by Paul Russell
Many rumors circulated about Véra Nabokov, née Slonim. Was she the reason behind the distinctly “un-Russian” character of Sirin’s work? Did she purposely isolate him from his fellow exiles? Was she a Bolshevik spy? Knowing my brother better than most of the rumormongers, I had privately figured Véra to be a version of the well-intentioned young wife in Luzhin’s Defense who inadvertently sabotages the chess player’s queer genius by insisting on bringing him out of the penumbra of his precious inner solitude and into the sunlit “normal” world. I imagined Volodya’s portrait of such a wife was his means of pushing back at Véra’s attempts to socialize him. But perhaps that was not the case. In any event, I was eager—if also somewhat anxious—to meet her.
“She won’t be home till quite late,” he told me as we walked toward their lodgings. “And she must leave in the mornings at an ungodly hour. She’s not a morning person. She’s practically blind till noon. Fortunately, tomorrow is her day off. So the three of us should manage to have some fun.”
In the meantime, Volodya was having his own peculiar fun. To the evident consternation of passersby, he made a point of entering each shop that had been marked with a yellow Star of David. He bought nothing, but he browsed, he made himself visible, a Gentile publicly flaunting the boycott. I understood why he did what he did, but for the second time in the space of a half hour he made me very nervous indeed.
He and Véra lived in two large rooms they rented in an apartment on Nestorstrasse, not far from where our parents had lived in Berlin. Their landlady was an amiable Russian Jew named Anna Feigen, who immediately brought out the samovar for us.
As Volodya had predicted, it was late when Véra returned. My brother having retreated to the other room several hours before with the excuse that a recalcitrant sentence urgently claimed his attention, I was left to my own devices. Perusing the contents of his bookshelf I discovered, among the usual suspects, a distinct oddity given my brother’s tastes: the complete works of Nicolay Chernyshevsky. With nothing better to do, I dipped into the old reformer’s once popular novel What Is to Be Done? but was soon bored by its well-intentioned sermonizing. I was beginning to wonder whether I should check myself into a pension for the night when the door opened and in walked a petite, strikingly beautiful woman. Removing her beret to shake out a mass of wavy, prematurely graying hair, she seemed unfazed by my presence.
“He’s neglecting you, of course.”
“Of course,” I told her. “He’s my brother. What should I expect?”
“Perhaps rather too much of him, given the constraints on his time. He warned me you might be demanding.”
“Oh, I’m hardly demanding at all,” I said, a little nonplussed. “I’ve just been sitting here reading. Quite contentedly, as a matter of fact.”
“Nonsense,” she said. “You’re reading Chernyshevsky. That can’t be very pleasurable.”
I had to laugh. “Well, actually…”
“See? No need to stand on niceties. I’m Véra, as I’m sure you’ve guessed.” She shook my hand briskly. “Welcome to Berlin. May you never have to spend a moment longer in this wretched city than absolutely necessary.”
“I wasn’t contemplating moving back, if that’s what you’re suggesting.”
“I’m glad to hear that.”
Volodya poked his head through the door. “Ah, my Happiness, they’ve deigned to set you free at last. One never knows,” he said to me. “I send her out in the morning, little knowing whether they’ll allow her to return in the evening. But every night, somehow, she convinces them to release her. Despite everything”—he now addressed his wife—“I’ve managed to have a fairly productive day. I’ve left the pages out for you. Whenever you’re ready.”
That their manner with each other should be at once so arch and businesslike struck me as odd, and perhaps depressing. I suggested we might go to a restaurant for dinner. “I’ll pay, of course. And I need to check into a pension.”
“My goodness,” said Véra. “You’ll do no such thing. Did he suggest you should?”
“Not at all,” Volodya and I both said at once.
“We haven’t discussed…” said he.
“I just assumed…” said I.
“There’s a perfectly adequate sofa. We insist you stay with us. We wouldn’t think of you spending money on a hotel. Ridiculous.”
“You won’t win an argument with Véra; don’t even try,” said Volodya.
