Bend Sinister

by Vladimir Nabokov

  “I am really sorry,” said Krug, “but I have to pass. Donje te zankoriv [do please excuse me].”

  They separated and he caught a glimpse of her pale, dark-eyed, not very pretty face with its glistening lips as she slipped under his door-holding arm and after one backward glance from the first landing ran upstairs trailing her wrap with all its constellation—Cepheus and Cassiopeia in their eternal bliss, and the dazzling tear of Capella, and Polaris the snowflake on the grizzly fur of the Cub, and the swooning galaxies—those mirrors of infinite space qui m’effrayent, Blaise, as they did you, and where Olga is not, but where mythology stretches strong circus nets, lest thought, in its ill-fitting tights, should break its old neck instead of rebouncing with a hep and a hop—hopping down again into this urine-soaked dust to take that short run with the half pirouette in the middle and display the extreme simplicity of heaven in the acrobat’s amphiphorical gesture, the candidly open hands that start a brief shower of applause while he walks backwards and then, reverting to virile manners, catches the little blue handkerchief, which his muscular flying mate, after her own exertions, takes from her heaving hot bosom—heaving more than her smile suggests—and tosses to him, so that he may wipe the palms of his aching weakening hands.

  5

  IT BRISTLED with farcical anachronisms; it was suffused with a sense of gross maturity (as in Hamlet the churchyard scene); its somewhat meager setting was patched up with odds and ends from other (later) plays; but still the recurrent dream we all know (finding ourselves in the old classroom, with our homework not done because of our having unwittingly missed ten thousand days of school) was in Krug’s case a fair rendering of the atmosphere of the original version. Naturally, the script of daytime memory is far more subtle in regard to factual details, since a good deal of cutting and trimming and conventional recombination has to be done by the dream producers (of whom there are usually several, mostly illiterate and middle-class and pressed by time); but a show is always a show, and the embarrassing return to one’s former existence (with the off-stage passing of years translated in terms of forgetfulness, truancy, inefficiency) is somehow better enacted by a popular dream than by the scholarly precision of memory.

  But is it really as crude as all that? Who is behind the timid producers? No doubt, this desk at which Krug finds himself sitting has been hastily borrowed from a different set and is more like the general equipment of the university auditorium than like the individual affair of Krug’s boyhood, with its smelly (prunes, rust) inkhole and the penknife scars on its lid (which could bang) and that special inkstain in the shape of Lake Malheur. No doubt, too, there is something wrong about the position of the door, and some of Krug’s students, vague supes (Danes today, Romans tomorrow), have been hurriedly rounded up to fill gaps left by those of his schoolmates who proved less mnemogenic than others. But among the producers or stagehands responsible for the setting there has been one … it is hard to express it … a nameless, mysterious genius who took advantage of the dream to convey his own peculiar code message which has nothing to do with school days or indeed with any aspect of Krug’s physical existence, but which links him up somehow with an unfathomable mode of being, perhaps terrible, perhaps blissful, perhaps neither, a kind of transcendental madness which lurks behind the corner of consciousness and which cannot be defined more accurately than this, no matter how Krug strains his brain. O yes—the lighting is poor and one’s field of vision is oddly narrowed as if the memory of closed eyelids persisted intrinsically within the sepia shading of the dream, and the orchestra of the senses is limited to a few native instruments, and Krug reasons in his dream worse than a drunken fool; but a closer inspection (made when the dream-self is dead for the ten thousandth time and the day-self inherits for the ten thousandth time those dusty trifles, those debts, those bundles of illegible letters) reveals the presence of someone in the know. Some intruder has been there, has tiptoed upstairs, has opened closets and very slightly disarranged the order of things. Then the shrunken, chalk-dusty, incredibly light and dry sponge imbibes water until it is as plump as a fruit; it makes glossy black arches all over the livid blackboard as it sweeps away the dead white symbols; and we start afresh now combining dim dreams with the scholarly precision of memory.

  You entered a tunnel of sorts; it ran through the body of an irrelevant house and brought you into an inner court coated with old grey sand which turned to mud at the first spatter of rain. Here soccer was played in the windy pale interval between two series of lessons. The yawn of the tunnel and the door of the school, at the opposite ends of the yard, became football goals much in the same fashion as the commonplace organ of one species of animal is dramatically modified by a new function in another.

