On Demonia (in VN's novel Ada, 1969, Earth's twin planet also known as Antiterra) the Iron Curtain (a term used by Winston Churchill in his Fulton speech on March 5, 1946) is known as the Golden Curtain:
On February 5, 1887, an unsigned editorial in The Ranter (the usually so sarcastic and captious Chose weekly) described Mascodagama’s performance as ‘the most imaginative and singular stunt ever offered to a jaded music-hall public.’ It was repeated at the Rantariver Club several times, but nothing in the programme or in publicity notices beyond the definition ‘Foreign eccentric’ gave any indication either of the exact nature of the ‘stunt’ or of the performer’s identity. Rumors, carefully and cleverly circulated by Mascodagama’s friends, diverted speculations toward his being a mysterious visitor from beyond the Golden Curtain, particularly since at least half-a-dozen members of a large Good-will Circus Company that had come from Tartary just then (i.e., on the eve of the Crimean War) — three dancing girls, a sick old clown with his old speaking goat, and one of the dancers’ husbands, a make-up man (no doubt, a multiple agent) — had already defected between France and England, somewhere in the newly constructed ‘Chunnel.’ Mascodagama’s spectacular success in a theatrical club that habitually limited itself to Elizabethan plays, with queens and fairies played by pretty boys, made first of all a great impact on cartoonists. Deans, local politicians, national statesmen, and of course the current ruler of the Golden Horde were pictured as mascodagamas by topical humorists. A grotesque imitator (who was really Mascodagama himself in an oversophisticated parody of his own act!) was booed at Oxford (a women’s college nearby) by local rowdies. A shrewd reporter, who had heard him curse a crease in the stage carpet, commented in print on his ‘Yankee twang.’ Dear Mr ‘Vascodagama’ received an invitation to Windsor Castle from its owner, a bilateral descendant of Van’s own ancestors, but he declined it, suspecting (incorrectly, as it later transpired) the misprint to suggest that his incognito had been divulged by one of the special detectives at Chose — the same, perhaps, who had recently saved the psychiatrist P.O. Tyomkin from the dagger of Prince Potyomkin, a mixed-up kid from Sebastopol, Id. (1.30)
Bronenosets Potyomkin (Battleship Potemkin, 1925) is a Soviet silent film directed by Sergei Eisenstein. In Victor Vitry’s film Letters from Terra the Golden Curtain becomes the Golden Veil:
Ada, who resented the insufficiency of her brother’s fame, felt soothed and elated by the success of The Texture of Time (1924). That work, she said, always reminded her, in some odd, delicate way, of the sun-and-shade games she used to play as a child in the secluded avenues of Ardis Park. She said she had been somehow responsible for the metamorphoses of the lovely larvae that had woven the silk of ‘Veen’s Time’ (as the concept was now termed in one breath, one breeze, with ‘Bergson’s Duration,’ or ‘Whitehead’s Bright Fringe’). But a considerably earlier and weaker work, the poor little Letters from Terra, of which only half a dozen copies existed — two in Villa Armina and the rest in the stacks of university libraries — was even closer to her heart because of its nonliterary associations with their 1892-93 sojourn in Manhattan. Sixty-year-old Van crustily and contemptuously dismissed her meek suggestion to the effect that it should be republished, together with the Sidra reflections and a very amusing anti-Signy pamphlet on Time in Dreams. Seventy-year-old Van regretted his disdain when Victor Vitry, a brilliant French director, based a completely unauthorized picture on Letters from Terra written by ‘Voltemand’ half a century before.
Vitry dated Theresa’s visit to Antiterra as taking place in 1940, but 1940 by the Terranean calendar, and about 1890 by ours. The conceit allowed certain pleasing dips into the modes and manners of our past (did you remember that horses wore hats — yes, hats — when heat waves swept Manhattan?) and gave the impression — which physics-fiction literature had much exploited — of the capsulist traveling backward in terms of time. Philosophers asked nasty questions, but were ignored by the wishing-to-be-gulled moviegoers.
