Bend Sinister Vladimir Nabokov

HOLDING YOUR CUPPED HANDS together dear, and progressing with the cautious and tremulous steps of tremendous age (although hardly fifteen) you crossed the porch; stopped; gently worked open the glass door by means of your elbow; made your way past the caparisoned grand piano, traversed the sequence of cool carnation-scented rooms, found your aunt in the chambre violette——

I think I want to have the whole scene repeated. Yes, from the beginning. As you came up the stone steps of the porch, your eyes never left your cupped hands, the pink chink between the two thumbs. Oh, what were you carrying? Come on now. You wore a striped (dingy white and pale-blue) sleeveless jersey, a dark-blue girl-scout skirt, untidy orphan-black stockings and a pair of old chlorophyl-stained tennis shoes. Between the pillars of the porch geometrical sunlight touched your reddish brown bobbed hair, your plump neck and the vaccination mark on your sunburned arm. You moved slowly through a cool and sonorous drawing room, then entered a room where the carpet and armchairs and curtains were purple and blue. From various mirrors your cupped hands and lowered head came towards you and your movements were mimicked behind your back. Your aunt, a lay figure, was writing a letter.

“Look,” you said.

Very slowly, rosewise, you opened your hands. There, clinging with all its six fluffy feet to the ball of your thumb, the tip of its mouse-grey body slightly excurved, its short, red, blue-ocellated inferior wings oddly protruding forward from beneath the sloping superior ones which were long and marbled and deeply notched——

I think I shall have you go through your act a third time, but in reverse—carrying that hawk moth back into the orchard where you found it.

As you went the way you had come (now with the palm of your hand open), the sun that had been lying in state on the parquetry of the drawing-room and on the flat tiger (spread-eagled and bright-eyed beside the piano), leaped at you, climbed the dingy soft rungs of your jersey and struck you right in the face so that all could see (crowding, tier upon tier, in the sky, jostling one another, pointing, feasting their eyes on the young radabarbára) its high colour and fiery freckles, and the hot cheeks as red as the hind wings basally, for the moth was still clinging to your hand and you were still looking at it as you progressed towards the garden, where you gently transferred it to the lush grass at the foot of an apple tree far from the beady eyes of your little sister.

Where was I at the time? An eighteen-year-old student sitting with a book (Les Pensées, I imagine) on a station bench miles away, not knowing you, not known to you. Presently I shut the book and took what was called an omnibus train to the country place where young Hedron was spending the summer. This was a cluster of rentable cottages on a hillside overlooking the river, the opposite bank of which revealed in terms of fir trees and alder bushes the heavily timbered acres of your aunt’s estate.

We shall now have somebody else arrive from nowhere—à pas de loup, a tall boy with a little black moustache and other signs of hot uncomfortable puberty. Not I, not Hedron. That summer we did nothing but play chess. The boy was your cousin, and while my comrade and I, across the river, pored over Tarrash’s collection of annotated games, he would drive you to tears during meals by some intricate and maddening piece of teasing and then, under the pretence of reconciliation, would steal after you into some attic where you were hiding your frantic sobbing, and there would kiss your wet eyes, and hot neck and tumbled hair and try to get at your armpits and garters for you were a remarkably big ripe girl for your age; but he, in spite of his fine looks and hungry hard limbs, died of consumption a year later.

And still later, when you were twenty and I twenty-three, we met at a Christmas party and discovered that we had been neighbours that summer, five years before—five years lost! And at the precise moment when in awed surprise (awed by the bungling of destiny) you put your hand to your mouth and looked at me with very round eyes and muttered: “But that’s where I lived!”—I recalled in a flash a green lane near an orchard and a sturdy young girl carefully carrying a lost fluffy nestling, but whether it had been really you no amount of probing and poking could either confirm or disprove.

Fragment from a letter addressed to a dead woman in heaven by her husband in his cups.

HE GOT RID of her furs, of all her photographs, of her huge English sponge and supply of lavender soap, of her umbrella, of her napkin ring, of the little porcelain owl she had bought for Ember and never given him—but she refused to be forgotten. When (some fifteen years before) both his parents had been killed in a railway accident, he had managed to alleviate the pain and the panic by writing Chapter III (Chapter IV in later editions) of his “Mirokonzepsia” wherein he looked straight into the eyesockets of death and called him a dog and an abomination. With one strong shrug of his burly shoulders he shook off the burden of sanctity enveloping the monster, and as with a thump and a great explosion of dust the thick old mats and carpets and things fell, he had experienced a kind of hideous relief. But could he do it again?

Her dresses and stockings and hats and shoes mercifully disappeared together with Claudina when the latter, soon after Hedron’s arrest, was bullied by police agents into leaving. The agencies he called, in an attempt to find a trained nurse to replace her, could not help him; but a couple of days after Claudina had gone, the bell rang and there, on the landing, was a very young girl with a suitcase offering her services. “I answer,” she amusingly said, “to the name of Mariette”; she had been employed as maid and model in the household of the well-known artist who had lived in apartment 30, right above Krug; but now he was obliged to depart with his wife and two other painters for a much less comfortable prison camp in a remote province. Mariette brought down a second suitcase and quietly moved into the room near the nursery. She had good references from the Department of Public Health, graceful legs and a pale, delicately shaped, not particularly pretty, but attractively childish face with parched-looking lips, always parted, and strange lustreless dark eyes; the pupil almost merged in tint with the iris, which was placed somewhat higher than is usual and was obliquely shaded by sooty lashes. No paint or powder touched her singularly bloodless, evenly translucid cheeks. She wore her hair long. Krug had a confused feeling that he had seen her before, probably on the stairs. Cinderella, the little slattern, moving and dusting in a dream, always ivory pale and unspeakably tired after last night’s ball. On the whole, there was something rather irritating about her, and her wavy brown hair had a strong chestnutty smell; but David liked her, so she might do after all.

ON HIS BIRTHDAY, Krug was informed by telephone that the Head of the State desired to grant him an interview, and hardly had the fuming philosopher laid down the receiver than the door flew open and—very much like one of those stage valets that march in stiffly half a second before their fictitious master (insulted and perhaps beaten up by them between acts) claps his hands—a dapper, heel-clicking aide-de-camp saluted from the threshold. By the time that the palace motor car, a huge black limousine, which made one think of first-class funerals in alabaster cities, arrived at its destination, Krug’s annoyance had given way to a kind of grim curiosity. Though otherwise fully dressed, he was wearing bedroom slippers, and the two gigantic janitors (whom Paduk had inherited together with the abject caryatids supporting the balconies) stared at his absent-minded feet as he shuffled up the marble steps. From then on a multitude of uniformed rascals kept silently seething around him, causing him to follow this or that course by means of a bodiless elastic pressure rather than by definite gestures or words. He was steered into a waiting room where, instead of the usual magazines, one was offered various games of skill (such as for instance, glass gadgets within which little bright hopelessly mobile balls had to be coaxed into the orbits of eyeless clowns). Presently two masked men came in and searched him thoroughly. Then one of them retired behind the screen while the other produced a small vial marked H₂SO₄, which he proceeded to conceal under Krug’s left armpit. Having had Krug assume a “natural position,” he called his companion, who approached with an eager smile and immediately found the object: upon which he was accused of having peeped through the kwazinka [a slit between the folding parts of a screen]. A rapidly mounting squabble was stopped by the arrival of the zemberl [chamberlain]. This prim old personage noticed at once that Krug was inadequately shod; there followed a feverish search through the oppressive vastness of the palace. A small collection of footgear began accumulating around Krug—a number of seedy-looking pumps, a girl’s tiny slipper trimmed with moth-eaten squirrel fur, some bloodstained arctics, brown shoes, black shoes and even a pair of half boots with screwed on skates. Only the last fitted Krug and some more time elapsed before adequate hands and instruments were found to deprive the soles of their rusty but gracefully curved supplements.

Then the zemberl ushered Krug into the presence of the ministr dvortza, a von Embit of German extraction. Embit at once pronounced himself a humble admirer of Krug’s genius. His mind had been formed by “Mirokonzepsia,” he said. Moreover, a cousin of his had been a student of Professor Krug’s—the famous physician—was he any relation? He wasn’t. The ministr kept up his social patter for a few minutes (he had a queer way of emitting a quick little snort before saying something) and then took Krug by the arm and they walked down a long passage with doors on one side and a stretch of pale-green and spinach-green tapestry on the other, displaying what seemed to be an endless hunt through a subtropical forest. The visitor was made to inspect various rooms, i.e. his guide would softly open a door and in a reverent whisper direct his attention to this or that interesting item. The first room to be shown contained a contour map of the State, made of bronze with towns and villages represented by precious and semiprecious stones of various colours. In the next, a young typist was poring over the contents of some documents, and so absorbed was she in deciphering them, and so noiselessly had the ministr entered, that she emitted a wild shriek when he snorted behind her back. Then a classroom was visited: a score of brown-skinned Armenian and Sicilian lads were diligently writing at rosewood desks while their eunig, a fat old man with dyed hair and bloodshot eyes, sat in front of them painting his fingernails and yawning with closed mouth. Of special interest was a perfectly empty room, in which some extinct furniture had left squares of honey-yellow colour on the brown floor: von Embit lingered there and bade Krug linger, and mutely pointed at a vacuum cleaner, and lingered on, eyes moving this way and that as if flitting over the sacred treasures of an ancient chapel.

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, terminated 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.

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 shrivelled 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?

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.

Another important feature of our press is the voluntary collaboration of local correspondents—letters, suggestions, discussions, criticism, and so on. Thus we observe that our citizens have free access to the papers, a state of affairs which is unknown anywhere else. True, in other countries there is a lot of talk about “freedom” but in reality a lack of funds does not allow one the use of the printed word. A millionaire and a working man clearly do not enjoy equal opportunities.

Our press is the public property of our nation. Therefore it is not run on a commercial basis. Even the advertisements in a capitalistic newspaper can influence its political trend: this of course would be quite impossible here.

Our newspapers are published by governmental and public organizations and are absolutely independent of individuals, private and commercial interests. Independence, in its turn, is synonymous with freedom. This is obvious.

Our newspapers are completely and absolutely independent of all such influences as do not coincide with the interests of the People to whom they belong and whom they serve to the exclusion of all other masters. Thus our country enjoys the use of free speech not in theory but in real practice. Obvious again.

The constitutions of other countries also mention various “freedoms.” In reality, however, these “freedoms” are extremely restricted. A shortage of paper limits the freedom of the press; unheated halls do not encourage free gatherings; and under the pretext of regulating traffic the police break up demonstrations and processions.

