Vera (13 page)

Whatever emotional effect the dual losses had on Véra, the financial fallout made itself most immediately felt. She claimed that she went to work at this time to pay the expenses incurred in her father's illness; she made no mention of her mother's expenses, which could not have been negligible. That year she attended stenography school; she was already an accomplished enough typist to have been coaching friends. On the recommendation of a friend, she took a
clerical position in the office of the commercial attaché of the French consulate, located a streetcar ride from the Nabokovs' rooms on Passauer Strasse. She owed the job to Raisa Tatarinov, a Jewish émigré who had organized a loose-limbed literary group, one of the two which Nabokov regularly attended. (It was at a 1926 reading held by this group that Aikhenvald had made the Turgenev comparison; if Véra and Vladimir met before the masked evening in 1923, they did so at the Tatarinovs'.) Véra had more dignified work than many of her compatriots; the aristocrats famously drove taxis, but the émigré intelligentsia supported itself in any way it could. Raisa Tatarinov, who held a law degree from the Sorbonne, also worked as a secretary. Nina Berberova strung beads and addressed thousands of Christmas cards. Elsa Triolet designed jewelry. Those whose German was good paid the rent composing articles like “
How to Organize Your Kitchen.” A very
great deal of cross-stitching and cigarette-rolling got done. Nabokov coached tennis; he and Iosef Hessen's son, George, organized an exhibition match to attract boxing pupils. He continued to give English lessons, an occupation that provided free meals as well as travel benefits.

October 1928 brought welcome news: Ullstein offered 7,500 marks for the German rights in
King, Queen, Knave
. This was several times what the publisher had paid for
Mary
and a fortune compared with what Vladimir was earning as a tutor. Much to the consternation of her boss at the consulate, Véra quit her job early in the winter. Her husband was eager to indulge his childhood passion for butterfly collecting; an expedition was planned for the southern Pyrenees, of which he had been dreaming for some time. It is almost impossible to believe that Véra did not experience some misgivings about the plan, much though she later reported on her desertion with glee; her husband reproached her more than once for being “
hysterical over all sorts of utterly foolish, practical thoughts.”
Even he admitted that their financial situation was not altogether rosy. Moreover, unemployment was on the rise in Berlin. One incentive for the 1929 trip was to meet with Gleb Struve, in the hope that Nabokov's friend and early champion might arrange for meetings with French publishers and translators. That dinner took place early in February during the Nabokovs' two-day stay in Paris. Several days later Véra was hunting her first butterflies and mastering her husband's system for killing his catches; she was careful always to see that he did so in the most humane way possible. From the Pyrenees Vladimir groused that he was spending more time with his butterflies than with his pen, but Véra managed to photograph him at his makeshift desk, at work on the first pages of what became
The Defense
.
^*
The photo reveals that the four-volume
Dahl
—the Russian cousin of the
OED
and a volume that Nabokov
claimed to have read from cover to cover at least four times—had made the trip to France with the couple. Vladimir had originally hoped to stay in France until August but by late June, probably for financial reasons, the Nabokovs were back in Berlin.

Vladimir would say that Russian Berlin “
was nothing more than a furnished room, rented out by a crude and malodorous German woman.” Beyond that stood a crude stage set of a corner of the world they had left behind. All seemed, and much was, counterfeit. Very little of the country wore off on the couple, who—with the exception of a few months in 1932, when they had enough money for only one room—generally took two rooms, one for each of them, and used a communal bath. (For better or worse these were years
when the economy had made boarders something of the rule; the middleclass family without a lodger raised suspicions.) Both Véra and Vladimir caught the new German craze for sunbathing; they spent a certain amount of time lounging in the less than spectacularly clean Grunewald, where, as Nabokov famously remembered, “
only the squirrels and certain caterpillars kept their coats on.” They remained lifelong sun worshipers, Vladimir bronzing to a
deep orange, Véra to a pinkish brown. The Weimar passion for calisthenics also made an impression. Nabokov reported to his mother months after the marriage that regardless of the weather, he and Véra
exercised with the windows open, stark naked, every morning. Dealings with the rest of the world fell to Véra, who assumed the lion's share of negotiating with landlords, often a delicate process in the couple's case; she could have written her own account of the appropriated overcoat. In the tradition of the Jewish scholar's wife as she had existed two or three generations before, Véra was the one familiar with the marketplace. It was she who had a better command of the local language than the learned author with whom she lived.

