Ada, or Ardor

by Vladimir Nabokov

  “Vous me comblez,” said Demon in reference to the burgundy, “though, pravda, my maternal grandfather would have left the table rather than see me drinking red wine instead of champagne with gelinotte. Superb, my dear (blowing a kiss through the vista of flame and silver).”

  The roast hazel-hen (or rather its New World representative, locally called “mountain grouse”) was accompanied by preserved lingonberries (locally called “mountain cranberries”). An especially succulent morsel of one of those brown little fowls yielded a globule of birdshot between Demon’s red tongue and strong canine: “La fève de Diane,” he remarked, placing it carefully on the edge of his plate. “How is the car situation, Van?”

  “Vague. I ordered a Roseley like yours but it won’t be delivered before Christmas. I tried to find a Silentium with a side car and could not, because of the war, though what connection exists between wars and motorcycles is a mystery. But we manage, Ada and I, we manage, we ride, we bike, we even jikker.”

  “I wonder,” said sly Demon, “why I’m reminded all at once of our great Canadian’s lovely lines about blushing Irène:

  “Le feu si délicat de la virginité

  Qui something sur son front…

  “All right. You can ship mine to England, provided—”

  “By the way, Demon,” interrupted Marina, “where and how can I obtain the kind of old roomy limousine with an old professional chauffeur that Praskovia, for instance, has had for years?”

  “Impossible, my dear, they are all in heaven or on Terra. But what would Ada like, what would my silent love like for her birthday? It’s next Saturday, po razschyotu po moemu (by my reckoning), isn’t it? Une rivière de diamants?”

  “Protestuyu!” cried Marina. “Yes, I’m speaking seriozno. I object to your giving her kvaka sesva (quoi que ce soit), Dan and I will take care of all that.”

  “Besides you’ll forget,” said Ada laughing, and very deftly showed the tip of her tongue to Van who had been on the look-out for her conditional reaction to “diamonds.”

  Van asked: “Provided what?”

  “Provided you don’t have one waiting already for you in George’s Garage, Ranta Road.”

  “Ada, you’ll be jikkering alone soon,” he continued, “I’m going to have Mascodagama round out his vacation in Paris. Qui something sur son front, en accuse la beauté!”

  So the trivial patter went. Who does not harbor in the darkest gulf of his mind such bright recollections? Who has not squirmed and covered his face with his hands as the dazzling past leered at him? Who, in the terror and solitude of a long night—

  “What was that?” exclaimed Marina, whom certicle storms terrified even more than they did the Antiamberians of Ladore County.

  “Sheet lightning,” suggested Van.

  “If you ask me,” said Demon, turning on his chair to consider the billowing drapery, “I’d guess it was a photographer’s flash. After all, we have here a famous actress and a sensational acrobat.”

  Ada ran to the window. From under the anxious magnolias a white-faced boy flanked by two gaping handmaids stood aiming a camera at the harmless, gay family group. But it was only a nocturnal mirage, not unusual in July. Nobody was taking pictures except Perun, the unmentionable god of thunder. In expectation of the rumble, Marina started to count under her breath, as if she were praying or checking the pulse of a very sick person. One heartbeat was supposed to span one mile of black night between the living heart and a doomed herdsman, felled somewhere—oh, very far—on the top of a mountain. The rumble came—but sounded rather subdued. A second flash revealed the structure of the French window.

  Ada returned to her seat. Van picked up her napkin from under her chair and in the course of his brief plunge and ascent brushed the side of her knee with his temple.

  “Might I have another helping of Peterson’s Grouse, Tetrastes bonasia windriverensis?” asked Ada loftily.

  Marina jangled a diminutive cowbell of bronze. Demon placed his palm on the back of Ada’s hand and asked her to pass him the oddly evocative object. She did so in a staccato arc. Demon inserted his monocle and, muffling the tongue of memory, examined the bell; but it was not the one that had once stood on a bed-tray in a dim room of Dr. Lapiner’s chalet; was not even of Swiss make; was merely one of those sweet-sounding translations which reveal a paraphrast’s crass counterfeit as soon as you look up the original.

  Alas, the bird had not survived “the honor one had made to it,” and after a brief consultation with Bouteillan a somewhat incongruous but highly palatable bit of saucisson d’Arles added itself to the young lady’s fare of asperges en branches that everybody was now enjoying. It almost awed one to see the pleasure with which she and Demon distorted their shiny-lipped mouths in exactly the same way to introduce orally from some heavenly height the voluptuous ally of the prim lily of the valley, holding the shaft with an identical bunching of the fingers, not unlike the reformed “sign of the cross” for protesting against which (a ridiculous little schism measuring an inch or so from thumb to index) so many Russians had been burnt by other Russians only two centuries earlier on the banks of the Great Lake of Slaves. Van remembered that his tutor’s great friend, the learned but prudish Semyon Afanasievich Vengerov, then a young associate professor but already a celebrated Pushkinist (1855–1954), used to say that the only vulgar passage in his author’s work was the cannibal joy of young gourmets tearing “plump and live” oysters out of their “cloisters” in an unfinished canto of Eugene Onegin. But then “everyone has his own taste,” as the British writer Richard Leonard Churchill mistranslates a trite French phrase (chacun à son goût) twice in the course of his novel about a certain Crimean Khan once popular with reporters and politicians, “A Great Good Man”—according, of course, to the cattish and prejudiced Guillaume Monparnasse about whose new celebrity Ada, while dipping the reversed corolla of one hand in a bowl, was now telling Demon, who was performing the same rite in the same graceful fashion.

