Bend Sinister

by Vladimir Nabokov

  “Quite true,” said Krug. “Unfortunately they are unable to read, let alone write.”

  “This does not concern us,” said bland grave handsome Pietro—and his companions nodded in grave judicious assent. “No, I cannot let you pass, unless, I repeat, your identity and innocence are guaranteed by the signature of the opposite sentry.”

  “But cannot we turn the bridge the other way round, so to speak?” said Krug patiently. “I mean—give it a full turn. You sign the permits of those who cross over from the south side to the north one, don’t you? Well, let us reverse the process. Sign this valuable paper and suffer me to go to my bed in Peregolm Lane.”

  Pietro shook his head: “I do not follow you, Professor. We have exterminated the enemy—aye, we have crushed him under our heels. But one or two hydra heads are still alive, and we cannot take any chances. In a week or so, Professor, I can assure you the city will go back to normal conditions. Isn’t that a promise, lads?” Pietro added, turning to the other soldiers who assented eagerly, their honest intelligent faces lit up by that civic ardour which transfigures even the plainest man.

  “I appeal to your imagination,” said Krug. “Imagine I was going the other way. In fact, I was going the other way this morning, when the bridge was not guarded. To place sentries only at nightfall is a very conventional notion—but let it pass. Let me pass too.”

  “Not unless this paper is signed,” said Pietro and turned away.

  “Aren’t you lowering to a considerable extent the standards by which the function, if any, of the human brain is judged?” rumbled Krug.

  “Hush, hush,” said another soldier, putting his finger to his cleaved lip and then quickly pointing at Pietro’s broad back. “Hush. Pietro is perfectly right. Go.”

  “Yes, go,” said Pietro who had overheard the last words. “And when you come again with your pass signed and everything in order—think of the inner satisfaction you will feel when we countersign it. And for us, too, it will be a pleasure. The night is still young, and anyway, we should not shirk a certain amount of physical exertion if we want to be worthy of our Ruler. Go, Professor.”

  Pietro looked at the two bearded old men patiently gripping their bicycle handles, their knuckles white in the lamplight, their lost dog eyes watching him intently. “You may go, too,” said the generous fellow.

  With an alacrity that was in odd contrast with their advanced age and spindle legs, the bearded ones jumped upon their mounts and pedalled off, wobbling in their eagerness to get away and exchanging rapid guttural remarks. What were they discussing? The pedigree of their bicycles? The price of some special make? The condition of the race track? Were their cries exclamations of encouragement? Friendly taunts? Did they banter the ball of a joke seen years before in the Simplizissimus or the Strekoza? One always desires to find out what people who ride by are saying to each other.

  Krug walked as fast as he could. Clouds had masked our siliceous satellite. Somewhere near the middle of the bridge he overtook the grizzled cyclists. Both were inspecting the anal ruby of one of the bicycles. The other lay on its side like a stricken horse with half-raised sad head. He walked fast and held his pass in his fist. What would happen if I threw it into the Kur? Doomed to walk back and forth on a bridge which has ceased to be one since neither bank is really attainable. Not a bridge but an hourglass which somebody keeps reversing, with me, the fluent fine sand, inside. Or the grass stalk you pick with an ant running up it, and you turn the stalk upside down the moment he gets to the tip, which becomes the pit, and the poor little fool repeats his performance. The old men overtook him in their turn, clattering lickety-split through the mist, gallantly galloping, goading their old black horses with blood-red spurs.

  “ ’Tis I again,” said Krug as his slovenly friends clustered around him. “You forgot to sign my pass. Here it is. Let us get it over with promptly. Scrawl a cross, or a telephone booth curlicue, or a gammadion, or something. I dare not hope that you have one of those stamping affairs at hand.”

  While still speaking, he realized that they did not recognize him at all. They looked at his pass. They shrugged their shoulders as if ridding themselves of the burden of knowledge. They even scratched their heads, a quaint method used in that country because supposed to prompt a richer flow of blood to the cells of thought.