In contrast to the cloudless course of Demonian history in the twentieth century, with the Anglo-American coalition managing one hemisphere, and Tartary, behind her Golden Veil, mysteriously ruling the other, a succession of wars and revolutions were shown shaking loose the jigsaw puzzle of Terrestrial autonomies. In an impressive historical survey of Terra rigged up by Vitry — certainly the greatest cinematic genius ever to direct a picture of such scope or use such a vast number of extras (some said more than a million, others, half a million men and as many mirrors) — kingdoms fell and dictatordoms rose, and republics, half-sat, half-lay in various attitudes of discomfort. The conception was controversial, the execution flawless. Look at all those tiny soldiers scuttling along very fast across the trench-scarred wilderness, with explosions of mud and things going pouf-pouf in silent French now here, now there!
In 1905, Norway with a mighty heave and a long dorsal ripple unfastened herself from Sweden, her unwieldy co-giantess, while in a similar act of separation the French parliament, with parenthetical outbursts of vive émotion, voted a divorce between State and Church. Then, in 1911, Norwegian troops led by Amundsen reached the South Pole and simultaneously the Italians stormed into Turkey. In 1914 Germany invaded Belgium and the Americans tore up Panama. In 1918 they and the French defeated Germany while she was busily defeating Russia (who had defeated her own Tartars some time earlier). In Norway there was Siegrid Mitchel, in America Margaret Undset, and in France, Sidonie Colette. In 1926 Abdel-Krim surrendered, after yet another photogenic war, and the Golden Horde again subjugated Rus. In 1933, Athaulf Hindler (also known as Mittler — from ‘to mittle,’ mutilate) came to power in Germany, and a conflict on an even more spectacular scale than the 1914-1918 war was under way, when Vitry ran out of old documentaries and Theresa, played by his wife, left Terra in a cosmic capsule after having covered the Olympic Games held in Berlin (the Norwegians took most of the prizes, but the Americans won the fencing event, an outstanding achievement, and beat the Germans in the final football match by three goals to one). (5.5)
Describing his meeting with Lucette (Van’s and Ada’s half-sister) in 1901 in Paris (also known as Lute on Demonia), Van mentions the Récamier room where Vivian Vale’s golden veils were on show:
The Bourbonian-chinned, dark, sleek-haired, ageless concierge, dubbed by Van in his blazer days ‘Alphonse Cinq,’ believed he had just seen Mlle Veen in the Récamier room where Vivian Vale’s golden veils were on show. With a flick of coattail and a swing-gate click, Alphonse dashed out of his lodge and went to see. Van’s eye over his umbrella crook traveled around a carousel of Sapsucker paperbacks (with that wee striped woodpecker on every spine): The Gitanilla, Salzman, Salzman, Salzman, Invitation to a Climax, Squirt, The Go-go Gang, The Threshold of Pain, The Chimes of Chose, The Gitanilla — here a Wall Street, very ‘patrician’ colleague of Demon’s, old Kithar K.L. Sween, who wrote verse, and the still older real-estate magnate Milton Eliot, went by without recognizing grateful Van, despite his being betrayed by several mirrors.
The concierge returned shaking his head. Out of the goodness of his heart Van gave him a Goal guinea and said he’d call again at one-thirty. He walked through the lobby (where the author of Agonic Lines and Mr Eliot, affalés, with a great amount of jacket over their shoulders, dans des fauteuils, were comparing cigars) and, leaving the hotel by a side exit, crossed the rue des Jeunes Martyres for a drink at Ovenman’s.
Upon entering, he stopped for a moment to surrender his coat; but he kept his black fedora and stick-slim umbrella as he had seen his father do in that sort of bawdy, albeit smart, place which decent women did not frequent — at least, unescorted. He headed for the bar, and as he was in the act of wiping the lenses of his black-framed spectacles, made out, through the optical mist (Space’s recent revenge!), the girl whose silhouette he recalled having seen now and then (much more distinctly!) ever since his pubescence, passing alone, drinking alone, always alone, like Blok’s Incognita. It was a queer feeling — as of something replayed by mistake, part of a sentence misplaced on the proof sheet, a scene run prematurely, a repeated blemish, a wrong turn of time. He hastened to reequip his ears with the thick black bows of his glasses and went up to her in silence. For a minute he stood behind her, sideways to remembrance and reader (as she, too, was in regard to us and the bar), the crook of his silk-swathed cane lifted in profile almost up to his mouth. There she was, against the aureate backcloth of a sakarama screen next to the bar, toward which she was sliding, still upright, about to be seated, having already placed one white-gloved hand on the counter. She wore a high-necked, long-sleeved romantic black dress with an ample skirt, fitted bodice and ruffy collar, from the black soft corolla of which her long neck gracefully rose. With a rake’s morose gaze we follow the pure proud line of that throat, of that tilted chin. The glossy red lips are parted, avid and fey, offering a side gleam of large upper teeth. We know, we love that high cheekbone (with an atom of powder puff sticking to the hot pink skin), and the forward upsweep of black lashes and the painted feline eye — all this in profile, we softly repeat. From under the wavy wide brim of her floppy hat of black faille, with a great black bow surmounting it, a spiral of intentionally disarranged, expertly curled bright copper descends her flaming cheek, and the light of the bar’s ‘gem bulbs’ plays on her bouffant front hair, which, as seen laterally, convexes from beneath the extravagant brim of the picture hat right down to her long thin eyebrow. Her Irish profile sweetened by a touch of Russian softness, which adds a look of mysterious expectancy and wistful surprise to her beauty, must be seen, I hope, by the friends and admirers of my memories, as a natural masterpiece incomparably finer and younger than the portrait of the similarily postured lousy jade with her Parisian gueule de guenon on the vile poster painted by that wreck of an artist for Ovenman. (3.3)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): affalés etc.: sprawling in their armchairs.
