Bend Sinister
Page 22
Krug, interrupting him with a gesture, made a dreadful grimace. The crowd waited in breathless suspense. Krug rent the silence with a tremendous sneeze.
“You silly people,” he said, wiping his nose with his hand, “what on earth are you afraid of? What does it all matter? Ridiculous! Same as those infantile pleasures—Olga and the boy taking part in some silly theatricals, she getting drowned, he losing his life or something in a railway accident. What on earth does it matter?”
“Well, if it does not matter,” said Rufel, breathing hard, “then, damn it, tell them you are ready to do your best, and stick to it, and we shall not be shot.”
“You see, it’s a horrible situation,” said Schimpffer, who had been a brave banal red-haired boy, but now had a pale puffy face with freckles showing through his sparse hair. “We have been told that unless you accepted the Government’s terms this is our last day. I have a big factory of sport articles in Ast-Lagoda. I was arrested in the middle of the night and clapped into prison. I am a law-abiding citizen and do not understand in the least why anybody should turn down a governmental offer, but I know that you are an exceptional person and may have exceptional reasons, and believe me I should hate to make you do anything dishonourable or foolish.”
“Krug, do you hear what we are saying?” asked Rufel abruptly, and as Krug continued to look at them with a benevolent and somewhat loose-lipped smile, they realized with a shock that they were addressing a madman.
“Khoroshen’koe polozhen’itze [a pretty business],” remarked Rufel to dumbfounded Schimpffer.
A coloured photograph taken a moment or two later showed the following: on the right (facing the exit) near the grey wall, Paduk was seated with thighs parted, in a chair which had just been fetched for him from the house. He wore the green and brown mottled uniform of one of his favourite regiments. His face was a dead pink blob under a waterproof cap (which his father had once invented). He sported bottle-shaped brown leggings. Schamm, a gorgeous person in a brass breastplate and wide-brimmed white-feathered hat of black velvet, was leaning toward him, saying something to the sulky little dictator. Three other Elders stood near by, wrapped in black cloaks, like cypresses or conspirators. Several handsome young men in operatic uniforms, armed with brown and green mottled automatic pistols, formed a protective semicircle around this group. On the wall behind Paduk and just above his head, an inscription in chalk, an obscene word scrawled by some schoolboy, had been allowed to remain; this gross negligence quite spoiled the right-hand part of the picture. On the left, in the middle of the yard, hatless, his coarse dark greying locks moving in the wind, clothed in ample white pyjamas with a silken girdle, and barefooted like a saint of old, loomed Krug. Guards were pointing rifles at Rufel and Schimpffer who were remonstrating with them. Olga’s sister, her face twitching, her eyes trying to look unconcerned, was telling her inefficient husband to go a few steps forward and occupy a more favourable position so that he and she might get to Krug next. In the background, a nurse was giving Maximov an injection: the old man had collapsed, and his kneeling wife was wrapping his feet in her black shawl (they both had been cruelly treated in prison). Hedron, or rather an extremely gifted impersonator (for Hedron himself had committed suicide a few days before), was smoking a Dunhill pipe. Ember, shivering (the outline was blurred) despite the astrakhan coat he wore, had taken advantage of the altercation between the first pair and the guards and was almost at Krug’s elbow. You can move again.
Rufel gesticulated. Ember caught Krug by the arm and Krug turned quickly to his friend.
“Wait a minute,” said Krug. “Don’t start complaining until I settle this misunderstanding. Because, you see, this confrontation is a complete misunderstanding. I had a dream last night, yes, a dream.… Oh, never mind, call it a dream or call it a haloed hallucination—one of those oblique beams across a hermit’s cell—look at my bare feet—cold as marble, of course, but—Where was I? Listen, you are not as stupid as the others, are you? You know as well as I do that there is nothing to fear?”
“My dear Adam,” said Ember, “let us not go into such details as fear. I am ready to die.… But there is one thing that I refuse to endure any longer, c’est la tragédie des cabinets, it is killing me. As you know, I have a most queasy stomach, and they lead me into an enseamed draught, an inferno of filth, once a day for a minute. C’est atroce. I prefer to be shot straightaway.”
As Rufel and Schimpffer still kept struggling and telling the guards that they had not finished talking to Krug, one of the soldiers appealed to the Elders, and Schamm walked over and softly spoke.
“This will never do,” he said in very careful accents (by sheer will power he had cured himself of an explosive stammer in his youth). “The programme must be carried out without all this chatter and confusion. Let us have done with it. Tell them” (he turned to Krug) “that you have been elected Minister of Education and Justice and in this capacity are giving them back their lives.”