Generally the newspapers of other countries are in the service of capitalists who either have their own organs or acquire columns in other papers. Recently, for instance, a journalist called Ballplayer was sold by one businessman to another for several thousand dollars.

On the other hand, when half a million American textile workers went on strike, the papers wrote about kings and queens, movies and theatres. The most popular photograph which appeared in all capitalist newspapers of that period was a picture of two rare butterflies glittering vsemi tzvetami radugi [with all the hues of the rainbow]. But not a word about the strike of the textile workers!

As our Leader has said: “The workers know that ‘freedom of speech’ in the so-called ‘democratic’ countries is an empty sound.” In our own country there cannot be any contradiction between reality and the rights granted to the citizens by Paduk’s Constitution for we have sufficient supplies of paper, plenty of good printing presses, spacious and warm public halls, and splendid avenues and parks.

We welcome queries and suggestions. Photographs and detailed booklets mailed free on application.

(I will keep it, thought Krug, I shall have it treated by some special process which will make it endure far into the future to the eternal delight of free humorists. O yes, I will keep it.)

As for news, there was practically none in the Ekwilist or the Evening Bell or any of the other government-controlled dailies. The editorials, however, were superb:

We believe that the only true Art is the Art of Discipline. All other arts in our Perfect City are but submissive variations of the supreme Trumpet-call. We love the corporate body we belong to better than ourselves and still better do we love the Ruler who symbolizes that body in terms of our times. We are for perfect Co-operation blending and balancing the three orders of the State: the productive, the executive, and the contemplative one. We are for an absolute community of interests among fellow citizens. We are for the virile harmony between lover and beloved.

(As Krug read this he experienced a faint “Lacedaemonian” sensation: whips and rods; music; and strange nocturnal terrors. He knew slightly the author of the article—a shabby old man who under the pen name of “Pankrat Tzikutin” had edited a pogromystic magazine years ago.)

Another serious article—it was curious how austere newspapers had become.

“A person who has never belonged to a Masonic Lodge or to a fraternity, club, union, or the like, is an abnormal and dangerous person. Of course, some organizations used to be pretty bad and are forbidden today, but nevertheless it is better for a man to have belonged to a politically incorrect organization than not to have belonged to any organization at all. As a model that every citizen ought to sincerely admire and follow we should like to mention a neighbour of ours who confesses that nothing in the world, not even the most thrilling detective story, not even his young wife’s plump charms, not even the day-dreams every young man has of becoming an executive some day can vie with the weekly pleasure of foregathering with his likes and singing community songs in an atmosphere of good cheer and, let us add, good business.”

Lately the elections to the Council of Elders were taking up a good deal of space. A list of candidates, thirty in number, drawn by a special commission under Paduk’s management, was circulated throughout the country; of these the voters had to select eleven. The same commission nominated “backer-grupps,” that is, certain clusters of names received the support of special agents, called “megaphonshchiki” [megaphone-armed “backers”] that boosted the civic virtues of their candidates at street corners, thus creating the illusion of a hectic election fight. The whole business was extremely confused and it did not matter in the least who won, who lost, but nevertheless the newspapers worked themselves into a state of mad agitation, giving every day, and then every hour, by means of special editions, the results of the struggle in this or that district. An interesting feature was that at the most exciting moments teams of agricultural or industrial workers, like insects driven to copulation by some unusual atmospheric condition, would suddenly issue challenges to other such teams declaring their desire to arrange “production matches” in honour of the elections. Therefore the net result of these “elections” was not any particular change in the composition of the Council, but a tremendously enthusiastic albeit somewhat exhausting “zoom-curve” in the manufacture of reaping machines, cream caramels (in bright wrappers with pictures of naked girls soaping their shoulder blades), kolbendeckelschrauben [piston-follower-bolts], nietwippen [lever-dollies], blechtafel [sheet iron], krakhmalchiki [starched collars for men and boys], glockenmetall [bronzo da campane], geschützbronze [bronzo da cannoni], blasebalgen [vozdukhoduvnye mekha] and other useful gadgets.

Detailed accounts of various meetings of factory people or collective kitchen gardeners, snappy articles, devoted to the problems of bookkeeping, denunciations, news of the activities of innumerable professional unions and the clipped accents of poems printed en escalier (incidentally tripling the per line honorarium) dedicated to Paduk, completely replaced the comfortable murders, marriages, and boxing matches of happier and more flippant times. It was as if one side of the globe had been struck with paralysis while the other smiled an incredulous—and slightly foolish—smile.

HE HAD never indulged in the search for the True Substance, the One, the Absolute, the Diamond suspended from the Christmas Tree of the Cosmos. He had always felt the faint ridicule of a finite mind peering at the iridescence of the invisible through the prison bars of integers. And even if the Thing could be caught, why should he, or anybody else for that matter, wish the phenomenon to lose its curls, its mask, its mirror, and become the bald noumenon?

On the other hand, if (as some of the wiser neo-mathematicians thought) the physical world could be said to consist of measure groups (tangles of stresses, sunset swarms of electric midgets) moving like mouches volantes on a shadowy background that lay outside the scope of physics, then, surely, the meek restriction of one’s interest to measuring the measurable smacked of the most humiliating futility. Take yourself away, you, with your ruler and scales! For without your rules, in an unscheduled event other than the paper chase of science, barefooted Matter does overtake Light.

We shall imagine then a prism or prison where rainbows are but octaves of ethereal vibrations and where cosmogonists with transparent heads keep walking into each other and passing through each other’s vibrating voids while, all around, various frames of reference pulsate with Fitz-Gerald contractions. Then we give a good shake to the telescopoid kaleidoscope (for what is your cosmos but an instrument containing small bits of coloured glass which, by an arrangement of mirrors, appear in a variety of symmetrical forms when rotated—mark: when rotated) and throw the damned thing away.

How many of us have begun building anew—or thought they were building anew! Then they surveyed their construction. And lo: Heraclitus the Weeping Willow was shimmering by the door and Parmenides the Smoke was coming out of the chimney and Pythagoras (already inside) was drawing the shadows of the window frames on the bright polished floor where the flies played (I settle and you buzz by; then I buzz up and you settle; then jerk-jerk-jerk; then we both buzz up).

Long summer days. Olga playing the piano. Music, order.

The trouble with Krug, thought Krug, was that for long summer years and with enormous success he had delicately taken apart the systems of others and had acquired thereby a reputation for an impish sense of humour and delightful common sense whereas in fact he was a big sad hog of a man and the “common sense” affair had turned out to be the gradual digging of a pit to accommodate pure smiling madness.

He was constantly being called one of the most eminent philosophers of his time but he knew that nobody could really define what special features his philosophy had, or what “eminent” meant or what “his time” exactly was, or who were the other worthies. When writers in foreign countries were called his disciples he never could find in their writings anything remotely akin to the style or temper of thought which, without his sanction, critics had assigned to him, so that he finally began regarding himself (robust rude Krug) as an illusion or rather as a shareholder in an illusion which was highly appreciated by a great number of cultured people (with a generous sprinkling of semi-cultured ones). It was much the same thing as is liable to happen in novels when the author and his yes-characters assert that the hero is a “great artist” or a “great poet” without, however, bringing any proofs (reproductions of his paintings, samples of his poetry); indeed, taking care not to bring such proofs since any sample would be sure to fall short of the reader’s expectations and fancy. Krug, while wondering who had puffed him up, who had projected him on to the screen of fame, could not help feeling that in some odd way he did deserve it, that he really was bigger and brighter than most of the men around him; but he also knew that what people saw in him, without realizing it perhaps, was not an admirable expansion of positive matter but a kind of inaudible frozen explosion (as if the reel had been stopped at the point where the bomb bursts) with some debris gracefully poised in mid-air.

When this type of mind, so good at “creative destruction,” says to itself as any poor misled philosopher (oh, that cramped uncomfortable “I,” that chess-Mephisto concealed in the cogito!) might say: “Now I have cleared the ground, now I will build, and the gods of ancient philosophy shall not intrude”—the result generally is a cold little heap of truisms fished out of the artificial lake into which they had been especially put for the purpose. What Krug hoped to fish out was something belonging not only to an undescribed species or genus or family or order, but something representing a brand-new class.

Now let us have this quite clear. What is more important to solve: the “outer” problem (space, time, matter, the unknown without) or the “inner” one (life, thought, love, the unknown within) or again their point of contact (death)? For we agree, do we not, that problems as problems do exist even if the world be something made of nothing within nothing made of something. Or is “outer” and “inner” an illusion too, so that a great mountain may be said to stand a thousand dreams high and hope and terror can be as easily charted as the capes and bays they helped to name?

Answer! Oh, that exquisite sight: a wary logician picking his way among the thorn bushes and pitfalls of thought, marking a tree or a cliff (this I have passed, this Nile is settled), looking back (“in other words”) and cautiously testing some quaggy ground (now let us proceed——); having his carload of tourists stop at the base of a metaphor or Simple Example (let us suppose that an elevator——); pressing on, surmounting all difficulties and finally arriving in triumph at the very first tree he had marked!

And then, thought Krug, on top of everything, I am a slave of images. We speak of one thing being like some other thing when what we are really craving to do is to describe something that is like nothing on earth. Certain mind pictures have become so adulterated by the concept of “time” that we have come to believe in the actual existence of a permanently moving bright fissure (the point of perception) between our retrospective eternity which we cannot recall and the prospective one which we cannot know. We are not really able to measure time because no gold second is kept in a case in Paris but, quite frankly, do you not imagine a length of several hours more exactly than a length of several miles?

And now, ladies and gentlemen, we come to the problem of death. It may be said with as fair an amount of truth as is practically available that to seek perfect knowledge is the attempt of a point in space and time to identify itself with every other point: death is either the instantaneous gaining of perfect knowledge (similar say to the instantaneous disintegration of stone and ivy composing the circular dungeon where formerly the prisoner had to content himself with only two small apertures optically fusing into one; whilst now, with the disappearance of all walls, he can survey the entire circular landscape), or absolute nothingness, nichto.

And this, snorted Krug, is what you call a brand-new class of thinking! Have some more fish.

Who could have believed that his powerful brain would become so disorganized? In the old days whenever he took up a book, the underscored passages, his lightning notes in the margin used to come together almost automatically, and a new essay, a new chapter was ready—but now he was almost incapable of lifting the heavy pencil from the dusty thick carpet where it had fallen from his limp hand.

ON THE FOURTH, he searched through some old papers and found a reprint of a Henry Doyle Lecture which he had delivered before the Philosophical Society of Washington. He reread a passage he had polemically quoted in regard to the idea of substance: “When a body is sweet and white all over, the motions of whiteness and sweetness are repeated in various places and intermixed.…” [Da mi basia mille.]

