Bend Sinister

by Vladimir Nabokov

  Presently they emerged into open country. Who was that idly sitting on a fence? He wore long boots and a peaked cap but did not look like a peasant. He smiled and said: “Good morning, Professor.” “Good morning to you,” answered Krug without stopping. Possibly one of the people who supplied the Maximovs with game and berries.

  The dachas on the right-hand side of the road were mostly deserted. Here and there, however, some remnants of vacational life still persisted. In front of one of the porches a black trunk with brass knobs, a couple of bundles, and a helpless looking bicycle with swathed pedals stood, sat, and lay, awaiting some means of transportation, and a child in town clothes was rocking for the last time in a doleful swing between the boles of two pine trees that had seen better days. A little further, two elderly women with tear-stained faces were engaged in burying a mercifully killed dog together with the old croquet ball that bore the signs of its gay young teeth. In yet another garden a white-bearded waltwhitmanesque man wearing a jaeger suit was seated before an easel, and although the time was a quarter to eleven of a nondescript morning, a cindery red-barred sunset sprawled on his canvas, and he was painting in the trees and various other details which, on the day before, advancing dusk had prevented him from completing. On a bench in a pine grove on the left a straight-backed girl was rapidly speaking (retaliation … bombs … cowards … oh, Phokus, if I were a man …) with nervous gestures of perplexity and dismay to a blue-capped student who sat with bent head and poked at scraps of paper, bus tickets, pine needles, the eye of a doll or a fish, the soft soil, with the point of the slim, tightly buttoned umbrella belonging to his pale companion. But otherwise the once cheerful resort was forlorn, the shutters were closed, a battered perambulator lay upside down in a ditch and the telegraph poles, those armless laggards, hummed in mournful unison with the blood that throbbed in one’s head.

  The road dipped slightly and then the village appeared, with a misty wilderness on one side and Lake Malheur on the other. The posters the milkman had mentioned gave a delightful touch of civilization and civic maturity to the humble hamlet squatting under its low mossy roofs. Several scrawny peasant women and their drum-bellied children had collected in front of the village hall, which was being prettily decorated for the coming festivities; and from the windows of the post office on the left and from the windows of the police station on the right uniformed clerks followed the progress of the good work with eager intelligent eyes full of pleasant anticipation. All of a sudden, with a sound akin to the cry of a newborn infant, a radio loud-speaker which had just been installed burst into life, then abruptly collapsed.

  “There are some toys there,” remarked David, pointing across the road towards a small but eclectic store which carried everything from groceries to Russian felt boots.

  “All right,” said Krug; “let us see what there is.”

  But as the impatient child started to cross alone, a big black automobile emerged at full speed from the direction of the district highway, and Krug, plunging forward, jerked David back as the car thundered by, leaving the mangled body of a hen in its tingling wake.

  “You hurt me,” said David.

  Krug felt weak in the knees and bade David make haste so that he would not notice the dead bird.

  “How many times——” said Krug.

  A small replica of the murderous vehicle (the vibration of which still haunted Krug’s solar plexus, although by that time it had probably reached or even passed the spot where the neighbourly loafer had been perched on his fence) was immediately detected by David among the cheap dolls and the tins of preserves. Though somewhat dusty and scratched, it had the kind of detachable tyres he approved of and was especially acceptable because it had been found in an out-of-the-way place. Krug asked the red-cheeked young grocer for a pocket flask of brandy (the Maximovs were teetotallers). As he was paying for it and for the little car which David was delicately rolling backwards and forwards upon the counter, the Toad’s nasal tones, prodigiously magnified, burst forth from outside. The grocer stood to attention, fixing in civic fervour the flags decorating the village hall, which, together with a strip of white sky, could be seen through the doorway.

  “… and to those who trust me as they trust themselves,” roared the loud-speaker, as it ended a sentence.

  The clatter of applause that followed was presumably interrupted by the gesture of the orator’s hand.

