Ada, or Ardor

by Vladimir Nabokov

  She tumbled out of her tree like a hoopoe when they all were ready to start. Hurry, hurry, my bird, my angel. The English coachman, Ben Wright, was still stone-sober (having had for breakfast only one pint of ale). Blanche, who had been to a big picnic at least once (when rushed to Pineglen to unlace Mademoiselle, who had fainted), now performed the less glamorous duty of carrying away snarling and writhing Dack to her little room in the turret.

  A charabanc had already conveyed two footmen, three armchairs and a number of hampers to the site of the picnic. The novelist, wearing a white satin dress (made by Vass of Manhattan for Marina who had lately lost ten pounds), with Ada sitting beside her, and Lucette, très en beauté in a white sailor blouse, perched next to sullen Wright, drove there in the calèche. Van rode behind on one of his uncle’s or grand-uncle’s bicycles. The forest road remained reasonably smooth if you kept to its middle run (still sticky and dark after a rainy dawn) between the sky-blue ruts, speckled with the reflections of the same birch leaves whose shadows sped over the taut nacrine silk of Mlle Larivière’s open sunshade and the wide brim of Ada’s rather rakishly donned white hat. Now and then Lucette from beside blue-coated Ben looked back at Van and made slacken-speed little signals with the flat of one hand as she had seen her mother do to Ada when fearing she would crash with her pony or bicycle into the back of the carriage.

  Marina came in a red motorcar of an early “runabout” type, operated by the butler very warily as if it were some fancy variety of corkscrew. She looked unwontedly smart in a man’s gray flannels and sat holding the palm of her gloved hand on the knob of a clouded cane as the car, wobbling a little, arrived at the very edge of the picnic site, a picturesque glade in an old pinewood cut by ravishingly lovely ravines. A strange pale butterfly passed from the opposite side of the woods, along the Lugano dirt road, and was followed presently by a landau from which emerged one by one, nimbly or slowly, depending on age and condition, the Erminin twins, their young pregnant aunt (narrationally a great burden), and a governess, white-haired Mme Forestier, the school friend of Mathilde in a forthcoming story.

  Three adult gentlemen, moreover, were expected but never turned up: Uncle Dan, who missed the morning train from town; Colonel Erminin, a widower, whose liver, he said in a note, was behaving like a pecheneg; and his doctor (and chess partner), the famous Dr. Krolik, who called himself Ada’s court jeweler, and indeed brought her his birthday present early on the following day—three exquisitely carved chrysalids (“Inestimable gems,” cried throatily Ada, tensing her brows), all of which were to yield, before long, specimens of a disappointing ichneumon instead of the Kibo Fritillary, a recently discovered rarity.

  Stacks of tender crustless sandwiches (perfect rectangles five inches by two), the tawny corpse of a turkey, black Russian bread, pots of Gray Bead caviar, candied violets, little raspberry tarts, half a gallon of Goodson white port, another of ruby, watered claret in thermos flasks for the girls, and the cold sweet tea of happy childhoods—all this is more readily imagined than described. One found it instructive [thus in the MS. Ed.].

  One found it instructive to place side by side Ada Veen and Grace Erminin: the skimmed-milk pallor of Ada and her coeval’s healthy hot flush; the straight black witch wench-hair of the one and the brown bob of the other; my love’s lackluster grave eyes and the blue twinkle behind Grace’s horn-rimmed glasses; the former’s naked thigh and the latter’s long red stockings; the gipsy skirt and the sailor suit. Still more instructive, perhaps, was to note how Greg’s plain features had been transposed practically intact into his sister’s aura where they acquired a semblance of girlish “good looks” without impairing the close resemblance between sailor boy and maiden.

  The ruins of the turkey, the port wine which only the governesses had touched, and a broken Sèvres plate were quickly removed by the servants. A cat appeared from under a bush, stared in a shock of intense surprise, and, despite a chorus of “kitty-kitty,” vanished.

