Bend Sinister

by Vladimir Nabokov

  Krug was caught by a friendly soldier.

  “Yablochko, kuda-zh ty tak kotishsa [little apple, whither are you rolling]?” asked the soldier and added:

  “A po zhabram, milaĭ, khochesh [want me to hit you, friend]?”

  Tut pocherk zhizni stanovitsa kraĭne nerazborchivym [here the long hand of life becomes extremely illegible]. Ochevidtzy, sredi kotorykh byl i evo vnutrenniĭ sogliadataĭ [witnesses among whom was his own something or other (“inner spy?” “private detective?” The sense is not at all clear)] potom govorili [afterwards said] shto evo prishlos’ sviazat’ [that he had to be tied]. Mezhdu tem [among the themes? (Perhaps: among the subjects of his dreamlike state)] Kristalsen, nevozmutimo dymia sigaroĭ [Crystalsen calmly smoking his cigar], sobral ves’ shtat v aktovom zale [called a meeting of the whole staff in the assembly hall] and informed them [i soobshchil im] that he had just received a telephone message according to which they would all be court-martialled for doing to death the only son of Professor Krug, celebrated philosopher, President of the University, Vice-President of the Academy of Medicine. Weak-hearted Hammecke slid from his chair and went on sliding, tobogganing down sinuous slopes, and after a smooth swoon-run finally came to rest like a derelict sleigh on the virgin snows of anonymous death. The woman Wytwyl, without losing her poise, swallowed a pill of poison. After trying and burying the rest of the staff and setting fire to the building where the buzzing patients were locked up, the soldiers carried Krug to the car.

  They drove back to the capital across the wild mountains. Beyond Lagodan Pass the valleys were already brimming with dusk. Night took over among the great fir trees near the famous Falls. Olga was at the wheel, Krug, a non-driver, sat beside her, his gloved hands folded in his lap; behind sat Ember and an American professor of philosophy, a gaunt hollow-cheeked, white-haired man who had come all the way from his remote country to discuss with Krug the illusion of substance. Gorged with landscapes and rich local food (wrongly accented piróshki, wrongly spelled schtschi and an unpronounceable meat course followed by a hot crisscross-crusted cherry pie) the gentle scholar had fallen asleep. Ember was trying to recall the American name for a similar kind of fir tree in the Rocky Mountains. Two things happened together: Ember said “Douglas” and a dazzled doe plunged into the blaze of our lights.

  18

  THIS OUGHT never to have happened. We are terribly sorry. Your child will be given the most scrumptious burial a white man’s child could dream up; but still we quite understand, that for those who remain this is——” (two words indistinct). “We are more than sorry. Indeed, it can be safely asserted that never in the history of this great country has a group, a government, or a ruler been as sorry as we are today.”

  (Krug had been brought to a spacious room resplendent with megapod murals, in the Ministry of Justice. A picture of the building itself as it had been planned but not actually built yet—in consequence of fires Justice and Education shared the Hotel Astoria—showed a white skyscraper mounting like an albino cathedral into a morpho-blue sky. The voice belonging to one of the Elders who were holding an extraordinary session in the Palace two blocks away poured forth from a handsome walnut cabinet. Crystalsen and several clerks were whispering together in another part of the hall.)

  “We feel, however,” continued the walnut voice, “that nothing has changed in the relationship, the bond, the agreement which you, Adam Krug, so solemnly defined just before the personal tragedy occurred. Individual lives are insecure; but we guarantee the immortality of the State. Citizens die so that the city may live. We cannot believe that any personal bereavement can come between you and our Ruler. On the other hand, there is practically no limit to the amends we are ready to make. In the first place our foremost Funeral Home has agreed to deliver a bronze casket with garnet and turquoise incrustations. Therein your little Arvid will lie clasping his favourite toy, a box of tin soldiers, which at this very moment several experts at the Ministry of War are minutely checking in regard to the correctness of uniforms and weapons. In the second place, the six main culprits will be executed by an inexperienced headsman in your presence. This is a sensational offer.”

  (Krug had been shown these persons in their death cells a few minutes before. The two dark pimply youths attended by a Catholic priest were putting on a brave show, due mainly to lack of imagination. Mariette sat with closed eyes, in a rigid faint, bleeding gently. Of the other three the less said the better.)

