Describing his meeting with Lucette (Van’s and Ada’s half-sister) in Paris, Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) mentions ‘Alphonse Cinq,’ the concierge at Alphonse Four (Lucette's hotel) who told Van that he had just seen Mlle Veen in the Récamier room where Vivian Vale’s golden veils were on show:
The Bourbonian-chinned, dark, sleek-haired, ageless concierge, dubbed by Van in his blazer days ‘Alphonse Cinq,’ believed he had just seen Mlle Veen in the Récamier room where Vivian Vale’s golden veils were on show. With a flick of coattail and a swing-gate click, Alphonse dashed out of his lodge and went to see. Van’s eye over his umbrella crook traveled around a carousel of Sapsucker paperbacks (with that wee striped woodpecker on every spine): The Gitanilla, Salzman, Salzman, Salzman, Invitation to a Climax, Squirt, The Go-go Gang, The Threshold of Pain, The Chimes of Chose, The Gitanilla — here a Wall Street, very ‘patrician’ colleague of Demon’s, old Kithar K.L. Sween, who wrote verse, and the still older real-estate magnate Milton Eliot, went by without recognizing grateful Van, despite his being betrayed by several mirrors.
The concierge returned shaking his head. Out of the goodness of his heart Van gave him a Goal guinea and said he’d call again at one-thirty. He walked through the lobby (where the author of Agonic Lines and Mr Eliot, affalés, with a great amount of jacket over their shoulders, dans des fauteuils, were comparing cigars) and, leaving the hotel by a side exit, crossed the rue des Jeunes Martyres for a drink at Ovenman’s.
Upon entering, he stopped for a moment to surrender his coat; but he kept his black fedora and stick-slim umbrella as he had seen his father do in that sort of bawdy, albeit smart, place which decent women did not frequent — at least, unescorted. He headed for the bar, and as he was in the act of wiping the lenses of his black-framed spectacles, made out, through the optical mist (Space’s recent revenge!), the girl whose silhouette he recalled having seen now and then (much more distinctly!) ever since his pubescence, passing alone, drinking alone, always alone, like Blok’s Incognita. It was a queer feeling — as of something replayed by mistake, part of a sentence misplaced on the proof sheet, a scene run prematurely, a repeated blemish, a wrong turn of time. He hastened to reequip his ears with the thick black bows of his glasses and went up to her in silence. For a minute he stood behind her, sideways to remembrance and reader (as she, too, was in regard to us and the bar), the crook of his silk-swathed cane lifted in profile almost up to his mouth. There she was, against the aureate backcloth of a sakarama screen next to the bar, toward which she was sliding, still upright, about to be seated, having already placed one white-gloved hand on the counter. She wore a high-necked, long-sleeved romantic black dress with an ample skirt, fitted bodice and ruffy collar, from the black soft corolla of which her long neck gracefully rose. With a rake’s morose gaze we follow the pure proud line of that throat, of that tilted chin. The glossy red lips are parted, avid and fey, offering a side gleam of large upper teeth. We know, we love that high cheekbone (with an atom of powder puff sticking to the hot pink skin), and the forward upsweep of black lashes and the painted feline eye — all this in profile, we softly repeat. From under the wavy wide brim of her floppy hat of black faille, with a great black bow surmounting it, a spiral of intentionally disarranged, expertly curled bright copper descends her flaming cheek, and the light of the bar’s ‘gem bulbs’ plays on her bouffant front hair, which, as seen laterally, convexes from beneath the extravagant brim of the picture hat right down to her long thin eyebrow. Her Irish profile sweetened by a touch of Russian softness, which adds a look of mysterious expectancy and wistful surprise to her beauty, must be seen, I hope, by the friends and admirers of my memories, as a natural masterpiece incomparably finer and younger than the portrait of the similarily postured lousy jade with her Parisian gueule de guenon on the vile poster painted by that wreck of an artist for Ovenman. (3.3)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): affalés etc.: sprawling in their armchairs.
bouffant: puffed up.
gueule etc.: simian facial angle.
Alphonse Cinq seems to hint at Alfonsinka, as in Dostoevski's novel Podrostok ("The Adolescent," 1875) Arkadiy Dolgoruki (the narrator and main character) calls Alphonsine (Lambert's mistress). According to Arkadiy, Alfonsinka is shpion (a spy):
Я уже предуведомил, что почти терял рассудок. И вот в моей комнате я вдруг застаю Альфонсинку и моего хозяина. Правда, они выходили, и у Петра Ипполитовича в руках была свеча.
- Это - что! - почти бессмысленно завопил я на хозяина, - как вы смели ввести эту шельму в мою комнату?
- Tiens! - вскричала Альфонсинка, - et les amis?
- Вон! - заревел я.
