The Unreal Life of Sergey Nabokov Read online

  Usually I managed a glimpse of Oleg at midday as he and his friends kicked the football around the courtyard. My heart quailed when I saw he was not among them. Of course Fate would thwart my plan. In dejection, I turned to go back inside and at that moment, hands in his pockets, and whistling a merry tune, he came through the door. We very nearly collided. He looked at me indifferently. I hesitated. Had it all been delusion on my part?

  “I have something very important to tell you,” I stuttered. “Can you meet me after school?”

  “Must it wait?”

  “It’s very important.”

  He looked skeptical. I could tell he was longing to join the noisy throng in the courtyard. Indeed, several voices called his name.

  “Very well,” he said. “After school. It can’t take long. I’ve things to do.” He had already started down the steps.

  “Promise you’ll wait for me.”

  “I’ll be there,” he said.

  I could scarcely concentrate on my studies for the remainder of the interminable afternoon, and was twice reprimanded for my inattention.

  At last we were released. I sprinted to the waiting Volkov. “I’ve got a bit of a favor to ask. If you don’t mind, I’ll get myself home on my own. Here’s a little token of appreciation.”

  When I handed over the vodka and cucumbers he laughed, and I suddenly feared my scheming had come to naught.

  “How thoughtful. I do relish a thoughtful boy. Don’t be gone too long. We don’t want trouble, do we? Neither one of us.” Then he bestowed upon me a rather hideous wink.

  Scarcely had he and the Benz vanished than I heard Oleg’s voice exclaim, “I’ve always fancied that smart limousine of yours. Too bad you weren’t planning to abduct me in it!”

  Mutely I held out my offering.

  “Ho-ho,” he said. “What’s this?” He took the bottle, hefted it in his palm. “You’re certainly a queer one, Nabokov. I can’t make you out at all. What with your stutter, and the odd way you look at me at school. Everyone remarks on it. They find it quite comic. But I shouldn’t have said that. I don’t want to wound you. I feel quite protective of you, in a way. My God. Where did you get this? 1769.” He slid it into his school satchel. “I should sell it and purchase fifty new bottles with the proceeds. Or perhaps I’d better save it for my wedding night.”

  “You’re to do with it as you please,” I told him.

  “That goes without saying. Whenever I do get around to opening it, I’ll be certain to think of you kindly. Really, you’re quite the lark, Nabokov. Shall we stroll a bit? Since we’re wanderers, you and I. Then I must get myself back to Smolny and the somber aunt.”

  At least he seemed to feel he owed me something.

  The first signs of spring were out in the Summer Gardens, yellow and purple crocuses in the muddy lawns, birdsong in the air. Young couples and soldiers in pairs strolled about, chatting amiably. I was conscious, as we walked among them, of our lapse into silence; the encounter that had begun so promisingly now seemed a duty he felt obliged to fulfill. I longed to bare the wonders of my soul, and for him to do likewise, but had no idea how to bring that about. Instead I said, “Your classes have been going well?”

  “Don’t be a bore,” he told me.

  “Then come visit me this summer at Vyra,” I stammered. Why had I not thought of that marvelous solution before? He could stay with us for several weeks, as Yuri Rausch sometimes did. We would nap together in the hammock. We would eat honey and butter on toast in the mornings. We would cover the stretches of Vyra and Rozhestveno on our bicycles. When the heat became intolerable we would strip off our clothes and bathe in the Oredezh.

  “Can’t,” he said. “I’ll be off to the Ukraine. My father needs me there. After all, I must learn to manage the estates. I must impress all the girls with my citified luster so that my father will deem the expense worthwhile. Besides, you hardly know me.”

  “But we would come to know each other,” I said. “That afternoon at the cinema—”

  “Haven’t you put that out of your head yet?”

  “Why should I? That was without doubt the finest afternoon of my entire life.”

  He smiled, and stared for several long moments into my eyes. “Take care that you don’t become too philosophical, Nabokov,” he said at last. “You and I both know many a fine chap has gone wrong by becoming too philosophical. So you enjoy a fellow’s touch now and again?”

  “Perhaps you’d like to see a movie this very afternoon.”

