Describing his departure from Manhattan, Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) says that Demon (Van’s and Ada’s father) dyed his hair a blacker black:
His father saw him off. Demon had dyed his hair a blacker black. He wore a diamond ring blazing like a Caucasian ridge. His long, black, blue-ocellated wings trailed and quivered in the ocean breeze. Lyudi oglyadïvalis' (people turned to look). A temporary Tamara, all kohl, kasbek rouge, and flamingo-boa, could not decide what would please her daemon lover more – just moaning and ignoring his handsome son or acknowledging bluebeard's virility as reflected in morose Van, who could not stand her Caucasian perfume, Granial Maza, seven dollars a bottle. (1.29)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): Granial Maza: a perfume named after Mt Kazbek’s ‘gran’ almaza’ (diamond’s facet) of Lermontov’s The Demon.
At the beginning of his poem Tamara (1841) Lermontov mentions an ancient tower showing black against the black cliff:
В глубокой теснине Дарьяла,
Где роется Терек во мгле,
Старинная башня стояла,
Чернея на чёрной скале.
В той башне высокой и тесной
Царица Тамара жила:
Прекрасна, как ангел небесный,
Как демон, коварна и зла.
И там сквозь туман полуночи
Блистал огонёк золотой,
Кидался он путнику в очи,
Манил он на отдых ночной.
И слышался голос Тамары:
Он весь был желанье и страсть,
В нём были всесильные чары,
Была непонятная власть.
На голос невидимой пери
Шёл воин, купец и пастух;
Пред ним отворялися двери,
Встречал его мрачный евнух.
На мягкой пуховой постели,
В парчу и жемчуг убрана,
Ждала она гостя... Шипели
Пред нею два кубка вина.
Сплетались горячие руки,
Уста прилипали к устам,
И странные, дикие звуки
Всю ночь раздавалися там.
Как будто в ту башню пустую
Сто юношей пылких и жён
Сошлися на свадьбу ночную,
На тризну больших похорон.
Но только что утра сиянье
Кидало свой луч по горам,
Мгновенно и мрак и молчанье
Опять воцарялися там.
Лишь Терек в теснине Дарьяла,
Гремя, нарушал тишину;
Волна на волну набегала,
Волна погоняла волну;
И с плачем безгласное тело
Спешили они унести;
В окне тогда что-то белело,
Звучало оттуда: прости.
И было так нежно прощанье,
Так сладко тот голос звучал,
Как будто восторги свиданья
И ласки любви обещал.
In the deep canyon of the Daryal,
Where the Terek burrows in the darkness,
An ancient tower stood,
Showing black against the black cliff.
In that tower tall and narrow,
The Princese Tamara lived:
Beautiful as a heavenly angel,
Sly and evil as a demon.
There through the midnightght fog ,
A golden light gleamed,
It threw itself into a traveler's eyes,
Beckoned him for a night's rest.
And the voice of Tamara was heard:
It was all desire sad passion,
In it were all-powerful charms,
Its power was incomprehensible,
To the voice of the invisible peri,
Went the warrior, the merchant and the shepherd;
Before him the doors opened,
He was met by a gloomy eunuch.
On a soft down bed
Bedecked in brocade and pearls,
She awaited her guest. There fizzed
Before her two goblets of wine.
The burning hands intertwined,
Lips stuck to lips,
And strange, wild sounds
Resounded there all night.
As if at that empty tower
One hundred fiery youths and young women
Gathered at a nocturnal wedding,
At the feast of a great funeral.
But as soon as the glow of the morning
Threw its ray on the mountains,
Suddenly both darkness and si lence
Again reigned there.
Only the Terek in the Daryal canyon,
Thundering, broke the silence;
Wave dashed upon wave,
Wave chased wave;
And with a lament the voiceless body
They hurried to carry away;
At that moment something showed white in the window,
Thence sounded: farewell.
And the farewell was so tender,
So sweetly sounded that voice,
As if it promised the raptures
Of meeting and the caresses of love.
Golos nevidimoy peri (the voice of the invisible peri) brings to mind “the blended and brightened charms of twin peris:”
The modest narrator has to remind the rereader of all this, because in April (my favorite month), 1869 (by no means a mirabilic year), on St George’s Day (according to Mlle Larivière’s maudlin memoirs) Demon Veen married Aqua Veen — out of spite and pity, a not unusual blend.
