Vladimir Nabokov Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle 4 страница

All right. What was the other game?

The other game (in a singsong voice) might seem a little more complicated. To play it properly one had to wait for p. m. to provide longer shadows. The player —

‘Stop saying " the player. " It is either you or me. ’

‘Say, you. You outline my shadow behind me on the sand. I move. You outline it again. Then you mark out the next boundary (handing him the stick). If I now move back —’

‘You know, ’ said Van, throwing the stick away, ‘personally I think these are the most boring and stupid games anybody has ever invented, anywhere, any time, a. m. or p. m. ’

She said nothing but her nostrils narrowed. She retrieved the stick and stuck it back, furiously, where it belonged, deep into the loam next to a grateful flower to which she looped it with a silent nod. She walked back to the house. He wondered if her walk would be more graceful when she grew up.

‘I’m a rude brutal boy, please forgive me, ’ he said.

She inclined her head without looking back. In token of partial reconciliation, she showed him two sturdy hooks passed into iron rings on two tulip-tree trunks between which, before she was born, another boy, also Ivan, her mother’s brother, used to sling a hammock in which he slept in midsummer when the nights became really sultry — this was the latitude of Sicily, after all.

‘A splendid idea, ’ said Van. ‘By the way, do fireflies burn one if they fly into you? I’m just asking. Just a city boy’s silly question. ’

She showed him next where the hammock — a whole set of hammocks, a canvas sack full of strong, soft nets — was stored: this was in the corner of a basement toolroom behind the lilacs, the key was concealed in this hole here which last year was stuffed by the nest of a bird — no need to identify it. A pointer of sunlight daubed with greener paint a long green box where croquet implements were kept; but the balls had been rolled down the hill by some rowdy children, the little Erminins, who were now Van’s age and had grown very nice and quiet.

‘As we all are at that age, ’ said Van and stooped to pick up a curved tortoiseshell comb — the kind that girls use to hold up their hair behind; he had seen one, exactly like that, quite recently, but when, in whose hairdo?

‘One of the maids, ’ said Ada. ‘That tattered chapbook must also belong to her, Les Amours du Docteur Mertvago, a mystical romance by a pastor. ’

‘Playing croquet with you, ’ said Van, ‘should be rather like using flamingoes and hedgehogs. ’

‘Our reading lists do not match, ’ replied Ada. ‘That Palace in Wonderland was to me the kind of book everybody so often promised me I would adore, that I developed an insurmountable prejudice toward it. Have you read any of Mlle Lariviè re’s stories? Well, you will. She thinks that in some former Hindooish state she was a boulevardier in Paris; and writes accordingly. We can squirm from here into the front hall by a secret passage, but I think we are supposed to go and look at the grand chê ne which is really an elm. ’ Did he like elms? Did he know Joyce’s poem about the two washerwomen? He did, indeed. Did he like it? He did. In fact he was beginning to like very much arbors and ardors and Adas. They rhymed. Should he mention it?

‘And now, ’ she said, and stopped, staring at him.

‘Yes? ’ he said, ‘and now? ’

‘Well, perhaps, I ought not to try to divert you — after you trampled upon those circles of mine; but I’m going to relent and show you the real marvel of Ardis Manor; my larvarium, it’s in the room next to mine’ (which he never saw, never — how odd, come to think of it! ).

She carefully closed a communicating door as they entered into what looked like a glorified rabbitry at the end of a marble-flagged hall (a converted bathroom, as it transpired). In spite of the place’s being well aired, with the heraldic stained-glass windows standing wide open (so that one heard the screeching and catcalls of an undernourished and horribly frustrated bird population), the smell of the hutches — damp earth, rich roots, old greenhouse and maybe a hint of goat — was pretty appalling. Before letting him come nearer, Ada fiddled with little latches and grates, and a sense of great emptiness and depression replaced the sweet fire that had been consuming Van since the beginning of their innocent games on that day.

‘Je raffole de tout ce qui rampe (I’m crazy about everything that crawls), ’ she said.

