Afternote

The Discovery of Incest

From the start of Ada Nabokov subverts the classic literary incest story: he has Van and Ada recognize their incest in the opening chapter, rather than at a catastrophic closing climax, then happily resume making love (see Afternote I.1). As soon as they find the evidence in the attic, they realize the danger of discovery, but the naked lovers blithely decide to destroy the incriminating album only after making love again:

“Now don’t you think we should resume our shorts and shirts and go down, and bury or burn this album
at once, girl. Right?”
            “Right,” answered Ada. “Destroy and forget. But we still have an hour before tea.” (9)

As the Forenote to this chapter discusses, the threat of discovery—present through Ardis the First and the Second in largely comic form (Lucette’s naïvely intrusive curiosity, Mlle Larivière’s blindness to her former charges)—becomes more serious during their Manhattan sojourn, not least through Kim Beauharnais’s blackmail album and through the risks of living in a city with so many eyes able to identify the dazzling Veens.

Now at last their father discovers their incestuous relationship. Although he remains grimly self-controlled at the discovery, he immediately cancels his participation in Dan’s funeral, for which he has rushed all the way from Santiago. His judgement has yet to fall, but its import is clear from the notes throughout the chapter of approaching and inescapable fate, and from Van’s regret for “years and years of lost life” after his first wrong response to his father’s arrival: “I am not alone” (435).

Last Judgement
     
Dan’s death provides the impetus for Demon to search out his son to inform him and to fetch him to the funeral. In his final decline, Dan has been hallucinating his life in terms of a detail from Bosch’s Last Judgement (the Vienna triptych), as Demon vividly recognizes and elaborates.

In this linkage of two Veen fathers, Nabokov parodically invokes God the Father’s final judgement on a sinful world: one, Dan, Ada’s official father, inept, absent, and sexually pathetic, the other, Demon, a kind of darkly radiant fallen angel, Van and Ada’s common—and highly uncommon—father, who swoops in from the other end of the Americas with a drug-fired mind and tongue.

In the left, paradisal, panel of Bosch’s Last Judgement Adam and Eve are first created by God, then take from the Tree of Knowledge, and are finally driven from Eden by a sword-wielding angel, as they cower to hide a nakedness suddenly shameful. At the end of this chapter’s first paragraph, Van sums up the precautions he and Ada have taken against discovery and adds: “The only personage they had not reckoned with was the old scoundrel usually portrayed as a skeleton or an angel” (433). Death, in other words, but the next sentence begins: “Van’s father had just left one Santiago to view the results of an earthquake in another” (433), almost as if the Earth is splitting apart on Judgement Day.
           
Demon, with his sexual appetite and his taste for ever-younger sexual partners, has a lascivious attitude even to his own daughter. When we last see him meeting Ada after a prolonged separation, in summer 1888,

Old Demon, iridescent wings humped, half rose but sank back again, enveloping Ada with one arm, holding his glass in the other hand,
kissing the girl in the neck, in the hair, burrowing in her sweetness with more than an uncle’s fervor. . . . “The last time I enjoyed you,”
said Demon, “was in April when you wore a raincoat with a white and black scarf and simply reeked of some arsenic stuff after seeing
your dentist. . . . ” (245)

Now in winter 1893 that dentist’s partner’s widow, Mrs Arfour, nearly crosses Demon’s path and could have disclosed that she has seen Van and Ada emerge from that apartment building towering over them. Demon avoids her, but, on the hunt for Van, he still finds his way into that high-rise apartment—and finds not only Van but Ada as well.
           
Demon is a comically unlikely figure to issue a Last Judgement on the erring children he has created. A rake, gambler, dueller, drinker, and now drug-taker, a pursuer of ever-younger girls, he has had an affair with a cousin, married her twin sister, and returned to the first with “a queer sort of ‘incestuous’ (whatever that term means) pleasure (in the sense of the French plaisir, which works up a lot of supplementary spinal vibrato)” (19). It is her children and his he now finds in their own incestuous cohabitation that he will insist must not continue.

Stern Fathers
        
If Demon, the self-confessed “old debaucher” (444), is a comically unlikely God of Judgement, a parody or inversion of that scriptural role, he is also in a sense another staple of secular story. Cognitive literary critic Patrick Colm Hogan, drawing on stories from Asia and Africa as well as the European tradition, observes that “The most common plot structure across different traditions is almost certainly romantic tragi-comedy, the story of the union, separation, and ultimate reunion of lovers.” Moreover, “the standard structure of romantic tragi-comedy involves two lovers who cannot be united due to some conflict between their love and social structure, typically represented by parental disapproval. This conflict commonly involves a rival as well, a suitor preferred by the interfering parents” (The Mind and Its Stories: Narrative Universals and Human Emotion, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003: 101).
           
