Bend Sinister

by Vladimir Nabokov

  They have torn my little one in two.

  “Look here, you brute,” he said, half on his knees, clinging to the wardrobe in the passage (Mac was holding him by the front of his dressing gown and pulling), “I cannot leave my child to be tortured. Let him come with me wherever you are taking me.”

  A toilet was flushed. The two sisters joined the men and looked on with bored amusement.

  “My dear man,” said Linda, “we quite understand that it is your child, or at least your late wife’s child, and not a little owl of porcelain or something, but our duty is to take you away and the rest does not concern us.”

  “Please, let us be moving,” pleaded Mariette, “it’s getting frightfully late.”

  “Allow me to telephone to Schamm,” (one of the members of the Council of Elders) said Krug. “Just that. One telephone call.”

  “Oh, do let us go,” repeated Mariette.

  “The question is,” said Mac, “will you go quietly, under your own power, or shall I have to maim you and then roll you down the steps as we do with logs in Lagodan?”

  “Yes,” said Krug suddenly making up his mind. “Yes. Logs. Yes. Let us go. Let us get there quickly. After all, the solution is simple!”

  “Put out the lights, Mariette,” said Linda, “or we shall be accused of stealing this man’s electricity.”

  “I shall be back in ten minutes,” shouted Krug in the direction of the nursery, using the full force of his lungs.

  “Aw, for Christ’s sake,” muttered Mac, pushing him towards the door.

  “Mac,” said Linda, “I’m afraid she might catch cold on the stairs. I think, you’d better carry her down. Look, why doesn’t he go first, then me, then you. Come on, pick her up.”

  “I don’t weigh much, you know,” said Mariette, raising her elbows towards Mac. Blushing furiously, the young policeman cupped a perspiring paw under the girl’s grateful thighs, put another around her ribs and lightly lifted her heavenwards. One of her slippers fell off.

  “It’s O.K.,” she said quickly, “I can put my foot into your pocket. There. Lin will carry my slipper.”

  “Say, you sure don’t weigh much,” said Mac.

  “Now hold me tight,” she said. “Hold me tight. And give me that flashlight, it’s hurting me.”

  The little procession made its way downstairs. The place was still and dark. Krug walked in front, with a circle of light playing upon his bent bare head and brown dressing gown—looking for all the world like a participant in some mysterious religious ceremony painted by a master of chiaroscuro, or copied from such a painting, or recopied from that or some other copy. Linda followed, her pistol pointing at his back, her prettily arched feet daintily negotiating the steps. Then came Mac carrying Mariette. Exaggerated parts of the banisters and sometimes the shadow of Linda’s hair and cap slipped across Krug’s back and along the ghostly wall, as the electric torch, fingered by sly Mariette, moved spasmodically. Her very thin wrist had a funny little bony knob on the outside. Now let us figure it out, let us look at it squarely. They have found the handle. On the night of the twenty-first, Adam Krug was arrested. This was unexpected since he had not thought they would find the handle. In fact, he had hardly known there was any handle at all. Let us proceed logically. They will not harm the child. On the contrary, it is their most valued asset. Let us not imagine things, let us stick to pure reason.

  “Oh, Mac, this is divine … I wish there were a billion steps!”

  He may go to sleep. Let us pray he does. Olga once said that a billion was a million with a bad cold. Shin hurts. Anything, anything, anything, anything, anything. Your boots, dragotzennyĭ, have a taste of candied plums. And look, my lips bleed from your spurs.

  “I can’t see a thing,” said Linda. “Quit fooling with that flashlight, Mariechen.”

  “Hold it straight, kiddo,” grumbled Mac, breathing somewhat heavily, his great raw paw steadily melting; despite the lightness of his auburn burden; because of her burning rose.

