Vladimir Nabokov Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle 17 страница

‘Lariviè re can go and’ (and Ada’s sweet pale lips repeated Gavronski’s crude crack)... ‘That goes for Lucette too, ’ she added.

‘Vos " vyragences" sont assez lestes, ’ remarked Van. ‘Are you very mad at me? ’

‘Oh Van, I’m not! In fact, I’m delighted you won. But I’m sixteen today. Sixteen! Older than grandmother at the time of her first divorce. It’s my last picnic, I guess. Childhood is scrapped. I love you. You love me. Greg loves me. Everybody loves me. I’m glutted with love. Hurry up or she’ll pull that cock off — Lucette, leave him alone at once! ’

Finally the carriage started on its pleasant homeward journey.

‘Ouch! ’ grunted Van as he received the rounded load — explaining wrily that he had hit his right patella against a rock.

‘Of course, if one goes in for horseplay... ’ murmured Ada — and opened, at its emerald ribbon, the small brown, gold-tooled book (a great success with the passing sun flecks) that she had been already reading during the ride to the picnic.

‘I do fancy a little horseplay, ’ said Van. ‘It has left me with quite a tingle, for more reasons than one. ’

‘I saw you — horseplaying, ’ said Lucette, turning her head.

‘Sh-sh, ’ uttered Van.

‘I mean you and him. ’

‘We are not interested in your impressions, girl. And don’t look back all the time. You know you get carriage-sick when the road —’

‘Coincidence: " Jean qui tâ chait de lui tourner la tê te..., " ’ surfaced Ada briefly.

‘— when the road " runs out of you, " as your sister once said when she was your age. ’

‘True, ’ mused Lucette tunefully.

She had been prevailed upon to clothe her honey-brown body. Her white jersey had filched a lot from its recent background — pine needles, a bit of moss, a cake crumb, a baby caterpillar. Her remarkably well-filled green shorts were stained with burnberry purple. Her ember-bright hair flew into his face and smelt of a past summer. Family smell; yes, coincidence: a set of coincidences slightly displaced; the artistry of asymmetry. She sat in his lap, heavily, dreamily, full of foie gras and peach punch, with the backs of her brown iridescent bare arms almost touching his face — touching it when he glanced down, right and left, to check if the mushrooms had been taken. They had. The little footboy was reading and picking his nose — judging by the movements of his elbow. Lucette’s compact bottom and cool thighs seemed to sink deeper and deeper in the quicksand of the dream-like, dream-rephrased, legend-distorted past. Ada, sitting next to him, turning her smaller pages quicker than the boy on the box, was, of course, enchanting, obsessive, eternal and lovelier, more somberly ardent than four summers ago — but it was that other picnic which he now relived and it was Ada’s soft haunches which he now held as if she were present in duplicate, in two different color prints.

Through strands of coppery silk he looked aslant at Ada, who puckered her lips at him in the semblance of a transmitted kiss (pardoning him at last for his part in that brawl! ) and presently went back to her vellum-bound little volume, Ombres et couleurs, an 1820 edition of Chateaubriand’s short stories with hand-painted vignettes and the flat mummy of a pressed anemone. The gouts and glooms of the woodland passed across her book, her face and Lucette’s right arm, on which he could not help kissing a mosquito bite in pure tribute to the duplication. Poor Lucette stole a languorous look at him and looked away again — at the red neck of the coachman — of that other coachman who for several months had haunted her dreams.

We do not care to follow the thoughts troubling Ada, whose attention to her book was far shallower than might seem; we will not, nay, cannot follow them with any success, for thoughts are much more faintly remembered than shadows or colors, or the throbs of young lust, or a green snake in a dark paradise. Therefore we find ourselves more comfortably sitting within Van while his Ada sits within Lucette, and both sit within Van (and all three in me, adds Ada).

He remembered with a pang of pleasure the indulgent skirt Ada had been wearing then, so swoony-baloony as the Chose young things said, and he regretted (smiling) that Lucette had those chaste shorts on today, and Ada, husked-corn (laughing) trousers. In the fatal course of the most painful ailments, sometimes (nodding gravely), sometimes there occur sweet mornings of perfect repose — and that not owing to some blessed pill or potion (indicating the bedside clutter) or at least without our knowing that the loving hand of despair slipped us the drug.