‘Personally, ’ said Van, ‘I rather like those that roll up in a muff when you touch them — those that go to sleep like old dogs. ’

‘Oh, they don’t go to sleep, quelle idé e, they swoon, it’s a little syncope, ’ explained Ada frowning. ‘And I imagine it may be quite a little shock for the younger ones. ’

‘Yes, I can well imagine that, too. But I suppose one gets used to it, by-and-by, I mean. ’

But his ill-informed hesitations soon gave way to esthetic empathy. Many decades later Van remembered having much admired the lovely, naked, shiny, gaudily spotted and streaked sharkmoth caterpillars, as poisonous as the mullein flowers clustering around them, and the flat larva of a local catocalid whose gray knobs and lilac plaques mimicked the knots and lichens of the twig to which it clung so closely as to practically lock with it, and, of course, the little Vaporer fellow, its black coat enlivened all along the back with painted tufts, red, blue, yellow, of unequal length, like those of a fancy toothbrush treated with certified colors. And that kind of simile, with those special trimmings, reminds me today of the entomological entries in Ada’s diary — which we must have somewhere, mustn’t we, darling, in that drawer there, no? you don’t think so? Yes! Hurrah! Samples (your round-cheeked script, my love, was a little larger, but otherwise nothing, nothing, nothing has changed):

‘The retractile head and diabolical anal appendages of the garish monster that produces the modest Puss Moth belong to a most uncaterpillarish caterpillar, with front segments shaped like bellows and a face resembling the lens of a folding camera. If you gently stroke its bloated smooth body, the sensation is quite silky and pleasant — until the irritated creature ungratefully squirts at you an acrid fluid from a slit in its throat. ’

‘Dr Krolik received from Andalusia and kindly gave me five young larvae of the newly described very local Carmen Tortoiseshell. They are delightful creatures, of a beautiful jade nuance with silvery spikes, and they breed only on a semi-extinct species of high-mountain willow (which dear Crawly also obtained for me). ’

(At ten or earlier the child had read — as Van had — Les Malheurs de Swann, as the next sample reveals):

‘I think Marina would stop scolding me for my hobby (" There’s something indecent about a little girl’s keeping such revolting pets..., " " Normal young ladies should loathe snakes and worms, " et cetera) if I could persuade her to overcome her old-fashioned squeamishness and place simultaneously on palm and pulse (the hand alone would not be roomy enough! ) the noble larva of the Cattleya Hawkmoth (mauve shades of Monsieur Proust), a seven-inch-long colossus flesh colored, with turquoise arabesques, rearing its hyacinth head in a stiff " Sphinxian" attitude. ’

(Lovely stuff! said Van, but even I did not quite assimilate it, when I was young. So let us not bore the boor who flips through a book and thinks: ‘what a hoaxer, that old V. V.! ’)

At the end of his so remote, so near, 1884 summer Van, before leaving Ardis, was to make a visit of adieu to Ada’s larvarium.

The porcelain-white, eye-spotted Cowl (or ‘Shark’) larva, a highly prized gem, had safely achieved its next metamorphosis, but Ada’s unique Lorelei Underwing had died, paralyzed by some ichneumon that had not been deceived by those clever prominences and fungoid smudges. The multicolored toothbrush had comfortably pupated within a shaggy cocoon, promising a Persian Vaporer later in the autumn. The two Puss Moth larvae had assumed a still uglier but at least more vermian and in a sense venerable aspect: their pitchforks now limply trailing behind them, and a purplish flush dulling the cubistry of their extravagant colors, they kept ‘ramping’ rapidly all over the floor of their cage in a surge of prepupational locomotion. Aqua had walked through a wood and into a gulch to do it last year. A freshly emerged Nymphalis carmen was fanning its lemon and amber-brown wings on a sunlit patch of grating, only to be choked with one nip by the nimble fingers of enraptured and heartless Ada; the Odettian Sphinx had turned, bless him, into an elephantoid mummy with a comically encased trunk of the guermantoid type; and Dr Krolik was swiftly running on short legs after a very special orange-tip above timberline, in another hemisphere, Antocharis ada Krolik (1884) — as it was known until changed to A. prittwitzi Stü mper (1883) by the inexorable law of taxonomic priority.

