Ada, or Ardor

by Vladimir Nabokov

  Van said:

  “I’m not eloping with your maid, Marina. It’s an optical illusion. Her reasons for leaving you do not concern me. There’s a bit of business I had been putting off like a fool but now must attend to before going to Paris.”

  “Ada is causing me a lot of worry,” said Marina with a downcast frown and a Russian wobble of the cheeks. “Please come back as soon as you can. You have such a good influence upon her. Au revoir. I’m very cross with everybody.”

  Holding up her robe she ascended the porch steps. The tame silver dragon on her back had an ant-eater’s tongue according to her eldest daughter, a scientist. What did poor mother know about P’s and R’s? Next to nothing.

  Van shook hands with the distressed old butler, thanked Bout for a silver-knobbed cane and a pair of gloves, nodded to the other servants and walked toward the carriage and pair. Blanche, standing by in a long gray skirt and straw hat, with her cheap valise painted mahogany red and secured with a crisscrossing cord, looked exactly like a young lady setting out to teach school in a Wild West movie. She offered to sit on the box next to the Russian coachman but he ushered her into the calèche.

  They passed undulating fields of wheat speckled with the confetti of poppies and bluets. She talked all the way about the young chatelaine and her two recent lovers in melodious low tones as if in a trance, as if en rapport with a dead minstrel’s spirit. Only the other day from behind that row of thick firs, look there, to your right (but he did not look—sitting silent, both hands on the knob of his cane), she and her sister Madelon, with a bottle of wine between them, watched Monsieur le Comte courting the young lady on the moss, crushing her like a grunting bear as he also had crushed—many times!—Madelon who said she, Blanche, should warn him, Van, because she was a wee bit jealous but she also said—for she had a good heart—better put it off until “Malbrook” s’en va t’en guerre, otherwise they would fight; he had been shooting a pistol at a scarecrow all morning and that’s why she waited so long, and it was in Madelon’s hand, not in hers. She rambled on and on until they reached Tourbière; two rows of cottages and a small black church with stained-glass windows. Van let her out. The youngest of the three sisters, a beautiful chestnut-curled little maiden with lewd eyes and bobbing breasts (where had he seen her before?—recently, but where?) carried Blanche’s valise and birdcage into a poor shack smothered in climbing roses, but for the rest, dismal beyond words. He kissed Cendrillon’s shy hand and resumed his seat in the carriage, clearing his throat and plucking at his trousers before crossing his legs. Vain Van Veen.

  “The express does not stop at Torfyanka, does it, Trofim?”

  “I’ll take you five versts across the bog,” said Trofim, “the nearest is Volosyanka.”

  His vulgar Russian word for Maidenhair; a whistle stop; train probably crowded.

  Maidenhair. Idiot! Percy boy might have been buried by now! Maidenhair. Thus named because of the huge spreading Chinese tree at the end of the platform. Once, vaguely, confused with the Venus’-hair fern. She walked to the end of the platform in Tolstoy’s novel. First exponent of the inner monologue, later exploited by the French and the Irish. N’est vert, n’est vert, n’est vert. L’arbre aux quarante ecus d’or, at least in the fall. Never, never shall I hear again her “botanical” voice fall at biloba, “sorry, my Latin is showing.” Ginkgo, gingko, ink, inkog. Known also as Salisbury’s adiantofolia, Ada’s infolio, poor Salisburia: sunk; poor Stream of Consciousness, marée noire by now. Who wants Ardis Hall!

  “Barin, a barin,” said Trofim, turning his blond-bearded face to his passenger.

  “Da?”

  “Dazhe skvoz’ kozhanïy fartuk ne stal-bï ya trogat’ etu frantsuzskuyu devku.”

  Bárin: master. Dázhe skvoz’ kózkaniy fártuk: even through a leathern apron. Ne stal-bï ya trógat’: I would not think of touching. Étu: this (that). Frantsuzskuyu: French (adj., accus.). Dévku: wench. Ûzhas, otcháyanie: horror, despair. Zhálost’: pity. Kóncheno, zagázheno, rastérzano: finished, fouled, torn to shreds.

