Bend Sinister

by Vladimir Nabokov

  When the November wind has its recurrent icy spasm, a rudimentary vortex of ripples creases the brightness of the puddle.

  Two leaves, two triskelions, like two shuddering three-legged bathers coming at a run for a swim, are borne by their impetus right into the middle where with a sudden slowdown they float quite flat. Twenty minutes past four. View from a hospital window.

  November trees, poplars, I imagine, two of them growing straight out of the asphalt: all of them in the cold bright sun, bright richly furrowed bark and an intricate sweep of numberless burnished bare twigs, old gold—because getting more of the falsely mellow sun in the higher air. Their immobility is in contrast with the spasmodic ruffling of the inset reflection—for the visible emotion of a tree is the mass of its leaves, and there remain hardly more than thirty-seven or so here and there on one side of the tree. They just flicker a little, of a neutral tint, but burnished by the sun to the same ikontinct as the intricate trillions of twigs. Swooning blue of the sky crossed by pale motionless superimposed cloud wisps.

  The operation has not been successful and my wife will die.

  Beyond a low fence, in the sun, in the bright starkness, a slaty house front has for frame two cream-coloured lateral pilasters and a broad blank unthinking cornice: the frosting of a shopworn cake. Windows look black by day. Thirteen of them; white lattice, green shutters. All very clear, but the day will not last. Something has moved in the blackness of one window: an ageless housewife—ope as my dentist in my milktooth days used to say, a Dr. Wollison—opens the window, shakes out something and you may now close.

  The other house (to the right, beyond a jutting garage) is quite golden now. The many-limbed poplars cast their alembic ascending shadow bands upon it, in between their own burnished black-shaded spreading and curving limbs. But it all fades, it fades, she used to sit in a field, painting a sunset that would never stay, and a peasant child, very small and quiet and bashful in spite of its mousy persistence would stand at her elbow, and look at the easel, at the paints, at her wet aquarelle brush poised like the tongue of a snake—but the sunset had gone, leaving only a clutter of the purplish remnants of the day, piled up anyhow—ruins, junk.

  The dappled surface of that other house is crossed by an outer stairway, and the dormer window to which this leads is now as bright as the puddle was—for the latter has now changed to a dull liquid white traversed by dead black, so that it looks like an achromatic copy of the painting previously seen.

  I shall probably never forget the dull green of the narrow lawn in front of the first house (to which the dappled one stands sideways). A lawn both dishevelled and baldish, with a middle parting of asphalt, and all studded with pale dun leaves. The colours go. There is a last glow in the window to which the stairs of the day still lead. But it is all up, and if the lights were turned on inside they would kill what remains of the outside day. The cloud wisps are flushed with flesh pink, and the trillions of twigs are becoming extremely distinct: and now there is no more colour below: the houses, the lawn, the fence, the vistas in between, everything has been toned down to a kind of auburn grey. Oh, the glass of the puddle is bright mauve.

  They have turned on the lights in the house I am in, and the view in the window has died. It is all inky black with a pale blue inky sky—“runs blue, writes black” as that ink bottle said, but it did not, nor does the sky, but the trees do with their trillions of twigs.

  2

  KRUG HALTED in the doorway and looked down at her upturned face. The movement (pulsation, radiation) of its features (crumpled ripples) was due to her speaking, and he realized that this movement had been going on for some time. Possibly all the way down the hospital stairs. With her faded blue eyes and long wrinkled upper lip she resembled someone he had known for years but could not recall—funny. A side line of indifferent cognition led him to place her as the head nurse. The continuation of her voice came into being as if a needle had found its groove. Its groove in the disc of his mind. Of his mind that had started to revolve as he halted in the doorway and looked down at her upturned face. The movement of its features was now audible.

  She pronounced the word that meant “fighting” with a north-western accent: “fakhtung” instead of “fahtung.” The person (male?) whom she resembled peered out of the mist and was gone before he could identify her—or him.

