an excerpt from the novel Nabokov’s Advantage

On a bright mid-April Berlin day in 1923 offering the first real taste of spring, I alighted from the Stadtbahn train at Grunewald, on the edge of that vast suburban forest. The electrification of Berlin’s railroads had recently begun, only to be blacked out by the howling inflation, and this day I rode one of the many old steam engines still in service. I loved it. It reminded me of the many trips I’d made to New York City on the old Pennsylvania line, rumbling through the countryside trailing a majestic plume of smoke.

A short pleasant walk through quiet residential streets, and suddenly I passed right by a vision: my first European red-clay tennis court. And then another, and another. As I’d suspected they would be, the nets were up on this fine morning at the Rot-Weiss Tennis Club, the clay swept into fine orange swirls, smooth as a sandy beach after the rain; the season had commenced. Two courts were occupied by men and women in long whites, swatting balls lightly in some informal mixed doubles. Young boys hired by the club, also in white, dashed about collecting the balls between points. The men wore braces and starched collars, I noticed, making me feel I’d stepped back into a past decade.

I myself wore my white flannel pants and white tennis shirt with the Penn insignia, under a light sport coat, and a new pair of Spalding canvas tennis shoes, the same kind Tilden wore. Tucked under my left arm were my two Wright & Ditson rackets. Finding myself at the clubhouse, on a terrace speckled with white tables and wicker armchairs, I reluctantly abandoned the paradisiacal sunshine and stepped inside. The carpeted building smelled of coffee and cigars, had the feel of an old baronial home. I walked around for a few minutes, smiling and nodding at the few people I encountered, and then, before I could even ask for him, I recognized the man I was looking for.

"Excuse me, Herr Froitzheim," I said in German.

The face I had seen in newspapers and in the pages of American Lawn Tennis, that of the most famous German tennis player ever, turned to me. "Guten Morgen."

"Guten Morgen. My name is Vel Spicehandler, from Philadelphia. I am living in Berlin for a time, and my good friend, Mr. Jorgan from the Germantown Cricket Club, sends you his compliments."

"Ah, Jorgan. Yes, his father was a wonderful host when I was in Philadelphia after the Davis Cup in ’14. And Andrew was here just a couple of years ago; it was a pleasure to return the favor."

"Andy and I played tennis together at the University of Pennsylvania. He said I must come to Rot-Weiss while I’m here. I’d like to keep my game sharp."

"But of course! I daresay Rot-Weiss can drum up a few players worth your while. The best players in the country train here, as you may know."

"Thank you. I’m here to do research for a book and would like to stay in shape if I can."

"Oh, well you should meet this other writer fellow who was playing here in the fall. Not a bad baseline game. Can’t remember his name, but I will find out. A pleasure," and he shook my hand again. I began to wander the clubhouse, a bit dazed at having just chatted up Germany’s greatest Davis Cupper, the man who’d almost led them to the trophy in ’14, he and his partner Kreuzer narrowly losing to the Australians, who in turn dethroned the Americans. War had broken out during the final German-Australian match, and Froitzheim and Kreuzer had set sail immediately afterwards for home. But their ship was intercepted by the British, and the two tennis stars spent the war years interned in England. A teenaged tennis fan, I had followed their matches⎯and capture at sea⎯in the papers.

I found myself entering the café at the far end of the building. Sunshine from the south window filtered through the dusty air and lit up the room, with its elegant carpet, tables, and spotless china, like an old stage set. Only two or three tables were occupied; the staff were putting the finishing touches on preparations for lunch. I sat at an empty table and ordered a coffee, but before it arrived I was struck by the familiar profile of a young man at a window table, ignoring his cup and scribbling into a small notebook when not otherwise chewing on his dark oak penholder and staring off into space.

The aristocratic features and bearing, the broad forehead beneath lightly oiled dark-blond hair, above all the monomaniacal application of nib to paper; I knew immediately who it was and couldn’t have been more shocked if I’d come across Joyce at a bullfight. The last thing I wanted to do was interrupt his writing, but I also couldn’t allow myself to forgo this opportunity. Finally he gave his fountain pen a coffee break and sat back in his chair, gazing out at the Hundekehle Lake beyond the trees.

