Invitation to a Beheading

by Vladimir Nabokov

My son proved to be a marvellously congenial translator, and it was settled between us that fidelity to one’s author comes first, no matter how bizarre the result. Vive le pédant, and down with the simpletons who think that all is well if the ‘spirit’ is rendered (while the words go away by themselves on a naïve and vulgar spree – in the suburbs of Moscow for instance – and Shakespeare is again reduced to play the king’s ghost).

a violin in a void.

On the table glistened a clean sheet of paper and, distinctly outlined against this whiteness, lay a beautifully sharpened pencil, as long as the life of any man except Cincinnatus, and with an ebony gleam to each of its six facets. An enlightened descendant of the index finger.

With banal dreariness the clock struck again. Time was advancing in arithmetical progression: it was now eight. The ugly little window proved accessible to the sunset; a fiery parallelogram appeared on the side wall. The cell was filled to the ceiling with the oils of twilight, containing extraordinary pigments. Thus one would wonder, is that some reckless colourist’s painting there to the right of the door, or another window, an ornate one of a kind that already no longer exists.

There, where, whenever life seemed unbearable, one could roam, with a meal of chewed lilac bloom in one’s mouth and firefly tears in one’s eyes …

‘And yet I have been fashioned so painstakingly,’ thought Cincinnatus as he wept in the darkness. ‘The curvature of my spine has been calculated so well, so mysteriously. I feel, tightly rolled up in my calves, so many miles that I could yet run in my lifetime. My head is so comfortable …’

He was impervious to the rays of others, and therefore produced when off his guard a bizarre impression, as of a lone dark obstacle in this world of souls transparent to one another; he learned however to feign translucence, employing a complex system of optical illusions, as it were – but he had only to forget himself, to allow a momentary lapse in self-control, in the manipulation of cunningly illuminated facets and angles at which he turned his soul, and immediately there was alarm. In the midst of the excitement of a game his coevals would suddenly forsake him, as if they had sensed that his lucid gaze and the azure of his temples were but a crafty deception and that actually Cincinnatus was opaque.

Cincinnatus, who seemed pitch-black to them, as though he had been cut out of a cord-size block of night, opaque Cincinnatus would turn this way and that, trying to catch the rays, trying with desperate haste to stand in such a way as to seem translucent. Those around him understood each other at the first word, since they had no words that would end in an unexpected way, perhaps in some archaic letter, an upsilamba, becoming a bird or a catapult with wondrous consequences.

Footsteps ran past. Footsteps ran past. Ran past and returned.

Matter was weary. Time gently dozed.

What anguish! Cincinnatus, what anguish! What stone anguish, Cincinnatus – the merciless bong of the clock, and the obese spider, and the yellow walls, and the roughness of the black wool blanket. The skim on the chocolate. Pluck it with two fingers at the very centre and snatch it whole from the surface, no longer a flat covering, but a wrinkled brown little skirt. The liquid is tepid underneath, sweetish and stagnant. Three slices of toast with tortoise-shell burns. A round pat of butter embossed with the monogram of the director. What anguish, Cincinnatus, how many crumbs in the bed!

Everything was lustrous and shimmering; everything gravitated passionately towards a kind of perfection whose definition was absence of friction. Revelling in all the temptations of the circle, life whirled to a state of such giddiness that the ground fell away and, stumbling, falling, weakened by nausea and languor – ought I to say it? – finding itself in a new dimension, as it were … Yes, matter has grown old and weary, and little has survived of those legendary days – a couple of machines, two or three fountains – and no one regrets the past, and even the very concept of ‘past’ has changed.

The wealth of shadows, the torrents of light, the gloss of a tanned shoulder, the rare reflection, the fluid transitions from one element to another – perhaps all of this pertains only to the snapshot, to a particular kind of heliotypy, to special forms of that art, and the world really never was so sinuous, so humid and rapid – just as today our unsophisticated cameras record in their own way our hastily assembled and painted world.’

But how can these ruminations help my anguish? Oh, my anguish – what shall I do with you, with myself?

