The Real Life of Sebastian Knight

14

So this was the way I got a list of some forty-two names among which Sebastian's (S. Knight, 36 Oak Park Gardens, London, SW) seemed strangely lovely and lost. I was rather struck (pleasantly) by the fact that all the addresses were there too, affixed to the names: Silbermann hurriedly explained that people often die in Blauberg. Out of forty-one unknown persons as many as thirty-seven 'did not come to question' as the little man put it. True, three of these (unmarried women) bore Russian names, but two of them were German and one Alsatian: they had often stayed at the hotel. There was also a somewhat baffling girl, Vera Rasine; Silbermann however knew for certain that she was French; that, in fact, she was a dancer and the mistress of a Strasbourg banker. There was also an aged Polish couple whom we let pass without a qualm. All the rest of this 'out-of-the-question' group, that is thirty-one persons, consisted of twenty adult males; of these only eight were married or at least had brought their wives (Emma, Hildegard, Pauline, and so on), all of whom Silbermann swore were elderly, respectable, and eminently non-Russian.

Thus we were left with four names:

Mademoiselle Lydia Bohemsky with an address in Paris. She had spent nine days in the hotel at the beginning of Sebastian's stay and the manager did not remember anything about her.

Madame de Rechnoy. She had left the hotel for Paris on the eve of Sebastian's departure for the same city. The manager remembered that she was a smart young woman and very generous with her tips. The 'de' denoted, I knew, a certain type of Russian who likes to accent gentility, though really me use of me French particule before a Russian name is not only absurd but illegal. She might have been an adventuress: she might have been me wife of a snob.

Helene Grinstein. The name was Jewish but in spite of me 'stein' it was not German-Jewish. That 'i' in 'grin' displacing the natural 'u' pointed to its having grown in Russia. She had arrived but a week before Sebastian left and had stayed three days longer. The manager said she was a pretty woman. She had been to his hotel once before and lived in Berlin.

Helene von Graun. That was a real German name. But me manager was positive mat several times during her stay she had sung songs in Russian. She had a splendid contralto, he said, and was ravishing. She had remained a month in all, leaving for Paris five days before Sebastian.

I meticulously noted all these particulars and the four addresses. Any of these four might prove to be the one I wanted. I warmly thanked Mr Silbermann as he sat mere before me with his hat on his joined knees. He sighed and looked down at me toes of his small black boots adorned by old mouse-grey spats.

'I have made dis,' he said, 'because you are to me sympathetic. But [he looked at me with mild appeal in his bright brown eyes] but please, I fink it is ewsyless. You can't see de odder side of de moon. Please donnt search de woman. What is past is past. She donnt remember your brodder.'

'I shall jolly well remind her,' I said grimly.

'As you desire,' he muttered squaring his shoulders and buttoning up his coat. He got up. 'Good djorney,' he said without his usual smile.

'Oh, wait a bit, Mr Silbermann, we've got to settle something. What do I owe you?'

'Yes, dat is correct,' he said seating himself again. 'Moment.' He unscrewed his fountain-pen, jotted down a few figures, looked at them tapping his teeth with me holder: 'Yes, sixty-eight francs.'

'Well, that's not much,' I said, 'won't you perhaps…'

'Wait,' he cried, 'dat is false. I have forgotten… do you guard dat notice-book dat I give, gave you?'

'Why, yes,' I said, 'in fact, I've begun using it. You see… I thought…'

'Den it is not sixty-eight,' he said, rapidly revising his addition, 'It is… It is only eighteen, because de book costs fifty. Eighteen francs in all, Travelling depences…'

'But,' I said, rather flabbergasted at his arithmetic….

'No, dat's now right,' said Mr Silbermann,

I found a twenty franc coin though I would have gladly given him a hundred times as much, if he had only let me.

'So,' he said, 'I owe you now…. Yes, dat's right. Eighteen and two make twenty,' He knitted his brows. 'Yes, twenty. Dat's yours,' He put my coin on the table and was gone.

I wonder how I shall send him this work when it is finished: the funny little man has not given me his address, my head was too full of other things to think of asking him for it, But if he ever does come across The Real Life of Sebastian Knight I should like him to know how grateful I am for his help. And for the notebook. It is well filled by now, and I shall have a new set of pages clipped in when these are completed.

After Mr Silbermann had gone I studied at length the four addresses he had so magically obtained for me, and I decided to begin with the Berlin one. If that proved a disappointment I should be able to grapple with a trio of possibilities in Paris without undertaking another long journey, a journey all the more enervating because then I should know for sure I was playing my very last card. If on the contrary, my first try was lucky, then…. But no matter…. Fate amply rewarded me for my decision.