  42

  Aqua used to say that only a very cruel or very stupid person, or innocent infants, could be happy on Demonia, our splendid planet. Van felt that for him to survive on this terrible Antiterra, in the multicolored and evil world into which he was born, he had to destroy, or at least to maim for life, two men. He had to find them immediately; delay itself might impair his power of survival. The rapture of their destruction would not mend his heart, but would certainly rinse his brain. The two men were in two different spots and neither spot represented an exact location, a definite street number, an identifiable billet. He hoped to punish them in an honorable way, if Fate helped. He was not prepared for the comically exaggerated zeal Fate was to display in leading him on and then muscling in to become an over-cooperative agent.

  First, he decided to go to Kalugano to settle accounts with Herr Rack. Out of sheer misery he fell asleep in a corner of a compartment, full of alien legs and voices, in the crack express tearing north at a hundred miles per hour. He dozed till noon and got off at Ladoga, where after an incalculably long wait he took another, even more jerky and crowded train. As he was pushing his unsteady way through one corridor after another, cursing under his breath the window-gazers who did not draw in their bottoms to let him pass, and hopelessly seeking a comfortable nook in one of the first-class cars consisting of four-seat compartments, he saw Cordula and her mother facing each other on the window side. The two other places were occupied by a stout, elderly gentleman in an old-fashioned brown wig with a middle parting, and a bespectacled boy in a sailor suit sitting next to Cordula, who was in the act of offering him one half of her chocolate bar. Van entered, moved by a sudden very bright thought, but Cordula’s mother did not recognize him at once, and the flurry of reintroductions combined with a lurch of the train caused Van to step on the prunella-shod foot of the elderly passenger, who uttered a sharp cry and said, indistinctly but not impolitely: “Spare my gout (or “take care” or “look out”), young man!”

  “I do not like being addressed as ‘young man,’ ” Van told the invalid in a completely uncalled-for, brutal burst of voice.

  “Has he hurt you, Grandpa?” inquired the little boy.

  “He has,” said Grandpa, “but I did not mean to offend anybody by my cry of anguish.”

  “Even anguish should be civil,” continued Van (while the better Van in him tugged at his sleeve, aghast and ashamed).

  “Cordula,” said the old actress (with the same apropos with which she once picked up and fondled a fireman’s cat that had strayed into Fast Colors in the middle of her best speech), “why don’t you go with this angry young demon to the tea-car? I think I’ll take my thirty-nine winks now.”

  “What’s wrong?” asked Cordula as they settled down in the very roomy and rococo “crumpeter,” as Kalugano College students used to call it in the ’Eighties and ’Nineties.

  “Everything,” replied Van, “but what makes you ask?”

  “Well, we know Dr. Platonov slightly, and there was absolutely no reason for you to be so abominably rude to the dear old man.”

  “I apologize,” said Van. “Let us order the traditional tea.”

  “Another queer thing,” said Cordula, “is that you actually noticed me today. Two months ago you snubbed me.”

  “You had changed. You had grown lovely and languorous. You are even lovelier now. Cordula is no longer a virgin! Tell me—do you happen to have Percy de Prey’s address? I mean we all know he’s invading Tartary—but where could a letter reach him? I don’t care to ask your snoopy aunt to forward anything.”

  “I daresay the Fräsers have it, I’ll find out. But where is Van going? Where shall I find Van?”

  “At home—5 Park Lane, in a day or two. Just now I’m going to Kalugano.”

  “That’s a gruesome place. Girl?”

  “Man. Do you know Kalugano? Dentist? Best hotel? Concert hall? My cousin’s music teacher?”

  S
he shook her short curls. No—she went there very seldom. Twice to a concert, in a pine forest. She had not been aware that Ada took music lessons. How was Ada?

  “Lucette,” he said, “Lucette takes or took piano lessons. Okay. Let’s dismiss Kalugano. These crumpets are very poor relatives of the Chose ones. You’re right, j’at des ennuis. But you can make me forget them. Tell me something to distract me, though you distract me as it is, un petit topinambour as the Teuton said in the story. Tell me about your affairs of the heart.”

  She was not a bright little girl. But she was a loquacious and really quite exciting little girl. He started to caress her under the table, but she gently removed his hand, whispering “womenses,” as whimsically as another girl had done in some other dream. He cleared his throat loudly and ordered half-a-bottle of cognac, having the waiter open it in his presence as Demon advised. She talked on and on, and he lost the thread of her discourse, or rather it got enmeshed in the rapid landscape, which his gaze followed over her shoulder, with a sudden ravine recording what Jack said when his wife ‘phoned, or a lone tree in a clover field impersonating abandoned John, or a romantic stream running down a cliff and reflecting her brief bright affair with Marquis Quizz Quisana.

