The Unreal Life of Sergey Nabokov Read online

  The Stray Dog café, hallowed by the likes of Ahkmatova and Mandelstam, Stanislavsky and Meyerhold, had recently been shut down by the Tsar’s police, but other cafés had opened in its place around the city, usually tucked away in dank cellars where the air was thick with the odor of tobacco smoke and overflowed toilets. We became habitués of several, the Red Jingle and the Crystal Petal among them, and would spend hours sipping Turkish coffee (or, in Genia’s case, almond milk) and smoking Egyptian cigarettes. We gossiped wickedly about our fellow schoolmates and teachers, whom we scorned, or about the theater, which we adored.

  Like our mother, Volodya had no ear for music—he insisted it bored and irritated him; thus from an early age I had regularly accompanied my father to the opera, of which he was a passionate devotee. I cherished the vigorous postmortems we conducted in the carriage ride home from the Maryinsky. I vividly remember a shattering performance of Die Walküre, after which he tried to warn me off the suspect allure of Wagner.

  Now that his regiment was at the front, however, it was my new friends who joined me in our subscription box, and it was owing to Davide that I discovered another theatrical pleasure against which my father had long tried to prejudice me. “Ballet isn’t art,” he was fond of saying. “It’s a toy, no better than a Fabergé egg, and we know how tasteless those are, despite the Romanovs’ enthusiasm for them.”

  Davide, however, wore the badge of balletomane fervently. Having only contempt for the staid set of subscribers who peopled the boxes and stalls, he preferred the upper standing-room gallery of the Maryinsky, called “paradise” by its habitués. Opera from the subscription box was all very well, but ballet demanded something different. From him I learned rituals. First, there was the business of purchasing a ticket—which, for paradise, could only be done the day of the performance. I had never in my life stood in a box office queue; now I grew accustomed to waiting with a hundred or more bleary-eyed ballet-omanes on a cold street at dawn, all of us clasping ourselves tightly and stamping our feet to keep warm while around us the city awakened, limbless veterans and child-encumbered gypsy mothers staking out their spots for the day’s round of begging, a mounted detachment of the Imperial Guard making its way toward the Winter Palace, shopkeepers sweeping last night’s snow from before their doors.

  How strange it felt to pass by my family’s box on the bel étage and climb the narrowing stairs toward paradise. The chandeliers, unnervingly close at hand, glittered; far below, the audience, perhaps less stylish than before the war, nonetheless filled the hall to capacity. With a sweet ache in my heart I watched the dancers sail across the stage, witnessed the holy simplicity of human gesture highlighted, drawn out, lovingly adored, reluctantly relinquished.

  The reigning goddess that season was Tamara Karsavina. At each of her appearances, paradise erupted in cries that seemed, in their prolongation, almost like wounds asking to be healed. None called out more longingly or for longer than Davide. My father would have been scandalized, but I cheered as well, with all my might. When the curtain closed for the last time, the boxes and stalls slowly emptied, the musicians packed away their instruments, but we in paradise remained in place, still roaring, “Brava, bravissima, La Karsavina!”

  But there was a final ritual to be enacted, as important as the purchase of a ticket that had begun the day. At the rear of the theater a small crowd would gather at the stage door. Dancers made their way past us to a scattering of applause. Fokine and entourage brushed by and into a waiting landau. Still we waited, and then she appeared, looking surprisingly frail. Around her shoulders she had draped an old, many-colored shawl, as if she had left her real selfbehind on the stage and were now in disguise. No cheer assailed her; rather, as she passed, each man bowed silently in homage. I too made my bow. She smiled sweetly, accepted a sheaf of white roses. She was accustomed to this; it was as much a part of the evening’s performance as anything else. Often, after conferring with her driver, she waved him on without her. Then, readjusting her shawl to cover her head, she set out on foot, alone, her small figure slowly receding into the vast emptiness of the moonlit square.

  As our étoile in mufti made her leisurely way solo down Kazanskaya Street, we followed at a respectable distance. When La Karsavina paused, we paused. She examined a set of patriotic prints in a shop window, dropped a coin into the outstretched hand of a pensioner. Standing in a circle of light cast by a streetlamp, she studied the clutter of posters on a kiosk—one of which featured herself, in alluring profile.