Once, when I was a child, on a distant school excursion, when I had got separated from the others – although I may have dreamt it – I found myself, under the sultry sun of midday, in a drowsy little town, so drowsy that when a man who had been dozing on a bench beneath a bright whitewashed wall at last got up to help me find my way, his blue shadow on the wall did not immediately follow him. Oh, I know, I know, there must have been some oversight, on my part, and the shadow did not linger at all, but simply, shall we say, it caught on the wall’s unevenness … but here is what I want to express; between his movement and the movement of the laggard shadow – that second, that syncope – there is the rare kind of time in which I live – the pause, the hiatus, when the heart is like a feather …

And I would write also about the continual tremor – and about how part of my thoughts is always crowding around the invisible umbilical cord that joins this world to something – to what I shall not say yet …

‘What shall I say to you?’ he continued, thinking, murmuring, shuddering. ‘What will you say to me? In spite of everything I loved you, and will go on loving you – on my knees, with my shoulders drawn back, showing my heels to the headsman and straining my goose neck – even then. And afterwards – perhaps most of all afterwards – I shall love you, and one day we shall have a real, all-embracing explanation, and then perhaps we shall somehow fit together, you and I, and turn ourselves in such a way that we form one pattern, and solve the puzzle: draw a line from point A to point B … without looking, or, without lifting the pencil … or in some other way … we shall connect the points, draw the line, and you and I shall form that unique design for which I yearn.

And finally the epilogue: the dark tower, above it a pleased moon, with the corners of its mouth curling upward.

Her world. Her world consists of simple components, simply joined; I think that the simplest cook-book recipe is more complicated than the world that she bakes as she hums: every day for herself, for me, for everyone.

It grew dark. He lay in bed and kept floating. At the customary hour Rodion turned on the light and removed the bucket and tub. The spider lowered itself to him on a thread and settled on the finger which Rodion offered to the furry beastie, chatting with it as with a canary. Meanwhile the door to the corridor remained ajar, and all at once something stirred there … for an instant the twining tips of pale curls drooped, and then disappeared when Rodion moved as he gazed up at the tiny black aerialist receding up under the circus dome. The door still remained a quarter of the way open. Heavy Rodion, with his leather apron and his crinkly red beard, lumbered about the cell, and, when the clock (closer now because of the direct communication) began its hoarse rattle prior to striking, he produced a thick watch from a recess in his belt and checked the time. Then, supposing Cincinnatus to be asleep, he watched him for a rather long time, leaning on his broom as on a halberd. Having reached who knows what conclusions he moved again … Just then, silently and not very fast, a red and blue ball rolled in through the door, followed one leg of a right triangle straight under the cot, disappeared for an instant, thumped against the chamber pot, and rolled out along the other cathetus – that is, towards Rodion, who all without noticing it, happened to kick it as he took a step; then, following the hypotenuse, the ball departed into the same chink through which it had entered. Shoulder...

Cincinnatus did not sleep, did not sleep, did not sleep – no, he was asleep, but with a moan scrambled out again – and now again he did not sleep, slept, did not sleep, and everything was jumbled – Marthe, the executioner’s block, her velvet – and how will it turn out … which will it be? A beheading or a tryst? Everything merged totally, but he did open his eyes for just one more wink when the light went on and Rodion entered on tiptoe, took the catalogue in its black binding from the table, went out, and it became dark.

‘I have a feeling that you will not answer me at any cost; that is logical, for even irresponsibility in the end develops its own logic. For thirty years I have lived among spectres that appear solid to the touch, concealing from them the fact that I am alive and real – but now that I have been caught, there is no reason to be constrained with you. At least I shall test for myself all the unsubstantiality of this world of yours.’

in the confining phenomena of life his reason sought out a possible trail, some kind of vision danced before his eyes – like a thousand iridescent needles of light that surround the dazzling reflection of the sun in a nickel-plated sphere …

‘Excuse me, I forgot something, I’ll catch up with you in a moment,’ and the director gushed back into the cell; he approached Cincinnatus, and for an instant the smile left his purple face; ‘I am ashamed,’ he hissed through his teeth, ‘ashamed of you. You behaved like … I’m coming, I’m coming,’ he yelled, beaming once again, then he snatched the vase of peonies from the table and, splashing water as he went, left the cell. Cincinnatus kept staring into the book. A drop had fallen on the page. Through the drop several letters turned from brevier to pica, having swollen as if a reading glass were lying over them.