  A pine forest fizzled out and factory chimneys replaced it. The train clattered past a roundhouse, and slowed down, groaning. A hideous station darkened the day.

  “Good Lord,” cried Van, “that’s my stop.”

  He put money on the table, kissed Cordula’s willing lips and made for the exit. Upon reaching the vestibule he glanced back at her with a wave of the glove he held—and crashed into somebody who had stooped to pick up a bag: “On n’est pas goujat à ce point,” observed the latter: a burly military man with a reddish mustache and a staff captain’s insignia.

  Van brushed past him, and when both had come down on the platform, glove-slapped him smartly across the face.

  The captain picked up his cap and lunged at the white-faced, black-haired young fop. Simultaneously Van felt somebody embrace him from behind in well-meant but unfair restraint. Not bothering to turn his head he abolished the invisible busybody with a light “piston blow” delivered by the left elbow, while he sent the captain staggering back into his own luggage with one crack of the right hand. By now several free-show amateurs had gathered around them; so, breaking their circle, Van took his man by the arm and marched him into the waiting room. A comically gloomy porter with a copiously bleeding nose came in after them carrying the captain’s three bags, one of them under his arm. Cubistic labels of remote and fabulous places color-blotted the newer of the valises. Visiting cards were exchanged. “Demon’s son?” grunted Captain Tapper, of Wild Violet Lodge, Kalugano. “Correct,” said Van. “I’ll put up, I guess, at the Majestic; if not, a note will be left for your second or seconds. You’ll have to get me one, I can’t very well ask the concierge to do it.”

  While speaking thus, Van chose a twenty dollar piece from a palmful of gold, and gave it with a grin to the damaged old porter. “Yellow cotton,” Van added: “Up each nostril. Sorry, chum.”

  With his hands in his trouser pockets, he crossed the square to the hotel, causing a motor car to swerve stridently on the damp asphalt. He left it standing transom-wise in regard to its ordained course, and clawed his way through the revolving door of the hotel, feeling if not happier, at least more buoyant, than he had within the last twelve hours.

  The Majestic, a huge old pile, all grime outside, all leather inside, engulfed him. He asked for a room with a bath, was told all were booked by a convention of contractors, tipped the desk clerk in the invincible Veen manner, and got a passable suite of three rooms with a mahogany paneled bathtub, an ancient rocking chair, a mechanical piano and a purple canopy over a double bed. After washing his hands, he immediately went down to inquire about Rack’s whereabouts. The Racks had no telephone; they probably rented a room in the suburbs; the concierge looked up at the clock and called some sort of address bureau or lost person department. It proved closed till next morning. He suggested Van ask at a music store on Main Street.

  On the way there he acquired his second walking stick: the Ardis Hall silver-knobbed one he had left behind in the Maidenhair station café. This was a rude, stout article with a convenient grip and an alpenstockish point capable of gouging out translucent bulging eyes. In an adjacent store he got a suitcase, and in the next, shirts, shorts, socks, slacks, pajamas, handkerchiefs, a lounging robe, a pullover and a pair of saffian bedroom slippers fetally folded in a leathern envelope. His purchases were put into the suitcase and sent at once to the hotel. He was about to enter the music shop when he remembered with a start that he had not left any message for Tapper’s seconds, so he retraced his steps.

  He found them sitting in the lounge and requested them to settle matters rapidly—he had more important business than that. “Ne grubit’ sekundantam” (never be rude to seconds), said Demon’s voice in his mind. Arwin Birdfoot, a lieutenant in the Guards, was blond and flabby, with moist pink lips and a foot-long cigarette holder. Johnny Rafin, Esq., was small, dark and dapper and wore blue suede shoes with a dreadful tan suit. Birdfoot soon disappeared, leaving Van to work out details with Johnny, who, though loyally eager to assist Van, could not conceal that his heart belonged to Van’s adversary.

  The Captain was a first-rate shot, Johnny said, and member of the Do-Re-La country club. Bloodthirsty brutishness did not come with his Britishness, but his military and academic standing demanded he defend his honor. He was an expert on maps, horses, horticulture. He was a wealthy landlord. The merest adumbration of an apology on Baron Veen’s part would clinch the matter with a token of gracious finality.

  “If,” said Van, “the good Captain expects that, he can go and stick his pistol up his gracious anality.”

  “That is not a nice way of speaking,” said Johnny, wincing. “My friend would not approve of it. We must remember he is a very refined person.”

