When Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) teaches Lucette to walk on her hands, Dack (the dackel at Ardis whom Ada calls nekhoroshaya sobaka, a bad dog) barks in strident protest:
Now Lucette demanded her mother’s attention.
‘What are Jews?’ she asked.
‘Dissident Christians,’ answered Marina.
‘Why is Greg a Jew?’ asked Lucette.
‘Why-why!’ said Marina; ‘because his parents are Jews.’
‘And his grandparents? His arrière grandparents?’
‘I really wouldn’t know, my dear. Were your ancestors Jews, Greg?’
‘Well, I’m not sure,’ said Greg. ‘Hebrews, yes — but not Jews in quotes — I mean, not comic characters or Christian businessmen. They came from Tartary to England five centuries ago. My mother’s grandfather, though, was a French marquis who, I know, belonged to the Roman faith and was crazy about banks and stocks and jewels, so I imagine people may have called him un juif.’
‘It’s not a very old religion, anyway, as religions go, is it?’ said Marina (turning to Van and vaguely planning to steer the chat to India where she had been a dancing girl long before Moses or anybody was born in the lotus swamp).
‘Who cares —’ said Van.
‘And Belle’ (Lucette’s name for her governess), ‘is she also a dizzy Christian?’
‘Who cares,’ cried Van, ‘who cares about all those stale myths, what does it matter — Jove or Jehovah, spire or cupola, mosques in Moscow, or bronzes and bonzes, and clerics, and relics, and deserts with bleached camel ribs? They are merely the dust and mirages of the communal mind.’
‘How did this idiotic conversation start in the first place?’ Ada wished to be told, cocking her head at the partly ornamented dackel or taksik.
‘Mea culpa,’ Mlle Larivière explained with offended dignity. ‘All I said, at the picnic, was that Greg might not care for ham sandwiches, because Jews and Tartars do not eat pork.’
‘The Romans,’ said Greg, ‘the Roman colonists, who crucified Christian Jews and Barabbits, and other unfortunate people in the old days, did not touch pork either, but I certainly do and so did my grandparents.’
Lucette was puzzled by a verb Greg had used. To illustrate it for her, Van joined his ankles, spread both his arms horizontally, and rolled up his eyes.
‘When I was a little girl,’ said Marina crossly, ‘Mesopotamian history was taught practically in the nursery.’
‘Not all little girls can learn what they are taught,’ observed Ada.
‘Are we Mesopotamians?’ asked Lucette.
‘We are Hippopotamians,’ said Van. ‘Come,’ he added, ‘we have not yet ploughed today.’
A day or two before, Lucette had demanded that she be taught to hand-walk. Van gripped her by her ankles while she slowly progressed on her little red palms, sometimes falling with a grunt on her face or pausing to nibble a daisy. Dack barked in strident protest.
‘Et pourtant,’ said the sound-sensitive governess, wincing, ‘I read to her twice Ségur’s adaptation in fable form of Shakespeare’s play about the wicked usurer.’
‘She also knows my revised monologue of his mad king,’ said Ada:
Ce beau jardin fleurit en mai,
Mais en hiver
Jamais, jamais, jamais, jamais, jamais
N’est vert, n’est vert, n’est vert, n’est vert,
n’est vert.
‘Oh, that’s good,’ exclaimed Greg with a veritable sob of admiration.
‘Not so energichno, children!’ cried Marina in Van-and-Lucette’s direction.
‘Elle devient pourpre, she is getting crimson,’ commented the governess. ‘I sustain that these indecent gymnastics are no good for her.’
Van, his eyes smiling, his angel-strong hands holding the child’s cold-carrot-soup legs just above the insteps, was ‘ploughing around’ with Lucette acting the sullow. Her bright hair hung over her face, her panties showed from under the hem of her skirt, yet she still urged the ploughboy on.
‘Budet, budet, that’ll do,’ said Marina to the plough team.
Van gently let her legs down and straightened her dress. She lay for a moment, panting.
‘I mean, I would love lending him to you for a ride any time. For any amount of time. Will you? Besides, I have another black.’
But she shook her head, she shook her bent head, while still twisting and twining her daisies.
