Vera (8 page)

Evsei Slonim rejoined his family in Odessa, a city in which chaos reigned well before the arrival of the Bolsheviks. “
No one knew who would be arrested tomorrow, whose portrait it was best to hang on the wall and whose to hide, which currency to accept and which to try to pass on to some simpleton” was one appraisal of the situation. At the end of 1919 the family managed to move on toward the Crimea, where they spent more than six months in a villa in Yalta, the last piece of Russian soil to be held by the Whites. Probably in November, at the bitter end of the civil war, the Slonims fled, on a Canadian boat whose captain agreed to ferry passengers across the Black Sea. (He accepted passengers when he discovered there were no valuables to be acquired cheaply in Yalta, the war's victims having lost virtually everything by the time they reached the southern port.) One photo survives from the journey; in it Véra looks like a character from
Oliver Twist
—a stylish one, but a Dickensian waif all the same. Her eyes are enormous and meet the photographer's with great weariness; the rest of the face is as much that of an eight-year-old as of an eighteen-year-old. The reality of Véra's departure from Russia is embedded in Martin's departure in
Glory
, a turbulent crossing to Istanbul. Certainly the description of the bewildered passengers “
sailing as if by chance” fit the actual picture; the “rashly chartered” Canadian freighter proved more salubrious than the
filthy vessel on which the Nabokovs had crossed the same sea a year earlier. On board ship the captain befriended Véra and Lena, allowing the girls the use of his cabin while he was on deck, a great luxury in the overcrowded vessel. (For a woman who was to be remembered for being unapproachable and fiercely independent, this first escape was one unremitting proof of the kindness of strangers.) In a novelized version of the life, the unsteady trip across the Black Sea would creak like a heavy-handed piece of foreshadowing. To Véra it could have felt like nothing of the kind. The fictional Martin could not grasp the danger of his situation. Véra Slonim—who since 1918 would have been accustomed to danger on all sides—could not have grasped the finality of hers.

The family was delayed by rail strikes, first in Istanbul and again in Sofia, where Véra learned the Bulgarian she put to use in her Rainov translations. After four weeks in Sofia, Evsei Lazarevich arranged with some French soldiers for a private carriage for his family and for a special rail permit.
On beds of hay they traveled to Vienna—Véra found the city architecturally glorious and greatly reminiscent of Petersburg—where they checked into a good hotel, and normal life resumed. Other émigrés traveling the same route were struck in particular by the
sight of white bread and well-fed horses, something they had not seen in Russia for three years; the first weeks abroad must have felt dreamlike. Early in 1921 the family settled in Berlin. Historically Germany had been tolerant of political refugees. Furthermore, life there was cheap; it seemed the perfect place to wait out the storm. With the assistance of Peltenburg, his Dutch associate, Evsei Slonim managed to sell his Russian properties to a speculator willing to gamble that a Bolshevik regime could not last. Soon after his arrival, and having made some contacts in Bulgaria, he set up an import-export business, specializing in farm machinery.

Despite the plain facts of the dislocation—the Russian language has no word that rings with the joyous, elective sound of “expatriate”—the first years of exile were comfortable. They were so especially if Véra Nabokov's account of them can be believed. She remembered that her father had “
made much money through the sale of Russian estates, his own, and those of some business acquaintances for whom he acted as broker.” She had very smart clothes, and happily attended all of the best dances, including plenty of charity balls. The general mood in the Russian community, which swelled that fall to over a half million members, has been described as one of defiance rather than despair. Véra's disposition over the crises of the next years was no different. (She was constitutionally incapable of self-pity, even of self-dramatization. Her letters suffer as a result.) It was assumed that, in her words, “
everybody was going back in a year, or two, or ten.” She was eighteen years old; she went stunt flying; she hoped to learn to pilot an airplane. She rode sidesaddle in the Tiergarten. She learned to shoot an automatic in a basement firing range, among a group of former White Army officers, at least a few of whom must have paid special attention to the wisp of a girl with the crystalline laugh and the impeccable posture and the ice-blue eyes.
She talked, and argued, more about politics than about literature. She did not like to see the Berlin stay “
deprived of its high adventure”; she shared the taste for exploit with which her future husband would infuse
Glory
, the novel that on a perfectly literal level most closely resembles his autobiography. “We went to automobile races, and boxing matches, and the celebrated Berlin variety show, Scala,” Véra recalled. She did not adhere to the “
welter of vodka and tears” school of description.

On the family's arrival in Germany, Sonia was sent to boarding school near Lausanne, to complete her grade school education. She later returned to
Berlin to attend a Russian gymnasium, and for dramatic training. Lena—who had received the highest possible grades at the Obolensky Academy and a gold medal along with them—went to Paris. At the Sorbonne she earned a degree in modern languages, returning to Berlin two years later. Véra was
discouraged in her plans to attend university. She had been prone to respiratory infections, and her father voted against her attending Berlin's Technische Hochschule, as she had hoped to. She did not qualify for admission without supplementary course work, a strain he thought inadvisable. That she could have been so easily convinced seems odd, given what we know about her resolve; it may be a tribute to her father's authority, or it may qualify as a tiny grain of defensiveness about her lack of higher education. In any event the degree in architectural engineering never materialized, though even without it she was to engage in much bridge-building—and throw the occasional stick of dynamite. Save for a stenography course in 1928, her formal schooling had come to an end. She went to work in her father's
import-export firm, probably in 1922. At about the same time Véra spent two months
teaching herself to type, first by memorizing the keyboard, then by taking dictation from whomever she could enlist.

