Bend Sinister

by Vladimir Nabokov

  Nevertheless, Krug managed to reach his destination: together with two youths whom he had bribed (ten kruns each) for helping to make up the necessary trio, he landed precisely where he had decided to land. His two companions (who frankly confessed that they were making a living of it) immediately boarded a moving trolley car (where the regulations were still more complicated).

  It had grown dark while he had been travelling and the crooked little street lived up to its name. He felt excited, insecure, apprehensive. He saw the possibility of escaping from Padukgrad into a foreign country as a kind of return into his own past because his own country had been a free country in the past. Granted that space and time were one, escape and return became interchangeable. The peculiar character of the past (bliss unvalued at the time, her fiery hair, her voice reading of small humanized animals to her child) looked as if it could be replaced or at least mimicked by the character of a country where his child could be brought up in security, liberty, peace (a long long beach dotted with bodies, a sunny honey and her satin Latin—advertisement of some American stuff somewhere seen, somehow remembered). My God, he thought, que j’ai été veule, this ought to have been done months ago, the poor dear man was right. The street seemed to be full of bookshops and dim little pubs. Here we are. Pictures of birds and flowers, old books, a polka-dotted china cat. He went in.

  The owner of the shop, Peter Quist, was a middle-aged man with a brown face, a flat nose, a clipped black moustache and wavy black hair. He was simply but neatly attired in a blue-and-white striped washable summer suit. As Krug entered he was saying goodbye to an old lady who had an old-fashioned feathery grey boa round her neck. She glanced at Krug keenly before lowering her voilette and swept out.

  “Know who that was?” asked Quist.

  Krug shook his head.

  “Ever met the late President’s widow?”

  “Yes,” said Krug, “I have.”

  “And what about his sister—ever met her?”

  “I do not think so.”

  “Well, that was his sister,” said Quist negligently. Krug blew his nose and while wiping it cast a look at the contents of the shop: mainly books. A heap of Librairie Hachette volumes (Molière and the like), vile paper, disintegrating covers, were rotting in a corner. A beautiful plate from some early nineteenth-century insect book showed an ocellated hawk moth and its shagreen caterpillar which clung to a twig and arched its neck. A large discoloured photograph (1894) representing a dozen or so bewhiskered men in tights with artificial limbs (some had as many as two arms and one leg) and a brightly coloured picture of a Mississippi flatboat graced one of the panels.

  “Well,” said Quist, “I am certainly glad to meet you.”

  Shake hands.

  “It was Turok who gave me your address,” said the genial antiquarian as he and Krug settled down in two armchairs in the depth of the shop. “Before we come to any arrangement I want to tell you quite frankly: all my life I have been smuggling—dope, diamonds, old masters.… And now—people. I do it solely to meet the expenses of my private urges and orgies, but I do it well.”

  “Yes,” said Krug, “yes, I see. I tried to locate Turok some time ago but he was away on business.”

  “Well, he got your eloquent letter just before he was arrested.”

  “Yes,” said Krug, “yes. So he has been arrested. That I did not know.”

  “I am in touch with the whole group,” explained Quist with a slight bow.

  “Tell me,” said Krug, “have you any news of my friends—the Maximovs, Ember, Hedron?”

  “None, though I can easily imagine how distasteful they must find the prison regime. Allow me to embrace you, Professor.”

  He leaned forward and gave Krug an old-fashioned kiss on the left shoulder. Tears came to Krug’s eyes. Quist coughed self-consciously and continued:

  “However, let us not forget that I am a hard businessman and therefore above these … unnecessary emotions. True, I want to save you, but I also want money for it. You would have to pay me two thousand kruns.”

  “It is not much,” said Krug.

  “Anyway,” said Quist dryly, “it is sufficient to pay the brave men who take my shivering clients across the border.”

  He got up, fetched a box of Turkish cigarettes, offered one to Krug (who refused), lit up, carefully arranged the burning match in a pink and violet sea shell for ashtray so that it would go on burning. Its end squirmed, blackened.

