Vera (17 page)

From Véra's pages on Dmitri's childhood, written when he was sixteen, we know a great deal about what mattered to her. Her first lines afford no surprise, coming from the would-be Trotsky assassin: “
He was always so brave. In every new experience he would exhibit a degree of courage unexpected in one so small.” Victory mattered, as did the right weapons: “He often got the worst in an exchange of physical arguments but always got his little victory in the verbal skirmishes.” She delighted in his perceptions of color, his innate gentleness, his neologizing, his discretion, his fascination with the technical, his strengths as a storyteller. (These indicate that he was not impervious to the world around him. This three-year-old's invented hero walked to the Italian frontier, where he was sent back for want of a visa.) In June 1936 Véra and Dmitri spent ten days in Leipzig, where they stayed with Anna Feigin in the Brombergs' spacious apartment. In Berlin Vladimir missed them terribly; it was the second separation of the year, as he had been on a triumphant reading tour in France and Belgium in January. Véra took Dmitri to a sort of petting zoo in the city, but as she observed, the “sudden exposure to nature had an unexpected result. A baby who loved to run around (and a fast runner he was) suddenly became a little lap-baby.” He refused to return to the ground, and for the next few days insisted on being carried, exclusively by an exhausted—he was “a big baby, a heavy armful of a baby”—Véra. Vladimir was fascinated to learn that his son should be afraid of squirrels, but doubtless worried, too: Véra appears to have been pregnant during this trip. As exhausted as her husband knew her to be with Dmitri, he advised her to remain motionless as much as possible.
He wrote a little wistfully of a secretarial job about which a friend had called Véra, but which he knew she could not accept.

While in Paris and Brussels in January, Nabokov had begun a full-scale campaign, a search for the person, the publishing contract, that might expedite their move to Paris. “My fate” had taken on a new connotation; he had done his best to interest as many friends and acquaintances in it as possible. He met masses of people, everyone from France's Edmond Jaloux to Franz
Hellens, Belgium's foremost writer. (“
You would really like Hellens!” he wrote Véra. “He's the premier writer of Belgium, and his books
don't bring him a thing!”
) It was far more difficult to pull up stakes now than it would have been in 1931 or 1932, when Vladimir was still joking about the
suitcase-dusting that went on in the émigré community each time word leaked out of an all-night meeting of the government. He and Véra had had a little tussle over the English edition of
Despair;
the novel had been sold to Hutchinson in London, but the author had been desperately unhappy about their translation and had asked to have a hand at it himself. Vladimir asked Véra to send his revised version; she had balked, of the opinion that it was not yet entirely polished. He attempted to reason with her: Its imperfections were no more numerous than the “birthmarks” on any of his Russian-language manucripts. Four months later, when Véra was in Leipzig, Vladimir reported that the British publisher was not exactly convinced by the revision. What should he answer?
^*
The better his work got, the more difficult it seemed to be to get it translated, and the more dire the family's financial straits. In May he wrote the historian Mikhail Karpovich, who was to play a great role on the other side of the looking glass, in America, and whom he had met briefly, to ask if perhaps some sort of teaching position might be arranged. Was there any hope? “
I am not afraid of living in the American boondocks,” swore Vladimir. “I could, in addition to an elementary Russian course, teach one on the side on French literature.” By November he conceded that he was at his wits' ends, that his position was “
desperate in the extreme.” Was there work anywhere, if not in Great Britain or North America, then in India or South Africa?

In the fall of 1936, his “fate” became what Véra feared might more accurately be labeled his “plight.” The monarchist politician General Biskupsky—one of the most reviled figures in the emigration, a man of so many schemes it was impossible to say where, if anywhere, his loyalties lay—had been named head of Hitler's Department of émigré Affairs in May. As his undersecretary he appointed Sergei Taboritsky, who had been convicted for the 1922 murder of Nabokov's father. (Véra was careful to say that Taboritsky was not simply a Monarchist—“
there were decent people among the Monarchists”—but a true Russian fascist.) According to Véra, Taboritsky's mandate was “
ferreting out Russian Jews and maintaining a corps of Russian fascist translators and intelligence agents to interrogate prisoners of war.”
Her first concern was for her husband, especially in September, when Biskupsky began to register all Russians in Berlin.

