The Unreal Life of Sergey Nabokov (9 page)

 

In the weeks that followed, crudely etched graffiti linking me to infamous practices began to appear—on tree trunks, bench backs, bridge railings, even in the rainbow-glassed pavilion by the ravine. With my penknife I erased what instances I could, but like the sorcerer's apprentice, I found that my actions that afternoon had generated a cascade impossible to contain. The more I gouged and scraped, the more widely the epithets seemed to proliferate, till a walk in the woods became an accusation at every turn. I had fancied my docile muzhiks illiterate, but thanks to the village school which Uncle Ruka had endowed a few years before, it seemed they could express themselves with brutal effectiveness.

“You appear to be the target of widespread calumny,” observed my father, home for a week from his regiment. From behind the gloomy headlines of his newspaper he spoke invisibly.

I offered that I hadn't a clue to what he was talking about.

“Don't pretend you haven't noticed. Everyone else has.”

His last remark took me off guard, and I sputtered helplessly.

“What is one to make of it, I wonder?” he went on, lowering the paper to cast me a quizzical look. “Such accusations don't generally materialize out of thin air.”

“I have no idea,” I lied.

“Will you swear to me that you've not lapsed into vice? Dr.
Bekhetev seems to think you've been doing quite well. Sophie, I believe, is her name?”

A convenient fabrication the physician had easily fallen for.

“I swear,” I lied.

Father studied me coolly, as he might a not-very-convincing witness on the stand. “Well, it's a mystery to me,” he said at last. “And I have only your word of honor. But without his honor, remember, a man is nothing.”

Though for obvious reasons I was ashamed of my actions, I did not altogether regret them. I had learned far more about myself in those ten shameful minutes in a half-scythed meadow than in all my sessions with Dr. Bekhetev put together.

BY THE BEGINNING OF 1916 THE STREETS OF Petrograd, which had emptied of young men at the start of the war, were once again thronging with able-bodied fellows. I suppose I knew they were deserters, but I somehow did not comprehend what it meant that there were so many of them. The newspapers, when not censored, offered mystifying accounts of our retreat from Galicia, assuring us, “The heroic and disciplined withdrawal of the Imperial Army has effectively blocked any advance by enemy forces”—desperate euphemisms whose echo I hear daily, some quarter century later, in the crumbling Reich.

Small changes had occurred at school which made my life more bearable: two new boys had entered, Genia Maklakov and Davide Gornotsvetov. Both hailed from the newly minted class of war profiteers; as both were in revolt against their fathers, the source of their recent fortune hardly mattered to me.

A year older than I, Davide Gornotsvetov was tall, slender, with features that were dark and regular. Pleasingly long
eyelashes framed his large brown, innocent-looking eyes. He had black, curling hair, and had recently grown his sideburns long—a wonderfully louche touch. A year younger, Genia Maklakov was a slight boy with a sweet smile, short blond hair, and the limpest of handshakes. His gaze was pensive, even dolorous. In his childhood he had been perilously frail, but had since achieved a less precarious foothold in the world due to a physician-ordered regimen of cod liver oil and birch sap. Of the two, Davide was the more extravagant, and I soon began to emulate some of his braver mannerisms by wearing my scarf extra long, parting my hair
à l'anglaise
, wearing too much eau de toilette, and painting my nails with coral lacquer. In a nod to one of several shared proclivities, we dubbed ourselves The Left-Handed Abyssinians, “Abyssinian” being the kind of invention much favored by Davide.

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.”

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.