by Paul Russell
“But how can that be?”
“She refuses to leave her job. She fears there’s no work to be had in Paris.”
“She’s right,” said Aldanov gloomily, without looking up from the chess board. “There’s no work to be had anywhere. And even if there were work, she wouldn’t be able to get working papers.”
Volodya paid his companion no mind. “I don’t understand her reluctance. As for myself, I’ve been desperate to get out. I don’t know if you’ve heard the news—there’s no reason you should, since what happens in Germany doesn’t concern you in the least—but that hyena Biskupsky’s been appointed head of the Department for Émigré Affairs. But that’s not the worst of it. Prepare yourself. He’s arranged for Taboritsky, of all people, to be his deputy. Taboritsky! That clockwork assassin, that miserable excuse for a man. Mother is beside herself, and rightly so. He should have been left to rot in prison for the rest of his days. Instead, he’s been put in charge of all our fates. Already an order has gone out that all Russians in the Reich must be registered immediately. And word is that Taboritsky has been given leave to gather a team who can serve as translators and interrogators in the event of war with the Soviet Union. It’s grotesque. It’s absurd. It’s unbearable.”
For a man who prided himself on never reading the newspaper, my brother seemed monstrously well informed—better than I, in fact, who had not previously heard this news about one of Father’s murderers.
“There’ll be no war with the Soviet Union,” said Aldanov. “Mark my word. Hitler’s not that foolish.” He gestured toward the chessboard. “I’m afraid I’ve no choice but to concede. I shall leave you two brothers to your reunion. I’m sure you’ve much to talk about.”
I had always thought Aldanov a remarkably kind man; though Volodya had once penned a devastating review of his friend’s latest novel, Aldanov appeared to have forgiven the treachery.
“You’re looking well,” Volodya informed me with uncharacteristic solicitude. “I believe you’ve put on a bit of weight. Life must be agreeing with you these days.”
“As a matter of fact it is. I’m quite settled and content.”
Volodya, on the other hand, looked dreadful. His jacket was threadbare, his cuffs worn, his shoes in abominable condition. He too seemed aware of the contrast. “And quite spiffily turned out these days, I see.”
“I’m not going to apologize for my choices,” I told him.
“You misunderstand me. I’m not asking you to do so. You’re still quite sensitive, aren’t you? But I don’t wish to provoke a quarrel. For one thing, I need to ask your help. Véra can’t get a work permit for France unless someone sponsors her. It’s maddening to be treated as criminals by these loathsome bureaucrats, but there it is. I seem to remember meeting some French friends of yours. Is there any possibility one of them might have connections in the bureaucratic labyrinth? Véra won’t come unless she feels she has a firm guarantee of a job, but under the circumstances that’s completely impossible. I only know Russians, and Russians are useless in these matters, since in the eyes of the state we barely exist.”
Gone was that Olympian confidence he used to exude. As he rolled himself a cigarette, his hands shook.
“Cocteau and Desbordes,” I said, remembering that afternoon at Michaud’s. “The latter is probably not much help, but the former may be. It’s one of his hobbies to know everyone who’s anyone. I’d be very happy to see what I can do.”
Volodya looked at me full on. I had not noticed till then the circles under his eyes that made him resemble Uncle Ruka. “I’d be terribly grateful, Seryosha, for anything you can do. Terribly, terribly grateful.”
It was as if Fate had decided, on some unfathomable lark, to let us trade places for a bit, to see what happened when the prince switched roles with the pauper—or was it the other way around?
I cabled Hermann that I was extending my stay in Paris indefinitely, as I felt my brother needed me. Then I set out to find Cocteau.
The sad truth was, after years of intimacy—or at least the enchanting appearance of intimacy—we no longer knew each other. He and Desbordes had affably drifted apart. These days he was said to consort with an American Negro boxer named “Panama” Al Brown, whose European career he was trying to manage with somewhat less success than he had once managed his nightclub.