It wasn’t like me to be so forward, but I forced myself to rise and approach his table. After all, I reminded myself, he was just another fellow about my own age. "Izvinite," I interrupted his reverie. "Gospodin Sirin?"

He turned to me as if he’d been expecting my interjection. With no expression at all, merely the slightest of nods, he offered, "Nabokoff."

"Of course, Nabokoff," I stammered. I knew him only, as his public did, by his pen name Sirin—the name of a fabulous bird of paradise from an old Russian folk tale. "Vel Spicehandler." He accepted my hand. "I was recently at your reading at the Schubertsaal, and have been reading your work, so naturally I had your pseudonym in my head."

"I trust the fluttering of his wings did not cause a migraine," he returned in English, a confident Oxbridge vintage that combined aristocratic rolls and flourishes with, surprisingly, a heavy Russian-immigrant flavor.

I smiled at the joke, but he did not. "I don’t want to disturb you now," I continued in English, "but⎯"

"No no, why not, I just finished a draft of a poem. Do have a seat." As I did so, the waiter, having discovered my dislocation, brought my coffee over; Nabokoff (as he spelled it then) produced a flat gold case with the hint of a faded inscription appearing and disappearing in the refracted sunlight like invisible ink, opened it in my direction (I declined), and lit up a Russian-style tipped cigarette.

"I understand you finished recently at Cambridge," I said.

"It’s almost a year now, and feels like a decade. So much has happened."

I nodded, too knowingly. "I’m terribly sorry about your father." Vladimir Dmitrievich

Nabokoff, a liberal former member of Russian Parliament and, since 1917, a journalist and prominent leader of the Russian emigration, had been murdered in Berlin the previous year by right-wing Russian monarchists.

I sensed a sudden physical tension in his body and immediately regretted my flippancy. "Yes," he said. "Well, if you don’t mind, old chap, we won’t talk about that." I had to suppress a smile at his colloquialism. He spoke English so well, but the elocution was not quite right. Not so much like a Russian immigrant, in fact, but more like an Englishman who had lived for decades in Russia without exercising his native tongue at all. The long “o”s were a little too long, the short “a”s not short enough.

"Of course." I sipped, he smoked. "Are you working?” I asked.

“For the Muse.” A bored curlicue of exhaled smoke wafted toward the ceiling.

I nodded. "I’m doing some writing myself."

"Ah, a fellow literatus?"

"Well, I’m no poet. I’m in a research phase, actually, right now. For a book about the Russian emigration."

"An archaeologist," he nodded knowingly. "Is this what you studied at Penn?"

"But how could you know⎯?"

"’Eh-mee-grashun.’ I knew a fellow at Cambridge from your hometown. But don’t worry, I’m no Holmes. I shan’t be examining the clay on the soles of your tennis shoes. My sleuthing normally extends only to the lexical felons in my verse."

"But what do you mean, archaeologist?"

"Well, you seem to be interested in examining the ruins of a dead civilization: early 20th-century St. Petersburg and Moscow. You’ve come to the right place. You’ll find most of the artifacts here."

"Exactly. I would greatly enjoy the opportunity to talk with you at length about it sometime."

"And you attended our little soiree. Yet another attempt by our homeless community to celebrate exactly the sort of antiquities you came in search of. What did you think?"

"I felt, as I often have in the month I’ve been here, as though I were observing a race of ghosts, the spirits of a whole nation of people transported to the netherworld before their time."

"Very good!" He smiled for the first time. "Pre-Bolshevik Russia the land of the living, and Russian Berlin the realm of purgatory. Very observant, Spitze, uh⎯"

"⎯Spicehandler. An Americanization of the Yiddish Speishändler, courtesy of Ellis Island."

"I see. How...vocational."

"I very much enjoyed the story you read."

