According to Lucette (in VN's novel Ada, 1969, Van's and Ada's half-sister), Dorothy Vinelander (Ada's sister-in-law) collects on her brother's behalf progressive philistine Art, bootblack blotches and excremental smears on canvas, imitations of an imbecile’s doodles, primitive idols, aboriginal masks, objets trouvés, or rather troués, the polished log with its polished hole à la Heinrich Heideland:
‘The last time I saw you,’ said Van, ‘was two years ago, at a railway station. You had just left Villa Armina and I had just arrived. You wore a flowery dress which got mixed with the flowers you carried because you moved so fast — jumping out of a green calèche and up into the Ausonian Express that had brought me to Nice.’
‘Très expressioniste. I did not see you or I would have stopped to tell you what I had just learned. Imagine, mother knew everything — your garrulous dad told her everything about Ada and you!’
‘But not about you and her.’
Lucette asked him not to mention that sickening, maddening girl. She was furious with Ada and jealous by proxy. Her Andrey, or rather his sister on his behalf, he was too stupid even for that, collected progressive philistine Art, bootblack blotches and excremental smears on canvas, imitations of an imbecile’s doodles, primitive idols, aboriginal masks, objets trouvés, or rather troués, the polished log with its polished hole à la Heinrich Heideland. His bride found the ranch yard adorned with a sculpture, if that’s the right word, by old Heinrich himself and his four hefty assistants, a huge hideous lump of bourgeois mahogany, ten feet high, entitled ‘Maternity,’ the mother (in reverse) of all the plaster gnomes and pig-iron toadstools planted by former Vinelanders in front of their dachas in Lyaska.
The barman stood wiping a glass in endless slow motion as he listened to Lucette’s denunciation with the limp smile of utter enchantment.
‘And yet (odnako),’ said Van in Russian, ‘you enjoyed your stay there, in 1896, so Marina told me.’
‘I did not (nichego podobnago)! I left Agavia minus my luggage in the middle of the night, with sobbing Brigitte. I’ve never seen such a household. Ada had turned into a dumb brune. The table talk was limited to the three C’s — cactuses, cattle, and cooking, with Dorothy adding her comments on cubist mysticism. He’s one of those Russians who shlyopayut (slap) to the toilet barefoot, shave in their underwear, wear garters, consider hitching up one’s pants indecent, but when fishing out coins hold their right trouser pocket with the left hand or vice versa, which is not only indecent but vulgar. Demon is, perhaps, disappointed they don’t have children, but really he "engripped" the man after the first flush of father-in-law-hood. Dorothy is a prissy and pious monster who comes to stay for months, orders the meals, and has a private collection of keys to the servants’ rooms — which our bumb brunette should have known — and other little keys to open people’s hearts — she has tried, by the way, to make a practicing Orthodox not only of every American Negro she can catch, but of our sufficiently pravoslavnaya mother — though she only succeeded in making the Trimurti stocks go up. One beautiful, nostalgic night —’
‘Po-russki,’ said Van, noticing that an English couple had ordered drinks and settled down to some quiet auditing.
‘Kak-to noch’yu (one night), when Andrey was away having his tonsils removed or something, dear watchful Dorochka went to investigate a suspicious noise in my maid’s room and found poor Brigitte fallen asleep in the rocker and Ada and me tryahnuvshih starinoy (reshaking old times) on the bed. That’s when I told Dora I would not stand her attitude, and immediately left for Monarch Bay.’
‘Some people are certainly odd,’ said Van. ‘If you’ve finished that sticky stuff let’s go back to your hotel and get some lunch.’ (3.3)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): troués: with a hole or holes.
engripped: from prendre en grippe, to conceive a dislike.
pravoslavnaya: Russ., Greek-Orthodox.