‘Well,’ he said, getting up, ‘I must be going. Good-bye, everybody. Good-bye, Ada. I guess it’s your father under that oak, isn’t it?’
‘No, it’s an elm,’ said Ada.
Van looked across the lawn and said as if musing — perhaps with just a faint touch of boyish show-off:
‘I’d like to see that Two-Lice sheet too when Uncle is through with it. I was supposed to play for my school in yesterday’s cricket game. Veen sick, unable to bat, Riverlane humbled.’ (1.14)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): un juif: a Jew.
et pourtant: and yet.
ce beau jardin etc.: This beautiful garden blooms in May, but in Winter never, never, never, never, never is green etc.
According to a Russian saying, sobaki layut, a karavan idyot (the dog barks, but the caravan walks on). Describing his debauch à trois with Ada and Lucette in his Manhattan flat, Van mentions a karavanchik of cigarettes:
Thus seen from above, as if reflected in the ciel mirror that Eric had naively thought up in his Cyprian dreams (actually all is shadowy up there, for the blinds are still drawn, shutting out the gray morning), we have the large island of the bed illumined from our left (Lucette’s right) by a lamp burning with a murmuring incandescence on the west-side bedtable. The top sheet and quilt are tumbled at the footboardless south of the island where the newly landed eye starts on its northern trip, up the younger Miss Veen’s pried-open legs. A dewdrop on russet moss eventually finds a stylistic response in the aquamarine tear on her flaming cheekbone. Another trip from the port to the interior reveals the central girl’s long white left thigh; we visit souvenir stalls: Ada’s red-lacquered talons, which lead a man’s reasonably recalcitrant, pardonably yielding wrist out of the dim east to the bright russet west, and the sparkle of her diamond necklace, which, for the nonce, is not much more valuable than the aquamarines on the other (west) side of Novelty Novel lane. The scarred male nude on the island’s east coast is half-shaded, and, on the whole, less interesting, though considerably more aroused than is good for him or a certain type of tourist. The recently repapered wall immediately west of the now louder-murmuring (et pour cause) dorocene lamp is ornamented in the central girl’s honor with Peruvian’ honeysuckle’ being visited (not only for its nectar, I’m afraid, but for the animalcules stuck in it) by marvelous Loddigesia Hummingbirds, while the bedtable on that side bears a lowly box of matches, a karavanchik of cigarettes, a Monaco ashtray, a copy of Voltemand’s poor thriller, and a Lurid Oncidium Orchid in an amethystine vaselet. The companion piece on Van’s side supports a similar superstrong but unlit lamp, a dorophone, a box of Wipex, a reading loupe, the returned Ardis album, and a separatum ‘Soft music as cause of brain tumors,’ by Dr Anbury (young Rattner’s waggish pen-name). Sounds have colors, colors have smells. The fire of Lucette’s amber runs through the night of Ada’s odor and ardor, and stops at the threshold of Van’s lavender goat. Ten eager, evil, loving, long fingers belonging to two different young demons caress their helpless bed pet. Ada’s loose black hair accidentally tickles the local curio she holds in her left fist, magnanimously demonstrating her acquisition. Unsigned and unframed. (2.8)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): et pour cause: and no wonder.
karavanchik: small caravan of camels (Russ.).
Van bought the Manhattan penthouse appartment where he lives with Ada from Cordula de Prey, his former mistress. Describing his meeting with Cordula (now married to Ivan G. Tobak) in 1901 in Paris (also known as Lute on Demonia, Earth's twin planet also known as Antiterra), Van quotes the stale but appropriate lines "The Veens speak only to Tobaks, but Tobaks speak only to dogs:"
A moment later, as happens so often in farces and foreign cities, Van ran into another friend. With a surge of delight he saw Cordula in a tight scarlet skirt bending with baby words of comfort over two unhappy poodlets attached to the waiting-post of a sausage shop. Van stroked her with his fingertips, and as she straightened up indignantly and turned around (indignation instantly replaced by gay recognition), he quoted the stale but appropriate lines he had known since the days his schoolmates annoyed him with them:
The Veens speak only to Tobaks
But Tobaks speak only to dogs.
