by Paul Russell
I was much taken by this idea, though my congenital indolence kept delaying the actual commencement of that noble exercise.
I returned to Paris in late summer to put my affairs in order. After much discussion, I had decided to forsake cosmopolitan toil and hardship for life in the gentle provinces. I was not without doubts, but I was in love—and perhaps more to the point, I was loved, as I had never before felt loved. It was a bit unnerving, to tell the truth. For so long I had sought just such a relationship. Now I found myself gasping for breath. Something Father Maritain had once said haunted me: “God’s love can be an awful thing to bear. And just think: in Paradise, there’ll be nothing but God’s love. Perhaps that’s why so many people spend their lives on earth doing everything they can to sabotage that daunting prospect.”
This, in other words, was a rehearsal. Thus I screwed up my courage and paid a visit to Oleg. The weather had turned sultry. I mounted the narrow staircase to the fifth floor and with no little trepidation knocked on his door. There was no answer. My heart leapt at the prospect of a reprieve. At least I had tried. I knocked once more, and then a third time, just to be sure, and as in the darkest of fairy tales the door swung open.
He had neither bathed nor shaved recently. Within their still gorgeous irises his pupils were pinpricks. But he seemed overjoyed to see me, embracing me affectionately and covering my face with rough kisses.
“Nabokov! You devil! I’ve been worried out of my mind. I thought, Surely something nasty must have happened to him. But here you are, looking fit as a fiddle. How could you abandon me like that?”
“I was kidnapped by fairies,” I told him. “Held captive by a ring of fire.”
He stared at me. “For once,” he said, “I choose to believe you. Otherwise I’d have to thrash you.”
The least stupid smell in the world hung in the close air.
“Look,” I said, “Are you hungry? Let me take you to a café.”
“I’ll have to make myself respectable. I’ve been ill the last few days. I haven’t been able to work for a week.”
I sat on his bed and smoked a cigarette as he stripped, washed himself, shaved while peering into a smudged bit of mirror. His hair was sorely in need of a trim.
“Here,” I said impulsively, going over to him. “You’re a bit untidy. Do you have a pair of scissors?”
“Somewhere,” he said, and after a moment’s search found a pair.
He chafed a bit as I snipped stray strands. “Careful,” I said. “I don’t want to cut your ear off.”
Slivers of auburn hair fell to the floor. I brushed a couple of wisps from his bare shoulders. I touched his neck, where a vein throbbed. Through the open window came the sounds of traffic. Oleg whistled a bit of melody as I clipped. Something seemed wrong, out of place—I kept glancing about the room, trying to make out what was missing.
Having put on a clean shirt, decent trousers, a frayed but presentable summer jacket, he proclaimed himself ready to venture forth. Flush with Hermann’s money, I proposed Le Sélect, where the artists and writers went, where I had once, in another life, been an habitué.
“It’s not really the sort of place I fancy.”
“It’s August. There’ll be no one there. I’d like to treat you.”
Despite the season, he wanted oysters, so willfully we settled in to two dozen marrenes and a bottle of Pouilly-Fuissé, followed by tournedos béarnaise, and a bottle of Châteauneuf-du-Pape.
He ate ravenously. I have never in my life so enjoyed seeing someone eat. As he feasted I told him of my weeks in the hospital, my recuperation in the Alps. I told him of Hermann’s affection for me, and mine for him.
Oleg grunted noncommittally. When he had finished devouring his meal, he leaned back in his chair, patted his belly, and said, “You know, you needn’t see me anymore if you don’t want to.”
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“Nothing at all,” he said.
“Something’s wrong,” I insisted. “I know you well enough.”
“You don’t know me at all. No one does. But if you must know, Valechka’s left me.”
“For all practical purposes Valechka left you a long time ago,” I told him.
“You’ve never been married,” he said. “You’ve never loved a woman. You’ve no idea what it’s like.”
A prolonged bout of coughing seized him. “My lungs are shredded,” he said with a ghastly grin. “But my heart’s shredded as well, so what’s the difference? And about my soul I dare no longer inquire. I pawned it some time ago, along with anything of else of value.”
