Describing his love-making with Cordula Tobak in a drab little hotel in Paris, Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) compares Cordula to a child braving her first merry-go-round:
A moment later, as happens so often in farces and foreign cities, Van ran into another friend. With a surge of delight he saw Cordula in a tight scarlet skirt bending with baby words of comfort over two unhappy poodlets attached to the waiting-post of a sausage shop. Van stroked her with his fingertips, and as she straightened up indignantly and turned around (indignation instantly replaced by gay recognition), he quoted the stale but appropriate lines he had known since the days his schoolmates annoyed him with them:
The Veens speak only to Tobaks
But Tobaks speak only to dogs.
The passage of years had but polished her prettiness and though many fashions had come and gone since 1889, he happened upon her at a season when hairdos and skirtlines had reverted briefly (another much more elegant lady was already ahead of her) to the style of a dozen years ago, abolishing the interruption of remembered approval and pleasure. She plunged into a torrent of polite questions — but he had a more important matter to settle at once — while the flame still flickered.
‘Let’s not squander,’ he said, ‘the tumescence of retrieved time on the gush of small talk. I’m bursting with energy, if that’s what you want to know. Now look; it may sound silly and insolent but I have an urgent request. Will you cooperate with me in cornuting your husband? It’s a must!’
‘Really, Van!’ exclaimed angry Cordula. ‘You go a bit far. I’m a happy wife. My Tobachok adores me. We’d have ten children by now if I’d not been careful with him and others.’
‘You’ll be glad to learn that this other has been found utterly sterile.’
‘Well, I’m anything but. I guess I’d cause a mule to foal by just looking on. Moreover, I’m lunching today with the Goals.’
‘C’est bizarre, an exciting little girl like you who can be so tender with poodles and yet turns down a poor paunchy stiff old Veen.’
‘The Veens are much too gay as dogs go.’
‘Since you collect adages,’ persisted Van, ‘let me quote an Arabian one. Paradise is only one assbaa south of a pretty girl’s sash. Eh bien?’
‘You are impossible. Where and when?’
‘Where? In that drab little hotel across the street. When? Right now. I’ve never seen you on a hobbyhorse yet, because that’s what tout confort promises — and not much else.’
‘I must be home not later than eleven-thirty, it’s almost eleven now.’
‘It will take five minutes. Please!’
Astraddle, she resembled a child braving her first merry-go-round. She made a rectangular moue as she used that vulgar contraption. Sad, sullen streetwalkers do it with expressionless faces, lips tightly closed. She rode it twice. Their brisk nub and its repetition lasted fifteen minutes in all, not five. Very pleased with himself, Van walked with her for a stretch through the brown and green Bois de Belleau in the direction of her osobnyachyok (small mansion).
‘That reminds me,’ he said, ‘I no longer use our Alexis apartment. I’ve had some poor people live there these last seven or eight years — the family of a police officer who used to be a footman at Uncle Dan’s place in the country. My policeman is dead now and his widow and three boys have gone back to Ladore. I want to relinquish that flat. Would you like to accept it as a belated wedding present from an admirer? Good. We shall do it again some day. Tomorrow I have to be in London and on the third my favorite liner, Admiral Tobakoff, will take me to Manhattan. Au revoir. Tell him to look out for low lintels. Antlers can be very sensitive when new. Greg Erminin tells me that Lucette is at the Alphonse Four?’
‘That’s right. And where’s the other?’
‘I think we’ll part here. It’s twenty minutes to twelve. You’d better toddle along.’
‘Au revoir. You’re a very bad boy and I’m a very bad girl. But it was fun — even though you’ve been speaking to me not as you would to a lady friend but as you probably do to little whores. Wait. Here’s a top secret address where you can always’ — (fumbling in her handbag) — ‘reach me’ — (finding a card with her husband’s crest and scribbling a postal cryptograph) — ‘at Malbrook, Mayne, where I spend every August.’
She looked around, rose on her toes like a ballerina, and kissed him on the mouth. Sweet Cordula! (3.2)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): moue: little grimace.
In Dmitri Merezhkovski's novel Pyotr i Aleksey (Peter and Alexis, 1905), the third and final part of Merezhkovski's Christ and Antichrist trilogy, Julia Arnheim, a lady-in-waiting of Princess Charlotte (Peter's daughter-in-law), says in her diary that she saw the tsar ride on the wooden horses of a second-rate merry-go-round:
Дикарь и дитя. Впрочем, все вообще русские – дети. Царь среди них только притворяется взрослым. Никогда не забуду, как на сельской ярмарке близ Вольфенбюттеля герой Полтавы ездил верхом на деревянных лошадках дрянной карусели, ловил медные кольца палочкой и забавлялся, как маленький мальчик.
A savage and a child! All Russians in general are children. The Tsar only pretends to be grown up when among them. I shall never forget how, at the village fair near Wolfenbüttel, the hero of Poltava rode on the wooden horses of a second-rate merry-go-round, tried to catch brass hoops on a stick, and enjoyed himself like a small schoolboy. (Book Three: "The Private Journal of Prince Alexis")
"My Tobachok" (as Cordula calls her husband, Ivan Giovannovich Tobak, the shipowner) brings to mind Tabachnyi kapitan ("The Tobacco Captain," 1944), a musical comedy by N. A. Aduev (the penname of Nikolay Rabinovich, 1895-1950). The action in it takes place during the reign of Peter I. The tsar sends a boyar's son to study navigation in Holland but it is Ivan, the nobleman's young serf, who succeeds in learning and becomes a naval officer after returning to Russia. N. A. Aduev (who, like VN, finished the Tenishev School in St. Petersburg) is mentioned in Sbornik vospominaniy ob I. Ilfe i E. Petrove ("The Collection of Reminiscences of Ilya Ilf and Eugene Petrov," 1964). The characters in Ilf and Petrov's novel Dvenadtsat' stuliev ("The Twelve Chairs," 1928) include the private furrier Fima Sobak (a friend of Ellochka the Cannibal). Sobaka is Russian for "dog." When they meet in Paris (also known as Lute on Demonia, Earth's twin planet also known as Antiterra), Van hails Cordula with the stale but appropriate lines: Viny govoryat lish' s Tobakami, a Tobaki govoryat lish' s sobakami ("The Veens speak only to Tobaks, but Tobaks speak only to dogs").
