Ada, or Ardor

by Vladimir Nabokov

  “Isn’t that wheezy Jones in the second row? I always liked the old fellow.”

  “No,” answered Ada, “that’s Price. Jones came four years later. He is now a prominent policeman in Lower Ladore. Well, that’s all.”

  Nonchalantly, Van went back to the willows and said:

  “Every shot in the book has been snapped in 1884, except this one. I never rowed you down Ladore River in early spring. Nice to note you have not lost your wonderful ability to blush.”

  “It’s his error. He must have thrown in a fotochka taken later, maybe in 1888. We can rip it out if you like.”

  “Sweetheart,” said Van, “the whole of 1888 has been ripped out. One need not be a sleuth in a mystery story to see that at least as many pages have been removed as retained. I don’t mind—I mean I have no desire to see the Knabenkräuter and other pendants of your friends botanizing with you; but 1888 has been withheld and he’ll turn up with it when the first grand is spent.”

  “I destroyed 1888 myself,” admitted proud Ada; “but I swear, I solemnly swear, that the man behind Blanche, in the perron picture, was, and has always remained, a complete stranger.”

  “Good for him,” said Van. “Really it has no importance. It’s our entire past that has been spoofed and condemned. On second thoughts, I will not write that Family Chronicle. By the way, where is my poor little Blanche now?”

  “Oh, she’s all right. She’s still around. You know, she came back—after you abducted her. She married our Russian coachman, the one who replaced Bengal Ben, as the servants called him.”

  “Oh she did? That’s delicious. Madame Trofim Fartukov. I would never have thought it.”

  “They have a blind child,” said Ada.

  “Love is blind,” said Van.

  “She tells me you made a pass at her on the first morning of your first arrival.”

  “Not documented by Kim,” said Van. “Will their child remain blind? I mean, did you get them a really first-rate physician?”

  “Oh yes, hopelessly blind. But speaking of love and its myths, do you realize—because I never did before talking to her a couple of years ago—that the people around our affair had very good eyes indeed? Forget Kim, he’s only the necessary clown—but do you realize that a veritable legend was growing around you and me while we played and made love?”

  She had never realized, she said again and again (as if intent to reclaim the past from the matter-of-fact triviality of the album), that their first summer in the orchards and orchidariums of Ardis had become a sacred secret and creed, throughout the countryside. Romantically inclined handmaids, whose reading consisted of Given de Vere and Klara Mertvago, adored Van, adored Ada, adored Ardis’s ardors in arbors. Their swains, plucking ballads on their seven-stringed Russian lyres under the racemosa in bloom or in old rose gardens (while the windows went out one by one in the castle), added freshly composed lines—naive, lackey-daisical, but heartfelt—to cyclic folk songs. Eccentric police officers grew enamored with the glamour of incest. Gardeners paraphrased iridescent Persian poems about irrigation and the Four Arrows of Love. Nightwatchmen fought insomnia and the fire of the clap with the weapons of Vaniada’s Adventures. Herdsmen, spared by thunderbolts on remote hillsides, used their huge “moaning horns” as ear trumpets to catch the lilts of Ladore. Virgin châtelaines in marble-floored manors fondled their lone flames fanned by Van’s romance. And another century would pass, and the painted word would be retouched by the still richer brush of time.

  “All of which,” said Van, “only means that our situation is desperate.”

  8

  Knowing how fond his sisters were of Russian fare and Russian floor shows, Van took them Saturday night to “Ursus,” the best Franco-Estotian restaurant in Manhattan Major. Both young ladies wore the very short and open evening gowns that Vass “miraged” that season—in the phrase of that season: Ada, a gauzy black, Lucette, a lustrous cantharid green. Their mouths “echoed” in tone (but not tint) each other’s lipstick; their eyes were made up in a “surprised bird-of-paradise” style that was as fashionable in Los as in Lute. Mixed metaphors and double-talk became all three Veens, the children of Venus.