bouffant: puffed up.
gueule etc.: simian facial angle.
At the beginning of Part One of his poem Vozmezdie (Retribution, 1910-21) Alexander Blok (1880-1921) calls the 19th century Vek ne salonov, a gostinykh, / Ne Rekam'ye, a prosto dam (The century of living rooms, not of salons, / Of simply ladies, not of Récamiers):
Век девятнадцатый, железный,
Воистину жестокий век!
Тобою в мрак ночной, беззвездный
Беспечный брошен человек!
В ночь умозрительных понятий,
Матерьялистских малых дел,
Бессильных жалоб и проклятий
Бескровных душ и слабых тел!
С тобой пришли чуме на смену
Нейрастения, скука, сплин,
Век расшибанья лбов о стену
Экономических доктрин,
Конгрессов, банков, федераций,
Застольных спичей, красных слов,
Век акций, рент и облигаций,
И малодейственных умов,
И дарований половинных
(Так справедливей — пополам!),
Век не салонов, а гостиных,
Не Рекамье, — а просто дам…
Век буржуазного богатства
(Растущего незримо зла!).
Vek devyatnadtsatyi, zheleznyi, / Voistinu zhestokiy vek! (The nineteenth century made of iron, / A truly cruel century!), the lines in Retribution, and Tyazhkiy, plotnyi zanaves u vkhoda (On the door a thick and heavy curtain), the opening line of Blok's poem Shagi komandora (“The Footsteps of the Commander,” 1910-12), make one think of zheleznyi zanaves (the Iron Curtain in Russian). In The Footsteps of the Commander Blok mentions Don Juan, Donna Anna and her sumptuous and chilly bedroom:
В. А. Зоргенфрею
Тяжкий, плотный занавес у входа,
За ночным окном — туман.
Что теперь твоя постылая свобода,
Страх познавший Дон-Жуан?
Холодно и пусто в пышной спальне,
Слуги спят, и ночь глуха.
Из страны блаженной, незнакомой, дальней
Слышно пенье петуха.
Что́ изменнику блаженства звуки?
Миги жизни сочтены.
Донна Анна спит, скрестив на сердце руки,
Донна Анна видит сны…
Чьи черты жестокие застыли,
В зеркалах отражены?
Анна, Анна, сладко ль спать в могиле?
Сладко ль видеть неземные сны?
Жизнь пуста, безумна и бездонна!
Выходи на битву, старый рок!
И в ответ — победно и влюблённо —
В снежной мгле поёт рожок…
Пролетает, брызнув в ночь огнями,
Чёрный, тихий, как сова, мотор.
Тихими, тяжелыми шагами
В дом вступает Командор…
Настежь дверь. Из непомерной стужи,
Словно хриплый бой ночных часов —
Бой часов: «Ты звал меня на ужин.
Я пришел. А ты готов?..»
На вопрос жестокий нет ответа,
Нет ответа — тишина.
В пышной спальне страшно в час рассвета,
Слуги спят, и ночь бледна.
В час рассвета холодно и странно,
В час рассвета — ночь мутна.
Дева Света! Где ты, донна Анна?
Анна! Анна! — Тишина.
