Vera (19 page)

Nabokov was an instinctive flirt.
^*
He had met both Irina Guadanini and her mother, Vera Kokoshkin, during his 1936 trip to Paris, after which he had written them jointly. Madame Kokoshkin had been less won over than her daughter. The older woman found the writer brilliant—she agreed he was a “
20th century miracle”—but frightening. Vladimir had begun seeing Irina romantically early in February; her head full of his poetry, she had attended the January 1937 reading, and he had called on her
three times the following week. Three years younger than Véra, Irina was a vivacious and highly emotional blonde, briefly married, now divorced.
Her laugh was musical; she had a lively sense of humor; she took great joy in playing with words. Once again Nabokov was seduced by a fine memory for verse. Her Petersburg background was not dissimilar from his. In and around Paris Irina Yurievna eked out a living as a dog groomer. She had a reputation, only enhanced by the involvement with Nabokov, as a siren. Nabokov's allure was established fact as well; when a friend's twenty-one-year-old daughter telephoned
Fondaminsky to ask if he might arrange for her to meet his illustrious houseguest, Fondaminsky laughed. He was not surprised by the request, assuring his caller that all women, regardless of age, fell under Sirin's charm. He also invited her to a private reading the writer was to give at his apartment two days later, of the English autobiography. This would have been in late February or early March. Already Vladimir was surrounded by admirers but smiling only at the blue-eyed blonde at his elbow. Mark Aldanov pointed her out, “the
femme fatale
, the breaker of hearts.” When Vladimir spoke of the disintegrating state of affairs in Germany, noting that “the novelist was God's translator” at reading the writing on walls, tears glittered in Irina's eyes. “How beautiful!” she swooned. She did not leave his side that evening, or any more often than was necessary that spring. He had called her immediately upon his arrival in London in February. It was the
coup de foudre;
she worshiped the imprint his head left on her pillow, his abandoned cigarette butt in the ashtray.
With tears streaming down his face, he professed to her mother his perfect inability to live without her. The closest the relationship came to earth appears to have been the games of hangman the two played in Irina's notebook.

It was inevitable that Véra should have learned of the affair; it was not conducted with any great discretion. Probably it would have raised few eyebrows had it not been for Véra's reputation as her husband's second, or had Vladimir been better liked. Few believed him capable of living without his wife. Blind passion was one thing, all-knowing intimacy a rarer commodity. Marc Slonim, an émigré editor in Paris at the time and a distant relative of Véra's, commented that very few women aside from Véra would be able to tolerate Nabokov's monomaniacal approach to literature. “
Were his hands to be cut off, he would learn to write with his mouth,” Slonim quoted him as having boasted. How many women would allow someone else's obsession to dominate their lives? This truth was hardly lost on Vladimir, for whom it now constituted an indescribable torture. He could not live without Irina—the longing for her was unlike anything he had ever known—but at the same time his fourteen years with Véra had been utterly “cloudless.” He wrote Irina in June that he and Véra knew each other's faintest nuances. A week later he celebrated the splendid rapport he enjoyed with his lover. He could not live without her, felt it
beyond his strength to swear off her. The choice he had to make seemed to him impossible, especially given Dmitri. This letter he mailed unsigned.
The strain was such that he felt he was going out of his mind.

