Bend Sinister

by Vladimir Nabokov

  Tears stood in the old man’s eyes and his voice had trembled while uttering this dramatic appeal. A page of foolscap skimmed off the table and gently settled on the green roses of the carpet. Dr. Alexander noiselessly walked over to it and restored it to the desk. Orlik, the old zoologist, opened a little book lying next to him and discovered that it was an empty box with a lone pink peppermint on the bottom.

  “You are the victim of a sentimental delusion, my dear Azureus,” said Krug. “What I and the Toad hoard en fait de souvenirs d’enfance is the habit I had of sitting upon his face.”

  There was a sudden crash of wood against wood. The zoologist had looked up and at the same time put down Buxum biblioformis with too much force. A hush followed. Dr. Azureus slowly sat down and said in a changed voice:

  “I do not quite follow you, Professor. I do not know who the … whom the word or name you used refers to and—what you mean by recalling that singular game—probably some childish tussle … lawn tennis or something like that.”

  “Toad was his nickname,” said Krug. “And it is doubtful whether you would call it lawn tennis—or even leapfrog for that matter. He did not. I was something of a bully, I am afraid, and I used to trip him up and sit upon his face—a kind of rest cure.”

  “Please, my dear Krug, please,” said the President, wincing. “This is in questionable taste. You were boys at school, and boys will be boys, and I am sure you have many enjoyable memories in common—discussing lessons or talking of your grand plans for the future as boys will do——”

  “I sat upon his face,” said Krug stolidly, “every blessed day for about five school years—which makes, I suppose, about a thousand sittings.”

  Some looked at their feet, others at their hands, others again got busy with cigarettes. The zoologist, after showing a momentary interest in the proceedings, turned to a newfound bookcase. Dr. Alexander negligently avoided the shifting eye of old Azureus, who apparently was seeking help in that unexpected quarter.

  “The details of the ritual,” continued Krug—but was interrupted by the ching-ching of a little cowbell, a Swiss trinket that the old man’s desperate hand had found on the bureau.

  “All this is quite irrelevant,” cried the President. “I really must call you to order, my dear colleague. We have wandered away from the main——”

  “But look here,” said Krug. “Really, I have not said anything dreadful, have I? I do not suggest for instance that the present face of the Toad retains after twenty-five years the immortal imprint of my weight. In those days, although thinner than I am now——”

  The President had slipped out of his chair and fairly ran towards Krug.

  “I have remembered,” he said with a catch in his voice, “something I wanted to tell you—most important—sub rosa—will you please come with me into the next room for a minute?”

  “All right,” said Krug, heaving out of his armchair.

  The next room was the President’s study. Its tall clock had stopped at a quarter past six. Krug calculated rapidly, and the blackness inside him sucked at his heart. Why am I here? Shall I go home? Shall I stay?

  “… My dear friend, you know well my esteem for you. But you are a dreamer, a thinker. You do not realize the circumstances. You say impossible, unmentionable things. Whatever we think of—of that person, we must keep it to ourselves. We are in deathly danger. You are jeopardizing the—everything.…”

  Dr. Alexander, whose courtesy, assistance and savoir vivre were really supreme, slipped in with an ash tray which he placed at Krug’s elbow.

  “In that case,” said Krug, ignoring the redundant article, “I have to note with regret that the tact you mentioned was but its helpless shadow—namely an afterthought. You ought to have warned me, you know, that for reasons I still cannot fathom you intended to ask me to visit the——”

  “Yes, to visit the Ruler,” interpolated Azureus hurriedly. “I am sure that when you take cognizance of the manifesto, the reading of which has been so unexpectedly postponed——”

  The clock began striking. For Dr. Alexander, who was an expert in such matters and a methodical man, had not been able to curb the tinkerer’s instinct and was now standing on a chair and pawing the danglers and the naked face. His ear and dynamic profile were reflected in pink pastel by the opened glass door of the clock.

  “I think I prefer going home,” said Krug.

