Laughter in the Dark

by Vladimir Nabokov

  "Well?" asked Albinus hoarsely.

  Lampert turned to the dignified old gentleman, who shrugged his shoulders slightly and followed him into the sickroom.

  A long time elapsed. The windows were quite dark; nobody had troubled to draw the curtains. Albinus took an orange and began peeling it slowly. Outside, snow was falling, and only muffled noises rose from the street. From time to time a tinkling sound came from the central heating apparatus. Down in the street someone whistled four notes (Siegfried); and then all was silent again. Albinus slowly ate the orange. It was very sour. Suddenly Paul came into the room, and without looking at anyone uttered a single short word.

  In the nursery, Albinus saw his wife's back, as she bent, motionless and intent, over the bed, still holding, it seemed, a ghostly glass in her hand. The hospital nurse put her arm round her shoulders and led her into dimness. Albinus walked up to the bed. For a moment he had a vague glimpse of a little dead face and of a short pale lip with bared front teeth--and one little milk-tooth was missing. Then all became misty before his eyes. He turned round and very carefully, trying not to jostle against anybody or anything, went out. The front-door below was locked. But as he stood there, a painted lady in a Spanish shawl came down, opened it and let in a snow-covered man. Albinus looked at his watch. It was past midnight. Had he really been there five hours?

  He walked along the white, soft, crunching pavement, and still could not quite believe what had happened. In his mind's eye he pictured Irma with surprising vividness, scrambling onto Paul's knees or patting a light ball against the wall with her hands; but the taxis hooted as if nothing had happened, the snow glittered Christmas-like under the lamps, the sky was black, and only in the distance, beyond the dark mass of roofs, in the direction of the Gedachtniskirche, where the great picture-palaces were, did the blackness melt to a warm brownish blush. All at once he remembered the names of the two ladies on the divan: Blanche and Rosa von Nacht.

  At length he reached home. Margot was lying supine, smoking lustily. Albinus was vaguely aware of having quarreled with her hideously, but that did not matter now. She followed his movements in silence, as he quietly walked up and down the room and wiped his face, which was wet from the snow. All she felt now was delicious content. Rex had left a short time before, well-contented too.

  21

  PERHAPS for the first time in the course of the year he had spent with Margot, Albinus was perfectly conscious of the thin, slimy layer of turpitude which had settled on his life. Now, with dazzling distinctness, fate seemed to be urging him to come to his senses; he heard her thunderous summons; he realized what a rare opportunity was being offered him to raise his life to its former level; and he knew, with the lucidity of grief, that if he returned to his wife now, the reconciliation, which under ordinary circumstances would have been impossible, would come about almost of itself.

  Certain recollections of that night gave him no peace: he remembered how Paul had suddenly glanced at him with a moist imploring look, and then, turning away, had squeezed his arm slightly. He remembered how, in the mirror, he had had a fleeting glimpse of his wife's eyes, in which there had been a heart-rending expression--pitiful, hunted--but still akin to a smile.

  He pondered over all this with deep emotion. Yes--if he were to go to his little girl's funeral, he would stay with his wife forever.

  He rang up Paul and the maid told him the place and hour of the burial. Next morning he rose, while Margot was still asleep, and ordered the servant to get him his black coat and top hat. After he had hastily swallowed some coffee, he went into Irma's former nursery--where a long table, with a green net across it, now stood; listlessly he took up a small celluloid ball and let it bounce, but instead of thinking of his child he saw another figure, a graceful, lively, wanton girl, laughing, leaning over the table, one heel raised, as she thrust out her ping-pong bat.

  It was time to start. In a few minutes he would be holding Elisabeth under the elbow, in front of an open grave. He threw the little ball on the table and went quickly into the bedroom, in order to see Margot asleep for the last time. And, as he stood by the bed and feasted his eyes on that childish face, with the soft pink lips and flushed cheeks, Albinus remembered their first night together and thought with horror of his future by the side of his pale, faded wife. This future seemed to him like one of those long, dim, dusty passages where one finds a nailed-up box--or an empty perambulator.

