by C. D. Rose
Someone could have consulted a rule book, but there was no rule book.
The game had its rules, but the rules were unwritten. Everything was precedent, tradition. Each precedent had, perhaps, begun as a cheat, or a challenge. No group had ever formally sat and ratified changes to the game. The rules were like the life-sized map of the town held in the Cartographer’s shop: no one had ever seen it; all believed in its existence, apocryphal as it may be.
The game had been played in the town for many years, though no one knew how many. The game had not always been played in the back bar of the Golden Lion. Over the years, the game had moved from inn to tavern to the storeroom of the baker to the salon of the big house at the edge of town, and then back again around this circuit. The game had been played in the town square, under hedges, in fields, and at one point it was said that the game was being played only by two men in a ditch.
Different traditions related that the game dated back to when a bride was gambled, or children auctioned, or to the founding of the town itself by a man who had had to sell all his land. The game had begun so long ago no one could quite remember when it had begun, or where, or how, or why.
“Before we begin,” said the Galician, “may I ask a question?”
The Marquis assented; the crowd cocked its ear.
“Would it be possible,” he asked, “to add my own pack?”
Although there had been many iterations of the game, it was—as far as anyone knew—always played with at least two packs of cards, and sometimes as many as nine. French and Neapolitan were standard, Latin and Swiss sometimes used, even Silesian or Sicilian, and very occasionally Tarot.
The request baffled the crowd. The polyphonic unwritten rules were consulted: the crowd debated; opinions varied.
Cheating, Klug reminded everyone, was not unheard of in the game. There were many modes of cheating, Karm asserted, some of which, over the years, had come to be accepted as acceptable modes of play. The Marquis himself had been known to cheat, had even admitted it, only a little, only ever slightly, but he was able to justify himself: it was, he claimed, his way of righting the balance of the world, of taking action against an unjust universe. He had, he said, been cheated against on several occasions (both large and small), but had—in those cases—never taken any revenge nor caused any scene nor publicly questioned anyone’s honour. He had merely decided, in turn, to cheat back. Such was the world, said the Marquis. Cheating could happen, but cheating had to be regulated. The Galician could certainly propose a new pack, but the pack would have to be inspected.
It was set to be a long evening. Food supplies were called for: the soup was stirred, the stale bread dampened and put back in the relit oven. Grasso carted up more pear brandy from his cellar. Link boys, their buckets of fire hanging on the ends of their poles, would be needed to guide the drunks home.
A committee (Grasso, Klug and Karm, Johann and Peter) hastily assembled, abetted by the others, each with their own theory: the Galician was going to play a double, introduce an extra to the pack, one more card, thus disturbing the game’s precise possibilities of combinations of variants. According to the rules, each card should have its twin, although the twin card was not necessarily identical. But if the card were, in turn, marked in some way (a dog-ear, a nicked edge, a tiny inked cross nestling at its corner), the delicate order, the unique balance of the game would also begin to totter, to crumble, to disintegrate. The fine calibrations would sway as if they were a house, and not a game, of cards. The intricate order would have mutated, been changed in a manner at once infinitesimal and immense. Such a corruption of order would call everything everyone knew, had ever known, or would ever know into question: everything would still be connected to everything else, but nothing would mean anything.
The game was not a game of cards, much less a game of money: It was a game of life, played with cards. Everything had its sequence, everything had its order, no matter how random or unpredictable it should seem.
Whether the Galician was aware of this or not, no one knew. He merely sat, his cooling tea before him, unconcerned about the commotion his query had caused. And then he made another.
“What,” he asked, “lies on the other side of the river?” The crowd looked at each other, blank faced. No one knew what was on the other side of the river. No one had thought to ask what lay on the other side of the river, over the bridge, on that far muddy or frosty bank.
“Bears,” said someone, and there was a murmur of agreement, though all were in truth unsure. The story of the bears was dimly remembered, spurious at best. There was no lingering menace, no ancestral curse that lay over the far bank; it was simply that no one had the slightest interest.
“There is a map,” Karm said to him, “in the Cartographer’s shop. It shows the whole town, life-sized. Perhaps it also shows what lies over the other bank.” No one knew because no one had consulted the map for many years, one said. It was no longer reliable, said another. In tatters, said a third.
By now the pack had been inspected and found to be in valid playing condition, and the tea, almost forgotten about, was judged cool enough.
The Marquis lifted his glass.
“One for salt!” he cried, and the crowd echoed him.
“One for salt!”
“One for iron!” he cried, and the crowd echoed him.
“One for iron!”
“One for blood!”
“One for blood!”
“…and one for the devil!”
(This last line was the Marquis’s own addition to the rhyme that had opened the game ever since anyone could remember. It was not universally liked, some feeling it overly macabre, but the Marquis felt it gave his game a flourish, a distinction not seen among previous generations of players.)
The game could begin.
In truth, the game had already begun. The game had begun a long time ago, and once it had started, the game was always in progress. One story recounted the tale of a player who had died at table and carried on regardless. (Quite how the deceased player carried on is never told. It is perhaps more probable that it was his companions who carried on regardless.)