It took me some days to track my old friend down; he was avoiding his usual cafés. His friends said he had become paranoid—all agreed the time for another opium cure drew nigh. My note to him at his new address went unanswered for nearly a fortnight.
In the meantime, Volodya’s situation grew even more desperate; he had come down with a severe case of psoriasis—brought on by nerves, declared his doctor.
“It’s driving me mad,” he confided to me. “In the middle of the night I think, if I had Véra’s pistol I’d put it against my temple and pull the trigger.”
“It’s best, then, you don’t have it,” I replied. “Perhaps she’d better not come after all, at least not till you’re better.”
“No, she must come at once. Besides, I miss Mitouchka. You’ve never been a father, you wouldn’t know the insane tenderness, the hellish anxiety one feels at the thought of that helpless, miraculous life, that mingling of one’s long blood shadow with another’s. There’s nothing like that feeling on this earth. But then there must be many things to rue about your predicament. How absurd it must feel to be so ill-fitted to the world one finds oneself in.”
“I assure you I don’t dwell on my predicament, as you call it. Really I don’t. Finding the right shade of lip gloss is a far more troubling annoyance.”
“Must your wit always be so obvious?” he asked.
When Cocteau finally rang me, it was Volodya who answered the telephone. He held the receiver out to me as if it were a distasteful object he wanted no part of.
“There’s a man on the other end who keeps insisting that I am actually you, and I cannot seem to convince him otherwise. He also demands to know whether the line is bugged.”
Cocteau’s voice buzzed in my ear. “Mon cher, I thought your charming stutter had abandoned you. Your brother sounds so very much like you, though his voice is less musical and, shall we say, more muscular. I prefer your own sweet tones. Unfortunately, I wish I were calling with sweet notes of my own, but I’ve simply run up against a brick wall—make that a paper wall, but no less formidable for being built of innumerable bureaucratic forms. Are you certain there’s not some other way? And must she absolutely find work immediately? It seems to me that many Russians over the years have simply wandered into our fair city. One sees them everywhere—not necessarily thriving, as none of us do that anymore, but bearing up perfectly well without showing any evidence at all of having been officially ‘cleared.’
“So I’m afraid, mon cher, this means I’ve no help to offer. In the old days I would have called the Hugos, who are so efficient at everything worldly, but they’ve abandoned me, as has practically everyone else—even my own genius, I sometimes fear. But I cherish this opportunity to have gotten back in touch with you. I’ve missed you terribly, you know. You must grace me with your limpid presence soon.” He paused; then, like a naughty child who cannot help himself, he murmured, “Perhaps you’d like to smoke a pipe or two for old times’ sake.”
By day Volodya worked on his novel The Gift, about which he would tell me only, “There’s nothing like it in all of Russian literature.” At night he frequented those émigré circles I had long avoided. However, Paris is a small city, especially for exiles, and one could not avoid hearing gossip. Sirin was charming the women who fluttered mothlike around his flame. His literary judgments were provoking outrage. He had offended Sorokin. He had insulted Adamovich to his face. The very mention of his name made Nobel laureate Bunin livid. He was having an affair.
At first I dismissed this last rumor as both ridiculous and malicious, but I soon began to hear it from many sources, though two different women tended to be ide
ntified, Nina Berberova and Irina Guadanini.
Resolving to acquaint my brother with the various speculations being bandied about, I proposed that we see each other on March 28, the fifteenth anniversary of Father’s death. He demurred, saying he had other obligations, but suggested we might meet the following afternoon. He showed up thoroughly out of sorts, and when I asked why, he said that he had waited all the previous day for a letter from Véra which had never arrived.
When I suggested her letter must have been delayed, and surely would arrive today, he reminded me that today’s post had already come. “She’s not herself,” he told me. “For some reason she refuses to move to Paris. One week she suggests we try living in Belgium, the next she’s fixated on Italy. She’s even mentioned Austria. And now this new wrinkle—she insists she must first travel to Czechoslovakia, so that Mother can see Mitouchka, and so that she can take a rheumatism cure. As if there aren’t rheumatism cures available in France! I understand her desire to show Mother her grandchild, because he’s certainly a very splendid grandchild, but why now, of all times? Surely it can wait a few more months until we’re settled.”