‘But, afterwards, when all these beasties have hatched, ’ asked Van, ‘what do you do with them? ’

‘Oh, ’ she said, ‘I take them to Dr Krolik’s assistant who sets them and labels them and pins them in glassed trays in a clean oak cabinet, which will be mine when I marry. I shall then have a big collection, and continue to breed all kinds of leps — my dream is to have a special Institute of Fritillary larvae and violets — all the special violets they breed on. I would have eggs or larvae rushed to me here by plane from allover North America, with their foodplants — Redwood Violets from the West Coast, and a Pale Violet from Montana, and the Prairie Violet, and Egglestone’s Violet from Kentucky, and a rare white violet from a secret marsh near an unnamed lake on an arctic mountain where Krolik’s Lesser Fritillary flies. Of course, when the things emerge, they are quite easy to mate by hand — you hold them — for quite a while, sometimes — like this, in folded-wing profile’ (showing the method, ignoring her poor fingernails), ‘male in your left hand; female in your right, or vice versa, with the tips of their abdomens touching, but they must be quite fresh and soaked in their favorite violet’s reek. ’

Was she really pretty, at twelve? Did he want — would he ever want to caress her, to really caress her? Her black hair cascaded over one clavicle and the gesture she made of shaking it back and the dimple on her pale cheek were revelations with an element of immediate recognition about them. Her pallor shone, her blackness blazed. The pleated skirts she liked were becomingly short. Even her bare limbs were so free from suntan that one’s gaze, stroking her white shins and forearms, could follow upon them the regular slants of fine dark hairs, the silks of her girlhood. The iridal dark-brown of her serious eyes had the enigmatic opacity of an Oriental hypnotist’s look (in a magazine’s back-page advertisement) and seemed to be placed higher than usual so that between its lower rim and the moist lower lid a cradle crescent of white remained when she stared straight at you. Her long eyelashes seemed blackened, and in fact were. Her features were saved from elfin prettiness by the thickish shape of her parched lips. Her plain Irish nose was Van’s in miniature. Her teeth were fairly white, but not very even.

Her poor pretty hands — one could not help cooing with pity over them — rosy in comparison to the translucent skin of the arm, rosier even than the elbow that seemed to be blushing for the state of her nails: she bit them so thoroughly that all vestige of free margin was replaced by a groove cutting into the flesh with the tightness of wire and lending an additional spatule of length to her naked fingertips. Later, when he was so fond of kissing her cold hands she would clench them, allowing his lips nothing but knuckle, but he would fiercely pry her hand open to get at those flat blind little cushions. (But, oh my, oh, the long, languid, rose-and-silver, painted and pointed, delicately stinging onyxes of her adolescent and adult years! )

What Van experienced in those first strange days when she showed him the house — and those nooks in it where they were to make love so soon — combined elements of ravishment and exasperation. Ravishment — because of her pale, voluptuous, impermissible skin, her hair, her legs, her angular movements, her gazelle-grass odor, the sudden black stare of her wide-set eyes, the rustic nudity under her dress; exasperation — because between him, an awkward schoolboy of genius, and that precocious, affected, impenetrable child there extended a void of light and a veil of shade that no force could overcome and pierce. He swore wretchedly in the hopelessness of his bed as he focused his swollen senses on the glimpse of her he had engulfed when, on their second excursion to the top of the house, she had mounted upon a captain’s trunk to unhasp a sort of illuminator through which one acceded to the roof (even the dog had once gone there), and a bracket or something wrenched up her skirt and he saw — as one sees some sickening miracle in a Biblical fable or a moth’s shocking metamorphosis — that the child was darkly flossed. He noticed that she seemed to have noticed that he had or might have noticed (what he not only noticed but retained with tender terror until he freed himself of that vision — much later — and in strange ways), and an odd, dull, arrogant look passed across her face: her sunken cheeks and fat pale lips moved as if she were chewing something, and she emitted a yelp of joyless laughter when he, big Van, slipped on a tile after wriggling in his turn through the skylight. And in the sudden sun, he realized that until then, he, small Van, had been a blind virgin, since haste, dust and dusk had obscured the mousy charms of his first harlot, so often possessed.

