Invitation to a Beheading

by Vladimir Nabokov

  "With your permission I'll change," spoke M'sieur Pierre and pulled off his dusty sweater; for an instant, with sham casualness, he flexed his arm, casting a sidelong glance at his turquoise-and-white biceps and exuding his characteristic stench. Around his left nipple there was an imaginative tattoo--two green leaves--so that the nipple itself seemed to be a rosebud (made of marchpane and candied angelica). "Have a seat, please," he said, putting on a robe with bright arabesques. "It's all I have, but it's mine. My quarters, as you see, are almost exactly like yours. Only I keep them clean and decorate them ... I decorate them as best I can." (He gasped slightly, as if from uncontrollable excitement.)

  I decorate. The wall calendar with the water color of the fortress at sunset exhibited a crimson numeral. A crazy-quilt blanket covered the cot. Above it, attached by thumbtacks, hung salacious photographs and a formal picture of M'sieur Pierre; a goffered paper fan stuck its crimped pleats from behind the edge of the frame. On the table lay an alligator-skin album, the face of a gold traveling clock glistened, and half a dozen velvety pansies looked out in various directions over the burnished rim of a porcelain mug bearing a German landscape. In a corner of the cell stood a large case containing possibly some musical instrument.

  "I am exceedingly happy to see you here in my place," M'sieur Pierre was saying as he promenaded back and forth, passing each time through an oblique ray of sunlight in which plaster dust still danced. "I feel that in the past week we have become such good friends, have come together so well, so warmly, as seldom happens. I see you are interested to know what is inside. Just let me [he caught his breath], let me finish and then I shall show you ..."

  "Our friendship," continued M'sieur Pierre, pacing and gasping slightly, "has flowered in the hothouse-like atmosphere of a prison, where it was nourished by the same alarms and the same hopes. I think I know you better now than anyone else does in the whole world, and certainly more intimately than your wife knew you. Therefore I find it particularly painful when you give in to a feeling of spite or are inconsiderate of people ... Just now, for instance, when we came to you so joyously, you again insulted Rodrig Ivanovich with your assumed indifference to the surprise in which he had taken part so kindly, so energetically--and do not forget he is no longer young, and has many troubles of his own. No, I would rather not talk about this now ... I only want to establish that not the slightest shade of feeling on your part escapes me, and therefore I personally feel that the well-known accusation is not quite fair ... To me you are transparent as--excuse the sophisticated simile--a blushing bride is transparent to the gaze of an experienced bridegroom. I don't know, there's something wrong with my breathing--excuse me, it will pass in a moment. But, if I have made such a close study of you and--why keep it a secret?--have grown fond, very fond of you, then you also must needs have grown to know me, grown accustomed to me--more than that, grown attached to me, as I to you. To achieve such a friendship--that was my first task, and it seems I have performed it successfully. Successfully. Now we are going to have tea. I can't understand why they don't bring it."

  Clutching at his chest, he sat down at the table across from Cincinnatus but instantly sprang up again; from under his pillow he produced a morocco purse, from the purse a chamois sheath, and from the sheath a key; he went to the large case that was standing in the corner.

  "I see that you are amazed by my neatness," he said as he carefully inclined the propped up case, which proved to be heavy and cumbersome. "But you see, neatness adorns the life of a lone bachelor, who thus proves to himself ..."

  He opened the case. There, upon black velvet, lay a broad, shiny ax.

  "... proves to himself that he does have a little nest ... A little nest," M'sieur Pierre went on, locking the case again, leaning it against the wall, and himself leaning, "a little nest that he has deserved, built, filled with his warmth.... In general, there is an important philosophical theme here, but from certain indications it seems to me that you, as I, are not in the mood for themes just now. Do you know what? Here is my advice: we'll have our cup of tea later; right now, though, go back to your place and lie down for a while--yes, go. We are both young--you must not remain here any longer. Tomorrow they will explain to you, but now please go. I too am excited, I too am not in complete control of myself, you must understand this ..."

  Cincinnatus was quietly fiddling with the locked door.

