Invitation to a Beheading

by Vladimir Nabokov

  He unfolded the paper and, without putting on his hornrimmed glasses, but holding them in front of his eyes, he began to read distinctly:

  " 'Prisoner! In this solemn hour, when all eyes'... I think we had better stand," he interrupted himself with concern and rose from his chair. Cincinnatus also rose.

  " 'Prisoner, in this solemn hour, when all eyes are upon thee, and thy judges are jubilant, and thou art preparing for those involuntary bodily movements that directly follow severance of the head, I address to thee a parting word. It is my lot--and this I will never forget--to provide thy sojourn in gaol with all that multitude of comforts which the law allows. I shall therefore be glad to devote all possible attention to any expression of thy gratitude, preferably, however, in written form and on one side of the sheet.' "

  "There," said the director, folding his glasses. "That will be all. I shall not keep you any longer. Let me know if you should need anything."

  He sat down at the table and began to write rapidly, thus indicating that the audience was over. Cincinnatus went out.

  On the corridor wall dozed the shadow of Rodion, hunched over on the shadow of a stool, with only a fringe of beard outlined in rufous. Further on, at the bend in the wall, the other guard had taken off his uniform mask and was wiping his face with his sleeve. Cincinnatus started down the stairs. The stone steps were narrow and slippery, with the impalpable spiral of a ghostly railing. Upon reaching the bottom he again went along corridors. A door with the sign "office" in mirrorlike inversion was wide open; moonlight glistened on an inkwell and a wastebasket rustled and rattled furiously under the table: a mouse must have fallen into it. Cincinnatus, after passing many other doors, stumbled, hopped, and found himself in a small courtyard, filled with various parts of the dismantled moon. This night the password was silence, and the soldier at the gate responded with silence to Cincinnatus' silence and let him pass; likewise at all the other gates. Leaving behind the misty mass of the fortress he began to slide down a steep, dewy bank of turf, reached a pale path between cliffs, twice, three times crossed the bends of the main road--which, having finally shaken off the last shadow of the fortress, ran more straight and free--and a filigrane bridge across a dried-up rivulet brought Cincinnatus to the city. He climbed to the top of a steep incline, turned left on Garden Street, and sped past a shrubbery in grayish bloom. A lighted window flashed somewhere; behind some fence a dog shook its chain but did not bark. The breeze was doing all it could to cool the fugitive's bare neck. Now and then a wave of fragrance would come from the Tamara Gardens. How well he knew that public park! There, where Marthe, when she was a bride, was frightened of the frogs and cockchafers ... There, where, whenever life seemed unbearable, one could roam, with a meal of chewed lilac bloom in one's mouth and firefly tears in one's eyes ... That green turfy tamarack park, the languor of its ponds, the tum-tum-tum of a distant band ... He turned on Matterfact Street, past the ruins of an ancient factory, the pride of the town, past whispering lindens, past the festive-looking white bungalows of the telegraph employees, perpetually celebrating somebody's birthdate, and came out on Telegraph Street. From there a narrow lane went uphill, and again the lindens began to murmur discreetly. Two men, supposedly on a bench, were quietly conversing in the obscurity of a public garden. "I say he's wrong," said one. The other replied unintelligibly, and both gave a kind of sigh which blended naturally with the sough of the foliage. Cincinnatus ran out into a circular plaza where the moon stood watch over the familiar statue of a poet that looked like a snowman--a cube for a head, legs stuck together--and, after a few more pattering steps, was in his own street. On the right the moon cast dissimilar patterns of branches on the walls of similar houses, so that it was only by the expression of the shadows, by the interciliary bar between two windows that Cincinnatus recognized his own house. Marthe's top-floor window was dark but open. The children must be sleeping on the hook-nosed balcony--there was a glimpse of something white there. Cincinnatus ran up the front steps, pushed open the door, and entered his lighted cell. He turned around, but already he was locked in. O horrible! The pencil glistened on the table. The spider sat on the yellow wall.

  "Turn off the light!" shouted Cincinnatus.

  His observer through the peephole turned it off. Darkness and silence began to merge but the clock interfered; it struck eleven times, thought for a moment, and struck once more, and Cincinnatus lay supine gazing into the dark, where bright dots were scattering and gradually disappearing. Darkness and silence merged completely. It was then and only then (that is, lying supine on a prison cot, after midnight, after a horrible, horrible, I simply cannot tell you what a horrible day) that Cincinnatus C. clearly evaluated his situation.

