The Unreal Life of Sergey Nabokov Read online

  “And how will things end for you?” I asked.

  He shrugged his frail shoulders. “It’s not how things end, Seryodushka. It’s how they are. I’m alive. Yuri is monstrously kind to me. I’ve always asked only for some measure of kindness in my life, so I’m very grateful. There’s nothing more to say, really.”

  I could see my visit had come to an end.

  “Give my respects to the great Yurev,” I told him.

  “Do you realize,” Genia said as he showed me the door, “that the Tsar’s gift to my friend turned out to be the very last official act of his reign? Isn’t that strange? It must auger something, though for the life of me I can’t ascertain what it might be. Yuri’s been teaching me to read Tarot. So perhaps one day…”

  “I wish great happiness for all of us,” I told him. “But I’m afraid, for the moment, I can see it no more clearly than you.”

  Those were the last words I ever spoke to Genia Maklakov. I have often wondered what became of him. I must confess I fear the worst.

  17

  IF THE FEBRUARY REVOLUTION HAD WORN AT least some of the trappings of a regular crisis, the October Revolution unscrolled with all the excitement of a shift change at a sewing machine factory. Mostly, the revolution appeared to be an excuse for everyone to get drunk: if anything can be said to have been liberated, it was the wine cellars of the Winter Palace and the city’s restaurants. Soldiers and sailors who had never downed anything but vodka got roaring drunk on stately Burgundies and fabulous Tokays laid in during the reign of Catherine the Great. Dominic’s resorted to guarding its cellars with machine guns, but a crowd overwhelmed them and an ugly scene ensued. Similar rampages occurred at the Great Bear and Coutant’s.

  A few days later, as the collective hangover brought a welcome pause to the revolutionary debauchery, Father called Volodya and me into his study to announce, quite matter-of-factly, that he thought it no longer advisable for the two of us to remain in St. Petersburg. Lenin had announced the immediate formation of a new Red Army into which the likes of Volodya and me were likely to be conscripted. “You’ll go south, to Crimea, which so far has escaped Bolshevik control. The Countess Panin has generously offered you refuge at her estate outside Yalta. The weather should be lovely. It’s quite near Livadia, where the Tsar, poor man, wished he might be allowed to retire.

  “For the time being I remain behind, but I shall be sending the rest of the family to you soon. I’ve nominated myself for the Constituent Assembly. Elections will proceed as scheduled. The Bolshevik hold on power is so tenuous, Miliukov jokes that at their meetings they stand rather than sit, ready to bolt.” He paused to chuckle, but his expression betrayed him.

  The following day he accompanied us to Nikolaevski Station.

  The train’s departure having been postponed, he sat at a table in the station restaurant, drinking coffee and drafting, in his fluent script, an article whose prospects for publication, all liberal journals having been shut down by the Bolsheviks, seemed as dubious as our train’s departure.

  To keep my mind off our circumstances, I leaned against a pillar and watched the pigeons perched in the iron girders high above our heads. Every now and then, with a noisy flapping of wings, one would sail out in a lazy circle and return to its companions; how I envied those ordinary birds, unaffected by the human stupidities taking place below. It never for a moment occurred to me that I would never see St. Petersburg again, that the bleak sight of those pigeons in the cold damp of Nikolaevksi Station would be among my very last memories of home. A few weeks of anxiety, I thought, and all would be resolved. Father would see to that. His busy scribbling seemed to promise nothing less.

  Looking smart in dark flannels, Volodya loafed about, scornfully scrutinizing the Bolshevik placards plastered about the station. Occasionally he poked at one with his walking stick, and made himself more noticeable than was prudent. The cane had once belonged to Uncle Ruka; now Volodya was using it to tap the nose of V. Lenin.

  At last, after hours of delay, the Simferopol Express began venting steam. Father rose, stuffed his papers in his briefcase, briskly made over each of us the sign of the cross, and then added, almost as an afterthought, “My dear boys, I shall quite possibly never see you again.”

  As he walked briskly away, a figure of heroic nonchalance, Volodya exchanged with me a look I shall never forget. All his high spirits seemed to leave along with the father we loved. The gravity of our situation was inescapable.

