At a party in “Ardis the Second” Philip Rack (Lucette’s music teacher in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) mispronounces Thursday “Forestday:”
The melancholy young German was in a philosophical mood shading into the suicidal. He had to return to Kalugano with his Elsie, who Doc Ecksreher thought ‘would present him with driplets in dry weeks.’ He hated Kalugano, his and her home town, where in a moment of ‘mutual aberration’ stupid Elsie had given him her all on a park bench after a wonderful office party at Muzakovski’s Organs where the oversexed pitiful oaf had a good job.
‘When are you leaving?’ asked Ada.
‘Forestday — after tomorrow.’
‘Fine. That’s fine. Adieu, Mr Rack.’
Poor Philip drooped, fingerpainting sad nothings on wet stone, shaking his heavy head, gulping visibly.
‘One feels… One feels,’ he said, ‘that one is merely playing a role and has forgotten the next speech.’
‘I’m told many feel that,’ said Ada; ‘it must be a furchtbar feeling.’
‘Cannot be helped? No hope any more at all? I am dying, yes?’
‘You are dead, Mr Rack,’ said Ada. (1.32)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): Forestday: Rack’s pronunciation of ‘Thursday’.
furchtbar: Germ., dreadful.
In Proust’s Un amour de Swann Swann spends his days in poring over a map of the forest of Compiègne, as though it had been that of the 'Pays du Tendre:'
Il passait ses journées penché sur une carte de la forêt de Compiègne comme si ç'avait été la carte du Tendre, s'entourait de photographies du château de Pierrefonds.
He spent his days in poring over a map of the forest of Compiègne, as though it had been that of the 'Pays du Tendre'; he surrounded himself with the photographs of Château de Pierrefonds.
Describing Kim Beauharnais’s album, Van calls it “the hearse of ars, a toilet roll of the Carte du Tendre:”
In an equally casual tone of voice Van said: 'Darling, you smoke too much, my belly is covered with your ashes. I suppose Bouteillan knows Professor Beauharnais's exact address in the Athens of Graphic Arts.'
'You shall not slaughter him,' said Ada. 'He is subnormal, he is, perhaps, blackmailerish, but in his sordidity, there is an istoshnïy ston ('visceral moan') of crippled art. Furthermore, this page is the only really naughty one. And let's not forget that a copperhead of eight was also ambushed in the brush'.
‘Art my foute. This is the hearse of ars, a toilet roll of the Carte du Tendre! I’m sorry you showed it to me. That ape has vulgarized our own mind-pictures. I will either horsewhip his eyes out or redeem our childhood by making a book of it: Ardis, a family chronicle.’ (2.7)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): foute: French swear word made to sound ‘foot’.
ars: Lat., art.
Carte du Tendre: ‘Map of Tender Love’, sentimental allegory of the seventeenth century.
During his last visit to Ardis Hall Philip Rack is clutching a roll of pink paper:
Lucette’s first tricycle stood there in a corner; a shelf above a cretonne-covered divan held some of the child’s old ‘untouchable’ treasures among which was the battered anthology he had given her four years ago. The door could not be locked, but Van was impatient, and the music would surely endure, as firm as a wall, for at least another twenty minutes. He had buried his mouth in Ada’s nuque, when she stiffened and raised a warning finger. Heavy slow steps were coming up the grand staircase. ‘Send him away,’ she muttered. ‘Chort (hell),’ swore Van, adjusting his clothes, and went out on the landing. Philip Rack was trudging up, Adam’s apple bobbing, ill-shaven, livid, gums exposed, one hand on his chest, the other clutching a roll of pink paper while the music continued to play on its own as if by some mechanical, device.
‘There’s one downstairs in the hall,’ said Van, assuming, or feigning to assume, that the unfortunate fellow had stomach cramps or nausea. But Mr Rack only wanted ‘to make his farewells’ — to Ivan Demonovich (accented miserably on the second ‘o’), to Fräulein Ada, to Mademoiselle Ida, and of course to Madame. Alas, Van’s cousin and aunt were in town, but Phil might certainly find his friend Ida writing in the rose garden. Was Van sure? Van was damned well sure. Mr Rack shook Van’s hand with a deep sigh, looked up, looked down, tapped the banisters with his mysterious pink-paper tube, and went back to the music room, where Mozart had begun to falter. Van waited for a moment, listening and grimacing involuntarily, and presently rejoined Ada. She sat with a book in her lap. (1.33)
Van visits dying Rack (who, according to Dr Fitzbishop, was poisoned by his jealous wife Elsie) in Ward Five (where hopeless cases are kept) of the Kalugano hospital:
Van, from his chair, extended the end of his cane, which the weak hand took, and palpated politely, thinking it was a well-meant offer of support. ‘No, I am not yet able to walk a few steps,’ Rack said quite distinctly, with the German accent which would probably constitute his most durable group of ghost cells.
