Imagining his duel with Andrey Vinelander (Ada’s husband), Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) says that the bullet of his adversary caused a slight fourmillement (excited ants) in his foot:
Would she write? Oh, she did! Oh, every old thing turned out superfine! Fancy raced fact in never-ending rivalry and girl giggles. Andrey lived only a few months longer, po pal’tzam (finger counting) one, two, three, four — say, five. Andrey was doing fine by the spring of nineteen six or seven, with a comfortably collapsed lung and a straw-colored beard (nothing like facial vegetation to keep a patient busy). Life forked and reforked. Yes, she told him. He insulted Van on the mauve-painted porch of a Douglas hotel where Van was awaiting his Ada in a final version of Les Enfants Maudits. Monsieur de Tobak (an earlier cuckold) and Lord Erminin (a second-time second) witnessed the duel in the company of a few tall yuccas and short cactuses. Vinelander wore a cutaway (he would); Van, a white suit. Neither man wished to take any chances, and both fired simultaneously. Both fell. Mr Cutaway’s bullet struck the outsole of Van’s left shoe (white, black-heeled), tripping him and causing a slight fourmillement (excited ants) in his foot — that was all. Van got his adversary plunk in the underbelly — a serious wound from which he recovered in due time, if at all (here the forking swims in the mist). Actually it was all much duller. (3.8)
When he takes a shower on his last morning at Ardis, Van (who just learnt of Ada’s infidelity and experienced a shock) finds it delightful to imagine that a cake of soap must be solid ambrosia to the ants swarming over it:
He took a tepid shower in the poolside shed, doing everything with comic deliberation, very slowly and cautiously, lest he break the new, unknown, brittle Van born a moment ago. He watched his thoughts revolve, dance, strut, clown a little. He found it delightful to imagine, for instance, that a cake of soap must be solid ambrosia to the ants swarming over it, and what a shock to be drowned in the midst of that orgy. The code, he reflected, did not allow to challenge a person who was not born a gentleman but exceptions might be made for artists, pianists, flutists, and if a coward refused, you could make his gums bleed with repeated slaps or, still better, thrash him with a strong cane — must not forget to choose one in the vestibule closet before leaving forever, forever. Great fun! He relished as something quite special the kind of one-legged jig a naked fellow performs when focusing on the shorts he tries to get into. He sauntered through a side gallery. He ascended the grand staircase. The house was empty, and cool, and smelled of carnations. Good morning, and good-bye, little bedroom. Van shaved, Van pared his toe-nails, Van dressed with exquisite care: gray socks, silk shirt, gray tie, dark-gray suit newly pressed — shoes, ah yes, shoes, mustn’t forget shoes, and without bothering to sort out the rest of his belongings, crammed a score of twenty-dollar gold coins into a chamois purse, distributed handkerchief, checkbook, passport, what else? nothing else, over his rigid person and pinned a note to the pillow asking to have his things packed and forwarded to his father’s address. Son killed by avalanche, no hat found, contraceptives donated to Old Guides’ Home. After the passage of about eight decades all this sounds very amusing and silly — but at the time he was a dead man going through the motions of an imagined dreamer. He bent down with a grunt, cursing his knee, to fix his skis, in the driving snow, on the brink of the slope, but the skis had vanished, the bindings were shoelaces, and the slope, a staircase. (1.41)
Les Enfants Maudits (“The Accursed Children”) is a novel by Mlle Larivière (Lucette’s governess who writes fiction under the penname Guillaume de Monparnasse). At the patio party on Van’s first morning in “Ardis the Second” Mlle Larivière wears a mauve dress, a mauve hat and mauve shoes (cf. the mauve-painted porch of a Douglas hotel where Van was awaiting his Ada in a final version of Les Enfants Maudits):
The shooting script was now ready. Marina, in dorean robe and coolie hat, reclined reading in a long-chair on the patio. Her director, G.A. Vronsky, elderly, baldheaded, with a spread of grizzled fur on his fat chest, was alternately sipping his vodka-and-tonic and feeding Marina typewritten pages from a folder. On her other side, crosslegged on a mat, sat Pedro (surname unknown, stagename forgotten), a repulsively handsome, practically naked young actor, with satyr ears, slanty eyes, and lynx nostrils, whom she had brought from Mexico and was keeping at a hotel in Ladore.