  At times, a regular association football with its red liver tightly tucked in under its leather corset and the name of an English maker running across the almost palatable sections of its hard ringing rotundity, would be surreptitiously brought and cautiously dribbled about in a corner, but this was a forbidden object in the yard, bounded as it was by brittle windows.

  Here is the ball, the ball, the smooth indiarubber ball, approved by the authorities, suddenly disclosed in a glass case like some museum exhibit: three balls, in fact, in three cases, for we are shown all its instars: first the new one, so clean as to be almost white—the white of a shark’s belly; then the dirty grey adult with grains of gravel adhering to its weather-beaten cheek; then a flabby and formless corpse. A bell tinkles. The museum gets dark and empty again.

  Pass the ball, Adamka! A shot wide of the mark or a deliberate punt seldom resulted in a crash of broken glass; but, conversely, a puncture would usually follow the collision with a certain vicious projection formed by an angle of the roofed porch. The stricken ball’s collapse would not be noticeable at once. Then, at the next hard kick, its life-air would start to ooze, and presently it would be flopping about like an old galosh, before coming to rest, a miserable jellyfish of soiled indiarubber, on the muddy ground where fiendishly disappointed boots would at last kick it to pieces. The end of the ballona [festive gathering with dances]. She doffs her diamond tiara before her mirror.

  Krug played football [vooter], Paduk did not [nekht]. Krug, a burly, fat-faced, curly-headed boy, sporting tweed knickerbockers with buttons below the knee (soccer shorts were taboo), pounded through the mud with more zest than skill. Now he found himself running (by night, ugly? Yah, by night, folks) down something that looked like a railway track through a long damp tunnel (the dream stage management having used the first set available for rendering “tunnel,” without bothering to remove either the rails or the ruby lamps that glowed at intervals along the rocky black sweating walls). There was a heavy ball at his toes; he kept treading upon it whenever he tried to kick it; finally it got stuck somehow or other on a ledge of the rock wall, which, here and there, had small inset show windows, neatly illumined and enlivened by a quaint aquarian touch (corals, sea urchins, champagne bubbles). Within one of them she sat, taking off her dew-bright rings and unclasping the diamond collier de chien that encircled her full white throat; yes, divesting herself of all earthly jewels. He groped for the ball on the ledge and fished out a slipper, a little red pail with the picture of a sailing boat upon it and an eraser, all of which somehow summed up to the ball. It was difficult to go on dribbling through the tangle of rickety scaffolding where he felt he was getting in the way of the workmen who were fixing wires or something, and when he reached the diner the ball had rolled under one of the tables, and there, half hidden by a fallen napkin, was the threshold of the goal, because the goal was a door.

  If you opened that door you found a few [zaftpupen] “softies” mooning on the broad window seats behind the clothes racks, and Paduk would be there, too, eating something sweet and sticky given him by the janitor, a be-medaled veteran with a venerable beard and lewd eyes. When the bell rang, Paduk would wait for the bustle of flushed begrimed classbound boys to subside, whereupon he would quietly make hi
s way up the stairs, his agglutinate palm caressing the banisters. Krug, whom the putting away of the ball had detained (there was a big box for playthings and fake jewellery under the stairs), overtook him and pinched his plump buttocks in passing.

  Krug’s father was a biologist of considerable repute. Paduk’s father was a minor inventor, a vegetarian, a theosophist, a great expert in cheap Hindu lore; at one time he seems to have been in the printing business—printing mainly the works of cranks and frustrated politicians. Paduk’s mother, a flaccid lymphatic woman from the Marshland, had died in childbirth, and soon after this the widower had married a young cripple for whom he had been devising a new type of braces (she survived him, braces and all, and is still limping about somewhere). The boy Paduk had a pasty face and a grey-blue cranium with bumps: his father shaved his head for him personally once a week—some kind of mystic ritual, no doubt.