  When she entered the Cathedral of Our Lady of Kazan we entered as well, loitering inconspicuously behind the pink granite columns as she made her way down the dim nave to kneel before the jewel-encrusted icon of the Mother of God, the very same icon by which General Kutuzov had defeated Napoleon’s armies. Lighting a votive candle, she remained for a time motionless, head bowed in veneration and prayer.

  My family was religious only in a sentimental sense, attending services at Christmas and Easter, celebrating name days, but otherwise steering clear of the claustrophobic grandeur of Russian Orthodoxy. As a child I would mumble an automatic prayer to Jesus before going to bed; whether that habit, long since atrophied, had been established under the auspices of my mother or one of our many governesses, I can no longer recall. And on my bedroom wall still hung an icon of a stern-looking, emaciated saint, to whom I paid scarcely any notice other than thinking that he looked in need of some medical attention.

  To witness the prima ballerina assoluta brought to stillness, in absolute submission to one greater than herself, was to understand that this was a self even more real than that brilliant creature who awed us at the Maryinsky. The moment went through my heart, a revelation out of the reach of mere words, but which would, one day, change my life entirely.

  At last she rose, and her secret escort scattered into the ample shadows of the deserted cathedral to allow her to pass undisturbed. When she had regained the chill freedom of the outdoors, we regrouped and discreetly followed her through the uneasy city to her brightly lit mansion in Millionaya Street.

  One night, our entourage having seen Karsavina safely home, I left my companions to catch their respective trams. Wandering home alone, I noted a figure approaching along the street.

  Hands thrust in the pockets of his short jacket, cheeks flushed with the cold, Oleg Danchenko strode toward me. Nearly a year had passed since my mad attempt to woo him with an ancient bottle of Tokay, and my new friends had changed my circumstances for the better—but how my heart leapt at this fortuitous encounter.

  “Well, well, well,” he said, coming to a halt in front of me. “If it isn’t Nabokov. Fancy that. Still wandering the streets as of old. Is that all you know how to do with yourself? What crime are you guilty of this time around?”

  Startled though not unpleased by his familiar air, I had difficulty stammering out a response.

  Taking me by the arm, he steered me around a corner before I had time even to consider the situation. The night was supernaturally clear; cold moonlight cast vivid shadows. Shoving me against a wall, he pinned me with his arms, thrusting his face inches from mine; I could smell caraway on his hot breath, but I do not think he was drunk. Gratefully I breathed in his scent. I have been afraid many times in my life, but I was not afraid then.

  “Do you still want what you used to want?” he whispered. “Answer me, because I know full well what you wanted. I’m no fool, Nabokov. You’ve had designs on me all along.”

  Protest was futile, really. We were alone in an alley that backed up to one of the frozen canals. The boulevard beyond was empty. No windows looked down on us. Grabbing my wrist, he guided my hand to the buttons of his trousers. His forwardness took my breath away.

  I leaned my head into his shoulder. “Manual release, if you please,” he implored—hoarsely, so that I had to wonder whether he was accustomed to speaking to some valet or servant boy that way. “Now, be quick about it. I don’t want to be freezing my jewels in this cold.”
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  I complied, my fingertips memorizing that smooth shaft, my fist gripping tightly the imperial wand. When, with requisite swiftness, I had accomplished the asked-for favor, I marveled at the pearly residue clinging to the curve of my forefinger and thumb, how it steamed in the cold air.

  Having stuffed his “jewels” back into his trousers, with incongruous courtesy he held out a handkerchief meant to dab that magical trace of him from my flesh—which, reluctantly, I did.

  “See?” he observed. “That was jolly, wasn’t it? An old Ukrainian pastime. Nothing to it. But one day, Nabokov—mark my word—I’ll have you bend over for me. You’d fancy that, wouldn’t you? But you’ll have to wait for it, you know. You’ll have to wait till I’m good and ready. Besides, I see you’ve gathered together a charming little menagerie of cata-mites. Have you poked them yet? I’m sure they’re dying for a touch of it. Tell them Oleg will oblige. But only when he’s good and ready.”

