Ada, or Ardor

by Vladimir Nabokov

  A particular nuisance was the angry or disdainful looking up of dubious words in a number of lexicons, sitting, standing and sprawling around the girls, on the floor, under Lucette’s chair upon which she knelt, on the divan, on the big round table with the board and the blocks and on an adjacent chest of drawers. The rivalry between moronic Ozhegov (a big, blue, badly bound volume, containing 52,872 words) and a small but chippy Edmundson in Dr. Gerschizhevsky’s reverent version, the taciturnity of abridged brutes and the unconventional magnanimity of a four-volume Dahl (“My darling dahlia,” moaned Ada as she obtained an obsolete cant word from the gentle long-bearded ethnographer)—all this would have been insupportably boring to Van had he not been stung as a scientist by the curious affinity between certain aspects of Scrabble and those of the planchette. He became aware of it one August evening in 1884 on the nursery balcony, under a sunset sky the last fire of which snaked across the corner of the reservoir, stimulated the last swifts, and intensified the hue of Lucette’s copper curls. The morocco board had been unfolded on a much inkstained, monogrammed and notched deal table. Pretty Blanche, also touched, on earlobe and thumbnail, with the evening’s pink—and redolent with the perfume called Miniver Musk by handmaids—had brought a still unneeded lamp. Lots had been cast, Ada had won the right to begin, and was in the act of collecting one by one, mechanically and unthinkingly, her seven “luckies” from the open case where the blocks lay face down, showing nothing but their anonymous black backs, each in its own cell of flavid velvet. She was speaking at the same time, saying casually: “I would much prefer the Benten lamp here but it is out of kerosin. Pet (addressing Lucette), be a good scout, call her—Good Heavens!”

  The seven letters she had taken, S,R,E,N,O,K,I, and was sorting out in her spektrik (the little trough of japanned wood each player had before him) now formed in quick and, as it were, self-impulsed rearrangement the key word of the chance sentence that had attended their random assemblage.

  Another time, in the bay of the library, on a thundery evening (a few hours before the barn burned), a succession of Lucette’s blocks formed the amusing VANIADA, and from this she extracted the very piece of furniture she was in the act of referring to in a peevish little voice: “But I, too, perhaps, would like to sit on the divan.”

  Soon after that, as so often occurs with games, and toys, and vacational friendships, that seem to promise an eternal future of fun, Flavita followed the bronze and blood-red trees into the autumn mists; then the black box was mislaid, was forgotten—and accidentally rediscovered (among boxes of table silver) four years later, shortly before Lucette’s visit to town where she spent a few days with her father in mid-July, 1888. It so happened that this was to be the last game of Flavita that the three young Veens were ever to play together. Either because it happened to end in a memorable record for Ada, or because Van took some notes in the hope—not quite unfulfilled—of “catching sight of the lining of time” (which, as he was later to write, is “the best informal definition of portents and prophecies”), the last round of that particular game remained vividly clear in his mind.

  “Je ne peux rien faire,” wailed Lucette, “mais rien—with my idiotie Buchstaben, REMNILK, LINKREM …”

  “Look,” whispered Van, “c’est tout simple, shift those two syllables and you get a fortress in ancient Muscovy.”

  “Oh, no,” said Ada, wagging her finger at the height of her temple in a way she had. “Oh, no. That pretty word does not exist in Russian. A Frenchman invented it. There is no second syllable.”

  “Ruth for a little child?” interposed Van.

  “Ruthless!” cried Ada.

  “Well,” said Van, “you can always make a little cream, KREM or KREME—or even better—there’s KREMLI, which means Yukon prisons. Go through her ORHIDEYa.”

  “Through her silly orchid,” said Lucette.

