Vladimir Nabokov

ADA OR ARDOR: A FAMILY CHRONICLE

to Véra

Part Three

1

He traveled, he studied, he taught.

He contemplated the pyramids of Ladorah (visited mainly because of its name) under a full moon that silvered the sands inlaid with pointed black shadows. He went shooting with the British Governor of Armenia, and his niece, on Lake Van. From a hotel balcony in Sidra his attention was drawn by the manager to the wake of an orange sunset that turned the ripples of a lavender sea into goldfish scales and was well worth the price of enduring the quaintness of the small striped rooms he shared with his secretary, young Lady Scramble. On another terrace, overlooking another fabled bay, Eberthella Brown, the local Shah's pet dancer (a naive little thing who thought 'baptism of desire' meant something sexual), spilled her morning coffee upon noticing a six-inch-long caterpillar, with fox-furred segments, qui rampait, was tramping, along the balustrade and curled up in a swoon when picked up by Van - who for hours, after removing the beautiful animal to a bush, kept gloomily plucking itchy bright hairs out of his fingertips with the girl's tweezers.

He learned to appreciate the singular little thrill of following dark byways in strange towns, knowing well that he would discover nothing, save filth, and ennui, and discarded 'merrycans' with 'Billy' labels, and the jungle jingles of exported jazz coming from syphilitic cafés. He often felt that the famed cities, the museums, the ancient torture house and the suspended garden, were but places on the map of his own madness.

He liked composing his works (Illegible Signatures, 1895; Clairvoyeurism, 1903; Furnished Space, 1913; The Texture of Time, begun 1922), in mountain refuges, and in the drawing rooms of great expresses, and on the sun decks of white ships, and on the stone tables of Latin public parks. He would uncurl out of an indefinitely lengthy trance, and note with wonder that the ship was going the other way or that the order of his left-hand fingers was reversed, now beginning, clockwise, with his thumb as on his right hand, or that the marble Mercury that had been looking over his shoulder had been transformed into an attentive arborvitae. He would realize all at once that three, seven, thirteen years, in one cycle of separation, and then four, eight, sixteen, in yet another, had elapsed since he had last embraced, held, bewept Ada.

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.

For seven years, after she had dismissed her life with her husband, a successfully achieved corpse, as irrelevant, and retired to her still dazzling, still magically well-staffed Côte d'Azur villa (the one Demon had once given her), Van's mother had been suffering from various 'obscure' illnesses, which everybody thought she made up, or talentedly simulated, and which she contended could be, and partly were, cured by willpower. Van visited her less often than dutiful Lucette, whom he glimpsed there on two or three occasions; and once, in 1899, he saw, as he entered the arbutus-and-laurel garden of Villa Armina, a bearded old priest of the Greek persuasion, clad in neutral black, leaving on a motor bicycle for his Nice parish near the tennis courts. Marina spoke to Van about religion, and Terra, and the Theater, but never about Ada, and just as he did not suspect she knew everything about the horror and ardor of Ardis, none suspected what pain in her bleeding bowels she was trying to allay by incantations, and 'self-focusing' or its opposite device, 'self-dissolving.' She confessed with an enigmatic and rather smug smile that much as she liked the rhythmic blue puffs of incense, and the dyakon's rich growl on the ambon, and the oily-brown ikon coped in protective filigree to receive the worshipper's kiss, her soul remained irrevocably consecrated, naperekor (in spite of) Dasha Vinelander, to the ultimate wisdom of Hinduism.

Early in 1900, a few days before he saw Marina, for the last time, at the clinic in Nice (where he learned for the first time the name of her illness), Van had a 'verbal' nightmare, caused, maybe, by the musky smell in the Miramas (Bouches Rouges-du-Rhône) Villa Venus. Two formless fat transparent creatures were engaged in some discussion, one repeating 'I can't!' (meaning 'can't die' - a difficult procedure to carry out voluntarily, without the help of the dagger, the ball, or the bowl), and the other affirming 'You can, sir!' She died a fortnight later, and her body was burnt, according to her instructions.

Van, a lucid soul, considered himself less brave morally than physically. He was always (meaning well into the nineteen-sixties) to recollect with reluctance, as if wishing to suppress in his mind a petty, timorous, and stupid deed (for, actually, who knows, the later antlers might have been set right then, with green lamps greening green growths before the hotel where the Vinelanders stayed) his reacting from Kingston to Lucette's cable from Nice ('Mother died this morning the funeral dash cremation dash is to be held after tomorrow at sundown') with the request to advise him ('please advise') who else would be there, and upon getting her prompt reply that Demon had already arrived with Andrey and Ada, his cabling back: 'Désolé de ne pouvoir être avec vous.'

He had roamed in Kingston's Cascadilla Park, in the active sweet-swarming spring dusk, so much more seraphic than that flurry of cables. The last time he had seen mummy-wizened Marina and told her he must return to America (though actually there was no hurry - only the smell in her hospital room that no breeze could dislodge), she had asked, with her new, tender, myopic, because inward, expression: 'Can't you wait till I'm gone?'; and his reply had been 'I'll be back on the twenty-fifth. I have to deliver an address on the Psychology of Suicide'; and she had said, stressing, now that everything was tripitaka (safely packed), the exact kinship: 'Do tell them about your silly aunt Aqua,' whereupon he had nodded, with a smirk, instead of answering: 'Yes, mother,' Hunched up in a last band of low sun, on the bench where he had recently fondled and fouled a favorite, lanky, awkward, black girl student, Van tortured himself with thoughts of insufficient filial affection - a long story of unconcern, amused scorn, physical repulsion, and habitual dismissal. He looked around, making wild amends, willing her spirit to give him an unequivocal, and indeed all-deciding sign, of continued being behind the veil of time, beyond the flesh of space. But no response came, not a petal fell on his bench, not a gnat touched his hand. He wondered what really kept him alive on terrible Antiterra, with Terra a myth and all art a game, when nothing mattered any more since the day he slapped Valerio's warm bristly cheek; and whence, from what deep well of hope, did he still scoop up a shivering star, when everything had an edge of agony and despair, when another man was in every bedroom with Ada.

2

On a bleak morning between the spring and summer of 1901, in Paris, as Van, black-hatted, one hand playing with the warm loose change in his topcoat pocket and the other, fawn-gloved, upswinging a furled English umbrella, strode past a particularly unattractive sidewalk café among the many lining the Avenue Guillaume Pitt, a chubby bald man in a rumpled brown suit with a watch-chained waistcoat stood up and hailed him.

Van considered for a moment those red round cheeks, that black goatee.

'Ne uznayosh' (You don't recognize me)?'

'Greg! Grigoriy Akimovich!' cried Van tearing off his glove.

'I grew a regular vollbart last summer. You'd never have known me then. Beer? Wonder what you do to look so boyish, Van.'

'Diet of champagne, not beer,' said Professor Veen, putting on his spectacles and signaling to a waiter with the crook of his 'umber.' 'Hardly stops one adding weight, but keeps the scrotum crisp.'

'I'm also very fat, yes?'

'What about Grace, I can't imagine her getting fat?'

'Once twins, always twins. My wife is pretty portly, too.'

'Tak tï zhenat (so you are married)? Didn't know it. How long?'

'About two years.'

'To whom?'

'Maude Sween.'

'The daughter of the poet?'

'No, no, her mother is a Brougham.'

Might have replied 'Ada Veen,' had Mr Vinelander not been a quicker suitor. I think I met a Broom somewhere. Drop the subject. Probably a dreary union: hefty, high-handed wife, he more of a bore than ever.

'I last saw you thirteen years ago, riding a black pony - no, a black Silentium. Bozhe moy!'

'Yes - Bozhe moy, you can well say that. Those lovely, lovely agonies in lovely Ardis! Oh, I was absolyutno bezumno (madly) in love with your cousin!'

'You mean Miss Veen? I did not know it. How long -'

'Neither did she. I was terribly -'

'How long are you staying -'

'- terribly shy, because, of course, I realized that I could not compete with her numerous boy friends.'

Numerous? Two? Three? Is it possible he never heard about the main one? All the rose hedges knew, all the maids knew, in all three manors. The noble reticence of our bed makers.

'How long will you be staying in Lute? No, Greg, I ordered it. You pay for the next bottle. Tell me -'

'So odd to recall! It was frenzy, it was fantasy, it was reality in the x degree. I'd have consented to be beheaded by a Tartar, I declare, if in exchange I could have kissed her instep. You were her cousin, almost a brother, you can't understand that obsession. Ah, those picnics! And Percy de Prey who boasted to me about her, and drove me crazy with envy and pity, and Dr Krolik, who, they said, also loved her, and Phil Rack, a composer of genius - dead, dead, all dead!'

'I really know very little about music but it was a great pleasure to make your chum howl. I have an appointment in a few minutes, alas. Za tvoyo zdorovie, Grigoriy Akimovich.'

'Arkadievich,' said Greg, who had let it pass once but now mechanically corrected Van.

'Ach yes! Stupid slip of the slovenly tongue. How is Arkadiy Grigorievich?'

'He died. He died just before your aunt. I thought the papers paid a very handsome tribute to her talent. And where is Adelaida Danilovna? Did she marry Christopher Vinelander or his brother?'

'In California or Arizona. Andrey's the name, I gather. Perhaps I'm mistaken. In fact, I never knew my cousin very well: I visited Ardis only twice, after all, for a few weeks each time, years ago.'

'Somebody told me she's a movie actress.'

'I've no idea, I've never seen her on the screen.'

'Oh, that would be terrible, I declare - to switch on the dorotelly, and suddenly see her. Like a drowning man seeing his whole past, and the trees, and the flowers, and the wreathed dachshund. She must have been terribly affected by her mother's terrible death.'

Likes the word 'terrible,' I declare, A terrible suit of clothes, a terrible tumor. Why must I stand it? Revolting - and yet fascinating in a weird way: my babbling shadow, my burlesque double.

Van was about to leave when a smartly uniformed chauffeur came up to inform' my lord' that his lady was parked at the corner of rue Saïgon and was summoning him to appear.

'Aha,' said Van, 'I see you are using your British title. Your father preferred to pass for a Chekhovian colonel.'

'Maude is Anglo-Scottish and, well, likes it that way. Thinks a title gets one better service abroad. By the way, somebody told me - yes, Tobak! - that Lucette is at the Alphonse Four. I haven't asked you about your father? He's in good health?' (Van bowed,) 'And how is the guvernantka belletristka?'

'Her last novel is called L'ami Luc. She just got the Lebon Academy Prize for her copious rubbish.'

They parted laughing.

A moment later, as happens so often in farces and foreign cities, Van ran into another friend. With a surge of delight he saw Cordula in a tight scarlet skirt bending with baby words of comfort over two unhappy poodlets attached to the waiting-post of a sausage shop. Van stroked her with his fingertips, and as she straightened up indignantly and turned around (indignation instantly replaced by gay recognition), he quoted the stale but appropriate lines he had known since the days his schoolmates annoyed him with them:

The Veens speak only to Tobaks

But Tobaks speak only to dogs.

The passage of years had but polished her prettiness and though many fashions had come and gone since 1889, he happened upon her at a season when hairdos and skirtlines had reverted briefly (another much more elegant lady was already ahead of her) to the style of a dozen years ago, abolishing the interruption of remembered approval and pleasure. She plunged into a torrent of polite questions - but he had a more important matter to settle at once - while the flame still flickered.

'Let's not squander,' he said, 'the tumescence of retrieved time on the gush of small talk. I'm bursting with energy, if that's what you want to know. Now look; it may sound silly and insolent but I have an urgent request. Will you cooperate with me in cornuting your husband? It's a must!'

'Really, Van!' exclaimed angry Cordula. 'You go a bit far. I'm a happy wife. My Tobachok adores me. We'd have ten children by now if I'd not been careful with him and others.'

'You'll be glad to learn that this other has been found utterly sterile.'

'Well, I'm anything but. I guess I'd cause a mule to foal by just looking on. Moreover, I'm lunching today with the Goals.'

'C'est bizarre, an exciting little girl like you who can be so tender with poodles and yet turns down a poor paunchy stiff old Veen.'

'The Veens are much too gay as dogs go.'

'Since you collect adages,' persisted Van, 'let me quote an Arabian one. Paradise is only one assbaa south of a pretty girl's sash. Eh bien?'

'You are impossible. Where and when?'

'Where? In that drab little hotel across the street. When? Right now. I've never seen you on a hobbyhorse yet, because that's what tout confort promises - and not much else.'

'I must be home not later than eleven-thirty, it's almost eleven now.'

'It will take five minutes. Please!'

Astraddle, she resembled a child braving her first merry-go-round. She made a rectangular moue as she used that vulgar contraption. Sad, sullen streetwalkers do it with expressionless faces, lips tightly closed. She rode it twice. Their brisk nub and its repetition lasted fifteen minutes in all, not five. Very pleased with himself, Van walked with her for a stretch through the brown and green Bois de Belleau in the direction of her osobnyachyok (small mansion).

'That reminds me,' he said, 'I no longer use our Alexis apartment. I've had some poor people live there these last seven or eight years - the family of a police officer who used to be a footman at Uncle Dan's place in the country. My policeman is dead now and his widow and three boys have gone back to Ladore. I want to relinquish that flat. Would you like to accept it as a belated wedding present from an admirer? Good. We shall do it again some day. Tomorrow I have to be in London and on the third my favorite liner, Admiral Tobakoff, will take me to Manhattan. Au revoir. Tell him to look out for low lintels. Antlers can be very sensitive when new. Greg Erminin tells me that Lucette is at the Alphonse Four?'

'That's right. And where's the other?'

'I think we'll part here. It's twenty minutes to twelve. You'd better toddle along.'

'Au revoir. You're a very bad boy and I'm a very bad girl. But it was fun - even though you've been speaking to me not as you would to a lady friend but as you probably do to little whores. Wait. Here's a top secret address where you can always' - (fumbling in her handbag) - 'reach me' - (finding a card with her husband's crest and scribbling a postal cryptograph) - 'at Malbrook, Mayne, where I spend every August.'

She looked around, rose on her toes like a ballerina, and kissed him on the mouth. Sweet Cordula!

3

The Bourbonian-chinned, dark, sleek-haired, ageless concierge, dubbed by Van in his blazer days 'Alphonse Cinq,' believed he had just seen Mlle Veen in the Récamier room where Vivian Vale's golden veils were on show. With a flick of coattail and a swing-gate click, Alphonse dashed out of his lodge and went to see. Van's eye over his umbrella crook traveled around a carousel of Sapsucker paperbacks (with that wee striped woodpecker on every spine): The Gitanilla, Salzman, Salzman, Salzman, Invitation to a Climax, Squirt, The Go-go Gang, The Threshold of Pain, The Chimes of Chose, The Gitanilla - here a Wall Street, very 'patrician' colleague of Demon's, old Kithar K.L. Sween, who wrote verse, and the still older real-estate magnate Milton Eliot, went by without recognizing grateful Van, despite his being betrayed by several mirrors.

The concierge returned shaking his head. Out of the goodness of his heart Van gave him a Goal guinea and said he'd call again at one-thirty. He walked through the lobby (where the author of Agonic Lines and Mr Eliot, affalés, with a great amount of jacket over their shoulders, dans des fauteuils, were comparing cigars) and, leaving the hotel by a side exit, crossed the rue des Jeunes Martyres for a drink at Ovenman's.

Upon entering, he stopped for a moment to surrender his coat; but he kept his black fedora and stick-slim umbrella as he had seen his father do in that sort of bawdy, albeit smart, place which decent women did not frequent - at least, unescorted. He headed for the bar, and as he was in the act of wiping the lenses of his black-framed spectacles, made out, through the optical mist (Space's recent revenge!), the girl whose silhouette he recalled having seen now and then (much more distinctly!) ever since his pubescence, passing alone, drinking alone, always alone, like Blok's Incognita. It was a queer feeling - as of something replayed by mistake, part of a sentence misplaced on the proof sheet, a scene run prematurely, a repeated blemish, a wrong turn of time. He hastened to reequip his ears with the thick black bows of his glasses and went up to her in silence. For a minute he stood behind her, sideways to remembrance and reader (as she, too, was in regard to us and the bar), the crook of his silk-swathed cane lifted in profile almost up to his mouth. There she was, against the aureate backcloth of a sakarama screen next to the bar, toward which she was sliding, still upright, about to be seated, having already placed one white-gloved hand on the counter. She wore a high-necked, long-sleeved romantic black dress with an ample skirt, fitted bodice and ruffy collar, from the black soft corolla of which her long neck gracefully rose. With a rake's morose gaze we follow the pure proud line of that throat, of that tilted chin. The glossy red lips are parted, avid and fey, offering a side gleam of large upper teeth. We know, we love that high cheekbone (with an atom of powder puff sticking to the hot pink skin), and the forward upsweep of black lashes and the painted feline eye - all this in profile, we softly repeat. From under the wavy wide brim of her floppy hat of black faille, with a great black bow surmounting it, a spiral of intentionally disarranged, expertly curled bright copper descends her flaming cheek, and the light of the bar's 'gem bulbs' plays on her bouffant front hair, which, as seen laterally, convexes from beneath the extravagant brim of the picture hat right down to her long thin eyebrow. Her Irish profile sweetened by a touch of Russian softness, which adds a look of mysterious expectancy and wistful surprise to her beauty, must be seen, I hope, by the friends and admirers of my memories, as a natural masterpiece incomparably finer and younger than the portrait of the similarily postured lousy jade with her Parisian gueule de guenon on the vile poster painted by that wreck of an artist for Ovenman.

'Hullo there, Ed,' said Van to the barman, and she turned at the sound of his dear rasping voice.

'I didn't expect you to wear glasses. You almost got le paquet, which I was preparing for the man supposedly "goggling" my hat. Darling Van! Dushka moy!'

'Your hat,' he said, 'is positively lautrémontesque - I mean, lautrecaquesque - no, I can't form the adjective.'

Ed Barton served Lucette what she called a Chambéryzette.

'Gin and bitter for me.'

'I'm so happy and sad,' she murmured in Russian. 'Moyo grustnoe schastie! How long will you be in old Lute?'

Van answered he was leaving next day for England, and then on June 3 (this was May 31) would be taking the Admiral Tobakoff back to the States. She would sail with him, she cried, it was a marvelous idea, she didn't mind whither to drift, really, West, East, Toulouse, Los Teques. He pointed out that it was far too late to obtain a cabin (on that not very grand ship so much shorter than Queen Guinevere), and changed the subject.

'The last time I saw you,' said Van, 'was two years ago, at a railway station. You had just left Villa Armina and I had just arrived. You wore a flowery dress which got mixed with the flowers you carried because you moved so fast - jumping out of a green calèche and up into the Ausonian Express that had brought me to Nice.'

'Très expressioniste. I did not see you or I would have stopped to tell you what I had just learned. Imagine, mother knew everything - your garrulous dad told her everything about Ada and you!'

'But not about you and her.'

Lucette asked him not to mention that sickening, maddening girl. She was furious with Ada and jealous by proxy. Her Andrey, or rather his sister on his behalf, he was too stupid even for that, collected progressive philistine Art, bootblack blotches and excremental smears on canvas, imitations of an imbecile's doodles, primitive idols, aboriginal masks, objets trouvés, or rather troués, the polished log with its polished hole à la Heinrich Heideland. His bride found the ranch yard adorned with a sculpture, if that's the right word, by old Heinrich himself and his four hefty assistants, a huge hideous lump of bourgeois mahogany, ten feet high, entitled 'Maternity,' the mother (in reverse) of all the plaster gnomes and pig-iron toadstools planted by former Vinelanders in front of their dachas in Lyaska.

The barman stood wiping a glass in endless slow motion as he listened to Lucette's denunciation with the limp smile of utter enchantment.

'And yet (odnako),' said Van in Russian, 'you enjoyed your stay there, in 1896, so Marina told me.'

'I did not (nichego podobnago)! I left Agavia minus my luggage in the middle of the night, with sobbing Brigitte. I've never seen such a household. Ada had turned into a dumb brune. The table talk was limited to the three C's - cactuses, cattle, and cooking, with Dorothy adding her comments on cubist mysticism. He's one of those Russians who shlyopayut (slap) to the toilet barefoot, shave in their underwear, wear garters, consider hitching up one's pants indecent, but when fishing out coins hold their right trouser pocket with the left hand or vice versa, which is not only indecent but vulgar. Demon is, perhaps, disappointed they don't have children, but really he "engripped" the man after the first flush of father-in-law-hood. Dorothy is a prissy and pious monster who comes to stay for months, orders the meals, and has a private collection of keys to the servants' rooms - which our bumb brunette should have known - and other little keys to open people's hearts - she has tried, by the way, to make a practicing Orthodox not only of every American Negro she can catch, but of our sufficiently pravoslavnaya mother - though she only succeeded in making the Trimurti stocks go up. One beautiful, nostalgic night -'

'Po-russki,' said Van, noticing that an English couple had ordered drinks and settled down to some quiet auditing.

'Kak-to noch'yu (one night), when Andrey was away having his tonsils removed or something, dear watchful Dorochka went to investigate a suspicious noise in my maid's room and found poor Brigitte fallen asleep in the rocker and Ada and me tryahnuvshih starinoy (reshaking old times) on the bed. That's when I told Dora I would not stand her attitude, and immediately left for Monarch Bay.'

'Some people are certainly odd,' said Van. 'If you've finished that sticky stuff let's go back to your hotel and get some lunch.'

She wanted fish, he stuck to cold cuts and salad.

'You know whom I ran into this morning? Good old Greg Erminin. It was he who told me you were around. His wife est un peu snob, what?'

'Everybody is un peu snob,' said Lucette. 'Your Cordula, who is also around, cannot forgive Shura Tobak, the violinist, for being her husband's neighbor in the telephone book. Immediately after lunch, we'll go to my room, a numb twenty-five, my age. I have a fabulous Japanese divan and lots of orchids just supplied by one of my beaux. Ach, Bozhe moy - it has just occurred to me - I shall have to look into this - maybe they are meant for Brigitte, who is marrying after tomorrow, at three-thirty, a head waiter at the Alphonse Trois, in Auteuil. Anyway they are greenish, with orange and purple blotches, some kind of delicate Oncidium, "cypress frogs," one of those silly commercial names. I'll stretch out upon the divan like a martyr, remember?'

'Are you still half-a-martyr - I mean half-a-virgin?' inquired Van.

'A quarter,' answered Lucette. 'Oh, try me, Van! My divan is black with yellow cushions.'

'You can sit for a minute in my lap.'

'No - unless we undress and you ganch me.'

'My dear, as I've often reminded you, you belong to a princely family but you talk like the loosest Lucinda imaginable. Is it a fad in your set, Lucette?'

'I have no set, I'm a loner. Once in a while, I go out with two diplomats, a Greek and an Englishman, who are allowed to paw me and play with each other. A corny society painter is working on my portrait and he and his wife caress me when I'm in the mood. Your friend Dick Cheshire sends me presents and racing tips. It's a dull life, Van.

'I enjoy - oh, loads of things,' she continued in a melancholy, musing tone of voice, as she poked with a fork at her blue trout which, to judge by its contorted shape and bulging eyes, had boiled alive, convulsed by awful agonies. 'I love Flemish and Dutch oils, flowers, food, Flaubert, Shakespeare, shopping, sheeing, swimming, the kisses of beauties and beasts - but somehow all of it, this sauce and all the riches of Holland, form only a kind of tonen'kiy-tonen'kiy (thin little) layer, under which there is absolutely nothing, except, of course, your image, and that only adds depth and a trout's agonies to the emptiness. I'm like Dolores - when she says she's "only a picture painted on air."'

'Never could finish that novel - much too pretentious.'

'Pretentious but true. It's exactly my sense of existing - a fragment, a wisp of color. Come and travel with me to some distant place, where there are frescoes and fountains, why can't we travel to some distant place with ancient fountains? By ship? By sleeping car?'

'It's safer and faster by plane,' said Van. 'And for Log's sake, speak Russian.'

Mr Sween, lunching with a young fellow who sported a bullfighter's sideburns and other charms, bowed gravely in the direction of their table; then a naval officer in the azure uniform of the Gulfstream Guards passed by in the wake of a dark, ivory-pale lady and said: 'Hullo Lucette, hullo, Van.'

'Hullo, Alph,' said Van, whilst Lucette acknowledged the greeting with an absent smile: over her propped-up entwined hands she was following with mocking eyes the receding lady. Van cleared his throat as he gloomily glanced at his half-sister.

'Must be at least thirty-five,' murmured Lucette, 'yet still hopes to become his queen.'

(His father, Alphonse the First of Portugal, a puppet potentate manipulated by Uncle Victor, had recently abdicated upon Gamaliel's suggestion in favor of a republican regime, but Lucette spoke of fragile beauty, not fickle politics.)

'That was Lenore Colline. What's the matter, Van?'

'Cats don't stare at stars, it's not done. The resemblance is much less close than it used to be - though, of course, I've not kept up with counterpart changes. A propos, how's the career been progressing?'

'If you mean Ada's career, I hope it's also a flop, the same as her marriage. So my getting you will be all Demon gains. I don't go often to movies, and I refused to speak to Dora and her when we met at the funeral and haven't the remotest idea of what her stage or screen exploits may have been lately.'

'Did that woman tell her brother about your innocent frolics?'

'Of course not! She drozhit (trembles) over his bliss. But I'm sure it was she who forced Ada to write me that I "must never try again to wreck a successful marriage" - and this I forgive Daryushka, a born blackmailer, but not Adochka. I don't care for your cabochon. I mean it's all right on your dear hairy hand, but Papa wore one like that on his hateful pink paw. He belonged to the silent-explorer type. Once he took me to a girls' hockey match and I had to warn him I'd yell for help if he didn't call off the search.'

'Das auch noch,' sighed Van, and pocketed the heavy dark-sapphire ring. He would have put it into the ashtray had it not been Marina's last present.

'Look, Van,' she said (finishing her fourth flute). 'Why not risk it? Everything is quite simple. You marry me. You get my Ardis. We live there, you write there. I keep melting into the back ground, never bothering you. We invite Ada - alone, of course - to stay for a while on her estate, for I had always expected mother to leave Ardis to her. While she's there, I go to Aspen or Gstaad, or Schittau, and you live with her in solid crystal with snow falling as if forever all around pendant que je shee in Aspenis. Then I come back like a shot, but she can stay on, she's welcome, I'll hang around in case you two want me. And then she goes back to her husband for a couple of dreary months, see?'

'Yes, magnificent plan,' said Van. 'The only trouble is: she will never come. It's now three o'clock, I have to see a man who is to renovate Villa Armina which I inherited and which will house one of my harems. Slapping a person's wrist that way is not your prettiest mannerism on the Irish side. I shall now escort you to your apartment. You are plainly in need of some rest.'

'I have an important, important telephone call to make, but I don't want you to listen,' said Lucette searching for the key in her little black handbag.

They entered the hall of her suite. There, firmly resolved to leave in a moment, he removed his glasses and pressed his mouth to her mouth, and she tasted exactly as Ada at Ardis, in the early afternoon, sweet saliva, salty epithelium, cherries, coffee. Had he not sported so well and so recently, he might not have withstood the temptation, the impardonable thrill. She plucked at his sleeve as he started to back out of the hallway.

'Let us kiss again, let us kiss again!' Lucette kept repeating, childishly, lispingly, barely moving her parted lips, in a fussy incoherent daze, doing her best to prevent him from thinking it over, from saying no.

He said that would do.

'Oh but why? Oh please!'

He brushed away her cold trembling fingers.

'Why Van? Why, why, why?'

'You know perfectly well why. I love her, not you, and I simply refuse to complicate matters by entering into yet another incestuous relationship.'

'That's rich,' said Lucette, 'you've gone far enough with me on several occasions, even when I was a kid; your refusing to go further is a mere quibble on your part; and besides, besides you've been unfaithful to her with a thousand girls, you dirty cheat!'

'You shan't talk to me in that tone,' said Van, meanly turning her poor words into a pretext for marching away.

'I apollo, I love you,' she whispered frantically, trying to cry after him in a whisper because the corridor was all door and ears, but he walked on, waving both arms in the air without looking back, quite forgivingly, though, and was gone.

4

A teasy problem demanded Dr Veen's presence in England.

Old Paar of Chose had written him that the 'Clinic' would like him to study a singular case of chromesthesia, but that given certain aspects of the case (such as a faint possibility of trickery) Van should come and decide for himself whether he thought it worth the trouble to fly the patient to Kingston for further observation. One Spencer Muldoon, born eyeless, aged forty, single, friendless, and the third blind character in this chronicle, had been known to hallucinate during fits of violent paranoia, calling out the names of such shapes and substances as he had learned to identify by touch, or thought he recognized through the awfulness of stories about them (falling trees, extinct saurians) and which now pressed on him from all sides, alternating with periods of stupor, followed invariably by a return to his normal self, when for a week or two he would finger his blind books or listen, in red-lidded bliss, to records of music, bird songs, and Irish poetry.

