Vera (60 page)

Véra spoke more often than did her husband of acquiring a home but—short of some tours of inspection, including one of a small Swiss château—did very little about it. At the end of 1963 the Nabokovs purchased a thousand-square-meter parcel of land, forty minutes from Montreux; they planned to build a small chalet on the village property, but never did so. All the same they continually cast about—in Italy, on the Riviera, in Corsica—for villas. As late as 1970, Véra considered a property in the south of France. She could never seem to find something that was both large enough to entice her and modest enough
to feel manageable. Nabokov continued to tease his
publishers—to his lists of dislikes could be added that bane of all authors: editorial thrift—that he would be happy to accept an advance in the form of a
modest villa in the south of Spain. Hotel life had its attractions however, especially when the party who would customarily have occupied herself with wallpapers and gardens was too busy to do so. As Anna Feigin regularly reminded Véra, why did she need the burden of a house when she had a job that claimed twenty-four hours of her day?

The comforts of European life were much closer to Véra's heart than was America; she understood Europe better, and doubtless Europe understood her. But
Lolita
, and the experience leading up to the novel, had made of the Nabokovs English-language Europeans. They spoke Russian when together, but Vladimir finally, by 1962, was ready to admit that his English was his stronger tongue. He felt that his written French—the language in which he lived in Montreux—had become “
rusty and unwieldy.” English was also the language Véra claimed to write most rapidly; it was the language in which she answered her Russian correspondents. On paper she felt more at ease, more precise, in English than in French, although at times it seemed as if no language was exact enough for Véra Nabokov. (She allowed Jacqueline
Callier to correct her French, whereas Callier was allowed no such liberties with her English, even when it was ungrammatical.) She conducted the Ergaz correspondence—throughout the 1960s she wrote the French agent an average of three times a week—in a piquant mixture of tongues, moving from French to English to French in the course of one sentence, sometimes by way of Russian. (“
We have hit a snag
avec ce contrat.… C'est un
slip-up
très embêtant”
was but the tip of the trilingual iceberg.) English always won out when a delicate matter, or delicate feelings, were at issue. Vladimir maintained too that he preferred life in an English-speaking country. As late as 1973 he protested that
America was his favorite country, that he was counting on seeing California the following year. It was his intellectual home; he felt happier there than anywhere else. (Véra ministered to the bruised feelings.
It would be inexact, she assured a Swiss reporter, to say that her husband felt well
only
in the United States, as he was happy in Switzerland. But he felt wholly
at home
only in the United States.)

Without ever having admitted they had done so, then, they settled in Montreux, wandering farther afield when the tourists alighted in summer and the butterflies flew elsewhere. June and July generally found them lakeor mountain-side, in Switzerland or Italy, exiled from their exile. The shores of Lake Léman proved the perfect ones for the émigré thrice buffeted by history; the country does not rush to claim its new arrivals. For the ultimate nonjoiner, for the Russian-born American writer who felt enough wrapped
in flags, it must have been a relief to set up shop under a rubric that corresponded so beautifully to his own sense of aesthetics: foreigner not exercising a gainful occupation. The Montreux Palace afforded Vladimir a luxury the villas the couple regularly considered did not. The condition of permanent transience, the address in the professionally neutral country, allowed him to melt into his prose, to amount to nothing more than the sum of his style.

When business required that Vladimir or his representative put in an appearance in New York, Véra made the trip. She did so in 1966, 1967, and 1968, focusing exclusively on the matters at hand. Much as she loved New York, she turned down all invitations to the theater, the opera, the ballet so that she could concentrate fully on her husband's affairs. “
I was five days in New York recently but what is 5 days if one has to attend to 1,000,000 business matters?” she grumbled in 1967. She begged friends' indulgence, limiting her social engagements to those with immediate family. Vladimir's publishers and lawyers saw the most of her. In his mind Vladimir saw her too: “
I have been imagining the entire time how you are winging in your new black boots across the sky over the ocean, after a stopover in foggy Paris. I love you, my angel in a mink coat!” he wrote her the day after the 1967 departure. (In her absence he was entrusted to the care of his sister, who referred to her stint at the Palace as “baby-sitting.”) He missed Véra unbearably, as he made clear in letters as tender, perhaps more tender than those he had composed in his twenties. “I was dealt a hellish blow by your departure,” he proclaimed when she left for eight days in 1967. The returns were a cause for elation. For a man who spent many of the Montreux years writing on time and space, it was entirely appropriate that when Véra traveled to New York he should convert her appointments to Swiss time, synchronizing their calendars.

The renewed correspondence was a delight at both ends. Véra kept these missives in her top desk drawer until her death; after one separation, her husband lamented that their reunion would put an end to his letter-writing spree. It posed its problems, too. Vladimir discovered that he had forgotten how to write in ink, in Russian, on anything other than an index card. Doubtless his gratitude to the person who had made that obliviousness possible had something to do with the depth of his devotion. At the end of an aerogramme he scribbled a frustrated postscript: “
I don't know how this thing is supposed to fold.” Throughout the 1960s he continued as well to write to
Véra in the form of little Russian poems, all of them dedicated to her, most of them signed “V. Sirin.” Her desk drawer was littered with these. In December 1964 he dedicated to Véra a five-line composition in which the poet addresses his muse. It ends, “
Oh, you mustn't cry so …” Véra scribbled her response on the card, one that speaks to so much of the borrowing and lending that went on in Montreux, as earlier: “I wouldn't even think of crying. But for the sake of such a rhyme, you can say as much.” As it happened, the letter to her husband's Italian publisher contending that all the previous translators of
Eugene Onegin
had erred in hewing to rhyme at the expense of meaning went out the next day.