  “You will excuse me,” he said, “for having yielded to a movement of affection and exaltation. See this scar?”

  He showed the back of his hand.

  “This,” he said, “I received in a duel, in Hungary, four years ago. We used cavalry sabres. In spite of my several wounds, I managed to kill my opponent. He was a great man, a brilliant brain, a gentle heart, but he had had the misfortune of jokingly referring to my young sister as ‘cette petite Phryné qui se croit Ophélie.’ You see, the romantic little thing had attempted to drown herself in his swimming pool.”

  He smoked in silence.

  “And there is no way to get them out of there?” asked Krug.

  “Out of where? Oh, I see. No. My organization is of a different type. We call it fruntgenz [frontier geese] in our professional jargon, not turmbrokhen [prison breakers]. So you are willing to pay me what I ask? Bene. Would you still be willing if I asked as much money as you have in the world?”

  “Certainly,” said Krug. “Any of the foreign universities would repay me.”

  Quist laughed and became rather coyly engaged in fishing a bit of cotton out of a little bottle containing some tablets.

  “You know what?” he said with a simper. “If I were an agent provocateur, which of course I am not, I would make at this point the following mental observation: Madamka (supposing this to be your nickname in the spying department) is eager to leave the country, no matter what it would cost him.”

  “And by golly you would be right,” said Krug.

  “You will also have to make a special present to me,” continued Quist. “Namely, your library, your manuscripts, every scrap of writing. You would have to be as naked as an earthworm when you left this country.”

  “Splendid,” said Krug. “I shall save the contents of my waste basket for you.”

  “Well,” said Quist, “if so, then, this is about all.”

  “When could you arrange it?” asked Krug.

  “Arrange what?”

  “My flight.”

  “Oh that. Well—Are you in a hurry?”

  “Yes. In a tremendous hurry. I want to get my child out of here.”

  “Child?”

  “Yes, a boy of eight.”

  “Yes. Of course, you have a child.”

  There was a curious pause. A dull red slowly suffused Quist’s face. He looked down. With soft claws he plucked at his mouth and cheeks. What fools they had been! Now promotion was his.

  “My clients,” said Quist, “have to do about twenty miles on foot, through blueberry woods and cranberry bogs. The rest of the time they lie at the bottom of trucks, and every jolt tells. The food is scant and crude. The satisfaction of natural needs has to be denied one’s self for ten hours at a stretch or more. Your physique is good, you will stand it. Of course, taking your child with you is quite out of the question.”

  “Oh, I think he would be as quiet as a mouse,” said Krug. “And I could carry him as long as I can carry myself.”

  “One day,” murmured Quist, “you were not able to carry him a couple of miles to the railway station.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “I said: some day you will not be able to carry him as far as it is from here to the station. That however, is not the essential point. Do you visualize the dangers?”

  “Vaguely. But I could never leave my child behind.”

  There was another pause. Quist twisted a bit of cotton round the head of a match and probed the inner recesses of his left ear. He inspected with satisfaction the gold h
e obtained.

  “Well,” he said, “I shall see what can be done. We must keep in touch of course.”

  “Could we not fix an appointment?” suggested Krug, rising from his chair and looking for his hat. “I mean you might want some money in advance. Yes, I can see it. It is under the table. Thanks.”

  “You are welcome,” said Quist. “What about some day next week? Would Tuesday do? Around five in the afternoon?”

  “That would be perfect.”

  “Would you care to meet me on Neptune Bridge? Say, near the twentieth lamp-post?”

  “Gladly.”

  “At your service. I confess our little talk has clarified the whole situation to a most marvellous degree. It is a pity you cannot stay longer.”

  “I shudder,” said Krug, “to think of the long journey home. It will take me hours to get back.”

  “Oh, but I can show you a shorter way,” said Quist. “Wait a minute. A very short and pleasant cut.”

  He went to the foot of a winding staircase and looking up called:

  “Mac!”