His ability to break space into ranks and files of 'strong' and 'weak' things in what seemed a wallpaper pattern remained a mystery until one evening, when a research student (R.S. - he wished to remain that way), who intended to trace certain graphs having to do with the metabasis of another patient, happened to leave within Muldoon's reach one of those elongated boxes of new, unsharpened, colored-chalk pencils whose mere evocation (Dixon Pink Anadel!) make one's memory speak in the language of rainbows, the tints of their painted and polished woods being graded spectrally in their neat tin container. Poor Muldoon's childhood could not come to him with anything like such iridian recall, but when his groping fingers opened the box and palpated the pencils, a certain expression of sensual relish appeared on his parchment-pale face. Upon observing that the blind man's eyebrows went up slightly at red, higher at orange, still higher at the shrill scream of yellow and then stepped down through the rest of the prismatic spectrum, R.S. casually told him that the woods were dyed differently - 'red,' 'orange,' 'yellow,' et cetera, and quite as casually Muldoon rejoined that they also felt different one from another.

In the course of several tests conducted by R.S. and his colleagues, Muldoon explained that by stroking the pencils in turn he perceived a gamut of 'stingles,' special sensations somehow allied to the tingling aftereffects of one's skin contact with stinging nettles (he had been raised in the country somewhere between Ormagh and Armagh, and had often tumbled, in his adventurous boyhood, the poor thick-booted soul, into ditches and even ravines), and spoke eerily of the 'strong' green stingle of a piece of blotting paper or the wet weak pink tingle of nurse Langford's perspiring nose, these colors being checked by himself against those applied by the researchers to the initial pencils. In result of the tests, one was forced to assume that the man's fingertips could convey to his brain 'a tactile transcription of the prismatic specter' as Paar put it in his detailed report to Van.

When the latter arrived, Muldoon had not quite come out of a state of stupor more protracted than any preceding one. Van, hoping to examine him on the morrow, spent a delightful day conferring with a bunch of eager psychologists and was interested to spot among the nurses the familiar squint of Elsie Langford, a gaunt girl with a feverish flush and protruding teeth, who had been obscurely involved in a 'poltergeist' affair at another medical institution. He had dinner with old Paar in his rooms at Chose and told him he would like to have the poor fellow transferred to Kingston, with Miss Langford, as soon as he was fit to travel. The poor fellow died that night in his sleep, leaving the entire incident suspended in midair within a nimbus of bright irrelevancy.

Van, in whom the pink-blooming chestnuts of Chose always induced an amorous mood, decided to squander the sudden bounty of time before his voyage to America on a twenty-four-hour course of treatment at the most fashionable and efficient of all the Venus Villas in Europe; but during the longish trip in the ancient, plushy, faintly perfumed (musk? Turkish tobacco?) limousine which he usually got from the Albania, his London hotel, for travels in England, other restless feelings joined, without dispelling it, his sullen lust. Rocking along softly, his slippered foot on a footrest, his arm in an armloop, he recalled his first railway journey to Ardis and tried - what he sometimes advised a patient doing in order to exercise the 'muscles of consciousness' - namely putting oneself back not merely into the frame of mind that had preceded a radical change in one's life, but into a state of complete ignorance regarding that change. He knew it could not be done, that not the achievement, but the obstinate attempt was possible, because he would not have remembered the preface to Ada had not life turned the next page, causing now its radiant text to flash through all the tenses of the mind. He wondered if he would remember the present commonplace trip. An English late spring with literary associations lingered in the evening air. The built-in 'canoreo' (an old-fashioned musical gadget which a joint Anglo-American Commission had only recently unbanned) transmitted a heart-wounding Italian song. What was he? Who was he? Why was he? He thought of his slackness, clumsiness, dereliction of spirit. He thought of his loneliness, of its passions and dangers. He saw through the glass partition the fat, healthy, reliable folds of his driver's neck. Idle images queued by - Edmund, Edmond, simple Cordula, fantastically intricate Lucette, and, by further mechanical association, a depraved little girl called Lisette, in Cannes, with breasts like lovely abscesses, whose frail favors were handled by a smelly big brother in an old bathing machine.

He turned off the canoreo and helped himself to the brandy stored behind a sliding panel, drinking from the bottle, because all three glasses were filthy. He felt surrounded by crashing great trees, and the monstrous beasts of unachieved, perhaps unachievable tasks. One such task was Ada whom he knew he would never give up; to her he would surrender the remnants of his self at the first trumpet blast of destiny. Another was his philosophic work, so oddly impeded by its own virtue - by that originality of literary style which constitutes the only real honesty of a writer. He had to do it his own way, but the cognac was frightful, and the history of thought bristled with clichés, and it was that history he had to surmount.

He knew he was not quite a savant, but completely an artist. Paradoxically and unnecessarily it had been in his 'academic career,' in his nonchalent and arrogant lectures, in his conduct of seminars, in his published reports on sick minds, that, starting as something of a prodigy before he was twenty, he had gained by the age of thirty-one 'honors' and a 'position' that many unbelievably laborious men do not reach at fifty. In his sadder moments, as now, he attributed at least part of his 'success' to his rank, to his wealth, to the numerous donations, which (in a kind of extension of his overtipping the haggard beggars who cleaned rooms, manned lifts, smiled in hotel corridors) he kept showering upon worthwhile institutions and students. Maybe Van Veen did not err too widely in his wry conjecture; for on our Antiterra (and on Terra as well, according to his own writings) a powerfully plodding Administration prefers, unless moved by the sudden erection of a new building or the thunder of torrential funds, the safe drabness of an academic mediocrity to the suspect sparkle of a V.V.

Nightingales sang, when he arrived at his fabulous and ignoble destination. As usual, he experienced a surge of brutal elation as the car entered the oak avenue between two rows of phallephoric statues presenting arms. A welcome habitué of fifteen years' standing, he had not bothered to 'telephone' (the new official term). A searchlight lashed him: Alas, he had come on a 'gala' night!

Members usually had their chauffeurs park in a special enclosure near the guardhouse, where there was a pleasant canteen for servants, with nonalcoholic drinks and a few inexpensive and homely whores. But that night several huge police cars occupied the garage boxes and overflowed into an adjacent arbor. Telling Kingsley to wait a moment under the oaks, Van donned his bautta and went to investigate. His favorite walled walk soon took him to one of the spacious lawns velveting the approach to the manor. The grounds were lividly illuminated and as populous as Park Avenue - an association that came very readily, since the disguises of the astute sleuths belonged to a type which reminded Van of his native land. Some of those men he even knew by sight - they used to patrol his father's club in Manhattan whenever good Gamaliel (not reelected after his fourth term) happened to dine there in his informal gagality. They mimed what they were accustomed to mime - grapefruit vendors, black hawkers of bananas and banjoes, obsolete, or at least untimely, 'copying clerks' who hurried in circles to unlikely offices, and peripatetic Russian newspaper readers slowing down to a trance stop and then strolling again behind their wide open Estotskiya Vesti. Van remembered that Mr Alexander Screepatch, the new president of the United Americas, a plethoric Russian, had flown over to see King Victor; and he correctly concluded that both were now sunk in mollitude. The comic side of the detectives' display (befitting, perhaps, their dated notion of an American sidewalk, but hardly suiting a weirdly illuminated maze of English hedges) tempered his disappointment as he shuddered squeamishly at the thought of sharing the frolics of historical personages or contenting himself with the brave-faced girlies they had started to use and rejected.

Here a bedsheeted statue attempted to challenge Van from its marble pedestal but slipped and landed on its back in the bracken. Ignoring the sprawling god, Van returned to the still-throbbing jolls-joyce. Purple-jowled Kingsley, an old tried friend, offered to drive him to another house, ninety miles north; but Van declined upon principle and was taken back to the Albania.

5

At five p.m., June 3, his ship had sailed from Le Havre-de-Grâce; on the evening of the same day Van embarked at Old Hantsport. He had spent most of the afternoon playing court tennis with Delaurier, the famous Negro coach, and felt very dull and drowsy as he watched the low sun's ardency break into green-golden eye-spots a few sea-serpent yards to starboard, on the far-side slope of the bow wave. Presently he decided to turn in, walked down to the A deck, devoured some of the still-life fruit prepared for him in his sitting room, attempted to read in bed the proofs of an essay he was contributing to a festschrift on the occasion of Professor Counterstone's eightieth birthday, gave it up, and fell asleep. A tempest went into convulsions around midnight, but despite the lunging and creaking (Tobakoff was an embittered old vessel) Van managed to sleep soundly, the only reaction on the part of his dormant mind being the dream image of an aquatic peacock, slowly sinking before somersaulting like a diving grebe, near the shore of the lake bearing his name in the ancient kingdom of Arrowroot. Upon reviewing that bright dream he traced its source to his recent visit to Armenia where he had gone fowling with Armborough and that gentleman's extremely compliant and accomplished niece. He wanted to make a note of it - and was amused to find that all three pencils had not only left his bed table but had neatly aligned themselves head to tail along the bottom of the outer door of the adjacent room, having covered quite a stretch of blue carpeting in the course of their stopped escape.

The steward brought him a Continental breakfast, the ship's newspaper, and the list of first-class passengers. Under 'Tourism in Italy,' the little newspaper informed him that a Domodossola farmer had unearthed the bones and trappings of one of Hannibal's elephants, and that two American psychiatrists (names not given) had died an odd death in the Bocaletto range: the older fellow from heart failure and his boy friend by suicide. After pondering the Admiral's morbid interest in Italian mountains, Van clipped the item and picked up the passenger list (pleasingly surmounted by the same crest that adorned Cordula's notepaper) in order to see if there was anybody to be avoided during the next days. The list yielded the Robinson couple, Robert and Rachel, old bores of the family (Bob had retired after directing for many years one of Uncle Dan's offices). His gaze, traveling on, tripped over Dr Ivan Veen and pulled up at the next name. What constricted his heart? Why did he pass his tongue over his thick lips? Empty formulas befitting the solemn novelists of former days who thought they could explain everything.

The level of the water slanted and swayed in his bath imitating the slow seesaw of the bright-blue, white-flecked sea in the porthole of his bedroom. He rang up Miss Lucinda Veen, whose suite was on the Main Deck amidships exactly above his, but she was absent. Wearing a white polo-neck sweater and tinted glasses, he went to look for her. She was not on the Games Deck from where he looked down at some other red-head, in a canvas chair on the Sun Deck: the girl sat writing a letter at passionate speed and he thought that if ever he switched from ponderous factitude to light fiction he would have a jealous husband use binoculars to decipher from where he stood that outpour of illicit affection.

She was not on the Promenade Deck where blanket-swathed old people were reading the number-one best seller Salzman and awaiting with borborygmic forebubbles the eleven o'clock bouillon. He betook himself to the Grill, where he reserved a table for two. He walked over to the bar and warmly greeted bald fat Toby who had served on the Queen Guinevere in 1889, and 1890, and 1891, when she was still unmarried and he a resentful fool. They could have eloped to Lopadusa as Mr and Mrs Dairs or Sardi!

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.

She dispatched the pozharskiya kotletï with gratitude: he was not scolding her for popping up as some sort of transcendental (rather than transatlantic) stowaway; and in her eagerness to see him she had botched her breakfast after having gone dinnerless on the eve. She who enjoyed the hollows and hills of the sea, when taking part in nautical sports, or the ups and oops, when flying, had been ignominiously sick aboard this, her first liner; but the Robinsons had given her a marvelous medicine, she had slept ten hours, in Van's arms all the time, and now hoped that both he and she were tolerably awake except for the fuzzy edge left by the drug.

Quite kindly he asked where she thought she was going.

To Ardis, with him - came the prompt reply - for ever and ever. Robinson's grandfather had died in Araby at the age of one hundred and thirty-one, so Van had still a whole century before him, she would build for him, in the park, several pavilions to house his successive harems, they would gradually turn, one after the other, into homes for aged ladies, and then into mausoleums. There hung, she said, a steeplechase picture of 'Pale Fire with Tom Cox Up' above dear Cordula's and Tobak's bed, in the suite 'wangled in one minute flat' from them, and she wondered how it affected the Tobaks' love life during sea voyages. Van interrupted Lucette's nervous patter by asking her if her bath taps bore the same inscriptions as his: Hot Domestic, Cold Salt. Yes, she cried, Old Salt, Old Salzman, Ardent Chambermaid, Comatose Captain!

They met again in the afternoon.

To most of the Tobakoff's first-class passengers the afternoon of June 4, 1901, in the Atlantic, on the meridian of Iceland and the latitude of Ardis, seemed little conducive to open air frolics: the fervor of its cobalt sky kept being cut by glacial gusts, and the wash of an old-fashioned swimming pool rhythmically flushed the green tiles, but Lucette was a hardy girl used to bracing winds no less than to the detestable sun. 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. With glowing cheekbones and that glint of copper showing from under her tight rubber cap on nape and forehead, she evoked the Helmeted Angel of the Yukonsk Ikon whose magic effect was said to change anemic blond maidens into konskie deti, freckled red-haired lads, children of the Sun Horse.

She returned after a brief swim to the sun terrace where Van lay and said:

'You can't imagine' - ('I can imagine anything,' he insisted) - 'you can imagine, okay, what oceans of lotions and streams of creams I am compelled to use - in the privacy of my balconies or in desolate sea caves - before I can exhibit myself to the elements. I always teeter on the tender border between sunburn and suntan - or between lobster and Obst as writes Herb, my beloved painter - I'm reading his diary published by his last duchess, it's in three mixed languages and lovely, I'll lend it to you. You see, darling, I'd consider myself a pied cheat if the small parts I conceal in public were not of the same color as those on show.'

'You looked to me kind of sandy allover when you were inspected in 1892,' said Van.

'I'm a brand-new girl now,' she whispered. 'A happy new girl. Alone with you on an abandoned ship, with ten days at least till my next flow. I sent you a silly note to Kingston, just in case you didn't turn up.'

They were now reclining on a poolside mat face to face, in symmetrical attitudes, he leaning his head on his right hand, she propped on her left elbow. The strap of her green breast-cups had slipped down her slender arm, disclosing drops and streaks of water at the base of one nipple. An abyss of a few inches separated the jersey he wore from her bare midriff, the black wool of his trunks from her soaked green pubic mask. The sun glazed her hipbone; a shadowed dip led to the five-year-old trace of an appendectomy. Her half-veiled gaze dwelt upon him with heavy, opaque greed, and she was right, they were really quite alone, he had possessed Marion Armborough behind her uncle's back in much more complex circumstances, what with the motorboat jumping like a flying fish and his host keeping a shotgun near the steering wheel. Joylessly, he felt the stout snake of desire weightily unwind; grimly, he regretted not having exhausted the fiend in Villa Venus. He accepted the touch of her blind hand working its way up his thigh and cursed nature for having planted a gnarled tree bursting with vile sap within a man's crotch. Suddenly Lucette drew away, exhaling a genteel 'merde.' Eden was full of people.

Two half-naked children in shrill glee came running toward the pool. A Negro nurse brandished their diminutive bras in angry pursuit. Out of the water a bald head emerged by spontaneous generation and snorted. The swimming coach appeared from the dressing room. 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.

'Come with me, hm?' she suggested, rising from the mat.

He shook his head, looking up at her: 'You rise,' he said, 'like Aurora,'

'His first compliment,' observed Lucette with a little cock of her head as if speaking to an invisible confidant.

He put on his tinted glasses and watched her stand on the diving board, her ribs framing the hollow of her intake as she prepared to ardis into the amber. He wondered, in a mental footnote that might come handy some day, if sunglasses or any other varieties of vision, which certainly twist our concept of 'space,' do not also influence our style of speech. The two well-formed lassies, the nurse, the prurient merman, the natatorium master, all looked on with Van.

'Second compliment ready,' he said as she returned to his side. 'You're a divine diver. I go in with a messy plop.'

'But you swim faster,' she complained, slipping off her shoulder straps and turning into a prone position; 'Mezhdu prochim (by the way), is it true that a sailor in Tobakoff's day was not taught to swim so he wouldn't die a nervous wreck if the ship went down?'

'A common sailor, perhaps,' said Van. 'When michman Tobakoff himself got shipwrecked off Gavaille, he swam around comfortably for hours, frightening away sharks with snatches of old songs and that sort of thing, until a fishing boat rescued him - one of those miracles that require a minimum of cooperation from all concerned, I imagine,'

Demon, she said, had told her, last year at the funeral, that he was buying an island in the Gavailles ('incorrigible dreamer,' drawled Van). He had 'wept like a fountain' in Nice, but had cried with even more abandon in Valentina, at an earlier ceremony, which poor Marina did not attend either. The wedding - in the Greek-faith style, if you please - looked like a badly faked episode in an 'old movie, the priest was gaga and the dyakon drunk, and - perhaps, fortunately - Ada's thick white veil was as impervious to light as a widow's weeds. Van said he would not listen to that.

'Oh, you must,' she rejoined, 'hotya bï potomu (if only because) one of her shafer's (bachelors who take turns holding the wedding crown over the bride's head) looked momentarily, in impassive profile and impertinent attitude (he kept raising the heavy metallic venets too high, too athletically high as if trying on purpose to keep it as far as possible from her head), exactly like you, like a pale, ill-shaven twin, delegated by you from wherever you were,'

At a place nicely called Agony, in Terra del Fuego. He felt an uncanny tingle as he recalled that when he received there the invitation to the wedding (airmailed by the groom's sinister sister) he was haunted for several nights by dream after dream, growing fainter each time (much as her movie he was to pursue from flick-house to flick-house at a later stage of his life) of his holding that crown over her.

'Your father,' added Lucette, 'paid a man from Belladonna to take pictures - but of course, real fame begins only when one's name appears in that cine-magazine's crossword puzzle. We all know it will never happen, never! Do you hate me now?'

'I don't,' he said, passing his hand over her sun-hot back and rubbing her coccyx to make pussy purr. 'Alas, I don't! I love you with a brother's love and maybe still more tenderly. Would you like me to order drinks?'

'I'd like you to go on and on,' she muttered, her nose buried in the rubber pillow.

'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.

'And so were the old Robinsons,' she rambled on. 'Not much chance, is there, they might turn up here? They've been sort of padding after me, rather pathetically, ever since we happened to have lunch at the same table on the boat-train, and I realized who they were but was sure they would not recognize the little fat girl seen in eighteen eighty-five or -six, but they are hypnotically talkative - at first we thought you were French, this salmon is really delicious, what's your home town? - and I'm a weak fool, and one thing led to another. Young people are less misled by the passage of time than the established old who have not much changed lately and are not used to the long-unseen young changing.'

'That's very clever, darling,' said Van '- except that time itself is motionless and changeless.'

'Yes, it's always I in your lap and the receding road. Roads move?'

'Roads move.'

After tea Lucette remembered an appointment with the hairdresser and left in a hurry. Van peeled off his jersey and stayed on for a while, brooding, fingering the little green-gemmed case with five Rosepetal cigarettes, trying to enjoy the heat of the platinum sun in its aura of 'film-color' but only managing to fan, with every shiver and heave of the ship, the fire of evil temptation.

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.

'I was told,' she explained, 'that a great friend of mine, Vivian Vale, the cootooriay - voozavay entendue? - had shaved his beard, in which case he'd look rather like you, right?'

'Logically, no, ma'am,' replied Van.

She hesitated for the flirt of a second, licking her lips, not knowing whether he was being rude or ready - and here Lucette returned for her Rosepetals.

'See you aprey,' said Miss Condor.

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.'

'You promised me a harem,' Van gently rebuked her.

'Not today, not today! Today is sacred.'

The cheek he intended to kiss was replaced by her quick mad mouth.

'Come and see my cabin,' she pleaded as he pushed her away with the very spring, as it were, of his animal reaction to the fire of her lips and tongue. 'I simply must show you their pillows and piano. There's Cordula's smell in all the drawers. I beseech you!'

'Run along now,' said Van. 'You've no right to excite me like that. I'll hire Miss Condor to chaperone me if you do not behave yourself. We dine at seven-fifteen.'

In his bedroom he found a somewhat belated invitation to the Captain's table for dinner. It was addressed to Dr and Mrs Ivan Veen. He had been on the ship once before, in between the Queens, and remembered Captain Cowley as a bore and an ignoramus.

He called the steward and bade him carry the note back, with the penciled scrawl: 'no such couple.' He lay in his bath for twenty minutes. He attempted to focus on something else besides a hysterical virgin's body. He discovered an insidious omission in his galleys where an entire line was wanting, with the vitiated paragraph looking, however, quite plausible - to an automatic reader - since the truncated end of one sentence, and the lower-case beginning of the other, now adjacent, fitted to form a syntactically correct passage, the insipidity of which he might never have noticed in the present folly of his flesh, had he not recollected (a recollection confirmed by his typescript) that at this point should have come a rather apt, all things considered, quotation: Insiste, anime meus, et adtende fortiter (courage, my soul and press on strongly).

'Sure you'd not prefer the restaurant?' he inquired when Lucette, looking even more naked in her short evening frock than she had in her 'bickny,' joined him at the door of the grill. 'It's crowded and gay down there, with a masturbating jazzband. No?'

Tenderly she shook her jeweled head.

They had huge succulent 'grugru shrimps' (the yellow larvae of a palm weevil) and roast bearlet à la Tobakoff. Only half-a-dozen tables were occupied, and except for a nasty engine vibration, which they had not noticed at lunch, everything was subdued, soft, and cozy. He took advantage of her odd demure silence to tell her in detail about the late pencil-palpating Mr Muldoon and also about a Kingston case of glossolalia involving a Yukonsk woman who spoke several Slavic-like dialects which existed, maybe, on Terra, but certainly not in Estotiland. Alas, another case (with a quibble on cas) engaged his attention subverbally.

She asked questions with pretty co-ed looks of doelike devotion, but it did not require much scientific training on a professor's part to perceive that her charming embarrassment and the low notes furring her voice were as much contrived as her afternoon effervescence had been. Actually she thrashed in the throes of an emotional disarray which only the heroic self-control of an American aristocrat could master. Long ago she had made up her mind that by forcing the man whom she absurdly but irrevocably loved to have intercourse with her, even once, she would, somehow, with the help of some prodigious act of nature, transform a brief tactile event into an eternal spiritual tie; but she also knew that if it did not happen on the first night of their voyage, their relationship would slip back into the exhausting, hopeless, hopelessly familiar pattern of banter and counterbanter, with the erotic edge taken for granted, but kept as raw as ever. He understood her condition or at least believed, in despair, that he had understood it, retrospectively, by the time no remedy except Dr Henry's oil of Atlantic prose could be found in the medicine chest of the past with its banging door and toppling toothbrush.

As he gloomily looked at her thin bare shoulders, so mobile and tensile that one wondered if she could not cross them in front of her like stylized angel wings, he reflected abjectly that he would have to endure, if conforming to his innermost code of honor, five such days of ruttish ache - not only because she was lovely and special but because he could never go without girl pleasure for more than forty-eight hours. He feared precisely that which she wanted to happen: that once he had tasted her wound and its grip, she would keep him insatiably captive for weeks, maybe months, maybe more, but that a harsh separation would inevitably come, with a new hope and the old despair never able to strike a balance. But worst of all, while aware, and ashamed, of lusting after a sick child, he felt, in an obscure twist of ancient emotions, his lust sharpened by the shame.

They had sweet, thick Turkish coffee and surreptitiously he looked at his wrist watch to check - what? How long the torture of self-denial could still be endured? How soon were certain events coming such as a ballroom dance competition? Her age? (Lucinda Veen was only five hours old if one reversed the human 'time current.')

She was such a pathetic darling that, as they proceeded to leave the grill, he could not help, for sensuality is the best breeding broth of fatal error, caressing her glossy young shoulder so as to fit for an instant, the happiest in her life, its ideal convexity bilboquet-wise within the hollow of his palm. Then she walked before him as conscious of his gaze as if she were winning a prize for 'poise.' He could describe her dress only as struthious (if there existed copper-curled ostriches), accentuating as it did the swing of her stance, the length of her legs in ninon stockings. Objectively speaking, her chic was keener than that of her 'vaginal' sister. As they crossed landings where velvet ropes were hastily stretched by Russian sailors (who glanced with sympathy at the handsome pair speaking their incomparable tongue) or walked this or that deck, Lucette made him think of some acrobatic creature immune to the rough seas. He saw with gentlemanly displeasure that her tilted chin and black wings, and free stride, attracted not only blue innocent eyes but the bold stare of lewd fellow passengers. He loudly exclaimed that he would slap the next jackanapes, and involuntarily walked backward with ridiculous truculent gestures into a folded deck chair (he also running the reel of time backward, in a minor way), which caused her to emit a yelp of laughter. Feeling now much happier, enjoying his gallant champagne-temper, she steered Van away from the mirage of her admirers, back to the lift.

They examined without much interest the objects of pleasure in a display window. Lucette sneered at a gold-threaded swimsuit. The presence of a riding crop and a pickax puzzled Van. Half a dozen glossy-jacketed copies of Salzman were impressively heaped between a picture of the handsome, thoughtful, now totally forgotten, author and a Mingo-Bingo vase of immortelles.

He clutched at a red rope and they entered the lounge;

'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.

'Please,' said Lucette, 'I'm tired of walking around, I'm frail, I'm feverish, I hate storms, let's all go to bed!'

'Hey, look!' he cried, pointing to a poster. 'They're showing something called Don Juan's Last Fling. It's prerelease and for adults only. Topical Tobakoff!'

'It's going to be an unmethylated bore,' said Lucy (Houssaie School, 1890) but he had already pushed aside the entrance drapery.

They came in at the beginning of an introductory picture, featuring a cruise to Greenland, with heavy seas in gaudy technicolor. It was a rather irrelevant trip since their Tobakoff did not contemplate calling at Godhavn; moreover, the cinema theater was swaying in counterrhythm to the cobalt-and-emerald swell on the screen. No wonder the place was emptovato, as Lucette observed, and she went on to say that the Robinsons had saved her life by giving her on the eve a tubeful of Quietus Pills.

'Want one? One a day keeps "no shah" away. Pun. You can chew it, it's sweet.'

'Jolly good name. No, thank you, my sweet. Besides you have only five left.'

'Don't worry, I have it all planned out. There may be less than five days.'

'More in fact, but no matter. Our measurements of time are meaningless; the most accurate clock is a joke; you'll read all about it someday, you just wait.'

'Perhaps, not. I mean, perhaps I shan't have the patience. I mean, his charwoman could never finish reading Leonardo's palm. I may fall asleep before I get through your next book.'

'An art-class legend,' said Van.

'That's the final iceberg, I know by the music. Let's go, Van! Or you want to see Hoole as Hooan?'

She brushed his cheek with her lips in the dark, she took his hand, she kissed his knuckles, and he suddenly thought: after all, why not? Tonight? Tonight.

He enjoyed her impatience, the fool permitted himself to be stirred by it, the cretin whispered, prolonging the free, new, apricot fire of anticipation:

'If you're a good girl we'll have drinks in my sitting room at midnight.'

The main picture had now started. The three leading parts - cadaverous Don Juan, paunchy Leporello on his donkey, and not too irresistible, obviously forty-year-old Donna Anna - were played by solid stars, whose images passed by in 'semi-stills,' or as some say 'translucencies,' in a brief introduction. Contrary to expectations, the picture turned out to be quite good.

On the way to the remote castle where the difficult lady, widowed by his sword, has finally promised him a long night of love in her chaste and chilly chamber, the aging libertine nurses his potency by spurning the advances of a succession of robust belles. A gitana predicts to the gloomy cavalier that before reaching the castle he will have succumbed to the wiles of her sister, Dolores, a dancing girl (lifted from Osberg's novella, as was to be proved in the ensuing lawsuit). She also predicted something to Van, for even before Dolores came out of the circus tent to water Juan's horse, Van knew who she would be.

In the magic rays of the camera, in the controlled delirium of ballerina grace, ten years of her life had glanced off and she was again that slip of a girl qui n'en porte pas (as he had jested once to annoy her governess by a fictitious Frenchman's mistranslation): a remembered triviality that intruded upon the chill of his present emotion with the jarring stupidity of an innocent stranger's asking an absorbed voyeur for directions in a labyrinth of mean lanes.

Lucette recognized Ada three or four seconds later, but then clutched his wrist:

'Oh, how awful! It was bound to happen. That's she! Let's go, please, let's go. You must not see her debasing herself. She's terribly made up, every gesture is childish and wrong -'

'Just another minute,' said Van.

Terrible? Wrong? She was absolutely perfect, and strange, and poignantly familiar. By some stroke of art, by some enchantment of chance, the few brief scenes she was given formed a perfect compendium of her 1884 and 1888 and 1892 looks.

The gitanilla bends her head over the live table of Leporello's servile back to trace on a scrap of parchment a rough map of the way to the castle. Her neck shows white through her long black hair separated by the motion of her shoulder. It is no longer another man's Dolores, but a little girl twisting an aquarelle brush in the paint of Van's blood, and Donna Anna's castle is now a bog flower.