On the fifth, he went on foot to the Ministry of Justice and demanded an interview in connection with the arrest of his friends but it gradually transpired that the place had been turned into a hotel and that the man whom he had taken for a high official was merely the headwaiter.

On the eighth, as he was showing David how to touch a pellet of bread with the tips of two crossed fingers so as to produce a kind of mirror effect in terms of contact (the feel of a second pellet), Mariette laid her bare forearm and elbow upon his shoulder and watched with interest, fidgeting all the time, tickling his temple with her brown hair and scratching her thigh with a knitting needle.

On the tenth, a student called Phokus attempted to see him but was not admitted, partly because he never allowed any scholastic matters to bother him outside his (for the moment nonexistent) office, but mainly because there were reasons to think that this Phokus might be a Government spy.

On the night of the twelfth, he dreamt that he was surreptitiously enjoying Mariette while she sat, wincing a little, in his lap during the rehearsal of a play in which she was supposed to be his daughter.

On the night of the thirteenth, he was drunk.

On the fifteenth, an unknown voice on the telephone informed him that Blanche Hedron, his friend’s sister, had been smuggled abroad and was now safe in Budafok, a place situated apparently somewhere in Central Europe.

On the seventeenth, he received a curious letter:

“Rich Sir, an agent of mine abroad has been informed by two of your friends, Messrs Berenz and Marbel, that you are seeking to purchase a reproduction of Turok’s masterpiece “Escape.” If you care to visit my shop (“Brikabrak,” Dimmerlamp Street 14) around five in the afternoon Monday, Tuesday or Friday, I shall be glad to discuss the possibility of your——” a large blot eclipsed the end of the sentence. The letter was signed “Peter Quist, Antiques.”

After a prolonged study of a map of the city, he discovered the street in its north-western corner. He laid down his magnifying glass and removed his spectacles. Making those little sticky sounds he was wont to make at such times, he put his spectacles on again, and took up the glass and tried to discover whether any of the bus routes (marked in red) would bring him there. Yes, it could be done. In a casual flash, for no reason at all, he recollected a way Olga had of lifting her left eyebrow when she looked at herself in the mirror.

Do all people have that? A face, a phrase, a landscape, an air bubble from the past suddenly floating up as if released by the head warden’s child from a cell in the brain while the mind is at work on some totally different matter? Something of the sort also occurs just before falling asleep when what you think you are thinking is not at all what you think. Or two parallel passenger trains of thought, one overtaking the other.

Outside, the roughish edges of the air had a touch of spring about them although the year had only begun.

An amusing new law demanded that everyone boarding a motor bus not only show his or her passport, but also give the conductor a signed and numbered photograph. The process of checking whether the likeness, signature and number corresponded to those of the passport was a lengthy one. It had been further decreed that in case a passenger did not have the exact fare (17⅓ cents per mile), whatever surplus he paid would be refunded to him at a remote post office, provided he took his place in the queue there not more than thirty-three hours after leaving the bus. The writing and stamping of receipts by a harassed conductor resulted in some more delay; and since, in accordance with the same decree, the bus stopped only at those points at which not fewer than three passengers wished to alight, a good deal of confusion was added to the delay. In spite of these measures buses were singularly crowded these days.

Nevertheless, Krug managed to reach his destination: together with two youths whom he had bribed (ten kruns each) for helping to make up the necessary trio, he landed precisely where he had decided to land. His two companions (who frankly confessed that they were making a living of it) immediately boarded a moving trolley car (where the regulations were still more complicated).

It had grown dark while he had been travelling and the crooked little street lived up to its name. He felt excited, insecure, apprehensive. He saw the possibility of escaping from Padukgrad into a foreign country as a kind of return into his own past because his own country had been a free country in the past. Granted that space and time were one, escape and return became interchangeable. The peculiar character of the past (bliss unvalued at the time, her fiery hair, her voice reading of small humanized animals to her child) looked as if it could be replaced or at least mimicked by the character of a country where his child could be brought up in security, liberty, peace (a long long beach dotted with bodies, a sunny honey and her satin Latin—advertisement of some American stuff somewhere seen, somehow remembered). My God, he thought, que j’ai été veule, this ought to have been done months ago, the poor dear man was right. The street seemed to be full of bookshops and dim little pubs. Here we are. Pictures of birds and flowers, old books, a polka-dotted china cat. He went in.

The owner of the shop, Peter Quist, was a middle-aged man with a brown face, a flat nose, a clipped black moustache and wavy black hair. He was simply but neatly attired in a blue-and-white striped washable summer suit. As Krug entered he was saying goodbye to an old lady who had an old-fashioned feathery grey boa round her neck. She glanced at Krug keenly before lowering her voilette and swept out.

“Know who that was?” asked Quist.

Krug shook his head.

“Ever met the late President’s widow?”

“Yes,” said Krug, “I have.”

“And what about his sister—ever met her?”

“I do not think so.”

“Well, that was his sister,” said Quist negligently. Krug blew his nose and while wiping it cast a look at the contents of the shop: mainly books. A heap of Librairie Hachette volumes (Molière and the like), vile paper, disintegrating covers, were rotting in a corner. A beautiful plate from some early nineteenth-century insect book showed an ocellated hawk moth and its shagreen caterpillar which clung to a twig and arched its neck. A large discoloured photograph (1894) representing a dozen or so bewhiskered men in tights with artificial limbs (some had as many as two arms and one leg) and a brightly coloured picture of a Mississippi flatboat graced one of the panels.

“Well,” said Quist, “I am certainly glad to meet you.”

Shake hands.

“It was Turok who gave me your address,” said the genial antiquarian as he and Krug settled down in two armchairs in the depth of the shop. “Before we come to any arrangement I want to tell you quite frankly: all my life I have been smuggling—dope, diamonds, old masters.… And now—people. I do it solely to meet the expenses of my private urges and orgies, but I do it well.”

“Yes,” said Krug, “yes, I see. I tried to locate Turok some time ago but he was away on business.”

“Well, he got your eloquent letter just before he was arrested.”

“Yes,” said Krug, “yes. So he has been arrested. That I did not know.”

“I am in touch with the whole group,” explained Quist with a slight bow.

“Tell me,” said Krug, “have you any news of my friends—the Maximovs, Ember, Hedron?”

“None, though I can easily imagine how distasteful they must find the prison regime. Allow me to embrace you, Professor.”

He leaned forward and gave Krug an old-fashioned kiss on the left shoulder. Tears came to Krug’s eyes. Quist coughed self-consciously and continued:

“However, let us not forget that I am a hard businessman and therefore above these … unnecessary emotions. True, I want to save you, but I also want money for it. You would have to pay me two thousand kruns.”

“It is not much,” said Krug.

“Anyway,” said Quist dryly, “it is sufficient to pay the brave men who take my shivering clients across the border.”

He got up, fetched a box of Turkish cigarettes, offered one to Krug (who refused), lit up, carefully arranged the burning match in a pink and violet sea shell for ashtray so that it would go on burning. Its end squirmed, blackened.

“You will excuse me,” he said, “for having yielded to a movement of affection and exaltation. See this scar?”

He showed the back of his hand.

“This,” he said, “I received in a duel, in Hungary, four years ago. We used cavalry sabres. In spite of my several wounds, I managed to kill my opponent. He was a great man, a brilliant brain, a gentle heart, but he had had the misfortune of jokingly referring to my young sister as ‘cette petite Phryné qui se croit Ophélie.’ You see, the romantic little thing had attempted to drown herself in his swimming pool.”

He smoked in silence.

“And there is no way to get them out of there?” asked Krug.

“Out of where? Oh, I see. No. My organization is of a different type. We call it fruntgenz [frontier geese] in our professional jargon, not turmbrokhen [prison breakers]. So you are willing to pay me what I ask? Bene. Would you still be willing if I asked as much money as you have in the world?”

“Certainly,” said Krug. “Any of the foreign universities would repay me.”

Quist laughed and became rather coyly engaged in fishing a bit of cotton out of a little bottle containing some tablets.

“You know what?” he said with a simper. “If I were an agent provocateur, which of course I am not, I would make at this point the following mental observation: Madamka (supposing this to be your nickname in the spying department) is eager to leave the country, no matter what it would cost him.”

“And by golly you would be right,” said Krug.

“You will also have to make a special present to me,” continued Quist. “Namely, your library, your manuscripts, every scrap of writing. You would have to be as naked as an earthworm when you left this country.”

“Splendid,” said Krug. “I shall save the contents of my waste basket for you.”

“Well,” said Quist, “if so, then, this is about all.”

“When could you arrange it?” asked Krug.

“Arrange what?”

“My flight.”

“Oh that. Well—Are you in a hurry?”

“Yes. In a tremendous hurry. I want to get my child out of here.”

“Child?”

“Yes, a boy of eight.”

“Yes. Of course, you have a child.”

There was a curious pause. A dull red slowly suffused Quist’s face. He looked down. With soft claws he plucked at his mouth and cheeks. What fools they had been! Now promotion was his.

“My clients,” said Quist, “have to do about twenty miles on foot, through blueberry woods and cranberry bogs. The rest of the time they lie at the bottom of trucks, and every jolt tells. The food is scant and crude. The satisfaction of natural needs has to be denied one’s self for ten hours at a stretch or more. Your physique is good, you will stand it. Of course, taking your child with you is quite out of the question.”

“Oh, I think he would be as quiet as a mouse,” said Krug. “And I could carry him as long as I can carry myself.”

“One day,” murmured Quist, “you were not able to carry him a couple of miles to the railway station.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“I said: some day you will not be able to carry him as far as it is from here to the station. That however, is not the essential point. Do you visualize the dangers?”

“Vaguely. But I could never leave my child behind.”

There was another pause. Quist twisted a bit of cotton round the head of a match and probed the inner recesses of his left ear. He inspected with satisfaction the gold he obtained.

“Well,” he said, “I shall see what can be done. We must keep in touch of course.”

“Could we not fix an appointment?” suggested Krug, rising from his chair and looking for his hat. “I mean you might want some money in advance. Yes, I can see it. It is under the table. Thanks.”

“You are welcome,” said Quist. “What about some day next week? Would Tuesday do? Around five in the afternoon?”

“That would be perfect.”

“Would you care to meet me on Neptune Bridge? Say, near the twentieth lamp-post?”

“Gladly.”

“At your service. I confess our little talk has clarified the whole situation to a most marvellous degree. It is a pity you cannot stay longer.”

“I shudder,” said Krug, “to think of the long journey home. It will take me hours to get back.”

“Oh, but I can show you a shorter way,” said Quist. “Wait a minute. A very short and pleasant cut.”

He went to the foot of a winding staircase and looking up called:

“Mac!”

