Laughter in the Dark

by Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

  One evening (a week before the talk about Axel Rex) he noticed on the way to a café where he had a business appointment that his watch was running amok (it was not the first time either) and that he had a full hour, a free gift to be used in some way. It was of course absurd to go back home to the other end of the town, yet neither did he feel disposed to sit and wait: the sight of other men with girl friends always upset him. He strolled about aimlessly and came to a small cinema the lights of which shed a scarlet sheen over the snow. He glanced at the poster (which portrayed a man looking up at a window framing a child in a nightshirt), hesitated—and bought a ticket.

  Hardly had he entered the velvety darkness when the oval beam of an electric torch glided toward him (as usually happens) and no less swiftly and smoothly led him down the dark and gently sloping gangway. Just as the light fell on the ticket in his hand, Albinus saw the girl’s inclined face and then, as he walked behind her, he dimly distinguished her very slight figure and the even swiftness of her dispassionate movements. Whilst shuffling into his seat he looked up at her and saw again the limpid gleam of her eye as it chanced to catch the light and the melting outline of a cheek which looked as though it were painted by a great artist against a rich dark background. There was nothing very much out of the common about all this: such things had happened to him before and he knew that it was unwise to dwell upon it. She moved away and was lost in the darkness and he suddenly felt bored and sad. He had come in at the end of a film: a girl was receding among tumbled furniture before a masked man with a gun. There was no interest whatever in watching happenings which he could not understand since he had not yet seen their beginning.

  In the pause as soon as the lights were turned on he noticed her again: she was standing at the exit next to a horribly purple curtain which she had just drawn to one side, and the outgoing people were surging past her. She was holding one hand in the pocket of her short embroidered apron and her black frock fitted her very tightly about the arms and bosom. He stared at her face almost in dread. It was a pale, sulky, painfully beautiful face. He guessed her age to be about eighteen.

  Then, when the place had almost emptied and fresh people began to shuffle sideways along the rows, she passed to and fro, quite near to him several times; but he turned away because it hurt to look and because he could not help remembering how many times beauty—or what he called beauty—had passed him by and vanished.

  For another half hour he sat in the darkness, his prominent eyes fixed on the screen. Then he rose and walked away. She drew the curtain aside for him with a slight clatter of wooden rings.

  “Oh, but I will have one more look,” thought Albinus miserably.

  It seemed to him that her lips twitched a little. She let the curtain fall.

  Albinus stepped into a blood-red puddle; the snow was melting, the night was damp, with the fast colors of street lights all running and dissolving. “Argus”—good name for a cinema.

  After three days he could ignore the memory of her no longer. He felt ridiculously excited as he entered the place once more—again in the middle of something. All was exactly as it had been the first time: the gliding torch, the long Luini-esque eyes, the swift walk in the darkness, the pretty movement of her black-sleeved arm as she clicked the curtain to one side. “Any normal man would know what to do,” thought Albinus. A car was spinning down a smooth road with hairpin turns between cliff and abyss.

  As he left, he tried to catch her eye, but failed. There was a steady downpour outside and the pavement glowed crimson.

  Had he not gone there that second time he might perhaps have been able to forget this ghost of an adventure, but now it was too late. He went there a third time firmly resolved to smile at her—and what a desperate leer it would have been, had he achieved it. As it was, his heart thumped so that he missed his chance.

  And the next day Paul came to dinner, they discussed the Rex affair, little Irma gobbled up her chocolate cream and Elisabeth asked her usual questions.

  “Just dropped from the moon?” he asked, and then tried to make up for his nastiness by a belated titter.

  After dinner he sat by his wife’s side on the broad sofa, pecked at her with little kisses while she looked at gowns and things in a women’s magazine, and dully he thought to himself:

  “Damn it all, I’m happy, what more do I need? That creature gliding about in the dark.… Like to crush her beautiful throat. Well, she is dead anyway, since I shan’t go there any more.”