Large wet snowflakes were drifting aslant the Passauer Strasse in West-Berlin as I approached an ugly old house, its face half-hidden in a mask of scaffolding, I tapped on the glass of the porter's lodge, a muslin curtain was roughly drawn aside, a small window was knocked open and a blowsy old woman gruffly informed me that Frau Helene Grinstein did live in the house. I felt a queer little shiver of elation and went up the stairs. 'Grinstein', said a brass plate on the door.

A silent boy in a black tie with a pale swollen face let me in and without so much as asking my name, turned and walked down the passage. There was a crowd of coats on the rack in the tiny hall. A bunch of snow-wet chrysanthemums lay on the table between two solemn top hats. As no one seemed to come, I knocked at one of the doors, then pushed it open and then shut it again. I had caught a glimpse of a dark-haired little girl, lying fast asleep on a divan, under a mole-skin coat. I stood for a minute in the middle of the hall. I wiped my face which was still wet from snow. I blew my nose. Then I ventured down the passage. A door was ajar and I caught the sound of low voices, speaking in Russian. There were many people in the two large rooms joined by a kind of arch. One or two faces turned towards me vaguely as I strolled in, but otherwise my entry did not arouse the slightest interest. There were glasses with half-finished tea on the table, and a plateful of crumbs. One man in a comer was reading a newspaper. A woman in a grey shawl was sitting at the table with her cheek propped on her hand and a tear-drop on her wrist. Two or three other persons were sitting quite still on the divan. A little girl rather like the one I had seen sleeping was stroking an old dog curled up on a chair. Somebody began to laugh or gasp or something in the adjacent room, where there were more people sitting or wandering about. The boy who had met me in the hall passed carrying a glass of water and I asked him in Russian whether I might speak to Mrs Helene Grinstein.

'Aunt Elena,' he said to the back of a dark slim woman who was bending over an old man hunched up in an armchair. She came up to me and invited me to walk into a small parlour on the other side of the passage. She was very young and graceful with a small powdered face and long soft eyes which appeared to be pulled up towards the temples. She wore a black jumper and her hands were as delicate as her neck.

'Kahk eto oojahsno… isn't it dreadful?' she whispered.

I replied rather foolishly that I was afraid I had called at the wrong moment.

'Oh,' she said, 'I thought…' She looked at me. 'Sit down,' she said, 'I thought I saw your face just now at the funeral…. No? Well, you see, my brother-in-law has died and…. No, no, sit down. It has been an awful day.'

'I don't want to disturb you,' I said, 'I'd better go… I only wanted to talk to you about a relation of mine… whom I think you knew… at Blauberg… but it does not matter….

'Blauberg? I have been there twice,' she said and her face twitched as the telephone began ringing somewhere.

'His name was Sebastian Knight,' I said looking at her unpainted tender trembling lips.

'No, I have never heard that name,' she said, 'no.'

'He was half-English,' I said, 'be wrote books.'

She shook her head and then turned to the door which had been opened by the sullen boy, her nephew.

'Sonya is coming up in half an hour,' he said. She nodded and he withdrew.

In fact I did not know anyone at the hotel,' she continued. I bowed and apologized again.

'But what is your name,' she asked peering at me with her dim soft eyes which somehow reminded me of Clare. 'I think you mentioned it, but today my brain seems to be in a daze…. Ach,' she said when I had told her. 'But that sounds familiar. Wasn't there a man of that name killed in a duel in St Petersburg? Oh, your father? I see. Wait a minute. Somebody… just the other day… somebody had been recalling the case. How funny…. It always happens like that, in heaps. Yes… the Rosanovs…. They knew your family and all that….'

'My brother had a school-fellow called Rosanov,' I said.

'You'll find them in the telephone book,' she went on rapidly, 'you see, I don't know them very well, and I am quite incapable just now of looking up anything.'

She was called away and I wandered alone toward the hall. There I found an elderly gentleman pensively sitting on my overcoat and smoking a cigar. At first he could not quite make out what I wanted but then was effusively apologetic.

Somehow I felt sorry it had not been Helene Grinstein. Although of course she never could have been the woman who had made Sebastian so miserable. Girls of her type do not smash a man's life – they build it. There she had been steadily managing a house that was bursting with grief and had found it possible to attend to the fantastic affairs of a completely superfluous stranger. And not only had she listened to me, she had given me a tip which I then and there followed, and though the people I saw had nothing to do with Blauberg and the unknown woman, I collected one of the most precious pages of Sebastian's life. A more systematic mind than mine would have placed them in the beginning of this book, but my quest had developed its own magic and logic and though I sometimes cannot help believing that it had gradually grown into a dream, that quest, using the pattern of reality for the weaving of its own fancies, I am forced to recognize that I was being led right, and that in striving to render Sebastian's life I must now follow the same rhythmical interlacements.