  “You will certainly appreciate,” said the walnut and fudge voice, “the effort we make to atone for the worst blunder that could have been committed under the circumstances. We are ready to condone many things, including murder, but there is one crime that can never, never be forgiven; and that is carelessness in the performance of one’s official duty. We also feel that having made the handsome amends just stated, we are through with the whole miserable business and do not have to refer to it any more. You will be pleased to hear that we are ready to discuss with you the various details of your new appointment.”

  Crystalsen came over to where Krug sat (still in his dressing gown, his bristly cheek propped on his abrased knuckles) and spread out several documents on the lion-clawed table whose edge supported Krug’s elbow. With his red and blue pencil the blue-eyed, red-faced official made little crosses here and there on the papers, showing Krug where to sign.

  In silence, Krug took the papers and slowly crushed and tore them with his big hairy hands. One of the clerks, a thin nervous young man who knew how much thought and labour the printing of the documents (on precious edelweiss paper!) had demanded, clutched at his brow and uttered a shriek of pure pain. Krug, without leaving his seat, caught the young man by his coat and with the same ponderous crushing slow gestures began to strangle his victim, but was made to desist.

  Crystalsen, who alone had retained a most perfect calm, notified the microphone in the following terms:

  “The sounds you have just heard, gentlemen, are the sounds made by Adam Krug in tearing the papers he had promised to sign last night. He has also attempted to choke one of my assistants.”

  Silence ensued. Crystalsen sat down and began cleaning his nails with a steel shoe-buttoner contained, together with twenty-three other instruments, in a fat pocketknife which he had filched somewhere during the day. The clerks on their hands and knees were collecting and smoothing out what remained of the documents.

  Apparently there took place a consultation among the Elders. Then the voice said:

  “We are ready to go even further. We offer to let you, Adam Krug, slaughter the culprits yourself. This is a very special offer and not likely to be renewed.”

  “Well?” asked Crystalsen without looking up.

  “Go and——” (three words indistinct) said Krug.

  There was another pause. (“The man is crazy … utterly crazy,” whispered one effeminate clerk to another. “To turn down such an offer! Incredible! Never heard of such a thing.” “Me neither.” “Wonder where the boss got that knife.”)

  The Elders reached a certain decision but before making it known the more conscientious among them thought they would like to have the disc run again. They heard Krug’s silence as he surveyed the prisoners. They heard one of the youths’ wrist watch and a sad little gurgle inside the supperless priest. They heard a drop of blood fall upon the floor. They heard forty satisfied soldiers in the neighbouring guardhouse compare carnal notes. They heard Krug being led to the radio room. They heard the voice of one of them saying how sorry they all were and how ready to make amends: a beautiful tomb for the victim of carelessness, a terrible doom for the careless. They heard Crystalsen sorting out papers and Krug tearing them. They heard the cry of the impressionable young clerk, the sounds of a struggle, then Crystalsen’s crisp tones. They heard Crystalsen’s firm fingernails getting at one twenty-fourth of the tight penknife. They heard themselves voicing their generous offer and Krug’s vulgar reply. They heard Crystalsen closing the knife with a click and the clerks whisp
ering. They heard themselves hearing all this.

  The walnut cabinet moistened its lips:

  “Let him be led to his bed,” it said.

  No sooner said than done. He was given a roomy cell in the prison; so roomy and pleasant, in fact, that the director had used it more than once to lodge some poor relatives of his wife when they came to town. On a second straw mattress right on the floor a man lay with his face to the wall, every inch of his body shivering. A huge curly brown wig sprawled all over his head. His clothes were those of an old-fashioned vagabond. His must have been a dark crime indeed. As soon as the door was closed and Krug had heavily sunk on to his own patch of straw and sackcloth, the tremor of his fellow prisoner ceased to be visible but at once became audible as a reedy quaking ably disguised voice:

  “Do not seek to find who I am. My face will be turned to the wall. To the wall my face will be turned. Turned to the wall for ever and ever my face will be. Madman, you. Proud and black is your soul as the damp macadam at night. Woe! Woe! Question thy crime. ’Twill show the depth of thy guilt. Dark are the clouds, denser they grow. The Hunter comes riding his terrible steed. Ho-yo-to-ho! Ho-yo-to-ho!”

