Bend Sinister

by Vladimir Nabokov

  “I dropped the right ones into my bath,” he explained cheerfully.

  Possibilities of buoyancy exerted a sudden attraction, and with the collaboration of popping sounds he jumped, once, twice, three times, higher, higher—then from a dizzy suspension fell down on his knees, rolled over, stood up again on the tossed bed, tottering, swaying.

  “Lie down, lie down,” said Krug, “it is getting very late. I must go now. Come, lie down. Quick.”

  (He may not ask.)

  He fell this time on his bottom and, fumbling with incurved toes, got them under the blanket, between blanket and sheet, laughed, got them right this time, and Krug rapidly tucked him in.

  “There has been no story tonight,” said David, lying quite flat, his own long upper lashes sweeping up, his elbows thrown back and resting like wings on both sides of his head on the pillow.

  “I shall tell you a double one tomorrow.”

  As he bent over the child, Krug was held at arm’s length for a moment, both looking into each other’s faces: the child hurriedly trying hard to think up something to ask in order to gain time, the father frantically praying that one particular question would not be asked. How tender the skin looked in its bedtime glory, with a touch of the palest violet above the eyes and with the golden bloom on the forehead, below the thick ruffled fringe of golden brown hair. The perfection of nonhuman creatures—birds, young dogs, moths asleep, colts—and these little mammals. A combination of three tiny brown spots, birthmarks on the faintly flushed cheek near the nose recalled some combination he had seen, touched, taken in recently—what was it? The parapet.

  He quickly kissed them, turned off the light and went out. Thank God, it has not been asked—he thought as he closed the door. But, as he gently released the handle, there it came, high-pitched, brightly remembered.

  “Soon,” he replied. “As soon as the doctor tells her she can. Sleep. I beg you.”

  At least a merciful door was between him and me.

  In the dining-room, on a chair near the sideboard, Claudina sat crying lustily into a paper napkin. Krug settled down to his meal, dispatched it in haste, briskly handling the unnecessary pepper and salt, clearing his throat, moving plates, dropping a fork and catching it on his instep, while she sobbed intermittently.

  “Please, go to your room,” he said at last. “The child is not asleep. Call me at seven tomorrow. Mr. Ember will probably attend to the arrangements tomorrow. I shall leave with the child as early as possible.”

  “But it’s so sudden,” she moaned. “You said yesterday——Oh, it ought not to have happened like this!”

  “And I shall wring your neck,” added Krug, “if you breathe one blessed word to the child.”

  He pushed away his plate, went to his study, locked the door.

  Ember might be out. The telephone might not work. But from the feel of the receiver as he took it up he knew the faithful instrument was alive. I could never remember Ember’s number. Here is the back of the telephone book on which we used to jot down names and figures, our hands mixed, slanting and curving in opposite directions. Her concavity fitting my convexity exactly. Extraordinary—I am able to make out the shadow of eyelashes on the child’s cheek but fail to decipher my own handwriting. He found his spare glasses and then the familiar number with the six in the middle resembling Ember’s Persian nose, and Ember put down his pen, removed the long amber cigarette-holder from his thickly pursed lips and listened.

  “I was in the middle of this letter when Krug rang up and told me a terrible thing. Poor Olga is no more. She died today following an operation of the kidney. I had gone to see her at the hospital last Tuesday and she was as sweet as ever and admired so much the really lovely orchids I had brought her; there was no real danger in sight—or if there was, the doctors did not tell him. I have registered the shock but cannot analyse yet the impact of the news. I shall probably not be able to sleep for several nights. My own tribulations, all those petty theatrical intrigues I have just described, will, I am afraid, seem as trivial to you as they now seem to me.

