At the picnic on her twelfth birthday Ada (the title character of a novel, 1969, by VN) tells Mlle Larivière (the governess of Van's and Ada's half-sister Lucette) that things like menstruations hardly ever happen to normal girls today and will certainly not occur in her case:
Presently Mlle Larivière asked Ada to accompany her to a secluded spot. There, the fully clad lady, with her voluminous dress retaining its stately folds but grown as it were an inch longer so that it now hid her prunella shoes, stood stock-still over a concealed downpour and a moment later reverted to her normal height. On their way back, the well-meaning pedagogue explained to Ada that a girl’s twelfth birthday was a suitable occasion to discuss and foresee a thing which, she said, was going to make a grande fille of Ada any day now. Ada, who had been sufficiently instructed about it by a school-teacher six months earlier, and who in fact had had it already twice, now astounded her poor governess (who could never cope with Ada’s sharp and strange mind) by declaring that it was all bluff and nuns’ nonsense; that those things hardly ever happened to normal girls today and would certainly not occur in her case. Mlle Larivière, who was a remarkably stupid person (in spite or perhaps because of her propensity for novelizing), mentally passed in review her own experience and wondered for a few dreadful minutes if perhaps, while she indulged in the arts, the progress of science had not changed that of nature. (1.13)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): grande fille: girl who has reached puberty.
In the second part of his essay on Leonid Andreyev, Nekto v serom ("Someone in Gray," 1914), Amfiteatrov says that menstruations are not a law of nature but rather a bad habit that temporarily became a law:
Человек жестоко пасует еще пред вопросом смерти, то есть, вернее сказать, пред вопросом преждевременной старости и болезненного умирания, которые сделали смерть ужасною, как насильственное и преждевременное уничтожение организмов, не успевших изжить сроков своих до спокойной потребности в уничтожении. Но вон и тут г. Мечников пророчествует нам близость времени, когда жизнь будет восстановлена в правах своих донашивать тело на костях, покуда оно само себе не опротивеет, и пришествие смерти не только перестанет устрашать человека, но даже осветится таким же физиологическим гедонизмом, как акт зачатия или рождения в свет. Мы узнали от него же, что родить чада в болезнях, сокращая тем свой жизненный срок,-- совсем не безнадежное проклятие для женщины, и менструации -- не закон природы, но лишь доисторически усвоенная,-- право, не знаю, как сказать,-- дурная привычка, что ли, приобретшая силу закона. С тех пор, как миром правит положительное знание, смерть сбита со стольких позиций, что считать победы свои человечество вправе уже не веками, как удавалось прежде, и не десятилетиями, а из года в год, да часто и по нескольку раз в год. Сегодня Пастер, завтра Рентген, послезавтра Кюри. Правда, прокаженный, как и во дни Иова, еще имеет нравственное право и полное основание вопиять:
-- Погибни день, в который я родился, и ночь, в которую сказано: "Зачался человек".
