Vera by Stacy Schiff Page B

time—accompanied her mother to a sanitarium. She left her husband a bouquet of roses, a box of candies, and a numbered notepad, on which he might write her daily. He did so, religiously. She was less obliging. Early on Nabokov complained that if they were to publish an anthology of their letters she would be able to take credit only for 20 percent. He urged her to catch up. In a more despairing mood he chastised her: “My darling, I am the only Russian émigré in Berlin who writes to his wife every day.” He missed her terribly, and dined nearly every evening with her father and Anna Feigin, from whom he also regularly borrowed money. He sent Véra his new poems (on the back of one letter can be read herattempts to commit the fresh verse to memory), accounts of
Mary’s
first reviews, word games; he reported on the activities of their stuffed animals. The puzzles and acrostics were less appreciated than the statements as to how much he missed her. She wasmiserable, homesick, and cold, and in her few letters complained bitterly. He offered to write her twice daily, if his doing so might in any way boost her spirits.
    More successful were the summer trips the two made together, late thatJuly and in 1927, to Binz, an island resort that afforded Véra a view of the Baltic Sea of her childhood, from the opposite shore. The Nabokovs were chaperones the first summer for Joseph and Abraham Bromberg, ages eleven and thirteen, whose tennis games Vladimir was hired to improve. Anna Feigin had arranged the trip; she was a cousin of the boys’ father, whom she had persuaded to offer Nabokov the job. The owner of a thriving fur-trading business, Herman Bromberg had been happy to oblige. Plans do not appear to have been made in advance, and on the 1927 excursion the Nabokovs and their wards arrived at the resort to find that no rooms were available. In the bar a “flushed fellow” offered to share a bed with Véra; Nabokov responded—as one of his charges looked on—with “a hook on the man’s jaw, flooding himself and the drunk with the latter’s sticky liquor.” * They stayed elsewhere, but the image tangled itself up with two others. In
King, Queen, Knave
, a novel begun shortly after the trip and in part conceived on the Baltic, two tanned, self-satisfied foreigners dance in the Siren Café at a resort on the same bay.They appear entirely lost in each other. They also happen to reveal a little about how the Nabokovs were seen, at least by Nabokov:
    The foreign girl in the blue dress danced with a remarkably handsome man in an old-fashioned dinner jacket. Franz had long since noticed this couple; they had appeared to him in fleeting glimpses, like a recurrent dream image or a subtle leitmotiv—now at the beach, now in a Café, now on the promenade. Sometimes the man carried a butterfly net. The girl had a delicately painted mouth and tender gray-blue eyes and her fiancé or husband, slender, elegantly balding, contemptuous of everything on earth but her, was looking at her with pride; and Franz felt envious of that unusual pair.
    They are quite unforgivably happy, busily speaking their incomprehensible tongue, and clearly privy to every little thing about Franz. Decades later, Vladimir dreamed of dancing with Véra. In his 1964 diary he noted:
    Her open dress, oddly speckled and summery. A man kisses her in passing. I clutch him by the head and bang his face with such vicious force against the wall that he almost gets meat-hooked on some fixtures onthe walls (gleaming metal suggestive of ship). Detaches himself with face all bloody and stumbles away.
3

    â€œAs I was saying every name has its responsibilities,” Nabokov proclaimed on the first page of his first novel. He could not have devised a better introduction to a literary marriage had he had his new wife in mind. Their match truly was alliterative, a fact that could not have been lost on the man who