In this light, Demon’s role as an ironic twist on the severe or interfering father helps explain the structural role of both his past judgements (“I saw you enlaced with your little Countess near the parking lot. If you marry her I will disinherit you. They’re quite a notch below our set,” 330) and the prominence of his endorsement here of “Ada’s fiancé. . . . Ada is marrying an outdoor man. . . . really, I don’t think we should bother Ada in her Agavia. He is—I mean Vinelander is—the scion . . . of one of those great Varangians who had conquered the Copper Tartars or Red Mongols” (436-37).
           
Indeed, the opening of Part 2 structurally prefigures its ending. Part 2 opens: “At the Goodson Airport, in one of the gilt-framed mirrors of its old-fashioned waiting room, Van glimpsed the silk hat of his father who sat awaiting him in an armchair of imitation marblewood, behind a newspaper that said in reversed characters: ‘Crimea Capitulates’” (329). The nightmare of Demon’s discovering him and Ada together begins for Van when he emerges for his breakfast to see Demon again ensconced in a newspaper: “clothed entirely in black, black-spatted, black-scarved, his monocle on a broader black ribbon than usual, . . .  sitting at the breakfast table, a cup of coffee in one hand, and a conveniently folded financial section of the Times in the other” (435). In that first chapter of Part 2, Demon disapproves of Cordula as Van’s partner and threatens to disinherit him. “They’re quite a notch below our set” (330). Now, Demon is about to discover that Van has a partner whom he disapproves of infinitely more, even if Ada is exactly of, far too much of, “our set.”
           
The figure of the overbearing father opposing a child’s marriage, especially if he has another suitor lined up, pervades Shakespeare from early to late, from comedy and tragedy to tragicomedy. A Midsummer Night’s Dream
opens with father Egeus blocking daughter Hermia’s love for Lysander, because he prefers Demetrius for her. Juliet’s parents want to marry her to Count Paris, who counts for nothing to her once she sets eyes on Romeo. Fussy Polonius appears all the more absurd because he commands Ophelia to reject Hamlet’s love and letters when there is neither alternative nor reason to disapprove. Cymbeline as king erupts with rage that his daughter Innogen has secretly married Posthumus, when he has designed that she should marry Cloten, his new queen’s clottish son. In The Winter’s Tale the spring-like turn at the winter’s tail seems headed for a renewed cold blast, when Polixenes emerges to bar his son, Prince Florizel, from marrying the seeming shepherd girl, Perdita.
           
But the severe father Nabokov knew best from classic storytelling was Sir Thomas Bertram in Mansfield Park. Sir Thomas returns from abroad, aghast at his young adult children stoking their amorous emotions by rehearsing the play Lover’s Vows. And although Fanny Price has her love stirred only by her cousin Edmund Bertram, Sir Thomas insists that when Henry Crawford proposes to Fanny, Sir Thomas’s poor niece and ward, she has a duty to accept someone so charming and so favorably positioned in society. Sir Thomas cannot understand her refusal to comply; his persistent pressure reduces Fanny to tears. After disaster in his own pursuit of Henry’s sister Mary, Edmund comes to discover that he values cousin Fanny enough to think of her as a wife, and wonders “whether it might not be a possible, an hopeful undertaking to persuade her that her warm and sisterly regard for him would be foundation enough for wedded love" (Mansfield Park, ed. James Kinsley, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990, III.xvii, 429)—the phrase beside which Nabokov scribbled “faint flavor of incest throughout the book” (8.25-28n.)—and discovers that she already loves him that way. Only now, when he learns that his son and niece wish to marry, does Sir Thomas Bertram come to understand fully this hitherto timid girl’s resolute opposition to his earlier insistence that she marry Crawford.