  The uha, the shashlik, the Ai were facile and familiar successes; but the old songs had a peculiar poignancy owing to the participation of a Lyaskan contralto and a Banff bass, renowned performers of Russian “romances,” with a touch of heart-wringing tsiganshchina vibrating through Grigoriev and Glinka. And there was Flora, a slender, hardly nubile, half-naked music-hall dancer of uncertain origin (Rumanian? Romany? Ramsey an?) whose ravishing services Van had availed himself of several times in the fall of that year. As a “man of the world,” Van glanced with bland (perhaps too bland) unconcern at her talented charms, but they certainly added a secret bonus to the state of erotic excitement tingling in him from the moment that his two beauties had been unfurred and placed in the colored blaze of the feast before him; and that thrill was somehow augmented by his awareness (carefully profiled, diaphanely blinkered) of the furtive, jealous, intuitive suspicion with which Ada and Lucette watched, unsmilingly, his facial reactions to the demure look of professional recognition on the part of the passing and repassing blyadushka (cute whorelet), as our young misses referred to (very expensive and altogether delightful) Flora with ill-feigned indifference. Presently, the long sobs of the violins began to affect and almost choke Van and Ada: a juvenile conditioning of romantic appeal, which at one moment forced tearful Ada to go and “powder her nose” while Van stood up with a spasmodic sob, which he cursed but could not control. He went back to whatever he was eating, and cruelly stroked Lucette’s apricot-bloomed forearm, and she said in Russian “I’m drunk, and all that, but I adore (obozhayu), I adore, I adore, I adore more than life you, you (tebya, tebya), I ache for you unbearably (ya toskuyu po tebe nevïnosimo), and, please, don’t let me swill (hlestat’) champagne any more, not only because I will jump into Goodson River if I can’t hope to have you, and not only because of the physical red thing—your heart was almost ripped out, my poor dusherika (‘darling,’ more than ‘darling’), it looked to me at least eight inches long-”

  “Seven and a half,” murmured modest Van, whose hearing the music impaired.

  “—but because you are Van, all Van, and nothing but Van, skin and scar, the only truth of our only life, of my accursed life, Van, Van, Van.”

  Here Van stood up again, as Ada, black fan in elegant motion, came back followed by a thousand eyes, while the opening bars of a romance (on Fet’s glorious Siyala noch’) started to run over the keys (and the bass coughed à la russe into his fist before starting).

  A radiant night, a moon-filled garden. Beams

  Lay at our feet. The drawing room, unlit;

  Wide open, the grand piano; and our hearts

  Throbbed to your song, as throbbed the strings in it…

  Then Banoffsky launched into Glinka’s great amphibrachs (Mihail Ivanovich had been a summer guest at Ardis when their uncle was still alive—a green bench existed where the composer was said to have sat under the pseudoacacias especially often, mopping his ample brow):

  Subside, agitation of passion!

  Then other singers took over with sadder and sadder ballads—“The tender kisses are forgotten,” and “The time was early in the spring, the grass was barely sprouting,” and “Many songs have I heard in the land of my birth: Some in sorrow were sung, some in gladness,” and the spuriously populist

  There’s a crag on the Ross, overgrown with wild moss

  On all sides, from the lowest to highest…

  and a series of viatic plaints such as the more modestly anapestic:

  In a monotone tinkles the yoke-bell,

  And the roadway is dusting a bit…

  And that obscurely corrupted soldier dit of singular genius

  Nadezhda, I shall then be back

  When the true batch outboys the riot…

  and Turgenev’s only memorable lyrical poem beginning
>
  Morning so nebulous, morning gray-dawning,

  Reaped fields so sorrowful under snow coverings

  and naturally the celebrated pseudo-gipsy guitar piece by Apollon Grigoriev (another friend of Uncle Ivan’s)

  O you, at least, do talk to me,

  My seven-stringed companion,

  Such yearning ache invades my soul,

  Such moonlight fills the canyon!

  “I declare we are satiated with moonlight and strawberry soufflé—the latter, I fear, has not quite ‘risen’ to the occasion,” remarked Ada in her archest, Austen-maidenish manner. “Let’s all go to bed. You have seen our huge bed, pet? Look, our cavalier is yawning ‘fit to declansh his masher’ ” (vulgar Ladore cant).

  “How (ascension of Mt. Yawn) true,” uttered Van, ceasing to palpate the velvet cheek of his Cupidon peach, which he had bruised but not sampled.

