Bend Sinister

by Vladimir Nabokov

  Here Ember suddenly raises his voice to a petulant scream of distress. He says that instead of this authentic Ophelia the impossible Gloria Bellhouse, hopelessly plump, with a mouth like the ace of hearts, has been selected for the part. He is especially incensed at the greenhouse carnations and lilies that the management gives her to play with in the “mad” scene. She and the producer, like Goethe, imagine Ophelia in the guise of a canned peach: “her whole being floats in sweet ripe passion,” says Johann Wolfgang, Ger. poet, nov., dram. & phil. Oh, horrible.

  “Or her father.… We all know him and love him, don’t we? and it would be so simple to have him right: Polonius-Pantolonius, a pottering dotard in a padded robe, shuffling about in carpet slippers and following the sagging spectacles at the end of his nose, as he waddles from room to room, vaguely androgynous, combining the pa and the ma, a hermaphrodite with the comfortable pelvis of a eunuch—instead of which they have a stiff tall man who played Metternich in The World Waltzes and insists on remaining a wise and wily statesman for the rest of his days. Oh, most horrible.”

  But there is worse to come. Ember asks his friend to hand him a certain book—no, the red one. Sorry, the other red one.

  “As you have noticed, perhaps, the Messenger mentions a certain Claudio as having given him letters which Claudio ‘received … of him that brought them [from the ship]’; there is no reference to this person anywhere else in the play. Now let us open the great Hamm’s second book. What does he do? Here we are. He takes this Claudio and—well, just listen.

  “That he was the King’s fool is evident from the fact that in the German original (Bestrafter Brudermord) it is the clown Phantasmo who brings the news. It is amazing that nobody as yet has troubled to follow up this prototypical clue. No less obvious is the fact that in his quibbling mood Hamlet would of course make a special point of having the sailors deliver his message to the King’s fool, since he, Hamlet, has fooled the King. Finally, when we recall that in those days a court jester would often assume the name of his master, with only a slight change in the ending, the picture becomes complete. We have thus the interesting figure of this Italian or Italianate jester haunting the gloomy halls of a Northern castle, a man in his forties, but as alert as he was in his youth, twenty years ago, when he replaced Yorick. Whereas Polonius had been the ‘father’ of good news, Claudio is the ‘uncle’ of bad news. His character is more subtle than that of the wise and good old man. He is afraid to confront the King directly with a message with which his nimble fingers and prying eye have already acquainted themselves. He knows that he cannot very well come to the King and tell him ‘your beer is sour’ with a quibble on ‘beer,’ meaning ‘your beard is soar’d’ (to soar—to pull, to twitch off). So, with superb cunning he invents a stratagem which speaks more for his intelligence than for his moral courage. What is this stratagem? It is far deeper than anything ‘poor Yorick’ could ever have devised. While the sailors hurry away to such abodes of pleasure as a long-yearned-for port can provide, Claudio, the dark-eyed schemer, neatly refolds the dangerous letter and casually hands it to another messenger, the ‘Messenger’ of the play, who innocently takes it to the King.”

  But enough of this, let us hear Ember’s rendering of some famous lines:

  Ubit’ il’ ne ubit’? Vot est’ oprosen.

  Vto bude edler: v rasume tzerpieren

  Ogneprashchi i strely zlovo roka——

  (or as a Frenchman might have it:)

  L’égorgerai-je ou non? Voici le vrai problème.

  Est-il plus noble en soi de supporter quand même

  Et les dards et le feu d’un accablant destin——

  Yes, I am still jesting. We now come to the real thing.

  Tam nad ruch’om rostiot naklonno iva,

  V vode iavliaia list’ev sedinu;

  Guirliandy fantasticheskie sviv

  Iz etikh list’ev—s primes’u romashek,

  Krapivy, lutikov——

  (over yon brook there grows aslant a willow

  Showing in the water the hoariness of its leaves;

  Having tressed fantastic garlands

  of these leaves, with a sprinkling of daisies,

  Nettles, crowflowers——)

  You see I have to choose my commentators.

  Or this difficult passage:

  Ne dumaete-li vy, sudar’, shto vot eto (the song about the wounded deer), da les per’ev na shliape, a dve kamchatye rozy na proreznykh bashmakakh, mogli by, kol’ fortuna zadala by mne turku, zasluzhit’ mne uchast’e v teatralnoí arteli; a, sudar’?

