Laughter in the Dark

by Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

  “How strange it all is,” thought he. “Had I been told on New Year’s Eve that my life would change so completely in a few months …”

  Margot dropped something in the next room. The humming stopped for a moment, and was then softly resumed.

  “Six months ago I was a model husband in a Margot-less world. Quick work fate made of it! Other men can combine a happy family life with little infidelities, but in my case everything went crash immediately. Why? And here I sit and seem to be thinking clearly and sensibly. Yet in reality the earthquake is in full swing and God knows how things will settle themselves …”

  Suddenly the bell rang. From three different doors Albinus, Margot and the cook all ran out into the hall simultaneously.

  “Albert,” whispered Margot, “be very careful. I’m sure it’s him.”

  “Go to your room,” he whispered back. “I’ll handle him nicely.”

  He opened the door. It was the girl from the milliner’s. Hardly had she gone, than there was another ring. He opened again. Before him stood a youth with a coarse oafish countenance, yet resembling Margot strikingly—those dark eyes, that sleek hair, that straight nose slightly wedged at the tip. He wore his Sunday suit and the end of his tie was tucked into his shirt between the buttons.

  “What do you want?” asked Albinus.

  Otto coughed and said with a confidential huskiness in his voice:

  “I must talk to you about my sister. I’m Margot’s brother.”

  “And why to me particularly, may I ask?”

  “You are Herr …?” began Otto in a questioning tone. “Herr …?”

  “Schiffermiller,” said Albinus, rather relieved to learn that the boy did not know his identity.

  “Well, Herr Schiffermiller, I happened to see you with my sister. So I thought it would perhaps interest you if I … if we …”

  “Certainly—but why stand in the doorway? Please come inside.”

  He came and coughed again.

  “What I want to say is this, Herr Schiffermiller. My sister is young and inexperienced. Mother hasn’t slept a single night since our little Margot left home. She’s only sixteen, you know—don’t believe her if she says she’s older. Let me tell you, we’re decent people—my father’s an old soldier. It’s a very, very unpleasant situation. I don’t know what amends can be made …”

  Otto, gaining confidence, was beginning almost to believe what he said.

  “I really don’t know,” he continued with rising excitement. “Just imagine, Herr Schiffermiller, if you had a loved and innocent sister whom someone had bought …”

  “Now listen, my good fellow,” Albinus interrupted him. “There seems to be some mistake. My fiancée told me that her family was only too thankful to be rid of her.”

  “Oh, no,” said Otto winking. “You’re not going to make me believe you’ll marry her. When a man wants to marry a respectable girl, he talks to her family about it. A little more care and a little less pride, Herr Schiffermiller!”

  Albinus gazed at Otto with curiosity, as he reflected that the young brute was talking sense in a way, for he had as much right to concern himself over Margot’s welfare as Paul had to worry on behalf of his sister. Indeed, there was a fine flavor of parody about this talk, in comparison with that other dreadful conversation two months ago. And it was pleasant to think that now at least he could stand his own ground, brother or no brother—take advantage, as it were, of the fact that Otto was simply a bluffer and a bully.

  “You’d better stop,” he said, very resolutely, very coolly—quite the patrician, in fact. “I know exactly how things stand. It is no concern of yours. Now please go.”

  “Oh, really,” said Otto frowning. “Very well.”

  He was silent, twisted his cap in his hand and looked at the floor. Then he tried a different key.

  “You may have to pay dearly for it before you’ve done, Herr Schiffermiller. My little sister is not exactly what you think her to be. I called her innocent, but that was brotherly compassion. You’re too easily led by the nose, Herr Schiffermiller. It’s mighty funny to hear you call her your fiancée. It makes me laugh. Now, I could tell you a thing or two …”

  “Quite superfluous,” replied Albinus flushing. “She has told me everything herself. An unfortunate child whom her family could not protect. Please, go at once”—and Albinus opened the door.

  “You’ll regret it,” said Otto awkwardly.

  “Go or I’ll kick you out,” said Albinus (putting the last sweet touch to victory, so to speak).

  Otto retired very slowly.