  “Stay, I implore you. We shall now quickly read and sign that really historical document. And you must agree, you must be the messenger, you must be the dove——”

  “Confound that clock,” said Krug. “Can’t you stop its striking, man? You seem to confuse the olive branch with the fig leaf,” he went on, turning again to the President. “But this is neither here nor there, since for the life of me——”

  “I only beg you to think it over, to avoid any rash decision. Those school recollections are delightful per se—little quarrels—a harmless nickname—but we must be serious now. Come, let us go back to our colleagues and do our duty.”

  Dr. Azureus, whose oratorical zest seemed to have waned, briefly informed his audience that the declaration which all had to read and sign, had been typed in the same number of copies as there would be signatures. He had been given to understand, he said, that this would lend a dash of individuality to every copy. What was the real object of this arrangement he did not explain, and, let us hope, did not know, but Krug thought he recognized in the apparent imbecility of the procedure the eerie ways of the Toad. The good doctors, Azureus and Alexander, distributed the sheets with the celerity that a conjuror and his assistant display when passing around for inspection articles which should not be examined too closely.

  “You take one, too,” said the older doctor to the younger one.

  “No, really,” exclaimed Dr. Alexander, and everybody could see his handsome face express a rosy confusion. “Indeed, no. I would not dare. My humble signature must not hobnob with those of this august assembly. I am nothing.”

  “Here—this is yours,” said Dr. Azureus with an odd burst of impatience.

  The zoologist did not bother to read his, signed it with a borrowed pen, returned the pen over his shoulder and became engrossed again in the only inspectable stuff he had found so far—an old Baedeker with views of Egypt and ships of the desert in silhouette. Poor collecting ground on the whole—except perhaps for the orthopterist.

  Dr. Alexander sat down at the rosewood desk, unbuttoned his jacket, shot out his cuffs, tuned the chair proximally, checked its position as a pianist does; then produced from his vest pocket a beautiful glittering instrument made of crystal and gold; looked at its nib; tested it on a bit of paper; and, holding his breath, slowly unfolded the convolutions of his name. Having completed the ornamentation of its complex tail, he raised his pen and surveyed the glamour he had wrought. Unfortunately at this precise moment, his golden wand (perhaps resentful of the concussions that its master’s various exertions had been transmitting to it throughout the evening) shed a big black tear on the valuable typescript.

  Really flushing this time, the V vein swelling on his forehead, Dr. Alexander applied the leech. When the corner of the blotting paper had drunk its fill without touching the bottom, the unfortunate doctor gingerly dabbed the remains. Adam Krug from a vantage point near by saw these pale blue remains: a fancy footprint or the spatulate outline of a puddle.

  Gleeman re-read the document twice, frowned twice, remembered the grant and the stained-glass window frontispiece and the special type he had chosen, and the footnote on page 306 that would explode a rival theory concerning the exact age of a ruined wall, and affixed his dainty but strangely illegible signature.

  Beuret who had been brusquely roused from a pleasant nap in a screened armchair, read, blew his nose, cursed the day he had changed his citizenship—then told himself that after all it was not his business to combat exotic politics, folded his handkerchief and seeing that others signed, signed.

  Economics and
History held a brief consultation during which a sceptic but slightly strained smile appeared on the latter’s face. They appended their signatures in unison and then noticed with dismay that while comparing notes they had somehow swapped copies, for each copy had the name and address of the potential undersigner typed out in the left-hand corner.

  The rest sighed and signed, or did not sigh and signed, or signed—and sighed afterwards, or did neither the one nor the other, but then thought better of it and signed. Adam Krug too, he too, he too, unclipped his rusty wobbly fountain pen. The telephone rang in the adjacent study.