  With an effort, he turned his eyes away from the sleeping girl, nervously bit his thumbnail and walked to the window. It was thawing. Bright motorcars were splashing their way through the puddles; at the corner a ragged rapscallion was selling violets; an adventurous Alsatian was insistently following a tiny Pekinese, which snarled, turned and slithered at the end of its leash; a great brilliant slice of the rapid blue sky was mirrored in a glass pane which a bare-armed servant girl was washing vigorously.

  "Why are you up so early? Where are you going?" asked Margot in a drawling voice broken by a yawn.

  "Nowhere," he said, without turning round.

  22

  "DON'T be so depressed, woggy," she said to him a fortnight later. "I know that it's all very sad, but they've grown to be almost strangers to you; you feel that yourself, don't you? And of course, they turned the little girl against you. Believe me, I do quite enter into your feelings, although if I could have a child, I'd rather have a boy."

  "You're a child yourself," said Albinus, stroking her hair.

  "Today of all days we must be in good spirits," continued Margot. "Today of all days! It's the beginning of my career. I'll be famous."

  "Why yes, I had forgotten. When is it? Really today?"

  Rex sauntered in. Of late, he had been with them every day, and Albinus had poured out his heart to him on several occasions and told him all that he could not say to Margot. Rex listened so kindly, made such sensible comments and was so sympathetic that the shortness of their acquaintance seemed to Albinus a mere accident in no way connected with the inner, spiritual time during which their friendship had developed and matured.

  "One can't build up one's life on the quick-sands of misfortune," Rex had said to him. "That is a sin against life. I once had a friend who was a sculptor and whose unerring appreciation of form was almost uncanny. Then, all of a sudden, out of pity he married an ugly, elderly hunchback. I don't know exactly what happened, but one day, soon after their marriage, they packed two little suitcases, one for each, and went on foot to the nearest lunatic asylum. In my opinion, an artist must let himself be guided solely by his sense of beauty: that will never deceive him."

  "Death," he had said on another occasion, "seems to be merely a bad habit, which nature is at present powerless to overcome. I once had a dear friend--a beautiful boy full of life, with the face of an angel and the muscles of a panther. He cut himself while opening a tin of preserved peaches--you know, the large, soft, slippery kind that plap in the mouth and slither down. He died a few days later of blood poisoning. Fatuous, isn't it? And yet ... yes, it is strange, but true, that, viewed as a work of art, the shape of his life would not have been so perfect had he been left to grow old. Death often is the point of life's joke."

  On such occasions Rex could talk endlessly, indefatigably, inventing stories about non-existent friends and propounding reflections not too profound for the mind of his listener and couched in a sham-brilliant form. His culture was patchy, but his mind shrewd and penetrating, and his itch to make fools of his fellow men amounted almost to genius. Perhaps the only real thing about him was his innate conviction that everything that had ever been created in the domain of art, science or sentiment, was only a more or less clever trick. No matter how important the subject under discussion, he could always find something witty or trite to say about it, supplying exactly what his listener's mind or mood demanded, though, at the same time, he could be impossibly rude and overbearing when his interlocutor annoyed him. Even when he was talking quite seriously about a book or a picture
, Rex had a pleasant feeling that he was a partner in a conspiracy, the partner of some ingenious quack--namely, the author of the book or the painter of the picture.

  He watched with interest the sufferings of Albinus (in his opinion an oaf with simple passions and a solid, too solid, knowlege of painting). who thought, poor man, that he had touched the very depths of human distress; whereas Rex reflected--with a sense of pleasant anticipation--that, far from being the limit, it was merely the first item in the program of a roaring comedy at which he, Rex, had been reserved a place in the stage manager's private box. The stage manager of this performance was neither God nor the devil. The former was far too gray, and venerable, and old-fashioned; and the latter, surfeited with other people's sins, was a bore to himself and to others, as dull as rain ... in fact, rain at dawn in the prison-court, where some poor imbecile, yawning nervously, is being quietly put to death for the murder of his grandmother. The stage manager whom Rex had in view was an elusive, double, triple, self-reflecting magic Proteus of a phantom, the shadow of many-colored glass balls flying in a curve, the ghost of a juggler on a shimmering curtain.... This, at any rate, was what Rex surmised in his rare moments of philosophic meditation.

