The Unreal Life of Sergey Nabokov Read online

  For two happy months our uncle would be in our midst, shedding wonder and light. He possessed a sweet, high tenor voice, and in his spare time—of which, despite his soi-disant career as a diplomat, he seemed to have endless store—he composed barcaroles and bagatelles and chansons tristes, which he would sing to us on summer evenings, accompanying himself on the piano. No one else seemed much impressed by his artistry, but how I envied his wistful melodies.

  I once convinced him to lend me the score to one of his songs, which he did with some reluctance: “Oh, that,” he said with half a laugh. “Well, if you wish.” I scurried away with the sacred document, and spent many happy hours rehearsing in secret, imagining his surprised smile when, freed of my stutter (for I do not stutter when I sing), I would one day lovingly offer his gift back to him.

  Evenings, after dinner, he would regale us, in French rather than Russian, which he spoke quite badly, with tales of the Pyramids and the Sphinx, whose nose Napoleon’s troops had shot away one indolent afternoon, or crocodile-hunting expeditions on the Nile with Hamid, his servant. We sat on the verandah, amid steady oil lamps and flickering candles, while Cairo’s smoky bazaars teemed with unimaginable bargains. Among the items Uncle Ruka had brought us were a number of weighty cylinders used to render wax seals with the stamp of the caliph. “And yet,”—here he would look around at us with his raccoon eyes—“amongst all those bargains and beggars, there was still the possibility”—he paused dramatically—“of being deliciously taken advantage of!”

  “Basile,” my father murmured—in warning.

  “But I was never,” Uncle Ruka hastily assured us, “never, ever taken advantage of!”

  Immediately he was off on another adventure, this time in an aeroplane, a Voisin Hydravion, the latest miracle from those amazing French brothers. Did we know he had crashed on a beach near Bayonne, that he had very nearly been killed? And yet—he kissed two beringed fingers he raised superstitiously to his lips—he had emerged with nary a scratch. The orthodox saints Sergius and Bacchus would remain his blessed protectors to the very end.

  In the midst of his gaudy patter—on the word Bacchus, for instance—difficulty would seize him, and only after several fraught moments would he finally succeed in surmounting the recalcitrant consonant.

  For an adoring nephew’s stutter, however, he had no patience. My very presence seemed to annoy him, which only reinforced my desire to make him like me—or at least acknowledge me. Finding him in the library, where he idly leafed through a volume of floral aquarelles, I observed, “Hamid sounds like a most interesting character. What adventures you must have with him.”

  “A scoundrel,” my uncle replied with surprising pique. “Don’t trouble yourself about Hamid. An infamous wretch if ever there was one. But now, dear lad, please allow your uncle a moment of peace. Can’t you see he’s busy reading?”

  For having penned an appeal for passive resistance to the Tsar’s policies (a document known to history as the Viborg Manifesto) Father and several of his fellow Cadets spent the summer of 1908 confined to prison. The rest of the family confined ourselves to Vyra, my mother’s estate, where one sultry afternoon an overloaded calèche brought a fashionable St. Petersburg photographer, his assistant, and a panoply of theatrical-looking camera equipment. Why my mother wished, in Father’s absence, to undertake a series of formal portraits of herself and her children I do not know—but Volodya violently objected at the prospect of the two of us being garbed in identical short white trousers and long-sleeved blouses. Our latest governess, Mlle. Miautin, whom we simply called “Mademoiselle,” reminded her charge that good boys did not throw fits, while the photographer reassured him that the two of us did not look the least bit alike. In the end Volodya acquiesced, and in the series of formal portraits that followed, our two younger sisters, Olga and Elena, stare solemnly at the camera while my difficult brother casts a smug, devilish smile and I manage a foolish grin.

  Just as our patience with the tedious process was nearly exhausted, we heard the rapid click-click of Uncle Ruka’s heels as he crossed through our foyer. “Ah, Lyova! Mes enfants! Je suis arrivé!” Immediately assessing the situation, Uncle Ruka persuaded the photographer to undertake yet another round of photographs. From the verandah, where Mademoiselle fed the rest of us cakes and cherry juice, I watched as my uncle posed in the garden, first with his sister, then with his sister and her firstborn, whose waist he encircled with a possessive arm. The photograph taken, Volodya squirmed free. “Not so fast,” said Uncle Ruka. “I’ve brought you something I think you’ll fancy.”

