In VN’s novel Ada (1969) Demon Veen (Van’s and Ada’s father) hopes that Cordula de Prey will recompense Van for playing Blindman’s Buff all summer with the babes of Ardis Wood (Ada and Lucette):
‘Marina gives me a glowing account of you and says uzhe chuvstvuetsya osen’. Which is very Russian. Your grandmother would repeat regularly that’ already-is-to-be-felt-autumn’ remark every year, at the same time, even on the hottest day of the season at Villa Armina: Marina never realized it was an anagram of the sea, not of her. You look splendid, sïnok moy, but I can well imagine how fed up you must be with her two little girls, Therefore, I have a suggestion —’
‘Oh, I liked them enormously,’ purred Van. ‘Especially dear little Lucette.’
‘My suggestion is, come with me to a cocktail party today. It is given by the excellent widow of an obscure Major de Prey — obscurely related to our late neighbor, a fine shot but the light was bad on the Common, and a meddlesome garbage collector hollered at the wrong moment. Well, that excellent and influential lady who wishes to help a friend of mine’ (clearing his throat) ‘has, I’m told, a daughter of fifteen summers, called Cordula, who is sure to recompense you for playing Blindman’s Buff all summer with the babes of Ardis Wood.’
‘We played mostly Scrabble and Snap,’ said Van. ‘Is the needy friend also in my age group?’
‘She’s a budding Duse,’ replied Demon austerely, ‘and the party is strictly a "prof push." You’ll stick to Cordula de Prey, I, to Cordelia O’Leary.’
‘D’accord,’ said Van. (1.27)
At the end of Laughter in the Dark (1938), the English version of VN's novel Camera Obscura, Albinus recalls blind man's buff that he played as a child:
Albinus stretched out his fist and moved the gun slowly to and fro, trying to induce some sound which would betray her exact position. He felt that she was somewhere near the miniatures; from that direction he could catch a faint whiff of warmth tinged with the perfume called "L'heure bleue"; in that corner something was trembling like the air above sand on a very hot day by the sea. He narrowed the curve along which his hand traveled and suddenly he heard a faint rustle. Shoot? No, not yet. He must get much nearer to her. He knocked against the middle table and came to a standstill. He felt that Margot was stealing to one side, but his own body, though fairly still, made so much noise that he could not hear her. Yes, now she was more to the left, near the window. Oh, if she lost her head and started opening it and shrieking, that would be divine--he would have a lovely target. But what if she slid past him round the table as he advanced? "Better lock the door," he thought. No, there was no key (doors were always against him). He gripped the edge of the table with one hand and, stepping backward, pulled it toward the door so as to have it behind him. Again the warmth he sensed shifted, shrank, diminished. Having blocked up the exit, he felt freer and again, with the point of his pistol, he located a living, quivering something in the darkness.
Now he advanced as quietly as possible so that he might detect every sound. Blind man's buff, blind man's buff ... in a country-house on a winter night, long, long ago. He stumbled against something hard and felt it with one hand, never for a moment letting loose the line which he held taut across the room. It was a small trunk. He thrust it away with his knee and moved on, driving the invisible prey before him into an imaginary corner. Her silence irritated him at first; but now he could detect her quite plainly. It was not her breathing, not the beating of her heart, but a sort of general impression: the voice of her life itself, which, in another moment, he would destroy. And then--peace, serenity, light.
Suddenly he was conscious of a relaxation of tension in the corner before him. He shifted the gun, and forced her warm presence back again. It seemed, that presence, to bend all at once as a flame in a draft; then it crawled, stretched ... was coming at his legs. Albinus could control himself no longer; with a fierce groan he pressed the trigger.
The shot rent the darkness, and immediately afterward something struck him across the knees, bringing him down, and for a second he was entangled in a chair that had been flung at him. As he fell he dropped the pistol, but found it again at once. At the same time he was conscious of rapid breathing, a smell of scent and sweat hit his nostrils, and a cold, nimble hand tried to wrench the weapon from his grasp. Albinus seized something living, something that let forth a hideous cry, as though a nightmare creature were being tickled by its nightmare mate. The hand he was catching twisted the pistol free and he felt the barrel prod him; and, together with a faint detonation that seemed miles away, in another world, there came a stab in his side which filled his eyes with a dazzling glory.
