According to Demon Veen (in VN’s novel Ada, 1969, Van’s and Ada’s father), Norbert von Miller (“the Black Miller”) has a head like a kegelkugel:
‘We’ll have coffee in the yellow drawing room,’ said Marina as sadly as if she were evoking a place of dreary exile. ‘Jones, please, don’t walk on that phonecord. You have no idea, Demon, how I dread meeting again, after all those years, that dislikable Norbert von Miller, who has probably become even more arrogant and obsequious, and moreover does not realize, I’m sure, that Dan’s wife is me. He’s a Baltic Russian’ (turning to Van) ‘but really echt deutsch, though his mother was born Ivanov or Romanov, or something, who owned a calico factory in Finland or Denmark. I can’t imagine how he got his barony; when I knew him twenty years ago he was plain Mr Miller.’
‘He is still that,’ said Demon drily, ‘because you’ve got two Millers mixed up. The lawyer who works for Dan is my old friend Norman Miller of the Fainley, Fehler and Miller law firm and physically bears a striking resemblance to Wilfrid Laurier. Norbert, on the other hand, has, I remember, a head like a kegelkugel, lives in Switzerland, knows perfectly well whom you married and is an unmentionable blackguard.’ (1.38)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): echt etc.: Germ., a genuine German.
Kegelkugel: Germ., skittle-ball.
Fehler is German for “mistake.” Describing his day in Berlin, Fyodor Konstantinovich Godunov-Cherdyntsev, the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Dar (“The Gift,” 1937), mentions his pupil who made the same ineradicable mistakes as any kegel’nogolovyi nemets (skittle-headed German) would have made:
Только Федор Константинович успел убрать постельное белье с кушетки, как к нему явился ученик, толстый, бледный юноша в роговых очках, с вечным пером в грудном кармане. Учась в берлинской гимназии, бедняга настолько пропитался местным бытом, что и в английской речи делал те же невытравимые ошибки, которые сделал бы кегельноголовый немец. Не было, например, такой силы, которая могла бы заставить его перестать употреблять несовершенный вид прошедшего времени вместо совершенного, что придавало всякому его вчерашнему случайному действию какое-то идиотское постоянство. Столь же упорно он английским "тоже" орудовал, как немецким "итак", и, одолевая тернистое окончание в слове, означавшем "одежды", неизменно добавлял лишний свистящий слог, как если б человек поскользнулся после взятия препятствия. Вместе с тем, он изъяснялся довольно свободно и только потому обратился к помощи репетитора, что хотел на выпускном экзамене получить высший балл. Он был самодоволен, рассудителен, туп и по-немецки невежественен, т. е. относился ко всему, чего не знал, скептически. Твердо считая, что смешная сторона вещей давным-давно разработана там, где ей и полагается быть - на последней странице берлинского иллюстрированного еженедельника, - он никогда не смеялся - разве только снисходительно хмыкал. Единственное, что еще мало-мальски могло его развеселить, это рассказ о какой-нибудь остроумной денежной операции. Вся философия жизни сократилась у него до простейшего положения: бедный несчастлив, богатый счастлив. Это узаконенное счастье игриво складывалось, под аккомпанимент первоклассной танцевальной музыки, из различных предметов технической роскоши. На урок он норовил прийти всегда на несколько минут раньше и старался уйти на столько же позже.
Fyodor had only just managed to clear the bedclothes from the couch before a pupil arrived, the son of an émigré dentist, a fat, pale youth in horn-rimmed spectacles, with a fountain pen in his breast pocket. Attending, as he did, a Berlin high school, the poor boy was so steeped in the local habitus that even in English he made the same ineradicable mistakes as any skittle-headed German would have made. There was no force on earth, for example, which could have stopped him using the past continuous instead of the simple past, and this endowed every of his accidental activities of the day before with a kind of idiotic permanence. Equally stubbornly he handled the English “also” like the German “also,” and in overcoming the thorny ending of the word “clothes” he invariably added a superfluous sibilant syllable (“clothes-zes”), as if skidding after having cleared an obstacle. At the same time he expressed himself fairly freely in English and had only sought the aid of a coach because he wanted to get the highest mark in the final examination. He was self-satisfied, discursive, obtuse and germanically ignorant; i.e., he treated everything he did not know with skepticism. Firmly believing that the humorous side of things had long since been worked out in the proper place for it (the back page of a Berlin illustrated weekly), he never laughed, or limited himself to a condescending snicker. The only thing that could just barely amuse him was a story about some ingenious financial operation. His whole philosophy of life had been reduced to the simplest proposition: the poor man is unhappy, the rich man is happy. This legalized happiness was playfully put together to the accompaniment of first-class dance music, out of various items of technical luxury. For the lesson he always did his best to come a little before the hour and tried to leave a little after it. (Chapter Three)
The lover of Marianna Nikolaevna (Zina Mertz’s mother) is a Baltic Baron. In a conversation with Fyodor Zina mentions the painter Romanov (according to Marina, the mother of Norbert von Miller was born Ivanov or Romanov, or something) and the lawyer Charski (Norman Miller is Dan’s lawyer):
Она продолжала возиться с чулком на грибе и, не поднимая глаз, но быстро и хитро улыбнувшись, сказала:
"А я знаю, что вы жили на Танненбергской семь, я часто бывала там".
