Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov (48 page)

Medical experiments had been conducted on homosexual prisoners elsewhere, but at Neuengamme, the clinical atrocities were limited to an experimental treatment for lice-born typhus and a fatal experiment infecting twenty Jewish children with tuberculosis
near the end of the war.
⁶⁶
There were, however, many other death rituals. Guards shot prisoners after forcing them to try to escape. People committed suicide by throwing themselves on the electric fence. A gallows was part of the camp topography. And behind it all lurked the crematorium.

Prisoners were assigned individual numbers, which were stamped on a small zinc tag and tied with string around their necks.
⁶⁷
Sergei was prisoner No. 28631.

The duties he was assigned would have made all the difference in the world. For those assigned to tasks nearby, the horrific chore of digging in the clay pits had mostly given way to work in the small-arms factory, and then to offsite projects, working as slave labor in factories, digging anti-tank trenches to block Allied advances, and clearing rubble after bombing raids.
⁶⁸

The statelessness that had plagued Nabokov in France may have benefitted Sergei in the camps. With no nationality on record (and thus not noted on his clothing), Sergei was likely spared the harshest work regimes and brutal measures reserved for Russians, more than four hundred of whom had been killed with Zyklon B in a gas chamber at the camp before his arrival.
⁶⁹
Being arrested a second time for an offense other than homosexual activity may have likewise liberated him from the additional abuse that often resulted from wearing the pink triangle that identified the homosexuals held at Neuengamme.

A typical day would begin at 5:00
A.M.
Prisoners had twenty minutes to wash and shave, if they could get to fresh water at all in the overcrowded facilities. But shaving was not optional, as failure to pass inspection could lead to punishment. The resourceful Sergei, who had once taken a bath with a single glass of water, was likely unable to brush his teeth.
⁷⁰

Foods that were ghosts of coffee, bread, and marmalade were served in the barracks, and then prisoners lined up in blocks for roll call before being assigned to work parties. Daily work shifts were fourteen hours, with a midday meal to break up the monotony. Every
prisoner had to carry his own tin and spoon, but not everyone got full rations, or even food.

At the end of the day roll call was repeated. But with stragglers, some sick and some dying, evening roll call could take as long as three hours, and with it, any free time in the barracks before going to bed. In the earlier days of the camp, before Sergei’s arrival, the evening tally had been handled by the SS, who were sloppy and slow in accounting for their ten thousand charges, which meant regular misery for prisoners forced to wait at attention. But by 1944, a former businessman with prior experience accounting for personnel had taken charge and, mindful of the agony of the prisoners at the end of the day, did what he could to wrap up matters quickly.
⁷¹

In that strange calculus of the tiny accommodations made to prisoners, even those held in many Nazi camps were allowed to receive care packages, and Sergei did. After the war, people called the Nabokov cousins in Paris to tell the family that he had distributed clothes and food he received to his fellow prisoners.
⁷²

Not much more can be known with certainty. At night, in the window that sometimes existed after roll call and before bed, there was one hour in which prisoners could clean their clothes and their equipment. They were not allowed to leave the barracks, but they could talk with some freedom. And as the prisoners had in the internment camps of the First World War, amid the horrors of Solovki, and in the fifty years since the first concentration camps had been built, they gathered and talked about the world that existed outside the camp, the things that were gone and yet could not be taken away. They talked about their favorite foods and exchanged recipes; they shared stories of home and loved ones; they offered up their fantasies and their memories.
⁷³

More than a hundred thousand inmates were assigned a prisoner number at Neuengamme; only half survived. The average life expectancy of a prisoner on arrival was twelve weeks.
⁷⁴
Sergei Nabokov may have arrived healthier than most, or, with his multiple fluencies, he may have drawn administrative rather than more brutal
general work duties. He lasted an extraordinary ten months. It cannot be said, however, whether those months were a curse or a mercy, because, in the end, they were not long enough. He died on January 10, 1945.
⁷⁵

It was three impossible months before the American Army would liberate Buchenwald and Dachau to the south, moving with such speed that the camp staff at those places were not effectively able to ensure the destruction of the records that would so clearly indict them.
⁷⁶

Neuengamme, however, was the very last camp to be liberated; the first British advance scouts would not arrive until May 2—which left several additional weeks for records to be destroyed. Much of the administrative minutiae that would have made it possible to pair a life outside the camp to a life inside it were burned in the Neuengamme crematorium.
⁷⁷

But the surviving Neuengamme prisoners, who were anxious to tell the stories of what had happened, had known that they would need evidence. So they hid records where they could. Among the items saved were laboratory journals with results of tests on inmates’ bodily fluids—the only proof of the presence of thousands of prisoners who had died in the camp—and the
Totenbuch
, the book that recorded the death of Sergei Nabokov.

From Hermann to Kinbote, in Nabokov’s writing it is often the madman, the murderer, life’s losers, or those regarded as freaks who have seen the most. (“Let us bless the freak,” Nabokov once told his students.) Attempting to escape history, they tumble into insanity, yet cannot elude their pasts.