Van drew in his useless weapon. Controlling himself, he thumped it against the footboard of his wheelchair. Dorofey glanced up from his paper, then went back to the article that engrossed him — ‘A Clever Piggy (from the memoirs of an animal trainer),’ or else ‘The Crimean War: Tartar Guerillas Help Chinese Troops.’ A diminutive nurse simultaneously stepped out from behind the farther screen and disappeared again.
Will he ask me to transmit a message? Shall I refuse? Shall I consent — and not transmit it?
‘Have they all gone to Hollywood already? Please, tell me, Baron von Wien.’
‘I don’t know,’ answered Van. ‘They probably have. I really —’
‘Because I sent my last flute melody, and a letter for all the family, and no answer has come. I must vomit now. I ring myself.’
The diminutive nurse on tremendously high white heels pulled forward the screen of Rack’s bed, separating him from the melancholy, lightly wounded, stitched-up, clean-shaven young dandy; who was rolled out and away by efficient Dorofey.
Upon returning to his cool bright room, with the rain and the sun mingling in the half-open window, Van walked on rather ephemeral feet to the looking-glass, smiled to himself in welcome, and without Dorofey’s assistance went back to bed. Lovely Tatiana glided in, and asked if he wanted some tea.
‘My darling,’ he said, ‘I want you. Look at this tower of strength!’
‘If you knew,’ she said, over her shoulder, ‘how many prurient patients have insulted me — exactly that way.’ (1.42)
According to Van, Tatiana (a pretty nurse in the Kalugano hospital) wrote him a charming and melancholy letter:
For half a minute Van was sure that he still lay in the car, whereas actually he was in the general ward of Lakeview (Lakeview!) Hospital, between two series of variously bandaged, snoring, raving and moaning men. When he understood this, his first reaction was to demand indignantly that he be transferred to the best private palata in the place and that his suitcase and alpenstock be fetched from the Majestic. His next request was that he be told how seriously he was hurt and how long he was expected to remain incapacitated. His third action was to resume what constituted the sole reason of his having to visit Kalugano (visit Kalugano!). His new quarters, where heartbroken kings had tossed in transit, proved to be a replica in white of his hotel apartment — white furniture, white carpet, white sparver. Inset, so to speak, was Tatiana, a remarkably pretty and proud young nurse, with black hair and diaphanous skin (some of her attitudes and gestures, and that harmony between neck and eyes which is the special, scarcely yet investigated secret of feminine grace fantastically and agonizingly reminded him of Ada, and he sought escape from that image in a powerful response to the charms of Tatiana, a torturing angel in her own right. Enforced immobility forbade the chase and grab of common cartoons. He begged her to massage his legs but she tested him with one glance of her grave, dark eyes — and delegated the task to Dorofey, a beefy-handed male nurse, strong enough to lift him bodily out of bed. with the sick child clasping the massive nape. When Van managed once to twiddle her breasts, she warned him she would complain if he ever repeated what she dubbed more aptly than she thought ‘that soft dangle.’ An exhibition of his state with a humble appeal for a healing caress resulted in her drily remarking that distinguished gentlemen in public parks got quite lengthy prison terms for that sort of thing. However, much later, she wrote him a charming and melancholy letter in red ink on pink paper; but other emotions and events had intervened, and he never met her again). (ibid.)
Pink paper on which Tatiana wrote her letter to Van brings to mind not only Rack’s roll of pink paper, but also oblatka rozovaya (the pink wafer) that in Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin (Three: XXXII: 1-7) dries on Tatiana’s fevered tongue while she lingers to seal her letter to Onegin:
Татьяна то вздохнёт, то охнет
Письмо дрожит в её руке:
Облатка розовая сохнет
На воспалённом языке.
К плечу головушкой склонилась.
Сорочка лёгкая спустилась
С её прелестного плеча...