  It is not known how the nickname “toad” originated, for there was nothing in his face suggestive of that animal. It was an odd face with all its features in their proper position but somehow diffuse and abnormal as if the little fellow had undergone one of those facial operations when the skin is borrowed from some other part of the body. The impression was due perhaps to the motionless cast of his features: he never laughed and when he happened to sneeze he had a way of doing it with a minimum of contraction and no sound at all. His small dead-white nose and neat blue galatea made him resemble en laid the wax schoolboys in the shop windows of tailors, but his hips were much plumper than those of mannikins, and he walked with a slight waddle and wore sandals which used to provoke a good deal of caustic comment. Once, when he was being badly mauled it was discovered that he had right against the skin a green undershirt, green as a billiard cloth and apparently made of the same texture. His hands were permanently clammy. He spoke in a curiously smooth nasal voice with a strong north-western accent and had an irritating trick of calling his classmates by anagrams of their names—Adam Krug for instance was Gumakrad or Dramaguk; this he did not from any sense of humour, which he totally lacked, but because, as he carefully explained to new boys, one should constantly bear in mind that all men consist of the same twenty-five letters variously mixed.

  Such traits would have been readily excused had he been a likable fellow, a good pal, a co-operative vulgarian or a pleasantly queer boy with most matter-of-fact muscles (Krug’s case). Paduk, in spite of his oddities, was dull, commonplace and insufferably mean. Thinking of it later, one comes to the unexpected conclusion that he was a veritable hero in the domain of meanness, since every time he indulged in it he must have known that he was heading again towards that hell of physical pain which his revengeful classmates put him through every time. Curiously enough, we cannot recall any single definite example of his meanness, albeit vividly remembering what Paduk had to suffer in retaliation of his recondite crimes. There was for instance the case of the padograph.

  He must have been fourteen or fifteen when his father invented this only contraption of his which was destined to have some commercial success. It was a portable affair looking like a typewriter made to reproduce with repellent perfection the hand of its owner. You supplied the inventor with numerous specimens of your penmanship, he would study the strokes and the linkage, and then turn out your individual padograph. The resulting script copied exactly the average “tone” of your handwriting while the minor variations of each character were taken care of by the several keys serving each letter. Punctuation marks were carefully diversified within the limits of this or that individual manner, and such details as spacing and what experts call “clines” were so rendered as to mask mechanical regularity. Although, of course, a close examination of the script never failed to reveal the presence of a mechanical medium, a good deal of more or less foolish deceit could be practised. You could, for instance, have your padograph based on the handwriting of a correspondent and then play all kinds of pranks on him and his friends. Despite this inane undertow of clumsy forgery, the thing caught the fancy of the honest consumer: devices which in some curious new way imitate nature are attractive to simple minds. A really good padograph, reproducing a multitude of shades, was a very expensive article. Orders, however, poured in, and one purchaser after another enjoyed the luxury of seeing the essence of his incomplex personality distilled by the magic of an elaborate instrument. In the course of a year, three thousand padographs were sold, and of this number, more than one tenth were optimistically used for fraudulent purposes (both cheaters and cheated displaying remarkable stupidity in the process). Paduk senior had been just about to build a special factory for production on a grand scale when a Parliamentary decree put a ban on the manufacture and sale of padographs throughout the country. Philosophically speaking, the padograph subsisted as an Ekwilist symbol, as a proof of the fact that a mechanical device can reproduce personality, and that Quality is merely the distribution aspect of Quantity.

  One of the first samples issued by the inventor was a birthday present for his son. Young Paduk applied it to the needs of homework. His handwriting was a thin arachnoid scrawl of the reverse type with strongly barred t’s standing out conspicuously among the other limp letters, and all this was perfectly mimicked. He had never got rid of infantile inkstains, so his father had thrown in additional keys for an hourglass-shaped blot and two round ones. These adornments, however, Paduk ignored, and quite rightly. His teachers only noticed that his work had become somewhat tidier and that such question marks as he happened to use were in darker and purpler ink than the rest of the characters: by one of those mishaps which are typical of a certain kind of inventor, his father had forgotten that sign.

  Soon, however, the pleasures of secrecy waned and one morning Paduk brought his machine to school. The teacher of mathematics, a tall, blue-eyed Jew with a tawny beard, had to attend a funeral, and the resulting free hour was devoted to a demonstration of the padograph. It was a beautiful object and a shaft of spring sunlight promptly located it; snow was melting and dripping outside, jewels glittered in the mud, iridescent pigeons cooed on the wet window ledge, the roofs of the houses beyond the yard shone with a diamond shimmer; and Paduk’s stumpy fingers (the edible part of each fingernail gone except for a dark linear limit embedded in a roll of yellowish flesh) drummed upon the bright keys. One must admit that the whole procedure showed considerable pluck on his part: he was surrounded by rough boys who disliked him intensely and there was nothing to prevent their pulling his magic instrument to pieces. But there he sat coolly transcribing some text and explaining in his high-pitched drawl the niceties of the demonstration. Schimpffer, a red-haired boy of Alsatian descent, with extremely efficient fingers, said: “Now let me try!” and Paduk made room for him and directed his—at first somewhat suspensive—taps. Krug tried next, and Paduk helped him, too, until he realized that his mechanized double under Krug’s strong thumb was submissively setting down: I am an imbecile imbecile am I and I promise to pay ten fifteen twenty-five kruns—“Please, oh, please,” said Paduk quickly, “somebody is coming, let us put it away.” He clapped it into his desk, pocketed the key and hurried to the lavatory, as he always did when he got excited.