  Or the beginning of my favourite scene:

  As he sits listening to Ember’s translation, Krug cannot help marvelling at the strangeness of the day. He imagines himself at some point in the future recalling this particular moment. He, Krug, was sitting beside Ember’s bed. Ember, with knees raised under the counterpane, was reading bits of blank verse from scraps of paper. Krug had recently lost his wife. A new political order had stunned the city. Two people he was fond of had been spirited away and perhaps executed. But the room was warm and quiet and Ember was deep in Hamlet. And Krug marvelled at the strangeness of the day. He listened to the rich-toned voice (Ember’s father had been a Persian merchant) and tried to simplify the terms of his reaction. Nature had once produced an Englishman whose domed head had been a hive of words; a man who had only to breathe on any particle of his stupendous vocabulary to have that particle live and expand and throw out tremulous tentacles until it became a complex image with a pulsing brain and correlated limbs. Three centuries later, another man, in another country, was trying to render these rhythms and metaphors in a different tongue. This process entailed a prodigious amount of labour, for the necessity of which no real reason could be given. It was as if someone, having seen a certain oak tree (further called Individual T) growing in a certain land and casting its own unique shadow on the green and brown ground, had proceeded to erect in his garden a prodigiously intricate piece of machinery which in itself was as unlike that or any other tree as the translator’s inspiration and language were unlike those of the original author, but which, by means of ingenious combinations of parts, light effects, breeze-engendering engines, would, when completed, cast a shadow exactly similar to that of Individual T—the same outline, changing in the same manner, with the same double and single spots of suns rippling in the same position, at the same hour of the day. From a practical point of view, such a waste of time and material (those headaches, those midnight triumphs that turn out to be disasters in the sober light of morning!) was almost criminally absurd, since the greatest masterpiece of imitation presupposed a voluntary limitation of thought, in submission to another man’s genius. Could this suicidal limitation and submission be compensated by the miracle of adaptive tactics, by the thousand devices of shadography, by the keen pleasure that the weaver of words and their witness experienced at every wile in the warp, or was it, taken all in all, but an exaggerated and spiritualized replica of Paduk’s writing machine?

  “Do you like it, do you accept it?” asked Ember anxiously.

  “I think it is wonderful,” said Krug, frowning. He got up and paced the room. “Some lines need oiling,” he continued, “and I do not like the colour of dawn’s coat—I see ‘russet’ in a less leathery, less proletarian way, but you may be right. The whole thing is really quite wonderful.”

  He went to the window as he spoke, unconsciously peering into the yard, a deep well of light and shade (for, curiously enough, it was some time in the afternoon, and not in the middle of the night).

  “I am so pleased,” said Ember. “Of course, there are lots of little things to be changed. I think I shall stick to ‘laderod kappe.’ ”

  “Some of his puns——” said Krug. “Hullo, that’s queer.”

  He had become aware of the yard. Two organ-grinders were standing there, a few paces from each other, neither of them playing—in fact, both looked depressed and self-conscious. Several heavy-chinned urchins with zi
gzag profiles (one little chap holding a toy cart by a string) gaped at them quietly.

  “Never in my life,” said Krug, “have I seen two organ-grinders in the same back yard at the same time.”

  “Nor have I,” admitted Ember. “I shall now proceed to show you——”

  “I wonder what has happened?” said Krug. “They look most uncomfortable, and they do not, or cannot play.”

  “Perhaps one of them butted into the other’s beat,” suggested Ember, sorting out a fresh set of papers.

  “Perhaps,” said Krug.

  “And perhaps each is afraid that the other will plunge into some competitive music as soon as one of them starts to play.”

  “Perhaps,” said Krug. “All the same—it is a very singular picture. An organ-grinder is the very emblem of oneness. But here we have an absurd duality. They do not play but they do glance upwards.”

  “I shall now proceed,” said Ember, “to read you——”

  “I know of only one other profession,” said Krug, “that has that upward movement of the eyeballs. And that is our clergy.”

  “Well, Adam, sit down and listen. Or am I boring you?”

  “Oh nonsense,” said Krug, going back to his chair. “I was only trying to think what exactly was wrong. The children seem also perplexed by their silence. There is something familiar about the whole thing, something I cannot quite disentangle—a certain line of thought.…”

  “The chief difficulty that assails the translator of the following passage,” said Ember, licking his fat lips after a draught of punch and readjusting his back to his large pillow, “the chief difficulty——”

  The remote sound of the doorbell interrupted him.

  “Are you expecting someone?” asked Krug.

  “Nobody in particular. Maybe some of those actor fellows have come to see whether I am dead. They will be disappointed.”

  The footfalls of the valet passed down the corridor. Then returned.

  “Gentleman and lady to see you, sir,” he said.

  “Curse them,” said Ember. “Could you, Adam,…?”

  “Yes of course,” said Krug. “Shall I tell them you are asleep?”

  “And unshaven,” said Ember. “And anxious to go on with my reading.”

  A handsome lady in a dove-grey tailor-made suit and a gentleman with a glossy red tulip in the buttonhole of his cutaway coat stood side by side in the hall.

  “We——” began the gentleman, fumbling in his left trouser pocket and accompanying this gesture with a kind of wriggle as if he had a touch of cramp or were uncomfortably clothed.

  “Mr. Ember is in bed with a cold,” said Krug. “And he asked me——”

  The gentleman bowed: “I understand perfectly, but this (his free hand proffered a card) will tell you my name and standing. I have my orders as you can see. Prompt submission to them tore me away from my very private duties as host. I too was giving a party. And no doubt Mr. Ember, if that is his name, will act as promptly as I did. This is my secretary—in fact, something more than a secretary.”

  “Oh, come, Hustav,” said the lady, nudging him. “Surely, Professor Krug is not interested in our relations.”