Heinrich Heideland seems to hint at Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland ("Now come, Saviour of the heathens"), a Lutheran chorale of 1524 with words written by Martin Luther, based on Veni redemptor gentium by Ambrose, and a melody, Zahn 1174, based on its plainchant. Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland (1714) is also a cantata by Johann Sebastian Bach (a composer and organist who was married twice and had twenty children). Describing his first day at Ardis, Van mentions a dwarf Haydn:
On the first floor, a yellow drawing room hung with damask and furnished in what the French once called the Empire style opened into the garden and now, in the late afternoon, was invaded across the threshold by the large leaf shadows of a paulownia tree (named, by an indifferent linguist, explained Ada, after the patronymic, mistaken for a second name or surname of a harmless lady, Anna Pavlovna Romanov, daughter of Pavel, nicknamed Paul-minus-Peter, why she did not know, a cousin of the non-linguist’s master, the botanical Zemski, I’m going to scream, thought Van). A china cabinet encaged a whole zoo of small animals among which the oryx and the okapi, complete with scientific names, were especially recommended to him by his charming but impossibly pretentious companion. Equally fascinating was a five-fold screen with bright paintings on its black panels reproducing the first maps of four and a half continents. We now pass into the music room with its little-used piano, and a corner room called the Gun Room containing a stuffed Shetland pony which an aunt of Dan Veen’s, maiden name forgotten, thank Log, once rode. On the other, or some other, side of the house was the ballroom, a glossy wasteland with wallflower chairs. ‘Reader, ride by’ (‘mimo, chitatel’,’ as Turgenev wrote). The ‘mews,’ as they were improperly called in Ladore County, were architecturally rather confusing in the case of Ardis Hall. A latticed gallery looked across its garlanded shoulder into the garden and turned sharply toward the drive. Elsewhere, an elegant loggia, lit by long windows, led now tongue-tied Ada and intolerably bored Van into a bower of rocks: a sham grotto, with ferns clinging to it shamelessly, and an artificial cascade borrowed from some brook or book, or Van’s burning bladder (after all the confounded tea).
The servants’ quarters (except those of two painted and powdered maids who had rooms upstairs) were on the courtyard side of the ground floor and Ada said she had visited them once in the explorative stage of her childhood but all she remembered was a canary and an ancient machine for grinding coffee beans which settled the matter.
They zoomed upstairs again. Van popped into a watercloset — and emerged in much better humor. A dwarf Haydn again played a few bars as they walked on. (1.6)
In Pushkin's little tragedy Mozart and Salieri (1830) Salieri calls Mozart novyi Gayden ("new Haydn"):
- Вот яд, последний дар моей Изоры.
- Осьмнадцать лет ношу его с собою -
- И часто жизнь казалась мне с тех пор
- Несносной раной, и сидел я часто
- С врагом беспечным за одной трапезой,
- И никогда на шепот искушенья
- Не преклонился я, хоть я не трус,
- Хотя обиду чувствую глубоко,
- Хоть мало жизнь люблю. Все медлил я.
- Как жажда смерти мучила меня,
- Что умирать? я мнил: быть может, жизнь
- Мне принесет незапные дары;
- Быть может, посетит меня восторг
- И творческая ночь и вдохновенье;
- Быть может, новый Гайден сотворит
- Великое - и наслажуся им...
- Как пировал я с гостем ненавистным,
- Быть может, мнил я, злейшего врага
- Найду; быть может, злейшая обида
- В меня с надменной грянет высоты -
- Тогда не пропадешь ты, дар Изоры.
- И я был прав! и наконец нашел
- Я моего врага, и новый Гайден
- Меня восторгом дивно упоил!
- Теперь - пора! заветный дар любви,
- Переходи сегодня в чашу дружбы.
- Here is the poison, Izora's latest gift.
- I've kept it for about eighteen years
- And ever since my life appears
- A godly wound to me, and I would often sit
- With a carefree friend of mine at table,
- And I have never bowed
- To whisper of temptation, though I am not
- A coward, and I am quick to take offence,
- And though I don't like life so much.