Ada, lying on the edge of the swimming pool, was doing her best to make the shy dackel face the camera in a reasonably upright and decent position, while Philip Rack, an insignificant but on the whole likable young musician who in his baggy trunks looked even more dejected and awkward than in the green velvet suit he thought fit to wear for the piano lessons he gave Lucette, was trying to take a picture of the recalcitrant chop-licking animal and of the girl’s parted breasts which her half-prone position helped to disclose in the opening of her bathing suit.
If one dollied now to another group standing a few paces away under the purple garlands of the patio arch, one might take a medium shot of the young maestro’s pregnant wife in a polka-dotted dress replenishing goblets with salted almonds, and of our distinguished lady novelist resplendent in mauve flounces, mauve hat, mauve shoes, pressing a zebra vest on Lucette, who kept rejecting it with rude remarks, learned from a maid but uttered in a tone of voice just beyond deafish Mlle Larivière’s field of hearing.
Lucette remained topless. Her tight smooth skin was the color of thick peach syrup, her little crupper in willow-green shorts rolled drolly, the sun lay sleek on her russet bob and plumpish torso: it showed but a faint circumlocation of femininity, and Van, in a scowling mood, recalled with mixed feelings how much more developed her sister had been at not quite twelve years of age.
He had spent most of the day fast asleep in his room, and a long, rambling, dreary dream had repeated, in a kind of pointless parody, his strenuous ‘Casanovanic’ night with Ada and that somehow ominous morning talk with her. Now that I am writing this, after so many hollows and heights of time, I find it not easy to separate our conversation, as set down in an inevitably stylized form, and the drone of complaints, turning on sordid betrayals that obsessed young Van in his dull nightmare. Or was he dreaming now that he had been dreaming? Had a grotesque governess really written a novel entitled Les Enfants Maudits? To be filmed by frivolous dummies, now discussing its adaptation? To be made even triter than the original Book of the Fortnight, and its gurgling blurbs? Did he detest Ada as he had in his dreams? He did.
Now, at fifteen, she was an irritating and hopeless beauty; a rather unkempt one, too; only twelve hours ago, in the dim toolroom he had whispered a riddle in her ear: what begins with a ‘de’ and rhymes more or less with a Silesian river ant? She was eccentric in habits and clothing. She cared nothing for sunbathing, and not a tinge of the tan that had californized Lucette could be traced on the shameless white of Ada’s long limbs and scrawny shoulder blades. (1.32)
The Hollywood Douglas apartment is a hotel in Los Angeles. At the picnic on Ada’s sixteenth birthday Marina (Van’s, Ada’s and Lucette’s mother) says that Pedro is coming again and that they all will go to Hollywood:
The execution was interrupted by the arrival of Uncle Dan. He had a remarkably reckless way of driving, as happens so often, goodness knows why, in the case of many dour, dreary men. Weaving rapidly between the pines, he brought the little red runabout to an abrupt stop in front of Ada and presented her with the perfect gift, a big box of mints, white, pink and, oh boy, green! He had also an aerogram for her, he said, winking.
Ada tore it open — and saw it was not for her from dismal Kalugano, as she had feared, but for her mother from Los Angeles, a much gayer place. Marina’s face gradually assumed an expression of quite indecent youthful beatitude as she scanned the message. Triumphantly, she showed it to Larivière-Monparnasse, who read it twice and tilted her head with a smile of indulgent disapproval. Positively stamping her feet with joy:
‘Pedro is coming again,’ cried (gurgled, rippled) Marina to calm her daughter.
‘And, I suppose, he’ll stay till the end of the summer,’ remarked Ada — and sat down with Greg and Lucette, for a game of Snap, on a laprobe spread over the little ants and dry pine needles.
‘Oh no, da net zhe, only for a fortnight’ (girlishly giggling). ‘After that we shall go to Houssaie, Gollivud-tozh’ (Marina was really in great form) — ‘yes, we shall all go, the author, and the children, and Van — if he wishes.’
‘I wish but I can’t,’ said Percy (sample of his humor). (1.39)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): Houssaie: French a ‘hollywood’. Gollivud-tozh means in Russian ‘known also as Hollywood’.
At the picnic on Ada’s sixteenth birthday Van asks Percy de Prey (one of Ada’s lovers) if Percy challenges him to a duel:
And now Mlle Larivière clapped her hands to rouse from their siesta, Kim, the driver of her gig, and Trofim, the children’s fair-bearded coachman. Ada reclenched her boletes and all Percy could find for his Handkuss was a cold fist.