“Your breastplate is fantastically beautiful,” murmured Krug and with a rapid movement of all ten fingers drummed upon the convex metal.
“The days when we pup-played in this very yard are gone,” said Schamm severely.
Krug reached for Schamm’s headgear and deftly transferred it to his own locks.
It was a sissy sealskin bonnet. The boy, with a stutter of rage, tried to retrieve it. Adam Krug threw it to Pinkie Schimpffer who, in turn, threw it up a snow-fringed amassment of stacked birch logs where it stuck. Schamm ran back into the schoolhouse to complain. The Toad, homeward bound, stealthily walked along the low wall towards the exit. Adam Krug slung his book satchel across his shoulder and remarked to Schimpffer that it was funny—did Schimpffer also get sometimes that feeling of a “repeated sequence,” as if all this had already happened before: fur cap, I threw it to you, you threw it up, logs, snow on logs, cap got stuck, the Toad came out …? Being of a practical turn of mind, Schimpffer suggested they better give the Toad a good fright. The two boys watched him from behind the logs. The Toad stopped near the wall, apparently waiting for Mamsch. With a tremendous huzza, Krug led the attack.
“For God’s sake, stop him,” cried Rufel, “he has gone mad. We are not responsible for his actions. Stop him!”
In a burst of vigorous speed, Krug was running towards the wall, where Paduk, his features dissolving in the water of fear, had slipped from his chair and was trying to vanish. The yard seethed in wild commotion. Krug dodged the embrace of a guard. Then the left side of his head seemed to burst into flames (that first bullet took off part of his ear), but he stumbled on cheerfully:
“Come on, Schrimp, come on,” he roared without looking back, “let us trim him, let us get at his guts, come on!”
He saw the Toad crouching at the foot of the wall, shaking, dissolving, speeding up his shrill incantations, protecting his dimming face with his transparent arm, and Krug ran towards him, and just a fraction of an instant before another and better bullet hit him, he shouted again: You, you—and the wall vanished, like a rapidly withdrawn slide, and I stretched myself and got up from among the chaos of written and rewritten pages, to investigate the sudden twang that something had made in striking the wire netting of my window.
As I had thought, a big moth was clinging with furry feet to the netting, on the night’s side; its marbled wings kept vibrating, its eyes glowed like two miniature coals. I had just time to make out its streamlined brownish-pink body and a twinned spot of colour; and then it let go and swung back into the warm damp darkness.
Well, that was all. The various parts of my comparative paradise—the bedside lamp, the sleeping tablets, the glass of milk—looked with perfect submission into my eyes. I knew that the immortality I had conferred on the poor fellow was a slippery sophism, a play upon words. But the very last lap of his life had been happy and it had been proven to him that death was but a question of style. Some tower clock which I could never exactly locate, which, in fact, I never heard in the daytime,
struck twice, then hesitated and was left behind by the smooth fast silence that continued to stream through the veins of my aching temples; a question of rhythm.
Across the lane, two windows only were still alive. In one, the shadow of an arm was combing invisible hair; or perhaps it was a movement of branches; the other was crossed by the slanting black trunk of a poplar. The shredded ray of a streetlamp brought out a bright green section of wet boxhedge. I could also distinguish the glint of a special puddle (the one Krug had somehow perceived through the layer of his own life), an oblong puddle invariably acquiring the same form after every shower because of the constant spatulate shape of a depression in the ground. Possibly something of the kind may be said to occur in regard to the imprint we leave in the intimate texture of space. Twang. A good night for mothing.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Vladimir Nabokov was born in St. Petersburg on April 23, 1899. His family fled to Germany in 1919, during the Bolshevik Revolution. Nabokov studied French and Russian literature at Trinity College, Cambridge, from 1919 to 1923, then lived in Berlin (1923–1937) and Paris (1937–1940), where he began writing, mainly in Russian, under the pseudonym Sirin. In 1940 he moved to the United States, where he pursued a brilliant literary career (as a poet, novelist, critic, and translator) while teaching literature at Stanford, Wellesley, Cornell, and Harvard. The monumental success of his novel Lolita (1955) enabled him to give up teaching and devote himself fully to his writing. In 1961 he moved to Montreux, Switzerland, where he died in 1977. Recognized as one of this century’s master prose stylists in both Russian and English, he translated a number of his original English works—including Lolita—into Russian, and collaborated on English translations of his original Russian works.
