Bend Sinister

by Vladimir Nabokov

  They drove on for some time in silence.

  “Why?” asked Dr. Alexander, gently treading, gently releasing.

  “A passing thought,” said Krug.

  Discreetly the gentle driver allowed one hand to leave the wheel and grope, then the other. Then, after a moment, the right one again.

  “I must have mislaid them,” he said after another minute of silence. “And you, Professor, are not only a non-smoker—and not only a man of genius, everybody knows that, but also (quick glance) an exceedingly lucky gambler.”

  “Eez eet zee verity,” said Beuret, suddenly shifting to English, which he knew Krug understood, and speaking it like a Frenchman in an English book, “eez eet zee verity zat, as I have been informed by zee reliably sources, zee disposed chef of the state has been captured together with a couple of other blokes (when the author gets bored by the process—or forgets) somewhere in the hills—and shot? But no, I ziss cannot credit—eet eez too orrible” (when the author remembers again).

  “Probably a slight exaggeration,” observed Dr. Alexander in the vernacular. “Various kinds of ugly rumours are apt to spread nowadays, and although of course domusta barbarn kapusta [the ugliest wives are the truest], still I do not think that in this particular case,” he trailed off with a pleasant laugh and there was another silence.

  O my strange native town! Your narrow lanes where the Roman once passed dream in the night of other things than do the evanescent creatures that tread your stones. O you strange town! Your every stone holds as many old memories as there are motes of dust. Every one of your grey quiet stones has seen a witch’s long hair catch fire, a pale astronomer mobbed, a beggar kicked in the groin by another beggar—and the King’s horses struck sparks from you, and the dandies in brown and the poets in black repaired to the coffee houses while you dripped with slops to the merry echoes of gardyloo. Town of dreams, a changing dream, O you, stone changeling. The little shops all shuttered in the clean night, the gaunt walls, the niche shared by the homeless pigeon with a sculptured churchman, the rose window, the exuded gargoyle, the jester who slapped Christ—lifeless carvings and dim life mingling their feathers.… Not for the wheels of oil-maddened engines were your narrow and rough streets designed—and as the car stopped at last and bulky Beuret crawled out in the wake of his beard, the anonymous muser who had been sitting beside him was observed to split into two, producing by sudden gemination Gleeman, the frail Professor of Medieval Poetry, and the equally diminutive Yanovsky, who taught Slavic scansion—two newborn homunculi now drying on the paleolithic pavement.

  “I shall lock the car and follow you presently,” said Dr. Alexander with a little cough.

  An Italianate mendicant in picturesque rags who had overdone it by having an especially dramatic hole in the one place which normally would never have had any—the bottom of his expectant hat—stood, shaking diligently with the ague in the lamplight at the front door. Three consecutive coppers fell—and are still falling. Four silent professors flocked up the rococo stairs.

  But they did not have to ring or knock or anything for the door on the topmost landing was flung open to greet them by the prodigious Dr. Alexander who was there already, having zoomed perhaps, up some special backstairs, or by means of those nonstop things as when I used to rise from the twinned night of the Keeweenawatin and the horrors of the Laurentian Revolution, through the ghoul-haunted Province of Perm, through Early Recent, Slightly Recent, Not So Recent, Quite Recent, Most Recent—warm, warm!—up to my room number on my hotel floor in a remote country, up, up, in one of those express elevators manned by the delicate hands—my own in a negative picture—of dark-skinned men with sinking stomachs and rising hearts, never attaining Paradise, which is not a roof garden; and from the depths of the stag-headed hall old President Azureus came at a quick pace, his arms open, his faded blue eyes beaming in advance, his long wrinkled upper lip quivering——

  “Yes, of course—how stupid of me,” thought Krug, the circle in Krug, one Krug in another one.

  4

  OLD AZUREUS’S MANNER of welcoming people was a silent rhapsody. Ecstatically beaming, slowly, tenderly, he would take your hand between his soft palms, hold it thus as if it were a long sought treasure or a sparrow all fluff and heart, in moist silence, peering at you the while with his beaming wrinkles rather than with his eyes, and then, very slowly, the silvery smile would start to dissolve, the tender old hands would gradually release their hold, a blank expression replace the fervent light of his pale fragile face, and he would leave you as if he had made a mistake, as if after all you were not the loved one—the loved one whom, the next moment, he would espy in another corner, and again the smile would dawn, again the hands would enfold the sparrow, again it would all dissolve.