There was no answer. He waited, with his face now turned upwards, now half turned to Krug—not really looking at Krug: blinking, listening.

“Mac!”

Again there was no reply, and after a while Quist decided to go upstairs and fetch what he wanted himself.

Krug examined some poor things on a shelf: an old rusty bicycle bell, a brown tennis racket, an ivory penholder with a tiny peephole of crystal. He peeped, closing one eye; he saw a cinnabar sunset and a black bridge. Gruss aus Padukbad.

Quist came down the steps humming and skipping, with a bundle of keys in his hand. Of these he selected the brightest and unlocked a secret door under the stairs. Silently he pointed down a long passage. There were obsolete posters and elbowed water pipes on its dimly lit walls.

“Why, thank you very much,” said Krug.

But Quist had already closed the door after him. Krug walked down the passage, his overcoat unbuttoned, his hands thrust into his trouser pockets. His shadow accompanied him like a Negro porter carrying too many bags.

Presently he came to another door consisting of rough boards roughly knocked together. He pushed it and stepped into his own back yard. Next morning he went down to inspect this exit from an ingressive angle. But now it was cunningly camouflaged, merging partly with some planks that were propped against the wall of the yard and partly with the door of a proletarian privy. On some bricks nearby the mournful detective assigned to his house and an organ-grinder of sorts sat playing chemin de fer; a soiled nine of spades lay on the ashstrewn ground at their feet, and, with a pang of impatient desire, he visualized a railway platform and glanced at a playing card and bits of orange peel enlivening the coal dust between the rails under a Pullman car which was still waiting for him in a blend of summer and smoke but a minute later would be gliding out of the station, away, away, into the fair mist of the incredible Carolinas. And following it along the darkling swamps, and hanging faithfully in the evening aether, and slipping through the telegraph wires, as chaste as a wove-paper watermark, as smoothly moving as the transparent tangle of cells that floats athwart an overworked eye, the lemon-pale double of the lamp that shone above the passenger would mysteriously travel across the turquoise landscape in the window.

THREE CHAIRS placed one behind the other.

Same idea

“The what?”

“The cowcatcher.”

A Chinese checker board resting against the legs of the first chair represented the cowcatcher. The last chair was the observation car.

“I see. And now the engine driver must go to bed.”

“Hurry up, daddy. Get on. The train is moving!”

“Look here, my darling——”

“Oh, please. Sit down just for a minute.”

“No, my darling—I told you.”

“But it’s just one minute. Oh, daddy! Mariette does not want to, you don’t want to. Nobody wants to travel with me on my supertrain.”

“Not now. It is really time to——”

To be going to bed, to be going to school,—bedtime, dinnertime, tubtime, never just “time”; time to get up, time to go out, time to go home, time to put out all the lights, time to die.

And what agony, thought Krug the thinker, to love so madly a little creature, formed in some mysterious fashion (even more mysterious to us than it had been to the very first thinkers in their pale olive groves) by the fusion of two mysteries, or rather two sets of a trillion of mysteries each; formed by a fusion which is, at the same time, a matter of choice and a matter of chance and a matter of pure enchantment; thus formed and then permitted to accumulate trillions of its own mysteries; the whole suffused with consciousness, which is the only real thing in the world and the greatest mystery of all.

He saw David a year or two older, sitting on a vividly labelled trunk at the customs house on the pier.

He saw him riding a bicycle in between brilliant forsythia shrubs and thin naked birch trees down a path with a “no bicycles” sign. He saw him on the edge of a swimming pool, lying on his stomach, in wet black shorts, one shoulder blade sharply raised, one hand stretched shaking out iridescent water that clogged a toy destroyer. He saw him in one of those fabulous corner stores that have face creams on one side and ice creams on the other, perched there at the bar and craning towards the syrup pumps. He saw him throwing a ball with a special flip of the wrist, unknown in the old country. He saw him as a youth crossing a technicoloured campus. He saw him wearing the curious garb (jockeylike except for the shoes and stockings) used by players in the American ball game. He saw him learning to fly. He saw him, aged two, sitting on his chamber pot, jerking, crooning, moving by jerks on his scraping chamber pot right across the nursery floor. He saw him as a man of forty.

On the eve of the day fixed by Quist he found himself on the bridge: he was out reconnoitring, since it had occurred to him that as a meeting place it might be unsafe because of the soldiers; but the soldiers had gone long ago, the bridge was deserted, Quist could come whenever he liked. Krug had only one glove, and he had forgotten his glasses, so could not reread the careful note Quist had given him with all the passwords and addresses and a sketch map and the key to the code of Krug’s whole life. It mattered little however. The sky immediately overhead was quilted with a livid and billowy expanse of thick cloud; very large, greyish, semitransparent, irregularly shaped snowflakes slowly and vertically descended; and when they touched the dark water of the Kur, they floated upon it instead of melting at once, and this was strange. Further on, beyond the edge of the cloud, a sudden nakedness of heaven and river smiled at the bridge-bound observer, and a mother-of-pearl radiance touched up the curves of the remote mountains, from which the river, and the smiling sadness, and the first evening lights in the windows of riverside buildings were variously derived. Watching the snowflakes upon the dark and beautiful water, Krug argued that either the flakes were real, and the water was not real water, or else the latter was real, whereas the flakes were made of some special insoluble stuff. In order to settle the question, he let his mateless glove fall from the bridge; but nothing abnormal happened: the glove simply pierced the corrugated surface of the water with its extended index, dived and was gone.

On the south bank (from which he had come) he could see, further upstream, Paduk’s pink palace and the bronze dome of the Cathedral, and the leafless trees of a public garden. On the other side of the river there were rows of old tenement houses beyond which (unseen but throbbingly present) stood the hospital where she had died. As he brooded thus, sitting sideways on a stone bench and looking at the river, a tugboat dragging a barge appeared in the distance and at the same time one of the last snowflakes (the cloud overhead seemed to be dissolving in the now generously flushed sky) grazed his underlip: it was a regular soft wet flake, he reflected, but perhaps those that had been descending upon the water itself had been different ones. The tug steadily approached. As it was about to plunge under the bridge, the great black funnel, doubly encircled with crimson, was pulled back, back and down by two men clutching at its rope and grinning with sheer exertion; one of them was a Chinese as were most of the river people and washermen of the town. On the barge behind, half a dozen brightly coloured shirts were drying and some potted geraniums could be seen aft, and a very fat Olga in the yellow blouse he disliked, arms akimbo, looked up at Krug as the barge in its turn was smoothly engulfed by the arch of the bridge.

He awoke (asprawl in his leather armchair) and immediately understood that something extraordinary had happened. It had nothing to do with the dream or the quite unprovoked and rather ridiculous physical discomfort he felt (a local congestion) or anything that he recalled in connection with the appearance of his room (untidy and dusty in an untidy and dusty light) or the time of the day (a quarter past eight P.M.; he had fallen asleep after an early supper). What had happened was that again he knew he could write.

He went to the bathroom, took a cold shower, like the good little boy scout he was, and tingling with mental eagerness and feeling comfortable and clean in pyjamas and dressing gown, let his fountain pen suck in its fill, but then remembered that it was David’s tucking-in hour, and decided to get it over with, so as not to be interrupted by nursery calls. In the passage three chairs still stood one behind the other. David was lying in bed and with rapid back and forth movements of his lead pencil was evenly shading a portion of a sheet of paper placed on the fibroid fine-grained cover of a big book. This produced a not unpleasant sound, both shuffling and silky with a kind of rising buzzing vibration underlying the scrabble. The punctate texture of the cover gradually appeared as a grey grating on the paper and then, with magical precision and quite independent of the (accidentally oblique) direction of the pencil strokes, the impressed word ATLAS came out in tall narrow white letters. One wondered if by shading one’s life in like fashion——

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 face 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.

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, nodding 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.

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 shall 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!”

He had apparently pressed a button or turned a knob for some trumpety-strumpety sounds issued from somewhere, and the good fellow added in a reverent whisper:

“Music in your honour.”

The band was drowned, however, by a shrill telephone peal. Capital news, evidently, for Kol replaced the receiver with a triumphant flourish and motioned Krug towards the curtained door. After you.

He was a man of the world; Krug was not, and pressed forward like a boorish boar.

Unnumbered scene (belonging to one of the last acts, anyway): the spacious waiting room of a fashionable prison. Cute little model of guillotine (with stiff top-hatted doll in attendance) under glass bell on mantelpiece. Oil pictures dealing darkly with various religious subjects. A collection of magazines on a low table (the Geographical Magazine, Stolitza i Usad’ba, Die Woche, The Tatler, L’Illustration). One or two bookcases with the usual books (Little Women, volume III of the History of Nottingham and so on). A bunch of keys on a chair (mislaid there by one of the wardens). A table with refreshments: a plate of herring sandwiches and a pail of water surrounded with several mugs coming from various German kurorts. (Krug’s mug had a view of Bad Kissingen.)

A door at the back swung open; several press photographers and reporters formed a living gallery for the passage of two burly men leading in a thin frightened boy of twelve or thirteen. His head was newly bandaged (nobody was to blame, they said, he had slipped on a highly polished floor and hit his forehead against a model of Stevenson’s engine in the Children’s Museum). He wore a schoolboy’s black uniform, with belt. His elbow flew up to shield his face as one of the men made a sudden gesture meant to curb the eagerness of the press people.

“This is not my child,” said Krug.

“Your dad is always joking, always joking,” said Kol to the boy kindly.

“I want my own child. This is somebody else’s child.”

“What’s that?” asked Kol sharply. “Not your child? Nonsense, man. Use your eyes.”

One of the burly men (a policeman in plain clothes) produced a document which he handed to Kol. The document said clearly: Arvid Krug, son of Professor Martin Krug, former Vice-President of the Academy of Medicine.

“The bandage perhaps changes him a little,” said Kol hastily, a note of desperation creeping into his patter. “And then, of course, little boys grow so fast——”

The guards were knocking down the apparatus of the photographers and pushing the reporters out of the room. “Hold the boy,” said a brutal voice.

The newcomer, a person called Crystalsen (red face, blue eyes, tall starched collar) who was, as it soon transpired, Second Secretary of the Council of Elders, came up close to Kol and asked poor Kol while holding him by the knot of his necktie whether Kol did not think he was sort of responsible for this idiotic misunderstanding. Kol was still hoping against hope——

“Are you quite sure,” he kept asking Krug, “are you quite sure this little fellow is not your son? Philosophers are absentminded, you know. The light in this room is not very grand——”

Krug closed his eyes and said through clenched teeth:

“I want my own child.”

