Invitation to a Beheading

by Vladimir Nabokov

  "Excellent, marvelous," Rodrig Ivanovich would comment, fawning, shaking his head, feasting his eyes on every shot or else holding two at a time and shifting his gaze from one to the other. "My, my, what biceps you have in this one! Who would think--with your graceful physique. Overwhelming! Oh, how charming--talking with the little birdie!"

  "A pet," said M'sieur Pierre.

  "Most entertaining! What do you know ... And this here ... Eating a watermelon, no less!"

  "Yep," said M'sieur Pierre. "You have already looked through those. Here are some more."

  "Charming, let me tell you. Let's have that other batch--he hasn't seen them yet ..."

  "Here I am juggling three apples," said M'sieur Pierre.

  "Isn't that something!" said the director clucking his tongue.

  "At breakfast," said M'sieur Pierre. "This is me, and that is my late father."

  "Yes, yes, of course I recognize him ... That noble brow!"

  "On the banks of the Strop," said M'sieur Pierre. "Have you been there?" he asked turning to Cincinnatus.

  "I don't think he has," replied Rodrig Ivanovich. "And where was this taken? What an elegant little overcoat! You know something, you look older in this one. Just a second, I want to see that one again, with the watering can."

  "There ... That is all I have with me," said M'sieur Pierre, and again addressed Cincinnatus: "If only I had known that you are so interested, I would have brought along more--I have a good dozen albums."

  "Wonderful, stunning," repeated Rodrig Ivanovich, wiping with a lilac-colored handkerchief his eyes, grown moist from all these joyous titters and ejaculations.

  M'sieur Pierre reassembled the contents of his wallet. Suddenly there was a deck of cards in his hands.

  "Think of a card, please, any card," he proposed, laying the cards out on the table; he pushed the ash tray aside with his elbow; he continued laying.

  "We have thought of one," said the director jauntily.

  Indulging in a bit of hocus-pocus M'sieur Pierre put his index finger to his forehead; then he quickly gathered up the cards, smartly made the pack crackle and threw out a trey of spades.

  "This is amazing," exclaimed the director. "Simply amazing!"

  The deck vanished just as suddenly as it had appeared, and, making an imperturbable face, M'sieur Pierre said: "This little old woman comes to the doctor and says, 'I have a terrible malady, Mr. Doctor,' she says, 'I've an awful fright I'll die of it ...' 'And what are the symptoms?' 'My head shakes, Mr. Doctor,' " and M'sieur Pierre, mumbling and shaking, imitated the little old woman.

  Rodrig Ivanovich burst into riotous mirth, struck the table with his fist, nearly fell off his chair; then had a fit of coughing; moaned; and with a great effort regained control of himself.

  "M'sieur Pierre, you are the life of the party," he said, still shedding tears, "truly the life of the party! I haven't heard such a hilarious anecdote in all my life!"

  "How melancholy we are, how tender," said M'sieur Pierre to Cincinnatus, thrusting out his lips as if he were trying to make a sulking child laugh. "We keep so still, and our little mustache is all quivering, and the vein on our neck is throbbing, and our little eyes are misty ..."

  "It's all from joy," quickly inserted the director. "N'y faites pas attention."

  "Yes, it is indeed a happy day, a red-letter day," said M'sieur Pierre. "I am bubbling over with excitement myself ... I don't want to boast, but in me, my dear colleague, you will find a rare combination of outward sociability and inward delicacy, the art of the causerie and the ability to keep silent, playfulness and seriousness ... Who will console a sobbing infant, and glue his broken toy together? M'sieur Pierre. Who will intercede for a poor widow? M'sieur Pierre. Who will provide sober advice, who will recommend a medicine, who will bring glad tidings? Who? Who? M'sieur Pierre. All will be done by M'sieur Pierre."

  "Remarkable! What talent!" exclaimed the director, as though he had been listening to poetry; yet all the time from beneath a twitching eyebrow he kept glancing at Cincinnatus.