  Being endowed with that kind of shallow sentimentality peculiar to his bourgeois set, Albinus (with the plum in his mouth) suddenly pictured to himself how poor and ugly the life of this boy must be. Also—he did look like Margot, when Margot sulked. Before shutting the door he swiftly produced a ten-mark note and pressed it into Otto’s hand.

  The door closed. Otto alone on the landing examined the note, stood there a moment lost in thought, then rang the bell.

  “What, back again?” exclaimed Albinus.

  Otto stretched out his hand with the money.

  “I don’t want your tips,” he muttered angrily. “Better give it to the unemployed—there are plenty of them about.”

  “But, please take it,” said Albinus feeling terribly embarrassed.

  Otto shrugged his shoulders.

  “I don’t accept crumbs from the bloody rich. A poor man has his pride. I …”

  “Well, it was only meant …” began Albinus.

  Otto shuffled his feet, thrust the note sullenly into his pocket and, muttering, walked on downstairs. Social honor was satisfied, now he could afford to satisfy more human needs.

  “Not much,” he reflected, “but better than nothing, anyway—and he’s afraid of me, the popeyed, stammering fool.”

  12

  FROM the moment when Elisabeth had read Margot’s short letter, her life had turned into one of those long grotesque riddles that one is set to work out in the dream classroom of dull delirium. And, at first, she felt as if her husband were dead and people were trying to deceive her into thinking that he had only deserted her.

  She remembered how—on that evening which now seemed so remote—she had kissed him on the forehead before he went, and he had said as he stooped: “Anyhow, you had better see Lampert. She can’t go on scratching herself like that.”

  These had been his last words in this life, simple homely words referring to a slight rash which had broken out on Irma’s neck—and then he had gone forever.

  The zinc ointment had cured the rash in a few days—but there was no ointment in the world which could mollify and erase the memory of his big white forehead and the way he had patted his pockets as he left the room.

  During the first days she wept so much that she herself was surprised at the capacity of her lachrymal glands. Do scientists know how much salted water can flow from a person’s eyes? And that reminded her of how, one summer on the Italian coast, they had used to bathe the baby in a tub of sea water—oh, one might fill a far bigger tub with her tears, and wash a struggling giant.

  Somehow his abandonment of Irma seemed to her far more monstrous than his desertion of her. Or would he be trying to steal his daughter? Was it prudent to have sent her to the country alone with the nurse? It was, said Paul, and he urged her to go there too. But she would not hear of it. Although she felt she could never forgive (not that he had humiliated her—she was much too proud to feel wronged that way—but because he had abased himself), still Elisabeth waited on, hoping from day to day that the door would open like the night in a thunderclap and that her husband would come in, pale as Lazarus, his blue eyes swollen and wet, his clothes worn to shreds, his arms wide open.

  The greater part of the day she sat in one of the rooms or sometimes even in the hall—in any place where the heavy mists of her thoughts happened to overtake her—and pondered over this or that detail of her married life. It seemed to
her he had always been unfaithful. And now she remembered and understood (as one learning a new language might remember once seeing a book in that tongue when one did not yet know it) the red stains—sticky red kisses—which she had noticed once on her husband’s pocket handkerchief.

  Paul did all he could to distract her thoughts. He never referred to Albinus. He changed some of his pet habits—that of spending Sunday morning at the turkish baths for instance. He brought her magazines and novels; and they talked about their childhood, their parents long dead and that fair-haired brother of theirs who had been killed on the Somme: a musician, a dreamer.

  One hot summer day when they had gone to the Park they watched a small monkey which had escaped from its owner and was up in a tall elm tree. Its little black face in a crown of gray fluff peered out of the green leaves, then was gone and a branch rustled and shook several feet higher. In vain did its master try to tempt it down by means of a soft whistle, a large yellow banana, a pocket mirror which he flashed and flashed.

  “It won’t come back, it’s hopeless; it will never come back,” she murmured, and burst into tears.

