We all flocked to the dining room. Van brushed against the past as he shot an arm out to forestall a door-opening waiter, and the past (still fingering his necklace) recompensed him with a sidelong’ Dolores’ glance.
Chance looked after the seating arrangement.
Lemorio’s agents, an elderly couple, unwed but having lived as man and man for a sufficiently long period to warrant a silver-screen anniversary, remained unsplit at table between Yuzlik, who never once spoke to them, and Van, who was being tortured by Dorothy. As to Andrey (who made a thready ‘sign of the cross’ over his un-unbuttonable abdomen before necking in his napkin), he found himself seated between sister and wife. He demanded the ‘cart de van’ (affording the real Van mild amusement), but, being a hard-liquor man, cast only a stunned look at the ‘Swiss White’ page of the wine list before ‘passing the buck’ to Ada who promptly ordered champagne. He was to inform her early next morning that her ‘Kuzen proizvodit (produces) udivitel’no simpatichnoe vpechatlenie (a remarkably sympathetic, in the sense of «fetching,» impression),’ The dear fellow’s verbal apparatus consisted almost exclusively of remarkably sympathetic Russian common-places of language, but — not liking to speak of himself — he spoke little, especially since his sister’s sonorous soliloquy (lapping at Van’s rock) mesmerized and childishly engrossed him. Dorothy preambled her long-delayed report on her pet nightmare with a humble complaint (‘Of course, I know that for your patients to have bad dreams is a zhidovskaya prerogativa’), but her reluctant analyst’s attention every time it returned to her from his plate fixed itself so insistently on the Greek cross of almost ecclesiastical size shining on her otherwise unremarkable chest that she thought fit to interrupt her narrative (which had to do with the eruption of a dream volcano) to say: ‘I gather from your writings that you are a terrible cynic. Oh, I quite agree with Simone Traser that a dash of cynicism adorns a real man; yet I’d like to warn you that I object to anti-Orthodox jokes in case you intend making one.’
By now Van had more than enough of his mad, but not interestingly mad, convive. He just managed to steady his glass, which a gesture he made to attract Ada’s attention had almost knocked down, and said, without further ado, in what Ada termed afterwards a mordant, ominous and altogether inadmissible tone:
‘Tomorrow morning, je veux vous accaparer, ma chère. As my lawyer, or yours, or both, have, perhaps, informed you, Lucette’s accounts in several Swiss banks —’ and he trotted out a prepared version of a state of affairs invented in toto. ‘I suggest,’ he added, ‘that if you have no other engagements’ — (sending a questioning glance that avoided the Vinelanders by leaping across and around the three cinematists, all of whom nodded in idiotic approval) — ‘you and I go to see Maître Jorat, or Raton, name escapes me, my adviser, enfin, in Luzon, half an hour drive from here — who has given me certain papers which I have at my hotel and which I must have you sigh — I mean sign with a sigh — the matter is tedious. All right? All right.’
‘But, Ada,’ clarioned Dora, ‘you forget that tomorrow morning we wanted to visit the Institute of Floral Harmony in the Château Piron!’
‘You’ll do it after tomorrow, or Tuesday, or Tuesday week,’ said Van. ‘I’d gladly drive all three of you to that fascinating lieu de méditation but my fast little Unseretti seats only one passenger, and that business of untraceable deposits is terribly urgent, I think.’
Yuzlik was dying to say something. Van yielded to the well-meaning automaton.
‘I’m delighted and honored to dine with Vasco de Gama,’ said Yuzlik holding up his glass in front of his handsome facial apparatus.