Mansfield Park

When Van and Ada discover the herbarium and old newspapers in the Ardis attic, they deduce that they are not just cousins but full brother and sister, in a dialogue that references Austen (“Dr. Krolik, our local naturalist, to whom you, Van, have referred, as Jane Austen might have phrased it, for the sake of rapid narrative information (you recall Brown, don’t you, Smith?)” (8)) and that Nabokov as Darkbloom glosses: “allusion to rapid narrative information imparted through dialogue, in Mansfield Park.” In the very first dialogue in Austen’s novel, Mrs Norris names for the first time Sir Thomas son’s, in these terms: “You are thinking of your sons—but do not you know that of all things upon earth that is the least likely to happen, brought up, as they would be, always together like brothers and sisters? It is morally impossible. I never knew an instance of it. It is, in fact, the only sure way of providing against the connection. Suppose her a pretty girl, and seen by Tom or Edmund for the first time seven years hence, and I dare say there would be mischief. The very idea of her having been suffered to grow up at a distance from us all in poverty and neglect, would be enough to make either of the dear sweet-tempered boys in love with her. But breed her up with them from this time, and suppose her even to have the beauty of an angel, and she will never be more to either than a sister” (I.i: 4-5).

Ardis is described on Van’s first arrival: “Presently the vegetation assumed a more southern aspect as the lane skirted Ardis Park. At the next turning, the romantic mansion appeared on the gentle eminence of old novels” (35). The next day Ada takes him on a tour of the house:

They zoomed upstairs again. . . . The attic. This is the attic. Welcome to the attic. It stored a great number of trunks and cartons,
and two brown couches one on top of the other like copulating beetles. . . . the roof of Ardis Manor presented an indescribable
confusion of angles and levels, of tin-green and fin-gray surfaces, of scenic ridges and wind-proof nooks. You could clip and
kiss, and survey in between, the reservoir, the groves, the meadows, even the inkline of larches that marked the boundary of
the nearest estate miles away. (44-45)

Notice those larches. Much later, in Ardis the Second, Van looks out at rain “slanting in parallel pencil lines against the darker background of a larch plantation, borrowed, Ada contended, from Mansfield Park” (231). That links with the likelihood that Ada is probably deflowered by Van in the larchwood: after the Night of the Burning Barn, Van and Ada meet the next morning at breakfast. Ada proposes a rendezvous, after her French class with Mlle Larivière, in the Baguenaudier Bower; from there they move “sufficiently deep in the larchwood which closed the park on the steep side of the rocky rise between Arids and Ladore” (129), where Van plans to sheathe Ada’s legs “in kisses from the A or arched instep to the V of velvet” (129), and does. In the next paragraph he notes: “Neither could establish in retrospect, nor, indeed, persisted in trying to do so, how, when and where he actually ‘deflowered’ her. . . Was it that night on the lap robe? Or that day in the larchwood? Or later in the shooting gallery, or in the attic, or on the roof,  . . . ” (129). Given that Van ejaculates without penetration twice “that night” on the lap robe, it seems likeliest that, after all, “he actually ‘deflowered’ her. . . that day in the larchwood” (129). Hence the irony that these larches are imported, as Ada notes, from Mansfield Park: precisely the fear that Sir Thomas Bertram might have had, and that Mrs Norris makes explicit—or much worse than Austen could imply—takes place in the larchwood of Ardis Park.

But there is more. Late in Ardis the First, as Van and Ada express their exasperation with Lucette’s trying to spy on their romps, Ada reports that Lucette

had confessed, Ada had made her confess, that it was, as Van had suspected, the other way round—that when they returned
to the damsel in distress, she was in all haste, not freeing herself, but actually trying to tie herself up again after breaking
loose and spying on them through the larches. “Good Lord,” said Van, “that explains the angle of the soap!” (152)

He refers to the mulberry soap that Lucette had defiantly posed with in the bath just before they all but imprisoned her there:

“I’m Van,” said Lucette, standing in the tub with the mulberry soap between her legs and protruding her shiny tummy.
            “You’ll turn into a boy if you do that,” said Ada sternly, “and that won’t be very amusing.” (144)

Mansfield Park and its larches and its “faint flavor of incest,” in other words, pointedly mark the boundary of Ardis Park and accompany the love of Van and Ada, from Van’s first view of the park, from their first view together from the attic over the manor roof and the estate, from their first full penetrative sex, from their discovery in the attic after becoming lovers (in the speech where Ada clinches the deduction that she and Van are full brother and sister, she refers early on to “Dr. Krolik, our local naturalist, to whom you, Van, have referred, as Jane Austen might have phrased it, for the sake of rapid narrative information (you recall Brown, don’t you, Smith?)” and in the next sentence to “that poor little Christmas larch” (8-9)), and from Lucette’s discovery, as she spies on them “through the larches,” of their making love.

But the really damaging discovery of incest for Van and Ada comes with Demon stumbling on them in their cosy apartment in Manhattan, where their father, rakehell that he remains, finds himself in the position of the severely moralistic and heavy-handedly disapproving Sir Thomas Bertram.

