Vera (54 page)

8
AUTRES RIVAGES

On New Year's Eve 1959, Véra wrote Stanley Kubrick, whose second attempt to lure Nabokov to Hollywood had reached him in San Remo. Vladimir had just begun to regret having declined Kubrick's initial offer. Assuming his conditions could be met, Véra explained, her husband would be willing to put his new work aside, for
Lolita's
sake. He could be in Hollywood by mid-March.
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On New Year's Day 1960—having been sick through the night, as were Dmitri and Vladimir, from the Hotel Excelsior-Bellevue's holiday pheasant—she wrote Jean-Jacques Demorest, at Cornell, about a few remnants of their American life. Demorest had inherited Nabokov's office: What to do with the armchairs, the table, the rug, the skis? “
If nobody wants them, give them to the custodian, or the Salvation Army,” she directed, apologizing for the inconvenience. A great deal of jettisoning went on over these months, when the one thing that seemed perpetually to elude the Nabokovs was an address. On January 6, the day after Véra's fifty-eighth birthday, they settled into a small apartment with an ocean terrace in Menton. Even as they did so they knew that the search for a European “refuge” was likely to be interrupted
by the Hollywood trip. “
We do not seem to have any permanent address at the present time,” Véra wrote Victor Thaller at Putnam's, who was compiling material for their 1959 taxes. “My husband suggests that you say ‘vagrant,' but I think that you might just as well use the one [the address] the Treasury Department has been using up till now: Goldwin Smith Hall.” The Ithaca Post Office forwarded everything to Putnam's, she reminded the indulgent Thaller. She sounded contrite: “All this is a little fuzzy but it is the best I can suggest.”

The next years were about nothing so much as the luxury of fuzziness, of dislocation, of the domestic arrangement that allows one to abstract oneself from daily life. As the Nabokovs reacquainted themselves with the Riviera, Dmitri was settling in Milan, where a fine voice instructor had been found for him. Véra's letters to the young artist are all of them reminders to put art above comfort. He was to disregard street noise, unsightly lavatories, cockroaches (an inevitable fixture of life, Véra reminded her son), and focus exclusively on his work. It alone mattered. She knew well which facts should be kept at bay so that the fictions might flourish. Dmitri had been commissioned to translate
The Gift
for Putnam's, and his progress was slower than his parents might have liked. “
Do tell me your deadline,” Véra advised Minton in January. “Don't tell Dmitri.” In the end Dmitri translated the first chapter, and Michaël Scammell, then a Columbia graduate student, the remaining four.

The dispossession was not entirely spatial. Véra's December challenge to Lena elicited a shrill four-page reply, in French. Lena had been long with her sister's letter: “
To be perfectly frank, I was thoroughly disgusted by it.” Did Véra think that twenty-one-year-old Michaël believed in the stork? He knew by heart the names of every one of his grandparents and great-grandparents. Surely she could not think it possible that Lena had been decorated as she had—Véra's older sister was very attached to her decorations, as to her title—while making a secret of her ancestry? Lena seemed to think her sister's assumptions were based on reports she had heard from Russian friends, which launched her into a vituperative screed about the behavior of their compatriots in Berlin. Did her sister have any idea how thoroughly the Russian emigration had embraced Hitler, of the difficulty of raising a child alone, of the Nazis' attempt to blacken her husband's name? (The husband, from whom she had separated in 1938, had taken refuge in a Hungarian monastery, bombed in the war. Lena had had word from him in 1945 but never heard from or saw him again.) Where Véra reproached her elder sister for having renounced her Judaism, Lena was happy to provide a litany of reasons why she had entirely shrugged off the past, neglecting to distinguish
between religion and nationality. She questioned her younger sister's affiliations, having heard—erroneously—that Véra corresponded with a Russian Nazi in England. Moreover and most objectionably, Lena applied a generous dose of sibling rivalry to the hardships of the previous years. Véra had not suffered sufficiently. Did she remember Lena was a widow? She would not be surprised if Véra had forgotten:

If she had discarded the past, she had done so with ample reason, whether Véra understood her reasons or not.
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(She could have carried the inventory further: Several of Lena's close friends had ended their lives in suicide; she herself had
twice been imprisoned, once with her three-month-old son. Her books and papers had been confiscated. She had nearly been deported.) Her postscript was doubtless a high-handed gesture toward conciliation, but could not have been read that way. Lena advised her younger sister on the steps necessary to put Vladimir in contention for the Nobel Prize.

