Bend Sinister

by Vladimir Nabokov

  But something even more curious than that was kept pour la bonne bouche. Notamment, une grande pièce bien claire with chairs and tables of a clean-cut laboratory type and what looked like an especially large and elaborate radio set. From this machine came a steady thumping sound not unlike that of an African drum, and three doctors in white were engaged in checking the number of beats per minute. In their turn, two violent-looking members of Paduk’s bodyguard controlled the doctors by keeping count separately. A pretty nurse was reading Flung Roses in a corner, and Paduk’s private physician, an enormous baby-faced man in a dusty-looking frockcoat, was fast asleep behind a projection screen. Thump-ah, thump-ah, thump-ah, went the machine, and every now and then there was an additional systole, causing a slight break in the rhythm.

  The owner of the heart to the amplified beatings of which the experts were listening, was in his study some fifty feet away. His guardian soldiers, all leather and cartridges, carefully examined Krug’s and von Embit’s papers. The latter gentleman had forgotten to provide himself with a photostat of his birth certificate and so could not pass, much to his good-natured discomfiture. Krug went in alone.

  Paduk, clothed from carbuncle to bunion in field grey, stood with his hands behind his back and his back to the reader. He stood, thus oriented and clothed, before a bleak French window. Ragged clouds rode the white sky and the windowpane rattled slightly. The room, alas, had been formerly a ballroom. A good deal of stucco ornamentation enlivened the walls. The few chairs that floated about in the mirrory wilderness were gilt. So was the radiator. One corner of the room was cut off by a great writing desk.

  “Here I am,” said Krug.

  Paduk wheeled around and without looking at his visitor marched to the desk. There he sank in a leathern armchair. Krug, whose left shoe had begun to hurt, sought a seat and not finding one in the vicinity of the table, looked back at the gilt chairs. His host, however, saw to that: there was a click, and a replica of Paduk’s klubzessel [armchair] Jack-in-the-boxed from a trap near the desk.

  Physically the Toad had hardly changed except that every particle of his visible organism had been expanded and roughened. On the top of his bumpy, bluish, shaven head a patch of hair was neatly brushed and parted. His blotched complexion was worse than ever, and one wondered what tremendous will power a man must possess to refrain from squeezing out the blackheads that clogged the coarse pores on and near the wings of his fattish nose. His upper lip was disfigured by a scar. A bit of porous plaster adhered to the side of his chin, and a still larger bit, with a soiled corner turned back and a pad of cotton awry, could be seen in the fold of his neck just above the stiff collar of his semi-military coat. In a word, he was a little too repulsive to be credible, and so let us ring the bell (held by a bronze eagle) and have him beautified by a mortician. Now the skin is thoroughly cleansed and has assumed a smooth marchpane colour. A glossy wig with auburn and blond tresses artistically intermixed covers his head. Pink paint has dealt with the unseemly scar. Indeed, it would be an admirable face, were we able to close his eyes for him. But no matter what pressure we exert upon the lids, they snap open again. I never noticed his eyes, or else his eyes have changed.

  They were those of a fish in a neglected aquarium, muddy meaningless eyes, and moreover the poor man was in a state of morbid embarrassment at being in the same room with big heavy Adam Krug.

  “You wanted to see me. What is your trouble? What is your truth? People always want to see me and talk of their troubles and truths. I am tired, the world is tired, we are both tired. The trouble of the world is mine. I tell them to tell me their troubles. What do you want?”

  This little speech was delivered in a slow flat toneless mumble. And having delivered it Paduk bent his head and stared at his hands. What remained of his fingernails looked like thin strings sunk deep in the yellowish flesh.

  “Well,” said Krug, “if you put it like this, dragotzennyĭ [my precious], I think I want a drink.”

  The telephone emitted a discreet tinkle. Paduk attended to it. His cheek twitched as he listened. Then he handed the receiver to Krug who comfortably clasped it and said “Yes.”