  "No, no--you use our tunnel. We didn't put in all this work for nothing. Crawl in, crawl in. I drape the hole, or else it would not look well. Go ..."

  "By myself," said Cincinnatus.

  He climbed into the black opening, and hurting his knees anew, began to crawl on all fours, deeper and deeper into the narrow darkness. M'sieur Pierre yelled something after him about tea and then apparently drew the curtain, for Cincinnatus immediately felt cut off from the bright cell where he had just been.

  Breathing the rough air with difficulty, running into sharp projections--and expecting, without especial fear, that the tunnel would collapse--Cincinnatus groped blindly through the winding passage, found himself in stone cul-de-sacs and, like some patient retreating animal, moved backwards; then, feeling out the tunnel's continuation, crawled on. He was impatient to lie down on something soft, even if it were only his cot, to pull the covers up over his head, and not think about anything. This return journey dragged out so that, skinning his shoulders, he began to hurry as much as the constant apprehension of a dead end would permit him. The closeness made him groggy, and he was just deciding to stop, to lie prone, to imagine that he was in bed and with this to go to sleep, when abruptly the surface along which he was crawling began to slope, and he glimpsed the gleam of a reddish chink ahead and caught a whiff of dampness and mold just as though he had passed from the bowels of the fortress wall into a natural cave, and from the low ceiling, muffled up bats, hanging like wrinkled fruit, awaited their cue, each holding on by a claw, head down; the chink opened in a blaze of light, and there was a breath of fresh evening air, and Cincinnatus crawled from a crack in the rock to freedom.

  He found himself on one of the many turfy taluses which, like dark-green waves, lapped up sharply at various levels among the rocks and ramparts of the terraced fortress. At first he was so dizzy from liberty, altitude and space that he clutched at the damp turf and hardly noticed anything besides the loud evening cries of the swallows as they snipped the colored air with their black scissors; the glow of sunset had invaded half the sky; and, right behind his head, there swept up with awful swiftness the blind stone steeps of the fortress out of which he had oozed like a drop of water; while at his feet there were fantastic precipices and clover-scented mists.

  He regained his breath and got used to the brightness dazzling him, to the trembling of his body, to the impact of the freedom that reverberated afar and welled up within him. He glued his back to the rock and contemplated the hazy landscape. Far below, where twilight had already settled, he could barely discern through wisps of mist the ornate hump of the bridge. While yonder, on the other side, the blurred blue city, its windows like embers, was either still borrowing the sunset's blaze or else perhaps had lit up at its own expense; he could make out the gradual threading of the bright beads of street lights as they were being lit along Steep Avenue--and there was an exceptionally distinct, delicate arch at its upper end. Beyond the city everything shimmered dimly, merged, and dissolved; but, above the invisible Gardens, in the rosy depths of the sky, stood a chain of translucent and fiery cloudlets, and there stretched a long violet bank with burning rents along its lower edge--and while Cincinnatus gazed, yonder, yonder an oak-covered hill flashed with Venetian Green and slowly sank into shadow.

  Intoxicated, weak, slipping on the coarse turf, and catching his balance, he set off downward, and immediately, from behind a projection of the rampart, where a black bramble bush rustled its warning, Emmie darted out to him, her face and legs painted pink by the sunset, and, firmly grasping him by the hand, dragged him after her. All her
movements betrayed excitement, rapturous haste. "Where are we going? Down?" Cincinnatus inquired haltingly, laughing from impatience. She quickly led him along the fortress wall. A small green door opened in the wall. Stairs, leading down, passed imperceptibly underfoot. Again a door creaked; beyond it was a darkish passage in which stood trunks, a wardrobe, and a ladder resting against the wall, and there was a smell of kerosene; it was now apparent that they had entered the director's apartment by the back way for, now no longer clutching his fingers quite so tightly, already absent-mindedly releasing them, Emmie led him into a dining room where they were all sitting and drinking tea at a lighted oval table. Rodrig Ivanovich's napkin amply covered his chest; his wife--thin, freckled, with white eyelashes--was passing the pretzels to M'sieur Pierre, who had dressed up in a Russian shirt embroidered with cocks; balls of colored wool and glassy knitting needles lay in a basket by the samovar. A sharp-nosed little old crone in a mobcap and black shawl was hunched at one end of the table.