  A score of prominent representatives of the University, some of them Dr. Alexander’s recent passengers, were standing or sitting in the spacious, more or less glittering drawing-room (not all the lamps were lit under the green cumuli and cherubs of its ceiling) and perhaps half a dozen more co-existed in the adjacent mussikisha [music room], for the old gentleman was a mediocre harpist à ses heures and liked to fix up trios, with himself as the hypotenuse, or have some very great musician do things to the piano, after which the very small and not overabundant sandwiches and some triangled bouchées, which he fondly believed had a special charm of their own due to their shape, were passed around by two maids and his unmarried daughter, who smelt vaguely of eau de Cologne and distinctly of sweat. Tonight, in lieu of these dainties, there were tea and hard biscuits; and a tortoiseshell cat (stroked alternately by the Professor of Chemistry, and Hedron, the Mathematician) lay on the dark-shining Bechstein. At the dry-leaf touch of Gleeman’s electric hand, the cat rose like boiling milk and proceeded to purr intensely; but the little medievalist was absent-minded and wandered away. Economics, Divinity, and Modern History stood talking near one of the heavily draped windows. A thin but virulent draught was perceptible in spite of the drapery. Dr. Alexander had sat down at a small table, had carefully removed to its north-western corner the articles upon it (a glass ashtray, a porcelain donkey with paniers for matches, a box made to mimic a book) and was going through a list of names, crossing out some of them by means of an incredibly sharp pencil. The President hovered over him in a mixed state of curiosity and concern. Now and then Dr. Alexander would stop to ponder, his unoccupied hand cautiously stroking the sleek fair hair at the back of his head.

  “What about Rufel?” (Political Science) asked the President. “Could you not get him?”

  “Not available,” replied Dr. Alexander. “Apparently arrested. For his own safety, I am told.”

  “Let us hope so,” said old Azureus thoughtfully. “Well, no matter. I suppose we may start.”

  Edmond Beuret, rolling his big brown eyes, was telling a phlegmatic fat person (Drama) of the bizarre sight he had witnessed.

  “Oh, yes,” said Drama. “Art students. I know all about it.”

  “Ils ont du toupet pourtant,” said Beuret.

  “Or merely obstinacy. When young people cling to tradition they do so with as much passion as the riper man shows when demolishing it. They broke into the Klumba [Pigeon Hole—a well-known theatre] since all the dancing halls proved closed. Perseverance.”

  “I hear that the Parlamint and the Zud [Court of Justice] are still burning,” said another Professor.

  “You hear wrongly,” said Drama, “because we are not talking of that, but of the sad case of history encroaching upon an annual ball. They found a provision of candles and danced on the stage,” he went on, turning again to Beuret, who stood with his stomach protruding and both hands thrust deep into his trouser pockets. “Before an empty house. A picture which has a few nice shadows.”

  “I think we may start,” said the President, coming up to them and then passing through Beuret like a moonbeam, to notify another group.

  “Then it is admirable,” said Beuret, as he suddenly saw the thing in a different
light. “I do hope the pauvres gosses had some fun.”

  “The police,” said Drama, “dispersed them about an hour ago. But I presume it was exciting while it lasted.”

  “I think we may start in a moment,” said the President confidently, as he drifted past them again. His smile gone long ago, his shoes faintly creaking, he slipped in between Yanovksy and the Latinist and nodded yes to his daughter, who was showing him surreptitiously a bowl of apples through the door.

  “I have heard from two sources (one was Beuret, the other Beuret’s presumable informer),” said Yanovsky—and sank his voice so low that the Latinist had to bring down and lend him a white-fluffed ear.

  “I have heard another version,” the Latinist said, slowly unbending. “They were caught while attempting to cross the frontier. One of the Cabinet Ministers whose identity is not certain was executed on the spot, but (he subdued his voice as he named the former President of the State) … was brought back and imprisoned.”

  “No, no,” said Yanovsky, “not Me Nisters. He all alone. Like King Lear.”

  “Yes, this will do nicely,” said Dr. Azureus with sincere satisfaction to Dr. Alexander who had shifted some of the chairs and had brought in a few more, so that by magic the room had assumed the necessary poise.