  He laughed. “Someone less kind would thrash you for such boldness, you know.”

  “I should like to be friends,” I told him.

  “Friends,” he said. “I have my own friends; they’re a good lot, really. I can’t let them down. I shan’t see you anymore this term, Nabokov. I don’t want you becoming a bad habit of mine. Still I wish, just for once—”

  He stopped mid-sentence. Heading our way along the graveled path were two of those friends, Vassily and Ilya. Both had an arm around the other’s shoulder and were singing the Marseillaise with exaggerated fervor, raising their knees comically high as they marched and swinging their free arms stiffly.

  “I must be on my way. Nice seeing you, Nabokov. And thanks,” he added, tapping his satchel. “Thanks very much for the jolly gift.”

  As his comrades passed, he fell in step with them, taking up the melody, and stomping his boots hard into the gravel underfoot.

  6

  BERLIN

  NOVEMBER 26, 1943

  LUFTGEFAHR FÜNFZEHN—THOSE TOO FAMILIAR words. Highest level of danger. Nearly every night, and especially if the skies over Berlin are clear, our building’s air-raid warden makes his rounds. Climbing the steep stairs (the elevator has long since ceased to function, and in any event it would be madness to risk being trapped inside it), he pauses at each landing to catch his breath, then moves down the corridor, beating a saucepan, knocking on each door, alerting those within to the aerial storm about to break once again over their heads. Everyone keeps a small satchel packed and ready for the descent into the cellar. I gather my valise of essential belongings, consisting mainly of these pages filled to the very margins with the smallest, most economical script I can manage, and my supply of precious foolscap pinched from the Ministry.

  We sit on makeshift cots, some thirty of us, women, children, old men, some Germans, others Russian émigrés like myself who work in various ministries. No one makes any pretense of trying to sleep. Instead we keep up nervous, superficial conversation. Two of my compatriots play a distracted game of chess. There was a time, early on, when the old war veteran in room 11 kept our spirits up by lustily wheezing out on a battered accordion “Ach, du Lieber Augustin,” the only tune he seemed to know—till one night Frau Schlegel, speaking by prior arrangement for the rest of us, suggested he might be making matters worse rather than better. He still lugs his accordion to the cellar, but now he sits quietly, and disconsolately whittles a stick away to nothing with his pocketknife.

  Of late, Frau Schlegel does not join us. She has discovered that once the air raid begins, the factories shut down. She uses the precious surge in electricity to get her ironing done. And when all the bombs have fallen, and the firestorm has done its worst, there she is, waiting at the top of the stairs with her neat stack of sheets and pillowcases and shirts. The RAF, I am afraid, have not counted on the likes of Frau Schlegel.

  7

  ST. PETERSBURG

  TO MY MIND, PUSHKIN BEST SUMS UP THE SEASON: “Lovely summer, how I could cherish you / If heat and dust and gnats and flies were banished.”

  Our father was away with his regiment; the rest of the family had migrated, as usual, to Vyra. As Uncle Ruka had elected to forgo his customary summer visit, his house at Rozhestveno lay shuttered in its park of romantic lindens and classical nymphs. From time to time I would bicycle out to the estate in order to commune with the melancholy of the place, and to miss my uncle’s inspiring presence. It was on one of those fo
rays, as I wheeled up the deserted allée toward the empty house, that I noticed, from afar, two human figures embracing on the portico. Having maneuvered the girl so that her back pressed against one of the pillars, the boy feasted on a bare shoulder that had worked free of her blouse. My first impulse was to call out to them a gentle warning that trespassing on my uncle’s property was strictly forbidden, but the instant before the words left me I realized who it was I had inadvertently surprised.

  I stopped my bicycle and stared—only for a moment, but it was a moment too long. Volodya broke off his ardors. Shoving his hands into his trouser pockets and turning from her, as she frantically adjusted her blouse and ran a hand through thick, disheveled hair, he called out to me, dispiritedly, “Oh, hello there, Seryosha.”

  No doubt my brother had chosen Rozhestveno precisely because of its remoteness from prying eyes; nonetheless I felt outraged, as if he’d chosen to violate my uncle’s estate on purpose.

