“… 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
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
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.
BOOKS BY VLADIMIR NABOKOV
ADA, OR ARDOR
Ada, or Ardor tells a love story troubled by incest, but is also at once a fairy tale, epic, philosophical treatise on the nature of time, parody of the history of the novel, and erotic catalogue.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-72522-0
BEND SINISTER
While it is filled with veiled puns and characteristically delightful wordplay, Bend Sinister is first and foremost a haunting and compelling narrative about a civilized man and his child caught up in the tyranny of a police state.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-72727-9
DESPAIR
Extensively revised by Nabokov in 1965, thirty years after its original publication, Despair is the wickedly inventive and richly derisive story of Hermann, a man who undertakes the perfect crime: his own murder.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-72343-1
THE ENCHANTER
The Enchanter is the precursor to Nabokov’s classic novel, Lolita. At once hilarious and chilling, it tells the story of an outwardly respectable man and his fatal obsession with certain pubescent girls.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-72886-3
THE EYE
The Eye is as much farcical detective story as it is a profoundly refractive tale about the vicissitudes of identities and appearances. Smurov is a lovelorn, self-conscious Russian émigré living in prewar Berlin who commits suicide after being humiliated by a jealous husband, only to suffer greater indignities in the afterlife.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-72723-1
THE GIFT
The Gift is the last of the novels Nabokov wrote in his native language and the crowning achievement of that period of his literary career. It is the story of Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev, an impoverished émigré who dreams of the book he will someday write.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-72725-5
GLORY
Glory is the wryly ironic story of Martin Edelweiss, a young Russian émigré of no account, who is in love with a girl who refuses to marry him. Hoping to impress his love, he embarks on a “perilous, daredevil”
project to illegally reenter the Soviet Union.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-72724-8
INVITATION TO A BEHEADING
Invitation to a Beheading embodies a vision of a bizarre and irrational world; in an unnamed dream country, the young man Cincinnatus C. is condemned to death by beheading for “gnostical turpitude.”
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-72531-2
KING, QUEEN, KNAVE
Dreyer, a wealthy and boisterous proprietor of a men’s clothing store, is ruddy, self-satisfied, and masculine, but repugnant to his exquisite but cold middle-class wife, Martha. Attracted to his money but repelled by his oblivious passion, she longs for their nephew instead.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-72340-0
LOLITA
Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov’s most famous and controversial novel, tells the story of the aging Humbert Humbert’s obsessive, devouring, and doomed passion for the nymphet Dolores Haze.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-72316-5
LOOK AT THE HARLEQUINS!
Nabokov’s last novel is an ironic play on the Janus-like relationship between fiction and reality. It is the autobiography of the eminent Russian-American author Vadim Vadimovich N. (b. 1899). Focusing on the central figures of his life, the book leads us to suspect that the fictions Vadim has created as an author have crossed the line between his life’s work and his life itself.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-72728-6
THE LUZHIN DEFENSE
As a young boy, Luzhin is unattractive, distracted, withdrawn, sullen—an enigma to his parents and an object of ridicule to his classmates. He takes up chess as a refuge, and rises to the rank of grandmaster, but at a cost: in Luzhin’s obsessive mind, the game of chess gradually supplants reality.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-72722-4
PALE FIRE
Pale Fire offers a cornucopia of deceptive pleasures: a 999-line poem by the reclusive genius John Shade; an adoring foreward and commentary by Shade’s self-styled Boswell, Dr. Charles Kinbote; a darkly comic novel of suspense, literary idolatry and one-upmanship, and political intrigue.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-72342-4
PNIN
Pnin is a professor of Russian at an American college who takes the wrong train to deliver a lecture in a language he cannot master. Pnin is the focal point of subtle academic conspiracies he cannot begin to comprehend, yet he stages a faculty party to end all faculty parties forever.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-72341-7
THE REAL LIFE OF SEBASTIAN KNIGHT
Many knew of Sebastian Knight, distinguished novelist, but few knew of the two love affairs that so profoundly influenced his career. After Knight’s death, his half brother sets out to penetrate the enigma of his life, starting with clues found in the novelist’s private papers.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-72726-2
SPEAK, MEMORY
Speak, Memory is an elegant and rich evocation of Nabokov’s life and times, even as it offers incisive insights into his major works.
Autobiography/Literature/978-0-679-72339-4
ALSO AVAILABLE
The Annotated Lolita, 978-0-679-72729-3
Laughter in the Dark, 978-0-679-72450-6
Lolita: A Screenplay, 978-0-679-77255-2
Mary, 978-0-679-72620-3
The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov, 978-0-679-72997-6
Strong Opinions, 978-0-679-72609-8
Transparent Things, 978-0-679-72541-1
VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL
Available at your local bookstore, or visit
www.randomhouse.com
A PUBLISHING EVENT
The final, unfinished novel from
Vladimir Nabokov
The Original of Laura
After years of controversy surrounding the fate of Nabokov’s final manuscript, Knopf will publish the last work by one of the 20th century’s acknowledged masters of literature. An essential part of Nabokov’s oeuvre, The Original of Laura blurs the line between the author’s life and fiction. This edition, uniquely designed by Chip Kidd, includes facsimiles of the 138 note cards on which it was written.
Available November 2009 in hardcover from Knopf
$35.00 •304 pages • 978-0-307-27189-1
Please visit www.aaknopf.com
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