by Paul Russell
I shook my head. “I’ve got to go now,” I told him. “I’m sorry.”
He hailed a cab—one of the Taxis de la Marne that still plied the streets. The evening having rapidly degenerated into grotesque farce, I was certain the shabby vehicle that pulled to the curb couldn’t possibly be piloted by anyone other than Oleg.
But Fate had already had its fun; the driver turned out to be a crusty old man with a thick Breton accent. I failed to dissuade Hermann from paying my fare, and reassured him that I would be quite all right, he shouldn’t concern himself any further on my account.
“Well, that’s someone I’ll see no more of,” I told myself with a strange sensation of relief, as the taxi pulled away.
The next day I received a note, written on letterhead from “Castle Weissenstein,” expressing Hermann’s great pleasure in meeting me, and looking forward to our seeing each other again in the near future. There was nothing in the note that was not polite, even charming—but it provoked in me such unreasonable dread that I could not bring myself to reply.
Each time during the next several months Hermann announced an upcoming business trip to Paris and his desire to see me, I shied away with all my heart. Perhaps I sensed I was wholly unworthy of the gift Fate proposed—or threatened—to bestow on me. I found myself returning again and again to the devastating realization: were anything to be possible between us, I would first have to change. I could not face Hermann Thieme as the man I presently was.
39
ONE SWELTERING AFTERNOON IN AUGUST 1929, the concierge handed me a telegram: Diaghilev est mort ce matin. Lifar.
Later I would learn the details: how the great man had gone to Venice, broken after the failure of his trip with Markevitch; how Lifar and Kochno tended to him in his last days; how Coco Chanel and Misia Sert arrived just before the final curtain fell. Sergey Pavlovich Diaghilev, whom the gypsy had long ago predicted would die on the water, had breathed his last in that city known as Serenissima, Queen of the Sea.
As I read the telegram, the memory that came to me was of the evening in 1928 after the triumphant première of Apollon Musagète, when Diaghilev had fallen to his knees before Lifar, who was still costumed in his tunic. Solemnly he kissed the dancer’s bare thighs, saying, “Remember this always. I am kissing a dancer’s leg for the second time in my life. The last was Nijinsky’s, after Le Spectre de la Rose!” And I remembered Lifar looking pleased and proud and a touch uncomfortable, for he loved Diaghilev, but never in a way that could be in the least commensurate with Diaghilev’s electrifying, abysmal, impossible love for him.
Diaghilev’s death announced the end of an era two months short of the collapse of financial markets. As with the arrival of the evil Carabosse at Aurora’s christening ceremony, the effects were instantaneous. Overnight the Americans disappeared, scurrying back to their wounded republic. Shops, cafés, hotels, restaurants that had depended on their largesse went dark. In what clubs remained open (Le Boeuf did not) the jazz turned melancholy. At 27 rue de Fleurus, Gertrude and Alice cast out the few young men who remained in the charmed circle, turned out the lights, and abandoned Paris for a country house in Bilignin. Lifar, Kochno, and Balanchine struggled to keep the Ballets Russes afloat, but it was as if the troupe had lost its heart.
The only one who seemed to profit was Shanghai Jimmy. “You can’t imagine the clients I see these days,” he told me in his brusque way. “Businessmen, lawyers, bankers flock to me to assuage their well-earned misery. The times have turned spiritual on us. It’s a great blessing.”
Cocteau was particularly despondent. “It’s all been for nothing,” he said. “As far ahead as I can see stretches only a gray, featureless landscape, uninterrupted by any flash of beauty, tenderness, kindness. There must be a new art for this desolation, but I have yet to find it within me. I invented the twenties. Must I invent this new decade as well?”
As the world flagged, my brother thrived. From some insatiable hunger in him poems, short stories, novels poured forth as never before. Even though I avoided émigré literary circles, I heard his name spoken with reverence in bookshops and cafés; he had become the hope of the emigration, the figure who would save us from ruin, obscurity, futility, even from ourselves. My brother! I scarcely recognized him in all the delirious talk. With each new production he won over powerful new admirers: Fondaminsky, Aldanov, Khodasevich, Berberova.