Was there some additional spice? Marina, with perverse vainglory, used to affirm in bed that Demon's senses must have been influenced by a queer sort of 'incestuous' (whatever that term means) pleasure (in the sense of the French plaisir, which works up a lot of supplementary spinal vibrato), when he fondled, and savored, and delicately parted and defiled, in unmentionable but fascinating ways, flesh (une chair) that was both that of his wife and that of his mistress, the blended and brightened charms of twin peris, an Aquamarina both single and double, a mirage in an emirate, a germinate gem, an orgy of epithelial alliterations. (1.3)
and “the pitcher peri” mentioned by Van as he describes Percy de Prey’s death:
(Bill Fraser, the son of Judge Fraser, of Wellington, witnessed Lieutenant de Prey’s end from a blessed ditch overgrown with cornel and medlar, but, of course, could do nothing to help the leader of his platoon and this for a number of reasons which he conscientiously listed in his report but which it would be much too tedious and embarrassing to itemize here. Percy had been shot in the thigh during a skirmish with Khazar guerillas in a ravine near Chew-Foot-Calais, as the American troops pronounced ‘Chufutkale,’ the name of a fortified rock. He had, immediately assured himself, with the odd relief of the doomed, that he had got away with a flesh wound. Loss of blood caused him to faint, as we fainted, too, as soon as he started to crawl or rather squirm toward the shelter of the oak scrub and spiny bushes, where another casualty was resting comfortably. When a couple of minutes later, Percy — still Count Percy de Prey — regained consciousness he was no longer alone on his rough bed of gravel and grass. A smiling old Tartar, incongruously but somehow assuagingly wearing American blue-jeans with his beshmet, was squatting by his side. ‘Bednïy, bednïy’ (you poor, poor fellow), muttered the good soul, shaking his shaven head and clucking: ‘Bol’no (it hurts)?’ Percy answered in his equally primitive Russian that he did not feel too badly wounded: ‘Karasho, karasho ne bol’no (good, good),’ said the kindly old man and, picking up the automatic pistol which Percy had dropped, he examined it with naive pleasure and then shot him in the temple. (One wonders, one always wonders, what had been the executed individual’s brief, rapid series of impressions, as preserved somewhere, somehow, in some vast library of microfilmed last thoughts, between two moments: between, in the present case, our friend’s becoming aware of those nice, quasi-Red Indian little wrinkles beaming at him out of a serene sky not much different from Ladore’s, and then feeling the mouth of steel violently push through tender skin and exploding bone. One supposes it might have been a kind of suite for flute, a series of ‘movements’ such as, say: I’m alive — who’s that? — civilian — sympathy — thirsty — daughter with pitcher — that’s my damned gun — don’t… et cetera or rather no cetera… while Broken-Arm Bill prayed his Roman deity in a frenzy of fear for the Tartar to finish his job and go. But, of course, an invaluable detail in that strip of thought would have been — perhaps, next to the pitcher peri — a glint, a shadow, a stab of Ardis.) (1.42)
The pitcher peri hints at Devushka s kuvshinom (“The Girl with a Pitcher”), a fountain in the park of Tsarskoe Selo. Pushkin describes it in Tsarskoselskaya statuya ("A Statue in Tsarskoe Selo," 1830), a poem in hexameter:
Урну с водой уронив, об утёс её дева разбила.
Дева печально сидит, праздный держа черепок.
Чудо! не сякнет вода, изливаясь из урны разбитой;
Дева, над вечной струёй, вечно печальна сидит.
A miracle! The water doesn’t dry up, pouring off from the broken urn;
over the perpetual current the maiden sits perpetually sad.
In his poem Vospominaniya v Tsarskom Sele ("The Reminiscences in Tsarskoe Selo," 1829) Pushkin mentions sady prekrasnye (beautiful gardens):
Воспоминаньями смущенный,
Исполнен сладкою тоской,
Сады прекрасные, под сумрак ваш священный
Вхожу с поникшею главой.
Так отрок библии, безумный расточитель,
До капли истощив раскаянья фиал,
Увидев наконец родимую обитель,
Главой поник и зарыдал.