I still alive, that is, the sphere of my own self still limits and eclipses my being, but, like any other mortal, I do not know my mortal hour and can apply to myself a formula that holds for everyone: the probability of a future decreases in inverse proportion to its theoretical remoteness.

Perhaps as a citizen of the next century, a guest who has arrived ahead of time (the hostess is not yet up), perhaps simply a carnival freak in a gaping, hopelessly festive world, I have lived an agonizing life, and I would like to describe that agony to you – but I am obsessed by the fear that there will not be time enough.

Yes, from a realm forbidden and inaccessible to others, yes, I know something, yes … but even now, when it is all over anyway, even now – I am afraid that I may corrupt someone. Or will nothing come of what I am trying to tell, its only vestiges being the corpses of strangled words, like hanged men … evening silhouettes of gammas and gerunds, gallow crows – I think I should prefer the rope, since I know authoritatively and irrevocably that it shall be the axe; a little time gained, time, which is now so precious to me that I value every respite, every postponement … I mean time allotted to thinking; the furlough I allow my thoughts for a free journey from fact to fantasy and return … I mean much more besides, but lack of writing skill, haste, excitement, weakness … I know something. I know something. But expression of it comes so hard! No, I cannot … I would like to give up – yet I have the feeling of boiling and rising, a tickling, which may drive you mad if you do not express it somehow.

I am here through an error – not in this prison, specifically – but in this whole terrible, striped world; a world which seems not a bad example of amateur craftsmanship, but is in reality calamity, horror, madness, error – and look, the curio slays the tourist, the gigantic carved bear brings its wooden mallet down upon me.

… In my dreams the world was ennobled, spiritualized; people whom in the waking state I feared so much appeared there in a shimmering refraction, just as if they were imbued with and enveloped by that vibration of light which in sultry weather inspires the very outlines of objects with life; their voices, their step, the expressions of their eyes and even of their clothes – acquired an exciting significance; to put it more simply, in my dreams the world would come alive, becoming so captivatingly majestic, free and ethereal, that afterwards it would be oppressive to breathe the dust of this painted life.

I myself picture all this so clearly, but you are not I, and therein lies the irreparable calamity. Not knowing how to write, but sensing with my criminal intuition how words are combined, what one must do for a commonplace word to come alive and to share its neighbour’s sheen, heat, shadow, while reflecting itself in its neighbour and renewing the neighbouring word in the process, so that the whole line is live iridescence; while I sense the nature of this kind of word propinquity, I am nevertheless unable to achieve it, yet that is what is indispensable to me for my task, a task of not now and not here. Not here!

The horrible “here”, the dark dungeon, in which a relentlessly howling heart is incarcerated, this “here” holds and constricts me. But what gleams shine through at night, and what – It exists, my dream world, it must exist, since, surely there must be an original of the clumsy copy. Dreamy, round, and blue, it turns slowly towards me. It is as if you are lying supine, with eyes closed, on an overcast day, and suddenly the gloom stirs under your eyelids, and slowly becomes first a languorous smile, then a warm feeling of contentment, and you know that the sun has come out from behind the clouds. With just such a feeling my world begins;

the misty air gradually clears, and it is suffused with such radiant, tremulous kindness, and my soul expands so freely in its native realm – But then what, then what? Yes,...

Brought up into the air, the word bursts, as burst those spherical fishes that breathe and blaze only in the compressed murk of the depths when brought up in the net. However I am making one last effort – and I think I have caught my prey … but it is only a fleeting apparition of my prey! There, tam, là-bas, the gaze of men glows with inimitable understanding; there the freaks that are tortured here walk unmolested; there time takes shape according to one’s pleasure, like a figured rug whose folds can be gathered in such a way that two designs will meet – and the rug is once again smoothed out, and you live on, or else superimpose the next image on the last, endlessly, endlessly, with the leisurely concentrat...

… And what I say is not it, not quite it, and I am getting mixed up, getting nowhere, talking nonsense, and the more I move about and search in the water where I grope on the sandy bottom for a glimmer I have glimpsed, the muddier the water grows, and the less likely it becomes that I shall grasp it. No, I have as yet said nothing, or, rather, said only bookish words …

I am cold, weakened, afraid, the back of my head blinks and cringes, and once again gazes with insane intensity, but, in spite of everything, I am chained to this table like a cup to a drinking fountain, and will not rise till I have said what I want.