In the fall of 1929 Luzhin’s Defense began to appear in installments in Fondaminsky’s Contemporary Annals. I read it with unmitigated awe. How wonderfully Sirin manages his plot; how nimbly he evokes a sense of lives overheard, urgent voices in other rooms, a slammed door somewhere, confirming one’s nagging suspicion that life’s real narrative, its fateful pattern, is always going on in secret, only vaguely apprehended by its human participants. And how marvelous the series of happy near misses—the mysterious pleasure of a conjuror’s trick, the fantastical misbehavior of numbers, the brain-twisting challenge of jigsaw puzzles—by which young Luzhin, our strange but sympathetic protagonist, is gradually brought to the fateful harmonies of chess. Here was my astonishing, maddening brother’s promise utterly fulfilled, a tale throbbing with all the life, tenderness, perplexity and, yes, transcendent beauty that had been so furiously scrubbed from his previous novel.
Other novels followed swiftly: The Eye, a macabre riff on Gogol; Glory, with its romantic Cantabrigian ethos in which Bobby de Calry is to be found unexpectedly memorialized as “kindly, ethereal Teddy” who has a “graceful, delicate fluttery something about him”; the darkly cinematic Camera Obscura, whose opening paragraph rivals anything in Dickens or Tolstoy.
I read them with bemusement. In their pages I found—or imagined—odd coincidences and correspondences, the stray shared memory, queer borrowings as if from my own most secret soul. The artist my brother had become I could see perfectly well, but beyond the tricky elisions, the diabolical fracturings and grotesque recastings, the beautiful outpouring of words, I wished to glimpse the man he had become. I did not succeed.
In defiance of social and economic reality, Nicki de Gunzburg’s parties grew more extravagant. “The Country Ball” took place in June 1931, at a pavilion in the Bois de Boulogne. As usual, his instructions were explicit. Guests were to be costumed in accordance with the rustic theme. They were to be suitably masked. They must arrive by horse-drawn carriage or bicycle. They must be witty and gay at all times. Any hint of reality would mean instant expulsion.
Boris Kochno and his new lover Bébé Bérard had shrouded the pavilion in shimmering silks, littered the gardens with tissue-paper poppies, papier-mâché farm animals, huge wire-and-fabric vegetables, even a full-size hay wagon. Bathed in beams of light, the scene had all the enchantment of one of the more elaborate Ballets Russes sets.
Kochno had dressed as Little Bo Peep, Bérard as Shakespeare’s Bottom (a notion with which those who spoke English had great fun). Elsie Maxwell came as a Breton milkmaid. Mr. and Mrs. Cole Porter arrived in a Sicilian donkey cart festooned with orchids and gardenias. Jean and Valentine Hugo were sunflowers. Coco Chanel and Anna de Noailles looked adorable as two matching lambs, which Boris quickly claimed as his own. Edmée, duchesse de La Rochefoucauld and Comtesse Marthe de Fels seemed to have stepped directly out of a Watteau canvas. Tchelitchew and Tanner impersonated two barefoot farm boys—“Hucklesberries Finns,” according to Pavlik’s colorful English—while the English poetess Edith Sitwell, who was carrying on a mad platonic affair with the painter, much to Allen’s consternation, looked more like a Plantagenet queen than the American Gothic farmwife she claimed to be.
Nicki de Gunzburg was resplendent in a thematically inexcusable toreador costume. “I made the rules, I break the rules,” he explained with an exquisite shrug of his shoulders.
Misia Sert attended as Misia Sert.
I had originally contemplated transforming myself into a muzhik with a scythe, but then in Poupineau, the lovely circus shop by the Musée Grévin, I discovered a yellowed w
edding gown of provincial vintage. A wig, tiara, and Venetian-style mask completed my disguise. Helena Rubinstein did the rest. In case anyone asked, I was the Sleeping Princess.
A gasp from the crowd marked the arrival of Serge Lifar, mounted on a white stallion and wearing nothing but a leather girdle, his muscular body covered entirely in a sheen of gold paint.
