The Unreal Life of Sergey Nabokov (29 page)

We got on famously, Weldon and I, and then we no longer got on so famously. And then we no longer got on at all.

“THE JEWS HAVE PRODUCED ONLY THREE originative geniuses,” announced the grand figure seated on her throne. “Christ, Spinoza, and myself.” A sandal dangled precariously from her big toe. I watched to see if it would fall, but it did not. None of the young men seated in a semicircle around the throne seemed willing to contradict her pronouncement.

“You see, Pussy?” The regal figure addressed the small, dark woman who had admitted us. “They agree with me.”

“Lovey certainly knows very well these things she knows,” said the small dark woman.

“But what new faces are these?”

“Tchelitchew and Tanner, and another young man who is unknown to us.”

“Why yes. The Russian painter and his American friend.”

Now she peered at me. “And they have brought along an unknown young man of inscrutable intent.”

All the young men eyed me, as if eager to witness my
peremptory eviction. But Miss Stein only laughed—a cordial, infectious, mirthful cascade of notes that settled into a prolonged jolly chuckle. “Very well,” she said. “I like unknown young men, as long as they intend to become well known.”

I bowed, and haltingly introduced myself.

“Why—a stutterer! How marvelous,” Miss Stein exclaimed. “You see, I also stutter, though only on paper.” She laughed again. The young men laughed as well, though their laughter was but a pale shadow of her capacious chortle. She was massive, continental, American; they were wisps of cirrus drifting across that landscape.

Blushing, I told her I very much wished to read her work.

“No doubt you shall, one day,” she said, adding, in a rather melancholy tone, “all in good time. You see, the world's not ready just yet for my genius. Even my young men are struck half dead by it—and they're the chosen ones. But in the meantime, tell me what you are, what you do, what you dream. You must be another Russian, I presume. Where do all these Russians come from?”

I told her I gave English lessons, and the occasional Russian one. That from time to time I reviewed concerts for an émigré newspaper.

“You write about music?” She frowned.

“Yes.”

“And in Russian, I imagine.”

“Yes.”

“I see. I really don't wish to fathom Russian,” she said. “It's got the temper of saints and the tongue of bears and the sweet stench of great smoking candles. I fear it, really I do. I would compare it to a wild forest into which I might wander and be lost—and end up changed into a beast or maybe a bird.”

As that had never occurred to me, I was left momentarily tongue-tied. Her young men murmured approvingly. Evidently she took my silence for assent, or perhaps she had grown bored
with the direction our conversation had taken; in any event, she nodded toward small, dark Miss Toklas, who took me by the arm and led me to a circle of chairs in a far corner of the room, away from the charmed circle, where two fashionably dressed American ladies balanced plates of cakes in their laps and observed the imperial proceedings from afar.

“You'll be much happier here,” Miss Toklas confided.

Miss Stein, leaning forward from her throne, was telling Pavlik, “So you're our young genius. Well, well. I like young geniuses so long as they are young.”

“Don't be crestfallen,” Miss Toklas continued. “You see, Lovey thinks music is something for adolescents, and since she's fully adult, she has no need of such amusements. Here. Sit by me. I shall manage to entertain you perfectly well.”

Producing needlework from a bag by her chair, she commenced her work, all the while peppering me with questions. How did I know this Mr. Tchelitchew? What did I think of my compatriot's work? Or that of his friends? She bandied about the names of Bérard, Berman, Tonny—painters with whom Pavlik had recently been associating in exhibitions and cafés. Who was the leader of that band of young Romantics? That was what they were, weren't they? Young Romantics bent on overturning the ancien régime of Picasso and Matisse? As for Mr. Tanner: did he have any talent as a pianist? Was he the next Paderewsky or Rachmaninov? If so, why had he not gone further? Did he lack ambition? Surely Mr. Tchelitchew did not lack ambition. Miss Toklas had seen the wolf gleam in his eyes.

I answered as best I could, sensing that every word of mine would find its way back to “Lovey.” I caught the phenomenal laughter booming forth occasionally across the atelier, and Pavlik's high giggle in echo.