Ardis: the Garden and Judgement

For Van and Ada their Manhattan sojourn—from their first copulation there, which Lucette stumbles upon—serves as a replay of Ardis: less than pleasant as they relive Ardis the First through Kim’s blackmail album; an intensification of Ardis the Second as Lucette becomes even more entangled in their sex lives in the débauche à trois; and yet, just before this chapter, “reaching heights of happiness he had not known at his brightest hour before his darkest one in the past” (431).

At Ardis the repetition of sexual desire (insatiable Van and Ada), its imitation (Lucette doting on Van and becoming entangled with him), its proliferation (Ada and her lovers, Van, Krolik, Rack, and Percy de Prey; Marina and her husband, Dan, and former lover, Demon, and her former and current lovers in the film world, Gavronsky and Pedro; Blanche and her lovers, including Bouteillan, Bout, Sore, the ribald Burgundian nightwatchman, and Trofim Fartukov), and its celebration of Van and Ada’s “first summer in the orchards and orchidariums of Ardis . . . [as] a sacred secret and creed, throughout the countryside,” 409), stand as a series of narrative counterparts to the pictorial display of repetitive sexual desire in the central panel of The Garden of Earthly Delights. But Bosch’s triptych, which begins with a paradise of two lovers in the left panel, follows its ambivalent central paradise of erotic repetition to end, on the right, with a panel in Hell, just as Blanche’s venereal disease, and her and Trofim’s child born blind as a result, and the emotional damage done to Lucette embody the hellish aftermath of Ardis’s ardors.

In The Last Judgement Bosch employs a structure akin to that of Earthly Delights: Paradise on the left; this world on the day of judgement in the center, much grimmer in tone than the earthly delights; and Hell on the right. Manhattan’s partial replays of Ardis move toward this Boschian pattern. The chapter that introduces Kim’s album, that unwished-for recapitulation of Ardis the First, begins with Ada’s “dreary stay at Ardis” (396) in the late fall, and with Dan in advanced physical and mental decay:

Uncle Dan, who just then was being wheeled out by his handsome and haughty nurse into the garden where coppery
and blood-red leaves were falling, clamored to be given the big book, but Kim said “Perhaps later,” and joined Ada
in the reception corner of the hall. (396)

Since then, Dan has declined still further, in a foretaste of hell, like the foretastes of hell in the central panel of The Last Judgement, which his final dark visions and actions gruesomely replay. The account fuses the last feeble repetitions of Dan’s squalid sex life, in a travesty of the central panel of The Garden of Earthly Delights, and the wintry day of judgement in “the brown shrubbery of Ardis”:

According to Bess (which is “fiend” in Russian), Dan’s buxom but otherwise disgusting nurse, whom he preferred to
all others and had taken to Ardis because she managed to extract orally a few last drops of “play-zero” (as the old
whore called it) out of his poor body, he had been complaining for some time, even before Ada’s sudden departure,
that a devil combining the characteristics of a frog and a rodent desired to straddle him and ride him to the torture
house of eternity. To Dr. Nikulin Dan described his rider as black, pale-bellied, with a black dorsal buckler shining
like a dung beetle’s back and with a knife in his raised forelimb. On a very cold morning in late January Dan had
somehow escaped, through a basement maze and a toolroom, into the brown shrubbery of Ardis; he was naked
except for a red bath towel which trailed from his rump like a kind of caparison, and, despite the rough going, had
crawled on all fours, like a crippled steed under an invisible rider, deep into the wooded landscape. (435)

Like Ardis, the Villas Venus had been another translation of Bosch’s Garden of Delights into a different art, not painting or narrative in this case but architecture, and its “parodies of paradise” (350) too had collapsed into the hellish:

Highborn gentlemen, magistrates of radiant integrity, mild-mannered scholars, proved to be such violent copulators
that some of their younger victims had to be hospitalized and removed to ordinary lupanars. . . . Disgusting pimps
with obsequious grins disclosing gaps in their tawny teeth popped out of rosebushes with illustrated pamphlets, and
there were fires and earthquakes, and quite suddenly, out of the hundred original palazzos, only a dozen remained,
and even those soon sank to the level of stagnant stews. . . . (356)

It was not Ardis, it was not the library, it was not even a human room, but merely the squalid recess
where the bouncer had slept before going back to his Rugby-coaching job at a public school somewhere in England.
The grand piano in the otherwise bare hall seemed to be playing all by itself but actually was being rippled by
rats in quest of the succulent refuse placed there by the maid who fancied a bit of music when her cancered womb
roused her before dawn with its first familiar stab. The ruinous Villa no longer bore any resemblance to Eric’s
“organized dream,” but the soft little creature in Van’s desperate grasp was Ada. (358)