  Keep telling yourself that whatever they do they will not harm him. Their horrible stink and bitten nails—the smell and dirt of high-school boys. They may start breaking his playthings. Toss to each other, toss and catch, handy-dandy, one of his pet marbles, the opal one, unique, sacred, which even I dared not touch. He in the middle, trying to stop them, trying to catch it, trying to save it from them. Or, for instance, twisting his arm, or some filthy adolescent joke, or—no, this is all wrong, hold on, I must not imagine things. They will let him sleep. They will merely ransack the flat and have a good meal in the kitchen. And as soon as I reach Schamm or the Toad himself and say what I shall say——

  A blustering wind took charge of our four friends as they came out of the house. An elegant car was waiting for them. At the wheel sat Linda’s fiancé, a handsome blond man with white eyelashes and——

  “Oh, but we do know each other. Yes, indeed. As a matter of fact, I have had the honour of being the Professor’s chauffeur once before. And so this is the little sister. Glad to meet you, Mariechen.”

  “Get in, you fat numbskull,” said Mac—and Krug heavily settled down next to the driver.

  “Here’s your slipper and here’s your fur,” said Linda, as she handed the promised coat to Mac who took it and started to help Mariette into it.

  “No—just round my shoulders,” said the debutante.

  She shook her smooth brown hair; then, with a special disengaging gesture (the back of her hand rapidly passing along the nape of her delicate neck), she lightly swished it up so that it would not catch under the collar of the coat.

  “There is room for three,” she sang out sweetly in her best golden-oriole manner from the depths of the car, and sidling up to her sister, patted the free space on the outer side.

  But Mac unfolded one of the front seats so as to be right behind his prisoner; resting both elbows on the partition and chewing the mint-flavoured cud, he told Krug to behave.

  “All aboard?” queried Dr. Alexander.

  At this moment the nursery window (last one on the left, fourth floor) flew open and one of the youths leant out, bawling something in a questioning tone. Because of the gusty wind, nothing could be made out of the jumble of words that came forth.

  “What?” cried Linda, her nose impatiently puckered.

  “Uglowowgloowoo?” called the youth from the window.

  “Okay,” said Mac to no one in particular. “Okay,” he grumbled. “We hear you.”

  “Okay!” cried Linda upwards, making a megaphone of her hands.

  The second youth loomed in violent motion within the trapezoid of light. He was cuffing David who had climbed upon a table in a futile attempt to reach the window. The bright-haired pale-blue little figure disappeared. Krug, bellowing and plunging, was half out of the car, with Mac hanging on to him, tackling him round the waist. The car was moving. The struggle was useless. A procession of small coloured animals raced along an oblique strip of wallpaper. Krug sank back in his seat.

  “I wonder what he was asking,” remarked Linda. “Are you quite sure it’s all right, Mac? I mean——”

  “Well, they have their instructions, haven’t they?”

  “I guess so.”

  “All six of you,” said Krug gasping, “all six will be tortured and shot if my child gets hurt.”

  “Now, now, these are ugly words,” said Mac, and none too gently rapped him with the loose joints of four fingers behind the ear.

  It was Dr. Alexander who relieved the somewhat strained situation (for there is no doubt that for a moment everybody felt something had gone wrong):

  “Well,” he said with a sophisticated semi-smile, “ugly rumours and plain facts are not always as true as ugly brides and plain wives invariably are.”

  Mac spluttered with laughter—right into Krug’s neck.

  “I must say, your new steady has a regular sense of humour,” whispered Mariette to her sister.

  “He is a college man,” said big-eyed Linda, nodd
ing in awe and protruding her lower lip. “He knows simply everything. It gives me the creeps. You should see him with a fuse or a monkey wrench.”

  The two girls settled down to some cozy chatting as girls in back seats are prone to do.

  “Tell me some more about Hustav,” asked Mariette. “How was he strangled?”

  “Well, it was like this. They came by the back door while I was making breakfast and said they had instructions to get rid of him. I said aha but I don’t want any mess on the floor and I don’t want any shooting. He had bolted into a clothes closet. You could hear him shivering there and clothes falling down upon him and hangers jingling at every shiver. It was just too gruesome. I said, I don’t want to see you guys doing it and I don’t want to spend all day cleaning up. So they took him to the bathroom and started to work on him there. Of course, my morning was ruined. I had to be at my dentist’s at ten, and there they were in the bathroom making simply hideous noises—especially Hustav. They must have been at it for at least twenty minutes. He had an Adam’s apple as hard as a heel, they said—and of course I was late.”

