Simultaneously, a tall splendid creature with trim ankles and
repulsively fleshy thighs, stalked past the Veens, all but treading on Lucette's
emerald-studded cigarette case. Except for a golden ribbon and a bleached mane,
her long, ripply, beige back was bare all the way down to the tops of her slowly
and lusciously rolling buttocks, which divulged, in alternate motion, their
nether bulges from under the lamé loincloth. Just before disappearing behind a
rounded white corner, the Titianesque Titaness half-turned her brown face and
greeted Van with a loud 'hullo!'
Lucette wanted to know: kto siya pava? (who's that
stately dame?)
'I thought she addressed you,' answered Van, 'I did not
distinguish her face and do not remember that bottom.'
'She gave you a big jungle smile,' said Lucette, readjusting
her green helmet, with touchingly graceful movements of her raised wings, and
touchingly flashing the russet feathering of her armpits.
'There's that waiter coming. What shall we have -
Honoloolers?'
'You'll have them with Miss Condor' (nasalizing the first
syllable) 'when I go to dress. For the moment I want only tea. Mustn't mix drugs
and drinks. Have to take the famous Robinson pill sometime tonight. Sometime
tonight.'
'Two teas, please.'
'And lots of sandwiches, George. Foie gras, ham,
anything.'
'It's very bad manners,' remarked Van, 'to invent a name for a
poor chap who can't answer: "Yes, Mademoiselle Condor." Best Franco-English pun
I've ever heard, incidentally.'
'But his name is George. He was awfully kind to me yesterday
when I threw up in the middle of the tearoom.'
'For the sweet all is sweet,' murmured Van.
A moment later, as if having spied on his solitude the
pava (peahen) reappeared - this time with an apology.
Polite Van, scrambling up to his feet and browing his
spectacles, started to apologize in his turn (for misleading her innocently) but
his little speech petered out in stupefaction as he looked at her face and saw
in it a gross and grotesque caricature of unforgettable features. That mulatto
skin, that silver-blond hair, those fat purple lips, reinacted in coarse
negative her ivory, her raven, her pale pout.
'Whom did she look like?' asked Lucette. 'En laid et en
lard?'
'I don't know,' he lied. 'Whom?'
'Skip it,' she said. 'You're mine tonight. Mine,
mine, mine!'
She was quoting Kipling - the same phrase
that Ada used to address to Dack. He cast around for a straw of Procrustean
procrastination. (3.5)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): en laid et en lard: in an ugly and fleshy
version.
"Miss Condor" (as Lucette dubbed that mulatto
girl) looked like Ada. "Condor" (1921) is a poem by Bryusov.
In Marina Tsvetaev's memoir essay Geroy truda ("The Hero of Toil,"
1925) Alya (Marina Tsvetaev's eight-year-old daughter Ariadna
Efron) compares Bryusov to Shere Khan (the tiger in Kipling's Jungle
Book) and Bryusov's mistress Adalis, to a young wolf from Shere Khan's
retinue:
Москва, начало декабря
1920 г.
Несколько дней спустя, читая
"Джунгли".
— Марина! Вы знаете — кто Шер-Хан? —
Брюсов! — Тоже хромой и одинокий, и у него там тоже Адалис. (Приводит:) «А
старый Шер-Хан ходил и открыто принимал лесть»… Я так в этом узнала Брюсова! А
Адалис — приблуда, из молодых волков.
While Ada seems to refer to Adalis,
Lucette brings to mind Lucia, the eponymous tigress in a story (1916)
by Kuprin. It is Lucia who kills Zenida, the Jewish animal-tamer in a provincial
circus:
Однако через несколько месяцев я услышал, что
тигрица Люция растерзала Зениду не то в Саратове, не то в Самаре.
Впрочем, так почти все укротители и
укротительницы оканчивают свою жизнь.
According to the narrator (who is in love with Mlle Zenida),
Zenida weighs nearly 100 kg:
В то время там гастролировала m-lle Зенида,
венгерская еврейка, женщина весом около шести пудов. Она безвкусно одевалась в
мужской костюм венгерского драгуна.
Zenida and the narrator drink champagne in a cage with Lucia
and the lions:
И вот однажды, в свой бенефис, она предложила
мне войти с нею в клетку со зверями и там выпить с нею бокал шампанского за
здоровье почтеннейшей публики. Должен откровенно сознаться, что сначала мне
хотелось отделаться от этого искушения болезнью или переломом ноги, но потом
мужество или, может быть, любовь заставили меня пойти на эту
сделку.
A wonderful imitatrix, Lucette is afraid of
lions:
'Lucette affirmed,' he said, 'that she (Ada)
imitated mountain lions.'
He was omniscient. Better say,
omni-incest.
'That's right,' said the other
total-recaller...
'You do the puma,' he said, 'but she does - to
perfection! - my favorite viola sardina. She's a wonderful imitatrix, by the
way, and if you are even better -'
'We'll speak about my talents and tricks
some other time,' said Ada. 'It's a painful
subject.' (2.6)
The famous Robinson pill ("Quietus") was given to Lucette
by the Robinsons, an elderly couple with whom Van and Lucette watch in
the Tobakoff cinema hall Don Juan's Last Fling, the movie in
which Ada plays the gitanilla.