  “Professor,” said the telephone, “this is merely a suggestion. The chief of the State is not generally addressed as ‘dragotzennyĭ.’ ”

  “I see,” said Krug, stretching out one leg. “By the way, will you please send up some brandy? Wait a bit——”

  He looked interrogatively at Paduk who had made a somewhat ecclesiastical and Gallic gesture of lassitude and disgust, raising both hands and letting them sink again.

  “One brandy and a glass of milk,” said Krug and hung up.

  “More than twenty-five years, Mugakrad,” said Paduk after a silence. “You have remained what you were, but the world spins on. Gumakrad, poor little Gumradka.”

  “And then,” said Krug, “the two proceeded to speak of old times, to remember the names of teachers and their idiosyncrasies—curiously the same throughout the ages, and what can be funnier than a habitual oddity? Come, dragotzennyĭ, come sir, I know all that, and really we have more important things to discuss than snowballs and ink blots.”

  “You might regret it,” said Paduk.

  Krug drummed for a while on his side of the desk. Then he fingered a long paper knife of ivory.

  The telephone rang again. Paduk listened.

  “You are not supposed to touch knives here,” he said to Krug as, with a sigh, he replaced the receiver. “Why did you want to see me?”

  “I did not. You did.”

  “Well—why did I? Do you know that, mad Adam?”

  “Because,” said Krug, “I am the only person who can stand on the other end of the seesaw and make your end rise.”

  Knuckles briskly rapped on the door and the zemberl marched in with a tinkling tray. He deftly served the two friends and presented a letter to Krug. Krug took a sip and read the note. “Professor,” it said, “this is still not the right manner. You should bear in mind that notwithstanding the narrow and fragile bridge of school memories uniting the two sides, these are separated in depth by an abyss of power and dignity which even a great philosopher (and that is what you are—yes, sir!) cannot hope to measure. You must not indulge in this atrocious familiarity. One has to warn you again. One beseeches you. Hoping that the shoes are not too uncomfortable, one remains a well-wisher.”

  “And that’s that,” said Krug.

  Paduk moistened his lips in the pasteurized milk and spoke in a huskier voice.

  “Now let me tell you. They come and say to me: Why is this good and intelligent man idle? Why is he not in the service of the State? And I answer: I don’t know. And they are puzzled also.”

  “Who are they?” asked Krug dryly.

  “Friends, friends of the law, friends of the lawmaker. And the village fraternities. And the city clubs. And the great lodges. Why is it so, why is he not with us? I only echo their query.”

  “The hell you do,” said Krug.

  The door opened slightly and a fat grey parrot with a note in its beak walked in. It waddled towards the desk on clumsy hoary legs and its claws made the kind of sound that unmanicured dogs make on varnished floors. Paduk jumped out of his chair, walked rapidly towards the old bird and kicked it like a football out of the room. Then he shut the door with a bang. The telephone was ringing its heart out on the desk. He disconnected the current and clapped the whole thing into a drawer.

  “And now the answer,” he said.

  “Which you owe me,” said Krug. “First of all I wish to know why you had those four friends of mine arrested. Was it to make a vacuum around me? To leave me shivering in a void?”

  “The State is your only true friend.”

  “I see.”

  Grey light from long windows. The dreary wail of a tugboat.

  “A nice picture we make—you as a kind of Erlkönig and myself as the male baby clinging to the matter-of-fact rider and peering into the magic mists. Pah!”

 
“All we want of you is that little part where the handle is.”

  “There is none,” cried Krug and hit his side of the table with his fist.

  “I beseech you to be careful. The walls are full of camouflaged holes, each one with a rifle which is trained upon you. Please, do not gesticulate. They are jumpy today. It’s the weather. This grey menstratum.”

  “If,” said Krug, “you cannot leave me and my friends in peace, then let them and me go abroad. It would save you a world of trouble.”

  “What is it exactly you have against my government?”

