According to Ada (the title character of a novel, 1969, by VN), the glossy-limbed shattal tree at the bottom of the garden that Van and Ada climb in "Ardis the First" is really the Tree of Knowledge:
One afternoon they were climbing the glossy-limbed shattal tree at the bottom of the garden. Mlle Larivière and little Lucette, screened by a caprice of the coppice but just within earshot, were playing grace hoops. One glimpsed now and then, above or through the foliage, the skimming hoop passing from one unseen sending stick to another. The first cicada of the season kept trying out its instrument. A silver-and-sable skybab squirrel sat sampling a cone on the back of a bench.
Van, in blue gym suit, having worked his way up to a fork just under his agile playmate (who naturally was better acquainted with the tree’s intricate map) but not being able to see her face, betokened mute communication by taking her ankle between finger and thumb as she would have a closed butterfly. Her bare foot slipped, and the two panting youngsters tangled ignominiously among the branches, in a shower of drupes and leaves, clutching at each other, and the next moment, as they regained a semblance of balance, his expressionless face and cropped head were between her legs and a last fruit fell with a thud — the dropped dot of an inverted exclamation point. She was wearing his wristwatch and a cotton frock.
(‘Remember?’
‘Yes, of course, I remember: you kissed me here, on the inside —’
‘And you started to strangle me with those devilish knees of yours —’
‘I was seeking some sort of support.’)
That might have been true, but according to a later (considerably later!) version they were still in the tree, and still glowing, when Van removed a silk thread of larva web from his lip and remarked that such negligence of attire was a form of hysteria.
‘Well,’ answered Ada, straddling her favorite limb, ‘as we all know by now, Mlle La Rivière de Diamants has nothing against a hysterical little girl’s not wearing pantalets during l’ardeur de la canicule.’
‘I refuse to share the ardor of your little canicule with an apple tree.’
‘It is really the Tree of Knowledge — this specimen was imported last summer wrapped up in brocade from the Eden National Park where Dr Krolik’s son is a ranger and breeder.’
‘Let him range and breed by all means,’ said Van (her natural history had long begun to get on his nerves), ‘but I swear no apple trees grow in Iraq.’
‘Right, but that’s not a true apple tree.’
(‘Right and wrong,’ commented Ada, again much later: ‘We did discuss the matter, but you could not have permitted yourself such vulgar repartees then. At a time when the chastest of chances allowed you to snatch, as they say, a first shy kiss! Oh, for shame. And besides, there was no National Park in Iraq eighty years ago.’ ‘True,’ said Van. ‘And no caterpillars bred on that tree in our orchard.’ ‘True, my lovely and larveless.’ Natural history was past history by that time.)
Both kept diaries. Soon after that foretaste of knowledge, an amusing thing happened. She was on her way to Krolik’s house with a boxful of hatched and chloroformed butterflies and had just passed through the orchard when she suddenly stopped and swore (chort!). At the same moment Van, who had set out in the opposite direction for a bit of shooting practice in a nearby pavilion (where there was a bowling alley and other recreational facilities, once much used by other Veens), also came to an abrupt standstill. Then, by a nice coincidence, both went tearing back to the house to hide their diaries which both thought they had left lying open in their respective rooms. Ada, who feared the curiosity of Lucette and Blanche (the governess presented no threat, being pathologically unobservant), found out she was wrong — she had put away the album with its latest entry. Van, who knew that Ada was a little ‘snoopy,’ discovered Blanche in his room feigning to make the made bed, with the unlocked diary lying on the stool beside it. He slapped her lightly on the behind and removed the shagreen-bound book to a safer place. Then Van and Ada met in the passage, and would have kissed at some earlier stage of the Novel’s Evolution in the History of Literature. It might have been a neat little sequel to the Shattal Tree incident. Instead, both resumed their separate ways — and Blanche, I suppose, went to weep in her bower. (1.15)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): chort!: Russ., ‘devil’.
In Konstantin Leontiev’s novel Podlipki (1861) subtitled Zapiski Vladimira Ladneva (“The Notes of Vladimir Ladnev”) Teryaev (Ladnev's neighbor) invites Ladnev to his place and mentions drevo poznaniya dobra i zla (the tree of knowledge of good and evil) that grows in his garden:
После этого Теряев стал для меня своим человеком. Были минуты, в которые я даже не мог удержаться от улыбки легкой радости, когда он входил в комнату. Но в апреле, после святой, тетушка тронулась в путь с тремя девицами. Мы с Теряевым провожали их до первой станции на почтовой тройке в телеге. Он рассказывал мне о своей деревне, которая всего шесть верст от Подлипок, о том, как он умеет жить и как он будет угощать меня самым лучшим запрещенным плодом, и прибавил:
— У меня, батюшка, там такое древо познания добра и зла, что вы, отец, целый месяц облизываться будете. Superfine.