- Mais c'est un ours! - выпорхнула она в коридор, притворяясь испуганною, и вмиг скрылась к хозяйке. Петр Ипполитович, все еще со свечой в руках, подошел ко мне с строгим видом:
- Позвольте вам заметить, Аркадий Макарович, что вы слишком разгорячились; как ни уважаем мы вас, а мамзель Альфонсина не шельма, а даже совсем напротив, находится в гостях, и не у вас, а у моей жены, с которою уже несколько времени как обоюдно знакомы.
- А как вы смели ввести ее в мою комнату? - повторил я, схватив себя за голову, которая почти вдруг ужасно заболела.
- А случайно-с. Это я входил, чтоб затворить форточку, которую я же и отворил для свежего воздуха; а так как мы продолжали с Альфонсиной Карловной прежний разговор, то среди разговора она и зашла в вашу комнату, единственно сопровождая меня.
- Неправда, Альфонсинка - шпион, Ламберт - шпион! Может быть, вы сами - тоже шпион! А Альфонсинка приходила у меня что-нибудь украсть.
- Это уж как вам будет угодно. Сегодня вы одно изволите говорить, а завтра другое. А квартиру мою я сдал на некоторое время, а сам с женой переберусь в каморку; так что Альфонсина Карловна теперь - почти такая же здесь жилица, как и вы-с.
- Вы Ламберту сдали квартиру? - вскричал я в испуге.
- Нет-с, не Ламберту, - улыбнулся он давешней длинной улыбкой, в которой, впрочем, видна была уже твердость взамен утреннего недоумения, - полагаю, что сами изволите знать кому, а только напрасно делаете вид, что не знаете, единственно для красы-с, а потому и сердитесь. Покойной ночи-с!
- Да, да, оставьте, оставьте меня в покое! - замахал я руками чуть не плача, так что он вдруг с удивлением посмотрел на меня; однако же вышел. Я насадил на дверь крючок и повалился на мою кровать ничком в подушку. И вот так прошел для меня этот первый ужасный день из этих трех роковых последних дней, которыми завершаются мои записки.
I have already stated that I was almost out of my mind. And lo, and behold! in my room I found Alphonsine and my landlord. They were coming out, it is true, and in Pyotr Ippolitovich's hand was a candle.
"What's this?" I yelled at the landlord, almost senselessly. "How dare you take that hussy into my room?"
"Tien," cried Alphonsine "et les amis?"
"Get out," I roared.
"Mais c'est un ours!" she whisked out into the passage, pretending to be alarmed, and instantly disappeared into the landlady's room.
Pyotr Ippolitovich, still holding the candle in his hand, came up to me with a severe face.
"Allow me to observe, Arkadiy Makarovich, that you are too hasty; with all respect to you, Mademoiselle Alphonsine is not a hussy, but quite the contrary, indeed, is here, not as your visitor, but as my wife's, with whom she has been for some time past acquainted."
"And how dared you take her into my room?" I repeated, clutching at my head, which almost suddenly began to ache violently.
"By chance. I went in to shut the window, which I had opened to air the room; and as Alphonsine Karlovna and I were continuing our conversation, she came into your room simply following me."
"That's a lie. Alphonsine's a spy, Lambert's a spy! Perhaps you're a spy, too! And Alphonsine came into my room to steal something."
"That's as you please. You'll say one thing to-day, but tomorrow you'll speak differently. And I've let our rooms for some time, and have moved with my wife into the little room so that Alphonsine Karlovna is almost as much a lodger here as you are."
"You've let your rooms to Lambert?" I cried in dismay.
"No, not to Lambert," he answered with the same broad grin, in which, however, the hesitation I had seen in the morning was replaced by determination. "I imagine that you know to whom and only affect not to know for the sake of appearances, and that's why you're angry. Good-night, sir!"
"Yes, yes, leave me, leave me alone!" I waved my hand, almost crying, so that he looked at me in surprise; he went away, however. I fastened the door with the hook and threw myself on my bed with my face in the pillow. And that is how I passed that awful day, the first of those three fateful days with which my story concludes. (Part Three, chapter IX, 5)
Van meets Lucette and dines with her on Friday, 1 June 1901. Three days later, on June 4 (Monday), Lucette commits suicide by jumping from Admiral Tobakoff into the Atlantic. A kitchen boy and photographer at Ardis whom Van blinds for spying on him and Ada and attempting to blackmail Ada, Kim Beauharnais seems to be a son of Arkadiy Dolgoruki and Alphonsine (the characters in Dostoevski's The Adolescent). As an infant, Kim was stolen by the Gypsies who somehow managed to smuggle him to Demonia (aka Antiterra, Earth's twin planet on which Ada is set). Kim (1901) is a novel by Kipling set in India after the Second Anglo-Afghan War. Onboard Admiral Tobakoff Lucette is quoting Kipling:
They examined without much interest the objects of pleasure in a display window. Lucette sneered at a gold-threaded swimsuit. The presence of a riding crop and a pickax puzzled Van. Half a dozen glossy-jacketed copies of Salzman were impressively heaped between a picture of the handsome, thoughtful, now totally forgotten, author and a Mingo-Bingo vase of immortelles.
He clutched at a red rope and they entered the lounge.
