Vladimir Nabokov Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle 19 страница

That day came soon enough. After a long journey down corridors where pretty little things tripped by, shaking thermometers, and first an ascent and then a descent in two different lifts, the second of which was very capacious with a metal-handled black lid propped against its wall and bits of holly or laurel here and there on the soap-smelling floor, Dorofey, like Onegin’s coachman, said priehali (‘we have arrived’) and gently propelled Van, past two screened beds, toward a third one near the window. There he left Van, while he seated himself at a small table in the door corner and leisurely unfolded the Russian-language newspaper Golos (Logos).

‘I am Van Veen — in case you are no longer lucid enough to recognize somebody you have seen only twice. Hospital records put your age at thirty; I thought you were younger, but even so that is a very early age for a person to die — whatever he be tvoyu mat’ — half-baked genius or full-fledged scoundrel, or both. As you may guess by the plain but thoughtful trappings of this quiet room, you are an incurable case in one lingo, a rotting rat in another. No oxygen gadget can help you to eschew the " agony of agony" — Professor Lamort’s felicitous pleonasm. The physical torments you will be, or indeed are, experiencing must be prodigious, but are nothing in comparison to those of a probable hereafter. The mind of man, by nature a monist, cannot accept two nothings; he knows there has been one nothing, his biological inexistence in the infinite past, for his memory is utterly blank, and that nothingness, being, as it were, past, is not too hard to endure. But a second nothingness — which perhaps might not be so hard to bear either — is logically unacceptable. When speaking of space we can imagine a live speck in the limitless oneness of space; but there is no analogy in such a concept with our brief life in time, because however brief (a thirty-year span is really obscenely brief! ), our awareness of being is not a dot in eternity, but a slit, a fissure, a chasm running along the entire breadth of metaphysical time, bisecting it and shining — no matter how narrowly — between the back panel and fore panel. Therefore, Mr Rack, we can speak of past time, and in a vaguer, but familiar sense, of future time, but we simply cannot expect a second nothing, a second void, a second blank. Oblivion is a one-night performance; we have been to it once, there will be no repeat. We must face therefore the possibility of some prolonged form of disorganized consciousness and this brings me to my main point, Mr Rack. Eternal Rack, infinite " Rackness" may not be much but one thing is certain: the only consciousness that persists in the hereafter is the consciousness of pain. The little Rack of today is the infinite rack of tomorrow — ich bin ein unverbesserlicher Witzbold. We can imagine — I think we should imagine — tiny clusters of particles still retaining Rack’s personality, gathering here and there in the here-and-there-after, clinging to each other, somehow, somewhere, a web of Rack’s toothaches here, a bundle of Rack’s nightmares there — rather like tiny groups of obscure refugees from some obliterated country huddling together for a little smelly warmth, for dingy charities or shared recollections of nameless tortures’ in Tartar camps. For an old man one special little torture must be to wait in a long long queue before a remote urinal. Well, Herr Rack, I submit that the surviving cells of aging Rackness will form such lines of torment, never, never reaching the coveted filth hole in the panic and pain of infinite night. You may answer, of course, if you are versed in contemporary novelistics, and if you fancy the jargon of English writers, that a ‘lower-middle-class’ piano tuner who falls in love with a fast ‘upper-class’ girl, thereby destroying his own family, is not committing a crime deserving the castigation which a chance intruder —’

With a not unfamiliar gesture, Van tore up his prepared speech and said:

‘Mr Rack, open your eyes. I’m Van Veen. A visitor. ’

The hollow-cheeked, long-jawed face, wax-pale, with a fattish nose and a small round chin, remained expressionless for a moment; but the beautiful, amber, liquid, eloquent eyes with pathetically long lashes had opened. Then a faint smile glimmered about his mouth parts, and he stretched one hand, without raising his head from the oil-cloth-covered pillow (why oil-cloth? ).

Van, from his chair, extended the end of his cane, which the weak hand took, and palpated politely, thinking it was a well-meant offer of support. ‘No, I am not yet able to walk a few steps, ’ Rack said quite distinctly, with the German accent which would probably constitute his most durable group of ghost cells.