His sentimental education now went on fast. Next morning, he happened to catch sight of her washing her face and arms over an old-fashioned basin on a rococo stand, her hair knotted on the top of her head, her nightgown twisted around her waist like a clumsy corolla out of which issued her slim back, rib-shaded on the near side. A fat snake of porcelain curled around the basin, and as both the reptile and he stopped to watch Eve and the soft woggle of her bud-breasts in profile, a big mulberry-colored cake of soap slithered out of her hand, and her black-socked foot hooked the door shut with a bang which was more the echo of the soap’s crashing against the marble board than a sign of pudic displeasure.

Weekday lunch at Ardis Hall. Lucette between Marina and the governess; Van between Marina and Ada; Dack, the golden-brown stoat, under the table, either between Ada and Mlle Lariviè re, or between Lucette and Marina (Van secretly disliked dogs, especially at meals, and especially that smallish longish freak with a gamey breath). Arch and grandiloquent, Ada would be describing a dream, a natural history wonder, a special belletristic device — Paul Bourget’s ‘monologue inté rieur’ borrowed from old Leo — or some ludicrous blunder in the current column of Elsie de Nord, a vulgar literary demimondaine who thought that Lyovin went about Moscow in a nagol’nï y tulup, ‘a muzhik’s sheepskin coat, bare side out, bloom side in, ’ as defined in a dictionary our commentator produced like a conjurer, never to be procurable by Elsies. Her spectacular handling of subordinate clauses, her parenthetic asides, her sensual stressing of adjacent monosyllables (‘Idiot Elsie simply can’t read’) — all this somehow finished by acting upon Van, as artificial excitements and exotic torture-caresses might have done, in an aphrodisiac sinistral direction that he both resented and perversely enjoyed.

‘My precious’ her mother called her, punctuating Ada’s discourse with little ejaculations: ‘Terribly funny! ’ ‘Oh, I adore that! ’ but also indulging in more admonitory remarks, such as ‘Do sit a wee bit straighter’ or ‘Eat, my precious’ (accenting the ‘eat’ with a motherly urge very unlike the malice of her daughter’s spondaic sarcasms).

Ada, now sitting straight, incurving her supple spine in her chair, then, as the dream or adventure (or whatever she was relating) reached a climax, bending over the place from which Price had prudently removed her plate, and suddenly all elbows, sprawling forward, invading the table, then leaning back, extravagantly making mouths, illustrating ‘long, long’ with both hands up, up!

‘My precious, you haven’t tried the — oh, Price, bring the —’

The what? The rope for the fakir’s bare-bottomed child to climb up in the melting blue?

‘It was sort of long, long. I mean (interrupting herself)... like a tentacle... no, let me see’ (shake of head, jerk of features, as if unknotting a tangled skein with one quick tug).

No: enormous purple pink plums, one with a wet yellow burst-split.

‘And so there I was —’ (the tumbling hair, the hand flying to the temple, sketching but not terminating the brushing-off-strand stroke; then a sudden peal of rough-rippled laughter ending in a moist cough).