“As for dinner, Anieta has made some soup. There are sausages. Restaurants in Berlin are dreadful anymore. And we don’t like to go out at night.”
“Unless one’s well armed,” I said.
She shot Volodya a reproachful look. “You talk too much for all our sakes,” she told him.
He made a humorous, self-deprecating shrug. “My Love hopes that eventually I will confine my utterances exclusively to paper. Perhaps she has a point.”
“Talking, sometimes, can be a waste of time,” she said.
Over soup and execrable sausage (“Only the finest sawdust!” Volodya claimed), I ribbed my brother: “So. Chernyshevsky. Your tastes have certainly changed.”
“Research.”
“A new novel?”
“Yes,” he said, chewing stolidly. “But that’s all you’ll get out of me.”
I told him I could see he was beginning to take Véra’s advice.
The remainder of the evening was spent in polite conversation. Financial worries were foremost, to the extent that I decided I would leave them the balance of my reichsmarks when I departed. Volodya expressed his usual exasperation with Olga and her husband, the unhelpful ways they meddled in Mother’s affairs. He was concerned about our brother Kirill’s lack of direction with his studies. He worried that Elena was not as happy as she should be in her recent marriage.
Wishing to move our talk into richer realms, I ventured that I was curious to know how Volodya and Véra had met. “Suddenly, out of the blue, you were married. No one knew.”
The two looked at each other.
“Surely there must be a story,” I prompted.
“There’s no story,” Véra asserted.
Volodya had other ideas. “But my Rose Blossom, there’s a marvelous story. When I first met my wife-to-be, she was wearing a black satin mask. Our meeting was by prior arrangement, on a bridge over a canal. She recited my poems to me. She had copied them from various journals into an album and learnt them all by heart. She never once removed her mask. She said she didn’t want her beauty to distract me from her recitation, but I was already quite distracted! All I could see were her bright blue eyes. Afterward I wrote a poem. ‘And night flowed,’” he began to declaim, more to Véra than to me, “‘and silent there floated / Into its satin stream / That black mask’s wolflike profile / And those tender lips of yours.’”
Véra seemed put off by this display of sentiment.
“That’s enough,” she said. “It wasn’t like that at all.”
“Then let me hear your version,” I teased.
But she only held up both her hands, palms out to me, shut her eyes, and shook her head.
“My wife’s a great romantic,” Volodya explained. “Not an exhibitionist: a great romantic. Most people fail to understand the difference.”
That evening I fell asleep to the muffled clatter of Véra’s typewriter in the adjoining room.
We occupied the next morning with a long walk around Wilmersdorf and Charlottenburg. The clouds had opened up, and Berlin showed a rare sunny aspect, and there, in the middle of a block of shops hunkered down behind their metal grates, was one storefront exposed to the world, its front windows shattered, its façade daubed with yellow Stars of David and JUDEN RAUS! It had been a pleasingly polyglot bookshop, I recalled—French, Russian, Italian, and Yiddish commingled with the smell of old paper and pipe smoke and a friendly tabby napping on the counter.
“Our latest bit of ugliness,” Volodya said. “The hooligans made a pile of books in the middle of the street,
set them on fire, and sang patriotic anthems and presumably felt better about themselves as Germans afterward.”
I took the opportunity to bring up again—this time in Véra’s presence—my conviction that the two of them might wish to follow the example of most other Russians and leave Berlin to its ugliness.
“We’ve nothing to fear,” Volodya assured me once more. “True, I’ve been called a ‘half-kike’ by certain members of the émigré community who have been driven insane by my talents. Those of our countrymen who are still left in Berlin are the worst sort; they’ve practically embraced Hitler and his ilk in their desire to get back at the Jews who, they believe, stole Russia from them. They’re a farcical bunch, hardly worth taking seriously. As for the homegrown German idiots, they’re little more than comic bullies better suited to one of Mister Chaplin’s movies than to real life.”
His assessment of the situation struck me as somewhat delusional. “But surely, Véra,” I implored, “it can’t be very comfortable for you.”