Только в грозном утреннем тумане
Бьют часы в последний раз:
Донна Анна в смертный час твой встанет
Анна встанет в смертный час.
On the door a thick and heavy curtain,
Through the window night mists peer.
What is left of all your hateful freedom,
Juan, now that you know fear?
Cold and lonely is the sumptuous bedroom,
Servants sleep in night profound.
Out of happy lands unknown and distant
You can hear the cock-crow sound.
What can that blest sound mean to a traitor?
Numbered now life’s moments seem.
Donna Anna sleeps, hands crossed on bosom,
Donna Anna dreams a dream.
Whose the cruel features, hard and frozen.
That the looking-glass displays?
Anna, is the grave so sweet to sleep in?
Sweet to dream unearthly days?
Life is empty, bottomless, and senseless!
Now advance to battle, ancient Doom!
In reply, enamoured and triumphant.
Sounds a horn in snowy gloom.
Then flies swiftly, splashed by flames at night-time.
Silent, black, the owl-eyed motor on.
To the house, in darkness, the Commander
With unsounding heavy steps has gone.
Door is opened. From the frost enormous
Hoarse clocks striking in the nightly sky,
Clocks are striking. . . . “You asked me to supper.
Are you ready? Here am I”
To the cruel question comes no answer,
Comes no answer. Voices fail.
Dread is the rich bedroom at the dawn-hour;
Servants slumber, night is pale.
At the dawn-hour it is pale and chilly.
At the dawn-hour night’s thick veil.
“Queen of Light! where are you, Donna Anna?
Anna! Anna! ” Voices fail.
Only in the fearful mist of morning
Hours resound with their last breath.
“Donna Anna rises at your death-hour,
Anna rises at your hour of death.”
(tr. C. M. Bowra)
In the Tobakoff cinema hall Van and Lucette watch Don Juan's Last Fling, a film in which Ada played the gitanilla:
‘Hey, look!’ he cried, pointing to a poster. ‘They’re showing something called Don Juan’s Last Fling. It’s prerelease and for adults only. Topical Tobakoff!’
‘It’s going to be an unmethylated bore,’ said Lucy (Houssaie School, 1890) but he had already pushed aside the entrance drapery.
They came in at the beginning of an introductory picture, featuring a cruise to Greenland, with heavy seas in gaudy technicolor. It was a rather irrelevant trip since their Tobakoff did not contemplate calling at Godhavn; moreover, the cinema theater was swaying in counterrhythm to the cobalt-and-emerald swell on the screen. No wonder the place was emptovato, as Lucette observed, and she went on to say that the Robinsons had saved her life by giving her on the eve a tubeful of Quietus Pills.
‘Want one? One a day keeps "no shah" away. Pun. You can chew it, it’s sweet.’
‘Jolly good name. No, thank you, my sweet. Besides you have only five left.’
‘Don’t worry, I have it all planned out. There may be less than five days.’
‘More in fact, but no matter. Our measurements of time are meaningless; the most accurate clock is a joke; you’ll read all about it someday, you just wait.’
‘Perhaps, not. I mean, perhaps I shan’t have the patience. I mean, his charwoman could never finish reading Leonardo’s palm. I may fall asleep before I get through your next book.’
‘An art-class legend,’ said Van.
‘That’s the final iceberg, I know by the music. Let’s go, Van! Or you want to see Hoole as Hooan?’
She brushed his cheek with her lips in the dark, she took his hand, she kissed his knuckles, and he suddenly thought: after all, why not? Tonight? Tonight.
He enjoyed her impatience, the fool permitted himself to be stirred by it, the cretin whispered, prolonging the free, new, apricot fire of anticipation:
‘If you’re a good girl we’ll have drinks in my sitting room at midnight.’
The main picture had now started. The three leading parts — cadaverous Don Juan, paunchy Leporello on his donkey, and not too irresistible, obviously forty-year-old Donna Anna — were played by solid stars, whose images passed by in ‘semi-stills,’ or as some say ‘translucencies,’ in a brief introduction. Contrary to expectations, the picture turned out to be quite good.
On the way to the remote castle where the difficult lady, widowed by his sword, has finally promised him a long night of love in her chaste and chilly chamber, the aging libertine nurses his potency by spurning the advances of a succession of robust belles. A gitana predicts to the gloomy cavalier that before reaching the castle he will have succumbed to the wiles of her sister, Dolores, a dancing girl (lifted from Osberg’s novella, as was to be proved in the ensuing lawsuit). She also predicted something to Van, for even before Dolores came out of the circus tent to water Juan’s horse, Van knew who she would be.