‘No, but seriously, Mother, you must imagine me utterly speechless, screaming speechlessly, as I realized —’

At the third or fourth meal Van also realized something. Far from being a bright lass showing off for the benefit of a newcomer, Ada’s behavior was a desperate and rather clever attempt to prevent Marina from appropriating the conversation and transforming it into a lecture on the theater. Marina, on the other hand, while awaiting a chance to trot out her troika of hobby horses, took some professional pleasure in playing the hackneyed part of a fond mother, proud of her daughter’s charm and humor, and herself charmingly and humorously lenient toward their brash circumstantiality: she was showing off — not Ada! And when Van had understood the true situation, he would take advantage of a pause (which Marina was on the point of filling with some choice Stanislavskiana) to launch Ada upon the troubled waters of Botany Bay, a voyage which at other times he dreaded, but which now proved to be the safest and easiest course for his girl. This was particularly important at dinner, since Lucette and her governess had an earlier evening meal upstairs, so that Mlle Lariviè re was not there, at those critical moments, and could not be relied on to take over from lagging Ada with a breezy account of her work on a new novella of her composition (her famous Diamond Necklace was in the last polishing stage) or with memories of Van’s early boyhood such as those eminently acceptable ones concerning his beloved Russian tutor, who gently courted Mlle L., wrote ‘decadent’ Russian verse in sprung rhythm, and drank, in Russian solitude.

Van: ‘That yellow thingum’ (pointing at a floweret prettily depicted on an Eckercrown plate) ‘— is it a buttercup? ’

Ada: ‘No. That yellow flower is the common Marsh Marigold, Caltha palustris. In this country, peasants miscall it " Cowslip, " though of course the true Cowslip, Primula veris, is a different plant altogether. ’

‘I see, ’ said Van.

‘Yes, indeed, ’ began Marina, ‘when I was playing Ophelia, the fact that I had once collected flowers —’

‘Helped, no doubt, ’ said Ada. ‘Now the Russian word for marsh marigold is Kuroslep (which muzhiks in Tartary misapply, poor slaves, to the buttercup) or else Kaluzhnitsa, as used quite properly in Kaluga, U. S. A. ’

‘Ah, ’ said Van.

‘As in the case of many flowers, ’ Ada went on, with a mad scholar’s quiet smile, ‘the unfortunate French name of our plant, souci d’eau, has been traduced or shall we say transfigured —’

‘Flowers into bloomers, ’ punned Van Veen.

‘Je vous en prie, mes enfants! ’ put in Marina, who had been following the conversation with difficulty and now, through a secondary misunderstanding, thought the reference was to the undergarment.

‘By chance, this very morning, ’ said Ada, not deigning to enlighten her mother, ‘our learned governess, who was also yours, Van, and who —’

(First time she pronounced it — at that botanical lesson! )

‘— is pretty hard on English-speaking transmongrelizers — monkeys called " ursine howlers" — though I suspect her reasons are more chauvinistic than artistic and moral — drew my attention — my wavering attention — to some really gorgeous bloomers, as you call them, Van, in a Mr Fowlie’s soi-disant literal version — called " sensitive" in a recent Elsian rave — sensitive! — of Mé moire, a poem by Rimbaud (which she fortunately — and farsightedly — made me learn by heart, though I suspect she prefers Musset and Coppé e)’ —

‘... les robes vertes et dé teintes des fillettes... ’ quoted Van triumphantly.

‘Egg-zactly’ (mimicking Dan). ‘Well, Lariviè re allows me to read him only in the Feuilletin anthology, the same you have apparently, but I shall obtain his oeuvres complè tes very soon, oh very soon, much sooner than anybody thinks. Incidentally, she will come down after tucking in Lucette, our darling copperhead who by now should be in her green nightgown —’

‘Angel moy, ’ pleaded Marina, ‘I’m sure Van cannot be interested in Lucette’s nightdress! ’

‘— the nuance of willows, and counting the little sheep on her ciel de lit which Fowlie turns into " the sky’s bed" instead of " bed ceiler. " But, to go back to our poor flower. The forged louis d’or in that collection of fouled French is the transformation of souci d’eau (our marsh marigold) into the asinine " care of the water" — although he had at his disposal dozens of synonyms, such as mollyblob, marybud, maybubble, and many other nick-names associated with fertility feasts, whatever those are. ’

‘On the other hand, ’ said Van, ‘one can well imagine a similarly bilingual Miss Rivers checking a French version of, say, Marvell’s Garden —’

‘Oh, ’ cried Ada, ‘I can recite " Le jardin" in my own transversion — let me see —

En vain on s’amuse à gagner

L’Oka, la Baie du Palmier. .. ’

‘... to win the Palm, the Oke, or Bayes! ’ shouted Van.

