Invitation to a Beheading

by Nabokov, Vladimir

  Further away the sun-flooded town described an ample hemicycle: some of the varicolored houses proceeded in even rows, accompanied by round trees, while others, awry, crept down slopes, stepping on their own shadows; one could distinguish the traffic moving on First Boulevard, and an amethystine shimmer at the end, where the famous fountain played; and still further, toward the hazy folds of the hills that formed the horizon, there was the dark stipple of oak groves, with, here and there, a pond gleaming like a hand mirror, while other bright ovals of water gathered, glowing through the tender mist, over there to the west, where the serpentine Strop had its source. Cincinnatus, his palm pressed to his cheek, in motionless, ineffably vague and perhaps even blissful despair, gazed at the glimmer and haze of the Tamara Gardens and at the dove-blue melting hills beyond them—oh, it was a long time before he could take his eyes away…

  A few paces from him, the lawyer leaned his elbows on the broad stone parapet, whose top was overgrown with some kind of enterprising vegetable. His back was soiled with chalk. He peered pensively into space, his left patent-leather shoe placed upon his right, and so distending his cheeks with his fingers that his lower eyelids turned out. Rodion had found a broom somewhere and kept silent as he swept the terrace flagstones.

  “How bewitching all this is,” said Cincinnatus, addressing the gardens, the hills (and for some reason it was especially pleasant to repeat the word “bewitching” in the wind, somewhat as children cover and then expose their ears, amused at this renewal of the audible world). “Bewitching! I have never seen those hills look exactly like that, so mysterious. Somewhere among their folds, in their mysterious valleys, couldn’t I … No, I had better not think about it.”

  He made a complete tour of the terrace. Flatlands stretched off to the north, with cloud shadows scudding across them; meadows alternated with grainfields. Beyond a bend of the Strop one could see the weed-blurred outlines of the ancient airport and the structure where they kept the venerable, decrepit airplane, with motley patches on its rusty wings, which was still sometimes used on holidays, principally for the amusement of cripples. Matter was weary. Time gently dozed. There was in town a certain man, a pharmacist, whose great-grandfather, it was said, had left a memoir describing how merchants used to go to China by air.

  Cincinnatus completed his trip around the terrace and returned to its south parapet. His eyes were making highly illegal excursions. Now he thought he distinguished that very bush in flower, that bird, that path disappearing under a canopy of ivy—

  “That will do now,” said the director good-naturedly, tossing the broom in a corner and putting on again his frock coat. “Come along home.”

  “Yes, it’s time,” responded the lawyer, looking at his watch.

  And the same little procession started back. In front was director Rodrig Ivanovich, behind him lawyer Roman Vissarionovich, and behind him prisoner Cincinnatus, who after so much fresh air was beset by spasms of yawning. The back of the director’s frock coat was soiled with chalk.

  Four

  She came in, taking advantage of Rodion’s morning visit, slipping beneath his hands, which were carrying the tray.

  “Tut, tut, tut,” said he, exorcising a storm of chocolate. With his soft foot he closed the door behind him, and muttered into his mustache, “What a naughty child …”

  Meanwhile Emmie had hidden from him, squatting behind the table.

  “Reading a book, eh?” observed Rodion, beaming with kindness. “That’s a worthwhile pastime.”

  Without raising his eyes from the page Cincinnatus emitted an iambic assent, but his eyes no longer grasped the text.

  Rodion finished his uncomplicated duties, chased with a rag the dust dancing in a ray of sunlight, fed the spider, and left.

  Emmie was still squatting, but a little less restrained, swaying a little as if on springs, her downy arms crossed, her pink mouth slightly open and her long, pale, almost white lashes nictating as she looked across the table-top at the door. An already familiar gesture: rapidly, with a haphazard selection of fingers, she brushed the flaxen hair from her temple, casting a sidelong glance at Cincinnatus, who had laid aside his book and was waiting to see what would come next.

  “He is gone,” said Cincinnatus.

  She left her squatting position, but was still stooping and looking at the door. She was embarrassed and did not know what to undertake. Suddenly she showed her teeth and, with a flash of ballerina calves, flew to the door—which of course proved to be locked. Her moire sash quickened the air in the cell.

