Vera (16 page)

“
Véra was a pale blonde when I met her, but it didn't take me long to turn her hair white,” Nabokov chuckled to a journalist. Atypically, an entire chromatic age was lost on him. Early in the marriage, slate streaks appeared in the hair that melted in the sunlight. Véra reported with pride that it had begun to turn when she was twenty-five. As a new mother in her early thirties, she was grayer (and thinner) yet; she looks
as wan as she reportedly felt. In a few years she would be almost entirely pearl-gray. By her mid-forties, the opalescent bob paled to a radiant cloud of white. (
Lena Massalsky's hair did the same at the same age, although the sisters would not discover this until later.) Véra expressed a desire even to hurry it along. “
I wish it would go all white,” she sighed in 1948, when it was very nearly there. “People will think I married an older woman,” her husband protested, to which, without blinking, Véra replied, “Not if they look at you.” She would be as striking in the late 1940s, with the pearly hair and the alabaster skin—the discrepancy between the hair and her young face was particularly dramatic—as she had been in the mask-wearing 1920s. She took great pride in the white halo, which seemed somehow to match her refinement, her agelessness; it removed her from all categories. It lent her an
air of divinity. With delight she shared one
hairdresser's amazement: Her color could not be reproduced artificially. Hers alone was the genuine article. Well before then she was very aware of her looks; the reflections in her husband's fiction were not the only ones she thought distorted. “
The camera and I have been at odds since I was a child,” she grumbled. The statement reveals a certain vanity and, too, a loose grasp of the truth. Véra Nabokov was beautiful, and she photographed beautifully.

She was highly conscious of presentation and appeared always impeccably dressed and coiffed, even when the Nabokovs had nothing. It is easy to imagine her standing before a mirror, less easy to imagine her meeting her own reflection there. Already she had eyes mostly for her husband. It was his portrait—the portrait of an artist—she saw in the looking glass. He knew enough about the makers of literature to realize how much he benefited from that attention. In 1931 he had written Struve:

Véra saw her husband always before her; he saw her image of him. This optics-defying arrangement sustained them at a time and in a place when little else did; it was the first in what was to be a repertoire of deceptive techniques, for which the couple had only begun their magic act. Already Vladimir had acquired a reputation for being impenetrable, almost impossible to get to know. “The thoughts and feelings of the other person rebounded from him as from a mirror,” observed another émigré. This was a cardinal sin among Russians, for whom it is a virtue to be “open-souled,” among whom one speaks not “one on one,” not
“en tête-à-tête,”
but “soul to soul.”
^*
Among the many who found Sirin brilliant, brittle, and impenetrable was the man before the looking glass, who cut from
Speak, Memory
a reference to “
the mirrory quality of his [Sirin's] personality.” (The ever-charitable
Aldanov held that watching Nabokov and Bunin talk was like watching two movie cameras trained on each other.) Véra so much existed in Vladimir's achievements, and in her pride in those achievements, that conversation with her could prove equally flattening. When she called the British embassy in
search of a translator “
who would be an experienced man of letters with fine style,” she heard nothing facetious in the suggestion that perhaps H. G. Wells might be capable of tackling the job. Her sense of humor—usually quite lively, and one of the qualities Nabokov professed to admire most about her—failed her utterly at such moments.

Why her self-effacement? The vanity was there, in ample supply. The desire, or the ability, to look herself in the eye was not. She was most comfortable in a mask, most herself when reflecting light elsewhere. This moon was no thief. She informed a biographer that she
panicked every time she saw her name in his footnotes. Her sisters took a different approach, gravitating toward the spotlight, even if that meant creating one of their own. They had no trouble discoursing at length about themselves. Meanwhile Véra developed a passion for secrecy. She had both the good and the ill fortune to recognize another's gift; her devotion to it allowed her to exempt herself from her own life while founding a very solid existence on that very selflessness. (Her father may well have shared this disposition, but the cloak of invisibility falls differently on a woman.) She was at once a model of solicitude and sincerity; on the one hand she was difficult to please, and on the other her husband could do no wrong. Nabokov's work had always been fostered by women, all of whom had copied out his verse, but few brought to it Véra's critical faculty. She affixed to it her own (and Zina's) ambition, while on the page—as she would later, in a more convoluted arrangement—she assumed the passive role, allowing her husband to speak through her. Her whole being was to constitute a mask.

For all her evasions, she was not unaware of the importance of what she publicly demoted to mere assistance and what detractors identified as her spell, or domination. She acknowledged a greater role with at least one friend. Years later Leo Peltenburg's middle daughter reminded her: “
Back in Berlin, you said that someone should write a book on the influence a woman bears on her husband, in other words on stimulation, and inspiration.” Véra and her husband shared an admiration for Musset's “La Nuit de Mai,” ten stanzas in which the patient but demanding muse urges a subject upon the despondent poet. Noted Nabokov in his 1951 diary: “
V[éra] says that if Musset had been writing his ‘Nuits' today, the conversation would have been between the poet and his secretary.” When Véra's father had asked after Nabokov's work in Berlin he had habitually inquired after “
their work,” implicating his daughter in the process, and perhaps revealing something of his own feelings on the subject. Véra never objected to the assertion that she had been her husband's muse.

