The Unreal Life of Sergey Nabokov (31 page)

For the first time since my arrival, I heard Mother make a sound that could almost be construed as laughter.

The only other time she came fully to life was when I brought up
Mary
. “Isn't it beautiful?” she enthused. “I wept when I read it. How very proud his father would be.”

I mentioned that I found it curious that the hero, though only sixteen, appears entirely unattached, as if he has no family at all.

“Oh, your brother's very discreet. I suspect he felt reluctant to bring us into it.”

I did not mention my other misgivings.

When, with some trepidation, I told her about my conversion she nodded vaguely. “Yes,” she said, “we all seek what comfort there is.
My
great comfort is that I was once so very happy. Unlike others, I don't look forward to Paradise as a hope; I gaze back on it as a fact.”

 

My second visit that summer took me to England; first to Uncle Kostya, whose ever-worsening finances had forced him to leave his rooms in Kensington for cheap digs in Battersea. Nonetheless, I found him in as cheerful a mood as I had ever seen him. Not once did he talk bitterly of German Jews and their Bolshevik puppets, nor did he rehearse the many slights and disappointments he had endured. On several occasions he referred cryptically to a young lieutenant in the Royal Engineers, stationed at Aldershot. I left London without ever meeting the lieutenant, though I was shown his handsome photograph, which had taken its place among the other handsome photographs, most
dating from the happy years during which my uncle had been posted to India, long before everything fell apart.

After London I nipped down to Somerset to pay a brief visit to Hugh Bagley, who had remained a faithful and affectionate correspondent over the years. I found him living the sort of unhurried idyll only possible in the English countryside. Married life had clearly agreed with him, and though he had added a half stone or so, he was handsomer than ever. Filling out the bucolic scene were the plumpish, merry-eyed wife (Lucinda of the Morris-Stanhopes), two cherubic little girls, and three rambunctious border collies.

As our time together at Cambridge had been so uncomplicated, I felt nothing but happiness for Hugh's present happiness. During a stroll along the river, he alluded to our old times together freely and without regret.

“Still,” he said, “one grows out of such youthful fun, into greater responsibilities.”

“I
haven't grown out of it,” I protested. “Nor do I imagine I ever will. For some of us it's not a passing fancy.”

“But don't you wish, sometimes, for the comfort of a wife, children—the knowledge that at the end of the day you've done your bit to continue the family name?”

“As long as the human race continues, I suppose I'm content. I've never felt my own particular blood was anything special.”

“Forget the future, then. I still heartily recommend married life to any man. I never knew what joy women could bring till I married my beloved. Out of my absolutely undying affection for you, I wish you the same joy, Sergey. Really, I do.”

“Oh, you're just weak-minded,” I teased him. “You've been booted out of Plato's army, and for good reason.”

Playfully he shoved me. I shoved him back. One thing led to another—all in jest—and soon enough we were grappling like schoolboys till he tripped on a rhododendron root, gripped my arm to catch his fall, and suddenly we had both plunged down
the muddy bank and into the shallow waters of the Frome.

He was not the least bit upset. Instead he whooped like an Apache—the old captivating Hugh I remembered so well—vigorously splashing me as I spattered him back. We stood in three feet of turbid water, facing each other, panting, grinning.

“The adventure I remember most of all,” I told him, “far more than any bits of drunken misbehavior, is our flight in your aeroplane. That I shall never, ever forget. You showed me my soul that day.”

“You see then why I love it so much. I'd take you up again in an instant. I've even got a brand-new machine—the latest in De Havilland's smashing Moth series. Alas, the motor's being overhauled, so we're earthbound for this visit. But you'll come again, Sergey. We're not done with soaring, you and I. Our destiny's in the air.”

He opened his arms to me, and I moved toward him through the waist-deep water till he had enfolded me in an embrace; we clung to each other, our hearts both beating madly, and I could feel his warm breath on the side of my neck, then the light graze of his lips along the same spot, and his grip all at once tightened and he released me. He wiped a tear from his eye.