Or better—come at once, both of you, because I’ll cancel my appointment and go home right now.” He spoke, or
thought he spoke, with the self-control and the clarity of enunciation which so frightened and mesmerized blunderers,
blusterers, a voluble broker, a guilty schoolboy. Especially so now—when everything had gone to the hell curs,
k chertyam sobach’im, of Jeroen Anthoniszoon van Äken. (438)

Demon and Dan

Demon, known in society as “Dark Walter” or “Raven Veen” (4), is never darker than when he comes in full mourning to announce Dan’s death: “clothed entirely in black, black-spatted, black-scarved, his monocle on a broader black ribbon than usual” (435).  And Dan, “Durak Walter or simply Red Veen” (4), is never more memorably associated with red than in the manner of his death, his fatal reenactment of a detail from Bosch’s Last Judgement.
           
What are the implications of the contrast first introduced so early in Ada’s exposition in such comically stark parallels and oppositions: Walter and Walter, Dark and Durak, Raven and Red?
           
The gulf between dark and dashing Demon and “Durak” (fool) and bumbling Dan persists throughout the novel. Dan had “rankly grown into a Manhattan art dealer” (4); but while Dan “did not have—initially at least—any particular liking for paintings” (4-5), Demon collects “old masters and young mistresses” (4) and can effortlessly identify a hitherto unknown Parmigianino drawing (12). In the manner of his death Dan succumbs to and reenacts the grotesque in Bosch’s Last Judgement, a painting that Demon “instantly” finds (433) in the illustrated catalogue of his mind, even specifying its institutional location (436); coming to inform Van of his uncle’s “odd Boschean death” (436) with that “red bath towel which trailed from his rump” (435), Demon, not just vibrantly alive but hyper, dwells not on the Last Judgement—it is Van who depicts its details—but on Bosch at his most exuberant and seductive, in the Garden of Earthly Delights, on “the joy of the eye, the feel and the taste of the woman-sized strawberry that you embrace with him” (437).
           
The contrast between Dan succumbing to the grim vision of the Last Judgement and Demon extolling the sensuality of the Garden of Earthly Delights marks the core contrast between the two: their sex lives. Dan has married Marina, but it is Demon who has fathered two children by her, one, Van, acknowledged his own, the other, Ada, whose emphatically dark hair signals her unrelatedness to her nominal father Dan, just as Lucette’s red hair indicates that she at least is Dan’s child. Here the dark-red contrast marks the gap between the sexual flair Demon can display and get away with and the sexual flubs Dan can never avoid.

Dan’s sex life has an almost Boschian awkwardness and grotesquerie from the first. He is inveigled into marrying Marina because she is pregnant by Demon. His nominal daughter Ada and nephew Van discover the evidence of the triple trip around the globe from which Marina has cabled him to return, “as he was in the act of making his evening plans with the same smelly but nice cicerone in a café-au-lait suit whom he had hired already twice at the same Genoese hotel” (5). In the attic, Van and Ada stumble on

a tremendous stretch of microfilm taken by the globetrotter, with many of its quaint bazaars, painted cherubs and pissing
urchins reappearing three times at different points, in different shades of heliocolor. Naturally, at a time one was starting
to build a family one could not display very well certain intérieurs (such as the group scenes in Damascus starring him
and the steadily cigar-smoking archeologist from Arkansas with the fascinating scar on his liver side, and the three fat
whores, and old Archie’s premature squitteroo, as the third male member of the party, a real British brick, drolly called it);
yet most of the film, accompanied by purely factual notes, not always easy to locate—because of the elusive or misleading
bookmarks in the several guidebooks scattered around—was run by Dan many times for his bride during their instructive
honeymoon in Manhattan. (6-7)

In a story by Chateaubriand about a pair of romantic siblings, Ada had not quite understood when she first read it at nine or
ten the sentence “les deux enfants pouvaient donc s’abandonner au plaisir sans aucune crainte. . . . In those times, in this
country “incestuous” meant not only “unchaste”—the point regarded linguistics rather than legalistics—but also implied
(in the phrase “incestuous cohabitation,” and so forth) interference with the continuity of human evolution. History had
long replaced appeals to “divine law” by common sense and popular science. With those considerations in mind, “incest”
could be termed a crime only inasmuch as inbreeding might be criminal. (133)

Dan’s sorry sex life, by contrast, ends with the “fiend” Bess managing “to extract orally a few last drops of ‘play-zero’ (as the old whore called it) out of his poor body” (435). Dan’s sex life ends with not plaisir but zero, a kind of nullity, and has never amounted to much more.