  “At first I was struck by the unpardonable thought that he was delivering himself of a monstrous joke like the time he read backwards from end to beginning that lecture on space to find out whether his students would react in any manner. They did not, nor do I for the moment. You will see him probably before you receive this muddled epistle; he is going tomorrow to the Lakes with his poor little boy. It is a wise decision. The future is not too clear but I suppose the University will resume its functions before long, though of course nobody knows what sudden changes may occur. Of late there have been some appalling rumours; the only newspaper I read has not come for at least a fortnight. He asked me to take care of the cremation tomorrow, and I wonder what people will think when he does not turn up; but of course his attitude towards death prevents his going to the ceremony though it will be as brief and formal as I can possibly make it—if only Olga’s family does not intrude. Poor dear fellow—she was a brilliant helper to him in his brilliant career. In normal times, I suppose, I would be supplying her picture to American newspapermen.”

  Ember put down his pen again and sat lost in thought. He too had participated in that brilliant career. An obscure scholar, a translator of Shakespeare in whose green, damp country he had spent his studious youth—he innocently shambled into the limelight when a publisher asked him to apply the reverse process to the Komparatiwn Stuhdar en Sophistat tuen Pekrekh or, as the title of the American edition had it, a little more snappily, The Philosophy of Sin (banned in four states and a best seller in the rest). What a strange trick of chance—this masterpiece of esoteric thought endearing itself at once to the middleclass reader and competing for first honours during one season with that robust satire Straight Flush, and then, next year, with Elisabeth Ducharme’s romance of Dixieland, When the Train Passes, and for twenty-nine days (leap year) with the book club selection Through Towns and Villages, and for two consecutive years with that remarkable cross between a certain kind of wafer and a lollipop, Louis Sontag’s Annunciata, which started so well in the Caves of St. Barthelemy and ended in the funnies.

  In the beginning, Krug, although professing to be amused, was greatly annoyed by the whole business, while Ember felt abashed and apologetic and covertly wondered whether perhaps his particular brand of rich synthetic English had contained some outlandish ingredient, some dreadful additional spice that might account for the unexpected excitement; but with a greater perspicacity than the two puzzled scholars showed, Olga prepared herself to enjoy thoroughly, for years to come, the success of a work whose very special points she knew better than its ephemeral reviewers could know. She it was who made the horrified Ember persuade Krug to go on that American lecture tour, as if she foresaw that its plangent reverberations would win him at home the esteem which his work in its native garb had neither wrung from academic stolidity nor induced in the comatose mass of amorphous readerdom. Not that the trip itself had been displeasing. Far from it. Although Krug, being as usual chary of squandering in idle conversation such experiences as might undergo unpredictable metamorphoses later on (if left to pupate quietly in the alluvium of the mind), had spoken little of his tour, Olga had managed to recompose it in full and to relay it gleefully to Ember who had vaguely expected a flow of sarcastic disgust. “Disgust?” cried Olga. “Why, he has known enough of that here. Disgust, indeed! Elation, delight, a quickening of the imagination, a disinfection of the mind, togliwn ochnat divodiv [the daily surprise of awakening]!”

  “Landscapes as yet unpolluted with conventional poetry, and life, that self-conscious stranger, being slapped on the back and told to relax.” He had written this upon his return, and Olga, with devilish relish, had pasted into a shagreen album indigenous allusions to the most original thinker of our times. Ember evoked her ample being, her thirty-seven resplendent years, the bright hair, the full lips, the heavy chin which went so well with the cooing undertones of her voice—something ventriloquial ab
out her, a continuous soliloquy following in willowed shade the meanderings of her actual speech. He saw Krug, the ponderous dandruffed maestro, sitting there with a satisfied and sly smile on his big swarthy face (recalling that of Beethoven in the general correlation of its rugged features)—yes, lolling in that old rose armchair while Olga buoyantly took charge of the conversation—and how vividly one remembered the way she had of letting a sentence bounce and ripple over the three quick bites she took at the raisin cake she held, and the brisk triple splash of her plump hand over the sudden stretch of her lap as she brushed the crumbs away and went on with her story. Almost extravagantly healthy, a regular radabarbára [full-blown handsome woman]: those wide radiant eyes, that flaming cheek to which she would press the cool back of her hand, that shining white forehead with a whiter scar—the consequence of an automobile accident in the gloomy Lagodan mountains of legendary fame. Ember could not see how one might dispose of the recollection of such a life, the insurrection of such a widowhood. With her small feet and large hips, with her girlish speech and her matronly bosom, with her bright wits and the torrents of tears she shed that night, while dripping with blood herself, over the crippled crying doe that had rushed into the blinding lights of the car, with all this and with many other things that Ember knew he could not know, she would lie now, a pinch of blue dust in her cold columbarium.