“Lovey so admires Mister Tchelitchew's
Basket of Strawberries
,” Miss Toklas divulged to me. “So fleshly ripe, so
refreshingly shocking, really, for plain adorable old strawberries. When she saw it in the Salon d'Automne she said immediately to me, ‘This is why there is no flower, this is why there is no flower in color, this is why there is why.' And she wondered whether there could be more where that delightful impertinence came from. We do think Mister Tchelitchew paints like one paints who paints what's real.”

Throughout our “conversation” the two American ladies had said not a word, and Miss Toklas had evinced no interest in them whatsoever. Now, taking advantage of a break in Miss Toklas's narrative, one of the ladies complimented her needlework, and asked where she had found the pattern. “It seems so unusual,” she said.

“Picasso designed it for me,” Miss Toklas told her matter-of-factly, without glancing up from her work.

The Americans—it dawned on me they were tourists drawn to the famous spectacle at 27 rue de Fleurus—looked at each other wide-eyed, as if every slight of the evening had in that instant been redeemed.

“Lovey has her business to attend to, but soon,” Miss Toklas revealed, “there will be plenty of time to mingle. I've made some cakes to be eaten, and a liqueur to taste, and soon we'll all be talking among ourselves. You must be curious who these young men are with whom you will soon be talking.

“There is Juan Gris, who is not young but who is the only true painter in the world, all the others are mere artists, and he is talking to an artist in many different ways, Monsieur Crevel, who is young and drawing and writing and living in ways that are unexpected and dangerous and inspired like driving a Ford along country lanes at much too great a speed but enjoying all the while a passionate view. There is Monsieur Bernard Fäy the professor of wit and morals who is a most indispensable presence. Mr. Anderson the American writer who is also not young but has been writing for many years in a way that is very American
and thus youthful even if no longer young. There is Elliot Paul who is also writing and is said to play the accordion like the very devil and has begun a very fine magazine which publishes only the literature of the future which is what the literature of today should be whether it is American or young or anything else. And another American who writes the music of the future which we admire but do not enjoy, his name is George Antheil, and he is always plotting his fame. They are all very musical, the modern young men of America. That one as well, Virgil Thomson. Lovey declares him a variety of apple, crisp but sweet, available for brandy-making. And finally, by the fire, Bravig Imbs, he is new to us and he aims to please, and we very much like him at the moment despite his aiming to please.”

Struck by her curious way of talking, I was uncertain whether my leg was being pulled—and that uncertainty would remain with me for all the many evenings I spent in their company.

 

My conversation with Cocteau that night in Villefranche lingered, as did that perplexing God dream I could not get out of my head. I had other dreams, which I remembered in snatches when I woke: heavenly hallucinations, indistinguishable in their way from the dreams opium fosters, and yet different, as they were not artificially induced but sprang, I fully believe, from my deepest soul. God, I was convinced, was attempting to show me something, only I was too stupid to understand.

In the wake of Weldon's disappearance from my life my smoking grew much worse. Meanwhile, Cocteau's admission of his longtime habit of ducking into churches had encouraged a recurrence of my own religious practice. I began to frequent St.-Séverin, which was in the neighborhood, but soon I ranged farther afield, to St.-Sulpice in the faubourg St.-Germain, La Madeleine in Cocteau's neighborhood, St.-Roch near the Louvre. I told no one that I had begun to pray in earnest to the nearly naked man who hangs bloodied from the cross.

St.-Roch was my favorite. Le Mercier's masterpiece. Framing the main altar was a baroque sculpture of the Nativity, Mary and Joseph flanking the infant Christ in the crib. In a stroke of theatrical genius, one's gaze was directed beyond that tableau, through an aperture, to the Calvary Chapel where the adult Christ hung crucified. As if thirty-three years were telescoped into a single instant, one took in at once the whole awful drama, from ignominious birth to ignominious death, all framed by Mary and Joseph, who leaned inward very much like two hands cupped in prayer. I do not know why this moved me as much as it did. That afternoon when I first paid a visit, I felt somehow closer to life's mystery than I had ever been—only I was still too stupid to understand. The words came to me:
For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.
I thought of Davide, of Yuri, of my father—all lovely, beloved sons, all prematurely dead, hideously tossed away. Fate. Providence. Free will. Just as in the dream, God who so loved the world asked me to understand what I had not felt capable of understanding. I gazed through tears at Christ's beautiful, broken form. I never saw Davide's corpse, but I had seen Yuri's, and Father's: undeniable evidence that they were no more, the same evidence Jesus's followers saw when they put His body in the tomb. And yet—when the women went to the tomb, it was empty. And the angel said, Why do you seek Him here? He whom you seek is not here.