There is even a “a queer sort of ‘incestuous’ . . . plaisir” in Demon’s relations with Ada as a young woman. As we have seen, Demon’s last on-stage meeting with Ada before he sees her emerging from and rushing back into the bedroom she shares with Van, before he forbids their incestuous relationship, is at the dinner he comes for at Ardis in the summer of 1888:

Old Demon, iridescent wings humped, half rose but sank back again, enveloping Ada with one arm, holding his glass in
the other hand, kissing the girl in the neck, in the hair, burrowing in her sweetness with more than an uncle’s fervor. . . .
“The last time I enjoyed you,” said Demon, “was in April when you wore a raincoat with a white and black scarf and
simply reeked of some arsenic stuff after seeing your dentist. Dr. Pearlman has married his receptionist, you’ll be glad to know.” (245)

The reference to the family firm of dentists will be picked up only once more in Ada, in the role of the other dentist’s wife, Mrs Arfour, and what could have been her role in apprising Demon that Van and Ada Veen seem to inhabit the same Manhattan apartment. Characteristically, Demon recalls “with a paint dab of delight one of the gargle girls of her late husband” as he avoids Mrs Arfour and this failed move of fate (433-34). But through the dentists Nabokov plainly links—once one makes the connection—Demon’s leering sensory pleasure in his own daughter (“The last time I enjoyed you”) and the “Last Judgement” that he imposes on Van and Ada for their incestuous desire: the last time, while Demon remains alive, Van will ever enjoy Ada.

Flamboyant Demon does nothing to hide and everything to display his leering pleasure in Ada. But the same week that he visits Ardis and engulfs Ada in his kisses, Dan and Lucette are absent in Kaluga, because “no child would want to miss the schoolgirls’ field-hockey and swimming matches which old Dan, a child at heart, attended religiously at that time of the year” (236). Although the “play-zero” extracted by Bess marks the end of what passes for Dan’s sex life, the last discovery we make about his pitiful amorous overtures also involves incestuous desire. Looking at a large ring on Van’s hand, Lucette tells him, a few days before she dies: “Papa wore one like that on his hateful pink paw. He belonged to the silent-explorer type. Once he took me to a girls’ hockey match and I had to warn him I’d yell for help if he didn’t call off the search” (466). Demon, the debonaire debaucher, “enjoys” Ada and on his last on-stage meeting with her, publicly kisses her “in the neck, in the hair, burrowing in her sweetness with more than an uncle’s fervor” (245); Dan, the same summer, the same week (236), only furtively and futilely fumbles with Lucette.

Redness and desire

Redness leaps out with what psychologists call a “pop-out effect” in the description of Dan’s last fatal crawl through Ardis, “naked except for a red bath towel which trailed from his rump like a kind of caparison” (435). That image, straight from the foreground of the central panel of Bosch’s Last Judgement, is matched in hue but emotionally contrasted with the other Boschian image that drug-jittery Demon evokes, from the central panel of the Garden of Earthly Delights:

I don’t give a hoot . . .  for the masterpiece-baiter who makes Bosch express some bosh of his time . . . and what we
have to study, as I was telling your cousins, is the joy of the eye, the feel and the taste of the woman-sized strawberry
that you embrace with him, or the exquisite surprise of an unusual orifice (437)

—a pattern anticipated by the “strawberry-red terry-cloth robe” (434) Van is wearing in this scene.
           
Note the “orifice” here as well as the strawberry. Dan’s forlorn and inept sexual life is reflected in another key in the ineptitude of a very different painting of sexual superabundance, a non-masterpiece among his private collection of erotica which Van and Ada linger over in the Ardis library and which features its own surprising orifices:

The collection of Uncle Dan’s Oriental Erotica prints turned out to be artistically second-rate and inept calisthenically.
In the most hilarious, and expensive, picture, a Mongolian woman with an inane oval face surmounted by a hideous
hair-do was shown communicating sexually with six rather plump, blank-faced gymnasts in what looked like a display
window jammed with screens, potted plants, silks, paper fans and crockery. Three of the males, contorted in attitudes
of intricate discomfort, were using simultaneously three of the harlot’s main orifices. . . . Uncle Dan, having patiently
disentangled all those limbs and belly folds directly or indirectly connected with the absolutely calm lady (still retaining
somehow parts of her robes), had penciled a note that gave the price of the picture and identified it as: “Geisha with
13 lovers.” (137)

