Ada, or Ardor

by Vladimir Nabokov

  “Odd, your saying that.”

  “Why?”

  “Never mind. Anyway, the beastly thing is now safe. I had to pay for it, lest he show poor Marina pictures of Van seducing his little cousin Ada—which would have been bad enough; actually, as a hawk of genius, he may have suspected the whole truth.”

  “So you really think that because you bought his album for a paltry thousand all evidence has been disposed of and everything is in order?”

  “Why, yes. Do you think the sum was too mean? I might send him more. I know where to reach him. He lectures, if you please, on the Art of Shooting Life at the School of Photography in Kalugano.”

  “Good place for shooting,” said Van. “So you are quite sure you own the ‘beastly thing’?”

  “Of course, I do. It’s with me, at the bottom of that trunk; I’ll show it to you in a moment.”

  “Tell me, my love, what was your so-called I.Q. when we first met?”

  “Two hundred and something. A sensational figure.”

  “Well, by now it has shrunk rather badly. Peeking Kim has kept all the negatives plus lots of pictures he will paste or post later.”

  “Would you say it has dropped to Cordula’s level?”

  “Lower. Now let’s look at those snapshots—before settling his monthly salary.”

  The first item in the evil series had projected one of Van’s initial impressions of Ardis Manor at an angle that differed from that of his own recollection. Its area lay between the shadow of a calèche darkening the gravel and the white step of a pillared porch shining in the sun. Marina, one arm still in the sleeve of the dust coat which a footman (Price) was helping her to remove, stood brandishing her free arm in a theatrical gesture of welcome (entirely at variance with the grimace of helpless beatitude twisting her face), while Ada in a black hockey blazer—belonging really to Vanda—spilled her hair over her bare knees as she flexed them and flipped Dack with her flowers to check his nervous barks.

  Then came several preparatory views of the immediate grounds: the colutea circle, an avenue, the grotto’s black O, and the hill, and the big chain around the trunk of the rare oak, Quercus ruslan Chat., and a number of other spots meant to be picturesque by the compiler of the illustrated pamphlet but looking a little shabby owing to inexperienced photography.

  It improved gradually.

  Another girl (Blanche!) stooping and squatting exactly like Ada (and indeed not unlike her in features) over Van’s valise opened on the floor, and “eating with her eyes” the silhouette of Ivory Revery in a perfume advertisement. Then the cross and the shade of boughs above the grave of Marina’s dear housekeeper, Anna Pimenovna Nepraslinov (1797–1883).

  Let’s skip nature shots—of skunklike squirrels, of a striped fish in a bubble tank, of a canary in its pretty prison.

  A photograph of an oval painting, considerably diminished, portrayed Princess Sophia Zemski as she was at twenty, in 1775, with her two children (Marina’s grandfather born in 1772, and Demon’s grandmother, born in 1773).

  “I don’t seem to remember it,” said Van, “where did it hang?”

  “In Marina’s boudoir. And do you know who this bum in the frock coat is?”

  “Looks to me like a poor print cut out of a magazine. Who’s he?”

  “Sumerechnikov! He took sumerographs of Uncle Vanya years ago.”

  “The Twilight before the Lumières. Hey, and here’s Alonso, the swimming-pool expert. I met his sweet sad daughter at a Cyprian party—she felt and smelt and melted like you. The strong charm of coincidence.”

  “I’m not interested. Now comes a little boy.”

  “Zdraste, Ivan Dementievich,” said Van, greeting his fourteen-year-old self, shirtless, in shorts, aiming a conical missile at the marble fore-image of a Crimean girl doomed to offer an everlasting draught of marble water to a dying marine from her bullet-chipped jar.

  Skip Lucette skipping rope.

  Ah, the famous first finch.

  “No, that’s a kitayskaya punochka (Chinese Wall Bunting). It has settled on the threshold of a basement door. The door is ajar. There are garden tools and croquet mallets inside. You remember how many exotic, alpine and polar, animals mixed with ordinary ones in our region.”

  Lunchtime. Ada bending low over the dripping peach improperly peeled that she is devouring (shot from the garden through the french window).

  Drama and comedy. Blanche struggling with two amorous tsigans in the Baguenaudier Bower. Uncle Dan calmly reading a newspaper in his little red motorcar, hopelessly stuck in black mud on the Ladore road.