Древо познания добра и зла напомнило мне об адамовой голове, и я невольно улыбнулся. Он принял это за Улыбку ликующего заранее воображения и, с жаром схватив меня за колено, продолжал:
— Да-с, упою вас самой квинтэссенцией! Я люблю вас. Если б не ваше бабье воспитание, так вы были бы отличный малый. Да я вас переделаю.
Я был уверен, что переделка не удастся, потому что под словами «бабье воспитание» он разумеет, вероятно, самые заветные мысли и чувства мои, которые я любил и лелеял, как самые нежные, изящные цветы моей жизни, и только по врожденной неосторожности и детской суетности выставлял напоказ, всегда с внутренним упреком и болью. Но слова «я вас люблю» действовали сильно. Соединив их с воспоминанием о Гизо и волосах, откинутых за пылающие уши, я готов был сам полюбить его. Случай спас меня. Навстречу ехал обоз.
— Сворачивай, сворачивай, чорт возьми!
Передний мужичок спит ничком на телеге. Еще мгновение — и кнут в руках Теряева. Ни одного не пропустил он так, задел хотя слегка или по крайней мере заставил откинуться в сторону. На возвратном пути я отвечал ему только да и нет; он поглядел на меня пристально и угадал в чем дело.
— А! вы не любите этого! — воскликнул он смеясь, — это правда; теперь оно скверно, но вот надо отпустить их всех и тогда можно будет тешиться. Это уже будет отношение одной свободной личности к другой... (Part Two, chapter XII)
Teryaev's oath chort voz'mi (may the devil take you) brings to mind Ada's expletive (chort!). The surname Teryaev comes from teryat' (to lose). Showing to Van Kim Beauharnais's album, Ada compares Ben Wright (the English coachman in "Ardis the First") and Blanche (a French handmaid at Ardis) to the Beast and the Belle at the ball where Cinderella loses her garter and the Prince his beautiful codpiece of glass:
A comparison piece: Ada’s very-much-exposed white thighs (her birthday skirt had got entangled with twigs and leaves) straddling a black limb of the tree of Eden. Thereafter: several shots of the 1884 picnic, such as Ada and Grace dancing a Lyaskan fling and reversed Van nibbling at pine starworts (conjectural identification).
‘That’s finished,’ said Van, ‘a precious sinistral sinew has stopped functioning. I can still fence and deliver a fine punch but hand-walking is out. You shall not sniffle, Ada. Ada is not going to sniffle and wail. King Wing says that the great Vekchelo turned back into an ordinary chelovek at the age I’m now, so everything is perfectly normal. Ah, drunken Ben Wright trying to rape Blanche in the mews — she has quite a big part in this farrago.’
‘He’s doing nothing of the sort. You see quite well they are dancing. It’s like the Beast and the Belle at the ball where Cinderella loses her garter and the Prince his beautiful codpiece of glass. You can also make out Mr Ward and Mrs French in a bruegelish kimbo (peasant prance) at the farther end of the hall. All those rural rapes in our parts have been grossly exaggerated. D’ailleurs, it was Mr Ben Wright’s last petard at Ardis.’ (2.7)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): d’ailleurs: anyhow.
petard: Mr Ben Wright, a poet in his own right, is associated throughout with pets (farts).
In the same chapter Ada mentions Love under the Lindens by one Eelmann:
But what about the rare radiance on those adored lips? Bright derision can easily grade, through a cline of glee, into a look of rapture:
‘Do you know, Van, what book lay there — next to Marina’s hand mirror and a pair of tweezers? I’ll tell you. One of the most tawdry and réjouissants novels that ever "made" the front page of the Manhattan Times’ Book Review. I’m sure your Cordula still had it in her cosy corner where you sat temple to temple after you jilted me.’
‘Cat,’ said Van.
‘Oh, much worse. Old Beckstein’s Tabby was a masterpiece in comparison to this — this Love under the Lindens by one Eelmann transported into English by Thomas Gladstone, who seems to belong to a firm of Packers & Porters, because on the page which Adochka, adova dochka (Hell’s daughter) happens to be relishing here, "automobile" is rendered as "wagon." And to think, to think, that little Lucette had to study Eelmann, and three terrible Toms in her Literature course at Los!’
‘You remember that trash but I remember our nonstop three-hour kiss Under the Larches immediately afterwards.’