"Да что вы", - удивился Федор Константинович.
"Я знакома еще по Петербургу с женой Лоренца, - она мне когда-то давала уроки рисования".
"Как это странно", - сказал Федор Константинович.
"А Романов теперь в Мюнхене, - продолжала она. - Глубоко противный тип, но я всегда любила его вещи".
Поговорили о Романове. О его картинах. Достиг полного расцвета. Музеи приобретали... Пройдя через всё, нагруженный богатым опытом, он вернулся к выразительной гармонии линий. Вы знаете его "Футболиста"? Вот как раз журнал с репродукцией. Потное, бледное, напряженно-оскаленное лицо игрока во весь рост, собирающегося на полном бегу со страшной силой шутовать по голу. Растрепанные рыжие волосы, пятно грязи на виске, натянутые мускулы голой шеи. Мятая, промокшая фиолетовая фуфайка, местами обтягивая стан, низко находит на забрызганные трусики, и на ней видна идущая по некой удивительной диагонали мощная складка. Он забирает мяч сбоку, подняв одну руку, пятерня широко распялена - соучастница общего напряжения и порыва. Но главное, конечно, - ноги: блестящая белая ляжка, огромное израненное колено, толстые, темные буцы, распухшие от грязи, бесформенные, а всё-таки отмеченные какой-то необыкновенно точной и изящной силой; чулок сполз на яростной кривой икре, нога ступней влипла в жирную землю, другая собирается ударить - и как ударить! - по черному, ужасному мячу, - и всё это на темно-сером фоне, насыщенном дождем и снегом. Глядящий на эту картину уже слышал свист кожаного снаряда, уже видел отчаянный бросок вратаря.
"И я еще кое-что знаю, - сказала Зина. - Вы должны были мне помочь с одним переводом, вам это передавал Чарский, но вы почему-то не объявились".
"Как это странно", - повторил Федор Константинович.
She continued to busy herself with a stocking stretched over a wooden mushroom and without lifting her eyes, but smiling quickly and slyly, she said:
“I also know that you used to live at seven Tannenberg Street, I often went there.”
“You did?” said Fyodor, amazed.
“I used to know Lorentz’s wife in St. Petersburg—she gave me drawing lessons.”
“How queer,” said Fyodor.
“Romanov is now in Munich,” she continued. “A most objectionable character, but I always liked his things.”
They talked about Romanov and about his pictures. He had reached full maturity. Museums were buying his stuff. Having passed through everything, loaded with rich experience, he had returned to an expressive harmony of line. You know his “Footballer”? There’s a reproduction in this magazine, here it is. The pale, sweaty, tensely distorted face of a player depicted from top to toe preparing at full speed to shoot with terrible force at the goal. Tousled red hair, a burst of mud on his temple, the taut muscles of his bare neck. A wrinkled, soaking wet, violet singlet, clinging in spots to his body, comes down low over his spattered shorts, and is crossed with the wonderful diagonal of a mighty crease. He is in the act of hooking the ball sideways; one raised hand with wide-splayed fingers is a participant in the general tension and surge. But most important, of course, are the legs: a glistening white thigh, an enormous scarred knee, boots swollen with dark mud, thick and shapeless, but nevertheless marked by an extraordinarily precise and powerful grace. The stocking has slipped down one vigorously twisted calf, one foot is buried in rich mud, the other is about to kick—and how!—the hideous, tar-black ball—and all this against a dark gray background saturated with rain and snow. Looking at this picture one could already hear the whiz of the leather missile, already see the goalkeeper’s desperate dive.
“And I know something else,” said Zina. “You were supposed to help me with a translation, Charski told you about it, but for some reason you didn’t turn up.”
“How queer,” repeated Fyodor. (ibid.)
