by Paul Russell
He packed another opium pellet into the bowl of his pipe and rocked it gently over the flame.
“Listen to something terrible. These were Radigo’s last words to me: ‘In three days God’s firing squad will execute me.’ I told him, nonsense, the doctors had said there was an excellent chance the fever would break. Despite his weakness, he interrupted me with such anger in his voice that it took me aback. ‘Your information’s a lot less good than mine,’ he told me. ‘The order’s been given. I heard the order given.’ Three days later he was dead. No one was with him at the end. That’s the worst of it. He told us all that what he feared most was the prospect of dying alone. Then he banished us and did just that. I couldn’t bear to go to the funeral. I knew his beautiful corpse would sit up in the coffin and ask, ‘What on earth have you done to me?’ I know too well what I’ve done to him.”
“But that’s absurd,” I told him. “Everyone knows he died of typhoid. There was nothing you could have done.”
“All those months he was ill—in secret. How could I not have known? Perhaps whisky masked the symptoms. Perhaps opium prolonged the veneer of health. I never smoked while he was alive, you know. It’s only to soothe my grief that I indulge now. Do this in remembrance, as our Savior said.”
He inhaled the rising smoke. I contemplated his pipe, a finely made item with a bulb of blue-and-white porcelain. Of course: even in the mindlessness of grief Cocteau would be mindful enough to use only the most pleasing of artifacts to court forgetfulness.
He murmured, “Do you know what Picasso says? ‘Opium is the least stupid smell in the world.’”
Several minutes drifted by.
“It’s a living organism, you know. The person who doesn’t smoke will never comprehend what kind of beautiful flower opium might have unfolded within him.
“But you listen so patiently. Really, your stutter has blessed you. It’s bestowed on you the genius of listening, a much under-appreciated gift in our noisy times.”
I laughed nervously.
“Of course you’re right to laugh. But you’re very good for me, mon cher. I feel great affection for you. In the old days I’d have invited you to share my bed. But the genius of opium is that it clears away the sexual instinct. Come now, kiss me. With lips parted. Just so.”
I leaned close, touched my open lips to his. He breathed into my mouth a delicate fume of smoke.
Not long after, having received an urgent summons—Expedition necessary. Yr. expertise required. Total secrecy essential—I found myself accompanying my convalescent friend to Boulogne-Billancourt, where he had an appointment with one of my countrymen who went by the name of Shanghai Jimmy.
When I told him that the name hardly sounded Russian, he clucked at me. “It’s clear you don’t understand the first thing about espionage!”
What was abundantly clear, however, once we arrived at Shanghai Jimmy’s spacious but dismal rooms, was that they doubled as some sort of laboratory. He and two coarse-skinned babushkas were so engaged in their work that they scarcely looked up when we entered. Poured into a fantastical assortment of vessels—trays, bowls, casseroles, even a chamber pot—fragrant, brownish residue steamed above spirit lamps. One of the women was straining the material through a cloth. The smell was so fresh and exciting, the sight of the opium fudge, especially in the chamber pot, so suggestive and nauseating that my head was instantly light.
“Shanghai Jimmy spent many years in Irkutsk, where he studied and perfected certain venerable practices of the Chinaman,” Cocteau said by way of explanation.
“That’s as good a story as any,” averred Shanghai Jimmy, noticing us at last. His brusque manner seemed to indicate a military background; an imperial double-headed eagle tattooed on his left bicep confirmed it.
“You’ll only acquire the finest from me,” he told us. “No adulterants here. Only the purest stuff: poppy and good, rich earth. See for yourself.”
As he and Cocteau conducted their transaction, I wandered about the high-ceilinged rooms. It seemed this building had once been a factory, and artifacts from its former incarnation, hulking metal skeletons and curious small wooden gadgets, lay all about, though I found it impossible to determine what, exactly, had ever been produced here.