Weldon had accused me of failing to come to terms with my grief. What if it were true? What if, beyond all the superficial pleasures in which I all too happily engaged, there was at my core an unassuageable grief? Grief for those I loved who had not loved me in return, grief for those whose death made our failed relationships forever irreparable, grief for Volodya, to whom I could conceivably still make amends except for our estrangement, which felt as absolute as death. Grief perhaps most of all for the self I had failed to become: the generous,
abundant, joyful self I avidly turned my back on as I longed, even now, for the pipes I would smoke when back in the tombal safety of my room.

They were not here, those whom I sought. Be they ever so battered, they were not any more battered than our Savior Himself had been when they took Him down from the cross. It was improbable, illogical, scarcely to be believed; yet without that hope—that all the dead, and all that love, would somehow live again, and forever—life as I understood it could not be borne. And I was suddenly, absolutely, irrevocably convinced, there on my knees in St.-Roch, that God would not, indeed could not, have created lives for any of us that cannot be borne.

Thus, in the fall of 1925, unbeknownst to any of my family or friends save Cocteau, who graciously agreed to be my sponsor, I began to prepare for the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults in order that I might, at Easter, be received into the sacraments of the Holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church. Weekly I attended a course of instruction with a gentle and most sympathetic priest at St.-Séverin who encouraged me to pray to Mary, the blessed Mother of God, for guidance and assistance.

“We say, ‘From Mary, straight to Jesus,'” he counseled. “Your friends and family may fall away, but Mary remains your most steadfast ally and advocate.”

When eventually I addressed her in prayer, I felt a remarkable sensation, which I find difficult to describe even now, for no sooner had I begun my prayer than three images sprang into my heart. The first was La Karsavina as she knelt in the vast cathedral before the Icon of Our Lady of Kazan, offering up to God her gratitude, her devotion, her sublime artistry. The second was my mother, kneeling to kiss the dark earth at Vyra—an act she performed each summer when we arrived in the countryside. The third was myself, in abject gratitude at having been returned safely to earth, courtesy of Hugh Bagley, after my ascent into the heavens over Somerset.

ON A BLUSTERY AFTERNOON NOT LONG BEFORE Easter, on the boul' Mich, where I had been browsing among the secondhand bookstores, a taxicab pulled up to the curb beside me. I paid it no heed, I walked on, it kept pace with me, then a voice called in Russian, “Hey, you there, don't you want a ride, Nabokov?”

I turned and looked at the driver, whose voice I had recognized with a dreadful thrill. Oleg Danchenko's face was fuller and coarser than it used to be; a nasty scar marred his forehead, just above his left eyebrow, but his gold-flecked eyes remained undimmed.

“
Bozhe moy
!” I cried. “Is it really you?”

“In the flesh. Come on and hop in. Where are you going?”

“Nowhere in particular,” I told him.

“Still stuttering, I see. Well, no matter. Let's go nowhere, then. Let's sit at a table and drink some wine and catch up for a bit. How's that sound? Are you glad to see me?”

“Delighted, actually,” I told him in all honesty. “I'd no idea
you were here. Why haven't our paths crossed?”

He appraised my tweeds, courtesy of Weldon's still-recent largesse. “I don't imagine we move in the same set,” he said. “I'm in the taxi all the time, except when it's in the garage, which is too bloody often. I spend half my hard-earned pay keeping her running. But what can a fellow do? I'm obligated to keep the wife in a style she's accustomed to, don't you know?”