forgot my spats.

  The first class of the morning had barely gotten under way before Mirsky, our slope-shouldered history teacher, stopped mid-sentence. “Nabokov,” he said. His spectacles glinted coldly. He would later be killed by the Bolsheviks at Melitopol, so I feel ashamed to record here that I never liked him.

  “Please come to the front of the class, if you would.”

  I did as I was told. Whispers rustled through the room.

  “Class. Observe. What about Nabokov strikes you this morning?”

  “Only this morning, sir?” asked a wag in the back.

  “He’s dressed his feet like an auntie [On nariadil svoi nogi kak tyotka],” said a milk-faced boy named Aleksey.

  Tyotka. I knew the word well. The previous year, it had driven me from the Tenishev School, where I had followed in my brother’s confident footsteps. I had not yet heard the term spoken openly at the First Gymnasium, but now there it was: tyotka.

  “That will do,” admonished Mirsky, though he seemed rather to relish having tyotka out in the open. “We know the regulations, don’t we? And don’t we know the consequences of flouting them? Nabokov, I might have thought you more sensible than that.” With his lecturer’s pointer he tapped the offending spats, which now seemed such a pointless provocation. “What do you have to say for yourself? Speak!”

  I knew I would only stutter helplessly, so I did not.

  His cold eyes grew colder. “Very well, then. Have it as you will. Come along with me.”

  He led me by the arm down the wide corridor where we boys exercised when it was too cold to play outside. Gonishev, the headmaster, was in his study. He looked up from an atlas he had been examining with a magnifying glass.

  I had been brought before him on two or three occasions in the past, minor infractions such as passing notes to a frail Armenian boy whose health now no longer permitted him to attend school.

  “Explain yourself,” Gonishev commanded.

  I said nothing.

  “Cat got your tongue, young man?”

  “Worse than that,” Mirsky told him, pointing to the spats I wore.

  “I see.” Gonishev nodded to himself. “We had hoped, when you matriculated, that the problems you experienced at Tenishev might be put behind you. I am concerned not so much with the infraction per se as with this inexplicable refusal to deliver a proper explanation. My boy, I understand your impediment. Nay, I sympathize with your impediment. Calm yourself. Speak to me slowly, as you would to your father.”

  I said nothing.

  He shrugged his shoulders and threw his hands in the air. “Very well. I shall suspend you for the period of one week, after which, contingent upon the proper apology, which I shall allow in either oral or written form, you may be readmitted. Is this understood, my boy?”

  I had only to nod, which I did.

  “I’m truly surprised at you,” Mirsky told me as he escorted me back to the classroom to collect my belongings, “but I hope you’ve proved whatever obscure point you intended to make.” Seeing that I was to be banished, the other boys let out a cheer—half catcall, half whoop of reluctant approbation.

  The empty corridor I walked down on my way to the exit could hardly have been any emptier than my heart. As I pushed open the heavy door frigid air enveloped me, and there he stood, exactly where I had, in vain, wished him to be an hour earlier.

  Lounging against the stone balustrade, Oleg Danchenko nonchalantly smoked his cigarette.

  “But you’re not in school!” I exclaimed.

  He scrutinized me indifferently. “Neither, it would appear, are you.”

  “I’ve just been suspended for the week.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yes. For wearing these silly things.” I turned my ankle for him to see, wanting to tell him I had done it for him, though I knew how absurd that would sound.

  “Well, well. Very fashionable. A bit of the criminal, are we? Turns out, I’ve been suspended as well. Isn’t that extraordinary?”

  Oleg put his hand on my shoulder. I still remember the lovely weight of that hand. He looked me in the eye. His were brown with flecks of faded gold. Then he smiled, while in the tender chambers of my heart the just-hatched dragon flexed its lovely, lethal talons.

  He offered me his half-consumed cigarette, which I put to my lips as if it were the holiest of sacraments.

  “So what are we to do now?” he asked as I passed the cigarette back. “We’ve only got the day, you know. We’ll both be kept in after this. At least I will. But for the moment, since we’re to be criminals, let’s play our parts well.”

  We had no plan; rather, some vivid energy gusted us along the streets. Our brisk pace left little opportunity for conversation, but that was just as well. We soldiered through the Summer Gardens sleeping under snow to the quay along the Neva where ice-breaking tugboats sent forth their mournful wails and on the other shore the needlelike spire of Saints Peter and Paul rose into the gray sky. Bone-chilling wind swept across the square in front of the Winter Palace, which a single imperial coach traversed, drawn by a pair of Orloff stallions. (“Magnificent!” Oleg exclaimed.) Farther along, in the Admiralty Gardens, the cries of ice skaters came to us; as we paused to watch them, Oleg draped an arm over my shoulder, his visible breath warm against my cheek, and for a moment I was afraid this all might evaporate into nothing more than a dream the gardens were dreaming under snow.

  My spats were soaked through, my toes painfully cold, but not for an instant did I regret a thing.

  “I’ll say, I’m damned hungry,” Oleg announced, turning us away from the skaters, pointing us down the Nevsky Prospect. In a stately and ravishingly warm restaurant he seemed to know quite well, he cajoled the waiter, who seemed to know him quite well, into bringing us flutes of champagne.

  “To our exile,” he toasted. “Life on the lam!”

  He had a
way of talking that made me suspect he had not grown up in St. Petersburg; he confirmed that his family owned several estates near Dnepropetrovsk. I confessed to hardly knowing where that was. Abbazia, Biarritz, Wiesbaden I knew well, but I had never traveled in Russia much beyond our country estates fifty miles to the south. “Your bread comes from the Ukraine,” Oleg told me proudly. “Your bread comes from my father’s fields.” He missed those fields, but the death from typhus of his mother and sister, two years before, had convinced his father to send him to the capital in order to “acquire luster,” as he put it. He lived rather unhappily with his mother’s sister’s family near the Smolny Convent.

  I, in turn, spoke of my father, who, ever since my meeting with Gonishev, had been much on my mind, and whose reaction to the day’s events I dreaded. It seemed important to develop a line of thought in which my father would sympathize instinctively with his rebellious son. Thus, as we devoured the delicious pirozhkis the waiter kept delivering to our table, I revealed to Oleg my father’s own revolutionary impulses. He had defiantly published certain articles that had dismayed the Tsar. At an imperial banquet he had declined to lift his glass to the despot’s health. On being expelled from the court, he had had the cheek to advertise his uniform for sale. After the dissolution of the Duma, he and his fellow Cadets had held illegal meetings, in consequence of which he had been imprisoned for a time.

  All the usual words presented all the usual impediments, but Oleg sat patiently, occasionally brushing away with the back of his cuff a succulent crumb that adhered to the corner of his mouth.

  When I had finished he asked, “But aren’t the Cadets a rather frightfully unpatriotic bunch?”

  It had failed to occur to me that confiding too much in this perfect stranger might be foolish.

  “My father stands firm against tyranny,” I told him, though tyranny, as is tyranny’s wont, resisted my tongue’s attempt to name it.

  “And my father has rather different notions, thank God,” Oleg said when finally I’d prevailed. He examined his palm, rubbing a finger across it as if to erase something vexing he saw there. When he looked up, however, he was once again smiling. “What does it matter? We both know everything will go on just as it is, everybody arguing this way and that. Only, I must say, with the war on, it seems rather churlish to criticize the government. I only wish I were older. Then the Boches would have to watch out.”