  The cat slid down from the piano and slowly walked out, on the way brushing for one mad instant against the pencil-striped trouser leg of Gleeman who was busy peeling a dark-red Bervok apple.

  Orlik, the Zoologist, stood with his back to the company as he intently examined at various levels and from various angles the spines of books on the shelves beyond the piano, now and then pulling out one which showed no title—and hurriedly putting it back: they were all zwiebacks, all in German—German poetry. He was bored and had a huge noisy family at home.

  “I disagree with you there—with both of you,” the Professor of Modern History was saying. “My client never repeats herself. At least not when people are all agog to see the repetition coming. In fact, it is only unconsciously that Clio can repeat herself. Because her memory is too short. As with so many phenomena of time, recurrent combinations are perceptible as such only when they cannot affect us any more—when they are imprisoned so to speak in the past, which is the past just because it is disinfected. To try to map our tomorrows with the help of data supplied by our yesterdays means ignoring the basic element of the future which is its complete non-existence. The giddy rush of the present into this vacuum is mistaken by us for a rational movement.”

  “Pure Krugism,” murmured the Professor of Economics.

  “To take an example”—continued the Historian without noticing the remark: “no doubt we can single out occasions in the past that parallel our own period, when the snowball of an idea had been rolled and rolled by the red hands of schoolboys and got bigger and bigger until it became a snowman in a crumpled top hat set askew and with a broom perfunctorily affixed to his armpit—and then suddenly the bogey eyes blinked, the snow turned to flesh, the broom became a weapon and a full-fledged tyrant beheaded the boys. Oh, yes, a parliament or a senate has been upset before, and it is not the first time that an obscure and unlovable but marvellously obstinate man has gnawed his way into the bowels of a country. But to those who watch these events and would like to ward them, the past offers no clues, no modus vivendi—for the simple reason that it had none itself when toppling over the brink of the present into the vacuum it eventually filled.”

  “If this be so,” said the Professor of Divinity, “then we go back to the fatalism of inferior nations and disown the thousands of past occasions when the capacity to reason, and act accordingly, proved more beneficial than scepticism and submission would have been. Your academic distaste for applied history rather suggests its vulgar utility, my friend.”

  “Oh, I was not talking of submission or anything in that line. That is an ethical question for one’s own conscience to solve. I was merely refuting your contention that history could predict what Paduk would say or do tomorrow. There can be no submission—because the very fact of our discussing these matters implies curiosity, and curiosity in its turn is insubordination in its purest form. Speaking of curiosity, can you explain the strange infatuation of our President for that pink-faced gentleman yonder—the kind gentleman who brought us here? What is his name, who is he?”

  “One of Maler’s assistants, I think; a laboratory worker or something like that,” said Economics.

  “And last term,” said the Historian, “we saw a stuttering imbecile being mysteriously steered into the Chair of Paedology because he happened to play the indispensable contrabass. Anyhow the man must be a very Satan of persuasiveness considering that he has managed to get Krug to come here.”

  “Did he not use,” asked the Professor of Divinity with a mild suggestion of slyness, “did he not use somewhere that simile of the snowball and the snowman’s broom?”

  “Who?” asked the Historian. “Who used it? That man?”

  “No,” said the Professor of Divinity. “The other. The one whom it was so hard to get. It is curious the way ideas he expressed ten years ago——”

  They were interrupted by the President who stood in the middle of the room asking for attention and lightly clapping his hands.

  The person whose name had just been mentioned, Professor Adam Krug, the philosopher, was seated somewhat apart from the rest, deep in a cretonned armchair, with his hairy hands on its arms. He was a big heavy man in his early forties, with untidy, dusty, or faintly grizzled locks and a roughly hewn face suggestive of the uncouth chess master or of the morose composer, but more intelligent. The strong compact dusky forehead had that peculiar hermetic aspect (a bank safe? a prison wall?) which the brows of thinkers possess. The brain consisted of water, various chemical compounds and a group of highly specialized fats. The pale steely eyes were half closed in their squarish orbits under the shaggy eyebrows which had protected them once from the poisonous droppings of extinct birds—Schneider’s hypothesis. The ears were of goodly size with hair inside. Two deep folds of flesh diverged from the nose along the large cheeks. The morning had been shaveless. He wore a badly creased dark suit and a bow tie, always the same, hyssop violet with (pure white in the type, here Isabella) interneural macules and a crippled left hindwing. The not so recent collar was of the low open variety, i.e., with a comfortable triangular space for his namesake’s apple. Thick-soled shoes and old-fashioned black spats were the distinctive characters of his feet. What else? Oh, yes—the absent-minded beat of his forefinger against the arm of his chair.