“Fortunately I pass easily for non-Jewish,” she said. “I’m mistaken for a Gentile all the time. No, I have to agree with Volodya. We’re perfectly safe for the time being.”
“For the time being,” I echoed dubiously.
“Come,” Volodya said, “let’s not trouble ourselves with shadows. Look!” He gestured toward a circus poster affixed to a kiosk, a forlorn enticement to enchantment nearly crowded out by the surrounding cacophony of National Socialist exhortations. “Isn’t it marvelous?” He pointed to the variously colored letters spelling out ZIRKUS BELLI that arched above a roiling scene of elephants and camels, clowns and showgirls. “They’ve got it practically dead on. How extraordinary. Some poor, anonymous artist after my own sensibility. Look, my Peach. The drama of ‘ZIRKUS,’ beginning so stormily, with those lurid flashes of I and U separated by the sooty hues of R and K, and then clearing into the pale blue of that final S. Followed by such a lovely ‘BELLI,’ with its buttercups and creams and burnt siennas, a word of very pleasing chromatic integrity.” Delicately he kissed the tips of his fingers in appreciation.
I had always known of my brother’s strange ability to “see” the colors of the alphabet, though I confess I had more or less considered it an affectation. Thus I was unprepared for Véra’s response.
“I agree with you entirely about ‘ZIRKUS,’” she said, “but to my eye ‘BELLI’ is more a jumble. That double L is a livid green, velvety in texture, quite at odds with the marble-smooth tones that cradle it.”
“Livid green? Extraordinary. F, P, T—now those are my shades of green.”
“No, no, T is dark blue, almost inky.”
And so they went on, merry as schoolchildren. If it was not a poster on a kiosk, it was the blue imp sparking above the streetcar, the shadows on a building, the speckled winter plumage of talkative starlings, a jowly old crone selling turnips who resembled—did she not?—a female version of Van Eyck’s Canon van der Paele…
If I confess that I felt excluded from their banter, it is without any bitterness—for the exclusion, I saw, was not intentional, but instead the outward sign of a degree of harmony I had never in my life observed between two people, not even between my parents, whose marriage had always seemed formidably seamless.
My brother delighted in everything Véra said or did. If I could not get used to his playful terms of endearment—my Happiness, my Peach, my Fairy Tale—I could nonetheless see that, despite their poverty, their uncertain prospects, the ugliness closing in, he was divinely happy.
The following day, he accompanied me to the Haupt-bahnhof to see me off. Though our visit had not afforded us the kind of thoughtful, prolonged conversation I had looked forward to, I was nonetheless grateful for the glimpses into his life. As we quaffed a last-minute Pilsener in the stale-smelling station saloon, I asked him whether, for the sake of my sanity, we might return to the old question of Davide Gornotsvetov.
He looked at me blankly.
“Davide Gornotsvetov,” I prompted, “and the ballet dancer in Mary—and other things in your fiction as well. Only recently, for instance, I read your beautiful story ‘The Admiralty Spire,’ and once again noticed, well, that there were things there you couldn’t possibly have known, little details, insignificant really, only they touched quite closely certain… How do I put it? Private experiences of mine. I really don’t quite know what I’m trying to ask you.”
He smiled patiently. Over his shoulder I noticed the minute hand on the wall clock lurch forward; it was one of those timepieces that suggests the medium it purports to measure is not flowing but rather a series of discrete moments, each isolated from what comes before or after.
“Nor do I,” said my brother. “Listen, Seryosha. I’m a writer. A writer is always noticing; half the time he doesn’t even notice what he’s noticing. I understand that’s not a very satisfactory answer. But I’m afraid it’s the straightest response you’re going to get from me.”
“I understand,” I said. The minute hand jerked forward. “I always keep hoping for more, even when I know there is no more.”
“Without doubt an admirable quality. But one can only give what one has to give.”
I reminded myself that I had not thought I would get much from him in the first place, but he surprised me.
“I suppose I’ve neglected to ask after Hermann,” he said. “That is his name, isn’t it? Hermann?” He pronounced it with a markedly German flourish.