  There was no answer. He waited, with his face now turned upwards, now half turned to Krug—not really looking at Krug: blinking, listening.

  “Mac!”

  Again there was no reply, and after a while Quist decided to go upstairs and fetch what he wanted himself.

  Krug examined some poor things on a shelf: an old rusty bicycle bell, a brown tennis racket, an ivory penholder with a tiny peephole of crystal. He peeped, closing one eye; he saw a cinnabar sunset and a black bridge. Gruss aus Padukbad.

  Quist came down the steps humming and skipping, with a bundle of keys in his hand. Of these he selected the brightest and unlocked a secret door under the stairs. Silently he pointed down a long passage. There were obsolete posters and elbowed water pipes on its dimly lit walls.

  “Why, thank you very much,” said Krug.

  But Quist had already closed the door after him. Krug walked down the passage, his overcoat unbuttoned, his hands thrust into his trouser pockets. His shadow accompanied him like a Negro porter carrying too many bags.

  Presently he came to another door consisting of rough boards roughly knocked together. He pushed it and stepped into his own back yard. Next morning he went down to inspect this exit from an ingressive angle. But now it was cunningly camouflaged, merging partly with some planks that were propped against the wall of the yard and partly with the door of a proletarian privy. On some bricks nearby the mournful detective assigned to his house and an organ-grinder of sorts sat playing chemin de fer; a soiled nine of spades lay on the ashstrewn ground at their feet, and, with a pang of impatient desire, he visualized a railway platform and glanced at a playing card and bits of orange peel enlivening the coal dust between the rails under a Pullman car which was still waiting for him in a blend of summer and smoke but a minute later would be gliding out of the station, away, away, into the fair mist of the incredible Carolinas. And following it along the darkling swamps, and hanging faithfully in the evening aether, and slipping through the telegraph wires, as chaste as a wove-paper watermark, as smoothly moving as the transparent tangle of cells that floats athwart an overworked eye, the lemon-pale double of the lamp that shone above the passenger would mysteriously travel across the turquoise landscape in the window.

  16

  THREE CHAIRS placed one behind the other.

  Same idea

  “The what?”

  “The cowcatcher.”

  A Chinese checker board resting against the legs of the first chair represented the cowcatcher. The last chair was the observation car.

  “I see. And now the engine driver must go to bed.”

  “Hurry up, daddy. Get on. The train is moving!”

  “Look here, my darling——”

  “Oh, please. Sit down just for a minute.”

  “No, my darling—I told you.”

  “But it’s just one minute. Oh, daddy! Mariette does not want to, you don’t want to. Nobody wants to travel with me on my supertrain.”

  “Not now. It is really time to——”

  To be going to bed, to be going to school,—bedtime, dinnertime, tubtime, never just “time”; time to get up, time to go out, time to go home, time to put out all the lights, time to die.

  And what agony, thought Krug the thinker, to love so madly a little creature, formed in some mysterious fashion (even more mysterious to us than it had been to the very first thinkers in their pale olive groves) by the fusion of two mysteries, or rather two sets of a trillion of mysteries each; formed by a fusion which is, at the same time, a matter of choice and a matter of chance and a matter of pure enchantment; thus formed and then permitted to accumulate trillions of its own mysteries; the whole suffused with consciousness, which is the only real thing in the world and the greatest mystery of all.

  He saw David a year or two older, sitting on a vividly labelled trunk at the customs house on the pier.

  He saw him riding a bicycle in between brilliant forsythia shrubs and thin naked birch trees down a path with a “no bicycles” sign. He saw him on the edge of a swimming pool, lying on his stomach, in wet black shorts, one shoulder blade sharply raised, one hand stretched shaking out iridescent water that clogged a toy destroyer. He saw him in one of those fabulous corner stores that have face creams on one side and ice creams on the other, perched there at the bar and craning towards the syrup pumps. He saw him throwing a ball with a special flip of the wrist, unknown in the old country. He saw him as a youth crossing a technicoloured campus. He saw him wearing the curious garb (jockeylike except for the shoes and stockings) used by players in the American ball game. He saw him learning to fly. He saw him, aged two, sitting on his chamber pot, jerking, crooning, moving by jerks on his scraping chamber pot right across the nursery floor. He saw him as a man of forty.

