During Van’s first tea party at Ardis Marina (in VN’s novel Ada, 1969, Van’s, Ada’s and Lucette’s mother) mentions Tarn, otherwise the New Reservoir:
There was not much to remember about that first tea. He noticed Ada’s trick of hiding her fingernails by fisting her hand or stretching it with the palm turned upward when helping herself to a biscuit. She was bored and embarrassed by everything her mother said and when the latter started to talk about the Tarn, otherwise the New Reservoir, he noted that Ada was no longer sitting next to him but standing a little way off with her back to the tea table at an open casement with the slim-waisted dog on a chair peering over splayed front paws out into the garden too, and she was asking it in a private whisper what it was it had sniffed.
‘You can see the Tarn from the library window,’ said Marina. ‘Presently Ada will show you all the rooms in the house. Ada?’ (She pronounced it the Russian way with two deep, dark ‘a’s, making it sound rather like ‘ardor.’)
‘You can catch a glint of it from here too,’ said Ada, turning her head and, pollice verso, introducing the view to Van who put his cup down, wiped his mouth with a tiny embroidered napkin, and stuffing it into his trouser pocket, went up to the dark-haired, pale-armed girl. As he bent toward her (he was three inches taller and the double of that when she married a Greek Catholic, and his shadow held the bridal crown over her from behind), she moved her head to make him move his to the required angle and her hair touched his neck. In his first dreams of her this re-enacted contact, so light, so brief, invariably proved to be beyond the dreamer’s endurance and like a lifted sword signaled fire and violent release. (1.5)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): pollice verso: Lat., thumbs down.
Tarn is a small mountain lake in a hollow area surrounded by steep slopes formed by a glacier. On the other hand, the Tarn near Ardis Hall seems to hint at Praskovia Tarnovski (1848-1910), VN's grand aunt, the author of works on psychiatry, anthropology and social welfare. Officially, Marina is Van’s aunt. The name of Van’s official mother (Marina’s poor mad twin sister Aqua) means in Latin water (cf. vsyo voda, “everything is water,” the last words of VN's Aunt Pasha quoted by VN in his autobiography Speak, Memory, 1951). Water is the element that destroys Lucette (Van’s and Ada’s half-sister who commits suicide by jumping from Admiral Tobakoff into the Atlantic):
Numbers and rows and series — the nightmare and malediction harrowing pure thought and pure time — seemed bent on mechanizing his mind. Three elements, fire, water, and air, destroyed, in that sequence, Marina, Lucette, and Demon. Terra waited. (3.1)
In March 1905 Demon Veen (Van’s and Ada’s father) perishes in a mysterious airplane disaster above the Pacific. Van does not realize that his father died, because Ada (who could not pardon Demon his forcing Van to give her up) managed to persuade the pilot to destroy his machine in midair. Also, the girlfriend of a girlfriend who shot Vanda Broom (Ada’s lesbian schoolmate at Brownhill) dead, on a starry night, in Ragusa of all places, seems to be Ada herself.
The original Russian title of Praskovia Tarnovski’s book is Zhenshchiny-ubiytsy (“Female Murderers”). In his story Zhenshchina s tochki zreniya p’yanitsy (“Woman as Seen by a Drunkard,” 1885) signed Brat moego brata (My brother’s brother) Chekhov compares girls younger than sixteen to aquae distillatae (distilled water). Poor mad Aqua's last note was signed “My sister’s sister who teper’ iz ada (now is out of hell)” (1.3).
Pollice Verso is an 1872 painting by French artist Jean-Léon Gérôme, featuring the eponymous Roman gesture directed to the winning gladiator. Pollice verso. Panneaux (1891) is a novel by Lugovoy (penname of Alexey Tikhonov, the writer and editor of the Cornfield magazine who settled down in Luga, a town 150 km south of St. Petersburg). Umirayushchiy gladiator ("The Dying Gladiator," 1836) is a poem by Lermontov, the author of The Demon (1829-40).
In the Night of the Burning Barn (when they make love for the first time) Van and Ada see Tarn from the library window:
Van, kneeling at the picture window, watched the inflamed eye of the cigar recede and vanish. That multiple departure... Take over.