Nabokov insisted on his lack of German, but it should be stressed that his definition of linguistic competence differed from most people's. (Véra's version of this was categorical: “
Personally, my husband had no contacts with any Germans at all and never learned, or tried to learn, the German language.”) He was perfectly able to understand a movie in German; he and Véra went every few weeks to the cheap neighborhood cinema, not only for foreign films. He communicated with the Bromberg boys, who had forgotten their Russian, in German. The German translation of
The Defense
was read aloud to him, for his approval. Later he would say that his German was only good enough to allow him to read entomological journals, which is roughly equivalent to saying that one's English is only accomplished enough to enable one to practice medicine. It was strong enough—or something was—to enable him to rewrite the English translation of Kafka. He clearly made some attempt at speaking the language, not only because it would have been quite impossible for him not to, but because he admitted to
mangling it. His summer charges laughed at his efforts. The point was less linguistic than philosophical; he wanted no part of this never-adopted country, which he had
long disliked.
^*
And the isolation suited him. As the tide of the Russian emigration ebbed, leaving the Nabokovs increasingly alone in Berlin,
Vladimir confessed that he was happier in a country in which his Russian stood in no danger of corruption, as it might have in France.

The language barrier was but one of several, constructed on both sides. For two very different sets of reasons the Nabokovs had lived outside the norms in Russia. Now another whole set of conventions failed to apply. Véra herself could not stress how little they cared to be part of Germany. “
Who wanted assimilation?” she challenged one historian. In no way was she, as he had asserted, “in search of citizenship.” This was fortunate, as the couple's situation was irregular from the start. In June 1925 they obtained Nansen passports, soon enough demoted to “
Nansen-sical” passports. Green Nansen documents were issued as of 1922 to the stateless, who enjoyed few legal rights, and who, with the papers in hand, were condemned to interminable bureaucratic deliberations each time they hoped to travel or work; the documents proved more effective in closing doors than in opening borders.
^*
Nabokov later railed brilliantly against these humiliations, recalling with a sweet sense of revenge the insults a few émigrés managed to hurl at the “
rat-whiskered” functionaries who controlled their fates. Their statelessness in these years would have as much to do with the Nabokovs' later obsession with rights and privileges as did the stateliness of their childhoods. All the same, when Vladimir cursed the German zeal for imposing forms and regulations on foreigners—for treating them like “
criminals on parole”—he did not seem aware that his wife had already had a full dress rehearsal for this state of affairs. She was well accustomed to belonging to a colony. The criminal treatment may have seemed to her unjust, but would also have felt familiar.

Despite their feelings about Germany, the Nabokovs cast a vote in 1929 for prolonging their stay. On the return from France they purchased a modest slice of lakeside property in Kolberg, an hour southeast of Berlin. Covered by pines and birches, the parcel abutted a little beach, dotted with waterlilies. On the land they envisioned a small cottage, to be shared with Anna Feigin. They spent a fair part of the summer on the isolated property, in the primitive splendor of a mailman's shack, swimming, swatting away horseflies, picnicking with visitors. They had as many friends in Berlin, and were as social, as they would have or be anywhere again. Vladimir reported to his mother that he was giving his wife tennis lessons—she had played as a child, but could not have had much practice since—and that her game was progressing beautifully. For her part Véra had more momentous news to share with her mother-in-law. Her son had been working consistently and well, and had
already completed about half of a new novel. Everything about it set it apart from his previous books. “
Russian literature,” asserted Véra, “has not seen its like.”