Writing from Menton, in measured tones and in English, Véra failed to rise to the bait. “
I am glad your son knows who he is which means that he and we can meet on frank terms of friendship. I do not think the rest of your letter has anything to do with my question,” she replied. She was astonished by the explosive letter, a long-winded, nonexplanation of the question she had wanted to ask and had herself posed in a rather roundabout fashion: Why
was
her Jewish sister a practicing Catholic? This was the stumbling block, although it was not discussed; on all levels the sisters were speaking different languages. Véra forwarded Lena's answer to Sonia. The youngest Slonim sister claimed not to be surprised by the letter, which says a good deal about Sonia's continued feelings about Lena, from whom she had now been estranged
for nearly forty years, and who she believed was generally unbalanced. Coolly Véra chided Lena, “I am sorry you did not write me sooner since now we are taking the boat for the States on February 19th.” She sounded not at all unhappy to be putting six thousand miles between herself and her elder sister. For the record, she denied that she corresponded with a Nazi, or a former Nazi, in England or elsewhere. And as for the Nobel, she was pleased to report that her husband cared so little for such distinctions that he had only the week before declined membership in the National Institute of Arts and Letters. That was an honorable institution. “The Nobel Prize Committee, on the other hand, has lately become a political racket which keeps dropping curtseys in the direction of the Kremlin. Who wants to be lumped together with Quasimodo [the 1959 laureate] and Dr. Zhivago? I think I have answered your questions,” she closed, informing Lena that her next address would be the Beverly Hills Hotel, Beverly Hills, California.

Véra signed the letter “with love,” as Lena had done as well, but appears to have had as little inclination to embrace her sister as she did her sister's version of the past. Certain baggage was under no circumstances to be shed, and the Jewish trunk was one such piece, all the more indispensable for being battered. Véra held on to it for moral rather than religious reasons, in much the same way that her husband had once articulated his entire political philosophy: “
When in doubt choose that course which annoys the Reds most.” What had once been a healthy sibling rivalry—Véra's handwriting is nowhere more polished than in her missives to Lena—displayed itself over the next years in a series of subtle and less subtle digs on Lena's part, a series of lofty but biting acknowledgments on Véra's. The two never got past the religion issue, into which they channeled their differences. Lena felt Véra made too much of her Judaism; Véra failed to grasp why her sister had—as one family member so perfectly expressed it—“
gone whole hog into Catholicism.” The relationship was not strengthened by the fact that Lena had raised her son alone and felt her disconnection profoundly. She was continually astonished by Swedish mores; she found the world outside Russia to be a barren landscape. Having devoted her life to a single, highly personal cause, Véra, especially in 1960, felt her isolation represented a luxury.

This did not prevent the two sisters from exchanging pleasantries, from sharing photos of their sons, from a short, agreeable visit at the end of 1962. (
Véra was startled by how ancient her sister looked, especially since Lena was only eighteen months her elder. The reunion was followed by a two-year silence, which Véra found mystifying but made no effort to break.) Much that she felt about her hard-won statelessness—and much that she felt about her sister—was loaded into a pronouncement she delivered to Lena in 1962,
when Véra was still without a permanent address. Lena could reach her by writing any major newspaper, magazine, or library. “
Or practically any big publisher—especially, of course, any one of those that publish V's books,” she added, grandiosely. While the effort to recapture the past was clear in the couple's itinerary it did not extend overly to family. The Nabokovs left Europe for Hollywood without seeing Lena, or meeting her son. Nor did they manage a second visit with Vladimir's brother Kirill, a travel agent in Brussels, who had attended the Weidenfeld reception. Véra wrote him from California, apologizing for the quick change in continents, and wondering why Kirill—a very talented poet—did not consider working as a translator. She had hopes he might tackle the Russian version of
Lolita
.

Loaded down with gifts for Anna Feigin and Sonia, uneasy about leaving Dmitri on his own in Milan, Véra set off with Vladimir on February 18, 1960. It took
Lolita's
screenwriter twelve days to travel from Menton to Beverly Hills, to trade European palms for North American ones. Photographers met the couple in Cherbourg and in New York, where after a rough passage—Véra spent one night clinging to the side of the bed, while the armchairs and table in their parlor sashayed into the suite door—they made a forty-eight-hour stop. She met with the Paul, Weiss lawyers; the first item on the agenda was termed “Escape from Olympia.” These chains would prove more difficult to slip than had most of the familial and geographic ones. At the end of the year Véra discreetly (and unsuccessfully) appealed to her husband's foreign publishers to withhold Olympia's share of the royalties until their differences with
Lolita's
original editor were settled; the Nabokovs were never convinced Girodias had respected any terms of their contract. Walter Minton advised Véra to drop the matter, aware that Girodias would not allow himself to be so easily thrown overboard. Minton did not believe in moral victories; Véra did. She conceded only that her husband had lost interest in the dispute. “
Girodias bores him, and he would like to drop the fight, which I think would be a pity,” she replied.
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