Van closed his eyes in order better to concentrate on the golden flood of swelling joy. Many, oh, many, many years later he recollected with wonder (how could one have endured such rapture? ) that moment of total happiness, the complete eclipse of the piercing and preying ache, the logic of intoxication, the circular argument to the effect that the most eccentric girl cannot help being faithful if she loves one as one loves her. He watched Ada’s bracelet flash in rhythm with the swaying of the victoria and her full lips, parted slightly in profile, show in the sun the red pollen of a remnant of salve drying in the transversal thumbnail lines of their texture. He opened his eyes: the bracelet was indeed flashing but her lips had lost all trace of rouge, and the certainty that in another moment he would touch their hot pale pulp threatened to touch off a private crisis under the solemn load of another child. But the little proxy’s neck, glistening with sweat, was pathetic, her trustful immobility, sobering, and after all no furtive fiction could compete with what awaited him in Ada’s bower. A twinge in his kneecap also came to the rescue, and honest Van chided himself for having attempted to use a little pauper instead of the princess in the fairy tale — ‘whose precious flesh must not blush with the impression of a chastising hand, ’ says Pierrot in Peterson’s version.

With the fading of that fugitive flame his mood changed. Something should be said, a command should be given, the matter was serious or might become serious. They were now about to enter Gamlet, the little Russian village, from which a birch-lined road led quickly to Ardis. A small procession of kerchiefed peasant nymphs, unwashed, no doubt, but adorably pretty with naked shiny shoulders and high-divided plump breasts tuliped up by their corsets, walked past through a coppice, singing an old ditty in their touching English:

Thorns and nettles

For silly girls:

Ah, torn the petals,

Ah, spilled the pearls!

‘You have a little pencil in your back pocket, ’ said Van to Lucette. ‘May I borrow it, I want to write down that song. ’

‘If you don’t tickle me there, ’ said the child.

Van reached for Ada’s book and wrote on the fly leaf, as she watched him with odd wary eyes:

I don’t wish to see him again.

It’s serious.

Tell M. not to receive him or I leave.

No answer required.

She read it, and slowly, silently erased the lines with the top of the pencil which she passed back to Van, who replaced it where it had been.

‘You’re awfully fidgety, ’ Lucette observed without turning. ‘Next time, ’ she added, ‘I won’t have him dislodge me. ’

They now swept up to the porch, and Trofim had to cuff the tiny blue-coated reader in order to have him lay his book aside and jump down to hand Ada out of the carriage.

Van was lying in his netted nest under the liriodendrons, reading Antiterrenus on Rattner. His knee had troubled him all night; now, after lunch, it seemed a bit better. Ada had gone on horseback to Ladore, where he hoped she would forget to buy the messy turpentine oil Marina had told her to bring him.

His valet advanced toward him across the lawn, followed by a messenger, a slender youth clad in black leather from neck to ankle, chestnut curls escaping from under a vizored cap. The strange child glanced around with an amateur thespian’s exaggeration of attitude, and handed a letter, marked ‘confidential, ’ to Van.

Dear Veen,

In a couple of days I must leave for a spell of military service abroad. If you desire to see me before I go I shall be glad to entertain you (and any other gentleman you might wish to bring along) at dawn tomorrow where the Maidenhair road crosses Tourbiè re Lane. If not, I beg you to confirm in a brief note that you bear me no grudge, just as no grudge is cherished in regard to you, sir, by your obedient servant

Percy de Prey

No, Van did not desire to see the Count. He said so to the pretty messenger, who stood with one hand on the hip and one knee turned out like an extra, waiting for the signal to join the gambaders in the country dance after Calabro’s aria.

‘Un moment, ’ added Van. ‘I would be interested to know — this could be decided in a jiffy behind that tree — what you are, stable boy or kennel girl? ’

The messenger did not reply and was led away by the chuckling Bout. A little squeal suggestive of an improper pinch came from behind the laurels screening their exit.

It was hard to decide whether that clumsy and pretentious missive had been dictated by the fear that one’s sailing off to fight for one’s country might be construed as running away from more private engagements, or whether its conciliatory gist had been demanded from Percy by somebody — perhaps a woman (for instance his mother, born Praskovia Lanskoy); anyway, Van’s honor remained unaffected. He limped to the nearest garbage can and, having burnt the letter with its crested blue envelope, dismissed the incident from his mind, merely noting that now, at least, Ada would cease to be pestered by the fellow’s attentions.