Honolulu (cf. "Honoloolers") is the capital of Hawaii.
The author of My vse - Robinzony ("We All are Robinson Crusoes,"
1921), Bryusov mentions the green slopes of Hawaii in another
poem, Segodnya ("Today," 1922):
На пёстрых площадях
Занзибара,
По зелёным склонам
Гавайи,
Распахиваются приветливо
бары...
Aujourd'hui (Fr., today) is the first word
in Aqua's last note: Aujourd'hui (heute-toity!) I, this eye-rolling
toy, have earned the psykitsch right to enjoy a landparty with Herr Doktor Sig,
Nurse Joan the Terrible, and several 'patients,' in the neighboring bor
(piney wood) where I noticed exactly the same skunk-like squirrels, Van, that
your Darkblue ancestor imported to Ardis Park, where you will ramble one day, no
doubt. (1.3)
He espied their half-sister on the forecastle deck, looking
perilously pretty in a low-cut, brightly flowered, wind-worried frock, talking
to the bronzed but greatly aged Robinsons. She turned toward him, brushing back
the flying hair from her face with a mixture of triumph and embarrassment in her
expression, and presently they took leave of Rachel and Robert who beamed after
them, waving similarly raised hands to her, to him, to life, to death, to the
happy old days when Demon paid all the gambling debts of their son, just before
he was killed in a head-on car collision...
Spring in Fialta and a torrid May on Minataor, the famous
artificial island, had given a nectarine hue to her limbs, which looked
lacquered with it when wet, but re-evolved their natural bloom as the breeze
dried her skin. (3.5)
In VN's story Spring in Fialta (1936) Nina
perishes in a car crash near Fialta:
...the yellow car I had seen under
the plane trees had suffered a crash beyond Fialta, having run at full speed
into the truck of a traveling circus entering the town, a crash from which
Ferdinand and his friend, those invulnerable rogues, those salamanders of fate,
those basilisks of good fortune, had escaped with local and temporary injury to
their scales, while Nina, in spite of her long-standing, faithful imitation of
them, had turned out after all to be mortal.
Nina had turned put after all
mortal.
A circus billboard in Fialta depicts a red hussar
and an orange tiger of sorts (in his effort to make the
beast as ferocious as possible, the artist had gone so far that he had come back
from the other side, for the tiger's face looked positively
human).
Lucette's emerald-studded cigarette case brings to
mind Izumrud (Emerald), the eponymous race horse in a story (1907) by
Kuprin.
"It is as if a naturalist, in
describing the equine genus, started to jaw about saddles of Mme. de V." (he
named a well-known literary hostess who indeed strongly resembled a
horse)...
"...rather like Wouwerman's white
horse," said Ferdinand, in regard to something he was discussing with
Segur.
"Tu es tres hippique ce
matin," remarked the latter. (Spring in
Fialta)
Lucette's gaze escorted to a
good-riddance exit the indolent motion of those gluteal lobes and
folds.
'You deceived me, Van. It is, it is one of your
gruesome girls!'
'I swear,' said Van, 'that's she's a perfect
stranger. I wouldn't deceive you.'
'You deceived me many, many times when I
was a little girl. If you're doing it now tu sais que j'en vais
mourir.' (3.5)
I held a platform
ticket crumpled beyond recognition, while a song of the last century (connected,
it has been rumored, with some Parisian drama of love) kept ringing and ringing in my head,
having emerged, God knows why, from the music box of memory, a sobbing ballad
which often used to be sung by an old maiden aunt of mine, with a face as yellow as Russian church wax, but whom nature
had given such a powerful, ecstatically full voice that it seemed to swallow her
up in the glory of a fiery cloud as soon as she would begin:
On dit
que tu te
maries,
tu sais
que j'en vais
mourir
and that melody, the
pain, the offense, the link between hymen
and death evoked by the rhythm, and the voice itself of the dead singer, which
accompanied the recollection as the sole owner of the song, gave me no rest for several hours after Nina's departure and
even later arose at increasing
intervals like the last flat little waves
sent to the beach by a passing ship, lapping ever more infrequently and
dreamily, or like the bronze agony of a
vibrating belfry after the bell ringer has already reseated himself in the
cheerful circle of his family. (Spring in
Fialta)
George
(the waiter who was awfully kind to Lucette when she threw up in the middle of
the tearoom) brings to mind Mount St. George in Spring in Fialta.
