Владимир Набоков - Ada, or Ador - A Family Chronicle

‘Monsieur a quinze ans, je crois, et moi, je sais, j’en ai dixneuf. Monsieur is a nobleman; I am a poor peat-digger’s daughter. Monsieur a tâté, sans doute, des filles de la ville; quant à moi, je suis vierge, ou peu s’en faut. De plus, were I to fall in love with you — I mean really in love — and I might, alas, if you possessed me rien qu’une petite fois — it would be, for me, only grief, and infernal fire, and despair, and even death, Monsieur. Finalement, I might add that I have the whites and must see le Docteur Chronique, I mean Crolique, on my next day off. Now we have to separate, the sparrow has disappeared, I see, and Monsieur Bouteillan has entered the next room, and can perceive us clearly in that mirror above the sofa behind that silk screen.’

‘Forgive me, girl,’ murmured Van, whom her strange, tragic tone had singularly put off, as if he were taking part in a play in which he was the principal actor, but of which he could only recall that one scene.

The butler’s hand in the mirror took down a decanter from nowhere and was withdrawn. Van, reknotting the cord of his robe, passed through the French window into the green reality of the garden.

On the same morning, or a couple of days later, on the terrace:

‘Mais va donc jouer avec lui,’ said Mlle Larivière, pushing Ada, whose young hips disjointedly jerked from the shock. ‘Don’t let your cousin se morfondre when the weather is so fine. Take him by the hand. Go and show him the white lady in your favorite lane, and the mountain, and the great oak.’

Ada turned to him with a shrug. The touch of her cold fingers and damp palm and the self-conscious way she tossed back her hair as they walked down the main avenue of the park made him self-conscious too, and under the pretext of picking up a fir cone he disengaged his hand. He threw the cone at a woman of marble bending over a stamnos but only managed to frighten a bird that perched on the brim of her broken jar.

‘There is nothing more banal in the world,’ said Ada, ‘than pitching stones at a hawfinch.’

‘Sorry,’ said Van, ‘I did not intend to scare that bird. But then, I’m not a country lad, who knows a cone from a stone. What games, au fond, does she expect us to play?’

‘Je l’ignore,’ replied Ada. ‘I really don’t care very much how her poor mind works. Cache-cache, I suppose, or climbing trees.’

‘Oh, I’m good at that,’ said Van, ‘in fact, I can even brachiate.’

‘No,’ she said, ‘we are going to play my games. Games I have invented all by myself. Games Lucette, I hope, will be able to play next year with me, the poor pet. Come, let us start. The present series belongs to the shadow-and-shine group, two of which I’m going to show you.’

‘I see,’ said Van.

‘You will in a moment,’ rejoined the pretty prig. ‘First of all we must find a nice stick.’

‘Look,’ said Van, still smarting a bit, ‘there goes another haw-haw finch.’

By then they had reached the rond-point — a small arena encircled by flowerbeds and jasmine bushes in heavy bloom. Overhead the arms of a linden stretched toward those of an oak, like a green-spangled beauty flying to meet her strong father hanging by his feet from the trapeze. Even then did we both understand that kind of heavenly stuff, even then.

‘Something rather acrobatic about those branches up there, no?’ he said, pointing.

‘Yes,’ she answered. ‘I discovered it long ago. The teil is the flying Italian lady, and the old oak aches, the old lover aches, but still catches her every time’ (impossible to reproduce the right intonation while rendering the entire sense — after eight decades! — but she did say something extravagant, something quite out of keeping with her tender age as they looked up and then down).

Looking down and gesturing with a sharp green stake borrowed from the peonies, Ada explained the first game.

The shadows of leaves on the sand were variously interrupted by roundlets of live light. The player chose his roundlet — the best, the brightest he could find — and firmly outlined it with the point of his stick; whereupon the yellow round light would appear to grow convex like the brimming surface of some golden dye. Then the player delicately scooped out the earth with his stick or fingers within the roundlet. The level of that gleaming infusion de tilleul would magically sink in its goblet of earth and finally dwindle to one precious drop. That player won who made the most goblets in, say, twenty minutes.

Van asked suspiciously if that was all.

No, it was not. As she dug a firm little circle around a particularly fine goldgout, Ada squatted and moved, squatting, with her black hair falling over her ivory-smooth moving knees while her haunches and hands worked, one hand holding the stick, the other brushing back bothersome strands of hair. A gentle breeze suddenly eclipsed her fleck. When that occurred, the player lost one point, even if the leaf or the cloud hastened to move aside.

All right. What was the other game?

The other game (in a singsong voice) might seem a little more complicated. To play it properly one had to wait for p.m. to provide longer shadows. The player —

‘Stop saying "the player." It is either you or me.’

‘Say, you. You outline my shadow behind me on the sand. I move. You outline it again. Then you mark out the next boundary (handing him the stick). If I now move back —’

‘You know,’ said Van, throwing the stick away, ‘personally I think these are the most boring and stupid games anybody has ever invented, anywhere, any time, a.m. or p.m.’

She said nothing but her nostrils narrowed. She retrieved the stick and stuck it back, furiously, where it belonged, deep into the loam next to a grateful flower to which she looped it with a silent nod. She walked back to the house. He wondered if her walk would be more graceful when she grew up.

‘I’m a rude brutal boy, please forgive me,’ he said.

She inclined her head without looking back. In token of partial reconciliation, she showed him two sturdy hooks passed into iron rings on two tulip-tree trunks between which, before she was born, another boy, also Ivan, her mother’s brother, used to sling a hammock in which he slept in midsummer when the nights became really sultry — this was the latitude of Sicily, after all.

‘A splendid idea,’ said Van. ‘By the way, do fireflies burn one if they fly into you? I’m just asking. Just a city boy’s silly question.’

She showed him next where the hammock — a whole set of hammocks, a canvas sack full of strong, soft nets — was stored: this was in the corner of a basement toolroom behind the lilacs, the key was concealed in this hole here which last year was stuffed by the nest of a bird — no need to identify it. A pointer of sunlight daubed with greener paint a long green box where croquet implements were kept; but the balls had been rolled down the hill by some rowdy children, the little Erminins, who were now Van’s age and had grown very nice and quiet.

‘As we all are at that age,’ said Van and stooped to pick up a curved tortoiseshell comb — the kind that girls use to hold up their hair behind; he had seen one, exactly like that, quite recently, but when, in whose hairdo?

‘One of the maids,’ said Ada. ‘That tattered chapbook must also belong to her, Les Amours du Docteur Mertvago, a mystical romance by a pastor.’

‘Playing croquet with you,’ said Van, ‘should be rather like using flamingoes and hedgehogs.’

‘Our reading lists do not match,’ replied Ada. ‘That Palace in Wonderland was to me the kind of book everybody so often promised me I would adore, that I developed an insurmountable prejudice toward it. Have you read any of Mlle Larivière’s stories? Well, you will. She thinks that in some former Hindooish state she was a boulevardier in Paris; and writes accordingly. We can squirm from here into the front hall by a secret passage, but I think we are supposed to go and look at the grand chêne which is really an elm.’ Did he like elms? Did he know Joyce’s poem about the two washerwomen? He did, indeed. Did he like it? He did. In fact he was beginning to like very much arbors and ardors and Adas. They rhymed. Should he mention it?