Vera (14 page)

Nabokov was to pay a price for this creative independence among the émigré community. Especially as his star rose in the 1930s, that community was happy to point out how un-Russian were his works, how “foreign” (read: Jewish) was the company he kept. Even
one of his then-admirers wrote that
King, Queen, Knave
read like a beautiful translation from the German; that
The Defense
took place in outer space; that
Glory
was wholly devoid of Russian atmosphere. The more the critics attempted to tie him to his Russian roots, the more he, the consummate escape artist, attempted to confound them; much of his later resistance to the idea of literary schools and influences could be explained by these years, when his readers were few and their need to claim him great. Though the uncertainty clearly took its toll on Véra, she maintained later that the artistic considerations alone had value, that the financial considerations were not merely secondary but unreal. Which made them her department, along with other apparitions like landlords and grammar books and postage stamps. When an aspiring Paris-based writer gracelessly imposed on Nabokov in the 1960s for advice and perhaps something a little more concrete, Véra responded for her husband. Bluntly she explained that he was unsympathetic to his correspondent's plight: “
As a young author, he too could not make a living with writing alone but gave lessons (English and tennis) and made innumerable and very dull translations for businessmen and journalists.” She recommended this approach to the craft as the best one—it was the key to independence—though she might more honestly have suggested the young man find a wife.

Véra conceded that a great many isolated moments of her past surfaced in her husband's novels, and the offices of Weil, Gans made the transition intact. Musically rechristened Traum, Baum & Käsebier, the firm comes to us as the corporate victims of Margot's crank calls in
Laughter in the Dark
. These they well earned, based on the description of the firm of the same name in
The Gift
. Zina's accounts are so vivid that Fyodor is able to describe the offices down to its resident wildlife, its distressed furniture, the carbon paper wilting in the heat. The shamelessly self-promoting Weil has been transformed into the shamelessly self-promoting Traum, who advises the French embassy instead of the French consulate. A generous layer of grime covers everything in sight; Zina's officemate reeks of carrion; her work consists of shorthand depositions for divorce cases, such as that of the man who has accused his wife of sexual congress with a Great Dane. The place reminds
Fyodor of Dickens “
in a German paraphrase,” but that is only because Fyodor cannot himself identify it as pure and vintage Nabokov, with its hilarious and unflinching attention to the grotesque, the tasteless, the self-important.

Alexis Goldenweiser, a highly esteemed attorney from a prominent Kiev family, wrote Nabokov on reading these pages of
The Gift
in newspaper form in 1938. He had often paid visits to Traum, Baum & Käsebier; the firm was then called Weil, Gans & Dieckmann. He delighted in the accuracy of Nabokov's depiction; he knew well the decrepit staircase that led to the opulent suites. And he could confirm that Bruno Weil's pronounced Francophilia was born of energetic rainmaking, as is that of his fictional counterpart. In
The Gift
, Nabokov has the lead partner writing popular biographies of figures like Sarah Bernhardt in his desire to cozy up to his French clientele. Weil wrote on Dreyfus, to the same end. In an odd twist of fate, it would be Alexis Goldenweiser, twenty years later and on another continent, who—insofar as anyone ever succeeded in doing so—would induce Véra to document these years. He elicited from her all we know of her chimerical days at Weil, Gans & Dieckmann, in order to file her reparations claim against the German government.

Otherwise Véra admitted to little deprivation, citing only the “
high adventure” of these years, the same words her husband uses in describing Martin's oblique triumph in
Glory
, which Nabokov thought
his happiest work. The emigration, the couple's limited finances, the dispersal of his family, allowed Vladimir to live a little bit outside the world. Véra did the rest. She had the marketable skills, as did her sisters, both of whom were working as secretaries and interpreters at the time. (During the brief period of the 1930s when all three Slonim sisters were married, they were also all three supporting their husbands.) She was perfectly at ease with both facets of the observation her father had made of her new husband: Writing was indeed the most important thing in the world to him, as well as the one thing of which he was supremely capable. She was the family's primary wage earner throughout these years, yet she never acknowledged as much, occasionally displaying her own loose grasp of reality. (In 1934, when Véra was out of work, Nabokov alone brought in
a third of what she had been earning between 1930 and 1933.)
She flatly denied that she had supported her husband, in
one visitor's opinion because admitting she had done so might reflect poorly on Vladimir. He was on this count entirely happy to embrace reality. When a Russian-Jewish friend felt the chill in the air and decided it was time to leave Germany, he asked if the Nabokovs would be doing so as well. Vladimir
answered that they could not because of Véra's job.