  “Do you live on the bridge?” asked the fat soldier.

  “No,” said Krug. “Do try to understand. C’est simple comme bonjour as Pietro would say. They sent me back because they had no evidence that you let me pass. From a formal point of view I am not on the bridge at all.”

  “He may have climbed up from a barge,” said a dubious voice.

  “No, no,” said Krug. “I not bargee-bargee. You still do not understand. I am going to put it as simply as possible. They of the solar side saw heliocentrically what you tellurians saw geocentrically, and unless these two aspects are somehow combined, I, the visualized object, must keep shuttling in the universal night.”

  “It is the man who knows Gurk’s cousin,” cried one of the soldiers in a burst of recognition.

  “Ah, excellent,” said Krug much relieved. “I was forgetting the gentle gardener. So one point is settled. Now, come on, do something.”

  The pale grocer stepped forward and said:

  “I have a suggestion to make. I sign his, he signs mine, and we both cross.”

  Somebody was about to cuff him, but the fat soldier, who seemed to be the leader of the group, intervened and remarked that it was a sensible idea.

  “Lend me your back,” said the grocer to Krug; and hastily unscrewing his fountain pen, he proceeded to press the paper against Krug’s left shoulder blade. “What name shall I put, brothers?” he asked of the soldiers.

  They shuffled and nudged each other, none of them willing to disclose a cherished incognito.

  “Put Gurk,” said the bravest at last, pointing to the fat soldier.

  “Shall I?” asked the grocer, turning nimbly to Gurk.

  They got his consent after a little coaxing. Having dealt with Krug’s pass, the grocer in his turn stood before Krug. Leapfrog, or the admiral in his cocked hat resting the telescope on the young sailor’s shoulder (the grey horizon going seesaw, a white gull veering, but no land in sight).

  “I hope,” said Krug, “that I will be able to do it as nicely as I would if I had my glasses.”

  On the dotted line it will not be. Your pen is hard. Your back is soft. Cucumber. Blot it with a branding iron.

  Both papers were passed around and bashfully approved of.

  Krug and the grocer started walking across the bridge; at least Krug walked: his little companion expressed his delirious joy by running in circles around Krug, he ran in widening circles and imitated a railway engine: chug-chug, his elbows pressed to his ribs, his feet moving almost together, taking small firm staccato steps with knees slightly bent. Parody of a child—my child.

  “Stoy, chort [stop, curse you],” cried Krug, for the first time that night using his real voice.

  The grocer ended his gyrations by a spiral that brought him back into Krug’s orbit whereupon he fell in with the latter’s stride and walked beside him, chatting airily.

  “I must apologize,” he said, “for my demeanor. But I am sure you feel the same as I do. This has been quite an ordeal. I thought they would never let me go—and those allusions to strangling and drowning were a bit tactless. Nice boys, I admit, hearts of gold, but uncivilized—their only defect really. Otherwise, I agree with you, they are grand. While I was standing——”

  This is the fourth lamp-post, and one tenth of the bridge. Few of them are alight.

  “… My brother who is practically stone deaf has a store on Theod—sorry, Emrald Avenue. In fact we are partners, but I have a little business of my own which keeps me away most of the time. In view of the present events he needs my help, as we all do. You might think——”

  Lamp-post number ten.

  “… but I look at it
this way. Of course our Ruler is a great man, a genius, a one-man-in-a-century-man. The kind of boss people like you and me have been always wanting. But he is bitter. He is bitter because for the last ten years our so-called liberal government has kept hounding him, torturing him, clapping him into jail for every word he said. I shall always remember—and shall pass it on to our grandsons—what he said that time they arrested him at the big meeting in the Godeon: “I,” he said, “am born to lead as naturally as a bird flies.” I think it is the greatest thought ever expressed in human language, and the most poetical one. Name me the writer who has said anything approaching it? I shall go even further and say——”

  This is number fifteen. Or sixteen?