  13

  WITH nothing but deep blue above, Margot lay spread-eagled on the platinum sand, her limbs a rich honey-brown, and a thin white rubber belt relieving the black of her bathing-suit: the perfect seaside poster. Lying alongside of her, Albinus propped up his cheek and looked with endless delight at the oily gloss of her closed eyelids and at her freshly made-up mouth. Her wet dark hair was thrown back from her round forehead and grains of sand glittered in her little ears. If you looked very close, there was an iridescent sheen in the pits of her brown polished shoulders. The close-fitting seal-like black thing she had on was much too short to be true.

  Albinus let a handful of sand trickle, as from an hour-glass, onto her indrawn stomach. She opened her eyes, blinked in the silver-blue blaze, smiled and shut her eyes again.

  After a while she drew herself up, clasped her arms round her knees and remained sitting motionless. Now he could see her back bared to the waist with the glitter of sand grains along the curve of her spine. He brushed them away gently. Her skin was silky and hot.

  “Heavens,” said Margot, “how blue the sea is today.”

  It really was blue: purple-blue in the distance, peacock-blue coming nearer, diamond-blue where the wave caught the light. The foam toppled over, ran, slowed down, then receded, leaving a smooth mirror on the wet sand, which the next wave flooded again. A hairy man in orange-red pants stood at the edge of the water wiping his glasses. A small boy shrieked with glee as the foam gushed into the walled city he had built. Gay parasols and striped tents seemed to repeat in terms of color what the shouts of the bathers were to the ear. A large bright ball was flung from somewhere and bounced on the sand with a ringing thud. Margot grabbed it, jumped up and swung it back.

  Now Albinus saw her figure framed in the gay pattern of the beach; a pattern he hardly saw, so entirely was his gaze concentrated on Margot. Slim, sunburned, with her dark head of hair and one arm with the gleam of a bracelet still outstretched after her throw, she seemed to him an exquisitely colored vignette heading the first chapter of his new life.

  She went up to him as he lay full-length (a towel over his pink blistered shoulders), watching the movements of her little feet. She bent over him and, with a Berlinese chuckle, gave him a nice hard slap on his well-filled bathing pants.

  “The water is wet!” she cried, and ran into the surf. There she advanced swinging her hips and her outspread arms, pushing forward in knee-deep water, then fell on all fours, tried to swim, gurgled, scrambled up and went on, up to the waist in foam. He splashed in after her. She turned toward him, laughing, spitting, wiping the wet hair from her eyes. He attempted to duck her, then caught her by the ankle and she kicked and screamed.

  An Englishwoman who was lolling in a deck-chair beneath a mauve sunshade reading Punch turned to her husband, a red-faced, white-hatted man squatting on the sand, and said:

  “Look at that German romping about with his daughter. Now, don’t be so lazy, William. Take the children out for a good swim.”

  14

  AFTERWARD, in their gaudy bathgowns, they walked up and up a flinty path, half-smothered in broom and ulex. Yonder a small villa, whose rent was enormous, gleamed white as sugar between the black cypresses. Great, beautiful crickets skidded across the gravel. Margot tried to catch them. She crouched down and cautiously stretched out finger and thumb, but the cricket’s sharp-elbowed limbs jerked suddenly, the fan-shaped blue wings shot out and it flew three yards on to vanish as soon as it fell.

  In the cool room with the red-tiled floor, where the light through the slits of the shutters danced in one’s eyes and lay in bright lines at one’s feet, Margot, snake-like, shuffled off her black skin, and, with nothing on but high-heeled slippers, clicked up and down the room, eating a sibilant peach; and stripes of sunshine crossed and re-crossed her body.

  In the evenings, there was dancing at the casino. The sea looked paler than the flushed sky, and the lights of a passing steamer glowed festively. A clumsy moth flapped round a rose-shaded lamp; and Albinus danced with Margot. Her smoothly brushed head barely reached his shoulder.