  Two huge common Peacock moths, still connected. Grooms and gardeners brought Ada that species every blessed year; which, in a way, reminds us of you, sweet Marco d’Andrea, or you, red-haired Domenico Benci, or you, dark and broody Giovanni del Brina (who thought they were bats) or the one I dare not mention (because it is Lucette’s scholarly contribution—so easily botched after the scholar’s death) who likewise might have picked up, at the foot of an orchard wall, not overhung with not-yet-imported wisteria (her half-sister’s addition), on a May morning in 1542, near Florence, a pair of the Pear Peacock in copula, the male with the feathery antennae, the female with the plain threads, to depict them faithfully (among wretched, unvisualized insects) on one side of a fenestral niche in the so-called “Elements Room” of the Palazzo Vecchio.

  Sunrise at Ardis. Congs: naked Van still cocooned in his hammock under the “lidderons” as they called in Ladore the liriodendrons, not exactly a lit d’édredon, though worth an auroral pun and certainly conducive to the physical expression of a young dreamer’s fancy undisguised by the network.

  “Congratulations,” repeated Van in male language. “The first indecent postcard. Bewhorny, no doubt, has a blown-up copy in his private stock.”

  Ada examined the pattern of the hammock through a magnifying glass (used by Van for deciphering certain details of his lunatics’ drawings).

  “I’m afraid there’s more to come,” she remarked with a catch in her voice; and taking advantage of their looking at the album in bed (which we now think lacked taste) odd Ada used the reading loupe on live Van, something she had done many times as a scientifically curious and artistically depraved child in that year of grace, here depicted.

  “I’ll find a mouche (patch) to conceal it,” she said, returning to the leering carúncula in the unreticent reticulation. “By the way, you have quite a collection of black masks in your dresser.”

  “For masked balls (bals-masqués),” murmured Van.

  A comparison piece: Ada’s very-much-exposed white thighs (her birthday skirt had got entangled with twigs and leaves) straddling a black limb of the tree of Eden. Thereafter: several shots of the 1884 picnic, such as Ada and Grace dancing a Lyaskan fling and reversed Van nibbling at pine starworts (conjectural identification).

  “That’s finished,” said Van, “a precious sinistral sinew has stopped functioning. I can still fence and deliver a fine punch but hand-walking is out. You shall not sniffle, Ada. Ada is not going to sniffle and wail. King Wing says that the great Vekchelo turned back into an ordinary chelovek at the age I’m now, so everything is perfectly normal. Ah, drunken Ben Wright trying to rape Blanche in the mews—she has quite a big part in this farrago.”

  “He’s doing nothing of the sort. You see quite well they are dancing. It’s like the Beast and the Belle at the ball where Cinderella loses her garter and the Prince his beautiful codpiece of glass. You can also make out Mr. Ward and Mrs. French in a brueghelish kimbo (peasant prance) at the farther end of the hall. All those rural rapes in our parts have been grossly exaggerated. D’ailleurs, it was Mr. Ben Wright’s last petard at Ardis.”

  Ada on the balcony (photographed by our acrobatic voyeur from the roof edge) drawing one of her favorite flowers, a Ladore satyrion, silky-haired, fleshy, erect. Van thought he recalled that particular sunny evening, the excitement, the softness, and some casual words she had muttered (in connection with an inane bo
tanical comment of his): “my flower opens only at dusk.” The one she was moistly mauving.

  A formal photograph, on a separate page: Adochka, pretty and impure in her flimsy, and Vanichka in gray-flannel suit, with slant-striped school tie, facing the kimera (chimera, camera) side by side, at attention, he with the shadow of a forced grin, she, expressionless. Both recalled the time (between the first tiny cross and a whole graveyard of kisses) and the occasion: it was ordered by Marina, who had it framed and set up in her bedroom next to a picture of her brother at twelve or fourteen clad in a bayronka (open shirt) and cupping a guinea pig in his gowpen (hollowed hands); the three looked like siblings, with the dead boy providing a vivisectional alibi.

  Another photograph was taken in the same circumstances but for some reason had been rejected by capricious Marina: at a tripod table, Ada sat reading, her half-clenched hand covering the lower part of the page. A very rare, radiant, seemingly uncalled-for smile shone on her practically Moorish lips. Her hair flowed partly across her collarbone and partly down her back. Van stood inclining his head above her and looked, unseeing, at the opened book. In full, deliberate consciousness, at the moment of the hooded click, he bunched the recent past with the imminent future and thought to himself that this would remain an objective perception of the real present and that he must remember the flavor, the flash, the flesh of the present (as he, indeed, remembered it half a dozen years later—and now, in the second half of the next century).