  "Therefore, it seems to me," went on M'sieur Pierre, "Oh yes, by the way," he interrupted himself, "are you satisfied with your quarters? You are not cold at night? Do they give you enough to eat?"

  "He gets the same as I," answered Rodrig Ivanovich. "The board is excellent."

  "All aboard," quipped M'sieur Pierre.

  The director was getting ready to roar again, but just then the door opened and the gloomy, lanky librarian appeared with a stack of books under his arm. A woolen scarf was wound around his throat. Without saying hello to anyone he dumped the books on the cot, and for a moment stereometric apparitions of those same books, composed of dust, hung above them in the air, they hung, vibrated, and dispersed.

  "Wait a minute," said Rodrig Ivanovich. "I don't think you have met."

  The librarian nodded, without looking, while polite M'sieur Pierre rose from his chair.

  "Please, M'sieur Pierre," begged the director, putting his hand to his shirt front, "please show him your trick!"

  "Oh, it's hardly worth it--it's really nothing," M'sieur Pierre modestly began but the director would not stop:

  "It's a miracle! Red magic! We all beg you! Oh, do it for us ... Wait, wait just a minute," he shouted to the librarian, who was already starting toward the door. "Just a minute, M'sieur Pierre will show you something. Please, please! Don't go ..."

  "Think of one of these cards," pronounced M'sieur Pierre with mock solemnity; he shuffled the deck; he threw out the five of spades.

  "No," said the librarian and left.

  M'sieur Pierre shrugged a round little shoulder.

  "I'll be right back," muttered the director and went out also.

  Cincinnatus and his guest remained alone.

  Cincinnatus opened a book and buried himself in it, that is, he kept reading the first sentence over and over. M'sieur Pierre looked at him with a kind smile, with one little paw lying palm up on the table, just as if he were offering to make peace with Cincinnatus. The director returned. In his tightly clenched fist was a woolen scarf.

  "Maybe you can use it, M'sieur Pierre," he said; then he handed over the scarf, sat down, exhaled noisily like a horse, and began examining his thumb, from the end of which a half-broken nail protruded like a sickle.

  "What were we talking about?" exclaimed M'sieur Pierre with charming tact, just as if nothing had happened. "Yes, we were talking about photographs. Some time I'll bring my camera and take your picture. That will be fun. What are you reading? May I take a look?"

  "You ought to put the book aside," remarked the director with a rasp of exasperation in his voice; "after all, you do have a guest."

  "Oh, let him be," smiled M'sieur Pierre.

  There was a pause.

  "It is growing late," said the director after consulting his watch.

  "Yes, we'll be going in a minute ... My, what a little grouch ... Look at him, his little lips all atremble ... any moment now the sun will peek out from behind the clouds ... Grouch, grouch!..."

  "Let's go," said the director, rising.

  "Just a moment ... I like it so much here that I can hardly tear myself away ... In any case, my dear neighbor, I shall take advantage of your permission to visit you often, often--that is, of course, if you grant me permission--and you will, won't you? ... Good-by for now, then. Good-by! Good-by!"

  Bowing comically, in imitation of someone, M'sieur Pierre withdrew; the director once again took him by his elbow, emitting voluptuous nasal sounds. They left, but at the last minute his voice was heard to say: "Excuse me, I forgot something, I'll catch up with you in a moment," and the director gushed back into the cell; he approached Cincinnatus, and for an instant the smile left his purple face: "I am ashamed," he hissed through his teeth, "ashamed of you. You behaved like ... I'm coming, I'm coming," he yelled, beaming once again; then he snatched the vase of peonies from the table, and splashing water as he went, left the cell.

  Cincinnatus kept staring in
to the book. A drop had fallen on the page. Through the drop several letters turned from brevier into pica, having swollen as if a reading glass were lying over them.