  “From now on,” continued the tremendously swollen Tyrannosaurus, “the way to total joy lies open. You will attain it, brothers, by dint of ardent intercourse with one another, by being like happy boys in a whispering dormitory, by adjusting ideas and emotions to those of a harmonious majority; you will attain it, citizens, by weeding out all such arrogant notions as the community does not and should not share; you will attain it, adolescents, by letting your person dissolve in the virile oneness of the State; then, and only then, will the goal be reached. Your groping individualities will become interchangeable and, instead of crouching in the prison cell of an illegal ego, the naked soul will be in contact with that of every other man in this land; nay, more: each of you will be able to make his abode in the elastic inner self of any other citizen, and to flutter from one to another, until you know not whether you are Peter or John, so closely locked will you be in the embrace of the State, so gladly will you be krum karum——”

  The speech disintegrated in a succession of cackles. There was a kind of stunned silence: evidently the village radio was not yet in perfect working order.

  “One could almost butter one’s bread with the modulations of that admirable voice,” remarked Krug.

  What followed was most unexpected: the grocer gave him a wink.

  “Good gracious,” said Krug, “a gleam in the gloom!”

  But the wink contained a specific injunction. Krug turned. An Ekwilist soldier was standing right behind him.

  All he wanted however was a pound of sunflower seeds. Krug and David inspected a cardboard house which stood on the floor in a corner. David sank down on his little haunches to peep inside through the windows. But these were simply painted upon the wall. He slowly drew himself up, still looking at the house and automatically slipping his hand into Krug’s.

  They left the shop, and in order to overcome the monotony of the return journey, decided to skirt the lake and then to follow a path that meandered through meadows and would bring them back to the Maximovs’ cottage after going round the wood.

  Was the fool trying to save me? From what? From whom? Excuse me, I am invulnerable. Not much more foolish in fact than suggesting I grow a beard and cross the frontier.

  There were a number of things to be settled before giving thought to political matters—if indeed that drivel could be called a political matter. If, moreover, in a fortnight or so some impatient admirer did not murder Paduk. Misunderstanding, so to speak, the drift of the spiritual cannibalism advocated by the poor fellow. One wondered also (at least somebody might wonder—the question was of little interest) what the peasants made of that eloquence. Maybe it vaguely reminded them of church. First of all I shall have to get him a good nurse—a picture-book nurse, kind and wise and scrupulously clean. Then I must do something about you, my love. We have imagined that a white hospital train with a white Diesel engine has taken you through many a tunnel to a mountainous country by the sea. You are getting well there. But you cannot write because your fingers are so very weak. Moonbeams cannot hold even a white pencil. The picture is pretty, but how long can it stay on the screen? We expect the next slide, but the magic-lantern man has none left. Shall we let the theme of a long separation expand till it breaks into tears? Shall we say (daintily handling the disinfected white symbols) that the train is Death and the nursing home Paradise? Or shall we leave the picture to fade by itself, to mingle with other fading impressions? But we want to write letters to you even if you cannot answer. Shall we suffer the slow wobbly scrawl (we can manage our name and two or three words of greeting) to work its conscien
tious and unnecessary way across a post card which will never be mailed? Are not these problems so hard to solve because my own mind is not made up yet in regard to your death? My intelligence does not accept the transformation of physical discontinuity into the permanent continuity of a nonphysical element escaping the obvious law, nor can it accept the inanity of accumulating incalculable treasures of thought and sensation, and thought-behind-thought and sensation-behind-sensation, to lose them all at once and forever in a fit of black nausea followed by infinite nothingness. Unquote.

  “See if you can climb on top of that stone. I don’t think you can.”

  David trotted across a dead meadow towards a boulder shaped like a sheep (left behind by some careless glacier). The brandy was bad but would serve. He suddenly recalled a summer day when he had walked through these very fields in the company of a tall black-haired girl with thick lips and downy arms whom he had courted just before he met Olga.