Increasingly those political winds made themselves felt. In June 1932, the Reichstag was dissolved and the ban on the SA and SS lifted. Communists and Nazis scuffled in the streets. By the end of the summer an unofficial civil war was brewing. For many the elections of 1933 would be the cue to leave Germany. Food shortages had already begun to make themselves felt; bombs and grenades exploded in the streets. Soon enough the Nabokovs' correspondence began to resound with a chorus of “
When are you fleeing Berlin?” The couple focused in this case more on the smaller than on the larger picture. They set their sights on their August move from their single room to two large rooms offered them in Anna Feigin's apartment on Nestorstrasse, and on Véra's September vacation. For reasons of economy, they elected to spend the vacation in a French village outside of Strasbourg, to which they had been invited by Vladimir's cousin. The Kolbsheim cottage had been lent to Nicholas Nabokov. His wife, Natalie; her sister, Zinaida Shakhovskoy; and their mother, Princess Anna Shakhovskoy, were vacationing in France at the time. While in Kolbsheim Vladimir's career was discussed at some length; Princess Shakhovskoy proposed that he offer some readings to the émigré communities in France or Belgium. While admitting that he was “
in somewhat of a dead-end situation,” the writer haggled a little over the terms. All the same, after Véra returned to Berlin, her husband left Kolbsheim for Paris, where he explored the possibilities of resettling. In France as well Véra was treated to a little preview of things to come. On the Russian Orthodox calendar the celebration of the Greek martyr-sister Véra—to the Orthodox a saint's day is more important than a Russian's actual birth date—falls on September 30. When Princess Shakhovskoy came down for breakfast that morning in 1932 she congratulated Véra warmly on the occasion. Evidently with some indignation, Véra responded, “
I'm Jewish, Princess!” What may have been a simple correction was heard by some in the room as a battle cry. It would come back to haunt Véra later.

In Paris Vladimir saw a good deal of his new friend, the poet Nina Berberova, and fell quickly into the welcoming arms of Ilya and Amalia Fondaminsky, wealthy patron saints of the emigration, whom the Nabokovs had met in Berlin.
^*
Fondaminsky, a onetime Socialist Revolutionary commissar, was now publishing
Contemporary Annals
. Eternally optimistic, financially
secure, he was one of the few in a position to transcend all émigré squabbles. By the end of the month Vladimir had moved in with the couple, and Madame Fondaminsky was to be found at her typewriter, transcribing pages of
Despair
for the author. (Vladimir warned Véra that she would need to redo the text all the same.) During the stay he wrote her nearly every day, with news, to pass on compliments, for opinions, for advice. At least two kinds of directives followed from Véra's end. He had made all the calls she suggested, to publishers and translators; he had written his letters. And yes, in accordance with her request, he promised to be careful
crossing the streets of Paris. He submitted
Despair
around; he reported on a long, debauched evening from which he had awoken at two-thirty the following afternoon; he toyed with the idea of writing something in French. He reported on a conversation he had had with Mark Aldanov, one of the best of the older generation of émigré critics, who despite advanced degrees in three fields could not fathom the younger novelist's humor. His confusion is understandable. “
I said to Aldanov, ‘Without my wife, I wouldn't have written a single novel,' ” Vladimir reported. Aldanov replied that news of Véra's heroic assistance had already reached Paris. It is impossible to tell if Vladimir was surprised that a statement he made sincerely was shrugged off by Aldanov, or if he made the statement in jest and was astonished when Aldanov took it seriously. Generally he was pleased with his visit—his prodigious output of the last years had secured his reputation as the best writer in the emigration, though the epithet made some sputter—and convinced they should move immediately. Véra was less sanguine, especially as she would be unable to work legally in France. She did not agree with her husband that they could
survive otherwise. Partly as a consequence, neither Nabokov was in Paris on December 10, 1932, when Véra's younger sister, Sonia, married an Austrian-Jewish engineer. It would be five years before Véra would again set foot in France, and by then the circumstances would be far different.