‘Whom did she look like?’ asked Lucette. ‘En laid et en lard?’
‘I don’t know,’ he lied. ‘Whom?’
‘Skip it,’ she said. ‘You’re mine tonight. Mine, mine, mine!’
She was quoting Kipling — the same phrase that Ada used to address to Dack. He cast around for a straw of Procrustean procrastination. (3.5)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): en laid et en lard: in an ugly and fleshy version.
Kim Philby (1912-88) was a British intelligence officer and a double agent for the Soviet Union. In 1963 he was revealed to be a member of the Cambridge Five, a spy ring that had divulged British secrets to the Soviets during the Second World War and in the early stages of the Cold War. After the family dinner in "Ardis the Second" Ada mentions spies from Terra:
He kissed her half-closed lips, gently and ‘morally’ as they defined moments of depth to distinguish them from the despair of passion.
‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘it’s fun to be two secret agents in an alien country. Marina has gone upstairs. Your hair is wet.’
‘Spies from Terra? You believe, you believe in the existence of Terra? Oh, you do! You accept it. I know you!’
‘I accept it as a state of mind. That’s not quite the same thing.’
‘Yes, but you want to prove it is the same thing.’
He brushed her lips with another religious’ kiss. Its edge, however, was beginning to catch fire.
‘One of these days,’ he said, ‘I will ask you for a repeat performance. You will sit as you did four years ago, at the same table, in the same light, drawing the same flower, and I shall go through the same scene with such joy, such pride, such — I don’t know — gratitude! Look, all the windows are dark now. I, too, can translate when I simply have to. Listen to this:
Lights in the rooms were going out.
Breathed fragrantly the rozï.
We sat together in the shade
Of a wide-branched beryozï.’
‘Yes, "birch" is what leaves the translator in the "lurch," doesn’t it? That’s a terrible little poem by Konstantin Romanov, right? Just elected president of the Lyascan Academy of Literature, right? Wretched poet and happy husband. Happy husband!’
‘You know,’ said Van, ‘I really think you should wear something underneath on formal occasions.’
‘Your hands are cold. Why formal? You said yourself it was a family affair.’
‘Even so. You were in peril whenever you bent or sprawled.’
‘I never sprawl!’
‘I’m quite sure it’s not hygienic, or perhaps it’s a kind of jealousy on my part. Memoirs of a Happy Chair. Oh, my darling.’
‘At least,’ whispered Ada, ‘it pays off now, doesn’t it? Croquet room? Ou comme ça?’
‘Comme ça, for once,’ said Van. (1.38)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): rozï... beryozï: Russ., roses... birches.
ou comme ça?: or like that?
Van is the author of Letters from Terra, a philosophical novel. Describing Victor Vitry's film based on his juvenile novel, Van mentions the Golden Veil (at first it was "the Golden Curtain," 1.30) that separates Tartary (a country that occupies on Demonia the territory of the Soviet Russia) from the rest of the world:
Ada, who resented the insufficiency of her brother’s fame, felt soothed and elated by the success of The Texture of Time (1924). That work, she said, always reminded her, in some odd, delicate way, of the sun-and-shade games she used to play as a child in the secluded avenues of Ardis Park. She said she had been somehow responsible for the metamorphoses of the lovely larvae that had woven the silk of ‘Veen’s Time’ (as the concept was now termed in one breath, one breeze, with ‘Bergson’s Duration,’ or ‘Whitehead’s Bright Fringe’). But a considerably earlier and weaker work, the poor little Letters from Terra, of which only half a dozen copies existed — two in Villa Armina and the rest in the stacks of university libraries — was even closer to her heart because of its nonliterary associations with their 1892-93 sojourn in Manhattan. Sixty-year-old Van crustily and contemptuously dismissed her meek suggestion to the effect that it should be republished, together with the Sidra reflections and a very amusing anti-Signy pamphlet on Time in Dreams. Seventy-year-old Van regretted his disdain when Victor Vitry, a brilliant French director, based a completely unauthorized picture on Letters from Terra written by ‘Voltemand’ half a century before.
Vitry dated Theresa’s visit to Antiterra as taking place in 1940, but 1940 by the Terranean calendar, and about 1890 by ours. The conceit allowed certain pleasing dips into the modes and manners of our past (did you remember that horses wore hats — yes, hats — when heat waves swept Manhattan?) and gave the impression — which physics-fiction literature had much exploited — of the capsulist traveling backward in terms of time. Philosophers asked nasty questions, but were ignored by the wishing-to-be-gulled moviegoers.
In contrast to the cloudless course of Demonian history in the twentieth century, with the Anglo-American coalition managing one hemisphere, and Tartary, behind her Golden Veil, mysteriously ruling the other, a succession of wars and revolutions were shown shaking loose the jigsaw puzzle of Terrestrial autonomies. In an impressive historical survey of Terra rigged up by Vitry — certainly the greatest cinematic genius ever to direct a picture of such scope or use such a vast number of extras (some said more than a million, others, half a million men and as many mirrors) — kingdoms fell and dictatordoms rose, and republics, half-sat, half-lay in various attitudes of discomfort. The conception was controversial, the execution flawless. Look at all those tiny soldiers scuttling along very fast across the trench-scarred wilderness, with explosions of mud and things going pouf-pouf in silent French now here, now there!