“I am but a simple soldier,” Shanghai Jimmy was saying when I returned, “loyal to the last to my dead Tsar and his family, God rest their martyred souls. Still, desperate times call for visionary solutions. If we can’t return to our homeland by ordinary means, then we must coax it to come to us. Imagine: a hundred, no, a thousand chambers in which we émigrés lie dreaming our lost motherland. Who can say that the force of all those dreams won’t alter reality itself? Who can say for certain that one day a new Russia—the only real Russia—may not be observed floating in the blue skies above Paris for all to see? We’ll wave to the Parisians, bless their souls, and they’ll wave to us, and then our sainted Russia will slowly drift heavenward, out of sight of the sad old earth entirely. The Bolsheviks can continue their murderous rampage. We won’t care at all. God will be so surprised when we draw near His heavenly throne.”
I was relieved when we were once more in the street, and yet saddened by this latest evidence of my fellow exiles’ ongoing refusal to face reality. It was why I avoided the émigré salons hosted by Miliukov, the Vinavers, the Gippiuses—all family friends whose havens of Russian culture and politics I might have been expected to frequent as soothing reminders of home. Mother often asked after them in her letters, but I had nothing to report to her. I could not bear the endless talk of “how Russia was lost.” I saw no point to the question “Which is preferable, Russia without freedom or freedom without Russia?” Seven years into our new lives, my countrymen still circled around that old, useless quandary.
Once we were in his bedchamber, Cocteau wasted no time in lighting his lamp and packing his pipe. “It’s the least addictive of substances,” he assured me. “So have no fear, mon cher. You’re perfectly safe—in fact, safer than safe, as taken in moderation opium is the healthiest of practices. I know doctors who recommend it to their patients. You’d be surprised who smokes. The Princesse de Noailles, for instance. The Comtesse de La Rochefoucauld. Coco Chanel, who I believe is centuries old by now, and doesn’t look a day over twenty-nine. Come, mon petit. Inhale.”
The effect proved subtler than I might have expected. I felt a comfortable torpor, both mental and physical. My eyes had not closed, but before me appeared a scene as palpable as if it really were there. Behold the Oredezh, speckled with nenuphars, on which blue demoiselles alighted, resting motionless before resuming flight. The landscape was caught in a lovely pause, as if something were about to happen—stallions, perhaps, were about to thunder into the shallow waters—but I was able to prolong the moment indefinitely, and savor the stillness, the languor, the burning midday scene before me.
Not for an instant did I take the hallucination for anything other than what it was, and I was rather proud of myself for maintaining my mental clarity throughout.
When I told Cocteau that it had been quite interesting, though not so remarkable that I intended to pursue it as an avocation, he hastened to declare, “Then we needn’t repeat this experiment. I’ve no wish for anyone to accuse me of attempting to ruin you.”
30
AS NEVER BEFORE, I MUST EARN MY KEEP. AN occasional review for Miliukov’s Latest News brought in spare change, but most of my meager income derived from English lessons. For several months I shared with the painter Pavel Tchelitchew and an American pianist named Allen Tanner an apartment in rue Copernic so tiny we called it “The Doll’s House.” They were amusing company—Pavlik high-strung, paranoid, exuberantly ambitious; Allen self-effacing to a fault but indispensible to his companion, who was far more concerned with Kabbalah than with paying the rent. We were a threadbare lot, but soon mastered the fine art of making a brandy and coffee last a whole evening in the cafés at the Raspail corner. We became expert at “dining on fumes,” as Pavlik d
ubbed the practice of absorbing the delicious aroma of a proper meal being consumed at the next table. Once or twice a week we would pool our scant resources and venture to Madame Wassilieff’s cantine on the avenue du Maine, where four francs bought cabbage soup, vegetable pie, a glass of white wine, and a cigarette. The day after our feast, we would fast.
As Pavlik had no money to pay for models, I posed for him on occasion.
He talked as he worked.
“There’s the most scrumptious boy lingering at the street corner,” he informed me, dancing back to the window. “He’s a leopard in boy form. No, don’t move. It’s what Diaghilev must have seen when he first glimpsed Nijinsky.”
He improvised a pirouette. “What I wouldn’t have given to see him dance. They say Diaghilev keeps him locked away in a guarded flat in Passy. The clown of God, he calls himself these days. He’s quite mad. Be still, kitten. I like that look on your face just now. Resolute but bored. What’s the color of your soul, I wonder? Like me, you’re part woman. Isn’t that true? But don’t answer. Don’t say a word.”