  He took life lightly, and the only human feeling that he ever experienced was his keen liking for Margot, which he endeavored to explain to himself by her physical characteristics, by something in the odor of her skin, the epithelium of her lips, the temperature of her body. But this was not quite the true explanation. Their mutual passion was based on a profound affinity of souls, though Margot was a vulgar little Berlin girl and he--a cosmopolitan artist.

  When Rex called, on that day of all days, he managed to tell her, as he was helping her on with her coat, that he had rented a room where they could meet undisturbed. She flung him an angry glance--for Albinus was patting his pockets only ten paces away. Rex chuckled and added, hardly lowering his voice, that he would expect her there every day at a given hour.

  "I'm inviting Margot to a rendezvous, but she won't come," he brightly said to Albinus as they were walking downstairs.

  "Let her just try," smiled Albinus, pinching Margot's cheek affectionately. "Now we shall see what sort of an actress you are," he added, drawing on his gloves.

  "Tomorrow at five, Margot, eh?" said Rex.

  "Tomorrow the child is going to choose herself a car," said Albinus, "so she can't come to you."

  "She'll have plenty of time in the morning for choosing. Does five suit you, Margot? Or shall we say six and clinch it?"

  Margot suddenly lost her temper. "Idiotic joke," she said through her teeth.

  The two men laughed and exchanged amused glances.

  The hall-porter who was talking to the postman outside gazed at them curiously as they passed.

  "It's hardly believable," said he when they were out of hearing, "that that Herr's little daughter died a couple of weeks ago."

  "And who's the other Herr?" asked the postman.

  "Don't ask me. An additional lover, I suppose. To tell the truth, I'm ashamed that the other tenants should see it all. And yet he's a rich, generous gentleman. What I always say is: if he's got to have a mistress, he might have chosen a larger and plumper one."

  "Love is blind," remarked the postman thoughtfully.

  23

  IN THE little hall where the film was to be viewed by a score of actors and guests, Margot felt a blissful shudder run down her back. Not far away she noticed the film manager in whose office she had once been made to feel so ridiculous. He walked up to Albinus, and Albinus introduced him to Margot. He had a large yellow stye on his right eyelid.

  Margot was vexed that he did not recognize her.

  "We had a talk a couple of years ago," she said slyly.

  "Quite right," he replied with a polite smile. "I remember you perfectly." (He did not.)

  As soon as the lights were out, Rex, who was seated between Margot and Albinus, fumbled for her hand and clasped it. In front of them, Dorianna Karenina was sitting in her sumptuous fur coat, although the room was hot, between the producer and the film-man with the stye, to whom she was trying to be very nice.

  The title, and then the names, unrolled with a diffident quiver. The apparatus hummed softly and monotonously, rather like a distant vacuum cleaner. There was no music.

  Margot appeared on the screen almost at once. She was reading a book; then she slapped it down and lurched to the window; her fiance was riding past.

  Margot was so horrified that she wrenched her hand away from Rex. Who on earth was that ghastly creature? Awkward and ugly, with a swollen, strangely altered, leech-black mouth, misplaced brows and unexpected creases in her dress, the girl on the screen stared wildly in front of her and then broke in two with her stomach on the window sill and her buttocks to the spectators. Margot thrust away Rex's groping hand. She wanted to bite someone, or to throw herself on the floor and kick.

  That monster on the screen had nothing in common with her--she was awful, awful! She was in fact like her mother, the porter's wife, in her wedding photograph.

  "Perhaps it'll be better later on," she thought miserably.

  Albinus bent over to her, almost embracing Rex, as he did so, and whispered tenderly:

  "Sweet, marvelous, I had no idea ..."

  He really was enchanted: somehow he recalled the little "Argus" cinema where they had first met, and it touched him that Margot should act so atrociously--and yet with such a delightful childish zeal, like a schoolgirl reciting a birthday poem.