  “Our relations?” said Hustav, looking at her with an expression of fond facetiousness on his aristocratic face. “Say that again. It sounded lovely.”

  She lowered her thick eyelashes and pouted.

  “I did not mean what you mean, you bad boy. The Professor will think Gott weiss was.”

  “It sounded,” pursued Hustav tenderly, “like the rhythmic springs of a certain blue couch in a certain guest room.”

  “All right. It is sure not to happen again if you go on being so nasty.”

  “Now she is cross with us,” sighed Hustav, turning to Krug. “Beware of women, as Shakespeare says! Well, I have to perform my sad duty. Lead me to the patient, Professor.”

  “One moment,” said Krug. “If you are not actors, if this is not some fatuous hoax——”

  “Oh, I know what you are going to say”—purred Hustav; “this element of gracious living strikes you as queer, does it not? One is accustomed to consider such things in terms of sordid brutality and gloom, rifle butts, rough soldiers, muddy boots—und so weiter. But headquarters knew that Mr. Ember was an artist, a poet, a sensitive soul, and it was thought that something a little dainty and uncommon in the way of arrests, an atmosphere of high life, flowers, the perfume of feminine beauty, might sweeten the ordeal. Please, notice that I am wearing civilian clothes. Whimsical perhaps, I grant you, but then—imagine his feelings if my uncouth assistants (the thumb of his free hand pointed in the direction of the stairs) crashed in and started to rip up the furniture.

  “Show the Professor that big ugly thing you carry about in your pocket, Hustav.”

  “Say that again?”

  “I mean your pistol of course,” said the lady stiffly.

  “I see,” said Hustav. “I misunderstood you. But we shall go into that later. You need not mind her, Professor, she is apt to exaggerate. There is really nothing special about this weapon. A humdrum official article, No. 184682, of which you can see dozens any time.”

  “I think I have had enough of this,” said Krug. “I do not believe in pistols and—well, no matter. You can put it back. All I want to know is: do you intend to take him away right now?”

  “Yep,” said Hustav.

  “I shall find some way to complain about these monstrous intrusions,” rumbled Krug. “It cannot go on like this. They were a perfectly harmless old couple, both in rather indifferent health. You shall certainly regret it.”

  “It has just occurred to me,” remarked Hustav to his fair companion, as they moved through the flat in Krug’s wake, “that the Colonel had one schnapps too many when we left him, so that I doubt whether your little sister will be quite the same by the time we get back.”

  “I thought that story he told about the two sailors and the barbok [a kind of pie with a hole in the middle for melted butter] most entertaining,” said the lady. “You must tell it to Mr. Ember; he is a writer and might put it into his next book.”

  “Well, for that matter, your own pretty mouth——” began Hustav—but they had reached the bedroom door and the lady modestly remained behind while Hustav, again thrusting a fumbling hand into his trouser pocket, jerkily went in after Krug.

  The valet was in the act of removing a mida [small table with incrustations] from the bedside. Ember was inspecting his uvula in a hand mirror.

  “This idiot here has come to arrest you,” said Krug in English.

  Hustav, who had been quietly beaming at Ember from the threshold, suddenly frowned and glanced at Krug suspiciously.

  “But surely this is a mistake,” said Ember. “Why should anyone want to arrest me?”

  “Heraus, Mensch, marsch,” said Hustav to the valet and, when the latter had left the room:

  “We are not in a classroom, Professor,” he said, turning to Krug, “so please use language that everybody can understand. Some other time I may ask you to teach me Danish or Dutch; at this moment, however, I am engaged in the performance of duties which are perhaps as repellent to me and to Miss Bachofen as they are to you. Therefore I must call your attention to the fact that, although I am not averse to a little mild bantering——”

  “Wait a minute, wait a minute,” cried Ember. “I know what it is. It is because I did not open my windows when those very loud speakers were on yesterday. But I can explain.… My doctor will certify I was ill. Adam, it is all right, there is no need to worry.”

  The sound of an idle finger touching the keys of a cold piano came from the drawing room, as Ember’s valet returned with some clothes over his arm. The man’s face was the colour of veal and he avoided looking at Hustav. To his master’s exclamation of surprise he replied that the lady in the drawing room had told him to get Ember dressed or be shot.

  “But this is ridiculous!” cried Ember, “I cannot just jump into my clothes. I must have a
bath first, I must shave.”

  “There is a barber at the nice quiet place you are going to,” remarked the kindly Hustav. “Come, get up, you really must not be so disobedient.”

  (How if I answer “no”?)

  “I refuse to dress while you are all staring at me,” said Ember.

  “We are not looking,” said Hustav.

  Krug left the room and walked past the piano towards the study. Miss Bachofen rose up from the piano stool and nimbly overtook him.

  “Ich will etwas sagen [I want to say something],” she said, and dropped her light hand upon his sleeve. “Just now, when we were talking, I had the impression you thought Hustav and I were rather absurd young people. But that is only a way he has, you know, always making witze [jokes] and teasing me, and really I am not the sort of girl you may think I am.”