by Paul Russell
Karsavina looked at me politely, nonplussed by this stuttering, scarlet-faced stranger; then she held out her delicate hand, which I daringly raised to my lips and kissed, ever so reverently—for all the Left-Handed Abyssinians.
Still smiling a stage smile held past its natural span, she slowly withdrew her hand.
“You are very kind,” she told me. “I do not know precisely what you are talking about, but you are very kind.”
21
OF ALL MY PLEASANT YOUNG MEN AT CAMBRIDGE only Bobby de Calry—or to give his incomparable name in full, Count Robert Louis Magawly-Cerati de Calry—was to prove problematic. In his red shoes, Oxford bags, outrageous cravats, and fur gauntlet gloves he cut a remarkable figure even by the standards of my dashingly eccentric set. A trim mustache that would have made anyone else look à la mode on him seemed vaguely old-fashioned. There was a haunted cast to his blue-gray eyes. His eau de cologne—rumored to be made exclusively for him by Irfe, Prince Yussupov’s Parisian parfum-erie —left a distinctive fragrance in his wake. How tantalizing it was to visit Volodya in his dreary rooms and detect traces of that scent lingering in the air. For Bobby and my brother had become, improbably, the best of friends.
“He’s awfully amusing,” Volodya explained in that offhanded way he had acquired. “A pathetic fellow, perhaps, but remarkably droll and affable. Besides, all my Russian friends have been sent down, so I’ve dubbed Calry an honorary Russian. It’s not too far-fetched. His mother’s Russian, and he speaks it a bit himself—astonishingly badly, if you must know.”
I was quite pleased to know, in fact, as I had developed a terrific smash on the young man. For several weeks that fall he had hobbled about on crutches, having broken his leg while skiing at Chamonix. This mishap lent him an attractive air of vulnerability. No doubt he was spoiled, affected, naturally moody as well. Had I spoken to him early on—and how easy it would have been to remark casually on his cast—I would not have quietly worked myself into the infatuation that ensued. By the time I realized my mistake it was too late. An unspannable gulf seemed to separate us. Did he feel it as well? Our paths would cross. We would look at each other wordlessly. Something smoldering or disconcerting or hostile—it was impossible to know which—would pass between us, sealing our mutual silence. And all the while he was on free and easy terms with my brother. It was maddening.
“But what on earth do you two do together?” I asked Volodya.
“Well, like normal men our age, we mostly hunt girls.”
His eyes twinkled with what I could only interpret as cruel mirth while I hastened to assure him that Calry wasn’t my type at all. Besides, I went on, I couldn’t imagine Bobby would be the least bit interested in me.
“No,” Volodya agreed, “I can’t imagine he would be. It would be perfectly useless to try to know him, if that’s what you’re conjuring. He’s perfectly normal that way.”
I would see them on the tennis court, or gadding about in Bobby’s powerful and illegal red Rover. (The Motor Proctors never seemed to catch him.) I would encounter them punting on the Cam beneath the horse chestnuts, my brother poling while his glamorous friend—now freed of his cast—trailed a hand in the indolent stream.
It seemed impossible Volodya had no clue as to either Bobby’s history or proclivities. To me, and to many of my falcon-eyed set as well, it was all too clear that poor Bobby was mad about his Russian friend. Was Volodya simply basking in the adoration? He had begun to publish regularly under the fairy tale pseudonym “Sirin” in Father’s new journal, The Rudder. Was he enjoying the first temptations of literary renown? Was that why he tolerated Bobby’s slavish devotion?
Bobby seemed eager to do anything for his friend. He put himself and his Rover at Volodya’s disposal. He had his maid take in Volodya’s laundry. He stopped by in the mornings to make my brother tea, and took him out in the evenings to dinner. It was even said that Bobby regularly gave my brother his notes from the lectures Volodya never bothered to attend. That their relationship might be in any way reciprocal never occurred to me. I knew my brother too well.
All this made my jealous head throb.