Paster and Röntgen mentioned by Amfiteatrov bring to mind charming Monsieur de Pastrouil (one of the two seconds in Demon's sword duel with Baron d'Onsky):
Upon being questioned in Demon’s dungeon, Marina, laughing trillingly, wove a picturesque tissue of lies; then broke down, and confessed. She swore that all was over; that the Baron, a physical wreck and a spiritual Samurai, had gone to Japan forever. From a more reliable source Demon learned that the Samurai’s real destination was smart little Vatican, a Roman spa, whence he was to return to Aardvark, Massa, in a week or so. Since prudent Veen preferred killing his man in Europe (decrepit but indestructible Gamaliel was said to be doing his best to forbid duels in the Western Hemisphere — a canard or an idealistic President’s instant-coffee caprice, for nothing was to come of it after all), Demon rented the fastest petroloplane available, overtook the Baron (looking very fit) in Nice, saw him enter Gunter’s Bookshop, went in after him, and in the presence of the imperturbable and rather bored English shopkeeper, back-slapped the astonished Baron across the face with a lavender glove. The challenge was accepted; two native seconds were chosen; the Baron plumped for swords; and after a certain amount of good blood (Polish and Irish — a kind of American ‘Gory Mary’ in barroom parlance) had bespattered two hairy torsoes, the whitewashed terrace, the flight of steps leading backward to the walled garden in an amusing Douglas d’Artagnan arrangement, the apron of a quite accidental milkmaid, and the shirtsleeves of both seconds, charming Monsieur de Pastrouil and Colonel St Alin, a scoundrel, the latter gentlemen separated the panting combatants, and Skonky died, not ‘of his wounds’ (as it was viciously rumored) but of a gangrenous afterthought on the part of the least of them, possibly self-inflicted, a sting in the groin, which caused circulatory trouble, notwithstanding quite a few surgical interventions during two or three years of protracted stays at the Aardvark Hospital in Boston — a city where, incidentally, he married in 1869 our friend the Bohemian lady, now keeper of Glass Biota at the local museum. (1.2)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): Aardvark: apparently, a university town in New England.
Gamaliel: a much more fortunate statesman than our W.G. Harding.
and Doc Ecksreher (a play on the X-rays discovered by Röntgen) who told Philip Rack (Lucette's music teacher) that his wife Elsie would present him with triplets in three weeks:
The melancholy young German was in a philosophical mood shading into the suicidal. He had to return to Kalugano with his Elsie, who Doc Ecksreher thought ‘would present him with drip lets in dry weeks.’ He hated Kalugano, his and her home town, where in a moment of ‘mutual aberration’ stupid Elsie had given him her all on a park bench after a wonderful office party at Muzakovski’s Organs where the oversexed pitiful oaf had a good job.
‘When are you leaving?’ asked Ada.
‘Forestday — after tomorrow.’
‘Fine. That’s fine. Adieu, Mr Rack.’
Poor Philip drooped, fingerpainting sad nothings on wet stone, shaking his heavy head, gulping visibly.
‘One feels... One feels,’ he said, ‘that one is merely playing a role and has forgotten the next speech.’
‘I’m told many feel that,’ said Ada; ‘it must be a furchtbar feeling.’
‘Cannot be helped? No hope any more at all? I am dying, yes?’
‘You are dead, Mr Rack,’ said Ada. (1.32)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): Forestday: Rack’s pronunciation of ‘Thursday’.
furchtbar: Germ., dreadful.
Kalugano blends Kaluga (a city in Russia, SW of Moscow) with Lugano (a city in Switzerland, near the Italian border). Alexander Amfiteatrov (1862-1938) was born in Kaluga and died in Levanto, NW Italy. He became a writer after giving up his career as an opera singer (a tenor). Van's adversary in a pistol duel near Kalugano, Captain Tapper, of Wild Violet Lodge, is a member of the Do-Re-La Country Club. On the train that brings Van to Kalugano Cordula de Prey (Ada's schoolmate at Brownhill) mentions her 'womenses' (women + menses):
‘What’s wrong?’ asked Cordula as they settled down in the very roomy and rococo ‘crumpeter,’ as Kalugano College students used to call it in the ‘Eighties and ‘Nineties.
‘Everything,’ replied Van, ‘but what makes you ask?’
‘Well, we know Dr Platonov slightly, and there was absolutely no reason for you to be so abominably rude to the dear old man.’
‘I apologize,’ said Van. ‘Let us order the traditional tea.’
‘Another queer thing,’ said Cordula, ‘is that you actually noticed me today. Two months ago you snubbed me.’
‘You had changed. You had grown lovely and languorous. You are even lovelier now. Cordula is no longer a virgin! Tell me — do you happen to have Percy de Prey’s address? I mean we all know he’s invading Tartary — but where could a letter reach him? I don’t care to ask your snoopy aunt to forward anything.’