  “And now,” said Ada, “Adochka is going to do something even sillier.” And taking advantage of a cheap letter recklessly sown sometime before in the seventh compartment of the uppermost fertile row, Ada, with a deep sigh of pleasure, composed the adjective TORFYaNUYu which went through a brown square at F and through two red squares (37×9 = 333 points) and got a bonus of 50 (for placing all seven blocks at one stroke) which made 383 in all, the highest score ever obtained for one word by a Russian Scrabbler. “There!” she said, “Ouf! Pas facile.” And brushing away with the rosy knuckles of her white hand the black-bronze hair from her temple, she recounted her monstrous points in a smug, melodious tone of voice like a princess narrating the poison-cup killing of a superfluous lover, while Lucette fixed Van with a mute, fuming appeal against life’s injustice—and then looking again at the board emitted a sudden howl of hope:

  “It’s a place name! One can’t use it! It’s the name of the first little station after Ladore Bridge!”

  “That’s right, pet,” sang out Ada. “Oh, pet, you are so right! Yes, Torfyanaya, or as Blanche says, La Tourbière, is, indeed, the pretty but rather damp village where our cendrillon’s family lives. But, mon petit, in our mother’s tongue—que dis-je, in the tongue of a maternal grandmother we all share—a rich beautiful tongue which my pet should not neglect for the sake of a Canadian brand of French—this quite ordinary adjective means ‘peaty,’ feminine gender, accusative case. Yes, that one coup has earned me nearly 400. Too bad—ne dotyanula (didn’t quite make it).”

  “Ne dotyanula!” Lucette complained to Van, her nostrils flaring, her shoulders shaking with indignation.

  He tilted her chair to make her slide off and go. The poor child’s final score for the fifteen rounds or so of the game was less than half of her sister’s last masterstroke, and Van had hardly fared better, but who cared! The bloom streaking Ada’s arm, the pale blue of the veins in its hollow, the charred-wood odor of her hair shining brownly next to the lampshade’s parchment (a translucent lakescape with Japanese dragons), scored infinitely more points than those tensed fingers bunched on the pencil stub could ever add up in the past, present or future.

  “The loser will go straight to bed,” said Van merrily, “and stay there, and we shall go down and fetch her—in exactly ten minutes—a big cup (the dark-blue cup!) of cocoa (sweet, dark, skinless Cadbury cocoa!).”

  “I’m not going anywhere,” said Lucette, folding her arms. “First, because it is only half-past eight, and, second, because I know perfectly well why you want to get rid of me.”

  “Van,” said Ada, after a slight pause, “will you please summon Mademoiselle; she’s working with Mother over a script which cannot be more stupid than this nasty child is.”

  “I would like to know,” said Van, “the meaning of her interesting observation. Ask her, Ada dear.”

  “She thinks we are going to play Scrabble without her,” said Ada, “or, go through those Oriental gymnastics which, you remember, Van, you began teaching me, as you remember.”

  “Oh, I remember! You remember I showed you what my teacher of athletics, you remember his name, King Wing, taught me.”

  “You remember a lot, ha-ha,” said Lucette, standing in front of them in her green pajamas, sun-tanned chest bare, legs parted, arms akimbo.

  “Perhaps the simplest—” began Ada.

  “The simplest answer,” said Lucette, “is that you two can’t tell me why exactly you want to get rid of me.”

  “Perhaps the simplest answer,” continued Ada, “is for you, Van, to give her a vigorous, resounding spanking.”

  “I dare you!” cried Lucette, and veered invitingly.

  Very gently Van stroked the silky top of her head and kissed her behind the ear; and, bursting into a hideous storm of sobs, Lucette rushed out of the room. Ada locked the door after her.

  “She’s an utterly mad and depraved gipsy nymphet, of course,” said Ada, “yet we must be more careful than ever … oh terribly, terribly, terribly … oh, careful, my darling.”