Vladimir continued to issue all-points bulletins but found the fates curiously indifferent to his distress signals. “
We're slowly dying of hunger and nobody cares,” he wrote Zinaida Shakhovskoy. She had already proved a guardian angel and did again now, quickly arranging for him to read in Brussels, from which city he would continue on to France. By January 19, 1937, Nabokov was on Belgian soil, never to return to Germany. Later Véra explained: “
My husband was abroad before I was because I insisted on his departure as soon as Taboritsky was released from prison and appointed a member of the commission for managing the Russian refugees in Germany.”
^*
She had remained behind to prepare for their definite emigration. In the ensuing correspondence—once again “allegro” would be the wrong tempo for the final exodus from Berlin, where the anti-Semitic laws had been extended, and a true ethnic cleansing had begun—there is no hint that life in Berlin might have been uncomfortable for her. That both Taboritsky and the head of the Foreign Policy Office believed the evil in the world to be the single-handed work of Jews appeared to have made no impression on her at all.

Between January 18, 1937, when she put him on a train for Belgium, and May 22, when they were reunited, Véra received a letter from her husband every day, sometimes twice a day. In those four tense months he did everything he could to advance his career, with the possible exception of write. His Brussels reading was beautifully arranged by Shakhovskoy and provides a clearer sense of Nabokov's definition of linguistic fluency, from which the geography of the next years derived. Excusing himself for
“son pauvre frangais
d'etranger
,” he went on to lecture on Pushkin in faultless French. The real triumph was the Parisian evening, which was sold out in advance; the appearance represented something of the return of the prodigal poet. Nabokov was introduced by Khodasevich, who observed, among other things, that Sirin's heroes are
all of them artists, even when art is not exactly their métier. To an overfilled auditorium Vladimir read for over an hour and a half from his novel-in-progress,
The Gift
. The applause was deafening. The most captious thing that could be said of the evening was said by the large-hearted Aldanov: “
I will refrain from saying whether one need write the way Sirin does. But at present, he alone can write that way.” The accolades accumulated over the next week, as Nabokov began a whirlwind tour of the French and Russian salons. He was toasted everywhere, introduced to everyone, to the French writers who might be able to arrange for translations of his work, the editors who might help him place stories. “
I'm the toast of the town, I'm surrounded by hundreds of the kindest people,” he informed his wife, moving from lunch to Café to reception. As a Nansen passport holder, he could obtain no French working papers; his ability to settle in France depended on these connections. Despite the compliments, despite the bravura performance at the January reading, this made for exhausting work. In the same February letter in which he described for Véra his greatest triumph to date—a reading James Joyce had attended, after which the two had chatted, mostly about Joyce's eyesight—he wrote of his first visit to Gallimard, an interview he had had some difficulty arranging. Having been told by the publisher's receptionist that Gaston Gallimard was occupied with another caller, he installed himself in the waiting room. Eventually the receptionist went to lunch, leaving him alone. An hour after the agreed-upon meeting time he wandered back to where he assumed Gallimard's office to be; the publisher too had left for lunch. Twenty years later—after Gallimard had published
Despair
but rejected
Invitation to a Beheading, Bend Sinister
, and
Speak, Memory
—the firm again became Nabokov's publisher. The reception would be dramatically different.