The Don rides past three windmills, whirling black against an ominous sunset, and saves her from the miller who accuses her of stealing a fistful of flour and tears her thin dress. Wheezy but still game, Juan carries her across a brook (her bare toe acrobatically tickling his face) and sets her down, top up, on the turf of an olive grove. Now they stand facing each other. She fingers voluptuously the jeweled pommel of his sword, she rubs her firm girl belly against his embroidered tights, and all at once the grimace of a premature spasm writhes across the poor Don's expressive face. He angrily disentangles himself and staggers back to his steed.

Van, however, did not understand until much later (when he saw - had to see; and then see again and again - the entire film, with its melancholy and grotesque ending in Donna Anna's castle) that what seemed an incidental embrace constituted the Stone Cuckold's revenge. In fact, being upset beyond measure, he decided to go even before the olive-grove sequence dissolved. Just then three old ladies with stony faces showed their disapproval of the picture by rising from beyond Lucette (who was slim enough to remain seated) and brushing past Van (who stood up) in three jerky shuffles. Simultaneously he noticed two people, the long-lost Robinsons, who apparently had been separated from Lucette by those three women, and were now moving over to her. Beaming and melting in smiles of benevolence and self-effacement, they sidled up and plumped down next to Lucette, who turned to them with her last, last, last free gift of staunch coul1esy that was stronger than failure and death. They were craning already across her, with radiant wrinkles and twittery fingers toward Van when he pounced upon their intrusion to murmur a humorous bad-sailor excuse and leave the cinema hall to its dark lurching.

In a series of sixty-year-old actions which now I can grind into extinction only by working on a succession of words until the rhythm is right, I, Van, retired to my bathroom, shut the door (it swung open at once, but then closed of its own accord) and using a temporary expedient less far-fetched than that hit upon by Father Sergius (who chops off the wrong member in Count Tolstoy's famous anecdote), vigorously got rid of the prurient pressure as he had done the last time seventeen years ago. And how sad, how significant that the picture projected upon the screen of his paroxysm, while the unlockable door swung open again with the movement of a deaf man cupping his ear, was not the recent and pertinent image of Lucette, but the indelible vision of a bent bare neck and a divided flow of black hair and a purple-tipped paint brush.

Then, for the sake of safety, he repeated the disgusting but necessary act.

He saw the situation dispassionately now and felt he was doing right by going to bed and switching off the 'ectric' light (a surrogate creeping back into international use). The blue ghost of the room gradually established itself as his eyes got used to the darkness. He prided himself on his willpower. He welcomed the dull pain in his drained root. He welcomed the thought which suddenly seemed so absolutely true, and new, and as lividly real as the slowly widening gap of the sitting room's doorway, namely, that on the morrow (which was at least, and at best, seventy years away) he would explain to Lucette, as a philosopher and another girl's brother, that he knew how agonizing and how absurd it was to put all one's spiritual fortune on one physical fancy and that his plight closely resembled hers, but that he managed, after all, to live, to work, and not pine away because he refused to wreck her life with a brief affair and because Ada was still a child. At that point the surface of logic began to be affected by a ripple of sleep, but he sprang back into full consciousness at the sound of the telephone. The thing seemed to squat for each renewed burst of ringing and at first he decided to let it ring itself out. Then his nerves surrendered to the insisting signal, and he snatched up the receiver.

No doubt he was morally right in using the first pretext at hand to keep her away from his bed; but he also knew, as a gentleman and an artist, that the lump of words he brought up was trite and cruel, and it was only because she could not accept him as being either, that she believed him:

'Mozhno pridti teper' (can I come now)?' asked Lucette.

'Ya ne odin (I'm not alone),' answered Van.

A small pause followed; then she hung up.

After he had stolen away, she had remained trapped between the cozy Robinsons (Rachel, dangling a big handbag, had squeezed by immediately to the place Van had vacated, and Bob had moved one seat up). Because of a sort of pudeur she did not inform them that the actress (obscurely and fleetingly billed as 'Theresa Zegris' in the 'going-up' lift-list at the end of the picture) who had managed to obtain the small but not unimportant part of the fatal gipsy was none other than the pallid schoolgirl they might have seen in Ladore. They invited Lucette to a Coke with them - proselytical teetotalists - in their cabin, which was small and stuffy and badly insulated, one could hear every word and whine of two children being put to bed by a silent seasick nurse, so late, so late - no, not children, but probably very young, very much disappointed honeymooners.

'We understand,' said Robert Robinson going for another supply to his portable fridge, 'we understand perfectly that Dr Veen is deeply immersed in his Inter Resting Work - personally, I sometimes regret having retired - but do you think, Lucy, prosit!, that he might accept to have dinner tomorrow with you and us and maybe Another Couple, whom he'll certainly enjoy meeting? Shall Mrs Robinson send him a formal invitation? Would you sign it, too?'

'I don't know, I'm very tired,' she said, 'and the rock and roll are getting worse. I guess I'll go up to my hutch and take your Quietus. Yes, by all means, let's have dinner, all of us. I really needed that lovely cold drink.'

Having cradled the nacred receiver she changed into black slacks and a lemon shirt (planned for tomorrow morning); looked in vain for a bit of plain notepaper without caravelle or crest; ripped out the flyleaf of Herb's Journal, and tried to think up something amusing, harmless, and scintillating to say in a suicide note. But she had planned everything except that note, so she tore her blank life in two and disposed of the pieces in the W.C.; she poured herself a glass of dead water from a moored decanter, gulped down one by one four green pills, and, sucking the fifth, walked to the lift which took her one click up from her three-room suite straight to the red-carpeted promenade-deck bar. There, two sluglike young men were in the act of sliding off their red toadstools, and the older one said to the other as they turned to leave: 'You may fool his lordship, my dear, but not me, oh, no.'

She drank a 'Cossack pony' of Klass vodka - hateful, vulgar, but potent stuff; had another; and was hardly able to down a third because her head had started to swim like hell. Swim like hell from sharks, Tobakovich!

She had no purse with her. She almost fell from her convex ridiculous seat as she fumbled in her shirt pocket for a stray bank note.

'Beddydee,' said Toby the barman with a fatherly smile, which she mistook for a leer. 'Bedtime, miss,' he repeated and patted her ungloved hand.

Lucette recoiled and forced herself to retort distinctly and haughtily:

'Mr Veen, my cousin, will pay you tomorrow and bash your false teeth in.'

Six, seven - no, more than that, about ten steps up. Dix marches. Legs and arms. Dimanche. Déjeuner sur l'herbe. Tout le monde pue. Ma belle-mère avale son râtelier. Sa petite chienne, after too much exercise, gulps twice and quietly vomits, a pink pudding onto the picnic nappe. Après quoi she waddles off. These steps are something.

While dragging herself up she had to hang onto the rail. Her twisted progress was that of a cripple. Once on the open deck she felt the solid impact of the black night, and the mobility of the accidental home she was about to leave.

Although Lucette had never died before - no, dived before, Violet - from such a height, in such a disorder of shadows and snaking reflections, she went with hardly a splash through the wave that humped to welcome her. That perfect end was spoiled by her instinctively surfacing in an immediate sweep - instead of surrendering under water to her drugged lassitude as she had planned to do on her last night ashore if it ever did come to this. The silly girl had not rehearsed the technique of suicide as, say, free-fall parachutists do every day in the element of another chapter. Owing to the tumultuous swell and her not being sure which way to peer through the spray and the darkness and her own tentaclinging hair - t,a,c,l - she could not make out the lights of the liner, an easily imagined many-eyed bulk mightily receding in heartless triumph. Now I've lost my next note.

Got it.

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. At every slap and splash of cold wild salt, she heaved with anise-flavored nausea and there was an increasing number, okay, or numbness, in her neck and arms. As she began losing track of herself, she thought it proper to inform a series of receding Lucettes - telling them to pass it on and on in a trick-crystal regression - that what death amounted to was only a more complete assortment of the infinite fractions of solitude.

She did not see her whole life flash before her as we all were afraid she might have done; the red rubber of a favorite doll remained safely decomposed among the myosotes of an unanalyzable brook; but she did see a few odds and ends as she swam like a dilettante Tobakoff in a circle of brief panic and merciful torpor. 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-tom wreath.

A brilliantly illumined motorboat was launched from the - not-too-distant ship with Van and the swimming coach and the oilskin-hooded Toby among the would-be saviors; but by that time a lot of sea had rolled by and Lucette was too tired to wait. Then the night was filled with the rattle of an old but still strong helicopter. Its diligent beam could spot only the dark head of Van, who, having been propelled out of the boat when it shied from its own sudden shadow, kept bobbing and bawling the drowned girl's name in the black, foam-veined, complicated waters.

6

Father:

enclosed is a self-explanatory letter which, please, read and, if unobjectionable in your opinion, forward to Mrs Vinelander, whose address I don't know. For your own edification - although it hardly matters at this stage - Lucette never was my mistress, as an obscene ass, whom I cannot trace, implies in the 'write-up' of the tragedy.

I'm told you'll be back East next month. Have your current secretary ring me up at Kingston, if you care to see me.

Ada:

I wish to correct and amplify the accounts of her death published here even before I arrived. We were not 'traveling together.' We embarked at two different ports and I did not know that she was aboard. Our relationship remained what it had always been. I spent the next day (June 4) entirely with her, except for a couple of hours before dinner. We basked in the sun. She enjoyed the brisk breeze and the bright brine of the pool. She was doing her best to appear carefree but I saw how wrong things were. The romantic attachment she had formed, the infatuation she cultivated, could not be severed by logic. On top of that, somebody she could not compete with entered the picture. The Robinsons, Robert and Rachel, who, I know, planned to write to you through my father, were the penultimate people to talk to her that night. The last was a bartender. He was worried by her behavior, followed her up to the open deck and witnessed but could not stop her jump.

I suppose it is inevitable that after such a loss one should treasure its every detail, every string that snapped, every fringe that frayed, in the immediate precession. I had sat with her through the greater part of a movie, Castles in Spain (or some title like that), and its liberal villain was being directed to the last of them, when I decided to abandon her to the auspices of the Robinsons, who had joined us in the ship's theater. I went to bed - and was called around 1 a.m. mariTime, a few moments after she had jumped overboard. Attempts to rescue her were made on a reasonable scale, but, finally, the awful decision to resume the voyage, after an hour of confusion and hope, had to be taken by the Captain. Had I found him bribable, we would still be circling today the fatal spot.

As a psychologist, I know the unsoundness of speculations as to whether Ophelia would not hove drowned herself after all, without the help of a treacherous sliver, even if she had married her Voltemand. Impersonally I believe she would have died in her bed, gray and serene, had V. loved her; but since he did not really love the wretched little virgin, and since no amount of carnal tenderness could or can pass for true love, and since, above all, the fatal Andalusian wench who had come, I repeat, into the picture, was unforgettable, I am bound to arrive, dear Ada and dear Andrey, at the conclusion that whatever the miserable man could have thought up, she would have pokonchila soboy ('put an end to herself') all the same. In other more deeply moral worlds than this pellet of muck, there might exist restraints, principles, transcendental consolations, and even a certain pride in making happy someone one does not really love; but on this planet Lucettes are doomed.

Some poor little things belonging to her - a cigarette case, a tulle evening frock, a book dog's-eared at a French picnic - have had to be destroyed, because they stared at me. I remain your obedient servant.

Son:

I have followed your instructions, anent that letter, to the letter. Your epistolary style is so involute that I should suspect the presence of a code, had I not known you belonged to the Decadent School of writing, in company of naughty old Leo and consumptive Anton. I do not give a damn whether you slept or not with Lucette; but I know from Dorothy Vinelander that the child had been in love with you. The film you saw was, no doubt, Don Juan's Last Fling in which Ada, indeed, impersonates (very beautifully) a Spanish girl. A jinx has been cast on our poor girl's career. Howard Hool argued after the release that he had been made to play an impossible cross between two Dons; that initially Yuzlik (the director) had meant to base his 'fantasy' on Cervantes's crude romance; that some scraps of the basic script stuck like dirty wool to the final theme; and that if you followed closely the sound track you could hear a fellow reveler in the tavern scene address Hool twice as 'Quicks.' Hool managed to buy up and destroy a number of copies while others have been locked up by the lawyer of the writer Osberg, who claims the gitanilla sequence was stolen from one of his own concoctions. In result it is impossible to purchase a reel of the picture which will vanish like the proverbial smoke once it has fizzled out on provincial screens. Come and have dinner with me on July 10. Evening dress.

Cher ami,

Nous fûmes, mon mari et moi, profondément bouleversés par l'effroyable nouvelle. C'est à moi - et je m'en souviendrai toujours! - que presqu'à la veille de sa mort cette pauvre fille s'est adressée pour arranger les choses sur le Tobakoff qui est toujours bondé, et que désormais je ne prendrai plus, par un peu de superstition et beaucoup de sympathie pour la douce, la tendre Lucette. J'étais si heureuse de faire mon possible, car quelqu'un m'avait dit que vous aussi y seriez; d'ailleurs, elle m'en a parlé elle-même: elle semblait tellement joyeuse de passer quelques jours sur le 'pont des gaillards' avec son cher cousin! La psychologie du suicide est un mystère que nul savant ne peut expliquer.

Je n'ai jamais versé tant de larmes, la plume m'en tombe des doigts. Nous revenons à Malbrook vers la mi-août. Bien à vous,

Cordula de Prey-Tobak

Van:

Andrey and I were deeply moved by the additional data you provide in your dear (i.e., insufficiently stamped!) letter. We had already received, through Mr Grombchevski, a note from the Robinsons, who cannot forgive themselves, poor well-meaning friends, for giving her that seasickness medicine, an overdose of which, topped by liquor, must have impaired her capacity to survive - if she changed her mind in the cold dark water. I cannot express, dear Van, how unhappy I am, the more so as we never learned in the arbors of Ardis that such unhappiness could exist.

My only love:

This letter will never be posted. It will lie in a steel box buried under a cypress in the garden of Villa Armina, and when it turns up by chance half a millennium hence, nobody will know who wrote it and for whom it was meant. It would not have been written at all if your last line, your cry of unhappiness, were not my cry of triumph. The burden of that excitement must be... [The rest of the sentence was found to be obliterated by a rusty stain when the box was dug up in 1928. The letter continues as follows]: ...back in the States, I started upon a singular quest. In Manhattan, in Kingston, in Lahore, in dozens of other towns, I kept pursuing the picture which I had not [badly discolored] on the boat, from cinema to cinema, every time discovering a new item of glorious torture, a new convulsion of beauty in your performance. That [illegible] is a complete refutation of odious Kim's odious stills. Artistically, and ardisiacally, the best moment is one of the last - when you follow barefoot the Don who walks down a marble gallery to his doom, to the scaffold of Dona Anna's black-curtained bed, around which you flutter, my Zegris butterfly, straightening a comically drooping candle, whispering delightful but futile instructions into the frowning lady's ear, and then peering over that mauresque screen and suddenly dissolving in such natural laughter, helpless and lovely, that one wonders if any art could do without that erotic gasp of schoolgirl mirth. And to think, Spanish orange-tip, that all in all your magic gambol lasted but eleven minutes of stopwatch time in patches of two- or three-minute scenes!

Alas, there came a night, in a dismal district of workshops and bleary shebeens, when for the very last time, and only halfway, because at the seduction scene the film black-winked and shriveled, I managed to catch [the entire end of the letter is damaged].

7

He greeted the dawn of a placid and prosperous century (more than half of which Ada and I have now seen) with the beginning of his second philosophic fable, a 'denunciation of space' (never to be completed, but forming in rear vision, a preface to his Texture of Time). Part of that treatise, a rather mannered affair, but nasty and sound, appeared in the first issue (January, 1904) of a now famous American monthly, The Artisan, and a comment on the excerpt is preserved in one of the tragically formal letters (all destroyed save this one) that his sister sent him by public post now and then. Somehow, after the interchange occasioned by Lucette's death such nonclandestine correspondence had been established with the tacit sanction of Demon:

And o'er the summits of the Tacit

He, banned from Paradise, flew on:

Beneath him, like a brilliant's facet,

Mount Peck with snows eternal shone.

It would seem indeed that continued ignorance of each other's existence might have looked more suspicious than the following sort of note:

Agavia Ranch

February 5, 1905

I have just read Reflections in Sidra, by Ivan Veen, and I regard it as a grand piece, dear Professor. The 'lost shafts of destiny' and other poetical touches reminded me of the two or three times you had tea and muffins at our place in the country about twenty years ago. I was, you remember (presumptuous phrase!), a petite fille modèle practicing archery near a vase and a parapet and you were a shy schoolboy (with whom, as my mother guessed, I may have been a wee bit in love!), who dutifully picked up the arrows I lost in the lost shrubbery of the lost castle of poor Lucette's and happy, happy Adette's childhood, now a 'Home for Blind Blacks' - both my mother and L., I'm sure, would have backed Dasha's advice to turn it over to her Sect. Dasha, my sister-in-law (you must meet her soon, yes, yes, yes, she's dreamy and lovely, and lots more intelligent than I), who showed me your piece, asks me to add she hopes to 'renew' your acquaintance - maybe in Switzerland, at the Bellevue in Mont Roux, in October. I think you once met pretty Miss 'Kim' Blackrent, well, that's exactly dear Dasha's type. She is very good at perceiving and pursuing originality and all kinds of studies which I can't even name! She finished Chose (where she read History - our Lucette used to call it 'Sale Histoire,' so sad and funny!). For her you're le beau ténébreux, because once upon a time, once upon libellula wings, not long before my marriage, she attended - I mean at that time, I'm stuck in my 'turnstyle' - one of your public lectures on dreams, after which she went up to you with her latest little nightmare all typed out and neatly clipped together, and you scowled darkly and refused to take it. Well, she's been after Uncle Dementiy to have him admonish le beau ténébreux to come to Mont Roux Bellevue Hotel, in October, around the seventeenth, I guess, and he only laughs and says it's up to Dashenka and me to arrange matters.

So 'congs' again, dear Ivan! You are, we both think, a marvelous, inimitable artist who should also 'only laugh,' if cretinic critics, especially lower-upper-middle-class Englishmen, accuse his turnstyle of being 'coy' and 'arch,' much as an American farmer finds the parson 'peculiar' because he knows Greek.

P.S.

Dushevno klanyayus' ('am souledly bowing', an incorrect and vulgar construction evoking the image of a 'bowing soul') nashemu zaochno dorogomu professoru ('to our "unsight-unseen" dear professor'), o kotorom mnogo slïshal (about whom have heard much) ot dobrago Dementiya Dedalovicha i sestritsï (from good Demon and my sister).

S uvazheniem (with respect),

Andrey Vaynlender

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. A list of 'leading figures' dead in the explosion comprised the advertising manager of a department store, the acting foreman in the sheet-metal division of a facsimile corporation, a recording firm executive, the senior partner of a law firm, an architect with heavy aviation background (a first misprint here, impossible to straighten out), the vice president of an insurance corporation, another vice president, this time of a board of adjustment whatever that might be -

'I'm hongree,' said a maussade Lebanese beauty of fifteen sultry summers.

'Use bell,' said Van, continuing in a state of odd fascination to go through the compilation of labeled lives:

- the president of a wholesale liquor-distributing firm, the manager of a turbine equipment company, a pencil manufacturer, two professors of philosophy, two newspaper reporters (with nothing more to report), the assistant controller of a wholesome liquor distribution bank (misprinted and misplaced), the assistant controller of a trust company, a president, the secretary of a printing agency -

The names of those big shots, as well as those of some eighty other men, women, and silent children who perished in blue air, were being withheld until all relatives had been reached; but the tabulatory preview of commonplace abstractions had been thought to be too imposing not to be given at once as an appetizer; and only on the following morning did Van learn that a bank president lost in the closing garble was his father.

'The lost shafts of every man's destiny remain scattered all around him,' etc. (Reflections in Sidra).

The last occasion on which Van had seen his father was at their house in the spring of 1904. Other people had been present: old Eliot, the real-estate man, two lawyers (Grombchevski and Gromwell), Dr Aix, the art expert, Rosalind Knight, Demon's new secretary, and solemn Kithar Sween, a banker who at sixty-five had become an avant-garde author; in the course of one miraculous year he had produced The Waistline, a satire in free verse on Anglo-American feeding habits, and Cardinal Grishkin, an overtly subtle yam extolling the Roman faith. The poem was but the twinkle in an owl's eye; as to the novel it had already been pronounced 'seminal' by celebrated young critics (Norman Girsh, Louis Deer, many others) who lauded it in reverential voices pitched so high that an ordinary human ear could not make much of that treble volubility; it seemed, however, all very exciting, and after a great bang of obituary essays in 1910 ('Kithar Sween: the man and the writer,' 'Sween as poet and person,' 'Kithar Kirman Lavehr Sween: a tentative biography') both the satire and the romance were to be forgotten as thoroughly as that acting foreman's control of background adjustment - or Demon's edict.

The table talk dealt mainly with business matters. Demon had recently bought a small, perfectly round Pacific island, with a pink house on a green bluff and a sand beach like a frill (as seen from the air), and now wished to sell the precious little palazzo in East Manhattan that Van did not want. Mr Sween, a greedy practitioner with flashy rings on fat fingers, said he might buy it if some of the pictures were thrown in. The deal did not come off.

Van pursued his studies in private until his election (at thirty-five!) to the Rattner Chair of Philosophy in the University of Kingston. The Council's choice had been a consequence of disaster and desperation; the two other candidates, solid scholars much older and altogether better than he, esteemed even in Tartary where they often traveled, starry-eyed, hand-in-hand, had mysteriously vanished (perhaps dying under false names in the never-explained accident above the smiling ocean) at the 'eleventh hour,' for the Chair was to be dismantled if it remained vacant for a legally limited length of time, so as to give another, less-coveted but perfectly good seat the chance to be brought in from the back parlor. Van neither needed nor appreciated the thing, but accepted it in a spirit of good-natured perversity or perverse gratitude, or simply in memory of his father who had been somehow involved in the whole affair. He did not take his task too seriously, reducing to a strict minimum, ten or so per year, the lectures he delivered in a nasal drone mainly produced by a new and hard to get 'voice recorder' concealed in his waistcoat pocket, among anti-infection Venus pills, while he moved his lips silently and thought of the lamplit page of his sprawling script left unfinished in his study. He spent in Kingston a score of dull years (variegated by trips abroad), an obscure figure around which no legends collected in the university or the city. Unbeloved by his austere colleagues, unknown in local pubs, unregretted by male students, he retired in 1922, after which he resided in Europe.

8

arriving mont roux bellevue sunday

dinnertime adoration sorrow rainbows

Van got this bold cable with his breakfast on Saturday, October 10, 1905, at the Manhattan Palace in Geneva, and that same day moved to Mont Roux at the opposite end of the lake. He put up there at his usual hotel, Les Trois Cygnes. Its small, frail, but almost mythically ancient concierge had died during Van's stay four years earlier, and instead of wizened Julien's discreet smile of mysterious complicity that used to shine like a lamp through parchment, the round rosy face of a recent bellboy, who now wore a frockcoat, greeted fat old Van.

'Lucien,' said Dr Veen, peering over his spectacles, 'I may have - as your predecessor would know - all kinds of queer visitors, magicians, masked ladies, madmen - que sais-je? and I expect miracles of secrecy from all three mute swans. Here's a prefatory bonus.'

'Merci infiniment,' said the concierge, and, as usual, Van felt infinitely touched by the courteous hyperbole provoking no dearth of philosophical thought.

He engaged two spacious rooms, 509 and 510: an Old World salon with golden-green furniture, and a charming bed chamber joined to a square bathroom, evidently converted from an ordinary room (around 1875, when the hotel was renovated and splendified). With thrilling anticipation, he read the octagonal cardboard sign on its dainty red string: Do not disturb. Prière de ne pas déranger. Hang this notice on the doorhandle outside. Inform Telephone Exchange. Avisez en particulier la téléphoniste (no emphasis, no limpid-voiced girl in the English version).

He ordered an orgy of orchids from the rez-de-chaussée flower shop, and one ham sandwich from Room Service. He survived a long night (with Alpine Choughs heckling a cloudless dawn) in a bed hardly two-thirds the size of the tremendous one at their unforgettable flat twelve years ago. He breakfasted on the balcony - and ignored a reconnoitering gull. He allowed himself an opulent siesta after a late lunch; took a second bath to drown time; and with stops at every other bench on the promenade spent a couple of hours strolling over to the new Bellevue Palace, just half a mile southeast.

One red boat marred the blue mirror (in Casanova's days there would have been hundreds!). The grebes were there for the winter but the coots had not yet returned.

Ardis, Manhattan, Mont Roux, our little rousse is dead. Vrubel's wonderful picture of Father, those demented diamonds staring at me, painted into me.

Mount Russet, the forested hill behind the town, lived up to its name and autumnal reputation, with a warm glow of curly chestnut trees; and on the opposite shore of Leman, Leman meaning Lover, loomed the crest of Sex Noir, Black Rock.

He felt hot and uncomfortable in silk shirt and gray flannels - one of his older suits that he had chosen because it happened to make him look slimmer; but he should have omitted its tightish waistcoat. Nervous as a boy at his first rendezvous! He wondered what better to hope for - that her presence should be diluted at once by that of other people or that she should manage to be alone, for the first minutes, at least? Did his glasses and short black mustache really make him look younger, as polite whores affirmed?

When he reached at long last the whitewashed and blue-shaded Bellevue (patronized by wealthy Estotilanders, Rheinlanders, and Vinelanders, but not placed in the same superclass as the old, tawny and gilt, huge, sprawling, lovable Trois Cygnes), Van saw with dismay that his watch still lagged far behind 7:00 p.m., the earliest dinner hour in local hotels. So he recrossed the lane and had a double kirsch, with a lump of sugar, in a pub. A dead and dry hummingbird moth lay on the window ledge of the lavatory. Thank goodness, symbols did not exist either in dreams or in the life in between.

He pushed through the revolving door of the Bellevue, tripped over a gaudy suitcase, and made his entrée at a ridiculous run. The concierge snapped at the unfortunate green-aproned cameriere, who had left the bag there. Yes, they were expecting him in the lounge. A German tourist caught up with him, to apologize, effusively, and not without humor, for the offending object, which, he said, was his.

'If so,' remarked Van, 'you should not allow spas to slap their stickers on your private appendages.'

His reply was inept, and the whole episode had a faint paramnesic tang - and next instant Van was shot dead from behind (such things happen, some tourists are very unbalanced) and stepped into his next phase of existence.

He stopped on the threshold of the main lounge, but hardly had he begun to scan the distribution of its scattered human contents, than an abrupt flurry occurred in a distant group. Ada, spurning decorum, was hurrying toward him. Her solitary and precipitate advance consumed in reverse all the years of their separation as she changed from a dark-glittering stranger with the high hair-do in fashion to the pale-armed girl in black who had always belonged to him. At that particular twist of time they happened to be the only people conspicuously erect and active in the huge room, and heads turned and eyes peered when the two met in the middle of it as on a stage; but what should have been, in culmination of her headlong motion, of the ecstasy in her eyes and fiery jewels, a great explosion of voluble love, was marked by incongruous silence; he raised to his unbending lips and kissed her cygneous hand, and then they stood still, staring at each other, he playing with coins in his trouser pockets under his 'humped' jacket, she fingering her necklace, each reflecting, as it were, the uncertain light to which all that radiance of mutual welcome had catastrophically decreased. She was more Ada than ever, but a dash of new elegancy had been added to her shy, wild charm. Her still blacker hair was drawn back and up into a glossy chignon, and the Lucette line of her exposed neck, slender and straight, came as a heartrending surprise. He was trying to form a succinct sentence (to warn her about the device he planned for securing a rendezvous), but she interrupted his throat clearing with a muttered injunction: Sbrit' usï! (that mustache must go) and turned away to lead him to the far corner from which she had taken so many years to reach him.

The first person whom she introduced him to, at that island of fauteuils and androids, now getting up from around a low table with a copper ashbowl for hub, was the promised belle-s?ur, a short plumpish lady in governess gray, very oval-faced, with bobbed auburn hair, a sallowish complexion, smoke-blue unsmiling eyes, and a fleshy little excrescence, resembling a ripe maize kernel, at the side of one nostril, added to its hypercritical curve by an afterthought of nature as not seldom happens when a Russian's face is mass-produced. The next outstretched hand belonged to a handsome, tall, remarkably substantial and cordial nobleman who could be none other than the Prince Gremin of the preposterous libretto, and whose strong honest clasp made Van crave for a disinfecting fluid to wash off contact with any of her husband's public parts. But as Ada, beaming again, made fluttery introductions with an invisible wand, the person Van had grossly mistaken for Andrey Vinelander was transformed into Yuzlik, the gifted director of the ill-fated Don Juan picture. 'Vasco de Gama, I presume,' Yuzlik murmured. Beside him, ignored by him, unknown by name to Ada, and now long dead of dreary anonymous ailments, stood in servile attitudes the two agents of Lemorio, the flamboyant comedian (a bearded boor of exceptional, and now also forgotten, genius, whom Yuzlik passionately wanted for his next picture). Lemorio had stood him up twice before, in Rome and San Remo, each time sending him for 'preliminary contact' those two seedy, incompetent, virtually insane, people with whom by now Yuzlik had nothing more to discuss, having exhausted everything, topical gossip, Lemorio's sex life, Hoole's hooliganism, as well as the hobbies of his, Yuzlik's, three sons and those of their, the agents', adopted child, a lovely Eurasian lad, who had recently been slain in a night-club fracas - which closed that subject. Ada had welcomed Yuzlik's unexpected reality in the lounge of the Bellevue not only as a counterpoise to the embarrassment and the deceit, but also because she hoped to sidle into What Daisy Knew; however, besides having no spells left in the turmoil of her spirit for business blandishments, she soon understood that if Lemorio were finally engaged, he would want her part for one of his mistresses.

