On the morning after the dinner in ‘Ursus’ (the best Franco-Estotian restaurant in Manhattan Major), just before the debauch à trois, Ada (the title character in VN's novel Ada, 1969) calls her and Van's half-sister Lucette “pet:”
Ada, being at twenty a long morning sleeper, his usual practice, ever since their new life together had started, was to shower before she awoke and, while shaving, ring from the bathroom for their breakfast to be brought by Valerio, who would roll in the laid table out of the lift into the sitting room next to their bedroom. But on this particular Sunday, not knowing what Lucette might like (he remembered her old craving for cocoa) and being anxious to have an engagement with Ada before the day began, even if it meant intruding upon her warm sleep, Van sped up his ablutions, robustly dried himself, powdered his groin, and without bothering to put anything on re-entered the bedroom in full pride, only to find a tousled and sulky Lucette, still in her willow green nightie, sitting on the far edge of the concubital bed, while fat-nippled Ada, already wearing, for ritual and fatidic reasons, his river of diamonds, was inhaling her first smoke of the day and trying to make her little sister decide whether she would like to try the Monaco’s pancakes with Potomac syrup, or, perhaps, their incomparable amber-and-ruby bacon. Upon seeing Van, who without a flinch in his imposing deportment proceeded to place a rightful knee on the near side of the tremendous bed (Mississippi Rose had once brought there, for progressive visual-education purposes, her two small toffee-brown sisters, and a doll almost their size but white), Lucette shrugged her shoulders and made as if to leave, but Ada’s avid hand restrained her.
‘Pop in, pet (it all started with the little one letting wee winds go free at table, circa 1882). And you, Garden God, ring up room service — three coffees, half a dozen soft-boiled eggs, lots of buttered toast, loads of —’
‘Oh no!’ interrupted Van. ‘Two coffees, four eggs, et cetera. I refuse to let the staff know that I have two girls in my bed, one (teste Flora) is enough for my little needs.’
‘Little needs!’ snorted Lucette. ‘Let me go, Ada. I need a bath, and he needs you.’
‘Pet stays right here,’ cried audacious Ada, and with one graceful swoop plucked her sister’s nightdress off. Involuntarily Lucette bent her head and frail spine; then she lay back on the outer half of Ada’s pillow in a martyr’s pudibund swoon, her locks spreading their orange blaze against the black velvet of the padded headboard.
‘Uncross your arms, silly,’ ordered Ada and kicked off the top sheet that partly covered six legs. Simultaneously, without turning her head, she slapped furtive Van away from her rear, and with her other hand made magic passes over the small but very pretty breasts, gemmed with sweat, and along the flat palpitating belly of a seasand nymph, down to the firebird seen by Van once, fully fledged now, and as fascinating in its own way as his favorite’s blue raven. Enchantress! Acrasia! (2.8)
In Dmitri Merezhkovski's novel Pyotr i Aleksey (Peter and Alexis, 1905), the third and final part of his Christ and Antichrist trilogy, Julia Arnheim, a lady-in-waiting of Princess Charlotte (Peter's daughter-in-law), quotes the words of Baron Manteufel about the tsar Peter I, "il n’a ni roté ni peté (he doesn't belch or fart):"
Дикая застенчивость. Я видела сама, как на пышном приеме послов, сидя на троне, он смущался, краснел, потел, часто для бодрости нюхал табак, не знал, куда девать глаза, избегал даже взоров царицы; когда же церемония кончилась, и можно было сойти с трона, рад был, как школьник. Маркграфиня Бранденбургская рассказывала мне, будто бы при первом свидании с нею царь -- правда тогда совсем еще юный -- отвернулся, закрыл лицо руками, как красная девушка, и только повторял одно: "Je nе sais pas m'exprimer. Я не умею говорить..." Скоро, впрочем, оправился и сделался даже слишком развязным; пожелал убедиться собственноручно, что не от природной костлявости немок зависит жесткость их талий, удивлявшая русских, а от рыбьего уса в корсетах. "II pourrait être un peu plus poli! Он бы мог быть повежливее!"-заметила маркграфиня. Барон Мантейфель передавал мне о свидании царя с королевою прусскою: "Он был настолько любезен, что подал ей руку, надев предварительно довольно грязную перчатку. За ужином превзошел себя: не ковырял в зубах, не рыгал и не производил других неприличных звуков (il n’a ni roté ni peté)."