  “… if we look at it from another angle. We are quiet people, we want a quiet life, we want our business to go on smoothly. We want the quiet pleasures of life. For instance, everybody knows that the best moment of the day is when one comes back from work, unbuttons one’s vest, turns on some light music, and sits in one’s favourite armchair, enjoying the jokes in the evening paper or discussing one’s neighbours with the little woman. That is what we mean by true culture, true human civilization, the things for the sake of which so much blood and ink have been shed in ancient Rome or Egypt. But nowadays you continuously hear silly people say that for the likes of you and me that kind of life has gone. Do not believe them—it has not. And not only has it not gone——”

  Are there more than forty? This must be at least half of the bridge.

  “… shall I tell you what has really been going on all those years? Well, firstly, we were made to pay impossible taxes; secondly, all those Parliament members and Ministers of State whom we never saw or heard, kept drinking more and more champagne and sleeping with fatter and fatter whores. That is what they call liberty! And what happened in the meantime? Somewhere deep in the woods, in a log cabin, the Ruler was writing his manifestos, like a tracked beast. The things they did to his followers! Jesus! I have heard dreadful stories from my brother-in-law who has belonged to the party since his youth. He is certainly the brainiest man I have ever met. So you see——”

  No, less than half.

  “… you are a professor I understand. Well, Professor, from now on a great future lies before you. We must now educate the ignorant, the moody, the wicked—but educate them in a new way. Just think of all the trash we used to be taught.… Think of the millions of unnecessary books accumulating in libraries. The books they print! You know—you will never believe me—but I have been told by a reliable person that in one bookshop there actually is a book of at least a hundred pages which is wholly devoted to the anatomy of bedbugs. Or things in foreign languages which nobody can read. And all the money spent on nonsense. All those huge museums—just one long hoax. Makes you gape at a stone that somebody picked up in his backyard. Less books and more commonsense—that’s my motto. People are made to live together, to do business with one another, to talk, to sing songs together, to meet in clubs and stores, and at street corners—and in churches and stadiums on Sundays—and not sit alone, thinking dangerous thoughts. My wife had a lodger——”

  The man with the velvet collar and his girl passed by quickly with pit-a-pat of fugitive footfalls, not looking back.

  “… change it all. You will teach young people to count, to spell, to tie a parcel, to be tidy and polite, to take a bath every Saturday, to speak to prospective buyers—oh, thousands of necessary things, all the things that make sense to all people alike. I wish I was a teacher myself. Because I maintain that every man, no matter how humble, the last gaberloon, the last——”

  If all were alight I should not have got so confused.

  “… for which I paid a ridiculous fine. And now? Now it is the State that will help me along with my business. It will be there to control my earnings—and what does that mean? It means that my brother-in-law who belongs to the party and now sits in a big office, if you please, at a big glass-topped writing desk will help me in every possible way to get my accounts straight: I shall make much more than I ever did because from now on we all belong to one happy community. It is all in the family now—one huge family, all linked up, all snug and no questions asked. Because every man has some kind of relative in the party. My sister says how sorry she is that our old father is no more, he who was so afraid of bloodshed. Greatly exaggerated. What I say is the sooner we shoot the smart fellows who raise hell because a few dirty anti-Ekwilists at last got what was coming to them——”

  This is the end of the bridge. And lo—there is no one to greet us.

  Krug was perfectly right. The south side guards had deserted their post and only the shadow of Neptune’s twin brother, a compact shadow that looked like a sentinel but was not one, remained as a reminder of those that had gone. True, some paces ahead, on the embankment, three or four, possibly uniformed, men, smoking two or three glowing cigarettes, relaxed on a bench while a seven-stringed amorandola was being discreetly, romantically thumbed in the dark, but they did not challenge Krug and his delightful companion, nor indeed pay any attention to them as the two passed.

  3

  HE ENTERED THE ELEVATOR which greeted him with the small sound he knew, half stamp, half shiver, and its features lit up. He pressed the third button. The brittle, thin-walled, old-fashioned little room blinked but did not move. He pressed again. Again the blink, the uneasy stillness, the inscrutable stare of a thing that does not work and knows it will not. He walked out. And at once, with an optical snap, the lift closed its bright brown eyes. He went up the neglected but dignified stairs.