  Volodya paused mid-escape. “I was hoping to hunt butterflies,” he said. “I’ve wasted half the day as it is.”

  Since the previous summer, that mania had consumed my brother’s energies. His room was now a trove of pinned and spread specimens, much to Mademoiselle’s horror.

  “Ah, then butterflies you shall have.”

  Volodya looked skeptical.

  “Come,” coaxed our uncle, leading his nephew past us and into the house. I followed as well. Uncle Ruka pointed to an enormous book that lay open on an armchair in the sitting room. Volodya approached dutifully, then burst into a swoon.

  “Oh my!” he intoned. “Oh my, oh my.” Lifting the tome, he slid onto the chair and began to page through it. “Die Gross-Schmetterlinge Europas. What I most wanted in all the world. How did you know?”

  “Your uncle’s not entirely without wit, now is he?” Gliding onto the chair beside Volodya, he drew an arm around his nephew. “I do believe I’ve seen one of these.” He pointed to an illustration.

  “Not very likely,” Volodya said. “Unless you’ve been to Nova Zembla, and even there it’s extremely rare.”

  “Well, perhaps it was a southern cousin,” Uncle Ruka stammered. “They do all rather look alike, I fear. Family resemblances can be most confusing!” He laughed gaily, and breathed in the scent of his nephew’s hair oil. Briefly his lips grazed the crown of Volodya’s head. My brother went rigid. His hazel-green gaze met mine. I turned aside, embarrassed not so much for him as for our poor uncle, who, oblivious to his nephew’s disdain, soon dashed from the room, his heels click-clicking across the floor. Volodya remained seated as if nothing had happened, unhurriedly turning the pages of his volume, pointedly unaware of anything else around him, neither his departing uncle nor his younger brother, who remained standing in the doorway as Uncle Ruka, with scarcely an acknowledgement, brushed past him.

  The next summer Uncle Ruka was again at Rozhestveno. Three or four days a week he would appear at luncheon. When the meal had finished, and everyone else retired to the verandah for Turkish coffee and cigarettes, he would grab Volodya by the wrist. “Now come, dear lad,” I’d hear him say as I lingered on the threshold a moment longer than necessary. “Indulge your poor uncle for a moment. In Italy, boys your age are eager for this game. Mount-the-Stallion, they call it.” With a groan, he lifted a squirming Volodya onto his lap. “Oof! You’ve become so very big lately. And look at those handsome thighs. Is that a bruise? It’s yellow as a melon. Does it hurt? Boys with thighs like yours grow up to be magnificent stallion riders. Do you want to be a cavalry officer one day?”

  Unperturbed, the servants went on clearing away the dishes. On strong adult thighs, Uncle Ruka heaved his reluctant rider to and fro. To no avail Volodya struggled, his long bare legs flailing as Uncle Ruka pressed his lips to the back of his nephew’s neck, murmuring, “There, there. Très amusant, n’est-ce pas? Shall I sing for you?”

  I slipped soundlessly onto the verandah. A rain shower had gusted through while we lunched; rekindled sunlight sparkled on the dripping lindens and poplars of our park. From the dining room came half-sung, half-panted phrases—“Un vol de tourterelles…strie le ciel…tendre.”

  At last Father spoke. “Lody, do stop bothering your uncle in there.” Almost instantly Volodya appeared, hair mussed, one white sock fallen down around his ankle, coral-pink finger marks on his bare thighs. “Come, s
it with us,” Father invited, but my brother paid no heed, charging down the steps and into the wildwood of the park without a word. Volodya was a very strange child.

  Flushed from his exertions, his white summer suit in disarray, Uncle Ruka appeared as well. “Spirited boy,” he said.

  “Have coffee, Basile,” said Father.

  “No, no,” my uncle protested. “It’s bad for my heart.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with your heart,” said Father. “You’ll outlive us all.”