  Krug conferred with Schimpffer and a simple plan of action was devised. After lessons they coaxed Paduk into giving them another look at the instrument. As soon as its case was unlocked, Krug removed Paduk and sat upon him, while Schimpffer laboriously typed out a short letter. This he slipped into the mailbox and Paduk was released.

  On the following day the young wife of the rheumy and dithering teacher of history received a note (on lined paper with two holes punched out in the margin) pleading for a rendezvous. Instead of complaining to her husband, as was expected, this amiable woman, wearing a heavy blue veil, waylaid Paduk, told him he was a big naughty boy and with an eager jiggle of her rump (which in those days of tight waists looked like an inverted heart) suggested taking a kuppe [closed carriage] and driving to a certain unoccupied flat, where she might scold him in peace. Althou
gh since the preceding day Paduk had been on the lookout for something nasty to happen, he was not prepared for anything of this particular sort and actually followed her into the dowdy cab before recovering his wits. A few minutes later, in the traffic jam of Parliament Square, he slithered out and ignominiously fled. How all these trivesta [details of amorous doings] reached his comrades, is difficult to conjecture; anyway, the incident became a school legend. For a few days Paduk kept away; nor did Schimpffer appear for some time: by an amusing coincidence the latter’s mother had been badly burned by a mysterious explosive that some practical joker had put into her bag while she was out shopping. When Paduk turned up again, he was his usual quiet self but he did not refer to his padograph or bring it to school any more.

  That same year, or perhaps the next, a new headmaster with ideas resolved to develop what he termed “the politico-social consciousness” of the older boys. He had quite a programme—meetings, discussions, the formation of party groups—oh, lots of things. The healthier boys avoided these gatherings for the simple reason that, being held after class or during recess, they encroached upon one’s freedom. Krug made violent fun of the fools or trucklers who fell for this civic nonsense. The headmaster, while stressing the purely voluntary nature of attendance, warned Krug (who was at the top of his class) that his individualistic behavior constituted a dreadful example. There was an etching representing the Sand Bread Riot, 1849, above the headmaster’s horsehair couch. Krug did not dream of yielding and stoically ignored the mediocre marks which from that moment fell to his lot despite his work’s remaining on the same level. Again the headmaster spoke to him. There was also a coloured print depicting a lady in cherry red, sitting before her mirror. The position was interesting: here was this headmaster, a liberal with robust leanings towards the left, an eloquent advocate of Uprightness and Impartiality, ingeniously blackmailing the brightest boy in this school and acting thus not because he wished him to join a certain definite group (say a Leftist one), but because the boy would not join any group whatsoever. For it should be remarked in all fairness to the headmaster that, far from enforcing his own political predilections, he allowed his pupils to adhere to any party they chose, even if this proved to be a new combination unrelated to any of the factions represented in the then flourishing Parliament. Indeed, so broadminded was he that he positively wanted the richer boys to form strongly capitalistic clusters, or the sons of reactionary nobles to keep in tune with their caste and unite in “Rutterheds.” All he asked for was that they follow their social and economic instincts, while the only thing he condemned was the complete absence of such instincts in an individual. He saw the world as a lurid interplay of class passions amid a landscape of conventional gauntness, with Wealth and Work emitting Wagnerian thunder in their predetermined parts; a refusal to act in the show appeared to him as a vicious insult to his dynamic myth as well as to the Trade Union to which the actors belonged. Under these circumstances he felt justified in pointing out to the teachers that if Adam Krug passed the final examinations with honours, his success would be dialectically unfair in regard to those of Krug’s schoolmates who had less brains but were better citizens. The teachers entered so heartily into the spirit of the thing that it is a wonder how our young friend managed to pass at all.