Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov (27 page)

Wilson had stopped his book at a dramatic high point, which made for a strong narrative arc. It also allowed him to avoid addressing the first wave of Terror, or the second, or the decades that followed. Wilson himself knew before he had finished it that the book was flawed and out of date, noting in a letter to a friend that he was finishing up his Finland Station project just as the Soviets were about to invade Finland.
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Despite Wilson’s use of overwhelmingly sympathetic sources,
Finland Station
reveals a surprising amount about Lenin, from how he was sent back to Russia in 1917 to his Jekyll-and-Hyde comment that those who crafted beautiful art made “you want to say stupid nice things,” when it was better to “hit them on the head, without any mercy, though our ideal is not to use force against anyone.”
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Wilson somehow took the latter statement as a testimony to Lenin’s appreciation of the arts but devotion to more practical matters. His notion of helping Nabokov to understand Lenin, however, was more hard-headed than his interpretation of Lenin. Wilson must already have built a solid reservoir of gratitude or affection for their friendship to withstand this overture.

In subsequent months, Nabokov filled out his freelancing schedule as he had in Europe, tutoring students in Russian. Volunteering at the Museum of Natural History, he also wrote his first real articles on Lepidoptera and learned to dissect butterfly genitalia. He began to prepare lectures on literature for the Stanford summer position that had finally materialized. He found a welcome audience for his earlier story “Cloud, Castle, Lake” at
The Atlantic
, which he had revised to reflect more recent history. The lyrics for the song the poor protagonist is forced to sing with marching German hikers were transformed into a call for murder and destruction. An
Atlantic
editor wrote to say that they were eager to see more such works of genius from Nabokov. He happily obliged.
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While Nabokov made inroads into literary America, Véra settled Dmitri into school and began looking for work with a selectivity that, for a time, rivaled her husband’s. An offer of a more-than-fulltime job was declined (too many hours), while a portion of the same translation job on a part-time basis was similarly rejected (too little pay). But that winter, she managed to secure a secretarial position with a Free French newspaper, part of France Forever, a stateside campaign allied with Charles de Gaulle funded in part by British intelligence. In an organization committed to denouncing Vichy policies and promoting American entry into the war, Véra had found her place; it was a job she loved.
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Just as opportunities began to appear for the Nabokovs, Véra’s sister Sonia arrived in New York on the S.S.
Guadeloupe
. Sonia had been in Casablanca for several months before getting a translator’s visa, showing up in New York in January 1941.

The Slonim sisters had kept in touch—Sonia listed Véra’s latest West Eighty-seventh Street address as her destination. Ship records stated that she was thirty-two years old and stood five feet six inches, with blond hair and brown eyes, but the rest of Sonia’s public identity lacked the clarity of her physical self. She first appeared in
the ship’s register and documents under her middle name, as Sophia. Her marital status has been recorded as single, then written over with a D for divorced and her married name “Berlstein” inserted by hand.

The confusion over Sonia’s name was easily cleared up, but others thought she had more to hide. As the
Guadeloupe
sailed into New York Harbor, a telegram arrived at the State Department from the ship’s last overseas stop. It was addressed to the U.S. Secretary of State, warning him that Sonia Slonim was suspected of being a German spy. The moment Sonia entered the country, her mail was placed under surveillance.
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Carl Junghans had secured a visa just a few days after Sonia, but having heard that the Germans were trying to extradite him from Casablanca, he had caught an earlier ship to America. After fleeing Germany under false papers, he had acquired a foreigner’s passport in Casablanca. He traveled through Lisbon on the S.S.
Carvalho Araujho;
his record shows him as stateless. Like Sonia, he had blond hair and brown eyes.
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Unlike Sonia, who intended to become a permanent resident, Junghans had been able to obtain only a six-month work visa.

The United States was still sitting out the war but was worried enough about it to require registration, ethnic identification, and fingerprinting from all non-citizens in America, with hefty prison terms for anyone dabbling in anarchy. Holding facilities for immigrants viewed as high-risk had been established; but unlike Canada, the U.S. concentration-camp system from the First World War sat dormant for the time being.

Which was not to say that the FBI, under the direction of J. Edgar Hoover, had been sleeping. Since the beginning of the war, agents had been collecting information and files on aliens deemed suspicious, tracking them to prepare for possible U.S. entry into the war. The U.S. Immigration Service, which had recently been folded into the Department of Justice, was happy to coordinate with law enforcement officials in monitoring incoming refugees and alien
visitors who might be of interest. Many were identified and their destinations recorded, in case they needed to be tracked down at a future date.

As a former Communist Nazi filmmaker, Junghans was intriguing to many people. He did not even make it off Ellis Island. Instead, he found his first American home in the dorm rooms and common caféteria with those waiting to be deported: political radicals, criminals, and suspected spies like himself.
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Sonia arrived three weeks later, but found there was nothing she could do. funghans’s deportation order had been filed; his only chance was to appeal and hope that immigration officials would review his case.

Sonia eventually contacted a refugee professor the couple had known in Berlin for help. Nearly four months into Junghans’s detention, he was permitted to leave Ellis Island under a $500 bond, officially free. But the authorities had not forgotten about Carl Junghans.
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Sonia taught French and German at the International School of Languages on Madison Avenue and found an apartment just a few blocks away from Vladimir and Véra. The proximity might not have been welcome; it is hard to imagine that either Vladimir or Véra would have been pleased to see Junghans with Sonia in yet another country. But they may have been spared a face-to-face encounter. The Nabokovs finally left for the Stanford summer teaching position in California not long after Junghans’s release.