  The captain, the vinocherpiy, the shashlikman, and a crew of waiters had been utterly entranced by the amount of zernist ay a ikra and At consumed by the vaporous-looking Veens and were now keeping a multiple eye on the tray that had flown back to Van with a load of gold change and bank notes.

  “Why,” asked Lucette, kissing Ada’s cheek as they both rose (making swimming gestures behind their backs in search of the furs locked up in the vault or somewhere), “why did the first song, Uzh gasli v komnatah ogni, and the ‘redolent roses,’ upset you more than your favorite Fet and the other, about the bugler’s sharp elbow?”

  “Van, too, was upset,” replied Ada cryptically and grazed with freshly rouged lips tipsy Lucette’s fanciest freckle.

  Detachedly, merely tactually, as if he had met those two slow-moving, hip-swaying graces only that night, Van, while steering them through a doorway (to meet the sinchilla mantillas that were being rushed toward them by numerous, new, eager, unfairly, inexplicably impecunious, humans), placed one palm, the left, on Ada’s long bare back and the other on Lucette’s spine, quite as naked and long (had she meant the lad or the ladder? Lapse of the lisping lips?). Detachedly, he sifted and tasted this sensation, then that. His girl’s ensellure was hot ivory; Lucette’s was downy and damp. He too had had just about his “last straw” of champagne, namely four out of half a dozen bottles minus a rizzom (as we said at old Chose) and now, as he followed their bluish furs, he inhaled like a fool his right hand before gloving it.

  “I say, Veen,” whinnied a voice near him (there were lots of lechers around), “you don’t rally need two, d’you?”

  Van veered, ready to cuff the gross speaker—but it was only Flora, a frightful tease and admirable mimic. He tried to give her a banknote, but she fled, bracelets and breast stars flashing a fond farewell.

  As soon as Edmund (not Edmond, who for security reasons—he knew Ada—had been sent back to Kingston) brought them home, Ada puffed out her cheeks, making big eyes, and headed for Van’s bathroom. Hers had been turned over to the tottering guest. Van, at a geographical point a shade nearer to the elder girl, stood and used in a sustained stream the amenities of a little vessie (Canady form of W.C.) next to his dressing room. He removed his dinner jacket and tie, undid the collar of his silk shirt and paused in virile hesitation: Ada, beyond their bedroom and sitting room, was running her bath; to its gush a guitar rhythm, recently heard, kept adapting itself aquatically (the rare moments when he remembered her and her quite rational speech at her last sanatorium in Agavia).

  He licked his lips, cleared his throat and, deciding to kill two finches with one fircone, walked to the other, southern, extremity of the flat through a boudery and manger hall (we always tend to talk Canady when haut). In the guest bedroom, Lucette stood with her back to him, in the process of slipping on her pale green nightdress over her head. Her narrow haunches were bare, and our wretched rake could not help being moved by the ideal symmetry of the exquisite twin dimples that only very perfect young bodies have above the buttocks in the sacral belt of beauty. Oh, they were even more perfect than Ada’s! Fortunately, she turned around, smoothing her tumbled red curls while her hem dropped to knee level.

  “My dear,” said Van, “do help me. She told me about her Valentian estanciero but now the name escapes me and I hate bothering her.”

  “Only she never told you,” said loyal Lucette, “so nothing could escape. Nope. I can’t do that to your sweetheart and mine, because we know you could hit that keyhole with a pistol.”

  “Please, little vixen! I’ll reward you with a very special kiss.”

  “Oh, Van,” she said over a deep sigh. “You promise you won’t tell her I told you?”

  “I promise. No, no, no,” he went on, assuming a Russian accent, as she, with the abandon of mindless love, was about to press her abdomen to his. “Nikak-s net: no lips, no philtrum, no nosetip, no swimming eye. Little vixen’s axilla, just that—unless”—(drawing back in mock uncertainty)—“you shave there?”

  “I stink worse when I do,” confided simple Lucette and obediently bared one shoulder.

  “Arm up! Point at Paradise! Terra! Venus!” commanded Van, and for a few synchronized heartbeats, fitted his working mouth to the hot, humid, perilous hollow.

  She sat down with a bump on a chair, pressing one hand to her brow.

  “Turn off the footlights,” said Van. “I want the name of that fellow.”