Kol turned to Crystalsen, spread out his hands and produced a helpless, hopeless bursting sound with his lips (ppwt). Meanwhile, the unwanted boy was led away.

“We apologize,” said Kol to Krug. “Such mistakes are bound to occur when there are so many arrests.”

“Or not enough,” interrupted Crystalsen crisply.

“He means,” said Kol to Krug, “that those who made this mistake will be dearly punished.”

Crystalsen, même jeu:

“Or pay for it severely.”

“Exactly. Of course, matters will be straightened out without delay. There are four hundred telephones in this building. Your little lost child will be found at once. I understand now why my wife had that terrible dream last night. Ah, Crystalsen, was ver a trum [what a dream]!”

The two officials, the smaller one talking volubly and pawing at his tie, the other maintaining a grim silence, his Polar Sea eyes looking straight ahead, left the room.

Krug waited again.

At 11:24 P.M. a policeman (now in uniform) stole in, looking for Crystalsen. He wanted to know what was to be done with the wrong boy. He spoke in a hoarse whisper. When told by Krug that they had gone that way, he repointed to the door delicately, interrogatively, then tiptoed across the room, his Adam’s apple moving diffidently. Was centuries long in closing, quite noiselessly, the door.

At 11:43, the same man, but now wild-eyed and dishevelled, was led back through the waiting room by two Special Guards, to be shot later as a minor scapegoat, together with the other “burly man” (vide unnumbered scene) and poor Konkordiĭ.

At 12 punctually Krug was still waiting.

Little by little, however, various sounds, coming from the neighbouring offices, increased in volume and agitation. Several times clerks crossed the room at a breathless run and once a telephone operator (a Miss Lovedale) who had been disgracefully manhandled, was carried to the prison hospital on a stretcher by two kind-hearted stone-faced colleagues.

At 1:08 A.M. rumours of Krug’s arrest reached the little group of anti-Ekwilist conspirators of which the student Phokus was leader.

At 2:17, a bearded man who said he was an electro-technician came to inspect the heat radiator, but was told by a suspicious warden that no electricity was involved in their heating system and would he please come another day.

The windows had turned a ghostly blue when Crystalsen at last reappeared. He was glad to inform Krug that the child had been located. “You will be reunited in a few minutes,” he said, adding that a new torture room completely modernized was right at the moment being prepared to receive those who had blundered. He wanted to know whether he had been correctly informed regarding Adam Krug’s sudden conversion. Krug answered—yes, he was ready to broadcast to some of the richer foreign states his firm conviction that Ekwilism was all right, if, and only if, his child were returned to him safe and sound. Crystalsen led him to a police car, and on the way started to explain things.

It was quite clear that something had gone dreadfully wrong; the child had been taken to a kind of—well, Institute for Abnormal Children—instead of the best State Rest House, as had been arranged. You are hurting my wrist, sir. Unfortunately, the director of the Institute had understood, as who would not, that the child delivered to him was one of the so-called “Orphans,” now and then used to serve as a “release-instrument” for the benefit of the most interesting inmates with a so-called “criminal” record (rape, murder, wanton destruction of State property, etc.). The theory—and we are not here to discuss its worth, and you shall pay for my cuff if you tear it—was that if once a week the really difficult patients could enjoy the possibility of venting in full their repressed yearnings (the exaggerated urge to hurt, destroy, etc.) upon some little human creature of no value to the community, then, by degrees, the evil in them would be allowed to escape, would be, so to say, “effundated,” and eventually they would become good citizens. The experiment might be criticized, of course, but that was not the point (Crystalsen carefully wiped the blood from his mouth and offered his none too clean handkerchief to Krug—to wipe Krug’s knuckles; Krug refused; they entered the car; several soldiers joined them). Well, the enclosure where the “release games” took place was so situated that the director from his window and the other doctors and research workers, male and female (Doktor Amalia von Wytwyl, for instance, one of the most fascinating personalities you have ever met, an aristocrat, you would enjoy meeting her under happier circumstances, sure you would) from other gemütlich points of vantage, could watch the proceedings and take notes. A nurse led the “orphan” down the marble steps. The enclosure was a beautiful expanse of turf, and the whole place, especially in summer, looked extremely attractive, reminding one of some of those open-air theatres that were so dear to the Greeks. The “orphan” or “little person” was left alone and allowed to roam all over the enclosure. One of the photographs showed him lying disconsolately on his stomach and uprooting a bit of turf with listless fingers (the nurse reappeared on the garden steps and clapped her hands to make him stop. He stopped). After a while the patients or “inmates” (eight all told) were let into the enclosure. At first, they kept at a distance, eyeing the “little person.” It was interesting to observe how the “gang” spirit gradually asserted itself. They had been rough lawless unorganized individuals, but now something was binding them, the community spirit (positive) was conquering the individual whims (negative); for the first time in their lives they were organized; Doktor von Wytwyl used to say that this was a wonderful moment: one felt that, as she quaintly put it, “something was really happening,” or in technical language: the “ego,” he goes “ouf” (out) and the pure “egg” (common extract of egos) “remains.” And then the fun began. One of the patients (a “representative” or “potential leader”), a heavy handsome boy of seventeen went up to the “little person” and sat down beside him on the turf and said “open your mouth.” The “little person” did what he was told and with unerring precision the youth spat a pebble into the child’s open mouth. (This was a wee bit against the rules, because generally speaking, all missiles, instruments, arms and so forth were forbidden.) Sometimes the “squeezing game” started at once after the “spitting game” but in other cases the development from harmless pinching and poking or mild sexual investigations to limb tearing, bone breaking, deoculation, etc. took a considerable time. Deaths were of course unavoidable, but quite often the “little person” was afterwards patched up and gamely made to return to the fray. Next Sunday, dear, you will play with the big boys again. A patched up “little person” provided an especially satisfactory “release.”

Now we take all this, press it into a small ball, and fit it into the centre of Krug’s brain where it gently expands.

The drive was a long one. Somewhere, in a rough mountain region four or five thousand feet above sea level they stopped: the soldiers wanted their frishtik [early luncheon] and were not loath to make a quiet picnic of it in that wild and picturesque place. The car stood inert, very slightly leaning on one side among dark rocks and patches of dead white snow. They took out their bread and cucumbers and regimental thermos bottles and moodily munched as they sat hunched up on the footboard or on the withered tousled coarse grass beside the highway. The Royal Gorge, one of nature’s wonders, cut by sand-laden waters of the turbulent Sakra river through eons of time, offered scenes of splendour and glory. We try very hard at Bridal Veil Ranch to understand and appreciate the attitude of mind in which many of our guests arrive from their city homes and businesses, and this is the reason we endeavour to have our guests do just exactly as they wish in the way of fun, exercise, and rest.

Krug was allowed to get out of the car for a minute. Crystalsen, who had no eye for beauty, remained inside eating an apple and skimming through a long private letter he had received the day before and had not had the time to peruse (even these men of steel have their domestic troubles). Krug stood with his back to the soldiers in front of a rock. This went on for such a long time that at last one of the soldiers remarked with a laugh:

“Podi galonishcha dva vysvistal za-noch [I fancy he must have drunk a couple of gallons during the night].”

Here she had her accident. Krug came back and slowly, painfully penetrated into the car where he joined Crystalsen who was still reading.

“Good morning,” mumbled the latter withdrawing his foot. Presently he lifted his head, hastily crammed the letter into his pocket and called out to the soldiers.

Highway 76 brought them down into another part of the plain and very soon they saw the smoking chimneys of the little factory town in the neighbourhood of which the famous experimental station was situated. Its director was a Dr. Hammecke: short, sturdy, with a bushy yellowish-white moustache, protruding eyes and stumpy legs. He, his assistants and the nurses were in a state of excitement bordering on ordinary panic. Crystalsen said he did not know yet whether they were to be destroyed or not; he expected, he said, to get destructions (a spoonerism for “instructions”) by telephone (he looked at his watch) soon. They all were horribly obsequious, toadying to Krug, offering him a shower bath, the assistance of a pretty masseuse, a mouth organ requisitioned from an inmate, a glass of beer, brandy, breakfast, the morning paper, a shave, a game of cards, a suit of clothes, anything. They were obviously playing for time. Finally Krug was ushered into a projection hall. He was told that he would be led to his child in a minute (the child was still asleep, they said), and in the meantime would not he like to see a movie picture taken but a few hours ago? It showed, they said, how healthy and happy the child was.

He sat down. He accepted the flask of brandy which one of the shivering smiling nurses was thrusting into his face (so scared was she that she first attempted to feed him as she would an infant). Dr. Hammecke, his false teeth rattling in his head like dice, gave the order to start the performance. A young Chinese brought David’s fur-trimmed little overcoat (yes, I recognize it, it is his) and turned it this way and that (newly cleaned, no more holes, see) with the flickering gestures of a conjuror to show there was no deceit: the child had been really found. Finally, with a twittering cry he turned out of one of the pockets a little toy car (yes, we bought it together) and a child’s silver ring with most of the enamel gone (yes). Then he bowed and retired. Crystalsen, who sat next to Krug in the first row, looked gloomy and suspicious; his arms were crossed. “A trick, a damned trick,” he kept muttering.

The lights went out and a square shimmer of light jumped on to the screen. But the whirr of the machine was again broken off (the engineer being affected by the general nervousness). In the dark Dr. Hammecke leant towards Krug and spoke in a thick stream of apprehensiveness and halitosis.

“We are happy to have you with us. We hope you will enjoy the picture. In the interest of silence. Put in a good word. We did our best.”

The whirring noise was resumed, an inscription appeared upside down, again the engine stopped.

A nurse giggled.

“Science, please!” said the doctor.

Crystalsen, who had had enough of it, quickly left his place; the unfortunate Hammecke tried to restrain him, but was shaken off by the gruff official.

A trembling legend appeared on the screen: Test 656. This melted into a subtle subtitle: “A Night Lawn Party.” Armed nurses were shown unlocking doors. Blinking, the inmates trooped out. “Frau Doktor von Wytwyl, Leader of the Experiment (No Whistling, Please!)” said the next inscription. In spite of the dreadful predicament he was in, even Dr. Hammecke could not restrain an appreciative ha-ha. The woman Wytwyl, a statuesque blonde, holding a whip in one hand and a chronometer in the other, swept haughtily across the screen. “Watch Those Curves”: a curving line on a blackboard was shown and a pointer in a rubber-gloved hand pointed out the climactic points and other points of interest in the yarovization of the ego.