  Under this visible surface, a silk shirt enveloped his robust torso and tired hips. It was tucked deep into his long underpants which in their turn were tucked into his socks: it was rumoured, he knew, that he wore none (hence the spats) but that was not true; they were in fact nice expensive lavender silk socks.

  Under this was the warm white skin. Out of the dark an ant trail, a narrow capillary caravan, went up the middle of his abdomen to end at the brink of his navel; and a blacker and denser growth was spread-eagled upon his chest.

  Under this was a dead wife and a sleeping child.

  The President bent his head over a rosewood bureau which had been drawn by his assistant into a conspicuous position. He put on his spectacles using one hand, shaking his silvery head to get their bows into place, and proceeded to collect, equate, tap, tap, the papers he had been counting. Dr. Alexander tiptoed into a far corner where he sat down on an introduced chair. The President put down his thick even batch of typewritten sheets, removed his spectacles and, holding them away from his right ear, began his preliminary speech. Soon Krug became aware that he was a kind of focal centre in respect to the Argus-eyed room. He knew that except for two people in the assembly, Hedron and, perhaps, Orlik, nobody really liked him. To each, or about each, of his colleagues he had said at one time or other, something … something impossible to recall in this or that case and difficult to define in general terms—some careless bright and har
sh trifle that had grazed a stretch of raw flesh. Unchallenged and unsought, a plump pale pimply adolescent entered a dim classroom and looked at Adam who looked away.

  “I have called you together, gentlemen, to inform you of certain very grave circumstances, circumstances which it would be foolish to ignore. As you know, our University has been virtually closed since the end of last month. I have now been given to understand that unless our intentions, our programme and conduct are made clear to the Ruler, this organism, this old and beloved organism, will cease to function altogether, and some other institution with some other staff be established in its stead. In other words, the glorious edifice which those bricklayers, Science and Administration, have built stone by stone during centuries, will fall.… It will fall because of our lack of initiative and tact. At the eleventh hour a line of conduct has been planned which, I hope, may prevent the disaster. Tomorrow it might have been too late.

  “You all know how distasteful the spirit of compromise is to me. But I do not think the gallant effort in which we shall all join can be branded by that obnoxious term. Gentlemen! When a man has lost a beloved wife, when an animal has lost his feet in the aging ocean; when a great executive sees the work of his life shattered to bits—he regrets. He regrets too late. So let us not by our own fault place ourselves in the position of the bereaved lover, of the admiral whose fleet is lost in the raging waves, of the bankrupt administrator—let us take our fate like a flaming torch into both hands.

  “First of all, I shall read you a short memorandum—a kind of manifesto if you wish—which is to be submitted to the Government and duly published … and here comes the second point I wish to raise—a point which some of you have already guessed. In our midst we have a man … a great man let me add, who by a singular coincidence happened in bygone days to be the schoolmate of another great man, the man who leads our State. Whatever political opinions we hold—and during my long life I have shared most of them—it cannot be denied that a government is a government and as such cannot be expected to suffer a tactless demonstration of unprovoked dissension or indifference. What seemed to us a mere trifle, the mere snowball of a transient political creed gathering no moss, has assumed enormous proportions, has become a flaming banner while we were blissfully slumbering in the security of our vast libraries and expensive laboratories. Now we are awake. The awakening is rough, I admit, but perhaps this is not solely the fault of the bugler. I trust that the delicate task of wording this … this that has been prepared … this historical paper which we all will promptly sign, has been accomplished with a deep sense of the enormous importance this task presents. I trust too that Adam Krug will recall his happy schooldays and carry this document in person to the Ruler, who, I know, will appreciate greatly the visit of a beloved and world-famous former playmate, and thus will lend a kinder ear to our sorry plight and good resolutions than he would if this miraculous coincidence had not been granted us. Adam Krug, will you save us?”