Bend Sinister

by Vladimir Nabokov

  12

  THINKING of that farcical interview, he wondered how long it would be till the next attempt. He still believed that so long as he kept lying low nothing harmful could happen. Oddly enough, at the end of the month his usual cheque arrived although for the time being the University had ceased to exist, at least on the outside. Behind the scenes there was an endless sequence of sessions, a turmoil of administrative activity, a regrouping of forces, but he declined either to attend these meetings or to receive the various delegations and special messengers that Azureus and Alexander kept sending to his house. He argued that, when the Council of Elders had exhausted its power of seduction, he would be left alone since the Government, while not daring to arrest him and being reluctant to grant him the luxury of exile, would still keep hoping with forlorn obstinacy that finally he might relent. The drab colour the future took matched well the grey world of his widowhood, and had there been no friends to worry about and no child to hold against his cheek and heart, he might have devoted the twilight to some quiet research: for example he had always wished to know more about the Aurignacian Age and those portraits of singular beings (perhaps Neanderthal half-men—direct ancestors of Paduk and his likes—used by Aurignacians as slaves) that a Spanish nobleman and his little daughter had discovered in the painted cave of Altamira. Or he might take up some dim problem of Victorian telepathy (the cases reported by clergymen, nervous ladies, retired colonels who had seen service in India) such as the remarkable dream a Mrs. Storie had of her brother’s death. And in our turn we shall follow the brother as he walks along the railway line on a very dark night: having gone sixteen miles, he felt a little tired (as who would not); he sat down to take off his boots and dozed off to the chirp of the crickets, and then a train lumbered by. Seventy-six sheep trucks (in a curious “count-sheep-sleep” parody) passed without touching him, but then some projection came in contact with the back of his head killing him instantly. And we might also probe the “illusions hypnagogiques” (only illusion?) of dear Miss Bidder who once had a nightmare from which a most distinct demon survived after she woke so that she sat up to inspect its hand which was clutching the bedrail but it faded into the ornaments over the mantelpiece. Silly, but I can’t help it, he thought as he got out of his armchair and crossed the room to rearrange the leering folds of his brown dressing gown which, as it sprawled across the divan, showed at one end a very distinct medieval face.

  He looked up various odds and ends he had stored at odd moments for an essay which he had never written and would never write because by now he had forgotten its leading idea, its secret combination. There was for instance the papyrus a person called Rhind bought from some Arabs (who said they had found it among the ruins of small buildings near Ramesseum); it began with the promise to disclose “all the secrets, all the mysteries” but (like Miss Bidder’s demon) turned out to be merely a Schoolbook with blank spaces which some unknown Egyptian farmer in the seventeenth century B.C. had used for his clumsy calculations. A newspaper clipping mentioned that the State Entomologist had retired to become Adviser on Shade Trees, and one wondered whether this was not some dainty oriental euphemism for death. On the next slip of paper he had transcribed passages from a famous American poem

  A curious sight—these bashful bears,

  These timid warrior whalemen

  And now the time of tide has come;

  The ship casts off her cables

  It is not shown on any map;

  True places never are

  This lovely light, it lights not me;

  All loveliness is anguish—

  and, of course, that bit about the delicious death of an Ohio honey hunter (for my humour’s sake I shall preserve the style in which I once narrated it at Thula to a lounging circle of my Russian friends).

  Truganini, the last Tasmanian, died in 1877, but the last Kruganini could not remember how this was linked up with the fact that the edible Galilean fishes in the first century A.D. would be principally chromids and barbels although in Raphael’s representation of the miraculous draught we find among nondescript piscine forms of the young painter’s fancy two specimens which obviously belong to the skate family, never found in fresh water. Speaking of Roman venationes (shows with wild beasts) of the same epoch, we note that the stage, on which ridiculously picturesque rocks (the later ornaments of “romantic” landscapes) and an indifferent forest were represented, was made to rise out of the crypts below the urine-soaked arena with Orpheus on it among real lions and bears with gilded claws; but this Orpheus was acted by a criminal and the scene ended with a bear killing him, while Titus or Nero, or Paduk, looked on with that complete pleasure which “art” shot through with “human interest” is said to produce.