Van drew in his useless weapon. Controlling himself, he thumped it against the footboard of his wheelchair. Dorofey glanced up from his paper, then went back to the article that engrossed him — ‘A Clever Piggy (from the memoirs of an animal trainer), ’ or else ‘The Crimean War: Tartar Guerillas Help Chinese Troops. ’ A diminutive nurse simultaneously stepped out from behind the farther screen and disappeared again.

Will he ask me to transmit a message? Shall I refuse? Shall I consent — and not transmit it?

‘Have they all gone to Hollywood already? Please, tell me, Baron von Wien. ’

‘I don’t know, ’ answered Van. ‘They probably have. I really —’

‘Because I sent my last flute melody, and a letter for all the family, and no answer has come. I must vomit now. I ring myself. ’

The diminutive nurse on tremendously high white heels pulled forward the screen of Rack’s bed, separating him from the melancholy, lightly wounded, stitched-up, clean-shaven young dandy; who was rolled out and away by efficient Dorofey.

Upon returning to his cool bright room, with the rain and the sun mingling in the half-open window, Van walked on rather ephemeral feet to the looking-glass, smiled to himself in welcome, and without Dorofey’s assistance went back to bed. Lovely Tatiana glided in, and asked if he wanted some tea.

‘My darling, ’ he said, ‘I want you. Look at this tower of strength! ’

‘If you knew, ’ she said, over her shoulder, ‘how many prurient patients have insulted me — exactly that way. ’

He wrote Cordula a short letter, saying he had met with a little accident, was in the suite for fallen princes in Lakeview Hospital, Kalugano, and would be at her feet on Tuesday. He also wrote an even shorter letter to Marina, in French, thanking her for a lovely summer. This, on second thought, he decided to send from Manhattan to the Pisang Palace Hotel in Los Angeles. A third letter he addressed to Bernard Rattner, his closest friend at Chose, the great Rattner’s nephew. ‘Your uncle has most honest standards, ’ he wrote, in part, ‘but I am going to demolish him soon. ’

On Monday around noon he was allowed to sit in a deckchair, on the lawn, which he had avidly gazed at for some days from his window. Dr Fitzbishop had said, rubbing his hands, that the Luga laboratory said it was the not always lethal ‘arethusoides’ but it had no practical importance now, because the unfortunate music teacher, and composer, was not expected to spend another night on Demonia, and would be on Terra, ha-ha, in time for evensong. Doc Fitz was what Russians call a poshlyak (‘pretentious vulgarian’) and in some obscure counter-fashion Van was relieved not to be able to gloat over the wretched Rack’s martyrdom.

A large pine tree cast its shadow upon him and his book. He had borrowed it from a shelf holding a medley of medical manuals, tattered mystery tales, the Riviè re de Diamants collection of Monparnasse stories, and this odd volume of the Journal of Modern Science with a difficult essay by Ripley, ‘The Structure of Space. ’ He had been wrestling with its phoney formulas and diagrams for several days now and saw he would not be able to assimilate it completely before his release from Lakeview Hospital on the morrow.

A hot sunfleck reached him. and tossing the red volume aside, he got up from his chair. With the return of health the image of Ada kept rising within him like a bitter and brilliant wave, ready to swallow him. His bandages had been removed; nothing but a special vest-like affair of flannel enveloped his torso, and though it was tight and thick it did not protect him any longer from the poisoned point of Ardis. Arrowhead Manor. Le Châ teau de la Flè che, Flesh Hall.

He strolled on the shade-streaked lawn feeling much too warm in his black pajamas and dark-red dressing gown. A brick wall separated his part of the garden from the street and a little way off an open gateway allowed an asphalt drive to curve toward the main entrance of the long hospital building. He was on the point of returning to his deckchair when a smart, pale-gray four-door sedan glided in and stopped before him. The door flew open, before the chauffeur, an elderly man in tunic and breeches, had time to hand out Cordula, who now ran like a ballerina toward Van. He hugged her in a frenzy of welcome, kissing her rosy hot face and kneading her soft catlike body through her black silk dress: what a delicious surprise!

