Vera

by Stacy Schiff

  The Nabokovs celebrated Ada’s French publication more elaborately, traveling to Paris at the end of May for four days. It was more of a dislocation than it sounded. Vladimir had taken to joking that a trip to Lausanne had become the equivalent to a trip to Hawaii. Geneva was solar systems away. The effort paid off: Ada made an early showing on the French bestseller lists. On their return they set off for the mountain resort of Davos, where, Véra dearly hoped, they might spend a relaxing six weeks, assuming of course—the language of tempests in teapots again—there was no “noisy construction in the proximity or some similar horror.” At least on some level she intended to refrain from work. “Rather incredibly,” she did not pack her address book. (Despite herself, she was back at her desk within a matter of days. She reconciled herself to sending her mail out registered, in case she mangled the addresses she now plucked from memory.) So many urgent matters competed for her attention that Madame Callier was summoned to join the couple for two weeks. Vladimir continued energetically to collect mountain butterflies, but he did so now without Véra, who felt she could no longer keep up with him. He was alone, then, late on the cool morning of June 13 when he took a terrible fall, tumbling 150 feet down a steep slope, his net clinging to a fir tree well above him. He was not far from a funicular and waved his arms in the air, to no avail; it was five hours before he was rescued by professionals. A “horrible shock,” as Vladimir wrote later, the fall proved the first in a series of painful misadventures.

  In mid-October he endured what he considered one of life’s greatest tortures: For prostate surgery he submitted to general anesthesia. Véra was her usual unforthcoming self about the procedure, telling her sister-in-law that Vladimir was to undergo a minor operation but refusing to name body parts. She was less cryptic afterward, a small tumor having been removed and found to be benign. The recovery was agonizing, for both Nabokovs; Vladimir’s insomnia was more acute than ever, and Véra found him nervous and edgy, easily annoyed. At the end of November her patience showed signs of wearing thin. She felt he would be completely recovered if only he could be persuaded not to work for a few more weeks. But that, she concluded, “is a hopeless undertaking in which I feel completely defeated.” Moreover, she was again experiencing trouble with her vision. Rowohlt patiently awaited her approved pages of Glory; three weeks after Vladimir’s surgery she found that the translation was not giving her any trouble, but that her eyes were, the more so because of the number of matters competing for her attention. Before the year was out Beverly Loo arrived for a short stay. As she had recently had surgery herself, the conversation turned to hospital visits. Vladimir insisted he did not really mind the stays. With a laugh Véra corrected him, reminding him that he did nothing but complain. “Only because you’re not there. I would never mind a hospital stay if I could take you, wrap you up in my top pocket and take you with me,” he countered, effectively ending the discussion.

  She was, and she began to sound, defeated by the tasks at hand. With Loo she investigated the possibility of appointing an agent for several foreign countries, an enormous concession on her part, given her pride in having avoided representation. The returns were not spectactular, she advised Loo, but the paperwork was. Similarly she complied with some unusual demands for documentation made by the IRS, but had to admit to the New York accountant: “As for me, I am just getting too old to spend days rummaging in trunks and bookcases, etc.” At the same time she learned that Marie Schebeko—whom she had been writing several times a week for over a decade—planned to retire. Schebeko offered to suggest a possible replacement, but did not think it necessary: “I have always thought—and proclaimed—that you are a far better agent than any I know.” At the time the compliment probably did not go far. The demons with which she battled continued to be the McGraw-Hill accounting statements; the political convictions of those eager to adapt her husband’s novels (Rainer Fassbinder had proposed a film of Despair, but the Nabokovs had heard he was anti-Semitic); the perceived transgressions of Andrew Field, a dialogue still conducted primarily, and very expensively, through lawyers.