“Were you crying?” I asked him.

He laughed. “I do that sometimes. You stutter. I cry.”

For the space of forty-eight hours Hugh's happiness—by which I mean the whole happy sphere of Westbrook House and environs—became my own. Rolling Somerset is not at all like flat Cambridgeshire, but I was ambushed by nostalgia for something ineffably “English.” It was nostalgia completely unlike that which I only occasionally felt for Russia—a sense of what might have been, another life I might have been happy in, a different destiny just as real as the one I have followed, but in which I would not, one day, in a Berlin half obliterated by British bombs, have uttered aloud my own death sentence.

 

 

 

“I MUST SAY, THE RAF'S PLAN TO ‘HAMBURGERIZE' Berlin doesn't seem to be working particularly well.”

Felix and I have met, by prior arrangement, at the corner of Wilhlemstrasse and Prinz-Albrechtstrasse—imprudently close to the Ministry and the Gestapo offices, I objected, but he only repeated, “In plain sight, my friend, in plain sight.”

“No,” he continues, “it's not so easy to erase us from the map. It turns out Berlin's no Hamburg. Wide avenues, spacious parks, sturdy masonry—so very unlike that crowded, timbered, medieval city. We offer too sporadic a fuel for the firestorms to get fully under way. Already the British have inflicted about as much damage as they can, while continuing to sustain very heavy casualties themselves. Have you noticed? One sees more and more British POWs in the work crews.
Not that your friend will be among them.”

“You have news, then?” I ask.

He frowns and strokes his neat little mustache. “No news, only leads. And they require us to venture in
there
.” He points to the Gestapo headquarters.

“Surely you must be joking.”

“Do you wish to discover the truth about your friend or not?”

“But why must I accompany you? Surely this is madness. I might as well simply turn myself in.”

“Have the Gestapo come round yet?”

“Yes, as a matter of fact, a dressmaker's dummy did stop by. He seemed more a census taker than anything else. He asked me a few questions he already knew the answers to.”

“The Gestapo can afford to take their time. They will come for you when they wish to do so. In the meantime, cherish your freedom. Between now and then, after all, anything can happen. Anything at all.”

He is testing me, of course.

I feel I must ask him point-blank: “Are you Gestapo?”

He laughs. “What an amusing thought. Of course you're suspicious of me. We must all be suspicious of each other these days. That's the worst of it. Were Jesus himself to appear, one would have to be suspicious.”

“I thought you'd lost your religion.”

“I've lost so much, it's difficult to keep track of all I've lost. But what I do have”—he pats the breast pocket of his jacket—“is a very valuable pass signed by none other than Count Wolf-Heinrich von Helldorf. With it we're practically invincible. Don't ask how I acquired it. I have many friends who owe me many favors.”

As Count von Helldorf is Berlin's chief of police, I am somewhat mollified, though Felix continues to become more rather than less mysterious. It occurs to me he is not so much
challenging me as challenging himself to venture into Gestapo headquarters. It also occurs to me he is merely using me to further some incomprehensible private aim of his own.

I do not have much choice but to follow him.

“Those work crews, by the way,” he says as we mount the steps. “They're most phenomenally efficient, don't you think? Within hours fires are doused, seemingly impassable streets reopened, electricity reinstated, telephone lines repaired. The Führer takes extraordinary care of his Reich.”

The building appears to be under evacuation. Clerks carry boxes to waiting military transports. Armed guards loiter, but seem indifferent to our presence. Felix approaches one, and when they have conferred for a bit, he returns to me and indicates we should go upstairs.

As we venture further into the darkened building, I have the dreadful feeling that I am being led into a labyrinth from which I shall not escape.

“I believe this is the department we seek,” Felix says.