In the magic rays of the camera, in the controlled delirium of ballerina grace, ten years of her life had glanced off and she was again that slip of a girl qui n’en porte pas (as he had jested once to annoy her governess by a fictitious Frenchman’s mistranslation): a remembered triviality that intruded upon the chill of his present emotion with the jarring stupidity of an innocent stranger’s asking an absorbed voyeur for directions in a labyrinth of mean lanes.
Lucette recognized Ada three or four seconds later, but then clutched his wrist:
‘Oh, how awful! It was bound to happen. That’s she! Let’s go, please, let’s go. You must not see her debasing herself. She’s terribly made up, every gesture is childish and wrong —’
‘Just another minute,’ said Van.
Terrible? Wrong? She was absolutely perfect, and strange, and poignantly familiar. By some stroke of art, by some enchantment of chance, the few brief scenes she was given formed a perfect compendium of her 1884 and 1888 and 1892 looks.
The gitanilla bends her head over the live table of Leporello’s servile back to trace on a scrap of parchment a rough map of the way to the castle. Her neck shows white through her long black hair separated by the motion of her shoulder. It is no longer another man’s Dolores, but a little girl twisting an aquarelle brush in the paint of Van’s blood, and Donna Anna’s castle is now a bog flower.
The Don rides past three windmills, whirling black against an ominous sunset, and saves her from the miller who accuses her of stealing a fistful of flour and tears her thin dress. Wheezy but still game, Juan carries her across a brook (her bare toe acrobatically tickling his face) and sets her down, top up, on the turf of an olive grove. Now they stand facing each other. She fingers voluptuously the jeweled pommel of his sword, she rubs her firm girl belly against his embroidered tights, and all at once the grimace of a premature spasm writhes across the poor Don’s expressive face. He angrily disentangles himself and staggers back to his steed.
Van, however, did not understand until much later (when he saw — had to see; and then see again and again — the entire film, with its melancholy and grotesque ending in Donna Anna’s castle) that what seemed an incidental embrace constituted the Stone Cuckold’s revenge. In fact, being upset beyond measure, he decided to go even before the olive-grove sequence dissolved. Just then three old ladies with stony faces showed their disapproval of the picture by rising from beyond Lucette (who was slim enough to remain seated) and brushing past Van (who stood up) in three jerky shuffles. Simultaneously he noticed two people, the long-lost Robinsons, who apparently had been separated from Lucette by those three women, and were now moving over to her. Beaming and melting in smiles of benevolence and self-effacement, they sidled up and plumped down next to Lucette, who turned to them with her last, last, last free gift of staunch coul1esy that was stronger than failure and death. They were craning already across her, with radiant wrinkles and twittery fingers toward Van when he pounced upon their intrusion to murmur a humorous bad-sailor excuse and leave the cinema hall to its dark lurching. (3.5)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): emptovato: Anglo-Russian, rather empty.
slip: Fr., panties.