  Krug, a hunchback for the nonce, inserted his latchkey and slowly reverting to normal stature stepped into the hollow, humming, rumbling, rolling, roaring silence of his flat. Alone, a mezzotint of the Da Vinci miracle—thirteen persons at such a narrow table (crockery lent by the Dominican monks) stayed aloof. The lightning struck her stubby tortoiseshell-handled umbrella as it leant away from his own gamp, which was spared. He took off the one glove he had on, disposed of his overcoat and hung up his wide-brimmed black felt hat. His wide-brimmed black hat, no longer feeling at home, fell off the peg and was left lying there.

  He walked down the long passage on the walls of which black oil-paintings, the overflow from his study, showed nothing but cracks in the blindly reflected light. A rubber ball the size of a large orange was asleep on the floor.

  He entered the dining-room. A plate of cold tongue garnished with cucumber slices and the painted cheek of a cheese were quietly expecting him.

  The woman had a remarkable ear. She slipped out of her room next to the nursery and joined Krug. Her name was Claudina and for the last week or so she had been the sole servant in Krug’s household: the male cook had left, disapproving of what he had neatly described as its “subversive atmosphere.”

  “Thank goodness,” she said, “you have come safely home. Would you like some hot tea?”

  He shook his head, turning his back to her, groping in the vicinity of the sideboard as if he were looking for something.

  “How is madame tonight?” she asked.

  Not answering, in the same slow blundering fashion, he made for the Turkish sitting-room which nobody used and, traversing it, reached another bend of the passage. There he opened a closet, lifted the lid of an empty trunk, looked inside and then came back.

  Claudina was standing quite still in the middle of the dining-room where he had left her. She had been in the family for several years and, as conventionally happens in such cases, was pleasantly plump, middle-aged, and sensitive. There she stood staring at him with dark liquid eyes, her mouth slightly opened showing a gold spotted tooth, her coral earrings staring too and one hand pressed to her formless grey-worsted bosom.

  “I want you to do something for me,” said Krug. “Tomorrow I am taking the child to the country for a few days and while I am away will you please collect all her dresses and put them into the empty black trunk. Also her personal affairs, the umbrella and such things.
Put it all, please, into the closet and lock it up. Anything you find. The trunk may be too small——”

  He wandered out of the room without looking at her, was about to inspect another closet but thought better of it, turned on his heel and then automatically switched into tiptoe gear as he approached the nursery. There at the white door he stopped and the thumping of his heart was suddenly interrupted by his little son’s special bedroom voice, detached and courteous, employed by David with graceful precision to notify his parents (when they returned, say, from a dinner in town) that he was still awake and ready to receive anybody who would like to wish him a second goodnight.

  This was bound to happen. Only a quarter past ten. I thought the night was almost over. Krug closed his eyes for a moment, then went in.

  He distinguished a rapid dim tumbling movement of bedclothes; the switch of a bed lamp clicked and the boy sat up, shielding his eyes. At that age (eight) children cannot be said to smile in any settled way. The smile is not localized; it is diffused throughout the whole frame—if the child is happy of course. This child was still a happy child. Krug said the conventional thing about time and sleep. No sooner had he said it than a fierce rush of rough tears started from the bottom of his chest, made for his throat, was stopped by inferior forces, remained in wait, maneuvering in black depths, getting ready for another leap. Pourvu qu’il ne pose pas la question atroce. I pray thee, local deity.

  “Have they been shooting at you?” David asked.

  “What nonsense,” he said. “Nobody shoots at night.”

  “But they have. I heard the pops. Look, here’s a new way of wearing pyjamas.”

  He stood up nimbly, spreading his arms, balancing on small powdery-white, blue-veined feet that seemed to cling monkey-wise to the disarranged linen on the dimpled creaking mattress. Blue pants, pale-green vest (the woman must be colour-blind).