Theirs was a pointless vigil. Martha knew perfectly well that he never seemed to have even so much as a toothache or a cold. Therefore it was particularly irritating to her when just before the holidays she herself contracted a chill; the poor girl developed a dry cough, a tease and a wheeze in the bronchia, night sweats, and spent the day in a kind of dull trance, dazed by the so-called Grippe, heavy-headed and with ears abuzz. When Christmas came she felt no better. That evening, nevertheless, she put on a sheer flame-colored dress, very low cut at the back; and deafened by aspirin, trying to dispell her illness by will power, supervised the preparation of the punch, the laying of the table, the ruddy smoky activity of the cook.
In the parlor, its silvery crown touching the ceiling, all decked out in flimsy tinselry, all studded with still unlit red and blue bulbs, a fresh luxuriant fir tree stood, indifferent to its buffoonish array. In an uncozy nook between the parlor and the entry, a bright and rather bare place, termed for some reason a reception room, where among the wicker furniture grew and bloomed potted plants—cyclamens, seven dwarf cactuses, a peperomia with painted leaves—and where the tangerine glow of an electric fireplace could not beat the draft from a plate-glass window, Dreyer in evening dress sat reading an English book while waiting for his guests. The scene was laid on the Island of Capri. He moved his lips as he read and peeked pretty often into a fat dictionary which kept shuttling between his lap and a glass-topped table. Not knowing what to do with herself during this prolonged lull before the first ring, Martha sat down at a little distance from him on a settee and lifted her foot off the floor, examining from every angle her pointed shoe. The stillness was intolerable. Dreyer accidentally dropped the dictionary and, making his generously starched shirt crackle, retrieved it without taking his eyes off his book. What could she do with that oppression, that tightness in the chest? Coughing alone could not relieve it; there was only one thing that could make the whole world well: the sudden and total disappearance of that self-satisfied bulky man with the leonine brows and freckled hands. The acuteness of her hatred reached such a pitch of perception that for a moment she had the illusion that his chair was empty. But his cuff link described a flashing arc as he shut the dictionary, and he said, smiling at her consolingly: “Goodness, what a cold you have. I can hear a veritable orchestra of wheezes tuning up in you.”
“Spare me your metaphors and put your book away,” said Martha. “The guests will be here any moment. And that dictionary. There’s nothing more untidy than a dictionary on a chair.”
“All right, my treasury,” he answered in English, and walked away with his books, mentally lamenting his unsure pronunciation and meager though exact vocabulary.
The chair by the glowing grate now stood empty, but that did not help. With her whole being she experienced his presence, there, behind the door, in the next room, and the next, and the next; the house was suffocating from him; the clocks ticked with an effort and the cold folded napkins stood stifling on the festive table with a strangled rose in each individual vase—but how to cough him up, how to breathe freely again? It now seemed to her that it had always been thus, that she had hated him hopelessly since the first days and nights of their marriage when he kept pawing and licking her like an animal, in a locked hotel room in white Salsborg. He now stood in her path, in her plain, straight path, like a solid obstacle, that ought somehow to be removed to let her resume her plain straight existence. How dared he enforce upon her the complications of adultery? How dared he stand in the queue before her? Our cruellest enemy is less hateful than the burly stranger whose placid back keeps us from squeezing through to a ticket window or to the counter of a sausage shop. She walked to and fro, she drummed on a window. She tore off a diseased cyclamen leaf, she felt she would suffocate any moment. At that instant the doorbell sounded. Martha checked her hairdo and walked quickly—not to the front door but back to the door of the drawing room in order to make an elegant entrance from afar to meet her guests.
During the next half hour the bell rang again and again. First to arrive were the inevitable Walds in their Debler limousine; then came Franz shivering from the cold; then, almost simultaneously, the count with a bouquet of mediocre pinks and a paper manufacturer with his wife; then—two loud, half-naked, ill-groomed girls whose late father had been their host’s partner in happier days; then—the snub-nosed, gaunt, and taciturn director of the Fatum Insurance Company; and a rosy-cheeked civil engineer in triplicate—that is, with a sister and a son comically resembling him. All this company gradually warmed up and coalesced until it formed a single many-limbed but otherwise not over-complex creature that made mirthful noise, and drank, and whirled. Only Martha and Franz were unable to identify themselves, as they should have by all the laws of a hearty holiday, with this animated, flushed, palpitating mass. She was pleased to note how unresponsive Franz was to the practically naked charms of those two practically identical vulgar young things with revoltingly thin arms, and snaky backs, and insufficiently spanked little popos. The injustice of life—in ten years’ time they would be still a little younger than I am now, all three of them as a matter of fact.