  “They are still fighting,” she said. “… dark and dangerous. The town is dark, the streets are dangerous. Really, you had better spend the night here.… In a hospital bed” (gospitalisha kruvka—again that marshland accent and he felt like a heavy crow—kruv—flapping against the sunset). “Please! Or you could wait at least for Dr. Krug who has a car.”

  “No relative of mine,” he said. “Pure coincidence.”

  “I know,” she said, “but still you ought not to not to not to not to”—(the world went on revolving although it had expended its sense).

  “I have,” he said, “a pass.” And, opening his wallet, he went so far as to unfold the paper in question with trembling fingers. He had thick (let me see) clumsy (there) fingers which always trembled slightly. The inside of his cheeks was methodically sucked in and smacked ever so slightly when he was in the act of unfolding something. Krug—for it was he—showed her the blurred paper. He was a huge tired man with a stoop.

  “But it might not help,” she whined, “a stray bullet might hit you.”

  (You see the good woman thought that bullets were still flukhtung about in the night, meteoric remnants of the firing that had long ceased.)

  “I am not interested in politics,” he said. “And I have only the river to cross. A friend of mine will come to fix things tomorrow morning.”

  He patted her on the elbow and went on his way.

  He yielded, with what pleasure there was in the act, to the soft warm pressure of tears. The sense of relief did not last, for as soon as he let them flow they became atrociously hot and abundant so as to interfere with his eyesight and respiration. He walked through a spasmodic fog down the cobbled Omigod Lane towards the embankment. Tried clearing his throat but it merely led to another gasping sob. He was sorry now he had yielded to that temptation for he could not stop yielding and the throbbing man in him was soaked. As usual he discriminated between the throbbing one and the one that looked on: looked on with concern, with sympathy, with a sigh, or with bland surprise. This was the last stronghold of the dualism he abhorred. The square root of I is I. Footnotes, forget-me-nots. The stranger quietly watching the torrents of local grief from an abstract bank. A familiar figure, albeit anonymous and aloof. He saw me crying when I was ten and led me to a looking glass in an unused room (with an empty parrot cage in the corner) so that I might study my dissolving face. He has listened to me with raised eyebrows when I said things which I had no business to say. In every mask I tried on, there were slits for his eyes. Even at the very moment when I was rocked by the convulsion men value most. My saviour. My witness. And now Krug reached for his handkerchief which was a dim white blob somewhere in the depths of his private night. Having at last crept out of a labyrinth of pockets, he mopped and wiped the dark sky and amorphous houses; then he saw he was nearing the bridge.

  On other nights it used to be a line of lights with a certain lilt, a metrical incandescence with every foot rescanned and prolonged by reflections in the black snaky water. This night there was only a diffused glow where a Neptune of granite loomed upon his square rock which rock continued as a parapet which parapet was lost in the mist. As Krug, trudging steadily, approached, two Ekwilist soldiers barred his way. More were lurking around, and when a lantern moved, knight-wise, to check him, he noticed a little man dressed as a meshchaniner [petty bourgeois] standing with folded arms and smiling a sickly smile. The two soldiers (both, oddly enough, had pockmarked faces) were asking, Krug understood, for his (Krug’s) papers. While he was fumbling for the pass they bade him hurry and mentioned a brief love affair they had had, or would have, or invited him to have with his moth
er.

  “I doubt,” said Krug as he went through his pockets, “whether these fancies which have bred maggot-like from ancient taboos could be really transformed into acts—and this for various reasons. Here it is” (it almost wandered away while I was talking to the orphan—I mean, the nurse).

  They grabbed it as if it had been a hundred krun note. While they were subjecting the pass to an intense examination, he blew his nose and slowly put back his handkerchief into the left-hand pocket of his overcoat; but on second thought transferred it to his right-hand trouser pocket.

  “What’s this?” asked the fatter of the two, marking a word with the nail of the thumb he was pressing against the paper. Krug, holding his reading spectacles to his eyes, peered over the man’s hand. “University,” he said. “Place where things are taught—nothing very important.”