  Once sequestered in our cozy first-class sleeper, however, we opened the bottles of mineral water and Madeira, the foil-wrapped chocolates, almond biscuits, and hothouse peaches our mother had so thoughtfully supplied, and grew a bit more cheerful. As it smoothly left St. Petersburg, the express seemed little different from those trains de luxe we had taken in the past to Biarritz or Abbazia, and it was hard not to imagine we were once more bound to a pleasant seaside spot.

  After Moscow, however, everything worsened. At each successive stop more and more soldiers, mostly drunk, scrambled on board. We gathered that news of Lenin’s coup had led to widespread desertions all along the front. Homeward bound, the soldiers lolled about in the corridors singing rowdy anthems. Soon they were pounding on the flimsy door of our compartment, determined to share their high spirits with us. Volodya was equally determined that we should retain our compartment against all intruders.

  “This is a quarantine compartment,” he called out to our unwanted guests clamoring at the door. “Beware. There is a typhus patient in here. Can’t you read the official warning posted on the door?”

  In frantic pantomime he urged me to appear ill. A burst of inspiration came to me, and I took from my bag some lipstick I had almost left behind. Stippling my face with bright dots, I wrapped myself in both our woolen coats and huddled in a corner, trusting my natural scarlet flush for once to come to my aid and simulate the effects of high fever. When, a moment later, the door flew open with a crack and a young deserter staggered into the room, I was moaning in opulent misery.

  “Typhus,” Volodya pointed. “I’ve been exposed as well. You’d best protect yourself.”

  Behind the intrepid first soldier I could see the vacantly grinning faces of several others as they peered in.

  “Believe me,” Volodya continued as I launched into a further fit of moans and trembling, “we have papers here from Dr. Bekhetev. I wouldn’t wish this condition on any of you.”

  The soldier, stupidly handsome in his way, looked doubtful, but already his wiser comrades were seizing him by the shoulders, tugging him out of harm’s way. When it became clear that we had prevailed, Volodya smiled at me and said, “Well done, Seryosha.” I was seventeen and a half years old. He had never in that many years said such a thing to me, and the gift was welcome and sweet.

  Our cheer was soon cut short by a distressing new development. The soldiers had somehow managed to climb onto the roof of our compartment, where they renewed their efforts to oust us by urinating into the ventilation hatch. Eventually they tired of their sport, and departed by twos or threes at the interminable stops we made at every small station along the route, so that by the time we reached Kharkov the morning of the third day, our tormentors were nowhere to be seen.

  It was later that day that I nearly lost Volodya. The Simferopol Express, which had long since become entirely local, had stopped at yet another dreary station. Against my nervous wishes, Volodya insisted on getting off to stretch his legs. From the window I watched him and Uncle Ruka’s estimable cane promenade up and down the platform, where other, less sympathetic eyes watched as well. All at once the train gave a start and began to pull from the station. Volodya made for the steps but stumbled, propelling Uncle Ruka’s cane onto the tracks. He looked up at me, holding up his hands in what seemed both surprise and wonderment. “Come on,” I shouted, but he stood where he was, an impossibly stylish and forlorn figure receding slowly as the train began to pick up speed.

  Never have I felt at such a complete
loss. I considered leaping from the train to join him, but the thought of consigning our luggage to certain oblivion was unthinkable. Thus I did nothing, refusing to admit, in my shock, that in an instant everything had changed forever. Scarcely a quarter of an hour earlier I had been preoccupied with what would happen to my schooling, and Volodya had been speaking of returning soon to St. Petersburg to retrieve the butterfly collection he had left behind. Now that sullen row of muzhiks who had watched from their benches as he promenaded gaily about the platform were no doubt beating him bloody, stripping him of his finery, taking revenge for the very existence of thoughtless families such as ours in their newly ascendant world. With that thought I quickly finished off the half bottle of Madeira that remained.

  How could we have been so foolish—all of us?

  Numbly I tried to word the cable I would be forced to send from Yalta to my disbelieving parents. That strange exercise calmed me a bit.