  (Shall I tell him to stop? thought Krug. What’s the use? Hell is full of these mummers.)

  “Ho-yo-to-ho! Now listen, friend. Listen, Gurdamak. We are going to make you a last offer. Four friends you had, four staunch friends and true. Deep in a dungeon they languish and moan. Listen, Drug, listen Kamerad. I am ready to give them and some twenty other liberalishki their freedom, if you agree to what you had practically agreed to yesterday. Such a small thing! The lives of twenty-four men are in your hands. If you say ‘no,’ they will be destroyed, if it is ‘aye,’ they live. Think, what marvellous power! You sign your name and twenty-two men and two women flock out into the sunlight. It is your last chance. Madamka, say yes!”

  “Go to hell, you filthy Toad,” said Krug wearily.

  The man uttered a cry of rage, and snatching a bronze cowbell from under his mattress shook it furiously. Masked guards with Japanese lanterns and lances invaded the cell and reverently helped him to his feet. Covering his face with the hideous locks of his red-brown wig he passed by Krug’s elbow. His jack boots smelled of dung and glistened with innumerable teardrops. The darkness swept back into place. One could hear the prison governor’s creaking spine and his voice telling the Toad what a dandy actor he was, what a swell performance, what a treat. The echoing steps retreated. Silence. Now, at last, you may think.

  But swoon or slumber, he lost consciousness before he could properly grapple with his grief. All he felt was a slow sinking, a concentration of darkness and tenderness, a gradual growth of sweet warmth. His head and Olga’s head, cheek to cheek, two heads held together by a pair of small experimenting hands which stretched up from a dim bed, were (or was—for the two heads formed one) going down, down, down towards a third point, towards a silently laughing face. There was a soft chuckle just as his and her lips reached the child’s cool brow and hot cheek, but the descent did not stop there and Krug continued to sink into the heart-rending softness, into the black dazzling depths of a belated but—never mind—eternal caress.

  In the middle of the night something in a dream shook him out of his sleep into what was really a prison cell with bars of light (and a separate pale gleam like the footprint of some phosphorescent islander) breaking the darkness. At first, as sometimes happens, his surroundings did not match any form of reality. Although of humble origin (a vigilant arc light outside, a livid corner of the prison yard, an oblique ray coming through some chink or bullet hole in the bolted and padlocked shutters) the luminous pattern he saw assumed a strange, perhaps fatal significance, the key to which was half-hidden by a flap of dark consciousness on the glimmering floor of a half-remembered nightmare. It would seem that some promise had been broken, some design thwarted, some opportunity missed—or so grossly exploited as to leave an afterglow of sin and shame. The pattern of light was somehow the result of a kind of stealthy, abstractly vindictive, groping, tampering movement that had been going on in a dream, or behind a dream, in a tangle of immemorial and by now formless and aimless machinations. Imagine a sign that warns you of an explosion in such cryptic or childish language that you wonder whether everything—the sign, the frozen explosion under the window sill and your quivering soul—has not been reproduced artificially, there and then, by special arrangement with the mind behind the mirror.

  It was at that moment, just after Krug had fallen through the bottom of a confused dream and sat up on the straw with a gasp—and just before his reality, his remembered hideous misfortune could pounce upon him—it was then that I felt a pang of pity for Adam and slid towards him along an inclined beam of pale light—causing instantaneous madness, but at least saving him from the senseless agony of his logical fate.

  With a smile of infinite relief on his tear-stained face, Krug lay back on the straw. In the limpid darkness he lay, amazed and happy, and listened to the usual nocturnal sounds peculiar to great prisons: the occasional akh-kha, kha-akha yawn of a guard, the laborious mumble of sleepless elderly prisoners studying their English grammar books (My aunt has a visa. Uncle Saul wants to see Uncle Samuel. The child is bold.), the heartbeats of younger men noiselessly digging an underground passage to freedom and recapture, the pattering sound made by the excrementa of bats, the cautious crackling of a page which had been viciously crumpled and thrown into the wastebasket and was making a pitiful effort to uncrumple itself and live just a little longer.

