Ada, or Ador: A Family Chronicle

Demon, flaunting his flair, desired to be told if Van or his poule had got into trouble with the police (nodding toward Jim or John who having some other delivery to make sat glancing through Crime Copulate Bessarmenia).

‘Poule,’ replied Van with the evasive taciturnity of the Roman rabbi shielding Barabbas.

‘Why gray?’ asked Demon, alluding to Van’s overcoat. ‘Why that military cut? It’s too late to enlist.’

‘I couldn’t — my draft board would turn me down anyway.’

‘How’s the wound?’

‘Komsi-komsa. It now appears that the Kalugano surgeon messed up his job. The rip seam has grown red and raw, without any reason, and there’s a lump in my armpit. I’m in for another spell of surgery — this time in London, where butchers carve so much better. Where’s the mestechko here? Oh, I see it. Cute (a gentian painted on one door, a lady fern on the other: have to go to the herbarium).’

He did not answer her letter, and a fortnight later John James, now got up as a German tourist, all pseudo-tweed checks, handed Van a second message, in the Louvre right in front of Bosch’s Bâteau Ivre, the one with a jester drinking in the riggings (poor old Dan thought it had something to do with Brant’s satirical poem!). There would be no answer — though answers were included, with the return ticket, in the price, as the honest messenger pointed out.

It was snowing, yet James in a fit of abstract rakishness stood fanning himself with a third letter at the front door of Van’s cottage orné on Ranta River, near Chose, and Van asked him to stop bringing him messages.

In the course of the next two years two more letters were handed to him, both in London, and both in the hall of the Albania Palace Hotel, by another VPL agent, an elderly gent in a bowler, whose matter-of-fact, undertakerish aspect might irritate Mr Van Veen less, thought modest and sensitive Jim, than that of a romanesque private detective. A sixth came by natural means to Park Lane. The lot (minus the last, which dealt exclusively with Ada’s stage & screen ventures) is given below. Ada ignored dates, but they can be approximately determined.

[Los Angeles, early September, 1888]

You must pardon me for using such a posh (and also poshlïy) means of having a letter reach you, but I’m unable to find any safer service.

When I said I could not speak and would write, I meant I could not utter the proper words at short notice. I implore you. I felt that I could not produce them and arrange them orally in the necessary order. I implore you. I felt that one wrong or misplaced word would be fatal, you would simply turn away, as you did, and walk off again, and again, and again. I implore you for breath [sic! Ed.] of understanding. But now I think that I should have taken the risk of speaking, of stammering, for I see now that it is just as dreadfully hard to put my heart and honor in script — even more so because in speaking one can use a stutter as a shutter, and plead a chance slurring of words, like a bleeding hare with one side of its mouth shot off, or twist back, and improve; but against a background of snow, even the blue snow of this notepaper, the blunders are red and final. I implore you.

One thing should be established once for all, indefeasibly. I loved, love, and shall love only you. I implore you and love you with everlasting pain and passion, my darling. Tï tut stoyal (you stayed here), in this karavansaray, you in the middle of everything, always, when I must have been seven or eight, didn’t you?

[Los Angeles, mid-September, 1888]

This is a second howl iz ada (out of Hades). Strangely, I learned on the same day, from three different sources, of your duel in K.; of P’s death; and of your recuperating at his cousin’s (congs as she and I used to say). I rang her up, but she said that you had left for Paris and that R. had also died — not through your intervention, as I had thought for a moment, but through that of his wife. Neither he nor P. was technically my lover, but both are on Terra now, so it does not matter.

[Los Angeles, 1889]