In October 1930 she typed a letter for her husband, to Struve: “My wife
and I are still trying to move to Paris—at a somewhat upbeat tempo.” Nabokov was not at his best with music and confused adagio with allegro: After the Paris trip of 1932, France was regularly discussed. In March 1933 the couple were granted visas, although they stayed put, possibly because of the pregnancy that fall. Vladimir
claimed in August that they expected to move over the winter; the following spring they were entirely distracted by the birth of Dmitri. Véra asserted later that “
from the moment Hitler seized power we began to prepare our departure,” a departure over which she repeatedly hesitated, even at a time when only a few thousand Russians remained in Berlin. The employment prospects remained a consideration: Early in 1935 she took a position handling foreign correspondence for an engineering firm called Ruthspeicher, manufacturers of heavy machinery, for whom she worked primarily in English. She had done a great deal of technical translating and was hired in part for that expertise. Before or just after the birth of Dmitri, she had gone so far as to design and attempt to patent a lateral parking device for cars, a retractable wheel affixed laterally to the chassis of a car. Connected to the engine, the wheel could be lowered on command, to maneuver the vehicle into position. From Berlin she submitted her
design to Packard. The marvel is not that she took the initiative of doing so but that she designed the parking system when she had not yet learned to drive.

Nabokov's memories of having accompanied Dmitri to the Grunewald date in part from that time; he was looking after their son while Véra was at the office. “
As before, Véra doesn't have a free minute; I help out as best I can,” he wrote his mother. The Ruthspeicher position proved short-lived, as the Nazis forced out the firm's Jewish owners, and all Jewish employees with them, four months after Véra's arrival. More than ever now the Nabokovs were struggling financially. “
I'm rather sick of being so hard up,” Vladimir sighed in May 1935, just after the couple's tenth wedding anniversary. He and Véra were perfectly exhausted, though continually delighted by Dmitri, whom they were deceiving into walking on his own. He would do so only by grasping at trees and bushes as he moved; they fixed a branch in his hand, and off he went. At eight months Véra began to teach him the
names of plants and trees, always to remain a test of literacy in the Nabokov family. At about the same time she sacrificed something more than her job to the new government. As the Nazis had established strict rules about gun ownership, Véra arranged to send her pistol to Paris, with an embassy friend. The transfer proved harrowing. At lunchtime she crossed Berlin to deliver the handgun to the embassy; her taxi was immobilized by a Nazi procession. As the demonstrators passed they knocked on the car windows, rattling their cans of
collection monies, demanding contributions. The pistol hidden under her clothing, Véra sat impassively, pretending she heard nothing.

The nature of the Nabokovs' poverty has been the subject of some dispute. Véra objected heatedly to one depiction of it: “
The point of émigré life was that even people who were much worse off than we, never allowed the financial considerations to occupy even one tenth part of their consciousness.” She held that her father did not discuss his financial woes, even after having been utterly ruined. They may never have discussed it, but the Nabokovs' was alternately genteel poverty, proud poverty, golden poverty, dire poverty. One thing it was not was unusual poverty. Few other émigrés were any more fortunate. In Paris many were already starving. (Again Nabokov's definition was different. “
I, you understand, need comforts not for the sake of comforts, but for the sake of not thinking about them,” he had explained to Véra in the early days of the relationship.) And his star seemed to wax as his fortune waned. It was all very well and good that Albert Parry had proclaimed of him in
The New York Times
that “
our age has been enriched by the appearance of a great writer,” but it was nonetheless true that he did not own a single decent pair of pants. And Véra had seen the last of her steady jobs. Her
work permit was revoked on ethnic grounds, not long after the Ruthspeicher job. The bleakest years were yet to come.

At many times, but especially in the first six years of his life, when their finances were as delicate as they would ever be, Dmitri represented the couple's only luxury. In Hitler's Berlin, Véra and Vladimir spun a Russian-speaking cocoon around their son, who grew up in as sheltered a context as had his mother, in a fair approximation of the silken comfort of his father. Bundled in furs, Dmitri rolled about Berlin in the Rolls-Royce of prams, on loan from a taxi-driving poet. Few mothers have enjoyed such elegant tributes as does Véra in her husband's autobiography; Nabokov eulogized the scrupulous care with which she attended to their son's diet and general hygiene, the patience with which she indulged his passions. (In
Speak, Memory
, that unlikely how-to book, he offers one crucial piece of advice: “
I appeal to parents: never, never say, ‘Hurry up,' to a child.”) Dmitri grew quickly, to the point where at twenty months he was
mistaken in a photo for a five-year-old. A more silent tribute yet to Véra is woven into
Speak, Memory
, in which her name figures nowhere in the text. Before composing his pages on Dmitri's early years, Nabokov asked his wife to set down her impressions. Aside from a few phrases, none of those recollections found its way directly into the final manuscript. But if anyone has ever wondered how Nabokov knew what Véra felt on a windy railroad bridge near Nestorstrasse, it is because she described for him the long waits for trains to pass below, Dmitri in his lambskin,
she in her black cloth coat, “
my feet hurting with the cold, my hands only kept from going numb by holding his in my right, then in my left (that incredible amount of heat his big baby body generated!)” Nabokov made the memory his own, confirming their cup-half-empty, cup-half-full world-views: “… 
and the fervency of his faith kept him glowing, and kept
you
warm too, since all you had to do to prevent your delicate fingers from freezing was to hold one of his hands alternately in your right and left, switching every minute or so, and marveling at the incredible amount of heat generated by a big baby's body.”