King, Queen, Knave

by Vladimir Nabokov

Franz reverentially turned the crank of the large lacquered box that must have cost more money than all the records it would ever consume. When he looked up, Martha was sitting on the sofa gazing at him with a strange morose expression.

  “I thought you’d choose a record meanwhile,” said Franz.

  She turned away. “No, I definitely don’t feel like dancing.”

  Franz heaved a sigh. He had seen her in difficult moods, but this was something special.

  He sat down beside her on the sofa. A door shut somewhere. Frieda going to bed? Still listening intently, he kissed Martha, first on the hair, then on the lips. Her teeth were chattering. “Give me my shawl,” she said. He picked up the pink woolly shawl from a corner hassock. She consulted her watch.

  Franz got up abruptly. “I’m going home,” he said.

  “You are what?”

  “Going home. I have to get up much earlier than old secretaries and fat maids.”

  “You shall stay,” said Martha.

  He considered her, reflecting vaguely that there was something behind all this. But what?

  “You know what I have just remembered?” Martha said suddenly, as he plucked at his trouser knees and sat down. “I remembered that rude policeman writing his report. Give me your little red book. And a pencil. There,” she continued, getting up and standing straight and stiff. “That’s how he held the notebook in front of him. Trembled with fury, and wrote in it.”

  “What policeman? What are you talking about?”

  “That’s right. You weren’t there. I’ve got used to including you, retroactively, if you know what I mean, in everything that ever happened.”

  “Stop it,” said Franz. “You frighten me.”

  “I don’t care if you’re frightened. In fact I don’t care if—Forgive me, darling. I’m talking nonsense. I’m just over-eager, I suppose.”

  She settled down on the sofa again, with the address book in her lap. She doodled some lines on a page. Then wrote her family name, and slowly crossed it out. She looked at him askance, once more wrote Dreyer in large characters, slitted her eyes, and started blacking it out. The pencil tip broke. She tossed the book and the pencil to him, and got up.

  The clock tocked rather than ticked, the tock clicked and clocked. Martha stood before him as if trying to hypnotize him, to transfer some simple thought to his young dull brain.

  The front door banged in the unbearable silence, and Tom’s rejoicing voice burst forth.

  “My spells don’t work,” said Martha, and a bizarre spasm distorted her beautiful face.

  Dreyer came in not quite as jauntily as he usually did. Nor did he greet Franz with a joke.

  “Why so late?” asked Martha. “Why didn’t you call?”

  “Just happened that way, my love, just happened that way.” He attempted a smile but nothing came of it. He stared at his nephew’s clothes. The pants were much too narrow, the lapels too shiny.

  “Well, it’s time for me to be going,” cried Franz hoarsely.

  He was in such a silly panic that he could not remember afterwards how he said good-by, or put on his overcoat, or reached the street.

  “You’re not telling the truth,” said Martha. “Something has happened. What is it?”

  “A boring story, my love. A man has been killed.”

  “Jokes again, always jokes,” moaned Martha.

  “Not this time,” Dreyer said quietly. “We smashed into a streetcar, at full speed. Number seventy-three. I only lost my hat and took a healthy bump against something. In these cases it’s always the driver who comes off worst. The ambulance people were angels. We took him to the hospital while he was still alive. Died there. Real angels. Better don’t ask for details.”

  In the dining room they sat facing each other across the table. Dreyer was finishing what remained of the cold chicken. Martha, her face pale and glossy, with drops of sweat over her lip where the tiny black hairs showed, stared with her fingers pressed to her temples at the white, white, intolerably white tablecloth.

  7

  When the inevitable explosion (somehow sensed as inevitable just before it occurred) was on the point of interrupting an absorbing although incoherent conversation with an unshaven Magyar or Basque about treating surgically, with buckets of blood, a seal’s tail to enable the seal to walk upright, Dreyer abruptly returned to the mortality of a winter morning, and with desperate haste, as if he were dealing with an infernal machine, stopped the alarm clock that was about to ring.

  Martha’s bed was already empty. A bad tingle in his left arm connected like an electric buzzer the previous day with the present one. Along the corridor, sobbing loudly, shuffled soft-hearted Frieda. With a sigh he examined the huge violet bruise on his thick shoulder.

  While lying in the tub, he heard Martha perform in the next room the panting, crunching, flopping exercises that were in fashion that year. He had a quick breakfast, lit a cigar, smiled with pain as he put on his overcoat, and went out.