  Marina helped herself to an Albany from a crystal box of Turkish cigarettes tipped with red rose petal and passed the box on to Demon. Ada, somewhat self-consciously, lit up too.

  “You know quite well,” said Marina, “that your father disapproves of your smoking at table.”

  “Oh, it’s all right,” murmured Demon.

  “I had Dan in view,” explained Marina heavily. “He’s very prissy on that score.”

  “Well, and I’m not,” answered Demon.

  Ada and Van could not help laughing. All that was banter—not of a high order, but still banter.

  A moment later, however, Van remarked: “I think I’ll take an Alibi—I mean an Albany—myself.”

  “Please note, everybody,” said Ada, “how voulu that slip was! I like a smoke when I go mushrooming, but when I’m back, this horrid tease insists I smell of some romantic Turk or Albanian met in the woods.”

  “Well,” said Demon, “Van’s quite right to look after your morals.”

  The real profitrol’ (very soft “l”) of the Russians, as first made by their cooks in Gavana before 1700, consists of larger puffs coated with creamier chocolate than the dark and puny “profit rolls” served in European restaurants. Our friends had finished that rich sweetmeat flooded with chocolat-au-lait sauce, and were ready for some fruit, when Bout followed by his father and floundering Jones made a sensational entry.

  All the toilets and waterpipes in the house had been suddenly seized with borborygmic convulsions. This always signified, and introduced, a long-distance call. Marina, who had been awaiting for several days a certain message from California in response to a torrid letter, could now hardly contain her passionate impatience and had been on the point of running to the dorophone in the hall at the first bubbling spasm, when young Bout hurried in dragging the long green cord (visibly palpitating in a series of swells and contractions rather like a serpent ingesting a field mouse) of the ornate, brass-and-nacre receiver, which Marina with a wild “A l’eau!” pressed to
her ear. It was, however, only fussy old Dan ringing her up to inform everybody that Miller could not make it that night after all and would accompany him to Ardis bright and early on the following morning.

  “Early but hardly bright,” observed Demon, who was now glutted with family joys and slightly annoyed he had missed the first half of a gambling night in Ladore for the sake of all that well-meant but not quite first-rate food.

  “We’ll have coffee in the yellow drawing room,” said Marina as sadly as if she were evoking a place of dreary exile. “Jones, please, don’t walk on that phonecord. You have no idea, Demon, how I dread meeting again, after all those years, that dislikable Norbert von Miller, who has probably become even more arrogant and obsequious, and moreover does not realize, I’m sure, that Dan’s wife is me. He’s a Baltic Russian” (turning to Van) “but really echt deutsch, though his mother was born Ivanov or Romanov, or something, who owned a calico factory in Finland or Denmark. I can’t imagine how he got his barony; when I knew him twenty years ago he was plain Mr. Miller.”

  “He is still that,” said Demon drily, “because you’ve got two Millers mixed up. The lawyer who works for Dan is my old friend Norman Miller of the Fainley, Fehler and Miller law firm and physically bears a striking resemblance to Wilfrid Laurier. Norbert, on the other hand, has, I remember, a head like a kegelkugel, lives in Switzerland, knows perfectly well whom you married and is an unmentionable blackguard.”

  After a quick cup of coffee and a drop of cherry liqueur Demon got up.

  “Partir c’est mourir un peu, et mourir c’est partir un peu trop. Do tell Dan and Norman I can give them tea-and-cake any time tomorrow at the Bryant. By the way, how’s Lucette?”

  Marina knitted her brows and shook her head acting the fond, worried mother though, in point of fact, she bore her daughters even less affection than she had for cute Dack and pathetic Dan.

  “Oh, we had quite a scare,” she replied finally, “quite a nasty scare. But now, apparently—”

  “Van,” said his father, “be a good scout. I did not have a hat but I did have gloves. Ask Bouteillan to look in the gallery, I may have dropped them there. No. Stay! It’s all right. I left them in the car, because I recall the cold of this flower, which I took from a vase in passing …”

  He now threw it away, discarding with it the shadow of his fugitive urge to plunge both hands in a soft bosom.

  “I had hoped you’d sleep here,” said Marina (not really caring one way or another). “What is your room number at the hotel—not 222 by any chance?”

  She liked romantic coincidences. Demon consulted the tag on his key: 221—which was good enough, fatidically and anecdotically speaking. Naughty Ada, of course, stole a glance at Van, who tensed up the wings of his nose in a grimace that mimicked the slant of Pedro’s narrow, beautiful nostrils.

  “They make fun of an old woman,” said Marina, not without coquetry, and in the Russian manner kissed her guest on his inclined brow as he lifted her hand to his lips: “You’ll forgive me,” she added, “for not going out on the terrace. I’ve grown allergic to damp and darkness; I’m sure my temperature has already gone up to thirty-seven and seven, at least.”