‘You know, children, ’ interrupted Marina resolutely with calming gestures of both hands, ‘when I was your age, Ada, and my brother was your age, Van, we talked about croquet, and ponies, and puppies, and the last fê te-d’enfants, and the next picnic, and — oh, millions of nice normal things, but never, never of old French botanists and God knows what! ’

‘But you just said you collected flowers? ’ said Ada.

‘Oh, just one season, somewhere in Switzerland. I don’t remember when. It does not matter now. ’

The reference was to Ivan Durmanov: he had died of lung cancer years ago in a sanatorium (not far from Ex, somewhere in Switzerland, where Van was born eight years later). Marina often mentioned Ivan who had been a famous violinist at eighteen, but without any special show of emotion, so that Ada now noted with surprise that her mother’s heavy make-up had started to thaw under a sudden flood of tears (maybe some allergy to flat dry old flowers, an attack of hay fever, or gentianitis, as a slightly later diagnosis might have shown retrospectively). She blew her nose, with the sound of an elephant, as she said herself — and here Mlle Lariviè re came down for coffee and recollections of Van as a bambin angé lique who adored à neuf ans — the precious dear! — Gilberte Swann et la Lesbie de Catulle (and who had learned, all by himself, to release the adoration as soon as the kerosene lamp had left the mobile bedroom in his black nurse’s fist).

A few days after Van’s arrival Uncle Dan came by the morning train from town for his habitual weekend stay with his family.

Van happened to run into him as Uncle Dan was crossing the hall. The butler very charmingly (thought Van) signaled to his master who the tall boy was by setting one hand three feet from the ground and then notching it up higher and higher — an altitudinal code that our young six-footer alone understood. Van saw the little red-haired gentleman glance with perplexity at old Bouteillan, who hastened to whisper Van’s name.

Mr Daniel Veen had a curious manner, when advancing toward a guest, of dipping the fingers of his stiffly held right hand into his coat pocket and holding them there in a kind of purifying operation until the exact moment of the handshake came.

He informed Van that it was going to rain in a few minutes, ‘because it had started to rain at Ladore, ’ and the rain, he said, ‘took about half-an-hour to reach Ardis. ’ Van thought this was a quip and chuckled politely but Uncle Dan looked perplexed again and, staring at Van with pale fish-eyes, inquired if he had familiarized himself with the environs, how many languages he knew, and would he like to buy for a few kopecks a Red Cross lottery ticket?

‘No, thank you, ’ said Van, ‘I have enough of my own lotteries’ — and his uncle stared again, but sort of sideways.

Tea was served in the drawing room, and everybody was rather silent and subdued, and presently Uncle Dan retired to his study, pulling a folded newspaper out of an inner pocket, and no sooner had he left the room than a window flew open all by itself, and a powerful shower started to drum upon the liriodendron and imperialis leaves outside, and the conversation became general and loud.

Not long did the rain last — or rather stay: it continued on its presumable way to Raduga or Ladoga or Kaluga or Luga, shedding an uncompleted rainbow over Ardis Hall.

Uncle Dan in an overstuffed chair was trying to read, with the aid of one of the dwarf dictionaries for undemanding tourists which helped him to decipher foreign art catalogues, an article apparently devoted to oystering in a Dutch-language illustrated paper somebody on the train had abandoned opposite him — when an abominable tumult started to spread from room to room through the whole house.

