AS: 'It's a gruesome girl!' she [Cordula] cried after the melodious adieux. 'Her name is Vanda Broom, and I learned only recently what I never suspected at school - she's a regular tribadka - poor Grace Erminin tells me Vanda used to make constant passes at her and at - at another girl. There's her picture here,' continued Cordula with a quick change of tone, producing a daintily bound and prettily printed graduation album of Spring, 1887, which Van had seen at Ardis, but in which he had not noticed the somber beetle-browed unhappy face of that particular girl, and now it did not matter any more, and Cordula quickly popped the book back into a drawer; but he remembered very well that among the various more or less coy contributions it contained a clever pastiche by Ada Veen mimicking Tolstoy's paragraph rhythm and chapter closings [ ] The name Vanda Broom is secretly present in Ada's poem. The old manor, in which Ada has parodied every veranda and room, is Ardis [ ]According to Van, angels, too, have brooms:
JM: Brooms are associated to witches, too.
I remember the word “Viedma” (“Witch”) in ADA: “A sense of otiose emptiness was all Van derived from those contacts with Literature […]As a boy of fifteen (Eric Veen’s age of florescence) he had studied with a poet’s passion the time-table of three great American transcontinental trains that one day he would take — not alone (now alone). From Manhattan, via Mephisto, El Paso, Meksikansk and the Panama Chunnel, the dark-red New World Express reached Brazilia and Witch (or Viedma, founded by a Russian admiral). There it split into two parts, the eastern one continuing to Grant’s Horn, and the western returning north through Valparaiso and Bogota.” It’s a rather cryptic paragraph. Do you think there’s anything in this list of places related to Vanda Broom, rooms in Ardis, “tribadka”? Why Tolstoy?