Fialta hints at Yalta:
I am fond of Fialta; I
am fond of it because I feel in the hollow of those violaceous syllables the
sweet dark dampness of the most rumpled of small flowers, and because the
altolike name of a lovely Crimean town is echoed by its viola; and also because
there is something in the very somnolence of its humid Lent that especially
anoints one’s soul. (Spring in
Fialta)
Yalta
is the city where Chekhov lived in his last years and where Kuprin visited
him. Dr Chekhov's Quina and Brom were the grandparents of Box II, the
Nabokovs' final dachshund that followed them into exile (Speak,
Memory, p. 40). En laid et en lard is the phrase that Ada
used to address to Dack, the dachshund (dackel) at Ardis. Yalta is
mentioned in Ada:
A small map of the European part of the British Commonwealth -
say, from Scoto-Scandinavia to the Riviera, Altar and Palermontovia - as well as
most of the U.S.A., from Estoty and Canady to Argentina, might be quite thickly
prickled with enameled red-cross-flag pins, marking, in her War of the Worlds,
Aqua's bivouacs. She had plans at one time to seek a modicum of health ('just a
little grayishness, please, instead of the solid black') in such Anglo-American
protectorates as the Balkans and Indias, and might even have tried the two
Southern Continents that thrive under our joint dominion. Of course, Tartary, an
independent inferno, which at the time spread from the Baltic and Black seas to
the Pacific Ocean, was touristically unavailable, though Yalta and Altyn Tagh
sounded strangely attractive... (1.3)
"The most
rumpled of small flowers" is fialka (violet). Ada calls Violet Knox
(old Van's typist) "Fialochka" (fialochka is a diminutive of
fialka; 5.4). Violet's surname is pronounced like nox
(Lat., night). Describing Lucette's suicide, Van mentions Oceanus
Nox:
The sky was also
heartless and dark, and her body, her head, and particularly those damned
thirsty trousers, felt clogged with Oceanus Nox, n,o,x. (3.5)
The last thing Lucette sees in her life is a dackel in a half-torn
wreath:
She saw a pair of new
vair-furred bedroom slippers, which Brigitte had forgotten to pack; she saw Van
wiping his mouth before answering, and then, still withholding the answer,
throwing his napkin on the table as they both got up; and she saw a girl with
long black hair quickly bend in passing to clap her hands over a dackel in a
half-torn wreath. (ibid.)
Dack must
be a grandson of the dog that accompanies Marina and Aqua in the hall of Demon's
favorite hotel:
Next day Demon was having tea at his favorite hotel with a
Bohemian lady whom he had never seen before and was never to see again (she
desired his recommendation for a job in the Glass Fish-and-Flower department in
a Boston museum) when she interrupted her voluble self to indicate Marina and
Aqua, blankly slinking across the hall in modish sullenness and bluish furs with
Dan Veen and a dackel behind, and said:
'Curious how that appalling actress resembles "Eve on the
Clepsydrophone" in Parmigianino's famous picture.'
'It is anything but famous,' said Demon quietly, 'and you
can't have seen it. I don't envy you,' he added; 'the naive stranger who
realizes that he or she has stepped into the mud of an alien life must
experience a pretty sickening feeling. Did you get that small-talk information
directly from a fellow named d'Onsky or through a friend of a friend of
his?'
'Friend of his,' replied the hapless Bohemian lady.
Upon being questioned in Demon's
dungeon, Marina, laughing trillingly, wove a picturesque tissue of lies; then
broke down, and confessed. She swore that all was over; that the Baron, a
physical wreck and a spiritual Samurai, had gone to Japan
forever. (1.2)
D'Onsky's name and nickname (Skonky, anagram of
konsky, "of a horse") seem to hint at Onegin's Don stallion
(donskoy zherebets) in Pushkin's Eugene Onegin. Onegin is
another race horse in Kuprin's Izumrud. The hero of Kuprin's story
Staff-Captain Rybnikov (1906) is a courageous Japanese spy in St.
Petersburg. His name comes from ryba (fish).
Describing the family dinner in "Ardis the
Second," Van mentions a scratch that his father received in a sword duel
with d'Onsky, the Tigris-Euphrates valley and Dack's grandsire:
The alcohol his [Demon's] vigorous system had already imbibed was
instrumental, as usual, in reopening what he gallicistically called condemned
doors, and now as he gaped involuntarily as all men do while spreading a napkin,
he considered Marina's pretentious ciel-étoilé hairdress and tried to
realize (in the rare full sense of the word), tried to possess the reality of a
fact by forcing it into the sensuous center, that here was a woman whom he had
intolerably loved, who had loved him hysterically and skittishly, who insisted
they make love on rugs and cushions laid on the floor ('as respectable people do
in the Tigris-Euphrates valley'), who would woosh down fluffy slopes on a
bobsleigh a fortnight after parturition, or arrive by the Orient Express with
five trunks, Dack's grandsire, and a maid, to Dr Stella Ospenko's ospedale where
he was recovering from a scratch received in a sword duel (and still visible as
a white weal under his eighth rib after a lapse of nearly seventeen years).
(1.38)
"The Tigris-Euphrates valley" brings to mind
Mesopotamian history mentioned by Marina:
'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. (1.14)
In Kuprin's story Belyi pudel' ("The
White Poodle," 1904) Sergey (a young acrobat) performs before the
audience walking on his hands. The (false) name of Sergey's old partner
(the organ-grinder), Lodyzhkin, comes from lodyzhka (ankle). The
action in the story takes place in the Crimea, near Yalta. Btw., in
Chekhov's story Dama s sobachkoy ("The Lady with the Little Dog," 1899)
Gurov first meets Anna Sergeevna in Yalta.