BOOKS BY VLADIMIR NABOKOV
ADA, OR ARDOR
Ada, or Ardor tells a love story troubled by incest, but is also at once a fairy tale, epic, philosophical treatise on the nature of time, parody of the history of the novel, and erotic catalogue.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-72522-0
BEND SINISTER
While it is filled with veiled puns and characteristically delightful wordplay, Bend Sinister is first and foremost a haunting and compelling narrative about a civilized man and his child caught up in the tyranny of a police state.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-72727-9
DESPAIR
Extensively revised by Nabokov in 1965, thirty years after its original publication, Despair is the wickedly inventive and richly derisive story of Hermann, a man who undertakes the perfect crime: his own murder.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-72343-1
THE ENCHANTER
The Enchanter is the precursor to Nabokov’s classic novel, Lolita. At once hilarious and chilling, it tells the story of an outwardly respectable man and his fatal obsession with certain pubescent girls.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-72886-3
THE EYE
The Eye is as much farcical detective story as it is a profoundly refractive tale about the vicissitudes of identities and appearances. Smurov is a lovelorn, self-conscious Russian émigré living in prewar Berlin who commits suicide after being humiliated by a jealous husband, only to suffer greater indignities in the afterlife.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-72723-1
THE GIFT
The Gift is the last of the novels Nabokov wrote in his native language and the crowning achievement of that period of his literary career. It is the story of Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev, an impoverished émigré who dreams of the book he will someday write.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-72725-5
GLORY
Glory is the wryly ironic story of Martin Edelweiss, a young Russian émigré of no account, who is in love with a girl who refuses to marry him. Hoping to impress his love, he embarks on a “perilous, daredevil” project to illegally reenter the Soviet Union.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-72724-8
INVITATION TO A BEHEADING
Invitation to a Beheading embodies a vision of a bizarre and irrational world; in an unnamed dream country, the young man Cincinnatus C. is condemned to death by beheading for “gnostical turpitude.”
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-72531-2
KING, QUEEN, KNAVE
Dreyer, a wealthy and boisterous proprietor of a men’s clothing store, is ruddy, self-satisfied, and masculine, but repugnant to his exquisite but cold middle-class wife, Martha. Attracted to his money but repelled by his oblivious passion, she longs for their nephew instead.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-72340-0
LOLITA
Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov’s most famous and controversial novel, tells the story of the aging Humbert Humbert’s obsessive, devouring, and doomed passion for the nymphet Dolores Haze.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-72316-5
LOOK AT THE HARLEQUINS!
Nabokov’s last novel is an ironic play on the Janus-like relationship between fiction and reality. It is the autobiography of the eminent Russian-American author Vadim Vadimovich N. (b. 1899). Focusing on the central figures of his life, the book leads us to suspect that the fictions Vadim has created as an author have crossed the line between his life’s work and his life itself.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-72728-6
THE LUZHIN DEFENSE
As a young boy, Luzhin is unattractive, distracted, withdrawn, sullen—an enigma to his parents and an object of ridicule to his classmates. He takes up chess as a refuge, and rises to the rank of grandmaster, but at a cost: in Luzhin’s obsessive mind, the game of chess gradually supplants reality.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-72722-4
PALE FIRE
Pale Fire offers a cornucopia of deceptive pleasures: a 999-line poem by the reclusive genius John Shade; an adoring foreward and commentary by Shade’s self-styled Boswell, Dr. Charles Kinbote; a darkly comic novel of suspense, literary idolatry and one-upmanship, and political intrigue.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-72342-4
PNIN
Pnin is a professor of Russian at an American college who takes the wrong train to deliver a lecture in a language he cannot master. Pnin is the focal point of subtle academic conspiracies he cannot begin to comprehend, yet he stages a faculty party to end all faculty parties forever.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-72341-7
THE REAL LIFE OF SEBASTIAN KNIGHT
Many knew of Sebastian Knight, distinguished novelist, but few knew of the two love affairs that so profoundly influenced his career. After Knight’s death, his half brother sets out to penetrate the enigma of his life, starting with clues found in the novelist’s private papers.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-72726-2
SPEAK, MEMORY
Speak, Memory is an elegant and rich evocation of Nabokov’s life and times, even as it offers incisive insights into his major works.
Autobiography/Literature/978-0-679-72339-4
ALSO AVAILABLE
The Annotated Lolita, 978-0-679-72729-3
Laughter in the Dark, 978-0-679-72450-6
Lolita: A Screenplay, 978-0-679-77255-2
Mary, 978-0-679-72620-3
The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov, 978-0-679-72997-6
Strong Opinions, 978-0-679-72609-8
Transparent Things, 978-0-679-72541-1
VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL
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