A Negro jazz orchestra played. Sitting wonderfully erect on a garden stool, Edith Sitwell narrated to anyone who would listen an implausibly Dickensian version of her childhood. Bérard nudged me aside in order to begin a separate conversation. He had removed his ass’s head, and held it under his arm. I saw that some green oil paint remained encrusted in his reddish beard.
“Cocteau sends you greetings. I saw him in Toulon, where I smoked with him and l’enfant Desbordes.”
I asked his impressions of Desbordes, whom I hardly knew.
“In a word, infantile,” pronounced Bérard. “Cocteau praises him to the heavens, but there’s nothing there. His so-called poetry’s simply embarrassing, a snail’s trail of semen on a mirror that has been gazed into far too admiringly. Really, our brilliant friend’s judgment these days has gone steeply into decline. I understand he’s made a movie, though no one’s seen it yet. Or if there’s been a screening, I haven’t been invited. Have you?” he asked with suspicion.
I told him I had not, though Cocteau had enlisted me to help paint the stage sets for Le Sang d’un Poète, which I had done with a rare sense of accomplishment.
“Well, either it’ll resuscitate his fading career or be the end of him. Movies! What on earth is he thinking! Of all his enfants, the one I wish I’d known is Radiguet. I’ve read his two marvelous novels. Such promise—though he’s already totally forgotten. I wonder which of us from this generation will be remembered? Perhaps we’ll all be forgotten, and this era will be seen as little more than a wasteland.”
There had been a momentary lull in the music. Now through the humid night air came the sound of a soprano saxophone eerily usurping the voluptuous flute melody that begins L’Après-midi d’un Faune. The queerness of the arrangement—Debussy was really quite ill-suited to jazz band transcription—made the music sound crudely rather than shimmeringly seductive. Still, it cast its pagan spell.
A dais had been set up—and there, languorously reclining, near-naked and fully golden, head tilted back, his thumb held to his lips as if to sip that longed-for elixir that never quenches thirst, was Lifar. He stretched sumptuously, rose on his haunches—the immortal, aching, libidinous faun in the heat of the midday sun.
A crowd had gathered. Misia Sert, looking pensive, stood apart from the others. An emptiness opened in me. Even at the Murphy’s barge fête, nearly ten years ago now, there had seemed something vaguely corrupt about Lifar’s appropriation of Nijinsky’s famous role. Cocteau had pointed out the sheer cheekiness of it. But I had been younger then, and his performance had not struck me as nearly so crass as it did now.
“What a beast,” I heard Boris tell Bérard. “Lifar has no morals whatsoever. He’ll sleep with anyone if it’ll advance his career. Right now he’s trying to sleep with us all.”
Strangely disconsolate, I withdrew into a shadowy corner of the garden, where roses bloomed in beds quadrisected by sandy paths. Though it was night, their scent still lingered. The reds were lost to darkness, but the whites floated mothlike out of the obscurity.
I could hear the orchestra as it ardently scaled its summit, then descended in those ravishing triplets, but the sound was distant, as if the rose garden had walls which shielded its occupant from the disappointing world without. A spider had begun to spin a web from one rose bush to another, across the path, and as I brushed against it I broke its fragile, clinging filaments. Presently I realized I was not alone.
A fellow I had noted earlier—a strapping young man dressed in a Tyrolean cap, open shirt, colorful braces, and lederhosen which exposed, beginning mid-thigh, the muscular legs of a cyclist—had quietly entered the garden.
The orchestra and Lifar having finished their sultry desecration, fireworks lit up the sky, like petals borne aloft and then spilled down upon us.
“So, at last,” said the stranger. “I thought I might find you here.”
He strode over to me and before I could say a word, planted a kiss on my lips.
He wore a black half mask. As he removed it, a burst of gold and green spangled the sky and I found myself looking into a pair of eyes the most exquisite shade of blue.
“Oh,” I said.
“Don’t act so startled,” said Hermann Thieme. “I’m not going to scold you, though it was rather rude never to respond to my notes.”
“Why did you run from me?” he asked later, as we lay together in the matrimonial bed in the Hotel Bristol.
“There’s no guarantee I won’t run again,” I told him. “No guarantee at all.”
“I won’t lock you in a tower and throw away the key,” he said. “If you wish to flee me once again, now that you’ve seen I’m not an ogre, I won’t stand in your way.”