For a full minute he painted, then leapt back to the window.
“Oh, dear God, that boy makes me so hungry. The only boys more scrumptious than French boys are the American ones, don’t you think? But this one’s so purely French. Surely he senses the gratitude streaming down on him from this window. See? I myself am sometimes like the famous faun. Sans pitié du sanglot dont j’étais encore ivre. There’s something wrong with this painting. Or perhaps I’m what’s wrong. It should be possible, you know, to execute an entire painting without the tip of the brush ever leaving the surface. That’s how God created the world. But we poor humans must dip and dip, and dawdle, and go again and again to the window.
“No, don’t say a word. You’ll ruin that beautiful look on your face. You’re quite the Russian princeling. Don’t look at me that way. Why, the Nabokovs are nearly as old a family as we Tchelitchews. Next to us, the Romanovs were johnnies-come-lately. Do you know that when Grand Duchess Marie saw my father at the theater, she exclaimed to a friend, ‘Now there’s someone who’s even nobler than we.’ It’s a fact. Our line traces itself back to a brother of Caesar Augustus. And I hear that you’re descended from a great Tatar warrior. Tell me, Seryodushka, is it true what I’ve also heard—that the blood of Peter the Great flows in your veins? Speak. I’ve granted you permission.”
“It’s old family gossip,” I admitted with a trace of a stutter. “Grandmother Nabokova conducted her amours at the very highest levels of the imperium. Alexander the Liberator was a particular friend.”
“And here we are, penniless, desperate, in exile. And longing for a boy who won’t even look this way.”
When he had finished the painting, I was a bit chagrined by the image the canvas conveyed: a figure ridiculously gaunt, more jester than princeling. Nonetheless I felt gratitude, even a strange sense of relief, that I had been recorded. Unfortunately, as Pavlik had no money for new canvases, that portrait was soon covered over by a new painting—an arrestingly garish basket of strawberries.
Later, when Pavlik was famous and I no longer knew him as well, I regretted that none of my portraits survived. But no matter.
Though my poverty was dreary beyond description, my reviews did afford me the luxury of otherwise unaffordable seats at symphony concerts or my beloved Ballets Russes. And I was not without other diversions. For a while I took up with Claude, a sweetly pathetic, big-bottomed lad from Reims. When that faded, I spent several weeks achingly enamored of Hervé, a handsome mannequin maker’s apprentice, only to discover, upon finally attaining his bed, that he was entirely impotent.
After each of these episodes I was left feeling somehow duller than before.
Then, in the fall of 1925, I met an American from Cleveland. Heir to a department store fortune, Weldon Bryce III was keen on jazz, French cuisine, and Byzantine icons, roughly in that order. I seemed to fall under the latter category, and he was happy enough to add me to the collection of smoke-darkened saints and martyrs that adorned his well-appointed chambers in rue Montparnasse. That they had mostly been looted from churches by the Bolsheviks gave me pause, but not enough to reject his advances. He had a large mouth and delicious lips, and he turned out to be well endowed in more respects than one.
We quickly settled into a pleasant enough routine. He was always immaculately clad in strange American threads, and inordinately fond of the expression “Wow!”—which Paris evoked in him with some regularity.
My friends found Weldon impossibly handsome and hopelessly naive. “I am mesmerized by l’américanisme,” Cocteau confessed to me after meeting him, “as by a man pointing a revolver directly at me.”
A tender day in early spring. Standing at a third-floor window of the Thermes Urbains, ashen and gaunt, clothed in a robe of regal purple, Cocteau bestowed on us an unhurried papal wave, his long slender fingers held rigidly together.
“Mes enfants!” he cried. “So heavenly of you to come. But do not approach. You must remain at a distance. The wise doctors insist.”
For a moment I could not repress the sense that he was being held in quarantine—the homme fatal at last found out by the authorities. In reality, he had checked himself into the clinic for an opium cure—a brutal regime, if his occasional notes to me could be believed, of purges, cathartics, and enemas, all paid for by the indispensible Coco Chanel.
“But tell us how you are,” Weldon called out.
Cocteau cupped his left hand to his ear while continuing to wave with his right.
