by Paul Russell
I saw that Miliukov sat perplexed, hoping he might be forgotten amid all these familial fireworks. Chain-smoking Hessen, on the other hand, seemed thoroughly amused; he kept my mother, who sat next to him, and whom Father often scolded for smoking too much, supplied with expensive Gold-flakes which he tipped out in a steady stream from their yellow packet.
Having answered correctly, and with quiet triumph, the most recent of Father’s questions (“Kozlov-Volovo and Moscow-Yelets”), Volodya turned his attention to Olga.
I had seen relatively little of my sisters in recent years. While Elena had blossomed into a poised, lovely girl, Olga had grown strange and moody, a flower bud clenched tight. Often she stared distractedly into space, and hummed monotonous snatches of melody. She read widely in Madame Blavatsky and other Theosophists. When Volodya asked her, “What books had Emma Bovary read?” she shrank into herself and glared blackly at him.
“Of course you’ve read Madame Bovary?” he prompted when no response was forthcoming. “Our esteemed Mademoiselle Hofeld hasn’t neglected your education to that degree, I presume?”
“You quite liked the book, didn’t you?” said Mlle. Hofeld helpfully.
“A single title will suffice,” taunted my brother.
“The Brother Who Died,” said Olga between clenched teeth. “An execution in three volumes by Olga Vladimirovna.”
“Sorry,” said my brother. “Your choices were—”
Father intervened; resorting to a time-tested method, he threw pellets of bread across the table to try to cheer her up, but this time it had no effect. Olga burst into tears, and rose from the table in a fury. “I hate you!” she cried. “I hate everybody in this cruel family! I wish you all would die!” Throwing down her napkin, she ran sobbing from the dining room.
Across the table, Svetlana’s squirrel eyes gazed steadily at mine, a connection we did not break for several seconds as the general commotion around the table rose (“Olga, my dearest,” Father called after her) and gradually subsided (my mother and Mlle. Hofeld excused themselves and hurriedly followed Olga from the room). What Svetlana wished to communicate, exactly, I do not know: what I saw in her gaze was alarm, disapproval, a sense that her worst, unnamed fears about her lover and his fantastical family had somehow been confirmed.
None of us could know that this would be the last evening we would all be together.
The next day I slept late, and read a bit from Splendeurs et Misères des Courtisanes, which I was quite enjoying despite my brother’s belief that it was not literature at all but only a crude attempt at social history. In the evening I went out to the Adonis Club. The mood there was uncommonly festive. The center of attention was a stocky, middle-aged gentleman, fashionably dressed and sporting a prodigious walrus mustache of the kind in vogue among a certain generation of Germans. Flanking him like bodyguards sat two muscular young men, one short-haired and blond, the other a brunette, both looking as if they had come directly to the club from a boxing ring. Hovering about was a girlish-looking lad whose long bony hands fluttered with even greater alacrity than his long dark eyelashes.
“Come to Papa.” The mustachioed gentleman patted his lap, and obediently the flitting youth perched there. I recognized one of the men at the table as Bruno, with whom I had had several amiable conversations on other occasions; he recognized me as well, and motioned for me to join the group.
I asked him what was being celebrated.
“Oh, but you don’t know? It’s the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee. Dr. Hirschfeld”—he nodded toward the mustachioed guest of honor—“is being fêted far and wide. He’s the toast of the town these days.”
I told him that, regrettably, I knew nothing of the committee nor its work, and reminded him that I was seldom in Berlin.
“Then you must learn about us. We’re a group dedicated to the repeal of Paragraph 175.”
I asked politely of what this paragraph consisted.
“Dear God,” he said. “You really are a stranger. Dr. Hirschfeld is a great pioneer in the realms of human freedom. Our petition’s been signed by some very prominent men. Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse, André Gide, Albert Einstein. The tide of history is with us, and we may be proud that Germany has proved the most enlightened of all nations in regard to the advancement of human sexual liberty. Our future here is very bright indeed!”