On Demonia VN's Lolita (1955) is known as The Gitanilla, a novel by the Spanish writer Osberg (in his review of Van's novel Letters from Terra the poet Max Mispel discerned the influence of Osberg, as well as that of an obscene ancient Arab, expounder of anagrammatic dreams, Ben Sirine). Sirin was VN's Russian nom de plume. On the other hand, Sirin and Alkonost, the Birds of Joy and Sorrow (1899) is a poem by Blok inspired by Viktor Vasnetsov's painting (1896). At the dinner with Ada (now married to Andrey Vinelander) and her family in Belle Vue Hotel in Mont Roux Van meets Yuzlik, the director of Don Juan's Last Fling:
The first person whom she introduced him to, at that island of fauteuils and androids, now getting up from around a low table with a copper ashbowl for hub, was the promised belle-sœur, a short plumpish lady in governess gray, very oval-faced, with bobbed auburn hair, a sallowish complexion, smoke-blue unsmiling eyes, and a fleshy little excrescence, resembling a ripe maize kernel, at the side of one nostril, added to its hypercritical curve by an afterthought of nature as not seldom happens when a Russian’s face is mass-produced. The next outstretched hand belonged to a handsome, tall, remarkably substantial and cordial nobleman who could be none other than the Prince Gremin of the preposterous libretto, and whose strong honest clasp made Van crave for a disinfecting fluid to wash off contact with any of her husband’s public parts. But as Ada, beaming again, made fluttery introductions with an invisible wand, the person Van had grossly mistaken for Andrey Vinelander was transformed into Yuzlik, the gifted director of the ill-fated Don Juan picture. ‘Vasco de Gama, I presume,’ Yuzlik murmured. Beside him, ignored by him, unknown by name to Ada, and now long dead of dreary anonymous ailments, stood in servile attitudes the two agents of Lemorio, the flamboyant comedian (a bearded boor of exceptional, and now also forgotten, genius, whom Yuzlik passionately wanted for his next picture). Lemorio had stood him up twice before, in Rome and San Remo, each time sending him for ‘preliminary contact’ those two seedy, incompetent, virtually insane, people with whom by now Yuzlik had nothing more to discuss, having exhausted everything, topical gossip, Lemorio’s sex life, Hoole’s hooliganism, as well as the hobbies of his, Yuzlik’s, three sons and those of their, the agents’, adopted child, a lovely Eurasian lad, who had recently been slain in a night-club fracas — which closed that subject. Ada had welcomed Yuzlik’s unexpected reality in the lounge of the Bellevue not only as a counterpoise to the embarrassment and the deceit, but also because she hoped to sidle into What Daisy Knew; however, besides having no spells left in the turmoil of her spirit for business blandishments, she soon understood that if Lemorio were finally engaged, he would want her part for one of his mistresses. (3.8)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): libretto: that of the opera Eugene Onegin, a travesty of Pushkin’s poem.
Yuzlik means in Uzbek “veil.” The capital of Uzbekistan is Tashkent. Gospoda tashkenttsy (“Gentlemen of Tashkent,” 1885) is a satirical novel by Saltykov-Shchedrin. In Part One of Retribution Blok mentions Shchedrin:
Он на обедах у Бореля
Брюжжит не плоше Щедрина:
То — недоварены форели,
А то — уха им не жирна.
He the dinners at Borel [a St. Petersburg's restaurateur]
grumbles not worse than Shchedrin:
now the trout is undercooked,
now the fish soup is not rich enough.
At a lunch with Van in Paris Lucette pokes with a fork at her blue trout which, to judge by its contorted shape and bulging eyes, had boiled alive, convulsed by awful agonies:
She wanted fish, he stuck to cold cuts and salad.
‘You know whom I ran into this morning? Good old Greg Erminin. It was he who told me you were around. His wife est un peu snob, what?’
‘Everybody is un peu snob,’ said Lucette. ‘Your Cordula, who is also around, cannot forgive Shura Tobak, the violinist, for being her husband’s neighbor in the telephone book. Immediately after lunch, we’ll go to my room, a numb twenty-five, my age. I have a fabulous Japanese divan and lots of orchids just supplied by one of my beaux. Ach, Bozhe moy — it has just occurred to me — I shall have to look into this — maybe they are meant for Brigitte, who is marrying after tomorrow, at three-thirty, a head waiter at the Alphonse Trois, in Auteuil. Anyway they are greenish, with orange and purple blotches, some kind of delicate Oncidium, "cypress frogs," one of those silly commercial names. I’ll stretch out upon the divan like a martyr, remember?’
‘Are you still half-a-martyr — I mean half-a-virgin?’ inquired Van.
‘A quarter,’ answered Lucette. ‘Oh, try me, Van! My divan is black with yellow cushions.’
‘You can sit for a minute in my lap.’
‘No — unless we undress and you ganch me.’
‘My dear, as I’ve often reminded you, you belong to a princely family but you talk like the loosest Lucinda imaginable. Is it a fad in your set, Lucette?’
‘I have no set, I’m a loner. Once in a while, I go out with two diplomats, a Greek and an Englishman, who are allowed to paw me and play with each other. A corny society painter is working on my portrait and he and his wife caress me when I’m in the mood. Your friend Dick Cheshire sends me presents and racing tips. It’s a dull life, Van.
