Free The Unreal Life of Sergey Nabokov by Paul Russell Page A

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.
    â€œHello,” 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.
    â€œWell, 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.
    â€œYou’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.
    â€œGet 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