  At first, against the background of that black velvet which lines at night the underside of the eyelids, Marthe's face appeared as in a locket; her doll-like rosiness; her shiny forehead with its childlike convexity; her thin eyebrows, slanting upward, high above her round hazel eyes. She began to blink, turning her head, and there was a black velvet ribbon on her soft, creamy-white neck, and the velvety quiet of her dress flared at the bottom, blending with the darkness. That is how he saw her among the audience, when they led him up to the freshly painted defendants' bench on which he did not dare sit, but stood beside it (and still he got emerald paint all over his hands, and the newspaper men greedily photographed the fingerprints he had left on the back of the bench). He could see their tense foreheads, he could see the gaudy pantaloons of the fops, and the hand-mirrors and iridescent scarves of the women of fashion; but the faces were indistinct--of all the spectators he remembered only round-eyed Marthe. The defense counsel and the prosecutor, both wearing makeup and looking very much alike (the law required that they be uterine brothers but such were not always available, and then makeup was used), spoke with virtuoso rapidity the five thousand words allotted to each. They spoke alternately and the judge, following the rapid exchanges, would move his head, right and left and all the other heads followed suit; only Marthe, half-turned, sat motionless like an astonished child, her gaze fixed on Cincinnatus, standing next to the bright green park bench. The defense counsel, an advocate of classic decapitation, won easily over the inventive prosecutor, and the judge summed up the case.

  Fragments of these speeches, in which the words "translucence" and "opacity" rose and burst like bubbles, now sounded in Cincinnati's ears, and the rush of blood became applause, and Marthe's locket-like face remained in his field of vision and faded only when the judge--who had moved so close that on his large swarthy nose he could see the enlarged pores, one of which, on the very extremity, had sprouted a lone but long hair--pronounced in a moist undertone, "with the gracious consent of the audience, you will be made to don the red tophat"--a token phrase that the courts had evolved, whose true meaning was known to every schoolboy.

  "And yet I have been fashioned so painstakingly," thought Cincinnatus as he wept in the darkness. "The curvature of my spine has been calculated so well, so mysteriously. I feel, tightly rolled up in my calves, so many miles that I could yet run in my lifetime. My head is so comfortable ..."

  The clock struck a half, pertaining to some unknown hour.

  Two

  The morning papers, brought to him with a cup of tepid chocolate by Rodion, the local sheet Good Morning Folks, and the more serious daily Voice of the Public, teemed as always with color photographs. In the first one he found the facade of his house: the children looking out from the balcony, his father-in-law looking out of the kitchen window, a photographer looking out of Marthe's window; in the second one there was the familiar view from this window, looking out on the garden, showing the apple tree, the open gate and the figure of the photographer shooting the facade. In addition he found two snapshots of himself, depicting him in his meek youth. Cincinnatus was the son of an unknown transient and spent his childhood in a large institution beyond the Strop River (only in his twenties did he casually meet twittering, tiny, still so young-looking Cecil
ia C., who had conceived him one night at the Ponds when she was still in her teens). From his earliest years Cincinnatus, by some strange and happy chance comprehending his danger, carefully managed to conceal a certain peculiarity. He was impervious to the rays of others, and therefore produced when off his guard a bizarre impression, as of a lone dark obstacle in this world of souls transparent to one another; he learned however to feign translucence, employing a complex system of optical illusions, as it were--but he had only to forget himself, to allow a momentary lapse in self control, in the manipulation of cunningly illuminated facets and angles at which he turned his soul, and immediately there was alarm. In the midst of the excitement of a game his coevals would suddenly forsake him, as if they had sensed that his lucid gaze and the azure of his temples were but a crafty deception and that actually Cincinnatus was opaque. Sometimes, in the midst of a sudden silence, the teacher, in chagrined perplexity, would gather up all the reserves of skin around his eyes, gaze at him for a long while, and finally say: "What is wrong with you, Cincinnatus?" Then Cincinnatus would take hold of himself, and, clutching his own self to his breast, would remove that self to a safe place.