She returned late in the afternoon — without the embrocation, thank goodness. He was still lolling in his low-slung hammock, looking rather forlorn and sulky, but having glanced around (with more natural grace than the brown-locked messenger had achieved), she raised her veil, kneeled down by him and soothed him.

When lightning struck two days later (an old image that is meant to intimate a flash-back to an old bam), Van became aware that it brought together, in livid confrontation, two secret witnesses; they had been hanging back in his mind since the first day of his fateful return to Ardis: One had been murmuring with averted gaze that Percy de Prey was, and would always be, only a dance partner, a frivolous follower; the other had kept insinuating, with spectral insistence, that some nameless trouble was threatening the very sanity of Van’s pale, faithless mistress.

On the morning of the day preceding the most miserable one in his life, he found he could bend his leg without wincing, but he made the mistake of joining Ada and Lucette in an impromptu lunch on a long-neglected croquet lawn and walked home with difficulty. A swim in the pool and a soak in the sun helped, however, and the pain had practically gone when in the mellow heat of the long afternoon Ada returned from one of her long ‘brambles’ as she called her botanical rambles, succinctly and somewhat sadly, for the florula had ceased to yield much beyond the familiar favorites. Marina, in a luxurious peignoir, with a large oval mirror hinged before her, sat at a white toilet table that had been carried out onto the lawn where she was having her hair dressed by senile but still wonderworking Monsieur Violette of Lyon and Ladore, an unusual outdoor activity which she explained and excused by the fact of her grandmother’s having also liked qu’on la coiffe au grand air so as to forestall the zephyrs (as a duelist steadies his hand by walking about with a poker).

‘That’s our best performer, ’ she said, indicating Van to Violette who mistook him for Pedro and bowed with un air entendu.

Van had been looking forward to a little walk of convalescence with Ada before dressing for dinner, but she said, as she drooped on a garden chair, that she was exhausted and filthy and had to wash her face and feet, and prepare for the ordeal of helping her mother entertain the movie people who were expected later in the evening.

‘I’ve seen him in Sexico, ’ murmured Monsieur Violette to Marina, whose ears he had shut with both hands as he moved the reflection of her head in the glass this way and that.

‘No, it’s getting late, ’ muttered Ada, ‘and, moreover, I promised Lucette —’

He insisted in a fierce whisper — fully knowing, however, how useless it was to attempt to make her change her mind, particularly in amorous matters; but unaccountably and marvelously her dazed look melted into one of gentle glee, as if in sudden perception of new-found release. Thus a child may stare into space, with a dawning smile, upon realizing that the bad dream is over, or that a door has been left unlocked, and that one can paddle with impunity in thawed sky. Ada rid her shoulder of the collecting satchel and, under Violette’s benevolent gaze following them over Marina’s mirrored head, they strolled away and sought the comparative seclusion of the park alley where she had once demonstrated to him her sun-and-shade games. He held her, and kissed her, and kissed her again as if she had returned from a long and perilous journey. The sweetness of her smile was something quite unexpected and special. It was not the sly demon smile of remembered or promised ardor, but the exquisite human glow of happiness and helplessness. All their passionate pump-joy exertions, from Burning Barn to Burnberry Brook, were nothing in comparison to this zaychik, this ‘sun blick’ of the smiling spirit. Her black jumper and black Skirt with apron pockets lost its ‘in-mourning-for-a-lost flower’ meaning that Marina had fancifully attached to her dress (‘nemedlenno pereodet’sya, change immediately! ’ she had yelped into the green-shimmering looking-glass); instead, it had acquired the charm of a Lyaskan, old-fashioned schoolgirl uniform. They stood brow to brow, brown to white, black to black, he supporting her elbows, she playing her limp light fingers over his collarbone, and how he ‘ladored, ’ he said, the dark aroma of her hair blending with crushed lily stalks, Turkish cigarettes and the lassitude that comes from ‘lass. ’ ‘No, no, don’t, ’ she said, I must wash, quick-quick, Ada must wash; but for yet another immortal moment they stood embraced in the hushed avenue, enjoying, as they had never enjoyed before, the ‘happy-forever’ feeling at the end of never-ending fairy tales.