Every now and then her eyes and those of Franz would meet, but even without looking he and she always clearly sensed the changing correlation of their respective whereabouts: while he walked diagonally across the parlor with a glass of punch for Ida or Isolda—no, for old Mrs. Wald—Martha was putting a rustling paper hat on bald Willy at the other end of the room; as Franz sat down and started listening to what the engineer’s sister, pink-cheeked and plain, had to say, Martha combined the oblique and the straight line by going from Willy to the door, and then to the dining-room table laden with hors-d’oeuvres. Franz lit a cigarette, Martha put a mandarin on a plate. Thus a chess player playing blind feels his trapped bishop and his opponent’s versatile queen move in relentless relation to each other. There was a vaguely regular rhythm established in those coordinations. And not for an instant was it interrupted. She and especially Franz felt the existence of this invisible geometric figure; they were two points moving through it, and the interrelation between those two points could be plotted at any given moment; and though they seemed to move independently they were nonetheless securely bound by the invisible, inexorable lines of that figure.
The parquet was already littered with motley paper trash; already someone had broken a glass and stood speechless with sticky fingers outspread. Willy Wald, already high, wearing a golden hat and garlanded with paper ribbons, his innocent blue eyes opened wide, was recounting to the gruff old count his recent trip to Russia, ardently extolling the Kremlin, the caviar, the commissars. Presently Dreyer, coatless, flushed, still holding a chef’s knife and wearing a chef’s cap, took Willy aside and began whispering something to him, while the rosy engineer went on telling the other guests about three masked individuals who, one Christmas night, had broken in and robbed the whole company. The phonograph broke into song in the adjoining boudoir. Dreyer started to dance with one of the pretty sisters, and then caught up the other, and the girls giggled and curved their supple bare backs as he tried to dance with both together. Franz stood by the window drapery, regretting that he still had not had time to learn to dance. He saw Martha’s white hand on somebody’s black shoulder, then her profile, then the birthmark under her left shoulder blade and somebody’s thumb upon it, then the madonna profile again, and again the raisin in the cream; and her silk-sheening legs which the hem of her short skirt revealed up to the knee moved hither and thither, and seemed (if one looked at them only) to belong to a woman who did not know what to do with herself from restlessness and anticipation: she steps, now slowly, now quickly, this way and that, turns abruptly, steps again in her excruciating impatience. Martha danced automatically, feeling not so much the rhythm of the music as the syncopic changes between her and Franz, who was standing by the drapery with folded arms and moving eyes. She noticed Dreyer reach through the drapery; he must have opened the window a little, for it gr
ew cooler in the room. As she danced, she kept checking Franz’s position: he was there, the dear sentinel; she searched for her husband with her eyes; he had left the room and she told herself that the sudden coolness and well-being were due precisely to his absence. On gliding closer to Franz she bathed him in such a familiar meaningful look that he lost countenance and smiled at the engineer whose face was presented to him by the whim of a whirl. Again and again the phonograph was wound, and among many pairs of ordinary legs flashed those strong, graceful, ravishing legs, and Franz, dizzy from the wine and the gyrations of the dancers, became aware of a certain terpsichorean tumult in his poor head as if all his thoughts were learning to foxtrot.
Then something happened. In mid-dance Isolda cried: “Oh, look! The drape!”
Everyone looked, and, indeed, the window curtain stirred strangely, altered its folds, and swelled slowly. Simultaneously the lights went out. In the darkness an oval light began to move about the room, the drapery parted, and in the unsteady glimmer, a masked man suddenly appeared, dressed in an old military coat and carrying a menacing flashlight in his fist. Ida gave a piercing scream. The engineer’s voice calmly pronounced in the dark: “I suspect that’s our genial host.” Then, after a curious pause, filled by the phonograph which had gone on dutifully playing in the dark, there sounded Martha’s tragic voice. She gave such a howl of warning that the two girls and the old count surged back toward the door (blocked by merry Willy). The masked figure emitted a hoarse sound and, training the light on Martha, moved forward. It is possible that the girls were genuinely frightened. It is also possible that one or two of the men were beginning to doubt its being a prank. Martha, who went on crying for help, noticed with cold exultation that the engineer standing beside her had reached back under his dinner jacket and had produced something from his hip pocket. She realized what her screams meant, what prompted them, and what they should cause to happen; and, secure in her performance, she screamed still louder, urging, hallooing.
