Vera (74 page)

On top of this affront arrived Shakhovskoy's 1979
In Search of Nabokov
, published in Paris. Véra was willing to overlook the personal attacks, what she read as flagrant anti-Semitism, even the insinuation that she had participated in the writing of her husband's books. What she could not stomach were the charges leveled against Vladimir. As she saw it, Shakhovskoy—to whom she referred by her married name, Malévitch—had two objectives: “
1) to prove my hatred (entirely imagined by her) for Russia and the Russian
people; 2) my having brought about VN's estrangement from a) Russia and b) Christianity and God (and the Maleviches).”
^*
This was beneath contempt, where Véra intended to leave it. But as Madame Malévitch seemed intent on a second objective—to “connect him [VN] with pedophilia, and insinuate that VN had commerce, if not with the devil himself, then at least with some of his representatives”—she contemplated legal action.
^†
(The matter was complicated by the fact that the two women shared a lawyer. Louba Schirman, who had so ingeniously freed the Nabokovs from Girodias, was also a close friend of Shakhovskoy's.) In a meeting in Montreux with Dmitri, Schirman counseled Véra against taking action; a suit would only focus attention on the book. She cannot have had an easy time doing so, but Véra turned the other cheek. The issue flared up again two years later, when Ullstein brought out the volume in Germany. Véra felt this publication more acutely. She believed that Russian readers would recognize Shakhovskoy's charges for what they were but that the German public would not. Schirman hesitated to pursue the matter, which Ledig Rowohlt advised Véra to drop as well. In his opinion the book was boring and would go unread. Generally friends agreed that the biography amounted to character assassination, but a few relations suffered. How could you have failed to notice the baseness, the villainy, all the vulgarity, Véra
rebuked one Parisian friend? Shyly she asked Natalie Nabokov, who had been so kind to her in America, if she had joined her sister's faction. “
I shall not love you less,” wrote the woman who knew one could judge a man as much by his enemies as by his friends, “but I shall not write you anymore.” The correspondence ended there.

All of these battle cries went out from a woman who continued to profess that she was alternately too lazy or too tired to attend properly to her work. She was suffering from Parkinson's disease; when the tremor was strong and she was obliged to receive visitors,
she hid her hands under a shawl. She avoided dinner invitations; she did not dare attempt a cup of tea. After 1980, she no longer ventured into the hotel restaurant, telling visitors she was not fit to sit out a whole meal. Her health never constituted an excuse, despite the obstacles it presented: She had attempted to use a tape recorder for her
Pale Fire
corrections but found that her fingers were too weak to manipulate the controls of the machine. Her hearing had faded to the point that a scholar's taped translation proved useless. Her right arm continued
to hang limp. There remained a vast discrepancy between the woman and her words. At one point she received a sixteen-page memo from a German authors' guild, a right-minded organization. She appealed to Ledig Rowohlt to intervene. “
I loathe organizations. I am suspicious of all questionnaires, detest unnecessary paperwork—in a word I would not like to have anything to do with VG Wort.” It was difficult to believe that the woman behind this letter was a frail and decorous seventy-eight-year-old who described herself as an invalid. A Lausanne-based scholar who worked with Véra on VN's poetry was taken aback by the contrast “
between her physical frailty on the one hand and, on the other, her calm sense of purpose, her firm will, and the remarkable clarity of her mind and intellect.”

She proved a gold mine to scholars, having committed to memory not only what was in the books but what was no longer in them. For Véra as for Zina, the word combinations amounted to archaeological ruins that “
stood for a long time on the golden horizon, reluctant to disappear.” She occasionally
astonished a scholar by letting slip a palimpsestic truth, some telling tidbit that had failed to make the final cut. She was a kind of walking key to the works. She regularly identified Cornell colleagues in
Pnin;
she could authenticate a text; she could
suggest a liberty the honest translator would not otherwise have hazarded. Boyd confronted her with an anonymous literary parody of 1940, from a Russian newspaper published in New York. Was the piece Nabokov's? “
Could be,” nodded Véra, taking it from him. “Beyond a doubt,” she asserted after a few paragraphs. “Absolutely,” she concluded at the end of the column, with a laugh. Did a particular meaning accidentally occur in a line from
Invitation to a Beheading?
she was asked. “
My husband would never commit a coincidence,” came the reply. Were it not for all the archival and editorial work, concluded one friend, she would have been a
prominent Nabokov critic. Dmitri found her omniscient.

Omniscience has a price; like any oracle she inspired fear. Even members of the immediate family were
terrified of her, as were most of her husband's editors. She ruled by cordial but distant fiat. As the Lausanne scholar quickly discovered, she knew all of her husband's verse—from 1921 on—by heart. When a journalist mentioned
Paul Bowles in her presence, she immediately demonstrated that she knew and understood Bowles's work better than he. She remained as adamantine as ever in her judgments. You ask, she wrote the Paris friend whom she had rebuked for having misread the Shakhovskoy volume, why there are no worthwhile new Russian poets and writers. They did exist. The problem was that
most of them were illiterate. She gave voice to only one
warmhearted regret: that her grandchildren were all of them literary.

