Adam Krug's Parrot
by Michael H. Begnal
page two of three

Krug employs many strategies to contain his emotions, and one of these is simply to repress or omit moments which he does not wish to confront. Upon returning home from the hospital where Olga has just died, he must kiss David good night, all the time hoping that the child will not ask about his mother. Of course David will pose the overwhelming question, but Krug is not up to dealing with it in his text. "Thank God, it has not been asked--he thought as he closed the door. But, as he gently released the handle, there it came, high pitched, brightly remembered. 'Soon,' he replied. 'As soon as the doctor tells her she can'" (27). The question itself has been replaced by "it," and the situation is thus navigated as painlessly as possible.

The entire question of Olga and her loss is one which plagues Krug throughout his fiction. As he begins his narrative, he states, as objectively as possible: "The operation has not been successful and my wife will die" (2). But Krug leaves the actual acceptance of this fact to his character Ember, with a sudden switch in time and perspective from Krug's dialling the telephone to Ember's writing a letter to the Maximovs after receiving the call. Krug's "I" is immediately replaced by Ember's: "I was in the middle of this letter when Krug rang up and told me a terrible thing. Poor Olga is no more"' (28). Ember is allowed to meditate on the actuality of Olga as she was in life, something which Krug's "I" cannot do: "the way she had of letting a sentence bounce and ripple over the three quick bites she took at the raisin cake she held, and the brisk triple splash of her plump hand over the sudden stretch of her lap as she brushed the crumbs away and went on with her story" (31). By momentarily employing a narrator other than himself, Krug can displace the emotion which would be inherent in the first person, and he even acknowledges to the reader that he is doing so, since Ember is concerned: "with all this and with many other things that Ember knew he could not know" (31). Ember is only echoing Krug when he concludes: "But he could not kill death" (31).

Yet, despite all this, at least in Krug's memory and imagination, Olga will not stay dead. Amid the tension of the ongoing closing of Paduk's net upon the father and the son, Olga consistently reappears with the same surrealistic trappings which adorned Krug's parrot. She manifests herself initially by turning up, totally out of place, in the middle of Krug's dream of a soccer game: "She doffs her diamond tiara before her mirror" (66). As the dream continues, Krug loses his ball, glances into a show window, and there: "within one of them she sat, taking off her dew bright rings and unclasping the diamond collier de chien that encircled her full white throat; yes, divesting herself of all earthly jewels" (66). In neither case does the "she" have a referent, but her identity is obvious to those of us "in the know." A bit later, Krug remembers being upbraided as a student in the headmaster's office, where: "There was also a coloured print depicting a lady in cherry red, sitting before her mirror" (72), again no comment.

The dream form allows the narrator to make Olga's presence known, without the necessity for comment, since who can know what might appear in a dream? Once established in this way, the Olga images persist. Krug explains the Ekwilist theory of the unfair distribution of talent in individual personalities by using a liquid metaphor: "If, for instance, a given amount of water were contained in a given number of heterogeneous bottles wine bottles, flagons and vials of varying shapes and size, and all the crystal and gold scent bottles that were reflected in her mirror, the distribution of the liquid would be uneven and unjust, but could be made even and just either by grading the contents or by eliminating the fancy vessels and adopting a standard size" (75). Olga at her dressing table is becoming omnipresent. The state of things in a corrupt democracy, says Ekwilism, gives precedence: "to those favoured ones (men of bizarre genius, big game hunters, chess players, prodigiously robust and versatile lovers, the radiant woman taking her necklace off after the ball)" (76).

These Olga intrusions come to a head at the conclusion of Krug's long dream, with the standard scholastic nightmare of a student's arriving unprepared for the final examination. The young scholars have been commanded to write two impromptu essays, one upon an "afternoon with Mallarmé," of whom Krug remembers practically nothing, and a second upon a living tableau which is displayed when two teachers pull apart the curtains. The second subject, of course, is Olga.

Olga was revealed sitting before her mirror and taking off her jewels after the ball. Still clad in cherry red velvet, her strong gleaming elbows thrown back and lifted like wings, she had begun to unclasp at the back of her neck her dazzling dog collar. . . . There was a flash, a click: with both hands she removed her beautiful head and, not looking at it, carefully, carefully, dear, smiling a dim smile of amused recollection (who could have guessed at the dance that the real jewels were pawned?), she placed the beautiful imitation upon the marble ledge of toilet table. Then he knew that all the rest would come off too, the rings together with the fingers, the bronze slippers with the toes, the breasts with the lace that cupped them . . . his pity and shame reached their climax, and at the ultimate gesture of the tall cold stripteaser, prowling pumalike up and down the stage, with a horrible qualm Krug awoke. (81 82).