At his office address on Neue Bayreuther Strasse, Evsei Slonim backed an established Moscow publisher in a literary venture. Orbis's dual mission was to translate Western literature for Russians, and to translate the Russian classics into English, for export to America. Beginning in 1922 Véra worked in that office as well, writing and translating, both for her father and for Orbis, occasionally freelancing for the automobile firm in the building. She handled all but the German correspondence, which was entrusted to a young German woman. The Orbis office would be gone by the following year, a casualty of the inflation, but it survives as the scene of one of the few certain nonencounters between Vladimir Nabokov and Véra Slonim. Nabokov fondly remembered having climbed the stairs to Evsei Slonim's office, debating with his university friend Gleb Struve the fair price to ask for
the Dostoyevsky translation they were contemplating. He met with his future father-in-law, and he left the office. Fate is merciful in some ways, a tasteless, prankish, absentminded, clumsy, uncooperative cheat in others. She did not introduce Vladimir Nabokov to Véra Slonim that day. But neither did she saddle him with a Dostoyevsky translation, for which he might never have been paid.

It is highly improbable that anyone ever placed a telephone call from Petersburg 3848, the Slonim home on Furstadtskaya, to Petersburg 2443, two miles away, where the Nabokovs' doorman would have answered. This did not
prevent Vladimir from contemplating the long history of his and Véra's near-encounters. In Russia they had had mutual friends—both knew different members of the same prominent families—but they did not meet. Nonetheless Nabokov took it upon himself to divulge that he and his future wife had been
strolled by their governesses side by side in a Petersburg garden. “
They could have met many times when they were children; at dancing class, perhaps; it bothers them, and they go over it,” a visitor reported, in the 1960s. By some accounts the two had acted as extras in the same Berlin movies. Véra had twice summered near his family's country estate. Nabokov positively contorted himself in his attempts to glimpse the workings of the Fate that had finally bent his and Véra's roughly parallel paths; repeatedly he “
directed the searchlight of backthought into that maze of the past,” just as Van would later do in
Ada
.

What would have happened had there been no Russian Revolution? Andrew Field asked Véra. Two sentences into her answer she was interrupted by her husband: “You would have met me in Petersburg, and we would have married and been living more or less as we are now!” he asserted peremptorily. For the two not to have met and married remained wholly unimaginable to the man with the protean imagination: He held an almost religious conviction about the stubborn inevitability of their union. He who had been so much buffeted about by history—who having lost his country, his father, and his fiancée, had every reason to believe, as he did, that
Fate was ill-inclined toward him—preferred to see coincidence as a marvelous artist. Fate holds a place of honor in Russian literature and Nabokov did nothing to dethrone her; her combinational moves are to be seen in every one of his novels, a body of work often said to be distinctly un-Russian. As Brian Boyd has made clear, destiny's contortions in bringing together Véra Slonim and Nabokov—or at least Nabokov's view of those contortions—lends a thematic design to a
whole catalogue of fictions.
^*

In front of others Véra Nabokov was happy to indulge her husband's insistence on destiny's near-misses in Petersburg and final, foreign triumph. She herself spoke of
Fate's devious ways. She shared her husband's retrospective capacity and had at least as robust a visual memory. But she did not share her husband's obsession with reconfiguring the near-misses and the uncanny parallels of the past. It was the uncertain past that concerned him, the uncertain future that concerned her. She did not believe Fate as painstaking as her husband; she was more inclined to take matters into her own hands.
She had ample reason for doing so. For a Jew in Russia to be a fatalist was tantamount to inviting disaster. Nabokov trusted in a thematic design which could not have looked quite so dazzling, so sure-handed, to someone who was in the habit of gingerly tiptoeing one step ahead of destiny. Véra made only one small acknowledgment to predestination, many years later. When a publisher asked for a publicity photo of her husband, she sent one of him in his infancy. “
If you look carefully into the baby's eyes,” she advised, “you can see all of my husband's books.” Of this she seemed herself perfectly convinced in 1923, although predestination was perhaps not the word for it. “
Oh, I have a thousand plans for you,” cries Zina in
The Gift
.

If indeed Fate meant finally to allow Nabokov “
the upper hand in his dealings with destiny,” she threw one last curveball. He missed Véra dreadfully during their January 1924 separation, when he was again in Prague with his mother and siblings. He had never imagined he could pine for Berlin, which suddenly seemed to him an earthly paradise.
He was bored without her. He counted the days until their reunion. He spoke repeatedly of their soon-to-be-realized happiness. Already he was
dreaming prophetically that he was seated at a piano, with Véra turning the pages of his score. But then—with the return imminent—a small domestic disaster struck. On the morning he read of Lenin's death, he wrote Véra sheepishly: “
Something has happened (only don't be angry). I can't remember (for God's sake, don't be angry!) I can't remember (promise that you won't be angry), I can't remember your telephone number.” He knew it had a seven in it, but the rest had entirely escaped him.