  “I am not in the least interested in your government. What I resent is your attempt to make me interested in it. Leave me alone.”

  “ ‘Alone’ is the vilest word in the language. Nobody is alone. When a cell in an organism says ‘leave me alone,’ the result is cancer.”

  “In what prison or prisons are they kept?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Where is Ember, for instance?”

  “You want to know too much. These are dull technical matters of no real interest to your type of mind. And now——”

  No, it did not go on quite like that. In the first place Paduk was silent during most of the interview. What he did say amounted to a few curt platitudes. To be sure, he did do some drumming on the desk (they all drum) and Krug retaliated with some of his own drumming but otherwise neither showed nervousness. Photographed from above, they would have come out in Chinese perspective, doll-like, a little limp but possibly with a hard wooden core under their plausible clothes—one slumped at his desk in a shaft of grey light, the other seated sideways to the desk, legs crossed, the toe of the upper foot moving up and down—and the secret spectator (some anthropomorphic deity, for example) surely would be amused by the shape of human heads seen from above. Paduk curtly asked Krug whether his (Krug’s) apartment were warm enough (nobody, of course, could have expected a revolution without a shortage of coal), and Krug said yes, it was. And did he have any trouble in getting milk and radishes? Well, yes, a little. He made a note of Krug’s answer on a calendar slip. He had learned with sorrow of Krug’s bereavement. Was Professor Martin Krug a relative of his? Were there any relatives on his late wife’s side? Krug supplied him with the necessary data. Paduk leaned back in his chair and tapped his nose with the rubber end of his six-faceted pencil. As his thoughts took a different course, he changed the position of the pencil: he now held it by the end, horizontally, rolling it slightly between the finger and thumb of either hand, seemingly interested in the disappearance and reappearance of Eberhard Faber No. 2⅜. It is not a difficult part but still the actor must be careful not to overdo what Graaf somewhere calls “villainous deliberation.” Krug in the meantime sipped his brandy and tenderly nursed the glass. Suddenly Paduk plunged towards his desk; a drawer shot out, a beribboned typescript was produced. This he handed to Krug.

  “I must put on my spectacles,” said Krug.

  He held them before his face and looked through them at a distant window. The left glass showed a dim spiral nebula in the middle not unlike the imprint of a ghostly thumb. While he breathed upon it and rubbed it away with his handkerchief, Paduk explained matters. Krug was to be nominated college president in place of Azureus. His salary would be three times that of his predecessor which had been five thousand kruns. Moreover, he would be provided with a motorcar, a bicycle, and a padograph. At the public opening of the University he would kindly deliver a speech. His works would be republished in new editions, revised in the light of political events. There might be bonuses, sabbatical years, lottery tickets, a cow—lots of things.

  “And this, I presume, is the speech,” said Krug cozily. Paduk remarked that in order to save Krug the trouble of composing it, the speech had been prepared by an expert.

  “We hope you will like it as well as we do.”

  “So this,” repeated Krug, “is the speech.”

  “Yes,” said Paduk. “Now take your time. Read it carefully. Oh, by the way, there was one word to be changed. I wonder if that has been done. Will you please——”

  He stretched his hand to take the typescript from Krug, and in doing so knocked down the tumbler of milk with his elbow. What was left of the milk made a kidney-shaped white puddle on the desk.

  “Yes,” said Paduk, handing the typescript back, “it has been changed.”

  He busied himself with removing various things from the desk (a bronze eagle, a pencil, a picture post card of Gainsborough’s “Blue Boy,” and a framed reproduction of Aldobrandini’s “Wedding,” of the half-naked wreathed, adorable minion whom the groom is obliged to renounce for the sake of a lumpy, muffled-up bride), and then messily dabbed at the milk with a piece of blotting paper. Krug read sotto voce:

  “ ‘Ladies and gentlemen! Citizens, soldiers, wives and mothers! Brothers and sisters! The revolution has brought to the fore problems [zadachi] of unusual difficulty, of colossal importance, of world-wide scope [mirovovo mashtaba]. Our leader has resorted to most resolute revolutionary measures calculated to arouse the unbounded heroism of the oppressed and exploited masses. In the shortest [kratchaĭsbiĭ] time [srok] the State has created central organs for providing the country with all the most important products which are to be distributed at fixed prices in a playful manner. Sorry—planful manner. Wives, soldiers and mothers! The hydra of the reaction may still raise its head …!’

