Demon to Van: 'However,
before I advise you of those two facts, I would like to know how long this - how
long this has been...' ('going on,' one presumes, or something equally banal,
but then all ends are banal - hangings, the Nuremberg Old Maid's iron sting,
shooting oneself, last words in the brand-new Ladore hospital, mistaking a drop
of thirty thousand feet for the airplane's washroom, being poisoned by one's
wife, expecting a bit of Crimean hospitality, congratulating Mr and Mrs
Vinelander -) (2.11)
The society nickname of Van's and Ada's father hints at Lermontov's poem
The Demon (1829-40). At the family dinner in Ardis the Second Demon
drinks Lord Byron's Hock: 'Ah!' said Demon, tasting Lord
Byron's Hock. 'This redeems Our Lady's Tears.' (1.38) Lermontov's poem
"Net, ya ne Bayron, ya drugoy..." ("No, I'm not Byron, I'm another..."
1832) ends in the lines:
Кто может, океан угрюмый,
Твои изведать тайны?
кто
Толпе мои расскажет думы?
Я — или бог — или никто!
The gloomy ocean, who can
come to know your secrets? Who
will tell the crowd my thoughts?
Myself - or God - or nobody!
Van's and Ada's half-sister Lucette drowns herself in the Atlantic
Ocean. Demon Veen perishes in a mysterious airplane disaster above the
Pacific:
Furnished Space, l'espace meublé (known to us
only as furnished and full even if its contents be 'absence of substance' -
which seats the mind, too), is mostly watery so far as this globe is concerned.
In that form it destroyed Lucette. Another variety, more or less atmospheric,
but no less gravitational and loathsome, destroyed Demon.
Idly, one March morning, 1905, on the terrace of Villa
Armina, where he sat on a rug, surrounded by four or five lazy nudes, like a
sultan, Van opened an American daily paper published in Nice. In the fourth or
fifth worst airplane disaster of the young century, a gigantic flying machine
had inexplicably disintegrated at fifteen thousand feet above the Pacific
between Lisiansky and Laysanov Islands in the Gavaille
region. (3.7)
The anagram in my previous post includes Nuremberg, Bog (God) and
nikto (nobody):
Nuremberg + ad/da + inkognito =
erunda + Gremin + Bog + nikto
Alexey Sklyarenko