Ada, or Ardor

by Vladimir Nabokov

  Your loving son, Van

  He carefully reread his letter—and carefully tore it up. The note he finally placed in his coat pocket was much briefer.

  Dad,

  I had a trivial quarrel with a stranger whose face I slapped and who killed me in a duel near Kalugano. Sorry!

  Van

  Van was roused by the night porter who put a cup of coffee with a local “eggbun” on his bedside table, and expertly palmed the expected chervonetz. He resembled somewhat Bouteillan as the latter had been ten years ago and as he had appeared in a dream, which Van now retrostructed as far as it would go: in it Demon’s former valet explained to Van that the “dor” in the name of an adored river equaled the corruption of hydro in “dorophone.” Van often had word dreams.

  He shaved, disposed of two blood-stained safety blades by leaving them in a massive bronze ashtray, had a structurally perfect stool, took a quick bath, briskly dressed, left his bag with the concierge, paid his bill and at six punctually squeezed himself next to blue-chinned and malodorous Johnny into the latter’s Paradox, a cheap “semi-racer.” For two or three miles they skirted the dismal bank of the lake—coal piles, shacks, boat-houses, a long strip of black pebbly mud and, in the distance, over the curving bank of autumnally misted water, the tawny fumes of tremendous factories.

  “Where are we now, Johnny dear?” asked Van as they swung out of the lake’s orbit and sped along a suburban avenue with clapboard cottages among laundry-linked pines.

  “Dorofey Road,” cried the driver above the din of the motor. “It abuts at the forest.”

  It abutted. Van felt a faint twinge in his knee where he had hit it against a stone when attacked from behind a week ago, in another wood. At the moment his foot touched the pine-needle strewn earth of the forest road, a transparent white butterfly floated past, and with utter certainty Van knew that he had only a few minutes to live.

  He turned to his second and said:

  “This stamped letter, in this handsome Majestic Hotel envelope, is addressed, as you see, to my father. I am transferring it to the back pocket of my pants. Please post it at once if the Captain, who I see has arrived in a rather funerary-looking limousine, accidentally slaughters me.”

  They found a convenient clearing, and the principals, pistol in hand, faced each other at a distance of some thirty paces, in the kind of single combat described by most Russian novelists and by practically all Russian novelists of gentle birth. As Arwin clapped his hands, informally signaling the permission to fire at will, Van noticed a speckled movement on his right: two little spectators—a fat girl and a boy in a sailorsuit, wearing glasses, with a basket of mushrooms between them. It was not the chocolate-muncher in Cordula’s compartment, but a boy very much like him, and as this flashed through Van’s mind he felt the jolt of the bullet ripping off, or so it felt, the entire left side of his torso. He swayed, but regained his balance, and with nice dignity discharged his pistol in the sun-hazy air.

  His heart beat steadily, his spit was clear, his lungs felt intact, but a fire of pain raged somewhere in his left armpit. Blood oozed through his clothes and trickled down his trouserleg. He sat down, slowly, cautiously, and leaned on his right arm. He dreaded losing consciousness, but, maybe, did faint briefly, because next moment he became aware that Johnny had relieved him of the letter and was in the act of pocketing it.

  “Tear it up, you idiot,” said Van with an involuntary groan.

  The Captain strolled up and muttered rather gloomily: “I bet you are in no condition to continue, are you?”

  “I bet you can’t wait—” began Van: he intended to say: “you can’t wait to have me slap you again,” but happened to laugh on “wait” and the muscles of mirth reacted so excruciatingly that he stopped in mid-sentence and bowed his sweating brow.

  Meanwhile, the limousine was being transformed into an ambulance by Arwin. Newspapers were dismembered to protect the upholstery, and the fussy Captain added to them what looked like a potato bag or something rotting in a locker, and then after rummaging again in the car trunk and muttering about the “bloody mess” (quite a literal statement) decided to sacrifice the ancient and filthy macintosh on which a decrepit dear dog had once died on the way to the veterinary.

  For half a minute Van was sure that he still lay in the car, whereas actually he was in the general ward of Lakeview (Lake-view!) Hospital, between two series of variously bandaged, snoring, raving and moaning men. When he understood this, his first reaction was to demand indignantly that he be transferred to the best private palata in the place and that his suitcase and alpenstock be fetched from the Majestic. His next request was that he be told how seriously he was hurt and how long he was expected to remain incapacitated. His third action was to resume what constituted the sole reason for his having to visit Kalugano (visit Kalugano!). His new quarters, where heartbroken kings had tossed in transit, proved to be a replica in white of his hotel apartment—white furniture, white carpet, white sparver. Inset, so to speak, was Tatiana, a remarkably pretty and proud young nurse, with black hair and diaphanous skin (some of her attitudes and gestures, and that harmony between neck and eyes which is the special, scarcely yet investigated secret of feminine grace fantastically and agonizingly reminded him of Ada, and he sought escape from that image in a powerful response to the charms of Tatiana, a torturing angel in her own right. Enforced immobility forbade the chase and grab of common cartoons. He begged her to massage his legs but she tested him with one glance of her grave, dark eyes—and delegated the task to Dorofey, a beefy-handed male nurse, strong enough to lift him bodily out of bed, with the sick child clasping the massive nape. When Van managed once to twiddle her breasts, she warned him she would complain if he ever repeated what she dubbed more aptly than she thought “that soft dangle.” An exhibition of his state with a humble appeal for a healing caress resulted in her drily remarking that distinguished gentlemen in public parks got quite lengthy prison terms for that sort of thing. However, much later, she wrote him a charming and melancholy letter in red ink on pink paper; but other emotions and events had intervened, and he never met her again). His suitcase promptly arrived from the hotel; the stick, however, could not be located (it must be climbing nowadays Wellington Mountain, or perhaps, helping a lady to go “brambling” in Oregon); so the hospital supplied him with the Third Cane, a rather nice, knotty, cherry-dark thing with a crook and a solid black-rubber heel. Dr. Fitzbishop congratulated him on having escaped with a superficial muscle wound, the bullet having lightly grooved or, if he might say so, grazed the greater serratus. Doc Fitz commented on Van’s wonderful recuperational power which was already in evidence, and promised to have him out of disinfectants and bandages in ten days or so if for the first three he remained as motionless as a felled tree-trunk. Did Van like music? Sportsmen usually did, didn’t they? Would he care to have a Sonorola by his bed? No, he disliked music, but did the doctor, being a concert-goer, know perhaps where a musician called Rack could be found? “Ward Five,” answered the doctor promptly. Van misunderstood this as the title of some piece of music and repeated his question. Would he find Rack’s address at Harper’s music shop? Well, they used to rent a cottage way down Dorofey Road, near the forest, but now some other people had moved in. Ward Five was where hopeless cases were kept. The poor guy had always had a bad liver and a very indifferent heart, but on top of that a poison had seeped into his system; the local “lab” could not identify it and they were now waiting for a report, on those curiously frog-green faeces, from the Luga people. If Rack had administered it to himself by his own hand, he kept “mum”; it was more likely the work of his wife who dabbled in Hindu-Andean voodoo stuff and had just had a complicated miscarriage in the maternity ward. Yes, triplets—how did he guess? Anyway, if Van was so eager to visit his old pal it would have to be as soon as he could be rolled to Ward Five in a wheelchair by Dorofey, so he’d better apply a bit of voodoo, ha-ha, on his own flesh and blood.

  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 deck-chair, 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 Rivière 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 Château de la Flèche, Flesh Hall.

  He strolled on the shade-streaked lawn feeling much too warm in his black pajamas and dark-re
d 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: