Describing his reunion with Ada in December 1892, Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) mentions two unrelated gypsy courtesans, a wild girl in a gaudy lolita, poppy-mouthed and black-downed, picked up in a café between Grasse and Nice, and another, a part-time model, aptly nicknamed Swallowtail by the patrons of a Norfolk Broads floramor:
What laughs, what tears, what sticky kisses, what a tumult of multitudinous plans! And what safety, what freedom of love! Two unrelated gypsy courtesans, a wild girl in a gaudy lolita, poppy-mouthed and black-downed, picked up in a café between Grasse and Nice, and another, a part-time model (you have seen her fondling a virile lipstick in Fellata ads), aptly nicknamed Swallowtail by the patrons of a Norfolk Broads floramor, had both given our hero exactly the same reason, unmentionable in a family chronicle, for considering him absolutely sterile despite his prowesses. Amused by the Hecatean diagnose, Van underwent certain tests, and although pooh-poohing the symptom as coincidental, all the doctors agreed that Van Veen might be a doughty and durable lover but could never hope for an offspring. How merrily little Ada clapped her hands! (2.6)
The Norfolk Broads (also commonly referred to as The Broads) is an historic and scenic area in the east of the English county of Norfolk, close to the Suffolk border and also extending into that county. It consists of a network of mostly navigable rivers, lakes and marshes. On the other hand, a Norfolk Boards floramor (one of the hundred palatial brothels built by David van Veen all over the world in memory of his grandson Eric, the author of an essay entitled 'Villa Venus: an Organized Dream') seems to hint at Max Norfolk, a character (the pimp) in Mark Aldanov's story Rubin ("The Ruby," 1949):
Если муж готов был принять вину на себя, он приезжал с женщиной легкого поведения в эту гостиницу, расположенную в очень бедном квартале Лондона, и проводил там ночь. Старушка хозяйка очень неохотно согласилась на то, чтобы ее гостиница выдавала свидетельства, нужные для бракоразводных процессов; однако согласилась по совету старика, которого она называла управляющим и который сам себя — для самоуничижения — называл швейцаром. Его все знали в околотке и любили, хотя он был иностранец и говорил по-американски, вдобавок с сильным акцентом, не то славянским, не то левантийским. Еще два-три года, и его стали бы называть «Dear old Max».
Хозяйка взяла его на службу после смерти мужа, в начале войны, когда немобилизованные мужчины были нарасхват. Вдобавок, он говорил на многих языках, а в гостинице часто останавливались бедные иностранцы. По наружности он напоминал актера, хорошо играющего роль Фальстафа в реалистическом театре. Было что-то жалкое и все же привлекательное в его бегающем беспокойном взгляде, в умных хитрых маленьких глазках, во всем его облике слишком много пьющего человека, знавшего лучшие времена. Он прятал обычно под стол свои нечищенные туфли со сбившимися даже под резинкой каблуками; костюм его был куплен три года тому назад на Ист-Бродвей за 29 долларов 95, и брюкам не возвращало молодости подкладывание на ночь под матрац. Звали его Макс Норфольк. Услышав фамилию первого пэра Англии, англичане с недоумением улыбались, а он с вызовом в хриплом голосе говорил: «Yes, Sir! Почему же мне не называться Норфольком!? Я выбрал эту фамилию при своей четвертой натурализации, на моей четвертой родине. Соединенные Штаты — свободная страна, не то что некоторые другие. Если б я хотел, я мог бы назвать себя Габсбургом, Романовым или Виндзором. Впрочем, Виндзоры, Габсбурги и Романовы это тоже псевдонимы очень почтенных семейств, ганноверского, лотарингского, гольштейн-готторпского, которым, как мне, было удобнее переменить фамилию. Yes, Sir!». Слова «Yes, Sir!» он почему-то употреблял постоянно, даже тогда, когда говорил с женщинами, и произносил их как-то особенно бодро, как бы с легким оттенком угрозы. (Chapter I)
Norfolk is not Max's real surname:
— Вы не американец? Норфольк ведь не настоящая ваша фамилия?
— Мою настоящую фамилию мог в Соединенных Штатах произносить только один человек, профессор сравнительного языкознания, да и он произносил ее неправильно. Поэтому я лет десять тому назад, при натурализации, решил переменить имя. Чиновник спросил, как я хочу называться. Я подумал и ответил: «Рузвельт», Он на меня посмотрел и сказал: «Не делайте этого, вас всегда будут смешивать с президентом, вы будете получать его письма, а он ваши. Кроме того, вы моете посуду в ресторанах, подумайте, хорошо если ваш хозяин демократ: ведь если он республиканец, то он вас выгонит. А вот что я вам посоветую: назовите себя «Норфольк», это фамилия первого пэра Англии». Я подумал и согласился. Должен сказать, что я в тот день выпил больше, чем нужно. Кажется, и чиновник тоже. (Chapter V)
Two gypsy courtesans who told Van that he would die childeless bring to mind gypsies that Van and Ada see from the library window in The Night of the Burning Barn (when they make love for the first time):
A sort of hoary riddle (Les Sophismes de Sophie by Mlle Stopchin in the Bibliothèque Vieux Rose series): did the Burning Barn come before the Cockloft or the Cockloft come first. Oh, first! We had long been kissing cousins when the fire started. In fact, I was getting some Château Baignet cold cream from Ladore for my poor chapped lips. And we both were roused in our separate rooms by her crying au feu! July 28? August 4?
Who cried? Stopchin cried? Larivière cried? Larivière? Answer! Crying that the barn flambait?
No, she was fast ablaze — I mean, asleep. I know, said Van, it was she, the hand-painted handmaid, who used your watercolors to touch up her eyes, or so Larivière said, who accused her and Blanche of fantastic sins.