‘I daresay the Frasers have it, I’ll find out. But where is Van going? Where shall I find Van?’
‘At home — 5 Park Lane, in a day or two. Just now I’m going to Kalugano.’
‘That’s a gruesome place. Girl?’
‘Man. Do you know Kalugano? Dentist? Best hotel? Concert hall? My cousin’s music teacher?’
She shook her short curls. No — she went there very seldom. Twice to a concert, in a pine forest. She had not been aware that Ada took music lessons. How was Ada?
‘Lucette,’ he said, ‘Lucette takes or took piano lessons. Okay. Let’s dismiss Kalugano. These crumpets are very poor relatives of the Chose ones. You’re right, j’ai des ennuis. But you can make me forget them. Tell me something to distract me, though you distract me as it is, un petit topinambour as the Teuton said in the story. Tell me about your affairs of the heart.’
She was not a bright little girl. But she was a loquacious and really quite exciting little girl. He started to caress her under the table, but she gently removed his hand, whispering ‘womenses,’ as whimsically as another girl had done in some other dream. He cleared his throat loudly and ordered half-a-bottle of cognac, having the waiter open it in his presence as Demon advised. She talked on and on, and he lost the thread of her discourse, or rather it got enmeshed in the rapid landscape, which his gaze followed over her shoulder, with a sudden ravine recording what Jack said when his wife ‘phoned, or a lone tree in a clover field impersonating abandoned John, or a romantic stream running down a cliff and reflecting her brief bright affair with Marquis Quizz Quisana. (1.42)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): j’ai des ennuis: I have worries.
topinambour: tuber of the girasole; pun on ‘pun’ (‘calembour’).
Marquis Quizz Quisana seems to hint at Quisisana, the best hotel in Capri, mentioned by Mark Aldanov in his novel Bred ("Delirium," 1955):
Она видела в городке большую гостиницу «Квисисана». В путеводителе было сказано, что это самый лучший отель Капри, да это и без путеводителя было ясно само собой, по виду выходивших людей, по тому, что здесь толпились гиды и стояли ослики для туристов, — когда Наташа проходила мимо, к крыльцу на ослике подъехала говорившая по-немецки горделивая дама. (chapter VI)
Dorothy Vinelander (Ada's impayable sister-in-law) eventually marries a Mr Brod or Bred (3.8). In Aldanov's novel Klyuch ("The Key," 1929) Prince Gorenski tells Fomin that Tamara Matveyevna (Musya's mother) is impayable and Kremenetsky (Musya's father) mentions kovarnye tevtony (the perfidious Teutons):
- Дa ведь спектaкль должен был состояться ещё в декaбре?
- Отложили из-зa болезни Тaмaры Мaтвеевны… Теперь онa, беднaя, совсем измотaлaсь с хлопотaми по устройству юбилея. Сегодня ещё мне говорит: "Все тaк сочувственно отнеслись…" Elle est impayable.
Князь покaзaл Фомину глaзaми нa подходившего сзaди Кременецкого.
- Мы о вaшем юбилее толковaли, не слушaйте, - скaзaл Горенский.
- Ох, и не говорите, смерть моя! - ответил шутливо, зaмaхaв рукaми, Семён Исидорович. - Вот тоже выдумaли дело: чествовaть meine Wenigkeit, кaк говорят ковaрные тевтоны. (Part Two, chapter II)
In Aldanov's novel Peshchera ("The Cave," 1936) Mme Leoni looks to Musya like a real grande dame:
"С виду, grande dame настоящая, -- подумала Муся. -- И с детьми она хорошо себя поставила, очень любит и держит в руках..." ("Part One, chapter II)
A real grande dame brings to a grande fille mentioned by Mlle Larivière and a grande cocotte for whom, accoording to Marina, Grandpa Bagrov mistook her:
Before his boarding-school days started, his father’s pretty house, in Florentine style, between two vacant lots (5 Park Lane in Manhattan), had been Van’s winter home (two giant guards were soon to rise on both sides of it, ready to frog-march it away), unless they journeyed abroad. Summers in Radugalet, the ‘other Ardis,’ were so much colder and duller than those here in this, Ada’s, Ardis. Once he even spent both winter and summer there; it must have been in 1878.