Charski is a character in Pushkin’s story Egipetskie nochi (“The Egyptian Nights,” 1835). Describing his first visit to Villa Venus (Eric Veen’s floramors), Van mentions three Egyptian squaws who prepared him for receiving a scared little virgin:
I have frequented bordels since my sixteenth year, but although some of the better ones, especially in France and Ireland, rated a triple red symbol in Nugg’s guidebook, nothing about them pre-announced the luxury and mollitude of my first Villa Venus. It was the difference between a den and an Eden.
Three Egyptian squaws, dutifully keeping in profile (long ebony eye, lovely snub, braided black mane, honey-hued faro frock, thin amber arms, Negro bangles, doughnut earring of gold bisected by a pleat of the mane, Red Indian hairband, ornamental bib), lovingly borrowed by Eric Veen from a reproduction of a Theban fresco (no doubt pretty banal in 1420 B.C.), printed in Germany (Künstlerpostkarte Nr. 6034, says cynical Dr Lagosse), prepared me by means of what parched Eric called ‘exquisite manipulations of certain nerves whose position and power are known only to a few ancient sexologists,’ accompanied by the no less exquisite application of certain ointments, not too specifically mentioned in the pornolore of Eric’s Orientalia, for receiving a scared little virgin, the descendant of an Irish king, as Eric was told in his last dream in Ex, Switzerland, by a master of funerary rather than fornicatory ceremonies.
Those preparations proceeded in such sustained, unendurably delicious rhythms that Eric dying in his sleep and Van throbbing with foul life on a rococo couch (three miles south of Bedford) could not imagine how those three young ladies, now suddenly divested of their clothes (a well-known oneirotic device), could manage to draw out a prelude that kept one so long on the very lip of its resolution. I lay supine and felt twice the size I had ever been (senescent nonsense, says science!) when finally six gentle hands attempted to ease la gosse, trembling Adada, upon the terrible tool. Silly pity — a sentiment I rarely experience — caused my desire to droop, and I had her carried away to a feast of peach tarts and cream. The Egypsies looked disconcerted, but very soon perked up. I summoned all the twenty hirens of the house (including the sweet-lipped, glossy chinned darling) into my resurrected presence. After considerable examination, after much flattering of haunches and necks, I chose a golden Gretchen, a pale Andalusian, and a black belle from New Orleans. The handmaids pounced upon them like pards and, having empasmed them with not unlesbian zest, turned the three rather melancholy graces over to me. The towel given me to wipe off the sweat that filmed my face and stung my eyes could have been cleaner. I raised my voice, I had the reluctant accursed casement wrenched wide open. A lorry had got stuck in the mud of a forbidden and unfinished road, and its groans and exertions dissipated the bizarre gloom. Only one of the girls stung me right in the soul, but I went through all three of them grimly and leisurely, ‘changing mounts in midstream’ (Eric’s advice) before ending every time in the grip of the ardent Ardillusian, who said as we parted, after one last spasm (although non-erotic chitchat was against the rules), that her father had constructed the swimming pool on the estate of Demon Veen’s cousin.
It was now all over. The lorry had gone or had drowned, and Eric was a skeleton in the most expensive corner of the Ex cemetery (‘But then, all cemeteries are ex,’ remarked a jovial ‘protestant’ priest), between an anonymous alpinist and my stillborn double. (2.3)
Künstlerpostkarte: Germ., art picture postcards.
la gosse: the little girl.
The Spanish architect who constructed the swimming pool at Ardis, Alonso is a namesake of Don Quixote (whose "real" name is Alonso Quijano). Don Quixote's fight with the windmills in Cervantes' novel brings to mind Mr. "Windmuller,” of “Ramsdale,” the lawyer in VN's novel Lolita (1955). Its narrator and main character, Humbert Humbert falls in love with a little girl and marries her widowed mother. According to Shchyogolev (Zina Mertz's step-father), if he had time, he would have written a novel:
Однажды, заметив исписанные листочки на столе у Федора Константиновича, он сказал, взяв какой-то новый, прочувствованный тон: "Эх, кабы у меня было времячко, я бы такой роман накатал... Из настоящей жизни. Вот представьте себе такую историю: старый пес, - но еще в соку, с огнем, с жаждой счастья, - знакомится с вдовицей, а у нее дочка, совсем еще девочка, - знаете, когда еще ничего не оформилось, а уже ходит так, что с ума сойти. Бледненькая, легонькая, под глазами синева, - и конечно на старого хрыча не смотрит. Что делать? И вот, недолго думая, он, видите ли, на вдовице женится. Хорошо-с. Вот, зажили втроем. Тут можно без конца описывать - соблазн, вечную пыточку, зуд, безумную надежду. И в общем - просчет. Время бежит-летит, он стареет, она расцветает, - и ни черта. Пройдет, бывало, рядом, обожжет презрительным взглядом. А? Чувствуете трагедию Достоевского? Эта история, видите ли, произошла с одним моим большим приятелем, в некотором царстве, в некотором самоварстве, во времена царя Гороха. Каково?" - и Борис Иванович, обрати в сторону темные глаза, надул губы и издал меланхолический лопающийся звук.