"A trivial work, scribbled down between poems. But I think a crowd enjoys a good yarn, don’t you agree? And I’m not above rousing their bloodlust toward the Bolsheviks. I’m generally not an admirer of mob emotions, but in this case it seems appropriate."

"The audience certainly was enthusiastic. You seem to have an avid following."

"I suppose it wouldn’t be too much to say that here, among our little literary world within a world, I have my even smaller subset of ’fans’⎯isn’t that the American word?"

"Yes. And I must say, a number of your fans share a certain, ah, bombshell quality. Another Americanism."

He smiled again. "I see you noticed Roma and Danechka. And perhaps a few of my actress acquaintances. Among the desultory occupations I have taken on to keep myself fed⎯I take it this is what you meant earlier by "working"⎯is that of film extra. Berlin seems to have become the Hollywood of Europe, if you believe certain experts, and they’re turning out all sorts of simulated murder and horror like so many mass-produced pornographic postcards."

"I did notice them. And I even met Roma and Danechka. I didn’t dream I’d meet so many lovely Jewish girls here."

"The Russian Jewess is a creature of underpublicized attractions. But you must understand: I recently emerged from the unhappy ending of an affair of the heart.... And I’m afraid I have sought solace in the arms of others. Not to be melodramatic. These have been evanescent affairs, however.

“In any case, I would say our Schubertsaal presentation was a bit less tedious than your run-of-the-mill Russian émigré literary evening. Cramped into some princess or other’s parlor decorated with escapee carpets and tapestries that made it down to the Crimea and over to mainland Europe, you would have been forced first to listen to a faded but ‘well preserved’ actress once of the Moscow Art Theatre deliver some old chestnut, Pushkin perhaps, in a limpid, almost sobbing, soprano, all the while clenching a perfumed handkerchief to her breast. Next would appear a pince-nezed author of middle age, condemned to second-rate status in Czarist Russia, promoted to upper-second-rate here in Purgatory, who would proceed to anesthetize the assemblage with a long, a very long, sample from his novel-in-progress, impressive mainly for the sheer acreage of forest it managed to denude. If your consciousness survived that, would it have withstood now the weary rising of a distinguished old gentleman of letters to read for the hundredth time an admirable bit of narrative that was received so well upon its publication in ’89? Who then is left awake for the young poet, whom some have called ‘brilliant’ and others merely ‘nascent,’ who stands in front of the crowded smoky room, naked without a single page to hold, exposing just the right paleness of skin, and fires his newly smithed lines at his displaced public as though challenging them to anoint him as the future of Russian literature?”

“I would be awake, I dare say. It sounds exotic to a Philadelphia lad.”

“Yes, perhaps for the first ten or twenty times. Go knocking on doors on Motzstrasse any Saturday night and you’re sure to find us. You talk about the spirit world, and that’s exactly where we are. Or, as I indicated, antiquity. We’re like practitioners of a dead language; we create Russian literature for a Russia that no longer exists.”

“And do your fans attend these smaller private soirees as well?”

Again his elusive hint of a smile. “No, no, how many people can fit into a living room? But don’t worry, there’s always room for one ectomorphic American. And who brought you to the Schubertsaal? Or did you merely see the listing in Rul’?”

“A young woman took me." I was quite mad about the girl in question, another refugee of the Revolution, and she in turn was one of Sirin’s biggest fans. But I had no trepidation about mentioning Véra to Nabokoff; he seemed to me unattainable for her and as such no rival. "One of these fetching Russian Jewesses you alluded to. Perhaps you know her. Her father is Evsei Slonim.”

"Ah yes, Slonim. A fine chap. I know him, of course. A friend and I proposed a translation of Dostoevsky⎯not one of my favorite writers, but he’s all the rage now, you know⎯for his Orbis publishing house. Have you noticed how the names of our émigré publishers⎯Orbis, Cosmos, and the like⎯sound like purveyors of Astrology guides? More evidence for our ‘spirit world’ theory. No, I’ve heard Slonim has daughters, but I haven’t met them. One can’t know every girl in Russian Berlin.” A drag on the cigarette and again the wry smile. “Or who knows? Maybe one can...."