Oh, of course! But not Marina’s poor French — it was our little goose Blanche. Yes, she rushed down the corridor and lost a miniver-trimmed slipper on the grand staircase, like Ashette in the English version.
‘And do you remember, Van, how warm the night was?’
‘Eschchyo bï! (as if I did not!). That night because of the blink —’
That night because of the bothersome blink of remote sheet lightning through the black hearts of his sleeping-arbor, Van had abandoned his two tulip trees and gone to bed in his room. The tumult in the house and the maid’s shriek interrupted a rare, brilliant, dramatic dream, whose subject he was unable to recollect later, although he still held it in a saved jewel box. As usual, he slept naked, and wavered now between pulling on a pair of shorts, or draping himself in his tartan lap robe. He chose the second course, rattled a matchbox, lit his bedside candle, and swept out of his room, ready to save Ada and all her larvae. The corridor was dark, somewhere the dachshund was barking ecstatically. Van gleaned from subsiding cries that the so-called ‘baronial barn,’ a huge beloved structure three miles away, was on fire. Fifty cows would have been without hay and Larivière without her midday coffee cream had it happened later in the season. Van felt slighted. They’ve all gone and left me behind, as old Fierce mumbles at the end of the Cherry Orchard (Marina was an adequate Mme Ranevski).
With the tartan toga around him, he accompanied his black double down the accessory spiral stairs leading to the library. Placing a bare knee on the shaggy divan under the window, Van drew back the heavy red curtains.
Uncle Dan, a cigar in his teeth, and kerchiefed Marina with Dack in her clutch deriding the watchdogs, were in the process of setting out between raised arms and swinging lanterns in the runabout — as red as a fire engine! — only to be overtaken at the crunching curve of the drive by three English footmen on horseback with three French maids en croupe. The entire domestic staff seemed to be taking off to enjoy the fire (an infrequent event in our damp windless region), using every contraption available or imaginable: telegas, teleseats, roadboats, tandem bicycles and even the clockwork luggage carts with which the stationmaster supplied the family in memory of Erasmus Veen, their inventor. Only the governess (as Ada, not Van, had by then discovered) slept on through everything, snoring with a wheeze and a harkle in the room adjacent to the old nursery where little Lucette lay for a minute awake before running after her dream and jumping into the last furniture van.
Van, kneeling at the picture window, watched the inflamed eye of the cigar recede and vanish. That multiple departure... Take over.
That multiple departure really presented a marvelous sight against the pale star-dusted firmament of practically subtropical Ardis, tinted between the black trees with a distant flamingo flush at the spot where the Barn was Burning. To reach it one had to drive round a large reservoir which I could make out breaking into scaly light here and there every time some adventurous hostler or pantry boy crossed it on water skis or in a Rob Roy or by means of a raft — typical raft ripples like fire snakes in Japan; and one could now follow with an artist’s eye the motorcar’s lamps, fore and aft, progressing east along the AB bank of that rectangular lake, then turning sharply upon reaching its B corner, trailing away up the short side and creeping back west, in a dim and diminished aspect, to a middle point on the far margin where they swung north and disappeared.
As two last retainers, the cook and the night watchman, scurried across the lawn toward a horseless trap or break, that stood beckoning them with erected thills (or was it a rickshaw? Uncle Dan once had a Japanese valet), Van was delighted and shocked to distinguish, right there in the inky shrubbery, Ada in her long nightgown passing by with a lighted candle in one hand and a shoe in the other as if stealing after the belated ignicolists. It was only her reflection in the glass. She dropped the found shoe in a wastepaper basket and joined Van on the divan.
‘Can one see anything, oh, can one see?’ the dark-haired child kept repeating, and a hundred barns blazed in her amber-black eyes, as she beamed and peered in blissful curiosity. He relieved her of her candlestick, placing it near his own longer one on the window ledge. ‘You are naked, you are dreadfully indecent,’ she observed without looking and without any emphasis or reproof, whereupon he cloaked himself tighter, Ramses the Scotsman, as she knelt beside him. For a moment they both contemplated the romantic night piece framed in the window. He had started to stroke her, shivering, staring ahead, following with a blind man’s hand the dip of her spine through the batiste.
‘Look, gipsies,’ she whispered, pointing at three shadowy forms — two men, one with a ladder, and a child or dwarf — circumspectly moving across the gray lawn. They saw the candlelit window and decamped, the smaller one walking à reculons as if taking pictures.
‘I stayed home on purpose, because I hoped you would too — it was a contrived coincidence,’ she said, or said later she’d said — while he continued to fondle the flow of her hair, and to massage and rumple her nightdress, not daring yet to go under and up, daring, however, to mold her nates until, with a little hiss, she sat down on his hand and her heels, as the burning castle of cards collapsed. She turned to him and next moment he was kissing her bare shoulder, and pushing against her like that soldier behind in the queue. (1.19)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): 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).
au feu!: fire!
flambait: was in flames.
Ashette: ‘Cendrillon’ in the French original.
en croupe: riding pillion.
à reculons: backwards.
A child or dwarf is Kim Beauharnais, the kitchen boy and photographer at Ardis whom Ada bribed to set the barn on fire and who is blinded by Van for spying on him and Ada and attempting to blackmail Ada. Zhozefina Bogarne i eyo gadalka ("Josephine Beauharnais and her Fortune Teller," 1935) is a biographical essay by Mark Aldanov (Mark Landau, 1886-1957), a Russian writer who hailed from Kiev and who spent his last years and died in Nice (one of the two courtesans was picked up by Van in a café between Grasse and Nice). The fortune-teller of Napoleon's first wife was Marie Anne Adelaide Lenormand (1772–1843). Napoleon divorced Josephine because she failed to bear him a heir.