The Unreal Life of Sergey Nabokov (5 page)

“To our exile,” he toasted. “Life on the lam!”

He had a way of talking that made me suspect he had not grown up in St. Petersburg; he confirmed that his family owned several estates near Dnepropetrovsk. I confessed to hardly knowing where that was. Abbazia, Biarritz, Wiesbaden I knew well, but I had never traveled in Russia much beyond our country estates fifty miles to the south. “Your bread comes from the Ukraine,” Oleg told me proudly. “Your bread comes from my father's fields.” He missed those fields, but the death from typhus of his mother and sister, two years before, had convinced his father to send him to the capital in order to “acquire luster,” as he put it. He lived rather unhappily with his mother's sister's family near the Smolny Convent.

I, in turn, spoke of my father, who, ever since my meeting with Gonishev, had been much on my mind, and whose reaction to the day's events I dreaded. It seemed important to develop a line of thought in which my father would sympathize instinctively with his rebellious son. Thus, as we devoured the delicious pirozhkis the waiter kept delivering to our table, I revealed to Oleg my father's own revolutionary impulses. He had defiantly published certain articles that had dismayed the Tsar. At an imperial banquet he had declined to lift his glass to the despot's health. On being expelled from the court, he had had the cheek to advertise his uniform for sale. After the dissolution of the Duma, he and his fellow Cadets had held illegal meetings, in consequence of which he had been imprisoned for a time.

All the usual words presented all the usual impediments, but Oleg sat patiently, occasionally brushing away with the back of his cuff a succulent crumb that adhered to the corner of his mouth.

When I had finished he asked, “But aren't the Cadets a rather frightfully unpatriotic bunch?”

It had failed to occur to me that confiding too much in this perfect stranger might be foolish.

“My father stands firm against tyranny,” I told him, though
tyranny
, as is tyranny's wont, resisted my tongue's attempt to name it.

“And
my
father has rather different notions, thank God,” Oleg said when finally I'd prevailed. He examined his palm, rubbing a finger across it as if to erase something vexing he saw there. When he looked up, however, he was once again smiling. “What does it matter? We both know everything will go on just as it is, everybody arguing this way and that. Only, I must say, with the war on, it seems rather churlish to criticize the government. I only wish I were older. Then the
Boches
would have to watch out.”

I hadn't the heart to convey to him, so shiningly brave did he seem, my father's sense that the war was already going very badly for Russia.

Our grand luncheon at an end, my new friend suggested a movie might suit the remainder of the afternoon. Only a day before, I told myself, this happiness would have been unthinkable.

Of that all-too-brief movie claiming the final stretch of an all-too-brief afternoon, I have no real memory. What I instead remember, even to this day, is Oleg's occasional hearty chuckle at the antics onscreen, the palpable warmth of his body next to mine, its drowsy odor of biscuits and champagne, the steady sound of his breathing. Across his profile I could see the play of light and shadow as the projected beam of the movie was reflected off the screen and back onto him. The orb of his entranced eye was luminous and moist, and I could not help but remember how once, when Volodya had got a speck of cinder in his eye, Uncle Ruka told him that the Egyptians, who were well acquainted with sandstorms, would volunteer the tip of a tongue to remove the offending mote.

Cautiously I slid my arm across the armrest till it touched Oleg's. The slight pressure I exerted was returned. For several exciting minutes we sent furtive tactile signals back and forth.
But what did they mean? Did I dare expand upon my presumption, however slight? Was Oleg conscious of intent, or was it all simply reflexive playfulness on his part, like good-natured jostling in the courtyard?

Soon enough I had my answer. He laid his hand on my thigh. Heavy and opulent, for a long moment it merely rested there, as if its placement were entirely accidental. But then gradually it came to life, massaging my thigh with increasing vigor and expanding, exploratory zeal. In the space of a skipped heartbeat I had reciprocated, and with my inveterate, incurable left hand palpated through cumbersome woolen trousers his own firm loins.

How extraordinary! Nearly thirty years have passed, and I can hardly convey the utter calm beneath the nervous excitement, the sense of having arrived somewhere unexpected yet foreordained. As the cinematic ghosts before us enacted their infinitely repeatable destinies, we two madcap lads stroked and petted and caressed—not so much with sexual urgency as with indolent contentment, more the way one might fondle a cat one cradles than a lover one intends to arouse. It was all, after its fashion, entirely innocent.

“Well,” said my companion when the final silver hallucination had faded from the screen. “I must say, life seems a most peculiar thing, don't you think?”

We are always taking leave—of a person, an emotion, a landscape, a way of life. Music and dance, the arts I have loved the most: what are they if not an enhanced enactment of continuous leave-taking, the passing note or the daring leap vanishing before one's eyes but living on in the heart? On the wind-bitten corner of Morskaya and Voznesensky streets, by the bleak little square with its statue of Nikolay I, Steerforth held out his ungloved hand. Copperfield returned the gesture by gratefully sheathing Steerforth's in both of his. Whether Copperfield drew Steerforth into the briefest of embraces or whether Oleg
was inclined that way without my urging I cannot say, but the bright tear glistening in his eye when we broke apart could hardly, I think, have been caused by the stinging wind alone.

“For a pair of outlaws we've been brilliant,” he observed.

Not trusting myself to speak, I could only nod mutely. Oleg bestowed on me, one last time, that unforgettable smile.

I watched his figure disappear down the darkening street. He did not look back.

Our front door's stained-glass tulip glowed from the light within. As Ustin removed my overcoat, he warned me sotto voce that the household had been in an uproar ever since Volkov had returned midafternoon with Vladimir and no Sergey, and the shocking news that the well-behaved son had been sent down.