  Presently Mlle Larivière asked Ada to accompany her to a secluded spot. There, the fully clad lady, with her voluminous dress retaining its stately folds but grown as it were an inch longer so that it now hid her prunella shoes, stood stock-still over a concealed downpour and a moment later reverted to her normal height. On their way back, the well-meaning pedagogue explained to Ada that a girl’s twelfth birthday was a suitable occasion to discuss and foresee a thing which, she said, was going to make a grande fille of Ada any day now. Ada, who had been sufficiently instructed about it by a schoolteacher six months earlier, and who in fact had had it already twice, now astounded her poor governess (who could never cope with Ada’s sharp and strange mind) by declaring that it was all bluff and nuns’ nonsense; that those things hardly ever happened to normal girls today and would certainly not occur in her case. Mlle Larivière, who was a remarkably stupid person (in spite or perhaps because of her propensity for novelizing), mentally passed in review her own experience and wondered for a few dreadful minutes if perhaps, while she indulged in the arts, the progress of science had not changed that of nature.

  The early afternoon sun found new places to brighten and old places to toast. Aunt Ruth dozed with her head on an ordinary bed pillow provided by Mme Forestier, who was knitting a tiny jersey for her charges’ future half-sibling. Lady Erminin, through the bothersome afterhaze of suicide, was, reflected Marina, looking down, with old wistfulness and an infant’s curiosity, at the picnickers, under the glorious pine verdure, from the Persian blue of her abode of bliss. The children displayed their talents: Ada and Grace danced a Russian fling to the accompaniment of an ancient music box (which kept halting in mid-bar, as if recalling other shores, other, radial, waves); Lucette, one fist on her hip, sang a St. Malô fisher-song; Greg put on his sister’s blue skirt, hat and glasses, all of which transformed him into a very sick, mentally retarded Grace; and Van walked on his hands.

  Two years earlier, when about to begin his first prison term at the fashionable and brutal boarding school, to which other Veens had gone before him (as far back as the days “when Washingtonias were Wellingtonias”), Van had resolved to study some striking stunt that would give him an immediate and brilliant ascendancy. Accordingly, after a conference with Demon, King Wing, the latter’s wrestling master, taught the strong lad to walk on his hands by means of a special play of the shoulder muscles, a trick that necessitated for its acquirement and improvement nothing short of a dislocation of the caryatics.

  What pleasure (thus in the MS.). The pleasure of suddenly discovering the right knack of topsy-turvy locomotion was rather like learning to man, after many a painful and ignominious fall, those delightful gliders called Magicarpets (or “jikkers”) that were given a boy on his twelfth birthday in the adventurous days before the Great Reaction—and then what a breathtaking long neural caress when one became airborne for the first time and managed to skim over a haystack, a tree, a burn, a barn, while Grandfather Dedalus Veen, running with upturned face, flourished a flag and fell into the horsepond.

  Van peeled off his polo shirt and took off his shoes and socks. The slenderness of his torso, matching in tint if not in texture, the tan of his tight shorts, contrasted with the handsome boy’s abnormally developed deltoids and sinewy forearms. Four years later Van could stun a man with one blow of either elbow.

  His reversed body gracefully curved, his brown legs hoisted like a Tarentine sail, his joined ankles tacking, Van gripped with splayed hands the brow of gravity, and moved to and fro, veering and sidestepping, opening his mouth the wrong way, and blinking in the odd bilboquet fashion peculiar to eyelids in his abnormal position. Even more extraordinary than the variety and velocity of the movements he made in imitation of animal hind legs was the effortlessness of his stance; King Wing warned him that Vekchelo, a Yukon professional, lost it by the time he was twenty-two; but that summer afternoon, on the silky ground of the pineglade, in the magical heart of Ardis, under Lady Erminin’s blue eye, fourteen-year-old Van treated us to the g
reatest performance we have ever seen a brachiambulant give. Not the faintest flush showed on his face or neck! Now and then, when he detached his organs of locomotion from the lenient ground, and seemed actually to clap his hands in midair, in a miraculous parody of a ballet jump, one wondered if this dreamy indolence of levitation was not a result of the earth’s canceling its pull in a fit of absentminded benevolence. Incidentally, one curious consequence of certain muscular changes and osteal “reclicks” caused by the special training with which Wing had racked him was Van’s inability in later years to shrug his shoulders.

