Dmitri Nabokov

The palimpsest of present and past is always with me, and the never-changing mountains and ski slopes don’t help. Every downhill run brings back memories, mostly pleasant ones, and mostly of friends no longer with us. As I sat down to write this, I read about Dmitri Nabokov’s passing. The son of the great Vladimir, he was as good-looking a man as a Don Juan deserves to be. He was also a writer, a racing driver, an opera singer who made his debut in La Boheme alongside Luciano Pavarotti, and a translator of his father’s Russian books.

A Greek friend of mine who was having wife trouble once rang me from Athens and asked if I could arrange a Gstaad dinner which would amuse his wife, who was getting bored in Greece. I asked Pat Buckley if she would put them up in Le ch”teau de Rougemont, where the Buckleys wintered back then. Pat placed Dmitri next to the bored Greek wife, who almost swooned upon meeting him. He was very tall and very masculine, and he came up the stairs singing an operatic aria. After dinner my friend came up to me and asked me if I’d had a leave of my senses. He didn’t speak to me for the next ten years.

I had discussed his father’s The Enchantress with Dmitri. I now apply the book’s title to Jessica Raine, AKA Nurse Jenny of Call the Midwife. I feel the ache of longing for someone who is just out of reach. I also know that desiring is often better than getting. (I really don’t mean that in Jessica’s case, in case she’s reading.) All last week the King of Greece made fun of my Jessica obsession. “While your majesty laughs, I suffer,” was all I said to him. Then I produced a couple of pictures of her cut out from the Daily Telegraph and left them in front of his dinner plate. (I have about ten of them, all the same—Jenny riding on her bicycle.)

Alas, my yearning for an unreachable woman continues. But as people laugh while I leave pictures of Jenny on their tables, I dream about skiing with her…or dining in a Paris bistro with her…or taking an ocean voyage with her—on my boat—and my romantic pain lessens as my imagination soars. I am certain that Jenny-Jessica would never throw a pitcher of orange juice, nor would she ever kick me very hard on the shin. But then I’d never, never, never, ever, ever even think of cheating on her, and that’s the difference between Miss B, the Countess de Caraman, and my only true love, Jessica-Jenny.