With
Onegin'
s publication, Vladimir acknowledged
Véra's enormous help; he attested that she had slaved alongside him on the scholarly work for twelve years. Such pronouncements could not have been easy for a man who exploded when asked by the Bollingen editors to include a formulaic acknowledgment to the poem's previous translators. Do I have to say this? he roared. “
To
whom
am I grateful? ‘Grateful' is a big word.” He was never to go half the distance of the deeply reverential J. S. Mill, who credited the woman who was his wife for seven years and his love for much longer as being a full collaborator, “
the inspirer of my best thoughts.” But in his more relaxed moments he came close. Véra
earned a promotion in 1965, when her husband described her more expansively: “
She is my collaborator. We work together in the warmest and most candid friendship.” And beginning with the interviews of the mid-1960s, he routinely referred to her as his first, his best, his only reader, the person for whom he wrote.
^*
The love, or the closeness, or the mutual respect, was more palpable even than it had been at Cornell, where Dick Keegan had noted that Vladimir lit up instantly in Véra's presence, where Carl Mydans had observed that the couple lived happily in great respect for each other. Saul Steinberg saw an almost insistent physical contact between the two, Vladimir reaching regularly for his wife's sleeve: “
I felt he was in constant touch with her, either through looks, or with his fingers, or watching for her reaction.” He felt Véra was to Vladimir as the earth to Antaeus. The attachment intensified with time.
Even the family members who believed Svetlana Siewert to have been the great love of Vladimir's life had to admit that the couple whom Hurricane Lolita had gusted to Montreux in the 1960s were not only inseparable but deeply in love. In 1973, Véra checked into a Geneva hospital with two slipped discs. A few months shy of the fiftieth anniversary of their first meeting, Vladimir noted in his diary:
“
The feeling of distress, désarroi, utter panic and dreadful presentiment every time that Véra is away in the hospital, is one of the greatest torments of my life.”

The fear of separation manifested itself earlier, in his dream life. “
It has been suggested by doctors that we sometimes pooled our minds when we dreamed,” proclaims the narrator of “Scenes from the Life of a Double Monster.” Save for one very large, common vision, the Nabokovs went their separate way in dreamland, in their separate beds, in what were in Montreux adjoining rooms. For a few months of 1964, however, Vladimir kept a dream journal, partly to support his conviction that we dream prognostically, that the morning's headlines can confirm the previous evening's reveries. Each morning he did his best to retrieve the half-buried images, which often eluded him. On one such occasion he borrowed Véra's metaphor, citing his difficulty: “
Tried in vain to pull one of them out by the end of the thread.” He enlisted Véra in the project as well, although while he categorized his own dreams (professional, precognitive, erotic, catastrophic, tales of Russia; some of the classifying went into
Ada
), he stopped short of categorizing hers. The past proved a not so foreign country in Véra's unconscious life. Thanks to her husband's notes, we know that she dreamed regularly of escape; of bordercrossing; of bribing authorities (in one scenario she did so on Dmitri's behalf, so as to assume the blame); of the floorboards separating underfoot; of being released from a (Portuguese) prison, barefoot, a baby Dmitri in her arms, in the midst of what appeared to be the Inquisition. On November 20, 1964, the Nabokovs had “matching” dreams of the Revolution, with shooting all around.
^*

The dreamlife proved constant in other ways. Also in November Vladimir dreamed he was lying on a couch, slowly dictating—without cards, and spontaneously—a continuation of
The Gift
in which Fyodor speaks of having fulfilled his ambitions. He was conscious as he did so of impressing Véra. He knew it would “please and surprise” her that he was for once able to compose orally with such eloquence. Exactly forty years earlier he had recorded a dream in which he sat at a piano, Véra at his side, turning the pages of the score. Of the less enchanting visions, a running feature in the calamities category was losing Véra—to another man, in the chaos of travel, into thin air. From these disasters he woke limp with relief. (It seems only fair to note that—at least in 1964—Véra did not suffer the corresponding nightmare
of losing her husband.) At two in the morning on December 6, 1964, Nabokov visualized that loss in the dimension closest to his heart: “
Awoke with a pang. An abstract, terrible accident sliced apart our life's monogram, instantly separating us. A nightmare blazon, Vé and Vn with profiles in opposite directions.” The previous day he had written the poem to Véra for which she gave him license to distort the truth for the sake of a rhyme. He blamed the fright on the previous evening's dinner, which had been wild boar. The experiment in “reverse memory” came to an end just after the New Year, but four years later Vladimir recorded a variation on one of the notebook's themes in his diary. “
Dream of the hotel in flames. I saved Véra, my glasses, the Ada typescript, my dentures, my passport—in that order!”

For many years he had been a national treasure in search of a nation; Véra was a little bit the country in which he lived. She, and Dmitri, allowed Nabokov what the world had tried to cheat him of: stability, privacy, an atmosphere of Old World taste and original humor, of strong opinion and exquisite, uncorrupted Russian. And it was Véra, more than anyone, who permitted her husband to dissolve into an abstract entity, to live at a full remove from himself. “Perfection,” the 1932 short story in which Nabokov executes a perfect half gainer of perspectival shift, was one of her favorites. So the change in perspective colored the Montreux years. Having done all she could to put her husband on the map, she now conspired in his disappearance.