“A true champion,” said Ada, whenever this story was told.
“A true hero,” replied Eva, whenever she heard the story.
“To die doing what one loves doing most in this life, surely, is no death at all,” said the Marquis, after he had told the story.
The game was being played whether the Marquis was at table or not. The game was being played even on the far side of the river. The game had always been played, and always would be.
The Marquis laid a card on the table: French suit, the Ace of Hearts. A simple, honest start, the crowd agreed. The classic opener for when a guest was playing, a show of welcome, of hospitality.
The Galician nodded but, before responding with a card of his own, made a further request.
“I would like the decks to be riffled and reshuffled.”
Once again, the crowd grumbled and murmured, moaned and burbled. The request was licit, surely, this was known, but to certain players—whether onlookers or active participants—it implied not only a certain degree of bad faith, but something more.
Though the rules of the game were Daedalian, its method of play was simple. A number of strategies or gambits could be put into effect at any given point in the play by any player or group of players, much as in a game of chess. Over the years, such strategies had earned names: the Shepherd’s Loss, the Sicilian Blade, the Swiss Entry, the Blacksmith’s Lament, the Russian Linesman, the Dancing Horse, the Lame Swan, the Bottle of Smoke, the Tattooist’s Daughter, the Drinker of Jasmine Tea, the Levantine Merchant, the Hungarian Dog’s Back Leg.
The Galician’s curious and unexpected questions had led the Marquis to a particular suspicion.
“I take it, Sir,” said the Marquis, “that you in
tend to play the Blind Accordionist.”
The Marquis knew, as Ada and Eva knew, as many of the assembled murmuring crowd knew, that the Blind Accordionist was one of the most controversial moves that could be made. The Blind Accordionist had never been played before; the Blind Accordionist had only ever been mentioned in hushed tones, spoken of behind closed doors, with nods of heads and grave faces and the low voices of men sitting in the quiet back room of the Golden Lion. The Blind Accordionist, it was said, would reorder everything, reconfigure the way in which the game was to be played.
And yet, the Marquis knew more than this.
“The Blind Accordionist,” he whispered to Eva and Ada, “cannot ever be played.”
“Why ever not?” asked Ada, or Eva.
“The Blind Accordionist,” said the Marquis with gravity, “is the move that will end the game.”
The game could not end.
Much as no one really knew how the game had begun, it was known that the game could not end. The game had always been, and would always be. The game could not end because the game could not ever be won or lost, because the game was life itself.
At this point, their options were limited. They could play a Bookbinder’s Reel, or the Dandelion Clock; they could invoke the Drohobych Variant; they could use extra-ludic strategies (as far as anything could ever be outside of the game): having a telegram delivered to the Galician calling him home on urgent business, shouting “fire!,” actually starting a fire. Other, darker, suggestions were made before being almost instantly dismissed.
There come times in every game, or every life, when chaos seems to be the constituent element. There are, if one is fortunate enough to know them, certain people for whom this is a moment not only of opportunity, but of meaning. Ada and Eva were two such people.
“Ada?” said Eva.
“Eva?” said Ada.
As if by clockwork, as if they had waited for this moment, as if this had all been planned and prepared, Ada and Eva moved in.
No subterfuge nor sleight of hand would be necessary. All that was needed was a reinterpretation of everything. A slight changing of the borders or the boundaries that would make everything—although completely different—stay exactly the same.
“The Galician,” said Eva, “is simply a man in the wrong place.”
“Or rather,” corrected Ada, “we should say that there is no wrong place.”
“Indeed,” said Eva. “Location is all relative.”
“Like time,” said Ada.
“We simply need to reinterpret.”
“To see from a different perspective.”
“Are you suggesting,” asked the Marquis, “that we change the rules?”
“The rules are always being changed,” said Ada.
“There are no rules—that is the rule,” said Eva. “There are no things.”
“Only events,” said Ada.
“It is up to us to make a sequence of them.”
“To give them pattern.”
“Order.” “Form.”
“Nothing can end,” said Ada.
“Only change,” said Eva.
The Galician looked at Eva, then at Ada, then at Ada, then at Eva. The cards were reshuffled. The Galician held his pack.
“Go ahead,” said Ada.
“You may,” said Eva.
It is said that the Galician then played a card, or cards, though no one who was there that night agrees on which or how many cards were placed on the table, or indeed if even any were at all. It is said that a wind came and blew all the cards away, that everyone was too drunk on pear brandy, and that the whole tale is a mere fiction, that Klug’s dog spoke but that everyone was too busy worrying about everything else to actually listen to what, if anything, the hound had to say.
The only things that were certain is that the Galician left for Odessa, the Marquis continued to drink, and Ada and Eva even joined him, and everyone, everywhere, continued to be part of the game, because the game could not be stopped, because everyone was part of the game; even those who lay in the cemetery or continued to walk the streets of the town with no bodily form, memories only, they too played the game, because everybody is playing the game, even—yes, at this very moment, as you read this page—you.