  He had liked her enormously, and he loved Krug with the same passion that a big sleek long-flewed hound feels for the high-booted hunter who reeks of the marsh as he leans towards the red fire. Krug could take aim at a flock of the most popular and sublime human thoughts and bring down a wild goose any time. But he could not kill death.

  Ember hesitated, then dialled fluently. The line was engaged. That sequence of small bar-shaped hoots was like the long vertical row of superimposed I’s in an index by first lines to a verse anthology. I am a lake. I am a tongue. I am a spirit. I am fevered. I am not covetous. I am the Dark Cavalier. I am the torch. I arise. I ask. I blow. I bring. I cannot change. I cannot look. I climb the hill. I come. I dream. I envy. I found. I heard. I intended an Ode. I know. I love. I must not grieve, my love. I never. I pant. I remember. I saw thee once. I travelled. I wandered. I will. I will. I will. I will.

  He thought of going out to mail his letter as bachelors are wont to do around eleven o’clock at night. He hoped a timely aspirin tablet had nipped his cold in the bud. The unfinished translation of his favourite lines in Shakespeare’s greatest play—

  follow the perttaunt jauncing ’neath the rack with her pale skeins-mate.

  crept up tentatively but it would not scan because in his native tongue ‘rack’ was anapaestic. Like pulling a grand piano through a door. Take it to pieces. Or turn the corner into the next line. But the berth there was taken, the table was reserved, the line was engaged.

  It was not now.

  “I thought perhaps you might like me to come. We might play chess or something. I mean, tell me frankly——”

  “I would,” said Krug. “But I have had an unexpected call from—well, an unexpected call. They want me to come immediately. They call it an emergency session—I don’t know—important, they say. All rubbish, of course, but as I can neither work nor sleep, I thought I might go.”

  “Had you any trouble in getting home tonight?”

  “I am afraid I was drunk. I broke my glasses. They are sending——”

  “Is it what you alluded to the other day?”

  “No. Yes. No—I do not remember. Ce sont mes collègues et le vieux et tout le trimbala. They are sending a car for me in a few minutes.”

  “I see. Do you think——”

  “You will be at the hospital as early as possible, won’t you?—At nine, at eight, even earlier.…”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “I told the maid—and perhaps you will look into the matter too when I am gone—I told her——”

  Krug heaved horribly, could not finish—crushed down the receiver. His study was unusually cold. All of them so blind and sooty, and hung up so high above the bookshelves, that he could hardly make out the cracked complexion of an upturned face under a rudimentary halo or the jigsaw indentures of a martyr’s parchmentlike robe dissolving into grimy blackness. A deal table in one corner supported loads of unbound volumes of the Revue de Psychologie bought secondhand, crabbed 1879 turning into plump 1880, their dead-leaf covers frayed or crumpled at the edges and almost cut through by the crisscross string eating its way into their dusty bulk. Results of the pact never to dust, never to unmake the room. A comfortable hideous bronze stand lamp with a thick glass shade of lumpy garnet and amethyst portions set in asymmetrical interspaces between bronze veins had grown to a great height, like some enormous weed, from the old blue carpet beside the striped sofa where Krug will lie tonight. The spontaneous generation of unanswered letters, reprints, university bulletins, disembowelled envelopes, paper clips, pencils in various stages of development littered the desk. Gregoire, a huge stag beetle wrought of pig iron which had been used by his grandfather to pull off by the heel (hungrily gripped by these burnished mandibles) first one riding boot, then the other, peered, unloved, from under the leathern fringe of a leathern armchair. The only pure thing in the room was a copy of Chardin’s “House of Cards,” which she had once placed over the mantelpiece (to ozonize your dreadful lair, she had said)—the conspicuous cards, the flushed faces, the lovely brown background.

