Invitation to a Beheading (24 page)

“Townspeople! One brief remark. Lately in our streets a tendency has been observed on the part of certain individuals of the younger generation to walk so fast that we oldsters must move aside and step into puddles. I would also like to say that after tomorrow a furniture exhibit will open at the corner of First Boulevard and Brigadier Street and I sincerely hope to see all of you there. I also remind you that tonight, there will be given with sensational success the new comic opera
Socrates Must Decrease
. I have
also been asked to tell you that the Kifer Distributing Center has received a large selection of ladies’ belts, and the offer may not be repeated. Now I make way for other performers and hope, townspeople, that you are all in good health and lack nothing.”

Sliding with the same nimbleness between the cross-pieces of the railing, he jumped down from the platform to the accompaniment of an approbatory murmur. M’sieur Pierre, who had already put on a white apron (from under which his jack boot showed) was carefully wiping his hands on a towel, and calmly, benevolently looking around. As soon as the deputy director had finished, he tossed the towel to his assistants and stepped over to Cincinnatus.

(The square black snouts of the photographers swayed and froze still.)

“No excitement, no fuss, please,” said M’sieur Pierre. “We shall first of all remove our little shirt.”

“By myself,” said Cincinnatus.

“That’s the boy. Take the little shirt away, men. Now I shall show you how to lie down.”

M’sieur Pierre dropped onto the block. The audience buzzed.

“Is this clear?” asked M’sieur Pierre, springing up and straightening his apron (it had come apart at the back, Rodrig helped tie it). “Good. Let’s begin. The light is a bit harsh … Perhaps you could … There, that’s fine. Thank you. Perhaps just a wee bit more … Excellent! Now I shall ask you to lie down.”

“By myself, by myself,” said Cincinnatus and lay face down as he had been shown, but at once he covered the back of his neck with his hands.

“What a silly boy,” said M’sieur Pierre from above. “If you do that how can I… (yes, give it here; then, immediately after, the bucket). And anyway why all this contraction of muscles? There must be no tension at all. Perfectly at ease. Remove your hands, please … (give it to me now). Be quite at ease and count aloud.”

“To ten,” said Cincinnatus.

“What was that, my friend?” said M’sieur Pierre as if asking him to repeat, and softly added, already beginning to heave, “Step back a little, gentlemen.”

“To ten,” repeated Cincinnatus, spreading out his arms.

“I am not doing anything yet,” said M’sieur Pierre with an extraneous note of gasping effort, and the shadow of his swing was already running along the boards, when Cincinnatus began counting loudly and firmly: one Cincinnatus was counting, but the other Cincinnatus had already stopped heeding the sound of the unnecessary count which was fading away in the distance; and, with a clarity he had never experienced before—at first almost painful, so suddenly did it come, but then suffusing him with joy, he reflected: why am I here? Why am I lying like this? And, having asked himself these simple questions, he answered them by getting up and looking around.

All around there was a strange confusion. Through the headsman’s still swinging hips the railing showed. On the steps the pale librarian sat doubled up, vomiting. The spectators were quite transparent, and quite useless, and they all kept surging and moving away—only the back rows, being painted rows, remained in place. Cincinnatus slowly descended from the platform and walked off through the shifting debris. He was overtaken by Roman, who was now
many times smaller and who was at the same time Rodrig: “What are you doing!” he croaked, jumping up and down. “You can’t, you can’t! It’s dishonest toward him, toward everybody … Come back, lie down—after all, you were lying down, everything was ready, everything was finished!” Cincinnatus brushed him aside and, he, with a bleak cry, ran off, already thinking only of his own safety.

Little was left of the square. The platform had long since collapsed in a cloud of reddish dust. The last to rush past was a woman in a black shawl, carrying the tiny executioner like a larva in her arms. The fallen trees lay flat and reliefless, while those that were still standing, also two-dimensional, with a lateral shading of the trunk to suggest roundness, barely held on with their branches to the ripping mesh of the sky. Everything was coming apart. Everything was falling. A spinning wind was picking up and whirling: dust, rags, chips of painted wood, bits of gilded plaster, pasteboard bricks, posters; an arid gloom fleeted; and amidst the dust, and the falling things, and the flapping scenery, Cincinnatus made his way in that direction where, to judge by the voices, stood beings akin to him.

Vladimir Nabokov was born in St. Petersburg on April 23, 1899. His family fled to the Crimea in 1917, during the Bolshevik Revolution, then went into exile in Europe. Nabokov studied at Trinity College, Cambridge, earning a degree in French and Russian literature in 1922, and lived in Berlin and Paris for the next two decades, writing prolifically, 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, memoirist, critic, and translator) while teaching Russian, creative writing, and 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 the master prose stylists of the century 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.

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Invitation to a Beheading
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