Lermontov’s Tamara and Pushkin’s sady (gardens) bring to mind Tamariny sady (Tamara Gardens) in VN’s novel Priglashenie na kazn’ (“Invitation to a Beheading,” 1935):
Там-то, на той маленькой фабрике, работала Марфинька, - полуоткрыв влажные губы, целилась ниткой в игольное ушко: "Здравствуй, Цинциннатик!" - и вот начались те упоительные блуждания в очень, очень просторных (так что даже случалось - холмы в отдалении были дымчаты от блаженства своего отдаления) Тамариных Садах, где в три ручья плачут без причины ивы, и тремя каскадами, с небольшой радугой над каждым, ручьи свергаются в озеро, по которому плывет лебедь рука об руку со своим отражением. Ровные поляны, рододендрон, дубовые рощи, весёлые садовники в зелёных сапогах, день-деньской играющие в прятки; какой-нибудь грот, какая-нибудь идиллическая скамейка, на которой три шутника оставили три аккуратных кучки (уловка - подделка из коричневой крашеной жести), - какой-нибудь оленёнок, выскочивший в аллею и тут же у вас на глазах превратившийся в дрожащие пятна солнца, - вот они были каковы, эти сады! Там, там - лепет Марфиньки, её ноги в белых чулках и бархатных туфельках, холодная грудь и розовые поцелуи со вкусом лесной земляники. Вот бы увидеть отсюда - хотя бы древесные макушки, хотя бы гряду отдаленных холмов...
There, in that little factory, worked Marthe; her moist lips half open, aiming a thread at the eye of a needle. ‘Hi, Cincinnatik!’ And so began those rapturous wanderings in the very, very spacious (so much so that even the hills in the distance would be hazy from the ecstasy of their remoteness) Tamara Gardens, where, for no reason, the willows weep into three brooks, and the brooks, in three cascades, each with its own small rainbow, tumble into the lake, where a swan floats arm in arm with its reflection. The level lawns, the rhododendrons, the oak groves, the merry gardeners in their green jackboots playing hide-and-seek the whole day through; some grotto, some idyllic bench, on which three jokers had left three neat little heaps (it’s a trick — they are imitations made of brown painted tin), some baby deer, bounding into the avenue and before your very eyes turning into trembling mottles of sunlight — that is what those gardens were like! There, there is Marthe’s lisping prattle, her white stockings and velvet slippers, her cool breast and her rosy kisses tasting of wild strawberries. If only one could see from here — at least the treetops, at least the distant range of hills… (Chapter Two)
In a letter to Marthe Cincinnatus compares her to odna syraya, sladkaya, proklyataya skladochka (one damp, sweet, accursed little fold):
Скажи мне, сколько рук мяло мякоть, которой обросла так щедро твоя твёрдая, гордая, горькая, маленькая душа? Да, снова, как привидение, я возвращаюсь к твоим первым изменам и, воя, гремя цепями, плыву сквозь них. Поцелуи, которые я подглядел. Поцелуи ваши, которые больше всего походили на какое-то питание, сосредоточенное, неопрятное и шумное. Или когда ты, жмурясь, пожирала прыщущий персик и потом, кончив, но ещё глотая, ещё с полным ртом, канибалка, топырила пальцы, блуждал осоловелый взгляд, лоснились воспаленные губы, дрожал подбородок, весь в каплях мутного сока сползавших на оголенную грудь, между тем как приап, питавший тебя, внезапно поворачивался с судорожным проклятием, согнутой спиной ко мне, вошедшему в комнату некстати. "Марфиньке всякие фрукты полезны", - с какой-то сладко-хлюпающей сыростью в горле говорила ты, собираясь вся в одну сырую, сладкую, проклятую складочку, - и если я опять возвращаюсь ко всему этому, так для того, чтобы отделаться, выделить из себя, очиститься, - и ещё для того, чтобы ты знала, чтобы ты знала...