‘See next illustration,’ said Ada grimly.
‘The scoundrel!’ cried Van; ‘He must have been creeping after us on his belly with his entire apparatus. I will have to destroy him.’
‘No more destruction, Van. Only love.’
‘But look, girl, here I’m glutting your tongue, and there I’m glued to your epiglottis, and —’
‘Intermission,’ begged Ada, ‘quick-quick.’
‘I’m ready to oblige till I’m ninety,’ said Van (the vulgarity of the peep show was catchy), ‘ninety times a month, roughly.’
‘Make it even more roughly, oh much more, say a hundred and fifty, that would mean, that would mean —’
But, in the sudden storm, calculations went to the canicular devils. (ibid.)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): réjouissants: hilarious.
Beckstein: transposed syllables.
Love under the Lindens: O’Neil, Thomas Mann, and his translator tangle in this paragraph.
Thomas Mann is the author of Der Zauberberg ("The Magic Mountain," 1924), a novel mentioned in VN’s story Podlets (“An Affair of Honor,” 1927):
Он вновь и вновь пробовал успокоиться. Но происходили странные вещи: книга, которую он держал, называлась "волшебная гора", а гора по-немецки - Берг; он решил, что если досчитает до трех, и на три пройдет трамвай, он будет убит,- и так оно и случилось: прошел трамвай. И тогда Антон Петрович сделал самое скверное, что мог сделать человек в его положении: он решил уяснить себе, что такое смерть. Спустя минуту такого раздумья все потеряло смысл. Ему стало трудно дышать. Он встал, прошелся по комнате, поглядел в окно на чистое, страшное ночное небо. "Надо завещанье написать",- подумал Антон Петрович. Но писать завещанье было, так сказать, играть с огнем; это значило мысленно похоронить себя. "Лучше всего выспаться",- сказал он вслух. Но как только он опускал веки, перед ним являлось злое, веселое лицо Берга и щурило один глаз. Тогда он опять зажигал свет, пытался читать, курил, хотя курильщиком не был. Мгновениями он вспоминал мелочь из прошлой жизни,- детский пистолетик, тропинку в парке или что-нибудь такое,- и сразу пресекал свои воспоминания, подумав: умирающие всегда вспоминают мелочи прошлой жизни. Этого не нужно делать. И тогда обратное пугало его: он замечал, что о Тане не думал, что он как бы охлажден наркотиком, нечувствителен к ее отсутствию. И сама собой являлась мысль: я бессознательно уже простился с жизнью, мне теперь все безразлично, раз я буду убит... И ночь уже шла на убыль.
He sought peace in vain. Strange things kept happening: the book he was holding, a novel by some German writer or other, was called The Magic Mountain, and “mountain,” in German is Berg; he decided that if he counted to three and a streetcar went by at “three” he would be killed, and a streetcar obliged. And then Anton Petrovich did the very worst thing a man in his situation could have done: he decided to reason out what death really meant. When he had thought along these lines for a minute or so, everything lost sense. He found it difficult to breathe. He got up, walked about the room, and took a look out the window at the pure and terrible night sky. Must write my testament, thought Anton Petrovich. But to make a will was, so to speak, playing with fire; it meant inspecting the contents of one’s own urn in the columbarium. “Best thing is to get some sleep,” he said aloud. But as soon as he closed his eyelids, Berg’s grinning face would appear before him, purposively slitting one eye. He would turn on the light again, attempt to read, smoke, though he was not a regular smoker. Trivial memories floated by—a toy pistol, a path in the park, that sort of thing—and he would immediately cut short his recollections with the thought that those who are about to die always remember trifles from their past. Then the opposite thing frightened him: he realized that he was not thinking of Tanya, that he was numbed by a strange drug that made him insensitive to her absence. She was my life and she has gone, he thought. I have already, unconsciously, bid life farewell, and everything is now indifferent to me, since I shall be killed.… The night, meanwhile, was beginning to wane. (2)
The characters in "An Affair of Honor" include Leontiev, a poor journalist into whom Anton Petrovich runs after fleeing from the site of his duel with Berg.
The name of Ladnev's estate in Konstantin Leontiev's novel, Podlipki means pod lipkami (under the little lindens). In the next chapter of Leontiev's novel Yuriev asks Ladnev's permission to call him "Don-Tabago:"
Незадолго до моего отъезда в деревню, я ехал однажды в пролетке по Кузнецкому Мосту. Вдруг смотрю, идет высокий мужчина в чорном пальто и серой шляпе, под мышкою зонтик. Вглядываюсь: это мой спаситель — Юрьев!
— Стой! Стой!
