The Unreal Life of Sergey Nabokov (8 page)

“Do be careful,” my mother told Volodya one evening after fire had claimed a shed at Batovo. I suspect she wished to forbid his nocturnal prowls altogether, but knew that would be pointless.

Grinning, Volodya pulled from his pocket a set of brass
knuckles. “Let anybody who wants come to terms with these fellows.”

My mother frowned. “Does your father know you carry those?”

“He bought them for me last spring at the English shop.”

“Really!” she exclaimed. Then, smiling forlornly: “Well, do try to avoid any situation in which you might be tempted to employ them.”

Volodya took a swipe at empty air.

After he had left, my mother and I settled down to a jigsaw puzzle that promised, upon completion, to reveal Rubens's
Adoration of the Magi
. How I hated these initial gropings when one scarcely knew where to start. My mother, on the other hand, sorted through the chaos before us with that combination of childish eagerness and adult deliberation that so endeared her to everyone who knew her. I watched her brow furrow, her mouth form a moue. “Your father and brother are too much alike,” she said. “Really. They both think they're immortal.” She regarded me fondly, then picked up a random puzzle piece. “You're so much more sensible in that respect.”

Little did she understand the dangerous things I also carried—not in my pocket but in my heart.

I went to bed early that evening musing on the handsome variety of riches—from girl to brass knuckles to Rozhestveno—Volodya had recently acquired. Sometime around three in the morning, in the midst of a lovely convoluted hallucination in which Oleg had wrapped his arms around me and was about to—But I would never know, for excited cries woke me.

“Come, come, everyone,” I heard my mother shout as she hurried down the corridor, rapping on each door.

The disused stable near the bridge where the Warsaw highway crossed the Oredezh was in flames.

Russians love fires. It is one of the stranger aspects of our national psyche, and though I have never quite understood the
fascination, I have observed it often enough. Whether in the city or the country, not just peasants but professors and priests and patricians flock to gawk at the sight of a building in flames. My mother was in this respect Russian to the core. All her considerable Western veneer fell away, and what remained was as untamed as those songs we used to hear at the fashionable tzigane restaurants on the islands at the mouth of the Neva.

Still half asleep, I joined my sisters, my four-year-old brother Kirill, and their governess, Mlle. Hofeld, in an old charabanc. Meanwhile Tsiganov, in our red Tornado, drove my mother and her new dachshund. Of course, Volodya was nowhere to be found, and his absence caused much consternation among my sisters.

“I have no idea where he's got to,” I told them as our turtling charabanc fell ever farther behind the leporine Tornado. “You'll have to ask Mother.” I could see that my words failed to endear me to Mlle. Hofeld, who shared my mother's confidences and was well aware of Volodya's worrisome vagabondage.

The strange hour, my moist dream of Oleg, a certain restiveness combined to enliven me. “Perhaps we'll find our brother's the arsonist. Perhaps we'll catch him red-handed, ha-ha-ha,” I said merrily, sending nine-year-old Elena, who adored her eldest brother, into a fit of tears abundant enough to douse the fiercest conflagration.

“That will be enough,” warned Mlle. Hofeld.

But I was hardly finished. Under cover of darkness, as the patch of orange in the distance lit our way, I startled myself by clasping my hands to my breast and crooning, “He's in love. The young swain's in love. He burns with love: the fires of the heart light his way, the flambeaux of desire. O lustrous fever in the blood! A hero for our time!” I had made myself very merry indeed, and my stammer was entirely gone. Elena, Olga, Mlle. Hofeld—all stared at me. Even our coachman Zahar turned around in his seat to make sure all was well with his charges. I
could see him shaking his head at the foolish young
barin
.

“Are you drunk?” asked Olga. “Please tell us if you are.”

“Drunk on love,” I wailed, for by now I no longer knew whether I was speaking of Volodya or myself. “Drunker on love than on Slivinka,” I whooped. “Drunker than on vodka or champagne or Tokay…”

Our arrival at the scene of the fire brought my spirited performance to an end. By carriage, automobile, bicycle, horseback, and hay wagon quite a festive crowd had shown up. From Batovo just across the river had come Grandmother Nabokova, Khristina, Aunt Nadezhda, and a hodgepodge retinue of servants who formed an absurdly inefficient bucket brigade to ferry water from the river to the by-now-unstoppable flames.