As he spoke, the troubling thought occurred to me: what if Véra had heard the rumors as well? What if that was the cause of her aversion to Paris?
“This may be neither here nor there,” I said. “But you should know that malicious gossip’s afoot. I’m sure it’s—”
“Nonsense,” he bellowed. “Of course it’s nonsense. Nina Berberova’s a very dear friend, and it’s a difficult time for her, having separated from Khodasevich after so many years. So we’re seen together in cafés. Does anyone really think I would jeopardize my relations with the greatest poet of our generation by having an affair with his estranged wife? I can assure you, Seryosha, there’s nothing between us save friendship and our love of literature.”
Struck by the forthrightness of his denial, I told him that I was grateful for the clarification, and that I knew how trying this spring must have been for him.
“You needn’t fuss over me so, you know. You start to suffocate me with the mothering touch.”
“But I haven’t,” I said.
“Really. I appreciate your attentions, but I’m perfectly well taken care of these days.”
If I was a little wounded by that last bit, I tried not to show it, telling him instead that I was very much looking forward to the luncheon we had planned to have when Hermann came to Paris the following week.
“Thank you for reminding me,” he said. “It had very nearly slipped my mind. I too shall look forward to it.”
Only some time later did I realize he had failed to say a word about Irina Guadanini.
47
THE LUNCHEON WAS NOT A SUCCESS. THE TWO men who meant the most in the world to me were polite and cautious with each other. And how very different they were: Hermann impeccably turned out, flirtatious and gay, Volodya brusque and even coarse in the presence of other men.
Volodya seemed amused by Hermann’s vegetarianism—and my own recent conversion to it. He asked the kind of questions one might ask of a newly discovered tribe of heathens. Hermann answered patiently—yes, there was sufficient protein to be found in a variety of foods without recourse to meat; no, he did not believe vegetables felt pain—but that line of inquiry could only advance so far. Hermann had of course not read Sirin—or any other Russian writer—in the original, and Volodya quickly let it be known that he was not particularly interested in discussing Pushkin or any other writer in translation.
Volodya of course knew nothing about music, and was completely uninterested in politics, and ventured to opine that he found Roman Catholicism a baffling mythology. For the duration of the meal I kept thinking there must be something they had in common other than the slender fact of me; the closest we came was when Hermann told Volodya about his father’s passion for collecting alpine plants, and the herbarium where he raised them. Volodya tried to engage him in a discussion of which plants served as food for which butterflies, but in Oskar’s absence that potentially promising topic went nowhere as well.
We did all manage to agree that it had been a particularly raw and rainy spring so far.
“I’d say that went off quite well,” Hermann pronounced after we had parted from Volodya.
“Well enough,” I told him with the sinking feeling that he was incapable of understanding the nature of my longing for Volodya. How could he, when after so many years I could not fully articulate it to myself?
“Let’s take a turn into Saint-Roch,” I said. “Indulge me, will you? It’s not far out of the way.”
A christening had just finished. A few people lingered, lighting candles in the side chapels, wandering about to look at the paintings and monuments. It was here I had first understood, with absolute clarity, how we are in the hands of God.
“Sometimes,” I told Hermann as we knelt midway among the ranks of wooden chairs, “I don’t even know what I’m praying for.”
“I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that,” he said. “Especially not after lunching with your brother.”
Whether Volodya had an affair with Irina Guadanini I do not know, nor do I particularly care. That May, after much miserable wrangling, he finally joined Véra and Mitouchka in Prague, and from there went on to Menton in the south of France, where they would spend the next year.
I was relieved to see all this resolved, for his tumultuous spring had taken a bit of a toll on me as well.