By then, Véra had already left her beloved position at France Forever, but Junghans signed on there in her wake, writing for their information agency and doing scripts for the State Department propaganda station WRUL, which broadcast anti-Nazi, anti-Vichy radio programs into occupied France.
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It was the fourth country in which he had produced political propaganda.

Junghans had a brief stint on the anti-Nazi lecture circuit, and wrote about the threat of sabotage from German submarines, while privately telling stories of his close association with Hitler and
Goebbels.
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As a filmmaker, however, there was just one place in America he really wanted to go—Hollywood.

But the Nabokovs would beat Sonia and Carl to the West Coast by several months. In May 1941, nearly a year to the day after his arrival in America—Véra, Vladimir, and Dmitri set out across the United States with one of Nabokov’s Russian-language students in her new Pontiac. He had done a series of lectures at Wellesley College that spring and had just learned that they wanted to offer him a one-year post starting that fall, reducing anxiety over mounting bills just in time for their trip west. The family had three weeks in a new car, with stops for reading, walking, and the endless collection of butterflies.

Tennessee, Arkansas, Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona lay open before them—the trip was a coast-to-coast lesson in the topography and sociology of America, one they enjoyed immensely. But whatever dreams they had in the new world, they were still refugees. Asked where he lived by a barber, Dmitri answered that he had no home but lived in “little houses by the road.”
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During his first year in America, Nabokov covered more territory in his adopted homeland than he had ever seen in Russia. And in that California summer, the gap between his current life and the people he had left behind expanded far beyond the physical distance dividing them. He had written months before to the Marinel sisters, still in Paris, of the impossibility of navigating the two realities—one in which he lay in a meadow of flowers in America at “the height of luxury, like some millionaire’s coarse dream”; another in which those he loved were still in danger.
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A bleaker reality shadowed every good thing that came the Nabokovs’ way, and news from Europe only got worse. The world was still in shock from the collapse of Western Europe and the quick humiliation of France, haunted by the nation’s surrender at Compiègne, fifty miles outside Paris. The town had previously been the site of
Germany’s capitulation at the end of the First World War, but by 1941 Compiègne had become home to a concentration camp.
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During his own stay in France, Nabokov had had little love for its bureaucrats and would later lump together the “rat-whiskered consuls and policemen” of France and Germany.
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He had his own visa nightmares for reference, of course, but that personal, intimate dislike for customs officials preoccupied with the proper papers would soon be borne out by larger events.

Many French policemen turned out to be more than willing to help root out foreigners, particularly foreign Jews, from their communities. After the fall of France, the Vichy government collaborated with the Germans, passing statutes resembling the Nazi Nuremberg Laws that severely restricted the rights of Jews. Officials noted that the French laws were sometimes more restrictive, but Vichy decided in 1941 that where the French law and German law differed, the French law should be used. In truth, whichever law was harsher was often the one that was applied.
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Had the Nabokovs not escaped France, not only Véra but Dmitri Nabokov, too, would likely have been declared Jewish—as he would not have been under the Nazis—a bureaucratic fine point with high-stakes ramifications.

French anti-Semitic measures began with registrations and censuses and moved on to arrests and detentions. Most Jewish prisoners were held at a newly-inaugurated concentration camp installed in apartment buildings in the Paris suburb of Drancy. A modern low-income housing project in the process of being built when it was commandeered, Drancy was so new that its plumbing and sanitation systems were still incomplete.

Drancy had its true inauguration in the summer of 1941, when French officers collaborating with Nazi occupiers swept through Paris’s 11th Arrondissement, arresting foreign Jewish males between the ages of eighteen and fifty, taking another family member when the man in question could not be located. Thousands were loaded onto buses and delivered to Drancy.
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Eventually, mothers and children followed. It was only the beginning,
and among the less fortunate Jews in Paris at the time were Sonia Slonim’s ex-husband, Max Berlstein, and Nabokov’s literary patron, Ilya Fondaminsky.

The Nabokov family arrived in Palo Alto on June 14, ten days before classes were due to start. They moved into a tidy villa just across from the Stanford campus, and Nabokov prepared to teach a group of undergraduates Russian literature and writing.
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But news from the war was relentless, and before classes had even begun, Germany invaded the Soviet Union, breaking the nonaggression pact that had divided Poland and other countries between them. The German advance was shocking and brutal. Nabokov, who had few doubts about the appropriateness of Hitler and Stalin as allies, found himself torn by their newfound enmity. Fantasizing an intricate British victory that might somehow pull off a defeat of Hitler, then Stalin, he hoped both dictators might end up in exile with only each other for company, two hundred miles off the coast of Jakarta on desolate Christmas Island.
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As the Germans bombed submarine bases, sank tankers, captured the Dnieper Dam, and moved closer to Leningrad, Nabokov spent his Stanford summer in the split reality he did not know how to reconcile, thinking of those trapped by war but also walking the hills above Palo Alto, catching butterflies. He corresponded with Edmund Wilson, whom he was already calling “Bunny,” confiding in his new friend the plight of the Russian émigré now that Germany and the Soviet Union were at war. “For almost 25 years,” he wrote, “Russians in exile have craved for something—anything—to happen that would destroy the Bolsheviks,—for instance a good bloody war. Now comes this tragic farce.”
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In the officially neutral America that was worried about the seemingly unstoppable Germans, the public quickly began to root for Stalin. For more than a decade, the Soviet dictator had been referred to in Moscow and the U.S. as Uncle Joe, but for many
Americans the nickname suddenly acquired a sentimental sheen. Even former head of the Provisional Government Alexander Kerensky, now in Manhattan, telegraphed Russia to pledge his support to Stalin, if only the Soviets would seize the opportunity to free prisoners from concentration camps, abolish collectivization, and restore Poland.
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