Bend Sinister

by Vladimir Nabokov

  The pencil cracked. David tried to straighten the loose tip in its pine socket and use the pencil in such a way as to have the longer projection of the wood act as a prop, but the lead broke off for good.

  “And anyway,” said Krug, who was impatient to get back to his own writing, “it is time to put out the lights.”

  “First the travel story,” said David

  For several nights already Krug had been evolving a serial which dealt with the adventures awaiting David on his way to a distant country (we had stopped at the point where we crouched at the bottom of a sleigh, holding our breaths, very very quiet under sheepskin blankets and empty potato sacks).

  “No, not tonight,” said Krug. “It is much too late and I am busy.”

  “It is not too late,” cried David sitting up suddenly, with blazing eyes, and striking the atlas with his fist.

  Krug removed the book and bent over David to kiss him good night. David abruptly turned away to the wall.

  “Just as you like,” said Krug, “but you’d better say good night [pokoĭnoĭ nochi] because I’m not going to come again.”

  David drew the bedclothes over his head, sulking. With a little cough Krug unbent and put out the lamp.

  “I am not going to sleep,” said David in a muffled voice.

  “That’s up to you,” said Krug, trying to imitate Olga’s smooth pedagogic tones.

  A pause in the dark.

  “Pokoĭnoĭ nochi, dushka [animula],” said Krug from the threshold. Silence. He told himself with a certain degree of irritation that he would have to come back in ten minutes and go through the whole act in detail. This was, as often happened, only the first rough draft of the good night ritual. But then, of course, sleep might settle the matter. He closed the door and as he turned the bend of the passage bumped into Mariette. “Look where you are going, child,” he said sharply, and hit his knee against one of the chairs left by David.

  In this preliminary report on infinite consciousness a certain scumbling of the essential outline is unavoidable. We have to discuss sight without being able to see. The knowledge we may acquire in the course of such a discussion will necessarily stand in the same relation to the truth as the black peacock spot produced intraoptically by pressure on the palpebra does in regard to a garden path brindled with genuine sunlight.

  Ah yes, the glair of the matter instead of its yolk, the reader will say with a sigh; connu, mon vieux! The same old sapless sophistry, the same old dust-coated alembics—and thought speeds along like a witch on her besom! But you are wrong, you captious fool.

  Ignore my invective (a question of impetus) and consider the following point: can we work ourself into a state of abject panic by trying to imagine the infinite number of years, the infinite folds of dark velvet (stuff their dryness into your mouth), in a word the infinite past, which extends on the minus side of the day of our birth? We cannot. Why? For the simple reason that we have already gone through eternity, have already non-existed once and have discovered that this néant holds no terrors whatever. What we are now trying (unsuccessfully) to do is to fill the abyss we have safely crossed with terrors borrowed from the abyss in front, which abyss is borrowed itself from the infinite past. Thus we live in a stocking which is in the process of being turned inside out, without our ever knowing for sure to what phase of the process our moment of consciousness corresponds.

  Once launched he went on writing with a somewhat pathetic (if viewed from the side) gusto. He was wounded, something had cracked but, for the time being, a rush of second-rate inspiration and somewhat precious imagery kept him going nicely. After an hour or so of this sort of thing he stopped and reread the four and a half pages he had written. The way was now clear. Incidentally in one compact sentence he had referred to several religions (not forgetting “that wonderful Jewish sect whose dream of the gentle young rabbi dying on the Roman crux had spread over all Northern lands”), and had dismissed them together with ghosts and kobolds. The pale starry heaven of untrammelled philosophy lay before him, but he thought he would like a drink. With his bared fountain pen still in his hand he trudged to the dining-room. She again.

  “Is he asleep?” he asked in a kind of atonic grunt without turning his head, while bending for the brandy in the lower part of the sideboard.

  “Should be,” she replied.

  He uncorked the bottle and poured some of its contents into a green glass goblet.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  He could not help glancing at her. She sat at the table mending a stocking. Her bare neck and legs looked uncommonly pale in contrast to her black frock and black slippers.