  From his leather portmanteau I removed on impulse the single thing Volodya had brought along from his precious collection: a sphagnum-filled larvarium—all that was left me of my brother save the words with which I would convey his demise. In the box, like shrouded mummies in a tomb, lay several fat pupae he had been nurturing.

  Then with amazement I saw a wriggle of movement. In the warmth of our compartment, perhaps jostled out of its sleep, urged forward, like us all, toward difficult metamorphosis, a brownish moth was hatching, wet-winged and dazed, before my eyes.

  “What have you there? Careful. Well, what do you know.” Volodya was beside me, peering into the box, prodding with his finger, not acknowledging my incredulous whoop of drunken joy at the sight of him. “You little fellow.” He addressed the creature by its scientific name. “What a world you’ve decided to come into.”

  “But how…?” I stammered.

  “Simple. I waited till the last car had passed, snatched my walking stick from the tracks, and relied on a strong-armed hero of the revolution to lend me his outstretched hand from the caboose. Unfortunately, the knob is all smashed now. By the way, where’s the rest of that Madeira? I feel I really must go make him a gift.”

  18

  CAMBRIDGE

  “LET’S BEGIN AT OUR FRONT DOOR,” SAID VOLODYA. “Number 47 Morskaya. We’ll be walking in the direction of Nevsky Prospect. At Number 45 we pass Prince Oglonski’s, then the Italian Embassy at 43, and the former German Embassy at 41. We reach Maria Square. Beyond the lindens in the small park on the north side of the square you can glimpse the dome of Saint Isaac’s. To the south stands that mediocre equestrian statue of Nikolay I. Past the eastern edge of the square we come to the Hotel Astoria. And then—”

  He paused. In reality, we were strolling The Backs in Cambridge, England. Two and a half years had passed since our escape from Russia; Volodya and I were beginning our third year at university.

  “And then—but what comes next?” he asked me. “What’s the building next to the Astoria? I can’t visualize it at all.”

  I laughed and told him I wasn’t sure either.

  “But it’s no laughing matter,” he exclaimed. “Don’t you see? Already it’s beginning, that hideous process of decay. Our beloved Saint Petersburg is beginning to disappear before our very eyes. Seryosha, we must face the appalling truth.”

  I reminded him that the city itself remained firmly ensconced on the banks of the Neva, the shores of the Bay of Finland.

  “Pah! Today’s Petrograd isn’t the Saint Petersburg we once knew. Were we to sneak across the border and make our way to its once-familiar streets, we’d recognize nothing. No, what concerns me is the Petersburg preserved in here”—he touched his forehead, then his heart. “And that indelible city is vanishing as we speak, and stroll, and sip tea, and very soon, I fear, I shall be left with nothing but a few stray phantoms, misremembered relics, the odd bit of déjà vu, then nothing at all.”

  I told him I was content to enjoy our autumnal walk.

  “Yes, yes, it’s perfectly fine,” he said, as if observing for the first time the lawns, the willows, the towers and spires in the distance. “An entirely plausible landscape, except for the lethal fact that it’s so relentlessly crowding out the past I love. Not just the material landscape of buildings and rivers and trees, but people’s faces as well, the scent of Russian lilacs at dusk, the noontime dance of sphingid moths among the allée of oaklings at Vyra, the sound of the warmhearted Russian language speaking incessantly through my dreams.”

  I foolishly mentioned that I, for one, welcomed the opportunity to gain a richer, more supple English. “What use is Russian to us now, anyway?” I asked.

  He looked at me as if I had slapped him across the face.

  How difficult to convey the strange tenor of those eighteen months during which we scattered Nabokovs gradually regrouped in Crimea, where we perched precariously, swimmers about to dive into exile but still hesitating, clinging to the ever-diminishing hope that events might yet relieve us of that necessary plunge. They did not.

  In January 1918, the sailors of the Black Sea Fleet mutinied, massacring their officers and declaring allegiance to the Bolshevik regime. In Yalta, on the elegant esplanade, sailors tied stones to the feet of native Tatars and refugees alike, dispatched them with pistol shots to the head, and threw the bodies into the water.

