The Unreal Life of Sergey Nabokov

by Paul Russell

  “It was quite brilliant, wasn’t it? I somehow feel we’ve been present at a historic occasion. But will the greater world take any note? There wasn’t a single non-Russian in the whole hall.”

  “Well… One, actually,” I said. “My friend Hermann.”

  “And what did he think?”

  “He couldn’t understand a word. Otherwise I think he quite enjoyed it. Take care, Nika.” I kissed him affectionately on both cheeks. “No doubt we’ll see each other soon.”

  As I turned to leave, Volodya came bearing down on me.

  “Ah,” he said. “Planning to sneak away like the guilty fox? How very nice to see you.”

  “I wouldn’t have missed it,” I stammered. “You were superb.”

  His face registered the old involuntary dismay he used to show whenever a word would catch me up. “That’s very kind of you,” he said. “It did go off quite well, didn’t it?

  “Absolutely.”

  For a moment we stared at each other, both at an awkward loss.

  “Well,” he said. “I find these occasions very tiring. Necessary, I suppose, but tiring. I’m very much looking forward to heading straight back to Nika’s and getting a good night’s sleep.”

  I took a deep breath. “Look, Volodya. Things have been very bad between us for a very long time. Perhaps they’re fated to remain so. But as you yourself so beautifully wrote, ‘Someday we all must die, and then we shall know everything, and everything will be forgiven—so why put it off?’ If you’d only give me the chance to explain myself, to see if by some means we can find our way past the obstacles that have divided us for so long. I have to think that our estrangement would have saddened Father, as I know it saddens Mother. I think this is something Father would have wished. Just one meeting. The two of us.”

  He studied me coolly. “My schedule’s very crowded,” he told me. “I leave tomorrow afternoon for Berlin.” He coughed, scratched his forehead distractedly, took a deep reluctant breath and said, “Still, I will meet you for lunch. On one condition. You must pay. I’m afraid I have no funds at all at the moment.”

  44

  WE MET AT MICHAUD’S, ON THE CORNER OF RUE Jacob and rue des Saints-Pères, in part because Hermann was underwriting the meal, but also because, as I told Volodya once we were seated, James Joyce and his family could often be seen dining at that table in the corner.

  “Mr. Leopold Bloom,” said my brother, “who eats with relish the inner organs of beast and fowl, is the most thoroughly decent figure to stroll through literature since Lyovin, though his sexual tastes are far more depraved. As for myself, I must confess I’m entirely indifferent to food in all its remarkable forms, beast, fowl or otherwise. As far as I’m concerned, it’s fuel—necessary, but hardly to be praised or pampered or paraded, which I sense the French are inclined to do. Left to my own devices, I’d be perfectly content to eat scrambled eggs three times a day. I do like champagne, though.”

  With a satisfying pop! our waiter uncorked the bottle I had ordered.

  “Yes, I like champagne very much,” he repeated. “This is so much better than the sweet Russian stuff, which is fit for children and old ladies and no one else.”

  I told him he must find Berlin congenial, then, given its undistinguished cuisine.

  “Berlin doesn’t exist,” he said, “any more than a movie exists. Unreal City, as Eliot calls London in that flimsy pastiche of his. That’s why I find Berlin, as you say, ‘congenial.’ I needn’t bother with it at all. Some would say we émigrés live as ghosts amid the cities we find ourselves in. I assert the opposite—it’s we who are real. Yes,” he said, seeming to warm to that line of thought, “that’s our predicament. We’re real citizens doomed to inhabit phantom cities. A parable, really: the fate of rich, real consciousness in a sham-material world.”

  To draw his attention a little closer to earth, I congratulated him once again on the previous night’s triumph.

  “I presume you noticed who stalked out? At least Bunin stayed to the end. He even managed to find one or two vaguely complimentary things to say, much as I’m sure it pained him. He’s really the dullest man alive. As for the others, Ivanov is a complete nobody; someone should seal him into his mousehole for good. And that grotesque old fool Gippius never liked my work, nor did her husband, despite his claim that he taught me all I know about literature; besides, she’s a lesbian, or hermaphrodite, or some such unpleasant thing. As for Sodomovitch, the less said the better.”

