The Unreal Life of Sergey Nabokov (10 page)

“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.

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 choreographer'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.

“That's beautiful, Volodyushka,” Yuri told him. “But you know poetry's beyond a simple soldier like me. These days I know only duty, fearlessness, honor.”

How unaccountable that Yuri and my brother could be friends! And yet they shared an affinity I could only envy. When I thought of Davide and Genia, they all at once seemed grotesquely insubstantial compared to this young man of the wider world.

I cheered myself up by mentally enumerating the qualities Yuri and I shared. We were both squeamish about insects. We both loved music, though Yuri's love was limited to tzigane melodies and martial flourishes. We were both indifferent chess players. All that distinguished us from Volodya. If those two were as different as night and day, weren't we as similar as dusk and dawn? Why should not Yuri and Sergey be friends, rather than Yuri and Volodya?

His ongoing talk quelled my idle thoughts. “Duty, fearlessness, honor, those three abide, but of those honor is the greatest. Without honor one does not live, one merely exists.”

“Some might say the same about love,” Volodya observed.

“No.” Yuri was adamant. “Honor above all else. Honor above all in loyalty to the Tsar, to Holy Mother Russia, to the Russian Orthodox Church and its seven blessed
mysteria
.”

“Please.” Volodya popped a cherry into his mouth. “You're
speaking platitudes. I, on the other hand, only wish to live in the details. When I write a poem, I don't write about Love with a capital L; no, I attempt to describe the very particular love I feel for a very particular girl, or for a landscape, or a memory—whatever it is I'm writing about. I strive to do so with the same precision with which a lepidopterist might describe a hitherto unknown butterfly he has nabbed on the wing in some obscure Kazakh or New England meadow. Not just any butterfly, mind you; one particular butterfly.”

“But what about classification?” asked Yuri. “Aren't there species, not just individuals? Besides, there's so much in our lives that's simply indescribable. Wouldn't you agree?”

“Nothing's indescribable. To hold that the world's indescribable—well, there lies futility, despair, defeat, all those things I refuse to have anything to do with. The universe is most certainly describable—its designer would have it no other way. And I think it's our duty to engage that intricate task of description—but then we're intricate creatures ourselves, don't you think? Or at least some of us are. I don't mean the common idiot in the street, the man who thinks that giving bread to everyone and flying red banners and turning the factories over to the workers and that sort of rot will solve anything. I mean those of us blessed with the ability to puzzle out the puzzle, so to speak: those of us grateful for that gift, and honor-bound—here's your true honor, Yuri—to make use of it.”

“That's very well put,” Yuri conceded. “I agree with all you've said. And yet, we who defend with our swords and bayonets your ability to puzzle out the puzzle in peace, aren't we to be valued as well? The Tsar may be of no interest to you whatsoever, but it's his Empire that allows you the freedom to nab your butterflies and compose your poems and solve your infernal chess problems, and, I daresay, fall in love with that particular girl. I fear all that will go by the wayside should Bolshevik instability ever prevail.”

“The poet travels lightly,” returned Volodya. “He'll always manage to go on doing what he does.”

How grown up we sounded, as we ate cherries, sipped tea from the samovar whose magical warmth the servants kept renewing. What did
they
think of our talk? Did they think anything, or only long for bed? Where were my muzhiks from the scythed field of last summer? Had they been sent off to war? Were they giving each other miserable comfort in a gore-splattered trench somewhere? Were they lying dead and unburied in some muddy field? Or were they among the throngs of deserters who filled Petrograd, and on whom the Bolsheviks were said to prey? It grieved me not to know such simple, human things about the world I lived in. The puzzle had far too many pieces; whenever I attempted to focus my thoughts on the whole, it dispersed before my eyes.

Yuri turned to me. “And what do
you
believe, O silent one?”

In the light of the spirit lamp his gray eyes met my own and held there—as if, after long hiatus, he had mysteriously elected to kiss me once more on the lips.

“I don't know,” I confessed. “I only know what I value. Friendship and beauty. I value those far more than honor itself. The love of a friend for a f—” I stalled humiliatingly on that final “friend.”

Yuri laughed. “Sorry,” he said. “That was rude of me. One mustn't make fun of someone's impediment.”

“The sound of an argument running aground,” murmured Volodya. “Seryosha's usually silent for a reason.”

My stutter had once again made comical the most serious of moments. Nonetheless I forged on, much to my brother's eye-rolling impatience.

“There's fearlessness of all sorts in the world,” I said. “Soldiers have it, and explorers, and poets, no doubt, but especially lovers. There. That's what I believe. I'd die for my friend.”

“Who's this friend?” Yuri asked—whether tenderly or mockingly I could not tell. “And is he a friend or a lover? You seem to confuse the two terms, which in my book are quite distinct.”

“I've not yet met him,” I said, ignoring for the moment his quibble, which really seemed beside the point, but all the while, to my surprise, sustaining his gaze. How lustrous his eyes were, how grave and thoughtful his expression.