Finally Van reached Ada's husband.

Van had murdered good Andrey Andreevich Vinelander so often, so thoroughly, at all the dark crossroads of the mind, that now the poor chap, dressed in a hideous, funereal, double-breasted suit, with those dough-soft features slapped together anyhow, and those sad-hound baggy eyes, and the dotted lines of sweat on his brow, presented all the depressing features of an unnecessary resurrection. Through a not-too-odd oversight (or rather 'undersight') Ada omitted to introduce the two men. Her husband enunciated his name, patronymic, and surname with the didactic intonations of a Russian educational-film narrator. 'Obnimemsya, dorogoy' (let us embrace, old boy), he added in a more vibrant voice but with his mournful expression unchanged (oddly remindful of that of Kosygin, the mayor of Yukonsk, receiving a girl scout's bouquet or inspecting the damage caused by an earthquake). His breath carried the odor of what Van recognized with astonishment as a strong tranquilizer on a neocodein base, prescribed in the case of psychopathic pseudo bronchitis. As Andrey's crumpled forlorn face came closer, one could distinguish various wartlets and lumps, none of them, however, placed in the one-sided jaunty position of his kid sister's naric codicil. He kept his dun-colored hair as short as a soldier's by means of his own clippers. He had the korrektnïy and neat appearance of the one-bath-per-week Estotian hobereau.

We all flocked to the dining room. Van brushed against the past as he shot an arm out to forestall a door-opening waiter, and the past (still fingering his necklace) recompensed him with a sidelong' Dolores' glance.

Chance looked after the seating arrangement.

Lemorio's agents, an elderly couple, unwed but having lived as man and man for a sufficiently long period to warrant a silver-screen anniversary, remained unsplit at table between Yuzlik, who never once spoke to them, and Van, who was being tortured by Dorothy. As to Andrey (who made a thready 'sign of the cross' over his un-unbuttonable abdomen before necking in his napkin), he found himself seated between sister and wife. He demanded the 'cart de van' (affording the real Van mild amusement), but, being a hard-liquor man, cast only a stunned look at the 'Swiss White' page of the wine list before 'passing the buck' to Ada who promptly ordered champagne. He was to inform her early next morning that her 'Kuzen proizvodit (produces) udivitel'no simpatichnoe vpechatlenie (a remarkably sympathetic, in the sense of "fetching," impression),' The dear fellow's verbal apparatus consisted almost exclusively of remarkably sympathetic Russian common-places of language, but - not liking to speak of himself - he spoke little, especially since his sister's sonorous soliloquy (lapping at Van's rock) mesmerized and childishly engrossed him. Dorothy preambled her long-delayed report on her pet nightmare with a humble complaint ('Of course, I know that for your patients to have bad dreams is a zhidovskaya prerogativa'), but her reluctant analyst's attention every time it returned to her from his plate fixed itself so insistently on the Greek cross of almost ecclesiastical size shining on her otherwise unremarkable chest that she thought fit to interrupt her narrative (which had to do with the eruption of a dream volcano) to say: 'I gather from your writings that you are a terrible cynic. Oh, I quite agree with Simone Traser that a dash of cynicism adorns a real man; yet I'd like to warn you that I object to anti-Orthodox jokes in case you intend making one.'

By now Van had more than enough of his mad, but not interestingly mad, convive. He just managed to steady his glass, which a gesture he made to attract Ada's attention had almost knocked down, and said, without further ado, in what Ada termed afterwards a mordant, ominous and altogether inadmissible tone:

'Tomorrow morning, je veux vous accaparer, ma chère. As my lawyer, or yours, or both, have, perhaps, informed you, Lucette's accounts in several Swiss banks -' and he trotted out a prepared version of a state of affairs invented in toto. 'I suggest,' he added, 'that if you have no other engagements' - (sending a questioning glance that avoided the Vinelanders by leaping across and around the three cinematists, all of whom nodded in idiotic approval) - 'you and I go to see Ma?tre Jorat, or Raton, name escapes me, my adviser, enfin, in Luzon, half an hour drive from here - who has given me certain papers which I have at my hotel and which I must have you sigh - I mean sign with a sigh - the matter is tedious. All right? All right.'

'But, Ada,' clarioned Dora, 'you forget that tomorrow morning we wanted to visit the Institute of Floral Harmony in the Château Piron!'

'You'll do it after tomorrow, or Tuesday, or Tuesday week,' said Van. 'I'd gladly drive all three of you to that fascinating lieu de méditation but my fast little Unseretti seats only one passenger, and that business of untraceable deposits is terribly urgent, I think.'

Yuzlik was dying to say something. Van yielded to the well-meaning automaton.

'I'm delighted and honored to dine with Vasco de Gama,' said Yuzlik holding up his glass in front of his handsome facial apparatus.

The same garbling - and this gave Van a clue to Yuzlik's source of recondite information - occurred in The Chimes of Chose (a memoir by a former chum of Van's, now Lord Chose, which had climbed, and still clung to, the 'best seller' trellis - mainly because of several indecent but very funny references to the Villa Venus in Ranton Brooks). While he munched the marrow of an adequate answer, with a mouthful of sharlott (not the charlatan 'charlotte russe' served in most restaurants, but the hot toasty crust, with apple filling, of the authentic castle pie made by Takomin, the hotel's head cook, who hailed from California's Rose Bay), two urges were cleaving Van asunder: one to insult Yuzlik for having placed his hand on Ada's when asking her to pass him the butter two or three courses ago (he was incomparably more jealous of that liquid-eyed male than of Andrey and remembered with a shiver of pride and hate how on New Year's Eve, 1893, he had lashed out at a relative of his, foppish Van Zemski, who had permitted himself a similar caress when visiting their restaurant table, and whose jaw he had broken later, under some pretext or other, at the young prince's club); and the other - to tell Yuzlik how much he had admired Don Juan's Last Fling. Not being able, for obvious reasons, to satisfy urge number one he dismissed number two as secretly smacking of a poltroon's politeness and contented himself with replying, after swallowing his amber-soaked mash:

'Jack Chose's book is certainly most entertaining - especially that bit about apples and diarrhea, and the excerpts from the Venus Shell Album' - (Yuzlik's eyes darted aside in specious recollection; whereupon he bowed in effusive tribute to a common memory) - 'but the rascal should have neither divulged my name nor botched my thespionym.'

During that dismal dinner (enlivened only by the sharlott and five bottles of Moët, out of which Van consumed more than three), he avoided looking at that part of Ada which is called 'the face' - a vivid, divine, mysteriously shocking part, which, in that essential form, is rarely met with among human beings (pasty and warty marks do not count). Ada on the other hand could not help her dark eyes from turning to him every other moment, as if, with each glance, she regained her balance; but when the company went back to the lounge and finished their coffee there, difficulties of focalization began to beset Van, whose points de repère disastrously decreased after the three cinematists had left.

ANDREY: Adochka, dushka (darling), razskazhi zhe pro rancho, pro skot (tell about the ranch, the cattle), emu zhe lyubopïtno (it cannot fail to interest him).

ADA (as if coming out of a trance): O chyom tï (you were saying something)?

ANDREY: Ya govoryu, razskazhi emu pro tvoyo zhit'yo bït'yo (I was saying, tell him about your daily life, your habitual existence). Avos' zaglyanet k nam (maybe he'd look us up).

ADA: Ostav', chto tam interesnago (what's so interesting about it)?

DASHA (turning to Ivan): Don't listen to her. Massa interesnago (heaps of interesting stuff). Delo brata ogromnoe, volnuyushchee delo, trebuyushchee ne men'she truda, chem uchyonaya dissertatsiya (his business is a big thing, quite as demanding as a scholar's). Nashi sel'skohozyaystvennïya mashinï i ih teni (our agricultural machines and their shadows) - eto tselaya kollektsiya predmetov modernoy skul'pturï i zhivopisi (is a veritable collection of modern art) which I suspect you adore as I do.

IVAN (to Andrey): I know nothing about farming but thanks all the same.

(A pause.)

IVAN (not quite knowing what to add): Yes, I would certainly like to see your machinery some day. Those things always remind me of long-necked prehistoric monsters, sort of grazing here and there, you know, or just brooding over the sorrows of extinction - but perhaps I'm thinking of excavators -

DOROTHY: Andrey's machinery is anything but prehistoric! (laughs cheerlessly).

ANDREY: Slovom, milosti prosim (anyway, you are most welcome). Budete zharit' verhom s kuzinoy (you'll have a rollicking time riding on horseback with your cousin).

(Pause.)

IVAN (to Ada): Half-past nine tomorrow morning won't be too early for you? I'm at the Trois Cygnes. I'll come to fetch you in my tiny car - not on horseback (smiles like a corpse at Andrey).

DASHA: Dovol'no skuchno (rather a pity) that Ada's visit to lovely Lake Leman need be spoiled by sessions with lawyers and bankers. I'm sure you can satisfy most of those needs by having her come a few times chez vous and not to Luzon or Geneva.

The madhouse babble reverted to Lucette's bank accounts, Ivan Dementievich explained that she had been mislaying one checkbook after another, and nobody knew exactly in how many different banks she had dumped considerable amounts of money. Presently, Andrey who now looked like the livid Yukonsk mayor after opening the Catkin Week Fair or fighting a Forest Fire with a new type of extinguisher, grunted out of his chair, excused himself for going to bed so early, and shook hands with Van as if they were parting forever (which, indeed, they were). Van remained with the two ladies in the cold and deserted lounge where a thrifty subtraction of faraday-light had imperceptibly taken place.

'How did you like my brother?' asked Dorothy. 'On redchayshiy chelovek (he's, a most rare human being). I can't tell you how profoundly affected he was by the terrible death of your father, and, of course, by Lucette's bizarre end. Even he, the kindest of men, could not help disapproving of her Parisian sans-gêne, but he greatly admired her looks - as I think you also did - no, no, do not negate it! - because, as I have always said, her prettiness seemed to complement Ada's, the two halves forming together something like perfect beauty, in the Platonic sense' (that cheerless smile again). 'Ada is certainly a "perfect beauty," a real muirninochka - even when she winces like that - but she is beautiful only in our little human terms, within the quotes of our social esthetics - right, Professor? - in the way a meal or a marriage or a little French tramp can be called perfect.'

'Drop her a curtsey,' gloomily remarked Van to Ada.

'Oh, my Adochka knows how devoted I am to her' - (opening her palm in the wake of Ada's retreating hand). 'I've shared all her troubles. How many podzharïh (tight-crotched) cowboys we've had to fire because they delali ey glazki (ogled her)! And how many bereavements we've gone through since the new century started! Her mother and my mother; the Archbishop of Ivankover and Dr Swissair of Lumbago (where mother and I reverently visited him in 1888); three distinguished uncles (whom, fortunately, I hardly knew); and your father, who, I've always maintained, resembled a Russian aristocrat much more than he did an Irish Baron. Incidentally, in her deathbed delirium - you don't mind, Ada, if I divulge to him ces potins de famille? - our splendid Marina was obsessed by two delusions, which mutually excluded each other - that you were married to Ada and that you and she were brother and sister, and the clash between those two ideas caused her intense mental anguish. How does your school of psychiatry explain that kind of conflict?'

'I don't attend school any longer,' said Van, stifling a yawn; 'and, furthermore, in my works, I try not to "explain" anything, I merely describe.'

'Still, you cannot deny that certain insights -'

It went on and on like that for more than an hour and Van's clenched jaws began to ache. Finally, Ada got up, and Dorothy followed suit but continued to speak standing:

'Tomorrow dear Aunt Beloskunski-Belokonski is coming to dinner, a delightful old spinster, who lives in a villa above Valvey. Terriblement grande dame et tout ça. Elle aime taquiner Andryusha en disant qu'un simple cultivateur comme lui n'aurait pas dû épouser la fille d'une actrice et d'un marchand de tableaux. Would you care to join us - Jean?'

Jean replied: 'Alas, no, dear Daria Andrevna: Je dois "surveiller les kilos." Besides, I have a business dinner tomorrow.'

'At least' - (smiling) - 'you could call me Dasha.'

'I do it for Andrey,' explained Ada, 'actually the grand' dame in question is a vulgar old skunk.'

'Ada!' uttered Dasha with a look of gentle reproof.

Before the two ladies proceeded toward the lift, Ada glanced at Van - and he - no fool in amorous strategy - refrained to comment on her 'forgetting' her tiny black silk handbag on the seat of her chair. He did not accompany them beyond the passage leading liftward and, clutching the token, awaited her planned return behind a pillar of hotel-hall mongrel design, knowing that in a moment she would say to her accursed companion (by now revising, no doubt, her views on the 'beau ténébreux') as the lift's eye turned red under a quick thumb: 'Akh, sumochku zabïla (forgot my bag)!' - and instantly flitting back, like Vere's Ninon, she would be in his arms.

Their open mouths met in tender fury, and then he pounced upon her new, young, divine, Japanese neck which he had been coveting like a veritable Jupiter Olorinus throughout the evening.

'We'll vroom straight to my place as soon as you wake up, don't bother to bathe, jump into your lenclose -' and, with the burning sap brimming, he again devoured her, until (Dorothy must have reached the sky!) she danced three fingers on his wet lips - and escaped.

'Wipe your neck!' he called after her in a rapid whisper (who, and wherein this tale, in this life, had also attempted a whispered cry?)

That night, in a post-Moët dream, he sat on the talc of a tropical beach full of sun-baskers, and one moment was rubbing the red, irritated shaft of a writhing boy, and the next was looking through dark glasses at the symmetrical shading on either side of a shining spine with fainter shading between the ribs belonging to Lucette or Ada sitting on a towel at some distance from him. Presently, she turned and lay prone, and she, too, wore sunglasses, and neither he nor she could perceive the exact direction of each other's gaze through the black amber, yet he knew by the dimple of a faint smile that she was looking at his (it had been his all the time) raw scarlet. Somebody said, wheeling a table nearby: 'It's one of the Vane sisters,' and he awoke murmuring with professional appreciation the oneiric word-play combining his name and surname, and plucked out the wax plugs, and, in a marvelous act of rehabilitation and link-up, the breakfast table clanked from the corridor across the threshold of the adjacent room, and, already munching and honey-crumbed, Ada entered his bedchamber. It was only a quarter to eight!

'Smart girl!' said Van; 'but first of all I must go to the petit endroit (W.C.).'

That meeting, and the nine that followed, constituted the highest ridge of their twenty-one-year-old love: its complicated, dangerous, ineffably radiant coming of age. The somewhat Italianate style of the apartment, its elaborate wall lamps with ornaments of pale caramel glass, its white knobbles that produced indiscriminately light or maids, the slat-eyes, veiled, heavily curtained windows which made the morning as difficult to disrobe as a crinolined prude, the convex sliding doors of the huge white 'Nuremberg Virgin'-like closet in the hallway of their suite, and even the tinted engraving by Randon of a rather stark three-mast ship on the zigzag green waves of Marseilles Harbor - in a word, the alberghian atmosphere of those new trysts added a novelistic touch (Aleksey and Anna may have asterisked here!) which Ada welcomed as a frame, as a form, something supporting and guarding life, otherwise unprovidenced on Desdemonia, where artists are the only gods. When after three or four hours of frenetic love Van and Mrs Vinelander would abandon their sumptuous retreat for the blue haze of an extraordinary October which kept dreamy and warm throughout the duration of adultery, they had the feeling of still being under the protection of those painted Priapi that the Romans once used to set up in the arbors of Rufomonticulus.

'I shall walk you home... we have just returned from a conference with the Luzon bankers and I'm walking you back to your hotel from mine' - this was the phrase consacrée that Van invariably uttered to inform the fates of the situation. One little precaution they took from the start was to strictly avoid equivocal exposure on their lakeside balcony which was visible to every yellow or mauve flowerhead on the platbands of the promenade.

They used a back exit to leave the hotel.

A boxwood-lined path, presided over by a nostalgic-looking sempervirent sequoia (which American visitors mistook for a 'Lebanese cedar' - if they remarked it at all) took them to the absurdly misnamed rue du Mûrier, where a princely paulownia ('mulberry tree!' snorted Ada), standing in state on its incongruous terrace above a public W.C., was shedding generously its heart-shaped dark green leaves, but retained enough foliage to cast arabesques of shadow onto the south side of its trunk. A ginkgo (of a much more luminous greenish gold than its neighbor, a dingily yellowing local birch) marked the corner of a cobbled lane leading down to the quay. They followed southward the famous Fillietaz Promenade which went along the Swiss side of the lake from Valvey to the Château de Byron (or 'She Yawns Castle'). The fashionable season had ended, and wintering birds, as well as a number of knickerbockered Central Europeans, had replaced the English families as well as the Russian noblemen from Nipissing and Nipigon.

'My upper-lip space feels indecently naked.' (He had shaved his mustache off with howls of pain in her presence). 'And I cannot keep sucking in my belly all the time.'

'Oh, I like you better with that nice overweight - there's more of you. It's the maternal gene, I suppose, because Demon grew leaner and leaner. He looked positively Quixotic when I saw him at Mother's funeral. It was all very strange. He wore blue mourning. D'Onsky's son, a person with only one arm, threw his remaining one around Demon and both wept comme des jontaines. Then a robed person who looked like an extra in a technicolor incarnation of Vishnu made an incomprehensible sermon. Then she went up in smoke. He said to me, sobbing: "I will not cheat the poor grubs!" Practically a couple of hours after he broke that promise we had sudden visitors at the ranch - an incredibly graceful moppet of eight, black-veiled, and a kind of duenna, also in black, with two bodyguards. The hag demanded certain fantastic sums - which Demon, she said, had not had time to pay, for "popping the hymen" - whereupon I had one of our strongest boys throw out vsyu (the entire) kompaniyu.'

'Extraordinary,' said Van, 'they had been growing younger and younger - I mean the girls, not the strong silent boys. His old Rosalind had a ten-year-old niece, a primed chickabiddy. Soon he would have been poaching them from the hatching chamber.'

'You never loved your father,' said Ada sadly.

'Oh, I did and do - tenderly, reverently, understandingly, because, after all, that minor poetry of the flesh is something not unfamiliar to me. But as far as we are concerned, I mean you and I, he was buried on the same day as our uncle Dan.'

'I know, I know. It's pitiful! And what use was it? Perhaps I oughtn't to tell you, but his visits to Agavia kept getting rarer and shorter every year. Yes, it was pitiful to hear him and Andrey talking. I mean, Andrey n'a pas le verbe facile, though he greatly appreciated - without quite understanding it - Demon's wild flow of fancy and fantastic fact, and would often exclaim, with his Russian "tssk-tssk" and a shake of the head - complimentary and all that - "what a balagur (wag) you are!" - And then, one day, Demon warned me that he would not come any more if he heard again poor Andrey's poor joke (Nu i balagur-zhe vï, Dementiy Labirintovich) or what Dorothy, l'impayable ("priceless for impudence and absurdity") Dorothy, thought of my camping out in the mountains with only Mayo, a cowhand, to protect me from lions.'

'Could one hear more about that?' asked Van.

'Well, nobody did. All this happened at a time when I was not on speaking terms with my husband and sister-in-law, and so could not control the situation. Anyhow, Demon did not come even when he was only two hundred miles away and simply mailed instead, from some gaming house, your lovely, lovely letter about Lucette and my picture.'

'One would also like to know some details of the actual coverture - frequence of intercourse, pet names for secret warts, favorite smells -'

'Platok momental'no (handkerchief quick)! Your right nostril is full of damp jade,' said Ada, and then pointed to a lawnside circular sign, rimmed with red, saying: Chiens interdits and depicting an impossible black mongrel with a white ribbon around its neck: Why, she wondered, should the Swiss magistrates forbid one to cross highland terriers with poodles?

The last butterflies of 1905, indolent Peacocks and Red Admirables, one Queen of Spain and one Clouded Yellow, were making the most of the modest blossoms. A tram on their left passed close to the promenade, where they rested and cautiously kissed when the whine of wheels had subsided. The rails hit by the sun acquired a beautiful cobalt sheen - the reflection of noon in terms of bright metal.

'Let's have cheese and white wine under that pergola,' suggested Van. 'The Vinelanders will lunch à deux today.'

Some kind of musical gadget played jungle jingles; the open bags of a Tirolese couple stood unpleasantly near - and Van bribed the waiter to carry their table out, onto the boards of an unused pier. Ada admired the waterfowl population: Tufted Ducks, black with contrasty white flanks making them look like shoppers (this and the other comparisons are all Ada's) carrying away an elongated flat carton (new tie? gloves?) under each arm, while the black tuft recalled Van's head when he was fourteen and wet, having just taken a dip in the brook. Coots (which had returned after all), swimming with an odd pumping movement of the neck, the way horses walk. Small grebes and big ones, with crests, holding their heads erect, with something heraldic in their demeanor. They had, she said, wonderful nuptial rituals, closely facing each other - so (putting up her index fingers bracketwise) - rather like two bookends and no books between, and, shaking their heads in turn, with flashes of copper.

'I asked you about Andrey's rituals.'

'Ach, Andrey is so excited to see all those European birds! He's a great sportsman and knows our Western game remarkably well. We have in the West a very cute little grebe with a black ribbon around its fat white bill. Andrey calls it pestroklyuvaya chomga. And that big chomga there is hohlushka, he says. If you scowl like that once again, when I say something innocent and on the whole rather entertaining, I'm going to kiss you on the tip of the nose, in front of everybody.'

Just a tiny mite artificial, not in her best Veen. But she recovered instantly:

'Oh, look at those sea gulls playing chicken.'

Several rieuses, a few of which were still wearing their tight black summer bonnets, had settled on the vermilion railing along the lakeside, with their tails to the path and watched which of them would stay staunchly perched at the approach of the next passerby. The majority flapped waterward as Ada and Van neared; one twitched its tail feathers and made a movement analogous to 'bending one's knees' but saw it through and remained on the railing.

'I think we noticed that species only once in Arizona - at a place called Saltsink - a kind of man-made lake. Our common ones have quite different wing tips.'

A Crested Grebe, afloat some way off, slowly, slowly, very slowly started to sink, then abruptly executed a jumping fish plunge, showing its glossy white underside, and vanished.

'Why on earth,' asked Van, 'didn't you let her know, in one way or another, that you were not angry with her? Your phoney letter made her most unhappy!'

'Pah!' uttered Ada. 'She put me in a most embarrassing situation. I can quite understand her being mad at Dorothy (who meant well, poor stupid thing - stupid enough to warn me against possible "infections" such as "labial lesbianitis." Labial lesbianitis!) but that was no reason for Lucette to look up Andrey in town and tell him she was great friends with the man I had loved before my marriage. He didn't dare annoy me with his revived curiosity, but he complained to Dorothy of Lucette's neopravdannaya zhestokost' (unjustified cruelty).'

'Ada, Ada,' groaned Van, 'I want you to get rid of that husband of yours, and his sister, right now!'

'Give me a fortnight,' she said, 'I have to go back to the ranch. I can't bear the thought of her poking among my things.'

At first everything seemed to proceed according to the instructions of some friendly genius.

Much to Van's amusement (the tasteless display of which his mistress neither condoned nor condemned), Andrey was laid up with a cold for most of the week. Dorothy, a born nurser, considerably surpassed Ada (who, never being ill herself, could not stand the sight of an ailing stranger) in readiness of sickbed attendance, such as reading to the sweating and suffocating patient old issues of the Golos Feniksa; but on Friday the hotel doctor bundled him off to the nearby American Hospital, where even his sister was not allowed to Visit him 'because of the constant necessity of routine tests' - or rather because the poor fellow wished to confront disaster in manly solitude.

During the next few days, Dorothy used her leisure to spy upon Ada. The woman was sure of three things: that Ada had a lover in Switzerland; that Van was her brother; and that he was arranging for his irresistible sister secret trysts with the person she had loved before her marriage. The delightful phenomenon of all three terms being true, but making nonsense when hashed, provided Van with another source of amusement.

The Three Swans overwinged a bastion. Anyone who called, flesh or voice, was told by the concierge or his acolytes that Van was out, that Madame André Vinelander was unknown, and that all they could do was to take a message. His car, parked in a secluded bosquet, could not betray his presence. In the forenoon he regularly used the service lift that communicated directly with the backyard. Lucien, something of a wit, soon learned to recognize Dorothy's contralto: 'La voix cuivrée a téléphoné,' 'La Trompette n'était pas contente ce matin,' et cetera. Then the friendly Fates took a day off.

Andrey had had a first copious hemorrhage while on a business trip to Phoenix sometime in August. A stubborn, independent, not overbright optimist, he had ascribed it to a nosebleed having gone the wrong way and concealed it from everybody so as to avoid 'stupid talks.' He had had for years a two-pack smoker's fruity cough, but when a few days after that first 'postnasal blood drip' he spat a scarlet gob into his washbasin, he resolved to cut down on cigarettes and limit himself to tsigarki (cigarillos). The next contretemps occurred in Ada's presence, just before they left for Europe; he managed to dispose of his bloodstained handkerchief before she saw it, but she remembered him saying' Vot te na' (well, that's odd) in a bothered voice. Believing with most other Estotians that the best doctors were to be found in Central Europe, he told himself he would see a Zurich specialist whose name he got from a member of his 'lodge' (meeting place of brotherly moneymakers), if he again coughed up blood. The American hospital in Valvey, next to the Russian church built by Vladimir Chevalier, his granduncle, proved to be good enough for diagnosing advanced tuberculosis of the left lung.

On Wednesday, October 22, in the early afternoon, Dorothy, 'frantically' trying to 'locate' Ada (who after her usual visit to the Three Swans was spending a couple of profitable hours at Paphia's 'Hair and Beauty' Salon) left a message for Van, who got it only late at night when he returned from a trip to Sorcière, in the Valais, about one hundred miles east, where he bought a villa for himself et ma cousine, and had supper with the former owner, a banker's widow, amiable Mme Scarlet and her blond, pimply but pretty, daughter Eveline, both of whom seemed erotically moved by the rapidity of the deal.

He was still calm and confident; after carefully studying Dorothy's hysterical report, he still believed that nothing threatened their destiny; that at best Andrey would die right now, sparing Ada the bother of a divorce; and that at worst the man would be packed off to a mountain sanatorium in a novel to linger there through a few last pages of epilogical mopping up far away from the reality of their united lives. Friday morning, at nine o'clock - as bespoken on the eve - he drove over to the Bellevue, with the pleasant plan of motoring to Sorcière to show her the house.

At night a thunderstorm had rather patly broken the back of the miraculous summer. Even more patly the sudden onset of her flow had curtailed yesterday's caresses. It was raining when he slammed the door of his car, hitched up his velveteen slacks, and, stepping across puddles, passed between an ambulance and a large black Yak, waiting one behind the other before the hotel. All the wings of the Yak were spread open, two bellboys had started to pile in luggage under the chauffeur's supervision, and various parts of the old hackney car were responding with discreet creaks to the grunts of the loaders.

He suddenly became aware of the rain's reptile cold on his balding head and was about to enter the glass revolvo, when it produced Ada, somewhat in the manner of those carved-wood barometers whose doors yield either a male puppet or a female one. Her attire - that mackintosh over a high-necked dress, the fichu on her upswept hair, the crocodile bag slung across her shoulder - formed a faintly old-fashioned and even provincial ensemble. 'On her there was no face,' as Russians say to describe an expression of utter dejection.

She led him around the hotel to an ugly rotunda, out of the miserable drizzle, and there she attempted to embrace him but he evaded her lips. She was leaving in a few minutes. Heroic, helpless Andrey had been brought back to the hotel in an ambulance. Dorothy had managed to obtain three seats on the Geneva-Phoenix plane. The two cars were taking him, her and the heroic sister straight to the helpless airport.

She asked for a handkerchief, and he pulled out a blue one from his windjacket pocket, but her tears had started to roll and she shaded her eyes, while he stood before her with outstretched hand.

'Part of the act?' he inquired coldly.

She shook her head, took the handkerchief with a childish 'merci,' blew her nose and gasped, and swallowed, and spoke, and next moment all, all was lost.

She could not tell her husband while he was ill. Van would have to wait until Andrey was sufficiently well to bear the news and that might take some time. Of course, she would have to do everything to have him completely cured, there was a wondermaker in Arizona -

'Sort of patching up a bloke before hanging him,' said Van.

'And to think,' cried Ada with a kind of square shake of stiff hands as if dropping a lid or a tray, 'to think that he dutifully concealed everything! Oh, of course, I can't leave him now!'