  Questions for study and discussion:

  1. Did both palms leave the ground when Van, while reversed, seemed actually to “skip” on his hands?

  2. Was Van’s adult incapacity to “shrug” things off only physical or did it “correspond” to some archetypal character of his “undersoul”?

  3. Why did Ada burst into tears at the height of Van’s performance?

  Finally Mlle Larivière read her La Rivière de Diamants, a story she had just typed out for The Quebec Quarterly. The pretty and refined wife of a seedy clerk borrows a necklace from a wealthy woman friend. On the way home from the office party she loses it. For thirty or forty horrible years the unfortunate husband and wife labor and economize to repay the debts they accumulated in the purchase of a half-million-franc necklace which they had secretly substituted for the lost one when returning the jewelbox to Mme F. Oh, how Mathilde’s heart fluttered—would Jeanne open the box? She did not. When decrepit but victorious (he, half-paralyzed by a half-century of copie in their mansarde, she, unrecognizably coarsened by the washing of floors à grand eau), they confess everything to a white-haired but still young-looking Mme F. the latter tells them, in the last phrase of the tale: “But, my poor Mathilde, the necklace was false: it cost only five hundred francs!”

  Marina’s contribution was more modest, but it too had its charm. She showed Van and Lucette (the others knew all about it) the exact pine and the exact spot on its rugged red trunk where in old, very old days a magnetic telephone nested, communicating with Ardis Hall. After the banning of “currents and circuits,” she said (rapidly but freely, with an actress’s désinvolture pronouncing those not quite proper words—while puzzled Lucette tugged at the sleeve of Van, of Vanichka, who could explain everything), her husband’s grandmother, an engineer of great genius, “tubed” the Redmont rill (running just below the glade from a hill above Ardis). She made it carry vibrational vibgyors (prismatic pulsations) through a system of platinum segments. These produced, of course, only one-way messages, and the installation and upkeep of the “drums” (cylinders) cost, she said, a Jew’s eye, so that the idea was dropped, however tempting the possibility of informing a picnicking Veen that his house was on fire.

  As if to confirm many people’s discontent with national and international policies (old Gamaliel was by now pretty gaga), the little red car came chugging back from Ardis Hall and the butler jumped out with a message. Monsieur had just arrived with a birthday present for Mademoiselle Ada, but nobody could figure out how the complicated object worked, and Madame must help. The butler had brought a letter which he now placed on a pocket tray and presented to Marina.

  We cannot reconstitute the exact wording of the message, but we know it said that this thoughtful and very expensive gift was a huge beautiful doll—unfortunately, and strangely, more or less naked; still more strangely, with a braced right leg and a bandaged left arm, and a boxful of plaster jackets and rubber accessories, instead of the usual frocks and frills. Directions in Russian or Bulgarian made no sense because they were not in the modern Roman, but in the old Cyrillitsa, a nightmare alphabet which Dan had never been able to master. Could Marina come over at once to have suitable doll clothes cut out of some nice silk discards her maid had collected in a drawer he had discovered and wrap the box again in fresh tissue paper?

  Ada, who had been reading the note over her mother’s shoulder, shuddered and said:

  “You tell him to take a pair of tongs and carry the whole business to the surgical dump.”

  “Bednyachok! Poor, poor little man,” exclaimed Marina, her eyes brimming with pity. “Of course I’ll come. Your cruelty, Ada, is sometimes, sometimes, I don’t know—satanic!”

  Briskly walking her long cane, her face twitching with nervous resolution, Marina marched toward the vehicle, which presently moved, turning and knocking over an empty half-gallon bottle as its fender leafed through an angry burnberry bush in order to avoid the parked calèche.

  But whatever wrath there hung in the air, it soon subsided. Ada asked her governess for pencils and paper. Lying on his stomach, leaning his cheek on his hand, Van looked at his love’s inclined neck as she played anagrams with Grace, who had innocently suggested “insect.”

  “Scient,” said Ada, writing it down.

  “Oh no!” objected Grace.

  “Oh yes! I’m sure it exists. He is a great scient. Dr. Entsic was scient in insects.”

  Grace meditated, tapping her puckered brow with the eraser end of the pencil, and came up with:

  “Nicest!”

  “Incest,” said Ada instantly.

  “I give up,” said Grace. “We need a dictionary to check your little inventions.”

