Laughter in the Dark (22 page)

At that moment a trap drove up and Margot jumped out of it. She ran toward them and shouted something, but the car was already turning in the road; it almost knocked her down as it backed, then it lurched forward and disappeared round the bend.

O
N
T
UESDAY
Elisabeth received a telegram and at about eight on Wednesday night she heard Paul’s voice in the hall and the pat-pat of a stick. The door opened and Paul led in her husband.

He was clean-shaven; he was wearing dark spectacles; there was a scar on his pale forehead. The unfamiliar purplish brown suit (a shade he would never have chosen himself) seemed rather too large for him.

“Here he is,” said Paul quietly.

Elisabeth began to sob, pressing her handkerchief to her mouth. Albinus bowed silently in the direction of the smothered sobbing.

“Come along, we’ll wash our hands,” said Paul, leading him slowly across the room.

Then the three of them sat in the dining room and had supper. Elisabeth had difficulty in accustoming herself to look at her husband. It
seemed to her that he felt her glance. The melancholy gravity of his slow movements filled her with a tranquil ecstasy of pity. Paul talked to him as though he were a child, and cut up the ham on his plate into little pieces.

He was given what had been Irma’s nursery. It surprised Elisabeth that she found it so easy to disturb the sacred slumber of that little room for the sake of this strange, large, silent occupant; to shift and change all its contents so as to adapt it to the blind man’s needs.

Albinus said nothing. At first, to be sure—while they were still in Switzerland—he had begged Paul with petulant persistency to ask Margot to come and see him; he had sworn that this final meeting would not last more than a moment. (And, indeed, would it take long to grope in the wonted darkness and, holding her tightly with one hand, to thrust the barrel of the automatic against her side and to stuff her with bullets?) Paul had obstinately refused to do as he asked, and after that Albinus had said nothing. He traveled to Berlin in silence, he arrived in silence and he was silent for the next three days, so that Elisabeth never heard his voice any more (except perhaps once): he might have been dumb as well as blind.

The heavy black object, the treasure-house of
seven compressed deaths, lay wrapped in his silk muffler in the depths of his overcoat pocket. Then, when he arrived, he managed to transfer it to a chest of drawers near his bed. He kept the key in his waistcoat pocket and put it under his pillow at night. Once or twice they noticed that he was fumbling and clutching something in his hand, but no comments were made. The touch of that key against his palm, its slight weight in his pocket, seemed to him a kind of Sesame that would—he was certain of it—one day unlock the door of his blindness.

And he still said not a word. Elisabeth’s presence, her light tread, her whispering (she always spoke to the servants and to Paul in a whisper now, as if there were great sickness in the house) were just as pale and shadowy as was his memory of her: an almost soundless memory drifting about listlessly with a faint trail of eau-de-Cologne—that was all. Real life, which was cruel, supple and strong like some anaconda, and which he longed to destroy without delay, was somewhere else—but where? He did not know. With extraordinary distinctness he pictured Margot and Rex—both quick and alert, with terrible, beaming, goggle eyes and long, lithe limbs—packing after his departure; Margot fawned, and caressed Rex among the open trunks and then they both
went away—but where, where? Not a light in the darkness. But their sinuous path burned in him like the trace which a foul, crawling creature leaves on the skin.

Three silent days passed. On the fourth, early in the morning, it so happened that Albinus was alone. Paul had just gone to the police (there were certain things which he wanted to elucidate), the maid was in a back room and Elisabeth, who had not slept all night, was not yet up. Albinus wandered about in an agony of restlessness, fingering the furniture and the doors. For some time the telephone had been ringing in the study, and this reminded him that there was, by this means, the possibility of getting certain information: someone might tell him whether the artist Rex was back in Berlin. But he could not remember a single telephone number and he knew moreover that he would not be able to pronounce that name in spite of its shortness. The ringing became more and more insistent. Albinus found his way to the table, took up the invisible receiver …

A voice which seemed to him familiar asked for Herr Hochenwart—that is, for Paul.

“He is out,” answered Albinus.