  Cincinnatus asked her the usual two questions. Mincingly she gave her name and answered that she was twelve.

  “And are you sorry for me?” asked Cincinnatus.

  To this she made no answer. She raised up to her face the clay pitcher, which was standing in a corner. It was empty, hollow-sounding. She hoo-hooted into its depths a few times, and an instant later darted away; now she was leaning against the wall, supporting herself only with her shoulder blades and elbows, sliding forward on her tensed feet in their flat shoes, and straightening up again. She smiled to herself, and then, as she continued slithering, glanced at Cincinnatus with a slight scowl, as one looks at the low sun. All indications were that this was a wild, restless child.

  “Aren’t you just a little bit sorry for me?” said Cincinnatus. “It isn’t possible. I cannot imagine it. Come on over here, you foolish little doe, and tell me on what day I shall die.”

  Emmie, however, made no reply, but slid down to the floor. There she quietly seated herself, pressing her chin against her bent knees, over which she stretched the hem of her skirt.

  “Tell me, Emmie, please … Surely you know all about it—I can tell that you know … Your father has talked at the table, your mother has talked in the kitchen … Everybody is talking. Yesterday there was a neat little window cut out of the newspaper—that means people are discussing it, and I am the only one …”

  As if caught in a whirlwind she jumped up from the floor, and, flying again to the door, began pounding on it, not with her palms, but, rather, with the heels of her hands. Her loose, silky-blond hair ended in hanging curls.

  “If only you were grown up,” mused Cincinnatus, “if your soul had a slight touch of my patina, you would, as in poetic antiquity, feed a potion to the turnkey, on a night that is murky. Emmie!” he exclaimed, “I implore you—and I shall not desist—tell me, when shall I die?”

  Gnawing on a finger, she went over to the table, where the books towered in a pile. She flung one open, leafed through the pages, making them snap and almost ripping them out, banged it shut, picked up another. A rippling something kept running across her face: first she would wrinkle her freckled nose, then her tongue would distend her cheek from within.

  The door clanged. Rodion, probably having looked through the peephole, came in, rather angry.

  “Shoo, young lady! I’m the one who will catch it for this.”

  She broke into shrill laughter, dodged his crablike hand and rushed to the open door. There, on the threshold, she abruptly stopped with a dancer’s magic precision and—perhaps blowing a kiss, or perhaps concluding a pact of silence—looked over her shoulder at Cincinnatus; whereupon, with the same rhythmic suddenness, she was off, running with long, high, springy steps, already preparing for flight.

  Rodion, grumbling, jingling, trudged off after her.

  “Wait a minute!” cried Cincinnatus. “I have finished all the books. Bring me again the catalogue.”

  “Books …” Rodion scoffed huffily and locked the door behind him with pronounced resonance.

  What anguish! Cincinnatus, what anguish! What stone anguish, Cincinnatus—the merciless bong of the clock, and the obese spider, and the yellow walls, and the roughness of the black wool blanket. The skim on the chocolate. Pluck it with two fingers at the very center and snatch it whole from the surface, no longer a flat covering, but a wrinkled brown little skirt. The liquid is tepid underneath, sweetish and stagnant. Th
ree slices of toast with tortoise shell burns. A round pat of butter embossed with the monogram of the director. What anguish, Cincinnatus, how many crumbs in the bed!

  He lamented for a while, groaned, cracked all his joints, then he got up from the cot, put on the abhorred dressing gown, and began to wander around. Once again he examined all the inscriptions on the walls in the hope of somewhere discovering a new one. Like a fledgling crow on a stump, he stood for a long while on the chair, motionlessly gazing up at the beggarly ration of sky. He walked some more. Once more he read the eight rules for inmates, which he already knew by heart:

  1. Leaving the prison building is positively forbidden.

  2. A prisoner’s meekness is a prison’s pride.

  3. You are firmly requested to maintain quiet between one and three P.M. daily.

  4. You are not allowed to entertain females.

  5. Singing, dancing and joking with the guards is permitted only by mutual consent and on certain days.

  6. It is desirable that the inmate should not have at all, or if he does, should immediately himself suppress nocturnal dreams whose content might be incompatible with the condition and status of the prisoner, such as: resplendent landscapes, outings with friends, family dinners, as well as sexual intercourse with persons who in real life and in the waking state would not suffer said individual to come near, which individual will therefore be considered by the law to be guilty of rape.