  Eight

  (There are some who sharpen a pencil toward themselves, as if they were peeling a potato, and there are others who slice away from themselves, as though whittling a stick ... Rodion was of the latter number. He had an old penknife with several blades and a corkscrew. The corkscrew slept on the outside.)

  "Today is the eighth day" (wrote Cincinnatus with the pencil, which had lost more than a third of its length) "and not only am I still alive, that is, the sphere of my own self still limits and eclipses my being, but, like any other mortal, I do not know my mortal hour and can apply to myself a formula that holds for everyone: the probability of a future decreases in inverse proportion to its theoretical remoteness. Of course in my case discretion requires that I think in term of very small numbers--but that is all right, that is all right--I am alive. I had a strange sensation last night--and it was not the first time--: I am taking off layer after layer, until at last ... I do not know how to describe it, but I know this: through the process of gradual divestment I reach the final, indivisible, firm, radiant point, and this point says: I am! like a pearl ring embedded in a shark's gory fat--O my eternal, my eternal ... and this point is enough for me--actually nothing more is necessary. Perhaps as a citizen of the next century, a guest who has arrived ahead of time (the hostess is not yet up), perhaps simply a carnival freak in a gaping, hopelessly festive world, I have lived an agonizing life, and I would like to describe that agony to you--but I am obsessed by the fear that there will not be time enough. As far back as I can remember myself--and I remember myself with lawless lucidity, I have been my own accomplice, who knows too much, and therefore is dangerous. I issue from such burning blackness, I spin like a top, with such propelling force, such tongues of flame, that to this day I occasionally feel (sometimes during sleep, sometimes while immersing myself in very hot water) that primordial palpitation of mine, that first branding contact, the mainspring of my "I." How I wriggled out, slippery, naked! Yes, from a realm forbidden and inaccessible to others, yes. I know something, yes ... but even now, when it is all over anyway, even now--I am afraid that I may corrupt someone? Or will nothing come of what I am trying to tell, its only vestiges being the corpses of strangled words, like hanged men ... evening silhouettes of gammas and gerunds, gallow crows--I think I should prefer the rope, since I know authoritatively and irrevocably that it shall be the ax; a little time gained, time, which is now so precious to me that I value every respite, every postponement ... I mean time allotted to thinking; the furlough I allow my thoughts for a free journey from fact to fantasy and return ... I mean much more besides, but lack of writing skill, haste, excitement, weakness ... I know something. I know something. But expression of it comes so hard! No, I cannot ... I would like to give up--yet I have the feeling of boiling and rising, a tickling, which may drive you mad if you do not express it somehow. Oh no, I do not gloat over my own person, I do not get all hot wrestling with my soul in a darkened room; I have no desires, save the desire to express myself--in defiance of all the world's muteness. How frightened I am. How sick with fright. But no one shall take me away from myself. I am frightened--and now I am losing some thread, which I held so palpably only a moment ago. Where is it? It has slipped out of my grasp! I am trembling over the paper, chewing the pencil through to the lead, hunching over to conceal myself from the door through which a piercing eye stings me in the nape, and it seems I am right on the verge of crumpling everything and tearing it up. I am here through an error--not in this prison, specifically--but in this whole terrible, striped world; a world which seems not a bad example of amateur craftsmanship, but is in reality calamity, horror, madness, error--and look, the curio slays the tourist, the gigantic carved bear brings its wooden mallet down upon me. And yet, ever since early childhood, I have had dreams ... In my dreams the world was ennobled, spiritualized; people whom in the waking state I feared so much appeared there in a shimmering refraction, just as if they were imbued with and enveloped by that vibration of light which in sultry weather inspires the very outlines of objects with life; their voices, their step, the expressions of their eyes and even of their clothes--acquired an exciting significance; to put it more simply, in my dreams the world would come alive, becoming so captivatingly majestic, free and ethereal, that afterwards it would be oppressive to breathe the dust of this painted life. But then I have long since grown accustomed to the thought that what we call dreams is