'Yes, the old story - the flute player whose impotence has to be treated, the reckless ensign who may never return from a distant war!'

'Ne ricane pas!' exclaimed Ada. 'The poor, poor little man! How dare you sneer?'

As had been peculiar to his nature even in the days of his youth, Van was apt to relieve a passion of anger and disappointment by means of bombastic and arcane utterances which hurt like a jagged fingernail caught in satin, the lining of Hell.

'Castle True, Castle Bright!' he now cried, 'Helen of Troy, Ada of Ardis! You have betrayed the Tree and the Moth!'

'Perestagne (stop, cesse)!'

'Ardis the First, Ardis the Second, Tanned Man in a Hat, and now Mount Russet -'

'Perestagne!' repeated Ada (like a fool dealing with an epileptic).

'Oh! Qui me rendra mon Hélène -'

'Ach, perestagne!'

'- et le phalène.'

'Je t'emplie ("prie" and "supplie"), stop, Van. Tu sais que j'en vais mourir.'

'But, but, but' - (slapping every time his forehead) - 'to be on the very brink of, of, of - and then have that idiot turn Keats!'

'Bozhe moy, I must be going. Say something to me, my darling, my only one, something that might help!'

There was a narrow chasm of silence broken only by the rain drumming on the eaves.

'Stay with me, girl,' said Van, forgetting everything - pride, rage, the convention of everyday pity.

For an instant she seemed to waver - or at least to consider wavering; but a resonant voice reached them from the drive and there stood Dorothy, gray-caped and mannish-hatted, energetically beckoning with her unfurled umbrella.

'I can't, I can't, I'll write you,' murmured my poor love in tears.

Van kissed her leaf-cold hand and, letting the Bellevue worry about his car, letting all Swans worry about his effects and Mme Scarlet worry about Eveline's skin trouble, he walked some ten kilometers along soggy roads to Rennaz and thence flew to Nice, Biskra, the Cape, Nairobi, the Basset range -

And oe'r the summits of the Basset -

Would she write? Oh, she did! Oh, every old thing turned out superfine! Fancy raced fact in never-ending rivalry and girl giggles. Andrey lived only a few months longer, po pal'tzam (finger counting) one, two, three, four - say, five. Andrey was doing fine by the spring of nineteen six or seven, with a comfortably collapsed lung and a straw-colored beard (nothing like facial vegetation to keep a patient busy). Life forked and reforked. Yes, she told him. He insulted Van on the mauve-painted porch of a Douglas hotel where van was awaiting his Ada in a final version of Les Enfants Maudits. Monsieur de Tobak (an earlier cuckold) and Lord Erminin (a second-time second) witnessed the duel in the company of a few tall yuccas and short cactuses. Vinelander wore a cutaway (he would); Van, a white suit. Neither man wished to take any chances, and both fired simultaneously. Both fell. Mr Cutaway's bullet struck the outsole of Van's left shoe (white, black-heeled), tripping him and causing a slight fourmillement (excited ants) in his foot - that was all. Van got his adversary plunk in the underbelly - a serious wound from which he recovered in due time, if at all (here the forking swims in the mist). Actually it was all much duller.

So she did write as she had promised? Oh, yes, yes! In seventeen years he received from her around a hundred brief notes, each containing around one hundred words, making around thirty printed pages of insignificant stuff - mainly about her husband's health and the local fauna. After helping her to nurse Andrey at Agavia Ranch through a couple of acrimonious years (she begrudged Ada every poor little hour devoted to collecting, mounting, and rearing!), and then taking exception to Ada's choosing the famous and excellent Grotonovich Clinic (for her husband's endless periods of treatment) instead of Princess Alashin's select sanatorium, Dorothy Vinelander retired to a subarctic monastery town (Ilemna, now Novostabia) where eventually she married a Mr Brod or Bred, tender and passionate, dark and handsome, who traveled in eucharistials and other sacramental objects throughout the Severnïya Territorii and who subsequently was to direct, and still may be directing half a century later, archeological reconstructions at Goreloe (the 'Lyaskan Herculanum'); what treasures he dug up in matrimony is another question.

Steadily but very slowly Andrey's condition kept deteriorating. During his last two or three years of idle existence on various articulated couches, whose every plane could be altered in hundreds of ways, he lost the power of speech, though still able to nod or shake his head, frown in concentration, or faintly smile when inhaling the smell of food (the origin, indeed, of our first beatitudes). He died one spring night, alone in a hospital room, and that same summer (1922) his widow donated her collections to a National Park museum and traveled by air to Switzerland for an 'exploratory interview' with fifty-two-year-old Van Veen.

Part Four

Here a heckler asked, with the arrogant air of one wanting to see a gentleman's driving license, how did the 'Prof' reconcile his refusal to grant the future the status of Time with the fact that it, the future, could hardly be considered nonexistent, since 'it possessed at least one future, I mean, feature, involving such an important idea as that of absolute necessity.'

Throw him out. Who said I shall die?

Refuting the determinist's statement more elegantly: unconsciousness, far from awaiting us, with flyback and noose, somewhere ahead, envelops both the Past and the Present from all conceivable sides, being a character not of Time itself but of organic decline natural to all things whether conscious of Time or not. That I know others die is irrelevant to the case. I also know that you, and, probably, I, were born, but that does not prove we went through the chronal phase called the Past: my Present, my brief span of consciousness, tells me I did, not the silent thunder of the infinite unconsciousness proper to my birth fifty-two years and 195 days ago. My first recollection goes back to mid-July, 1870, i.e., my seventh month of life (with most people, of course, retentive consciousness starts somewhat later, at three or four years of age) when, one morning, in our Riviera villa, a chunk of green plaster ornament, dislodged from the ceiling by an earthquake, crashed into my cradle. The 195 days preceding that event being indistinguishable from infinite unconsciousness, are not to be included in perceptual time, so that, insofar as my mind and my pride of mind are concerned, I am today (mid-July, 1922) quite exactly fifty-two, et trêve de mon style plafond peint.

In the same sense of individual, perceptual time, I can put my Past in reverse gear, enjoy this moment of recollection as much as I did the horn of abundance whose stucco pineapple just missed my head, and postulate that next moment a cosmic or corporeal cataclysm might - not kill me, but plunge me into a permanent state of stupor, of a type sensationally new to science, thus depriving natural dissolution of any logical or chronal sense. Furthermore, this reasoning takes care of the much less interesting (albeit important, important) Universal Time ('we had a thumping time chopping heads') also known as Objective Time (really, woven most coarsely of private times), the history, in a word, of humanity and humor, and that kind of thing. Nothing prevents mankind as such from having no future at all - if for example our genus evolves by imperceptible (this is the ramp of my argument) degrees a novo-sapiens species or another subgenus altogether, which will enjoy other varieties of being and dreaming, beyond man's notion of Time. Man, in that sense, will never die, because there may never be a taxonomical point in his evolutionary progress that could be determined as the last stage of man in the cline turning him into Neohomo, or some horrible, throbbing slime. I think our friend will not bother us any further.

My purpose in writing my Texture of Time, a difficult, delectable and blessed work, a work which I am about to place on the dawning desk of the still-absent reader, is to purify my own notion of Time. I wish to examine the essence of Time, not its lapse, for I do not believe that its essence can be reduced to its lapse. I wish to caress Time.

One can be a lover of Space and its possibilities: take, for example, speed, the smoothness and sword-swish of speed; the aquiline glory of ruling velocity; the joy cry of the curve; and one can be an amateur of Time, an epicure of duration. I delight sensually in Time, in its stuff and spread, in the fall of its folds, in the very impalpability of its grayish gauze, in the coolness of its continuum. I wish to do something about it; to indulge in a simulacrum of possession. I am aware that all who have tried to reach the charmed castle have got lost in obscurity or have bogged down in Space. I am also aware that Time is a fluid medium for the culture of metaphors.

Why is it so difficult - so degradingly difficult - to bring the notion of Time into mental focus and keep it there for inspection? What an effort, what fumbling, what irritating fatigue! It is like rummaging with one hand in the glove compartment for the road map - fishing out Montenegro, the Dolomites, paper money, a telegram - everything except the stretch of chaotic country between Ardez and Somethingsoprano, in the dark, in the rain, while trying to take advantage of a red light in the coal black, with the wipers functioning metronomically, chronometrically: the blind finger of space poking and tearing the texture of time. And Aurelius Augustinus, too, he, too, in his tussles with the same theme, fifteen hundred years ago, experienced this oddly physical torment of the shallowing mind, the shchekotiki (tickles) of approximation, the evasions of cerebral exhaustion - but he, at least, could replenish his brain with God-dispensed energy (have a footnote here about how delightful it is to watch him pressing on and interspersing his cogitations, between sands and stars, with vigorous little fits of prayer).

Lost again. Where was I? Where am I? Mud road. Stopped car. Time is rhythm: the insect rhythm of a warm humid night, brain ripple, breathing, the drum in my temple - these are our faithful timekeepers; and reason corrects the feverish beat. A patient of mine could make out the rhythm of flashes succeeding one another every three milliseconds (0.003!). On.

What nudged, what comforted me, a few minutes ago at the stop of a thought? Yes. Maybe the only thing that hints at a sense of Time is rhythm; not the recurrent beats of the rhythm but the gap between two such beats, the gray gap between black beats: the Tender Interval. The regular throb itself merely brings back the miserable idea of measurement, but in between, something like true Time lurks. How can I extract it from its soft hollow? The rhythm should be neither too slow nor too fast. One beat per minute is already far beyond my sense of succession and five oscillations per second make a hopeless blur. The ample rhythm causes Time to dissolve, the rapid one crowds it out. Give me, say, three seconds, then I can do both: perceive the rhythm and probe the interval. A hollow, did I say? A dim pit? But that is only Space, the comedy villain, returning by the back door with the pendulum he peddles, while I grope for the meaning of Time. What I endeavor to grasp is precisely the Time that Space helps me to measure, and no wonder I fail to grasp Time, since knowledge-gaining itself 'takes time.'

If my eye tells me something about Space, my ear tells me something about Time. But while Space can be contemplated, naively, perhaps, yet directly, I can listen to Time only between stresses, for a brief concave moment warily and worriedly, with the growing realization that I am listening not to Time itself but to the blood current coursing through my brain, and thence through the veins of the neck heartward, back to the seat of private throes which have no relation to Time.

The direction of Time, the ardis of Time, one-way Time, here is something that looks useful to me one moment, but dwindles the next to the level of an illusion obscurely related to the mysteries of growth and gravitation. The irreversibility of Time (which is not heading anywhere in the first place) is a very parochial affair: had our organs and orgitrons not been asymmetrical, our view of Time might have been amphitheatric and altogether grand, like ragged night and jagged mountains around a small, twinkling, satisfied hamlet. We are told that if a creature loses its teeth and becomes a bird, the best the latter can do when needing teeth again is to evolve a serrated beak, never the real dentition it once possessed. The scene is Eocene and the actors are fossils. It is an amusing instance of the way nature cheats but it reveals as little relation to essential Time, straight or round, as the fact of my writing from left to right does to the course of my thought.

And speaking of evolution, can we imagine the origin and stepping stones and rejected mutations of Time? Has there ever been a 'primitive' form of Time in which, say, the Past was not clearly differentiated from the Present, so that past shadows and shapes showed through the still soft, long, larval 'now'? Or did that evolution only refer to timekeeping, from sandglass to atomic clock and from that to portable pulsar? And what time did it take for Old Time to become Newton's? Ponder the Egg, as the French cock said to his hens.

Pure Time, Perceptual Time, Tangible Time, Time free of content, context, and running commentary - this is my time and theme. All the rest is numerical symbol or some aspect of Space. The texture of Space is not that of Time, and the piebald four-dimensional sport bred by relativists is a quadruped with one leg replaced by the ghost of a leg. My time is also Motionless Time (we shall presently dispose of 'flowing' time, water-clock time, water-closet time).

The Time I am concerned with is only the Time stopped by me and closely attended to by my tense-willed mind. Thus it would be idle and evil to drag in 'passing' time. Of course, I shave longer when my thought 'tries on' words; of course, I am not aware of the lag until I look at my watch; of course, at fifty years of age, one year seems to pass faster because it is a smaller fraction of my increased stock of existence and also because I am less often bored than I was in childhood between dull game and duller book. But that 'quickening' depends precisely upon one's not being attentive to Time.

It is a queer enterprise - this attempt to determine the nature of something consisting of phantomic phases. Yet I trust that my reader, who by now is frowning over these lines (but ignoring, at least, his breakfast), will agree with me that there is nothing more splendid than lone thought; and lone thought must plod on, or - to use a less ancient analogy - drive on, say, in a sensitive, admirably balanced Greek car that shows its sweet temper and road-holding assurance at every turn of the alpine highway.

Two fallacies should be dealt with before we go any further. The first is the confusion of temporal elements with spatial ones. Space, the impostor, has been already denounced in these notes (which are now being set down during half a day's break in a crucial journey); his trial will take place at a later stage of our investigation. The second dismissal is that of an immemorial habit of speech. We regard Time as a kind of stream, having little to do with an actual mountain torrent showing white against a black cliff or a dull-colored great river in a windy valley, but running invariably through our chronographical landscapes. We are so used to that mythical spectacle, so keen upon liquefying every lap of life, that we end up by being unable to speak of Time without speaking of physical motion. Actually, of course, the sense of its motion is derived from many natural, or at least familiar, sources - the body's innate awareness of its own bloodstream, the ancient vertigo caused by rising stars, and, of course, our methods of measurement, such as the creeping shadow line of a gnomon, the trickle of an hourglass, the trot of a second hand - and here we are back in Space. Note the frames, the receptacles. The idea that Time 'flows' as naturally as an apple thuds down on a garden table implies that it flows in and through something else and if we take that 'something' to be Space then we have only a metaphor flowing along a yardstick.

But beware, anime meus, of the marcel wave of fashionable art; avoid the Proustian bed and the assassin pun (itself a suicide - as those who know their Verlaine will note).

We are now ready to tackle Space. We reject without qualms the artificial concept of space-tainted, space-parasited time, the space-time of relativist literature. Anyone, if he likes, may maintain that Space is the outside of Time, or the body of Time, or that Space is suffused with Time and vice versa, or that in some peculiar way Space is merely the waste product of Time, even its corpse, or that in the long, infinitely long, run Time is Space; that sort of gossip may be pleasing, especially when we are young; but no one shall make me believe that the movement of matter (say, a pointer) across a carved-out area of Space (say, a dial) is by nature identical with the 'passing' of time. Movement of matter merely spans an extension of some other palpable matter, against which it is measured, but tells us nothing about the actual structure of impalpable Time. Similarly, a graduated tape, even of infinite length, is not Space itself, nor can the most exact odometer represent the road which I see as a black mirror of rain under turning wheels, hear as a sticky rustle, smell as a damp July night in the Alps, and feel as a smooth basis. We, poor Spatians, are better adapted, in our three-dimensional Lacrimaval, to Extension rather than to Duration: our body is capable of greater stretching than volitional recall can boast of. I cannot memorize (though I sought only yesterday to resolve it into mnemonic elements) the number of my new car but I feel the asphalt under my front tires as if they were parts of my body. Yet Space itself (like Time) is nothing I can comprehend: a place where motion occurs. A plasm in which matter - concentrations of Space plasm - is organized and enclosed. We can measure the globules of matter and the distances between them, but Space plasm itself is incomputable.

We measure Time (a second hand trots, or a minute hand jerks, from one painted mark to another) in terms of Space (without knowing the nature of either), but the spanning of Space does not always require Time - or at least does not require more time than the 'now' point of the specious present contains in its hollow. The perceptual possession of a unit of space is practically instantaneous when, for example, an expert driver's eye takes in a highway symbol - the black mouth and neat archivolt within a red triangle (a blend of color and shape recognized in 'no time,' when properly seen, as meaning a road tunnel) or something of less immediate importance such as the delightful Venus sign ?, which might be misunderstood as permitting whorelets to thumb rides, but actually tells the worshipper or the sightseer that a church is reflected in the local river. I suggest adding a pilcrow for persons who read while driving.

Space is related to our senses of sight, touch, and muscular effort; Time is vaguely connected with hearing (still, a deaf man would perceive the 'passage' of time incomparably better than a blind limbless man would the idea of 'passage'). 'Space is a swarming in the eyes, and Time a singing in the ears,' says John Shade, a modem poet, as quoted by an invented philosopher ('Martin Gardiner') in The Ambidextrous Universe, page 165. Space flutters to the ground, but Time remains between thinker and thumb, when Monsieur Bergson uses his scissors. Space introduces its eggs into the nests of Time: a 'before' here, an 'after' there - and a speckled clutch of Minkowski's 'world-points.' A stretch of Space is organically easier to measure mentally than a 'stretch' of Time. The notion of Space must have been formed before that of Time (Guyau in Whitrow). The indistinguisable inane (Locke) of infinite space is mentally distinguishable (and indeed could not be imagined otherwise) from the ovoid 'void' of Time. Space thrives on surds, Time is irreducible to blackboard roots and birdies. The same section of Space may seem more extensive to a fly than to S. Alexander, but a moment to him is not 'hours to a fly,' because if that were true flies would know better than wait to get swapped. I cannot imagine Space without Time, but I can very well imagine Time without Space. 'Space-Time' - that hideous hybrid whose very hyphen looks phoney. One can be a hater of Space, and a lover of Time.

There are people who can fold a road map. Not this writer.

At this point, I suspect, I should say something about my attitude to 'Relativity.' It is not sympathetic. What many cosmogonists tend to accept as an objective truth is really the flaw inherent in mathematics which parades as truth. The body of the astonished person moving in Space is shortened in the direction of motion and shrinks catastrophically as the velocity nears the speed beyond which, by the fiat of a fishy formula, no speed can be. That is his bad luck, not mine - but I sweep away the business of his clock's slowing down. Time, which requires the utmost purity of consciousness to be properly apprehended, is the most rational element of life, and my reason feels insulted by those flights of Technology Fiction. One especially grotesque inference, drawn (I think by Engelwein) from Relativity Theory - and destroying it, if drawn correctly - is that the galactonaut and his domestic animals, after touring the speed spas of Space, would return younger than if they had stayed at home all the time. Imagine them filing out of their airark - rather like those 'Lions,' juvenilified by romp suits, exuding from one of those huge chartered buses that stop, horribly blinking, in front of a man's impatient sedan just where the highway wizens to squeeze through the narrows of a mountain village.

Perceived events can be regarded as simultaneous when they belong to the same span of attention; in the same way (insidious simile, unremovable obstacle!) as one can visually possess a unit of space - say, a vermilion ring with a frontal view of a toy car within its white kernel, forbidding the lane into which, however, I turned with a furious coup de volant. I know relativists, hampered by their 'light signals' and 'traveling clocks,' try to demolish the idea of simultaneity on a cosmic scale, but let us imagine a gigantic hand with its thumb on one star and its minimus on another - will it not be touching both at the same time - or are tactile coincidences even more misleading than visual ones? I think I had better back out of this passage.

Such a drought affected Hippo in the most productive months of Augustine's bishopric that clepsydras had to be replaced by sandglasses. He defined the Past as what is no longer and the future as what is not yet (actually the future is a fantasm belonging to another category of thought essentially different from that of the Past which, at least, was here a moment ago - where did I put it? Pocket? But the search itself is already 'past').

The Past is changeless, intangible, and 'never-to-be-revisited' - terms that do not fit this or that section of Space which I see, for instance, as a white villa and its whiter (newer) garage with seven cypresses of unequal height, tall Sunday and short Monday, watching over the private road that loops past scrub oak and briar down to the public one connecting Sorcière with the highway to Mont Roux (still one hundred miles apart).

I shall now proceed to consider the Past as an accumulation of sensa, not as the dissolution of Time implied by immemorial metaphors picturing transition. The 'passage of time' is merely a figment of the mind with no objective counterpart, but with easy spatial analogies. It is seen only in rear view, shapes and shades, arollas and larches silently tumbling away: the perpetual disaster of receding time, éboulements, landslides, mountain roads where rocks are always falling and men always working.

We build models of the past and then use them spatiologically to reify and measure Time. Let us take a familiar example. Zembre, a quaint old town on the Minder River, near Sorcière, in the Valais, was being lost by degrees among new buildings. By the beginning of this century it had acquired a definitely modem look, and the preservation people decided to act. Today, after years of subtle reconstruction, a replica of the old Zembre, with its castle, its church, and its mill extrapolated onto the other side of the Minder, stands opposite the modernized town and separated from it by the length of a bridge. Now, if we replace the spatial view (as seen from a helicopter) by the chronal one (as seen by a retrospector), and the material model of old Zembre by the mental model of it in the Past (say, around 1822), the modem town and the model of the old turn out to be something else than two points in the same place at different times (in spatial perspective they are at the same time in different places). The space in which the modem town coagulates is immediately real, while that of its retrospective image (as seen apart from material restoration) shimmers in an imaginary space and we cannot use any bridge to walk from the one to the other. In other words (as one puts it when both writer and reader flounder at last in hopeless confusion of thought), by making a model of the old town in one's mind (and on the Minder) all we do is to spatialize it (or actually drag it out of its own element onto the shore of Space). Thus the term 'one century' does not correspond in any sense to the hundred feet of steel bridge between modem and model towns, and that is what we wished to prove and have now proven.

The Past, then, is a constant accumulation of images. It can be easily contemplated and listened to, tested and tasted at random, so that it ceases to mean the orderly alternation of linked events that it does in the large theoretical sense. It is now a generous chaos out of which the genius of total recall, summoned on this summer morning in 1922, can pick anything he pleases: diamonds scattered allover the parquet in 1888; a russet black-hatted beauty at a Parisian bar in 1901; a humid red rose among artificial ones in 1883; the pensive half-smile of a young English governess, in 1880, neatly reclosing her charge's prepuce after the bedtime treat; a little girl, in 1884, licking the breakfast honey off the badly bitten nails of her spread fingers; the same, at thirty-three, confessing, rather late in the day, that she did not like flowers in vases; the awful pain striking him in the side while two children with a basket of mushrooms looked on in the merrily burning pine forest; and the startled quonk of a Belgian car, which he had overtaken and passed yesterday on a blind bend of the alpine highway. Such images tell us nothing about the texture of time into which they are woven - except, perhaps, in one matter which happens to be hard to settle. Does the coloration of a recollected object (or anything else about its visual effect) differ from date to date? Could I tell by its tint if it comes earlier or later, lower or higher, in the stratigraphy of my past? Is there any mental uranium whose dream-delta decay might be used to measure the age of a recollection? The main difficulty, I hasten to explain, consists in the experimenter not being able to use the same object at different times (say, the Dutch stove with its little blue sailing boats in the nursery of Ardis Manor in 1884 and 1888) because of the two or more impressions borrowing from one another and forming a compound image in the mind; but if different objects are to be chosen (say, the faces of two memorable coachmen: Ben Wright, 1884, and Trofim Fartukov, 1888), it is impossible, insofar as my own research goes, to avoid the intrusion not only of different characteristics but of different emotional circumstances, that do not allow the two objects to be considered essentially equal before, so to speak, their being exposed to the action of Time. I am not sure, that such objects cannot be discovered. In my professional work, in the laboratories of psychology, I have devised myself many a subtle test (one of which, the method of determining female virginity without physical examination, today bears my name). Therefore we can assume that the experiment can be performed - and how tantalizing, then, the discovery of certain exact levels of decreasing saturation or deepening brilliance - so exact that the 'something' which I vaguely perceive in the image of a remembered but unidentifiable person, and which assigns it 'somehow' to my early boyhood rather than to my adolescence, can be labeled if not with a name, at least with a definite date, e.g., January 1, 1908 (eureka, the 'e.g.' worked - he was my father's former house tutor, who brought me Alice in the Camera Obscura for my eighth birthday).

Our perception of the Past is not marked by the link of succession to as strong a degree as is the perception of the Present and of the instants immediately preceding its point of reality. I usually shave every morning and am accustomed to change the blade in my safety razor after every second shave; now and then I happen to skip a day, have to scrape off the next a tremendous growth of loud bristle, whose obstinate presence my fingers check again and again between strokes, and in such cases I use a blade only once. Now, when I visualize a recent series of shaves, I ignore the element of succession: all I want to know is whether the blade left in my silver plough has done its work once or twice; if it was once, the order of the two bristle-growing days in my mind has no importance - in fact, I tend to hear and feel the second, grittier, morning first, and then to throw in the shaveless day, in consequence of which my beard grows in reverse, so to speak.

If now, with some poor scraps of teased-out knowledge relating to the colored contents of the Past, we shift our view and regard it simply as a coherent reconstruction of elapsed events, some of which are retained by the ordinary mind less clearly, if at all, than the others, we can indulge in an easier game with the light and shade of its avenues. Memory-images include after-images of sound, regurgitated, as it were, by the ear which recorded them a moment ago while the mind was engaged in avoiding hitting schoolchildren, so that actually we can replay the message of the church clock after we have left Turtsen and its hushed but still-echoing steeple behind. Reviewing those last steps of the immediate Past involves less physical time than was needed for the clock's mechanism to exhaust its strokes, and it is this mysterious 'less' which is a special characteristic of the still-fresh Past into which the Present slipped during that instant inspection of shadow sounds. The 'less' indicates that the Past is in no need of clocks and the succession of its events is not clock time, but something more in keeping with the authentic rhythm of Time. We have suggested earlier that the dim intervals between the dark beats have the feel of the texture of Time. The same, more vaguely, applies to the impressions received from perceiving the gaps of unremembered or 'neutral' time between vivid events. I happen to remember in terms of color (grayish blue, purple, reddish gray) my three farewell lectures - public lectures - on Mr Bergson's Time at a great university a few months ago. I recall less clearly, and indeed am able to suppress in my mind completely, the six-day intervals between blue and purple and between purple and gray. But I visualize with perfect clarity the circumstances attending the actual lectures. I was a little late for the first (dealing with the Past) and observed with a not-unpleasant thrill, as if arriving at my own funeral, the brilliantly lighted windows of Counterstone Hall and the small figure of a Japanese student who, being also late, overtook me at a wild scurry, and disappeared in the doorway long before I reached its semicircular steps. At the second lecture - the one on the Present - during the five seconds of silence and 'inward attention' which I requested from the audience in order to provide an illustration for the point I, or rather the speaking jewel in my waistcoat pocket, was about to make regarding the true perception of time, the behemoth snores of a white-bearded sleeper filled the house - which, of course, collapsed. At the third and last lecture, on the Future ('Sham Time'), after working perfectly for a few minutes, my secretly recorded voice underwent an obscure mechanical disaster, and I preferred simulating a heart attack and being carried out into the night forever (insofar as lecturing was concerned) to trying to decipher and sort out the batch of crumpled notes in pale pencil which poor speakers are obsessed with in familiar dreams (attributed by Dr Froid of Signy-Mondieu-Mondieu to the dreamer's having read in infancy his adulterous parents' love letters). I give these ludicrous but salient details to show that the events to be selected for the test should be not only gaudy and graduated (three lectures in three weeks), but related to each other by their main feature (a lecturer's misadventures). The two intervals of five days each are seen by me as twin dimples, each brimming with a kind of smooth, grayish mist, and a faint suggestion of shed confetti (which, maybe, might leap into color if I allowed some casual memory to form in between the diagnostic limits). Because of its situation among dead things, that dim continuum cannot be as sensually groped for, tasted, harkened to, as Veen's Hollow between rhythmic beats; but it shares with it one remarkable indicium: the immobility of perceptual Time. Synesthetia, to which I am inordinately prone, proves to be of great help in this type of task - a task now approaching its crucial stage, the flowering of the Present.

Now blows the wind of the Present at the top of the Past - at the top of the passes I have been proud to reach in my life, the Umbrail, the Fluela, the Furka, of my clearest consciousness! The moment changes at the point of perception only because I myself am in a constant state of trivial metamorphosis. To give myself time to time Time I must move my mind in the direction opposite to that in which I am moving, as one does when one is driving past a long row of poplars and wishes to isolate and stop one of them, thus making the green blur reveal and offer, yes, offer, its every leaf. Cretin behind me.

This act of attention is what I called last year the 'Deliberate Present' to distinguish it from its more general form termed (by Clay in 1882) the 'Specious Present.' The conscious construction of one, and the familiar current of the other give us three or four seconds of what can be felt as nowness. This nowness is the only reality we know; it follows the colored nothingness of the no-longer and precedes the absolute nothingness of the future. Thus, in a quite literal sense, we may say that conscious human life lasts always only one moment, for at any moment of deliberate attention to our own flow of consciousness we cannot know if that moment will be followed by another. As I shall later explain, I do not believe that 'anticipation' ('looking forward to a promotion or fearing a social blunder' as one unfortunate thinker puts it) plays any significant part in the formation of the specious present, nor do I believe that the future is transformed into a third panel of Time, even if we do anticipate something or other - a turn of the familiar road or the picturesque rise of two steep hills, one with a castle, the other with a church, for the more lucid the forevision the less prophetic it is apt to be. Had that rascal behind me decided to risk it just now he would have collided head-on with the truck that came from beyond the bend, and I and the view might have been eclipsed in the multiple smash.