In 1905, Norway with a mighty heave and a long dorsal ripple unfastened herself from Sweden, her unwieldy co-giantess, while in a similar act of separation the French parliament, with parenthetical outbursts of vive émotion, voted a divorce between State and Church. Then, in 1911, Norwegian troops led by Amundsen reached the South Pole and simultaneously the Italians stormed into Turkey. In 1914 Germany invaded Belgium and the Americans tore up Panama. In 1918 they and the French defeated Germany while she was busily defeating Russia (who had defeated her own Tartars some time earlier). In Norway there was Siegrid Mitchel, in America Margaret Undset, and in France, Sidonie Colette. In 1926 Abdel-Krim surrendered, after yet another photogenic war, and the Golden Horde again subjugated Rus. In 1933, Athaulf Hindler (also known as Mittler — from ‘to mittle,’ mutilate) came to power in Germany, and a conflict on an even more spectacular scale than the 1914-1918 war was under way, when Vitry ran out of old documentaries and Theresa, played by his wife, left Terra in a cosmic capsule after having covered the Olympic Games held in Berlin (the Norwegians took most of the prizes, but the Americans won the fencing event, an outstanding achievement, and beat the Germans in the final football match by three goals to one).
Van and Ada saw the film nine times, in seven different languages, and eventually acquired a copy for home use. They found the historical background absurdly farfetched and considered starting legal proceedings against Vitry — not for having stolen the L.F.T. idea, but for having distorted Terrestrial politics as obtained by Van with such diligence and skill from extrasensorial sources and manic dreams. But fifty years had elapsed, and the novella had not been copyrighted; in fact, Van could not even prove that ‘Voltemand’ was he. Reporters, however, ferreted out his authorship, and in a magnanimous gesture, he allowed it to be publicized.
Three circumstances contributed to the picture’s exceptional success. One factor was, of course, that organized religion, disapproving of Terra’s appeal to sensation-avid sects, attempted to have the thing banned. A second attraction came from a little scene that canny Vitry had not cut out: in a flashback to a revolution in former France, an unfortunate extra, who played one of the under-executioners, got accidentally decapitated while pulling the comedian Steller, who played a reluctant king, into a guillotinable position. Finally, the third, and even more human reason, was that the lovely leading lady, Norwegian-born Gedda Vitry, after titillating the spectators with her skimpy skirts and sexy rags in the existential sequences, came out of her capsule on Antiterra stark naked, though, of course, in miniature, a millimeter of maddening femininity dancing in ‘the charmed circle of the microscope’ like some lewd elf, and revealing, in certain attitudes, I’ll be damned, a pinpoint glint of pubic floss, gold-powered!
L.F.T. tiny dolls, L.F.T. breloques of coral and ivory, appeared in souvenir shops, from Agony, Patagonia, to Wrinkleballs, Le Bras d’Or. L.F.T. clubs sprouted. L.F.T. girlies minced with mini-menus out of roadside snackettes shaped like spaceships. From the tremendous correspondence that piled up on Van’s desk during a few years of world fame, one gathered that thousands of more or less unbalanced people believed (so striking was the visual impact of the Vitry-Veen film) in the secret Government-concealed identity of Terra and Antiterra. Demonian reality dwindled to a casual illusion. Actually, we had passed through all that. Politicians, dubbed Old Felt and Uncle Joe in forgotten comics, had really existed. Tropical countries meant, not only Wild Nature Reserves but famine, and death, and ignorance, and shamans, and agents from distant Atomsk. Our world was, in fact, mid-twentieth-century. Terra convalesced after enduring the rack and the stake, the bullies and beasts that Germany inevitably generates when fulfilling her dreams of glory. Russian peasants and poets had not been transported to Estotiland, and the Barren Grounds, ages ago — they were dying, at this very moment, in the slave camps of Tartary. Even the governor of France was not Charlie Chose, the suave nephew of Lord Goal, but a bad-tempered French general. (5.5)
The phenomenon of Terra appeared on Demonia after the L disaster in the beau milieu of the 19th century (1.3). Chronologically, the Antiterran L disaster seems to correspond to the mock execution of Dostoevski and the Petrashevskians on January 3, 1850 (NS), in our world. January 3 is Lucette's birthday:
According to the Sunday supplement of a newspaper that had just begun to feature on its funnies page the now long defunct Goodnight Kids, Nicky and Pimpernella (sweet siblings who shared a narrow bed), and that had survived with other old papers in the cockloft of Ardis Hall, the Veen-Durmanov wedding took place on St Adelaida’s Day, 1871. Twelve years and some eight months later, two naked children, one dark-haired and tanned, the other dark-haired and milk-white, bending in a shaft of hot sunlight that slanted through the dormer window under which the dusty cartons stood, happened to collate that date (December 16, 1871) with another (August 16, same year) anachronistically scrawled in Marina’s hand across the corner of a professional photograph (in a raspberry-plush frame on her husband’s kneehole library table) identical in every detail — including the commonplace sweep of a bride’s ectoplasmic veil, partly blown by a parvis breeze athwart the groom’s trousers — to the newspaper reproduction. A girl was born on July 21, 1872, at Ardis, her putative father’s seat in Ladore County, and for some obscure mnemonic reason was registered as Adelaida. Another daughter, this time Dan’s very own, followed on January 3, 1876. (1.1)
Describing the torments of poor mad Aqua (the twin sister of Van's, Ada's and Lucette's mother Marina), Van mentions Terra the Fair:
Actually, Aqua was less pretty, and far more dotty, than Marina. During her fourteen years of miserable marriage she spent a broken series of steadily increasing sojourns in sanatoriums. A small map of the European part of the British Commonwealth — say, from Scoto-Scandinavia to the Riviera, Altar and Palermontovia — as well as most of the U.S.A., from Estoty and Canady to Argentina, might be quite thickly prickled with enameled red-cross-flag pins, marking, in her War of the Worlds, Aqua’s bivouacs. She had plans at one time to seek a modicum of health (‘just a little grayishness, please, instead of the solid black’) in such Anglo-American protectorates as the Balkans and Indias, and might even have tried the two Southern Continents that thrive under our joint dominion. Of course, Tartary, an independent inferno, which at the time spread from the Baltic and Black seas to the Pacific Ocean, was touristically unavailable, though Yalta and Altyn Tagh sounded strangely attractive... But her real destination was Terra the Fair and thither she trusted she would fly on libellula long wings when she died. Her poor little letters from the homes of madness to her husband were sometimes signed: Madame Shchemyashchikh-Zvukov (‘Heart rending-Sounds’). (1.3)
In the first line of his poem Priblizhaetsya zvuk... (“A sound approaches...” 1912) Alexander Blok (a Russian poet, 1880-1921) mentions shchemyashchiy zvuk (a heart-rending sound):
Приближается звук. И, покорна щемящему звуку,
Молодеет душа.
И во сне прижимаю к губам твою прежнюю руку,
Не дыша.
Снится - снова я мальчик, и снова любовник,
И овраг, и бурьян,
И в бурьяне - колючий шиповник,
И вечерний туман.
Сквозь цветы, и листы, и колючие ветки, я знаю,
Старый дом глянет в сердце моё,
Глянет небо опять, розовея от краю до краю,
И окошко твоё.
Этот голос - он твой, и его непонятному звуку
Жизнь и горе отдам,
Хоть во сне твою прежнюю милую руку
Прижимая к губам.
In Blok's poem Vozmezdie ("Retribution," 1910-21) Fyodor Dostoevski (1821-81) appears as a character:
На вечерах у Анны Вревской
Был общества отборный цвет.
Больной и грустный Достоевский
Ходил сюда на склоне лет
Суровой жизни скрасить бремя,
Набраться сведений и сил
Для «Дневника». (Он в это время
С Победоносцевым дружил). (Chapter I)
It is Dostoevski (a guest at Anna Vrevski's soirées) who says that the hero's father resembles Byron:
Средь пожилых людей и чинных,
Среди зеленых и невинных —
В салоне Вревской был как свой
Один ученый молодой.
Непринужденный гость, привычный —
Он был со многими на «ты».
Его отмечены черты
Печатью не совсем обычной.
Раз (он гостиной проходил)
Его заметил Достоевский.
«Кто сей красавец? — он спросил
Негромко, наклонившись к Вревской: —
Похож на Байрона». — Словцо
Крылатое все подхватили,
И все на новое лицо
Свое вниманье обратили.
На сей раз милостив был свет,
Обыкновенно — столь упрямый;
«Красив, умен» — твердили дамы,
Мужчины морщились: «поэт»…
Но, если морщатся мужчины,
Должно быть, зависть их берет…
А чувств прекрасной половины
Никто, сам чорт, не разберет…
И дамы были в восхищеньи:
«Он — Байрон, значит — демон…» — Что ж?
Он впрямь был с гордым лордом схож
Лица надменным выраженьем
И чем-то, что хочу назвать
Тяжелым пламенем печали. (Retribution, Part One)
The ladies were excited: "He is Byron, ergo he is a demon." Demon is the society nickname of Van's and Ada's father:
On April 23, 1869, in drizzly and warm, gauzy and green Kaluga, Aqua, aged twenty-five and afflicted with her usual vernal migraine, married Walter D. Veen, a Manhattan banker of ancient Anglo-Irish ancestry who had long conducted, and was soon to resume intermittently, a passionate affair with Marina. The latter, some time in 1871, married her first lover’s first cousin, also Walter D. Veen, a quite as opulent, but much duller, chap.