Of course, of course, because that was the first time, Ada recalled, she had glimpsed him. In his little white sailor suit and blue sailor cap. (Un régulier angelochek, commented Van in the Raduga jargon.) He was eight, she was six. Uncle Dan had unexpectedly expressed the desire to revisit the old estate. At the last moment Marina had said she’d come too, despite Dan’s protests, and had lifted little Ada, hopla, with her hoop, into the calèche. They took, she imagined, the train from Ladoga to Raduga, for she remembered the way the station man with the whistle around his neck went along the platform, past the coaches of the stopped local, banging shut door after door, all six doors of every carriage, each of which consisted of six one-window carrosses of pumpkin origin, fused together. It was, Van suggested, a ‘tower in the mist’ (as she called any good recollection), and then a conductor walked on the running board of every coach with the train also running and opened doors all over again to give, punch, collect tickets, and lick his thumb, and change money, a hell of a job, but another ‘mauve tower.’ Did they hire a motor landaulet to Radugalet? Ten miles, she guessed. Ten versts, said Van. She stood corrected. He was out, he imagined, na progulke (promenading) in the gloomy firwood with Aksakov, his tutor, and Bagrov’s grandson, a neighbor’s boy, whom he teased and pinched and made horrible fun of, a nice quiet little fellow who quietly massacred moles and anything else with fur on, probably pathological. However, when they arrived, it became instantly clear that Demon had not expected ladies. He was on the terrace drinking goldwine (sweet whisky) with an orphan he had adopted, he said, a lovely Irish wild rose in whom Marina at once recognized an impudent scullery maid who had briefly worked at Ardis Hall, and had been ravished by an unknown gentleman — who was now well-known. In those days Uncle Dan wore a monocle in gay-dog copy of his cousin, and this he screwed in to view Rose, whom perhaps he had also been promised (here Van interrupted his interlocutor telling her to mind her vocabulary). The party was a disaster. The orphan languidly took off her pearl earrings for Marina’s appraisal. Grandpa Bagrov hobbled in from a nap in the boudoir and mistook Marina for a grande cocotte as the enraged lady conjectured later when she had a chance to get at poor Dan. Instead of staying for the night, Marina stalked off and called Ada who, having been told to ‘play in the garden,’ was mumbling and numbering in raw-flesh red the white trunks of a row of young birches with Rose’s purloined lipstick in the preamble to a game she now could not remember — what a pity, said Van — when her mother swept her back straight to Ardis in the same taxi leaving Dan — to his devices and vices, inserted Van — and arriving home at sunrise. But, added Ada, just before being whisked away and deprived of her crayon (tossed out by Marina k chertyam sobach’im, to hell’s hounds — and it did remind one of Rose’s terrier that had kept trying to hug Dan’s leg) the charming glimpse was granted her of tiny Van, with another sweet boy, and blond-bearded, white-bloused Aksakov, walking up to the house, and, oh yes, she had forgotten her hoop — no, it was still in the taxi. But, personally, Van had not the slightest recollection of that visit or indeed of that particular summer, because his father’s life, anyway, was a rose garden all the time, and he had been caressed by ungloved lovely hands more than once himself, which did not interest Ada. (1.24)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): Bagrov’s grandson: allusion to Childhood Years of Bagrov’s Grandson by the minor writer Sergey Aksakov (A.D. 1791-1859).