  Dr. Azureus had personally handed the document to him and had hung around while Krug had leisurely put on his spectacles and had started to read, throwing his head back so as to rest it on the antimacassar and holding the sheets rather high in his slightly trembling thick fingers. They trembled more than usually because it was after midnight and he was unspeakably tired. Dr. Azureus stopped hovering and felt his old heart stumble as it went upstairs (metaphorically) with its guttering candle when Krug nearing the end of the manifesto (three pages and a half, sewn) pulled at the pen in his breast pocket. A sweet aura of intense relief made the candle rear its flame as old Azureus saw Krug spread the last page on the flat wooden arm of his cretonned armchair and unscrew the muzzle part of his pen, turning it into a cap.

  With a quick flip-like delicately precise stroke quite out of keeping with his burly constitution, Krug inserted a comma in the fourth line. Then (chmok) he remuzzled, reclipped his pen (chmok) and handed the document to the distracted President.

  “Sign it,” said the President in a funny automatic voice.

  “Legal documents excepted,” answered Krug, “and not all of them at that, I never have signed, nor ever shall sign, anything not written by myself.”

  Old Azureus glanced around, his arms slowly rising. Somehow nobody was looking his way save Hedron, the mathematician, a gaunt man with a so-called “British” moustache and a pipe in his hand. Dr. Alexander was in the next room attending to the telephone. The cat was asleep in the stuffy room of the President’s daughter who was dreaming of not being able to find a certain pot of apple jelly which she knew was a ship she had once seen in Bervok and a sailor was leaning and spitting overboard, watching his spit fall, fall, fall into the apple jelly of the heart-rending sea for her dream was shot with golden-yellow, as she had not put out the lamp, wishing to keep awake until her old father’s guests had gone.

  “Moreover,” said Krug, “the metaphors are all mongrels whereas the sentence about being ready to add to the curriculum such matters as would prove necessary to promote political understanding and to do our utmost is miserable grammar which even my comma cannot save. I want to go home now.”

  “Prakhtata meta!” poor Dr. Azureus cried to the very quiet assembly. “Prakhta tuen vadust, mohen kern! Profsar Krug malarma ne donje … Prakhtata!”

  Dr. Alexander, faintly resembling the fading sailor, reappeared and signalled, then called the President, who, still clutching the unsigned paper, sped wailing towards his faithful assistant.

  “Come on, old boy, don’t be a fool. Sign that darned thing,” said Hedron, leaning over Krug and resting the fist with the pipe on Krug’s shoulder. “What on earth does it matter? Affix your commercially valuable scrawl. Come on! Nobody can touch our circles—but we must have some place to draw them.”

  “Not in the mud, sir, not in the mud,” said Krug, smiling his first smile of the evening.

  “Oh, don’t be a pompous pedant,” said Hedron. “Why do you want to make me feel so uncomfortable? I signed it—and my gods did not stir.”

  Without looking, Krug put up his hand to touch lightly Hedron’s tweed sleeve.

  “It’s all right,” he said. “I don’t care a damn for your morals so long as you draw your circles and show conjuring tricks to my boy.”

  For one dangerous moment he felt again the hot black surge of grief and the room was almost melted … but Dr. Azureus was speeding back.

  “My poor friend,” said the President with great gusto. “You are a hero to have come. Why did not you tell me? I understand everything now! Of course, you could not have given the necessary attention—your decision and signature may be postponed—and I am sure we all are heartily ashamed of ourselves for having bothered you at such a moment.”

  “Go on speaking,” said Krug. “Go on. Your words are conundrums to me but don’t let that stop you.”

  With an awful feeling that a piece of utter misinformation had bedeviled him, Azureus stared, then stammered:

  “I hope, I am not … I mean, I hope I am … I mean, haven’t you … isn’t there sorrow in your family?”

  “If there is, it is no concern of yours,” said Krug. “I want to go home,” he added, blasting out suddenly in the terrible voice that would come like a thunderclap when he arrived at the climax of a lecture. “Will that man—what’s his name—drive me back?”

  From afar Dr. Alexander nodded to Dr. Azureus.