That’s a beautiful passage, Van. I shall cry all night (late interpolation).

As a last sunbeam struck Ada, her mouth and chin shone drenched with his poor futile kisses. She shook her head saying they must really part, and she kissed his hands as she did only in moments of supreme tenderness, and then quickly turned away, and they really parted.

One common orchid, a Lady’s Slipper, was all that wilted in the satchel which she had left on a garden table and now dragged upstairs. Marina and the mirror had gone. He peeled off his training togs and took one last dip in the pool over which the butler stood, looking meditatively into the false-blue water with his hands behind his back.

‘I wonder, ’ he said, ‘if I haven’t just seen a tadpole. ’

The novelistic theme of written communications has now really got into its stride. When Van went up to his room he noticed, with a shock of grim premonition, a slip of paper sticking out of the heart pocket of his dinner jacket. Penciled in a large hand, with the contour of every letter deliberately whiffled and rippled, was the anonymous injunction: ‘One must not berne you. ’ Only a French-speaking person would use that word for ‘dupe. ’ Among the servants, fifteen at least were of French extraction — descendants of immigrants who had settled in America after England had annexed their beautiful and unfortunate country in 1815. To interview them all — torture the males, rape the females — would be, of course, absurd and degrading. With a puerile wrench he broke his best black butterfly on the wheel of his exasperation. The pain from the fang bite was now reaching his heart. He found another tie, finished dressing and went to look for Ada.

He found both girls and their governess in one of the ‘nursery parlors, ’ a delightful sitting room with a balcony on which Mlle Lariviè re was sitting at a charmingly ornamented Pembroke table and reading with mixed feelings and furious annotations the third shooting script of Les Enfants Maudits. At a larger round table in the middle of the inner room, Lucette under Ada’s direction was trying to learn to draw flowers; several botanical atlases, large and small, were lying about. Everything appeared as it always used to be, the little nymphs and goats on the painted ceiling, the mellow light of the day ripening into evening, the remote dreamy rhythm of Blanche’s ‘linen-folding’ voice humming ‘Malbrough’ (... ne sait quand reviendra, ne sait quand reviendra) and the two lovely heads, bronze-black and copper-red, inclined over the table. Van realized that he must simmer down before consulting Ada — or indeed before telling her he wished to consult her. She looked gay and elegant; she was wearing his diamonds for the first time; she had put on a new evening dress with jet gleams, and — also for the first time — transparent silk stockings.

He sat down on a little sofa, took at random one of the open volumes and stared in disgust at a group of brilliantly pictured gross orchids whose popularity with bees depended, said the text, ‘on various attractive odors ranging from the smell of dead workers to that of a tomcat. ’ Dead soldiers might smell even better.

In the meantime obstinate Lucette kept insisting that the easiest way to draw a flower was to place a sheet of transparent paper over the picture (in the present case a red-bearded pogonia, with indecent details of structure, a plant peculiar to the Ladoga bogs) and trace the outline of the thing in colored inks. Patient Ada wanted her to copy not mechanically but ‘from eye to hand and from hand to eye, ’ and to use for model a live specimen of another orchid that had a brown wrinkled pouch and purple sepals; but after a while she gave in cheerfully and set aside the crystal vaselet holding the Lady’s Slipper she had picked. Casually, lightly, she went on to explain how the organs of orchids work — but all Lucette wanted to know, after her whimsical fashion, was: could k boy bee impregnate a girl flower through something, through his gaiters or woolies or whatever he wore?

‘You know, ’ said Ada in a comic nasal voice, turning to Van, ‘you know, that child has the dirtiest mind imaginable and now she is going to be mad at me for saying this and sob on the Lariviè re bosom, and complain she has been pollinated by sitting on your knee. ’

‘But I can’t speak to Belle about dirty things, ’ said Lucette quite gently and reasonably.

‘What’s the matter with you, Van? ’ inquired sharp-eyed Ada.

‘Why do you ask? ’ inquired Van in his turn.

‘Your ears wiggle and you clear your throat. ’

‘Are you through with those horrible flowers? ’

‘Yes. I’m going to wash my hands. We’ll meet downstairs. Your tie is all crooked. ’

‘All right, all right, ’ said Van.