  “Yes, I am looking. Splendid. Now try to get down.”

  But David could not. Krug walked up to the boulder and tenderly removed him. This little body. They sat for a while on a lamb-boulder near by and contemplated an endless freight train puffing beyond the fields towards the station near the lake. A crow ponderously flapped by, the slow swish-swish of its wings making the rotting grassland and the colourless sky seem even sadder than they actually were.

  “You will lose it that way. Better let me put it into my pocket.”

  Presently they started moving again, and David was curious to know how far they had to walk yet. Only a little way. They followed the edge of the forest and then turned into a very muddy road which led them to what was for the moment home.

  A cart was standing in front of the cottage. The old white horse looked at them across its shoulder. On the threshold of the porch two people were sitting side by side: the farmer who lived on the hill and his wife who did the housework for the Maximovs.

  “They are gone,” said the farmer.

  “I hope they did not go out to meet us on the road because we came by another way. Go in, David, and wash your hands.”

  “No,” said the farmer. “They are quite gone. They have been taken away in a police car.”

  At this point his wife became very voluble. She had just come down from the hill when she saw the soldiers leading the aged couple away. She had been afraid to come near. Her wages had not been paid since October. She would take, she said, all the jars of jam in the house.

  Krug went in. The table was laid for four. David wanted to have his toy which, he hoped, his father had not lost. A piece of raw meat was lying on the kitchen table.

  Krug sat down. The farmer had also come in and was stroking his grizzled chin.

  “Could you drive us to the station?” asked Krug after a while.

  “I might get into trouble,” said the farmer.

  “Oh, come, I offer you more than the police will ever pay you for whatever you do for them.”

  “You are not the police and so cannot bribe me,” replied the honest and meticulous old farmer.

  “You mean you refuse?”

  The farmer was silent.

  “Well,” said Krug, getting to his feet, “I am afraid I shall have to insist. The child is tired, I do not intend to carry him and the bag.”

  “How much was it again?” asked the farmer.

  Krug put on his glasses and opened his wallet.

  “You will stop at the police station on the way,” he added.

  The toothbrushes and the pyjamas were quickly packed. David accepted the sudden departure with perfect equanimity but suggested eating something first. The kind woman got him some biscuits and an apple. A fine rain had set in. David’s hat could not be found and Krug gave him his own broad-brimmed black one, but David kept taking it off because it covered his ears and he wanted to hear the sloshing hoofs, the creaking wheels.

  As they were passing the spot where two hours before a man with a heavy moustache and twinkling eyes had been sitting on a rustic fence, Krug noticed that now, instead of the man, there were but a couple of rudobrustki or ruddocks [a small bird allied to the robin] and that a square of cardboard had been nailed to the fence. It bore a rough inscription in ink (already somewhat affected by the drizzle):

  Bon Voyage!

  To this Krug drew the attention of the driver; who, without turning his head, remarked that there were many inexplicable things happening nowadays (a euphemism for “new regime”) and that it was better not to study current phenomena too closely. David tugged at his father’s sleeve and wanted to know what it was all about. Krug explained that they were discussing the strange ways of people who arranged picnics in dreary November.

  “I had better drive you straight on, folks, or you might miss the one-forty,” said the farmer tentatively, but Krug made him pull up at the brick house where the local police had their headquarters. Krug got out and entered an office room where a bewhiskered old man, his uniform unbuttoned at the neck, was sipping tea from a blue saucer and blowing upon it between sips. He said he knew nothing about the business. It was, he said, the City Guard, and not his department, which had made the arrest. He could only presume that they had been taken to some prison in town as political offenders. He suggested that Krug stop playing the busybody and thank his stars for not having been in the house when the arrest took place. Krug said that, on the contrary, he intended doing everything in his power to find out why two aged and respectable persons who had lived quietly in the country for a number of years and had no connection whatever with——The police officer, interrupting him, said that the best a professor could do (if Krug was a professor) would be to keep his mouth shut and leave the village. Again the saucer was lifted to the bearded lips. Two young members of the force hovered around and stared at Krug.

