Vera (22 page)

The family returned to Paris the day before the declaration of war. In the flush of those first harried minutes after September 3, when the gas masks were handed out, when the air-raid alarms sounded nightly, they did what Vladimir's mother had done when the first rumblings of revolution had been felt in Russia: They sent their son off, in this case with Anna Feigin to Deauville, where Dmitri remained until mid-December.
They missed him, but knew the separation to be necessary. Meanwhile Vladimir redoubled his efforts to obtain American visas. He began his own blitzkrieg campaign—so different in tone and tempo from the
drôle de guerre
around him—bombarding the Tolstoy Foundation, Mikhail Karpovich, his cousin Nicholas, now teaching music at Wells College, with urgent requests for help.
He fretted that no one understood how utterly dire was his situation. The ever-loyal Jannelli gathered precious affidavits in New York; Vladimir left her and the Tolstoy Foundation with the alarmed impression that he would be mobilized were he not to leave the country before December 10.
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To his agent he dictated the kind of letter he hoped Bobbs-Merrill would submit on his behalf to the American consul. His desperation can be read in its final line: “
And, please, make it quite clear to Bobbs-Merrill that, once in New York, I shall certainly write for them
the novel
they expect from me.” (Had she known of them, Véra would doubtless have found distressingly familiar the lengths to which Alexandra Tolstoy went for the family. To one refugee coordinator, Tolstoy suggested that if nothing could be done for Mr. Nabokov, certainly someone would be willing to offer his wife an
affidavit for domestic service. The appeal echoed the thirteen-year campaign Evsei Lazarevich Slonim had waged to bring his brother to St. Petersburg.) The Bobbs-Merrill letter went out punctually, along the lines Vladimir had requested, as did an affidavit from Serge Koussevitzky, the conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. For a few weeks the Nabokovs—more penniless than ever, all émigré publishing having come to a standstill—held out hope that they might leave in December, but what they were to remember as the dimmest,
most miserable period of their lives lasted five months longer.

Since September the family had been accepting monthly thousand-franc loans from a friend who owned a Parisian cinema; Nabokov went back to giving English lessons that winter. Among his three students was Maria Marinel, the eldest sister of a conservatory-trained harp-playing trio, all of whom became devoted family friends. Maria's younger sister, Elisaveta, offered
a portrait of Véra at the time, hardly the serene Vermeer that would suffice for the years to come: Slim and lovely, Véra leaned over a bathtub, washing the family's sheets. (On another occasion when the Nabokovs gave a small party, Véra could be heard holding forth at great length on Proust. Maria Marinel was glad to have the excuse of entertaining a disruptive Dmitri in the next room, as she felt the discussion was over her head.)
Berberova provided a correspondingly bleak picture of Vladimir, whom she found lying in bed in January, ashen and destitute, after a bout with influenza. The apartment was practically free of furniture. She claimed to have brought the family a chicken, which Véra immediately set out to cook, a statement Véra later found offensive, more offensive than she could possibly have found a chicken in the winter of 1940. The family's circumstances were not lost on Dmitri, who informed Maria Marinel, “
We have a very hard life.” Véra did all in her power to shelter him from his reality. When he spent the night at Anna Feigin's, his mother announced grandly to friends, “
Tonight my son is dining out.” And his father was forthright about his desire for Dmitri to have all that of which the Revolution had deprived him. Over the winter Véra and Vladimir together prepared a series of lectures on Russian literature; by April Nabokov reported that the course was nearly ready, but that he was
delivering it to the walls. At the end of 1939 he had also written a novella called “The Enchanter.” He read it, one night during the blue-out, to three friends and the woman doctor who had treated his psoriasis. Word of its unusual subject spread quickly, stories of forty-year-old seducers of prepubescent girls not being in great supply at the time. It was unpublishable and, unlike the two thousand pages of lecture notes, would do nothing to put its author on that boat to America. On the other hand the novel into which it blossomed, in another language, on another continent, would twenty years later allow the American writer Nabokov to realize precisely the reverse of what the Russian writer Sirin now dreamed. It would send Véra and Vladimir sailing back to Europe.