PILGRIM SOULS
ON THE DAY they finished moving the cemetery, Alma Brik went to ten funerals. After eighty-eight years, the full strangeness of this world was nothing new to her, but ten funerals in a day was pushing it, especially as they were funerals for people for whom she had already attended funerals. She should go again, she told herself, if only to show the dead they had not been reforgotten.
It was late February, and the pear trees were already in bloom. Too soon, Alma knew, but the weather was warmer up here on this side of the valley. That wasn’t the only strange thing, though, noted Alma: apples were growing on their boughs.
She thought of Doctor Albert, her neighbour, who used to tell her his outlandish dreams, even though she begged him not to and covered her ears when he spoke. Ten funerals in one day and apples growing on pear trees would have been dreams too strange even for Doctor Albert, she thought. He had stopped dreaming now, though. He hadn’t had a single dream, he told her, since they moved the village.
The early evening light fell at an angle now unfamiliar to her. The shadows she had used to guide herself home had shifted, and she could no longer be sure she wouldn’t end up lost. The snow had mostly cleared; what remained banked up into small rifts around the edges of the square. It looked more like ash, she thought.
Alma was pleased the oak had come with them. Ten strong men had uprooted the tree and heaved it onto a cart, which strained up the hillside, then replanted it in the new square. Some branches had been lost during the journey, so it no longer had quite the same shape, even though it was the same tree, in the same square, in the same village, only now in a different place. They moved the fountain, too, but not its source, so now the fountain ran dry.
When they opened the new village, the mayor had a ribbon put around the oak that he then cut, ceremonially, declaring the new village open. Everybody looked at one another and wondered what they should do now that their village, where they had lived for most of their lives, was officially open. Shortly after, as they went home, they were thinking of the mayor cutting the ribbon, and of the river drowning what remained of their original homes. They thought of their old walls collapsing under the weight of the water coursing onward, devouring everything until it hit the wall of the new dam at the bottom of the valley. Had she so wished, Alma could have stood in the cemetery and watched the water plough its path, filling the now-empty graves below. But she had not wished such a thing, and had instead sat herself in the new main square by the new old oak, uncertain as to what direction her new old home lay in.
She had continued to sit there, with many passersby not thinking it strange that the old woman should spend her days so.
When Lev returned to the village, twenty years after having left, he didn’t even notice the woman sitting by the side of the square. He would already have regarded her as old back then, but Alma watched him come back, and remembered. Scarcely a boy he’d been when he left. There was much Lev did not notice. He did not notice, for example, the very fact that the village had moved.
Each brick, each stone, each tree, and each scrubby bush had been carried up the hillside and put back, both new and ancient. Exactly as it had been, they’d been promised, only better, they said: the new village would no longer be the worn-out old place it had been, the place the young ones left for the attractions of the city or other countries entirely. The new village would be brighter, more spacious, healthier. The new village would be closer to the new factories offering new jobs for the new people. The old village suffered from damp, they said, and it was true: its old walls ached to the point of collapse, worms ate its wooden beam
s, its old white paint was stained by eternal mildew. The new village was heated, hermetic, insulated. There was no space in the old houses, they said, they’re too small for modern families. Nobody should have to go to a well for water nowadays, they said, no one should have to urinate in a field. So they built the new houses a little bigger than the old ones, a few feet more space for the floors, the ceilings a few hands higher. All the new houses were given a tiny plot to grow vegetables, run chickens, or tether a goat.
No one had told Lila any of this, but her aunt had given her the name of a village and a photograph of a rich man giving money to a blind beggar playing the accordion, and even though there was no map, she decided to make her way back to the place she had been born.
Alma remembered how the valley had suffered from gloom, damp, flies. In the winter, a clammy cold grew like mould on their bones. They forgot what warmth meant. In the summer, the heat slid down the hillside like butter and coagulated in the village. They forgot what cold meant. But now, up on the shoulder of the hill that leaned into the valley, it was healthier, they said, protected from strong winds but open to salutary breezes, warm in the winter and cool in the summer. It was lighter, it was drier, there was no fear of flooding. Their fingers, toes, and window frames wouldn’t freeze in the winter and rot in the autumn; their plants wouldn’t die of heatstroke in the barren August.
Leon had a map, but it still stank of all the damp and rot, all the foul air and gloom. His father had drawn it for him, and his father had not been to the village for twenty years. His father, a man to whom words were strange things, had read no newspaper and took no heed of gossip. Leon hadn’t even heard of the place until a week ago and lacked the basic skills needed to read a map, but this mattered little to him. He had asked where the village was, people had pointed, he had arrived.
Alma watched them all pass, Lev, Lila and Leon, but knew she could not help them. Nothing was as it had been. Mirrors had stopped reflecting her directly, and showed only oblique angles of the room she stood in. Her own face was unrecognisable. Clocks carried on ticking, but their hands cast no shadow. In the yard of her new old house, time itself had slowed to the speed of thick honey sliding from a spoon.