  When at dawn four elegant officers (three Counts and a Georgian Prince) came to take him to a crucial meeting with friends, he refused to move and lay smiling at them and playfully trying to chuck them under their chins by means of his bare toes. He could not be made to put on any clothes and after a hurried consultation the four young guardsmen, swearing in old-fashioned French, carried him as he was, i.e. dressed only in (white) pyjamas, to the very same car that had once been so smoothly driven by the late Dr. Alexander.

  He was given a programme of the confrontation ceremony and led through a kind of tunnel into a central yard.

  As he contemplated the shape of the yard, the jutting roof of yonder porch, the gaping arch of the tunnel-like entrance through which he had come, it dawned upon him with a kind of frivolous precision difficult to express, that this was the yard of his school; but the building itself had been altered, its windows had grown in length and through them one could see a flock of hired waiters from the Astoria laying a table for a fairy tale feast.

  He stood in his white pyjamas, bareheaded, barefooted, blinking, looking this way and that. He saw a number of unexpected people: near the dingy wall separating the yard from the workshop of a surly old neighbour who never threw back one’s ball, there stood a stiff and silent little group of guards and bemedalled officials, and among them stood Paduk, one heel scraping the wall, his arms folded. In another, dimmer part of the yard several shabbily clothed men and two women “represented the hostages,” as the programme given to Krug said. His sister-in-law sat in a swing, her feet trying to catch the ground, and her blond-bearded husband was in the act of plucking at one of the ropes when she snarled at him for causing the swing to wobble, and slithered off with an ungraceful movement, and waved to Krug. Somewhat apart stood Hedron and Ember and Rufel and a man he could not quite place, and Maximov, and Maximov’s wife. Everybody wanted to talk to the smiling philosopher (for it was not known that his son had died and that he himself was insane) but the soldiers had their orders and allowed the petitioners to approach only in pairs.

  One of the Elders, a person called Schamm, bent his plumed head towards Paduk and half-pointing with a nervously diffident finger, taking back, as it were, every jerky poke he made with it and using some other finger to repeat the gesture, explained the goings on in a low voice. Paduk nodded and stared at nothing, and nodded again.

  Professor Rufel, a high-strung, angular, extremely hirsute little man with hollow chee
ks and yellow teeth came up to Krug together with——

  “Goodness, Schimpffer!” exclaimed Krug. “Fancy meeting you here after all these years—let me see——.”

  “A quarter of a century,” said Schimpffer in a deep voice.

  “Well, well, this certainly is like old times,” Krug went on with a laugh. “And what with the Toad there——”

  A gust of wind overturned an empty sonorous ash can; a small vortex of dust raced across the yard.

  “I have been elected as spokesman,” said Rufel. “You know the situation. I shall not dwell upon details because time is short. We want you to know that we do not wish your plight to influence you in any way. We want to live very much, very much indeed, but we shall not bear you any grudge whatsoever——” He cleared his throat. Ember, still far away, was bobbing and straining, like Punch, trying to get a glimpse of Krug over the shoulders and heads.

  “No grudge, none at all,” Rufel continued rapidly. “In fact, we shall quite understand if you decline to yield—Vy ponimaete o chom rech? Daĭte zhe nme znak, shto vy ponimaete—[Do you understand what it is all about? Make me a sign that you understand].”

  “It’s all right, go on,” said Krug. “I was just trying to remember. You were arrested—let me see—just before the cat left the room. I suppose——” (Krug waved to Ember whose big nose and red ears kept appearing here and there between soldiers and shoulders). “Yes, I think I remember now.”

  “We have asked Professor Rufel to be our spokesman,” said Schimpffer.

  “Yes, I see. A wonderful orator. I have heard you, Rufel, in your prime, on a lofty platform, among flowers and flags. Why is it that bright colours——”

  “My friend,” said Rufel, “time is short. Please, let me continue. We are no heroes. Death is hideous. There are two women among us sharing our fate. Our miserable flesh would throb with exquisite joy, if you consented to save our lives by selling your soul. But we do not ask you to sell your soul. We merely——”