A strange timidity occasionally besets him. I myself have seen him at a pompous reception of Ambassadors sitting on the throne, confused, blushing, perspiring, trying to gain courage by repeatedly taking snuff; he did not know what to do with his eyes, and even avoided his wife’s glances. When the ceremony was over and he was no longer obliged to stay on the throne, he was as merry as a schoolboy. The Markgravine of Brandenburg told me that at her first interview with the Tsar—who it is true was quite young at that time—he turned away, covered his face with his hands like a shy debutante, and did nothing but repeat, “Je ne sais pas m’exprimer”—“I cannot talk.” He soon recovered, however, and became almost too free. He expressed the desire to convince himself that the German ladies’ hard waists, which so surprised the Russians, were not caused by their bony nature, but by the whalebones in the stays. “Il pourrait être plus poli”—“He might have been a little more polite,” observed the Markgravine. Baron Manteuffel related to me the Tsar’s interview with the Queen of Prussia: “He was so amiable that before offering her his hand he put on a rather dirty glove. At the supper he surpassed himself. He neither picked his teeth, nor belched, nor uttered any other unbecoming noises (il n’a ni roté ni peté).”. (Book Three: "The Private Journal of Prince Alexis")
Tabak (tobacco) mentioned by the diarist brings to mind Cordula Tobacco, alias Mme Perwitzky:
‘She’s terribly nervous, the poor kid,’ remarked Ada stretching across Van toward the Wipex. ‘You can order that breakfast now — unless... Oh, what a good sight! Orchids. I’ve never seen a man make such a speedy recovery.’
‘Hundreds of whores and scores of cuties more experienced than the future Mrs Vinelander have told me that,’
‘I may not be as bright as I used to be,’ sadly said Ada, ‘but I know somebody who is not simply a cat, but a polecat, and that’s Cordula Tobacco alias Madame Perwitsky, I read in this morning’s paper that in France ninety percent of cats die of cancer. I don’t know what the situation is in Poland.’ (2.8)
The founder of VN's home city, Peter the Great (as the tsar Peter I, 1672-1725, is sometimes called) brings to mind Pierre Legrand, Van's fencing master:
‘Now let’s go out for a breath of crisp air,’ suggested Van. ‘I’ll order Pardus and Peg to be saddled.’
‘Last night two men recognized me,’ she said. ‘Two separate Californians, but they didn’t dare bow — with that silk-tuxedoed bretteur of mine glaring around. One was Anskar, the producer, and the other, with a cocotte, Paul Whinnier, one of your father’s London pals. I sort of hoped we’d go back to bed.’
‘We shall now go for a ride in the park,’ said Van firmly, and rang, first of all, for a Sunday messenger to take the letter to Lucette’s hotel — or to the Verma resort, if she had already left.
‘I suppose you know what you’re doing?’ observed Ada.
‘Yes,’ he answered.
‘You are breaking her heart,’ said Ada.
‘Ada girl, adored girl,’ cried Van, ‘I’m a radiant void. I’m convalescing after a long and dreadful illness. You cried over my unseemly scar, but now life is going to be nothing but love and laughter, and corn in cans. I cannot brood over broken hearts, mine is too recently mended. You shall wear a blue veil, and I the false mustache that makes me look like Pierre Legrand, my fencing master.’
‘Au fond,’ said Ada, ‘first cousins have a perfect right to ride together. And even dance or skate, if they want. After all, first cousins are almost brother and sister. It’s a blue, icy, breathless day,’
She was soon ready, and they kissed tenderly in their hallway, between lift and stairs, before separating for a few minutes.
‘Tower,’ she murmured in reply to his questioning glance, just as she used to do on those honeyed mornings in the past, when checking up on happiness: ‘And you?’
‘A regular ziggurat.’ (2.8)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): bretteur: duelling bravo.
au fond: actually.
The element that destorys Marina (Van's, Ada's and Lucette's mother who dies of cancer in 1900 and whose body is burnt, according to her instructions) is fire. The element that destroys Lucette (who in June 1901 commits suicide by jumping from Admiral Tobakoff into the Atlantic) is water. According to Julia Arnheim, Peter's elements are fire and water:
Его стихии -- огонь и вода. Он их любит, как существо, рожденное в них: воду -- как рыба, огонь -- как Саламандра. Страсть к пушечной пальбе, ко всяким опытам с огнем, к фейерверкам. Всегда сам их зажигает, лезет в огонь; однажды при мне спалил себе волосы. Говорит, что приучает подданных к огню сражений. Но это только предлог: он просто любит огонь.