He continued on his social rounds in February in London, with two readings and a great number of dinners. He inquired after lecturing possibilities in England but was not overly optimistic. He had begun a version of an autobiography, in which he tried to interest publishers; fragments of it would be folded into
Sebastian Knight
. He saw scores of people, including his nontranslator H. G. Wells. By comparison the days in Paris seemed like a vacation. He was universally charming, as only a writer in pursuit of a publisher can be. He kept
a very un-Nabokovian list of all those to whom he was introduced. This effort took its toll. After two weeks he reported that he was
exhausted from all the sherry, from the constant strain of being cheerful, from the serial introductions. Between each appointment he spent unaccountable amounts of time in the London subway, which depleted him further. “
I am rather fed up with the whole business, and I so desperately want some peace, you and the muse,” he wrote Véra. All the same the London prospects began to burn brighter. By the end of the month letters were flying in all directions on his behalf. The country was expensive but he felt the food was good; he could easily see his family installing themselves in London. He thought they could realistically manage as much, after a summer in the south of France. He counted on a reunion by mid-March, at the latest. “
I have never loved you as I love you now,” Vladimir swore, worried that his wife was tired and lonely. He reminded her of the Peltenburgs' insistence that she visit them in Holland; perhaps she should go now? She should keep in mind that she at least had Dmitri. He had no such consolation, and missed them both dreadfully. He longed for her. He was counting the days until March 15.

He returned to Paris early in March, buoyant, but all the same painfully aware that his fate hung in a delicate balance. The strain of living with that uncertainty can be read in the letters to Berlin; it took its toll as well on his health. He had suffered from psoriasis in the past, and in Paris the condition—aggravated by stress—deteriorated. The wild itching kept him from sleep and greatly affected his mood; the disease spread even to his face. (His condition was not much helped by the fact that this was a particularly cold and rainy spring in Paris.) He felt as if in constant torment, especially as he hesitated to use the ointment he had been prescribed for fear of ruining the sheets at Ilya Fondaminsky's, where he was again a houseguest.
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He could not wait to get to the Riviera, where the sun would offer some relief. In the meantime, he worried for his sanity. He was itching in other ways too; he felt he would burst if he did not get back to
The Gift
. He could not be more sick of his “society lifestyle.” He continued to write Véra of the admiration his work and his person evoked, not always in the most comforting terms. In England he made a less than prepossessing entrance: “My hat (which lost any and all shape after the first Parisian rain) elicits surprise and laughter, and my scarf dangles along the sidewalk, having been flattened in the process.” In Paris he left a different impression, one that was no more reassuring to his wife: “
I have been encountering two breeds of ladies here,” he related early in March. “Those who quote to me excerpts from my books, and those who
ponder the question of whether my eyes are green or yellow.”
^*
He had found a French—English translating job, but was waiting for answers from all kinds of journals and publishers. In March, in another piquant example of the future shimmering through the past, Putnam's turned down the pages they had seen of the English-language autobiography. He wanted only to write; there was too much noise at the Fondaminsky apartment for him to do so.

To make matters worse, in February Véra began to balk at the idea of the move. “
Tell yourself that our Berlin life is over—and please, get ready to go,” her husband implored her as he raced about breathlessly, attempting to establish some kind of base for the family, in France or England. But from Berlin Véra began to raise all kinds of nettlesome objections. For the next two months they sang a painfully atonal duet: He said March, she insisted on April. He said France, she said Belgium. He said France, she said Italy. He said France, she said Austria. She developed a sudden obsession with Vladimir's mother, who had been promised a glimpse of the grandson she had not yet met; she insisted they not move west without first venturing east, as a family, to Prague. And while in Czechoslovakia, Véra hoped to spend some time at a Franzenbad sanitarium, taking the cure for rheumatism. Nabokov railed at this proposal. After all he had done to secure a foothold in London and Paris, was he really to be hauled off to the backwaters of eastern Europe, far from all opportunity? He felt he had depleted himself reaching this other, more promising, shore, and “
that after your letter I truly feel like a swimmer who is being torn from a rock he has reached by some whim of Neptune, a wave of unknown origin, a sudden wind or some such thing.” This time common sense was surely on his side, he argued. Stubbornly Véra proposed that she and Dmitri make the Prague trip and meet him later, an idea to which her husband objected as well. He did not want to put off their reunion for another month. He could not believe his mother's equilibrium depended on their visit. As for Véra's rheumatism, the south of France would prove just as salubrious. It would also be free of doctors insisting she stay forever. A Czech sanitarium would not.