  She glanced up from her work, her head cocked, soft wrinkles on her forehead.

  “Well?” she said.

  “No liquor for you,” he answered. “Root beer if you like. I think there is some in the icebox.”

  “You nasty man,” she said, lowering her untidy eyelashes and crossing her legs anew. “You horrible man. I feel pretty tonight.”

  “Pretty what?” he asked slamming the door of the sideboard.

  “Just pretty. Pretty all over.”

  “Good night,” he said. “Don’t sit up too late.”

  “May I sit in your room while you are writing?”

  “Certainly not.”

  He turned to go but she called him back:

  “Your pen’s on the sideboard.”

  Moaning, he came back with his goblet and took the pen.

  “When I’m alone,” she said, “I sit and do like this, like a cricket. Listen, please.”

  “Listen to what?”

  “Don’t you hear?”

  She sat with parted lips, slightly moving her tightly crossed thighs, producing a tiny sound, soft, labiate, with an alternate crepitation as if she were rubbing the palms of her hands which, however, lay idle.

  “Chirruping like a poor cricket,” she said.

  “I happen to be partly deaf,” remarked Krug and trudged back to his room.

  He reflected he ought to have gone to see whether David was asleep. Oh, he should be, because otherwise he would have heard his father’s footsteps and called. Krug did not care to pass again by the open door of the dining-room and so told himself that David was at least half asleep and likely to be disturbed by an intrusion, however well-meant. It is not quite clear why he indulged in all this ascetic self-restraint business when he might have ridden himself so deliciously of his quite natural tension and discomfort with the assistance of that keen puella (for whose lively little abdomen younger Romans than he would have paid the Syrian slavers 20,000 dinarii or more). Perhaps he was held back by certain subtle supermatrimonial scruples or by the dismal sadness of the whole thing. Unfortunately his urge to write had suddenly petered out and he did not know what to do with himself. He was not sleepy having slept after dinner. The brandy only added to the nuisance. He was a big heavy man of the hairy sort with a somewhat Beethovenlike face. He had lost his wife in November. He had taught philosophy. He was exceedingly virile. His name was Adam Krug.

  He reread what he had written, crossed out the witch on her besom and started to pace the room with his hands in the pockets of his robe. Gregoire peered from under the armchair. The radiator purled. The street was silent behind thick dark-blue curtains. Little by little his thoughts resumed their mysterious course. The nutcracker cracking one hollow second after another, came to a full meaty one again. An indistinct sound like the echo of some remote ovation met the appearance of a new eidolon.

  A fingernail scraped, tapped.

  “What is it? What do you want?”

  No answer. Smooth silence. Then an audible dimple. Then silence again.

  He opened the door. She was standing there in her nightgown. A slow blink concealed and revealed again the queer stare of her dark opaque eyes. She had a pillow under her arm and an alarm clock in her hand. She sighed deeply.

  “Please, let me come in,” she said, the somewhat lemurian features of her small white fac
e puckering up entreatingly. “I am terrified, I simply can’t be alone. I feel something dreadful is about to happen. May I sleep here? Please!”

  She crossed the room on tiptoe and with infinite care put the round-faced clock down on the night table. Penetrating her flimsy garment, the light of the lamp brought out her body in peachblow silhouette.

  “Is it O.K.?” she whispered. “I shall make myself very small.”

  Krug turned away, and as he was standing near a bookcase, pressed down and released again a torn edge of calf’s leather on the back of an old Latin poet. Brevis lux. Da mi basia mille. He pounded in slow motion the book with his fist.

  When he looked at her again she had crammed the pillow under her nightgown in front and was shaking with mute laughter. She patted her false pregnancy. But Krug did not laugh.

  Knitting her brow and letting the pillow and some peach petals drop to the floor between her ankles.

  “Don’t you like me at all?” she said [inquit].

  If, he thought, my heart could be heard, as Paduk’s heart is, then its thunderous thumping would awaken the dead. But let the dead sleep.

