Van (crossly): 'I don't understand the first word...
What's that? L'adorée? Wait a second' (to Lucette). 'Please, stay where
you are.' (Lucette whispers a French child-word with two 'p's.). 'Okay'
(pointing toward the corridor). 'Sorry, Polly. Well, is it l'adorée?
No? Give me the context. Ah - la durée. La durée is not... sin on what?
Synonymous with duration. Aha. Sorry again, I must stopper that orgiastic soda.
Hold the line.' (Yells down the 'cory door,' as they called the long
second-floor passage at Ardis.) 'Lucette, let it run over, who
cares!'
He poured himself another glass of brandy and for a
ridiculous moment could not remember what the hell he had been - yes, the
polliphone.
It had died, but buzzed as soon as he recradled the
receiver, and Lucette knocked discreetly at the same time.
'La durée... For goodness sake, come in
without knocking... No, Polly, knocking does not concern you - it's my little
cousin. All right. La durée is not synonymous with duration, being
saturated - yes, as in Saturday - with that particular philosopher's thought.
What's wrong now? You don't know if it's dorée or durée? D, U,
R. I thought you knew French. Oh, I see. So long.
'My typist, a trivial but always available blonde,
could not make out durée in my quite legible hand because, she says,
she knows French, but not scientific French.'
'Actually,' observed Lucette, wiping the long envelope
which a drop of soda had stained, 'Bergson is only for very young people or very
unhappy people, such as this available rousse.'
'Spotting Bergson,' said the assistant lecher, 'rates a
B minus dans ton petit cas, hardly more. Or shall I reward you
with a kiss on your krestik - whatever that is?' (Ada, 2.5)
Bergson's la durée is mentioned by Zinaida Hippius in
Opravdanie svobody (Justification of Freedom, 1924), a review of
Berdyaev's Filosofiya neravenstva (The Philosophy of Inequality):
Революция не имеет дленья (la durée, по
Бергсону), и когда мы говорим о "революции" -- мы говорим, в сущности, о
временах, окружающих этот миг; о времени "послереволюционном", о революционных
"эпохах"... (Revolution does not have la durée...)
As to krestik (little cross), it brings to mind Georgiy
Ivanov's famous poem (1949):
Эмалевый крестик в петлице
И серой
тужурки сукно...
Какие печальные лица
И как это было давно.
Какие
прекрасные лица
И как безнадежно бледны -
Наследник,
императрица,
Четыре великих княжны...
(Enamel cross in his lapel,
And a gray jacket cloth...
What sad
faces,
And how long ago it was.
What beautiful
faces,
and how hopelessly pale
are Heir, the Empress
and
four Great Princesses...)
Alexey Sklyarenko