  But the glow of the afternoon had entered its most oppressive phase, and the first bad mosquito of the season was resonantly slain on Ada’s shin by alert Lucette. The charabanc had already left with the armchairs, the hampers and the munching footmen, Essex, Middlesex and Somerset; and now Mlle Larivière and Mme Forestier were exchanging melodious adieux. Hands waved, and the twins with their ancient governess and sleepy young aunt were carried away in the landau. A pale diaphanous butterfly with a very black body followed them and Ada cried “Look!” and explained it was closely related to a Japanese Parnassian. Mlle Larivière said suddenly she would use a pseudonym when publishing the story. She led her two pretty charges toward the calèche and poked sans façons in his fat red neck with the point of her parasol Ben Wright, grossly asleep in the back under the low-hanging festoons of foliage. Ada tossed her hat into Ida’s lap and ran back to where Van stood. Being unfamiliar with the itinerary of sun and shade in the clearing, he had left his bicycle to endure the blazing beams for at least three hours. Ada mounted it, uttered a yelp of pain, almost fell off, googled, recovered—and the rear tire burst with a comic bang.

  The discomfitured machine was abandoned under a shrub to be fetched later by Bouteillan Junior, yet another household character. Lucette refused to give up her perch (accepting with a bland little nod the advice of her drunken boxfellow who was seen to touch her bare knees with a good-natured paw); and there being no strapontin, Ada had to content herself with Van’s hard lap.

  It was the children’s first bodily contact and both were embarrassed. She settled down with her back to Van, resettled as the carriage jerked, and wriggled some more, arranging her ample pine-smelling skirt, which seemed to envelop him airily, for all the world like a barber’s sheet. In a trance of awkward delight he held her by the hips. Hot gouts of sun moved fast across her zebra stripes and the backs of her bare arms and seemed to continue their journey through the tunnel of his own frame.

  “Why did you cry?” he asked, inhaling her hair and the heat of her ear. She turned her head and for a moment looked at him closely, in cryptic silence.

  (Did I? I don’t know—it upset me somehow. I can’t explain it, but I felt there was something dreadful, brutal, dark, and, yes, dreadful, about the whole thing. A later note.)

  “I’m sorry,” he said as she looked away, “I’ll never do it again in your presence.”

  (By the way, that “for all the world,” I detest the phrase. Another note in Ada’s late hand.)

  With his entire being, the boiling and brimming lad relished her weight as he felt it responding to every bump of the road by softly parting in two and crushing beneath it the core of the longing which he knew he had to control lest a possible s
eep perplex her innocence. He would have yielded and melted in animal laxity had not the girl’s governess saved the situation by addressing him. Poor Van shifted Ada’s bottom to his right knee, blunting what used to be termed in the jargon of the torture house “the angle of agony.” In the mournful dullness of unconsummated desire he watched a row of izbas straggle by as the calèche drove through Gamlet, a hamlet.

  “I can never get used (m’y faire)” said Mlle Laparure, “to the contrast between the opulence of nature and the squalor of human life. See that old moujik décharné with that rent in his shirt, see his miserable cabane. And see that agile swallow! How happy, nature, how unhappy, man! Neither of you told me how you liked my new story? Van?”

  “It’s a good fairy tale,” said Van.

  “It’s a fairy tale,” said careful Ada.

  “Allons donc!” cried Mlle Larivière. “On the contrary—every detail is realistic. We have here the drama of the petty bourgeois, with all his class cares and class dreams and class pride.”

  (True; that might have been the intent—apart from the pointe assassine; but the story lacked “realism” within its own terms, since a punctilious, penny-counting employee would have found out, first of all, no matter how, quitte à tout dire à la veuve, what exactly the lost necklace had cost. That was the fatal flaw in the Larivière pathos-piece, but at the time young Van and younger Ada could not quite grope for that point although they felt instinctively the falsity of the whole affair.)

  A slight commotion took place on the box. Lucette turned around and spoke to Ada.

  “I want to sit with you. Mne tut neudobno, i ot nego nehorosho pakhnet (I’m uncomfortable here, and he does not smell good).”

  “We’ll be there in a moment,” retorted Ada, “poterpi (have a little patience).”