In the fall of 1937 Chapter Two of Sirin’s The Gift was published in Contemporary Annals. I read with trepidation. By the end of the chapter, my cheeks were streaked with tears. Through what superhuman discipline had my brother managed to set aside all the turbulence of his life in order to create the meltingly beautiful description of his young poet Fyodor’s father? For Konstantin Kirillovich Godunov-Cherdyntsev (what a distinguished patrimony in that name!) was our own father.
How on earth could that be? Fyodor’s father was neither a jurist nor a politician—he was instead an explorer and lepidopterist, “the conquistador of Russian entomology.” Away from his family for protracted periods of time, engaged in fabulous, dangerous exploits, he returned home carrying within him an unshakable solitude, whatever he had attempted to flee still within him.
How difficult this was to put into words, and yet how tenderly Volodya managed it. How lovingly detailed was Fyodor’s recreation of Konstantin’s final expedition, undertaken in 1917, just as everything began to fall apart. How painfully detailed was his litany of all the possible deaths his father might have suffered—from illness, from exposure, from accident, by the hand of man—ending with the mad possibility that he might not have died, that he might still somehow be alive somewhere, ill, wounded, imprisoned, struggling to contact us if we could only hold out hope for just a little while longer. That was the rub, of course, the heartbreaking rub, for we knew exactly how our own father had died. No need to speculate about his capture by the Reds, his execution by firing squad—in a garden, as Fyodor imagines, at night, where in his father’s last instant of consciousness the moonlight reveals a whitish moth hovering in the shadows. No, we had seen Father’s waxen face in the coffin. We had seen the coffin lowered into the ground. We had heard the stuttering thud as clods of earth were shoveled into the grave. And yet—despite the facts, the immutable, incontrovertible, all too well understood facts—here Father lived again, here he shone, as enduring as those butterflies in display cases that outlast by centuries their long-forgotten collectors.
I saw now why Volodya had discouraged as foolish my notion of composing Father’s biography. I knew this novel, his most humane and ambitious, had been under way for several years.
I had known, but never before so fully, the depths of Volodya’s longing for Father—for his approval, his tutelage, his companionship. I understood now that the elusiveness my brother sensed in Father, and that I sensed in them both, was not a fault in either, but rather an essential element of their ident
ity. And further, I understood that far from being an impediment to my love, their elusiveness was precisely the quality that had made me want to love them in the first place.
I saw now that Volodya, apparently so indifferent to me, had in reality all along been patiently teaching me that the only way to know him was through his art. Everything else was incidental; it was only in his books that he lived, intimately revealed, fully and forever available.
And I believe I have found something else as well—that we only, any of us, live in art. No matter whether it is in books, painting, music, or dance, it is there we flourish, there we survive. It has taken me many years to come to this realization.
Without my brother’s pages I would never have been able to begin my own.
48
WE WERE NEITHER BLIND NOR DEAF NOR STUPID in Castle Weissenstein. We knew what was happening down below—how could we not? We frequently heard Hitler on the radio, and Hermann and Oskar would sometimes get into long, passionate discussions about the status of Austrian national identity after 1918. “Who are we, exactly?” Hermann would ask. “Are we German-Austrians, or Austro-Germans? Are we Tyroleans first and Austrians second? Or are we simply Germans in a second German state as mandated by the treaties of Versailles and Saint Germain?”
For his part, Oskar mourned the demise of the Austro-Hungarian Empire—the unnecessary demolition, he said, of a complex, many-tongued, many-peopled civilization, the felicitous marriage of East and West. In his study, he kept a portrait of Emperor Franz Joseph I; he was fond of reminding me that the sumptuous finale of the greatest symphony ever composed, by which he meant Bruckner’s Eighth, was inspired by the historic meeting between Emperor Franz Joseph and Tsar Alexander III, a confluence of histories, cultures, and languages he pronounced himself gratified to host in miniature every day under his own roof—a remark that never failed to elicit a raised eyebrow from Hermann.