Ada, or Ardor

by Vladimir Nabokov

  “It is not,” said Van indignantly. “What perfect nonsense. She can’t play a note!”

  “Well, no matter,” said Demon. “Observation is not always the mother of deduction. However, there is nothing improper about a hanky dumped on a Bechstein. You don’t have, my love, to blush so warmly. Let me quote for comic relief

  “Lorsque son fi-ancé fut parti pour la guerre

  Irène de Grandfief, la pauvre et noble enfant

  Ferma son pi-ano … vendit son éléphant

  “The gobble enfant is genuine, but the elephant is mine.”

  “You don’t say so,” laughed Ada.

  “Our great Coppée,” said Van, “is awful, of course, yet he has one very fetching little piece which Ada de Grandfief here has twisted into English several times, more or less successfully.”

  “Oh, Van!” interjected Ada with unusual archness, and scooped up a handful of salted almonds.

  “Let’s hear it, let’s hear it,” cried Demon as he borrowed a nut from her cupped hand.

  The neat interplay of harmonious motions, the candid gayety of family reunions, the never-entangling marionette strings—all this is easier described than imagined.

  “Old storytelling devices,” said Van, “may be parodied only by very great and inhuman artists, but only close relatives can be forgiven for paraphrasing illustrious poems. Let me preface the effort of a cousin—anybody’s cousin—by a snatch of Pushkin, for the sake of rhyme—”

  “For the snake of rhyme!” cried Ada. “A paraphrase, even my paraphrase, is like the corruption of ‘snakeroot’ into ‘snagrel’—all that remains of a delicate little birthwort.”

  “Which is amply sufficient,” said Demon, “for my little needs, and those of my little friends.”

  “So here goes,” continued Van (ignoring what he felt was an indecent allusion, since the unfortunate plant used to be considered by the ancient inhabitants of the Ladore region not so much as a remedy for the bite of a reptile, as the token of a very young woman’s easy delivery; but no matter). “By chance preserved has been the poem. In fact, I have it. Here it is: Leur chute est lente and one can know ’em …”

  “Oh, I know ’em,” interrupted Demon:

  “Leur chute est lente. On peut les suivre

  Du regard en reconnaissant

  Le chêne à sa feuille de cuivre

  L’érable à sa feuille de sang

  “Grand stuff!”

  “Yes, that was Coppée and now comes the cousin,” said Van, and he recited:

  “Their fall is gentle. The leavesdropper

  Can follow each of them and know

  The oak tree by its leaf of copper,

  The maple by its blood-red glow.”

  “Pah!” uttered the versionist.

  “Not at all!” cried Demon. “That ‘leavesdropper’ is a splendid trouvaille, girl.” He pulled the girl to him, she landing on the arm of his Klubsessel, and he glued himself with thick moist lips to her hot red ear through the rich black strands. Van felt a shiver of delight.

  It was now Marina’s turn to make her entrée, which she did in excellent chiaroscuro circumstances, wearing a spangled dress, her face in the soft focus sought by ripe stars, holding out both arms and followed by Jones who carried two flambeaux and kept trying to keep within the limits of decorum the odd little go-away kicks he was aiming backwards at a brown flurry in the shadows.

  “Marina!” cried Demon with perfunctory enthusiasm, and patted her hand as he joined her on a settee.

  Puffing rhythmically, Jones set one of his beautiful dragon-entwined flambeaux on the low-boy with the gleaming drinks and was about to bring over its fellow to the spot where Demon and Marina were winding up affable preliminaries but was quickly motioned by Marina to a pedestal near the striped fish. Puffing, he drew the curtains, for nothing but picturesque ruins remained of the day. Jones was new, very efficient, solemn and slow, and one had to get used gradually to his ways and wheeze. Years later he rendered me a service that I will never forget.

  “She’s a jeune fille fatale, a pale, heart-breaking beauty,” Demon confided to his former mistress without bothering to discover whether the subject of his praise could hear him (she did) from the other end of the room where she was helping Van to corner the dog—and showing much too much leg in the process. Our old friend, being quite as excited as the rest of the reunited family, had scampered in after Marina with an old miniver-furred slipper in his merry mouth. The slipper belonged to Blanche, who had been told to whisk Dack to her room but, as usual, had not incarcerated him properly. Both children experienced a chill of déjà-vu (a twofold déjà-vu, in fact, when contemplated in artistic retrospect).