  “And there was another,” I said. “The woman who accosted you at intermission. She seemed vaguely familiar. I’ve been trying ever since to place her.”

  My brother laughed. “Oh,” he said. “I’m astonished you remember her at all, since your memory’s so often faulty. But yes, you did meet her once—rather embarrassing circumstances. The Acropolis…”

  At once I remembered: it had been during our short stay in Piraeus, an interval of repose between Crimea and England. I had gone with Nika and Onya to see the Parthenon by moonlight. All at once a voice rose from amid the ruins, singing first a pulsing aria from Verdi, then a plaintive Russian song. We later learned it was the celebrated diva Cherkasskaya, serenading the stone maidens of the Erechtheum. At almost the same time, as if stage-managed by an invisible hand, there emerged from other shadows my brother and a strikingly beautiful young woman whom I did not know, and whom I was not to see again in Piraeus, but whose moonlit looks and poise in a potentially embarrassing moment must have imprinted themselves in the nether regions of my consciousness.

  “Novotvortseva was her name,” Volodya said. “I’ve been trying to recall her first name. She was married, I remember, and fancied herself a poet. She’s not aged well, and she should bathe more often. She took umbrage with that story I read—seemed to think it was addressed exclusively to her. As if I’d known she’d be there. And in the meantime, she’d had absolutely no idea that Sirin and I were one and the same. Comic, isn’t it. Now what was her first name?”

  I told him I was afraid I could be of no help there.

  “It doesn’t matter,” he went on. “I must get her out of my head. On the whole, I seem to have found my footing here in Paris quite nicely. They apparently find me English—that is to say, high-quality. Already some of my better bons mots are coming back to me. And increasingly I hear a word beginning with the letters g-e-n… I’ve written to Véra telling her we really must move here as soon as possible. We’re practically the last Russians left in Berlin. How marvelous it was to look out at that sea of literate faces! All of literary Berlin could—and on occasion does—fit into a modest sitting room. I’ve been making valuable contacts as well. I’ve met with the translators who are metamorphosing Luzhin’s Defense and Camera Obscura into French. A professor from the University of California has offered to show several of my books to American publishers.”

  I had never heard my brother speak at such length—about anything, and certainly not about himself—and I began to wonder whether his literary successes had begun to swell his head, until after some minutes it began to dawn on me that it was instead his nervousness at the prospect of our beginning a real conversation, the sort of conversation I had asked for, that accounted for his uncharacteristic volubility.

  Only the arrival of our food stemmed the torrent of his narrative. Though we had not yet finished our first, he wondered if another bottle of champagne might be in order. I assented with some relief. He tucked into his foie de veau with methodical zest while I took advantage of his momentary preoccupation to say, “Mother conveys to me in great detail whatever she gleans of your life from the letters you send. I have no idea whether she does the same regarding my news. I’ve gone through some turbulent times, but things have been sorting themselves out.” He continued to eat without looking up. Feeling a bit queasy, I went on, “I’d like you to know, for instance, that I’ve converted to Roman Catholicism.” He stopped eating, laid down his fork and knife, tipped his napkin to his lips, and looked at me curious
ly.

  “I did not know that,” he said. Then he picked up his fork and knife and resumed his meal.

  “Mother’s known of my conversion for quite some time,” I told him. “I broke the news to her when I visited back in twenty-six. I suppose I’m not surprised she neglected to pass it along. It was almost as if she hadn’t heard me. Not that I blame her. She had quite a lot on her mind, I’m sure.”

  “I’m afraid Mother tells me very little about you in her letters. Don’t take it personally. She’s very distracted by her financial situation, which as you know is frighteningly grim. I’ve been doing what I can, but I’ve no money whatsoever. My books may be acclaimed, but they earn me nothing. Recently I’ve begun to give the occasional by-invitation-only reading in an attempt to raise funds to send her, but most in my circle are as penniless as I. How you can afford to bring me to this restaurant, by the way, I have no idea.”