  Our cousin Yuri Rausch von Traubenburg also came to us in the summers. The son of divorced parents, he spent his time shuttling between Warsaw, where his father was military governor, and the dispiriting spas in which his mother, my aunt Nina, sought elusive cures and pleasures. Worldly, scandalously at ease with the servants, untroubled by parental neglect, and four years my senior, he was Volodya’s friend, not mine. Still, I was in awe of this handsome, lanky interloper. He and Volodya would disappear into the park for hours to pursue elaborate cowboy-and-Apache fantasies derived in part from the penny dreadfuls they devoured, in part from their own dreadful imaginations.

  Only on rare occasions did I participate in their fun, most memorably for a brief spell during the summer of 1910 when they approached me with an intriguing proposition: might I consent to play the damsel in their adventure? Easily coaxed, I draped myself in a shawl, allowed myself to be tied to a tree trunk, was danced around for a while with delirious Indian hoots, then left to languish while their complicated plot played itself out elsewhere. I would glimpse them ranging through the shrubbery, shooting at each other with air rifles. Lashed to my stake, I was forced to entertain the depressing thought that they might have forgotten me, but eventually they returned, no longer captors but liberators, untying me with glee while Yuri, or rather the gallant Maurice the Mustanger, pledged his troth to me, the fair Louise Poindexter. One afternoon, in an excess of identification with his character, he went so far as to kiss me on the lips, much to Volodya’s disgust and my own perplexity. After that fascinating episode I was no longer asked to participate in their games.

  Thus Yuri Rausch receded from my thoughts till one afternoon in August 1913. My mother and my grandmother Nabokova were having a terrific row. The chief cook had been caught thieving and was to be let go. My grandmother strenuously objected: he had been with the family for more than a decade; his children suffered various ailments; no one in the whole district prepared dishes half so well as he. To escape the hubbub I wandered, book in hand, down to the bank of the Oredezh, that placid stream winding its way through our landscape, the better to dream my way further into the stormy friendship of Copperfield and Steerforth. Now, their rows were worth paying attention to!

  So lost was I in their world that I did not notice approaching horses. Sequestered in a copse of pea shrubs, I saw that my brother and Yuri were not only riding their steeds bareback, but that they were themselves naked, having shed their garments in order to enjoy the languid afternoon au naturel. Oblivious to my presence, they plunged their mounts into the cooling river. The beasts thrashed about, churning up the water, muddying the stream. Teeth bared, they whinnied and sputtered; their hectic eyes bulged; their nostrils flared. Their flanks shone like velvet. After several explosive minutes the magnificent creatures, urged by their high-spirited riders, clambered up the riverbank, where the two boys dismounted and tethered them. Now it was the humans’ turn. The horses watched, tails flicking, as my brother and cousin waded out into the river till the water reached mid-thigh. Volodya’s flesh was sun-toasted, Yuri’s pale as milk. They splashed on each other the holy water of the Oredezh, they yelped and whooped, each took turns carrying the other on his shoulders. Yuri sang snatches of gypsy songs off-key. It was only my brother and my cousin, but in the afternoon light they seemed agents of some heavenly dispensation.

  Too soon the episode was over. I was certain they were not in the least aware of my worshipful presence; nonetheless, I lowered my eyes to my neglected book as a precaution, only to find I could no longer concentrate on the page before me.

  Even after they had gone I felt all about me a remnant of electricity, as if a storm had broken out and then abruptly vanished into the somnolent blue of a summer afternoon. I tried to recreate the sensation, just as at the piano I would sometimes repeat a dozen times some passage from Gounod or Tchaikovsky in a futile attempt to catch some evanescent promise contained in the music. Only after a long empty interval did the drowse of a bee in the pea shrubs rouse me from the tristesse into which I had unaccountably sunk.