She had come all the way from Manhattan, at a hundred kilometers an hour, fearing he might have already left, though he said it would be tomorrow.

‘Idea! ’ he cried. ‘Take me back with you, right away. Yes, just as I am! ’

‘Okay, ’ she said, ‘come and stay at my flat, there’s a beautiful guest room for you. ’

She was a good sport — little Cordula de Prey. Next moment he was sitting beside her in the car, which was backing gateward. Two nurses came running and gesturing toward them, and the chauffeur asked in French if the Countess wished him to stop.

‘Non, non, non! ’ cried Van in high glee and they sped away.

Panting, Cordula said:

‘My mother rang me up from Malorukino’ (their country estate at Malbrook, Mayne): ‘the local papers said you had fought a duel. You look a tower of health, I’m so glad. I knew something nasty must have happened because little Russel, Dr Platonov’s grandson — remember? — saw you from his side of the train beating up an officer on the station platform. But, first of all, Van, net, pozhaluysta, on nas vidit (no, please, he sees us), I have some very bad news for you. Young Fraser, who has just been flown back from Yalta, saw Percy killed on the second day of the invasion, less than a week after they had left Goodson airport. He will tell you the whole story himself, it accumulates more and more dreadful details with every telling, Fraser does not seem to have shined in the confusion, that’s why, I suppose, he keeps straightening things out. ’

(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. ‘Bednï y, bednï y’ (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 tofinish his job and go. But, of course, an invaluable detail in that strip of thought would have been — perhaps, next tothe pitcher peri — a glint, a shadow, a stab of Ardis. )

‘How strange, how strange, ’ murmured Van when Cordula had finished her much less elaborate version of the report Van later got from Bill Fraser.

What a strange coincidence! Either Ada’s lethal shafts were at work, or he, Van, had somehow managed to dispatch her two wretched lovers in a duel with a dummy.

Strange, too, that he felt nothing special, except, perhaps, a kind of neutral wonder, as he listened to little Cordula. A one-track man in matters of soft passion, strange Van, strange Demon’s son, was at the moment much more anxious to enjoy Cordula as soon as humanly and humanely possible, as soon as satanically and viatically feasible, than to keep deploring the fate of a fellow he hardly knew; and although Cordula’s blue eyes flashed with tears once or twice, he knew perfectly well that she had never seen much of her second cousin and, in point of fact, had rather disliked him.

Cordula told Edmond: ‘Arrê tez prè s de what’s-it-called, yes, Albion, le store pour messieurs, in Luga’; and as peeved Van remonstrated: ‘You can’t go back to civilization in pajamas, ’ she said firmly. ‘I shall buy you some clothes, while Edmond has a mug of coffee. ’

She bought him a pair of trousers, and a raincoat. He had been waiting impatiently in the parked car and now under the pretext of changing into his new clothes asked her to drive him to some secluded spot, while Edmond, wherever he was, had another mug.

As soon as they reached a suitable area he transferred Cordula to his lap and had her very comfortably, with such howls of enjoyment that she felt touched and flattered.

‘Reckless Cordula, ’ observed reckless Cordula cheerfully; ‘this will probably mean another abortion — encore un petit enfantô me, as my poor aunt’s maid used to wail every time it happened to her. Did I say anything wrong? ’

‘Nothing wrong, ’ said Van, kissing her tenderly; and they drove back to the diner.

Van spent a medicinal month in Cordula’s Manhattan flat on Alexis Avenue. She dutifully visited her mother at their Malbrook castle two or three times a week, unescorted by Van either there or to the numerous social ‘flits’ she attended in town, being a frivolous fun-loving little thing; but some parties she canceled, and resolutely avoided seeing her latest lover (the fashionable psychotechnician Dr F. S. Fraser, a cousin of the late P. de P. ’s fortunate fellow soldier). Several times Van talked on the dorophone with his father (who pursued an extensive study of Mexican spas and spices) and did several errands for him in town. He often took Cordula to French restaurants, English movies, and Varangian tragedies, all of which was most satisfying, for she relished every morsel, every sip, every jest, every sob, and he found ravishing the velvety rose of her cheeks, and the azure-pure iris of her festively painted eyes to which indigo-black thick lashes, lengthening and upcurving at the outer canthus, added what fashion called the ‘harlequin slant. ’