  The nearest star is Alpha Centauri. The Sun is about 93 millions of miles away. Our solar system emerged from a spiral nebula. De Sitter, a man of leisure, has estimated the circumference of the “finite though boundless” universe at about one hundred million light-years and its mass at about a quintillion quadrillions of grams. We can easily imagine people in 3000 A.D. sneering at our naïve nonsense and replacing it by some nonsense of their own.

  “Civil war is destroying Rome which none could ruin, not even the wild beast Germany with its blue-eyed youth.” How I envy Cruquius who had actually seen the Blandinian MSS of Horace (destroyed in 1556 when the Benedictine abbey of St. Peter at Blankenbergh near Ghent was sacked by the mob). Oh, what was it like travelling along the Appian Way in that large four-wheeled coach for long journeys known as the rhēda? Same Painted Ladies fanning their wings on the same thistleheads.

  Lives that I envy: longevity, peaceful times, peaceful country, quiet fame, quiet satisfaction: Ivar Aasen, Norwegian philologist, 1813–1896, who invented a language. Down here we have too much of homo civis and too little of sapiens.

  Dr. Livingstone mentions that on one occasion, after talking with a Bushman for some time about the Deity, he found that the savage thought he was speaking of Sakomi, a local chief. The ant lives in a universe of shaped odours, of chemical configurations.

  Old Zoroastrian motif of the rising sun, origin of Persian ogee design. The blood-and-gold horrors of Mexican sacrifices as told by Catholic priests or the eighteen thousand Formosan boys under nine whose little hearts were burned out upon an altar at the command of the spurious prophet Psalmanazar—the whole thing being a European forgery of the pale-green eighteenth century.

  He tossed the notes back into the drawer of his desk. They were dead and unusable. Leaning his elbow on the desk and swaying slightly in his armchair, he slowly scratched his scalp through his coarse hair (as coarse as that of Balzac, he had a note of that too somewhere). A dismal feeling grew upon him: he was empty, he would never write another book, he was too old to bend and rebuild the world which had crashed when she died.

  He yawned and wondered what individual vertebrate had yawned first and whether one might suppose that this dull spasm was the first sign of exhaustion on the part of the whole subdivision in its evolutional aspect. Perhaps, if I had a new fountain pen instead of this wreck, or a fresh bouquet of, say, twenty beautifully sharpened pencils in a slim vase, and a ream of ivory smooth paper instead of these, let me see, thirteen, fourteen more or less frumpled sheets (with a two-eyed dolichocephalic profile drawn by David upon the top one) I might start writing the unknown thing I want to write; unknown, except for a vague shoe-shaped outline, the infusorial quiver of which I feel in my restless bones, a feeling of shchekotiki (as we used to say in our childhood) half-tingle, half-tickle, when you are trying to remember something or understand something or find something, and probably your bladder is full, and your nerves are on edge, but the combination is on the whole not unpleasant (if not protracted) and produces a minor orgasm or “petit éternuement intérieur” when at last you find the picture-puzzle piece which exactly fits the gap.

  As he completed his yawn, he reflected that his body was much too big and healthy for him: had he been all shr
ivelled up and flaccid and pestered by petty diseases, he might have been more at peace with himself. Baron Munchausen’s horse-decorpitation story. But the individual atom is free: it pulsates as it wants, in low or high gear; it decides itself when to absorb and when to radiate energy. There is something to be said for the method employed by male characters in old novels: it is indeed soothing to press one’s brow to the deliciously cold windowpane. So he stood, poor percipient. The morning was grey with patches of thawing snow.