Our modest Present is, then, the time span that one is directly and actually aware of, with the lingering freshness of the Past still perceived as part of the nowness. In regard to everyday life and the habitual comfort of the body (reasonably healthy, reasonably strong, breathing the green breeze, relishing the aftertaste of the most exquisite food in the world - a boiled egg), it does not matter that we can never enjoy the true Present, which is an instant of zero duration, represented by a rich smudge, as the dimensionless point of geometry is by a sizable dot in printer's ink on palpable paper. The normal motorist, according to psychologists and policemen, can perceive, visually, a unit of time as short in extension as one tenth of a second (I had a patient, a former gambler, who could identify a playing card in a five-times-faster flash!). It would be interesting to measure the instant we need to become aware of disappointed or fulfilled expectations. Smells can be very sudden, and in most people the ear and sense of touch work quicker than the eye. Those two hitch-hikers really smelled - the male one revoltingly.

Since the Present is but an imaginary point without an awareness of the immediate past, it is necessary to define that awareness. Not for the first time will Space intrude if I say that what we are aware of as 'Present' is the constant building up of the Past, its smoothly and relentlessly rising level. How meager! How magic!

Here they are, the two rocky ruin-crowned hills that I have retained for seventeen years in my mind with decalcomaniac romantic vividness - though not quite exactly, I confess; memory likes the otsebyatina ('what one contributes oneself'); but the slight discrepancy is now corrected and the act of artistic correction enhances the pang of the Present. The sharpest feeling of nowness, in visual terms, is the deliberate possession of a segment of Space collected by the eye. This is Time's only contact with Space, but it has a far-reaching reverberation. To be eternal the Present must depend on the conscious spanning of an infinite expansure. Then, and only then, is the Present equatable with Timeless Space. I have been wounded in my duel with the Imposter.

And now I drive into Mont Roux, under garlands of heart-rending welcome. Today is Monday, July 14, 1922, five-thirteen p.m. by my wrist watch, eleven fifty-two by my car's built-in clock, four-ten by all the timepieces in town. The author is in a confused state of exhilaration, exhaustion, expectancy and panic. He has been climbing with two Austrian guides and a temporarily adopted daughter in the incomparable Balkan mountains. He spent most of May in Dalmatia, and June in the Dolomites, and got letters in both places from Ada telling him of her husband's death (April 23, in Arizona). He started working his way west in a dark-blue Argus, dearer to him than sapphires and morphos because she happened to have ordered an exactly similar one to be ready for her in Geneva. He collected three additional villas, two on the Adriatic and one at Ardez in the Northern Grisons. Late on Sunday, July 13, in nearby Alvena, the concierge of the Alraun Palace handed him a cable that had waited for him since Friday

ARRIVING MONT ROUX TROIS CYGNES MONDAY DINNERTIME I WANT YOU TO WIRE ME FRANKLY IF THE DATE AND THE WHOLE TRALALA ARE INCONVENIENT.

He transmitted by the new 'instantogram,' flashed to the Geneva airport, a message ending in the last word of her 1905 cable; and despite the threats of a torrential night set out by car for the Vaud. Traveling too fast and too wildly, he somehow missed the Oberhalbstein road at the Sylvaplana fork (150 kilometers south of Alvena); wriggled back north, via Chiavenna and Splügen, to reach in apocalyptic circumstances Highway 19 (an unnecessary trip of 100 kilometers); veered by mistake east to Chur; performed an unprintable U-turn, and covered in a couple of hours the 175-kilometer stretch westward to Brig. The pale flush of dawn in his rear-vision mirror had long since turned to passionately bright daylight when he looped south, by the new Pfynwald road, to Sorcière, where seventeen years ago he had bought a house (now Villa Jolana). The three or four servants he had left there to look after it had taken advantage of his lengthy absence to fade away; so, with the enthusiastic help of two hitch-hikers stranded in the vicinity - a disgusting youth from Hilden and his long-haired, slatternly, languorous Hilda - he had to break into his own house. His accomplices were mistaken if they expected to find loot and liquor there. After throwing them out he vainly courted sleep on a sheetless bed and finally betook himself to the bird-mad garden, where his two friends were copulating in the empty swimming pool and had to be shooed off again. It was now around noon. He worked for a couple of hours on his Texture of Time, begun in the Dolomites at the Lammermoor (not the best of his recent hotels). The utilitarian impulse behind the task was to keep him from brooding on the ordeal of happiness awaiting him 150 kilometers west; it did not prevent a healthy longing for a hot breakfast from making him interrupt his scribbling to seek out a roadside inn on his way to Mont Roux.

The Three Swans where he had reserved rooms 508-509-510 had undergone certain changes since 1905. A portly, plum-nosed Lucien did not recognize him at once - and then remarked that Monsieur was certainly not 'deperishing' - although actually Van had almost reverted to his weight of seventeen years earlier, having shed several kilos in the Balkans rock-climbing with crazy little Acrazia (now dumped in a fashionable boarding school near Florence). No, Madame Vinn Landère had not called. Yes, the hall had been renovated. Swiss-German Louis Wicht now managed the hotel instead of his late father-in-law Luigi Fantini. In the lounge, as seen through its entrance, the huge memorable oil - three ample-haunched Ledas swapping lacustrine impressions - had been replaced by a neoprimitive masterpiece showing three yellow eggs and a pair of plumber's gloves on what looked like wet bathroom tiling. As Van stepped into the 'elevator' followed by a black-coated receptionist, it acknowledged his footfall with a hollow clank and then, upon moving, feverishly began transmitting a fragmentary report on some competition - possibly a tricycle race. Van could not help feeling sorry that this blind functional box (even smaller than the slop-pail lift he had formerly used at the back) now substituted for the luxurious affair of yore - an ascentive hall of mirrors - whose famous operator (white whiskers, eight languages) had become a button.

In the hallway of 509, Van recognized the Bruslot à la sonde picture next to the pregnant-looking white closet (under whose round sliding doors the corner of the carpet, now gone, would invariably catch). In the salon itself, only a lady's bureau and the balcony view were familiar. Everything else - the semi-transparent shredded-wheat ornaments, the glass flowerheads, the silk-covered armchairs - had been superseded by Hochmodern fixtures.

He showered and changed, and finished the flask of brandy in his dressing case, and called the Geneva airport and was told that the last plane from America had just arrived. He went for a stroll - and saw that the famous 'mûrier,' that spread its great limbs over a humble lavatory on a raised terrace at the top of a cobbled lane, was now in sumptuous purple-blue bloom. He had a beer at the café opposite the railway station, and then, automatically, entered the flower shop next door. He must be gaga to have forgotten what she said the last time about her strange anthophobia (somehow stemming from that debauche à trois thirty years ago). Roses she never liked anyway. He stared and was easily outstared by small Carols from Belgium, long-stemmed Pink Sensations, vermilion Superstars. There were also zinnias, and chrysanthemums, and potted aphelandras, and two graceful fringetails in an inset aquarium. Not wishing to disappoint the courteous old florist, he bought seventeen odorless Baccara roses, asked for the directory, opened it at Ad-Au, Mont Roux, lit upon 'Addor, Yolande, Mlle secrét., rue des Délices, 6,' and with American presence of mind had his bouquet sent there.

People were already hurrying home from work. Mademoiselle Addor, in a sweat-stained frock, was climbing the stairs. The streets had been considerably quieter in the sourdine Past. The old Morris pillar, upon which the present Queen of Portugal figured once as an actress, no longer stood at the corner of Chemin de Mustrux (old corruption of the town's name). Must Trucks roar through Must Rux?

The chambermaid had drawn the curtains. He wrenched them all open as if resolved to prolong to its utmost limit the torture of that day. The ironwork balcony jutted out far enough to catch the slanting rays. He recalled his last glimpse of the lake on that dismal day in October, 1905, after parting with Ada. Fuligula ducks were falling and rising upon the rain-pocked swell in concentrated enjoyment of doubled water; along the lake walk scrolls of froth curled over the ridges of advancing gray waves and every now and then a welter heaved sufficiently high to splash over the parapet. But now, on this radiant summer evening, no waves foamed, no birds swam; only a few seagulls could be seen, fluttering white over their black reflections. The wide lovely lake lay in dreamy serenity, fretted with green undulations, ruffed with blue, patched with glades of lucid smoothness between the ackers; and, in the lower right corner of the picture, as if the artist had wished to include a very special example of light, the dazzling wake of the westering sun pulsated through a lakeside lombardy poplar that seemed both liquefied and on fire.

A distant idiot leaning backward on waterskis behind a speedboat started to rip the canvas; fortunately, he collapsed before doing much harm, and at the same instant the drawing-room telephone rang.

Now it so happened that she had never - never, at least, in adult life - spoken to him by phone; hence the phone had preserved the very essence, the bright vibration, of her vocal cords, the little 'leap' in her larynx, the laugh clinging to the contour of the phrase, as if afraid in girlish glee to slip off the quick words it rode. It was the timbre of their past, as if the past had put through that call, a miraculous connection ('Ardis, one eight eight six' - comment? Non, non, pas huitante-huit - huitante-six). Goldenly, youthfully, it bubbled with all the melodious characteristics he knew - or better say recollected, at once, in the sequence they came: that entrain, that whelming of quasi-erotic pleasure, that assurance and animation - and, what was especially delightful, the fact that she was utterly and innocently unaware of the modulations entrancing him.

There had been trouble with her luggage. There still was. Her two maids, who were supposed to have flown over the day before on a Laputa (freight airplane) with her trunks, had got stranded somewhere. All she had was a little valise. The concierge was in the act of making some calls for her. Would Van come down? She was neveroyatno golodnaya (incredibly hungry).

That telephone voice, by resurrecting the past and linking it up with the present, with the darkening slate-blue mountains beyond the lake, with the spangles of the sun wake dancing through the poplar, formed the centerpiece in his deepest perception of tangible time, the glittering 'now' that was the only reality of Time's texture. After the glory of the summit there came the difficult descent.

Ada had warned him in a recent letter that she had 'changed considerably, in contour as well as in color.' She wore a corset which stressed the unfamiliar stateliness of her body enveloped in a black-velvet gown of a flowing cut both eccentric and monastic, as their mother used to favor. She had had her hair bobbed page-boy-fashion and dyed a brilliant bronze. Her neck and hands were as delicately pale as ever but showed unfamiliar fibers and raised veins. She made lavish use of cosmetics to camouflage the lines at the outer corners of her fat carmined lips and dark-shadowed eyes whose opaque iris now seemed less mysterious than myopic owing to the nervous flutter of her painted lashes. He noted that her smile revealed a gold-capped upper premolar; he had a similar one on the other side of his mouth. The metallic sheen of her fringe distressed him less than that velvet gown, full-skirted, square-shouldered, of well-below-the-calf length, with hip-padding which was supposed both to diminish the waist and disguise by amplification the outline of the now buxom pelvis. Nothing remained of her gangling grace, and the new mellowness, and the velvet stuff, had an irritatingly dignified air of obstacle and defense. He loved her much too tenderly, much too irrevocably, to be unduly depressed by sexual misgivings; but his senses certainly remained stirless - so stirless in fact, that he did not feel at all anxious (as she and he raised their flashing champagne glasses in parody of the crested-grebe ritual) to involve his masculine pride in a half-hearted embrace immediately after dinner. If he was expected to do so, that was too bad; if he was not, that was even worse. At their earlier reunions the constraint, subsisting as a dull ache after the keen agonies of Fate's surgery, used to be soon drowned in sexual desire, leaving life to pick up by and by. Now they were on their own.

The utilitarian trivialities of their table talk - or, rather, of his gloomy monologue - seemed to him positively degrading. He explained at length - fighting her attentive silence, sloshing across the puddles of pauses, abhorring himself - that he had a long and hard journey; that he slept badly; that he was working on an investigation of the nature of Time, a theme that meant struggling with the octopus of one's own brain. She looked at her wrist watch.

'What I'm telling you,' he said harshly, 'has nothing to do with timepieces.' The waiter brought them their coffee. She smiled, and he realized that her smile was prompted by a conversation at the next table, at which a newcomer, a stout sad Englishman, had begun a discussion of the menu with the ma?tre d'hôtel.

'I'll start,' said the Englishman, 'with the bananas.'

'That's not bananas, sir. That's ananas, pineapple juice.'

'Oh, I see. Well, give me some clear soup.'

Young Van smiled back at young Ada. Oddly, that little exchange at the next table acted as a kind of delicious release.

'When I was a kid,' said Van, 'and stayed for the first - or rather, second - time in Switzerland, I thought that "Verglas" on roadway signs stood for some magical town, always around the corner, at the bottom of every snowy slope, never seen, but biding its time. I got your cable in the Engadine where there are real magical places, such as Alraun or Alruna - which means a tiny Arabian demon in a German wizard's mirror. By the way, we have the old apartment upstairs with an additional bedroom, number five-zero-eight.'

'Oh dear. I'm afraid you must cancel poor 508. If I stayed for the night, 510 would do for both of us, but I've got bad news for you. I can't stay. I must go back to Geneva directly after dinner to retrieve my things and maids, whom the authorities have apparently put in a Home for Stray Females because they could not pay the absolutely medieval new droits de douane - isn't Switzerland in Washington State, sort of, après tout? Look, don't scowl' - (patting his brown blotched hand on which their shared birthmark had got lost among the freckles of age, like a babe in autumn woods, on peut les suivre en reconnaissant only Mascodagama's disfigured thumb and the beautiful almond-shaped nails) - 'I promise to get in touch with you in a day or two, and then we'll go on a cruise to Greece with the Baynards - they have a yacht and three adorable daughters who still swim in the tan, okay?'

'I don't know what I loathe more,' he replied, 'yachts or Baynards; but can I help you in Geneva?'

He could not. Baynard had married his Cordula, after a sensational divorce - Scotch veterinaries had had to saw off her husband's antlers (last call for that joke).

Ada's Argus had not yet been delivered. The gloomy black gloss of the hackney Yak and the old-fashioned leggings of its driver reminded him of her departure in 1905.

He saw her off - and ascended, like a Cartesian glassman, like spectral Time standing at attention, back to his desolate fifth floor. Had they lived together these seventeen wretched years, they would have been spared the shock and the humiliation; their aging would have been a gradual adjustment, as imperceptible as Time itself.

His Work-in-Progress, a sheaf of notes tangling with his pajamas, came to the rescue as it had done at Sorcière. Van swallowed a favodorm tablet and, while waiting for it to relieve him of himself, a matter of forty minutes or so, sat down at a lady's bureau to his 'lucubratiuncula.'

Does the ravage and outrage of age deplored by poets tell the naturalist of Time anything about Time's essence? Very little. Only a novelist's fancy could be caught by this small oval box, once containing Duvet de Ninon (a face powder, with a bird of paradise on the lid), which has been forgotten in a not-quite-closed drawer of the bureau's arc of triumph - not, however, triumph over Time. The blue-green-orange thing looked as if he were meant to be deceived into thinking it had been waiting there seventeen years for the bemused, smiling finder's dream-slow hand: a shabby trick of feigned restitution, a planted coincidence - and a bad blunder, since it had been Lucette, now a mermaid in the groves of Atlantis (and not Ada, now a stranger somewhere near Morges in a black limousine) who had favored that powder. Throw it away lest it mislead a weaker philosopher; what I am concerned with is the delicate texture of Time, void of all embroidered events.

Let us recapitulate.

Physiologically the sense of Time is a sense of continuous becoming, and if 'becoming' has a voice, the latter might be, not unnaturally, a steady vibration; but for Log's sake, let us not confuse Time with Tinnitus, and the seashell hum of duration with the throb of our blood. Philosophically, on the other hand, Time is but memory in the making. In every individual life there goes on from cradle to deathbed the gradual shaping and strengthening of that backbone of consciousness, which is the Time of the strong. 'To be' means to know one 'has been.' 'Not to be' implies the only 'new' kind of (sham) time: the future. I dismiss it. Life, love, libraries, have no future.

Time is anything but the popular triptych: a no-longer existing Past, the durationless point of the Present, and a 'not-yet' that may never come. No. There are only two panels. The Past (ever-existing in my mind) and the Present (to which my mind gives duration and, therefore, reality). If we make a third compartment of fulfilled expectation, the foreseen, the foreordained, the faculty of prevision, perfect forecast, we are still applying our mind to the Present.

If the Past is perceived as a storage of Time, and if the Present is the process of that perception, the future, on the other hand, is Dot an item of Time, has nothing to do with Time and with the dim gauze of its physical texture. The future is but a quack at the court of Chronos. Thinkers, social thinkers, feel the Present as pointing beyond itself toward a not yet realized 'future' - but that is topical utopia, progressive politics. Technological Sophists argue that by taking advantage of the Laws of Light, by using new telescopes revealing ordinary print at cosmic distances through the eyes of our nostalgic agents on another planet, we can actually see our own past (Goodson discovering the Goodson and that sort of thing) including documentary evidence of our not knowing what lay in store for us (and our knowing now), and that consequently the Future did exist yesterday and by inference does exist today. This may be good physics but is execrable logic, and the Tortoise of the Past will never overtake the Achilles of the future, no matter how we parse distances on our cloudy blackboards.

What we do at best (at worst we perform trivial tricks) when postulating the future, is to expand enormously the specious present causing it to permeate any amount of time with all manner of information, anticipation and precognition. At best, the 'future' is the idea of a hypothetical present based on our experience of succession, on our faith in logic and habit. Actually, of course, our hopes can no more bring it into existence than our regrets change the Past. The latter has at least the taste, the tinge, the tang, of our individual being. But the future remains aloof from our fancies and feelings. At every moment it is an infinity of branching possibilities. A determinate scheme would abolish the very notion of time (here the pill floated its first cloudlet). The unknown, the not yet experienced and the unexpected, all the glorious 'x' intersections, are the inherent parts of human life. The determinate scheme by stripping the sunrise of its surprise would erase all sunrays -

The pill had really started to work. He finished changing into his pajamas, a series of fumbles, mostly unfinished, which he had begun an hour ago, and fumbled into bed. He dreamed that he was speaking in the lecturing hall of a transatlantic liner and that a bum resembling the hitch-hiker from Hilden was asking sneeringly how did the lecturer explain that in our dreams we know we shall awake, is not that analogous to the certainty of death and if so, the future -

At daybreak he sat up with an abrupt moan, and trembling: if he did not act now, he would lose her forever! He decided to drive at once to the Manhattan in Geneva.

Van welcomed the renewal of polished structures after a week of black fudge fouling the bowl slope so high that no amount of flushing could dislodge it. Something to do with olive oil and the Italian type water closets. He shaved, bathed, rapidly dressed. Was it too early to order breakfast? Should he ring up her hotel before starting? Should he rent a plane? Or might it, perhaps, be simpler -

The door-folds of his drawing room balcony stood wide open, Banks of mist still crossed the blue of the mountains beyond the lake, but here and there a peak was tipped with ocher under the cloudless turquoise of the sky. Four tremendous trucks thundered by one after another. He went up to the rail of the balcony and wondered if he had ever satisfied the familiar whim by going platch - had he? had he? You could never know, really. One floor below, and somewhat adjacently, stood Ada engrossed in the view.

He saw her bronze bob, her white neck and arms, the pale flowers on her flimsy peignoir, her bare legs, her high-heeled silver slippers. Pensively, youngly, voluptuously, she was scratching her thigh at the rise of the right buttock: Ladore's pink signature on vellum at mosquito dusk. Would she look up? All her flowers turned up to him, beaming, and she made the royal-grant gesture of lifting and offering him the mountains, the mist and the lake with three swans.

He left the balcony and ran down a short spiral staircase to the fourth floor. In the pit of his stomach there sat the suspicion that it might not be room 410, as he conjectured, but 412 or even 414, What would happen if she had not understood, was not on the lookout? She had, she was.

When, 'a little later,' Van, kneeling and clearing his throat, was kissing her dear cold hands, gratefully, gratefully, in full defiance of death, with bad fate routed and her dreamy afterglow bending over him, she asked:

'Did you really think I had gone?'

'Obmanshchitsa (deceiver), obmanshchitsa,' Van kept repeating with the fervor and gloat of blissful satiety,

'I told him to turn,' she said, 'somewhere near Morzhey ('morses' or 'walruses,' a Russian pun on 'Morges' - maybe a mermaid's message), And you slept, you could sleep!'

'I worked,' he replied, 'my first draft is done,'

She confessed that on coming back in the middle of the night she had taken to her room from the hotel bookcase (the night porter, an avid reader, had the key) the British Encyclopedia volume, here it was, with this article on Space-time: '"Space" (it says here, rather suggestively) "denotes the property, you are my property, in virtue of which, you are my virtue, rigid bodies can occupy different positions" Nice? Nice.'

'Don't laugh, my Ada, at our philosophic prose,' remonstrated her lover. 'All that matters just now is that I have given new life to Time by cutting off Siamese Space and the false future. My aim was to compose a kind of novella in the form of a treatise on the Texture of Time, an investigation of its veily substance, with illustrative metaphors gradually increasing, very gradually building up a logical love story, going from past to present, blossoming as a concrete story, and just as gradually reversing analogies and disintegrating again into bland abstraction.'

'I wonder,' said Ada, 'I wonder if the attempt to discover those things is worth the stained glass. We can know the time, we can know a time. We can never know Time. Our senses are simply not meant to perceive it. It is like -'

Part Five

1

I, Van Veen, salute you, life, Ada Veen, Dr Lagosse, Stepan Nootkin, Violet Knox, Ronald Oranger. Today is my ninety-seventh birthday, and I hear from my wonderful new Everyrest chair a spade scrape and footsteps in the snow-sparkling garden, and my old Russian valet, who is deafer than he thinks, pullout and push in nose-ringed drawers in the dressing room. This Part Five is not meant as an epilogue; it is the true introduction of my ninety-seven percent true, and three percent likely, Ada or Ardor, a family chronicle.

Of all their many houses, in Europe and in the Tropics, the château recently built in Ex, in the Swiss Alps, with its pillared front and crenelated turrets, became their favorite, especially in midwinter, when the famous glittering air, le cristal d'Ex, 'matches the highest forms of human thought - pure mathematics & decipherment' (unpublished ad).

At least twice a year our happy couple indulged in fairly long travels. Ada did not breed or collect butterflies any more, but throughout her healthy and active old age loved to film them in their natural surroundings, at the bottom of her garden or the end of the world, flapping and flitting, settling on flowers or filth, gliding over grass or granite, fighting or mating. Van accompanied her on picture-shooting journeys to Brazil, the Congo, New Guinea, but secretly preferred a long drink under a tent to a long wait under a tree for some rarity to come down to the bait and be taken in color. One would need another book to describe Ada's adventures in Adaland. The films - and the crucified actors (Identification Mounts) - can be seen by arrangement at the Lucinda Museum, 5, Park Lane, Manhattan.

2

He had lived up to the ancestral motto: 'As healthy a Veen as father has been.' At fifty he could look back at the narrowing recession of only one hospital corridor (with a pair of white-shod trim feet tripping away), along which he had ever been wheeled. He now noticed, however, that furtive, furcating cracks kept appearing in his physical well-being, as if inevitable decomposition were sending out to him, across static gray time, its first emissaries. A stuffed nose caused a stifling dream, and, at the door of the slightest cold, intercostal neuralgia waited with its blunt spear. The more spacious his bedside table grew the more cluttered it became with such absolute necessities of the night as nose drops, eucalyptic pastilles, wax earplugs, gastric tablets, sleeping pills, mineral water, zinc ointment, a spare cap for its tube lest the original escape under the bed, and a large handkerchief to wipe the sweat accumulating between right jaw and right clavicle, neither being accustomed to his new fleshiness and insistence to sleep on one side only, so as not to hear his heart: he had made the mistake one night in 1920 of calculating the maximal number of its remaining beats (allowing for another half-century), and now the preposterous hurry of the countdown irritated him and increased the rate at which he could hear himself dying. During his solitary and quite superfluous peregrinations, he had developed a morbid sensitivity to night noises in luxury hotels (the gogophony of a truck rated three distressibles; the Saturday-night gawky cries exchanged by young apprentices in the empty street, thirty; a radiator-relayed snore from downstairs, three hundred); but, though indispensable at times of total despair, earplugs had the disadvantage (especially after too much wine) of magnifying the throbbing in his temples, the weird squeaks in his inexplored nasal cavity, and the atrocious creak of his neck vertebras. To an echo of that creak, transmitted vascularly to the brain before the system of sleep took over, he put down the eerie detonation that took place somewhere in his head at the instant that his senses played false to his consciousness. Antacid mints and the like proved sometimes insufficient to relieve the kind of good old-fashioned heartburn, which invariably afflicted him after certain rich sauces; but on the other hand, he looked forward with juvenile zest to the delightful effect of a spoonful of sodium bicarbonate dissolved in water that was sure to release three or four belches as big as the speech balloons in the 'funnies' of his boyhood.

Before he met (at eighty) tactful and tender, ribald and learned, Dr Lagosse who thenceforth resided and traveled with him and Ada, he had detested physicians. Notwithstanding his own medical training, he could not shake off a sneaky, credulous feeling, befitting a yokel, that the doctor who pumped up a sphygmomanometer or listened in to his wheeze already knew (but still kept secret) what fatal illness had been diagnosed with the certainty of death itself. He wryly remembered his late brother-in-law, when he caught himself concealing from Ada that his bladder troubled him on and off or that he had had another spell of dizziness after paring his toenails (a task he performed himself, being unable to endure any human hand to touch his bare feet).

As if doing his best to avail himself of his body, soon to be removed like a plate wherefrom one collects the last sweet crumbs, he now prized such small indulgences as squeezing out the vermicule of a blackhead, or obtaining with the long nail of his little finger the gem of an itch from the depths of his left ear (the right one was less interesting), or permitting himself what Bouteillan used to brand as le plaisir anglais - holding one's breath, and making one's own water, smooth and secret, while lying chin-deep in one's bath.

On the other hand, the pains of life affected him more acutely than in the past. He groaned, on the tympanic rack, when a saxophone blared, or when a subhuman young moron let loose the thunder of an infernal motorcycle. The obstructive behaviour of stupid, inimical things - the wrong pocket, the ruptured shoestring, the idle hanger toppling with a shrug and a hingle-tingle in the darkness of a wardrobe - made him utter the Oedipean oath of his Russian ancestry.

He had stopped aging at about sixty-five but by sixty-five he had changed in muscle and bone more sharply than people who had never gone in for such a variety of athletic pursuits as he had enjoyed in his prime. Squash and tennis gave way to ping-pong; then, one day, a favorite paddle, still warm from his grip, was forgotten in the playroom of a club, and the club was never revisited. During his sixth decade some punching-bag exercise had done duty for the wrestling and pugilistics of his earlier years. Gravitational surprises now made skiing grotesque. He could still click foils at sixty, but a few minutes of practice blinded him with sweat; so fencing soon shared the fate of the table tennis. He could never overcome his snobbish prejudice against golf; it was too late to begin, anyway. At seventy, he tried jogging before breakfast in a secluded lane, but the clacking and bouncing of his breasts reminded him too dreadfully that he was thirty kilograms heavier than in his youth. At ninety, he still danced on his hands - in a recurrent dream.

Normally, one or two sleeping pills helped him to hold at bay the monster of insomnia for three or four hours in one blessed blur, but sometimes, particularly after he had completed a mental task, a night of excruciating restlessness would grade into morning migraine. No pill could cope with that torment. There he sprawled, curled up, uncurled, turned off and turned on the bedside light (a gurgling new surrogate - real lammer having been forbidden again by 1930), and physical despair pervaded his unresolvable being. Steady and strong struck his pulse; supper had been adequately digested; his daily ration of one bottle of burgundy had not been exceeded - and yet that wretched restlessness continued to make of him an outcast in his own home: Ada was fast asleep, or comfortably reading, a couple of doors away; the various domestics in their more remote quarters had long passed over to the inimical multitude of local sleepers that seemed to blanket the surrounding hills with the blackness of their repose; he alone was denied the unconsciousness he so fiercely scorned and so assiduously courted.

3

During the years of their last separation, his libertinism had remained essentially as implacable as before; but sometimes the score of love-making would drop to once in four days, and sometimes he would realize with a shock that a whole week had passed in unruffled chastity. The series of exquisite harlots might still alternate with runs of amateur charmers at chance resorts and might still be broken by a month of inventive love in the company of some frivolous Women of fashion (there was one red-haired English virgin, Lucy Manfristan, seduced June 4, 1911, in the walled garden of her Norman manor and carried away to Fialta on the Adriatic, whom he recalled with a special little shiver of lust); but those false romances only fatigued him; the indifferently plumbed palazzina would soon be given away, the badly sunburnt girl sent back - and he would need something really nasty and tainted to revive his manhood.