Долго не забуду я выражение радости на его бледном лице.
Он сказал только: Володя! — и протянул мне руки.
Мы сели в пролетку и не расставались до полуночи. Все было перебрано, пересказано; был и смех, была и невеселая беседа. Юрьев жил в Хамовниках, в красном домике с желтыми украшениями, у разбогатевшего чиновника и занимался его детьми. Ему не хотелось поступить на казенный счет в университет, а на свой без работы он не мог. Я стал звать его в Подлипки, но он заметил, что подлипки не мои, «да и куда-де мужику в ваши антресоли забираться!»
— Почему же антресоли? — спросил я смеясь. — Полно, поедем!..
— Посмотрите, — отвечал он, — у нас и перчаток нет. И сейчас сымпровизировал:
С голыми студент руками
И с небритой бородой
Принужден был жить трудами
У чиновника зимой...
Дальше помню только игру слов «аристократ» — и «ори-стократ». И, несмотря на все мои мольбы, он остался непреклонен.
В день отъезда он пришел провожать меня, был серьезен, говорил мне: «Вернись же, Володя, скорее! при тебе все теплее». Но в ту минуту, когда я занес ногу на подножку тарантаса (Модест уже сидел в нем), он спросил: — «Позвольте мне всегда звать вас "Дон-Табаго"?»
— Хорошо, зови, — отвечал я, не обижаясь слишком, но все-таки поморщился и прибавил: «Что за бессмыслица! ».
— Он грубоват и, должно быть, эгоист, — заметил Модест, когда Юрьев скрылся из глаз. (Part Two, chapter XIII)
"Don-Tabago" brings to mind the Tobago Islands mentioned by Van when he describes Lucette's visit to Kingston (Van's American University):
‘I want to see you again soon,’ said Van, biting his thumb, brooding, cursing the pause, yearning for the contents of the blue envelope. ‘You must come and stay with me at a flat I now have on Alex Avenue. I have furnished the guest room with bergères and torchères and rocking chairs; it looks like your mother’s boudoir.’
Lucette curtseyed with the wicks of her sad mouth, à l’Américaine.
‘Will you come for a few days? I promise to behave properly. All right?’
‘My notion of propriety may not be the same as yours. And what about Cordula de Prey? She won’t mind?’
‘The apartment is mine,’ said Van, ‘and besides, Cordula is now Mrs Ivan G. Tobak. They are making follies in Florence. Here’s her last postcard. Portrait of Vladimir Christian of Denmark, who, she claims, is the dead spit of her Ivan Giovanovich. Have a look.’
‘Who cares for Sustermans,’ observed Lucette, with something of her uterine sister’s knight move of specious response, or a Latin footballer’s rovesciata.
No, it’s an elm. Half a millennium ago.
‘His ancestor,’ Van pattered on, ‘was the famous or fameux Russian admiral who had an épée duel with Jean Nicot and after whom the Tobago Islands, or the Tobakoff Islands, are named, I forget which, it was so long ago, half a millennium.’ (2.5)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): making follies: Fr. ‘faire des folies’, living it up.
Van recalls Ada's words "no, it's an elm" in reply to Greg Erminin's question "I guess it’s your father under that oak, isn’t it?" in "Ardis the First:"
Van, his eyes smiling, his angel-strong hands holding the child’s cold-carrot-soup legs just above the insteps, was ‘ploughing around’ with Lucette acting the sullow. Her bright hair hung over her face, her panties showed from under the hem of her skirt, yet she still urged the ploughboy on.
‘Budet, budet, that’ll do,’ said Marina to the plough team.
Van gently let her legs down and straightened her dress. She lay for a moment, panting.
‘I mean, I would love lending him to you for a ride any time. For any amount of time. Will you? Besides, I have another black.’
But she shook her head, she shook her bent head, while still twisting and twining her daisies.
‘Well,’ he said, getting up, ‘I must be going. Good-bye, everybody. Good-bye, Ada. I guess it’s your father under that oak, isn’t it?’
‘No, it’s an elm,’ said Ada.
Van looked across the lawn and said as if musing — perhaps with just a faint touch of boyish show-off:
‘I’d like to see that Two-Lice sheet too when Uncle is through with it. I was supposed to play for my school in yesterday’s cricket game. Veen sick, unable to bat, Riverlane humbled.’ (1.14)
Immediately after parting with Greg Erminin (whom Van meets in Paris in 1901), Van runs into Cordula Tobak:
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! (3.2)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): moue: little grimace.
See also the updated version of my previous post, "Ladno (Okay) & na bosu nogu (on bare feet) in Ada."