  37

  It was raining. The lawns looked greener, and the reservoir gra
yer, in the dull prospect before the library bay window. Clad in a black training suit, with two yellow cushions propped under his head, Van lay reading Rattner on Terra, a difficult and depressing work. Every now and then he glanced at the autumnally tocking tall clock above the bald pate of tan Tartary as represented on a large old globe in the fading light of an afternoon that would have suited early October better than early July. Ada, wearing an unfashionable belted macintosh that he disliked, with her handbag on a strap over one shoulder, had gone to Kaluga for the whole day—officially to try on some clothes, unofficially to consult Dr. Krolik’s cousin, the gynecologist Seitz (or “Zayats,” as she transliterated him mentally since it also belonged, as Dr. “Rabbit” did, to the leporine group in Russian pronunciation). Van was positive that not once during a month of love-making had he failed to take all necessary precautions, sometimes rather bizarre, but incontestably trustworthy, and had lately acquired the sheathlike contraceptive device that in Ladore county only barbershops, for some odd but ancient reason, were allowed to sell. Still he felt anxious—and was cross with his anxiety—and Rattner, who halfheartedly denied any objective existence to the sibling planet in his text, but grudgingly accepted it in obscure notes (inconveniently placed between chapters), seemed as dull as the rain that could be discerned slanting in parallel pencil lines against the darker background of a larch plantation, borrowed, Ada contended, from Mansfield Park.

  At ten minutes to five, Bout quietly came in with a lighted kerosene lamp and an invitation from Marina for a chat in her room. As Bout passed by the globe he touched it and looked with disapproval at his smudged finger. “The world is dusty,” he said. “Blanche should be sent back to her native village. Elle est folle et mauvaise, cette fille.”

  “Okay, okay,” muttered Van, going back to his book. Bout left the room, still shaking his silly cropped head, and Van, yawning, allowed Rattner to slide down from the black divan on to the black carpet.

  When he looked up again at the clock, it was gathering its strength to strike. He hastily got up from his couch recalling that Blanche had just come in to ask him to complain to Marina that Mile Ada had again refused to give her a lift to “Beer Tower,” as local jokers called her poor village. For a few moments the brief dim dream was so closely fused with the real event that even when he recalled Bout’s putting his finger on the rhomboid peninsula where the Allies had just landed (as proclaimed by the Ladore newspaper spread-eagled on the library table), he still clearly saw Blanche wiping Crimea clean with one of Ada’s lost handkerchiefs. He swarmed up the cochlea to the nursery water-closet; heard from afar the governess and her wretched pupil recite speeches from the horrible “Berenice” (a contralto croak alternating with a completely expressionless little voice); and decided that Blanche or rather Marina probably wished to know if he had been serious when he said the other day he would enlist at nineteen, the earliest volunteer age. He also gave a minute’s thought to the sad fact that (as he well knew from his studies) the confusion of two realities, one in single, the other in double, quotes, was a symptom of impending insanity.

  Naked-faced, dull-haired, wrapped up in her oldest kimono (her Pedro had suddenly left for Rio), Marina reclined on her mahogany bed under a golden-yellow quilt, drinking tea with mare’s milk, one of her fads.

  “Sit down, have a spot of chay ku,” she said. “The cow is in the smaller jug, I think. Yes, it is.” And when Van, having kissed her freckled hand, lowered himself on the ivanilich (a kind of sighing old hassock upholstered in leather): “Van, dear, I wish to say something to you, because I know I shall never have to repeat it again. Belle, with her usual flair for the right phrase, has cited to me the cousinage-dangereux-voisinage adage—I mean ‘adage,’ I always fluff that word—and complained qu’on s’embrassait dans tous les coins. Is that true?”

  Van’s mind flashed in advance of his speech. It was, Marina, a fantastic exaggeration. The crazy governess had observed it once when he carried Ada across a brook and kissed her because she had hurt her toe. I’m the well-known beggar in the saddest of all stories.

  “Erunda (nonsense),” said Van. “She once saw me carrying Ada across the brook and misconstrued our stumbling huddle (spotikayushcheesy a sliyanie).”

