The famous quay was not yet black then from Muslim burkas—instead it was full of neat old ladies in furs and sunglasses taking their daily walks. Kovalev unzipped his coat and squinted in the direction of the Alps, blue in the haze:
“Yeah, this is just how I imagined everything would be!”
I had to take endless photographs of him with his wife and child at every corner.
When Kovalev registered at the Montreux-Palace, he questioned the girl behind the counter suspiciously to make sure he really was given the same room where Nabokov had lived. The affirmative answer did not satisfy him, and he asked again when the bearded bellboy wheeled the suitcases into the hotel room. The bellboy also assured Kovalev that he was not being tricked. The bellboy turned out to be from Serbia. The Americans were bombing Belgrade and blood had only very recently been spilled in Yugoslavia, so the Serb, having heard Russian being spoken, refused to take his tip out of gratitude to Russia—and immediately received twice as large a tip. Kovalev and the bellboy even hugged.
Kovalev was disappointed with Nabokov’s room. I explained to him that after Vera’s death everything had been remodeled, and the writer’s space had been divided into separate rooms; but he was appalled by the crooked low ceilings, narrow windows, and tiny balcony.
“How could he stand to live here?”
Old photographs of Nabokov hung on the walls of the room, and Kovalev wanted to recreate each one. He called room service to request a chess set and sat down at a table on the balcony with Alina, just like Nabokov with his Vera. He made me take lots of replicas.
Of course, Kovalev also wanted to have a picture of himself behind Nabokov’s desk. For the first time, I was glad Nabokov was dead.
When Kovalev and his wife went out to the balcony, I opened the treasured drawer—the memorial inkblot, the one I had once read about, the one I had dreamed about touching for so many years, was right where it was supposed to be. I touched it lightly with my finger. I don’t know what I was trying to discover but Yanochka prevented me from doing it. She ran up and peered into the drawer.
“What’s that? Show me!”
“Here, look!” I said. “The inkblot.”
She was surprised and obviously disappointed.
“An inkblot…”
Kovalev said the room was too small, and they ended up staying in another room, a giant one.
They put me up in the hotel next to the train station for two days.
First thing in Montreux, I had to look for a pony. After all, Kovalev had promised Yanochka a pony. Kovalev and his wife stayed behind in their hotel room, while Yanochka and I set off to ride a pony. The little horse was sad and smelled terrible.
Yanochka was keen on me for some reason and didn’t want to say goodbye, so the Kovalevs invited me over for dinner. At the table, Kovalev was either in raptures over the beauty of Lake Geneva and Swiss cleanliness and order, or else he expressed dissatisfaction: the hotel’s sauna was not properly heated, security at the entrance was lax—an invitation to any old person off the street if he isn’t lazy—and most importantly—you trip over Russians on every step! For some reason the abundance of his compatriots bothered him most of all.
I was amazed at how lovingly Alina looked at her husband. You can’t fake eyes like that.
The riddle of Eva Braun. How can women sincerely love criminals, crooks, and ruffians? Will anybody ever be able to explain this?
Maybe it was animal instinct? The male’s place within the herd does determine the survival of his offspring. The most cruel and devious ones become the leaders and wield the power, so their children have a better chance of survival. Women want to bear the children of leaders, of alpha-males who give them and their offspring protection. Maybe that’s it?
Or maybe everything is simpler: a woman doesn’t fall in love with a criminal, but with a man, with the vitality and strength he exudes. She falls in love with his force of life.
At dessert Kovalev declared, “How can you live here? It’s so boring! Are you even living here? You’re just rotting away!”
I was eating on his dime and had to agree with everything.
“Here, in the West,” he said, chewing with pleasure, “people are so miserly, putting everything off until tomorrow. But back home in Russia, people are greedy with life. Because if you don’t take something from life right now, tomorrow there might not be anything left!”
He did everything greedily—ate greedily, laughed greedily, sucked the air coming off the lake greedily into his nostrils. He even took photographs greedily. Nothing was enough for him.
But more than anything, Kovalev loved taking pictures with his daughter. It seemed like he sincerely loved her a lot. He called her “bunny,” which was distasteful for me because that’s what we called our son—“bunny.”
That night I tossed and turned in my bed at the train station hotel. I couldn’t sleep out of self-hatred. Was I really jealous of this guy? Why was he the one staying in Nabokov’s room and not me? I’m the one who loves Nabokov. I’m the one who was saved by his books, banned long ago in our homeland. For some reason I had always thought that if I were able to touch that sacred inkblot, I would understand something very important, very deep. And now I had touched it—and what did I understand? What was the revelation?
I lay there, listening to the occasional late train pass, and the same miserable thoughts kept crawling into my head: why can Kovalev afford to spoil his wife and daughter while I have to play lackey to his rich family, just so I can get some money for my son’s and wife’s presents from this impossibly smug guy? Who is he? How did he get his money? Was he a better student than I was at the Institute? In that late Soviet era life, when you could make the choice between a small debasement—to be quiet—and a large one—to give speeches—he voluntary chose the large one. In any country, at any time, there is always a minimum level of immorality necessary to survive. But it’s possible to stop at that level. Though maybe it’s not, if you actually want to accomplish something in this life. I was certain that in the new epoch he was still choosing the larger debasement, disgrace, dishonor, in order to get even richer. I suddenly imagined that tomorrow morning I would tell him all of this right to his face and then leave. And only then did I fall asleep.
But the next day I drove them on an excursion to Chillon castle and was friendly, talkative, and attentive. I was gathering material for my Russian Switzerland and probably made a pretty good guide—I told them all about the Russian crowd in Chillon, sprinkling in amusing quotations.
I couldn’t stand myself, but I knew why I was doing it.
Russians are familiar with a particular kind of conversation: train talk. Strangers meet each other in a train car and spend a day, two days, three days in a cramped compartment together. And then they part forever. You might spill out your soul to a random traveling companion, tell him things that you’d never tell friends in your daily life. On that evening, our last evening together, we had one of those train talks.
Alina went to put her daughter to sleep, while Kovalev and I sat at the hotel bar, and he ordered a bottle of the most expensive cognac. It was unlikely that Kovalev was interested in me as a conversational companion; he probably just needed a witness to the causal manner in which he ordered the bottle, which cost the average monthly salary of a cashier at Migros Supermarket.
We drank. The cognac was actually outstanding.
I remember I told him a funny story about how Nabokov and Solzhenitsyn, two giants of Russian literature, never met in the Montreux Palace Hotel. They wrote to each other and agreed to meet: Nabokov wrote in his daybook: “6 October, 11:00 Solzhenitsyn and wife.” Apparently Solzhenitsyn was waiting for a letter confirming the date. He came to Montreux with his wife Natalia, walked up to the hotel, but decided to drive on, thinking that Nabokov was either sick or for some reason didn’t want to see them. Meanwhile, the Nabokovs waited for their guests at the restaurant for an entire hour—without ordering lunch—not understanding why they weren’t showing up. After that, they never ended up meeting.