  On the eve of the day fixed by Quist he found himself on the bridge: he was out reconnoitring, since it had occurred to him that as a meeting place it might be unsafe because of the soldiers; but the soldiers had gone long ago, the bridge was deserted, Quist could come whenever he liked. Krug had only one glove, and he had forgotten his glasses, so could not reread the careful note Quist had given him with all the passwords and addresses and a sketch map and the key to the code of Krug’s whole life. It mattered little however. The sky immediately overhead was quilted with a livid and billowy expanse of thick cloud; very large, greyish, semitransparent, irregularly shaped snowflakes slowly and vertically descended; and when they touched the dark water of the Kur, they floated upon it instead of melting at once, and this was strange. Further on, beyond the edge of the cloud, a sudden nakedness of heaven and river smiled at the bridge-bound observer, and a mother-of-pearl radiance touched up the curves of the remote mountains, from which the river, and the smiling sadness, and the first evening lights in the windows of riverside buildings were variously derived. Watching the snowflakes upon the dark and beautiful water, Krug argued that either the flakes were real, and the water was not real water, or else the latter was real, whereas the flakes were made of some special insoluble stuff. In order to settle the question, he let his mateless glove fall from the bridge; but nothing abnormal happened: the glove simply pierced the corrugated surface of the water with its extended index, dived and was gone.

  On the south bank (from which he had come) he could see, further upstream, Paduk’s pink palace and the bronze dome of the Cathedral, and the leafless trees of a public garden. On the other side of the river there were rows of old tenement houses beyond which (unseen but throbbingly present) stood the hospital where she had died. As he brooded thus, sitting sideways on a stone bench and looking at the river, a tugboat dragging a barge appeared in the distance and at the same time one of the last snowflakes (the cloud overhead seemed to be dissolving in the now generously flushed sky) grazed his underlip: it was a regular soft wet flake, he reflected, but perhaps those that had been descending upon the water itself had been different ones. The tug stea
dily approached. As it was about to plunge under the bridge, the great black funnel, doubly encircled with crimson, was pulled back, back and down by two men clutching at its rope and grinning with sheer exertion; one of them was a Chinese as were most of the river people and washermen of the town. On the barge behind, half a dozen brightly coloured shirts were drying and some potted geraniums could be seen aft, and a very fat Olga in the yellow blouse he disliked, arms akimbo, looked up at Krug as the barge in its turn was smoothly engulfed by the arch of the bridge.

  He awoke (asprawl in his leather armchair) and immediately understood that something extraordinary had happened. It had nothing to do with the dream or the quite unprovoked and rather ridiculous physical discomfort he felt (a local congestion) or anything that he recalled in connection with the appearance of his room (untidy and dusty in an untidy and dusty light) or the time of the day (a quarter past eight P.M.; he had fallen asleep after an early supper). What had happened was that again he knew he could write.

  He went to the bathroom, took a cold shower, like the good little boy scout he was, and tingling with mental eagerness and feeling comfortable and clean in pyjamas and dressing gown, let his fountain pen suck in its fill, but then remembered that it was David’s tucking-in hour, and decided to get it over with, so as not to be interrupted by nursery calls. In the passage three chairs still stood one behind the other. David was lying in bed and with rapid back and forth movements of his lead pencil was evenly shading a portion of a sheet of paper placed on the fibroid fine-grained cover of a big book. This produced a not unpleasant sound, both shuffling and silky with a kind of rising buzzing vibration underlying the scrabble. The punctate texture of the cover gradually appeared as a grey grating on the paper and then, with magical precision and quite independent of the (accidentally oblique) direction of the pencil strokes, the impressed word ATLAS came out in tall narrow white letters. One wondered if by shading one’s life in like fashion——