“I must say, you’re the last person I expected to run into at Rot-Weiss. Do you play?”

“I led a rather privileged childhood back in the land of the living: St. Petersburg. And among the many pleasurable skills I acquired were English and lawn tennis. Queen Victoria’s lingo I picked up from my English governess⎯in fact it was technically my first language. And then we lived in the summer months at Vyra, our dacha some seventy-five versts to the south, where I spent countless hours batting balls about on the clay tennis court with a local coach. Also, of course, with my father and siblings. One summer, when I was still a small boy, the French trainer who had coached Decugis to the French championship that very year stayed with us and gave the whole family lessons. You too, I take it, learned the game?”

“Yes, also as a child, though in my case it was on the public courts in the park. Later, after I was on the Penn team, I had the opportunity to play on many hallowed grass courts: Germantown, Forest Hills.”

“Well, I suppose Rot-Weiss is the Forest Hills, or better yet the Germantown, of Germany. Of course, I could never afford a membership here now. But one of my part-time valuta-earning engagements, in addition to giving English lessons to corpulent Berliner businessmen, is teaching ’the white sport,’ as they call it, to their sons and daughters. I’m like a walking rummage sale, marketing the remnants of a privileged childhood with just a hint of melancholy at my wares’ lost glory. Usually I do this on dusty public courts boasting no elegant café like this one. However, one of these tennis-loving fathers, a Mr. Kaplan, brought me here to play with his son. I began to meet and play with some of the members, and eventually Mr. Froitzheim, the local tennis deity, invited me to play here whenever I like. He added some generous comments about my slice backhand. But really, I’ve never been a serious player.”

“Well, we seem to have a lot in common. I also have given tennis lessons here and there⎯and even tutored Russian⎯to help pay the bills. And Froitzheim just offered to find me a good game. Rather sporting of him. I mean, it is a private club. In fact, something has just occurred to me. He mentioned a writer who ‘was playing here’ last autumn. Said he might be a good playing partner for me. Could that be you?”

“It isn’t impossible. I fit both criteria. Of course, there are other writers who play here. Rot-Weiss, in fact, has a surprisingly liberal membership, including a number of intellectuals and artists. I’m not much one for private clubs, and there are few at which I would feel comfortable sitting in the café, smoking and writing.”

“Where do you normally write, if I may ask?”

“Wherever I can⎯and never normally, I hope. The top of a bureau in a cramped corner of a boardinghouse room is most likely. Railroad compartments aren’t bad. My favorite locale, though, is a wildflower-saturated alpine hillside, while giving the local lepidoptera a break in the action. Getting back to Tennismeister Froitzheim, though, the clue that finally fingers me and breaks the case wide open⎯if I may play Sherlock once more⎯is his ignorance of my name. I would guess he knows most of the members’ names, including the literary tennists, but he probably doesn’t remember mine.”

I could hardly believe my good fortune. “That settles it, then. We must hit the old white ball around sometime. Have you played already today?”

“In fact, no. On such a fine morning, I thought it would be nice to slide around chasing elusive flying things, and since the Alps are so distant I took the train out here. I figured that if I didn’t get a game of tennis I would be compensated with the time for composition.”

“I wouldn’t want to stand in the way of your poetry, but you did say you’d finished a draft. Why don’t we take a court?”

“Ach so,” chortled Froitzheim at the front desk. “I see you’ve found each other without my help.” He sold us a box of new Slazenger balls and assigned us an outer court. We walked out into the rejuvenated sunshine and down a flowery lane between rows of courts. Nabokoff now wore a dark green velour blazer over his tennis whites and, I couldn’t help but notice, lilac socks above his white tennis shoes. An elegant Rolex wristwatch with crocodile-skin band sparkled beneath his left cuff⎯perhaps his own bit of escapee finery. We arrived at the court, an enclosure of precisely swept red clay, an oasis of perfection to any tennis lover. On the courtside table, I opened the carton in which lay half a dozen pristine white fuzzy balls like newly hatched chicks, each wrapped in its own protective shell of onionskin paper. I took three in one hand and offered them; he accepted them on the tray made by the natural gut strings of his outstretched racket.