  Then in April the Reds suddenly withdrew, to be replaced, courtesy of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, by a well-provisioned, smartly uniformed army of Germans. Overnight, chaos gave way to order. Handsome soldiers handed out cigarettes and sausages. On the emerald lawns of public parks neat little signs warned one to keep off the grass. Cafés and restaurants that had shuttered themselves in terror reopened, and it was once again safe to travel from Countess Panin’s estate at Gaspra into Yalta, where we gazed into the shallow waters of the harbor at the ghoulish crowd of upright corpses gently swaying in the back and forth of the tides.

  In July news arrived that the Tsar had been executed in Yekaterinburg, soon followed by rumors that his entire family had perished as well.

  When November came, the orderly Germans effected an orderly disappearance and were replaced by the Whites, whose occupation, despite the nominal fact that they were “on our side,” proved nearly as frightening as that of the Reds had earlier.

  The ordinary and the perilous mingled farcically. There was the afternoon when my piano playing was interrupted by the arrival at our door of a clutch of sailors who had evidently been drinking and debauching for days; heavily armed, with ammunition belts slung across their chests, they also sported brooches and diamond tiaras and long strands of pearls. Their uniforms and faces were ominously smeared with blood. As our trembling servant Ustin explained, “Our friends here were drawn by your melody. They wish to enjoy it again, if you’d be so kind. They wonder if you might sing for them as well.”

  Uncertain whether I could accurately recall the words to Uncle Ruka’s barcarole, but reminding myself that, since the verses were in French, it did not particularly matter, I began the gently undulating figure in the left hand, then added the delicately scented melody, and as if by a miracle the words came: “Un vol de tourterelles strie le ciel tendre / Les chrysanthèmes se parent pour la Toussaint.” I held my own till the song had come to an end in a cadence of three bittersweet chords. Two of the sailors were sobbing like girls. “Again,” Ustin urged, and I complied. I believe I played and sang Uncle Ruka’s unforgotten song half a dozen times before the sailors, almost comically unsteady on their feet, lurched at Ustin, my father, Volodya (the women in the house had hidden themselves upstairs), embracing each in turn with clumsy hugs and slobbering kisses. I remember meeting Volodya’s eyes as he stood stoically, clasped by a lipsticked young murderer who insisted on kissing my brother’s neck, his cheek, his bitterly compressed lips, leaving a blood mark everywhere his own rose-red lips touched. Then merrily, they staggered out of the house and down the road, hooting as they went their rough approximation of Uncle Ruka’s fastidious melody.
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br />   Against such a baleful backdrop, I found myself from time to time slipping into one of Yalta’s humble Orthodox chapels. I did not consider my impulse religious so much as the simple need for momentary refuge from too much reality. I knelt before gilded icons and tapers lit by pious old ladies. Always I left those dim, aromatic sanctuaries feeling as at peace as it was ever possible to feel in those distinctly unpeaceful days.

  In the meantime, I had a brief and unhappy fling with a young dancer named Maxim, and an even briefer but rather more satisfactory liaison with a German officer. Volodya had more affairs than anyone could keep track of, lyrical spasms he converted with great efficiency into the poems he regularly recited behind closed doors to my parents. Occasionally we would be visited by Yuri Rausch, who was with Deniken’s army in the north as they attempted to stave off the Bolshevik effort to retake the peninsula. He was more charismatic than ever, but disappointingly aloof, on one occasion rudely rebuffing my attempt to resume our conversation about friendship from some years before. Instead he chose to spend his time discussing the volatile political situation with Father, or taking long walks with Volodya in the hills above Yalta. Then one terrible day came the news that he had been killed in action.

  I remember knocking on the door of my brother’s bedroom, expecting to find him sitting in the dark, perhaps gazing out the window, alone with his grief. Instead he was at his desk, intently fixing a butterfly specimen to a board, the beginnings of a new collection to replace the one he had been forced to leave behind.

  “I’m very sorry,” I told him.

  He did not turn to look at me, nor did he speak. With precision he pierced a beautiful brown-and-orange butterfly’s thorax with a pin. I wondered whether I should continue with the course I had rehearsed. Foolishly I decided to.