  Of grave concern too was Dmitri, whose finances Véra continued to manage. (“I am sorry that my son is such an elusive individual!” she apologized to their mutual accountant, evidently not realizing how easy she made it to be elusive.) Dmitri was again happily single, having parted ways with a girlfriend of whom Véra had been particularly fond. As allergic as she was to drama, she appealed to him solemnly to consider the consequences of his decision. She worried that he might find himself alone in the world in some not too distant future. He would soon be forty-two, she reminded him; he was laying the ground for his own unhappiness. She implored him to turn his imagination to this essential matter. The letter reads like an advertisement for the safe harbor that marriage can provide and which it clearly had, for Véra as well as for Vladimir, for fifty years. She regretted that her son might not experience the same gratifications. Would she have counseled a daughter any differently? It does not sound so. There was no question in her mind that the enterprise was a perfectly reciprocal one, that the compromises and sacrifices extended in both directions, or, for that matter, that the looking-after was any less a marvel than the being looked after. (One of Dmitri’s public explanations years later for not having married was in essence the very luxury his mother outlined now. He knew how uncommon was the rapport his parents had enjoyed, what an elusive rarity is the “twin soul.”) Véra professed relief that Dmitri had not married—she claimed she was horrified by the results when most young people attempted the sport—but she worried a great deal about him, increasingly so as the years wore on.

  By April 1976 Vladimir had completed the first hundred pages of the new novel, The Original of Laura, to which he referred as “TOOL.” “He does not know, he says, what is more brilliant, the novel itself or its acronym—this is as much as he can disclose at the moment,” Véra reported to Fred Hills, three days before the couple celebrated Vladimir’s seventy-seventh birthday privately, with champagne and caviar. Both Nabokovs worked at a reduced tempo through the spring, when Vladimir suffered a second fall, closer to home but more serious. Having caught his foot on something in his bedroom, he tripped and fell backward, hitting the back of his head on the floor. The resulting concussion kept him in the hospital for ten days. Véra consequently met alone with the associate of Fassbinder’s who traveled to Montreux to plead the director’s case. She was convinced by his arguments, and successful in exacting an agreement that would allow her husband to vet the finished Despair screenplay.* Meanwhile the siege of ill health continued. On June 16 Vladimir returned by ambulance to the hospital for a third time, having developed an infection that mystified his doctors. He spent much of the summer in various clinics, weak and feverish, while in Montreux Véra labored on, alerting McGraw-Hill to the fact that TOOL would be delayed, probably until Easter 1977. She found the convalescence disturbingly slow, the doctors frustratingly unforthcoming. Those who saw VN at this time felt a shiver of sadness.

  In November Véra wrote, as Vladimir, to report that Laura was practically complete in his head but that its transcription was taking some time. Three months later she wrote, as herself, to concede that little progress had been made. “I am writing you on my husband’s request. He would not like you to believe either that he is not working on the novel or that he will finish it within a few weeks,” she warned Hills. That month a team of BBC interviewers descended on Montreux, where they found both Nabokovs slowmoving, Vladimir a hunched and diminished version of himself, Véra walking stiffly with a cane. In some ways nothing had changed. Softly Véra asked the interviewer if he was nervous; he jumped out of his seat with fright to deny as much. The BBC dialogue had been prepared in advance, but the producers were a few minutes short of their twenty-five-minute program. It was decided that Vladimir would supplement the talk with the reading of a poem, fifteen strophes at so many seconds a strophe, he began to calculate, interrupted by Véra, who reminded him that
the verse in question consisted of twelve. Weeks later the Nabokovs shared their last flu, which developed in Vladimir’s case into pneumonia, and took him back to the hospital. He stayed for seven weeks. Véra found distraction where she could. “My husband wants me to say he is very much disturbed by the complete lack of publicity for his book,” she cautioned Loo. He returned home in early May, but was back at the hospital a month later with a persistent fever. The Proffers were shocked by the change in the normally robust writer when they visited in the spring; the tenderness with which Véra observed her husband combined now with fear. The conversation moved at a full and invigorating gallop all the same.