  “As usual,” commented Dr. Alexander.

  The girls laughed. Mac turned to the younger of the two and stopped chewing to ask:

  “Sure you not cold, Cin?”

  His baritone voice was loaded with love. The teenager blushed and furtively pressed his hand. She said she was warm, oh, very warm. Feel for yourself. She blushed because he had employed a secret diminutive which none knew, which he had somehow divined. Intuition is the sesame of love.

  “All right, all right, caramel eyes,” said the shy young giant disengaging his hand. “Remember, I’m on duty.”

  And Krug felt again the man’s drugstore breath.

  17

  THE CAR came to a stop at the north gate of the prison. Dr. Alexander, mellowly manipulating the plump rubber of the horn (white hand, white lover, pyriform breast of black concubine), honked.

  A slow iron yawn was induced and the car crawled into yard No. 1. There a swarm of guards, some wearing gas masks (which in profile bore a striking resemblance to greatly magnified ant heads), clambered upon the footboards and other accessible parts of the car; two or three even grunted their way up to the roof. Numerous hands, several of which were heavily gloved, tugged at torpid recurved Krug (still in the larval stage) and pulled him out. Guards A and B took charge of him; the rest zigzagged away, darting this way and that, in search of new victims. With a smile and a semi-salute Dr. Alexander said to guard A: “I’ll be seeing you,” then backed and proceeded to energetically unravel the wheel. Unravelled, the car turned, jerked forward: Dr. Alexander repeated his semi-salute, while Mac, after wagging a great big forefinger at Krug, squeezed his haunches into the place Mariette had made for him next to herself. Presently the car was heard uttering festive honks as it sped away, down to a private musk-scented apartment. O joyous, red-hot, impatient youth!

  Krug was led through several yards to the main building. In yards Nos. 3 and 4 outlines of condemned men for target practice had been chalked on a brick wall. An old Russian legend says that the first thing a rastrelianyĭ [person executed by the firing squad] sees on entering the “other world” (no interruption please, this is premature, take your hands away) is not a gathering of ordinary “shades” or “spirits” or repulsive dear repulsive unutterably dear unutterably repulsive dear ones in antiquated clothes, as you might think, but a kind of silent slow ballet, a welcoming group of these chalked outlines moving wavily like transparent Infusoria; but away with those bleak superstitions.

  They entered the building and Krug found himself in a curiously empty room. It was perfectly round, with a well-scrubbed cement floor. So suddenly did his guards disappear that, had he been a character in fiction, he might well have wondered whether the strange doings and so on had not been some evil vision, and so forth. He had a throbbing headache: one of those headaches that seem to transcend on one side the limits of one’s head, like the colours in cheap comics, and do not quite fill the head space on the other; and the dull throbs were saying: one, one, one, never reaching two, never. Of the four doors at the cardinal points of the circular room, only one, one, one was unlocked. Krug pushed it open.

  “Yes?” said a pale-faced man, still looking down at the seesaw blotter with which he was dabbing whatever he had just written.

  “I demand immediate action,” said Krug.

  The official looked at him with tired watery eyes.

  “My name is Konkordiĭ Filadelfovich Kolokololiteishchikov,” he said, “but they call me Kol. Take a seat.”

  “I——” began Krug anew.

  Kol, shaking his head, hurriedly selected the necessary forms:

  “Wait a minute. First of all we must have all the answers. Your name is——?”

  “Adam Krug. Will you please have my child brought here at once, at once——”

  “A little patience,” said Kol dipping his pen. “I admit the procedure is tiresome but the sooner we get it over with the better. All right. K,r,u,g. Age?”

  “Will this nonsense be necessary if I tell you straightaway that I have changed my mind?”

  “It is necessary under all circumstances. Sex—male. Eyebrows—shaggy. Father’s name——”

  “Same as mine, curse you.”

  “Now, don’t curse me. I am as tired as you are. Religion?”

  “None.”

