Lucette to Van: 'I don't care for your
cabochon. I mean it's all right on your dear hairy hand, but Papa wore one like
that on his hateful pink paw. He belonged to the silent-explorer type. Once he
took me to a girls' hockey match and I had to warn him I'd yell for help if he
didn't call off the search.'
'Das auch noch,' sighed Van, and
pocketed the heavy dark-sapphire ring. He would have put it into the ashtray had
it not been Marina's last present. (3.3)
Van's cabochon (a precious stone of convex hemispherical or
oval form, polished but not cut into facets) must have belonged to Daniel
Veen, Lucette's father who left the ring to Marina (Van's, Ada's and
Lucette's mother).
In Maximilian Voloshin's poem Matros (The
Sailor, 1919) from the cycle Lichiny ("The Masks") of the
book Neopalimaya kupina (The Burning Bush) the red sailor
has a cabochon in his ring:
Браслеты. В перстне кабошон,
И красный бант с алмазной пряжкой.
The crew of Tobakoff consists of Russian
sailors:
As they crossed landings where velvet
ropes were hastily stretched by Russian sailors (who glanced with sympathy at
the handsome pair speaking their incomparable tongue) or walked this or that
deck, Lucette made him [Van] think of some
acrobatic creature immune to the rough seas. (3.5)
Acrobatic creature immune to the rough seas brings to
mind an aquatic peacock seen by Van in a dream on the eve:
A tempest went into convulsions around
midnight, but despite the lunging and creaking (Tobakoff was an
embittered old vessel) Van managed to sleep soundly, the only reaction on the
part of his dormant mind being the dream image of an aquatic peacock, slowly
sinking before somersaulting like a diving grebe, near the shore of the lake
bearing his name in the ancient kingdom of Arrowroot. Upon reviewing that bright
dream he traced its source to his recent visit to Armenia where he had gone
fowling with Armborough and that gentleman's extremely compliant and
accomplished niece. (ibid.)
Van mentions his visit to Armenia in the chapter dealing
with Marina's death:
He went shooting with the British Governor
of Armenia, and his niece, on Lake Van. (3.1)
Leaving the Tobakoff cinema hall, Van murmurs a humorous
bad-sailor excuse:
They [the Robinsons]
were craning already across her [Lucette],
with radiant wrinkles and twittery fingers toward Van when he pounced upon their
intrusion to murmur a humorous bad-sailor excuse and leave the cinema hall to
its dark lurching. (3.5)
Speaking of Revolution: according to Voloshin, Revolution
is a paroxysm of the sense of justice (see the chapter on Voloshin from Evgenia
Gertsyk's Memoirs).
And how sad, how significant that the
picture projected upon the screen of his paroxysm, while the unlockable door
swung open again with the movement of a deaf man cupping his ear, was not the
recent and pertinent image of Lucette, but the indelible vision of a bent bare
neck and a divided flow of black hair and a purple-tipped paint brush.
(3.5)
Alexey Sklyarenko