  It is unclear at what point it would have occurred to Véra, or Vladimir, that this was the end. Anna Feigin’s death had unsettled the couple; Lena Massalsky had died in the spring of 1975, having spent the previous year in a nursing home. The morning before his seventy-seventh birthday Vladimir had been woken at one by raw terror of the “ ‘this-is-it’ sort.” He had screamed—discreetly. He hoped to wake Véra and at the same time feared he might actually succeed in doing so; he had not felt entirely unwell. A year later Dmitri sensed the attitude to be one of resignation. In defiance of all antibiotics Vladimir’s temperature again began to climb; Nicholas Nabokov suggested to Véra that his cousin be moved to the United States, an idea she could not even begin to consider seriously as she felt Vladimir was too weak to make the trip. When Field’s Nabokov: His Life in Part arrived on June 16, its subject did not have the strength to read the volume. Véra had a cursory glance at the first pages. Throughout these months her tone—even, self-assured, uninflected—did not falter.

  At the end of June Vladimir appeared rapidly to be losing what remained of his strength. His doctor nonetheless declared himself optimistic about a recovery; he was visibly angered when Véra disagreed, stating that in her opinion her husband seemed to be in the process of dying. Dmitri returned to Italy shortly after this conversation, to be called back to Lausanne almost immediately. His father was breathing with difficulty, expelling pus. His temperature had climbed to 107 degrees; bronchial pneumonia had set in. Dmitri noted that “the physicians’ manner was changing from bedside to graveside.” We are as far from knowing the last meaningful words Véra and Vladimir exchanged as we are from knowing those that had been imparted on a Berlin sidewalk fifty-four years earlier. A few days before the last Véra remarked that she did not believe everything finished with death, one matter she and her husband had plainly discussed in the first flush of their courtship, and a statement with which he still agreed. A different veil now descended: The heart that had been racing from one abyss toward another at a rate of about forty-five hundred heartbeats an hour reached its final destination. As Véra and Dmitri stood watch, it stopped at 6:50 on Saturday evening, July 2.

  Seconds after it did so a Lausanne nurse precipitated herself bodily upon Véra, with condolences. Véra pushed her away with an acid, “S’il vous plaît, Madame.” She had no patience for clichés and did not intend to play the grieving widow. When she saw her sister-in-law that month she issued equally stern (and unnecessary) instructions for the visit: “But please, no tears, no wails, none of that.” She had a similar request to make regarding the quiet ceremony in nearby Clarens that followed the cremation on July 7: She asked a family member not to embrace her. She appeared in perfect command of herself on that occasion, as the forty or so friends and relatives who gathered at the hillside cemetery—Sonia, Topazia Markevitch, the Rowohlts, Beverly Loo, the numerous Nabokov cousins—expected she would. The mask had served her well for over half a century; there was no reason to drop it now. Nor was there any reason to assume that the mask and the face were one. As soon as she heard the news, Beverly Loo had called to ask if Véra would like her to fly to Switzerland. Sounding grateful and relieved, Véra said she would, very much. She was in tears when Loo next saw her. Dmitri had driven his mother back to Montreux from the Lausanne hospital at dusk on July 2, in his blue Ferrari, on the last day of his father’s life. Véra had sat silently for a few minutes and then uttered the one desperate line Dmitri ever heard escape her lips: “Let’s rent an airplane and crash.”

  Generally Dmitri stayed close to his mother’s side, attending to the few calls that had to be answered. On July 4 she had managed to compose a note to Marie Schebeko, whom she felt would understand her loss: “I am writing to inform you that my husband died on July 2nd. I know that it will touch you deeply. I do not want to add anything today, I just wanted you to know.” On the same day she and Dmitri had disclosed the news of VN’s death to the papers. If there was relief of any kind it was only that a protracted struggle was over, that Vladimir need not suffer further. The last weeks had been grueling. Véra later contradicted a niece who remarked that her husband’s death had been a shame. He had gone when he should have, Véra insisted. He had not been able to think, or write, as he liked. (Elena Sikorski had sensed that something was radically wrong when she managed to defeat her brother at Scrabble that spring.) There was otherwise no hint of a character having been liberated from a novelist’s iron grip; there were no thwarted ambitions, no deep, slumbering regrets. If anything there was bewilderment of the opposite kind. There was no longer a VN behind which to hide. Of Véra’s emotional state there was no question. Two years later a childhood friend was widowed in Paris. Véra offered keenly felt condolences, “because it is so much more grim for those who remain than for those who have gone on.” Boyd was in Montreux on the fifth anniversary of Nabokov’s death. “It doesn’t feel like five years,” he commented to Véra, with whom he had been working since 1979. “It feels like fifty to me,” she replied.