There seems to have been a law of some strange harmony in the placing of a meeting relating to Sebastian's first adolescent romance in such close proximity to the echoes of his last dark love. Two modes of his life question each other and the answer is his life itself, and that is the nearest one ever can approach a human truth. He was sixteen and so was she. The lights go out, the curtain rises and a Russian summer landscape is disclosed; the bend of a river half in the shade because of the dark fir trees growing on one steep clay bank and almost reaching out with their deep black reflections to the other side which is low and sunny and sweet, with marsh-flowers and silver-tufted grass. Sebastian, his close-cropped head hatless, his loose silk blouse now clinging to his shoulder-blades, now to his chest according to whether he bends or leans back, is lustily rowing in a boat painted a shiny green. A girl is sitting at the helm, but we shall let her remain achromatic: a mere outline, a white shape not filled in with colour by the artist. Dark blue dragonflies in a slow skipping flight pass hither and thither and alight on the flat waterlily leaves. Names, dates, and even faces have been hewn in the red clay of the steeper bank and swifts dart in and out of holes therein. Sebastian's teeth glisten. Then, as he pauses and looks back, the boat with a silky swish slides into the rushes.

'You're a very poor cox,' he says.

The picture changes: another bend of that river. A path leads to the water edge, stops, hesitates, and turns to loop around a rude bench. It is not quite evening yet, but the air is golden and midges are performing a primitive native dance in a sunbeam between the aspen leaves which are quite, quite still at last, forgetful of Judas.

Sebastian is sitting upon the bench and reading aloud some English verse from a black copybook. Then he stops suddenly: a little to the left a naiad's head with auburn hair is seen just above the water, receding slowly, the long tresses floating behind. Then the nude bather emerges on the opposite bank, blowing his nose with the aid of his thumb; it is the long-haired village priest. Sebastian goes on reading to the girl beside him. The painter has not yet filled in the white space except for a thin sunburnt arm streaked from wrist to elbow along its outer side with glistening down.

As in Byron's dream, again the picture changes. It is night. The sky is alive with stars. Years later Sebastian wrote that gazing at the stars gave him a sick and squeamish feeling, as for instance when you look at the bowels of a ripped-up beast. But at the time, this thought of Sebastian's had not yet been expressed. It is very dark. Nothing can be discerned of what is possibly an alley in the park. Sombre mass on sombre mass and somewhere an owl hooting. An abyss of blackness where all of a sudden a small greenish circle moves up: the luminous dial of a watch (Sebastian disapproved of watches in his riper years).

'Must you go?' asks his voice.

A last change: a V-shaped flight of migrating cranes; their tender moan melting in a turquoise-blue sky high above a tawny birch-grove. Sebastian, still not alone, is seated on the white-and-cinder-grey trunk of a felled tree. His bicycle rests, its spokes a-glitter among the bracken. A Camberwell Beauty skims past and settles on the kerf, fanning its velvety wings. Back to town tomorrow, school beginning on Monday.

'Is this the end? Why do you say that we shall not see each other this winter?' he asks for the second or third time. No answer. 'Is it true that you think you've fallen in love with that student chap? – vetovo studenta?' The seated girl's shape remains blank except for the arm and a thin brown hand toying with a bicycle pump. With the end of the holder it slowly writes on the soft earth the word 'yes', in I English, to make it gentler.

The curtain is rung down. Yes, that is all. It is very little but it is heartbreaking. Never more may he ask of the boy who sits daily at the next school desk, 'And how is your sister?' Nor must he ever question old Miss Forbes, who still drops in now and then, about the little girl to whom she had also given lessons. And how shall he tread again the same paths next summer, and watch the sunset and cycle down to the river? (But next summer was mainly devoted to the futurist poet Pan.)

By a chance conjuncture of circumstances it was Natasha Rosanov's brother that drove me to the Charlottenburg station to catch the Paris express. I said how curious it had been to have talked to his sister, now the plump mother of two boys, about a distant summer in the dreamland of Russia. He answered that he was perfectly content with his job in Berlin. I tried, as I had vainly tried before, to make him talk of Sebastian's school life. 'My memory is appallingly bad,' he replied, 'and anyway I am too busy to be sentimental about such ordinary things.'

'Oh, but surely, surely,' I said, 'you can recall some little outstanding fact, anything would be welcome….' Her laughed. 'Well,' he said, 'haven't you just spent hours talking to my sister? She adores the past, doesn't she? She says, you are going to put her in a book as she was in those days, she is quite looking forward to it, in fact.'

'Please, try and remember something,' I insisted, stubbornly.

'I am telling you that I do not remember, you queer person. It's useless, quite useless. There is nothing to relate except ordinary rot about cribbing and cramming and nicknaming teachers. We had quite a good time, I suppose…. But you know, your brother… how shall I put it?… your brother was not very popular at school….'