  The gardener (who was also the watchman) was standing by the fence, and Dreyer thought it might be well, even at this late date, to solve by means of a direct question the mystery that had preoccupied him for so long.

  “A calamity, a real calamity,” observed the gardener gravely. “And to think that back in his village he has left a comparatively young father and four little sisters. A skid on the ice, and kaputt. He had hoped so much to drive a big truck some day.”

  “Yes,” nodded Dreyer. “Cracked his skull, his rib cage—”

  “A good merry chap,” said the gardener with feeling. “And now he is dead.”

  “Listen,” began Dreyer, “you did not happen to notice—You see, I have a strong suspicion—”

  He faltered. A trifle—the tense of a verb—stopped him. Instead of asking “does he drink?” it would have to be “did he drink?” This shift of tense caused a wobble in logic.

  “… as I was saying, have you noticed—there is something wrong with the latch of the big parlor window. I mean, the catch does not work properly; anybody could get in from the outside.”

  “Finis,” he mused, as he sat in a taxi with his hand in the strap. “The end of a life, the end of a joke. I shall sell Icarus without repairing it. She does not want another car, and I think she is right. It’s best to wait awhile till Fate forgets.”

  The reason Martha did not want a car was less metaphysical. It might seem a bit strange and suspicious not to use one’s own car to go two or three times a week in the late afternoon to lessons in rhythmic inclinations and gesticulations (“Flora, accept these lilies” or “Let us unfold our veils in the wind”), and the reason she could not use it was that she would have to bribe her chauffeur to be silent about her real destination. Therefore she had to resort to other means of transportation, of the most varied kind, including even the subway, which brought one very conveniently from any part of the city (and a roundabout route was essential though it took only fifteen minutes to walk the distance) to a certain street corner where a rather fantastic house was being slowly built. She casually mentioned to Dreyer that she loved taking a bus or a tram whenever she had a chance because it was a shame not to take advantage of the cheap, exhilaratingly cheap, methods of transportation put at one’s disposal by a generous city. He said he was a generous citizen who preferred a taxi or a private car. By taking these precautions, Martha believed that nobody would ever guess that she transposed or curtailed or missed altogether those delightful contortions and scattering of invisible flowers in the delightful company of other barefooted ladies in more or less comical tunics.

  On the day that businessman Dreyer, owner of the Dandy department store, and his chauffeur briefly appeared in the city news section of her newspaper, Martha arrived a little earlier than usual. Franz was not yet back from work. She sat down on the couch, took off her hat, slowly removed her gloves. That day her face was particularly pale. She wore her high-neck beige dress with little buttons in front. When Franz’s familiar footsteps sounded
in the corridor and he entered (with that abrupt unceremoniousness with which we enter our own room, assuming that it is empty), she did not smile. Franz emitted an exclamation of pleased surprise and without taking off his hat began to shower Martha’s neck and ear with rapid kisses.

  “You know about it already?” she asked, and her eyes had the strange expression he had hoped never to see again.

  “You bet,” he answered and, getting up from the couch, shed his raincoat and striped scarf. “Everybody was discussing it at the store. They asked me all kinds of questions. I was really scared when he came in looking so grim yesterday. What a dreadful thing.”

  “What’s dreadful, Franz?”

  He was already coatless and collarless, and was noisily washing his hands.

  “Well, all that jagged glass hitting you in the face, that crunch of metal and bones, and blood, and blackness. I don’t know why but I picture such things so clearly. Makes me want to vomit.”

  “That is just nerves, Franz, nerves. Come here.”

  He sat down close to her and, trying not to notice that she was absorbed in remote dreary thoughts of her own, softly asked:

  “No pompons today?”

  She did not hear the sweet euphemism, or did not seem to hear it.

  “Franz,” she said, stroking and restraining his hand, “do you realize what a miracle it was? I had a presentiment yesterday which did not work.”

  “There we go again,” he thought, “how long will she bore me with her concern for him?”

  He turned away and attempted to whistle, but no sound came out and he remained brooding with puckered lips.

  “What’s the matter with you, Franz? Stop acting like a fool. I’m closed for repairs today” (another sweet euphemism).