‘I enjoy — oh, loads of things,’ she continued in a melancholy, musing tone of voice, as she poked with a fork at her blue trout which, to judge by its contorted shape and bulging eyes, had boiled alive, convulsed by awful agonies. ‘I love Flemish and Dutch oils, flowers, food, Flaubert, Shakespeare, shopping, sheeing, swimming, the kisses of beauties and beasts — but somehow all of it, this sauce and all the riches of Holland, form only a kind of tonen’kiy-tonen’kiy (thin little) layer, under which there is absolutely nothing, except, of course, your image, and that only adds depth and a trout’s agonies to the emptiness. I’m like Dolores — when she says she’s "only a picture painted on air."’
‘Never could finish that novel — much too pretentious.’
‘Pretentious but true. It’s exactly my sense of existing — a fragment, a wisp of color. Come and travel with me to some distant place, where there are frescoes and fountains, why can’t we travel to some distant place with ancient fountains? By ship? By sleeping car?’
‘It’s safer and faster by plane,’ said Van. ‘And for Log’s sake, speak Russian.’ (3.3)
A to ukha im ne zhirna (now the fish soup is not rich enough) brings to mind the uha that Van, Ada and Lucette eat at 'Ursus:'
Knowing how fond his sisters were of Russian fare and Russian floor shows, Van took them Saturday night to ‘Ursus,’ the best Franco-Estonian restaurant in Manhattan Major. Both young ladies wore the very short and open evening gowns that Vass ‘miraged’ that season — in the phrase of that season: Ada, a gauzy black, Lucette, a lustrous cantharid green. Their mouths ‘echoed’ in tone (but not tint) each other’s lipstick; their eyes were made up in a ‘surprised bird-of-paradise’ style that was as fashionable in Los as in Lute. Mixed metaphors and double-talk became all three Veens, the children of Venus.
The uha, the shashlik, the Ai were facile and familiar successes; but the old songs had a peculiar poignancy owing to the participation of a Lyaskan contralto and a Banff bass, renowned performers of Russian ‘romances,’ with a touch of heart-wringing tsiganshchina vibrating through Grigoriev and Glinka. And there was Flora, a slender, hardly nubile, half-naked music-hall dancer of uncertain origin (Rumanian? Romany? Ramseyan?) whose ravishing services Van had availed himself of several times in the fall of that year. As a ‘man of the world,’ Van glanced with bland (perhaps too bland) unconcern at her talented charms, but they certainly added a secret bonus to the state of erotic excitement tingling in him from the moment that his two beauties had been unfurred and placed in the colored blaze of the feast before him; and that thrill was somehow augmented by his awareness (carefully profiled, diaphanely blinkered) of the furtive, jealous, intuitive suspicion with which Ada and Lucette watched, unsmilingly, his facial reactions to the demure look of professional recognition on the part of the passing and repassing blyadushka (cute whorelet), as our young misses referred to (very expensive and altogether delightful) Flora with ill-feigned indifference. Presently, the long sobs of the violins began to affect and almost choke Van and Ada: a juvenile conditioning of romantic appeal, which at one moment forced tearful Ada to go and ‘powder her nose’ while Van stood up with a spasmodic sob, which he cursed but could not control. He went back to whatever he was eating, and cruelly stroked Lucette’s apricot-bloomed forearm, and she said in Russian ‘I’m drunk, and all that, but I adore (obozhayu), I adore, I adore, I adore more than life you, you (tebya, tebya), I ache for you unbearably (ya toskuyu po tebe nevïnosimo), and, please, don’t let me swill (hlestat’) champagne any more, not only because I will jump into Goodson River if I can’t hope to have you, and not only because of the physical red thing — your heart was almost ripped out, my poor dushen’ka (‘darling,’ more than ‘darling’), it looked to me at least eight inches long —’
‘Seven and a half,’ murmured modest Van, whose hearing the music impaired.
‘— but because you are Van, all Van, and nothing but Van, skin and scar, the only truth of our only life, of my accursed life, Van, Van, Van.’ (2.8)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): romances, tsiganshchina: Russ., pseudo-Tsigan ballads.
In his old age Van remembers Flora and mentions the Film Festival in Sindbad:
In vain he told himself that those vile hankerings did not differ, in their intrinsic insignificance, from the anal pruritis which one tries to relieve by a sudden fit of scratching. Yet he knew that by daring to satisfy the corresponding desire for a young wench he risked wrecking his life with Ada. How horribly and gratuitously it might hurt her, he foreglimpsed one day in 1926 or ‘27 when he caught the look of proud despair she cast on nothing in particular before walking away to the car that was to take her on a trip in which, at the last moment, he had declined to join her. He had declined — and had simulated the grimace and the limp of podagra — because he had just realized, what she, too, had realized — that the beautiful native girl smoking on the back porch would offer her mangoes to Master as soon as Master’s housekeeper had left for the Film Festival in Sindbad. The chauffeur had already opened the car door, when, with a great bellow, Van overtook Ada and they rode off together, tearful, voluble, joking about his foolishness.