  David would have to be fetched from the kindergarten in a few minutes (if his watch was right). The slow languid sounds and half-hearted thumps coming from the next room meant that Mariette was engaged in expressing her vague notions of order. He heard the sloppy tread of her old bed slippers trimmed with dirty fur. She had an irritating way of performing her household duties with nothing on to conceal her miserably young body save a dim nightgown, the frayed hem of which hardly reached to her knees. Femineum lucet per bombycina corpus. Lovely ankles: she had won a prize for dancing, she said. A lie, I guess, like most of her utterances: though, on second thoughts, she did have in her room a Spanish fan and a pair of castanets. For no special reason (or was he looking for something? No) he had been led to peep into her room in passing while she was out with David. It smelt strongly of her hair and of Sanglot (a cheap musky perfume); flimsy soiled odds and ends lay on the floor and the bedtable was occupied by a brownish-pink rose in a glass and a large X-ray picture of her lungs and vertebrae. She had proved such an execrable cook that he was forced to have at least one square meal a day brought for all three from a good restaurant round the corner, while relying on eggs and gruels and various preserves to provide breakfasts and suppers.

  Having glanced at his watch again (and even listened to it) he decided to take his restlessness out for a walk. He found Cinderella in David’s bedroom: she had interrupted her labours to pick up one of David’s animal books and was now engrossed in it, half-sitting, half-lying athwart the bed, with one leg stretched far out, the bare ankle resting on the back of a chair, the slipper off, the toes moving.

  “I shall fetch David myself,” he said, averting his eyes from the brownish-pink shadows she showed.

  “What?” (The queer child did not trouble to change her attitude—merely stopped twitching her toes and lifted her lustreless eyes.)

  He repeated the sentence.

  “Oh, all right,” she said, her eyes back on the book.

  “And do, please, dress,” Krug added before leaving the room.

  Ought to get somebody else, he thought, as he walked down the street; somebody totally different, an elderly person, completely clothed. It was, he had understood, merely a matter of habit, the result of having constantly posed naked for the black-bearded artist in apartment 30. In fact, during summer, none of them, she said, wore anything at all indoors—neither he, nor she, nor the artist’s wife (who, according to sundry oils exhibited before the revolution had a grand body with numerous navels, some frowning, others looking surprised).

  The kindergarten was a bright little institution run by one of his former students, a woman called Clara Zerkalsky and her brother Miron. The main enjoyment of the eight little children in their care was provided by an intricate set of padded tunnels, just high enough to let one crawl through on all fours, but there were also brilliantly painted cardboard bricks and mechanical trains and picture books and a live shaggy dog called Basso. The place had been found by Olga the year before and David was getting a little too big for it though he still loved to crawl through the tunnels. In order to avoid exchanging salutations with the other parents, Krug stopped at the gate beyond which was the little garden (now mostly consisting of puddles) with benches for visitors. David was the first to run out of the gaily coloured wooden house.

  “Why didn’t Mariette come?”

  “Instead of me? Put on your cap.”

  “You and she could have come together.”

  “Didn’t you have any rubbers?”

  “Uh-uh.”

  “Then give me your hand. And if you walk into a puddle but once …”

  “And if I do it by chance [nechaianno]?”

  “I shall see to that. Come, raduga moia [my rainbow], give me your hand and let us be moving.”

  “Billy brought a bone today. Gee whizz—some bone. I want to bring one, too.”

  “Is it the dark Billy or the little fellow with the glasses?”

  “The glasses. He said my mother was dead. Look, look, a woman chimney sweep.”

  (These had recently appeared owing to some obscure shift or rift or sift or drift in the economics of the State—and much to the delight of the children.) Krug was silent. David went on talking.

  “That was your fault, not mine. My left shoe is full of water, Daddy!”

  “Yes.”

  “My left shoe is full of water.”

  “Yes. I’m sorry. Let’s walk a little faster. What did you answer?”

  “When?”

  “When Billy said that stupid thing about your mother.”

  “Nothing. What should I have said?”

  “But you knew it was a stupid remark?”

  “I guess so.”

  “Because even if she were dead she would not be dead for you or me.”

  “Yes, but she isn’t, is she?”

  “Not in our sense. A bone is nothing to you or me but it means a lot to Basso.”