Такая же страсть к воде. Потомок московских царей, которые никогда не видели моря, он затосковал о нем еще ребенком в душных теремах Кремлевского дворца, как дикий гусеныш в курятнике. Плавал в игрушечных лодочках по водовзводным потешным прудам. А как достиг до моря, то уже не расставался с ним. Большую часть жизни проводит на воде. Каждый день после обеда стоит на фрегате. Когда болен, совсем туда переселяется, морской воздух его почти всегда исцеляет. Летом в Петергофе, в огромных садах ему душно; Устроил себе мыльню в Монплезире, домике, одна сторона которого омывается волнами Финского залива; окна спальни прямо nа море. В Петербурге Подзорный дворец построен весь в воде, на песчаной отмели Невского устья. Дворец в Летнем саду также окружен водою с двух сторон: ступени крыльца спускаются в воду, как в Амстердаме и Венеции.
Однажды зимою, когда Нева уже стала и только перед дворцом оставалась еще полынья окружностью не больше сотни шагов, он и по ней плавал взад и вперед на крошечной гичке, как утка в луже. Когда же вся река покрылась крепким льдом, велел расчистить вдоль набережной пространство, шагов сто в длину, тридцать в ширину, каждый день сметать с него снег, и я сама видела, как он катался по этой площадке на маленьких красивых шлюпках или буерах, поставленных на стальные коньки и полозья. "Мы, говорит, плаваем по льду, чтоб и зимою не забыть морских экзерциций". Даже в Москве, на Святках, катался раз по улицам на огромных санях, подобии настоящих кораблей с парусами. Любит пускать на воду молодых диких уток и гусей, подаренных ему царицею. И как радуется их радости! Точно сам он водяная птица.
Говорит, что начал впервые думать о море, когда прочел сказание летописца Нестора о морском походе киевского князя Олега под Царьград. Если так, то он воскрешает в новом древнее, в чужом родное. От моря через сушу к морю -- таков путь России.
Иногда кажется, что в нем слились противоречия двух родных ему стихий -- воды и огня -- в одно существо, странное, чуждое -- не знаю, доброе или злое, божеское или бесовское -- но нечеловеческое.
Fire and water are his elements, he loves them like one born in them,—water like a fish, fire like a salamander. He has a passion for cannonades, and for various experiments with fire and fireworks. He always lights the fireworks himself, rushing into the flames; I was present once when he singed his hair. He says he is inuring his people to the smell of powder; but this is only an excuse, fire itself he simply loves.
His passion is as great for water. Although the offspring of Muscovy’s Tsars who never saw the sea, he yet began longing for it, when, but a child, he was secluded in the close terems of the Kremlin Palace, like a wild gosling in a hen-house.
He used to float in toy boats on artificial lakes. When at last he got to the sea he could not tear himself away from it again. He spends most of his time on water, he sleeps every day after dinner on his frigate; when ill he lives on board altogether, and sea-air generally cures him. During the summer he feels the lack of air, even among the large gardens of Peterhof, so he fitted himself up a bedroom in Monplaisir, a small house, washed by the Gulf of Finland; the windows of the bedroom look straight upon the sea. In Petersburg the Observatory is built on a sandbank in the mouth of the Neva. In the Summer Garden, also, the Palace is surrounded on two sides by water. Steps lead from the door straight down into the water, just as in Amsterdam and Venice. Once, during winter, when the Neva had already put on her ice-chains, and only before the Palace there remained a round, open ice-free space, about a hundred yards in circumference, he sailed on it up and down in a tiny boat, like a duck in a pool. When the whole river was covered with hard ice he ordered a space, about a hundred yards long and thirty yards wide, to be daily cleared and swept of the snow: I myself have seen him sliding along this surface in small pretty boyers, fitted with steel skates and bulge-ways. “We sail on the ice,” said he, “so as not to forget our nautical exercises during the winter.” Another time, at Moscow, in the Christmas holidays, he went along the streets in a huge sleigh—rigged in imitation of a real sailing vessel. He loves letting young geese and ducks, which the Tsaritsa gives him, go into the water. He delights in their glee as though he himself were a water bird.
He says his first thoughts about the sea date from his reading the narrative of the maritime expedition of Prince Oleg of Kieff to Constantinople, recorded by the Chronicler Nestor. If this be true he is only resuscitating the old in the new, the native in the foreign. From the sea, across the land to the sea—this is Russia’s course!