  “No, this,” said the soldier.

  “Oh, ‘philosophy.’ You know. When you try to imagine a mirok [small pink potato] without the least reference to any you have eaten or will eat.” He gestured vaguely with his glasses and then slipped them into their lecture-hall nook (vest pocket).

  “What is your business? Why are you loafing near the bridge?” asked the fat soldier while his companion tried to decipher the permit in his turn.

  “Everything can be explained,” said Krug. “For the last ten days or so I have been going to the Prinzin Hospital every morning. A private matter. Yesterday my friends got me this document because they foresaw that the bridge would be guarded after dark. My home is on the south side. I am returning much later than usual.”

  “Patient or doctor?” asked the thinner soldier.

  “Let me read you what this little paper is meant to convey,” said Krug, stretching out a helpful hand.

  “Read on while I hold it,” said the thin one, holding it upside down.

  “Inversion,” said Krug, “does not trouble me, but I need my glasses.” He went through the familiar nightmare of overcoat—coat—trouser pockets, and found an empty spectacle case. He was about to resume his search.

  “Hands up,” said the fatter soldier with hysterical suddenness.

  Krug obeyed, holding the case heavenward.

  The left part of the moon was so strongly shaded as to be almost invisible in the pool of clear but dark ether across which it seemed to be swiftly floating, an illusion due to the moonward movement of some small chinchilla clouds; its right part, however, a somewhat porous but thoroughly talcpowdered edge or cheek, was vividly illumined by the artificial-looking blaze of an invisible sun. The whole effect was remarkable.

  The soldiers searched him. They found an empty flask which quite recently had contained a pint of brandy. Although a burly man, Krug was ticklish and he uttered little grunts and squirmed slightly as they rudely investigated his ribs. Something jumped and dropped with a grasshopper’s click. They had located the glasses.

  “All right,” said the fat soldier. “Pick them up, you old fool.”

  Krug stooped, groped, side-stepped—and there was a horrible scrunch under the toe of his heavy shoe.

  “Dear, dear, this is a singular position,” he said. “For now there is not much to choose between my physical illiteracy and your mental one.”

  “We are going to arrest you,” said the fat soldier. “It will put an end to your clowning, you old drunkard. And when we get fed up with guarding you, we’ll chuck you into the water and shoot at you while you drown.”

  Another soldier came up idly juggling with a flashlight and again Krug had a glimpse of a pale-faced little man standing apart and smiling.

  “I want some fun too,” the third soldier said.

  “Well, well,” said Krug. “Fancy seeing you here. How is your cousin, the gardener?”

  The newcomer, an ugly, ruddy-cheeked country lad, looked at Krug blankly and then pointed to the fat soldier.

  “It is his cousin, not mine.”

  “Yes, of course,” said Krug quickly. “Exactly what I meant. How is he, that gentle gardener? Has he recovered the use of his left leg?”

  “We have not seen each other for some time,” answered the fat soldier moodily. “He lives in Bervok.”

  “A fine fellow,” said Krug. “We were all so sorry when he fell into that gravel pit. Tell him, since he exists, that Professor Krug often recalls the talks we had over a jug of cider. Anyone can create the future but only a wise man can create the past. Grand apples in Bervok.”

  “This is his permit,” said the fat moody one to the rustic ruddy one, who took the paper gingerly and at once handed it back.

  “You had better call that ved’ min syn [son of a witch] there,” he said.

  It was then that the little man was brought forward. He seemed to labour under the impression that Krug was some sort of superior in relation to the soldiers for he started to complain in a thin almost feminine voice, saying that he and his brother owned a grocery store on the other side and that both had venerated the Ruler since the blessed seventeenth of that month. The rebels were crushed, thank God, and he wished to join his brother so that a Victorious People might obtain the delicate foods he and his deaf brother sold.

  “Cut it out,” said the fat soldier, “and read this.”