The passage of years had but polished her prettiness and though many fashions had come and gone since 1889, he happened upon her at a season when hairdos and skirtlines had reverted briefly (another much more elegant lady was already ahead of her) to the style of a dozen years ago, abolishing the interruption of remembered approval and pleasure. She plunged into a torrent of polite questions — but he had a more important matter to settle at once — while the flame still flickered.
‘Let’s not squander,’ he said, ‘the tumescence of retrieved time on the gush of small talk. I’m bursting with energy, if that’s what you want to know. Now look; it may sound silly and insolent but I have an urgent request. Will you cooperate with me in cornuting your husband? It’s a must!’
‘Really, Van!’ exclaimed angry Cordula. ‘You go a bit far. I’m a happy wife. My Tobachok adores me. We’d have ten children by now if I’d not been careful with him and others.’
‘You’ll be glad to learn that this other has been found utterly sterile.’
‘Well, I’m anything but. I guess I’d cause a mule to foal by just looking on. Moreover, I’m lunching today with the Goals.’
‘C’est bizarre, an exciting little girl like you who can be so tender with poodles and yet turns down a poor paunchy stiff old Veen.’
‘The Veens are much too gay as dogs go.’
‘Since you collect adages,’ persisted Van, ‘let me quote an Arabian one. Paradise is only one assbaa south of a pretty girl’s sash. Eh bien?’
‘You are impossible. Where and when?’
‘Where? In that drab little hotel across the street. When? Right now. I’ve never seen you on a hobbyhorse yet, because that’s what tout confort promises — and not much else.’
‘I must be home not later than eleven-thirty, it’s almost eleven now.’
‘It will take five minutes. Please!’
Astraddle, she resembled a child braving her first merry-go-round. She made a rectangular moue as she used that vulgar contraption. Sad, sullen streetwalkers do it with expressionless faces, lips tightly closed. She rode it twice. Their brisk nub and its repetition lasted fifteen minutes in all, not five. Very pleased with himself, Van walked with her for a stretch through the brown and green Bois de Belleau in the direction of her osobnyachyok (small mansion).
‘That reminds me,’ he said, ‘I no longer use our Alexis apartment. I’ve had some poor people live there these last seven or eight years — the family of a police officer who used to be a footman at Uncle Dan’s place in the country. My policeman is dead now and his widow and three boys have gone back to Ladore. I want to relinquish that flat. Would you like to accept it as a belated wedding present from an admirer? Good. We shall do it again some day. Tomorrow I have to be in London and on the third my favorite liner, Admiral Tobakoff, will take me to Manhattan. Au revoir. Tell him to look out for low lintels. Antlers can be very sensitive when new. Greg Erminin tells me that Lucette is at the Alphonse Four?’
‘That’s right. And where’s the other?’
‘I think we’ll part here. It’s twenty minutes to twelve. You’d better toddle along.’
‘Au revoir. You’re a very bad boy and I’m a very bad girl. But it was fun — even though you’ve been speaking to me not as you would to a lady friend but as you probably do to little whores. Wait. Here’s a top secret address where you can always’ — (fumbling in her handbag) — ‘reach me’ — (finding a card with her husband’s crest and scribbling a postal cryptograph) — ‘at Malbrook, Mayne, where I spend every August.’
She looked around, rose on her toes like a ballerina, and kissed him on the mouth. Sweet Cordula! (3.2)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): moue: little grimace.
Actually, Van quotes these lines in Russian: Viny govoryat lish' s Tobakami, a Tobaki govoryat lish' s sobakami. Just before meeting Cordula, Van parted with Greg Erminin. On the picnic at Ada's sixteenth birthday Greg gives Ada a little camel of yellow ivory carved in Kiev, five centuries ago, in the days of Timur and Nabok:
Ada had declined to invite anybody except the Erminin twins to her picnic; but she had had no intention of inviting the brother without the sister. The latter, it turned out, could not come, having gone to New Cranton to see a young drummer, her first boy friend, sail off into the sunrise with his regiment. But Greg had to be asked to come after all: on the previous day he had called on her bringing a ‘talisman’ from his very sick father, who wanted Ada to treasure as much as his grandam had a little camel of yellow ivory carved in Kiev, five centuries ago, in the days of Timur and Nabok. (1.39)
In his autobiography Speak, Memory (1951) VN mentions the Nabokov's dachshunds, Trainy and Box II, a dog that followed its masters into exile. According to VN, the grandparents of Box II were Dr Anton Chekhov's Quina and Brom. Greg Erminin and his twin sister Grace are Jewish. Chekhov in jest called his dogs Quina Markovna and Brom Isayevich.