“I see you have an old Pim,” I said.

“Yes, I picked it up at the local tennis shop in Cambridge. It served me quite well on the English grass.”

I took the other three balls, and we walked out on the clay. I hadn’t played for several months, and it felt good to drop a new ball out of my hand and disturb its freefall with the pendulum of my forehand swing, to feel the ball’s inertia transmitted by the hit up through my arm into the shoulder, the old familiar biophysics of my youth. We hit the ball easily at first, the slow cadence of ball against strings and earth amid the twittering of blackbirds and hissing of crickets sounding like the percussion section of a vernal fanfare. Occasionally a forehand into the net or else one hit too well would disrupt the rehearsal; the conductor would merely cue up the orchestra and restart.

From the very first shot my partner’s expertise was evident. Nabokoff shone the same glow of confidence on the tennis court as Sirin did on the reading lectern. His racket described large arcing circles in the air and continued its orbit even after each hit, as though the collision of racket and ball, which sent the smaller body on a new trajectory back through space whence it came, were merely a byproduct, and the true purpose of the swing lay somewhere within its own motion, which produced a series of fluttering spirals seeming to trace the kinetic outlines of the wings of an enormous insect. His backhand stroke concluded with his arms elegantly spread wide. He roamed the baseline athletically, pouncing on the darting white object as if it were prey but then dispatching it back to my side so smoothly that he now seemed like a kitten toying with a mouse, holding it gently in its mouth so it might live to be chased again.

In comparison, I was a pit bull. Whereas he seemed almost to be catching the ball with his groundstrokes, wielding his old wooden Pim like a butterfly net, I bludgeoned it, not interested in catching live specimens. There weren’t any other Jewish kids on the courts at Franklin Park in those prewar years when I was spending all my free time there, captivated for some reason by this relatively new game, learning by watching. There certainly weren’t any at the Germantown Cricket Club, where I had visions for a while of being the first Jewish club champion. I had no opportunity to learn stylish strokes from a well-paid instructor; I improved by getting older players to play with me, and I only did that by showing I could hold my own with them. I learned to win by winning. It was only on the Penn team that I finally received some real instruction and worked expert gilding onto my dependable but roughly fashioned strokes.

We made quite a contrast, then, the aristocratic European and the immigrant American, his velvety backhands met by my garishly thumped volleys, the erudition born of governesses and tutors versus the how-to of the street. I could hear from the low plunk his racket made that it had probably been last strung in Cambridge⎯the gut had stretched over time and lost tension. The sound, alternating with the high-pitched twang of my strings (“Board tight,” I’d told the stringer at Germantown before leaving Philly⎯we didn’t have mechanical tensioners then, with pressure gauges), sounded like a cello-and-violin pizzicato duet⎯molto adagio.

After hitting for fifteen minutes, there was no question in my mind that I would prevail were we to play a real match, and for some reason I wanted to beat him, even as much as I liked him right off the bat. I wanted to be his friend, but I was also jealous of his prodigious literary talent as well as his sway over Véra, and I wanted to show the superiority of my court experience and brute force over his lovely learned game. But he demurred: "Oh, why bother with a match? Let’s just have a nice workout, shall we?" So we continued to pound the balls purposelessly⎯they had already lost their virgin freshness, besmirched with spots of red clay and fuzzed up by our textured gut strings. After an hour or more, with the sun now near its apex and the springtime temperature feeling more like summer, my shirt was suffused with sweat and my shoes and the cuffs of my trousers had turned orange with clay. Nabokoff looked ready for an evening at the Hotel Eden, his outfit a spotless white, fresh from the cleaners.

"Not bad, is it, this Rot-Weiss," he remarked as we approached the net to pick up a couple of balls.

"A small touch of paradise, I’d say."