The sportive dackel, one ear flapping, the other upturned and showing its gray-mottled pink, rapidly moving his comical legs, and skidding on the parquetry as he executed abrupt turns, was in the act of carrying away, to a suitable hiding place where to worry it, a sizable wad of blood-soaked cottonwool, snatched somewhere upstairs. Ada, Marina and two maids were pursuing the merry animal but he was impossible to corner among all the baroque furniture as he tore through innumerable doorways. Suddenly the whole chase veered past Uncle Dan’s armchair and shot out again.

‘Good Lord! ’ he exclaimed, on catching sight of the gory trophy, ‘somebody must have chopped off a thumb! ’ Patting his thighs and his chair, he sought and retrieved — from under the footstool — the vestpocket wordbook and went back to his paper, but a second later had to look up ‘groote, ’ which he had been groping for when disturbed.

The simplicity of its meaning annoyed him.

Through an open french door Dack led his pursuers into the garden. There, on the third lawn, Ada overtook him with the flying plunge used in ‘American football, ’ a kind of Rugby game cadets played at one time on the wet turfy banks of the Goodson River. Simultaneously, Mlle Lariviè re rose from the bench where she had been paring Lucette’s fingernails, and pointing her scissors at Blanche who had rushed up with a paper bag, she accused the young slattern of a glaring precedent — namely of having once dropped a hairpin in Lucette’s cot, un machin long comme ç a qui faillit blesser l’enfant à la fesse. Marina, however, who had a Russian noblewoman’s morbid fear of ‘offending an inferior, ’ declared the incident closed.

‘Nehoroshaya, nehoroshaya sobaka, ’ crooned Ada with great aspiratory and sibilatory emphasis as she gathered into her arms the now lootless, but completely unabashed. ‘bad dog. ’

Hammock and honey: eighty years later he could still recall with the young pang of the original joy his falling in love with Ada. Memory met imagination halfway in the hammock of his boyhood’s dawns. At ninety-four he liked retracing that first amorous summer not as a dream he had just had but as a recapitulation of consciousness to sustain him in the small gray hours between shallow sleep and the first pill of the day. Take over, dear, for a little while. Pill, pillow, billow, billions. Go on from here, Ada, please.

(She). Billions of boys. Take one fairly decent decade. A billion of Bills, good, gifted, tender and passionate, not only spiritually but physically well-meaning Billions, have bared the jillions of their no less tender and brilliant Jills during that decade, at stations and under conditions that have to be controlled and specified by the worker, lest the entire report be choked up by the weeds of statistics and waist-high generalizations. No point would there be, if we left out, for example, the little matter of prodigious individual awareness and young genius, which makes, in some cases, of this or that particular gasp an unprecedented and unrepeatable event in the continuum of life or at least a thematic anthemia of such events in a work of art, or a denouncer’s article. The details that shine through or shade through: the local leaf through the hyaline skin, the green sun in the brown humid eye, tout ceci, vsyo eto, in tit and toto, must be taken into account, now prepare to take over (no, Ada, go on, ya zaslushalsya: I’m all enchantment and ears), if we wish to convey the fact, the fact, the fact — that among those billions of brilliant couples in one cross section of what you will allow me to call spacetime (for the convenience of reasoning), one couple is a unique super-imperial couple, sverhimperatorskaya cheta, in consequence of which (to be inquired into, to be painted, to be denounced, to be put to music, or to the question and death, if the decade has a scorpion tail after all), the particularities of their love-making influence in a special unique way two long lives and a few readers, those pensive reeds, and their pens and mental paintbrushes. Natural history indeed! Unnatural history — because that precision of senses and sense must seem unpleasantly peculiar to peasants, and because the detail is all: The song of a Tuscan Firecrest or a Sitka Kinglet in a cemetery cypress; a minty whiff of Summer Savory or Yerba Buena on a coastal slope; the dancing flitter of a Holly Blue or an Echo Azure — combined with other birds, flowers and butterflies: that has to be heard, smelled and seen through the transparency of death and ardent beauty. And the most difficult: beauty itself as perceived through the there and then. The males of the firefly (now it’s really your turn, Van).