"So that's all," he thought quite softly, as if he were lying in bed. "I must keep quiet for a little space and then walk very slowly along that bright sand of pain, toward that blue, blue wave. What bliss there is in blueness. I never knew how blue blueness could be. What a mess life has been. Now I know everything. Coming, coming, coming to drown me. There it is. How it hurts. I can't breathe ..."
He sat on the floor with bowed head, then bent slowly forward and fell, like a big, soft doll, to one side.
Stage-directions for last silent scene: door--wide open. Table--thrust away from it. Carpet--bulging up at table foot in a frozen wave. Chair--lying close by dead body of man in a purplish brown suit and felt slippers. Automatic pistol not visible. It is under him. Cabinet where the miniatures had been--empty. On the other (small) table, on which ages ago a porcelain ballet-dancer stood (later transferred to another room) lies a woman's glove, black outside, white inside. By the striped sofa stands a smart little trunk, with a colored label still adhering to it: "Rouginard, Hotel Britannia."
The door leading from the hall to the landing is wide open, too. (Chapter 39)
In Camera Obscura (1933), the novel's Russian original, the gun in blind Kretschmar's hand is a browning:
Выпрямив руку, он стал поводить браунингом перед собой, стараясь вынудить какой-нибудь уяснительный звук. Чутьем, впрочем, он знал, что Магда где-то около горки с миниатюрами, – оттуда шло как бы легчайшее ядовито-душистое тепло, и что-то дрожало там, как дрожит воздух в зной. Он начал суживать дугу, по которой водил стволом, и вдруг раздался тихий скрип. Выстрелить? Нет, еще рано. Нужно подойти ближе. Он ударился о стол и остановился. Ядовитое тепло куда-то передвинулось, но звука перехода он не уловил за громом и треском собственных шагов. Да, теперь оно было левее, у самого окна. Запереть за собой дверь, тогда будет свободнее. Ключа не оказалось. Тогда он взялся за край стола и, отступая, потянул его к двери. Опять тепло передвинулось, сузилось, уменьшилось. Он заставил дверь и стал опять водить перед собой браунингом и опять нашел во мраке живую дрожащую точку. Тогда он тихо двинулся вперед, стараясь не скрипеть, чтобы не мешать слуху. Он наткнулся на твердое и, не опуская браунинга, исследовал препятствие. Небольшой сундук. Он отодвинул его к дивану и опять пошел по диагонали комнаты, загоняя невидимую добычу в угол. Его слух и осязание были так обострены, что теперь он отлично чуял ее. Это был не звук дыхания, и не биение сердца, а некое сборное впечатление, звучание самой жизни, которое сейчас, вот сейчас, будет прекращено, и тогда наступит покой, ясность, освобождение от тьмы… Но он почувствовал внезапно какое-то полегчание в том углу – повел пистолетом в сторону, и угол опять наполнился теплым присутствием. Затем оно как бы стало понижаться, это присутствие, оно опускалось, опускалось, вот поползло, вот стелется по полу. Кречмар не выдержал и нажал собачку. Выстрел словно лягнул тьму, и тотчас после этого что-то взвилось и ударило его – сразу в голову, в плечо, в грудь. Он упал, запутавшись – в чем? – в стуле, в летающем стуле. Падая, он выронил браунинг, мгновенно нащупал его, но одновременно почувствовал быстрое дыхание, холодная проворная рука пыталась выхватить то, что он сам хватал. Кречмар вцепился в живое, в шелковое, и вдруг – невероятный крик, как от щекотки, но хуже, и сразу: звон в ушах и нестерпимый толчок в бок, как это больно, нужно посидеть минутку совершенно смирно, посидеть, потом потихоньку пойти по песку к синей волне, к синей, нет, к сине-красной в золотистых прожилках волне, как хорошо видеть краски, льются они, льются, наполняют рот, ох, как мягко, как душно, нельзя больше вытерпеть, она меня убила, какие у нее выпуклые глаза, базедова болезнь, надо все-таки встать, идти, я же все вижу, – что такое слепота? отчего я раньше не знал… но слишком душно булькает, не надо булькать, еще раз, еще, перевалить, нет, не могу…
Он сидел на полу, опустив голову, и потом вяло наклонился вперед и криво упал на бок.
