Mike Marcus: "Near the start of Part I, Chapter 8 of
Jansy Mello:
The sentences Mike Marcus selected, reminded me of another episode, directly
related to Percy de Prey.
I didn't find, right now, the threads that once led me from one
paragraph, or a selection of images, to the other I think they may be
found in A.Sklyarenko's "
There are several elements in common between the episodes, such as
the holograph dream-quality of doubles and twins, a reference to
birds... Perhaps the items below will be helpful and add some information to
what Mike Marcus has been searching, in connection to Shakespeare (athough I
cannot follow most of his associations...).I'm curious about what will come out
from this sampling...
(1) "‘I’m
not interested. Now comes a little boy.’/ ‘Zdraste, Ivan Dementievich,’ said
Van, greeting his fourteen-year-old self, shirtless, in shorts, aiming a conical
missile at the marble fore-image of a Crimean girl doomed to offer an
everlasting draught of marble water to a dying marine from her bullet-chipped
jar [ ] Ah, the famous first finch./‘No, that’s a kitayskaya
punochka (Chinese Wall Bunting). It has settled on the threshold of a basement
door. The door is ajar. There are garden tools and croquet mallets inside. You
remember how many exotic, alpine and polar, animals mixed with ordinary ones in
our region.’
(2) "Percy, you were to die very
soon — and not from that pellet in your fat leg, on the turf of a Crimean
ravine...you were to die very soon, Percy; but that July day in Ladore County,
lolling under the pines, royally drunk after some earlier festivity, with lust
in your heart and a sticky glass in your strong blond-haired hand...Burly,
handsome, indolent and ferocious, a crack Rugger player, a cracker of country
girls, you combined the charm of the off-duty athlete with the engaging drawl of
a fashionable ass.[ ] ‘In a birdhouse fixed to that pine trunk,’
said Marina to her young admirer, ‘there was once a "telephone." [ ] They
thought, he thought, he was a shepherd too."
(3) "Maidenhair. Idiot! Percy boy might have been buried by now!
Maidenhair. Thus named because of the huge spreading Chinese tree at the end of
the platform....N’est vert, n’est vert, n’est vert. L’arbre aux quarante écus
d’or... Ginkgo, gingko, ink, inkog. Known also as
(4) "Young Fraser,
who has just been flown back from Yalta, saw Percy killed on the second day of
the invasion...He will tell you the whole story himself, it accumulates more and
more dreadful details with every telling [ ] (Bill Fraser, the son
of Judge Fraser, of Wellington, witnessed Lieutenant de Prey’s end from a
blessed ditch overgrown with cornel and medlar, but, of course, could do nothing
to help the leader of his platoon [ ] Percy had been shot in the
thigh during a skirmish with Khazar guerillas in a ravine [ ] Loss
of blood caused him to faint, as we fainted, too, as soon as he started to crawl
or rather squirm toward the shelter of the oak scrub and spiny bushes, where
another casualty was resting comfortably [ ] A smiling old Tartar,
incongruously but somehow assuagingly wearing American blue-jeans with his
beshmet, was squatting by his side[ ]‘Karasho, karasho ne bol’no
(good, good),’ said the kindly old man and, picking up the automatic pistol
which Percy had dropped, he examined it with naive pleasure and then shot him in
the temple [ ]One supposes it might have been a kind of suite for
flute, a series of ‘movements’ such as, say: I’m alive — who’s that? — civilian
— sympathy — thirsty — daughter with pitcher — that’s my damned gun — don’t...
et cetera or rather no cetera... while Broken-Arm Bill prayed his Roman deity in
a frenzy of fear for the Tartar to finish his job and go. But, of course, an
invaluable detail in that strip of thought would have been — perhaps, next to
the pitcher peri — a glint, a shadow, a stab of Ardis.) / /‘How strange, how
strange,’ murmured Van when Cordula had finished her much less elaborate version
of the report Van later got from Bill Fraser./What a strange coincidence! Either
The word "peri" appears twice. Here is another quote and Brian
Boyd's explanation in Ada Online:
(5) "Marina, with perverse vainglory, used to
affirm in bed that Demon’s senses must have been influenced by a queer sort of
‘incestuous’ (whatever that term means) pleasure (in the sense of the French
plaisir, which works up a lot of supplementary spinal vibrato), when he fondled,
and savored, and delicately parted and defiled, in unmentionable but fascinating
ways, flesh (une chair) that was both that of his wife and that of his mistress,
the blended and brightened charms of twin peris, an Aquamarina both single and
double, a mirage in an emirate, a germinate gem, an orgy of epithelial
alliterations."
.