“The Patients Are Grouped at the Rosebush Entrance of the Enclosure. They Are Searched for Concealed Weapons.” One of the doctors drew out of the sleeve of the fattest boy a lumberman’s saw. “Bad Luck, Fatso!” A collection of labelled implements was shown on a tray: the aforeseen saw, a piece of lead pipe, a mouth organ, a bit of rope, one of those penknives with twenty-four blades and things, a peashooter, a sixshooter, awls, augers, gramophone needles, an old-fashioned battle-axe. “Lying in Wait.” They lay in wait. “The Little Person Appears.”

Down the floodlit marble steps leading into the garden he came. A nurse in white accompanied him, then stopped and bade him descend alone. David had his warmest overcoat on, but his legs were bare and he wore his bedroom slippers. The whole thing lasted a moment: he turned his face up to the nurse, his eyelashes beat, his hair caught a gleam of lambent light; then he looked around, met Krug’s eyes, showed no sign of recognition and uncertainly went down the few steps that remained. His face became larger, dimmer, and vanished as it met mine. The nurse remained on the steps, a faint not untender smile playing on her dark lips. “What a Treat,” said the legend, “For a Little Person to be Out Walking in the Middle of the Night,” and then “Uh-Uh. Who’s that?”

Loudly Dr. Hammecke coughed and the whirr of the machine stopped. The light went on again.

I want to wake up. Where is he? I shall die if I do not wake up.

He declined the refreshments, refused to sign the distinguished visitors’ book, walked through the people barring his way as if they were cobwebs. Dr. Hammecke, rolling his eyes, panting, pressing his hand to his diseased heart, motioned the head nurse to lead Krug to the infirmary.

There is little to add. In the passage Crystalsen with a big cigar in his mouth was engaged in jotting down the whole story in a little book which he pressed to the yellow wall on the level of his forehead. He jerked his thumb towards door A-1. Krug entered. Frau Doktor von Wytwyl née Bachofen (the third, eldest, sister) was gently, almost dreamily, shaking a thermometer as she looked down at the bed near which she stood in the far corner of the room. Then she turned to Krug and advanced towards him.

“Brace yourself,” she said quietly. “There has been an accident. We have done our best——”

Krug pushed her aside with such force that she crashed into a white weighing machine and broke the thermometer she was holding.

“Oops,” she said.

The murdered child had a crimson and gold turban around its head; its face was skilfully painted and powdered: a mauve blanket, exquisitely smooth, came up to its chin. What looked like a fluffy piebald toy dog was prettily placed at the foot of the bed. Before rushing out of the ward, Krug knocked this thing off the blanket, whereupon the creature, coming to life, gave a snarl of pain and its jaws snapped, narrowly missing his hand.

Krug was caught by a friendly soldier.

“Yablochko, kuda-zh ty tak kotishsa [little apple, whither are you rolling]?” asked the soldier and added:

“A po zhabram, milaĭ, khochesh [want me to hit you, friend]?”

Tut pocherk zhizni stanovitsa kraĭne nerazborchivym [here the long hand of life becomes extremely illegible]. Ochevidtzy, sredi kotorykh byl i evo vnutrenniĭ sogliadataĭ [witnesses among whom was his own something or other (“inner spy?” “private detective?” The sense is not at all clear)] potom govorili [afterwards said] shto evo prishlos’ sviazat’ [that he had to be tied]. Mezhdu tem [among the themes? (Perhaps: among the subjects of his dreamlike state)] Kristalsen, nevozmutimo dymia sigaroĭ [Crystalsen calmly smoking his cigar], sobral ves’ shtat v aktovom zale [called a meeting of the whole staff in the assembly hall] and informed them [i soobshchil im] that he had just received a telephone message according to which they would all be court-martialled for doing to death the only son of Professor Krug, celebrated philosopher, President of the University, Vice-President of the Academy of Medicine. Weak-hearted Hammecke slid from his chair and went on sliding, tobogganing down sinuous slopes, and after a smooth swoon-run finally came to rest like a derelict sleigh on the virgin snows of anonymous death. The woman Wytwyl, without losing her poise, swallowed a pill of poison. After trying and burying the rest of the staff and setting fire to the building where the buzzing patients were locked up, the soldiers carried Krug to the car.

They drove back to the capital across the wild mountains. Beyond Lagodan Pass the valleys were already brimming with dusk. Night took over among the great fir trees near the famous Falls. Olga was at the wheel, Krug, a non-driver, sat beside her, his gloved hands folded in his lap; behind sat Ember and an American professor of philosophy, a gaunt hollow-cheeked, white-haired man who had come all the way from his remote country to discuss with Krug the illusion of substance. Gorged with landscapes and rich local food (wrongly accented piróshki, wrongly spelled schtschi and an unpronounceable meat course followed by a hot crisscross-crusted cherry pie) the gentle scholar had fallen asleep. Ember was trying to recall the American name for a similar kind of fir tree in the Rocky Mountains. Two things happened together: Ember said “Douglas” and a dazzled doe plunged into the blaze of our lights.

THIS OUGHT never to have happened. We are terribly sorry. Your child will be given the most scrumptious burial a white man’s child could dream up; but still we quite understand, that for those who remain this is——” (two words indistinct). “We are more than sorry. Indeed, it can be safely asserted that never in the history of this great country has a group, a government, or a ruler been as sorry as we are today.”

(Krug had been brought to a spacious room resplendent with megapod murals, in the Ministry of Justice. A picture of the building itself as it had been planned but not actually built yet—in consequence of fires Justice and Education shared the Hotel Astoria—showed a white skyscraper mounting like an albino cathedral into a morpho-blue sky. The voice belonging to one of the Elders who were holding an extraordinary session in the Palace two blocks away poured forth from a handsome walnut cabinet. Crystalsen and several clerks were whispering together in another part of the hall.)

“We feel, however,” continued the walnut voice, “that nothing has changed in the relationship, the bond, the agreement which you, Adam Krug, so solemnly defined just before the personal tragedy occurred. Individual lives are insecure; but we guarantee the immortality of the State. Citizens die so that the city may live. We cannot believe that any personal bereavement can come between you and our Ruler. On the other hand, there is practically no limit to the amends we are ready to make. In the first place our foremost Funeral Home has agreed to deliver a bronze casket with garnet and turquoise incrustations. Therein your little Arvid will lie clasping his favourite toy, a box of tin soldiers, which at this very moment several experts at the Ministry of War are minutely checking in regard to the correctness of uniforms and weapons. In the second place, the six main culprits will be executed by an inexperienced headsman in your presence. This is a sensational offer.”

(Krug had been shown these persons in their death cells a few minutes before. The two dark pimply youths attended by a Catholic priest were putting on a brave show, due mainly to lack of imagination. Mariette sat with closed eyes, in a rigid faint, bleeding gently. Of the other three the less said the better.)

“You will certainly appreciate,” said the walnut and fudge voice, “the effort we make to atone for the worst blunder that could have been committed under the circumstances. We are ready to condone many things, including murder, but there is one crime that can never, never be forgiven; and that is carelessness in the performance of one’s official duty. We also feel that having made the handsome amends just stated, we are through with the whole miserable business and do not have to refer to it any more. You will be pleased to hear that we are ready to discuss with you the various details of your new appointment.”

Crystalsen came over to where Krug sat (still in his dressing gown, his bristly cheek propped on his abrased knuckles) and spread out several documents on the lion-clawed table whose edge supported Krug’s elbow. With his red and blue pencil the blue-eyed, red-faced official made little crosses here and there on the papers, showing Krug where to sign.

In silence, Krug took the papers and slowly crushed and tore them with his big hairy hands. One of the clerks, a thin nervous young man who knew how much thought and labour the printing of the documents (on precious edelweiss paper!) had demanded, clutched at his brow and uttered a shriek of pure pain. Krug, without leaving his seat, caught the young man by his coat and with the same ponderous crushing slow gestures began to strangle his victim, but was made to desist.

Crystalsen, who alone had retained a most perfect calm, notified the microphone in the following terms:

“The sounds you have just heard, gentlemen, are the sounds made by Adam Krug in tearing the papers he had promised to sign last night. He has also attempted to choke one of my assistants.”

Silence ensued. Crystalsen sat down and began cleaning his nails with a steel shoe-buttoner contained, together with twenty-three other instruments, in a fat pocketknife which he had filched somewhere during the day. The clerks on their hands and knees were collecting and smoothing out what remained of the documents.

Apparently there took place a consultation among the Elders. Then the voice said:

“We are ready to go even further. We offer to let you, Adam Krug, slaughter the culprits yourself. This is a very special offer and not likely to be renewed.”

“Well?” asked Crystalsen without looking up.

“Go and——” (three words indistinct) said Krug.

There was another pause. (“The man is crazy … utterly crazy,” whispered one effeminate clerk to another. “To turn down such an offer! Incredible! Never heard of such a thing.” “Me neither.” “Wonder where the boss got that knife.”)

The Elders reached a certain decision but before making it known the more conscientious among them thought they would like to have the disc run again. They heard Krug’s silence as he surveyed the prisoners. They heard one of the youths’ wrist watch and a sad little gurgle inside the supperless priest. They heard a drop of blood fall upon the floor. They heard forty satisfied soldiers in the neighbouring guardhouse compare carnal notes. They heard Krug being led to the radio room. They heard the voice of one of them saying how sorry they all were and how ready to make amends: a beautiful tomb for the victim of carelessness, a terrible doom for the careless. They heard Crystalsen sorting out papers and Krug tearing them. They heard the cry of the impressionable young clerk, the sounds of a struggle, then Crystalsen’s crisp tones. They heard Crystalsen’s firm fingernails getting at one twenty-fourth of the tight penknife. They heard themselves voicing their generous offer and Krug’s vulgar reply. They heard Crystalsen closing the knife with a click and the clerks whispering. They heard themselves hearing all this.

The walnut cabinet moistened its lips:

“Let him be led to his bed,” it said.

No sooner said than done. He was given a roomy cell in the prison; so roomy and pleasant, in fact, that the director had used it more than once to lodge some poor relatives of his wife when they came to town. On a second straw mattress right on the floor a man lay with his face to the wall, every inch of his body shivering. A huge curly brown wig sprawled all over his head. His clothes were those of an old-fashioned vagabond. His must have been a dark crime indeed. As soon as the door was closed and Krug had heavily sunk on to his own patch of straw and sackcloth, the tremor of his fellow prisoner ceased to be visible but at once became audible as a reedy quaking ably disguised voice:

“Do not seek to find who I am. My face will be turned to the wall. To the wall my face will be turned. Turned to the wall for ever and ever my face will be. Madman, you. Proud and black is your soul as the damp macadam at night. Woe! Woe! Question thy crime. ’Twill show the depth of thy guilt. Dark are the clouds, denser they grow. The Hunter comes riding his terrible steed. Ho-yo-to-ho! Ho-yo-to-ho!”