  When he saw Cincinnatus the director gaped, and something drooled from one corner of his mouth.

  "Pfui, you naughty child!" said the director's wife to Emmie with a slight German accent.

  M'sieur Pierre, who was stirring his tea, demurely lowered his eyes.

  "What's the meaning of this escapade?" Rodrig Ivanovich said through the trickling melon juice. "To say nothing of the fact that this is against all regulations!"

  "Let them be," said M'sieur Pierre without raising his eyes. "After all, they are both children."

  "It's the end of her vacation, so she wants to play a prank," put in the director's wife.

  Emmie sat down at the table, deliberately making her chair scrape, fidgeting and wetting her lips and having dismissed Cincinnatus forever, began spreading sugar (which immediately assumed an orange hue) on her shaggy slice of melon; thereupon she bit into it busily, holding it by the ends, which reached her ears, and brushing her neighbor with her elbow. Her neighbor continued to sip his tea, holding the spoon protruding from it between second and third fingers, but inconspicuously, reached under the table with his left hand. "Eek!" cried Emmie as she gave a ticklish start, without, however, taking her mouth from the melon.

  "Sit down over there for the time being," said the director, with his fruit knife indicating to Cincinnatus a green armchair with an antimacassar that stood aloof in the damask dusk near the folds of the window draperies. "When we finish I'll take you back. I said sit down. What's the matter with you? What's wrong with him? What a slow-witted fellow!"

  M'sieur Pierre leaned over to Rodrig Ivanovich and, blushing slightly, imparted to him something.

  The latter's larynx emitted a regular thunderclap:

  "Well, congratulations, congratulations," he said, restraining with difficulty the gusts of his voice. "This is good news!--It's high time you informed him--We all ..." He glanced at Cincinnatus and was about to launch on a formal--

  "No, not yet, my friend, don't embarrass me," murmured M'sieur Pierre, touching his sleeve.

  "In any case, you won't refuse another tumbler of tea," said Rodrig Ivanovich playfully, and then, after a moment of reflection and some champing, he addressed Cincinnatus.

  "Hey, you there. You can look at the album meanwhile. Child, give him the album. For her" (gesture with the knife) "return to school our dear guest has made her--has made her a--Pardon me, Pyotr Petrovich, I've forgotten what you called it."

  "A photohoroscope," M'sieur Pierre replied modestly.

  "Shall I leave the lemon in?" asked the director's wife.

  The hanging kerosene lamp, whose light did not reach the back of the dining room (where only the gleam of a pendulum flashed as it hacked off the solid seconds) flooded the cozily spread table with a familial light, which graded into the chinking sounds of the tea ritual.

  Sixteen

  Let us be calm. The spider had sucked dry a small downy moth with marbled forewings, and three houseflies, but was still hungry and kept glancing at the door. Let us be calm. Cincinnatus was a mass of scrapes and bruises. Be calm; nothing had happened. Last night, when they brought him back to the cell, two employees were just finishing plastering the place where lately the hole had gaped. That place was now marked only by swirls of paint a bit rounder and thicker than elsewhere, and he had a stifling sensation whenever he glanced at the wall, which again was blind, deaf and impenetrable.

  Another vestige of the previous day was the alligator album with its massive dark silver monogram that he had taken along in a fit of meek abstraction: that singular photo-horoscope put together by the resourceful M'sieur Pierre, that is, a series of photographs depicting the natural progression of a given person's entire life. How was this done? Thus: extensively retouched snapshots of Emmie's present face were supplemented by shots of other people--for the sake of costume, furniture and surroundings--so as to create the entire decor and stage properties of her future life. Consecutively stuck into the polygonal little windows of the solid, gilt-edged cardboard, and supplied with finely inscribed dates, these sharp and, at first sight, genuine photographs pictured Emmie first as she was at present; then at fourteen, an attache case in her hand; then at sixteen, in tights and tutu, with gaseous wings growing from her back, seated relaxed on a table, and lifting a goblet of wine amid rakes; then, at eighteen, in femme-fatale weeds, at a railing above a waterfall; then ... oh, in many more aspects and poses, even to the very last, horizontal.