The two main characters in Ivan Goncharov's novel Obyknovennaya istoriya ("The Same Old Story," 1847) are Alexander Aduev and his uncle Peter. Goncharov is the author of The Frigate Pallada (1858), a travel book from the sea journey. The name of Cordula's first husband also seems to hint at John Cabot (c. 1450 – c. 1500), an Italian navigator and explorer who is known as Giovanni Caboto in Italian, Zuan Caboto in Venetian and Jean Cabot in French. His 1497 voyage to the coast of North America under the commission of Henry II, King of England is the earliest known European exploration of coastal North America since the Norse visits to Vinland in the eleventh century. In his poem Boston (1903) John Collins Bossidy says:
And this is good old Boston
The home of the bean and the cod,
Where the Lowells talk to the Cabots,
And the Cabots talk only to God.
The author of Brave New World (1932), Aldous Huxley called God "a gaseous vertebrate." The Merry-go-round (1918) is a prose poem by Huxley:
The machine is ready to start. The symbolic beasts grow resty, curvetting where they stand at their places in the great blue circle of the year. The Showman's voice rings out. ' Montez, mesdames et messieurs, montez. You, sir, must bestride the Ram. You will take the Scorpion. Yours, madame, is the Goat. As for you there, blackguard boy, you must be content with the Fishes. I have allotted you the Virgin, mademoiselle.' . . . ' Polisson ! ' ' Pardon, pardon. Evidemment, c'est le Sagittaire qa'on demande. Ohe, les dards ! The rest must take what comes. The Twins shall counterpoise one another in the Scales. So, so. Now away we go, away.'
Ha, what keen air. Wind of the upper spaces. Snuff it deep, drink in the intoxication of our speed. Hark how the music swells and rings . . . sphery music, music of every vagabond planet, every rooted star; sound of winds and seas and all the simmering millions of life. Moving, singing . . . so with a roar and a rush round we go and round, for ever whirling on a ceaseless Bank Holiday of drunken life and speed.
But I happened to look inwards among the machinery of our roundabout, and there I saw a slobbering cretin grinding at a wheel and sweating as he ground and grinding eternally. And when I perceived that he was the author of all our speed and that the music was of his making, that everything depended on his grinding wheel, I thought I would like to get off. But we were going too fast.
After the dinner in 'Ursus' (the best Franco-Estotian restaurant in Manhattan Major) and debauch à trois with Ada and Lucette (Van's and Ada's half-sister) in his (formerly, Cordula's) Alexis penthouse apartment, Van mentions Pierre Legrand, his fencing master:
‘Now let’s go out for a breath of crisp air,’ suggested Van. ‘I’ll order Pardus and Peg to be saddled.’
‘Last night two men recognized me,’ she said. ‘Two separate Californians, but they didn’t dare bow — with that silk-tuxedoed bretteur of mine glaring around. One was Anskar, the producer, and the other, with a cocotte, Paul Whinnier, one of your father’s London pals. I sort of hoped we’d go back to bed.’
‘We shall now go for a ride in the park,’ said Van firmly, and rang, first of all, for a Sunday messenger to take the letter to Lucette’s hotel — or to the Verma resort, if she had already left.
‘I suppose you know what you’re doing?’ observed Ada.
‘Yes,’ he answered.
‘You are breaking her heart,’ said Ada.
‘Ada girl, adored girl,’ cried Van, ‘I’m a radiant void. I’m convalescing after a long and dreadful illness. You cried over my unseemly scar, but now life is going to be nothing but love and laughter, and corn in cans. I cannot brood over broken hearts, mine is too recently mended. You shall wear a blue veil, and I the false mustache that makes me look like Pierre Legrand, my fencing master.’
‘Au fond,’ said Ada, ‘first cousins have a perfect right to ride together. And even dance or skate, if they want. After all, first cousins are almost brother and sister. It’s a blue, icy, breathless day,’
She was soon ready, and they kissed tenderly in their hallway, between lift and stairs, before separating for a few minutes.
‘Tower,’ she murmured in reply to his questioning glance, just as she used to do on those honeyed mornings in the past, when checking up on happiness: ‘And you?’
‘A regular ziggurat.’ (2.8)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): bretteur: duelling bravo.
au fond: actually.
The name of Van's fencing master, Pierre Legrand, seems to hint at Peter the Great (as the tsar Peter I is sometimes called). The Alexis Avenue is the Antiterran counterpart of the Manhattan Lexington Avenue (often colloquially abbreviated as 'Lex'). It brings to mind Prince Alexis (Tsarevich Aleksey), the son of Peter I and Eudoxia Lopukhin (Peter's first wife), and Paul Alexis (a French novelist, dramatist, and journalist, 1847-1901), the friend and biographer of Émile Zola (a French writer, 1840-1902). Terra the Fair (the real destination of poor mad Aqua, the twin sister of Van's, Ada's and Lucette's mother Marina) makes one think of Zola's novel La Terre (1887). Paul Alexis is the author of La Fin de Lucie Pellegrin (1880), a story whose heroine is a namesake of Van's and Ada's half-sister Lucette.