Тишина. Дверь широко открыта в прихожую. Стол отодвинут, стул валяется рядом с мертвым телом человека в бледно-лиловом костюме. Браунинга не видно, он под ним. На столике, где некогда, во дни Аннелизы, белела фарфоровая балерина (перешедшая затем в другую комнату), лежит вывернутая дамская перчатка. Около полосатого дивана стоит щегольской сундучок с цветной наклейкой: Сольфи, Отель Адриатик. Дверь из прихожей на лестницу тоже осталась открытой. (Chapter XXXVII)
In his poem With Gerard de Lairesse (1887) Robert Browning mentions Jove's very thunderbolt:
So commenced
That " Walk" amid true wonders — none to you,
But huge to us ignobly common-sensed,
Purblind, while plain could proper optics view
In that old sepulchre by lightning split,
Whereof the lid bore carven, — any dolt
Imagines why, — Jove's very thunderbolt:
You who could straight perceive, by glance at it,
This tomb must needs be Phaeton's! In a trice,
Confirming that conjecture, close on hand,
Behold, half out, half in the ploughed-up sand,
A chariot-wheel explained its bolt-device:
What other than the Chariot of the Sun
Ever let drop the like? Consult the tome —
I bid inglorious tarriers-at-home —
For greater still surprise the while that " Walk"
Went on and on, to end as it begun,
Choke-full of chances, changes, every one
No whit less wondrous. What was there to balk
Us, who had eyes, from seeing? You with none
Missed not a marvel: wherefore? Let us talk. (III)
Describing his suicide attempt, Van mentions his Thunderbolt pistol:
He judged it would take him as much time to find a taxi at this hour of the day as to walk, with his ordinary swift swing, the ten blocks to Alex Avenue. He was coatless, tieless, hatless; a strong sharp wind dimmed his sight with salty frost and played Medusaean havoc with his black locks. Upon letting himself in for the last time into his idiotically cheerful apartment, he forthwith sat down at that really magnificent desk and wrote the following note:
Do what he tells you. His logic sounds preposterous, prepsupposing [sic] a vague kind of ‘Victorian’ era, as they have on Terra according to ‘my mad’ [?], but in a paroxysm of [illegible] I suddenly realized he was right. Yes, right, here and there, not neither here, nor there, as most things are. You see, girl, how it is and must be. In the last window we shared we both saw a man painting [us?] but your second-floor level of vision probably prevented your seeing that he wore what looked like a butcher’s apron, badly smeared. Good-bye, girl.
Van sealed the letter, found his Thunderbolt pistol in the place he had visualized, introduced one cartridge into the magazine and translated it into its chamber. Then, standing before a closet mirror, he put the automatic to his head, at the point of the pterion, and pressed the comfortably concaved trigger. Nothing happened — or perhaps everything happened, and his destiny simply forked at that instant, as it probably does sometimes at night, especially in a strange bed, at stages of great happiness or great desolation, when we happen to die in our sleep, but continue our normal existence, with no perceptible break in the faked serialization, on the following, neatly prepared morning, with a spurious past discreetly but firmly attached behind. Anyway, what he held in his right hand was no longer a pistol but a pocket comb which he passed through his hair at the temples. It was to gray by the time that Ada, then in her thirties, said, when they spoke of their voluntary separation:
‘I would have killed myself too, had I found Rose wailing over your corpse. "Secondes pensées sont les bonnes," as your other, white, bonne used to say in her pretty patois. As to the apron, you are quite right. And what you did not make out was that the artist had about finished a large picture of your meek little palazzo standing between its two giant guards. Perhaps for the cover of a magazine, which rejected that picture. But, you know, there’s one thing I regret,’ she added: ‘Your use of an alpenstock to release a brute’s fury — not yours, not my Van’s. I should never have told you about the Ladore policeman. You should never have taken him into your confidence, never connived with him to burn those files — and most of Kalugano’s pine forest. Eto unizitel’no (it is humiliating).’
‘Amends have been made,’ replied fat Van with a fat man’s chuckle. ‘I’m keeping Kim safe and snug in a nice Home for Disabled Professional People, where he gets from me loads of nicely brailled books on new processes in chromophotography.’
There are other possible forkings and continuations that occur to the dream-mind, but these will do. (2.11)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): secondes pensées etc.: second thoughts are the good ones.
bonne: housemaid.
Van's white bonne brings to mind Irma's German bonne in Camera Obscura (Laughter in the Dark).