  Rex was delighted too. He had never doubted that Margot would be a failure on the screen, and he knew that she would revenge herself on Albinus for this failure. Tomorrow, by way of reaction, she would come. At five punctually. It was all very pleasant. His hand went groping once more, and suddenly she gave him a violent pinch.

  After a short absence Margot reappeared: she stole furtively along house-fronts, patting the walls and looking over her shoulder (although, queerly enough, causing not the slightest surprise to the passers-by) and then crept into a cafe where a good soul had told her she might find her lover in the company of a vamp (Dorianna Karenina). She crept in, and her back looked fat and clumsy.

  "I shall yell in a moment," thought Margot.

  Fortunately, there came a timely fade-in, and there was disclosed a little table in the cafe, a bottle in an ice-pail and the hero offering Dorianna a cigarette, then lighting it for her (which gesture, in every producer's mind, is the symbol of newborn intimacy). Dorianna threw back her head, breathed out the smoke and smiled with one corner of her mouth.

  Someone in the hall began to clap; others joined in. Then Margot appeared, the applause was hushed. Margot opened her mouth, as in real life she never opened it, and then, with drooping head and dangling arms, came out into the street again.

  Dorianna, the real Dorianna, who was sitting in front of them, turned round and her eyes beamed amiably in the semi-darkness: "Bravo, little girl," she said in her husky voice, and Margot would have liked to scratch her face.

  Now she so dreaded her every reappearance on the screen that she felt quite faint and was no longer capable of pushing and pinching Rex's persistent hand. He felt her hot breath in his ear, as she moaned gently: "Please, stop, or I'll change my seat." He patted her knee and withdrew his hand.

  The forsaken sweetheart returned and her every movement was agony to Margot. She felt like a soul in Hell to whom the demons are displaying the unsuspected lining of its earthly transgressions. Those stiff, clumsy, angular gestures ... In her bloated face she somehow recognized her mother's expression when the latter was trying to be polite to an influential tenant.

  "A most successful scene," whispered Albinus, bending over to her again.

  Rex was getting bored with sitting in the dark, watching a bad film and having a large man lean over him. He closed his eyes, saw the little colored caricatures he had been doing lately for Albinus, and meditated over the fascinating though quite simple problem of how to
suck some more cash out of him.

  The drama was drawing to a close. The hero, deserted by the vamp, made his way to a chemist's, in a good cinematic downpour, to buy himself some poison, but remembered his old mother and went back to his native farm instead. There, among hens and pigs, his original sweetheart was playing with their illegitimate baby (it would not remain illegitimate long now, judging by the way he peered over the fence). This was Margot's best scene. But, as the infant snuggled up to her, she suddenly stroked down her dress with the back of her hand (quite unintentionally) as if she were wiping her hand--and the infant gazed at her askance. A laugh rippled through the hall. Margot could stand it no longer and began to cry softly.

  As soon as the lights went up, she left her seat and walked rapidly toward the exit.

  With a worried look of apprehension, Albinus hurried after her.

  Rex got up and stretched himself. Dorianna touched his arm. Beside her stood the man with the stye, yawning.

  "A failure," said Dorianna, winking. "Poor little lass."

  "And are you satisfied with your performance?" asked Rex curiously.

  Dorianna laughed. "I'll tell you a secret: a true actress cannot be satisfied."

  "Nor can the public sometimes," said Rex calmly. "By the way, do tell me, my dear, how did you come to hit on your stage name? It sort of disturbs me."

  "Oh, that's a long story," she answered wistfully. "If you come to tea with me one day, I shall perhaps tell you more about it. The boy who suggested this name committed suicide."

  "Ah--and no wonder. But what I wanted to know ... Tell me, have you read Tolstoy?"

  "Doll's Toy?" queried Dorianna Karenina. "No, I'm afraid not. Why?"

  24

  THERE were stormy scenes at home, sobs, moans, hysterics. She flung herself on the sofa, the bed, the floor. Her eyes sparkled brilliantly and wrathfully; one of her stockings had slipped down. The world was swamped in tears.