Hirschfeld himself, at the far end of the table, held forth, richly and fervently, for some time. I cannot now fully recall all that he said, but I remember that he ended by declaring, in his gruff and kindly baritone, the resolute voice of a general, “We are citizens not of a nation but of the world, Plato’s invincible army of lovers. What a tomorrow awaits us, mein Kinder. Nothing—nothing!—shall keep us from our destiny.”
I could not help but contrast his words with Father’s melancholy prognosis of our émigré plight the night before. I wondered if Father knew of this Dr. Hirschfeld, and determined to ask him at the next opportunity. It might even provide us with an occasion to address certain aspects of my life he seemed set on ignoring.
Just as the political conversation chez Nabokov had given way to fun and games, so merriment in the Adonis Club also became general once the doctor had finished speaking. A small band of musicians began to puff and wheeze its way through a polka. Had the Germans not yet heard of jazz? Some couples danced. I found myself talking to a curly-haired tailor who told me proudly that he specialized in reconfiguring military uniforms into evening wear. When he began to disparage the Russians flooding the city and undercutting honest men’s wages, I was relieved to be able to pass for English. Had it not been for his attractively upturned nose I would have turned heel and walked away. But it amused me, as did something humorous in his blue eyes, and I resolved to kiss him before the night was through.
He wished to introduce me to a chap who’d been to England once, and I obliged, seating myself at a table slick with spilled beer while the fellow regaled us with a preposterous story involving the Victoria and Albert Museum and an Egyptian mummy. My tailor—I believe Maximilian was his name—contented himself with massaging my thigh with his large hand. It was all very jolly, even if I do dislike the smell of beer and cigar smoke, and the inane drivel that is polka music. I watched Dr. Hirschfeld move with great ceremony about the room, stopping here and there to receive congratulations from well-wishers.
“Tante Magnesia is in her element tonight,” drawled the fellow who had been to England.
“Oh, don’t be rude,” Maximilian told him. “Not everyone appreciates the professor’s work,” he explained to me. “Some small people are positively jealous.”
“Why should I be jealous of a self-aggrandizing old queen who abuses her medical privileges for the sake of bedding clueless young thugs? It’s reprehensible, really.”
“My, we’ve developed a stern case of morals since we returned from London. Is the fog there really so thick that it clouds one’s libido?”
I could see that these two had for far too long been sparring partners.
Impatient, I asked if I could have a word with Maximilian alone.
Maximilian shot his friend a haughty look. I took him around the corner to an alley and proceeded to kiss him. It was nothing but a lark, that kiss, harmless mischief of the sort I had been pursuing with some vigor since my arrival in the city ten days before. Unlike London, which was all great innocent fun but little more, Berlin invited one into more immediately naughty embraces.
My new acquaintance seemed at first startled and then gratified by my assertiveness, and he answered in kind.
What happened next is difficult to describe. Even as I relished the taste of his mouth, the firm organ that was his tongue, his buttock-clutching tailor’s hands, there suddenly descended on me a desolation so profound that even now I shudder to recall it. The feeling lasted scarcely a moment, but in that moment all satisfaction in kissing this pleasingly available Berliner with the snub nose evaporated. He seemed su
rprised by the abrupt cessation of my advances, even going so far as to mutter, “Hey, what funny business is this?” as I broke our embrace and thrust him from me.
I told him I had forgotten an appointment of paramount importance. All I knew, with eerie certainty, was that I must at once go home.
“Well that’s a fine thing, for sure,” my snubbed companion complained. “Leaving a poor fellow in the lurch. My friend always warned me the English have no real manners.”
“Russian,” I corrected as I hurried away.
At Nollendorfplatz I waited some minutes for a streetcar, but as none was forthcoming, and my agitation had not abated, I began to walk.
Somewhere along the Hohenzollerndam my arrival at a streetcar stop coincided with the approach of a tram, and I gratefully boarded the empty car that would speed me homeward. The conductor wore frayed gray gloves, and swayed drunkenly as he made his way up the aisle to where I sat.