Many elements of that description pointedly recur in Lucette’s account of her sexual romps with Ada in Arizona: “We were Mongolian tumblers . . . She kissed my krestik while I kissed hers, our heads clamped in such odd combinations that Brigitte, a little chambermaid who blundered in with her candle, thought for a moment, though naughty herself, that we were giving birth simultaneously to baby girls, your Ada bringing out une rousse, and no one’s Lucette, une brune” (375). But between such sessions

“we were just ordinary sisters, exchanging routine nothings, having little in common, she collecting cactuses or running
through her lines for the next audition in Sterva, and I reading a lot, or copying beautiful erotic pictures from an album
of Forbidden Masterpieces that we found, . . . and I can assure you, they were far more realistic than the scroll-painting
by Mong Mong, very active in 888, a millennium before Ada said it illustrated Oriental calisthenics when I found it by
chance in the corner of one of my ambuscades. So the day passed, and then the star rose, and tremendous moths walked
on all sixes up the window panes, and we tangled until we fell asleep. And that’s when I learnt—” concluded Lucette,
closing her eyes and making Van squirm by reproducing with diabolical accuracy Ada’s demure little whimper of
ultimate bliss. (376)

Note the verbal repetitions: Mongolian in both, reinforced by Lucette’s “scroll-painting by Mong Mong”; gymnasts or tumblers; Oriental; calisthenics; erotic; harlot and its Russian equivalent, Sterva.
           
Just like their father aroused by the twin charms of Marina and Aqua or by the beauty of his own daughter, Van and Ada are aroused not only by each other but also by their half-sister. Lucette reports her romps with Ada to Van in the scene at Kingston, where Van in turn is very much aroused by imagining Lucette’s concealed russet charms:

He could not help inhaling briefly her Degrasse, smart, though decidedly “paphish,” perfume and, through it, the flame
of her Little Larousse as he and the other said when they chose to emprison her in bath water. Yes, very nervous and
fragrant. Indian summer too sultry for furs. The cross (krest) of the best-groomed redhead (rousse). Its four burning
ends. Because one can’t stroke (as he did now) the upper copper without imagining at once the lower fox cub and the
paired embers. (368)

A little later, Van has to readjust his trousers to accommodate the erection Lucette has aroused: “Wincing and rearranging his legs, our young Vandemonian cursed under his breath the condition in which the image of the four embers of a vixen’s cross had now solidly put him” (377). (Notice the Vandemonian: Van echoes Demon and his “incestuous” arousal with Marina and Aqua and in a different way with Ada.) As Lucette leaves, Van even allows her to judge that he has more than “intangible admiration” for her: “Intangible? You goose. You may gauge it, you may brush it once very lightly, with the knuckles of your gloved hand. I said knuckles. I said once. That will do. I can’t kiss you. Not even your burning face. Good-bye, pet” (387).
          
The desire Lucette arouses in both Van and Ada reaches its erotic climax of tension in the débauche à trois scene—which Lucette escapes from in high distress.

Plaisir and “play-zero”
           
Just as her father is left with “play-zero” rather than plaisir, just as his poor sex life contrasts with his flamboyant cousin’s,Lucette too—although capable of an unwavering love far from her father’s feeble opportunism—feels her love-life is close to zero.

Despite Lucette’s very early initiation into sex, at eight, as the witness of Van and Ada’s lovemaking by the brook and elsewhere, despite the frenzy of her later romps with Ada, despite her striking beauty, her sexual life feels as forlorn and desperate as Red Veen’s, albeit in a melancholy rather than a grotesque manner. Her report about her frolics with Ada comes in the scene at Kingston where Van is aroused and erect at the thought of her red pubic hair. But despite those intense romps with her sister, Lucette counts the four years since 1888 when she has not seen Van as “four absolutely blank years” (369). Despite her attempting at Kingston to imitate Ada’s allure (“I knew it was hopeless. . . . I did my best. I imitated all her shtuchki (little stunts),” 386), despite Van’s monstrous erection, despite the retracted promise of a kiss, she leaves crying “Takoe otchayanie (such despair!). . . . I want Van . . . and not intangible admiration” (387). When earlier in this scene she tells Van she is still a virgin, she elaborates:

“Oh, to be sure, it was not easy! In parked automobiles and at rowdy parties, thrusts had to be parried, advances fought off!
And only last winter, on the Italian Riviera, there was a youngster of fourteen or fifteen, an awfully precocious but terribly
shy and neurotic young violinist, who reminded Marina of her brother . . . Well, for almost three months, every blessed
afternoon, I had him touch me, and I reciprocated, and after that I could sleep at last without pills, but otherwise I haven’t
once kissed male epithelia in all my love—I mean, life.” (371)