  4

  The remarkable thing about Véra Nabokov’s life after Nabokov was not how much but how little it changed. Since 1923 she had not posited herself at the center of her own existence. She showed no sign of doing so now. “A book lives longer than a girl,” Vladimir had noted, speaking of the two Madame Bovarys. His widow took comfort in the fact that a book also outlives its author. A month after his death she was back at her desk, soliciting publishing advice, asking Schirman what course of action she should pursue against a public appraisal of Vladimir’s work that he had found objectionable. She was still not up to receiving guests. At the end of the month she packed Dmitri off for a vacation in San Remo. She knew he was cruelly wounded by their loss. The previous year when Vladimir had fallen in his room she had attempted to break his fall but proved no match for his weight; her spine had been injured as a result, and was now crooked in two places, giving her a biggish hump. Her right arm refused to function properly—it was “half an invalid in its own right,” she declared—which made the letter-writing more of an ordeal than ever. She had no choice but to dictate her words to Madame Callier. She avoided social calls as much out of self-consciousness as out of any kind of emotional frailty. Over and over she explained that she had grown hunchbacked. Ultimately she would be as bent over as a question mark.

  While she was indifferent to how the world perceived her, she was not without her vanity. In March 1978 Alison Bishop traveled to Europe, where her daughter, now Alison Jolly, was living. The one thing she wanted to do before returning to Ithaca was to see Véra again. Véra was oddly reluctant to see the surviving member of the couple who had been their intimates at Cornell; Alison was left with the feeling that she was inflicting herself on an old friend. Ultimately it was agreed that the three would meet for a quiet dinner in the Montreux apartment. Alison Bishop was herself eighty-one and crippled by knee trouble; it required some effort on her part to wade through the vast hotel lobby and down the corridors leading to the elevator to the sixth floor. Véra received the two Bishop women in the apartment all in black. The curtains were drawn, and the lights turned down low; her radiant face and the sweep of white hair appeared to float magically, a semi-shimmer in the darkness. The twisted back was barely visible. Dinner was wheeled in quickly, evidently so that the visit could be brief. Any fears she may
have had about the reunion were quickly dispelled. The conversation sparkled, and Véra’s joy was evident. There was much laughter. When the younger Alison asked if she had fallen, Véra shrugged and replied that it been her husband who fell. The shoulder had hurt a great deal, but no longer gave her any pain.* As they rose to leave, one of the Alisons could not help but tell Véra how extraordinarily beautiful she was. “Oh, you don’t find me so ugly then?” she asked, touched and surprised, and alluding to the hump. It could only have weighed all the heavier on a woman whose carriage had been for decades so utterly exemplary. The deformation made no difference; Véra remained in the mind of Alison Bishop Jolly the most beautiful woman she had ever known.

  For the most part and with few exceptions, she resisted callers. She was as always inundated with work. In the first year without VN she checked the French translation of Look at the Harlequins!—she was quite happy with the results—and devoted her time to polishing a collection of Russian poems, to be published by the Proffers’ Ardis Publishers. She contributed a brief, dispassionate preface to the collection as well, one line of which, stressing the presence of the otherworldly in VN’s work, would set Nabokov studies off in a new direction. The regular housekeeping affairs proved as complex as ever: VN had five publishers in France alone. On top of this came the estaterelated details. The complications were the usual ones. “I have received from the I.R.S. an answer to a letter I never sent them,” Véra complained toward the end of 1978. She felt she was living under the sword of Damocles in the perennial anticipation of staggering legal and tax bills.† The evaluation of the estate was complicated by the volume of paper with which she lived; she nearly begged Iseman not to ask her to provide a detailed incentory. “We have been living here for almost 17 years, in a very small apartment, and every drawer, every trunk and lots of cases are filled with papers, most of which have no value at all and have not been destroyed for the only reason that the task of taking everything out and sorting it was too much for me.” The bulk of it was of little value, she added, having been written by her.