  In the course of time the safe places became ever fewer: the solicitous sunshine of public concern penetrated everywhere, and the peephole in the door was placed in such a way that in the whole cell there was not a single point that the observer on the other side of the door could not pierce with his gaze. Therefore Cincinnatus did not crumple the motley newspapers, did not hurl them, as his double did (the double, the gangrel, that accompanies each of us--you, and me, and him over there--doing what we would like to do at that very moment, but cannot...). Cincinnatus very calmly laid the papers aside and finished his chocolate. The brown skim that had mantled the chocolate became shriveled scum on his lips. Then Cincinnatus put on the black dressing gown (which was too long for him), the black slippers with pompons, and the black skullcap, and began walking about the cell, as he had done every morning since the first day of his confinement.

  Childhood on suburban lawns. They played ball, pig, daddy-longlegs, leapfrog, rumpberry, poke. He was light and nimble, but they did not like to play with him. In winter the city slopes were covered with a smooth sheet of snow, and what fun it was to hurtle down on the so-called "glassy" Saburov sleds. How quickly night would fall, when one was going home after sledding ... What stars, what thought and sadness up above, and what ignorance below. In the frosty metallic dark the edible windows glowed with amber and crimson light; women in fox furs over silk dresses ran across the street from house to house; the electric "wagonet" stirred up a momentary luminescent blizzard as it sped by over the snow-powdered track.

  A small voice: "Arkady Ilyich, take a look at Cincinnatus ..."

  He was not angry at the informers, but the latter multiplied and, as they matured, became frightening. Cincinnatus, who seemed pitch-black to them, as though he had been cut out of a cord-size block of night, opaque Cincinnatus would turn this way and that, trying to catch the rays, trying with desperate haste to stand in such a way as to seem translucent. Those around him understood each other at the first word, since they had no words that would end in an unexpected way, perhaps in some archaic letter, an upsilamba, becoming a bird or a catapult with wondrous consequences. In the dusty little museum on Second Boulevard, where they used to take him as a child, and where he himself would later take his charges, there was a collection of rare, marvelous objects, but all the townsmen except Cincinnatus found them just as limited and transparent as they did each other. That which does not have a name does not exist. Unfortunately everything had a name.

  "Nameless existence, intangible substance," Cincinnatus read on the wall where the door covered it when open.

  "Perpetual name-day celebrants, you can just ..." was written in another place.

  Further to the left, in a strong and neat hand, without a single superfluous line: "Note that when they address you ..." The continuation had been erased.

  Next to this, in clumsy childish letters: "I will collect fines from writers," signed "director of the prison."

  One could make out yet another line, an ancient and enigmatic one: "Measure me while I live--after it will be too late."

  "In any case I have been measured," said Cincinnatus, resuming his journey and rapping lightly with his knuckles on the walls. "But how I don't want to die! My soul has burrowed under the pillow. Oh, I don't want to! It will be cold getting out of my warm body. I don't want to ... wait a while ... let me doze some more."

  Twelve, thirteen, fourteen. At fifteen Cincinnatus went to work in the toy workshop, where he was assigned by reason of his small stature. In the evenings he would feast on ancient books to the lazy enchanting lap of wavelets in the Floating Library, in memoriam of Dr. Sineokov, who had drowned at just that spot in the city river. The grinding of chains, the little gallery with its orange-colored lamp shades, the plash, the water's smooth surface oiled by the moon, and, in the distance, lights flickering past in the black web of a lofty bridge. Later, however, the valuable volumes began to suffer from the damp, so that in the end it was necessary to drain the river, channeling all the water over to the Strop by means of a specially dug canal.

  In the shop he struggled for a long time with intricate trifles and worked on rag dolls for schoolgirls; here there was little hairy Pushkin in a fur carrick, and ratlike Gogol in a flamboyant waistcoat, and old little Tolstoy with his fat nose, in a peasant's smock, and many others, as for example Dobrolyubov, in spectacles without lenses and all buttoned up. Having artificially developed a fondness for this mythical Nineteenth Century, Cincinnatus was ready to become completely engrossed in the mists of that antiquity and find therein a false shelter, but something else distracted him.