  “Pozhalsta bez glupostey (please, no silly things), especially devant les gens,” said deeply flattered Marina (sounding the final “s” as her granddams had done); and when the slow fish-mouthed footman had gone carrying away, supine, high-chested Dack and his poor plaything, she continued: “Really, in com parison to the local girls, to Grace Erminin, for example, or Cordula de Prey, Ada is a Turgenevian maiden or even a Jane Austen miss.”

  “I’m Fanny Price, actually,” commented Ada.

  “In the staircase scene,” added Van.

  “Let’s not bother about their private jokes,” said Marina to Demon. “I never can understand their games and little secrets. Mlle Larivière, however, has written a wonderful screenplay about mysterious children doing strange things in old parks—but don’t let her start talking of her literary successes tonight, that would be fatal.”

  “I hope your husband won’t be too late,” said Demon. “He is not at his best after eight P.M., summertime, you know. By the way, how’s Lucette?”

  At this moment both battants of the door were flung open by Bouteillan in the grand manner, and Demon offered kala-chikom (in the form of a Russian crescent loaf) his arm to Marina. Van, who in his father’s presence was prone to lapse into a rather dismal sort of playfulness, proposed taking Ada in, but she slapped his wrist away with a sisterly sans-gêne, of which Fanny Price might not have approved.

  Another Price, a typical, too typical, old retainer whom Marina (and G. A. Vronsky, during their brief romance) had dubbed, for unknown reasons, “Grib,” placed an onyx ashtray at the head of the table for Demon, who liked to smoke between courses—a puff of Russian ancestry. A side table supported, also in the Russian fashion, a collection of red, black, gray, beige hors-d’oeuvres, with the serviette caviar (salfetochnaya ikra) separated from the pot of Graybead (ikra svezhaya) by the succulent pomp of preserved boletes, “white,” and “subbetu-line,” while the pink of smoked salmon vied with the incarnadine of Westphalian ham. The variously flavored vodochki glittered, on a separate tray. The French cuisine had contributed its chaudfroids and foie gras. A window was open, and the crickets were stridulating at an ominous speed in the black motionless foliage.

  It was—to continue the novelistic structure—a long, joyful, delicious dinner, and although the talk consisted mainly of family quips and bright banalities, that reunion was to remain suspended in one’s memory as a strangely significant, not wholly pleasant, experience. One treasured it in the same way as when falling in love with a picture in a pinacoteca or remembering a dream style, the dream detail, the meaningful richness of color and contour in an otherwise meaningless vision. It should be observed that nobody, not even the reader, not even Bouteillan (who crumbled, alas, a precious cork), was at his or her best at that particular party. A faint element of farce and falsity flawed it, preventing an angel—if angels could visit Ardis—from being completely at ease; and yet it was a marvelous show which no artist would have wanted to miss.

  The tablecloth and the candle blaze attracted timorous or impetuous moths among which Ada, with a ghost pointing them out to her, could not help recognizing many old “flutterfriends.” Pale intruders, anxious only to spread out their delicate wings on some lustrous surface; ceiling-bumpers in guildman furs; thick-set rake-hells with bushy a
ntennae; and party-crashing hawkmoths with red black-belted bellies, sailed or shot, silent or humming, into the dining room out of the black hot humid night.

  It was a black hot humid night in mid-July, 1888, at Ardis, in Ladore county, let us not forget, let us never forget, with a family of four seated around an oval dinner table, bright with flowers and crystal—not a scene in a play, as might have seemed—nay, must have seemed—to a spectator (with a camera or a program) placed in the velvet pit of the garden. Sixteen years had elapsed from the end of Marina’s three-year affair with Demon. Intermissions of various length—a break of two months in the spring of 1870, another, of almost four, in the middle of 1871—had at the time only increased the tenderness and the torture. Her singularly coarsened features, her attire, that sequin-spangled dress, the glittering net over her strawberry-blond dyed hair, her red sunburnt chest and melodramatic make-up, with too much ochre and maroon in it, did not even vaguely remind the man, who had loved her more keenly than any other woman in his philanderings, of the dash, the glamour, the lyricism of Marina Durmanov’s beauty. It aggrieved him—that complete collapse of the past, the dispersal of its itinerant court and music-makers, the logical impossibility to relate the dubious reality of the present to the unquestionable one of remembrance. Even these hors-d’oeuvres on the zakusochnïy stol of Ardis Manor and its painted dining room did not link up with their petits soupers, although, God knows, the triple staple to start with was always much the same—pickled young boletes in their tight-fitting glossy fawn helmets, the gray beads of fresh caviar, the goose liver paste, pique-aced with Perigord truffles.