That multiple departure really presented a marvelous sight against the pale star-dusted firmament of practically subtropical Ardis, tinted between the black trees with a distant flamingo flush at the spot where the Barn was Burning. To reach it one had to drive round a large reservoir which I could make out breaking into scaly light here and there every time some adventurous hostler or pantry boy crossed it on water skis or in a Rob Roy or by means of a raft — typical raft ripples like fire snakes in Japan; and one could now follow with an artist’s eye the motorcar’s lamps, fore and aft, progressing east along the AB bank of that rectangular lake, then turning sharply upon reaching its B corner, trailing away up the short side and creeping back west, in a dim and diminished aspect, to a middle point on the far margin where they swung north and disappeared.
As two last retainers, the cook and the night watchman, scurried across the lawn toward a horseless trap or break, that stood beckoning them with erected thills (or was it a rickshaw? Uncle Dan once had a Japanese valet), Van was delighted and shocked to distinguish, right there in the inky shrubbery, Ada in her long nightgown passing by with a lighted candle in one hand and a shoe in the other as if stealing after the belated ignicolists. It was only her reflection in the glass. She dropped the found shoe in a wastepaper basket and joined Van on the divan.
‘Can one see anything, oh, can one see?’ the dark-haired child kept repeating, and a hundred barns blazed in her amber-black eyes, as she beamed and peered in blissful curiosity. He relieved her of her candlestick, placing it near his own longer one on the window ledge. ‘You are naked, you are dreadfully indecent,’ she observed without looking and without any emphasis or reproof, whereupon he cloaked himself tighter, Ramses the Scotsman, as she knelt beside him. For a moment they both contemplated the romantic night piece framed in the window. He had started to stroke her, shivering, staring ahead, following with a blind man’s hand the dip of her spine through the batiste.
‘Look, gipsies,’ she whispered, pointing at three shadowy forms — two men, one with a ladder, and a child or dwarf — circumspectly moving across the gray lawn. They saw the candlelit window and decamped, the smaller one walking à reculons as if taking pictures. (1.19)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): à reculons: backwards.
A child or dwarf who is walking à reculons as if taking pictures is Kim Beauharnais, a kitchen boy and photographer at Ardis whom Ada (who wanted to spend the night with Van) has bribed to set the barn on fire and whom Van blinds for spying on him and Ada and attempting to blackmail Ada. Kim’s surname seems to hint at Josephine Beauharnais (Napoleon’s first wife, the Empress of the French). During Van’s first tea party at Ardis Marina mentions Queen Josephine:
They now had tea in a prettily furnished corner of the otherwise very austere central hall from which rose the grand staircase. They sat on chairs upholstered in silk around a pretty table. Ada’s black jacket and a pink-yellow-blue nosegay she had composed of anemones, celandines and columbines lay on a stool of oak. The dog got more bits of cake than it did ordinarily. Price, the mournful old footman who brought the cream for the strawberries, resembled Van’s teacher of history, ‘Jeejee’ Jones.
‘He resembles my teacher of history,’ said Van when the man had gone.
‘I used to love history,’ said Marina, ‘I loved to identify myself with famous women. There’s a ladybird on your plate, Ivan. Especially with famous beauties — Lincoln’s second wife or Queen Josephine.’
‘Yes, I’ve noticed — it’s beautifully done. We’ve got a similar set at home.’
‘Slivok (some cream)? I hope you speak Russian?’ Marina asked Van, as she poured him a cup of tea.
‘Neohotno no sovershenno svobodno (reluctantly but quite fluently),’ replied Van, slegka ulïbnuvshis’ (with a slight smile). ‘Yes, lots of cream and three lumps of sugar.’
‘Ada and I share your extravagant tastes. Dostoevski liked it with raspberry syrup.’
‘Pah,’ uttered Ada. (1.5)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): with a slight smile: a pet formula of Tolstoy’s denoting cool superiority, if not smugness, in a character’s manner of speech.
Ada’s badly bitten fingernails (that she hides from Van) make one think of podnogotnaya, Dostoevski’s favorite word (as pointed out by Hermann, the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Otchayanie, “Despair,” 1934) that comes from nogot’, “fingernail,” and means “the whole truth.”