NPPF Tulips (Light Codes and Barns, Too)

[sZ]

(Other than a reference to 'tulip-red' shaded swiming suits in _Lolita_, the
only references to tulips from _Lolita_ through the end of VN's opus are to
be found in _Ada_:

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.

The males of the firefly, a small luminous beetle, more like a wandering
star than a winged insect, appeared on the first warm black nights of Ardis,
one by one, here and there, then in a ghostly multitude, dwindling again to
a few individuals as their quest came to its natural end. Van watched them
with the same pleasurable awe he had experienced as a child, when, lost in
the purple crepuscule of an Italian hotel garden, in an alley of cypresses,
he supposed they were golden ghouls or the passing fancies of the garden.
Now as they softly flew, apparently straight, crossing and recrossing the
darkness around him, each flashed his pale-lemon light every five seconds or
so, signaling in his own specific rhythm (quite different from that of an
allied species, flying with Photinus ladorensis, according to Ada, at Lugano
and Luga) to his grass-domiciled female pulsating in photic response after
taking a couple of moments to verify the exact type of light code he used.
The presence of those magnificent little animals, delicately illuminating,
as they passed, the fragrant night, filled Van with a subtle exhilaration
that Ada's entomology seldom evoked in him - maybe in result of the abstract
scholar's envy which a naturalist's immediate knowledge sometimes provokes.
The hammock, a comfortable oblong nest, reticulated his naked body either
under the weeping cedar that sprawled over one corner of a lawn, and granted
a partial shelter in case of a shower, or, on safer nights, between two
tulip trees (where a former summer guest, with an opera cloak over his
clammy nightshirt, had awoken once because a stink bomb had burst among the
instruments in the horsecart, and striking a match, Uncle Van had seen the
bright blood blotching his pillow).

That night because of the bothersome blink of remote sheet lightning through
the black hearts of his sleeping-arbor, Van had abandoned his two tulip
trees and gone to bed in his room. The tumult in the house and the maid's
shriek interrupted a rare, brilliant, dramatic dream, whose subject he was
unable to recollect later, although he still held it in a saved jewel box.
As usual, he slept naked, and wavered now between pulling on a pair of
shorts, or draping himself in his tartan lap robe. He chose the second
course, rattled a matchbox, lit his bedside candle, and swept out of his
room, ready to save Ada and all her larvae. The corridor was dark, somewhere
the dachshund was barking ecstatically. Van gleaned from subsiding cries
that the so-called 'baronial barn,' a huge beloved structure three miles
away, was on fire. Fifty cows would have been without hay and Larivière
without her midday coffee cream had it happened later in the season. Van
felt slighted. They've all gone and left me behind, as old Fierce mumbles at
the end of the Cherry Orchard

She had been casting sidelong glances, during that dreadful talk, and now
saw pure, fierce Van under the tulip tree, quite a way off, one hand on his
hip, head thrown back, drinking beer from a bottle. She left the pool edge,
with its corpse, and moved toward the tulip tree making a strategic detour
between the authoress, who - still unaware of what they were doing to her
novel - was dozing in a deckchair (out of whose wooden arms her chubby
fingers grew like pink mushrooms), and the leading lady, now puzzling over a
love scene where the young chatelaine's 'radiant beauty' was mentioned.

With the fading of that fugitive flame his mood changed. Something should be
said, a command should be given, the matter was serious or might become
serious. They were now about to enter Gamlet, the little Russian village,
from which a birch-lined road led quickly to Ardis. A small procession of
kerchiefed peasant nymphs, unwashed, no doubt, but adorably pretty with
naked shiny shoulders and high-divided plump breasts tuliped up by their
corsets, walked past through a coppice, singing an old ditty in their
touching English:

Thorns and nettles
For silly girls:
Ah, torn the petals,
Ah, spilled the pearls!