‘It’s funny,’ said Ada, ‘what black, broken teeth they have hereabouts, those blyadushki.’
(‘Ursus,’ Lucette in glistening green, ‘Subside, agitation of passion,’ Flora’s bracelets and breasts, the whelk of Time). (5.3)
Vivian Vale's golden veils and the Golden Veil in Victor Vitry's movie bring to mind tyomnaya vual' (the girl's dusky veil) in Blok's poem Neznakomka ("The Stranger," 1906):
По вечерам над ресторанами
Горячий воздух дик и глух,
И правит окриками пьяными
Весенний и тлетворный дух.
Вдали над пылью переулочной,
Над скукой загородных дач,
Чуть золотится крендель булочной,
И раздается детский плач.
И каждый вечер, за шлагбаумами,
Заламывая котелки,
Среди канав гуляют с дамами
Испытанные остряки.
Над озером скрипят уключины
И раздается женский визг,
А в небе, ко всему приученный
Бесмысленно кривится диск.
И каждый вечер друг единственный
В моем стакане отражен
И влагой терпкой и таинственной
Как я, смирен и оглушен.
А рядом у соседних столиков
Лакеи сонные торчат,
И пьяницы с глазами кроликов
«In vino veritas!» кричат.
И каждый вечер, в час назначенный
(Иль это только снится мне?),
Девичий стан, шелками схваченный,
В туманном движется окне.
И медленно, пройдя меж пьяными,
Всегда без спутников, одна
Дыша духами и туманами,
Она садится у окна.
И веют древними поверьями
Ее упругие шелка,
И шляпа с траурными перьями,
И в кольцах узкая рука.
И странной близостью закованный,
Смотрю за темную вуаль,
И вижу берег очарованный
И очарованную даль.
Глухие тайны мне поручены,
Мне чье-то солнце вручено,
И все души моей излучины
Пронзило терпкое вино.
И перья страуса склоненные
В моем качаются мозгу,
И очи синие бездонные
Цветут на дальнем берегу.
В моей душе лежит сокровище,
И ключ поручен только мне!
Ты право, пьяное чудовище!
Я знаю: истина в вине.
In the evenings, the sultry air above the restaurants
is both wild and torpid,
and drunken vociferations are governed
by the evil spirit of spring.
In the dusty vista of lanes
where reigns the suburban tedium of clapboard villas
the gilt sign of a bakery — a giant pretzel — glimmers,
and children are heard crying.
And every evening, beyond the town barriers,
in a zone of ditches,
wags of long standing, their jaunty derbies askew,
go for walks with their lady friends.
From the lake comes the sound of creaking oar locks
and women are heard squealing,
while overhead, the round moon,
accustomed to everything, blankly mugs.
And every evening my sole companion
is reflected in my wineglass,
as tamed and as stunned as I am
by the same acrid and occult potion.
And nearby, at other tables,
waiters drowsily hover,
and tipplers with the pink eyes of rabbits
shout: In vino veritas!
And every evening, at the appointed hour
(or is it merely a dream of mine?),
the figure of a girl in clinging silks
moves across the misty window.
Slowly she makes her way among the drinkers,
always escortless, alone,
perfume and mists emanating from her,
and takes a seat near the window.
And her taut silks,
her hat with its tenebrous plumes,
her slender bejeweled hand
waft legendary magic.
And with a strange sense of intimacy enchaining me,
I peer beyond her dusky veil
and perceive an enchanted shoreline,
a charmed remoteness.
Dim mysteries are in my keeping,
the orb of somebody’s day has been entrusted to me,
and the tangy wine has penetrated
all the meanders of my soul.
And the drooping ostrich feathers
sway within my brain,
and the dark-blue fathomless eyes
become blossoms on the distant shore.
A treasure lies in my soul,
and I alone have the keeping of its key.
Those drunken brutes are right:
indeed, – there is truth in wine...
(VN's translation)