semi-reality, the promise of reality, a foreglimpse and a whiff of it; that is, they contain, in a very vague, diluted state, more genuine reality than our vaunted waking life which, in its turn, is semi-sleep, an evil drowsiness into which penetrate in grotesque disguise the sounds and sights of the real world, flowing beyond the periphery of the mind--as when you hear during sleep a dreadful insidious tale because a branch is scraping on the pane, or see yourself sinking into snow because your blanket is sliding off. But how I fear awakening! How I fear that second, or rather split second, already cut short then, when, with a lumberjack's grunt--But what is there to fear? Will it not be for me simply the shadow of an ax, and shall I not hear the downward vigorous grunt with the ear of a different world? Still I am afraid! One cannot write it off so easily. Neither is it good that my thoughts keep getting sucked into the cavity of the future--I want to think about something else, clarify other things ... but I write obscurely and limply, like Pushkin's lyrical duelist. Soon, I think, I shall evolve a third eye on the back of my neck, between my brittle vertebrae: a mad eye, wide open, with a dilating pupil and pink venation on the glossy ball. Keep away! Even stronger, more hoarsely: hands off! I can foresee it all! And how often do my ears ring with the sob I am destined to emit and the terrible gurgling cough, uttered by the beheaded tyro. But all of this is not the point, and my discourse on dreams and waking are also not the point ... Wait! There, I feel once again that I shall really express myself, shall bring the words to bay. Alas, no one taught me this kind of chase, and the ancient inborn art of writing is long since forgotten--forgotten are the days when it needed no schooling, but ignited and blazed like a forest fire--today it seems just as incredible as the music that once used to be extracted from a monstrous pianoforte, music that would nimbly ripple or suddenly hack the world into great, gleaming blocks--I myself picture all this so clearly, but you are not I, and therein lies the irreparable calamity. Not knowing how to write, but sensing with my criminal intuition how words are combined, what one must do for a commonplace word to come alive and to share its neighbor's sheen, heat, shadow, while reflecting itself in its neighbor and renewing the neighboring word in the process, so that the whole line is live iridescence; while I sense the nature of this kind of word propinquity, I am nevertheless unable to achieve it, yet that is what is indispensable to me for my task, a task of not now and not here. Not here! The horrible 'here,' the dark dungeon, in which a relentlessly howling heart is encarcerated, this 'here' holds and constricts me. But what gleams shine through at night, and what--. It exists, my dream world, it must exist, since, surely there must be an original of the clumsy copy. Dreamy, round, and blue, it turns slowly toward me. It is as if you are lying supine, with eyes closed, on an overcast day, and suddenly the gloom stirs under your eyelids, and slowly becomes first a langorous smile, then a warm feeling of contentment, and you know that the sun has come out from behind the clouds. With just such a feeling my world begins: the misty air gradually clears, and it is suffused with such radiant, tremulous kindness, and my soul expanses so freely in its native realm.--But then what, then what? Yes, that is the line beyond which I lose control ... Brought up into the air, the word bursts, as burst those spherical fishes that breathe and blaze only in the compressed murk of the depths when brought up in the net. However I am making one last effort--and I think I have caught my prey ... but it is only a fleeting apparition of my prey! There, tarn, la-bas,
the gaze of men glows with inimitable understanding; there the freaks that are tortured here walk unmolested; there time takes shape according to one's pleasure, like a figured rug whose folds can be gathered in such a way that two designs will meet--and the rug is once again smoothed out, and you live on, or else superimpose the next image on the last, endlessly, endlessly, with the leisurely concentration of a woman selecting a belt to go with her dress--now she glides in my direction, rhythmically butting the velvet with her knees, comprehending everything and comprehensible to me ... There, there are the originals of those gardens where we used to roam and hide in this world; there everything strikes one by its bewitching evidence, by the simplicity of perfect good; there everything pleases one's soul, everything is filled with the kind of fun that children know; there shines the mirror that now and then sends a chance reflection here ... And what I say is not it, not quite it, and I am getting mixed up, getting nowhere, talking nonsense, and the