As if leaving a trail of breadcrumbs in the forest, he had passed through Czechoslovakia in May sending furtive signals back to Paris. He arranged
for Irina to write him at a post office address in Prague, under his grand-mother's maiden name.
^*
The Czech weeks had been weeks of perfect duplicity. It was agony pretending to Véra that all was on the former secure footing. On the other hand, he was delighted to inform Irina that Fate had provided them with
a lovely ruse: Gallimard had bought
Despair
, and he would be able to claim he needed to meet with his French publisher alone. He posted an anodyne letter to Irina and Madame Kokoshkin, clearly a smokescreen. He slipped outside to write of his longing; it was “
indescribable, unprecedented.” He stole a few minutes at the post office, at the stationery store, addresses he did not normally frequent. He wrote from a park bench in Franzenbad and carried his letter “
around like a bomb in his jacket until he could post it.” He dragged his heels about leaving for Marienbad, where he had been expected days earlier. (It was something of a miracle that he could write a short story under the circumstances, which he did in forty-eight hours at Marienbad. Then again, “Cloud, Castle, Lake” is very much the story of a man wedged between two realities, a pleasure trip that proves a torture, and a happiness that, once sighted, cannot be grasped.) Meanwhile he denied over and over to Véra what was true. He felt terrible deceiving her, especially since her health was poor. On one pretext or another she inquired after Irina daily. “
You always have something derisive to say about everyone else, why not about Irina?” she chided. Nabokov reported on these interrogations to Irina, who noted in her diary that Véra was tormenting her lover. There were plenty of additional questions. He could not shake off his sordid sense of deceit, the vulgar banality of his situation. It would be years before he uttered the phrase, but he was discovering firsthand what Emma Bovary appeared to have taught him later:
Adultery was a perfectly conventional way of rising above the conventional. He could not condone his behavior, could not forgive himself for having sullied what he saw as his fourteen impeccable years with Véra. He was a great distance away from his 1920s endorsement of “radiant truthfulness.” Never had he sounded so much like one of his characters, brought down by his passion, unable to escape his own private abyss, heartrendingly separated from his own self-image. He resembled himself—or at least his idea of himself—about as much as Felix does Hermann in
Despair
, that portrait of the artist in a cracked mirror.

What was to be done? In the immediate very little, save for Vladimir to lead a double life and for Véra to continue to probe. During their four-day stopover in Paris he conducted an extraordinary amount of business with
Gallimard. After a month's separation, the reunion with Irina was electrifying. Nabokov felt that he had never waited for anyone as he waited for her on July 1. He had been paralyzed by fear that she might not appear at their late-night rendezvous. “
I love you more than anything on earth,” he wrote in her notebook, having stopped by to see her when she was out. When he headed for the Riviera with Véra and Dmitri he left Irina with a notepad on which she could cross off the days until his return, exactly as Véra had done for him in the past. Generally the letters sound painfully like those he had written his wife fourteen years earlier. He wrote of preordained compatability; he marveled over the commonality of their impressions; he felt his lover's handling of him flawless. (For the more mortal among us there is cold comfort in the idea that even Nabokov could not coax two entire vocabularies out of reckless passion.) Ten days later Véra exacted his confession, which in no way put an end to the love letters. If anything, Nabokov
yearned for Irina even more desperately than he had in Czechoslovakia. Nothing slaked his desire. He begged her to be faithful to him, though he realized this was not entirely fair. He pleaded for longer letters.
He promised they would be together early in the fall. As if to prove his point, he had left a change of clothes at her apartment.

Véra's response to the affair was to blame herself. She felt she had neglected her husband because of the daunting task of caring for a child and on account of the unbearably difficult material conditions under which they had lived in Berlin. Vladimir explained as much to Irina, reporting that his wife was now doing all she could to make up for her inattention. “
Her smile kills me,” he declared miserably, late in July. Nor did Véra so much as mention Irina after the confession. “I know what she is thinking,” Vladimir brooded. “She is convincing herself and me (without words) that you are a hallucination.” It was a familiar strategy: Vigorous denial was at times Véra's only form of acknowledgment. Irina's mother was not surprised; days earlier she had predicted that Véra would “
bamboozle her husband and not let him go.” Her calm was true to her nature but also constituted an apt torture. In a Paris-bound letter, Vladimir wrote that the situation was all the more frightening because relations with Véra appeared perfectly even-keeled. He feared he was forgetting Irina. Late in July the Nabokovs moved to a two-room apartment across from their hotel, from which they followed a tunnel to the beach. From the woods above Cannes Vladimir confessed that he thought his wife probably knew of his continued correspondence, but that he
felt so madly sorry for her that he did not dare conduct it openly. In this he was well advised, as he had
promised to terminate the exchange.