The voice hesitated, then suddenly exclaimed brightly:

“Why, is it you, Herr Albinus?”

“Yes. And who are you?”

“Schiffermiller. I just rang up Herr Hochenwart’s office, but he had not arrived. So I thought I’d get him here. How lucky my getting you, Herr Albinus!”

“What’s the matter?” asked Albinus.

“Well, probably it’s quite all right, but I thought my duty was to make quite sure. You see, Fräulein Peters has just come to fetch some things, and … well … I let her into your flat, but I don’t quite know … So I thought I’d better …”

“That’s all right,” said Albinus, moving his lips with difficulty (they felt numb as though from cocaine).

“What did you say, Herr Albinus?”

Albinus made a great effort to conquer speech: “That’s all right,” he repeated distinctly, and hung up with a trembling hand.

He blundered back into his room, unlocked the sacred chest, then went, groping, into the hall and tried to find his hat and stick. But that took too long and he gave it up. Cautiously he patted and shuffled his way down the stairs, clutching the banisters and muttering to himself feverishly. In a few moments he was standing in the street. Something cold and tickling was dripping on his
forehead: rain. He held onto the iron railing of the front garden and desperately prayed for the sound of a taxi-horn. Soon he heard the moist, leisurely swish of tires. He shouted, but the sound moved away unheedingly.

“May I help you across?” asked a pleasant young voice.

“For heaven’s sake, get me a cab,” implored Albinus.

Once more the sound of tires approached. Someone helped him into the taxi and slammed the door. (A window opened in the fourth story, but it was too late.)

“Straight ahead, straight ahead,” said Albinus softly, and, when the taxi was once in motion, he tapped with his finger on the glass and gave the address.

“I’ll count the turnings,” thought Albinus. The first one—this will be Motzstrasse. To the left he heard the shrill jingle of an electric tram. Albinus passed his hand over the seat, the front partition and the floor, suddenly disquieted by the thought that someone might be sitting beside him. Another turning. This must be the Victoria-Luisenplatz or the Pragerplatz? In a moment he would be at the Kaiserallee.

The taxi stopped. Am I really there already? It can’t be. It’s only a cross-road. It must be at
least another five minutes … But the door opened.

“This is number fifty-six,” said the taxi driver.

Albinus stepped out of the taxi. Through the air in front of him arose cheerfully a complete edition of the voice which he had just heard on the telephone. Schiffermiller, the house-porter, said:

“Glad to see you again, Herr Albinus. The young lady is upstairs, in your flat. She …”

“Hush, hush,” whispered Albinus, “pay the taxi, please. My eyes are …”

His knee hit against something which wobbled and jingled—probably a child’s bicycle on the pavement.

“Lead me into the house,” he said. “Give me the key of my flat. Quick, please. And now take me to the lift. No, no, you can stay downstairs. I’ll go up alone. I’ll press the button myself.”

The lift made a low, moaning sound and he felt a faint dizziness. Then the floor seemed to jerk against the soles of his felt slippers. He had arrived.

He got out of the lift, moved forward and stepped with one foot into an abyss—no, it was nothing, only the step leading downstairs. He had to keep still for a moment, he was quivering so.

“It’s to the right, more to the right,” he whispered, and, with outstretched hand, he walked across the landing. At last he found the keyhole, thrust in the key and turned it.

Ah, there it was, the sound he had coveted for days—just to the left, in the little drawing room … a crackle of wrapping paper and then a soft creaking like the sound made by the joints of a person who is crouching down.

“I shall want you in a minute, Herr Schiffermiller,” said Margot’s strained voice. “You must help me to carry this thing …”

The voice broke off.

“She has seen me,” thought Albinus, drawing the pistol out of his pocket.

To the left, in the drawing room, he heard the click of a valise-lock closing. Margot gave a little grunt of satisfaction—it had closed after all—and continued in a sing-song tone:

“…  to carry this down. Or perhaps you might call …”

At the word “call” her voice seemed to turn round and suddenly it was silent.

Albinus was holding the pistol in his right hand ready for use, while with his left he felt the post of the open door, entered, slammed the door behind him and stood with his back to it.