As the narrative progresses, as one Krug is detailing the emotional progression of the other, the father Krug, on the country visit to the Maximovs, realizes that he must make plans for David's future. Having experienced the dream vision of Olga, having realized her, he can now allow himself to address her directly: "Then I must do something about you, my love" (98). "Are not these problems so hard to solve because my own mind is not made up yet in regard to your death?" (99). He states his dilemma clearly though pedantically--the word "death"--as the narrator Krug underlines his problem ironically at the thought's conclusion. "My intelligence does not accept the transformation of physical discontinuity into the permanent continuity of a nonphysical element escaping the obvious law, nor can it accept the inanity of accumulating incalculable treasures of thought and sensation, and thought behind thought and sensation behind sensation, to lose them all at once and forever in a fit of black nausea followed by infinite nothingness. Unquote" (99).

By the time Krug pays a visit to Ember, and the Shakespearean discussion ensues, Krug is ready to accept the physical reality of Olga's death by describing her cremation. While earlier he had hidden behind Ember's interior monologue, now the scene is described from the third person point of view, with the naked first person intruding: "What shall I say?" (111). The two Krugs are coming together, and he can even bring himself, in his sorrow, to note the black humor of mistaken identity. "The priest mistook a blear eyed old man belonging to Viola's party for the widower and while making his oration, and while the beautiful big body was burning behind a thick wall, kept addressing himself to that person (who nodded back), Not even an uncle, not even her mother's lover" (111).

With Olga's spirit finally laid to rest, Krug can now resurrect her artistically, and this he does in Chapter Nine. The portrait of Olga at the age of fifteen, which he offers as the answer to the dream examination of his nightmare, incorporates all the tenderness and love that he has kept beneath the surface of his consciousness until now. The vignette is pure fiction, since the two were not to meet for another five years, and it is the artistic imagination presented without the crutch of memory. Though the piece is directed to Olga, Krug the fictionalist carefully constructs it for himself, complete with more stage directions to his character. "I think I want to have the whole scene repeated. Yes, from the beginning!" (133); "I think I shall have you go through your act a third time, but in reverse" (134). Whereas before his emotions ruled his narration, now he can manipulate them to the benefit of his artifice. (It is possible that Krug is also aware of literary antecedents, as he was in the conversation with Ember, when he alluded to the dream of Joyce's Finnegans Wake with a sly aside: "[cp. Winnipeg Lake, ripple 585, Vico Press edition]" (114).7 Now Olga is provided with an imaginary lover: "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" (135), which reminds one of Gretta Conroy and Michael Furey, a parallel instance in Dubliners. Fittingly, Joyce's story is entitled "The Dead.")

This portrait exists outside of time, or at least outside the time frame of the plot of Bend Sinister, and thus it can include, for the first and only instance, a happy Adam Krug, at eighteen reading Blaise Pascal's Les Pensées and completely unaware of Olga's existence. Later in his life, earlier in the novel, Krug will have to confront in a different context: "those mirrors of infinite space qui m'effrayent, Blaise, as they did you, and where Olga is not" (61). It is this chapter which almost certainly leads to the self realization that: "What had happened was that again he knew he could write" (190). For this short moment, Krug is not at the mercy of the ongoing flow of events in Paduk's kingdom, and art enables him to freeze Olga forever in a fiction which is more real and more quintessential than memory could ever be. In many ways, this is the most overt demonstration of what Nabokov calls the main theme of Bend Sinister: "the beating of Krug's loving heart" (viii). The hawk moth which the youthful Olga releases in the orchard links Krug with the anthropomorphic deity who notices yet another moth at the end of the novel, when: "Olga's rosy soul . . . bombinates in the damp dark at the bright window of my room" (xiii).