“You really needn’t talk like that,” I told him. “It doesn’t do anyone any good.”
“And who are you to talk? What’s any better about your life? Oh, you’ve won yourself a temporary stay of execution—but for how long, Nabokov? We’ve both wrecked ourselves, though I daresay it’s not entirely our fault. Do you know a single Russian who isn’t ruined in one way or another? We who escaped are every bit as doomed as the ones we left behind. Maybe they were the luckier ones, in fact. At least for them, the end came quickly. They didn’t have to wait around fooling themselves that everything was going to be fine again one day. No, when the patient’s doomed, it’s best to put him down immediately. Anyone who knows horses knows that.”
“I should be perfectly honest with you,” I said, “It’s the least I owe you. I’m in love with this Hermann Thieme.”
“I’m not an idiot, Nabokov. Of course you are. Don’t you think I can see that? And do you think I care anymore than you care that Valechka left me? I admire you, my friend, really I do. If anyone knows when to jump ship, it’s you, old chum.”
“I’m not jumping ship. I’m simply telling you something I should have told you some months ago. I owe you that.”
He looked at me intently across the table. “But you’ve never owed me a thing, Nabokov. For better or worse, you’ve never owed me a single thing.”
Strange how a very long chapter in one’s life can finally close. We parted on friendly terms, if one can be said to part from a ghost on friendly terms. On the corner of the boulevard Montparnasse and the boul’ Mich, Steerforth held out his hand. Copperfield returned the gesture. Neither drew the other into an embrace; no bright tear glistened in either’s eye.
“For a pair of outlaws,” Oleg said, “we’ve been brilliant.” Then he bestowed on me, one last time, that unforgettable smile.
I watched his figure disappear down the glittering street. He did not look back.
42
BERLIN
DECEMBER 11, 1943
“EXPECT TO HEAR FROM ME SOON,” FELIX SILBER has said, but that now presents a grave difficulty. I have no way of contacting him save through the Ministry, which would be madness, and to chalk my new address on a ruined wall on Ravensbergerstrasse for everyone, including the Gestapo, to see would be madness as well. So I am stymied. I have moved into a room in Onya’s comfortable villa in a relatively unscathed neighborhood past the Grunewald, in the direction of Potsdam. There is a bomb shelter dug in the back garden, but we have not so far had to seek shelter in it. At night the bombers come—we hear their rumble in the distance, we see the sky to the northeast lit up in an infernal glow. One morning we emerge to find the ground littered with strips of tinsel the RAF has begun dropping to confuse the German radar; it looks as if the whole neighborhood has been decorated for Christmas. And there has been snow as well. It would all be oddly festive were it not for the reality of everything.
I tell Onya that I have quit my job at the Ministry. No more ration coupons, she points out. I tell her I may be in some difficulty with the police. She frowns, but says nothing. I offer to find other lodging, but she tells me, “Don’t think of it. We are Nabokovs.” I do what I can to make myself useful. I spend one morning scavenging coal from a bin up the road, and come back with my last suit thoroughly ruined.
One day, as she is attempting to eke some tea from thrice-before brewed leaves,
she says, “I’m so thankful Nika moved to America when he did. And Volodya. We all had the chance. What were the rest of us thinking?”
I contemplate that question for a moment. “We were certain we were loved,” I tell her. “I refuse to think we were wrong.”
After several days I can stand this hiatus no longer, and make my way into the battered city, nearly a two-hour ordeal, as very few trams or buses run any longer. When I pass POW cleanup crews I scrutinize their faces, though I know Hugh will not be among them. What would I do if he were? My intention is to catch Felix as he leaves the Ministry without attracting the attention of any of my other former colleagues. I muffle my face in my scarf and loiter in the vicinity as inconspicuously as possible. At least the bitter cold subdues the pervasive odor of death. Funny that I should come to have some sympathy for the Tsar’s secret police who used to stand outside our house on Morskaya Street on winter afternoons. A steady stream of people comes and goes from the Ministry building. I realize I have no idea what entrance or exit Felix uses, which way he turns as he leaves the building, where he might be lodging now that his home has been destroyed. I realize once again how very, very little I know about this unassuming man to whom I have become so oddly attached. I am fully aware that my attempts to assist Hugh Bagley are pure folly—as Felix must have been aware all along. But without the distraction of these attempts I should soon yield to complete despair, for I realize that my obsession with aiding Hugh is in part a substitute for my utter helplessness with regard to Hermann’s terrible fate.
Eventually dark settles. No Felix. I am cold, and hungry, and absurdly disappointed, and in fact begin to cry like a frustrated child. The prospect of a very long walk back to Onya’s is disheartening, but I realize I have nowhere else to go.
But I do not return immediately to Onya’s; instead I make my way to the Milchbar. My parting from Hansel the swing boy was studiously casual—“See you around, Blisters,” he said with weary glamour, hitching up his tight trousers. Why raise any hopes? One must remind oneself daily: to hope is to be crushed. Still, the prospect of seeing him again stirs me.
When I reach the Milchbar I see that it is utterly gone, the entire street reduced to rubble. Soon enough the air-raid sirens on the city’s outskirts begin to keen like Valkyries. It is not too many blocks to an S-Bahn shelter, and those have held up remarkably well during the bombardment.
43
PARIS
AN EVENING IN LATE NOVEMBER 1932. THE MAIN hall of the Musée Social on rue Las Cases filled to capacity with Russian literary Paris: Khodasevich, Berberova, Aldanov, Bunin, Adamovich, Zinaida Gippius. After a longish wait, V. Sirin entered.
By sheer accident Hermann and I had been in town and seen the announcement in a bookshop window. At first I was hesitant about attending—after all, I had not seen my brother in nearly a decade—but Hermann was adamant. “By all means we must go. I’m most curious to hear your brother read, even if I won’t understand a word of it! You’ll have to translate for me afterward.”
In the end, of course, I was even more curious than Hermann to hear Volodya read.
Balding but otherwise looking fit, my brother sauntered to the lectern, arranged his papers, paused, looked beneath the lectern, cleared his throat. Could a glass of water be made available? Another longish wait (staring at the ceiling) while water was brought. He sipped. Stirred his papers. Looked straight ahead—defiantly, as if somehow daring the audience to attend. An anticipatory hush fell over the hall.
Never looking down, Sirin began to recite in a strong, even-keeled voice. I held my breath. He held his audience rapt. When he had ended the poem, rapturous applause ensued. He looked about, now seeming a bit abashed at the intensity of the response he had provoked. He sipped once again from his water glass. Again he brought forth a poem. Again the tempest of approval. After several poems he seemed to relax. He could see he had his audience firmly in hand.
He sipped more water. I studied him avidly. He looked handsome, confident, worldly in his ill-fitting dinner jacket. The lights gleamed on his balding forehead. His cheeks sagged, pulling down the corners of his mouth, making his eyes droop. He looked like a sad but still regal hound.
I used to hear him, through a closed door, reciting his latest melodious effort to our parents. The poems were still melodious, but they were no longer parlor songs: they were by turns stern, powerful, hypnotic, ironic. Like Pushkin, they sparkled. Like Fet, they sang. Like Blok, they delved wondrously deep.
After another swell of applause he mumbled what I presumed was meant to be a transition or explanation or joke—something to do with the water he had been sipping, and the title of the story, “Music,” he proposed now to read—but few if any in the audience seemed to grasp his intent, so diffident was his delivery of his impromptu lines. Nonetheless, as soon as he dove into the first sentence of the story he was once more in his element. He read, he declaimed, he chanted—clearly he retained the story fully in his head, glancing only occasionally at the pages before him, perhaps to assure the audience that the words had actually been written down, butterflies seized out of thin air, deftly ethered, pinned permanently to the page.