  “I do not mean Ada, silly,” said Marina with a slight snort, as she fussed over the teapot. “Azov, a Russian humorist, derives erunda from the German hier und da, which is neither here nor there. Ada is a big girl, and big girls, alas, have their own worries. Mlle Larivière meant Lucette, of course. Van, those soft games must stop. Lucette is twelve, and naive, and I know it’s all clean fun, yet (odnako) one can never behave too delikatno in regard to a budding little woman. A propos de coins: in Griboedov’s Gore ot uma, ‘How stupid to be so clever,’ a play in verse, written, I think, in Pushkin’s time, the hero reminds Sophie of their childhood games, and says:

  How oft we sat together in a corner

  And what harm might there be in that?

  but in Russian it is a little ambiguous, have another spot, Van?” (he shook his head, simultaneously lifting his hand, like his father), “because, you see,—no, there is none left anyway—the second line, i kazhetsya chto v etom, can be also construed as ‘And in that one, meseems,’ pointing with his finger at a corner of the room. Imagine—when I was rehearsing that scene with Kachalov at the Seagull Theater, in Yukonsk, Stanislavski, Konstantin Sergeevich, actually wanted him to make that cosy little gesture (uyutnen’kiy zhest).”

  “How very amusing,” said Van.

  The dog came in, turned up a brimming brown eye Vanward, toddled up to the window, looked at the rain like a little person, and returned to his filthy cushion in the next room.

  “I could never stand that breed,” remarked Van. “Dackelo-phobia.”

  “But girls—do you like girls, Van, do you have many girls? You are not a pederast, like your poor uncle, are you? We have had some dreadful perverts in our ancestry but—Why do you laugh?”

  “Nothing,” said Van. “I just want to put on record that I adore girls. I had my first one when I was fourteen. Mais qui me rendra mon Hélène? She had raven black hair and a skin like skimmed milk. I had lots of much creamier ones later. I kazhetsya chto v etom?”

  “How strange, how sad! Sad, because I know hardly anything about your life, my darling (moy dushka). The Zemskis were terrible rakes (razvratnikï), one of them loved small girls, and another raffolait d’une de ses juments and had her tied up in a special way—don’t ask me how” (double-hand gesture of horrifled ignorance) “—when he dated her in her stall. Kstati (à propos), I could never understand how heredity is transmitted by bachelors, unless genes can jump like chess knights. I almost beat you, last time we played, we must play again, not today, though—I’m too sad today. I would have liked so much to know everything, everything, about you, but now it’s too late. Recollections are always a little ‘stylized’ (stilizovani), as your father used to say, an irresistible and hateful man, and now, even if you showed me your old diaries, I could no longer whip up any real emotional reaction to them, though all actresses can shed tears, as I’m doing now. You see (rummaging for her handkerchief under her pillow), when children are still quite tiny (takie malyutki), we cannot imagine that we can go without them, for even a couple of days, and later we do, and it’s a couple of weeks, and later it’s months, gray years, black decades, and then the opéra bouffe of the Christians’ eternity. I think even the shortest separation is a kind of training for the Elysian Games—who said that? I said that. And your costume, though very becoming, is, in a sense, traurnïy (funerary). I’m spouting drivel. Forgive me these idiotic tears … Tell me, is there anything I could do for you? Do think up something! Would you like a beautiful, practically new Peruvian scarf, which he left behind, that crazy boy? No? It’s not your style? Now go. And remember—not a word to poor Mlle Larivière, who means well!”

  Ada came back just before dinnertime. Worries? He met her as she climbed rather wearily the grand stair
case, trailing her vanity bag by its strap up the steps behind her. Worries? She smelled of tobacco, either because (as she said) she had spent an hour in a compartment for smokers, or had smoked (she added) a cigarette or two herself in the doctor’s waiting room, or else because (and this she did not say) her unknown lover was a heavy smoker, his open red mouth full of rolling blue fog.

  “Well? Tout est bien?” asked Van after a sketchy kiss. “No worries?”

  She glared, or feigned to glare, at him.

  “Van, you should not have rung up Seitz! He does not even know my name! You promised!”

  Pause.

  “I did not,” answered Van quietly.

  “Tant mieux,” said Ada in the same false voice, as he helped her out of her coat in the corridor. “Oui, tout est bien. Will you stop sniffing me over, dear an? In fact the blessed thing started on the way home. Let me pass, please.”

  Worries of her own? Of her mother’s automatic making? A casual banality? “We all have our troubles”?

  “Ada!” he cried.

  She looked back, before unlocking her (always locked) door. “What?”

  “Tuzenbakh, not knowing what to say: ‘I have not had coffee today. Tell them to make me some.’ Quickly walks away.”