It was in this disheveled state of mind that I went up to London in November to attend, with Uncle Kostya, the première of Diaghilev’s much-anticipated The Sleeping Princess. Having recently dismissed Massine from the company, as Uncle Kostya had predicted, and thus finding himself without a choreographer, the ever-resourceful impresario had decided to revive Marius Petipa’s 1890 masterpiece, La Belle au Bois Dormant, the very cornerstone of the “old school” Russian ballet that Diaghilev had so dramatically broken with. Stravinsky had rearranged and reorchestrated Tchaikovsky’s music, and my parents’ friend Léon Bakst had updated the costumes and sets.
I dressed especially well for the occasion in a secondhand dinner jacket borrowed from my brother (who had it from Rachmaninov), finishing my ensemble with a black opera cloak lined in scarlet silk I had recently purchased for a criminal sum of money. With a touch of Helena Rubinstein I deepened my colorless lips; with a dab of lilac powder I cooled my cheeks. All of this my uncle noted, and none of it did he seem to mind.
“I hear Serge Pavlovich changed the name from Sleeping Beauty to The Sleeping Princess because he claims there are currently no beauties in his troupe,” he offered. For someone who, since his resignation from the Embassy, claimed to have foresworn all dinner parties, he managed to hear quite a bit about town. “Well, we shall see,” he went on. “He’s risked everything on this venture, poor fellow. Sleeping Beauty was the first ballet he ever saw. It was one of the first I ever saw as well. The great Cecchetti danced the role of the evil Carabosse, and Brianza was the good Princess Aurora. I understand that Diaghilev has coaxed Brianza out of retirement to undertake Carabosse. A splendid symmetry, don’t you think? Aren’t all beauties fated, eventually, to become the witch?”
With such musings, we arrived at the Alhambra in Leicester Square. In the air was all the palpable excitement that surrounds a première, and a notable one at that. I scanned the audience in the hope of glimpsing Diaghilev—the unmistakable white streak in his ebony-black hair—but he was not in evidence.
I did, however, lay eyes on the ever-elegant Bakst, who greeted me warmly; I reminded him of the fine portrait he had done of my mother, which to our great regret we had had to leave behind in our flight from Russia.
“But there is good news, Sergey Vladimirovich,” he told me. “Our friend Benois has had that drawing, along with some of his own works, transferred from your former house to the new State Museum where they are now perfectly safe, or at least as safe as anything in our poor Russia can be. I’ve been meaning to write your parents, but as you can imagine I’ve been terribly overworked.”
I told him how pleased they would be to hear that news, though my own emotions were unpleasantly stirred by the thought of our belongings—my father’s books, my mother’s beloved prints, even my brother’s carefully mounted butterflies—so duly disposed of in our absence.
“Have you said hello yet to Serge Pavlovich?” asked Bakst.
I told him we had never met.
“How can that be?”
“My uncle is under the impression I should be kept from him.”
“But your uncle is most fond of Serge, are you not, Konstantin Dmitrievich? I don’t understand at all. At the risk of creating a scene, I’ll take you to him immediately.”
“That won’t do,” my uncle said. “Our Serge is no doubt in the green room as we speak, clutching his Saint Anthony’s medallion and crossing himself like the most superstitious of old babushkas, repenting his sins and beseeching protection from all the saints and holy martyrs. I once called on him in his hotel room. When I set my hat on the bureau, he cried out, ‘No! No! Do you want me to face financial ruin?’ So I set it on the bed, and he cried out, ‘Do you wish me disaster in love?’ I set it on the chair—well, you can guess what ensued. So I ended up holding my hat for the entire visit.”
; Bakst laughed. “Then you must come around afterward to the Savoy. There’s a dinner party in his honor. All his fears will be calmed by then, and he’ll be most delighted to make your acquaintance, I’m sure.”