‘Mon page, mon beau page,

— Mironton-mironton-mirontaine —

Mon page, mon beau page... ’

Downstairs, Jones was already taking down the dinner gong from its hook in the hall.

‘Well, what’s the matter? ’ she asked when they met a minute later on the drawing-room terrace.

‘I found this in my jacket, ’ said Van.

Rubbing her big front teeth with a nervous forefinger, Ada read and reread the note.

‘How do you know it’s meant for you? ’ she asked, giving him back the bit of copybook paper.

‘Well, I’m telling you, ’ he yelled.

‘Tishe (quiet! )! ’ said Ada.

‘I’m telling you I found it here, ’ (pointing at his heart).

‘Destroy and forget it, ’ said Ada.

‘Your obedient servant, ’ replied Van.

Pedro had not yet returned from California. Hay fever and dark glasses did not improve G. A. Vronsky’s appearance. Adorno, the star of Hate, brought his new wife, who turned out to have been one of the old (and most beloved wives) of another guest, a considerably more important comedian, who after supper bribed Bouteillan to simulate the arrival of a message necessitating his immediate departure. Grigoriy Akimovich went with him (having come with him in the same rented limousine), leaving Marina, Ada, Adorno and his ironically sniffing Marianne at a card table. They played biryuch, a variety of whist, till a Ladore taxi could be obtained, which was well after 1: 00 a. m.

In the meantime Van changed back to shorts, cloaked himself in the tartan plaid and retired to his bosquet, where the bergamask lamps had not been lit at all that night which had not proved as festive as Marina had expected. He climbed into his hammock and drowsily started reviewing such French-speaking domestics as could have slipped him that ominous but according to Ada meaningless note. The first, obvious choice was hysterical and fantastic Blanche — had there not been her timidity, her fear of being ‘fired’ (he recalled a dreadful scene when she groveled, pleading for mercy, at the feet of Lariviè re, who accused her of ‘stealing’ a bauble that eventually turned up in one of Lariviè re’s own shoes). The ruddy face of Bouteillan and his son’s grin next appeared in the focus of Van’s fancy; but presently he fell asleep, and saw himself on a mountain smothered in snow, with people, trees, and a cow carried down by an avalanche.

Something roused him from that state of evil torpor. At first he thought it was the chill of the dying night, then recognized the slight creak (that had been a scream in his confused nightmare), and raising his head saw a dim light in between the shrubs where the door of the tool room was being pushed ajar from the inside. Ada had never once come there without their prudently planning every step of their infrequent nocturnal trysts. He scrambled out of his hammock and padded toward the light doorway. Before him stood the pale wavering figure of Blanche. She presented an odd sight: bare armed, in her petticoat, one stocking gartered, the other down to her ankle; no slippers; armpits glistening with sweat; she was loosening her hair in a wretched simulacrum of seduction.

‘C’est ma derniè re nuit au châ teau, ’ she said softly, and rephrased it in her quaint English, elegiac and stilted, as spoken only in obsolete novels. ‘‘Tis my last night with thee. ’

‘Your last night? With me? What do you mean? ’ He considered her with the eerie uneasiness one feels when listening to the utterances of delirium or intoxication.

But despite her demented look, Blanche was perfectly lucid. She had made up her mind a couple of days ago to leave Ardis Hall. She had just slipped her demission, with a footnote on the young lady’s conduct, under the door of Madame. She would go in a few hours. She loved him, he was her ‘folly and fever, ’ she wished to spend a few secret moments with him.

He entered the toolroom and slowly closed the door. The slowness had its uncomfortable cause. She had placed her lantern on the rung of a ladder and was already gathering up and lifting her skimpy skirt. Compassion, courtesy and some assistance on her part might have helped him to work up the urge which she took for granted and whose total absence he carefully concealed under his tartan cloak; but quite aside from the fear of infection (Bout had hinted at some of the poor girl’s troubles), a graver matter engrossed him. He diverted her bold hand and sat down on the bench beside her.

Was it she who had placed that note in his jacket?

It was. She had been unable to face departure if he was to remain fooled, deceived, betrayed. She added, in naive brackets, that she had been sure he always desired her, they could talk afterwards. Je suis à toi, c’est bientô t l’aube, your dream has come true.