In VN’s novel The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941) the narrator (Sebastian’s half-brother V.) says that Sebastian could not have tolerated a grande cocotte hinting at a craving for bhang:
My first impression was that I had got what I wanted – that at least I knew who Sebastian's mistress had been; but presently I cooled down. Could it have been she, that windbag's first wife? I wondered as a taxi took me to my next address. Was it really worthwhile following that plausible, too plausible trail? Was not the image Pahl Pahlich had conjured up a trifle too obvious? The whimsical wanton that ruins a foolish man's life. But was Sebastian foolish? I called to mind his acute distaste for the obvious bad and the obvious good; for ready-made forms of pleasure and hackneyed forms of distress. A girl of that type would have got on his nerves immediately. For what could her conversation have been, if indeed she had managed to get acquainted with that quiet, unsociable, absent-minded Englishman at the Beaumont Hotel? Surely, after the very first airing of her notions, he would have avoided her. He used to say, I know, that fast girls had slow minds and that there could be nothing duller than a pretty woman who likes fun; even more: that if you looked well at the prettiest girl while she was exuding the cream of the commonplace, you were sure to find some minute blemish in her beauty, corresponding to her habits of thought. He would not mind perhaps having a bite at the apple of sin because, apart from solecisms, he was indifferent to the idea of sin; but he did mind apple-jelly, potted and patented. He might have forgiven a woman for being a flirt, but he would never have stood a sham mystery. He might have been amused by a hussy getting drunk on beer, but he could not have tolerated a grande cocotte hinting at a craving for bhang. The more I thought of it, the less possible it seemed…. At any rate, I ought not to bother about that girl until I had examined the two other possibilities. (Chapter 16)
Bhang is an edible preparation made from the leaves of the cannabis plant originating from the Indian Subcontinent. According to Van, Marina believed that she had been a dancing girl in India long before Moses or anybody was born in the lotus swamp:
Now Lucette demanded her mother’s attention.
‘What are Jews?’ she asked.
‘Dissident Christians,’ answered Marina.
‘Why is Greg a Jew?’ asked Lucette.
‘Why-why!’ said Marina; ‘because his parents are Jews.’
‘And his grandparents? His arrière grandparents?’
‘I really wouldn’t know, my dear. Were your ancestors Jews, Greg?’
‘Well, I’m not sure,’ said Greg. ‘Hebrews, yes — but not Jews in quotes — I mean, not comic characters or Christian businessmen. They came from Tartary to England five centuries ago. My mother’s grandfather, though, was a French marquis who, I know, belonged to the Roman faith and was crazy about banks and stocks and jewels, so I imagine people may have called him un juif.’
‘It’s not a very old religion, anyway, as religions go, is it?’ said Marina (turning to Van and vaguely planning to steer the chat to India where she had been a dancing girl long before Moses or anybody was born in the lotus swamp).
‘Who cares —’ said Van.
‘And Belle’ (Lucette’s name for her governess), ‘is she also a dizzy Christian?’
‘Who cares,’ cried Van, ‘who cares about all those stale myths, what does it matter — Jove or Jehovah, spire or cupola, mosques in Moscow, or bronzes and bonzes, and clerics, and relics, and deserts with bleached camel ribs? They are merely the dust and mirages of the communal mind.’
‘How did this idiotic conversation start in the first place?’ Ada wished to be told, cocking her head at the partly ornamented dackel or taksik.
‘Mea culpa,’ Mlle Larivière explained with offended dignity. ‘All I said, at the picnic, was that Greg might not care for ham sandwiches, because Jews and Tartars do not eat pork.’
‘The Romans,’ said Greg, ‘the Roman colonists, who crucified Christian Jews and Barabbits, and other unfortunate people in the old days, did not touch pork either, but I certainly do and so did my grandparents.’
Lucette was puzzled by a verb Greg had used. To illustrate it for her, Van joined his ankles, spread both his arms horizontally, and rolled up his eyes.
‘When I was a little girl,’ said Marina crossly, ‘Mesopotamian history was taught practically in the nursery.’
‘Not all little girls can learn what they are taught,’ observed Ada.
