The Game of Cards

by Adolf Schroder

  “Not my wife,” says Berger.

  They have gone into the Chinese restaurant and are sitting facing one another across the table. The waiter has taken their order and is now bringing the soup.

  “My daughter died,” says Berger, and as Markus dips his spoon into the bowl, without daring to raise it to his mouth, Berger continues, saying she was much too young to get cancer, she hadn’t smoked and she had taken care of what she ate, she had done plenty of sport and even in her job—she had been a teacher—she had found more satisfaction and recognition than hassle, the illness had erupted into all of their lives like a flash of lightning, catching them unawares, except for his daughter, who right from the start had behaved as if the illness had finally come to her, after she had waited a long time for it.

  Berger stops talking and starts to drink his soup. As it is hot, he sips it from the spoon that he holds lightly to his lips. Markus eats too, but he doesn’t feel as if he can really taste his food. Although Berger is now silent, Markus feels he can still hear his voice, which sounded almost indifferent, as if he had been dictating a report for his records.

  “I’m sorry,” he says, feeling he has to say something.

  “You don’t need to feel sorry,” says Berger, pushing the empty soup bowl away, “do you know what she said when she died?”

  The waiter comes up to their table, clears away the soup bowls, puts a match to the tea lights under the hotplate and goes away again.

  Berger leans back in his chair, turns his gaze away from Markus and looks out of the window, as he continues to speak in the same cool tone, saying that what had struck him most had been his daughter’s submissiveness, the gentle way she faced up to this illness, he says it made him feel helpless and filled him with such anger that, when he was alone, he had beaten the wall with his fist.

  When the waiter comes back and puts the dishes on the hotplate, takes the lid off the preheated food, and lays knife, fork, and spoon next to the table napkin, Berger again falls silent. Markus opens the rice dish and helps himself to rice, then hands the bowl over to Berger. Only when Berger has helped himself to rice and meat, and has poured red sambal spice out of the little glass bottle onto the side of his plate, does Markus begin to eat, keeping his eyes fixed on his plate and putting his left hand, which is unoccupied since he eats only with his fork, onto the table next to the plate. They eat in silence. Occasionally, when Berger reaches for his glass and takes a drink, there is a slurping noise. Markus, who always makes the same movement as he brings his fork to his mouth, feeling that he mustn’t stop until his plate is empty, although after the very first bite he has entirely lost his appetite, hopes Berger will not start speaking again, interrupting the silence with his toneless voice of which he is starting to be afraid. Berger eats until the dish of meat and the bowl of rice are empty. He wipes his mouth with a napkin, pushes the empty plate away, folds the napkin and places it next to the plate, drinks the last drop of his beer, and carefully places the glass next to the napkin on the beer mat. Then he leans back in his chair.

  “When she died, she said, before she stopped breathing: it’s fine,” says Berger. He reaches for the toothpicks, lifts the little pointed piece of wood to his mouth and, without covering his mouth with his hand, he pokes around in the gaps between his front teeth. Markus looks away. He seeks for words, as if it were absolutely necessary to say something, and is relieved when the waiter comes back to their table to clear away the dishes.

  “Selma Bruhns was strangled with her white silk shawl,” says Berger without changing his tone of voice. With a quick movement that takes Markus by surprise, he stands up and walks through the room in which, apart from them, there are only two men sitting at a distant table. He makes his way to the door leading to the toilets. When the waiter returns to the table bringing the coffee, as the two businessmen pack their things away, get up and also leave the room, Markus pushes his chair back, lights up a cigarette and leans his head against the back of the chair, gazing up at the ceiling decorated with wooden carvings. He shut his eyes and sees Glowna coming towards him, with a friendly smile, coming ever closer to him, leaning slightly to the left, until Markus could touch him, he sees Christine sitting at the kitchen table and wrapping the sandwich she’s going to give him into the aluminium foil, then Berger comes up to him, takes him by the arm, draws him up from the chair and embraces him, pressing Markus to him so tightly that he cannot breathe, he sees the photograph that he had picked up from Berger’s desk, her face with her half-opened eyes and mouth twisted in a grin, he sees one of the animals leaping into the photograph, squatting on her shoulder and nestling its head against her ear, which is not covered by her hair.

  “Up you get.”

  Markus opens his eyes. Berger is standing next to the table.

  Dear Almut,

  The sun has set, and the darkness outside the windows seems to be protecting the house, as if it needed protection. The darkness has settled onto the water and hidden it beneath itself, only the noise of the rising waves comes up to me. I am sitting at my writing desk and for the third time starting this letter to you, having torn up the first two attempts and thrown the pieces into the wastepaper basket, since I did not feel I was reaching you with my words. Today you are so far away from me, and I wonder whether you have turned away from me or whether I no longer have the strength to cross the distance between us that stretches out ever further in time and space. Since Herbert died and only my footsteps can be heard in the house, I increasingly have the feeling I don’t belong here, as if only Herbert had been able to keep me here, and as if, now that his smile, a smile that at one and the same time was understanding, patient and consoling, though I remained a stranger for him, is still and frozen in his death mask, there was nothing left to keep me back here. I’m going to travel, Almut, by ship, just as I came here, as if I wanted to reverse my flight and conquer time, my great enemy.