Upon starting in 1922 a new life with Ada, Van firmly resolved to be true to her. Save for a few discreet, and achingly draining, surrenders to what Dr Lena Wien has so aptly termed 'onanistic voyeurism,' he somehow managed to stick to his resolution. The ordeal was morally rewarding, physically preposterous. As pediatricians are often cursed with impossible families, so our psychologist presented a not uncommon case of subdivided personality. His love for Ada was a condition of being, a steady hum of happiness unlike anything he had met with professionally in the lives of the singular and the insane. He would have promptly plunged into boiling pitch to save her just as he would have sprung to save his honor at the drop of a glove. Their life together responded antiphonally to their first summer in 1884. She never refused to help him achieve the more and more precious, because less and less frequent, gratification of a fully shared sunset. He saw reflected in her everything that his fastidious and fierce spirit sought in life. An overwhelming tenderness impelled him to kneel suddenly at her feet in dramatic yet utterly sincere attitudes, puzzling to anyone who might enter with a vacuum cleaner. And on the same day his other compartments and subcompartments would be teeming with longings and regrets, and plans of rape and riot. The most hazardous moment was when he and she moved to another villa, with a new staff and new neighbors, and his senses would be exposed in icy, fantastic detail, to the gipsy girl poaching peaches or the laundry woman's bold daughter.

In vain he told himself that those vile hankerings did not differ, in their intrinsic insignificance, from the anal pruritis which one tries to relieve by a sudden fit of scratching. Yet he knew that by daring to satisfy the corresponding desire for a young wench he risked wrecking his life with Ada. How horribly and gratuitously it might hurt her, he foreglimpsed one day in 1926 or '27 when he caught the look of proud despair she cast on nothing in particular before walking away to the car that was to take her on a trip in which, at the last moment, he had declined to join her. He had declined - and had simulated the grimace and the limp of podagra - because he had just realized, what she, too, had realized - that the beautiful native girl smoking on the back porch would offer her mangoes to Master as soon as Master's housekeeper had left for the Film Festival in Sindbad. The chauffeur had already opened the car door, when, with a great bellow, Van overtook Ada and they rode off together, tearful, voluble, joking about his foolishness.

'It's funny,' said Ada, 'what black, broken teeth they have hereabouts, those blyadushki.'

('Ursus,' Lucette in glistening green, 'Subside, agitation of passion,' Flora's bracelets and breasts, the whelk of Time).

He discovered that a touch of subtle sport could be derived from constantly fighting temptation while constantly dreaming of somehow, sometime, somewhere, yielding to it. He also discovered that whatever fire danced in those lures, he could not spend one day without Ada; that the solitude he needed to sin properly did not represent a matter of a few seconds behind an evergreen bush, but a comfortable night in an impregnable fortress; and that, finally, the temptations, real or conjured up before sleep, were diminishing in frequency. By the age of seventy-five fortnightly intimacies with cooperative Ada, mostly Blitzpartien, sufficed for perfect contentment. The successive secretaries he engaged got plainer and plainer (culminating in a coconut-haired female with a horse mouth who wrote love notes to Ada); and by the time Violet Knox broke the lack-luster series Van Veen was eighty-seven and completely impotent.

4

Violet Knox [now Mrs Ronald Oranger. Ed.], born in 1940, came to live with us in 1957. She was (and still is - ten years later) an enchanting English blonde with doll eyes, a velvet carnation and a tweed-cupped little rump [.....]; but such designs, alas, could no longer flesh my fancy. She has been responsible for typing out this memoir - the solace of what are, no doubt, my last ten years of existence. A good daughter, an even better sister, and half-sister, she had supported for ten years her mother's children from two marriages, besides laying aside [something]. I paid her [generously] per month, well realizing the need to ensure unembarrassed silence on the part of a puzzled and dutiful maiden. Ada called her 'Fialochka' and allowed herself the luxury of admiring 'little Violet' 's cameo neck, pink nostrils, and fair pony-tail. Sometimes, at dinner, lingering over the liqueurs, my Ada would consider my typist (a great lover of Koo-Ahn-Trow) with a dreamy gaze, and then, quick-quick, peck at her flushed cheek. The situation might have been considerably more complicated had it arisen twenty years earlier.

I do not know why I should have devoted so much attention to the hoary hairs and sagging apparatus of the venerable Veen. Rakes never reform. They burn, sputter a few last green sparks, and go out. Far greater importance must be attached by the self-researcher and his faithful companion to the unbelievable intellectual surge, to the creative explosion, that occurred in the brain of this strange, friendless, rather repulsive nonagenarian (cries of 'no, no!' in lectorial, sororial, editorial brackets).

More fiercely than ever he execrated all sham art, from the crude banalities of junk sculpture to the italicized passages meant by a pretentious novelist to convey his fellow hero's cloudbursts of thought. He had even less patience than before with the 'Sig' (Signy-M.D.-M.D.) school of psychiatry. Its founder's epoch-making confession ('In my student days I became a deflowerer because I failed to pass my botany examination') he prefixed, as an epigraph, to one of his last papers (1959) entitled The Farce of Group Therapy in Sexual Maladjustment, the most damaging and satisfying blast of its kind (the Union of Marital Counselors and Catharticians at first wanted to sue but then preferred to detumefy).

Violet knocks at the library door and lets in plump, short, bow-tied Mr Oranger, who stops on the threshold, clicks his heels, and (as the heavy hermit turns with an awkward sweep of frieze robe) darts forward almost at a trot not so much to stop with a masterful slap the avalanche of loose sheets which the great man's elbow has sent sliding down the lectern-slope, as to express the eagerness of his admiration.

Ada, who amused herself by translating (for the Oranger editions en regard) Griboyedov into French and English, Baudelaire into English and Russian, and John Shade into Russian and French, often read to Van, in a deep mediumesque voice, the published versions made by other workers in that field of semiconsciousness. The verse translations in English were especially liable to distend Van's face in a grotesque grin which made him look, when he was not wearing his dental plates, exactly like a Greek comedial mask. He could not tell who disgusted him more: the well-meaning mediocrity, whose attempts at fidelity were thwarted by lack of artistic insight as well as by hilarious errors of textual interpretation, or the professional poet who embellished with his own inventions the dead and helpless author (whiskers here, private parts there) - a method that nicely camouflaged the paraphrast's ignorance of the From language by having the bloomers of inept scholarship blend with the whims of flowery imitation.

As Ada, Mr Oranger (a born catalyzer), and Van were discussing those matters one afternoon in 1957 (Van's and Ada's book Information and Form had just come out), it suddenly occurred to our old polemicist that all his published works - even the extremely abstruse and specialized Suicide and Sanity (1912), Compitalia (1921), and When an Alienist Cannot Sleep (1932), to cite only a few - were not epistemic tasks set to himself by a savant, but buoyant and bellicose exercises in literary style. He was asked why, then, did he not let himself go, why did he not choose a big playground for a match between Inspiration and Design; and with one thing leading to another it was resolved that he would write his memoirs - to be published posthumously.

He was a very slow writer. It took him six years to write the first draft and dictate it to Miss Knox, after which he revised the typescript, rewrote it entirely in long hand (1963-1965) and redictated the entire thing to indefatigable Violet, whose pretty fingers tapped out a final copy in 1967. E, p, i - why 'y,' my dear?

5

Ada, who resented the insufficiency of her brother's fame, felt soothed and elated by the success of The Texture of Time (1924). That work, she said, always reminded her, in some odd, delicate way, of the sun-and-shade games she used to play as a child in the secluded avenues of Ardis Park. She said she had been somehow responsible for the metamorphoses of the lovely larvae that had woven the silk of 'Veen's Time' (as the concept was now termed in one breath, one breeze, with 'Bergson's Duration,' or 'Whitehead's Bright Fringe'). But a considerably earlier and weaker work, the poor little Letters from Terra, of which only half a dozen copies existed - two in Villa Armina and the rest in the stacks of university libraries - was even closer to her heart because of its nonliterary associations with their 1892-93 sojourn in Manhattan. Sixty-year-old Van crustily and contemptuously dismissed her meek suggestion to the effect that it should be republished, together with the Sidra reflections and a very amusing anti-Signy pamphlet on Time in Dreams. Seventy-year-old Van regretted his disdain when Victor Vitry, a brilliant French director, based a completely unauthorized picture on Letters from Terra written by 'Voltemand' half a century before.

Vitry dated Theresa's visit to Antiterra as taking place in 1940, but 1940 by the Terranean calendar, and about 1890 by ours. The conceit allowed certain pleasing dips into the modes and manners of our past (did you remember that horses wore hats - yes, hats - when heat waves swept Manhattan?) and gave the impression - which physics-fiction literature had much exploited - of the capsulist traveling backward in terms of time. Philosophers asked nasty questions, but were ignored by the wishing-to-be-gulled moviegoers.

In contrast to the cloudless course of Demonian history in the twentieth century, with the Anglo-American coalition managing one hemisphere, and Tartary, behind her Golden Veil, mysteriously ruling the other, a succession of wars and revolutions were shown shaking loose the jigsaw puzzle of Terrestrial autonomies. In an impressive historical survey of Terra rigged up by Vitry - certainly the greatest cinematic genius ever to direct a picture of such scope or use such a vast number of extras (some said more than a million, others, half a million men and as many mirrors) - kingdoms fell and dictatordoms rose, and republics, half-sat, half-lay in various attitudes of discomfort. The conception was controversial, the execution flawless. Look at all those tiny soldiers scuttling along very fast across the trench-scarred wilderness, with explosions of mud and things going pouf-pouf in silent French now here, now there!

In 1905, Norway with a mighty heave and a long dorsal ripple unfastened herself from Sweden, her unwieldy co-giantess, while in a similar act of separation the French parliament, with parenthetical outbursts of vive émotion, voted a divorce between State and Church. Then, in 1911, Norwegian troops led by Amundsen reached the South Pole and simultaneously the Italians stormed into Turkey. In 1914 Germany invaded Belgium and the Americans tore up Panama. In 1918 they and the French defeated Germany while she was busily defeating Russia (who had defeated her own Tartars some time earlier). In Norway there was Siegrid Mitchel, in America Margaret Undset, and in France, Sidonie Colette. In 1926 Abdel-Krim surrendered, after yet another photogenic war, and the Golden Horde again subjugated Rus. In 1933, Athaulf Hindler (also known as Mittler - from 'to mittle,' mutilate) came to power in Germany, and a conflict on an even more spectacular scale than the 1914-1918 war was under way, when Vitry ran out of old documentaries and Theresa, played by his wife, left Terra in a cosmic capsule after having covered the Olympic Games held in Berlin (the Norwegians took most of the prizes, but the Americans won the fencing event, an outstanding achievement, and beat the Germans in the final football match by three goals to one).

Van and Ada saw the film nine times, in seven different languages, and eventually acquired a copy for home use. They found the historical background absurdly farfetched and considered starting legal proceedings against Vitry - not for having stolen the L.F.T. idea, but for having distorted Terrestrial politics as obtained by Van with such diligence and skill from extrasensorial sources and manic dreams. But fifty years had elapsed, and the novella had not been copyrighted; in fact, Van could not even prove that 'Voltemand' was he. Reporters, however, ferreted out his authorship, and in a magnanimous gesture, he allowed it to be publicized.

Three circumstances contributed to the picture's exceptional success. One factor was, of course, that organized religion, disapproving of Terra's appeal to sensation-avid sects, attempted to have the thing banned. A second attraction came from a little scene that canny Vitry had not cut out: in a flashback to a revolution in former France, an unfortunate extra, who played one of the under-executioners, got accidentally decapitated while pulling the comedian Steller, who played a reluctant king, into a guillotinable position. Finally, the third, and even more human reason, was that the lovely leading lady, Norwegian-born Gedda Vitry, after titillating the spectators with her skimpy skirts and sexy rags in the existential sequences, came out of her capsule on Antiterra stark naked, though, of course, in miniature, a millimeter of maddening femininity dancing in 'the charmed circle of the microscope' like some lewd elf, and revealing, in certain attitudes, I'll be damned, a pinpoint glint of pubic floss, gold-powered!

L.F.T. tiny dolls, L.F.T. breloques of coral and ivory, appeared in souvenir shops, from Agony, Patagonia, to Wrinkleballs, Le Bras d'Or. L.F.T. clubs sprouted. L.F.T. girlies minced with mini-menus out of roadside snackettes shaped like spaceships. From the tremendous correspondence that piled up on Van's desk during a few years of world fame, one gathered that thousands of more or less unbalanced people believed (so striking was the visual impact of the Vitry-Veen film) in the secret Government-concealed identity of Terra and Antiterra. Demonian reality dwindled to a casual illusion. Actually, we had passed through all that. Politicians, dubbed Old Felt and Uncle Joe in forgotten comics, had really existed. Tropical countries meant, not only Wild Nature Reserves but famine, and death, and ignorance, and shamans, and agents from distant Atomsk. Our world was, in fact, mid-twentieth-century. Terra convalesced after enduring the rack and the stake, the bullies and beasts that Germany inevitably generates when fulfilling her dreams of glory. Russian peasants and poets had not been transported to Estotiland, and the Barren Grounds, ages ago - they were dying, at this very moment, in the slave camps of Tartary. Even the governor of France was not Charlie Chose, the suave nephew of Lord Goal, but a bad-tempered French general.

6

Nirvana, Nevada, Vaniada. By the way, should I not add, my Ada, that only at the very last interview with poor dummy-mummy, soon after my premature - I mean, premonitory - nightmare about, 'You can, Sir,' she employed mon petit nom, Vanya, Vanyusha - never had before, and it sounded so odd, so tend... (voice trailing off, radiators tinkling).

'Dummy-mum' - (laughing). 'Angels, too, have brooms - to sweep one's soul clear of horrible images. My black nurse was Swiss-laced with white whimsies.'

Sudden ice hurtling down the rain pipe: brokenhearted stalactite.

Recorded and replayed in their joint memory was their early preoccupation with the strange idea of death. There is one exchange that it would be nice to enact against the green moving backdrop of one of our Ardis sets. The talk about 'double guarantee' in eternity. Start just before that.

'I know there's a Van in Nirvana. I'll be with him in the depths moego ada, of my Hades,' said Ada.

'True, true' (bird-effects here, and acquiescing branches, and what you used to call 'golden gouts').

'As lovers and siblings,' she cried, 'we have a double chance of being together in eternity, in terrarity. Four pairs of eyes in paradise!'

'Neat, neat,' said Van.

Something of the sort. One great difficulty. The strange mirage-shimmer standing in for death should not appear too soon in the chronicle and yet it should permeate the first amorous scenes. Hard but not insurmountable (I can do anything, I can tango and tap-dance on my fantastic hands). By the way, who dies first?

Ada. Van. Ada. Vaniada. Nobody. Each hoped to go first, so as to concede, by implication, a longer life to the other, and each wished to go last, in order to spare the other the anguish or worries, of widowhood. One solution would be for you to marry Violet.

'Thank you. J'ai tâté de deux tribades dans ma vie, ça suffit. Dear Emile says "terme qu'on évite d'employer." How right he is!'

'If not Violet, then a local Gauguin girl. Or Yolande Kickshaw.'

Why? Good question. Anyway. Violet must not be given this part to type. I'm afraid we're going to wound a lot of people (openwork American lilt)! Oh come, art cannot hurt. It can, and how!

Actually the question of mortal precedence has now hardly any importance. I mean, the hero and heroine should get so close to each other by the time the horror begins, so organically close, that they overlap, intergrade, interache, and even if Vaniada's end is described in the epilogue we, writers and readers, should be unable to make out (myopic, myopic) who exactly survives, Dava or Vada, Anda or Vanda.

I had a schoolmate called Vanda. And I knew a girl called Adora, little thing in my last floramor. What makes me see that bit as the purest sanglot in the book? What is the worst part of dying?

For you realize there are three facets to it (roughly corresponding to the popular tripartition of Time). There is, first, the wrench of relinquishing forever all one's memories - that's a commonplace, but what courage man must have had to go through that commonplace again and again and not give up the rigmarole of accumulating again and again the riches of consciousness that will be snatched away! Then we have the second facet - the hideous physical pain - for obvious reasons let us not dwell upon that. And finally, there is the featureless pseudo-future, blank and black, an everlasting nonlastingness, the crowning paradox of our boxed brain's eschatologies!

'Yes,' said Ada (aged eleven and a great hair-tosser), 'yes - but take a paralytic who forgets the entire past gradually, stroke by stroke, who dies in his sleep like a good boy, and who has believed all his life that the soul is immortal - isn't that desirable, isn't that a quite comfortable arrangement?'

'Cold comfort,' said Van (aged fourteen and dying of other desires). 'You lose your immortality when you lose your memory. And if you land then on Terra Caelestis, with your pillow and chamberpot, you are made to room not with Shakespeare or even Longfellow, but with guitarists and cretins.'

She insisted that if there were no future, then one had the right of making up a future, and in that case one's very own future did exist, insofar as one existed oneself. Eighty years quickly passed - a matter of changing a slide in a magic lantern. They had spent most of the morning reworking their translation of a passage (lines 569-572) in John Shade's famous poem:

...Sovetï mï dayom

Kak bït' vdovtsu: on poteryal dvuh zhyon;

On ih vstrechaet - lyubyashchih, lyubimïh,

Revnuyushchih ego drug k druzhke...

(...We give advice

To widower. He has been married twice:

He meets his wives, both loved, both loving, both

Jealous of one another...)

Van pointed out that here was the rub - one is free to imagine any type of hereafter, of course: the generalized paradise promised by Oriental prophets and poets, or an individual combination; but the work of fancy is handicapped - to a quite hopeless extent - by a logical ban: you cannot bring your friends along - or your enemies for that matter - to the party. The transposition of all our remembered relationships into an Elysian life inevitably turns it into a second-rate continuation of our marvelous mortality. Only a Chinaman or a retarded child can imagine being met, in that Next-Installment World, to the accompaniment of all sorts of tail-wagging and groveling of welcome, by the mosquito executed eighty years ago upon one's bare leg, which has been amputated since then and now, in the wake of the gesticulating mosquito, comes back, stomp, stomp, stomp, here I am, stick me on.

She did not laugh; she repeated to herself the verses that had given them such trouble. The Signy brain-shrinkers would gleefully claim that the reason the three 'boths' had been skipped in the Russian version was not at all, oh, not at all, because cramming three cumbersome amphibrachs into the pentameter would have necessitated adding at least one more verse for carrying the luggage.

'Oh, Van, oh Van, we did not love her enough. That's whom you should have married, the one sitting feet up, in ballerina black, on the stone balustrade, and then everything would have been all right - I would have stayed with you both in Ardis Hall, and instead of that happiness, handed out gratis, instead of all that we teased her to death!'

Was it time for the morphine? No, not yet. Time-and-pain had not been mentioned in the Texture. Pity, since an element of pure time enters into pain, into the thick, steady, solid duration of I-can't-bear-it pain; nothing gray-gauzy about it, solid as a black bole, I can't, oh, call Lagosse.

Van found him reading in the serene garden. The doctor followed Ada into the house. The Veens had believed for a whole summer of misery (or made each other believe) that it was a touch of neuralgia.

Touch? A giant, with an effort-contorted face, clamping and twisting an engine of agony. Rather humiliating that physical pain makes one supremely indifferent to such moral issues as Lucette's fate, and rather amusing, if that is the right word, to constate that one bothers about problems of style even at those atrocious moments. The Swiss doctor, who had been told everything (and had even turned out to have known at medical school a nephew of Dr Lapiner) displayed an intense interest in the almost completed but only partly corrected book and drolly said it was not a person or persons but le bouquin which he wanted to see guéri de tous ces accrocs before it was too late. It was. What everybody thought would be Violet's supreme achievement, ideally clean, produced on special Atticus paper in a special cursive type (the glorified version of Van's hand), with the master copy bound in purple calf for Van's ninety-seventh birthday, had been immediately blotted out by a regular inferno of alterations in red ink and blue pencil. One can even surmise that if our time-racked, flat-lying couple ever intended to die they would die, as it were, into the finished book, into Eden or Hades, into the prose of the book or the poetry of its blurb.

Their recently built castle in Ex was inset in a crystal winter. In the latest Who's Who the list of his main papers included by some bizarre mistake the title of a work he had never written, though planned to write many pains: Unconsciousness and the Unconscious. There was no pain to do it now - and it was high pain for Ada to be completed. 'Quel livre, mon Dieu, mon Dieu,' Dr [Professor. Ed.] Lagosse exclaimed, weighing the master copy which the flat pale parents of the future Babes, in the brown-leaf Woods, a little book in the Ardis Hall nursery, could no longer prop up in the mysterious first picture: two people in one bed.

Ardis Hall - the Ardors and Arbors of Ardis - this is the leitmotiv rippling through Ada, an ample and delightful chronicle, whose principal part is staged in a dream-bright America - for are not our childhood memories comparable to Vineland-born caravelles, indolently encircled by the white birds of dreams? The protagonist, a scion of one of our most illustrious and opulent families, is Dr Van Veen, son of Baron 'Demon' Veen, that memorable Manhattan and Reno figure. The end of an extraordinary epoch coincides with Van's no less extraordinary boyhood. Nothing in world literature, save maybe Count Tolstoy's reminiscences, can vie in pure joyousness and Arcadian innocence with the 'Ardis' part of the book. On the fabulous country estate of his art-collecting uncle, Daniel Veen, an ardent childhood romance develops in a series of fascinating scenes between Van and pretty Ada, a truly unusual gamine, daughter of Marina, Daniel's stage-struck wife. That the relationship is not simply dangerous cousinage, but possesses an aspect prohibited by law, is hinted in the very first pages.

In spite of the many intricacies of plot and psychology, the story proceeds at a spanking pace. Before we can pause to take breath and quietly survey the new surroundings into which the writer's magic carpet has, as it were, spilled us, another attractive girl, Lucette Veen, Marina's younger daughter, has also been swept off her feet by Van, the irresistible rake. Her tragic destiny constitutes one of the highlights of this delightful book.

The rest of Van's story turns frankly and colorfully upon his long love-affair with Ada. It is interrupted by her marriage to an Arizonian cattle-breeder whose fabulous ancestor discovered our country. After her husband's death our lovers are reunited. They spend their old age traveling together and dwelling in the various villas, one lovelier than another, that Van has erected all over the Western Hemisphere.

Not the least adornment of the chronicle is the delicacy of pictorial detail: a latticed gallery; a painted ceiling; a pretty plaything stranded among the forget-me-nots of a brook; butterflies and butterfly orchids in the margin of the romance; a misty view descried from marble steps; a doe at gaze in the ancestral park; and much, much more.

Notes to Ada

by Vivian Darkbloom

p.9. All happy families etc: mistranslations of Russian classics are ridiculed here. The opening sentence of Tolstoy's novel is turned inside out and Anna Arkadievna's patronymic given an absurd masculine ending, while an incorrect feminine one is added to her surname. 'Mount Tabor' and 'Pontius' allude to the transfigurations (Mr G. Steiner's term, I believe) and betrayals to which great texts are subjected by pretentious and ignorant versionists.

p.9. Severnïya Territorii: Northern Territories. Here and elsewhere transliteration is based on the old Russian orthography.

p.9. granoblastically: in a tesselar (mosaic) jumble.

p.9. Tofana: allusion to 'aqua tofana' (see any good dictionary).

p.10. sur-royally: fully antlered, with terminal prongs.

p.10. Durak: 'fool' in Russian.

p.10. Lake Kitezh: allusion to the legendary town of Kitezh which shines at the bottom of a lake in a Russian fairy tale.

p.11. Mr Eliot: we shall meet him again, on pages 361 and 396, in company of the author of 'The Waistline' and 'Agonic Lines'.

p.11. Counter-Fogg: Phileas Fogg, Jules Verne's globetrotter, travelled from West to East.

p.11. Goodnight Kids: their names are borrowed, with distortions, from a comic strip for French-speaking children.

p.13. Dr Lapiner: for some obscure but not unattractive reason, most of the physicians in the book turn out to bear names connected with rabbits. The French 'lapin' in Lapiner is matched by the Russian 'Krolik', the name of Ada's beloved lepidopterist (p.13, et passim) and the Russian 'zayats' (hare) sounds like 'Seitz' (the German gynecologist on page 181); there is a Latin 'cuniculus' in 'Nikulin' ('grandson of the great rodentiologist Kunikulinov', p.341), and a Greek 'lagos' in 'Lagosse' (the doctor who attends Van in his old age). Note also Coniglietto, the Italian cancer-of-the-blood specialist, p.298.

p.13. mizernoe: Franco-Russian form of 'miserable' in the sense of 'paltry'.

p.13. c'est bien le cas de le dire: and no mistake.

p.13. lieu de naissance: birthplace.

p.13. pour ainsi dire: so to say.

p.13. Jane Austen: allusion to rapid narrative information imparted through dialogue, in Mansfield Park.

p.13. 'Bear-Foot', not 'bare foot': both children are naked.

p.13. Stabian flower girl: allusion to the celebrated mural painting (the so-called 'Spring') from Stabiae in the National Museum of Naples: a maiden scattering blossoms.

p.16. Raspberries; ribbon: allusions to ludicrous blunders in Lowell's versions of Mandelshtam's poems (in the N.Y. Review, 23 December 1965).

p.16. Belokonsk: the Russian twin of 'Whitehorse' (city in N.W. Canada).

p.17. en connaissance de cause: knowing what it was all about (Fr.).

p.18. Aardvark: apparently, a university town in New England.

p.18. Gamaliel: a much more fortunate statesman than our W.G. Harding.

p.19. interesting condition: family way.

p.19. Lolita, Texas: this town exists, or, rather, existed, for it has been renamed, I believe, after the appearance of the notorious novel.

p.20. penyuar: Russ., peignoir.

p.20. beau milieu: right in the middle.

p.20. Faragod: apparently, the god of electricity.

p.20. braques: allusion to a bric-à-brac painter.

p.23. entendons-nous: let's have it clear (Fr.).

p.24. Yukonets: inhabitant of Yukon (Russ.).

p.25. lammer: amber (Fr: l'ambre), allusion to electricity.

p.25. my lad, my pretty, etc: paraphrase of a verse in Housman.

p.25. ballatetta: fragmentation and distortion of a passage in a 'little ballad' by the Italian poet Guido Cavalcanti (1255-1300). The relevant lines are: 'you frightened and weak little voice that comes weeping from my woeful heart, go with my soul and that ditty, telling of a destroyed mind.'

p.27. Nuss: German for 'nut'.

p.28. Khristosik: little Christ (Russ.).

p.28. rukuliruyushchiy: Russ., from Fr. roucoulant, cooing.

p.29. horsepittle: 'hospital', borrowed from a passage in Dickens' Bleak House. Poor Joe's pun, not a poor Joycean one.

p.30. aujourd'hui, heute: to-day (Fr., Germ.).

p.30. Princesse Lointaine: Distant Princess, title of a French play.

p.31. pour attraper le client: to fool the customer.

p.34. Je parie, etc.: I bet you do not recognize me, Sir.

p.35. tour du jardin: a stroll in the garden.

p.36. Lady Amherst: confused in the child's mind with the learned lady after whom a popular pheasant is named.

p.36. with a slight smile: a pet formula of Tolstoy's denoting cool superiority, if not smugness, in a character's manner of speech.

p.37. pollice verso: Lat., thumbs down.

p.39. Sumerechnikov: the name is derived from 'sumerki' ('dusk' in Russian).

p.42. lovely Spanish poem: really two poems - Jorge Guillén's Descanso en jardin and his El otono: isla).

p.44. Monsieur a quinze ans, etc.: You are fifteen, Sir, I believe, and I am nineteen, I know.... You, Sir, have known town girls no doubt; as to me, I'm a virgin, or almost one. Moreover...

p.44. rien qu'une petite fois: just once.

p.45. mais va donc jouer avec lui: come on, go and play with him.

p.45. se morfondre: mope.

p.45. au fond: actually.

p.45. Je l'ignore: I don't know.

p.45. cache-cache: hide-and-seek.

p.46. infusion de tilleul: lime tea.

p.48. Les amours du Dr Mertvago: play on 'Zhivago' ('zhiv' means in Russian 'alive' and 'mertv' dead).

p.48. grand chêne: big oak.

p.49. quelle idée: the idea!

p.50. Les malheurs de Swann: cross between Les malheurs de Sophie by Mme de Ségur (née Countess Rostopchin) and Proust's Un amour de Swann.

p.53. monologue intérieur: the so-called 'stream-of-consciousness' device, used by Leo Tolstoy (in describing, for instance, Anna's last impressions whilst her carriage rolls through the streets of Moscow).

p.56. Mr Fowlie: see Wallace Fowlie, Rimbaud (1946).

p.56. soi-disant: would-be.

p.56. les robes vertes, etc.: the green and washed-out frocks of the little girls.

p.56. angel moy: Russ., 'my angel'.

p.57. en vain. etc.: In vain, one gains in play

The Oka river and Palm Bay...

p.57. bambin angélique: angelic little lad.

p.59. groote: Dutch, 'great'.

p.59. un machin etc.: a thing as long as this that almost wounded the child in the buttock.

p.60. pensive reeds: Pascal's metaphor of man, un roseau pensant.