more I move about and search in the water where I grope on the sandy bottom for a glimmer I have glimpsed, the muddier the water grows, and the less likely it becomes that I shall grasp it. No, I have as yet said nothing, or, rather, said only bookish words ... and in the end the logical thing would be to give up and I would give up if I were laboring for a reader existing today, but as there is in the world not a single human who can speak my language; or, more simply, not a single human who can speak; or, even more simply, not a single human; I must think only of myself, of that force which urges me to express myself. I am cold, weakened, afraid, the back of my head blinks and cringes, and once again gazes with insane intensity, but, in spite of everything, I am chained to this table like a cup to a drinking fountain, and will not rise till I have said what I want. I repeat (gathering new momentum in the rhythm of repetitive incantations), I repeat: there is something I know, there is something I know, there is something ... When still, a child, living still in a canary-yellow, large, cold house where they were preparing me and hundreds of other children for secure nonexistence as adult dummies, into which all my coevals turned without effort or pain; already then, in those accursed days, amid rag books and brightly painted school materials and soul-chilling drafts, I knew without knowing, I knew without wonder, I knew as one knows oneself, I knew what it is impossible to know--and, I would say, I knew it even more clearly than I do now. For life has worn me down: continual uneasiness, concealment of my knowledge, pretense, fear, a painful straining of all my nerves--not to let down, not to ring out ... and even to this day I still feel an ache in that part of my memory where the very beginning of this effort is recorded, that is, the occasion when I first understood that things which to me had seemed natural were actually forbidden, impossible, that any thought of them was criminal. Well do I remember that day! I must have just learned how to make letters, since I remember myself wearing on my fifth finger the little copper ring that was given to children who already knew how to copy the model words from the flower beds in the school garden, where petunias, phlox and marigold spelled out lengthy adages. I was sitting with my feet up on the low window sill and looking down as my schoolmates, dressed in the same kind of long pink smocks as I, held hands and circled around a beribboned pole. Why was I left out? In punishment? No. Rather, the reluctance of the other children to have me in their game and the mortal embarrassment, shame and dejection I myself felt when I joined them made me prefer that white nook of the sill, sharply marked off by the shadow of the half-open casement. I could hear the exclamations required by the game and the strident commands of the red-haired 'pedagoguette'; I could see her curls and her spectacles, and with the squeamish horror that never left me I watched her give the smallest children shoves to make them whirl faster. And that teacher, and the striped pole, and the white clouds, now and then letting through the gliding sun, which would suddenly spill out passionate light, searching for something, were all repeated in the flaming glass of the open window ... In short, I felt such fear and sadness that I tried to submerge within myself, to slow down and slip out of the senseless life that was carrying me onward. Just then, at the end of the stone gallery where I was sitting, appeared the senior educator--I do not recall his name--a fat, sweaty, shaggy-chested man, who was on his way to the bathing place. While still at a distance he shouted to me, his voice amplified by the acoustics, to go into the garden; he approached quickly and flourished his towel. In my sadness, in my abstraction, unconsciously and innocently, instead of descending into the garden by the stairs (the gallery was on the third floor), not thinking what I was doing, but really acting obediently, even submissively, I stepped straight from the window sill onto the elastic air and--feeling nothing more than a half-sensation of bare-footedness (even though I had shoes on)--slowly and quite naturally strode forward, still absently sucking and examining the finger in which I had caught a splinter that morning ... Suddenly, however, an extraordinary, deafening silence brought me out of my reverie, and I saw below me, like pale daisies, the upturned faces of the stupefied children, and the pedagoguette, who seemed to be falling backward; I saw also the globes of the trimmed shrubs, and the falling towel that had not yet reached the lawn; I saw myself, a pink-smocked boy, standing transfixed in mid-air; turning around, I saw, but three aerial paces from me, the window I had just left, and, his hairy arm extended in malevolent amazement, the--"