  “I’ll explain that a little later,” I told him, daunted by how much territory I wished to cover, and aware that his schedule severely limited our time together. “It’s another chapter entirely. Have you no response to my conversion?”

  He shrugged. “What am I to say? I should think it provides you with much-needed consolation and hope. It can’t be easy for someone in your condition. I imagine there’s much to be sorry for. If belief in an ancient and long-lasting system of practices eases one’s suffering, I am hardly one to criticize it—just as I’m not about to criticize Mother’s taking up Christian Science, which I presume offers similar benefits.”

  Now it was my turn to be surprised.

  “But I’ve heard nothing of that!” I told him.

  “She’s dabbled in it for some time now. She and Mademoiselle Hofeld both. It’s helped her spirits immensely, though to me it’s all hopelessly vague. It reminds me of those depressing séances one attends in hopes of actually learning something tangible about the dead. I’ve never quite forgiven, by the way, that cruel prank you pulled.”

  “It was no prank,” I said. “To this day I still can’t explain what happened. But I swear to you, I had no ill intent; what happened was entirely beyond my control. How can I make you believe that?”

  He studied me. The waiter poured more champagne. “I don’t know that you can. It was a very long time ago. It’s hard to know anymore what one knew then. There was a time when I made it a hobby to investigate the other world. How many séances I endured, obscure messages from the Great Beyond spelled out one letter at a time by a lazy teacup on a painted board, spectral knockings in darkened parlors, proper ladies making fools of themselves in sham basso profundo to resurrect the spirit of Frederick the Great or a slave from the time of Vespasian. I was rummaging through all that dismal magic in the hope that, somehow, Father might have found a way to send me a sign. We made a promise that whoever died first would have a solemn duty, through whatever means possible, to breach that barrier separating this world from the next. But though I upheld my end of the bargain, I was never contacted by anyone remotely resembling Father. Though there was one spirit who professed to know my future in great detail. Claimed I would one day teach schoolchildren in Kaluga. ‘High above Kaluga’s waters,’ as the spirit poetically put it. But I shall never return to Russia. All through the twenties I never ceased to believe that one day we would return. But it’s like a love that has gone. I shall never return to Russia. I shall never have the opportunity to speak to Father again. At thirty-three, that is where I find myself.”

  Obviously he had dismissed out of hand the notion that I might have been the conduit by which Father reached him.

  “Do you still believe?” I asked. “I mean, in a world beyond this one? Any kind of life after death?”

  He spoke carefully. “I know more than I can understand. I understand more than I can express.”

  Unfortunately, at that moment our waiter returned to clear away our plates and, in the process, the fragile communion between us. When he had gone I said, to salvage the moment, “You’ll be interested to hear that I’ve thought seriously about writing Father’s biography. A friend who’s a great admirer of Father’s has urged me to do it. He thinks I’m uniquely suited for the task.”

  Volodya’s reaction was immediate.

  “And what do you imagine you might produce?” he asked. “Some dry, learned rehearsal in which Father’s public ‘accomplishments’ float unattached to the ultimately unknowable texture of his private life? An allegory of the liberal spirit undone by its own idealism? A sham biographie romancée where an infinitely graduated life is reduced to an artificially crafted plot, complete with characters and dialogue and dramatic scenes that never happened—and worst of all, sentimental detours into the subject’s psyche, his innermost thoughts and emotions. No, I think I’d rather see poor Father’s corpse thrown to a pack of feral dogs.”

  I had never seen him quite so agitated, though he rapidly enough seemed to recognize that the ferocity of his response was out of all proportion to my innocent proposal. He went on, more mildly, “What I mean to say, Seryosha, is that I don’t know if a conventional biography is the best approach to the task. It seems to me there must be a better way, a way more attuned to Father’s particular genius—though what that way is, precisely, and if it would be at all available to an amateur such as yourself, or even an artist such as I, I don’t yet entirely know. I must give it some thought. But I’d strongly caution you against plunging too hastily into such a challenging project.”