  He stood there for a moment looking at the wall, at a poster calling attention to the plight of aged policemen, at a calendar (monstrously in copula with a barometer); pondered a bribe: decided that they really knew nothing here; and with a shrug of his heavy shoulders walked out.

  David was not in the cart.

  The farmer turned his head, looked at the empty seat and said the child had probably followed Krug into the police station. Krug went back. The chief eyed him with irritation and suspicion and said that he had seen the cart from the window and that there had been no child in it from the very start. Krug tried to open another door in the corridor but it was locked. “Stop that,” growled the man, losing his temper, “or else we’ll arrest you for making a nuisance of yourself.”

  “I want my little boy,” said Krug (another Krug, horribly handicapped by a spasm in the throat and a pounding heart).

  “Hold your horses,” said one of the younger policemen. “This is not a kindergarten, there are no children here.”

  Krug (now a man in black with an ivory face) pushed him aside and went out again. He cleared his throat and bellowed for David. Two villagers in medieval kappen who stood near the cart gazed at him and then at each other, and then one of them turned and glanced in a given direction. “Have you——?” asked Krug. But they did not reply and looked once more at each other.

  I must not lose my head, thought Adam the Ninth—for by now there were quite a number of these serial Krugs: turning this way and that like the baffled buffeted seeker in a game of blindman’s buff: battering with imaginary fists a cardboard police station to pulp; running through nightmare tunnels; half-hiding together with Olga behind a tree to watch David warily tiptoe around another, his whole body ready for a little shiver of glee; searching an intricate dungeon where, somewhere, a shrieking child was being tortured by experienced hands; hugging the boots of a uniformed brute; strangling the brute amid a chaos of overturned furniture; finding a small skeleton in a dark cellar.

  At this point it may be mentioned that David wore on the fourth finger of his left hand a child’s enamelled ring.

  He was about to attack the police once more, but then noticed that a nar
row lane fringed with shrivelled nettles ran along the side of the brick police house (the two peasants had been glancing in that direction for quite a while) and turned into it, stumbling painfully over a log as he did so.

  “Take care, don’t break your pins, you’ll need ’em,” said the farmer with an amiable laugh.

  In the lane, a barefooted scrofulous boy in a pink red-patched shirt was whipping a top and David stood looking on with his hands behind his back.

  “This is intolerable,” cried Krug. “You ought never, never to wander away like that. Shut up! Yes. I will hold you. Get in. Get in.”

  One of the peasants tapped his temple slightly with a judicious air, and his crony nodded. In an open window a young policeman aimed a half-eaten apple at Krug’s back but was restrained by a staider comrade.

  The cart moved on. Krug groped for his handkerchief, did not find it, wiped his face with the palm of his still shaking hand.

  The well-named lake was a featureless expanse of grey water, and as the cart turned on to the highway that ran along the shore to the station, a cold breeze lifted with invisible finger and thumb the thin silvery mane of the old mare.

  “Will my mummy be back when we come?” asked David.

  7

  A FLUTED GLASS with a blue-veined violet and a jug of hot punch stand on Ember’s bedtable. The buff wall directly above his bed (he has a bad cold) bears a sequence of three engravings.

  Number one represents a sixteenth-century gentleman in the act of handing a book to a humble fellow who holds a spear and a bay-crowned hat in his left hand. Note the sinistral detail (Why? Ah, “that is the question,” as Monsieur Homais once remarked, quoting le journal d’hier; a question which is answered in a wooden voice by the Portrait on the title page of the First Folio). Note also the legend: “Ink, a Drug.” Somebody’s idle pencil (Ember highly treasures this scholium) has numbered the letters so as to spell Grudinka which means “bacon” in several Slavic languages.