“You’re certainly not an ogre. It’s never been the ogre I’ve feared; it’s the prince that might break my heart.”
“Well, if it eases things between us, I’m no prince either, even though my parents own a castle. Quite a modest castle. My father bought it a few years ago, not so much because he desired a castle as because it was in dire need of restoration, and he couldn’t bear to see it decline any further.”
“That was decent of him.”
“Father’s a decent man. I’m lucky that way.”
“My own father—” I began to say, but Hermann put a finger to my lips.
“Your father was a very great man. I already know a good deal about him.”
“But how?”
“I was curious. It wasn’t difficult to find out. There are many people eager to share their memories of him. And your brother’s fame doesn’t hurt.”
There it pounced again: that panic that had seized me on the street outside Nicki’s town house. Feeling very much the cornered animal I looked about the opulent room half convinced that it was about to dissolve before my eyes, and that the handsome man next to me would in the next instant tear off his human mask to reveal a gloating demon. But of course none of that happened.
“What’s wrong?” Hermann asked, placing his palm on my bare chest. “I can feel your heart thumping.”
“It’s nothing. It’s just that—there are moments when everything seems completely unreal to me.”
“And this is one of those moments?”
“Yes,” I said. “It is.”
He nestled in close to me, spoke with his lips against my ear. “But I’m quite real, Nabokov. This room is quite real. The city outside the windows is indisputably real.”
“I don’t doubt those things at all. It’s my own unreality that frightens me.”
“But that’s absurd!” Herman exclaimed. “I need another cigarette for this.” He reached to the nightstand to fumble with his pack.
“Do you really,” he asked, exhaling a wraith of torpid smoke, “think I would have pursued a phantasm for two years? Yes, that’s how long it’s been. You may not have been counting, but I have. And now to have you here, flesh and blood, body and spirit…” He inserted his cigarette between my lips, and I took a puff. “If you’re not real, Nabokov, then I’m utterly mad. And I’ve never once in my life been even tempted to consider I might be mad. So there. It’s settled.”
To prove it he stubbed out our cigarette, and the passionate empiricist in him began once again to investigate my reality.
40
THERE WAS NOT TO BE A LILAC FAIRY’S MAGIC wand. A lifetime of unreality is a devilish legacy to undo.
I did not attempt to hide my vices entirely. I confessed to smoking opium—on occasion. (“A nasty habit!” Hermann exclaimed. “We’ll have to see what we can do about that.”) I confessed to an occasional bit of afternoon naughtiness with a Russian schoolmate—for ol
d times’ sake. (“I promise I won’t hire a gangster to do him in!”) I confessed to my very serious lapses as a Roman Catholic (“And I’d assumed you were Russian Orthodox. Well, that’s a bright bit of news. All is not lost after all.”)
Our first weeks together were exhilarating. Business brought him frequently to Paris, and the Hotel Bristol became my home away from home. Not since Russia had I found myself in such luxury, and though I had told myself again and again I did not miss all that, to find myself coddled was delightful. It was always a shock to return to my own flat whenever, after a magic week, Hermann traveled back to his parents’ castle in the Tyrolean Alps.
Had I fallen in love? Yes, indubitably. Though he assured me that his parents were perfectly ordinary bürgherliches Volk, that the family business, which involved the manufacture of wooden cigar boxes, was as humdrum as could be, nonetheless Hermann’s taste and manners were exquisitely refined. He was erudite and kind. At university, he had become vegetarian. He was a great champion of animal welfare, and though he was the most mild-mannered of men, I once witnessed him fly into an astonishing rage upon seeing a farmer beat an emaciated donkey that had fallen and could not rise to its feet. Though fit, he was hardly a fighter and the farmer was a red-faced ox of a man, yet Hermann thrashed him so thoroughly that the fellow soon fled the scene entirely while the donkey, having finally hoisted itself up, munched on some roadside clover.
When he was in Paris we dined superbly, spent our evenings at the ballet or opera, and afterward made the rounds of the jazz clubs. He loved Django Reinhardt, and thought Josephine Baker extraordinary. I very much enjoyed these diversions as well.