‘Jolly nice to have seen you, old boy,’ he said, tapping Van lightly on the shoulder, a forbidden gesture in their milieu. ‘Hope to play with you again soon. I wonder,’ he added in a lower voice, ‘if you shoot as straight as you wrestle.’
Van followed him to the convertible.
‘Van, Van come here, Greg wants to say good-bye,’ cried Ada, but he did not turn.
‘Is that a challenge, me faites-vous un duel?’ inquired Van.
Percy, at the wheel, smiled, slit his eyes, bent toward the dashboard, smiled again, but said nothing. Click-click went the motor, then broke into thunder and Percy drew on his gloves.
‘Quand tu voudras, mon gars,’ said Van, slapping the fender and using the terrible second person singular of duelists in old France.
The car leapt forward and disappeared. (ibid.)
On the way back from the picnic site Ada calls Van’s scuffle with Percy (witnessed by Greg Erminin, "a second-time second" in Van's imaginary duel with Andrey Vinelander) "horseplay:”
Finally the carriage started on its pleasant homeward journey.
‘Ouch!’ grunted Van as he received the rounded load — explaining wrily that he had hit his right patella against a rock.
‘Of course, if one goes in for horseplay...’ murmured Ada — and opened, at its emerald ribbon, the small brown, gold-tooled book (a great success with the passing sun flecks) that she had been already reading during the ride to the picnic.
‘I do fancy a little horseplay,’ said Van. ‘It has left me with quite a tingle, for more reasons than one.’
‘I saw you — horseplaying,’ said Lucette, turning her head.
‘Sh-sh,’ uttered Van.
‘I mean you and him.’
‘We are not interested in your impressions, girl. And don’t look back all the time. You know you get carriage-sick when the road —’
‘Coincidence: "Jean qui tâchait de lui tourner la tête...,"’ surfaced Ada briefly.
‘— when the road "runs out of you," as your sister once said when she was your age.’
‘True,’ mused Lucette tunefully. (ibid.)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): qui tâchait etc.: who was trying to turn her head.
Describing Demon’s sword duel with Baron d’Onsky (nicknamed Skonky), Van mentions an amusing Douglas d’Artagnan arrangement:
Upon being questioned in Demon’s dungeon, Marina, laughing trillingly, wove a picturesque tissue of lies; then broke down, and confessed. She swore that all was over; that the Baron, a physical wreck and a spiritual Samurai, had gone to Japan forever. From a more reliable source Demon learned that the Samurai’s real destination was smart little Vatican, a Roman spa, whence he was to return to Aardvark, Massa, in a week or so. Since prudent Veen preferred killing his man in Europe (decrepit but indestructible Gamaliel was said to be doing his best to forbid duels in the Western Hemisphere — a canard or an idealistic President’s instant-coffee caprice, for nothing was to come of it after all), Demon rented the fastest petroloplane available, overtook the Baron (looking very fit) in Nice, saw him enter Gunter’s Bookshop, went in after him, and in the presence of the imperturbable and rather bored English shopkeeper, back-slapped the astonished Baron across the face with a lavender glove. The challenge was accepted; two native seconds were chosen; the Baron plumped for swords; and after a certain amount of good blood (Polish and Irish — a kind of American ‘Gory Mary’ in barroom parlance) had bespattered two hairy torsoes, the whitewashed terrace, the flight of steps leading backward to the walled garden in an amusing Douglas d’Artagnan arrangement, the apron of a quite accidental milkmaid, and the shirtsleeves of both seconds, charming Monsieur de Pastrouil and Colonel St Alin, a scoundrel, the latter gentlemen separated the panting combatants, and Skonky died, not ‘of his wounds’ (as it was viciously rumored) but of a gangrenous afterthought on the part of the least of them, possibly self-inflicted, a sting in the groin, which caused circulatory trouble, notwithstanding quite a few surgical interventions during two or three years of protracted stays at the Aardvark Hospital in Boston — a city where, incidentally, he married in 1869 our friend the Bohemian lady, now keeper of Glass Biota at the local museum. (1.2)
Baron d’Onsky seems to be a cross between Prince Dmitri Donskoy (who opposed Khan Mamay in the battle of Kulikovo, 1380) and Onegin’s donskoy zherebets (Don stallion) in Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin (Two: V: 4). In Chapter Six of EO Onegin kills Lenski in a pistol duel.