"Certainly a step up from my first tennis in Berlin. I was eleven years old, and my parents left my brother and me here for three months to have our teeth straightened by a certain renowned American dentist. Quite unusual in those days. Anyway, while the weather held out our tutor would take us to play at a vast array of twenty or so public courts, which I feel absolutely certain was on the Kurfürstendamm, though I can find no trace of it now. Must have been transformed into a department store or cinema."

"A tennis park right in the center of Berlin! I’d have liked to have seen that."

"Of course it was nothing like this quality, but to us boys it was quite wonderful. Funny, one of my strongest memories from those courts is my poor mother, who really didn’t have much of a game, starting every point with an underhand serve and simultaneous⎯and really quite unnecessary⎯shout of ’Play!’"

"Listen, Vladimir⎯"

"Please, Volodya, if we’re going to be tennis partners."

"That would be swell: I didn’t know if I’d find any good players to practice with here. But you know, we really should try a set. Put all this practice to some use."

"If you insist. I rarely play sets anymore. Mostly just plop balls to bob-haired, spoiled German girls or rally in a carefree yet impressive manner with the odd paramour. My fiancée enjoyed the game. But now I’m a single man, so why not a manly competition? Rough or smooth? My Pim never lets me down on the spin."

Nor did it on this occasion, though the spin for service was the last advantage he would enjoy. He elected to serve first, and I got my initial look at his balletic, statuesque service motion. Tossing the white sphere skywards, left arm stretched up to heaven, like a marble angel in classical pose, he would bend and then stretch to his full height before stepping into the court as his racket snatched the ball out of the air at its very apex. It was simply a perfect service motion. Unfortunately, the ball, though propelled at impressive speed, landed outside the service box more often than in. It was to be expected when one hadn’t been playing matches, and Nabokoff didn’t seem to mind a bit⎯or even to notice. He hit his second serve virtually identical to his first⎯hard, and with little spin which might afford a margin of error⎯and so produced an excess of double faults. When he did get it in, if it wasn’t an ace, we would find ourselves in a long baseline rally, since he never came to net. In a match, as in practice, he remained fond of his baseline, skipping left and right along it to fetch balls and retreating back to it should he be forced to advance a few steps to reach a short ball. His strokes remained loose and free, ending with his body stretched in long, wide-open follow-throughs, pausing for just an instant as if to feel the full pleasure of the stroke. He seemed oblivious of whether his balls were flying like arrows to the corner for winners or soaring awry into the fence.

I, on the other hand, though I hadn’t been playing much lately either, still had strong mental and physical memory of thousands of competitive matches played in my teens and through my college years, and from the very first point I took pleasure in recreating the competitive point structures of those days: hammering the ball corner to corner, and taking aggressive advantage of any short ball. Unlike my new friend, who played an older and more European style, I personified the new brand of American tennis, cutting drop shots, throwing up deep lobs, chopping the ball and getting to net at every opportunity to put away volleys and smashes. The poet managed a couple of times, when his dreamy iambic delivery brought several consecutive balls to the intended corner, to hold serve; but otherwise my modern game was too much for him, and I won quickly, six games to two.

He hardly seemed to realize the set was over and was heading back to the baseline to serve another game until I, somewhat abashedly, informed him of the score. He shrugged. "Oh well, I gave up my boyish fantasy in ’14 or so, even before the revolution, of partnering Mikhail Sumarokov-Elston to bring Russia the Davis Cup. And now, with the maniacal police state in control, they’ll probably never even have a team."

"Perhaps you’ll still have a chance, if the Bolsheviks lose control quickly enough."

He smiled. "And we intellectuals and aristocrats all come sailing back into Petersburg, to our townhouses and dachas, sweep the dust off the divan covers and resume our old lives?"

"That seems to be the event many of your compatriots are anticipating."

"Yes, well, there seem to be a number of puerile fantasies yet to be abandoned. Somehow, oddly enough," he gazed out at the coruscations of lake water between the trees, "that particular daydream for me seemed to dematerialize along with my father a year ago."