  Two days after Herbert’s death a cat came running up to me, it followed me through the house, I think I can hear it paws padding along on the floor, and when it leaps into my lap and snuggles up in my arms, when I can feel the warmth of its apparently weightless body, and the beating of its heart under its fur, its trusting attitude alarms me, as if I had not deserved it. Do you remember, Almut, I am writing these four words as if they were a magic spell, how you often snuggled up in my arms when we were still young enough not to be afraid of touching each other, and how you started to tell me the stories that you had made up in the middle of the night when you could not get off to sleep, you always were a restless sleeper? I persuaded you to write them down. Your stories, that to begin with were short, often just a few words long, became longer and more complicated, as if they or you refused to reach a conclusion, as if you wanted, as I want now, to conquer time in your stories. But one day you took the exercise books—they had soft blue covers with squared paper—into the yard, melted candle wax, poured it over the exercise books, and set fire to them, and neither my entreaties nor my anger could hold you back.

  When Herbert died, I realised that my grief consisted merely in the perception of an emptiness in which there were neither feelings nor images, an emptiness that allowed me to remain silent since in it my voice echoed, and it filled me with fear as if it were I who had died and yet remained alive. Perhaps my departure is another flight from the chill that covers my thoughts with a thin layer of ice, so that the space through which I move, even if it is as big as the hall of my house, is getting more and more cramped.

  I have not given the cat a name, so as not to take possession of it. I’m going to take it to the woman I mentioned to you, the one who hangs her washing on the balcony to dry, the one who has lured the laughter of a child into her flat. The cat is young, it will soon entrust itself to a child’s hands.

  I can hardly dare to bring this letter to an end, just like you with your stories, as if, when I lay my pen aside, there were nothing more awaiting me, merely the noise of the cat’s paws over the parq
uet floor.

  The door opened. When he looked up, she was standing in the door frame. Since the light was falling out of the hall into the small room, at first he recognized only her silhouette against the bright background, until his eyes grew used to the altered light and he saw that she had again put on a red dress, tidied up her hair, and instead of sandals was wearing laced up boots. Since he did want to stay crouching on the floor in front of her, he straightened up, without putting the letters he was holding onto the floor. He took a step backwards, to lean against the wall of the small room, as if this had become more cramped now that she stood in the door blocking his way. She did not come into the room, and stared at him in silence as if she had asked him a question.

  “Morning,” said Markus.

  Now she stepped up to him, and Markus, who could not move any further back, involuntarily raised his arms and folded them in front of his chest. Before reaching him, she turned to the wooden chests, two of which were empty while in the bottom half of the third there was still a pile of yellowed paper.

  “Why are you scared of me?” she said, without giving her words the intonation of a question. Markus did not reply. Not because he did not want to reply. Not because he was surprised at the question. He remained silent because he did not know whether he really was scared of her.

  As if she too had not been expecting any answer, she went back to the door, she needed to take only two steps to leave the room, but before she did so, Markus heard chords being struck on the piano in the front room. There followed rapid runs up and down every octave of the keyboard. He panicked, since he had thought that he was alone with her in the house. Involuntarily his fingers opened and the letters fell to the ground.

  Today they fetched the piano that Herbert gave me and carried it down to the harbour. He did so because, in a moment of weakness that I regret, I told him about us, about the music room where we had lessons and where you sat next to the piano tuner who had come to tune the instrument, you stayed there the whole time he was working, as if you had wanted to hear and check every note.

  Selma Bruhns, who had remained standing in the door frame observing him, came back up to him, bent down and picked up the fallen letters. She held them out to Markus who automatically took them from her.

  “So then, good morning,” she said and left the room.

  Markus squatted back down on the floor. He wanted to carry on with his work—during the five days he had spent in Selma Bruhns’s house it had not become any easier. The letters kept slipping out of his hand, often the figures of the date blurred into black smudges, sometimes they simply could not be deciphered and he had to place them at random on one of the piles. He listened to the notes that wandered through the house, not arranging themselves into harmonies or into any melody, as if they were being struck arbitrarily. He knew that it was not Selma Bruhns playing. He stood up and went out of the room. Although he was tempted to walk through the big room with the fireplace, open the sliding door and look into the front room to discover who was playing the piano and apparently submitting it to a thorough examination, he quickly walked across the hall so as not to meet her, went out of the house, through the front garden and into the street. He drove into town, parked the car in a side street in the centre and walked to the café on the Market Square. He sat on one of the white plastic chairs, ordered a cup of coffee, and while he waited opened his briefcase, took his notebook out, laid it on his knee without opening it, pulled a ball point pen from the inner pocket of his jacket, and held it as if at any moment he would start to write. A young woman brought him the coffee. He paid and gazed across the Market Square to the buildings opposite. He couldn’t make up his mind to write a single sentence in the notebook. All at once he knew why he had driven here, why, as soon as he had approached the café, his gaze had darted round every table as if he had been looking for somebody. It was Rufus he had hoped to meet here, although he did not know what he would have said to him.