The ‘D’ in the name of Aqua’s husband stood for Demon (a form of Demian or Dementius), and thus was he called by his kin. In society he was generally known as Raven Veen or simply Dark Walter to distinguish him from Marina’s husband, Durak Walter or simply Red Veen. Demon’s twofold hobby was collecting old masters and young mistresses. He also liked middle-aged puns. (1.1)
Describing Kim Beauharnais' album, Van mentions a bayronka (open shirt) worn by Ivan Durmanov (Aqua's and Marina's brother, a musical prodigy who died young and famous):
A formal photograph, on a separate page: Adochka, pretty and impure in her flimsy, and Vanichka in gray-flannel suit, with slant-striped school tie, facing the kimera (chimera, camera) side by side, at attention, he with the shadow of a forced grin, she, expressionless. Both recalled the time (between the first tiny cross and a whole graveyard of kisses) and the occasion: it was ordered by Marina, who had it framed and set up in her bedroom next to a picture of her brother at twelve or fourteen clad in a bayronka (open shirt) and cupping a guinea pig in his gowpen (hollowed hands); the three looked like siblings, with the dead boy providing a vivisectional alibi. (2.7)
At the beginning of Part One of Retribution Blok mentions Mme Récamier (a French socialite, 1777-1849):
Век девятнадцатый, железный,
Воистину жестокий век!
Тобою в мрак ночной, беззвездный
Беспечный брошен человек!
В ночь умозрительных понятий,
Матерьялистских малых дел,
Бессильных жалоб и проклятий
Бескровных душ и слабых тел!
С тобой пришли чуме на смену
Нейрастения, скука, сплин,
Век расшибанья лбов о стену
Экономических доктрин,
Конгрессов, банков, федераций,
Застольных спичей, красных слов,
Век акций, рент и облигаций,
И малодейственных умов,
И дарований половинных
(Так справедливей — пополам!),
Век не салонов, а гостиных,
Не Рекамье, — а просто дам…
Век буржуазного богатства
(Растущего незримо зла!).
Describing his meeting with Lucette in Paris, Van compares his and Ada's half-sister to Blok's Incognita. Vivian Vale’s golden veils bring to mind tyomnaya vual' (the dusky veil) mentioned by Blok in his poem Neznakomka ("The Stranger," 1906):
И странной близостью закованный,
Смотрю за темную вуаль,
И вижу берег очарованный
И очарованную даль.
And with a strange sense of intimacy enchaining me,
I peer beyond her dusky veil
and perceive an enchanted shoreline,
a charmed remoteness.
In his poem Blok mentions p’yanitsy s glazami krolikov (tipplers with the pink eyes of rabbits):
А рядом у соседних столиков
Лакеи сонные торчат,
И пьяницы с глазами кроликов
"In vino veritas!" кричат.
And nearby, at other tables,
waiters drowsily hover,
and tipplers with the pink eyes of rabbits
shout: In vino veritas!
At the family dinner in "Ardis the Second" Demon uses the phrase s glazami (with the eyes) and mentions Dr Krolik (Ada’s beloved lepidopterist and teacher of natural history):
'Marina,' murmured Demon at the close of the first course. 'Marina,' he repeated louder. 'Far from me' (a locution he favored) 'to criticize Dan's taste in white wines or the manners de vos domestiques. You know me, I'm above all that rot, I'm...' (gesture); 'but, my dear,' he continued, switching to Russian, 'the chelovek who brought me the pirozhki - the new man, the plumpish one with the eyes (s glazami) -'
'Everybody has eyes,' remarked Marina drily.
'Well, his look as if they were about to octopus the food he serves. But that's not the point. He pants, Marina! He suffers from some kind of odïshka (shortness of breath). He should see Dr Krolik. It's depressing. It's a rhythmic pumping pant. It made my soup ripple.'
'Look, Dad,' said Van, 'Dr Krolik can't do much, because, as you know quite well, he's dead, and Marina can't tell her servants not to breathe, because, as you also know, they're alive.'
'The Veen wit, the Veen wit,' murmured Demon.
‘Exactly,’ said Marina. ‘I simply refuse to do anything about it. Besides poor Jones is not at all asthmatic, but only nervously eager to please. He’s as healthy as a bull and has rowed me from Ardisville to Ladore and back, and enjoyed it, many times this summer. You are cruel, Demon. I can’t tell him "ne pïkhtite," as I can’t tell Kim, the kitchen boy, not to take photographs on the sly — he’s a regular snap-shooting fiend, that Kim, though otherwise an adorable, gentle, honest boy; nor can I tell my little French maid to stop getting invitations, as she somehow succeeds in doing, to the most exclusive bals masqués in Ladore.’
‘That’s interesting,’ observed Demon.
‘He’s a dirty old man!’ cried Van cheerfully.
‘Van!’ said Ada.
‘I’m a dirty young man,’ sighed Demon.