  “Vinelander,” she answered.

  He heard Ada Vinelander’s voice calling for her Glass bed slippers (which, as in Cordulenka’s princessdom too, he found hard to distinguish from dance footwear), and a minute later, without the least interruption in the established tension, Van found himself, in a drunken dream, making violent love to Rose—no, to Ada, but in the rosacean fashion, on a kind of lowboy. She complained he hurt her “like a Tiger Turk.” He went to bed and was about to doze off for good when she left his side. Where was she going? Pet wanted to see the album.

  “I’ll be back in a rubby,” she said (tribadic schoolgirl slang), “so keep awake. From now on by the way, it’s going to be Chére-amie-fait-morata”—(play on the generic and specific names of the famous fly)—“until further notice.”

  “But no sapphic vorschmacks,” mumbled Van into his pillow.

  “Oh, Van,” she said, turning to shake her head, one hand on the opal doorknob at the end of an endless room. “We’ve been through that so many times! You admit yourself that I am only a pale wild girl with gipsy hair in a deathless ballad, in a nulliverse, in Rattner’s ‘menald world’ where the only principle is random variation. You cannot demand,” she continued—somewhere between the cheeks of his pillow (for Ada had long vanished with her blood-brown book)—“you cannot demand pudicity on the part of a delphinet! You know that I really love only males and, alas, only one man.”

  There was always something colorfully impressionistic, but also infantile, about Ada’s allusions to her affairs of the flesh, reminding one of baffle painting, or little glass labyrinths with two peas, or the Ardis throwing-trap—you remember?—which tossed up clay pigeons and pine cones to be shot at, or cocka-maroo (Russian “biks”), played with a toy cue on the billiard cloth of an oblong board with holes and hoops, bells and pins among which the ping-pong-sized eburnean ball zigzagged with bix-pix concussions.

  Tropes are the dreams of speech. Through the boxwood maze and bagatelle arches of Ardis, Van passed into sleep. When he reopened his eyes it was nine A.M. She lay curved away from him, with nothing beyond the opened parenthesis, its contents not yet ready to be enclosed, and the beloved, beautiful, treacherous, blue-black-bronze hair smelt of Ardis, but also of Lucette’s “Oh-de-grace.”

  Had she cabled him? Canceled or Postponed? Mrs. Viner—no, Vingolfer, no, Vinelander—first Russki to taste the labruska grape.

  “Mne snitsa saPERnik SHCHASTLEE VOY!” (Mihail Ivanovich arcating the sand with his cane, humped on his bench under the creamy racemes).

  “I dream of a fortunate rival!”

  In the meantime it’s Dr. Hangover for me, and his strongest Kaffeina pill.

/>   Ada being at twenty a long morning sleeper, his usual practice, ever since their new life together had started, was to shower before she awoke and, while shaving, ring from the bathroom for their breakfast to be brought by Valerio, who would roll in the laid table out of the lift into the sitting room next to their bedroom. But on this particular Sunday, not knowing what Lucette might like (he remembered her old craving for cocoa) and being anxious to have an engagement with Ada before the day began, even if it meant intruding upon her warm sleep, Van sped up his ablutions, robustly dried himself, powdered his groin, and without bothering to put anything on reentered the bedroom in full pride, only to find a tousled and sulky Lucette, still in her willow green nightie, sitting on the far edge of the concubital bed, while fat-nippled Ada, already wearing, for ritual and fatidic reasons, his river of diamonds, was inhaling her first smoke of the day and trying to make her little sister decide whether she would like to try the Monaco’s pancakes with Potomac syrup, or, perhaps, their incomparable amber-and-ruby bacon. Upon seeing Van, who without a flinch in his imposing deportment proceeded to place a rightful knee on the near side of the tremendous bed (Mississippi Rose had once brought there, for progressive visual-education purposes, her two small toffee-brown sisters, and a doll almost their size but white), Lucette shrugged her shoulders and made as if to leave, but Ada’s avid hand restrained her.

  “Pop in, pet (it all started with the little one letting wee winds go free at table, circa 1882). And you, Garden God, ring up room service—three coffees, half a dozen soft-boiled eggs, lots of buttered toast, loads of—”