  He picked up the notebook, stuffed it into his briefcase, stood up and went back to his car, walking more and more quickly, as if afraid she might have noticed his absence and would be standing behind one of the great windows and observing his return through a gap in the drapes.

  But the house seemed abandoned when he opened the front door and stepped into the hall. For a moment he stood there, feeling that something was missing without knowing what it was, until he saw the bright rectangular mark on the wallpaper where the portrait of the old man had hung.

  It was quiet. Markus did not go back into the small room. He opened the door of the big room with the fireplace, went in and crossed the room, reached the half-opened sliding doors and stood there in the gap. He looked across to the glass facade where the grand piano had stood. Its place was empty.

  Berger drives quickly. When he approaches a red light, only at the last minute does he switch down into second gear and step on the brake, and Markus, sitting next to him, has to steady himself against the dashboard so as not to lose his balance. When they had left the Chinese restaurant he had not asked Berger where they were going but sat in silence in the passenger seat and observed Berger as he walked down to the car, clambered into the driver’s seat and with some difficulty manoeuvred his car out of the car park.

  “What do you know about her house?” says Berger, turning into a road in the suburbs where single-storey terraced houses stretch out into the meadows extending behind them. As Berger stops the car outside one of the terraced houses and switches off the engine, but remains seated behind the wheel, without making any move to get out, and as Markus, like Berger, does not move and, remembering the slap, prepares to duck another blow, Berger says, staring at Markus with eyes that have narrowed to slits in which Markus thinks he can read a mocking glint, as he had this morning in Berger’s office:

  “I’m sorry. I’ve lost patience.”

  He opens the door and gets out of the car. Through the windscreen Markus observes him leaning against the wing of the car and pulling his jacket collar up. When he gets out and stands next to Berger’s car and they again stare at each other across the car roof, he says, voluntarily, not being under any compulsion to say something:

  “I’m sorry too.”

  Berger nods as if he had been expecting Markus to say this, points to the terraced house standing behind him and walks up the paved path between the lawns towards the house. Markus does not move. He remains standing next to the car.

  “Is this where you live?”

  Berger has pulled a key-ring out of his trouser pocket and unlocks the front door.

  “Yes, this is where I live,” he says, without raising his voice, but Markus understands his words. He walks up to Berger, and together they step into the house. The hall is narrow and lies in the dim light coming in through the grooved windowpane on one of the doors, a light so weak that the photos on the walls can barely be made out.

  “Wait for me,” says Berger, opens one of the doors, steps to one side and motions Markus in. Markus walks past him into the room. Berger shuts the door behind him. In front of the window, through which Markus can look out onto a lawn surrounded by a gravel path, there stands a desk on top of which there is a green writing pad and to the right of this several books piled on top of each other. A pencil, a ballpoint pen and an eraser lie in a bowl. In front of the desk there is a leather chair on rollers. On the one free wall next to the window—all the other walls are covered with bookshelves reaching up to the ceiling—there hangs a picture. Even before he spots the pipe lying in a glass ashtray, he smells the honey aroma of tobacco. He does not dare sit on the leather sofa, remains standing and tries to imagine Berger in this room, sitting at the desk, smoking his pipe and leafing through one of the books that he has taken down from the shelves and placed on his desk within easy reach. He does not know how long Berger keeps him waiting before he opens the door and comes in, but he thinks he must have been waiting for him for a long time.

  “What do you know about her house?”r />
  Berger repeats the question that he has already asked Markus in the car and that has so far remained unanswered.

  Berger has changed and is now wearing a dark jacket over a white shirt. He sits on the sofa, crosses his legs, which makes them seem even shorter, and, as if he wanted to touch Markus, stretches out his hand.

  “Sit down,” he says.

  Since the only possibility is sitting next to Berger or on the chair in front of the desk, Markus hesitates, as if afraid of making some mistake, and then rolls the chair away from the desk until it is standing opposite Berger. When he sits down, he feels the springs of the chair allowing the backrest to tilt gently backwards, which makes him lean forward in alarm and touch Berger’s still extended hand with his own hand.

  “In the autumn of 1940 the Bruhns family had to give up their house,” says Berger, once Markus has withdrawn his hand, “it was confiscated and until the end of the war used by the Gestapo as an auxiliary branch.”

  Berger, who looks odd in his jacket, leans back, and while Markus waits for him to carry on speaking, gazes past him at the book-covered wall. As if this time he cannot stand the silence that he had had to put up with for so long in Berger’s office, Markus says:

  “What became of the family?”

  Berger does not answer straightaway, but strokes his head as if arranging his hair.

  “They were obliged to move into a so-called Jews’ residence, which was then cleared out during the first deportations,” he says, without Markus being able to perceive in his words the hostility with which Berger had spoken about his daughter, “didn’t Selma Bruhns tell you?”

  Berger bends forward and looks at him. He lays his hand on Markus’ knee.

  “We’ll just drive quietly over to her house,” he says. “Perhaps when we get there you’ll tell me what Selma Bruhns told you.”