According to Ada, she told the driver to turn somewhere near Morzhey (a Russian pun on ‘Morges,’ a town on Lake Geneva mentioned by Karamzin in “The Letters of a Russian Traveler”):
He left the balcony and ran down a short spiral staircase to the fourth floor. In the pit of his stomach there sat the suspicion that it might not be room 410, as he conjectured, but 412 or even 414, What would happen if she had not understood, was not on the lookout? She had, she was.
When, ‘a little later,’ Van, kneeling and clearing his throat, was kissing her dear cold hands, gratefully, gratefully, in full defiance of death, with bad fate routed and her dreamy afterglow bending over him, she asked:
‘Did you really think I had gone?’
‘Obmanshchitsa (deceiver), obmanshchitsa,’ Van kept repeating with the fervor and gloat of blissful satiety.
‘I told him to turn,’ she said, ‘somewhere near Morzhey (‘morses’ or ‘walruses,’ a Russian pun on ‘Morges’ — maybe a mermaid’s message). And you slept, you could sleep!’
‘I worked,’ he replied, ‘my first draft is done.’
She confessed that on coming back in the middle of the night she had taken to her room from the hotel bookcase (the night porter, an avid reader, had the key) the British Encyclopedia volume, here it was, with this article on Space-time: ‘"Space" (it says here, rather suggestively) "denotes the property, you are my property, in virtue of which, you are my virtue, rigid bodies can occupy different positions" Nice? Nice.’
‘Don’t laugh, my Ada, at our philosophic prose,’ remonstrated her lover. ‘All that matters just now is that I have given new life to Time by cutting off Siamese Space and the false future. My aim was to compose a kind of novella in the form of a treatise on the Texture of Time, an investigation of its veily substance, with illustrative metaphors gradually increasing, very gradually building up a logical love story, going from past to present, blossoming as a concrete story, and just as gradually reversing analogies and disintegrating again into bland abstraction.’
‘I wonder,’ said Ada, ‘I wonder if the attempt to discover those things is worth the stained glass. We can know the time, we can know a time. We can never know Time. Our senses are simply not meant to perceive it. It is like —’ (Part Four)
Morzhey seems to hint at umorzhenie, a neologism used by VN in Anya v strane chudes (1923), VN’s Russian translation of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland:
- Чему же вы учились? - полюбопытствовала Аня.
- Сперва, конечно, - чесать и питать. Затем были четыре правила арифметики: служенье, выметанье, уморженье и пиленье.
- Я никогда не слышала об уморженьи, - робко сказала Аня. - Что это такое?
Гриф удивленно поднял лапы к небу. "Крота можно укротить? - спросил он.
- Да... как будто можно, - ответила Аня неуверенно.
- Ну так, значит, и моржа можно уморжить, - продолжал Гриф.
- Если вы этого не понимаете, вы просто дурочка.
“I couldn’t afford to learn it.” said the Mock Turtle with a sigh. “I only took the regular course.”
“What was that?” inquired Alice.
“Reeling and Writhing, of course, to begin with,” the Mock Turtle replied; “and then the different branches of Arithmetic—Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision.”
“I never heard of ‘Uglification,’” Alice ventured to say. “What is it?”
The Gryphon lifted up both its paws in surprise. “What! Never heard of uglifying!” it exclaimed. “You know what to beautify is, I suppose?”
“Yes,” said Alice doubtfully: “it means—to—make—anything—prettier.”
“Well, then,” the Gryphon went on, “if you don’t know what to uglify is, you are a simpleton.” (Chapter IX: “The Mock Turtle’s Story”)
Umorzhenye (as VN renders ‘Uglification’) combines morzh (walrus) with umnozhenie (multiplication). Besides, umorit' means "to starve" and umoritel'nyi means "side-splitting." Telling about Lucette’s suicide, Van mentions a series of receding Lucettes:
Although Lucette had never died before — no, dived before, Violet — from such a height, in such a disorder of shadows and snaking reflections, she went with hardly a splash through the wave that humped to welcome her. That perfect end was spoiled by her instinctively surfacing in an immediate sweep — instead of surrendering under water to her drugged lassitude as she had planned to do on her last night ashore if it ever did come to this. The silly girl had not rehearsed the technique of suicide as, say, free-fall parachutists do every day in the element of another chapter. Owing to the tumultuous swell and her not being sure which way to peer through the spray and the darkness and her own tentaclinging hair — t,a,c,l — she could not make out the lights of the liner, an easily imagined many-eyed bulk mightily receding in heartless triumph. Now I’ve lost my next note.
Got it.
The sky was also heartless and dark, and her body, her head, and particularly those damned thirsty trousers, felt clogged with Oceanus Nox, n,o,x. At every slap and splash of cold wild salt, she heaved with anise-flavored nausea and there was an increasing number, okay, or numbness, in her neck and arms. As she began losing track of herself, she thought it proper to inform a series of receding Lucettes — telling them to pass it on and on in a trick-crystal regression — that what death amounted to was only a more complete assortment of the infinite fractions of solitude.
She did not see her whole life flash before her as we all were afraid she might have done; the red rubber of a favorite doll remained safely decomposed among the myosotes of an unanalyzable brook; but she did see a few odds and ends as she swam like a dilettante Tobakoff in a circle of brief panic and merciful torpor. She saw a pair of new vair-furred bedroom slippers, which Brigitte had forgotten to pack; she saw Van wiping his mouth before answering, and then, still withholding the answer, throwing his napkin on the table as they both got up; and she saw a girl with long black hair quickly bend in passing to clap her hands over a dackel in a half-tom wreath.
A brilliantly illumined motorboat was launched from the — not-too-distant ship with Van and the swimming coach and the oilskin-hooded Toby among the would-be saviors; but by that time a lot of sea had rolled by and Lucette was too tired to wait. Then the night was filled with the rattle of an old but still strong helicopter. Its diligent beam could spot only the dark head of Van, who, having been propelled out of the boat when it shied from its own sudden shadow, kept bobbing and bawling the drowned girl’s name in the black, foam-veined, complicated waters. (3.5)
As has been pointed out before, Morzhey may also hint at the French phrase J'ai mort de rire (I’m dying of laughter), a succinct message from the mermaid (Lucette). The irony is that Van does not suspect that Andrey Vinelander (Ada’s late husband) and Ada have at least two children and that Ronald Oranger (old Van’s secretary, the Editor of Ada) and Violet Knox (old Van’s typist whom Ada calls Fialochka and who marries Ronald Oranger after Van’s and Ada’s death) are Ada’s grandchildren.