  Going on with her act, she flung herself on the bedded sofa and lay there prone, her rich brown hair and the edge of a flushed ear in the full blaze of the lamp. Her pale young legs invited an old man’s groping hand.

  He sat down near her; morosely, with clenched teeth, he accepted the banal invitation, but no sooner had he touched her, than she got up and, lifting and twisting her thin white chestnutty-smelling bare arms, yawned.

  “I guess I’ll go back now,” she said.

  Krug said nothing, Krug sat there, sullen and heavy, bursting with vine-ripe desire, poor thing.

  She sighed, put her knee against the bedding and, baring her shoulder, investigated the marks that some playmate’s teeth had left near a small, very dark birthmark on the diaphanous skin.

  “Do you want me to go?” she asked.

  He shook his head.

  “Shall we make love if I stay?”

  His hands compressed her frail hips as if he were taking her down from a tree.

  “You know too little or much too much,” he said. “If too little, then run along, lock yourself up, never come near me because this is going to be a bestial explosion, and you might get badly hurt. I warn you. I am nearly three times your age and a great big sad hog of a man. And I don’t love you.”

  She looked down at the agony of his senses. Tittered.

  “Oh, you don’t?”

  Mea puella, puella mea. My hot, vulgar, heavenly delicate little puella. This is the translucent amphora which I slowly set down by the handles. This is the pink moth clinging——

  A deafening din (the door bell, loud knocking) interrupted these anthological preambulations.

  “Oh, please, please,” she muttered wriggling up to him, “let’s go on, we have just enough time to do it before they break the door, please.”

  He pushed her away violently and snatched up his dressing gown from the floor.

  “It’s your last cha-ance,” she sang out with that special rising note which produces as it were a faint interrogatory ripple, the liquid reflection of a question mark.

  Catching up and hastily interlacing the ends of the brown cord of his somewhat monastic robe, he swung down the passage followed by Mariette and, a hunchback again, unlocked the impatient door.

  Young woman with pistol in gloved hand; two raw youths of S.B. (Schoolboy Brigade): repulsive patches of unshaven skin and pustules, plaid wool shirts, worn loose and flapping.

  “Hi, Linda,” said Mariette.

  “Hi, Mariechen,” said the woman. She had an Ekwilist soldier’s greatcoat carelessly hanging from her shoulders and a crumpled military cap was rakishly poised on her neatly waved honey-coloured hair. Krug recognized her at once.

  “My fiancé is waiting outside in a car,” she explained to Mariette after giving her a smiling kiss. “The Professor can go as he is. He will get some nice sterilized regulation togs at the place we are taking him to.”

  “Is it my turn at last?” asked Krug.

  “How are you, Mariechen? We shall go to a party after we drop the Professor. Is that O.K.?”

  “That’s fine,” said Mariette, and then asked, lowering her voice: “Can I play with the nice boys?”

  “Come, come, honey, you deserve better. Fact is, I have a big surprise for you. You, kids, get busy. The nursery is down there.”

  “No, you don’t,” said Krug blocking the way.

  “Let them pass, Professor, they are doing their duty. And they will not steal a pin.”

  “Step aside, Doc, we are doing our duty.”

  There was a businesslike knuckle-rap on the half-closed hall door, and when Linda, who stood with her back to it and against whose spine it gently butted, flung it wide open, a tall, broad-shouldered man in a smart semipolice uniform walked in with a heavyweight wrestler’s rotund step. He had bushy black eyebrows, a square heavy jaw and the whitest of white teeth.

  “Mac,” said Linda, “this here is my little sister. Escaped from a boarding school on fire. Mariette, this is my fiancé’s best friend. I hope you two will like each other.”

  “I sure hope we do,” said hefty Mac in a deep mellow voice. Dental display, extended palm the size of a steak for five.

  “I sure am glad to meet a friend of Hustav,” said Mariette demurely.

  Mac and Linda exchanged a twinkling smile.