  “ ‘None’ is no answer. The law requires every male to declare his religious affiliation. Catholic? Vitalist? Protestant?”

  “There is no answer.”

  “My dear sir, you have been baptized, at least?”

  “I do not know what you are talking about.”

  “Well, this is most—Look here, I must put down something.”

  “How many questions more? Have you got to fill all this?” (pointing with a madly trembling finger at the page).

  “I am afraid so.”

  “In that case I refuse to continue. Here I am with a declaration of the utmost importance to make—and you take up my time with nonsense.”

  “Nonsense is a harsh word.”

  “Look here, I will sign anything if my son——”

  “One child?”

  “One. A boy of eight.”

  “A tender age. Pretty hard upon you, sir, I admit. I mean—I am a father myself and all that. However I can assure you that your boy is perfectly safe.”

  “He is not!” cried Krug. “You delegated two ruffians——”

  “I did not delegate anybody. You are in the presence of an underpaid chinovnik. As a matter of fact, I deplore everything that has happened in Russian literature.”

  “Anyway, whoever is responsible must choose: either I remain silent for ever, or else I speak, sign, swear—anything the Government wants. But I will do all this, and more, only if my child is brought here, to this room, at once.”

  Kol pondered. The whole thing was very irregular.

  “The whole thing is very irregular,” he said at length, “but I guess you are right. You see, the general procedure is something like this: first the questionnaire must be filled, then you go to your cell. There you have a heart-to-heart talk with a fellow prisoner who really is one of our agents. Then, around two in the morning, you are roused from a fitful sleep and I start to question you again. It was thought by competent people that you would break down between six-forty and seven-fifteen. Our meteorologist predicted a particularly cheerless dawn. Dr. Alexander, a colleague of yours, agreed to translate into everyday language your cryptic utterances, for no one could have predicted this bluntness, this … I suppose, I may also add that a child’s voice would have been relayed to you emitting moans of artificial pain. I had been rehearsing it with my own little children—they will be bitterly disappointed. Do you really mean to say that you are ready to pledge allegiance to the State and all that, if——”

  “You had better hurry. The nightmare may get out of control.”

  “Why, of course, I s
hall have things fixed immediately. Your attitude is most satisfactory. Our great prison has made a man of you. It is a real treat. I shall be congratulated for having broken you so quickly. Excuse me.”

  He got up (a small slender State employee with a large pale head and black serrated jaws), plucked aside the folds of a velvet portière, and then the captive remained alone with his dull “one-one-one.” A filing cabinet concealed the entrance Krug had used some minutes before. What looked like a curtained window turned out to be a curtained mirror. He rearranged the collar of his dressing gown.

  Four years elapsed. Then disjointed parts of a century. Odds and ends of torn time. Say, twenty-two years in all. The oak tree before the old church had lost all its birds; alone, gnarled Krug had not changed.

  Preceded by a slight hunching or bunching or both of the curtain and then by his own visible hand, Konkordiĭ Filadelfovich returned. He looked pleased.

  “Your boy will be brought here in a jiffy,” he said brightly. “Everybody is very much relieved. Been in the care of a trained nurse. She says, the kid behaved pretty badly. A problem child, I suppose? By the way, I am asked to ask you: would you like to write your own speech and submit it in advance or will you use the material prepared?”

  “The material. I am terribly thirsty.”

  “We shall have some refreshments presently. Now, there is another question. Here are a few papers to be signed. We could start right now.”

  “Not before I see my child.”

  “You are going to be a very busy man, sudar, [sir], I warn you. There is sure to be a journalist or two hanging around already. Oh, the worries we have gone through! We thought, the University would never open again. I suppose, tomorrow there will be student demonstrations, processions, public thanksgiving. Do you know d’Abrikossov, the film producer? Well, he said he had known all along you would suddenly realize the greatness of the State and all that. He said it was like la grâce in religion. A revelation. He said it was very difficult to explain things to anybody who had not experienced this sudden dazzling shock of truth. Personally, I am very happy to have had the privilege of witnessing your beautiful conversion. Still sulking? Come, let us erase those wrinkles. Hark! Music!”