On the porch of The Enchanted Hunters (in VN's novel Lolita, 1955, a hotel in Briceland where Humbert and Lolita spend their first night together) a stranger (Clare Quilty) tells Humbert that his child needs a lot of sleep and that sleep is a rose, as the Persians say:
I left the loud lobby and stood outside, on the white steps, looking at the hundreds of powdered bugs wheeling around the lamps in the soggy black night, full of ripple and stir. All I would do - all I would dare do - would amount to such a trifle… Suddenly I was aware that in the darkness next to me there was somebody sitting in a chair on the pillared porch. I could not really see him but what gave him away was the rasp of a screwing off, then a discreet gurgle, then the final note of a placid screwing on. I was about to move away when his voice addressed me:
“Where the devil did you get her?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“I said: the weather is getting better.”
“Seems so.”
“Who’s the lassie?”
“My daughter.”
“You lie - she’s not.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“I said: July was hot. Where’s her mother?”
“Dead.”
“I see. Sorry. By the way, why don’t you two lunch with me tomorrow. That dreadful crowd will be gone by then.”
“We’ll be gone too. Good night.”
“Sorry. I’m pretty drunk. Good night. That child of yours needs a lot of sleep. Sleep is a rose, as the Persians say. Smoke?”
“Not now.”
He struck a light, but because he was drunk, or because the wind was, the flame illumined not him but another person, a very old man, one of those permanent guests of old hotelsand his white rocker. Nobody said anything and the darkness returned to its initial place. Then I heard the old-timer cough and deliver himself of some sepulchral mucus. (1.28)
In an interview to the Briceland Gazette Quilty (“the author of Dark Age”) mentioned a Persian bubble bird and roses:
A curious urge to relive my stay there with Lolita had got hold of me. I was entering a phase of existence where I had given up all hope of tracing her kidnapper and her. I now attempted to fall back on old settings in order to save what still could be saved in the way of souvenir, souvenir que me veux-tu? Autumn was ringing in the air. To a post card requesting twin beds Professor Hamburg got a prompt expression of regret in reply. They were full up. They had one bathless basement room with four beds which they thought I would not want. Their note paper was headed:
The Enchanted Hunters
Near Churches
No Dogs
All legal beverages
I wondered if the last statement was true. All? Did they have for instance sidewalk grenadine? I also wondered if a hunter, enchanted or otherwise, would not need a pointer more than a pew, and with a spasm of pain I recalled a scene worthy of a great artist: petite nymphe accroupie; but that silky cocker spaniel had perhaps been a baptized one. No - I felt I could not endure the throes of revisiting that lobby. There was a much better possibility of retrievable time elsewhere in soft, rich-colored, autumnal Briceland. Leaving Rita in a bar, I made for the town library. A twittering spinster was only too glad to help me disinter mid-August 1947 from the bound Briceland Gazette, and presently, in a secluded nook under a naked light, I was turning the enormous and fragile pages of a coffin-black volume almost as big as Lolita.
Reader! Bruder! What a foolish Hamburg that Hamburg was! Since his supersensitive system was loath to face the actual scene, he thought he could at least enjoy a secret part of it - which reminds one of the tenth or twentieth soldier in the raping queue who throws the girl’s black shawl over her white face so as not to see those impossible eyes while taking his military pleasure in the sad, sacked village. What I lusted to get was the printed picture that had chanced to absorb my trespassing image while the Gazette’s photographer was concentrating on Dr. Braddock and his group. Passionately I hoped to find preserved the portrait of the artist as a younger brute. An innocent camera catching me on my dark way to Lolita’s bed - what a magnet for Mnemosyne! I cannot well explain the true nature of that urge of mine. It was allied, I suppose, to that swooning curiosity which impels one to examine with a magnifying glass bleak little figures - still life practically, and everybody about to throw up - at an early morning execution, and the patient’s expression impossible to make out in the print. Anyway, I was literally gasping for breath, and one corner of the book of doom kept stabbing me in the stomach while I scanned and skimmed… Brute Force and Possessed were coming on Sunday, the 24th, to both theatres. Mr. Purdom, independent tobacco auctioneer, said that ever since 1925 he had been an Omen Faustum smoker. Husky Hank and his petite bride were to be the guests of Mr. and Mrs. Reginald G. Gore, 58 Inchkeith Ave. The size of certain parasites is one sixth of the host. Dunkerque was fortified in the tenth century. Misses’ socks, 39 c. Saddle Oxfords 3.98. Wine, wine, wine, quipped the author of Dark Age who refused to be photographed, may suit a Persian bubble bird, but I say give me rain, rain, rain on the shingle roof for roses and inspiration every time. Dimples are caused by the adherence of the skin to the deeper tissues. Greeks repulse a heavy guerrilla assault - and, ah, at last, a little figure in white, and Dr. Braddock in black, but whatever spectral shoulder was brushing against his ample form - nothing of myself could I make out. (2.26)
The author of the Foreword to Humbert's manuscript, John Ray, Jr. brings to mind Shahr-e Ray (nickname: Mother of Tehran), the capital of Ray County, Tehran provonce, Iran. Formerly a distinct city (the oldest existing city in Tehran Province), it has now been absorbed into the metropolitan area of Greater Tehran as the 20th district of municipal Tehran, the capital city of the country. Iran's old name in the West was Persia, named after the Fars (Pars) region, but Iranians themselves always called their land Iran, meaning "Land of the Aryans." In the Russian Lolita Quilty (who meets Humbert in the Oriental parlor) tells Humbert "etot dom - ariyskiy" ("this is a Gentile's house" in the original):
"Куильти", - сказал я. - "Попробуйте сосредоточиться. Через минуту вы умрете. Загробная жизнь может оказаться, как знать, вечным состоянием мучительнейшего безумия. Вы выкурили вашу последнюю папиросу вчера. Сосредоточьтесь. Постарайтесь понять, что с вами происходит".