“How are you?” Weldon repeated, responding in kind by cupping his hands around his mouth like a megaphone.
“Marvelous,” Cocteau told us. “My memory is returning. I can remember…telephone numbers! And bits of poetry I thought I’d lost forever. An angel comes every night and sits on my chest as I sleep, though the nurses claim this can’t be so. But what do they know? He touches my lips with his fingers which are feathered like the wings of birds.”
A nurse appeared by his side. “Monsieur Cocteau,” she urged. “You’re disturbing the other patients. Perhaps you could return to your bed. You need your rest.”
“I’m so invigorated,” Cocteau told us—and the nurse as well. “All my sexual energy has returned. I sweat, I piss, I ejaculate. These are miracles.” At this the nurse looked positively miserable. She was joined by a second, even more formidable sister. Firmly they took our frail friend in hand. “Adieu, mes amis,” he cried like a child carried off to bed. “Adieu, adieu.” Then he disappeared. The window shut behind him. We remained where we were, looking up at the spot he had vacated.
Then the window opened, just barely, and out sailed a flimsy aeroplane of folded paper. The breeze caught it, sustained it till it landed almost at our feet. Unfolded, the page torn from a notebook revealed an alarming sketch: Cocteau, his eyeballs protruding at the ends of long stems, his slender fingers likewise stems, as if his whole body were in the process of metamorphosing into a grotesque bouquet of opium pipes.
His own antique pipe and lamp he had bequeathed to me on his entry into the asylum. Even as I scrutinized that horrible drawing, a part of me longed to be out of the wonderful sunlight and sequestered in my wretched room in rue St.-Jacques. I had not counted on succumbing so readily to the drug’s lures. I reassured myself that my habit was hardly regular enough to be habit—an indulgence, rather; a sometime refuge from the dull daily march toward oblivion.
It was the only cause for quarrel between me and Weldon. Indeed, I suspected he had brought me to the Thermes Urbains to absorb in full the terrible, disfiguring vision Cocteau had sketched for our benefit. It struck me that my desire for opium mimicked my other desires: my thirst for the ballet, my hunger for old books, my fevered quest for various ill-starred loves. Weldon, for instance: I loved the mere fact of his skin. But what, in the end, did I wish from him? What did I want from any of them? It was a conundrum I pondered increasingly.
After a hearty meal a
t the Closerie des Lilas, we parted at the corner of boulevard Montparnasse and the boul’ Mich. I am loath to admit it, but I remained with Weldon in part because he was happy to treat me to dinner at such restaurants, and I was tired of dining on fumes.
When I arrived home, the concierge handed me a letter from my mother.
My dearest Seryosha, she wrote from Prague,Perhaps you will have heard the news from Berlin, though knowing your brother I suspect he has neglected to inform you: he has married one Véra Evseevna Slonim. You are not to feel slighted. There was no ceremony; they told no one of their plans, and no one from the family attended. I am of course happy for him, as we all must be—happy for his happiness, that is. As for this Véra, she is a rather strange creature, I think (though I hardly know her, and mostly through your brother’s taciturn remarks) but in many ways I believe her to be quite well suited to our Volodya, and utterly devoted to him and to his art. She is both muse and typist—and, by my count, the fifth woman he has asked to marry him. Perhaps now he’ll settle down. Your aunt Nadezhda, by the way, is quite beside herself at the thought of having a Jewess in the family. Of course, as usual, she blames your father’s liberal attitudes for this turn of events. I must say I relish her discomfiture, as would your father. Your Uncle Kostya has not yet weighed in, but I can imagine his reaction as well.
All is well enough here. Your sisters and little brother send their love, as do I, my dearest.
I had become used to following my brother’s life from afar, whether through Mother’s missives or the increasingly frequent appearances of “V. Sirin” in émigré journals. The news was not so much startling as melancholy, and I realized how I still grieved the silence that had become so entrenched between us. If only he had married Svetlana Siewert—she would not have allowed this estrangement to continue.
Before retiring to my bed to enjoy a consoling smoke, I wrote my brother a friendly and congratulatory note. Several weeks later I received in return a printed announcement:Monsieur Vladimir Nabokov