  The brief parenthesis of Russian summer: by the first of September autumn is at hand, the birch and alders begin losing their leaves, each day the dark falls earlier, a chill insinuates itself in the air. A calèche would take Yuri and his spartan baggage to the regular train stop at Luga, whence he would return to his father in Poland or his mother somewhere in Bohemia or Moravia or Germany. Meanwhile, in the foyer at Rozhestveno enormous traveling trunks would appear. The Nord Express would be bribed to stop at the little station at Siverskaya. Blowing us all a farewell kiss, Uncle Ruka would depart to another of his foreign refuges: Villa Tamarindo near Rome; Chateau Perpigna in the south of France; a small, exclusive hotel overlooking the harbor at Alexandria, where Hamid waited patiently for his master’s return. And our servants, particularly the younger ones, would breathe a sigh of relief that “Mr. Bumtickle,” “Lord Grab-Ass,” “Seigneur Sodoma,” as they cruelly called him, had finally gone.

  3

  BERLIN

  NOVEMBER 24, 1943

  SCARCELY TWENTY-FOUR HOURS HAVE PASSED since I walked out of the Propaganda Ministry. When my landlady, Frau Schlegel, raps on my door to announce that a gentleman has come to see me, my heart freezes. Surely the Gestapo would not send a man unaccompanied to arrest me? As it turns out, they have not. My visitor removes the scarf he has wrapped across his face—a common precaution against the ash and dust in the air—and I see it is Herr Silber from the Ministry. Mutely he presents me with my umbrella, which I left behind in my haste to depart, and as I take it from him he says, “Weather continues, after all, no matter what else may happen.”

  “You’ve taken an unnecessary risk in coming here,” I tell him, though I feel stupidly grateful. “I’m certain I’ve been under surveillance for some time. Long before my rash words yesterday.”

  “Perhaps,” he says. “But there’s no evidence of it at the moment. I lingered along the block for half an hour before finally knocking on your door. Everything seems quite normal out there.” Realizing the absurdity of that remark, he giggles. I share for a moment in his hysterical merriment. I do not know the man well, and he has never paid me a visit in my lodgings, but his presence brings a welcome sense of normality, as if I have only dreamt what I have lately done.

  “Still,” I say when our grim mirth has subsided, “I can’t imagine why you’ve come. In fact, I can’t imagine why the Gestapo haven’t yet taken me.”

  The word makes him visibly nervous—as of course it does us all.

  “I know nothing about that, Nabokov. Rest assured I haven’t turned you in, but your absence has been noted. And it is highly likely that others heard your unfortunate remarks. Magda in particular.”

  “I was afraid of that. Magda’s a wolf.”

  “I fear she is,” he replies. His candor startles me. Such forthrightness is unheard of these days in the Reich. “To tell the truth, I’m rather surprised you’re still here as well. Isn’t there anywhere you can go?”

  “Not likely. We Russians are stuck. But then, as far as I can see, so are the rest of you. Berlin is a barrel full of fish ready to be shot.”

  “Then can you really stand by what you said?”

  “Surely you haven’t come here merely to ask me that?”

  He looks about my battered room. Alarming fissures have appeared in the plaster. A layer of ash lies on everything. The light is dim owing to the brown paper with which I have covered the shattered win
dows. A spirit lamp turned very low burns at my desk, where I have been writing. On a bookshelf next to the desk is half a set of a German children’s encyclopedia, the only books in the room, relics I presume of Frau Schlegel’s youngest son, who is missing at the front. Once upon a time I was an avid collector of books.

  “Perhaps one longs for a bit of truth,” Herr Silber says. “It’s commonly assumed that only a madman would make such a statement aloud in the heart of the Reich. So yes, I am here to ask if you stand by the madness you’ve uttered.”

  I consider him for a moment: mild-eyed, graying, with a neat little mustache. His suit is in shambles. “I don’t know you well at all,” I say, “but you’ve always seemed a decent chap. So why should I lie to you at this point? I know it’s rather hard to believe, given the atrocities the RAF delivers to us nightly, but yes, I believe what I said. I believe the German atrocities have been far worse. You’ve seen the reports from the Eastern Front, just as I have. You’ve read the documents I’ve translated. You know as well as I what the Führer planned to do once he’d conquered Moscow. If there’s a just God, and I believe there is, then I fear the Reich will be made to suffer terribly for its crimes. Is that madness? Then so be it.”

  “It seems to me we’re all being made to suffer. As for God—as far as I can tell He’s abandoned His creation without so much as a fare-thee-well.”