Он, меж тем, рвал на части папиросу Дромадер и жевал кусочки.
"Я готов постараться", - проговорил он. - "Вы либо австралиец, либо немецкий беженец. Как это вообще случилось, что вы со мной разговариваете? Этот дом - арийский, имейте в виду. Вы бы лучше уходили. И прошу вас перестать размахивать этим кольтом. Между прочим, у меня есть старый наган в соседнем зальце".
“Quilty,” I said. “I want you to concentrate. You are going to die in a moment. The hereafter for all we know may be an eternal state of excruciating insanity. You smoked your last cigarette yesterday. Concentrate. Try to understand what is happening to you.”
He kept taking the Drome cigarette apart and munching bits of it.
“I am willing to try,” he said. “You are either Australian, or a German refugee. Must you talk to me? This is a Gentile’s house, you know. Maybe, you’d better run along. And do stop demonstrating that gun. I’ve an old Stern-Luger in the music room.” (2.35)
Mother of Tehran (Shahr-e Ray's nickname) brings to mind mat' gorodov russkikh ("the mother of Russian cities"), as Prince Oleg called Kiev in 882 AD. A Russian writer of Jewish descent, Mark Aldanov (Landau) was born in Kiev in 1886. In VN's novel Ada (1969) Greg Erminin gives Ada as a birthday present a little camel of yellow ivory carved in Kiev, five centuries ago, in the days of Timur and Nabok:
Ada had declined to invite anybody except the Erminin twins to her picnic; but she had had no intention of inviting the brother without the sister. The latter, it turned out, could not come, having gone to New Cranton to see a young drummer, her first boy friend, sail off into the sunrise with his regiment. But Greg had to be asked to come after all: on the previous day he had called on her bringing a ‘talisman’ from his very sick father, who wanted Ada to treasure as much as his grandam had a little camel of yellow ivory carved in Kiev, five centuries ago, in the days of Timur and Nabok. (1.39)
A little camel of yellow ivory brings to mind the Drome (Dromedary) cigarettes advertised by Clare Quilty. The name of Daniel Veen's family estate in Ada, Ardis seems to hint at paradise. In Russian, ray means "paradise." In a conversation with Cordula Tobak (born de Prey) Van Veen (the narrator and main character in Ada) quotes an Arabian saying "paradise is only one assbaa south of a pretty girl's sash.'
The author of Gore ot uma ("Woe from Wit," 1824), a play in verse, Griboedov was assassinated in Tehran (where he was envoy) on February 11, 1829. In Griboedov's play, Famusov calculates the pregnancy of a woman friend. According to John Ray, Jr., Mrs. “Richard F. Schiller” (Lolita's married name) died in childbed, giving birth to a stillborn girl, on Christmas Day 1952, in Gray Star, a settlement in the remotest Northwest:
For the benefit of old-fashioned readers who wish to follow the destinies of “real” people beyond the “true” story, a few details may be given as received from Mr. “Windmuller,” of “Ramsdale,” who desires his identity suppressed so that “the long shadows of this sorry and sordid business” should not reach the community to which he is proud to belong. His daughter, “Louise,” is by now a college sophomore. “Mona Dahl” is a student in Paris. “Rita” has recently married the proprietor of a hotel in Florida. Mrs. “Richard F. Schiller” died in childbed, giving birth to a stillborn girl, on Christmas Day 1952, in Gray Star, a settlement in the remotest Northwest. ‘Vivian Darkbloom’ has written a biography, ‘My Cue,’ to be published shortly, and critics who have perused the manuscript call it her best book. The caretakers of the various cemeteries involved report that no ghosts walk.
But it seems that, actually, Lolita dies of ague in the Elphinstone hospital on July 4, 1949, and everything what happens after her sudden death (Lolita's escape from the hospital, Humbert's affair with Rita, Lolita's marriage and pregnancy, and the murder of Quilty) was invented by Humbert Humbert (whose "real" name is John Ray, Jr.).