‘Are we Mesopotamians?’ asked Lucette.
‘We are Hippopotamians,’ said Van. ‘Come,’ he added, ‘we have not yet ploughed today.’
A day or two before, Lucette had demanded that she be taught to hand-walk. Van gripped her by her ankles while she slowly progressed on her little red palms, sometimes falling with a grunt on her face or pausing to nibble a daisy. Dack barked in strident protest. (1.14)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): un juif: a Jew.
At the picnic on Ada's twelfth birthday Van walks on his hands for the first time:
The early afternoon sun found new places to brighten and old places to toast. Aunt Ruth dozed with her head on an ordinary bed pillow provided by Mme Forestier, who was knitting a tiny jersey for her charges’ future half-sibling. Lady Erminin, through the bothersome afterhaze of suicide, was, reflected Marina, looking down, with old wistfulness and an infant’s curiosity, at the picnickers, under the glorious pine verdure, from the Persian blue of her abode of bliss. The children displayed their talents: Ada and Grace danced a Russian fling to the accompaniment of an ancient music box (which kept halting in mid-bar, as if recalling other shores, other, radial, waves); Lucette, one fist on her hip, sang a St Malô fisher-song; Greg put on his sister’s blue skirt, hat and glasses, all of which transformed him into a very sick, mentally retarded Grace; and Van walked on his hands.
Two years earlier, when about to begin his first prison term at the fashionable and brutal boarding school, to which other Veens had gone before him (as far back as the days ‘when Washingtonias were Wellingtonias’), Van had resolved to study some striking stunt that would give him an immediate and brilliant ascendancy. Accordingly, after a conference with Demon, King Wing, the latter’s wrestling master, taught the strong lad to walk on his hands by means of a special play of the shoulder muscles, a trick that necessitated for its acquirement and improvement nothing short of a dislocation of the caryatics.
What pleasure (thus in the MS.). The pleasure of suddenly discovering the right knack of topsy turvy locomotion was rather like learning to man, after many a painful and ignominious fall, those delightful gliders called Magicarpets (or ‘jikkers’) that were given a boy on his twelfth birthday in the adventurous days before the Great Reaction — and then what a breathtaking long neural caress when one became airborne for the first time and managed to skim over a haystack, a tree, a burn, a barn, while Grandfather Dedalus Veen, running with upturned face, flourished a flag and fell into the horsepond.
Van peeled off his polo shirt and took off his shoes and socks. The slenderness of his torso, matching in tint if not in texture, the tan of his tight shorts, contrasted with the handsome boy’s abnormally developed deltoids and sinewy forearms. Four years later Van could stun a man with one blow of either elbow.
His reversed body gracefully curved, his brown legs hoisted like a Tarentine sail, his joined ankles tacking, Van gripped with splayed hands the brow of gravity, and moved to and fro, veering and sidestepping, opening his mouth the wrong way, and blinking in the odd bilboquet fashion peculiar to eyelids in his abnormal position. Even more extraordinary than the variety and velocity of the movements he made in imitation of animal hind legs was the effortlessness of his stance; King Wing warned him that Vekchelo, a Yukon professional, lost it by the time he was twenty-two; but that summer afternoon, on the silky ground of the pineglade, in the magical heart of Ardis, under Lady Erminin’s blue eye, fourteen-year-old Van treated us to the greatest performance we have ever seen a brachiambulant give. Not the faintest flush showed on his face or neck! Now and then, when he detached his organs of locomotion from the lenient ground, and seemed actually to clap his hands in midair, in a miraculous parody of a ballet jump, one wondered if this dreamy indolence of levitation was not a result of the earth’s canceling its pull in a fit of absentminded benevolence. Incidentally, one curious consequence of certain muscular changes and osteal ‘reclicks’ caused by the special training with which Wing had racked him was Van’s inability in later years to shrug his shoulders. (1.13)