  I hadn’t thought him drunk before, but now I was no longer sure—nor, it seemed, as we stumbled into the street, was the driver of a lone droshky that had just rounded the corner.

  “Gentlemen, gentlemen, are you hammered?” called out the muffled-up driver, clearly no stranger to that condition himself.

  Oleg clapped me on the shoulder. “Hammered?” he shouted to the driver, to me, to the sham of a city sleeping under moonlight. “More like schoolboy games. Old times’ sake, you know.” He laughed uproariously, a thigh-pounding guffaw.

  I said nothing, and the droshky left us. It occurred to me that, in strictly clinical terms, I had lapsed badly. I had betrayed my father, Dr. Bekhetev, myself. Where was the note of triumph I had felt only minutes before? I saw Oleg quite clearly as he was—a bully and tormentor, a creature entirely unworthy of my esteem. Then he smiled at me, and my certainty melted but for a moment.

  “I must go,” I told him, adding, “My parents will worry.”

  “Till we meet again,” he said. Without a word, angry now, I turned and walked away from him. I noted with disappointment that he did not call out, or make a move to follow me. Indeed, he seemed willing to relinquish his prey without a trace of regret.

  But I was mistaken. Without warning came a blow to the back of my head, an Apache whoop as he knocked my cap askew and dashed past me. The force of his assault caused me to stumble; I fell face forward onto the wooden pavement blocks and cried out in pain. He doubled back and stood over me, panting merrily, as I struggled to sit up.

  I was reluctant to take his outstretched hand. “No hard feelings,” he urged. Against my better judgment I allowed him to pull me to my feet.

  “You’re hurt,” he said, reaching out to touch my cheekbone.

  I told him it was nothing.

  “I didn’t mean to hurt you,” he said.

  It was nothing, I repeated.

  “I’ll see you to your door, then,” he offered, and I did not decline; despite the throbbing in my cheek I was grateful that he linked his arm in mine. When he left me at my front door, he kissed my forehead. The expression on his face was wondrous.

  “I love a touch of blood” was the last thing he said to me.

  10

  WHAT A SIGHT WE MUST HAVE BEEN, WE LEFT-Handed Abyssinians parading three abreast down the Nevsky Prospect on one of those mild blue afternoons when the ice in the Neva was splitting asunder with the explosive spring thaw and the gauzy light out over the Bay of Finland made beauty of distance. The smart click of our three walking sticks on the wooden pavements, our elegant spats, our carefully lacquered fingernails, the crimson carnation each of us wore in his buttonhole reminded the world that we too had thawed from our long winter.

  People would stop and stare; sometimes a half-sober droshky driver would whistle provocatively, or some of the street boys engaged in poaching water-logged timber from a canal would shout obscenities. We did not mind, any more than if we had played the part of some villainous character in an opera by Donizetti or Rossini. Occasionally we would meet my brother coming from the opposite direction with his Valentina on his arm, the two of them looking elegant and miserable, their lips stung from kisses snatched in the far reaches of public parks or the unfrequented rooms of minor museums, their eyes languorous and melancholy, and somehow I knew that what had blossomed the previous summer had not survived the long, cold winter. I did not pity him, though I wondered, as he gave me and my gay companions the skeptical once-over, whether he, misguidedly, pitied me.

  Perhaps inevitably there came the day when I confessed to Davide that I was in love with him. I believe I mumbled something like, “You matter rather dreadfully to me, you know.”

  We had been lingering, just the two of us, in Peto’s, the English store on the Nevsky Prospect, though we were too old for most of its offerings. For weeks I had dared myself to say those words which, now that I had said them, astonished me by their boldness.

  He had been handling a rice-paper and balsa-wood model of an aquatic biplane, not unlike the Voisin Hydravion Uncle Ruka had once crashed in. His response was tart and to the point: “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “But why may I not say it, or at least believe it?” I asked him, cheeks aflame.

  “If you do, moy dushka, then you are dreadfully deluded. Please, in the future refrain from such macabre admissions. They ruin the otherwise agreeable mood.”

  I asked him if he thought the present mood agreeable.