Once, when he had noticed some written-up sheets of paper on Fyodor’s desk, he said, adopting a new heartfelt tone of voice: “Ah, if only I had a tick or two, what a novel I’d whip off! From real life. Imagine this kind of thing: an old dog—but still in his prime, fiery, thirsting for happiness—gets to know a widow, and she has a daughter, still quite a little girl—you know what I mean—when nothing is formed yet but already she has a way of walking that drives you out of your mind—A slip of a girl, very fair, pale, with blue under the eyes—and of course she doesn’t even look at the old goat. What to do? Well, not long thinking, he ups and marries the widow. Okay. They settle down the three of them. Here you can go on indefinitely—the temptation, the eternal torment, the itch, the mad hopes. And the upshot—a miscalculation. Time flies, he gets older, she blossoms out—and not a sausage. Just walks by and scorches you with a look of contempt. Eh? D’you feel here a kind of Dostoevskian tragedy? That story, you see, happened to a great friend of mine, once upon a time in fairyland when Old King Cole was a merry old soul,” and Boris Ivanovich, turning his dark eyes away, pursed his lips and emitted a melancholy, bursting sound. (Chapter Three)
On Demonia (aka Antiterra, Earth's twin planet on which Ada is set) VN's Lolita is known as The Gitanilla, a novel by the Spanish writer Osberg. In a letter to Van (written after the suicide of Van's and Ada's half-sister Lucette) Demon mentions Cervantes’s crude romance and the lawyer of the writer Osberg:
Son:
I have followed your instructions, anent that letter, to the letter. Your epistolary style is so involute that I should suspect the presence of a code, had I not known you belonged to the Decadent School of writing, in company of naughty old Leo and consumptive Anton. I do not give a damn whether you slept or not with Lucette; but I know from Dorothy Vinelander that the child had been in love with you. The film you saw was, no doubt, Don Juan’s Last Fling in which Ada, indeed, impersonates (very beautifully) a Spanish girl. A jinx has been cast on our poor girl’s career. Howard Hool argued after the release that he had been made to play an impossible cross between two Dons; that initially Yuzlik (the director) had meant to base his ‘fantasy’ on Cervantes’s crude romance; that some scraps of the basic script stuck like dirty wool to the final theme; and that if you followed closely the sound track you could hear a fellow reveler in the tavern scene address Hool twice as ‘Quicks.’ Hool managed to buy up and destroy a number of copies while others have been locked up by the lawyer of the writer Osberg, who claims the gitanilla sequence was stolen from one of his own concoctions. In result it is impossible to purchase a reel of the picture which will vanish like the proverbial smoke once it has fizzled out on provincial screens. Come and have dinner with me on July 10. Evening dress. (3.6)
According to Ada, at Marina's funeral Demon looked positively Quixotic:
‘My upper-lip space feels indecently naked.’ (He had shaved his mustache off with howls of pain in her presence). ‘And I cannot keep sucking in my belly all the time.’
‘Oh, I like you better with that nice overweight — there’s more of you. It’s the maternal gene, I suppose, because Demon grew leaner and leaner. He looked positively Quixotic when I saw him at Mother’s funeral. It was all very strange. He wore blue mourning. D’Onsky’s son, a person with only one arm, threw his remaining one around Demon and both wept comme des fontaines. Then a robed person who looked like an extra in a technicolor incarnation of Vishnu made an incomprehensible sermon. Then she went up in smoke. He said to me, sobbing: "I will not cheat the poor grubs!" Practically a couple of hours after he broke that promise we had sudden visitors at the ranch — an incredibly graceful moppet of eight, black-veiled, and a kind of duenna, also in black, with two bodyguards. The hag demanded certain fantastic sums — which Demon, she said, had not had time to pay, for "popping the hymen" — whereupon I had one of our strongest boys throw out vsyu (the entire) kompaniyu.’
‘Extraordinary,’ said Van, ‘they had been growing younger and younger — I mean the girls, not the strong silent boys. His old Rosalind had a ten-year-old niece, a primed chickabiddy. Soon he would have been poaching them from the hatching chamber.’
‘You never loved your father,’ said Ada sadly.
‘Oh, I did and do — tenderly, reverently, understandingly, because, after all, that minor poetry of the flesh is something not unfamiliar to me. But as far as we are concerned, I mean you and I, he was buried on the same day as our uncle Dan.’ (3.8)