  3

  SHE was called Margot Peters. Her father was a house-porter who had been badly shellshocked in the War: his gray head jerked unceasingly as if in constant confirmation of grievance and woe, and he fell into a violent passion on the slightest provocation. Her mother was still youngish, but rather battered too—a coarse callous woman whose red palm was a perfect cornucopia of blows. Her head was generally tied up in a kerchief to keep the dust from her hair during work, but after her great Saturday clean-up—which was mainly effected by means of a vacuum cleaner ingeniously connected to the lift—she dressed herself up and sallied forth to pay visits. She was unpopular with the tenants on account of her insolence and the vicious way she had of ordering people to wipe their feet on the mat. The Staircase was the main idol of her existence—not as a symbol of glorious ascension, but as a thing to be kept nicely polished, so that her worst nightmare (after too generous a helping of potatoes and sauerkraut) was a flight of white steps with the black trace of a boot first right, then left, then right again and so on—up to the top landing. A poor woman indeed, and no object for derision.

  Otto, Margot’s brother, was three years her senior. He worked in a bicycle factory, despised his father’s tame republicanism, held forth on politics in the neighboring pub and declared as he banged his fist on the table: “The first thing a man must have is a full belly.” This was his guiding principle—and quite a sound one too.

  As a child Margot went to school, and there she had her ears boxed rather less frequently than at home. A kitten’s commonest movement is a soft little jump coming in sudden series; hers was a sharp raising of her left elbow to protect her face. In spite of all, she grew up into a bright and high-spirited girl. When only eight she joined with much gusto in the screaming, scraping games of football which schoolboys played in the middle of the street using a rubber ball the size of an orange. At ten she learned to ride her brother’s bicycle. Bare-armed, with black pigtails flying, she scorched up and down the pavement; then halted with one foot resting on the curbstone, pensively. At twelve she became less boisterous. Those were the days when she liked nothing better than to stand at the door and chatter in undertones with the coalman’s daughter, exchanging views upon the women who visited one of the lodgers, and discussing passing hats. Once she found on the staircase a shabby handbag containing a small cake of almond soap with a thin curved hair adhering to it, and half-a-dozen very queer photos. On another occasion the redhaired boy who always used to trip her up at play kissed her on the nape of the neck. Then one night she had a fit of hysterics, for which she got a dousing of cold water followed by a sound wallop.

  A year later she had grown remarkably pretty, wore a short red frock and was mad on the movies. Afterward she remembered this period of her life with a strange oppressive feeling—the light, warm, peaceful evenings; the sound of the shops being bolted for the night; her father sitting astride on his chair outside the door, smoking his pipe and jerking his head; her mother, arms akimbo; the lilac bush leaning over the railing, Frau von Brock going home with her purchases in a green string-bag; Martha the maid waiting to cross with the greyhound and two wire-haired terriers.… It grew darker. Her brother would come along with a couple of burly comrades who gathered round and jostled against her, plucking at her bare arms. One of them had eyes like the film actor Veidt. The street, with the upper stories of the houses still bathed in yellow light, grew quite silent. Only, across the way, two baldheaded men were playing cards on a balcony, and every guf
faw and thump was audible.

  When she was barely sixteen she became friendly with the girl who served behind the counter of a small stationery shop at the corner. This girl’s young sister was already earning a decent living as an artist’s model. So Margot dreamed of becoming a model, and then a film star. This transition seemed to her quite a simple matter: the sky was there, ready for her star. At about the same time she learned to dance, and now and then went with the shopgirl to the “Paradise” dance hall where elderly men made her extremely frank proposals to the crash and whine of a jazz band.

  One day, as she was standing at the corner of the street, a fellow on a red motorcycle, whom she had observed once or twice already, drew up suddenly and offered her a ride. He had flaxen hair combed back and his shirt billowed behind, still full of the wind he had gathered.