A few less enduring fictions helped speed the departure. Nabokov urged the Tolstoy Foundation to assign him an invented series of well-remunerated lectures. It went without saying that this arrangement would remain
purely “metaphysical.” Similar letters went out to friends, who were to assure the authorities that they would lodge the family on their arrival. The visas came through in February 1940, but the Nabokovs still lacked the $650 they needed for three steamer tickets.
Nicholas Nabokov was among those who suggested that his cousin sail alone and send for his family later, when he could afford to do so. It is easy to imagine how this idea would have sat with Véra. Having had a closer view of the Nazis than most in Paris, she can have
had no great desire to meet up with them again; while few in Paris that spring believed a German would ever march into the city, she would have belonged to that small minority. She had already spent much of the fall running desperately from office to office, in search of the requisite visas. Vladimir appears to have considered the idea of sailing alone, or at least was remembered by many as having been in such a panic to leave that he contemplated doing so. Véra's determination to leave can be read in her having compromised her unassailable ethics by offering a
200-franc bribe in exchange for exit permits. In April a Jewish rescue organization headed by a former associate of Vladimir's father offered the family half-fare tickets on a crossing. A second agency, committed to assisting non-Jews who had been victims of the Nazis' racial policies, supplied additional funds.
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In all of Nabokov's work there is barely a clock that functions properly, and yet now, abruptly, in the nick of time, everything came together. The monies arrived the morning after the Germans had invaded the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg, when the thunder of antiaircraft guns could be heard outside Paris. By the time the Nabokovs sailed, nine days later, the files at the Quai d'Orsay had been burned by the best-dressed cadre of arsonists in history; traffic police patrolled with rifles; the city had begun to fill with bewildered refugees from Belgium and northern France. The scene at the Gare Montparnasse was chaotic; the Germans were barely seventy miles from Paris. The Marinel-assisted departure was made in haste, amid great chaos and with some concern for Dmitri, who was running a 104-degree fever and who was plied with sulfamides all the way to the embarkation. On the same day Winston Churchill delivered his first radio address as Prime Minister, an address in which he acknowledged that the Maginot Line had been penetrated. If good-byes were said they were not extended to Sergei, who may have been left “
to stutter his astonishment to an indifferent concierge,” as Vladimir later surmised, with oddly phrased contrition. Véra had listed Sergei (and not Sonia) as her nearest relative on her
application for immigration; she also borrowed Ilya Fondaminsky's avenue de Versailles address, which sounded—and was—statelier than the rue Boileau. She saw neither her brother-in-law nor Fondaminsky again. Both men were to perish in concentration camps.

A crossing on the French Lines'
Champlain
was not without drama at the best of times. Christopher Isherwood had sailed to America on the same vessel the previous year and noted that it seemed very small, “
slithering down
the long grey Atlantic slopes.” Compared with the Canadian cargo ship on which Véra had sailed from Yalta it must have felt luxurious, however, especially as a benevolent French Lines agent took it upon himself to assign the family to a
first-class cabin. Certainly perfect comfort would have been the impression Véra conveyed. As Elisaveta Marinel wrote, given the fear of U-boat attack and Dmitri's illness, the crossing must have been difficult, “
but you, Véra Evseevna, are superhuman, and if you had the strength to get out despite the odds, then you probably arrived better than anyone else under the same circumstances.”

Véra Nabokov left no record of what she thought as she sailed into New York harbor on May 27, 1940, but a few scraps of evidence can be assembled. She had been turned back at borders before, when in possession of a regular passport. Under more pacific circumstances, Isherwood had looked out from the same deck to find New York terrifying,
visibly pulsing with New World energy. That Véra may have been flustered is confirmed by Dmitri's recollection that his mother lost her composure precisely once in her life, and that before a bureaucratic ordeal at the Port of New York. At customs the keys to the Nabokovs' trunk failed to materialize, turning up later in her pocket. (
The trunk was opened with a firm blow of a hammer—then immediately and accidentally closed again, either by the porter or by Vladimir.) The family
looked miserably lost, and very poor; the trip across Manhattan and to the Upper East Side felt interminable. In the taxi from the pier there was a comic fumble with the unfamiliar currency, when Véra attempted to bestow a hundred-dollar bill on an
honest driver to whom the Nabokovs actually owed ninety-nine cents.

There was plenty of cause for concern. For the third time a mythical, flourishing world had collapsed behind the Nabokovs, who escaped as if through a trapdoor. This one came banging down behind them. It was not literally true that they had made their way “
out of the cell, which in fact was no longer there.” Despite what Vladimir liked later to claim, the building at 59, rue Boileau was not obliterated by a bomb. The Germans were in Paris on June 14, however; the
Champlain
hit a mine and sank on its next westbound crossing. And among the many borders they had traversed the Nabokovs had this time crossed a truly semantic divide. In Berlin and Paris a Russian counted as an émigré. In America, she was
a refugee.