Pale Fire
’s narrator is melodramatic and self-centered, and is often seen as the villain of the book. He is no mirror copy of Sergei, but his presence in the novel becomes a rebuke against readers who judge without divining the full story, as well as a plea for a kind of tolerance that Nabokov struggled and failed to offer to his
own brother. Sergei’s life, Nabokov writes in
Speak, Memory
, “hopelessly claim(s) a belated something—compassion, understanding, no matter what—which the mere recognition of such a want can neither replace nor redeem.”
⁷⁸

By revising his autobiography to include details on Sergei’s life years after
Pale Fire
’s publication, Nabokov made it possible for yet another understanding of his most innovative book to emerge. In his own lectures, Nabokov had said that all “great novels are great fairy tales.” The executioner in
Invitation to a Beheading
announces, “Only in fairy tales do people escape from prison.”
⁷⁹
And so Nabokov created a fairy tale in which a problematic, fictionalized version of his flamboyant dead brother could escape a continent littered with camps. A resurrected sibling could parachute into America to deliver a litany not of his own suffering but the wild fantasies and poetry with which he had consoled himself in a place of horror, as if it were possible (four months too late, twenty years too late) to peek into his diary again and unearth his private imaginings. Part elegy for the victims of the Gulag,
Pale Fire
also shimmers as a memorial to the dead of Nabokov’s own life.

C
HAPTER
F
OURTEEN

Waiting for Solzhenitsyn

After revising
Speak, Memory
, Nabokov would spend his last decade moving further away from the world, falling deeper into his created universes. His relative isolation in his “portable Winter Palace” at Montreux separated him from many of the mundane settings and human interactions that had provided a compelling present within which he could conceal the past.
¹
As a result, the past and the present wrestled for control of his work, and the coherence, often as not, was lost.

He had not yet finished reminding readers of the forgotten past and hypocrisies of the present, but he would do so less and less vibrantly. His last years were split between novels that wandered through decades without the discipline that had focused his best writing and books that addressed death and its aftermath.

Nabokov, like his mother, acknowledged signs and portents, and paid particular attention to his dreams. He had always had nightmares—one from his last years included guillotines set up in
his bedroom for Véra and himself. But in the decade after revising
Speak, Memory
, his nights were also full of reveries that crossed unbridgeable gaps. He dreamed of Sergei. He imagined Edmund Wilson coming up behind him and surprising him, triggering a happy reunion. Another night, Nabokov’s father came to visit, sitting pale and glum on an imaginary beach.
²

In between dreams, he completed
Ada, Or Ardor: A Family Chronicle
, a novel sprung out of concepts of time and distance that he had been thinking about for years. Beginning with a reversal of the start of
Anna Karenina
—“ All happy families are more or less dissimilar; all unhappy ones are more or less alike”—Nabokov portrayed an inverted take on family life.

Keeping with his penchant for shocking sexual situations, he moved from the mock-incest scenario of stepfather Humbert in
Lolita
to a simpler brother-sister pairing. The sibling lovers of the novel, Van and Ada, are two difficult people living in an alternate reality caught up in an intermittent but lifelong affair, their existences studded with bits of lost and reinvented literature and history.

The book, Nabokov’s longest novel, skitters through a maze of puns, wordplay, subplots, and winking references to everything from Chekhov to the book of Genesis. With a loose narrative of the lovers’ grievous separation and joyful reunion stringing it all together,
Ada
is by far Nabokov’s most rambling work. But as with nearly all Nabokov’s mature writing, a sense of a menacing history operates in the background, hinting that Van and Ada have concealed something in their complex reminiscences. Oblique and unconnected nods to blood-filled mosquitoes in a secret location, capital “T” Terror, the grotesque rape of a young boy by Van, and a “first prison term” at a putative school further destabilize the landscape.
³

Van and Ada’s home world, Demonia, is an amalgam of nineteenth-and twentieth-century Earthlike settings. On Demonia, the empire of Tartary rules in the East, and Russians, including Van and Ada’s forebears, were transported years before to settle in North America. Legends persist of another, or real, world named
Terra, but belief in Terra is viewed a form of mental illness, and as a psychiatrist-psychologist, Van studies patients who have such delusions. In his youth, Van writes the book
Letters from Terra
under a pseudonym, recounting these patients’ beliefs, but it is read by only a handful of people.

Yet it is the strange world of Demonia—which Van at times navigates upside down, walking on his hands—that may be nothing more than a figment of Van and Ada’s imagination. As they begin to detail their family’s life on Demonia early in the book, Ada wonders in a parenthetical note if they should describe with such enthusiasm a place which may not have existed outside of the study of dreams. Midway through the novel, Van wonders if he is merely dreaming inside another dream. Elsewhere, Ada says to him excitedly, “You believe, you believe in the existence of Terra?” saying she knows he wants to prove the reality of the other world.
⁴

Decades later, a famous director uses old documentary films to turn Van’s book about Terra into a wildly popular movie. In the last pages of the book, however, after recounting the craze for stories from Terra that briefly promotes Van to fame, our narrators describe all the letters Van receives from thousands of believers who are convinced that their government has hidden the truth from its people. The ideas of those believers bleed into Van’s description of events until it sounds as if it is him talking, and the story that Van and Ada have so carefully constructed across more than five hundred pages unravels: “Our world
was
, in fact, mid-twentieth-century. Terra convalesced after enduring the rack and the stake, the bullies and beasts that Germany inevitably generates when fulfilling her dreams of glory. Russian peasants and poets had not been transported … ages ago—they were dying, at this very moment, in the slave camps of Tartary.”
⁵