  The pale grocer complied. Professor Krug had been given full liberty by the Committee of Public Welfare to circulate after dusk. To cross from the south town to the north one. And back. The reader desired to know why he could not accompany the professor across the bridge. He was briskly kicked back into the darkness. Krug proceeded to cross the black river.

  This interlude had turned the torrent away: it was now running unseen behind a wall of darkness. He remembered other imbeciles he and she had studied, a study conducted with a kind of gloating enthusiastic disgust. Men who got drunk on beer in sloppy bars, the process of thought satisfactorily replaced by swine-toned radio music. Murderers. The respect a business magnate evokes in his home town. Literary critics praising the books of their friends or partisans. Flaubertian farceurs. Fraternities, mystic orders. People who are amused by trained animals. The members of reading clubs. All those who are because they do not think, thus refuting Cartesianism. The thrifty peasant. The booming politician. Her relatives—her dreadful humourless family. Suddenly, with the vividness of a praedormital image or of a bright-robed lady on stained glass, she drifted across his retina, in profile, carrying something—a book, a baby, or just letting the cherry paint on her fingernails dry—and the wall dissolved, the torrent was loosed again. Krug stopped, trying to control himself, with the palm of his ungloved hand resting on the parapet as in former days frock-coated men of parts used to be photographed in imitation of portraits by old masters—hand on book, on chair back, on globe—but as soon as the camera had clicked everything started to move, to gush, and he walked on—jerkily, because of the sobs shaking his ungloved soul. The lights of the thither side were nearing in a shudder of concentric prickly iridescent circles, dwindling again to a blurred glow when you blinked, and extravagantly expanding immediately afterwards. He was a big heavy man. He felt an intimate connection with the black lacquered water lapping and heaving under the stone arches of the bridge.

  Presently he stopped again. Let us touch this and look at this. In the faint light (of the moon? of his tears? of the few lamps the dying fathers of the city had lit from a mechanical sense of duty?) his hand found a certain pattern of roughness: a furrow in the stone of the parapet and a knob and a hole with some moisture inside—all of it highly magnified as the 30,000 pits in the crust of the plastic moon are on the large glossy print which the proud selenographer shows his young wife. On this particular night, just after they had tried to turn over to me her purse, her comb, her cigarette holder, I found and touched this—a selected combination, details of the bas-relief. I had never touched this particular knob before and shall never find it again. This moment of conscious contact holds a drop of solace. The emergency brake of time. Whatever the present moment is, I have stopped it. Too late.
In the course of our, let me see, twelve, twelve and three months, years of life together, I ought to have immobilized by this simple method millions of moments; paying perhaps terrific fines, but stopping the train. Say, why did you do it? the popeyed conductor might ask. Because I liked the view. Because I wanted to stop those speeding trees and the path twisting between them. By stepping on its receding tail. What happened to her would perhaps not have happened, had I been in the habit of stopping this or that bit of our common life, prophylactically, prophetically, letting this or that moment rest and breathe in peace. Taming time. Giving her pulse respite. Pampering life, life—our patient.

  Krug—for it was still he—walked on, with the impression of the rough pattern still tingling and clinging to the ball of his thumb. This end of the bridge was brighter. The soldiers who bade him halt looked livelier, better shaven, wore neater uniforms. There was also more of them, and more nocturnal travellers had been held up: two old men with their bicycles and what might be termed a gentleman (velvet collar of overcoat set up, hands thrust into pockets) and his girl, a bedraggled bird of paradise.

  Pietro—or at least the soldier resembled Pietro, the head waiter at the University Club—Pietro the soldier examined Krug’s pass and said in cultured accents:

  “I fail to understand, Professor, what enabled you to effect the crossing of the bridge. You had no right whatever to do so since this pass has not been signed by my colleagues of the north side guard. I am afraid you must go back and have it done by them according to emergency regulations. Otherwise I cannot let you enter the south side of the city. Je regrette but a law is a law.”