‘Parlez pour vous, ’ answered Van. ‘I am in no mood for love-making. And I will strangle you, I assure you, if you do not tell me the whole story in every detail, at once. ’

She nodded, fear and adoration in her veiled eyes. When and how had it started? Last August, she said. Votre demoiselle picking flowers, he squiring her through the tall grass, a flute in his hand. Who he? What flute? Mais le musicien allemand, Monsieur Rack. The eager informer had her own swain lying upon her on the other side of the hedge. How anybody could do it with l’immonde Monsieur Rack, who once forgot his waistcoat in a haystack, was beyond the informer’s comprehension. Perhaps because he made songs for her, a very pretty one was once played at a big public ball at the Ladore Casino, it went... Never mind how it went, go on with the story. Monsieur Rack, one starry night, in a boat on the river, was heard by the informer and two gallants in the willow bushes, recounting the melancholy tale of his childhood, of his years of hunger and music and loneliness, and his sweetheart wept and threw her head back and he fed on her bare throat, il la mangeait de baisers dé goû tants. He must have had her not more than a dozen times, he was not as strong as another gentleman — oh, cut it out, said Van — and in winter the young lady learnt he was married, and hated his cruel wife, and in April when he began to give piano lessons to Lucette the affair was resumed, but then —

‘That will do! ’ he cried and, beating his brow with his fist, stumbled out into the sunlight.

It was a quarter to six on the wristwatch hanging from the net of the hammock. His feet were stone cold. He groped for his loafers and walked aimlessly for some time among the trees of the coppice where thrushes were singing so richly, with such sonorous force, such fluty fioriture that one could not endure the agony of consciousness, the filth of life, the loss, the loss, the loss. Gradually, however, he regained a semblance of self-control by the magic method of not allowing the image of Ada to come anywhere near his awareness of himself. This created a vacuum into which rushed a multitude of trivial reflections. A pantomime of rational thought.

He took a tepid shower in the poolside shed, doing everything with comic deliberation, very slowly and cautiously, lest he break the new, unknown, brittle Van born a moment ago. He watched his thoughts revolve, dance, strut, clown a little. He found it delightful to imagine, for instance, that a cake of soap must be solid ambrosia to the ants swarming over it, and what a shock to be drowned in the midst of that orgy. The code, he reflected, did not allow to challenge a person who was not born a gentleman but exceptions might be made for artists, pianists, flutists, and if a coward refused, you could make his gums bleed with repeated slaps or, still better, thrash him with a strong cane — must not forget to choose one in the vestibule closet before leaving forever, forever. Great fun! He relished as something quite special the kind of one-legged jig a naked fellow performs when focusing on the shorts he tries to get into. He sauntered through a side gallery. He ascended the grand staircase. The house was empty, and cool, and smelled of carnations. Good morning, and good-bye, little bedroom. Van shaved, Van pared his toe-nails, Van dressed with exquisite care: gray socks, silk shirt, gray tie, dark-gray suit newly pressed — shoes, ah yes, shoes, mustn’t forget shoes, and without bothering to sort out the rest of his belongings, crammed a score of twenty-dollar gold coins into a chamois purse, distributed handkerchief, checkbook, passport, what else? nothing else, over his rigid person and pinned a note to the pillow asking to have his things packed and forwarded to his father’s address. Son killed by avalanche, no hat found, contraceptives donated to Old Guides’ Home. After the passage of about eight decades all this sounds very amusing and silly — but at the time he was a dead man going through the motions of an imagined dreamer. He bent down with a grunt, cursing his knee, to fix his skis, in the driving snow, on the brink of the slope, but the skis had vanished, the bindings were shoelaces, and the slope, a staircase.

He walked down to the mews and told a young groom, who was almost as drowsy as he, that he wished to go to the railway station in a few minutes. The groom looked perplexed, and Van swore at him.

Wristwatch! He returned to the hammock where it was strapped to the netting. On his way back to the stables, around the house, he happened to look up and saw a black-haired girl of sixteen or so, in yellow slacks and a black bolero, standing on a third-floor balcony and signaling to him. She signaled telegraphically, with expansive linear gestures, indicating the cloudless sky (what a cloudless sky! ), the jacaranda summit in bloom (blue! bloom! ) and her own bare foot raised high and placed on the parapet (have only to put on my sandals! ). Van, to his horror and shame, saw Van wait for her to come down.