  But what about the rare radiance on those adored lips? Bright derision can easily grade, through a cline of glee, into a look of rapture:

  “Do you know, Van, what book lay there—next to Marina’s hand mirror and a pair of tweezers? I’ll tell you. One of the most tawdry and réjouissants novels that ever ‘made’ the front page of the Manhattan Times’ Book Review. I’m sure your Cordula still had it in her cosy corner where you sat temple to temple after you jilted me.”

  “Cat,” said Van.

  “Oh, much worse. Old Beckstein’s Tabby was a masterpiece in comparison to this—this Love under the Lindens by one Eelmann transported into English by Thomas Gladstone, who seems to belong to a firm of Packers & Porters, because on the page which Adochka, adova dochka (Hell’s daughter), happens to be relishing here, ‘automobile’ is rendered as ‘wagon.’ And to think, to think, that little Lucette had to study Eelmann, and three terrible Toms in her Literature course at Los!”

  “You remember that trash but I remember our nonstop three-hour kiss Under the Larches immediately afterwards.”

  “See next illustration,” said Ada grimly.

  “The scoundrel!” cried Van; “He must have been creeping after us on his belly with his entire apparatus. I will have to destroy him.”

  “No more destruction, Van. Only love.”

  “But look, girl, here I’m glutting your tongue, and there I’m glued to your epiglottis, and—”

  “Intermission,” begged Ada, “quick-quick.”

  “I’m ready to oblige till I’m ninety,” said Van (the vulgarity of the peep show was catchy), “ninety times a month, roughly.”

  “Make it even more roughly, oh much more, say a hundred and fifty, that would mean, that would mean—”

  But, in the sudden storm, calculations went to the canicular devils.

  “Well,” said Van, when the mind took over again, “let’s go back to our defaced childhood. I’m anxious”—(picking up the album from the bedside rug)—“to get rid of this burden. Ah, a new character, the inscription says: Dr. Krolik.”

  “Wait a sec. It may be the best Vanishing Van but it’s terribly messy all the same. Okay. Yes, that’s my poor nature teacher.”

  Knickerbockered, panama-hatted, lusting for his babochka (Russian for “lepidopteron”). A passion, a sickness. What could Diana know about that chase?

  “How curious—in the state Kim mounted him here, he looks much less furry and fat than I imagined. In fact, darling, he’s a big, strong, handsome old March Hare! Explain!”

  “There’s nothing to explain. I asked Kim one day to help me carry some boxes there and back, and here’s the visual proof. Besides, that’s not my Krolik but his brother, Karol, or Karapars, Krolik. A doctor of philosophy, born in Turkey.”

  “I love the way your eyes narrow when you tell a lie. The remote mirage in Effrontery Minor.”

  “I’m not lying!”—(with lovely dignity): “He is a doctor of philosophy.”

  “Van ist auch one,” murmured Van, sounding the last word as “avann.”

  “Our fondest dream,” she continued, “Krolik’s and my fondest dream, was to describe and depict the early stages, from ova to pupa, of all the known Fritillaries, Greater and Lesser, beginning with those of the New World. I would have been responsible for building an argynninarium (a pestproof breeding house, with temperature patterns, and other refinements—such as background night smells and night-animal calls to create a natural atmosphere in certain difficult cases)—a caterpillar needs exquisite care! There are hundreds of species and good subspecies in both hemispheres but, I repeat, we’d begin with America. Live egg-laying females and live food plants, such as violets of numerous kinds, airmailed from everywhere, starting, for the heck of it, with arctic habitats—Lyaska, Le Bras d’Or, Victor Island. The magnanery would be also a violarium, full of fascinating flourishing plants, from the endiconensis race of the Northern Marsh Violet to the minute but magnificent Viola kroliki recently described by Professor Hall from Good-son Bay. I would contribute colored figures of all the instars, and line drawings of the perfect insect’s genitalia and other structures. It would be a wonderful work.”

  “A work of love,” said Van, and turned the page.

  “Unfortunately, my dear collaborator died intestate, and all his collections, including my own little part, were surrendered by a regular warren of collateral Kroliks to agents in Germany and dealers in Tartary. Disgraceful, unjust, and so sad!”