  By means of retouching and other photographic tricks, what appeared to be progressive changes in Emmie's face had been achieved (incidentally, the trickster had made use of her mother's photographs); but one had only to look closer and it became repulsively obvious how trite was this parody of the work of time. The Emmie who was leaving by the stage door, in furs, with flowers pressed to her shoulder, had limbs that had never danced; while in the next shot, showing her already in her bridal veil, the groom at her side was tall and slender, but had the round little face of M'sieur Pierre. At thirty she already had what was supposed to look like wrinkles, drawn in without meaning, without life, without knowledge of their true significance, but conveying something very bizarre to the expert, as a chance stirring of a tree's branches may coincide with a sign gesture comprehensible to a deaf-mute. And at forty Emmie was dying--and here allow me to congratulate you on an inverse error: her face in death could never pass for the face of death!

  Rodion bore this album away, mumbling that the young lady was just leaving, and when he next appeared he deemed it necessary to announce that the young lady had left:

  (Sighing) "Gone, gone ..." (To the spider) "Enough, you've had enough ..." (Showing his palm) "I don't have anything for you." (To Cincinnatus again) "It'll be dull, so dull without our little daughter ... how she flitted about, what music she made, our spoiled darling, our golden flower." (Pause. Then, in a different tone) "What's the matter, good sir, why don't you ask those catchy questions any more? Well? So, so," Rodion convincingly replied to himself and withdrew with dignity.

  After dinner, quite formally, no longer in prison garb but in a velvet jacket, an arty bow tie and new, high-heeled, insinuatingly squeaking boots with glossy legs (making him somehow resemble an operatic woodman), M'sieur Pierre came in, and, behind him, respectfully yielding to him first place in perambulation, speech, everything, came Rodrig Ivanovich and the lawyer with his briefcase. The three of them settled themselves at the table in wicker chairs (brought from the waiting room), while Cincinnatus walked about the cell, in single combat with shameful fear; but presently he also sat down.

  Somewhat clumsily (with a clumsiness that was, however, practiced and familiar) fussing with the briefcase, yanking open its black cheek, holding it partly on his knee, partly leaning it against the table--it would slip off one point, then off the other--the lawyer produced a large writing pad and locked, or rather buttoned up the briefcase, which yielded too readily and therefore at first muffed the fastening nip; he was just placing it on the table, but changed his mind and, t
aking it by the collar, lowered it to the floor, leaning it against a leg of his chair where it assumed the drooping position of a drunk; he then produced from his lapel an enameled pencil, on the back swing opened the pad and, paying attention to no one and nothing, began covering the detachable pages with even writing; however, this very inattention made all the more obvious the connection between the rapid movement of his pencil and the conference for which everyone had gathered here.

  Rodrig Ivanovich was sitting in the easy chair, leaning back slightly, making the chair creak by the pressure of his solid back, with one purplish paw resting on the arm of his chair and the other thrust in the bosom of his frock coat; every once in a while he would jerk his flabby cheeks and his chin, powdered like a Turkish delight, as if freeing them from some viscous and absorbing element.

  M'sieur Pierre, seated in the center, poured himself water from a decanter, then ever so carefully placed his hands, on the table, fingers interlaced (an artificial aquamarine flashing on his little finger) and, lowering his long eyelashes for ten seconds or so pondered reverently how he would begin his speech.

  "Kind gentlemen," M'sieur Pierre finally said in a high voice, without raising his eyes, "first of all and before anything else, allow me to outline by means of a few deft strokes what has already been accomplished by me."

  "Proceed, we beg you," said the director resonantly, making his chair emit a stern creak.

  "You gentlemen are of course aware of the reasons for the amusing mystification that is required by the tradition of our craft. After all, how would it be if I had announced myself right at the start and offered my friendship to Cincinnatus C.? This, gentlemen, would have certainly resulted in repelling him, frightening him, antagonizing him--in short, I would have committed a fatal blunder."