I knew without knowing, I knew without wonder, I knew as one knows oneself, I knew what it is impossible to know – and, I would say, I knew it even more clearly than I do now. For life has worn me down: continual uneasiness, concealment of my knowledge, pretence, fear, a painful straining of all my nerves – not to let down, not to ring out … and even to this day I still feel an ache in that part of my memory where the very beginning of this effort is recorded, that is, the occasion when I first understood that things which to me had seemed natural were actually forbidden, impossible, that any thought of them was criminal.

I felt such fear and sadness that I tried to submerge within myself, to slow down and slip out of the senseless life that was carrying me onward.

Marthe’s maternal grandparents, so old that one could already see through them;

‘You mean you wanted to save me …’ Cincinnatus said pensively. ‘Whether I wanted to or not is my business, friend of my heart, cockroach-under-the-hearth.

You are not fair either to our good Rodion or, even more important, to his excellency the director. All right – he is not very bright, a little pompous, something of a scatterbrain – and he is not averse to delivering speeches – it’s all true, and I myself sometimes am not in the mood for him and, of course, cannot share with him my inmost thoughts, as I do with you, especially when my soul – pardon the expression – aches.

The subject will now be the precious quality of Cincinnatus; his fleshy incompleteness; the fact that the greater part of him was in a quite different place, while only an insignificant portion of it was wandering, perplexed, here – a poor, vague Cincinnatus, a comparatively stupid Cincinnatus, trusting, feeble and foolish as people are in their sleep. But even during this sleep – still, still – his real life showed through too much.

a moustache with such a delicate hair texture that it seemed to be actually a bit of dishevelled sunlight on his upper lip;

She sighed causelessly, pushed the volume aside, knocked the pencil off, did not catch it in time, and said ‘oops!’ ‘Leave as is,’ said Cincinnatus. ‘There can be no disorder here – only a shifting about.’

for what is a recollection, if not the soul of an impression?

‘now the air is pale, and I am so frozen that it seems to me that the abstract concept of “cold” must have as its concrete form the shape of my body,

“Love at the sloping of our years” – but I know I should not yield – “Becomes more tender and superstitious” – neither to memories, nor to fear, nor to this passionate syncope: “… and superstitious” – and I had hoped so much that everything would be orderly, all simple and neat. For I know that the horror of death is nothing really, a harmless convulsion – perhaps even healthful for the soul – the choking wail of a newborn child or a furious refusal to release a toy – and that there once lived, in caverns where there is the tinkle of a perpetual stillicide, and stalactites, sages who rejoiced at death and who – blunderers for the most part, it is true – yet who in their own way, mastered – and even though I know all this, and know yet another main, paramount thing that no one here knows – nevertheless, look, dummies, how afraid I am, how everything in me trembles, and dins, and rushes – and any moment now they will come for me, and I am not ready, I am ashamed …’

‘My words all mill about in one spot,’ wrote Cincinnatus. ‘Envious of poets. How wonderful it must be to speed along a page and, right from the page, where only a shadow continues to run, to take off into the blue. The untidiness, sloppiness of an execution, of all the manipulations, before and after. How cold the blade, how smooth the axe’s grip. With emery paper. I suppose the pain of parting will be red and loud. The thought, when written down, becomes less oppressive, but some thoughts are like a cancerous tumour: you express it, you excise it, and it grows back worse than before. It is hard to imagine that this very morning, in an hour or two …’

she depicted herself as being calm as snow).

Her short, coarse eyelashes again glistened, and the tears crept down, visiting every dimple on her apple-rosy cheeks. Cincinnatus took one of these tears and tasted it: it was neither salty nor sweet – merely a drop of luke-warm water. Cincinnatus did not do this.

‘Good-bye, Marthe,’ said Cincinnatus. She sat down and lapsed into thought, leaning on her right elbow, and sketching her world on the table with her left hand. ‘How dreadful, how dull,’ she said, heaving a deep, deep sigh. She frowned and drew a river with her fingernail. ‘I thought we would meet quite differently. I was ready to give you everything. And this is what I get for my pains! Well, what’s done is done.’ (The river flowed into a sea – off the edge of the table.)