On January 30, 1933, Hitler was named Chancellor, and the loudspeakers began to blare; at the end of February the Reichstag burned. Within weeks Jews were being paraded barefoot through the streets by Nazi youth. In its German edition,
Laughter in the Dark
sold precisely 172 copies that year, when another Russian import of the 1920s began to sell briskly: It was the
Protocols of the Elders of Zion
. Volumes of
Mein Kampf
sailed out of bookstores all over the city. In the spring the first Jewish laws were promulgated; the Weil, Gans offices closed, without warning. (The firm reopened for a short time later, with a skeleton staff.) Still, despite her husband's pull to Paris, despite the brown-uniformed SA teams tramping throughout the Grunewald, the assaults on Jewish lawyers, the mass rallies, Véra remained rooted in Berlin.
With her light hair she was a less obvious target than some. And she was by no means alone in her stubbornness. Her sister Lena, married to a titled Russian named Massalsky, remained in the city as well. Plenty of Berliners had left, but plenty stayed;
Jewish emigration between 1934 and 1937 dropped off considerably. Véra Nabokov did not precisely keep a low profile, as has been suggested. With relish she told the story of having been advised by her former consulate boss to call the office of a German minister then organizing an international congress, for a stenography assignment. “I said ‘they won't engage me, don't forget I'm Jewish.' But he only laughed and said ‘they will. They have been unable to get anyone else.' I did as I was told, and was accepted with alacrity, whereupon I said to the German to whom I was talking ‘but are you sure you want me? I'm Jewish.'… ‘Oh,' he said, ‘but it does not make
any
difference to us. We pay no attention to such things. Who told you we did?' ” The wool producers' convention was to begin the next day;
she got the job. Dutifully she copied down the speeches of four Nazi ministers.

By that time swastikas hung in every street. Uniformed Nazis had begun to make the rounds of Cafés, soliciting donations to the party. It was not wise to refuse them. Véra Nabokov cannot be imagined tipping a coin into one of those metal boxes; she can only have avoided Cafés. The newspapers were filled with new rules—
they were said to resemble nothing so much as a school magazine—but only one Nabokov was reading them anyway.
^*
The first boycott of Jewish businesses was held on April 1, when storm troopers were posted at the doors of all establishments. Véra witnessed firsthand the destruction of a culture in May 1933 when she stumbled upon a book-burning on her way home. It was twilight; she stayed long enough to hear the crowd burst into patriotic song but hurried on before the storm troopers began to prance around
their bonfire. Tens of thousands of volumes went up in flames; though Nabokov would set his own little conflagrations under Marx and Freud, the sight of Berlin youths doing the same must have sent chills down the spine. By the fall, it was considered seditious to buy those authors' books.

Why did they stay? The Nabokovs had long thought the city a
miserable dead end; the year after their marriage Vladimir had written Véra that hearing German made him sick, and that the cuisine did little more for him. He would prefer almost any
provincial outpost to Berlin, a city he vowed, in a draft of
Speak, Memory
, that they had both disliked.
^†
Initially
Véra had admired
Germany for its democratic institutions, an affection she could no longer feel. She did not frighten easily, if at all; her father had also waited until the bitter end to leave Russia. Mostly they had no place to go. Berberova's description of the face of the continent at the time goes some way toward explaining their inertia: “
On the map of Europe were England, France, Germany, and Russia. In the first, imbeciles reigned, in the second living corpses, in the third villains, and in the fourth villains and bureaucrats.” Zinaida Shakhovskoy visited the Nabokovs on Nestorstrasse in 1932 or 1933 and was surprised to find them every bit as disgusted by Russia and Russians as they were by the situation in Germany. (
She pointed out to them that in their blanket condemnations they were guilty of the same kind of racism as the Germans.) They were comfortably settled with Anna Feigin, the only relative to whom Véra felt close; the arrangement reduced their living expenses considerably and provided them the great luxury of domestic help. Véra continued to work freelance assignments and to offer language lessons; her students included their great friend George Hessen, also still in Berlin. Nabokov did not find politics in any way broke his literary stride. Writers should “
occupy themselves only with their own meaningless, innocent, intoxications,” he announced in 1934. “I am writing my novel. I do not read the papers.”