At the picnic on Ada’s twelfth birthday Marina (Van’s, Ada’s and Lucette’s mother) shows to Van and Lucette the exact pine and the exact spot on its rugged red trunk where in old, very old days a magnetic telephone nested and mentions the ‘drums’ (cylinders) whose installation and upkeep of cost a Jew’s eye:
Marina’s contribution was more modest, but it too had its charm. She showed Van and Lucette (the others knew all about it) the exact pine and the exact spot on its rugged red trunk where in old, very old days a magnetic telephone nested, communicating with Ardis Hall. After the banning of ‘currents and circuits,’ she said (rapidly but freely, with an actress’s désinvolture pronouncing those not quite proper words — while puzzled Lucette tugged at the sleeve of Van, of Vanichka, who could explain everything), her husband’s grandmother, an engineer of great genius, ‘tubed’ the Redmount rill (running just below the glade from a hill above Ardis). She made it carry vibrational vibgyors (prismatic pulsations) through a system of platinum segments. These produced, of course, only one-way messages, and the installation and upkeep of the ‘drums’ (cylinders) cost, she said, a Jew’s eye, so that the idea was dropped, however tempting the possibility of informing a picnicking Veen that his house was on fire. (1.13)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): vibgyor: violet-indigo-blue-green-yellow-orange-red.
In the New Testament Jusus says: "it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God." Greg Erminin comes to Ardis on the next day (or on the day after the next) after the picnic. His arrival on a pony seems to be a parody of Jesus' arrival in Jerusalem on a donkey:
Next day, or the day after the next, the entire family was having high tea in the garden. Ada, on the grass, kept trying to make an anadem of marguerites for the dog while Lucette looked on, munching a crumpet. Marina remained for almost a minute wordlessly stretching across the table her husband’s straw hat in his direction; finally he shook his head, glared at the sun that glared back and retired with his cup and the Toulouse Enquirer to a rustic seat on the other side of the lawn under an immense elm.
‘I ask myself who can that be,’ murmured Mlle Larivière from behind the samovar (which expressed fragments of its surroundings in demented fantasies of a primitive genre) as she slitted her eyes at a part of the drive visible between the pilasters of an open-work gallery. Van, lying prone behind Ada, lifted his eyes from his book (Ada’s copy of Atala).
A tall rosy-faced youngster in smart riding breeches dismounted from a black pony.
‘It’s Greg’s beautiful new pony,’ said Ada.
Greg, with a well-bred boy’s easy apologies, had brought Marina’s platinum lighter which his aunt had discovered in her own bag.
‘Goodness, I’ve not even had time to miss it. How is Ruth?’
Greg said that both Aunt Ruth and Grace were laid up with acute indigestion — ‘not because of your wonderful sandwiches,’ he hastened to add, ‘but because of all those burnberries they picked in the bushes.’
Marina was about to jingle a bronze bell for the footman to bring some more toast, but Greg said he was on his way to a party at the Countess de Prey’s.
‘Rather soon (skorovato) she consoled herself,’ remarked Marina, alluding to the death of the Count killed in a pistol duel on Boston Common a couple of years ago.
‘She’s a very jolly and handsome woman,’ said Greg.
‘And ten years older than me,’ said Marina. (1.14)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): Atala: a short novel by Chateaubriand.
A Jew's eye brings to mind Jesus' words about our ability to see a speck in the eye of another man while being unable to notice the log in our own eye. Jesus also said: "if your eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away." Besides, one is reminded of "an eye for an eye," a commandment found in the Old Testament (the Book of Exodus).