Tell me, how many hands have palpated the pulp that has grown so generously around your hard, bitter little soul? Yes, like a ghost I return to your first betrayals and, howling, rattling my chains, walk through them. The kisses I spied. Your and his kisses, which most resembled some sort of feeding, intent, untidy, and noisy. Or when you, with eyes closed tight, devoured a spurting peach and then, having finished, but still swallowing, with your mouth still full, you cannibal, your glazed eyes wandered, your fingers were spread, your inflamed lips were all glossy, your chin trembled, all covered with drops of the cloudy juice, which trickled down on to your bared bosom, while the Priapus who had nourished you suddenly, with a convulsive oath, turned his bent back to me, who had entered the room at the wrong moment. ‘All kinds of fruit are good for Marthe,’ you would say with a certain sweet-slushy moistness in your throat, all gathering into one damp, sweet, accursed little fold — and if I return to all of this, it is to get it out of my system, to purge myself— and also so that you will know, so that you will know… (Chapter Thirteen)
Describing Ada’s eyelids, Van uses the phrase v skladochku (pleaty):
The eyes. Ada’s dark brown eyes. What (Ada asks) are eyes anyway? Two holes in the mask of life. What (she asks) would they mean to a creature from another corpuscle or milk bubble whose organ of sight was (say) an internal parasite resembling the written word ‘deified’? What, indeed, would a pair of beautiful (human, lemurian, owlish) eyes mean to anybody if found lying on the seat of a taxi? Yet I have to describe yours. The iris: black brown with amber specks or spokes placed around the serious pupil in a dial arrangement of identical hours. The eyelids: sort of pleaty, v skladochku (rhyming in Russian with the diminutive of her name in the accusative case). Eye shape: languorous. The procuress in Wicklow, on that satanic night of black sleet, at the most tragic and almost fatal point of my life (Van, thank goodness, is ninety now — in Ada’s hand) dwelt with peculiar force on the ‘long eyes’ of her pathetic and adorable grandchild. How I used to seek, with what tenacious anguish, traces and tokens of my unforgettable love in all the brothels of the world! (1.17)
"An internal parasite resembling the written word ‘deified’" brings to mind "a sublime, purified, analyzed, deified Harold Haze," as Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Lolita, 1955) calls Lolita’s father:
And I have still other smothered memories, now unfolding themselves into limbless monsters of pain. Once, in a sunset-ending street of Beardsley, she turned to little Eva Rosen (I was taking both nymphets to a concert and walking behind them so close as almost to touch them with my person), she turned to Eva, and so very serenely and seriously, in answer to something the other had said about its being better to die than hear Milton Pinski, some local schoolboy she knew, talk about music, my Lolita remarked:
“You know, what's so dreadful about dying is that you are completely on your own;” and it struck me, as my automaton knees went up and down, that I simply did not known a thing about my darling's mind and that quite possibly, behind the awful juvenile clichés, there was in her a garden and a twilight, and a palace gate — dim and adorable regions which happened to be lucidly and absolutely forbidden to me, in my polluted rags and miserable convulsions; for I often noticed that living as we did, she and I, in a world of total evil, we would become strangely embarrassed whenever I tried to discuss something she and an older friend, she and a parent, she and a real healthy sweetheart, I and Annabel, Lolita and a sublime, purified, analyzed, deified Harold Haze, might have discussed — an abstract idea, a painting, stippled Hopkins or shorn Baudelaire, God or Shakespeare, anything of genuine kind. Good will! She would mail her vulnerability in trite brashness and boredom, whereas I, using for my desperately detached comments an artificial tone of voice that set my own last teeth on edge, provoked my audience to such outbursts of rudeness as made any further conversation impossible, oh my poor, bruised child. (2.32)
"A garden and a twilight, and a palace gate" recall the romantic Tamara Gardens. According to Van, Demon's mistresses grew younger and younger:
‘My upper-lip space feels indecently naked.’ (He had shaved his mustache off with howls of pain in her presence). ‘And I cannot keep sucking in my belly all the time.’
‘Oh, I like you better with that nice overweight — there’s more of you. It’s the maternal gene, I suppose, because Demon grew leaner and leaner. He looked positively Quixotic when I saw him at Mother’s funeral. It was all very strange. He wore blue mourning. D’Onsky’s son, a person with only one arm, threw his remaining one around Demon and both wept comme des fontaines. Then a robed person who looked like an extra in a technicolor incarnation of Vishnu made an incomprehensible sermon. Then she went up in smoke. He said to me, sobbing: "I will not cheat the poor grubs!" Practically a couple of hours after he broke that promise we had sudden visitors at the ranch — an incredibly graceful moppet of eight, black-veiled, and a kind of duenna, also in black, with two bodyguards. The hag demanded certain fantastic sums — which Demon, she said, had not had time to pay, for "popping the hymen" — whereupon I had one of our strongest boys throw out vsyu (the entire) kompaniyu.’
'Extraordinary,' said Van, 'they had been growing younger and younger - I mean the girls, not the strong silent boys. His old Rosalind had a ten-year-old niece, a primed chickabiddy. Soon he would have been poaching them from the hatching chamber.'
'You never loved your father,' said Ada sadly.
'Oh, I did and do - tenderly, reverently, understandingly, because, after all, that minor poetry of the flesh is something not unfamiliar to me. But as far as we are concerned, I mean you and I, he was buried on the same day as our uncle Dan.' (3.8)