  “Daddy, he growled over it. He just lay there and growled with his paw on it. Miss Zee said we must not touch him or talk to him while he had it.”

  “Raduga moia!”

  They were now in Peregolm Lane. A bearded man whom Krug knew to be a spy and who always appeared punctually at noon was at his post before Krug’s home. Sometimes he hawked apples, once he had come disguised as a postman. On very cold days he would try standing in the window of a tailor, mimicking a dummy, and Krug had amused himself by outstaring the poor chap. Today he was inspecting the house fronts and jotting down something on a pad.

  “Counting the raindrops, inspector?”

  The man looked away; moved; and in moving stubbed his toe against the curb. Krug smiled.

  “Yesterday,” said David, “as we were going by, that man winked at Mariette.”

  Krug smiled again.

  “You know what, Daddy? I think she talks to him on the telephone. She talks on the telephone every time you go out.”

  Krug laughed. That queer little girl, he imagined, enjoyed the love-making of quite a number of swains. She had two afternoons off, probably full of fauns and footballers and matadors. Is this getting to be an obsession? Who is she—a servant? an adopted child? Or what? Nothing. I know perfectly well, thought Krug, as he stopped laughing, that she merely goes to the pictures with a stumpy girl friend—so she says—and I have no reason to disbelieve her; and if I really did think she was what she certainly is, I should have fired her instantly: because of the germs she might bring into the nursery. Just as Olga would have done.

  Sometime during the last month the elevator had been removed bodily. Men had come, sealed the door of the unfortunate Baron’s tiny house and carried it into a van, intact. The bird inside was too terrified to flutter. Or had he been a spy, too?

  “It’s all right. Don’t ring. I have the key.”

  “Mariette!” shouted David.

  “I suppose she is out shopping,” said Krug and made his way to the bathroom.

  She was standing in the tub, sinuously soaping her back or at least such parts of her narrow, variously dimpled, glistening back which she could reach by throwing her arm across her shoulder. Her hair was up, with a kerchief or something twisted around it. The mirror reflected a brown armpit and a poppling pale nipple. “Ready in a sec,” she sang out.

  Krug slammed the door with a great show of disgust. He stalked to the nursery and helped David to change his shoes. She was still in the bathroom when the man from the Angliskii Club brought a meat pie, a rice pudding, and her adolescent buttocks.
When the waiter had gone, she emerged, shaking her hair, and ran into her room where she slipped into a black frock and a minute later ran out again and started to lay the table. By the time dinner was over, the newspaper had come and the afternoon mail. What news could there be?

  13

  THE GOVERNMENT had taken to sending him a good deal of printed matter advertising its achievements and aims. Together with the telephone bill and his dentist’s Christmas greeting he would find in his mailbox some mimeographed circular running thus:

  Dear Citizen, according to Article 521 of our Constitution the following four freedoms are to be enjoyed by the nation: 1. freedom of speech, 2. freedom of the press, 3. freedom of meetings, and 4. freedom of processions. These freedoms are guaranteed by placing at the disposal of the people efficient printing machines, adequate supplies of paper, well-aerated halls and broad streets. What should one understand by the first two freedoms? For a citizen of our State a newspaper is a collective organizer whose business is to prepare its readers for the accomplishment of various assignments allotted to them. Whereas in other countries newspapers are purely business ventures, firms that sell their printed wares to the public (and therefore do their best to attract the public by means of lurid headlines and naughty stories), the main object of our press is to supply such information as would give every citizen a clear perception of the knotty problems presented by civic and international affairs, consequently, they guide the activities and the emotions of their readers in the necessary direction.

  In other countries we observe an enormous number of competing organs. Each newspaper tugs its own way and this baffling diversity of tendencies produces complete confusion in the mind of the man in the street; in our truly democratic country a homogeneous press is responsible before the nation for the correctness of the political education which it provides. The articles in our newspapers are not the outcome of this or that individual fancy but a mature carefully prepared message to the reader who, in turn, receives it with the same seriousness and intentness of thought.