On September 26, 1980, Dmitri called his mother to say that he would not be home for lunch, as expected. He had had
a little accident. That was something of an understatement, as Véra discovered before the afternoon was out. Between Montreux and Lausanne, his Ferrari had spun out of control, bouncing between guardrails and bursting into flames. As he forced himself from the burning car, Dmitri's back, hands, and hair had caught fire. Minutes after speaking with his mother that Friday, he lapsed into a coma. He had suffered third-degree burns over 40 percent of his body. He had also broken his neck. It would be three and a half months—and six skin grafts—before Véra saw her son again up close. When she visited him in the hospital burn unit she would be brought outside the glass-walled room, in a wheelchair. Dmitri turned the lights down low. He could feel her gaze; she seemed to regard him “
like a rare animal.” She passed on Dmitri's understatement—she wrote the family accountant that Dmitri was
under the weather—but nonetheless focused much of her energy on his recovery.
Those who saw her at this time easily glimpsed the fragile woman beneath the steely exterior; she was nearly out of her mind with worry. This was not conveyed by the voice on the page. “
The car was wholly burned to a crisp,” she informed one relative. “
Dmitri has seen a wonderful return from the other side of the Styx,” she assured another. She apologized to Carl Proffer for her inability to vet a
Pnin
translation. Between the final pages of the
Pale Fire
manuscript and her calls and visits to the hospital she was insanely busy.

Dmitri spent a total of forty-two weeks in intensive care and rehabilitation. Martin Amis was on hand shortly after the worst was over, having secured Véra's consent to an interview
about her life with VN for the London
Observer
. Amis found Mrs. Nabokov's humor and warmth much on display, though he was himself largely “
frozen with deference.” Dmitri was still living at the Lausanne hospital but joined his mother; his scorched fingers made an impression. Véra observed the striated skin on her son's arms and asked solicitously when the “purple lace” was likely to disappear. She hoped Amis could reassure her that he drove with immaculate care. Stephen and Marie-Luce Parker also visited Montreux at the time. When Dmitri stepped out of the room at one point Véra turned to the couple: “
Don't ever let your children get burned.”

One bargain she did not make with the gods in the course of Dmitri's recovery was to be more forgiving. The Amis piece was edited like any other; Véra recoiled when she saw that Amis intended to repeat her observation that VN “was as a young man extremely beautiful,” a remark she categorically
denied having made. (And that Amis vividly remembered having heard. It remained in the piece.) Simon Karlinsky's draft introduction to Nabokov's
Lectures on Russian Literature
arrived during Dmitri's convalescence; it was shot through with admiration for VN's work, but Véra deemed it unacceptable, on the grounds that Karlinsky's approach to literature did
not accord with her husband's. An erudite scholar in his sixties, Karlinsky had been a discerning reader of Nabokov since the age of twelve. He rallied eloquently to his own defense; Véra had misread the piece, which was not intended to diminish her husband in any way. Véra proved in equal parts thick-skinned and hypersensitive. She
could not impress upon Karlinsky how much his essay had upset her. (She most resisted Karlinsky's persuasive attempts to locate Nabokov within a historical continuum, where she felt he neither belonged nor aspired to belong. To her mind her husband had neither peers nor equals.) The little victories in the verbal skirmishes still mattered. To the editor of the volume, who agreed to forgo Karlinsky's pages, she wrote with unusual fervor: “
You are not a publisher, you are an angel.”

Much of the last decade of her life was dedicated to the fine art of perfecting the past, an activity that in some views teetered on the brink of censorship. In the late 1970s Karlinsky edited the Nabokov-Wilson letters;
he testifies that there was no tension between the two widows, aside from the fact that Mrs. Wilson wanted to put everything in and Véra wanted to take everything out. A scholar researching Nabokov's fiancées was free to publish his work—
so long as he did not mention Véra. She persisted not in correcting references to herself, to the marriage, to her past, but in
deleting them from texts. She swore she had never said anything Boyd had quoted her as saying. She was gnomic in her pronouncements. Was it not unusual that most of her husband's books were dedicated to her? Amis asked. “
What should I answer? We had a very unusual relationship,” she offered. “
You were very different from your husband,” Boyd insisted, leadingly. “Yes, but everyone was different from VN,” Véra parried. Have you ever written fiction yourself? she was asked. “No,” she replied. Her favorite VN work? “Unanswerable.” On the publication of
Selected Letters
in Milan, she consented to a talk, accompanied by Dmitri, with an Italian journalist. She proved the world's worst interview subject. “
Madame Nabokov, I am told you were a passionate equestrienne, that you fired a pistol, that you went up on acrobatic flights. What do you believe has been the most important thing in your life?” the journalist asked. “My life, it has been full of important things,” replied Véra, slipping deftly through the net.

It would be difficult to say that she had come into her own since Vladimir's death; she had never really left herself. But she spoke now for and
as herself. There was no more Vladimir wants me to say, asks me to say, insists I say. For some time she used the line that her husband would have agreed, or railed, or expected as a weapon; she knew as well as anyone that it is difficult to argue with a memory. As time went on she found that saying that she, Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov, was insulted, or unhappy, was potent enough, perhaps even more so. As Karlinsky observed,
people became more attentive to Véra after VN's death, for the right and the wrong reasons. The quiet humor, too, was more on display, at least for those who had an ear for it. Gennady Barabtarlo, whose Russian
Pnin
translation Véra reviewed, perhaps put it best: “
Suffice it to say that she possessed a wonderful humor for which not all people had a sense.” He found her delightfully droll. “
For once,” Véra wrote Beverly Loo, well acquainted with how unlikely was the scenario, “you have overpaid me.” She hoped that the insane printer Carl Proffer had located proved every bit as good as the sane one. Her nephew Michaël Massalsky reminded her of Halley's Comet, with his infrequent visits, advertised long in advance. (She had warm feelings for him, whatever her differences with his mother.) She thanked the director of the Palace for the orchids he sent on her eighty-seventh birthday, informing him that she had decided now to start counting backwards on her birthdays, toward takeoff. She stretched against every instinct in her body to accommodate the prying biographer. She shared with Boyd all her memories of a family he had asked about, including their light-brown poodle, Dolly, finishing her account with a sly “
I don't know her patronymic.”