I calmed a bit. My strange sense of urgency seemed absurd, and I set about thinking how I meant to scold Olga for using such uncommonly violent language at the table the night before. It was bad luck to say such things, and she of all people should know better. From Olga my thoughts turned to my German tailor, toward whom I had behaved abominably, and who no doubt was now besmirching me to his colleagues at the Adonis Club, perhaps even to Dr. Hirschfeld, about whom I really must remember to ask Father….
I am recounting all this in some detail, as it is, even to this day, etched with awful clarity in my memory.
I got off the tram at Sächsischestrasse and walked the remaining few blocks. Outside my parents’ building I passed the elderly gentleman who nightly patrolled the neighborhood, tapping at the curb with his cane, ever on the lookout for discarded cigarette butts.
A sepulchral quiet greeted me as I entered our flat—and yet the room was far from empty. Several of Father’s friends—Hessen, Kaminka, Shtein, Yakolev, all of whom must have returned with him from Miliukov’s speech at the Philharmonie—sat silently. Hessen had been handing around cigarettes when I walked in, but froze when he saw me. No one spoke a word. I noticed that the men looked pale and exhausted. Father had said last night, after Miliukov left, that his speech was sure to be dreadfully dull—but had it been as bad as that?
Mother raised herself from the divan where she had been reclining.
“Seryosha, we were so worried. Where have you been? How could you have stayed out till such hours?”
“It’s not all that late,” I said, though it was well past midnight, “and besides—”
Volodya, whose presence I had not till that moment registered, took me firmly by the arm. “Seryosha,” he said, “you must know immediately. Father has been shot.”
“That’s not possible,” I told him, and indeed, I fully expected Father in the next instant to come leaping into the room, flicking pellets of bread, delighted at this bit of sport he had arranged at my expense.
All eyes watched me as Volodya continued to grasp my arm. “This is no dream,” he told me. “Father’s dead. He’s been murdered.”
The facts, the immutable, incontrovertible, to this day barely comprehensible facts: at the crowded Philharmonie that evening Father introduced Miliukov, who spoke for an hour or so on “America and the Restoration of Russia.” He had just finished his speech when a gunman rushed the stage, crying, “For the Tsar’s family, and for Russia!” He fired off several rounds at Miliukov. Each missed. My quick-thinking, fearless, doomed father seized the gunman’s wrist, and along with his friend Avgust Kaminka succeeded in wrestling him to the floor, whereupon a second gunman emerged from the pandemonium and fired three times, point-blank, into Father’s back, piercing his spine and heart.
The gunmen, who were apprehended, were pro-monarchist thugs who had long nursed a political grudge against Miliukov. As it turned out, Peter Shabelsky-Bork and Sergey Taboritsky had no clue as to the identity of the man they actually succeeded in murdering.
I knew Father had had many enemies—his life had been in danger for many years—and yet I had convinced myself, once we had fled Russia, that the danger—the immediate, physical danger—had at last subsided.
Losing Russia was not half so hard as losing Father. Gone were the conversations we might have had, the concerts we might have attended, the friendly disagreements over Wagner and Stravinsky we might have entertained. Gone forever was the hope of regaining his respect, which I knew I had lost through my aberrant ways. My actions the evening of his death seemed shamefully frivolous. Father had given his life for Russia while I had been seeking to kiss a German in whom I was not even very interested.
25
SOMEHOW VOLODYA AND I MANAGED TO COMPLETE the second part of the Tripos in June, and both of us took degrees with seconds in Russian and French. After that we returned to Berlin, where our fellow exiles treated us with great tenderness, offering us various unsatisfactory jobs from which we had difficulty extricating ourselves graciously. Funds were low, my mother’s store of jewels long since depleted, but Berlin was ludicrously inexpensive in those days, and we were able to subsist by doing a bit of translation work, tutoring the occasional pupil in English or French (no one wanted to learn Russian), and in Volodya’s case giving the odd tennis lesson. We were, as he put it, two young gentlemen selling off the surplus of our aristocratic upbringing.