  At dinner that evening, I could not help but send investigatory glances his way. On his neck a bruise no larger than a thumbprint had appeared—a rosy mark of possession, as if his flesh had been impressed by one of those vizier’s seals Uncle Ruka had once brought us from Cairo.

  Although I now resolutely avoided Rozhestveno, I stumbled upon the enamored couple with unnerving frequency throughout the rest of that rainy summer. I did not seek them out, at least not consciously—indeed, I would have said I did everything I could to avoid them—but the result was that I found them everywhere. My bicycle’s rear tire might burst, and as I attempted to patch it, they would materialize out of nowhere, strolling hand in hand, swinging their arms in unison the way I had seen peasants do. She hummed a popular gypsy ditty and he, though he cared for music not at all, would dreamily repeat the last couple of words from the end of each rhyming line.

  Or, as I walked along a deserted road, suddenly, from the brambles, preceded by a spurt of that full-throated feminine laughter I had learned to recognize, the two would emerge, flushed and jolly. Without a word, Volodya offered me a single bilberry from the basket they carried between them, and without a word I accepted. Only then did he announce, “This is my brother, in whom I am well baffled. He’s a bit odd, you see.” His girl smiled, dimpling, said her name was Valentina, and that she was much pleased to meet me. A bit of Tatar exoticism saved her features from coarseness, but then I have always been fatally indifferent to the physical charms of women, a defect not even the most modern cure could alter.

  Then came a thunderbolt from the hazy midsummer skies. Word arrived that Uncle Ruka was on his way. The very next day the Nord Express made an irregular stop at the Siverskaya station and, before the servants had had a chance to fully prepare his room (he was staying with us; Rozhestveno remained closed) my splendid relative was once again in our midst.

  I had not seen him since the domestic ruckus my ill-fated diary had kicked up several months before, though I had often longed for his company as one longs, in beleaguered circumstances, for an ally. I did not imagine anyone had written him about my plight; still, I thought our meeting in the flesh might render palpable the invisible bond between us. But in his cream-colored summer suit and customary mouse-gray spats he seemed, as he approached across the sandy drive, curiously diminished. Thanks to Father and Dr. Bekhetev, I no longer saw my uncle as an enchanting individual but as a type (his mincing walk, the gold filigree bracelet on his wrist, the gaudy carnation in his buttonhole). Despite myself, I shuddered. Dr. Bekhetev would have been pleased.

  But in the next moment he lofted a magnificent walking stick jauntily over his left shoulder, and that devil-may-care gesture suddenly swelled in me a kind of irrational pride as well as anger that anyone would dare dismiss my uncle as a mere “invert.” For if he was merely a cutout, a shadow of a man, what then was I?

  We all clamored to know what brought him northward.

  “A secret mission,” he answered, a glimmer of mischief in his eyes.

  We sat in wicker chairs on the verandah. A band of gnats shimmered in the late-afternoon sunbeams. He ate iced cherries from a bowl and sipped cassis and soda.

  “Travel no longer agrees with me,” he announced in his somewhat formal-sounding French. “I have had a most difficult time of it. Warsaw, where I made the mistake of breaking my journey for a few days, was simply crawling with urchins. Frankly, I’m exhausted. I never wish to see a young face again. Excepting yours, my dear nephews, but then, you’re my only family in the world. But how you’ve changed, Volodya. How sallow and plain you’ve grown!”

  At that he sighed, as he often did.

  At supper, my mother insisted that our guest occupy the head of the table, but he demurred, saying, “Lyova, I am but a diplomat. Your husband is a leader. In his absence, it is his son who must head the table.” With that graceful gesture he relinquished his position to his elder nephew.

  “We see so little of Volodya these days,” my mother told her brother. “He’s out at all hours, day and night. He’s of that age when he’s begun taking a greater interest in the local fauna.”

  “Still chasing butterflies, my dear boy?”

  “Nymphs,” explained my mother. Volodya stared at the tablecloth, making minute adjustments to the position of his silverware. “But it’s unkind to tease. He’s in the first flush of love, I think.”

  Uncle Ruka looked nonplussed. “Charming. Delightful,” he stuttered. “May we ask who she is?”