  Demon tapped the barometer next to the door. It had been tapped too often to react in any intelligible way and remained standing at a quarter past three.

  Van and Ada saw him off. The night was very warm and dripping with what Ladore farmers called green rain. Demon’s black sedan glinted elegantly among the varnished laurels in the moth-flaked porchlight. He tenderly kissed the children, the girl on one cheek, the boy on the other, then Ada again—in the hollow of the white arm that clasped his neck. Nobody paid much attention to Marina, who waved from a tangelo-colored oriel window a spangled shawl although all she could see was the sheen of the car’s bonnet and the rain slanting in the light of its lamps.

  Demon pulled on his gloves and sped away with a great growl of damp gravel.

  “That last kiss went a little too far,” remarked Van, laughing.

  “Oh well—his lips sort of slipped,” laughed Ada and, laughing, they embraced in the dark as they skirted the wing of the house.

  They stopped for a moment under the shelter of an indulgent tree, where many a cigar-smoking guest had stopped after dinner. Tranquilly, innocently, side by side in their separately ordained attitudes, they added a trickle and a gush to the more professional sounds of the rain in the night, and then lingered, hand in hand, in a corner of the latticed gallery waiting for the lights in the windows to go out.

  “What was faintly off-key, ne tak, about the whole evening?” asked Van softly. “You noticed?”

  “Of course, I did. And yet I adore him. I think he’s quite crazy, and with no place or occupation in life, and far from happy, and philosophically irresponsible—and there is absolutely nobody like him.”

  “But what went wrong tonight? You were tongue-tied, and everything we said was fal’shivo. I wonder if some inner nose in him smelled you in me, and me in you. He tried to ask me … Oh it was not a nice family reunion. What exactly went wrong at dinner?”

  “My love, my love, as if you don’t know! We’ll manage, perhaps, to wear our masks always, till dee do us part, but we shall never be able to marry—while they’re both alive. We simply can’t swing it, because he’s more conventional in his own way than even the law and the social lice. One can’t bribe one’s parents, and waiting forty, fifty years for them to die is too horrible to imagine—I mean the mere thought of anybody waiting for such a thing is not in our nature, is mean and monstrous!”

  He kissed her half-closed lips, gently and “morally” as they defined moments of depth to distinguish them from the despair of passion.

  “Anyway,” he said, “it’s fun to be two secret agents in an alien country. Marina has gone upstairs. Your hair is wet.”

  “Spies from Terra? You believe, you believe in the existence of Terra? Oh, you do! You accept it. I know you!”

  “I accept it as a state of mind. That’s not quite the same thing.”

  “Yes, but you want to prove it is the same thing.”

  He brushed her lips with another religious kiss. Its edge, however, was beginning to catch fire.

  “One of these days,” he said, “I will ask you for a repeat performance. You will sit as you did four years ago, at the same table, in the same light, drawing the same flower, and I shall go through the same scene with such joy, such pride, such—I don’t know—gratitude! Look, all the windows are dark now. I, too, can translate when I simply have to. Listen to this:

  Lights in the rooms were going out.

  Breathed fragrantly the rozï.

  We sat together in the shade

  Of a wide-branched beryozï.”

  “Yes, ‘birch’ is what leaves the translator in the ‘lurch,’ doesn’t it? That’s a terrible little poem by Konstantin Romanov, right? Just elected president of the Lyascan Academy of Literature, right? Wretched poet and happy husband. Happy husband!”

  “You know,” said Van, “I really think you should wear something underneath on formal occasions.”

  “Your hands are cold. Why formal? You said yourself it was a family affair.”

  “Even so. You were in peril whenever you bent or sprawled.”

  “I never sprawl!”

  “I’m quite sure it’s not hygienic, or perhaps it’s a kind of jealousy on my part. Memoirs of a Happy Chair. Oh, my darling.”

  “At least,” whispered Ada, “it pays off now, doesn’t it? Croquet room? Ou comme ça?”

  “Comme ça, for once,” said Van.

  39

  Although fairly eclectic in 1888, Ladore fashions were not quite as free as taken for granted at Ardis.

  For the grand picnic on her birthday sixteen-year-old Ada wore a plain linen blouse, maize-yellow slacks and scuffed moccasins. Van had wanted her to let her hair down; she demurred, saying it was too long for country comfort, but finally compromised by tying it midway behind with a
rumpled ribbon of black silk. Van’s only observance of summer elegancies consisted of a blue polo jersey, knee-length gray flannel trousers, and sport “creepers.”

  While the rustic feast was being prepared and distributed among the sun gouts of the traditional pine glade, the wild girl and her lover slipped away for a few moments of ravenous ardor in a ferny ravine where a rill dipped from ledge to ledge between tall burnberry bushes. The day was hot and breathless. The smallest pine had its cicada.

  She said: “Speaking as a character in an old novel, it seems so long, long ago, davnïm davno, since I used to play word-games here with Grace and two other lovely girls. ‘Insect, incest, nicest.’ ”