At the margin of the gathering crowd, good-naturedly shoving each other, two muzhik lads caught my attention.

I had seen the pair countless times before, two more anonymous cogs in the vast machinery of our estate. Now firelight transformed them. Was it my imagination? The longer I watched them, as one deftly tripped the other with his leg and both went down in a tumble, the more certain I grew that they kept between them some secret. I had not an iota of evidence save the illogic of desire, but when a slant-eyed old Tatar cuffed one of the boys on the ear and ordered the two of them to join the fire brigade, I suddenly knew that it was none other than they who were responsible for the arson.

From her handbag my mother produced two tumblers and a small bottle of port with which to fortify herself and Mlle. Hofeld. On seeing the bottle, my siblings burst out laughing, much to my mother's confusion.

“What,
mes enfants
?” she kept asking. “What's so funny?” But as they would not tell her, she grew more and more confused.

This left Mlle. Hofeld to cluck, “What a foolish bunch of children! The excitement has caused all of them to completely lose their minds!”

As my mother, grandmother, and aunt nattered away and my siblings milled about, their boredom growing in direct proportion to the flames, which now consumed the shed entirely, I caught sight once again of my two criminals and felt a satisfaction heightened nearly to ecstasy by the simple gesture of one boy putting his arm around the other's neck and whispering something no doubt conspiratorial in his ear.

Had I actually seen them brandish the incriminating torch, I could not have been more astonished. It was mere practice, I saw now, for the greater drama they planned. One day soon, they and their flame-red banners would come for Vyra itself, for Batovo, for Rozhestveno. Our night watchmen, the Tsar's secret police, the scarlet-uniformed Cossacks that patrolled the streets of the capital, the Imperial Guard at Tsarkoe Selo: none could hold the flames at bay. And I was in love with the arsonists!

We rode back in subdued spirits, Kirill and Elena asleep on either side of Mlle. Hofeld, Olga singing under her breath a strange song of her own devising. Ashamed of my antics on the ride out, and chastened by my traitorous emotions at the fire, I gazed at the passing woods. The early light of a Russian summer morning was turning them ashen. Two figures strolled hand in hand; they swung their arms broadly. Volodya had woven his Valentina a garland of lunar flowers; he wore on his face a look of supreme satisfaction.

Olga must have nudged Elena awake, for they both began pointing excitedly, and Volodya acknowledged them with a single gallant wave that roused them to even more hysterical paroxysms of adoration.

 

A humid afternoon some days after the incident of the burning stable found me guiding my bicycle in lazy figure eights back and forth along a dirt track on the farther reaches of our estate. The object of my scrutiny? Two figures in the middle distance mowing a golden hayfield. Swinging their scythes in
long, soul-stirring arcs, my arsonists seemed anything but grim reapers. I longed to ditch my bicycle in the long grass, as Lenin would have our soldiers abandon their rifles in muddy fields, and approach the enemy, arms raised in surrender.

As if prompted by some cue, the two toilers all at once ceased their toil. Flinging aside their tools, they began a bit of horseplay, two colts pawing the ground, butting heads, whinnying with delight. The high grass concealed them whenever they fell wrestling to the ground, but then their shaven heads and naked torsos would bob again into sight. “The peasants are in general quite content with their lot,” Aunt Nadezhda was fond of proclaiming, and for the moment that seemed undeniable.

I was beside myself with joy, though the youths' spontaneous eruption of high spirits cooled quickly enough. They stood solemnly facing each other, their uncouth voices a blur; I tried to imagine what tender confessions two criminals alone together in a half-scythed field might share.

Thoughts roiled through me: how the slave Khristina had been given to my grandmother as a playmate; how Uncle Ruka's Egyptian Hamid was a most mischievous but devoted character. Suddenly I wanted my own slave and companion. It was an extraordinarily thoughtless wish, but what use was my family's wealth and power if I were to be so miserable and wanting?