Though I was disappointed Karsavina was no longer performing—she had recently married a diplomat who had been posted to Bulgaria, and decided to put the rigors of marriage before the demands of dance—two other favorites of mine graced the stage: Olga Spessivtseva as Aurora and the luminous Lydia Lopokova, who brought the Lilac Fairy to rich, warm life. I did not know Tchaikovsky’s score, but was soon won over by its dandyish charms. Bakst’s sets were superb, especially the Enchanted Palace where the princess slumbered on an enormous bed canopied with cobwebs and brooded over by two giant, thoughtful spiders. The fairies bearing their gifts for the infant princess were ravishing: how I loved the subtle way each set of gestures was later incorporated into Aurora’s repertoire —their gifts nothing but the gift of dance, which is to say life itself! Everything the wicked Carabosse would destroy…
Only the occasional mechanical malfunction marred the magic that first evening: at the end of the Birthday Party, when the Princess Aurora has pricked her finger and fallen into a sleep, and the Lilac Fairy conjured a thicket of roses to protect her, the roses failed to rise from the ground at her command; and in the next scene, as the gondola bearing the Prince made its way toward the sleeping princess, the descending veils of gauze meant to indicate a gathering fog caught on a protruding pipe and piled up clumsily rather than descending gracefully. But no matter. What really mattered—the dancing—was perfection. Despite all my modern prejudices, Petipa’s choreography was a revelation: here was a world of noble and harmonious form, full of lucid gestures: a bold movement here contrasted with a subtle one there, a flurry of motion was answered by the most eloquent of pauses. Through everything shone such calming certainty about what is beautiful in the world that I found myself transported to a place where beauty seemed nothing less than a birthright.
For once, Uncle Kostya and I were in perfect agreement over the merits of a performance; however, we were in less perfect agreement over Bakst’s intention to introduce me to Diaghilev.
“He thrives on young men,” my uncle warned me as we entered the dining room of the Savoy. “Observe his latest specimen.” He pointed out a slender youth. “His name is Boris Kochno. Seventeen years old, can you imagine? And already he’s aping his mentor’s mannerisms. You may always tell Diaghilev’s young men by their clothes. He dresses them as he dresses himself. They all wear homburgs, and their collars high, and tuberoses in their buttonholes. They even become hypochondriacs in honor of the master!”
Bakst, it soon became apparent, had been a bit too eager in extending his invitation. I could tell by his gesticulations to the maître d’ that his spur-of-the-moment guests would not be admitted, even if he were the great Léon Bakst.
Bakst returned to us livid. “He presumes to tell me that only Serge Pavlovich or Madame Sert, who is bankrolling this little fête, can admit guests who do not carry an official invitation. And both of those individuals have simply vanished! There’s really nothing I can do. I can labor like a slave, I can throw my soul into sets and costumes the Ballets Russes can barely afford, and for which I have not been paid a centime, but I can’t bring my two friends to dinner.”
My uncle seemed quite relieved, assuring him there was nothing to apologize for, that it was the thought that had counted. Disappointedly, I did the same.
“Please remember me to your dear parents,” Bakst reminded me. “Au revoir! I must live with my great shame.”
He turned his back on us and marched into the dining room, calling out merrily to the seventeen-year-old whom Diaghilev had claimed, “Borya, how are you?”
“My liver’s a bit congested, I’m afraid,” I could hear Kochno complain as waiters whisked past us platters of luscious-looking smoked salmon and caviar. “Otherwise I’m pretty well…”
“Fate has intervened,” said my uncle, wiping his face with a handkerchief. “I shall happily treat you to some claret and a nice steak-and-kidney pie at our usual haunt. Who knows? We may well meet some of the dancers there.”
We had just left the hotel when a black Hispano-Suiza pulled up to the curb. Out tumbled an absurd-looking little man whom I recognized at once as Stravinsky. He was followed by Madame Sert, a woman of striking, bird-of-prey beauty, and she by a corpulent, sweating Diaghilev.
“Kostya Dmitrievich!” He cried out in his high-pitched voice.
I could see my uncle quail. Nonetheless, he managed a cordial “Sergey Pavlovich. Greetings, my old friend.”
“What news of Russia?”
The question seemed to bewilder my uncle, but Diaghilev did not appear to notice. I saw that he had been weeping, and had only just now pulled himself together. His huge dark eyes were bloodshot, his cheeks still streaked. I felt embarrassed, as if I had stumbled upon a scene never meant for my eyes.
He peered at me through his pince-nez. “And who is your young companion?” he inquired of my flustered uncle. “Yet another recent acquisition?”
