‘Oh,’ cried Ada, ‘I can recite "Le jardin" in my own transversion — let me see —
En vain on s’amuse à gagner
L’Oka, la Baie du Palmier...’
‘...to win the Palm, the Oke, or Bayes!’ shouted Van.
‘You know, children,’ interrupted Marina resolutely with calming gestures of both hands, ‘when I was your age, Ada, and my brother was your age, Van, we talked about croquet, and ponies, and puppies, and the last fête-d’enfants, and the next picnic, and — oh, millions of nice normal things, but never, never of old French botanists and God knows what!’
‘But you just said you collected flowers?’ said Ada.
‘Oh, just one season, somewhere in Switzerland. I don’t remember when. It does not matter now.’
The reference was to Ivan Durmanov: he had died of lung cancer years ago in a sanatorium (not far from Ex, somewhere in Switzerland, where Van was born eight years later). Marina often mentioned Ivan who had been a famous violinist at eighteen, but without any special show of emotion, so that Ada now noted with surprise that her mother’s heavy make-up had started to thaw under a sudden flood of tears (maybe some allergy to flat dry old flowers, an attack of hay fever, or gentianitis, as a slightly later diagnosis might have shown retrospectively). She blew her nose, with the sound of an elephant, as she said herself — and here Mlle Larivière came down for coffee and recollections of Van as a bambin angélique who adored à neuf ans — the precious dear! — Gilberte Swann et la Lesbie de Catulle (and who had learned, all by himself, to release the adoration as soon as the kerosene lamp had left the mobile bedroom in his black nurse’s fist).
11
A few days after Van’s arrival Uncle Dan came by the morning train from town for his habitual weekend stay with his family.
Van happened to run into him as Uncle Dan was crossing the hall. The butler very charmingly (thought Van) signaled to his master who the tall boy was by setting one hand three feet from the ground and then notching it up higher and higher — an altitudinal code that our young six-footer alone understood. Van saw the little red-haired gentleman glance with perplexity at old Bouteillan, who hastened to whisper Van’s name.
Mr Daniel Veen had a curious manner, when advancing toward a guest, of dipping the fingers of his stiffly held right hand into his coat pocket and holding them there in a kind of purifying operation until the exact moment of the handshake came.
He informed Van that it was going to rain in a few minutes, ‘because it had started to rain at Ladore,’ and the rain, he said, ‘took about half-an-hour to reach Ardis.’ Van thought this was a quip and chuckled politely but Uncle Dan looked perplexed again and, staring at Van with pale fish-eyes, inquired if he had familiarized himself with the environs, how many languages he knew, and would he like to buy for a few kopecks a Red Cross lottery ticket?
‘No, thank you,’ said Van, ‘I have enough of my own lotteries’ — and his uncle stared again, but sort of sideways.
Tea was served in the drawing room, and everybody was rather silent and subdued, and presently Uncle Dan retired to his study, pulling a folded newspaper out of an inner pocket, and no sooner had he left the room than a window flew open all by itself, and a powerful shower started to drum upon the liriodendron and imperialis leaves outside, and the conversation became general and loud.
Not long did the rain last — or rather stay: it continued on its presumable way to Raduga or Ladoga or Kaluga or Luga, shedding an uncompleted rainbow over Ardis Hall.
Uncle Dan in an overstuffed chair was trying to read, with the aid of one of the dwarf dictionaries for undemanding tourists which helped him to decipher foreign art catalogues, an article apparently devoted to oystering in a Dutch-language illustrated paper somebody on the train had abandoned opposite him — when an abominable tumult started to spread from room to room through the whole house.
The sportive dackel, one ear flapping, the other upturned and showing its gray-mottled pink, rapidly moving his comical legs, and skidding on the parquetry as he executed abrupt turns, was in the act of carrying away, to a suitable hiding place where to worry it, a sizable wad of blood-soaked cottonwool, snatched somewhere upstairs. Ada, Marina and two maids were pursuing the merry animal but he was impossible to corner among all the baroque furniture as he tore through innumerable doorways. Suddenly the whole chase veered past Uncle Dan’s armchair and shot out again.
‘Good Lord!’ he exclaimed, on catching sight of the gory trophy, ‘somebody must have chopped off a thumb!’ Patting his thighs and his chair, he sought and retrieved — from under the footstool — the vestpocket wordbook and went back to his paper, but a second later had to look up ‘groote,’ which he had been groping for when disturbed.
The simplicity of its meaning annoyed him.
Through an open french door Dack led his pursuers into the garden. There, on the third lawn, Ada overtook him with the flying plunge used in ‘American football,’ a kind of Rugby game cadets played at one time on the wet turfy banks of the Goodson River. Simultaneously, Mlle Larivière rose from the bench where she had been paring Lucette’s fingernails, and pointing her scissors at Blanche who had rushed up with a paper bag, she accused the young slattern of a glaring precedent — namely of having once dropped a hairpin in Lucette’s cot, un machin long comme ça qui faillit blesser l’enfant à la fesse. Marina, however, who had a Russian noblewoman’s morbid fear of ‘offending an inferior,’ declared the incident closed.
‘Nehoroshaya, nehoroshaya sobaka,’ crooned Ada with great aspiratory and sibilatory emphasis as she gathered into her arms the now lootless, but completely unabashed. ‘bad dog.’
12
Hammock and honey: eighty years later he could still recall with the young pang of the original joy his falling in love with Ada. Memory met imagination halfway in the hammock of his boyhood’s dawns. At ninety-four he liked retracing that first amorous summer not as a dream he had just had but as a recapitulation of consciousness to sustain him in the small gray hours between shallow sleep and the first pill of the day. Take over, dear, for a little while. Pill, pillow, billow, billions. Go on from here, Ada, please.
(She). Billions of boys. Take one fairly decent decade. A billion of Bills, good, gifted, tender and passionate, not only spiritually but physically well-meaning Billions, have bared the jillions of their no less tender and brilliant Jills during that decade, at stations and under conditions that have to be controlled and specified by the worker, lest the entire report be choked up by the weeds of statistics and waist-high generalizations. No point would there be, if we left out, for example, the little matter of prodigious individual awareness and young genius, which makes, in some cases, of this or that particular gasp an unprecedented and unrepeatable event in the continuum of life or at least a thematic anthemia of such events in a work of art, or a denouncer’s article. The details that shine through or shade through: the local leaf through the hyaline skin, the green sun in the brown humid eye, tout ceci, vsyo eto, in tit and toto, must be taken into account, now prepare to take over (no, Ada, go on, ya zaslushalsya: I’m all enchantment and ears), if we wish to convey the fact, the fact, the fact — that among those billions of brilliant couples in one cross section of what you will allow me to call spacetime (for the convenience of reasoning), one couple is a unique super-imperial couple, sverhimperatorskaya cheta, in consequence of which (to be inquired into, to be painted, to be denounced, to be put to music, or to the question and death, if the decade has a scorpion tail after all), the particularities of their love-making influence in a special unique way two long lives and a few readers, those pensive reeds, and their pens and mental paintbrushes. Natural history indeed! Unnatural history — because that precision of senses and sense must seem unpleasantly peculiar to peasants, and because the detail is alclass="underline" The song of a Tuscan Firecrest or a Sitka Kinglet in a cemetery cypress; a minty whiff of Summer Savory or Yerba Buena on a coastal slope; the dancing flitter of a Holly Blue or an Echo Azure — combined with other birds, flowers and butterflies: that has to be heard, smelled and seen through the transparency of death and ardent beauty. And the most difficult: beauty itself as perceived through the there and then. The males of the firefly (now it’s really your turn, Van).