  “We may not,” said Volodya. “If it’s all the same.”

  Uncle Ruka daintily brushed his lips with his napkin. “Quite. I understand completely. The charm of an escapade is so often in direct proportion to its degree of furtiveness. As I know so well.”

  And then, looking my way, he winked.

  Was it possible? I had no chance to ask him, for immediately after dinner friends of my mother arrived from their nearby estate, and soon they had all settled in for a game of poker that would go very late into the night.

  “Something’s up,” Volodya muttered as the two of us climbed the stairs to our bedrooms. “I don’t like the looks of it. I believe he’s gotten himself into some kind of trouble, and he’s come here to seek Mother’s help. I’m certain of it.”

  “Uncle Ruka? What kind of trouble?” I asked.

  Volodya gave me a sidelong look and shook his head, as if to say, Don’t be stupid.

  But I was stupid, hopelessly so. I lay awake till long after the sounds of the poker game had subsided and Volodya had slipped out of the house for his nightly rendezvous. Stupidly, I waited for the soft knock at my door, my uncle gliding into the room, seating himself on the edge of my bed, tenderly stroking my knee, telling me, “There, there. No need to be afraid, mon petit. I have been told everything; I understand all.”

  But of course no one came.

  The next day our visitor slept till early afternoon. I passed the time in the music room playing, pianissimo, a number of my uncle’s songs on the old Becker grand that never wanted to stay in tune. It had been quite a while since I had last rehearsed them, and from time to time my memory failed me. Later, I drew out his walking stick from the hallway stand, admiring the blond shaft flecked with beautiful auburn blemishes and the fantastic knob of smooth coral—evidence of a stylish life of adventure and romance I could scarcely imagine, but that one day, I swore, would be mine as well.

  When at last he emerged from his bedchamber, looking more haunted than usual, I asked him how he had slept.

  “Well enough,” he muttered, “except for the interruptions of some most unheavenly music. Whatever imp commandeered the piano must really learn to play a bit more adroitly before inflicting his soi-disant melodies on others.”

  With a flick of his head he turned away. Snapping his fingers in a way that invariably distressed my father, who accused him of treating the household staff like slaves, he summoned Aleksey the butler, requesting that he, in turn, summon the young master Vladimir Vladimirovich. He wished to converse with him. When Vo
lodya appeared, looking sleep-deprived, Uncle Ruka took him by the elbow and purred, “Walk with me, my dear. I have news which will amuse you.”

  Smiling bleakly at my mother and me, he led Volodya away, his arm draped over his shoulder, while my brother did his best to shrink from the affectionate gesture. We could see them taking a turn about the orange sand path by the flowerbeds, and I was certain I could see my brother glancing desolately at the butterflies that fluttered amid the dahlias. Their conversation lasted scarcely five minutes, during which time Uncle Ruka drew my brother so close that his murmuring lips were nearly touching Volodya’s crimsoned ear.

  When released, Volodya did not flee but remained by his side. He hung his head, stuck his hands in his pockets, kicked at the sand underfoot.

  But Uncle Ruka had finished with him. “L’audience est finie,” he said briskly. “Je n’ai plus rien à vous dire. And now I must be on my way! I have just time to reach the station before the Warsaw train. I needn’t be seen off! Tsiganov can drive me. Au revoir, mes chers!”

  In the aftermath of our uncle’s visit, my brother seemed uncharacteristically subdued.

  “Volodya,” my mother asked at supper. “What on earth was all that about? What did my brother have to tell you that was so important?”

  For a long while Volodya did not speak. He toyed with a slice of roast beef on his plate. Then, without looking up, he said in a strange, strangled voice, “He’s named me his sole heir. Rozhestveno will one day be mine.”

  My mother crossed herself. “Bozhe moy! Why in Heaven’s name would he do such a thing? Basile’s only forty-four. He has years to live. Why has he tempted Fate?”

  My brother looked miserable. We all knew Fate had nothing to do with it. When a servant brought in coffee, my mother burst into tears. Not even Mademoiselle offering her licorice from the stash she always carried in her capacious handbag could calm her.