  She smiled, got up behind him, arranged her skirt and next moment was traveling at a terrific speed with his tie flying in her face. He took her outside the city and there halted. It was a sunny evening and a little party of midges were continuously darning the air in one spot. It was all very quiet: the quietude of pine and heather. He alighted and as he sat by her side at the edge of a ditch he told her that last year he had pushed on to Spain, just like this. Then he put his arm round her and began to squeeze and fumble and kiss her so violently that the discomfort she felt that day turned to dizziness. She wriggled free and began to cry. “You may kiss me,” she sobbed, “but not that way, please.” The youth shrugged his shoulders, started his engine, ran, jumped, swerved and was gone; leaving her sitting on a milestone. She returned home on foot. Otto, who had seen her go off, thumped his fist down on her neck and then kicked her skilfully, so that she fell and bruised herself against the sewing machine.

  Next winter the shopgirl’s sister introduced her to Frau Levandovsky, an elderly woman of goodly proportions with a genteel manner, albeit marred by a certain fruitiness of speech, and a large purple blotch on her cheek the size of a hand: she used to explain it by her mother’s having been frightened by a fire whilst expecting her. Margot moved to a small servant’s room in her flat, and her parents were thankful to be rid of her, the more so as they considered that any job was sanctified by the money it brought in; and fortunately her brother, who liked to speak in threatening terms of capitalists’ buying the daughters of the poor, was away for a time, working at Breslau.

  First Margot posed in the classroom of a girls’ school; then, later on, in a real studio where she was drawn not only by women, but by men also, most of whom were quite young. With her sleek black hair nicely cut, she sat on a small rug, stark naked, her feet curled under her, leaning on her blue-veined arm, her slim back (with a sheen of fine down between the pretty shoulders, one of which was raised to her flaming cheek) bent slightly forward in a semblance of wistful weariness; she watched askance the students lift and lower their eyes and heard the faint whir and grating of carbon pencils shading this curve or that. Out of sheer boredom she used to pick out the best-looking man and throw him a dark liquid glance whenever he raised his face with its parted lips and puckered forehead. She never succeeded in changing the color of his attention, and this vexed her. Before, when she had pictured herself sitting thus, alone in a pool of light, exposed to so many eyes, she had fancied that it would be rather exhilarating. But it made her stiff, that was all. To amuse herself she made up her face for the sitting, painted her dry hot mouth, darkened her eyelids, although indeed they were quite dark enough, and once even touched up her nipples with her lipstick. For this she got a good scolding from the Levandovsky woman.

  So the days passed and Margot had only a very vague idea of what she was really aiming at, though there was always that vision of herself as a screen beauty in gorgeous furs being helped out of a gorgeous car by a gorgeous hotel porter under a giant umbrella. She was still wondering how to hop into that diamond bright world straight from the faded rug in the studio, when Frau Levandovsky told her for the first time about a lovesick young man from the provinces.

  “You can’t do without a boy friend,” declared that lady complacently as she drank her coffee. “You are much too lively a lass not to need a companion, and this modest young fellow is wanting to find a pure soul in this wicked city.”

  Margot was holding Frau Levandovsky’s fat yellow dachshund in her lap. She pulled up the animal’s soft silky ears so as to make their tips meet over the gentle head (inside they resembled dark pink blotting paper, much used) and answered without looking up:

  “Oh, there’s no need for that yet. I’m only sixteen, aren’t I? And what’s the use? Does it lead you anywhere? I know those fellows.”

  “You’re a fool,” said Frau Levandovsky calmly. “I’m not talking to you about some scamp, but about a generous gentleman who saw you in the street and has been dreaming of you ever since.”

  “Some old dodderer, I expect,” said Margot, kissing the wart on the dog’s cheek.

  “Fool,” repeated Frau Levandovsky. “He is thirty, clean-shaven, distinguished, with a silk tie and a gold cigarette holder.”

  “Come, come for a walk,” said Margot to the dog, and the dachshund slipped from her lap to the floor with a plop and trotted off along the passage.