- I lingered. Thirst for death tormented me
- Why die? I fancied: life might bring
- Some gifts, perchance.
- And, joy, creative night and inspiration
- Might possibly attend me, and, perhaps,
A Haydn might create an outstanding thing,
And I would take delight ...
I feasted with the hateful guest,
I thought that I might find, the worst of enemy, - Perchance from up a haughty height
- The worst offense might fall on me -
Then you, Izora's gift, would not get lost,
And I was right! I found in the end - My enemy, and new Haydn
- Suprisingly intoxicated me with joy!
- The time has come! You precious gift of love,
- Turn into cup of friendship now. (Scene I)
In Pushkin's little tragedy Salieri poisons Mozart. In the Kalugano hospital (where Van recovers from a wound received in a pistol duel with Captain Tapper, of Wild Violet Lodge) Van visits Philip Rack, Lucette's music teacher and a composer of genius who was poisoned by his jealous wife Elsie. According to Dr Fitzbishop, Rack's wife had just had a complicated miscarriage in the maternity ward (cf. a huge hideous lump of bourgeois mahogany, ten feet high, entitled ‘Maternity,’ a sculpture by Heinrich Heideland that adorns the backyard of Agavia Ranch):
For half a minute Van was sure that he still lay in the car, whereas actually he was in the general ward of Lakeview (Lakeview!) Hospital, between two series of variously bandaged, snoring, raving and moaning men. When he understood this, his first reaction was to demand indignantly that he be transferred to the best private palata in the place and that his suitcase and alpenstock be fetched from the Majestic. His next request was that he be told how seriously he was hurt and how long he was expected to remain incapacitated. His third action was to resume what constituted the sole reason of his having to visit Kalugano (visit Kalugano!). His new quarters, where heartbroken kings had tossed in transit, proved to be a replica in white of his hotel apartment — white furniture, white carpet, white sparver. Inset, so to speak, was Tatiana, a remarkably pretty and proud young nurse, with black hair and diaphanous skin (some of her attitudes and gestures, and that harmony between neck and eyes which is the special, scarcely yet investigated secret of feminine grace fantastically and agonizingly reminded him of Ada, and he sought escape from that image in a powerful response to the charms of Tatiana, a torturing angel in her own right. Enforced immobility forbade the chase and grab of common cartoons. He begged her to massage his legs but she tested him with one glance of her grave, dark eyes — and delegated the task to Dorofey, a beefy-handed male nurse, strong enough to lift him bodily out of bed. with the sick child clasping the massive nape. When Van managed once to twiddle her breasts, she warned him she would complain if he ever repeated what she dubbed more aptly than she thought ‘that soft dangle.’ An exhibition of his state with a humble appeal for a healing caress resulted in her drily remarking that distinguished gentlemen in public parks got quite lengthy prison terms for that sort of thing. However, much later, she wrote him a charming and melancholy letter in red ink on pink paper; but other emotions and events had intervened, and he never met her again). His suitcase promptly arrived from the hotel; the stick, however, could not be located (it must be climbing nowadays Wellington Mountain, or perhaps, helping a lady to go ‘brambling’ in Oregon); so the hospital supplied him with the Third Cane, a rather nice, knotty, cherry-dark thing with a crook and a solid black-rubber heel. Dr Fitzbishop congratulated him on having escaped with a superficial muscle wound, the bullet having lightly grooved or, if he might say so, grazed the greater serratus. Doc Fitz commented on Van’s wonderful recuperational power which was already in evidence, and promised to have him out of disinfectants and bandages in ten days or so if for the first three he remained as motionless as a felled tree-trunk. Did Van like music? Sportsmen usually did, didn’t they? Would he care to have a Sonorola by his bed? No, he disliked music, but did the doctor, being a concert-goer, know perhaps where a musician called Rack could be found? ‘Ward Five,’ answered the doctor promptly. Van misunderstood this as the title of some piece of music and repeated his question. Would he find Rack’s address at Harper’s music shop? Well, they used to rent a cottage way down Dorofey Road, near the forest, but now some other people had moved in. Ward Five was where hopeless cases were kept. The poor guy had always had a bad liver and a very indifferent heart, but on top of that a poison had seeped into his system; the local ‘lab’ could not identify it and they were now waiting for a report, on those curiously frog-green faeces, from the Luga people. If Rack had administered it to himself by his own hand, he kept ‘mum’; it was more likely the work of his wife who dabbled in Hindu-Andean voodoo stuff and had just had a complicated miscarriage in the maternity ward. Yes, triplets — how did he guess? Anyway, if Van was so eager to visit his old pal it would have to be as soon as he could be rolled to Ward Five in a wheelchair by Dorofey, so he’d better apply a bit of voodoo, ha-ha, on his own flesh and blood.
