Laughter in the Dark by Vladimir Nabokov, John Banville Page B

landing—and the second. “Let me explain … A young artist in need … Not quite right in head, writes love letters to strangers.” … Nonsense—the game was up.
    Before reaching his door, he suddenly turned round and rushed down again. A cat crossed the garden path and slipped nimbly between the iron bars.
    Ten minutes later he was back in the room which he had entered so gaily a short while ago.Margot was still curved on the couch in the same posture—a torpid lizard. The book was still open at the same page. Albinus sat down at a little distance from her and began to crack his finger joints.
    “Don’t do that,” said Margot without raising her head.
    He stopped, but soon began again.
    “Well, has the letter come?”
    “Oh, Margot,” he said, and cleared his throat several times. “Too late, too late,” he cried in a new shrill voice.
    He rose, walked up and down the room, blew his nose and sat down on the chair again.
    “She reads all my letters,” he said, gazing through a moist haze at the toe of his shoe and trying to fit it into the trembling pattern of the carpet.
    “Well, you ought to have forbidden her to do that.”
    “Margot, you don’t understand … It was always like that—a habit, a pleasure. Mislaid them sometimes before I had read them. There were all sorts of amusing letters. How could you do it? I can’t imagine what she’ll do now. If, by a miracle, just this once … perhaps she was busy with something … perhaps … No!”
    “Well, mind you don’t show yourself whenshe comes along here. I’ll see her alone, in the hall.”
    “Who? When?” he asked, dully remembering the drunken hag he had seen—ages ago.
    “When? Any moment, I suppose. She’s got my address now, hasn’t she?”
    Albinus still failed to understand.
    “Oh, that’s what you mean,” he muttered at last. “How silly you are, Margot! Believe me, that, at any rate, is utterly impossible. Anything else … but not that.”
    “So much the better,” thought Margot, and suddenly she felt extremely elated. When she had sent off the letter she had anticipated a far more trivial consequence: he refuses to show it, wife gets wild, stamps, has a fit. So the first suspicions are roused and that eases the way. But now chance had helped her and the way was made clear at one stroke. She let the book slip to the floor and smiled as she looked at his downcast twitching face. It was time to act, she supposed.
    Margot stretched herself out, was aware of a pleasant tingling in her slim body and said, gazing up at the ceiling, “Come here.”
    He came, sat down on the edge of the couch and shook his head despondently.
    “Kiss me,” she said, closing her eyes. “I’ll comfort you.”

9
    B ERLIN -W EST , a morning in May. Men in white caps cleaning the street. Who are they who leave old patent leather boots in the gutter? Sparrows bustling about in the ivy. An electric milk van on fat tires rolling creamily. The sun dazzling in an attic window on the slope of a green-tiled roof. The young fresh air itself was not yet used to the hooting of the distant traffic; it gently took up the sounds and bore them along like something fragile and precious. In the front gardens the Persian lilac was in bloom. Despite the early coolness white butterflies were already fluttering about as though in a rustic garden. All these things surrounded Albinus as he walked out of the house in which he had spent the night.
    He was conscious of a dull discomfort. He was hungry; he had neither shaved nor bathed; the touch of yesterday’s shirt against his skin was exasperating. He felt utterly spent—and no wonder.This had been the night of which he had dreamed for years. The very way in which she had drawn her shoulder blades together and purred when he first kissed her downy back had told him that he would get exactly what he wanted, and what he wanted was not the chill of innocence. As in his most reckless visions, everything