p.61. horsecart: an old anagram. It leads here to a skit on Freudian dream charades ('symbols in an orchal orchestra'), p.62.

p.61. buvard: blotting pad.

p.62. Kamargsky: La Camargue, a marshy region in S. France combined with Komar, 'mosquito', in Russian and moustique in French.

p.63. sa petite collation du matin: light breakfast.

p.64. tartine au miel: bread-and-butter with honey.

p.64. Osberg: another good-natured anagram, scrambling the name of a writer with whom the author of Lolita has been rather comically compared. Incidentally, that title's pronunciation has nothing to do with English or Russian (pace an anonymous owl in a recent issue of the TLS).

p.65. mais ne te etc.: now don't fidget like that when you put on your skirt! A well-bred little girl...

p.65. très en beauté: looking very pretty.

p.66. calèche: victoria.

p.66. pecheneg: a savage.

p.67. grande fille: girl who has reached puberty.

p.69. La Rivière de Diamants: Maupassant and his 'La Parure' (p.73) did not exist on Antiterra.

p.70. copie etc.: copying in their garret.

p.70. à grand eau: swilling the floors.

p.70. désinvolture: uninhibitedness.

p.70. vibgyor: violet-indigo-blue-green-yellow-orange-red.

p.72. sans façons: unceremoniously.

p.72. strapontin: folding seat in front.

p.73. décharné: emaciated.

p.73. cabane: hut.

p.73. allons donc: oh, come.

p.73. pointe assassine: the point (of a story or poem) that murders artistic merit.

p.73. quitte à tout dire etc.: even telling it all to the widow if need be.

p.73. il pue: he stinks.

p.74. Atala: a short novel by Chateaubriand.

p.75. un juif: a Jew.

p.76. et pourtant: and yet.

p.76. ce beau jardin etc.: This beautiful garden blooms in May, but in Winter never, never, never, never, never is green etc.

p.78. chort!: Russ., 'devil'.

p.83. mileyshiy: Russ., 'dearest'.

p.83. partie etc.: exterior fleshy part that frames the mouth... the two edges of a simple wound... it is the member that licks.

p.84. pascaltrezza: in this pun, which combines Pascal with caltrezza (Ital., 'sharp wit') and treza (a Provençal word for 'tressed stalks'), the French 'pas' negates the 'pensant' of the 'roseau' in his famous phrase 'man is a thinking reed'.

p.86. Katya: the ingénue in Turgenev's 'Fathers and Children'.

p.86. a trouvaille: a felicitous find.

p.86. Ada who liked crossing orchids: she crosses here two French authors, Baudelaire and Chateaubriand.

p.86. mon enfant, etc.: my child, my sister, think of the thickness of the big oak at Tagne, think of the mountain, think of the tenderness -

p.87. recueilli: concentrated, rapt.

p.87. canteen: a reference to the 'scrumpets' (crumpets) provided by school canteens.

p.90. puisqu'on etc.: since we broach this subject.

p.91. hument: inhale.

p.92. tout le reste: all the rest.

p.92. zdravstvuyte etc.: Russ., lo and behold: the apotheosis

p.92. Mlle Stopchin: a representative of Mme de Ségur, née Rostopchine, author of Les Malheurs de Sophie (nomenclatorially occupied on Antiterra by Les Malheurs de Swann).

p.92. au feu!: fire!

p.92. flambait: was in flames.

p.92. Ashette: 'Cendrillon' in the French original.

p.93. en croupe: riding pillion.

p.94. à reculons: backwards.

p.97. The Nile is settled: a famous telegram sent by an African explorer.

p.97. parlez pour vous: speak for yourself.

p.97. trempée: soaked.

p.101. je l'ai vu etc.: 'I saw it in one of the wastepaper-baskets of the library.'

p.101. aussitôt après: immediately after.

p.102. ménagez etc.: go easy on your Americanisms.

p.103. leur chute etc.: their fall is slow... one can follow them with one's eyes, recognizing -

p.103. Lowden: a portmanteau name combining two contemporary bards.

p.103. baguenaudier: French name of bladder senna.

p.103. Floeberg: Flaubert's style is mimicked in this pseudo quotation.

p.105. pour ne pas etc.: so as not to put any ideas in her head.

p.105. en lecture: 'out'.

p.105. cher, trop cher René: dear, too dear (his sister's words in Chateaubriand's René).

p.106. Chiron: doctor among centaurs: an allusion to Updike's best novel.

p.106. London Weekly: a reference to Alan Brien's New Statesman column.

p.106. Höhensonne: ultra-violet lamp.

p.107. bobo: little hurt.

p.107. démission etc.: tearful notice.

p.107. les deux enfants etc.: 'therefore the two children could make love without any fear'.

p.108. fait divers: news item.

p.109. blin: Russ., pancake.

p.109. qui le sait: who knows.

p.110. Heinrich Müller: author of Poxus, etc.

p.111. Ma soeur te souvient-il encore: first line of the third sextet of Chateaubriand's Romance à Hélène ('Combien j'ai douce souvenance') composed to an Auvergne tune that he heard during a trip to Mont Dore in 1805 and later inserted in his novella Le Dernier Abencerage. The final (fifth) sextet begins with 'Oh! qui me rendra mon Hélène. Et ma montagne et le grand chêne' - one of the leitmotivs of the present novel.

p.111. sestra moya etc.: my sister, do you remember the mountain, and the tall oak, and the Ladore?

p.111. oh! qui me rendra etc.: oh who will give me back my Aline, and the big oak, and my hill?

p.112. Lucile: the name of Chateaubriand's actual sister.

p.112. la Dore etc.: the Dore and the agile swallow.

p.112. vendage: vine-harvest.

p.114. Rockette: corresponds to Maupassant's La Petite Rocque.

p.114. chaleur du lit: bed warmth.

p.115. horosho: Russ., all right.

p.117. mironton etc.: burden of a popular song.

p.118. Lettrocalamity: a play on Ital. elettrocalamita, electromagnet.

p.121. Bagrov's grandson: allusion to Childhood Years of Bagrov's Grandson by the minor writer Sergey Aksakov (A.D. 1791-1859).

p.122. hobereaux: country squires.

p.122. biryul'ki proshlago: Russ., the Past's baubles.

p.124. traktir: Russ., pub.

p.124. (avoir le) vin triste: to be melancholy in one's cups.

p.124. au cou rouge etc.: with the ruddy and stout neck of a widower still full of sap.

p.124. gloutonnerie: gourmandise.

p.125. tant pis: too bad.

p.125. je rêve etc.: I must be dreaming. It cannot be that anyone should spread butter on top of all that indigestible and vile British dough.

p.125. et ce n'est que etc.: and it is only the first slice.

p.125. lait caillé!: curds and whey.

p.125. shlafrok: Russ., from Germ. Schlafrock, dressing gown.

p.126. tous les etc.: all the tires are new.

p.126. tel un: thus a wild lily entrusting the wilderness.

p.126. non etc.: no, Sir, I simply am very fond of you, Sir, and of your young lady.

p.127. qu'y puis-je? what can I do about it?

p.128. Stumbling on melons... arrogant fennels: allusions to passages in Marvell's 'Garden' and Rimbaud's 'Mémoire'.

p.130. d'accord: Okay.

p.133. la bonne surprise: what a good surprise.

p.134. amour propre, sale amour: pun borrowed from Tolstoy's 'Resurrection'.

p.135. quelque petite etc.: some little laundress.

p.135. Toulouse: Toulouse-Lautrec.

p.136. dura: Russ., fool (fem.).

p.136. The Headless Horseman: Mayn Reid's title is ascribed here to Pushkin, author of The Bronze Horseman.

p.136. Lermontov: author of The Demon.

p.137. Tolstoy etc.: Tolstoy's hero, Haji Murad, (a Caucasian chieftain) is blended here with General Murat, Napoleon's brother-in-law, and with the French revolutionary leader Marat assassinated in his bath by Charlotte Corday.

p.138. Lute: from 'Lutèce', ancient name of Paris.

p.139. constatait etc.: noted with pleasure.

p.140. Shivering aurora, laborious old Chose: a touch of Baudelaire.

p.142. golubyanka: Russ., small blue butterfly.

p.142. petit bleu: Parisian slang for pneumatic post (an express message on blue paper).

p.142. cousin: mosquito.

p.143. mademoiselle etc.: the young lady has a pretty bad pneumonia, I regret to say, Sir.

p.143. Granial Maza: a perfume named after Mt Kazbek's 'gran' almuza' (diamond's facet) of Lermontov's The Demon.

p.145. inquiétante: disturbing.

p.148. Yellow-blue Vass: the phrase is consonant with ya lyublyu vas, ('I love you' in Russian).

p.150. mais, ma pauvre amie etc.: but, my poor friend, it was imitation jewellery.

p.151. nichego ne podelaesh': Russ., nothing to be done.

p.151. elle le mangeait etc.: she devoured him with her eyes.

p.152. petits vers etc.: fugitive poetry and silk worms.

p.153. Uncle Van: allusion to a line in Chekhov's play Uncle Vanya: We shall see the sky swarming with diamonds.

p.157. Les Enfants Maudits: the accursed children.

p.157. du sollst etc.: Germ., you must not listen.

p.157. an ne parle pas etc.: one does not speak like that in front of a dog.

p.158. que voulez-vous dire: what do you mean.

p.160. Forestday: Rack's pronunciation of 'Thursday'.

p.160. furchtbar: Germ., dreadful.

p.161. Ero: thus the h-dropping policeman in Wells' Invisible Man defined the latter's treacherous friend.

p.163. mais qu'est-ce etc.: but what did your cousin do to you.

p.166. petit-beurre: a tea biscuit.

p.170. unschicklich: Germ., improper (understood as 'not chic' by Ada).

p.173. ogon': Russ., fire.

p.173. Microgalaxies: known on Terra as Les Enfants du Capitaine Grant, by Jules Verne.

p.173. ailleurs: elsewhere.

p.174. alfavit: Russ., alphabet.

p.175. particule: 'de' or 'd''.

p.176. Pat Rishin: a play on 'patrician'. One may recall Podgoretz (Russ. 'underhill') applying that epithet to a popular critic, would-be expert in Russian as spoken in Minsk and elsewhere. Minsk and Chess also figure in Chapter Six of Speak, Memory (p.133, N.Y. ed. 1966).

p.177. Gerschizhevsky: a Slavist's name gets mixed here with that of Chizhevki, another Slavist.

p.178. Je ne peux etc.: I can do nothing, but nothing.

p.178. Buchstaben: Germ., letters of the alphabet.

p.178. c'est tout simple: it's quite simple.

p.179. pas facile: not easy.

p.179. Cendrillon: Cinderella.

p.179. mon petit... qui dis-je: darling... in fact.

p.181. elle est folie etc.: she is insane and evil.

p.181. Beer Tower: pun on 'Tourbière'.

p.182. chayku: Russ., tea (diminutive).

p.182. Ivanilich: a pouf plays a marvelous part in Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich, where it sighs deeply under a friend of the widow's.

p.182. cousinage: cousinhood is dangerous neighborhood.

p.182. on s'embrassait: kissing went on in every corner.

p.182. erunda: Russ., nonsense.

p.182. hier und da: Germ., here and there.

p.183. raffolait etc.: was crazy about one of his mares.

p.184. tout est bien: everything is all right.

p.184 tant mieux: so much the better.

p.185. Tuzenbakh: Van recites the last words of the unfortunate Baron in Chekhov's Three Sisters who does not know what to say but feels urged to say something to Irina before going to fight his fatal duel.

p.185. kontretan: Russian mispronunciation of contretemps.

p.187. kameristochka: Russ., young chambermaid.

p.187. en effet: indeed.

p.188. petit nègre: little Negro in the flowering field.

p.188. ce sera etc.: it will be a dinner for four

p.188. Wagging his left forefinger: that gene did not miss his daughter (see p.178, where the name of the cream is also prefigured).

p.188. Lyovka: derogative or folksy diminutive of Lyov (Leo).

p.191. antranou etc.: Russian mispronunciation of Fr. entre nous soit dit, between you and me.

p.191. filius aqua: 'son of water', bad pun on filum aquae, the middle way, 'the thread of the stream'.

p.192. une petite juive etc.: a very aristocratic little Jewess.

p.192. ça va: it goes.

p.192. seins durs: mispronunciation of sans dire 'without saying'.

p.193. passe encore: may still pass muster.

p.195. Lorsque etc.: When her fiancé had gone to war, the unfortunate and noble maiden closed her piano, sold her elephant.

p.195. Klubsessel: Germ., easy chair.

p.194. By chance preserved: The verses are by chance preserved

I have them, here they are:

(Eugene Onegin, Six: XXI: 1-2)

p.196. devant les gens: in front of the servants.

p.196. Fanny Price: the heroine of Jane Austen's Mansfield Park.

p.196. grib: Russ., mushroom.

p.196. vodochki: Russ., pl. of vodochka, diminutive of vodka.

p.198. zakusochnïy etc.: Russ., table with hors-d'oeuvres.

p.198. petits soupers: intimate suppers.

p.198. Persty: Evidently Pushkin's vinograd:

as elongated and transparent

as are the fingers of a girl.

(devï molodoy, jeune fille)

p.198. ciel-étoilé: starry sky.

p.201. ne pïkhtite: Russ., do not wheeze.

p.202. vous me comblez: you overwhelm me with kindness.

p.202. pravda: Russ., it's true.

p.202. gelinotte: hazel-hen.

p.203. le feu etc.: the so delicate fire of virginity

that on her brow...

p.203. po razschyotu po moemu: an allusion to Famusov (in Griboedov's Gore ot uma), calculating the pregnancy of a lady friend.

p.203. protestuyu: Russ., I protest.

p.203. seriozno: Russ., seriously.

p.203. quoi que ce soit: whatever it might be.

p.203. en accuse etc.: ...brings out its beauty.

p.203. certicle: anagram of 'electric'.

p.204. Tetrastes etc.: Latin name of the imaginary 'Peterson's Grouse' from Wind River Range, Wyo.

p.205. Great good man: a phrase that Winston Churchill, the British politician, enthusiastically applied to Stalin.

p.205. voulu: intentional.

p.206. echt etc.: Germ., a genuine German.

p.207. Kegelkugel: Germ., skittle-ball.

p.207. partir etc.: to go away is to die a little, and to die is to go a way a little too much.

p.208. tangelo: a cross between the tangerine and the pomelo (grapefruit).

p.208. fal'shivo: Russ., false.

p.209. rozï... beryozï: Russ., roses... birches.

p.210. ou comme ça?: or like that?

p.213. sale etc.: dirty little Philistine.

p.213. d'accord: Okay.

p.214. zhe etc.: Russ., distortion of je t'en prie.

p.215. Trigorin etc.: a reference to a scene in The Seagull.

p.215. Houssaie: French a 'hollywood'. Gollivud-tozh means in Russian 'known also as Hollywood'.

p.216. enfin: at last.

p.217. passati: pseudo-Russian pun on 'pass water'.

p.217. coeur de boeuf: bull's heart (in shape).

p.219. quand tu voudras etc.: any time, my lad.

p.220. la maudite etc.: the confounded (governess).

p.220. vos etc.: Franco-Russ., your expressions are rather free.

p.221. qui tâchait etc.: who was trying to turn her head.

p.222. ombres etc.: shadows and colors.

p.226. qu'on la coiffe etc.: to have her hair done in the open.

p.226. un air entendu: a knowing look.

p.228. ne sais quand etc.: knows not when he'll come back.

p.229. mon beau page: my pretty page.

p.231. c'est ma dernière: this is my last night in the manor.

p.231. je suis etc.: I'm yours, it's soon dawn.

p.231. parlez pour vous: speak for yourself.

p.232. immonde: unspeakable.

p.232. il la mangeait etc.: he devoured her with disgusting kisses.

p.234. qu'on vous culbute: that they tumble you.

p.237. marais noir: black tide.

p.240. j'ai des ennuis: I have worries.

p.240. topinambour: tuber of the girasole; pun on 'pun' ('calembour').

p.240. on n'est pas etc: what scurvy behavior.

p.241. Tapper: 'Wild Violet', as well as 'Birdfoot' (p.242), reflects the 'pansy' character of Van's adversary and of the two seconds.

p.242. Rafin, Esq.: pun on 'Rafinesque', after whom a violet is named.

p.242. Do-Re-La: 'Ladore' musically jumbled.

p.244. partie etc.: picnic.

p.246. palata: Russ., ward.

p.248. tvoyu mat': Russ., 'Thy mother': the end of a popular Russian oath.

p.249. Ich bin etc.: Germ., I'm an incorrigible joker.

p.251. uncle: 'my uncle has most honest principles'.

(Eug. Onegin, One: I:1)

p.255. encore un etc.: one more 'baby ghost' (pun).

p.257. the last paragraph of Part One imitates, in significant brevity of intonation (as if spoken by an outside voice), a famous Tolstoyan ending, with Van in the role of Kitty Lyovin.

p.260. poule: tart.

p.260. komsi etc.: comme-ci comme-ça in Russ. mispronunciation: so-so.

p.260. mestechko: Russ., little place.

p.260. bateau ivre: 'sottish ship', title of Rimbaud's poem here used instead of 'ship of fools'.

p.261. poshlïy: Russ., vulgar.

p.262. da: Russ., yes.

p.262. ce qui etc.: which amounts to the same thing.

p.263. maux: aches.

p.263. aril: coating of certain seeds.

p.263. Grant etc.: Jules Verne in Captain Grant's Children has 'agonie' (in a discovered message) turn out to be part of 'Patagonie'.

p.266. Cyraniana: allusion to Cyrano de Bergerac's Histoire comique des Etats de la Lune.

p.266. Nekto: Russ., quidam.

p.266. romanchik: Russ., novelette.

p.267. Sig Leymanski: anagram of the name of a waggish British novelist keenly interested in physics fiction.

p.269. Abencerage, Zegris: Families of Granada Moors (their feud inspired Chateaubriand).

p.271. fille de joie: whore.

p.275. maison close: brothel.

p.276. vyshibala: Russ., bouncer.

p.277. Künstlerpostkarte: Germ., art picture postcards.

p.278. la gosse: the little girl.

p.279. subsidunt etc.: mountains subside and heights deteriorate.

p.281. smorchiama: let us snuff out the candle.

p.283. Marmlad in Dickens: or rather Marmeladov in Dostoevsky, whom Dickens (in translation) greatly influenced.

p.284. frôlements: light touchings.

p.286. sturb: pun on Germ. sterben, to die.

p.288. qui prend etc.: that takes wing.

p.288. all our old etc.: Swinburne.

p.288. Larousse: pun: rousse, 'redhair' in French.

p.289. pourtant: yet.

p.289. cesse: cease.

p.289. Glanz: Germ., luster.

p.290. Mädel: Germ., girl.

p.290. vsyo sdelali: Russ., had done everything.

p.292. relanced: from Fr. relancer, to go after.

p.294. coigner etc.: pun ('to coin a phrase').

p.294. fraise: strawberry red.

p.295. krestik: Anglo-Russian, little crest.

p.295. vanouissements: 'Swooning in Van's arms'.

p.297. I have not art etc.: Hamlet.

p.298. si je puis etc.: if I may put it that way.

p.298. la plus laide etc.: the ugliest girl in the world can give more than she has.

p.299. Wattebausch: Germ., piece of cottonwool.

p.299. à la queue etc.: in Indian file.

p.301. making follies: Fr. 'faire des folies', living it up.

p.301. komondi: Russian French: 'comme on dit', as they say.

p.302. Vieux-Rose etc..: Ségur-Rostopchin's books in the Bibliothèque Rose edition.

p.304. l'ivresse etc.: the intoxication of speed, conceptions on Sundays.

p.304. un baiser etc.: one single kiss.

p.307. shuba: Russ., furcoat.

p.311. ébats: frolics.

p.311. mossio etc.: monsieur your cousin.

p.311. jolies: pretty.

p.312. n'aurait etc.: should never have received that scoundrel.

p.312. Ashettes: Cinderellas.

p.314. Sumerechnikov: His name comes from Russ., sumerki, twilight; see also p.37.

p.314. zdraste: abbrev. form of zdravstvuyte, the ordinary Russian greeting.

p.315. lit etc.: pun on 'eider-down bed'.

p.316. d'ailleurs: anyhow.

p.316. petard: Mr Ben Wright, a poet in his own right, is associated throughout with pets (farts).

p.316. bayronka: from Bayron, Russ., Byron.

p.317. réjouissants: hilarious.

p.317. Beckstein: transposed syllables.

p.317. Love under the Lindens: O'Neil, Thomas Mann, and his translator tangle in this paragraph.

p.317. vanishing etc.: allusion to 'vanishing cream'.

p.318. auch: Germ., also.

p.319. éventail: fan.

p.319. fotochki: Russ., little photos.

p.320. foute: French swear word made to sound 'foot'.

p.320. ars: Lat., art.

p.320. Carte du Tendre: 'Map of Tender Love', sentimental allegory of the seventeenth century.

p.321. Knabenkräuter: Germ., orchids (and testicles).

p.321. perron: porch.

p.323. romances, tsiganshchina: Russ., pseudo-Tsigan ballads.

p.325. vinocherpiy: Russ., the 'wine-pourer'.

p.325. zernistaya ikra: 'large-grained' caviar (Russ.).

p.325. uzh gasli etc.: Russ., the lights were already going out in the rooms.

p.327. Nikak-s net: Russ., certainly not.

p.328. famous fly: see p.109, Serromyia.

p.328. Vorschmacks: Germ., hors-d'oeuvres.

p.330. et pour cause: and no wonder.

p.330. karavanchik: small caravan of camels (Russ.).

p.331. oberart etc.: Germ., superspecies; subspecies.

p.332. spazmochka: Russ., little spasm.

p.333. bretteur: duelling bravo.

p.333. au fond: actually.

p.335. fokus-pokus: Russ., bogus magic.

p.336. au dire etc.: according to the reviewers.

p.336. finestra, sestra: Ital., window, sister.

p.337. Arinushka: Russ., folksy diminutive of 'Irina'.

p.337. oh qui me rendra etc.: Oh, who'll give me back

my hill and the big oak.

p.338. sekundant: Russ., second.

p.338. puerulus: Lat., little lad.

p.338. matovaya: Russ., dull-toned.

p.339. en robe etc.: in a pink and green dress.

p.341. R4: 'rook four', a chess indication of position (pun on the woman's name).

p.343. c'est le mot: that's the right word.

p.344. pleureuses: widow's weeds.

p.345. Bozhe moy: Russ., good Heavens.

p.349. ridge: money.

p.351. secondes pensées etc.: second thoughts are the good ones.

p.351. bonne: housemaid.

p.354. dyakon: deacon.

p.355. désolé etc.: distressed at being unable to be with you.

p.356. So you are married, etc.: see Eugene Onegin, Eight: XVIII: 1-4.

p.357 za tvoyo etc.: Russ., your health.

p.358. guvernantka etc.: Russ., governess-novelist.

p.359. moue: little grimace.

p.361. affalés etc.: sprawling in their armchairs.

p.362. bouffant: puffed up.

p.362. gueule etc.: simian facial angle.

p.362. grustnoe etc.: Russ., she addresses him as 'my sad bliss'.

p.363. troués: with a hole or holes.

p.363. engripped: from prendre en grippe, to conceive a dislike.

p.364. pravoslavnaya: Russ., Greek-Orthodox.

p.366. das auch noch: Germ., and that too.

p.366. pendant que je etc.: while I am skiing.

p.372. Vesti: Russ., News.

p.375. Obst: Germ., fruit.

p.378. I love you with a brother's love etc.: see Eugene Onegin, Four: XVI: 3-4.

p.379. cootooriay etc.: mispronunciation of 'couturier', dressmaker, 'vous avez entendu', you've heard (about him).

p.379. tu sais etc.: you know it will kill me.

p.381. Insiste etc.: quotation from St Augustine.

p.381. Henry: Henry James' style is suggested by the italicized 'had'.

p.383. en laid et en lard: in an ugly and fleshy version.

p.383. emptovato: Anglo-Russian, rather empty.

p.385. slip: Fr., panties.

p.387. pudeur: modesty, delicacy.

p.388. prosit: Germ., your health.

p.389. Dimanche etc.: Sunday. Lunch on the grass. Everybody stinks. My mother-in-law swallows her dentures. Her little bitch, etc. After which, etc. (see p.375, a painter's diary Lucette has been reading).

p.389. Nox: Lat., at night.

p.392. Cher ami, etc.: Dear friend, my husband and I, were deeply upset by the frightful news. It was to me - and this I'll always remember - that practically on the eve of her death the poor girl addressed herself to arrange things on the Tobakoff, which is always crowded and which from now on I'll never take again, slightly out of superstition and very much out of sympathy for gentle, tender Lucette. I had been so happy to do all I could, as somebody had told me that you would be there too. Actually, she said so herself; she seemed so joyful to spend a few days on the upper deck with her dear cousin! The psychology of suicide is a mystery that no scientist can explain. I have never shed so many tears, it almost makes me drop my pen. We return to Malbrook around mid-August. Yours ever.

p.394. And o'er the summits of the Tacit etc.: parody of four lines in Lermontov's The Demon (see also p.115).

p.394. le beau ténébreux: wrapt in Byronic gloom.

p.398. que sais-je: what do I know.

p.398. Merci etc.: My infinite thanks.

p.399. cameriere: Ital., hotel manservant who carries the luggage upstairs, vacuum-cleans the rooms, etc.

p.400. libretto: that of the opera Eugene Onegin, a travesty of Pushkin's poem

p.402. korrektnïy: Russ., correct.

p.402. hobereau: country squire.

p.402. cart de van: Amer., mispronunciation of carte des vins.

p.402. zhidovskaya: Russ. (vulg.), Jewish.

p.403. je veux etc.: I want to get hold of you, my dear.

p.403. enfin: in short.

p.403. Luzon: Amer., mispronunciation of 'Lausanne'.

p.403. lieu: place.

p.405. (a pause): This and the whole conversation parody Chekhov's mannerisms.

p.406. muirninochka: Hiberno-Russian caressive term.

p.406. potins de famille: family gossip.

p.407. terriblement etc.: terribly grand and all that, she likes to tease him by saying that a simple farmer like him should not have married the daughter of an actress and an art dealer.

p.407. je dois etc.: I must watch my weight.

p.407. Olorinus: from Lat. olor, swan (Leda's lover).

p.407. lenclose: distorted 'clothes' (influenced by 'Ninon de Lenclos'), the courtesan in Vere de Vere's novel mentioned above.

p.408. Aleksey etc.: Vronski and his mistress.

p.409. phrase etc.: stock phrase.

p.409. She Yawns: Chillon's.

p.409. D'Onsky: see p.17.

p.409. comme etc.: shedding floods of tears.

p.410. N'a pas le verbe etc.: lacks the gift of the gab.

p.411. chiens etc.: dogs not allowed.

p.412. rieuses: black-headed gulls.

p.413. Golos etc.: Russ., The Phoenix Voice, Russian language newspaper in Arizona.

p.413. la voix etc.: the brassy voice telephoned... the trumpet did not sound pleased this morning.

p.413. contretemps: mishap.

p.416. phalène: moth (see also p.111).

p.416. tu sais etc.: you know it will kill me.

p.416. Bozhe moy: Russ., oh, my God.

p.419. et trève etc.: and enough of that painted-ceiling style of mine.

p.422. ardis: arrow.

p.422. ponder: pun on Fr. pondre, to lay an egg (allusion to the problem what came first, egg or hen).

p.424. anime etc.: Lat., soul.

p.424. assassin pun: a pun on pointe assassine (from a poem by Verlaine).

p.424. Lacrimaval: Italo-Swiss. Pseudo-place-name, 'vale of tears'.

p.426. coup de volant: one twist of the steering wheel.

p.428. dream-delta: allusion to the disintegration of an imaginary element.

p.432. unfortunate thinker: Samuel Alexander, English philosopher.

p.434. Villa Jolana: named in honor of a butterfly, belonging to the subgenus Jolana, which breeds in the Pfynwald (see also p.103).

p.434. Vinn Landère: French distortion of 'Vinelander'.

p.435. a la sonde: in soundings (for the same ship see p.408).

p.436. Comment etc.: what's that? no, no, not 88, but 86.

p.439. droits etc.: custom-house dues.

p.439. après tout: after all.

p.439. on peut etc.: see p.194.

p.439. lucubratiuncula: bit of writing in the lamplight.

p.439. duvet: fluff.

p.442. simpler: simpler to take off from the balcony.

p.442. mermaid: allusion to Lucette.

p.445. Stepan Nootkin: Van's valet.

p.450. blyadushki: little whores (echo of p.323).

p.450. Blitzpartien: Germ., quickies (quick chess games).

p.452. Compitalia: Lat., crossroads.

p.453. E, p, i: referring to 'epistemic' (see above).

p.457. j'ai tâté etc.: I have known two Lesbians in my life, that's enough.

p.457. terme etc.: term one avoids using.

p.459. le bouquin... gueri, etc.: the book... cured of all its snags.

p.460. quell livre etc.: what a book, good God.

p.460. gamine: lassie.