During their meetings in Mont Roux Ada (now married to Andrey Vinelander) tells Van that at Marina’s funeral she met d’Onsky’s son, a person with only one arm:
‘My upper-lip space feels indecently naked.’ (He had shaved his mustache off with howls of pain in her presence). ‘And I cannot keep sucking in my belly all the time.’
‘Oh, I like you better with that nice overweight — there’s more of you. It’s the maternal gene, I suppose, because Demon grew leaner and leaner. He looked positively Quixotic when I saw him at Mother’s funeral. It was all very strange. He wore blue mourning. D’Onsky’s son, a person with only one arm, threw his remaining one around Demon and both wept comme des fontaines. Then a robed person who looked like an extra in a technicolor incarnation of Vishnu made an incomprehensible sermon. Then she went up in smoke. He said to me, sobbing: "I will not cheat the poor grubs!" Practically a couple of hours after he broke that promise we had sudden visitors at the ranch — an incredibly graceful moppet of eight, black-veiled, and a kind of duenna, also in black, with two bodyguards. The hag demanded certain fantastic sums — which Demon, she said, had not had time to pay, for "popping the hymen" — whereupon I had one of our strongest boys throw out vsyu (the entire) kompaniyu.’
‘Extraordinary,’ said Van, ‘they had been growing younger and younger — I mean the girls, not the strong silent boys. His old Rosalind had a ten-year-old niece, a primed chickabiddy. Soon he would have been poaching them from the hatching chamber.’
‘You never loved your father,’ said Ada sadly.
‘Oh, I did and do — tenderly, reverently, understandingly, because, after all, that minor poetry of the flesh is something not unfamiliar to me. But as far as we are concerned, I mean you and I, he was buried on the same day as our uncle Dan.’
‘I know, I know. It’s pitiful! And what use was it? Perhaps I oughtn’t to tell you, but his visits to Agavia kept getting rarer and shorter every year. Yes, it was pitiful to hear him and Andrey talking. I mean, Andrey n’a pas le verbe facile, though he greatly appreciated — without quite understanding it — Demon’s wild flow of fancy and fantastic fact, and would often exclaim, with his Russian "tssk-tssk" and a shake of the head — complimentary and all that — "what a balagur (wag) you are!" — And then, one day, Demon warned me that he would not come any more if he heard again poor Andrey’s poor joke (Nu i balagur-zhe vï, Dementiy Labirintovich) or what Dorothy, l’impayable ("priceless for impudence and absurdity") Dorothy, thought of my camping out in the mountains with only Mayo, a cowhand, to protect me from lions.’
‘Could one hear more about that?’ asked Van.
‘Well, nobody did. All this happened at a time when I was not on speaking terms with my husband and sister-in-law, and so could not control the situation. Anyhow, Demon did not come even when he was only two hundred miles away and simply mailed instead, from some gaming house, your lovely, lovely letter about Lucette and my picture.’
‘One would also like to know some details of the actual coverture — frequence of intercourse, pet names for secret warts, favorite smells —’
‘Platok momental’no (handkerchief quick)! Your right nostril is full of damp jade,’ said Ada, and then pointed to a lawnside circular sign, rimmed with red, saying: Chiens interdits and depicting an impossible black mongrel with a white ribbon around its neck: Why, she wondered, should the Swiss magistrates forbid one to cross highland terriers with poodles? (3.8)
In Canto Ten (IX: 3-4) of EO Pushkin mentions bezrukiy knyaz’ (the one-armed Prince):
Безрукий князь друзьям Мореи
Из Кишинёва уж мигал
The one-armed prince to the friends of Morea
from Kishinev already winked.
The Morea was the name of the Peloponnese peninsula in southern Greece during the Middle Ages and the early modern period. On Van’s last morning at Ardis Ada tells him that Percy (who goes to a distant war and is killed on the second day of the invasion) left for some Greek or Turkish port:
She walked swiftly toward him across the iridescently glistening lawn. ‘Van,’ she said, ‘I must tell you my dream before I forget. You and I were high up in the Alps — Why on earth are you wearing townclothes?’
‘Well, I’ll tell you,’ drawled dreamy Van. ‘I’ll tell you why. From a humble but reliable sauce, I mean source, excuse my accent, I have just learned qu’on vous culbute behind every hedge. Where can I find your tumbler?’