  Very soon after their arrival they made several acquaintances. He was conscious of a gnawing degrading jealousy when he saw how closely Margot pressed to her partner as she danced, especially as he knew that she had nothing on beneath her flimsy frock: her legs had browned so prettily that she wore no stockings. Sometimes Albinus lost sight of her. Then he got up and walked about restlessly, tapping a cigarette against his case. He would wander into a room where people were playing cards, and onto a terrace, and then back again with the sickening conviction that she was deceiving him. Suddenly she would appear from nowhere and sit down by his side in her beautiful, shimmering dress and take a long draught of wine. He did not betray his fears, but nervously stroked beneath the table her bare knees which knocked against one another as she leaned back in her chair and laughed—a little hysterically, he thought—at something—not overfunny—that her latest partner was saying.

  To Margot’s credit it must be admitted that she did try her utmost to remain quite faithful to him. But no matter how tender and thoughtful he was in his love-making, she knew, all along, that for her it would always be love minus something, whereas the least touch of her first lover had always been a sample of everything. Unfortunately a young Austrian who was the best dancer in Solfi, and a crack ping-pong player to boot, somehow resembled the man Miller; there was something about his strong knuckles, his keen sardonic eyes, which kept reminding her of things she would have preferred to forget.

  One hot night between two dances she happened to stray with him into a dark corner of the casino garden. The dull sweetish smell of a fig tree weighted the air and there was that banal blend of moonlight and distant music which is apt to affect simple souls.

  “No, no,” muttered Margot when she felt his lips on her neck and cheek, while his clever hands groped their way up her legs.

  “You shouldn’t,” she whispered, and threw back her head and greedily returned his kiss. He caressed her so thoroughly that she felt the little strength she still had ebbing away; but in time she slipped free and ran to the brightly lit terrace.

  This scene was never repeated. Margot had so fallen in love with the life that Albinus could offer her—a life full of the glamour of a first-class film with rocking palm trees and shuddering roses (for it is always windy in filmland)—and she was so afraid of seeing it all snap that she dared not take any risks; indeed, she even lost for a time her ruling characteristic—self-confidence. She recovered it, however, as soon as they returned to Berlin in the autumn.

  “Very nice, to be sure,” she said drily as she surveyed the good hotel room where they had put up, “but I hope you understand, Albert, that we can’t go on like this forever.”

  Albinus, who was dressing for dinner, hastened to assure her that he was already takin
g steps to rent a new flat.

  “Does he really think me a fool?” she wondered with fierce resentment.

  “Albert,” she said aloud, “I see you don’t understand.” She sighed deeply and covered her face with her hands. “You’re ashamed of me,” she said, watching him through her fingers.

  Gaily he tried to embrace her.

  “Don’t touch me,” she screamed, giving him a smart shove with her elbow. “I know perfectly well you’re afraid to be seen with me in the street. If you’re ashamed of me, you can leave me and go back to your Lizzy. You’re quite free.”

  “Don’t, darling,” he pleaded helplessly.

  She flung herself on the sofa and managed to burst into sobs.

  Albinus pulled up the knees of his trousers, knelt down, and tried carefully to touch her shoulder, which jerked every time his fingers approached it.

  “What is it you want?” he asked softly. “What is it you want, Margot?”

  “I want to live with you quite openly,” she blubbered. “In your own home. And to see people …”

  “Very well,” he said, rising to his feet and brushing his knees.

  (“And in a year’s time you’ll marry me,” thought Margot as she went on sobbing nicely, “you’ll marry me unless by that time I’m already in Hollywood—in which case you may go to the devil.”)

  “If you don’t stop crying,” said Albinus, “I shall begin to cry myself.”

  Margot sat up and smiled plaintively. Tears only added to her beauty. Her face was aflame, the iris of her eyes was dazzling, and a large tear trembled on the side of her nose: he had never before seen tears of that size and brilliance.

  15

  JUST as Albinus had accustomed himself never to speak to Margot of art, of which she knew and cared nothing, he had now to learn to hide from her the agonies he suffered during the first days of their life together in the old flat, where he had spent ten years with his wife. All around were objects which reminded him of Elisabeth; her presents to him and his to her. In Frieda’s eyes he read sullen censure, and, before a week had passed, she left after listening contemptuously to Margot’s second or third outburst of shrill scolding.