‘Tell me, Bouteillan,’ asked Marina, ‘what other good white wine do we have — what can you recommend?’ The butler smiled and whispered a fabulous name. (1.38)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): ne pïkhtite: Russ., do not wheeze.
Before the family dinner Demon mentions the portentous footfall:
‘Good! Ah, the portentous footfall is approaching, I hear. Prascovie de Prey has the worst fault of a snob: overstatement. Bonsoir, Bouteillan. You look as ruddy as your native vine — but we are not getting any younger, as the amerlocks say, and that pretty messenger of mine must have been waylaid by some younger and more fortunate suitor.’
‘Proshu, papochka (please, Dad),’ murmured Van, who always feared that his father’s recondite jests might offend a menial — while sinning himself by being sometimes too curt. (1.38)
The portentous footfall brings to mind Blok's poem Shagi komandora (“The Commander's Footsteps,” 1912). In the poem's first stanza Blok mentions strakh poznavshiy Don Zhuan (Don Juan who came to learn fear):
Тяжкий, плотный занавес у входа,
За ночным окном — туман.
Что теперь твоя постылая свобода,
Страх познавший Дон-Жуан?
On the door a thick and heavy curtain,
Through the window night mists peer.
What is left of all your hateful freedom,
Juan, now that you know fear?
(tr. C. M. Bowra)
In the Tobakoff cinema hall Van and Lucette watch Don Juan’s Last Fling, a movie in which Ada played the gitanilla. According to a mulatto girl whom Lucette’s calls ‘Miss Condor,’ Van resembles her friend Vivian Vale:
A moment later, as if having spied on his solitude the pava (peahen) reappeared — this time with an apology.
Polite Van, scrambling up to his feet and browing his spectacles, started to apologize in his turn (for misleading her innocently) but his little speech petered out in stupefaction as he looked at her face and saw in it a gross and grotesque caricature of unforgettable features. That mulatto skin, that silver-blond hair, those fat purple lips, reinacted in coarse negative her ivory, her raven, her pale pout.
‘I was told,’ she explained, ‘that a great friend of mine, Vivian Vale, the cootooriay — voozavay entendue? — had shaved his beard, in which case he’d look rather like you, right?’
‘Logically, no, ma’am,’ replied Van.
She hesitated for the flirt of a second, licking her lips, not knowing whether he was being rude or ready — and here Lucette returned for her Rosepetals.
‘See you aprey,’ said Miss Condor.
Lucette’s gaze escorted to a good-riddance exit the indolent motion of those gluteal lobes and folds.
‘You deceived me, Van. It is, it is one of your gruesome girls!’
‘I swear,’ said Van, ‘that’s she’s a perfect stranger. I wouldn’t deceive you.’
‘You deceived me many, many times when I was a little girl. If you’re doing it now tu sais que j’en vais mourir.’
‘You promised me a harem,’ Van gently rebuked her.
‘Not today, not today! Today is sacred.’ (3.5)
When Van tells Lucette that he is not alone in his cabin, Lucette thinks that he is with Miss Condor:
No doubt he was morally right in using the first pretext at hand to keep her away from his bed; but he also knew, as a gentleman and an artist, that the lump of words he brought up was trite and cruel, and it was only because she could not accept him as being either, that she believed him:
‘Mozhno pridti teper’ (can I come now)?’ asked Lucette.
‘Ya ne odin (I’m not alone),’ answered Van.
A small pause followed; then she hung up. (ibid.)
The Condor (1922) is a poem by Valeriy Bryusov, Korshun ("The Kite," 1916) is a poem by Blok. In Part One of Retribution Blok mentions Saltykov-Shchedrin (the writer who introduced in his works the well-known characters of other authors):
Он на обедах у Бореля
Брюжжит не плоше Щедрина:
То — недоварены форели,
А то — уха им не жирна.
Ukha im ne zhirna (the fish soup not rich enough) brings to mind the uha mentioned by Van when he describes his dinner in 'Ursus' with Ada and Lucette:
Knowing how fond his sisters were of Russian fare and Russian floor shows, Van took them Saturday night to ‘Ursus,’ the best Franco-Estotian restaurant in Manhattan Major. Both young ladies wore the very short and open evening gowns that Vass ‘miraged’ that season — in the phrase of that season: Ada, a gauzy black, Lucette, a lustrous cantharid green. Their mouths ‘echoed’ in tone (but not tint) each other’s lipstick; their eyes were made up in a ‘surprised bird-of-paradise’ style that was as fashionable in Los as in Lute. Mixed metaphors and double-talk became all three Veens, the children of Venus.