  “We’ll find you another director of science. Now what do we have here?”

  Three footmen, Price, Norris, and Ward dressed up as grotesque firemen. Young Bout devotedly kissing the veined instep of a pretty bare foot raised and placed on a balustrade. Nocturnal outdoor shot of two small white ghosts pressing their noses from the inside to the library window.

  Artistically éventail-ed all on one page were seven fotochki (diminutive stills) taken within as many minutes—from a fairly distant lurk—in a setting of tall grass, wild flowers, and overhanging foliage. Its shade, and the folly of peduncles, delicately camouflaged the basic details, suggesting little more than a tussle between two incompletely clad children.

  In the central miniature, Ada’s only limb in sight was her thin arm holding aloft, in a static snatch, like a banner, her discarded dress above the daisy-starred grass. The magnifier (now retrieved from under the bed sheet) clearly showed, topping the daisies in an upper picture, the type of tight-capped toadstool called in Scots law (ever since witching was banned) “the Lord of Erection.” Another interesting plant, Marvel’s Melon, imitating the backside of an occupied lad, could be made out on the floral horizon of a third photo. In the next three stills la force des choses (“the fever of intercourse”) had sufficiently disturbed the lush herbage to allow one to distinguish the details of a tangled composition consisting of clumsy Romany clips and illegal nelsons. Finally, in the last picture, the lower one in the fanlike sequence, Ada was represented by her two hands rearranging her hair while her Adam stood over her, a frond or inflorescence veiling his thigh with the deliberate casualness of an Old Master’s device to keep Eden chaste.

  In an equally casual tone of voice Van said: “Darling, you smoke too much, my belly is covered with your ashes. I suppose Bouteillan knows Professor Beauharnais’s exact address in the Athens of Graphic Arts.”

  “You shall not slaughter him,” said Ada. “He is subnormal, he is, perhaps, blackmailerish, but in his sordidity there is an istoshnïy ston (“visceral moan”) of crippled art.
Furthermore, this page is the only really naughty one. And let’s not forget that a copperhead of eight was also ambushed in the brush.”

  “Art my joute. This is the hearse of ars, a toilet roll of the Carte du Tendre! I’m sorry you showed it to me. That ape has vulgarized our own mind-pictures. I will either horsewhip his eyes out or redeem our childhood by making a book of it: Ardis, a family chronicle.”

  “Oh do!” said Ada (skipping another abominable glimpse—apparently, through a hole in the boards of the attic). “Look, here’s our little Caliph Island!”

  “I don’t want to look any more. I suspect you find that filth titillating. Some nuts get a kick from motor-bikini comics.”

  “Please, Van, do glance! These are our willows, remember?”

  “ ‘The castle bathed by the Adour:

  The guidebooks recommend that tour.’ ”

  “It happens to be the only one in color. The willows look sort of greenish because the twigs are greenish, but actually they are leafless here, it’s early spring, and you can see our red boat Souvenance through the rushes. And here’s the last one: Kim’s apotheosis of Ardis.”

  The entire staff stood in several rows on the steps of the pillared porch behind the Bank President Baroness Veen and the Vice President Ida Larivière. Those two were flanked by the two prettiest typists, Blanche de la Tourberie (ethereal, tearstained, entirely adorable) and a black girl who had been hired, a few days before Van’s departure, to help French, who towered rather sullenly above her in the second row, the focal point of which was Bouteillan, still wearing the costume sport he had on when driving off with Van (that picture had been muffed or omitted). On the butler’s right side stood three footmen; on his left, Bout (who had valeted Van), the fat, flour-pale cook (Blanche’s father) and, next to French, a terribly tweedy gentleman with sightseeing strappings athwart one shoulder: actually (according to Ada), a tourist, who, having come all the way from England to see Bryant’s Castle, had bicycled up the wrong road and was, in the picture, under the impression of accidentally being conjoined to a group of fellow tourists who were visiting some other old manor quite worth inspecting too. The back rows consisted of less distinguished menservants and scullions, as well as of gardeners, stableboys, coachmen, shadows of columns, maids of maids, aids, laundresses, dresses, recesses—getting less and less distinct as in those bank ads where limited little employees dimly dimidiated by more fortunate shoulders, but still asserting themselves, still smile in the process of humble dissolve.