The reader will recall that Volodya had no ear for music. Neither does the protagonist of “Music.” In a salon he sits, indifferent as a pianist storms through his flurry of meaningless notes. As his gaze travels around the room he realizes to his dismay that his former wife, whom he has not seen in two years, is in the audience as well. Tender, painful memories of their brief marriage ensue. He feels imprisoned by the music, the room, her presence. He will not look her way. He recalls his discovery of her infidelity, his decision to live without her. It is all simply intolerable. But now a wholly surprising tenderness replaces his feeling of entrapment. Come, look at me, he thinks. I implore you, please, please look. I’ll forgive you everything, because someday we all must die, and then we shall know everything, and everything will be forgiven—so why put it off?
Had my brother any inkling I might be in the audience? All I could know was that the author of those imploring words could not be altogether heartless, that at the very least he must see their relevance to his own estranged brother.
The music ceases. The protagonist notices, with a pang, that his former wife is taking an early leave of their hostess; clearly she has seen him as well. And suddenly the music, which had seemed such a prison, becomes a magic glass dome under which he and she have lived together, breathed together for a short blissful time that is now ending, that is now, since she has left the room, gone forever.
The switch from poetry to prose had not diminished the audience’s enthusiasm for Sirin’s art. Beside me, Hermann too applauded energetically, though I knew he had not understood a word.
“Marvelous. It’s like listening to Boris Godunov,” he confided, his face flushed, his forehead glistening with sweat. (The hall was quite overheated; the crowd had been much larger than anticipated that evening.)
There followed a half hour’s intermission. If I had thought to speak to the acclaimed author, the spectacle of dozens of people crowding around him quelled that notion. Only at one point, near the end of intermission, did the mob subside, and I saw my chance—but at that instant a woman rushed up to him and began to harangue him fiercely. I could not hear what she was saying, but she seemed to be lecturing him with great agitation. Clearly she had once been a great beauty, but her looks now were coarsened. Though she seemed vaguely familiar, try as I might I could not place her. He withstood her onslaught impassively, finally directing his eyes heavenward and lifting his upturned palms before him in a gesture of helpless if amused surrender.
“He certainly seems to be getting an earful,” Hermann observed. “One hardly needs words when a pantomime’s as expressive as that.”
The second part of the reading consisted of the first two chapters of his latest novel, Despair. He read with ironic detachment, deliciously emphasizing the cluelessness of the narrator (named Hermann!) as he co
nfidently, hilariously misconstrues everything in the world around him. That the whole was headed for heartbreak somewhere down the line quickly became apparent, but the astute clowning of those opening pages—the narrator’s spectacular inability to begin his tale, his mad dash to arrive at his meeting with his supposed double Felix (a kind of premature ejaculation in narrative terms, masterfully managed for full psychological effect), the slow hatching of Hermann’s odious and improbable scheme—provided the audience with considerable opportunity for merriment, with only the occasional sensation of the bottom dropping out from underneath everything.
It was splendid, it was triumphant. It was a quarter till midnight. He had read for more than two and a half hours, and had kept his audience spellbound the entire time. As far as I could see, the only ones in the whole hall who defected midway through were Adamovich, Ivanov, and Gippius—no surprise there, as they regularly savaged Sirin in print—as well as the mystery woman whose scolding my brother had endured.
Seeing that his band of admirers was not likely to disperse anytime soon, I told Hermann we should leave. I rather fancied a drink.
“No,” Hermann said. “Speak to him, by all means. Stay as long as you need. Trust me, he’ll be very pleased that you came. I’ll just be outside having a cigarette. And then we can go get that drink you crave.”
I waited. I spoke briefly with Miliukov, whom I had not seen in months, much to Mother’s consternation, and who always seemed to feel it his duty to commune with me. I spoke at greater length with Nika, which was always a pleasure. “There’s talk of adjourning to a café afterward,” he told me.
“You’ll join us, I hope.”
“I’ve got a friend waiting outside. I think he’s made plans for us. Tell Volodya I’m sorry to have missed him, but by all means congratulate him on his reading.”