Ada, or Ador: A Family Chronicle

The pill had really started to work. He finished changing into his pajamas, a series of fumbles, mostly unfinished, which he had begun an hour ago, and fumbled into bed. He dreamed that he was speaking in the lecturing hall of a transatlantic liner and that a bum resembling the hitch-hiker from Hilden was asking sneeringly how did the lecturer explain that in our dreams we know we shall awake, is not that analogous to the certainty of death and if so, the future —

At daybreak he sat up with an abrupt moan, and trembling: if he did not act now, he would lose her forever! He decided to drive at once to the Manhattan in Geneva.

Van welcomed the renewal of polished structures after a week of black fudge fouling the bowl slope so high that no amount of flushing could dislodge it. Something to do with olive oil and the Italian type water closets. He shaved, bathed, rapidly dressed. Was it too early to order breakfast? Should he ring up her hotel before starting? Should he rent a plane? Or might it, perhaps, be simpler —

The door-folds of his drawing room balcony stood wide open, Banks of mist still crossed the blue of the mountains beyond the lake, but here and there a peak was tipped with ocher under the cloudless turquoise of the sky. Four tremendous trucks thundered by one after another. He went up to the rail of the balcony and wondered if he had ever satisfied the familiar whim by going platch — had he? had he? You could never know, really. One floor below, and somewhat adjacently, stood Ada engrossed in the view.

He saw her bronze bob, her white neck and arms, the pale flowers on her flimsy peignoir, her bare legs, her high-heeled silver slippers. Pensively, youngly, voluptuously, she was scratching her thigh at the rise of the right buttock: Ladore’s pink signature on vellum at mosquito dusk. Would she look up? All her flowers turned up to him, beaming, and she made the royal-grant gesture of lifting and offering him the mountains, the mist and the lake with three swans.

He left the balcony and ran down a short spiral staircase to the fourth floor. In the pit of his stomach there sat the suspicion that it might not be room 410, as he conjectured, but 412 or even 414, What would happen if she had not understood, was not on the lookout? She had, she was.

When, ‘a little later,’ Van, kneeling and clearing his throat, was kissing her dear cold hands, gratefully, gratefully, in full defiance of death, with bad fate routed and her dreamy afterglow bending over him, she asked:

‘Did you really think I had gone?’

‘Obmanshchitsa (deceiver), obmanshchitsa,’ Van kept repeating with the fervor and gloat of blissful satiety,

‘I told him to turn,’ she said, ‘somewhere near Morzhey (‘morses’ or ‘walruses,’ a Russian pun on ‘Morges’ — maybe a mermaid’s message), And you slept, you could sleep!’

‘I worked,’ he replied, ‘my first draft is done,’

She confessed that on coming back in the middle of the night she had taken to her room from the hotel bookcase (the night porter, an avid reader, had the key) the British Encyclopedia volume, here it was, with this article on Space-time: ‘"Space" (it says here, rather suggestively) "denotes the property, you are my property, in virtue of which, you are my virtue, rigid bodies can occupy different positions" Nice? Nice.’

‘Don’t laugh, my Ada, at our philosophic prose,’ remonstrated her lover. ‘All that matters just now is that I have given new life to Time by cutting off Siamese Space and the false future. My aim was to compose a kind of novella in the form of a treatise on the Texture of Time, an investigation of its veily substance, with illustrative metaphors gradually increasing, very gradually building up a logical love story, going from past to present, blossoming as a concrete story, and just as gradually reversing analogies and disintegrating again into bland abstraction.’

‘I wonder,’ said Ada, ‘I wonder if the attempt to discover those things is worth the stained glass. We can know the time, we can know a time. We can never know Time. Our senses are simply not meant to perceive it. It is like —’

Part Five

1

I, Van Veen, salute you, life, Ada Veen, Dr Lagosse, Stepan Nootkin, Violet Knox, Ronald Oranger. Today is my ninety-seventh birthday, and I hear from my wonderful new Everyrest chair a spade scrape and footsteps in the snow-sparkling garden, and my old Russian valet, who is deafer than he thinks, pullout and push in nose-ringed drawers in the dressing room. This Part Five is not meant as an epilogue; it is the true introduction of my ninety-seven percent true, and three percent likely, Ada or Ardor, a family chronicle.