  Demon popped into his mouth a last morsel of black bread with elastic samlet, gulped down a last pony of vodka and took his place at the table with Marina facing him across its oblong length, beyond the great bronze bowl with carved-looking Calville apples and elongated Persty grapes. The alcohol his vigorous system had already imbibed was instrumental, as usual, in reopening what he gallicistically called condemned doors, and now as he gaped involuntarily as all men do while spreading a napkin, he considered Marina’s pretentious ciel-étoilé hair-dress and tried to realize (in the rare full sense of the word), tried to possess the reality of a fact by forcing it into the sensuous center, that here was a woman whom he had intolerably loved, who had loved him hysterically and skittishly, who insisted they make love on rugs and cushions laid on the floor (“as respectable people do in the Tigris-Euphrates valley”), who would woosh down fluffy slopes on a bobsleigh a fortnight after parturition, or arrive by the Orient Express with five trunks, Dack’s grandsire, and a maid, to Dr. Stella Ospenko’s ospedale where he was recovering from a scratch received in a sword duel (and still visible as a white weal under his eighth rib after a lapse of nearly seventeen years). How strange that when one met after a long separation a chum or fat aunt whom one had been fond of as a child the unimpaired human warmth of the friendship was rediscovered at once, but with an old mistress this never happened—the human part of one’s affection seemed to be swept away with the dust of the inhuman passion, in a wholesale operation of demolishment. He looked at her and acknowledged the perfection of the potage, but she, this rather thick-set woman, goodhearted, no doubt, but restive and sour-faced, glazed over, nose, forehead and all, with a sort of brownish oil that she considered to be more “juvenizing” than powder, was more of a stranger to him than Bouteillan who had once carried her in his arms, in a feigned faint, out of a Ladore villa and into a cab, after a final, quite final row, on the eve of her wedding.

  Marina, essentially a dummy in human disguise, experienced no such qualms, lacking as she did that third sight (individual, magically detailed imagination) which many otherwise ordinary and conformant people may also possess, but without which memory (even that of a profound “thinker” or technician of genius) is, let us face it, a stereotype or a tear-sheet. We do not wish to be too hard on Marina; after all, her blood throbs in our wrists and temples, and many of our megrims are hers, not his. Yet we cannot condone the grossness of her soul. The man sitting at the head of the table and joined to her by a pair of cheerful youngsters, the “juvenile” (in movie parlance) on her right, the “ingénue” on her left, differed in no way from the same Demon in much the same black jacket (minus perhaps the carnation he had evidently purloined from a vase Blanche had been told to bring from the gallery) who sat next to her at the Praslins’ last Christmas. The dizzy chasm he felt every time he met her, that awful “wonder of life” with its extravagant jumble of geological faults, could not be bridged by what she accepted as a dotted line of humdrum encounters: “poor old” Demon (all her pillow mates being retired with that title) appeared before her like a harmless ghost, in the foyers of theaters “between mirror and fan,” or in the drawing rooms of common friends, or once in Lincoln Park, indicating an indigo-buttocked ape with his cane and not saluting her, according to the rules of the beau monde, because he was with a courtesan. Somewhere, further back, much further back, safely transformed by her screen-corrupted mind into a stale melodrama was her three-year-long period of hectically spaced love-meetings with Demon, A Torrid Affair (the title of her only cinema hit), passion in palaces, the palms and larches, his Utter Devotion, his impossible temper, separations, reconciliations, Blue Trains, tears, treachery, terror, an insane sister’s threats, helpless, no doubt, but leaving their tiger-marks on the drapery of dreams, especially when dampness and dark affect one with fever. And the shadow of retribution on the backwall (with ridiculous legal innuendoes). All this was mere scenery, easily packed, labeled “Hell” and freighted away; and only very infrequently some reminder would come—say, in the trick-work closeup of two left hands belonging to different sexes—doing what? Marina could no longer recall (though only four years had elapsed!)—playing à quatre mains?—no, neither took piano lessons—casting bunny-shadows on a wall?—closer, warmer, but still wrong; measuring something? But what? Climbing a tree? The polished trunk of a tree? But where, when? Someday, she mused, one’s past must be put in order. Retouched, retaken. Certain “wipes” and “inserts” will have to be made in the picture; certain telltale abrasions in the emulsion will have to be corrected; “dissolves” in the sequence discreetly combined with the trimming out of unwanted, embarrassing “footage,” and definite guarantees obtained; yes, someday—before death with its clapstick closes the scene.