  She drew him to her by the neck; he would not yield but her diamond-like gaze slashed him, and he went all limp and whimpery, the way a child’s balloon collapses with a pitiful squeak. Tears of resentment fogged his glasses. He pressed his head to her shoulder: “I can’t go on like this,” he whined. “Already last night I wondered if your feeling for me was really serious. Worrying about that old uncle of mine! It means you care for him! Oh, it’s so painful—”

  Martha blinked, then understood his mistake. “So that’s what it is,” she drawled with a laugh. “Oh, you poor dear.”

  She took his head in her hands, looked intently and sternly into his eyes, and then slowly, with her mouth half open, as if she were about to give him a gentle bite, drew close to his face, and took possession of his lips.

  “Shame on you,” she said, releasing him slowly, “shame on you,” she repeated with a nod. “I never thought you were that silly. No, just a minute—I want you to understand how silly you are. No, wait. You can’t touch me but I can certainly touch you, and nibble you, and even swallow you whole if I want.”

  “Listen,” she said a little while later, after that stunt, quite new to Franz, had been brought to a satisfactory close. “Listen, Franz, how wonderful it would be if I didn’t have to go today. Today, or tomorrow, or ever. Of course, we could not live in a tiny room like this.”

  “We would rent a larger, brighter room,” said Franz with assurance.

  “Yes. Let’s dream a little. Larger and much brighter. Maybe even two rooms, what do you think? Or perhaps three? And of course a kitchen.”

  “And lots of beautiful knives,” said Franz, “meat cleavers, and cheese cutters, and a roast pork slicer, but you would not do any cooking. You have such precious nails.”

  “Yes, naturally, we’d have a cook. What did we decide—three rooms?”

  “No, four,” said Franz after a moment’s thought. “Bedroom, drawing room, sitting room, dining room.”

  “Four. Fine. A regular four-room apartment. With kitchen. With bath. And we’ll have the bedroom all done in white, won’t we? And the other rooms blue. And there’ll be a reception room with lots and lots of flowers. And an extra room upstairs, just in case, for guests, say.… For a wee little guest, maybe.”

  “What do you mean—‘upstairs’?”

  “Why, of course—it will be a villa.”

  “Ah, I see,” nodded Franz.

  “Let’s continue, darling. A detached villa, then. With a pretty entrance hall. We enter. Rugs, pictures, silverware, embroidered sheets. Right? And a garden, fruit trees. Magnolias. Is that so, Franz?”

  He sighed. “All this will come only in ten years, or more. It will be a long time before I earn sufficiently for you to divorce him.”

  Martha fell silent as if she were not in the room. Franz turned to her with a smile, ready to play on, but the smile faded: she was looking at him with narrowed eyes, biting her lip.

  “Ten years,” she said bitterly. “You little fool! You really want to wait ten years?”

  “That’s how it looks to me,” Franz replied. “I don’t know. Maybe, if I’m very lucky … but, for instance, take Mr. Piffke; he’s been with the store right from the start, and that’s you know how many years. But he lives very modestly. He doesn’t make more than four hundred fifty a month. His wife works too. They have a tiny apartment full of boxes and things.”

  “Thank God you understand,” said Martha. “You see, sweetheart, one cannot deposit dreams at the bank. They aren’t dependable securities, and the dividends they bring are nothing.”

  “Then what shall we do?” said frightened Franz. “You know I’m ready to marry you immediately. I can’t exist without you. Without you I’m like an empty sleeve. But I can’t even afford one of those nice new floormats we sell at the store, let alone carpets. And then, of course, I’d have to look for another job—and I don’t know anything (wrinkling his face), I have no experience in anything. That means learning all over again. We’d have to live in a damp, shabby little room, saving on food and clothes.”

  “Yes, there would be no longer any uncle to help,” said Martha dryly. “No uncle at all.”

  “The whole idea is unthinkable,” said Franz.

  “Absolutely unthinkable,” said Martha.

  “Why are you angry with me?” he asked after a moment’s silence. “As if I were responsible or something. It’s really not my fault. Well, let’s dream on, if you want. Only don’t get angry. I have seventeen suits, like Uncle—Want me to describe them for you?”

  “In ten years,” she said with a laugh, “in ten years, my dear, men’s fashions will have changed substantially.”

  “There—you are angry again.”

  “Yes, I’m angry; not with you, though, but with Fate. You see, Franz—no, you wouldn’t understand.”

  “I’ll understand,” said Franz.