One Sunday, while Cordula was still lolling in her perfumed bath (a lovely, oddly unfamiliar sight, which he delighted in twice a day), Van ‘in the nude’ (as his new sweetheart drolly genteelized ‘naked’), attempted for the first time after a month’s abstinence to walk on his hands. He felt strong, and fit, and blithely turned over to the ‘first position’ in the middle of the sun-drenched terrace. Next moment he was sprawling on his back. He tried again and lost his balance at once. He had the terrifying, albeit illusionary, feeling that his left arm was now shorter than his right, and Van wondered wrily if he ever would be able to dance on his hands again. King Wing had warned him that two or three months without practice might result in an irretrievable loss of the rare art. On the same day (the two nasty little incidents thus remained linked up in his mind forever) Van happened to answer the ‘phone — a deep hollow voice which he thought was a man’s wanted Cordula, but the caller turned out to be an old schoolmate, and Cordula feigned limpid delight, while making big eyes at Van over the receiver, and invented a number of unconvincing engagements.

‘It’s a gruesome girl! ’ she cried after the melodious adieux. ‘Her name is Vanda Broom, and I learned only recently what I never suspected at school — she’s a regular tribadka — poor Grace Erminin tells me Vanda used to make constant passes at her and at — at another girl. There’s her picture here, ’ continued Cordula with a quick change of tone, producing a daintily bound and prettily printed graduation album of Spring, 1887, which Van had seen at Ardis, but in which he had not noticed the somber beetle-browed unhappy face of that particular girl, and now it did not matter any more, and Cordula quickly popped the book back into a drawer; but he remembered very well that among the various more or less coy contributions it contained a clever pastiche by Ada Veen mimicking Tolstoy’s paragraph rhythm and chapter closings; he saw clearly in mind her prim photo under which she had added one of her characteristic jingles:

In the old manor, I’ve parodied

Every veranda and room,

And jacarandas at Arrowhead

In supernatural bloom.

It did not matter, it did not matter. Destroy and forget! But a butterfly in the Park, an orchid in a shop window, would revive everything with a dazzling inward shock of despair.

His main industry consisted of research at the great granite-pillared Public Library, that admirable and formidable palace a few blocks from Cordula’s cosy flat. One is irresistibly tempted to compare the strange longings and nauseous qualms that enter into the complicated ecstasies accompanying the making of a young writer’s first book with childbearing. Van had only reached the bridal stage; then, to develop the metaphor, would come the sleeping car of messy defloration; then the first balcony of honeymoon breakfasts, with the first wasp. In no sense could Cordula be compared to a writer’s muse but the evening stroll back to her apartment was pleasantly saturated with the afterglow and afterthought of the accomplished task and the expectation of her caresses; he especially looked forward to those nights when they had an elaborate repast sent up from ‘Monaco, ’ a good restaurant in the entresol of the tall building crowned by her penthouse and its spacious terrace. The sweet banality of their little mé nage sustained him much more securely than the company of his constantly agitated and fiery father did at their rare meetings in town or was to do during a fortnight in Paris before the next term at Chose. Except gossip — gossamer gossip — Cordula had no conversation and that also helped. She had instinctively realized very soon that she should never mention Ada or Ardis. He, on his part, accepted the evident fact that she did not really love him. Her small, clear, soft, well-padded and rounded body was delicious to stroke, and her frank amazement at the variety and vigor of his love-making anointed what still remained of poor Van’s crude virile pride. She would doze off between two kisses. When he could not sleep, as now often happened, he retired to the sitting room and sat there annotating his authors or else he would walk up and down the open terrace, under a haze of stars, in severely restricted meditation, till the first tramcar jangled and screeched in the dawning abyss of the city.

When in early September Van Veen left Manhattan for Lute, she was pregnant.