My uncle bristled. “This is my most esteemed nephew, Sergey Vladimirovich.”
“Enchanté,” said Diaghilev, clearly less interested than he had been a moment before. I bowed respectfully, and told him how beautiful had been the production, how much I had adored it in every respect.
“Nonsense!” he bellowed. “The fact is, I’m ruined. Pure and simple. There can be no recovery from this catastrophe. The entire enterprise is now cursed. I should never have attempted to revive the glories of a bygone age. What you’ve witnessed tonight is nothing less than the beginning of the end of the Ballets Russes. Mark my words. Within three months, you shall see me a broken man, my company scattered to the ends of the earth. Fate holds sway over us all. We’re at its mercy, and it shows us no mercy, none at all.”
This rather took me aback. Stravinsky and Madame looked at me as if I were somehow to blame for precipitating this outburst.
With great tenderness Stravinsky took Diaghilev’s arm. “You’re exhausted, my dear friend. You’re making too much of too little. By tomorrow night all shall be remedied; no one will remember a thing of these little mishaps. Some champagne, the company of your friends and ardent admirers, you’ll soon see that all isn’t lost. Far from it: you’ve created a stupendous triumph tonight.”
Madame Sert began to soothe him as well, murmuring into his ear words I could not make out, and the three of them began to move slowly toward the entrance of the Savoy, having already forgotten who we were, or that we were ever there.
“Well,” sniffed my uncle. “He’s in rare form tonight. He’s the most childish of men, really. I suppose that’s the price of his greatness, but it can be most dismaying. My relations with him aren’t what they once were. No, not at all.”
But he would say no more, neither then nor later. My uncle, I dare say, went to his grave with many more secrets than most of us.
22
BERLIN
DECEMBER 5, 1943
CERTAIN INDIVIDUALS ONE RECOGNIZES AT ONCE as Nazis. That is the case with my latest caller. He just misses being handsome; a battlefield of old acne scars desecrates his lower face. For a moment I think I know him from somewhere, but that is likely not the case. He is blunt with me.
“You are Sergey Nabokov?” he asks, showing me his warrant disk.
“I am.”
“Then I must inform you that I have questions for you.”
“As you wish.” I motion for him to be seated in the frigid semidarkness of my room. For some reason I think it wise to offer him a drink.
“Where did you get this?” he asks once I have poured. I have forgotten that brandy is only available on the black market.
“Oh,” I say, “I’ve had it for quite some time. I saved it for a special occasion.”
“I’m no special occasion,” he says, “but I’ll take a drop anyway.”
�
�Special occasions seem to arrive unexpectedly these days.”
“What do you mean?”
“Never mind,” I tell him. Through his stupidity, he senses I am mocking him. I know my behavior is reckless, I know I still have many pages to write, but I cannot resist. He is all the tormentors I never sufficiently resisted in my youth. “Why have you come?”
“I’ve been sent to ask you a few questions.”
He sips his brandy. Then deliberately removes from the pocket of his coat a document which he carefully unfolds. He studies it with a frown and a squint.
“You are Russian?”
“Well, yes, quite obviously.”
“Nothing is obvious,” he tells me.
“You’re quite right. Yes, I am a Russian émigré. I carry a Nansen passport, if you wish to see it.”
“Not necessary. You arrived in Berlin on May 18, 1942. From Prague. And before that you were in Ostmark. You had been held in the jail in Lienz. For what reason, may I ask?”
“Your documentation seems quite thorough,” I tell him. “I’m surprised you need to ask.”
“I wish to hear it in your own words.”
“I was arrested under Paragraph 129b of the Austrian Penal Code.”
“And what is Paragraph 129b?”
“It’s rather like the Reich’s Paragraph 175. You know, criminal sexual relations with persons of the same sex.”
“And what did you plead?”
“It really doesn’t much matter, does it? I was convicted. I served out my five-month term and was released.”
“Why did you come to Berlin?”
“I sought employment. The office where I worked briefly in Prague was shut down. My cousin suggested I come here, as various ministries were seeking qualified translators.”
“And you have been employed by the Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda?
“Correct.”
“Is it common for the Ministry to employ Russians who are not citizens of the Reich?”