  7. Inasmuch as he enjoys the hospitality of the prison, the prisoner should in his turn not shirk participation in cleaning and other work of prison personnel in such measure as said participation is offered him.

  8. The management shall in no case be responsible for the loss of property or of the inmate himself.

  Anguish, anguish, Cincinnatus. Pace some more, Cincinnatus, brushing with your robe first the walls, then the chair. Anguish! The books heaped on the table have all been read. And, even though he knew that they had all been read, Cincinnatus searched, rummaged, peeked into a thick volume … Without sitting down, he leafed through the already familiar pages.

  It was a bound magazine, published once upon a time, in a barely remembered age. The prison library, considered the second in the city for its size and the rarity of its volumes, kept several such curiosities. That was a remote world, where the simplest objects sparkled with youth and an inborn insolence, proceeding from the reverence that surrounded the labor devoted to their manufacture. Those were years of universal fluidity; well-oiled metals performed silent soundless acrobatics; the harmonious lines of men’s suits were dictated by the unheard-of limberness of muscular bodies; the flowing glass of enormous windows curved around corners of buildings; a girl in a bathing suit flew like a swallow so high over a pool that it seemed no larger than a saucer; a high-jumper lay supine in the air, having already made such an extreme effort that, if it were not for the flaglike folds of his shorts, he would seem to be in lazy repose; and water ran, glided endlessly; the gracefulness of falling water, the dazzling details of bathrooms; the satiny ripples of the ocean with a two-winged shadow falling on it. Everything was lustrous and shimmering; everything gravitated passionately toward a kind of perfection whose definition was absence of friction. Reveling in all the temptations of the circle, life whirled to a state of such giddiness that the ground fell away and, stumbling, falling, weakened by nausea and languor—ought I to say it?—finding itself in a new dimension, as it were … Yes, matter has grown old and weary, and little has survived of those legendary days—a couple of machines, two or three fountains—and no one regrets the past, and even the very concept of “past” has changed.

  “But then perhaps,” thought Cincinnatus, “I am misinterpreting these pictures. Attributing to the epoch the characteristics of its photograph. The wealth of shadows, the torrents of light, the gloss of a tanned shoulder, the rare reflection, the fluid transitions from one element to another—perhaps all of this pertains only to the snapshot, to a particular kind of heliotypy, to special forms of that art, and the world really never was so sinuous, so humid and rapid-just as today our unsophisticated cameras record in their own way our hastily assembled and painted world.”