My unexpected estrangement from Volodya began with two happy announcements. We had taken a tram out to the Grunewald one bright afternoon to stroll in the pine woods. Dappled sunlight sifted through the latticework of green needles above onto the carpet of brown needles below. A butterfly dogged us delicately, dipping around our shoulders, fluttering before our noses. Volodya can identify that butterfly, I thought to myself, and I cannot.
“Angle wing,” he said, as if reading my mind. “Our sweat attracts it.” Then: “At the aquarium, yesterday, I proposed to Svetlana, and she accepted.”
I clapped my hands together in delight, and told my brother what wonderful news that was. “Cherish her,” I admonished him. “She’s beautiful, charming—above all, wise.” His confidence touched me; was it possible, after the recent shock we had endured, that our fraternal bond might be maturing into something less fraught?
“There’s one condition, however, dreamed up by her impossible parents. I must find myself a proper job. As you know, I refuse to be shackled to a desk. Keats’s ‘delicious diligent indolence’ is what I must protect above all else if I’m to coax my ever-reluctant muse to sing.”
I laughed and told him his indolence was liable to make Svetlana jealous.
There had always been moments when I felt I had stepped across an invisible line: this was one. He looked at me with furrowed brow and narrowing eyes. “Svetlana must know where my first loyalty lies,” he said. “If she doesn’t—then God help her. But that brings me to my second bit of good news.
“Gamayun has commissioned me to translate Alice in Wonderland. Isn’t that splendid? I’ve always loved poor Alice’s adventures. I pity her real-life counterpart in the clutches of that dull, depraved mathematician—but what glorious imaginings his dreamy and deranged mind was capable of.”
“It’s perfect for you,” I told him. “How much is he paying?”
“My advance was an American five-dollar bill. I would show it to you as proof of my great wealth, but unfortunately I had to change it yesterday on the tram; I had no other money for the fare.”
“In other words, it scarcely constitutes a proper job in the Siewerts’ eyes.”
“Her father’s a mining engineer. It’s maddening to have to deal with such cautious, unimaginative folk. How Svetlana sprang from those two I’ll never know.”
He paused to look around us. On the shores of Grunewaldsee, Berliners had spread themselves—singly, in pairs, or in larger family groups—and were enjoying the fine summer afternoon.
“Speaking of vacancy—what a scene. I’m not sure which are more repulsive, those who’ve shed their clothes or those who’
ve retained them. Surely the Germans must be the most repellent of God’s inventions.”
There were moments when I hated my brother.
To our left, two laughing youths were cavorting in a game that seemed to involve grabbing each other’s wrists. They had been in the water, and their bathing trunks clung to them tightly.
“Come,” said Volodya. “I know a lovely nook nearby.” I followed, and soon we had entered a secluded glade which retained a view of the sparkling lake. He began immediately to remove his clothing. My brother was by both inclination and avocation something of a naturist. Already his flesh had extracted from the stingy summer sun a golden hue unmarred by that band of ivory that exposes the infrequent nudist.
“Oh, come on,” he said. “The sun releases us from all those artificial obligations. Rejoice! Let the sun translate you into another language altogether!”
He was in a good mood.
Settling myself on a clean spot of sand, I declined his invitation. One or two embarrassing incidents in my youth had taught me the wisdom of remaining clothed when in the presence of other males, a caution I extended even to my brother. Was he deliberately provoking me—or was he indeed oblivious to my liabilities?
“You remind me of an old pensioner,” Volodya complained. “At least remove your jacket and shoes, for God’s sake. Don’t you have any capacity at all for pleasure?”
I told him I had my own pleasures, thank you, which he very well knew about. I suppose that provoked him, but then I was feeling rather bullied.
Volodya lit a cigarette without offering me one. He exhaled expressively, staring skyward, where a small biplane had appeared in the fathomless blue. “Father spoke of you his last night on earth.”
I found my own pack and lit one. This was something I had not known. I had seen very little of Volodya since Father’s death.