  There, in that little factory, worked Marthe; her moist lips half open, aiming a thread at the eye of a needle. "Hi, Cincinnatik!" And so began those rapturous wanderings in the very, very spacious (so much so that even the hills in the distance would be hazy from the ecstasy of their remoteness) Tamara Gardens, where, for no reason, the willows weep into three brooks, and the brooks, in three cascades, each with its own small rainbow, tumble into the lake, where a swan floats arm in arm with its reflection. The level lawns, the rhododendrons, the oak groves, the merry gardeners in their green jackboots playing hide-and-seek the whole day through; some grotto, some idyllic bench, on which three jokers had left three neat little heaps (it's a trick--they are imitations made of brown painted tin), some baby deer, bounding into the avenue and before your very eyes turning into trembling mottles of sunlight--that is what those gardens were like! There, there is Marthe's lisping prattle, her white stockings and velvet slippers, her cool breast and her rosy kisses tasting of wild strawberries. If only one could see from here--at least the treetops, at least the distant range of hills ... Cincinnatus tied the dressing gown a little tighter. Cincinnatus moved the table and began dragging it backwards as it shrieked with rage: how unwillingly, with what shudderings it moved across the stone floor! Its shudderings were transmitted to Cincinnatus's fingers and to Cincinnati's palate as he retreated toward the window (that is, toward the wall where way, way up high, there was the inclined cavity of the window). A loud spoon fell, the cup began to dance, the pencil started to roll, one book began sliding upon another. Cincinnatus lifted the bucking chair onto the table. Finally he climbed up himself. But of course he could see nothing, only the hot sky with a few white hairs thinly combed back--the remnants of clouds that could not tolerate the blueness. Cincinnatus could barely stretch as far as the bars beyond which rose the window tunnel with more bars at the end, and their shadowed repetition on the peeling walls of the stone incline. There, on the side, written in the same neat, contemptuous hand as one of the half-erased sentences he had read before, was the inscription: "You cannot see anything. I tried it too."

  Cincinnatus was standing on tiptoe, holding the iron bars with his small hands, which were all white from the strain, and half of
his face was covered with a sunny grating, and the gold of his left mustache shone, and there was a tiny golden cage in each of his mirrorlike pupils, while below, from behind, his heels rose out of the too-large slippers.

  "A little more and you'll have a fall," said Rodion, who had been standing nearby for a full half minute and now firmly clenched the leg of the trembling chair. "It's all right, it's all right. You can climb down now."

  Rodion had cornflower-blue eyes and, as always, his splendid red beard. This attractive Russian countenance was turned upwards toward Cincinnatus, who stepped on it with his naked sole--that is, his double stepped on it, while Cincinnatus himself had already descended from the chair to the table. Rodion, embracing him like a baby, carefully took him down, after which he moved the table with a violinlike sound to its previous place and sat on the edge, dangling the foot that was in the air, and bracing the other against the floor, having assumed the imitation-jaunty pose of operatic rakes in the tavern scene, while Cincinnatus picked at the sash of his dressing gown, and did his best not to cry.

  Rodion was singing in his bass-baritone, rolling his eyes, brandishing the empty mug. Marthe used to sing that same dashing song once. Tears gushed from the eyes of Cincinnatus. On a climactic note Rodion sent the mug crashing against the floor and slid off the table. His song went on in chorus, even though he was alone. Suddenly he raised both arms and went out.

  Sitting on the floor, Cincinnatus looked upward through his tears; the shadow of the bars had already moved. He tried--for the hundredth time--to move the table, but, alas, the legs had been bolted down for ages. He ate a pressed fig and began again to walk about the cell.

  Nineteen, twenty, twenty-one. At twenty-two he was transferred to a kindergarten as a teacher in division F, and at that time he married Marthe. Almost immediately after he had assumed his new duties (consisting of keeping busy little children who were lame, hunchbacked or crosseyed) an important personage made a second-degree complaint against him. Cautiously, in the form of a conjecture, there was expressed the suggestion of Cincinnatus's basic illegality. Together with this memorandum the city fathers also examined the old complaints that had been made from time to time by the more perceptive of his colleagues at the workshop. The chairman of the education committee and certain other official figures took turns locking themselves up with him and making on him the tests prescribed by law. For several days in a row he was not allowed to sleep, and was compelled to keep up rapid senseless small talk until it bordered on delirium, to write letters to various objects and natural phenomena, enact everyday scenes, and to imitate various animals, trades and maladies. All of this he performed, all of this he passed, because he was young, resourceful, fresh, yearning to live, to live for a while with Marthe. Reluctantly they released him, allowing him to continue working with children of the lowest category, who were expendable, in order to see what would come of it. He took them for walks, in pairs, while he turned the handle of a small portable music box that looked like a coffee grinder; on holidays he would swing with them at the play-ground--the whole cluster would be still and breathless as it soared and would squeal as it plummeted down. Some of them he taught to read.