That day came soon enough. After a long journey down corridors where pretty little things tripped by, shaking thermometers, and first an ascent and then a descent in two different lifts, the second of which was very capacious with a metal-handled black lid propped against its wall and bits of holly or laurel here and there on the soap-smelling floor, Dorofey, like Onegin’s coachman, said priehali (‘we have arrived’) and gently propelled Van, past two screened beds, toward a third one near the window. There he left Van, while he seated himself at a small table in the door corner and leisurely unfolded the Russian-language newspaper Golos (Logos). (1.42)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): palata: Russ., ward.
When Andrey Vinelander falls ill, his sister reads to him old issues of Golos Feniksa:
At first everything seemed to proceed according to the instructions of some friendly genius.
Much to Van’s amusement (the tasteless display of which his mistress neither condoned nor condemned), Andrey was laid up with a cold for most of the week. Dorothy, a born nurser, considerably surpassed Ada (who, never being ill herself, could not stand the sight of an ailing stranger) in readiness of sickbed attendance, such as reading to the sweating and suffocating patient old issues of the Golos Feniksa; but on Friday the hotel doctor bundled him off to the nearby American Hospital, where even his sister was not allowed to visit him ‘because of the constant necessity of routine tests’ — or rather because the poor fellow wished to confront disaster in manly solitude.
During the next few days, Dorothy used her leisure to spy upon Ada. The woman was sure of three things: that Ada had a lover in Switzerland; that Van was her brother; and that he was arranging for his irresistible sister secret trysts with the person she had loved before her marriage. The delightful phenomenon of all three terms being true, but making nonsense when hashed, provided Van with another source of amusement.
he Three Swans overwinged a bastion. Anyone who called, flesh or voice, was told by the concierge or his acolytes that Van was out, that Madame André Vinelander was unknown, and that all they could do was to take a message. His car, parked in a secluded bosquet, could not betray his presence. In the forenoon he regularly used the service lift that communicated directly with the backyard. Lucien, something of a wit, soon learned to recognize Dorothy’s contralto: ‘La voix cuivrée a téléphoné,’ ‘La Trompette n’était pas contente ce matin,’ et cetera. Then the friendly Fates took a day off. (3.8)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): Golos etc.: Russ., The Phoenix Voice, Russian language newspaper in Arizona.
la voix etc.: the brassy voice telephoned... the trumpet did not sound pleased this morning.
In March, 1905, Demon Veen (Van's and Ada's father) perishes in a mysterious airplane disaster above the Pacific. Half a year later, in October 1905, Van and Ada (now married to Andrey Vinelander) meet again after the thirteen-year-long separation. Van does not suspect that his father died, because Ada (who could not pardon Demon his forcing Van to give her up) managed to persuade the pilot to destroy his machine in midair. And he never finds out that Andrey and Ada have at least two children (who were born in the period between June, 1901, and March 1905) and that Ronald Oranger (old Van's secretary, the editor of Ada) and Violet Knox (old Van's typist whom Ada calls Fialochka, "little Violet," and who marries Ronald Oranger after Van's and Ada's death) are Ada's grandchildren.