Sometimes it seems to me that the contradictions of his two beloved elements, water and fire, have merged in him into one being, strange and curious. I know not whether kind or cruel, divine or diabolic—but certainly inhuman. (Book Three)
Julia Arnheim compares Peter I to vodyanaya ptitsa (a water bird). On his first night on Admiral Tobakoff (the ship on which Van and Lucette cross the Atlantic) Van dreams of an aquatic peacock:
At five p.m., June 3, his ship had sailed from Le Havre-de-Grâce; on the evening of the same day Van embarked at Old Hantsport. He had spent most of the afternoon playing court tennis with Delaurier, the famous Negro coach, and felt very dull and drowsy as he watched the low sun’s ardency break into green-golden eye-spots a few sea-serpent yards to starboard, on the far-side slope of the bow wave. Presently he decided to turn in, walked down to the A deck, devoured some of the still-life fruit prepared for him in his sitting room, attempted to read in bed the proofs of an essay he was contributing to a festschrift on the occasion of Professor Counterstone’s eightieth birthday, gave it up, and fell asleep. A tempest went into convulsions around midnight, but despite the lunging and creaking (Tobakoff was an embittered old vessel) Van managed to sleep soundly, the only reaction on the part of his dormant mind being the dream image of an aquatic peacock, slowly sinking before somersaulting like a diving grebe, near the shore of the lake bearing his name in the ancient kingdom of Arrowroot. Upon reviewing that bright dream he traced its source to his recent visit to Armenia where he had gone fowling with Armborough and that gentleman’s extremely compliant and accomplished niece. He wanted to make a note of it — and was amused to find that all three pencils had not only left his bed table but had neatly aligned themselves head to tail along the bottom of the outer door of the adjacent room, having covered quite a stretch of blue carpeting in the course of their stopped escape. (3.5)
During her meetings with Van in October 1905 in Mont Roux Ada (now married to Andrey Vinelander) admires the waterfowl population:
Some kind of musical gadget played jungle jingles; the open bags of a Tirolese couple stood unpleasantly near — and Van bribed the waiter to carry their table out, onto the boards of an unused pier. Ada admired the waterfowl population: Tufted Ducks, black with contrasty white flanks making them look like shoppers (this and the other comparisons are all Ada’s) carrying away an elongated flat carton (new tie? gloves?) under each arm, while the black tuft recalled Van’s head when he was fourteen and wet, having just taken a dip in the brook. Coots (which had returned after all), swimming with an odd pumping movement of the neck, the way horses walk. Small grebes and big ones, with crests, holding their heads erect, with something heraldic in their demeanor. They had, she said, wonderful nuptial rituals, closely facing each other — so (putting up her index fingers bracketwise) — rather like two bookends and no books between, and, shaking their heads in turn, with flashes of copper.
‘I asked you about Andrey’s rituals.’
‘Ach, Andrey is so excited to see all those European birds! He’s a great sportsman and knows our Western game remarkably well. We have in the West a very cute little grebe with a black ribbon around its fat white bill. Andrey calls it pestroklyuvaya chomga. And that big chomga there is hohlushka, he says. If you scowl like that once again, when I say something innocent and on the whole rather entertaining, I’m going to kiss you on the tip of the nose, in front of everybody.’
Just a tiny mite artificial, not in her best Veen. But she recovered instantly:
‘Oh, look at those sea gulls playing chicken.’
Several rieuses, a few of which were still wearing their tight black summer bonnets, had settled on the vermilion railing along the lakeside, with their tails to the path and watched which of them would stay staunchly perched at the approach of the next passerby. The majority flapped waterward as Ada and Van neared; one twitched its tail feathers and made a movement analogous to ‘bending one’s knees’ but saw it through and remained on the railing.
‘I think we noticed that species only once in Arizona — at a place called Saltsink — a kind of man-made lake. Our common ones have quite different wing tips.’
A Crested Grebe, afloat some way off, slowly, slowly, very slowly started to sink, then abruptly executed a jumping fish plunge, showing its glossy white underside, and vanished.
‘Why on earth,’ asked Van, ‘didn’t you let her know, in one way or another, that you were not angry with her? Your phoney letter made her most unhappy!’
‘Pah!’ uttered Ada. ‘She put me in a most embarrassing situation. I can quite understand her being mad at Dorothy (who meant well, poor stupid thing — stupid enough to warn me against possible "infections" such as "labial lesbianitis." Labial lesbianitis!) but that was no reason for Lucette to look up Andrey in town and tell him she was great friends with the man I had loved before my marriage. He didn’t dare annoy me with his revived curiosity, but he complained to Dorothy of Lucette’s neopravdannaya zhestokost’ (unjustified cruelty).’
Ada, Ada,’ groaned Van, ‘I want you to get rid of that husband of yours, and his sister, right now!’
‘Give me a fortnight,’ she said, ‘I have to go back to the ranch. I can’t bear the thought of her poking among my things.’ (3.8)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): rieuses: black-headed gulls.