Everything was quiet. But he knew that he
was alone with Margot in the room and that this room had only one exit—the one he was blocking. He could see the room distinctly—almost as if he had the use of his eyes: to the left, the striped sofa, against the right wall, a small table with the porcelain figure of a ballet-dancer; in the corner by the window, the cabinet with the valuable miniatures; in the middle, another large table, very shiny and smooth.

Albinus stretched out his fist and moved the gun slowly to and fro, trying to induce some sound which would betray her exact position. He felt that she was somewhere near the miniatures; from that direction he could catch a faint whiff of warmth tinged with the perfume called “L’heure bleue”; in that corner something was trembling like the air above sand on a very hot day by the sea. He narrowed the curve along which his hand traveled and suddenly he heard a faint rustle. Shoot? No, not yet. He must get much nearer to her. He knocked against the middle table and came to a standstill. He felt that Margot was stealing to one side, but his own body, though fairly still, made so much noise that he could not hear her. Yes, now she was more to the left, near the window. Oh, if she lost her head and started opening it and shrieking, that would be divine—he would have a lovely target.
But what if she slid past him round the table as he advanced? “Better lock the door,” he thought. No, there was no key (doors were always against him). He gripped the edge of the table with one hand and, stepping backward, pulled it toward the door so as to have it behind him. Again the warmth he sensed shifted, shrank, diminished. Having blocked up the exit, he felt freer and again, with the point of his pistol, he located a living, quivering something in the darkness.

Now he advanced as quietly as possible so that he might detect every sound. Blind man’s buff, blind man’s buff … in a country-house on a winter night, long, long ago. He stumbled against something hard and felt it with one hand, never for a moment letting loose the line which he held taut across the room. It was a small trunk. He thrust it away with his knee and moved on, driving the invisible prey before him into an imaginary corner. Her silence irritated him at first; but now he could detect her quite plainly. It was not her breathing, not the beating of her heart, but a sort of general impression: the voice of her life itself, which, in another moment, he would destroy. And then—peace, serenity, light.

Suddenly he was conscious of a relaxation of tension in the corner before him. He shifted the gun, and forced her warm presence back again.
It seemed, that presence, to bend all at once as a flame in a draft; then it crawled, stretched … was coming at his legs. Albinus could control himself no longer; with a fierce groan he pressed the trigger.

The shot rent the darkness, and immediately afterward something struck him across the knees, bringing him down, and for a second he was entangled in a chair that had been flung at him. As he fell he dropped the pistol, but found it again at once. At the same time he was conscious of rapid breathing, a smell of scent and sweat hit his nostrils, and a cold, nimble hand tried to wrench the weapon from his grasp. Albinus seized something living, something that let forth a hideous cry, as though a nightmare creature were being tickled by its nightmare mate. The hand he was catching twisted the pistol free and he felt the barrel prod him; and, together with a faint detonation that seemed miles away, in another world, there came a stab in his side which filled his eyes with a dazzling glory.

“So that’s all,” he thought quite softly, as if he were lying in bed. “I must keep quiet for a little space and then walk very slowly along that bright sand of pain, toward that blue, blue wave. What bliss there is in blueness. I never knew how blue blueness could be. What a mess life has been.
Now I know everything. Coming, coming, coming to drown me. There it is. How it hurts. I can’t breathe …”

He sat on the floor with bowed head, then bent slowly forward and fell, like a big, soft doll, to one side.

Stage-directions for last silent scene: door—wide open. Table—thrust away from it. Carpet—bulging up at table foot in a frozen wave. Chair—lying close by dead body of man in a purplish brown suit and felt slippers. Automatic pistol not visible. It is under him. Cabinet where the miniatures had been—empty. On the other (small) table, on which ages ago a porcelain ballet-dancer stood (later transferred to another room) lies a woman’s glove, black outside, white inside. By the striped sofa stands a smart little trunk, with a colored label still adhering to it: “Rouginard, Hôtel Britannia.”

The door leading from the hall to the landing is wide open, too.

THE END

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.