(Shall I tell him to stop? thought Krug. What’s the use? Hell is full of these mummers.)

“Ho-yo-to-ho! Now listen, friend. Listen, Gurdamak. We are going to make you a last offer. Four friends you had, four staunch friends and true. Deep in a dungeon they languish and moan. Listen, Drug, listen Kamerad. I am ready to give them and some twenty other liberalishki their freedom, if you agree to what you had practically agreed to yesterday. Such a small thing! The lives of twenty-four men are in your hands. If you say ‘no,’ they will be destroyed, if it is ‘aye,’ they live. Think, what marvellous power! You sign your name and twenty-two men and two women flock out into the sunlight. It is your last chance. Madamka, say yes!”

“Go to hell, you filthy Toad,” said Krug wearily.

The man uttered a cry of rage, and snatching a bronze cowbell from under his mattress shook it furiously. Masked guards with Japanese lanterns and lances invaded the cell and reverently helped him to his feet. Covering his face with the hideous locks of his red-brown wig he passed by Krug’s elbow. His jack boots smelled of dung and glistened with innumerable teardrops. The darkness swept back into place. One could hear the prison governor’s creaking spine and his voice telling the Toad what a dandy actor he was, what a swell performance, what a treat. The echoing steps retreated. Silence. Now, at last, you may think.

But swoon or slumber, he lost consciousness before he could properly grapple with his grief. All he felt was a slow sinking, a concentration of darkness and tenderness, a gradual growth of sweet warmth. His head and Olga’s head, cheek to cheek, two heads held together by a pair of small experimenting hands which stretched up from a dim bed, were (or was—for the two heads formed one) going down, down, down towards a third point, towards a silently laughing face. There was a soft chuckle just as his and her lips reached the child’s cool brow and hot cheek, but the descent did not stop there and Krug continued to sink into the heart-rending softness, into the black dazzling depths of a belated but—never mind—eternal caress.

In the middle of the night something in a dream shook him out of his sleep into what was really a prison cell with bars of light (and a separate pale gleam like the footprint of some phosphorescent islander) breaking the darkness. At first, as sometimes happens, his surroundings did not match any form of reality. Although of humble origin (a vigilant arc light outside, a livid corner of the prison yard, an oblique ray coming through some chink or bullet hole in the bolted and padlocked shutters) the luminous pattern he saw assumed a strange, perhaps fatal significance, the key to which was half-hidden by a flap of dark consciousness on the glimmering floor of a half-remembered nightmare. It would seem that some promise had been broken, some design thwarted, some opportunity missed—or so grossly exploited as to leave an afterglow of sin and shame. The pattern of light was somehow the result of a kind of stealthy, abstractly vindictive, groping, tampering movement that had been going on in a dream, or behind a dream, in a tangle of immemorial and by now formless and aimless machinations. Imagine a sign that warns you of an explosion in such cryptic or childish language that you wonder whether everything—the sign, the frozen explosion under the window sill and your quivering soul—has not been reproduced artificially, there and then, by special arrangement with the mind behind the mirror.

It was at that moment, just after Krug had fallen through the bottom of a confused dream and sat up on the straw with a gasp—and just before his reality, his remembered hideous misfortune could pounce upon him—it was then that I felt a pang of pity for Adam and slid towards him along an inclined beam of pale light—causing instantaneous madness, but at least saving him from the senseless agony of his logical fate.

With a smile of infinite relief on his tear-stained face, Krug lay back on the straw. In the limpid darkness he lay, amazed and happy, and listened to the usual nocturnal sounds peculiar to great prisons: the occasional akh-kha, kha-akha yawn of a guard, the laborious mumble of sleepless elderly prisoners studying their English grammar books (My aunt has a visa. Uncle Saul wants to see Uncle Samuel. The child is bold.), the heartbeats of younger men noiselessly digging an underground passage to freedom and recapture, the pattering sound made by the excrementa of bats, the cautious crackling of a page which had been viciously crumpled and thrown into the wastebasket and was making a pitiful effort to uncrumple itself and live just a little longer.

When at dawn four elegant officers (three Counts and a Georgian Prince) came to take him to a crucial meeting with friends, he refused to move and lay smiling at them and playfully trying to chuck them under their chins by means of his bare toes. He could not be made to put on any clothes and after a hurried consultation the four young guardsmen, swearing in old-fashioned French, carried him as he was, i.e. dressed only in (white) pyjamas, to the very same car that had once been so smoothly driven by the late Dr. Alexander.

He was given a programme of the confrontation ceremony and led through a kind of tunnel into a central yard.

As he contemplated the shape of the yard, the jutting roof of yonder porch, the gaping arch of the tunnel-like entrance through which he had come, it dawned upon him with a kind of frivolous precision difficult to express, that this was the yard of his school; but the building itself had been altered, its windows had grown in length and through them one could see a flock of hired waiters from the Astoria laying a table for a fairy tale feast.

He stood in his white pyjamas, bareheaded, barefooted, blinking, looking this way and that. He saw a number of unexpected people: near the dingy wall separating the yard from the workshop of a surly old neighbour who never threw back one’s ball, there stood a stiff and silent little group of guards and bemedalled officials, and among them stood Paduk, one heel scraping the wall, his arms folded. In another, dimmer part of the yard several shabbily clothed men and two women “represented the hostages,” as the programme given to Krug said. His sister-in-law sat in a swing, her feet trying to catch the ground, and her blond-bearded husband was in the act of plucking at one of the ropes when she snarled at him for causing the swing to wobble, and slithered off with an ungraceful movement, and waved to Krug. Somewhat apart stood Hedron and Ember and Rufel and a man he could not quite place, and Maximov, and Maximov’s wife. Everybody wanted to talk to the smiling philosopher (for it was not known that his son had died and that he himself was insane) but the soldiers had their orders and allowed the petitioners to approach only in pairs.

One of the Elders, a person called Schamm, bent his plumed head towards Paduk and half-pointing with a nervously diffident finger, taking back, as it were, every jerky poke he made with it and using some other finger to repeat the gesture, explained the goings on in a low voice. Paduk nodded and stared at nothing, and nodded again.

Professor Rufel, a high-strung, angular, extremely hirsute little man with hollow cheeks and yellow teeth came up to Krug together with——

“Goodness, Schimpffer!” exclaimed Krug. “Fancy meeting you here after all these years—let me see——.”

“A quarter of a century,” said Schimpffer in a deep voice.

“Well, well, this certainly is like old times,” Krug went on with a laugh. “And what with the Toad there——”

A gust of wind overturned an empty sonorous ash can; a small vortex of dust raced across the yard.

“I have been elected as spokesman,” said Rufel. “You know the situation. I shall not dwell upon details because time is short. We want you to know that we do not wish your plight to influence you in any way. We want to live very much, very much indeed, but we shall not bear you any grudge whatsoever——” He cleared his throat. Ember, still far away, was bobbing and straining, like Punch, trying to get a glimpse of Krug over the shoulders and heads.

“No grudge, none at all,” Rufel continued rapidly. “In fact, we shall quite understand if you decline to yield—Vy ponimaete o chom rech? Daĭte zhe nme znak, shto vy ponimaete—[Do you understand what it is all about? Make me a sign that you understand].”

“It’s all right, go on,” said Krug. “I was just trying to remember. You were arrested—let me see—just before the cat left the room. I suppose——” (Krug waved to Ember whose big nose and red ears kept appearing here and there between soldiers and shoulders). “Yes, I think I remember now.”

“We have asked Professor Rufel to be our spokesman,” said Schimpffer.

“Yes, I see. A wonderful orator. I have heard you, Rufel, in your prime, on a lofty platform, among flowers and flags. Why is it that bright colours——”

“My friend,” said Rufel, “time is short. Please, let me continue. We are no heroes. Death is hideous. There are two women among us sharing our fate. Our miserable flesh would throb with exquisite joy, if you consented to save our lives by selling your soul. But we do not ask you to sell your soul. We merely——”

Krug, interrupting him with a gesture, made a dreadful grimace. The crowd waited in breathless suspense. Krug rent the silence with a tremendous sneeze.

“You silly people,” he said, wiping his nose with his hand, “what on earth are you afraid of? What does it all matter? Ridiculous! Same as those infantile pleasures—Olga and the boy taking part in some silly theatricals, she getting drowned, he losing his life or something in a railway accident. What on earth does it matter?”

“Well, if it does not matter,” said Rufel, breathing hard, “then, damn it, tell them you are ready to do your best, and stick to it, and we shall not be shot.”

“You see, it’s a horrible situation,” said Schimpffer, who had been a brave banal red-haired boy, but now had a pale puffy face with freckles showing through his sparse hair. “We have been told that unless you accepted the Government’s terms this is our last day. I have a big factory of sport articles in Ast-Lagoda. I was arrested in the middle of the night and clapped into prison. I am a law-abiding citizen and do not understand in the least why anybody should turn down a governmental offer, but I know that you are an exceptional person and may have exceptional reasons, and believe me I should hate to make you do anything dishonourable or foolish.”

“Krug, do you hear what we are saying?” asked Rufel abruptly, and as Krug continued to look at them with a benevolent and somewhat loose-lipped smile, they realized with a shock that they were addressing a madman.

“Khoroshen’koe polozhen’itze [a pretty business],” remarked Rufel to dumbfounded Schimpffer.

A coloured photograph taken a moment or two later showed the following: on the right (facing the exit) near the grey wall, Paduk was seated with thighs parted, in a chair which had just been fetched for him from the house. He wore the green and brown mottled uniform of one of his favourite regiments. His face was a dead pink blob under a waterproof cap (which his father had once invented). He sported bottle-shaped brown leggings. Schamm, a gorgeous person in a brass breastplate and wide-brimmed white-feathered hat of black velvet, was leaning toward him, saying something to the sulky little dictator. Three other Elders stood near by, wrapped in black cloaks, like cypresses or conspirators. Several handsome young men in operatic uniforms, armed with brown and green mottled automatic pistols, formed a protective semicircle around this group. On the wall behind Paduk and just above his head, an inscription in chalk, an obscene word scrawled by some schoolboy, had been allowed to remain; this gross negligence quite spoiled the right-hand part of the picture. On the left, in the middle of the yard, hatless, his coarse dark greying locks moving in the wind, clothed in ample white pyjamas with a silken girdle, and barefooted like a saint of old, loomed Krug. Guards were pointing rifles at Rufel and Schimpffer who were remonstrating with them. Olga’s sister, her face twitching, her eyes trying to look unconcerned, was telling her inefficient husband to go a few steps forward and occupy a more favourable position so that he and she might get to Krug next. In the background, a nurse was giving Maximov an injection: the old man had collapsed, and his kneeling wife was wrapping his feet in her black shawl (they both had been cruelly treated in prison). Hedron, or rather an extremely gifted impersonator (for Hedron himself had committed suicide a few days before), was smoking a Dunhill pipe. Ember, shivering (the outline was blurred) despite the astrakhan coat he wore, had taken advantage of the altercation between the first pair and the guards and was almost at Krug’s elbow. You can move again.