  “I’m afraid we have not made this too clear, honey. The fiancé in question is not Hustav. Definitely not Hustav. Poor Hustav is by now an abstraction.”

  (“You shall not pass,” rumbled Krug, holding the two youths at bay.)

  “What happened?” asked Mariette.

  “Well, they had to wring his neck. He was a schlapp [a failure], you see.”

  “A schlapp who during his short life made many a fine arrest,” remarked Mac with the generosity and broadmindedness so characteristic of him.

  “This here belonged to him,” said Linda in confidential tones, showing the pistol to her sister.

  “The flashlight too?”

  “No, that’s Mac’s.”

  “My!” said Mariette reverently touching the huge leathery thing.

  One of the youths, propelled by Krug, collided with the umbrella stand.

  “Now, now, will you please stop this unseemly scuffle,” said Mac pulling Krug back (poor Krug executed a cake-walk). The two youths at once made for the nursery.

  “They will frighten him,” muttered and gasped Krug trying to free himself from Mac’s hold. “Let me go at once. Mariette, do me a favour”: he frantically signalled to her to run, to run to the nursery and see that my child, my child, my child——

  Mariette looked at her sister and giggled. With wonderful professional precision and savoir-faire, Mac suddenly dealt Krug a cutting backhand blow with the edge of his pig-iron paw: the blow caught Krug neatly on the inside of the right arm and instantly paralysed it. Mac proceeded to treat Krug’s left arm in like fashion. Krug, bent double holding his dead arms in his dead arms, sank down on one of the three chairs that stood (by now askew and meaningless) in the passage.

  “Mac’s awfully good at this sort of thing,” remarked Linda.

  “Yes, isn’t he?” said Mariette.

  The sisters had not seen each other for some time and kept smiling and blinking sweetly and touching each other with limp girlish gestures.

  “That’s a nice brooch,” said the younger.

  “Three fifty,” said Linda, a fold adding itself to her chin.

  “Shall I go and put on my black lace panties and the Spanish dress?” asked Mariette.

  “Oh, I think you look just cute in this rumpled nighty. Doesn’t she, Mac?”

  “Sure,” said Mac.

  “And you won’t catch cold because there is a mink coat in the car.”

  Owing to the door of the nursery suddenly opening (before slamming again) David’s voice was heard for a
moment: oddly enough, the child, instead of whimpering and crying for help, seemed to be trying to reason with his impossible visitors. Perhaps he had not been asleep after all. The sound of that dutiful and bland little voice was worse than the most anguished moaning.

  Krug moved his fingers—the numbness was gradually passing away. As calmly as possible. As calmly as possible, he again appealed to Mariette.

  “Does anybody know what he wants of me?” asked Mariette.

  “Look,” said Mac to Adam, “either you do what you’re told or you don’t. And if you don’t, it’s going to hurt like hell, see? Get up!”

  “All right,” said Krug. “I will get up. What next?”

  “Marsh vniz [Go downstairs]!”

  And then David began to scream. Linda made a tchk-tchk sound (“now those dumb kids have done it”) and Mac looked at her for directions. Krug lurched towards the nursery. Simultaneously David in pale-blue, the little mite, ran out but was immediately caught. “I want my daddy,” he cried off stage. Humming, Mariette in the bathroom with the door open was making up her lips. Krug managed to reach his child. One of the hoodlums had pinned David to the bed. The other was trying to catch David’s rapidly kicking feet.

  “Leave him alone, merzavtzy!” [a term of monstrous abuse] cried Krug.

  “They want him to be quiet, that’s all,” said Mac, who again had taken control of the situation.

  “David, my love,” said Krug, “it’s all right, they won’t hurt you.”

  The child, still held by the grinning youths, caught Krug by a fold of his dressing gown.

  This little hand must be unclenched.

  “It’s all right, leave it to me, gentlemen. Don’t touch him. My darling——”

  Mac, who had had enough of it, briskly kicked Krug in the shins and bundled him out.