By turns Tatiana sighs and ohs.
The letter trembles in her hand;
the pink wafer dries
on her fevered tongue.
Her poor head shoulderward she has inclined;
her light chemise has slid
down from her charming shoulder.
In his EO Commentary (vol. II, p. 178) VN translates Pushkin’s epigram on one of Notbek’s illustrations (“Tatiana writing to Onegin”) in the Nevski Almanac:
Пупок чернеет сквозь рубашку,
Наружу <титька> - милый вид!
Татьяна мнёт в руке бумажку,
Зане живот у ней болит:
Она затем поутру встала
При бледных месяца лучах
И на <потирку> изорвала
Конечно "Невский Альманах".
Through her chemise a nipple blackens;
Delightful sight: one titty shows.
Tatiana holds a crumpled paper,
For she's beset with stomach throes.
So that is why she got up early
With the pale moonlight still about,
And tore up for wiping purpose
The Nevski Almanac, no doubt.
In his article <O Мильтоне и шатобриановом переводе "Потерянного рая"> ("On Milton and Chateaubriand's Translation of Paradise Lost," 1836) Pushkin criticizes Alfred de Vigny’s novel Cinq Mars in which Scudéry explains to the guests of Marion Delorme (cardinal de Richelieu's mistress) his allegorical map of love:
Альфред де Виньи в своём «Сен-Марсе» также выводит перед нами Мильтона и вот в каких обстоятельствах:
У славной Марии Делорм, любовницы кардинала Ришелье, собирается общество придворных и учёных. Скюдери толкует им свою аллегорическую карту любви. Гости в восхищении от крепости Красоты, стоящей на реке Гордости, от деревни Записочек, от гавани Равнодушия и проч. и проч. Все осыпают г-на Скюдери напыщенными похвалами, кроме Мольера, Корнеля и Декарта, которые тут же находятся. Вдруг хозяйка представляет обществу молодого путешествующего англичанина, по имени Джона Мильтона, и заставляет его читать гостям отрывки из «Потерянного Рая».
All guests of Marion Delorme (except Molière, Corneille and Descartes) are delighted with the fortress of Beauty on the river of Pride, with the village of Little Notes, with the harbor of Indifference, et cetera. Young Milton (whose eyes are red because of too much vigil or shedding too many tears) is asked to read aloud the excerpts from his Paradise Lost. In his article Pushkin remarks that, actually, Milton composed Paradise Lost (publ. in 1667) much later, when he was completely blind.
Van (for whom Ardis is a lost paradise) blinds Kim Beauharnais for spying on him and Ada and attempting to blackmail Ada:
Van sealed the letter, found his Thunderbolt pistol in the place he had visualized, introduced one cartridge into the magazine and translated it into its chamber. Then, standing before a closet mirror, he put the automatic to his head, at the point of the pterion, and pressed the comfortably concaved trigger. Nothing happened — or perhaps everything happened, and his destiny simply forked at that instant, as it probably does sometimes at night, especially in a strange bed, at stages of great happiness or great desolation, when we happen to die in our sleep, but continue our normal existence, with no perceptible break in the faked serialization, on the following, neatly prepared morning, with a spurious past discreetly but firmly attached behind. Anyway, what he held in his right hand was no longer a pistol but a pocket comb which he passed through his hair at the temples. It was to gray by the time that Ada, then in her thirties, said, when they spoke of their voluntary separation:
‘I would have killed myself too, had I found Rose wailing over your corpse. "Secondes pensées sont les bonnes," as your other, white, bonne used to say in her pretty patois. As to the apron, you are quite right. And what you did not make out was that the artist had about finished a large picture of your meek little palazzo standing between its two giant guards. Perhaps for the cover of a magazine, which rejected that picture. But, you know, there’s one thing I regret,’ she added: ‘Your use of an alpenstock to release a brute’s fury — not yours, not my Van’s. I should never have told you about the Ladore policeman. You should never have taken him into your confidence, never connived with him to burn those files — and most of Kalugano’s pine forest. Eto unizitel’no (it is humiliating).’
‘Amends have been made,’ replied fat Van with a fat man’s chuckle. ‘I’m keeping Kim safe and snug in a nice Home for Disabled Professional People, where he gets from me loads of nicely brailled books on new processes in chromophotography.’
There are other possible forkings and continuations that occur to the dream-mind, but these will do. (2.11)