The same garbling — and this gave Van a clue to Yuzlik’s source of recondite information — occurred in The Chimes of Chose (a memoir by a former chum of Van’s, now Lord Chose, which had climbed, and still clung to, the ‘best seller’ trellis — mainly because of several indecent but very funny references to the Villa Venus in Ranton Brooks). While he munched the marrow of an adequate answer, with a mouthful of sharlott (not the charlatan ‘charlotte russe’ served in most restaurants, but the hot toasty crust, with apple filling, of the authentic castle pie made by Takomin, the hotel’s head cook, who hailed from California’s Rose Bay), two urges were cleaving Van asunder: one to insult Yuzlik for having placed his hand on Ada’s when asking her to pass him the butter two or three courses ago (he was incomparably more jealous of that liquid-eyed male than of Andrey and remembered with a shiver of pride and hate how on New Year’s Eve, 1893, he had lashed out at a relative of his, foppish Van Zemski, who had permitted himself a similar caress when visiting their restaurant table, and whose jaw he had broken later, under some pretext or other, at the young prince’s club); and the other — to tell Yuzlik how much he had admired Don Juan’s Last Fling. Not being able, for obvious reasons, to satisfy urge number one he dismissed number two as secretly smacking of a poltroon’s politeness and contented himself with replying, after swallowing his amber-soaked mash:
‘Jack Chose’s book is certainly most entertaining — especially that bit about apples and diarrhea, and the excerpts from the Venus Shell Album’ — (Yuzlik’s eyes darted aside in specious recollection; whereupon he bowed in effusive tribute to a common memory) — ‘but the rascal should have neither divulged my name nor botched my thespionym.’
During that dismal dinner (enlivened only by the sharlott and five bottles of Moët, out of which Van consumed more than three), he avoided looking at that part of Ada which is called ‘the face’ — a vivid, divine, mysteriously shocking part, which, in that essential form, is rarely met with among human beings (pasty and warty marks do not count). Ada on the other hand could not help her dark eyes from turning to him every other moment, as if, with each glance, she regained her balance; but when the company went back to the lounge and finished their coffee there, difficulties of focalization began to beset Van, whose points de repère disastrously decreased after the three cinematists had left.
ANDREY: Adochka, dushka (darling), razskazhi zhe pro rancho, pro skot (tell about the ranch, the cattle), emu zhe lyubopïtno (it cannot fail to interest him).
ADA (as if coming out of a trance): O chyom tï (you were saying something)?
ANDREY: Ya govoryu, razskazhi emu pro tvoyo zhit’yo bït’yo (I was saying, tell him about your daily life, your habitual existence). Avos’ zaglyanet k nam (maybe he’d look us up).
ADA: Ostav’, chto tam interesnago (what’s so interesting about it)?
DASHA (turning to Ivan): Don’t listen to her. Massa interesnago (heaps of interesting stuff). Delo brata ogromnoe, volnuyushchee delo, trebuyushchee ne men’she truda, chem uchyonaya dissertatsiya (his business is a big thing, quite as demanding as a scholar’s). Nashi sel’skohozyaystvennïya mashinï i ih teni (our agricultural machines and their shadows) — eto tselaya kollektsiya predmetov modernoy skul’pturï i zhivopisi (is a veritable collection of modern art) which I suspect you adore as I do.
IVAN (to Andrey): I know nothing about farming but thanks all the same.
(A pause.)
IVAN (not quite knowing what to add): Yes, I would certainly like to see your machinery some day. Those things always remind me of long-necked prehistoric monsters, sort of grazing here and there, you know, or just brooding over the sorrows of extinction — but perhaps I’m thinking of excavators —
DOROTHY: Andrey’s machinery is anything but prehistoric! (laughs cheerlessly).
ANDREY: Slovom, milosti prosim (anyway, you are most welcome). Budete zharit’ verhom s kuzinoy (you’ll have a rollicking time riding on horseback with your cousin).
(Pause.)
IVAN (to Ada): Half-past nine tomorrow morning won’t be too early for you? I’m at the Trois Cygnes. I’ll come to fetch you in my tiny car — not on horseback (smiles like a corpse at Andrey).
DASHA: Dovol’no skuchno (rather a pity) that Ada’s visit to lovely Lake Leman need be spoiled by sessions with lawyers and bankers. I’m sure you can satisfy most of those needs by having her come a few times chez vous and not to Luzon or Geneva.
The madhouse babble reverted to Lucette’s bank accounts, Ivan Dementievich explained that she had been mislaying one checkbook after another, and nobody knew exactly in how many different banks she had dumped considerable amounts of money. Presently, Andrey who now looked like the livid Yukonsk mayor after opening the Catkin Week Fair or fighting a Forest Fire with a new type of extinguisher, grunted out of his chair, excused himself for going to bed so early, and shook hands with Van as if they were parting forever (which, indeed, they were). Van remained with the two ladies in the cold and deserted lounge where a thrifty subtraction of faraday-light had imperceptibly taken place.
‘How did you like my brother?’ asked Dorothy. ‘On redchayshiy chelovek (he’s,