  “This won’t do, the creature has more heads than one, has it not?”

  “Make a note of it,” said Paduk through his teeth. “Make a note in the margin and for goodness’ sake go on.”

  “ ‘As our old proverb has it, “the ugliest wives are the truest,” but surely this cannot apply to the “ugly rumours” which our enemies are spreading. It is rumoured for instance that the cream of our intelligentsia is opposed to the present regime.’

  “Wouldn’t ‘whipped cream’ be fitter? I mean, pursuing the metaphor——”

  “Make a note, make a note, these details do not matter.”

  “ ‘Untrue! A mere phrase, an untruth. Those who rage, storm, fulminate, gnash their teeth, pour a ceaseless stream [potok] of abusive words upon us do not accuse us of anything directly, they only “insinuate.” This insinuation is stupid. Far from opposing the regime, we professors, writers, philosophers, and so forth, support it with all possible learning and enthusiasm.

  “ ‘No, gentlemen; no, traitors, your most “categorical” words, declarations and notes will not diminish these facts. You may gloss over the fact that our foremost professors and thinkers support the regime, but you cannot dismiss the fact that they do support it. We are happy and proud to march with the masses. Blind matter regains the use of its eyes and knocks off the rosy spectacles which used to adorn the long nose of so-called Thought. Whatever I have thought and written in the past, one thing is clear to me now: no matter to whom they belong, two pairs of eyes looking at a boot see the same boot since it is identically reflected in both; and further, that the larynx is the seat of thought so that the working of the mind is a kind of gargling.’

  “Well, well, this last sentence seems to be a garbled passage from one of my works. A passage turned inside out by somebody who did not understand the gist of my remarks. I was criticizing that old——”

  “Please, go on. Please.”

  “ ‘In other words, the new Education, the new University which I am happy and proud to direct will inaugurate the era of Dynamic Living. In result, a great and beautiful simplification will replace the evil refinements of a degenerate past. We shall teach and learn, first of all, that the dream of Plato has come true in the hands of the Head of our State. … ’

  “This is sheer drivel. I refuse to go on. Take it away.”

  He pushed the typescript towards Paduk, who sat with closed eyes.

  “Do not make any hasty decisions, mad Adam. Go home. Think it over. Nay, do not speak. They cannot hold their fire much longer. Prithee, go.”

  Which, of course, termina
ted the interview. Thus? Or perhaps in some other way? Did Krug really glance at the prepared speech? And if he did, was it really as silly as all that? He did; it was. The seedy tyrant or the president of the State, or the dictator, or whoever he was—the man Paduk in a word, the Toad in another—did hand my favourite character a mysterious batch of neatly typed pages. The actor playing the recipient should be taught not to look at his hand while he takes the papers very slowly (keeping those lateral lower-jaw muscles in movement, please) but to stare straight at the giver: in short, look at the giver first, then lower your eyes to the gift. But both were clumsy and cross men, and the experts in the cardiarium exchanged solemn nods at a certain point (when the milk was upset), and they, too, were not acting. Tentatively scheduled to take place in three months’ time, the opening of the new University was to be a most ceremonious and widely publicized affair, with a host of reporters from foreign countries, ignorant overpaid correspondents, with noiseless little typewriters in their laps, and photographers with souls as cheap as dried figs. And the one great thinker in the country would appear in scarlet robes (click) beside the chief and symbol of the State (click, click, click, click, click, click) and proclaim in a thundering voice that the State was bigger and wiser than any mortal could be.