  Was Johnny Van’s second, or the Captain’s?

  “I’m yours,” said Johnny with a languid look.

  Did he or the refined Captain know a German-born pianist, Philip Rack, married, with three babies (probably)?

  “I’m afraid,” said Johnny, with a note of disdain, “that I don’t know many people with babies in Kalugano.”

  Was there a good whorehouse in the vicinity?

  With increasing disdain Johnny answered he was a confirmed bachelor.

  “Well, all right,” said Van. “I have now to go out again before the shops close. Shall I acquire a brace of dueling pistols or will the Captain lend me an army ‘bruger’?”

  “We can supply the weapons,” said Johnny.

  When Van arrived in front of the music shop, he found it locked. He stared for a moment at the harps and the guitars and the flowers in silver vases on consoles receding in the dusk of looking-glasses, and recalled the schoolgirl whom he had longed for so keenly half a dozen years ago—Rose? Roza? Was that her name? Would he have been happier with her than with his pale fatal sister?

  He walked for a while along Main Street—one of a million Main Streets—and then, with a surge of healthy hunger, entered a passably attractive restaurant. He ordered a beefsteak with roast potatoes, apple pie and claret. At the far end of the room, on one of the red stools of the burning bar, a graceful harlot in black—tight bodice, wide skirt, long black gloves, black-velvet picture hat—was sucking a golden drink through a straw. In the mirror behind the bar, amid colored glints, he caught a blurred glimpse of her russety blond beauty; he thought he might sample her later on, but when he glanced again she had gone.

  He ate, drank, schemed.

  He looked forward to the encounter with keen exhilaration. Nothing more invigorating could have been imagined. Shooting it out with that incidental clown furnished unhoped-for relief, particularly since Rack would no doubt accept a plain thrashing in lieu of combat. Designing and re-designing various contingencies pertaining to that little duel might be co
mpared to those helpful hobbies which polio patients, lunatics and convicts are taught by generous institutions, by enlightened administrators, by ingenious psychiatrists—such as bookbinding, or putting blue beads into the orbits of dolls made by other criminals, cripples and madmen.

  At first he toyed with the idea of killing his adversary: quantitively, it would afford him the greatest sense of release; qualitatively, it suggested all sorts of moral and legal complications. Inflicting a wound seemed an inept half-measure. He decided to do something artistic and tricky, such as shooting the pistol out of the fellow’s hand, or parting for him his thick brushy hair in the middle.

  On his way back to the gloomy Majestic he acquired various trifles: three round cakes of soap in an elongated box, shaving cream in its cold resilient tube, ten safety-razor blades, a large sponge, a smaller soaping sponge of rubber, hair lotion, a comb, Skinner’s Balsam, a toothbrush in a plastic container, toothpaste, scissors, a fountain pen, a pocket diary—what else?—yes, a small alarm clock—whose comforting presence, however, did not prevent him from telling the concierge to have him called at five A.M.

  It was only nine P.M. in late summer; he would not have been surprised if told it was midnight in October. He had had an unbelievably long day. The mind could hardly grasp the fact that this very morning, at dawn, a fey character out of some Dormilona novel for servant maids had spoken to him, half-naked and shivering, in the toolroom of Ardis Hall. He wondered if the other girl still stood, arrow straight, adored and abhorred, heartless and heartbroken, against the trunk of a murmuring tree. He wondered if in view of tomorrow’s partie de plaisir he should not prepare for her a when-you-receive-this note, flippant, cruel, as sharp as an icicle. No. Better write to Demon.

  Dear Dad,

  in consequence of a trivial altercation with a Captain Tapper, of Wild Violet Lodge, whom I happened to step upon in the corridor of a train, I had a pistol duel this morning in the woods near Kalugano and am now no more. Though the manner of my end can be regarded as a kind of easy suicide, the encounter and the ineffable Captain are in no way connected with the Sorrows of Young Veen. In 1884, during my first summer at Ardis, I seduced your daughter, who was then twelve. Our torrid affair lasted till my return to Riverlane; it was resumed last June, four years later. That happiness has been the greatest event in my life, and I have no regrets. Yesterday, though, I discovered she had been unfaithful to me, so we parted. Tapper, I think, may be the chap who was thrown out of one of your gaming clubs for attempting oral intercourse with the washroom attendant, a toothless old cripple, veteran of the first Crimean War. Lots of flowers, please!