Vladimir finished
The Defense
—a novel in which a wife, with all the good intentions in the world, squelches her husband's erratic genius—before the year was out. By that time the Nabokovs were installed in two rooms on Luitpoldstrasse, for the second time. The stock market crash in New York had disastrous effects on the German economy, the prosperity of which had been assured by a wave of foreign investment. That tide now ebbed; sawdust sausage was invented. Again the couple were forced to tighten their belts. The dream of building the house at Kolberg evaporated; Nabokov managed to set a murder scene but never a house on the property. They
relinquished the land, and Véra went back to work. In April 1930, on the recommendation of the commercial attaché of the French consulate, she took a secretarial job with a law firm that acted for the French. Her monthly income was slightly less than what she had earned in her previous position, but the day was shorter as well, and the Weil, Gans & Dieckmann office was only a fifteen-minute walk from Luitpoldstrasse. For five hours a day she devoted herself to
French and German stenography, French and English translation. Additionally she worked overtime when the situation demanded it. In particular she remembered Bruno Weil's involvement in the purchase of a German factory by Renault: “I at that time not only spent an entire Sunday at one of the big hotels where our French subcontractor was staying, interpreting during negotiations and later spending countless hours reworking the French text of the agreement, but I spent a lot of time working on it at home as well, until the deal could be cut.” Throughout the 1930s she continued to give English lessons, as did Vladimir, and worked sporadically for an American agency as a tourist guide. Her principal source of supplementary income was stenography assignments, for which she was paid on a handsome hourly basis. Her clientele varied: Véra had something of an established relationship with the representative of a French perfume concern. She recorded the proceedings of an international convention on eliminating slums. Without holding what could legally be considered full-time employment, she managed to produce an income of RM 3,000 to RM 3,300 a year, or a little over half of what a well-placed banker earned at the time.

All the same
Nabokov resented his wife's job, which claimed so much of her time and energy. He especially disliked the fact that she was required to get up early; morning was not Véra's shining hour at the best of times. (Vladimir said it all when he referred to her affectionately as “
my morning blind girl.”) And she put in such a mercilessly long day! Nor was her husband
the only one to rail against her commitments. German unemployment hovered around five million in 1930, when industrial wages were lower than they had been in 1914 and many families found themselves in financial straits. A married woman who accepted a job opened herself to criticism as a
Doppelverdiener
, or second wage earner. In 1932, by the end of which year the unemployed numbered over seven million, out of a workforce of about thirty million, a law was passed permitting the government to dismiss women who were second wage earners from public service. In any event, Véra's schedule amply supports her later assertion that—no matter how spare the Berlin years—“
we always had the possibility of earning more money, had we wanted to put more of our time into earning it.” It also to a very great extent explained Nabokov's
proud assertion of 1935: Despite having to support himself with tennis, boxing, and language lessons, he had managed in ten years to turn out seven novels and a fair selection of poems. (He did not mention the thirty-odd short stories.)

Véra must have concurred with her husband about the long hours and the early mornings. Neither prevented her from returning home to hear, and to type, what he had written between lessons in the course of his day. In the decade following the marriage he wrote in a white heat: most of
The Eye
in the first two months of 1930;
Glory
between May and the end of the year;
Laughter in the Dark
(then
Camera Obscura
) in a matter of months immediately afterward; stories and poems for
Rul
until its October 1931 demise; a draft of
Despair
between June and September 1932. For Véra this added up to a great mountain of pages, sublimely different from those she spent her days transcribing.
^*
Nabokov reported that he held his novels in his head, already formed, fully developed film ready to be printed, but he indulged all the same in the usual orgies of corrections. There is a reason why his books are filled with paeans to smart typists. There were paeans on Véra's side—retrospective paeans anyway—to the arrangements of the early 1930s as well. She made a virtue of necessity, as her father had done in floating timber to Riga on ingeniously constructed rafts, not because it was the best way, but because it was the best way for a Jew to do so while observing the letter of the law. She saw to it that her husband benefited from his cultural isolation. In this she was exactly the reverse of
The Defense's
Mrs. Luzhin, eager to saturate her husband in the real world so as to spare him the painful, lonely communion with his own obsessive genius. Without mentioning quite how he had managed the feat, Véra boasted of Nabokov's “
having developed his talent
to a luxurious blooming virtually in a vacuum,” of his having lived “a life within and practically outside of a milieu of strangers.” Others found this to be a description of a living hell; there was a rash of émigré suicides. Véra made of their disenfranchisement an exalted thing.