  Now the gentleman referred to by Frau Levandovsky was anything but a shy young man from the country. He had got in touch with her through two hearty commercial travelers with whom he had played poker on the boat train all the way from Bremen to Berlin. At first, nothing had been said about prices: the procuress had merely showed him a snapshot of a smiling girl with the sun in her eyes and a dog in her arms, and Miller (that was the name he gave) merely nodded. On the appointed day she bought some cakes and made plenty of coffee. Very shrewdly, she advised Margot to wear her old red frock. Toward six o’clock the bell rang.

  “I’m not going to run any risks, I’m not,” thought Margot. “If I hate him, I’ll tell her so straight out, and if I don’t I’ll take my time to think it over.”

  Unfortunately it was not such a simple matter to decide what to make of Miller. First of all, he had a striking face. His lusterless black hair, carelessly brushed back, longish and with an odd dry look about it, was certainly not a wig, although it looked uncommonly like one. His cheeks seemed hollow because the cheekbones protruded so, and their skin was dull white as if coated with a thin layer of powder. His sharp twinkling eyes and those funny three-cornered nostrils which made one think of a lynx were never still for a moment; not so the heavy lower half of his face with the two motionless furrows at the corners of the mouth. His attire seemed rather foreign: that very blue shirt with a bright blue tie, that dark blue suit with enormously wide trousers. He was tall and slim and his square shoulders moved splendidly as he picked his way among Frau Levandovsky’s plush furniture. Margot had pictured him quite differently and now she sat there with arms tightly crossed, feeling rather shocked and unhappy, while Miller fairly gobbled her up with his eyes. In a rasping voice he asked for her name. She told him.

  “And I’m little Axel,” he said with a short laugh, and brusquely turning away from her he resumed his conversation with Frau Levandovsky: they were talking sedately of Berlin sights and he was mockingly polite with his hostess.

  Then suddenly he lapsed into silence, lit a cigarette and, picking off a bit of the cigarette paper which had stuck to his full, very red lip (where was the golden holder?), said:

  “An idea, dear lady. Here’s a stall for that Wagner thing; you’re certain to like it. So put on your bonnet and toddle off. Take a taxi, I’ll pay for that too.”

  Frau Levandovsky thanked him, but replied with some dignity that she preferred to remain at home.

  “May I have a word with you?” asked Miller, obviously annoyed, rising from his chair.

  “Have some more coffee,” suggested the lady coolly.

  Miller licked his chops and sat down again. Then he smiled, and in a new good-natured manner launched into a funny story about some friend of his, an opera sing
er who once, in the part of Lohengrin, being tight, failed to board the swan in time and waited hopefully for the next one. Margot bit her lips and then suddenly bent forward and went off into the most girlish fits of laughter. Frau Levandovsky laughed too, her large bosom quivering softly.

  “Good,” thought Miller, “if the old bitch wants me to play the lovesick fool, I shall—with a vengeance. I’ll do it far more thoroughly and successfully than she supposes.”

  So he came next day, and then again and again. Frau Levandovsky, who had received only a small advance payment and wanted the whole sum, did not leave the pair alone for a moment. But sometimes when Margot took the dog for a walk late in the evening, Miller would suddenly emerge from the darkness and stroll along by her side. It flurried her so that she involuntarily hurried her steps, neglecting the dog, which followed with its body at a slight angle to the line of its wobbly trot. Frau Levandovsky got wind of these secret meetings and henceforth took out the dachshund herself.

  More than a week passed in this manner. Then Miller resolved to act. It would have been absurd to pay the huge price demanded since he was on the point of getting what he wanted without the woman’s help. One night he told her and Margot three more funny stories, the funniest they had yet heard, drank three cups of coffee and then, walking up to Frau Levandovsky, gathered her up in his arms, rushed her into the lavatory, nimbly drew out the key, and locked the door from the outside. The poor woman was so utterly taken aback at first that for five seconds at least she did not utter a sound, but then—oh, God! …