  “My great regret,” I said, “is that Father and I were on such uncertain terms at the time of his death. Indeed, I’ve always regretted your account of his worry about me the night before his murder. But what was I to do? Can any of us, even for the sake of the ones we love, be someone we simply are not? People speak of my ‘attitude,’ as if it’s something I’ve willfully adopted. I assure you that’s not the case.”

  “My views have changed somewhat,” Volodya told me. “I’ve become aware of the extent to which such an attitude runs in our family, though I still fail to understand how heredity is transmitted by bachelors, unless genes can jump like chess knights.”

  “You’re thinking of Uncle Ruka, and Uncle Konstantin, and, according to Grandmother Nabokova, at least one other. Speaking of the failure to understand—I’ve never understood why you were so cruel to Uncle Ruka, who clearly loved you dearly.”

  “Uncle Ruka was a vain, vile monster, who, were there a hell, would deserve to burn there for eternity.”

  “But why?” I asked, aghast.

  “Why? Because he habitually took advantage of those who were younger, weaker, more vulnerable than he, whether servants or stable boys or Arabs or anyone else he fancied. His appetite knew no bounds. Were you blind to all that reprehensible behavior? But then he never wished to cuddle you every chance he got; he never forced you to play the stallion game. He never humiliated you with his kisses and caresses in front of everyone. You were fortunate, Seryosha. Very fortunate.”

  “What I’d have given for a kiss or a cuddle—anything that might have shown he was halfway conscious of my existence,” I said.

  “I’m perfectly aware you admired him—far too much for your own good. And because he never took liberties with you, perhaps I’ll allow him one single day every year to walk in the green fields of Paradise. But only one! I must confess, Seryosha: I hated seeing you become one of his kind, though I suspect you’re infinitely kinder, more moral than he. But are you any less unhappy? He, too, adopted Roman Catholicism in his endless search for relief from his urges, but I don’t think it did him any good. I can only hope you’re more fortunate than he.”

  The remark gave me pause; I had forgotten entirely my uncle’s long-ago conversion. “You were often quite cruel to me,” I found myself saying. “The way you and Yuri teased me, when I was Louise Poindexter and you and he were Apaches and mustangers. Or when you showed my diary to our tutor, knowing that he would most certainly show it to Father. Or when you denied me my grief for Davide Gorno
tsvetov, practically accusing me of having invented him—and then to read in Mary a description of a character named Gornotsvetov who resembles Davide in so many ways. What am I to think of that, Volodya?”

  “I never knew this Davide Gornotsvetov. Readers are always finding uncanny coincidences in my work. Art has a discomfiting way of sending its tentacles out into so-called reality. That’s all there is to it.”

  “It doesn’t matter. It was all a long time ago, as you say, and I don’t mean to rehearse old grievances.”

  “I really don’t remember any of these things you accuse me of, but then I’m all too aware I was a bit of a brute and a bully in those days. For that I’m truly sorry. But you have to understand, dear Seryosha,”—here he smiled—“as the butt of a practical joke now and again, you really were irresistible. I hope you can forgive me.”

  “Of course I forgive you. I forgive everybody who, whether inadvertently or not, made my boyhood so miserable. Father, Mother, the teachers at Tenishev and the Gymnasium, my treacherous classmates, that villain Bekhetev.”

  “Bekhetev? Our physician?”

  “An ass and a charlatan,” I said. “Now there’s someone who should be consigned to hellfire.”

  “I can’t imagine a more decent, benevolent gentleman. I’m terrifically grateful he’s in Prague these days, where he can attend Mother even if her Christian Science asks her to eschew proper medicine. Even today, Olga and Elena swear by his care. They won’t see anyone else.”

  I proceeded to tell him in some detail of my “cure” at Dr. Bekhetev’s hands, those weekly sessions of pseudoscientific cruelty that ended only when the civilization that had mandated them ended as well.

  “I never knew,” he said when I had finished. He looked vaguely perplexed. “But then, most of your life has necessarily been mysterious to me. Even when we lived under the same roof.”