In August, presumably when Véra discovered that her husband was still
writing his lover—Irina received four letters in the first ten days of the month—storms broke out on the home front. Vladimir described such tempests that he feared he would end in the madhouse. Véra vehemently denied later that these battles had ever raged. She offered to
prove under oath that these scenes—which her husband deplored, and which Irina and her mother duly recorded in their diaries—had never taken place. Vladimir had nothing to gain from inventing such things, and was brutally honest in his letters to Paris. Had he wanted to break with Irina, he could have done so without eliciting her sympathy; it is unimaginable that voices were not raised. There is
powerful evidence as well that Véra threatened to take Dmitri from his father. One quality was more dear to her even than her devotion to truth, however. Her husband's undignified behavior was one thing, her own quite another. She was far too proud to admit that most of August passed in a spasm of violent arguments.

Irina countered by offering to go away somewhere, anywhere, with Vladimir. When next she heard from him he announced that Véra had forced him to end the affair. He would not be writing again. This put Irina on the first train to Cannes, on or about September 9. On the morning of her arrival she headed directly to the Nabokovs' apartment and waited outside until she was able to intercept Vladimir on his way to the beach with Dmitri. He made a date to meet her later in the day, in a public garden.
^*
As they strolled toward the port that afternoon, he explained that he loved her but could not bring himself to slam the door on the rest of his life. He begged her to be patient but remained noncommittal. Irina left the following day for Italy, brokenhearted, near-suicidal, convinced that Véra had somehow
hoodwinked Vladimir back into the marriage. She attended a reading he gave in Paris at the end of the following year, but never saw him again.

She did not disappear as quietly as Vladimir (and Véra) might have hoped, however. She never entirely recovered from the affair; Nabokov remained the great love of her life.
^†
She predicted that he would deceive again, as soon as he had the chance, all the while protesting that his marriage was impeccable. She wrote poems to their star-crossed love for the next four decades; she kept an extensive notebook of Nabokov clippings, parallel to the one kept by Véra. In the 1960s she wrote a flagrantly autobiographical short
story about the relationship and the meetings in Cannes, called “
The Tunnel.” It is liberally sprinkled with quotes from Vladimir's 1937 letters; its epigraphs are taken in part from Sirin's poetry. The lovers know from the start that their affair is doomed; the hero of the story refers to his passion as the “shipwreck of his entire life.” He begs for his lover's patience while he attempts to extricate himself from his marriage, which, on leaving the city for the Riviera, he is unable to do. His mistress meanwhile worships the imprint his head has left on her pillow, the abandoned cigarette butt in the ashtray. “Gradually something alien, foreign began to penetrate his letters,” which arrive less and less frequently. On the Riviera the heroine accosts her lover, on the beach, with his little girl. He makes a date to meet her later in the day in a public garden. As they stroll toward the port that afternoon, he explains that he loves her but cannot bring himself to slam the door on the rest of his life. He begs her to be patient but remains noncommittal; somehow they will manage to see each other again in the fall. At nightfall the heroine passes by his house, where she feels she should call to demand her happiness. A woman's shadow deters her. At the entrance to the train tunnel she throws herself on the tracks.

“The Tunnel” was not the only piece of literature to follow this debacle. For the latter half of 1937 Nabokov was at work on Chapters 3 and 5 of
The Gift
, a novel that has been described as his
ode to fidelity. The story of an artist as a young man, the book reads like a hymn of gratitude to a woman who in nearly every imaginable way resembles Véra. Zina is easily the
single most appealing woman in his fiction; even Véra, who spent her time distancing herself from Zina, defended the character's purity and moral authority.
^*
Vladimir appears to have been perfectly aware of the chasm that separated the reality of his fiction from the fiction of his reality. In June he had told Irina that he had written foolishly about faithfulness.
Later he reported that he was finishing a chapter, but assured his lover it was not the one about Zina, instead the one on his hero's biographical labors. Véra was battling a figure who was dangerously, splendidly flesh and blood, but Irina was playing a far more arduous game, having to run competition with a rival who existed partly in prose.