Impetuously abandoning my bicycle, I waded through the waist-high grass.

“Hello,” I called out, even though I was expressly forbidden to talk to the peasants who worked our estates. All I wanted, confusedly, was to share in their joy. To make it mine. And if they were the criminals I believed them to be, then so much the better, for I had convinced myself that since those associated with my vice were criminals, insofar as these lads were criminal they must also be receptive to that vice. No brass knuckles for me! They could do with me what they would.

When I emerged from the unscythed portion of the meadow into a circle of sweet-smelling stubble, a confounding sight confronted me. Drawers puddled around their ankles, my criminals, as if obedient to every whim of my fancy, were lazily pleasuring each other!

They started up, alarmed by the scarlet-faced, panting, bespectacled lad who had materialized before them. “Go away!” they hissed, shooing me off. “Go, go, go!”

But I did not move. Up close, my Bolshevik angels appeared unbelievably grimy, their faces smudged, their nails blackened, the reek of their sweat an obscure warning. A livid scar disfigured the older one's creamy thigh.

It quickly dawned on them who I was. The
barin's
son. The young master Sergey Vladimirovich.

“Well, well,” I said, adopting all the hauteur I had witnessed in my favorite villains onstage at the Maryinsky. “What have we here?” (Would that I had had a riding crop to tap against a gloved palm.)

That I frightened them excited me. They eyed me with disbelief, miserable amusement, murderous hatred.

“You've not got permission to loaf,” I said. “My father doesn't pay idlers. But now that you've begun this droll game, by all means continue.”

They hesitated, sullen and cowed.

“Get on with it,” I told them, swelling to my role. “Help each other out, comrades. Look lively, there.”

It was a tone I had heard Uncle Ruka use on the cringing staff at Rozhestveno, a tone my father rightfully deplored. But for the moment I
was
Uncle Ruka, Seigneur Sodoma. I folded my arms across my chest and observed my victims as coolly as I might observe a mare give birth to a foal in one of our as-yet-unburned stables.

How easily—and justifiably—those two might have wrung my neck. But they did not. Years later, at the Cirque d'Hiver
in Paris, I would witness a gaudily dressed young lion tamer wedge open the maw of an ancient lion and slowly, insanely insert his head. With what indescribable forbearance did the long-suffering lion allow his tormentor to make a spectacle of his humiliation. So too my muzhiks shrugged, scowled, then the older one muttered to the younger, “So the little monkey wants an eyeful? We'll give him an eyeful.”

And they got on uncomplainingly with the task at hand, as they did with all the labor that dogged their long days. What choice did they have? After all, their grandparents had been slaves of the Nabokovs and Rukavishnikovs, their parents barely better off. Still, I could not get past the suspicion that the clever mice had once more outsmarted the stupid pussens.

They could not fail to observe the excitement their mutual engagement induced in the kind master's depraved son, the brimming cup he could not prevent from spilling.

I have often thought that Russia was lost that very afternoon. Not for an instant do I claim that an incident of no import whatsoever was in any real sense the cause of Russia's downfall. What I am attempting to say is simply this: In the moment I misused my opulent position in the world, I made clear how unworthy I was of it. In a million variations, my actions were being repeated by those of my standing and privilege all over the empire, collectively leading to that inevitable end that none of us wished at the time to foresee.

“I hope you're pleased with your filthy selves,” I heard myself say as the muzhiks wiped their milky sap from their fingers. Gamely I sought to rearrange myself inside my flannels and depart the scene with a few remaining shreds of seignorial dignity. Already a dull film of shame was beginning to coat my soul. I had scarcely taken a dozen steps, however, before an inspiration occurred to me; taking from my coin purse a generous assortment of kopeks, I turned and flung them in the direction of my smirking companions. In the dull sunlight
the coins did not glitter, nor did either of the recipients of my largesse make a move.

“Ladyboy,” the cheekier of the pair called out after me, though his companion, older and more prudent, he of the ugly scar, brusquely shushed him. As I mounted my Enfield Racer—had they ever, would they ever in their poor lives ride such a fine machine?—I could see them scouring among the stubble for every last coin.