Upon seeing me, my mother cried out, “Seryosha, are you ill? Are you starved and frostbitten? Come here, come here.”

Father intervened. “Let us go into the study.”

“But he must be famished,” my mother implored.

“No supper for this one,” Father said. “He knows full well what he's been up to.”

But did I? As I followed him up the stairs, it occurred to me how deliriously unconscious I had been of any consequences that might come my way. For half a day I had floated free of the world. Now nothing remained but to give an account of myself, which I did freely, omitting little save my enchanting indiscretions as I sat next to Oleg Danchenko in the cinema.

“What a peculiar stunt to have pulled,” Father said when I had finished. He toyed with an ivory paper knife he had picked up from his desk. “May I ask if any of this is related to your difficulties at your previous school? I had hoped a change of venue and regimen might act as a curative to those childish foibles. We can't have you endlessly shuffled about from school to school. You must learn to live in the world as it is, however difficult that may be for you.”

“I understand,” I said, though I must say I did not.

I would very much like to report that, upon returning to school two weeks later, my reunion with Oleg went swimmingly, that I loved and was loved, but this was not to be. Several days passed before I saw Oleg again. Perhaps his suspension had lasted longer than mine; perhaps his Ukrainian outspokenness had prevented him from penning an apology as obsequiously effective as mine had been. I never knew. When I did see him at last, he was standing with his friends in the courtyard and smoking a cigarette in an uncanny replay of that fateful moment two weeks before. He did not notice me, engaged as he was in entertaining his pals with some amusing anecdote. As I approached, my heart trembling with joy, I caught his words. What a fright they gave me! Indeed, for a long terrible instant I refused to believe what I heard.

Oleg was stuttering. His exaggerated attempt to fight his way past a consonant's obstacle met with great hilarity all around. Finally, with an explosion of relief, he managed to utter the troublesome word: “T-t-tyranny!”

Then, in a perfectly normal voice, his own, he announced, “And now, this is Nabokov tipsy on champagne and trying to eat a piroshki.”

Ilya, whom I always thought a decent sort, had by then noticed my approach and was attempting, by frantic gesticulations, to alert Oleg, who would not be interrupted. Finally, eyes bulging in desperation, Ilya called out, “Sergey ahoy.”

Oleg turned to face me.

Affection, sadness, apology, shame, disdain: how I tried to understand what I saw in those treacherous, gold-flecked eyes.

“I AM FIERCELY IN LOVE WITH OLEG'S SOUL,”
Father read aloud in a scornful voice. “
How I love its harmonious proportions, the joy it has in living. My blood throbs, I melt like a schoolgirl, and he knows this and I have become repulsive to him and he does not conceal his disgust. Oh, this is just as fruitless as falling in love with the moon!
”

Father put down the diary. “Remarkably silly stuff, wouldn't you agree?” he said.

It was my brother who had discovered my furtive pages—quite by accident. Having read my inflamed words, he showed the diary to our tutor, who immediately conveyed it to Father.

“I don't suppose it's particularly well written,” I admitted.

“Style is hardly the point here, Seryosha. There are sentiments so deplorable that no beautiful words can redeem them. So you fancy yourself in love with this fellow Oleg?”

“I'm writing a novel in the style of Bely. These are notes I was assembling.”

Father slammed his fist against the pages lying open on his
desk. “Don't play me for a fool, Seryosha.”

“I can be a most convincing liar,” I said.

Father pierced me with a disdainful look.

“All right. I intended these words for no one but myself. But even had I never written them, I would have felt the emotions all the same.”

Father's look of disdain softened. “I've long known,” he said, and now his tone was melancholy, “of an inclination, in both your mother's bloodline and my own, toward this defect. I'd hoped my offspring might escape, but that is apparently not to be.”

“I fail to understand the defect to which you refer,” I told him stubbornly. That my most cherished emotions might constitute a defect had never occurred to me.

Father cleared his throat, hesitated, and then said, in a pained tone, “I am speaking of your uncle Ruka.”

“But there's nothing wrong with Uncle Ruka,” I protested.

“Seryosha. Your Uncle Ruka may be charming—indeed, in his way, very charismatic—but I am afraid he is
au fond
a lonely and pitiable soul. His ridiculous conversion to Roman Catholicism represents, I fear, but his latest attempt to expiate the depraved pleasures to which his flesh must occasionally yield. I would not wish anyone to go through life enduring such torment as your uncle has. Or my brother Konstantin, for that matter. To see souls condemned to such a life is almost enough to make one doubt the existence of a benign deity. Were I to allow this tendency to go unchecked in my own son, I would be as criminally negligent in the execution of my love for him as I would were I to ignore in him the life-threatening symptoms of typhus or tuberculosis.

“How does Pushkin so bitterly put it? ‘To joke with love is Satan's way.' By no means should you accept this evil jest visited upon you. The human will is capable of mounting a
defense against any number of humiliations. To that end I've retained the services of my trusted friend Dr. Bekhetev, who, having availed himself of the latest scientific knowledge, will attempt—nay, let us say
effect—
a cure. I would ask you, as a man of honor, as my dearly beloved son, to accept his help. If not for my sake, then for your dear mother's. In the meantime, I'd prefer to keep these pages in my possession. I hope you'll have no occasion in the future to repeat this error. Do you have any questions?”

“I've none,” I told him.

He flipped through my pages one last time before depositing the violated diary in the desk drawer where he also, according to prying Volodya, kept a loaded Browning revolver. Did he realize that in confiscating those paltry confessions he was acting like a man who, upon waking to find his bed on fire, tosses the culprit cigarette out the nearest window? In retrospect, I think we both knew perfectly well the futility of his gesture.