  “But then perhaps” (Cincinnatus began to write rapidly on a sheet of ruled paper) “I am misinterpreting … Attributing to the epoch … This wealth … Torrents … Fluid transitions … And the world really never was … Just as … But how can these ruminations help my anguish? Oh, my anguish—what shall I do with you, with myself? How dare they conceal from me … I, who must pass through an ordeal of supreme pain, I, who, in order to preserve a semblance of dignity (anyway I shall not go beyond silent pallor—I am no hero anyway …), must during that ordeal keep control of all my faculties, I, I … am gradually weakening … the uncertainty is horrible—well, why don’t you tell me, do tell me—but no, you have me die anew every morning … On the other hand, were I to know, I could perform … a short work … a record of verified thoughts … Some day someone would read it and would suddenly feel just as if he had awakened for the first time in a strange country. What I mean to say is that I would make him suddenly burst into tears of joy, his eyes would melt, and, after he experiences this, the world will seem to him cleaner, fresher. But how can I begin writing when I do not know whether I shall have time enough, and the torture comes when you say to yourself, ‘Yesterday there would have been enough time’—and again you think, ‘If only I had begun yesterday …’ And instead of the clear and precise work that is needed, instead of a gradual preparation of the soul for that morning when it will have to get up, when—when you, soul, will be offered the executioner’s pail to wash in—Instead, you involuntarily indulge in banal senseless dreams of escape—alas, of escape … Today, when she came running in, stamping and laughing—that is, I mean—No, I still ought to record, to leave something. I am not an ordinary—I am the one among you who is alive—Not only are my eyes different, and my hearing, and my sense of taste-not only is my sense of smell like a deer’s, my sense of touch like a bat’s—but, most important, I have the capacity to conjoin all of this in one point—No, the secret is not revealed yet—even this is but the flint—and I have not even begun to speak of the kindling, of the fire itself. My life. Once, when I was a child, on a distant school excursion, when I had got separated from the others—although I may have dreamt it—I found myself, under the sultry sun of midday, in a drowsy little town, so drowsy that when a man who had been dozing on a bench beneath a bright whitewashed wall at last got up to help me find my way, his blue shadow on the wall did not immediately follow him. Oh, I know, I know, there must have been some oversight, on my part, and the shadow did not linger at all, but simply, shall we say, it caught on the wall’s unevenness … but here is what I want to express: between his movement and the movement of the laggard shadow—that second, that syncope—there is the rare kind of time in which I live—the pause, the hiatus, when the heart is like a feather … And I would write also about the continual tremor—and about how part of my thoughts is always crowding around the invisible umbilical cord that joins this world to something—to what I shall not say yet … But how can I write about this when I am afraid of not having time to finish and of stirring up all these thoughts in vain? When she came rushing in today—only a child—here is what I want to say—only a child, with certain loopholes for my thoughts—I wondered, to the rhythm of an ancient poem—could she not give the guards a drugged potion, could she not rescue me? If only she would remain the child she is, but at the same time mature and understand—and then it would be feasible: her burning cheeks, a black windy night, salvation, salvation … And I’m wrong when I keep repeating that there is no refuge in the world for me. There is! I’ll find it! A lush ravine in the desert! A patch of snow in the shadow of an alpine crag! This is unhealthy, though—what I am doing: as it is I am weak, and here I am exciting myself, squandering the last of my strength. What anguish, oh, what anguish … And it is obvious to me that I have not yet removed the fina
l film from my fear.”

  He became lost in thought. Then he dropped the pencil, got up, began walking. The striking of the clock reached his ears. Using its chimes as a platform, footfalls rose to the surface; the platform floated away, but the footfalls remained and now two persons entered the cell: Rodion with the soup and the Librarian with the catalogue.

  The latter was a man of tremendous size but sickly appearance, pale, with shadows under his eyes, with a bald spot encircled by a dark crown of hair, with a long torso in a blue sweater, faded in places and with indigo patches on the elbows. He had his hands in the pockets of his pants, which were narrow as death, and clutched under his arm a large book, bound in black leather. Cincinnatus had already once had the pleasure of seeing him.

  “The catalogue,” said the Librarian, whose speech was distinguished by a kind of defiant laconicism.

  “Fine, leave it here,” said Cincinnatus, “I shall choose something. If you would like to wait, to sit down for a minute, please do. If, however, you should like to go …”

  “To go,” said the Librarian.

  “All right. Then I shall return the catalogue through Rodion. Here, you may take these back with you … These magazines of the ancients are wonderfully moving … With this weighty volume I went down, you know, as with a ballast, to the bottom of time. An enchanting sensation.”

  “No,” said the Librarian.

  “Bring me some more—I’ll copy out the years I want. And some novel, a recent one. You are going already? You have everything?”

  Left alone, Cincinnatus went to work on the soup, simultaneously leafing through the catalogue. Its nucleus was carefully and attractively printed; amid the printed text numerous titles were inserted in red ink, in a small but precise hand. It was difficult for someone who was not a specialist to make sense of the catalogue, since the titles were arranged not in alphabetical order, but according to the number of pages in each, with notations as to how many extra sheets (in order to avoid duplication) had been pasted into this or that book. Therefore Cincinnatus searched without any definite goal in mind, picking out whatever happened to seem attractive. The catalogue was kept in a state of exemplary cleanness; this made it all the more surprising that on the white verso of one of the first pages a child’s hand had made a series of pencil drawings, whose meaning at first escaped Cincinnatus.