  The mendicant had been relieved. Two soldiers sat huddled on the treadboard of the car, presumably guarding it. Krug, being eager to avoid a chat with Dr. Alexander, promptly got into the back. To his great annoyance, however, Dr. Alexander, instead of taking the wheel, joined him there. With one of the soldiers driving while the other protruded a comfortable elbow, the car screeched, cleared its throat and hummed through the dark streets.

  “Perhaps you would like——” said Dr. Alexander, and, groping on the floor, attempted to draw up a rug so as to unite under it his and his bedfellow’s legs. Krug grunted and kicked the thing off. Dr. Alexander tugged, fidgeted, tucked himself in all alone, and then relaxed, one hand languidly resting in the strap on his side of the car. An incidental street lamp found and mislaid his opal.

  “I must confess I admired you, Professor. Of course you were the only real man among those poor dear fossils. I understand, you do not see much of your colleagues, do you? Oh, you must have felt rather out of place——”

  “Wrong again,” said Krug, breaking his vow to keep silent. “I esteem my colleagues as I do my own self, I esteem them for two things: because they are able to find perfect felicity in specialized knowledge and because they are not apt to commit physical murder.”

  Dr. Alexander mistook this for one of the obscure quips which, he had been told, Adam Krug liked to indulge in and laughed cautiously.

  Krug glanced at him through the running darkness and turned away for good.

  “And you know,” continued the young biodynamicist, “I have a curious feeling, Professor, that somehow or other the numerous sheep are prized less than the one lone wolf. I wonder what is going to happen next. I wonder, for instance, what would be your attitude if our whimsical government with apparent inconsistency ignored the sheep but offered the wolf the most munificent position imaginable. It is a passing thought of course and you may laugh at the paradox (the speaker briefly demonstrated the way it might be done) but this and other possibilities, perhaps of a quite opposite nature, somehow or other come to the mind. You know, when I was a student and lived in a garret, my landlady, the wife of the grocer below, used to insist that I should end by setting the house on fire, so many candles did I burn every night while poring over the pages of your admirable in every respect——”

  “Shut up, will you?” said Krug, all of a sudden revealing a queer streak of vulgarity and even cruelty, for nothing in the innocent and well-meaning, if not very intelligent prattle of the young scientist (who quite obviously had been turned into a chatterbox by the shyness characteristic of overstrung and perhaps undernourished young folks, victims of capitalism, communism and masturbation, when they find themselves in the company of really big men, such as for instance someone whom they know to be a personal friend of the boss, or the head of the firm himself, or even the head’s brother-in-law Gogolevitch, and so on) warranted the rudeness of the interjection; which interjection however had the effect of ensuring complete silence for the rest o
f the trip.

  Only when the somewhat roughly driven car swerved into Peregolm Lane, did the unrestful young man, who realized no doubt the bewildered state of mind of the widower, open his mouth again.

  “Here we are,” he said genially, “I hope you have your sesamka [latchkey]. We must be dashing back, I’m afraid. Good night! Happy dreams! Proshchevantze!” [jocose “adieu”].

  The car vanished while the square echo of its slammed door was still suspended in mid-air like an empty picture frame of ebony. But Krug was not alone: a thing that resembled a helmet had rolled down the steps of the porch and lay at his feet.

  Close up, close up! In the farewell shadows of the porch, his moon-white monstrously padded shoulder in pathetic disharmony with his slender neck, a youth, dressed up as an American Football Player, stood in one last deadlock with a sketchy little Carmen—and even the sum of their years was at least ten less than the spectator’s age. Her short black skirt with its suggestion of jet and petal half veiled the quaint garb of her lover’s limbs. A spangled wrap drooped from her left hand and the inner side of her limp arm shone through black gauze. Her other arm circled up and around the boy’s neck and the tense fingers were thrust from behind into his dark hair; yes, one distinguished everything—even the short clumsily lacquered fingernails, the rough schoolgirl knuckles. He, the tackier, held Laocoön, and a brittle shoulder-blade, and a small rhythmical hip, in his throbbing coils through which glowing globules were travelling in secret, and her eyes were closed.