‘Nowhere,’ she answered quite calmly, ignoring or not even perceiving his rudeness, for she had always known that disaster would come today or tomorrow, a question of time or rather timing on the part of fate.
‘But he exists, he exists,’ muttered Van, looking down at a rainbow web on the turf.
‘I suppose so,’ said the haughty child, ‘however, he left yesterday for some Greek or Turkish port. Moreover, he was going to do everything to get killed, if that information helps. Now listen, listen! Those walks in the woods meant nothing. Wait, Van! I was weak only twice when you had hurt him so hideously, or perhaps three times in all. Please! I can’t explain in one gush, but eventually you will understand. Not everybody is as happy as we are. He’s a poor, lost, clumsy boy. We are all doomed, but some are more doomed than others. He is nothing to me. I shall never see him again. He is nothing, I swear. He adores me to the point of insanity.’
‘I think,’ said Van, ‘we’ve got hold of the wrong lover. I was asking about Herr Rack, who has such delectable gums and also adores you to the point of insanity.’
He turned, as they say, on his heel, and walked toward the house. (1.41)
Povernut’sya na kablukakh (to turn on the heels of one’s shoes), the Russian idiom that corresponds to the English “to turn on one’s heels,” brings to mind the outsole of Van’s left shoe (white, black-heeled) hit by Mr Cutaway’s bullet in Van’s imaginary duel with Andrey Vinelander.
Describing the family dinner in “Ardis the Second,” Van mentions Onegin’s unfinished canto:
Alas, the bird had not survived ‘the honor one had made to it,’ and after a brief consultation with Bouteillan a somewhat incongruous but highly palatable bit of saucisson d’Arles added itself to the young lady’s fare of asperges en branches that everybody was now enjoying. It almost awed one to see the pleasure with which she and Demon distorted their shiny-lipped mouths in exactly the same way to introduce orally from some heavenly height the voluptuous ally of the prim lily of the valley, holding the shaft with an identical bunching of the fingers, not unlike the reformed ‘sign of the cross’ for protesting against which (a ridiculous little schism measuring an inch or so from thumb to index) so many Russians had been burnt by other Russians only two centuries earlier on the banks of the Great Lake of Slaves. Van remembered that his tutor’s great friend, the learned but prudish Semyon Afanasievich Vengerov, then a young associate professor but already a celebrated Pushkinist (1855-1954), used to say that the only vulgar passage in his author’s work was the cannibal joy of young gourmets tearing ‘plump and live’ oysters out of their ‘cloisters’ in an unfinished canto of Eugene Onegin. But then ‘everyone has his own taste,’ as the British writer Richard Leonard Churchill mistranslates a trite French phrase (chacun à son gout) twice in the course of his novel about a certain Crimean Khan once popular with reporters and politicians, ‘A Great Good Man’ — according, of course, to the cattish and prejudiced Guillaume Monparnasse about whose new celebrity Ada, while dipping the reversed corolla of one hand in a bowl, was now telling Demon, who was performing the same rite in the same graceful fashion. (1.38)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): Great good man: a phrase that Winston Churchill, the British politician, enthusiastically applied to Stalin.
One of the seconds in Demon’s sword duel was Colonel St Alin, a scoundrel.
At the family dinner Ada mentions some romantic Turk or Albanian whom, according to Van, she meets in the woods:
Marina helped herself to an Albany from a crystal box of Turkish cigarettes tipped with red rose petal and passed the box on to Demon. Ada, somewhat self-consciously, lit up too.
‘You know quite well,’ said Marina, ‘that your father disapproves of your smoking at table.’
‘Oh, it’s all right,’ murmured Demon.
‘I had Dan in view,’ explained Marina heavily. ‘He’s very prissy on that score.’
‘Well, and I’m not,’ answered Demon.
Ada and Van could not help laughing. All that was banter — not of a high order, but still banter.
A moment later, however, Van remarked: ‘I think I’ll take an Alibi — I mean an Albany — myself.’
‘Please note, everybody,’ said Ada, ‘how voulu that slip was! I like a smoke when I go mushrooming, but when I’m back, this horrid tease insists I smell of some romantic Turk or Albanian met in the woods.’
‘Well,’ said Demon, ‘Van’s quite right to look after your morals.’ (ibid.)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): voulu: intentional.
Some romantic Turk or Albanian is, of course, Percy de Prey.