           
When Van meets Lucette in Paris almost ten years later and asks “Are you still half-a-martyr—I mean half-a-virgin?” she responds “A quarter. . . . Oh, try me, Van!” He tells her: “you talk like the loosest Lucinda imaginable. Is it a fad in your set, Lucette?” and she replies:

“I have no set, I’m a loner. Once in a while, I go out with two diplomats, a Greek and an Englishman, who are allowed to
paw me and play with each other. A corny society painter is working on my portrait and he and his wife caress me when
I’m in the mood. Your friend Dick Cheshire sends me presents and racing tips. It’s a dull life, Van. I enjoy—oh, loads of
things,” she continued in a melancholy, musing tone of voice, as she poked with a fork at her blue trout which, to judge
by its contorted shape and bulging eyes, had boiled alive, convulsed by awful agonies. “I love Flemish and Dutch oils,
flowers, food, Flaubert, Shakespeare, shopping, sheeing, swimming, the kisses of beauties and beasts—but somehow all
of it, this sauce and all the riches of Holland, form only a kind of tonen’kiy-tonen’kiy (thin little) layer, under which there
is absolutely nothing, except, of course, your image, and that only adds depth and a trout’s agonies to the emptiness.” (464)

           
The high eroticism and the gymnastic exuberance of the Garden of Earthly Delights—where many standon their hands or their head (or even half upside down on one leg on horseback!)—are set off against the final Last-Judgement-stylehumiliation of Dan, out of his wheelchair and crawling across the cold Ardis earth naked, with that red towel trailing from his rump. As shown in the links between Dan’s erotic scroll-painting and the Forbidden Masterpieces that Lucette copies and also imitates in live action with Ada, there are sad similarities in their unfulfilled love-lives, and agonies in both.
           
Nabokov makes an even more striking and direct connection between the scene of Demon’s “last judgement” on Van and Ada’s “heights of happiness” (431) and Lucette’s tragic unfulfillment in love. Demon’s discovery of his children’s incest is irrevocable from the moment Van, caught off guard, can fend him off no better than by saying “I am not alone (je ne suis pas seul)” (435). Aboard the Tobakoff, free of the Robinsons, having at last aroused Van sufficiently to have extracted from him earlier in the evening the invitation “If you’re a good girl we’ll have drinks in my sitting room at midnight” (488), Lucette calls to his suite: “‘Mozhno pridti teper’ (can I come now?)” only to receive the answer “Ya ne odin (I’m not alone)” (491). “A small pause followed” while Lucette wrongly infers, as Van expects her to, that he has the brazen “Miss Condor” in his rooms; “then she hung up” and proceeds with her suicide plans.
          
The two scenes seem utterly different; but the two instances of Van’s “I am not alone,” each a translation from one of the other three languages the Veens use among themselves, point to the similar irrevocability of what follows in each case: Demon’s decree separating Van and Ada, and Lucette’s execution of her intended suicide, if she should fail to secure Van. In each case, there is tragedy for the participants: the abrupt parting for Van and Ada, with no limit fixed, and the death of Lucette. In both cases, incest is central: the reason for Demon’s stern decree, the cause of Lucette’s fatal and futile entanglement with her half-brother and half-sister.
           
In Van and Ada’s case, their father has himself lecherously leered at and kissed Ada, on the neck, in the hair, “burrowing in her sweetness” on arriving at Ardis in 1888 (245), and on the cheek and “in the hollow of the white arm that clasped his neck” (263) on parting. His confidence in matters of desire is theirs, and although they obey his decree while he lives, they reunite the year he dies, only for another twist of fate, Andrey’s diagnosis with tuberculosis, to prompt another separation and require another reunion. Their disjunction becomes irrevocable from the moment of Van’s “je ne suis pas seul” (435); but these two, lucky in love, despite bitter years apart, will ultimately be able to enjoy four and a half decades together from 1922.
          
In Lucette’s case, she has inherited not just her father’s red hair but also his haplessness in love, horribly amplified by Van and Ada’s embroiling her in their rampant and reciprocal passion. She can fend off her father’s incestuous fumbling, she can extricate herself in anguish from the débauche à trois, but she cannot find a love life without Van. In her case, Van’s “Ya ne odin” (491) signals a truly irrevocable parting not just from Van but from hope and life itself.