Once freed from Olga, Krug the novelist must continue to order the events of the present, and he is in the process of reorganizing his purpose. Shortly after the session with Paduk, Krug decides that he will give up on philosophy, since: "he was too old to bend and rebuild the world which had crashed when she died" (157). But he has not given up altogether, has simply shifted his focus to fictionalizing, to the composing of Bend Sinister. "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 . . . half tingle, half tickle, when you are trying to remember something or understand something or find something" (157). The emphasis will now be placed upon the second Krug, the analyzer and recorder, and, if he cannot truly influence the events of his life, perhaps he can come to understand them through fiction. He can schematize the chaos for himself, and he can do this by making himself a character. "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" (172). He has done this, as we have seen, with the image of Olga, and now he must do the same thing with himself.

Krug the philosopher has become Krug the novelist, and he sets his new direction quite openly: "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)?" (173-174). It is this inner course that Krug will take, and in a humorous and disturbing way he becomes aware of his own sensual nature. He can concentrate on himself. With the inclusion of Mariette into the domestic routine, as David's nanny and (secretly) Paduk's spy, Krug rediscovers his own healthy body and finds that sexual desire is not so easily repressed. "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" (158). But Krug is in a new novel, not an old one, and Mariette's allure is everywhere, including on her bed table: "a large X ray picture of her lungs and vertebrae" (159). (This is not really so incongruous a detail, if one remembers that it is just this sort of memento that the temptress Madame Chauchat gave to the naive Hans Castorp in The Magic Mountain after their evening of delight.)

The vision of his young Carmen naked in the bathtub, which he comes upon unexpectedly, overpowers his composure and even his prose, so that the supposedly objective third person voice cannot maintain its distance in describing the arrival of supper. "She was still in the bathroom when the man from the Angliskii Club brought a meat pie, a rice pudding, and her adolescent buttocks" (163). No comment, and no erasure.

As a quick step backward, the next chapter is devoted to a seemingly dispassionate reproduction of the Ekwilist newspaper, complete with editorials and news of the world: "Recently, for instance, a journalist called Ballplayer was sold by one businessman to another for several thousand dollars" (167). We cannot be sure that Krug gets the joke, just as Charles Kinbote will misunderstand baseball in a future fiction. But even in these journalistic accounts, Krug's imagery betrays his obsession, as when he notes teams of productive workers in the new state: "like insects driven to copulation by some unusual atmospheric condition" (169). They are madly competing to exceed their quotas of such useful items as bells, guns, bellows, reaping machines, and: "cream caramels (in bright wrappers with pictures of naked girls soaping their shoulder blades)" (169). In the succeeding chapter, the novelist resorts to a clinical, diary-like form, but even here the truth must out, in a foreshadowing of the loveplay of Humbert and Lolita. "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" (178).

Krug's immersion in sensuality, and the concomitant struggles with narrative voice, temporarily deflect the fiction away from Paduk's kingdom, but they lead to the bathetic culmination of the almost copulation. In an echo of the previously mentioned insect imagery (Ada, with her Scrabble mind, will later point out that "insect" is "incest" turned inside out), Mariette performs her ultimate seductive trick, which proves too much for Krug. She can chirrup like a cricket. "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" (194). Just as words like "labiate" and "crepitation" strive to maintain a highly formal tone in the face of a sensual breakdown, the narrative voice attempts to wrench the lustful widower back to objectivity. "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" (195). Though he has obviously lost the battle, still his other "I" stands on the side, watching and transcribing, with sympathy, with composure. "Krug said nothing, Krug sat there, sullen and heavy, bursting with vine ripe desire, poor thing" (197). But simple, declarative sentences cannot stem the tide.

6. Many people have noticed the similarities of Bend Sinister and Invitation to a Beheading (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1959), which Nabokov first published in Russian in 1938 and later translated into English himself, with the collaboration of Dmitri Nabokov. Along with the two halves to Krug and two halves to Cincinnatus, the latter takes himself apart, piece by piece, just as Olga does: "He took off his head like a toupee, took off his collarbones like shoulder straps, took off his rib cage like a hauberk" (32). Later on in the novel, Cincinnatus will explain: "'I am taking off layer after layer, until at last . . . I do not know how to describe it, but I know this: through the process of gradual divestment I reach the final, indivisible, firm, radiant point, and this point says: I am!"' (90).

7. I have discussed the Joycean echoes at greater length in "Bend Sinister. Joyce, Shakespeare, Nabokov," Modern Language Studies, 15 (Fall, 1985), 22 27.