  He walked down the passage again, listened to the rhythmic silence in the nursery—and Claudina again slipped out of the adjacent room. He told her he was going out and asked her to make his bed on the divan in the study. Then he picked up his hat from the floor and went downstairs to wait for the car.

  It was cold outside and he regretted not having refilled his flask with that brandy which had helped him to live through the day. It was also very quiet—quieter than usual. The oldfashioned genteel house fronts across the cobbled lane had extinguished most of their lights. A man he knew, a former Member of Parliament, a mild bore who used to take out his two polite paletoted dachshunds at nightfall, had been removed a couple of days before from number fifty in a motor truck already crammed with other prisoners. Obviously the Toad had decided to make his revolution as conventional as possible. The car was late.

  He had been told by University President Azureus that a Dr. Alexander, Assistant Lecturer in Biodynamics, whom Krug had never met, would come to fetch him. The man Alexander had been collecting people all evening and the President had been trying to get in touch with Krug since the early afternoon. A peppy, dynamic, efficient gentleman, Dr. Alexander—one of those people who in times of disaster emerge from dull obscurity to blossom forth suddenly with permits, passes, coupons, cars, connections, lists of addresses. The University bigwigs had crumpled up helplessly, and of course no such gathering would have been possible had not a perfect organizer been evolved from the periphery of their species by a happy mutation which almost suggested the discreet intermediation of a transcendental force. One could distinguish in the dubious light the emblem (bearing a remarkable resemblance to a crushed dislocated but still writhing spider) of the new government upon a red flaglet affixed to the bonnet, when the officially sanctioned car obtained by the magician in our midst drew up at the curb which it grazed with a purposeful tyre.

  Krug seated himself beside the driver, who was none other than Dr. Alexander himself, a pink-faced, very blond, very well-groomed man in his thirties, with a pheasant’s feather in his nice green hat and a heavy opal ring on his fourth finger. His hands were very white and soft, and lay lightly on the steering wheel. Of the two (?) persons in the back Krug recognized Edmond Beuret, the Professor of French literature.

  “Bonsoir, cher collègue,” said Beuret. “On m’ai tiré du lit au grand désepoir de ma femme. Comment va la vôtre?”

  “A few days ago,” said Krug, “I had the pleasure of reading your article on—” (he could not recall the name of that French general, an honest if somewh
at limited historical figure who had been driven to suicide by slanderous politicians).

  “Yes,” said Beuret, “it did me good to write it. ‘Les morts, les pauvres morts ont de grandes douleurs. Et quand Octobre souffle’——”

  Dr. Alexander turned the wheel very gently and spoke without looking at Krug, then giving him a rapid glance, then looking again straight ahead:

  “I understand, Professor, that you are going to be our saviour tonight. The fate of our Alma Mater lies in good hands.”

  Krug grunted noncommittally. He had not the vaguest—or was it a veiled allusion to the fact that the Ruler, colloquially known as the Toad, had been a schoolmate of his—but that would have been too silly.

  The car was stopped in the middle of Skotoma (ex Liberty, ex Imperial) Place by three soldiers, two policemen, and the raised hand of poor Theodor the Third who permanently wanted a lift or to go to a smaller place, teacher; but they were motioned by Dr. Alexander to look at the little red and black flag—whereupon they saluted and retired into the darkness.

  The streets were deserted as usually happens in the gaps of history, in the terrains vagues of time. Taken all in all the only live creature encountered was a young man going home from an ill-timed and apparently badly truncated fancy ball: he was dressed up as a Russian mujik—embroidered shirt spreading freely from under a tasselled sash, culotte bouffante, soft crimson boots, and wrist watch.

  “On va lui torcher le derrière, à ce gaillard-là,” remarked Professor Beuret grimly. The other—anonymous—person in the back seat, muttered something inaudible and replied to himself in an affirmative but likewise inarticulate way.

  “I cannot drive much faster,” said Dr. Alexander steadily looking ahead, “because the wrestle-cap of the lower slammer is what they call muckling. If you will put your hand into my right-hand pocket, Professor, you will find some cigarettes.”

  “I am a non-smoker,” said Krug. “And anyway I do not believe there are any there.”