“Yes, Hermann. He’s wonderful. Quite simply, he saved my life. Were it not for him…”
“I do understand, Seryosha. We’ve more in common, you and I, than anyone might have thought. Without Véra I wouldn’t have written a single novel.”
The minute hand stuttered forward. “I presume that’s not an attempt at a joke,” I told him.
“Why should it be? I’m perfectly serious. I honor my own salvation, and yours as well.”
“Then I hope we’ll continue to exchange letters. I very much cherish this contact.”
His hazel-green eyes met mine. His expression turned sheepish.
“What is it?” I asked him.
“Well, if you absolutely must know.” He paused; I waited for the minute hand. There! “Véra’s the one who handles the correspondence.”
It took a moment to register.
“What?” I said. “I’ve been writing to Véra all this time?
“And she’s been writing to you. She finds you a most charming correspondent. She’s told me so many times. And rest assured, I do read your letters. It’s just that I find answering them difficult. I’d explain, but I think you’d best board your train now. I can see you’ve been keeping your eye on the clock. We certainly don’t want you stranded in Berlin.”
46
I DID NOT ALTOGETHER BECOME A RECLUSE IN those happy years. From our Valkyrie perch in the mountains Hermann and I would descend at regular intervals to Munich, Salzburg, and Paris. When in Paris I saw my old friends less and less as time and circumstance dispersed them. Most of the Americans had gone home; even Tchelitchew and Tanner were now in America (though no longer together). The Ballets Russes had split into several quarreling entities, and Cocteau had thrown himself into playwriting.
Only once did I see Oleg—and only from afar, across the great width of the Champs-Elysées. His taxi had broken down—from its radiator rose a fume of angry steam—and as traffic flowed around him one could imagine the fume of angry steam rising from him as well. He did not see me, and I did not go to his assistance. Whatever help he needed was no longer mine to give. Mercilessly he flogged with his jacket the flank of his hapless vehicle, as a peasant might a long-suffering beast that had finally collapsed from its burden, a sight that must surely have seemed comic to most passersby but that spoke to me of a melancholy as deep as the memory of Russia herself.
Every August Hermann and I made a pilgrimage to Bayreuth, and if, as the decade wore on, one had to put up with swastikas and the paraphernalia of the Nation
al Socialists, it seemed a small price to pay for the privilege of hearing Richard Strauss conduct the 1933 Parsifal, or in that sweltering summer of 1937 the inimitable Furtwängler illuminating, as only his brooding genius could, the complete Ring. How I wished Father could have been there. These performances would have changed his mind about Wagner—but then I remembered the full-page photograph of Hitler in the printed program and was no longer so sure.
From Volodya—or was it from Véra?—I received the occasional cordial missive.
From V. Sirin, on the other hand, I received regular commu-niqués from that incomparably rich inner world he inhabited. In 1935 Invitation to a Beheading appeared, a wild dream of a book, harrowing and hilarious and tender and transcendent. I did not know at the time how closely my own situation would one day resemble that of the condemned man who wonders how he can begin writing without knowing how much time remains.
It was not until 1937 that I saw Volodya again. Halfway through a visit to Paris, I dropped by Le Sélect one afternoon, and was astonished to discover my brother seated in the rear of the café, absorbed in a chess game with his friend Mark Aldanov. My first shameful impulse was to turn and flee, so full was I of tumult—joy at seeing him, confusion that he should be in Paris, hurt that he had not informed me of his plans—but why should he have? I approached the table, touched him on the shoulder, and in as casual a tone as I could manage expressed my pleasure and surprise at having run into him.
He flinched at my touch (I should have known better), looked around for a very long second without any glimmer of recognition in his eyes, and then exclaimed, “Ah, Seryosha, what a delight to see you. What brings you down from the Alps?”
I told him, all a-stutter, that I could very well ask what brought him down from Berlin. Had he come to Paris for a reading? Had I missed the event? I’d seen no notices.
“No, no,” he said. “I’ve been here for two months now. I’m done with Berlin.”
“That’s marvelous news, I’m so relieved for you and Véra.”
“Véra, alas, remains in Berlin. As does our son.”