  “All right then. You see, people generally make all kinds of plans, very good plans, but completely fail to consider one possibility: death. As if no one could ever die. Oh, don’t look at me as if I were saying something indecent.”

  She now had exactly the same odd expression as last night when she tried to impersonate a policeman.

  “It’s time for me to go,” said Martha with a frown. She got up and looked at herself in the mirror.

  “Christmas trees are already sold in the streets,” she said, raising her elbows as she put on her hat. “I want to buy a tree, a huge very expensive fir tree, and lots of presents to go under it. Please, give me four hundred and twenty marks. I’m out of pocket.”

  “And you’re also very nasty,” sighed Franz.

  He accompanied her down the dark stairs. He walked her to the square. The builders had started on the facade of the new cinema. The sidewalk was very slippery, the glare ice glistened under the street lamps.

  “You know something, treasure?” she said when bidding him good-by at the corner. “I might have been in deep mourning today. And very becoming it would have been. It’s just by chance that I’m not in mourning. Ponder that, my little nephew.”

  Exactly what she wanted happened then: Franz looked at her, opened his mouth, and suddenly burst out laughing. She rocked with laughter, too. A gentlem
an with a fox terrier, who was waiting near by for the dog to make up its mind in regard to a lamppost, glanced at the merry couple with approval and envy. “In mourning,” said Franz, choking with laughter. She nodded, laughing. “In mourning,” said Franz, stifling a rich guffaw in the palm of his hand. The man with the fox terrier shook his head and moved on. “I adore you,” uttered Franz in a weak voice, and for quite a while gazed after her with moist eyes.

  However, as soon as she turned away to go home Martha’s face again grew stern. Franz meanwhile wiped his glasses with his handkerchief and ambled off, continuing to chuckle to himself. “Yes, it really was a matter of chance. If only the owner of the car had sat beside the chauffeur. Just supposing he’d gone and sat there. There she would be today—a widow. A rich widow, an adorable mistress, a wonderful wife. How drolly she put it: yours is honey; his, poison. And then again, who needs an elaborate crack-up. After all, car accidents are not necessarily fatal; much too often one gets away with bruises, a fracture, lacerations, one mustn’t make too complicated demands on chance: exactly that way, please, make the brains squirt out. There are other possibilities: illnesses, for example. Perhaps he has a bad heart and does not know it. And look at all the influenza people who croak. Then we’d really start living. The store would go on doing business. The money would roll in. But then more likely he’ll outlive his wife and make it all the way to the twenty-first century. Why, there was something in the papers about a Turk who was a hundred and fifty years old, and still produced children, the filthy old brute.”

  Thus he mused, vaguely and crudely, unaware that his thoughts were spinning along from the push given them by Martha. The thought of marriage had also come from her. Oh, but it was a good thought. If he derived such pleasure from Martha’s satisfying him twice in one hour three or four times a week, what varied ecstasies would she grant him if she were available twenty-four hours a day! He employed this method of calculating happiness quite guilelessly, the way a greedy child imagines a country with chocolate-cream mud and ice-cream snow.

  In those days—which as a very old and very sick man, guilty of worse sins than avunculicide, he remembered with a grin of contempt—young Franz was oblivious to the corrosive probity of his pleasant daydreams about Dreyer’s dropping dead. He had plunged into a region of delirium, blithely and light-heartedly. His subsequent meetings with Martha appeared to be as natural and tender as all the previous ones but, just as that modest little room, with its unpretentious old furniture and its naively dark corridor, had for master a person, or persons, incurably though not obviously insane, there now lurked in those meetings something strange—a little eerie and shameful at first, but already enthralling, already all-powerful. Whatever Martha said, however charmingly she smiled, Franz sensed an irresistible insinuation in her every word and glance. They were like heirs sitting in a dim-lit parlor while in the bedroom doomed Plutus pleads with the doctor and curses the priest; they might talk about trifles, about the approach of Christmas, about the intense activity of skis and wool at the emporium; one might talk about anything although perhaps a little more soberly than before—for one’s hearing is strained, one’s eyes have a changeable gleam; a secret impatience allows one no peace as one waits and waits for the grim physician to come out on tiptoe, with an eloquent sigh, and lo—through the crack of the door one glimpses the long back of the cleric, representative of a boundlessly charitable Church, in the act of bending over the white, white bed.