  “Oh, absolutely. But let’s not sully it with anything so untoward as, well, let’s just call them the baser impulses. It’s so much pleasanter not to, don’t you agree? Besides, it would be nice to have one friend with whom one hasn’t squandered everything.”

  I told him I hadn’t anything base in mind at all.

  “Exactly,” he said. “Will you buy me this aeroplane? I do fancy it.”

  “What would you do with it?”

  “I’d look at it and think of you,” he told me.

  I hazarded the observation that he could look at me anytime he wanted.

  “One day you’ll no longer know me,” he said, guiding the plane in loops and barrel rolls. “You’ll drop me as if I were contagious.”

  “Why would I ever do that?”

  He looked at me with the saddest expression I had ever seen on anyone’s face. “There’s much about me you don’t know.”

  “Then tell me.”

  “Ah, yes. But that’s the point. There’s much I don’t want you to know.”

  The aeroplane’s pointless flight was beginning to annoy me, so I grabbed his wrist and maneuvered a landing on the countertop, whereupon I informed him that he was acting very peculiarly toward someone who had just expressed a frank and simple affection for him.

  That made him laugh. He peered at me from under half-closed eyelids. “Imagine,” he said, “a pas de deux featuring two ballerinas. How tragic and ridiculous. And when one of the ballerinas has dark secrets she wishes no one to know, well, let’s leave it at that.”

  I told him he maddened me. What dark secrets was he concealing? Why did he talk like that? “It’s all very well to adopt a glamorous pose,” I told him.

  “You’re right,” he said. “I don’t need this aeroplane after all. What was I thinking? When my ruin comes, as it must, I shan’t be allowed aeroplanes or anything else by which to remember all that I loved.”

  I told him I found his words mysterious, even dreadful.

  “That’s what I am. A woman of dreadful mystery.”

  I reminded him he was no woman. He sighed and declared that, no, he was very much a man.

  As we emerged from Peto’s, he took my arm. “What a close call that was,” he said. “But my spirits are now very high—appallingly, inexplicably, ravishingly high. Thank you, darling. Thank you.”

  That night I dreamt I was called before God. The setting aped, more or less, the Cathedral of Our Lady of Kazan, and God Himself resembled, more or less, Fokine as I had glimpsed him at the rear door of the Maryinsky, though instead of the choreographe
r’s fur coat and astrakhan cap, He wore the regimental uniform of my father. I had difficulty understanding His speech—His accent was a bit garbled, rather like Old Church Slavonic—but I gathered He wished to apologize. “When I made you,” He confessed, “I had run out of souls, and so, you see, I filled you with something that resembled a soul but that was not, alas, a real soul. Only a very clever facsimile. I cannot tell you how sorry I am to have to report this, but there is nothing to be done. All your deepest emotions may seem real to you, but they are nonetheless counterfeit. I regret My mistake, Seryosha, but even God cannot undo His mistakes.”

  Too soon, summer arrived. Never before had I felt so wrenched from my cosmopolitan habits for the sake of desolate rural pleasures. Davide and Genia remained in town, though they bemoaned the capital’s aestival listlessness almost as much as I did the countryside’s. We all longed for September and the resumption of the theater season.

  Yuri Rausch’s arrival at Vyra in late July provided the summer’s only diversion. I had not seen my cousin in two years. The lanky, gray-eyed boy had filled out into a robust young man. A little mustache accented his upper lip. The smart uniform of an officer’s training academy sheathed him becomingly.

  Forgotten entirely was that impulsive kiss Maurice the Mustanger had bestowed on Louise Poindexter. A new seriousness informed us. As he and I and Volodya sat on the verandah late into the night, long after Mother and her friends had retired from their poker game and Father and Dr. Bekhetev had smoked their last cigar, Yuri spoke of the war effort, the Tsar’s bravery at the front, the danger posed by Rasputin’s influence on the Tsarina. We were sixteen, seventeen, nineteen—no longer the children we had been.

  Volodya remained indifferent. “What do those ridiculous puppets matter? Here’s the real news of the day,” he said, proceeding to recite to us a poem he had composed, an accomplished, slightly chilly imitation of Blok.