A small man sits behind a desk stacked with paper halfway to the ceiling. The room is filled with the clatter of typewriters. No sooner has one sheet finished than it is whisked off the roll, another inserted, and the rapid-fire process begins anew.

“I come with a priority request from Count von Helldorf regarding a certain POW taken into custody near Hamburg on 29 July of this year. Flight Sergeant Hugh Bagley, serial number 658465, RAF Group 4, Squadron 78, based at Middleton Saint George, Durham.”

I am stunned by this information Felix has somehow managed to gather.

“That would be a military matter,” the small man says.

Felix is undeterred. “Our records show he has escaped from detention and is currently being sheltered by subversive elements, perhaps even here in Berlin. I wish to request that you track any pertinent information you may have about him.”

As he fills out—with apparent relish—various complicated forms, I watch the infernal battery of typists at their relentless work. They are mostly young women, very professional in appearance, with smart haircuts and good legs, though many are dressed in the sort of motley one sees on people whose apartments have been destroyed. I have a very bad feeling that they are typing arrest warrants, or perhaps transfer orders to labor camps. I wonder whether at this moment my own fate is being typed somewhere in this room.

At last Felix is finished with the paperwork, and we retrace our steps along busy corridors to emerge into the gray afternoon light.

“I insist you tell me,” I say. “What have we gained by that? Has Hugh Bagley really escaped? And if so, haven't we in fact made matters worse for him?”

Felix is calm. “Oh, I have no evidence whatsoever that he has escaped. The problem is, I have no definite information as to where he is being held. I am merely trying to work in reverse. If the Gestapo can confirm to me that your friend is not actually on the lam, they may reveal inadvertently where he is currently detained.”

“I don't understand why you continually put yourself in jeopardy like this. And others too, I might add.”

“Simply because I can,” he says. “Ah, Nabokov. It's really not complicated. I don't know whether you've shown great courage or great foolishness in your recent actions. What matters is, I know I have shown neither.”

“And perhaps all this gives you a chance to show it now?”

“Listen to my great fear, Nabokov. Worse than my fear of dying under bombs is the fear that I shall die without having taken a stand. That owing to caution and conformity, which I always thought would ensure my survival, I have instead muddled my way into something unspeakable. The men who have brought this war on us are beasts. And yet I fear I have
done my bit to sustain this war as much as anyone. You must have that fear as well. And yet you've spoken your mind.”

“God tells us there's no such thing as a human beast,” I say. “It's a contradiction in terms. Whoever has started this war, whoever continues it, is as fully human as you or I.”

“Perhaps that's why I no longer believe in God.”

“Perhaps that's why I still do. The alternative is simply unacceptable.”

“Yes,” he says, looking at me dolefully. “The alternative is unacceptable. I will leave you now, Nabokov. Expect to hear from me soon. We shall see if my little plan yields results.”

There is a very beautiful and ancient hymn, “Salve Regina,” and as I begin again on these pages, once more at my desk in this frigid room, I sing it quietly to myself.
Salve, Regina, Mater misericordiae, vita, dulcedo, et spes nostra, salve! O clemens, O pia, O dulcis Virgo Maria.
It calms me. It comforts me. It nourishes me. It contains the whole of my life even now, from the nativity I have forgotten to the crucifixion that ineluctably awaits me. Everything, I remind myself, has already been paid in full by the beautiful young man nailed to a cross. All that is left for me is to complete the paperwork.

 

 

 

I AM NOT CERTAIN EXACTLY WHEN I BECAME AWARE I was being shadowed. I would be walking down rue de Montparnasse or rue de Vaugirard and sense a presence gliding patiently behind me. When I turned around to confirm my suspicions, the red-and-black taxicab that had been following some fifty paces behind stopped and allowed me to go on without interference. The same taxi—I could see it from my fourth-floor window—would often be parked across the street from my building on rue St.-Jacques. It was preposterous, really. Of course I knew it was he; he made no attempt to hide his identity. At last I summoned the will to confront him.