Rufel gesticulated. Ember caught Krug by the arm and Krug turned quickly to his friend.

“Wait a minute,” said Krug. “Don’t start complaining until I settle this misunderstanding. Because, you see, this confrontation is a complete misunderstanding. I had a dream last night, yes, a dream.… Oh, never mind, call it a dream or call it a haloed hallucination—one of those oblique beams across a hermit’s cell—look at my bare feet—cold as marble, of course, but—Where was I? Listen, you are not as stupid as the others, are you? You know as well as I do that there is nothing to fear?”

“My dear Adam,” said Ember, “let us not go into such details as fear. I am ready to die.… But there is one thing that I refuse to endure any longer, c’est la tragédie des cabinets, it is killing me. As you know, I have a most queasy stomach, and they lead me into an enseamed draught, an inferno of filth, once a day for a minute. C’est atroce. I prefer to be shot straightaway.”

As Rufel and Schimpffer still kept struggling and telling the guards that they had not finished talking to Krug, one of the soldiers appealed to the Elders, and Schamm walked over and softly spoke.

“This will never do,” he said in very careful accents (by sheer will power he had cured himself of an explosive stammer in his youth). “The programme must be carried out without all this chatter and confusion. Let us have done with it. Tell them” (he turned to Krug) “that you have been elected Minister of Education and Justice and in this capacity are giving them back their lives.”

“Your breastplate is fantastically beautiful,” murmured Krug and with a rapid movement of all ten fingers drummed upon the convex metal.

“The days when we pup-played in this very yard are gone,” said Schamm severely.

Krug reached for Schamm’s headgear and deftly transferred it to his own locks.

It was a sissy sealskin bonnet. The boy, with a stutter of rage, tried to retrieve it. Adam Krug threw it to Pinkie Schimpffer who, in turn, threw it up a snow-fringed amassment of stacked birch logs where it stuck. Schamm ran back into the schoolhouse to complain. The Toad, homeward bound, stealthily walked along the low wall towards the exit. Adam Krug slung his book satchel across his shoulder and remarked to Schimpffer that it was funny—did Schimpffer also get sometimes that feeling of a “repeated sequence,” as if all this had already happened before: fur cap, I threw it to you, you threw it up, logs, snow on logs, cap got stuck, the Toad came out …? Being of a practical turn of mind, Schimpffer suggested they better give the Toad a good fright. The two boys watched him from behind the logs. The Toad stopped near the wall, apparently waiting for Mamsch. With a tremendous huzza, Krug led the attack.

“For God’s sake, stop him,” cried Rufel, “he has gone mad. We are not responsible for his actions. Stop him!”

In a burst of vigorous speed, Krug was running towards the wall, where Paduk, his features dissolving in the water of fear, had slipped from his chair and was trying to vanish. The yard seethed in wild commotion. Krug dodged the embrace of a guard. Then the left side of his head seemed to burst into flames (that first bullet took off part of his ear), but he stumbled on cheerfully:

“Come on, Schrimp, come on,” he roared without looking back, “let us trim him, let us get at his guts, come on!”

He saw the Toad crouching at the foot of the wall, shaking, dissolving, speeding up his shrill incantations, protecting his dimming face with his transparent arm, and Krug ran towards him, and just a fraction of an instant before another and better bullet hit him, he shouted again: You, you—and the wall vanished, like a rapidly withdrawn slide, and I stretched myself and got up from among the chaos of written and rewritten pages, to investigate the sudden twang that something had made in striking the wire netting of my window.

As I had thought, a big moth was clinging with furry feet to the netting, on the night’s side; its marbled wings kept vibrating, its eyes glowed like two miniature coals. I had just time to make out its streamlined brownish-pink body and a twinned spot of colour; and then it let go and swung back into the warm damp darkness.

Well, that was all. The various parts of my comparative paradise—the bedside lamp, the sleeping tablets, the glass of milk—looked with perfect submission into my eyes. I knew that the immortality I had conferred on the poor fellow was a slippery sophism, a play upon words. But the very last lap of his life had been happy and it had been proven to him that death was but a question of style. Some tower clock which I could never exactly locate, which, in fact, I never heard in the daytime, struck twice, then hesitated and was left behind by the smooth fast silence that continued to stream through the veins of my aching temples; a question of rhythm.

Across the lane, two windows only were still alive. In one, the shadow of an arm was combing invisible hair; or perhaps it was a movement of branches; the other was crossed by the slanting black trunk of a poplar. The shredded ray of a streetlamp brought out a bright green section of wet boxhedge. I could also distinguish the glint of a special puddle (the one Krug had somehow perceived through the layer of his own life), an oblong puddle invariably acquiring the same form after every shower because of the constant spatulate shape of a depression in the ground. Possibly something of the kind may be said to occur in regard to the imprint we leave in the intimate texture of space. Twang. A good night for mothing.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Vladimir Nabokov was born in St. Petersburg on April 23, 1899. His family fled to Germany in 1919, during the Bolshevik Revolution. Nabokov studied French and Russian literature at Trinity College, Cambridge, from 1919 to 1923, then lived in Berlin (1923–1937) and Paris (1937–1940), where he began writing, mainly in Russian, under the pseudonym Sirin. In 1940 he moved to the United States, where he pursued a brilliant literary career (as a poet, novelist, critic, and translator) while teaching literature at Stanford, Wellesley, Cornell, and Harvard. The monumental success of his novel Lolita (1955) enabled him to give up teaching and devote himself fully to his writing. In 1961 he moved to Montreux, Switzerland, where he died in 1977. Recognized as one of this century’s master prose stylists in both Russian and English, he translated a number of his original English works—including Lolita—into Russian, and collaborated on English translations of his original Russian works.

BOOKS BY VLADIMIR NABOKOV

ADA, OR ARDOR

Ada, or Ardor tells a love story troubled by incest, but is also at once a fairy tale, epic, philosophical treatise on the nature of time, parody of the history of the novel, and erotic catalogue.

Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-72522-0

BEND SINISTER

While it is filled with veiled puns and characteristically delightful wordplay, Bend Sinister is first and foremost a haunting and compelling narrative about a civilized man and his child caught up in the tyranny of a police state.

Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-72727-9

DESPAIR

Extensively revised by Nabokov in 1965, thirty years after its original publication, Despair is the wickedly inventive and richly derisive story of Hermann, a man who undertakes the perfect crime: his own murder.

Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-72343-1

THE ENCHANTER

The Enchanter is the precursor to Nabokov’s classic novel, Lolita. At once hilarious and chilling, it tells the story of an outwardly respectable man and his fatal obsession with certain pubescent girls.

Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-72886-3

THE EYE

The Eye is as much farcical detective story as it is a profoundly refractive tale about the vicissitudes of identities and appearances. Smurov is a lovelorn, self-conscious Russian émigré living in prewar Berlin who commits suicide after being humiliated by a jealous husband, only to suffer greater indignities in the afterlife.

Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-72723-1

THE GIFT

The Gift is the last of the novels Nabokov wrote in his native language and the crowning achievement of that period of his literary career. It is the story of Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev, an impoverished émigré who dreams of the book he will someday write.

Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-72725-5

GLORY

Glory is the wryly ironic story of Martin Edelweiss, a young Russian émigré of no account, who is in love with a girl who refuses to marry him. Hoping to impress his love, he embarks on a “perilous, daredevil” project to illegally reenter the Soviet Union.

Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-72724-8

INVITATION TO A BEHEADING

Invitation to a Beheading embodies a vision of a bizarre and irrational world; in an unnamed dream country, the young man Cincinnatus C. is condemned to death by beheading for “gnostical turpitude.”

Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-72531-2

KING, QUEEN, KNAVE

Dreyer, a wealthy and boisterous proprietor of a men’s clothing store, is ruddy, self-satisfied, and masculine, but repugnant to his exquisite but cold middle-class wife, Martha. Attracted to his money but repelled by his oblivious passion, she longs for their nephew instead.

Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-72340-0

LOLITA

Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov’s most famous and controversial novel, tells the story of the aging Humbert Humbert’s obsessive, devouring, and doomed passion for the nymphet Dolores Haze.

Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-72316-5

LOOK AT THE HARLEQUINS!

Nabokov’s last novel is an ironic play on the Janus-like relationship between fiction and reality. It is the autobiography of the eminent Russian-American author Vadim Vadimovich N. (b. 1899). Focusing on the central figures of his life, the book leads us to suspect that the fictions Vadim has created as an author have crossed the line between his life’s work and his life itself.

Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-72728-6

THE LUZHIN DEFENSE

As a young boy, Luzhin is unattractive, distracted, withdrawn, sullen—an enigma to his parents and an object of ridicule to his classmates. He takes up chess as a refuge, and rises to the rank of grandmaster, but at a cost: in Luzhin’s obsessive mind, the game of chess gradually supplants reality.

Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-72722-4

PALE FIRE

Pale Fire offers a cornucopia of deceptive pleasures: a 999-line poem by the reclusive genius John Shade; an adoring foreward and commentary by Shade’s self-styled Boswell, Dr. Charles Kinbote; a darkly comic novel of suspense, literary idolatry and one-upmanship, and political intrigue.

Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-72342-4

PNIN

Pnin is a professor of Russian at an American college who takes the wrong train to deliver a lecture in a language he cannot master. Pnin is the focal point of subtle academic conspiracies he cannot begin to comprehend, yet he stages a faculty party to end all faculty parties forever.

Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-72341-7

THE REAL LIFE OF SEBASTIAN KNIGHT

Many knew of Sebastian Knight, distinguished novelist, but few knew of the two love affairs that so profoundly influenced his career. After Knight’s death, his half brother sets out to penetrate the enigma of his life, starting with clues found in the novelist’s private papers.

Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-72726-2

SPEAK, MEMORY

Speak, Memory is an elegant and rich evocation of Nabokov’s life and times, even as it offers incisive insights into his major works.

Autobiography/Literature/978-0-679-72339-4

ALSO AVAILABLE
The Annotated Lolita, 978-0-679-72729-3
Laughter in the Dark, 978-0-679-72450-6
Lolita: A Screenplay, 978-0-679-77255-2
Mary, 978-0-679-72620-3
The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov, 978-0-679-72997-6
Strong Opinions, 978-0-679-72609-8
Transparent Things, 978-0-679-72541-1

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