The uha, the shashlik, the Ai were facile and familiar successes; but the old songs had a peculiar poignancy owing to the participation of a Lyaskan contralto and a Banff bass, renowned performers of Russian ‘romances,’ with a touch of heart-wringing tsiganshchina vibrating through Grigoriev and Glinka. And there was Flora, a slender, hardly nubile, half-naked music-hall dancer of uncertain origin (Rumanian? Romany? Ramseyan?) whose ravishing services Van had availed himself of several times in the fall of that year. As a ‘man of the world,’ Van glanced with bland (perhaps too bland) unconcern at her talented charms, but they certainly added a secret bonus to the state of erotic excitement tingling in him from the moment that his two beauties had been unfurred and placed in the colored blaze of the feast before him; and that thrill was somehow augmented by his awareness (carefully profiled, diaphanely blinkered) of the furtive, jealous, intuitive suspicion with which Ada and Lucette watched, unsmilingly, his facial reactions to the demure look of professional recognition on the part of the passing and repassing blyadushka (cute whorelet), as our young misses referred to (very expensive and altogether delightful) Flora with ill-feigned indifference. Presently, the long sobs of the violins began to affect and almost choke Van and Ada: a juvenile conditioning of romantic appeal, which at one moment forced tearful Ada to go and ‘powder her nose’ while Van stood up with a spasmodic sob, which he cursed but could not control. He went back to whatever he was eating, and cruelly stroked Lucette’s apricot-bloomed forearm, and she said in Russian ‘I’m drunk, and all that, but I adore (obozhayu), I adore, I adore, I adore more than life you, you (tebya, tebya), I ache for you unbearably (ya toskuyu po tebe nevïnosimo), and, please, don’t let me swill (hlestat’) champagne any more, not only because I will jump into Goodson River if I can’t hope to have you, and not only because of the physical red thing — your heart was almost ripped out, my poor dushen’ka (‘darling,’ more than ‘darling’), it looked to me at least eight inches long —’
‘Seven and a half,’ murmured modest Van, whose hearing the music impaired.
‘— but because you are Van, all Van, and nothing but Van, skin and scar, the only truth of our only life, of my accursed life, Van, Van, Van.’ (2.8)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): romances, tsiganshchina: Russ., pseudo-Tsigan ballads.
To nedovareny foreli (Now the trouts are undercooked), a line in Blok's poem, reminds one of Lucette's blue trout:
She wanted fish, he stuck to cold cuts and salad.
‘You know whom I ran into this morning? Good old Greg Erminin. It was he who told me you were around. His wife est un peu snob, what?’
‘Everybody is un peu snob,’ said Lucette. ‘Your Cordula, who is also around, cannot forgive Shura Tobak, the violinist, for being her husband’s neighbor in the telephone book. Immediately after lunch, we’ll go to my room, a numb twenty-five, my age. I have a fabulous Japanese divan and lots of orchids just supplied by one of my beaux. Ach, Bozhe moy — it has just occurred to me — I shall have to look into this — maybe they are meant for Brigitte, who is marrying after tomorrow, at three-thirty, a head waiter at the Alphonse Trois, in Auteuil. Anyway they are greenish, with orange and purple blotches, some kind of delicate Oncidium, "cypress frogs," one of those silly commercial names. I’ll stretch out upon the divan like a martyr, remember?’
‘Are you still half-a-martyr — I mean half-a-virgin?’ inquired Van.
‘A quarter,’ answered Lucette. ‘Oh, try me, Van! My divan is black with yellow cushions.’
‘You can sit for a minute in my lap.’
‘No — unless we undress and you ganch me.’
‘My dear, as I’ve often reminded you, you belong to a princely family but you talk like the loosest Lucinda imaginable. Is it a fad in your set, Lucette?’
‘I have no set, I’m a loner. Once in a while, I go out with two diplomats, a Greek and an Englishman, who are allowed to paw me and play with each other. A corny society painter is working on my portrait and he and his wife caress me when I’m in the mood. Your friend Dick Cheshire sends me presents and racing tips. It’s a dull life, Van.
‘I enjoy — oh, loads of things,’ she continued in a melancholy, musing tone of voice, as she poked with a fork at her blue trout which, to judge by its contorted shape and bulging eyes, had boiled alive, convulsed by awful agonies. ‘I love Flemish and Dutch oils, flowers, food, Flaubert, Shakespeare, shopping, sheeing, swimming, the kisses of beauties and beasts — but somehow all of it, this sauce and all the riches of Holland, form only a kind of tonen’kiy-tonen’kiy (thin little) layer, under which there is absolutely nothing, except, of course, your image, and that only adds depth and a trout’s agonies to the emptiness. I’m like Dolores — when she says she’s "only a picture painted on air."’
‘Never could finish that novel — much too pretentious.’
‘Pretentious but true. It’s exactly my sense of existing — a fragment, a wisp of color. Come and travel with me to some distant place, where there are frescoes and fountains, why can’t we travel to some distant place with ancient fountains? By ship? By sleeping car?’
‘It’s safer and faster by plane,’ said Van. ‘And for Log’s sake, speak Russian.’ (3.3)
Radi boga is Russian for "for God's sake." Van's "for Log's sake" and "thank Log" (a phrase used earlier in Ada) seem to hint at Logos (in ancient Greek philosophy and early Christian theology, the divine reason implicit in the cosmos, ordering it and giving it form and meaning) and at the Antiterran L disaster.