  Tonight she contented herself with the automatic ceremony of giving him what she remembered, more or less correctly, when planning the menu, as being his favorite food—zelyoniya shchi, a velvety green sorrel-and-spinach soup, containing slippery hard-boiled eggs and served with finger-burning, irresistibly soft, meat-filled or carrot-filled or cabbage-filled pirozhki—peer-rush-KEY, thus pronounced, thus celebrated here, for ever and ever. After that, she had decided, there would be bread-crumbed sander (sudak) with boiled potatoes, hazel-hen (ryabchiki) and that special asparagus (bezukhanka) which does not produce Proust’s After-effect, as cookbooks say.

  “Marina,” murmured Demon at the close of the first course. “Marina,” he repeated louder. “Far from me” (a locution he favored) “to criticize Dan’s taste in white wines or the manners de vos domestiques. You know me, I’m above all that rot, I’m …” (gesture); “but, my dear,” he continued, switching to Russian, “the chelovek who brought me the pirozhki—the new man, the plumpish one with the eyes (s glazami)—”

  “Everybody has eyes,” remarked Marina drily.

  “Well, his look as if they were about to octopus the food he serves. But that’s not the point. He pants, Marina! He suffers from some kind of od’ishka (shortness of breath). He should see Dr. Krolik. It’s depressing. It’s a rhythmic pumping pant. It made my soup ripple.”

  “Look, Dad,” said Van, “Dr. Krolik can’t do much, because, as you know quite well, he’s dead, and Marina can’t tell her servants not to breathe, because, as you also know, they’re alive.”

  “The Veen wit, the Veen wit,” murmured Demon.

  “
Exactly,” said Marina. “I simply refuse to do anything about it. Besides poor Jones is not at all asthmatic, but only nervously eager to please. He’s as healthy as a bull and has rowed me from Ardisville to Ladore and back, and enjoyed it, many times this summer. You are cruel, Demon. I can’t tell him ’ne pïkhtite] as I can’t tell Kim, the kitchen boy, not to take photographs on the sly—he’s a regular snap-shooting fiend, that Kim, though otherwise an adorable, gentle, honest boy; nor can I tell my little French maid to stop getting invitations, as she somehow succeeds in doing, to the most exclusive bals masqués in Ladore.”

  “That’s interesting,” observed Demon.

  “He’s a dirty old man!” cried Van cheerfully.

  “Van!” said Ada.

  “I’m a dirty young man,” sighed Demon.

  “Tell me, Bouteillan,” asked Marina, “what other good white wine do we have—what can you recommend?” The butler smiled and whispered a fabulous name.

  “Yes, oh, yes,” said Demon. “Ah, my dear, you should not think up dinners all by yourself. Now about rowing—you mentioned rowing … Do you know that moi, qui vous parle, was a Rowing Blue in 1858? Van prefers football, but he’s only a College Blue, aren’t you Van? I’m also better than he at tennis—not lawn tennis, of course, a game for parsons, but ‘court tennis’ as they say in Manhattan. What else, Van?”

  “You still beat me at fencing, but I’m the better shot. That’s not real sudak, papa, though it’s tops, I assure you.”

  (Marina, having failed to obtain the European product in time for the dinner, had chosen the nearest thing, wall-eyed pike, or “dory,” with Tartar sauce and boiled young potatoes.)

  “Ah!” said Demon, tasting Lord Byron’s Hock. “This redeems Our Lady’s Tears.”

  “I was telling Van a moment ago,” he continued, raising his voice (he labored under the delusion that Marina had grown rather deaf), “about your husband. My dear, he overdoes the juniper vodka stuff, he’s getting, in fact, a mite fuzzy and odd. The other day I chanced to walk through Pat Lane on the Fourth Avenue side, and there he was coming, at quite a spin, in his horrid town car, that primordial petrol two-seater he’s got, with the tiller. Well, he saw me, from quite a distance, and waved, and the whole contraption began to shake down, and finally stopped half a block away, and there he sat trying to budge it with little jerks of his haunches, you know, like a child who can’t get his tricycle unstuck, and as I walked up to him I had the definite impression that it was his mechanism that had stalled, not the Hardpan’s.” But what Demon, in the goodness of his crooked heart, omitted to tell Marina was that the imbecile, in secret from his art adviser, Mr. Aix, had acquired for a few thousand dollars from a gaming friend of Demon’s, and with Demon’s blessings, a couple of fake Correggios—only to resell them by some unforgivable fluke to an equally imbecile collector, for half a million which Demon considered henceforth as a loan his cousin should certainly refund him if sanity counted for something on this gemel planet. And, conversely, Marina refrained from telling Demon about the young hospital nurse Dan had been monkeying with ever since his last illness (it was, by the way, she, busybody Bess, whom Dan had asked on a memorable occasion to help him get “something nice for a half-Russian child interested in biology”).