Franz could not bear it any longer. He stood nearest of all to the intruder, had recognized him at once by his tailor-made tuxedo trousers, and now his nimble fingers ripped the mask off the intruder’s face. Meanwhile Mr. Fatum had finally overcome panting Willy and switched on the lights. In the center of the room, dressed in a combination of apache scarf and soldier’s coat, stood Dreyer roaring with laughter, now swaying, now squatting, all red and tousled, and pointing his finger at Martha. Quickly deciding how she should now resolve her feigned terror, she turned her back upon her husband, re-arranged the strap on one bare shoulder, and calmly went off to the faltering phonograph. He rushed after her and, still laughing, hugged and kissed her. “Oh, I knew it was you all along,” she said—which, of course, was quite true.
Franz had been trying for some time to fight off the welling of nausea but now he was going to be sick, and he hurriedly left the room. Behind him the hubbub continued; they were all laughing and shouting, probably crowding around Dreyer, squeezing him, squeezing him, squeezing both him and Martha, who wriggled. With his handkerchief pressed to his lips, Franz made for the front hall, and wrenched open the door of the toilet. Old Mrs. Wald came flying out like a bomb and disappeared behind the bend of the wall. “My God, my God,” he muttered, doubled over. He emitted horrible sounds, recognizing in the intermittent torrent a medley of food and drink the way a sinner in hell retastes the hash of his life. Breathing heavily, squeamishly wiping his mouth with a bit of toilet paper, he waited for a moment, and pulled the chain. On his way back he paused in the entrance hall and listened. Through an open door a mirror reflected the ominously blazing Christmas tree. The phonograph was singing again. Suddenly he saw Martha.
She went up to him quickly, looking over her shoulder like a conspirator in a play. They were alone in the brightly lit hall, and from beyond the door came noise, laughter, the squeals of a helpless pig, the quawks of a tortured turkey.
“No luck,” said Martha. “I’m sorry, dear.”
Her piercing eyes were at once in front of him and all around him. Then she started to cough, clutched at her side and dropped in a chair.
He asked: “What do you mean—no luck?”
“It cannot go on like this,” muttered Martha between fits of coughing. “It simply cannot. Why, look at yourself—you’re as pale as death.”
The noise in the house was swelling and drawing nearer; it seemed as though that enormous tree were bellowing with all its lights.
“… as death,” said Martha.
Franz felt another onset of nausea; the voices surged forward; sweaty Dreyer rushed past, escaping from Wald and the engineer, and after them came the others guffawing and gibbering, and Tom, locked up in the garage, was barking his head off. And the noise of the hunt seemed to pursue Franz as he vomited in the deserted street and staggered home. At the corner of the square the scaffolding that cocooned the future Kino-Palazzo was adorned on the very top with a bright Christmas tree. The latter could be also seen, but only as a tiny colored blur in the starry sky from the Dreyers’ bedroom window.
“Either of the two would make a marvellous little wife for good old Franz,” said Dreyer as he undressed.
“That’s what you think,” said Martha, glaring into her dressing-table mirror.
“Ida, of course, is the more beautiful,” continued drunken Dreyer, “but Isolda with that fluffy pale hair and that way of gasping she has while one is telling her something comical—”
“Why don’t you sample her? Or both together?”
“I wonder,” mused Dreyer as he took off his drawers. He laughed and added: “My love, what about you tonight? After all, it is Christmas.”
“Not after your idiotic joke,” said Martha, “and if you pester me with your lust I’ll take my pillow to the guest room.”
“I wonder,” repeated Dreyer as he got into bed and laughed again. He had never tried them together. Might be fun! Separately he had had them only on two occasions: Ida three summers ago quite unexpectedly in the woods of Spandau during a picnic; and Isolda a little later in a Dresden hotel. Hopelessly bad stenographers, both of them.
Franz had never gone to bed yet at half past four in the morning. He woke up in the afternoon feeling hungry, healthy, and happy. He remembered with pleasure snatching that mask off. The roaring darkness that had pursued him like a nightmare had been transformed, now that he had surrendered himself to it, into a hum of euphoria.
He dined at the nearby tavern and went back home to wait for Martha. At ten minutes past seven she had not come. At twenty minutes to eight he knew she was not coming. Should he wait till tomorrow? He dared not ring her up: Martha had forbidden him and herself to telephone lest it became a sweet habit which in its turn might lead to the wrong ears’ overhearing a careless caressive phrase. The urge to tell her how strong and well he felt, despite all that wine and venison, and music, and terror, was even stronger than his desire to know if her cold was better.
As he reached their street, an empty taxi overtook him and pulled up at the villa. He decided his visit was ill-timed—they were probably going out. He paused at the fence of the garden expecting them to emerge, she in her lovely furs, he in his camelhair coat. Then, changing his mind again, Franz hurried toward the porch.
The front door was ajar. Frieda was pulling half-strangled Tom upstairs by his collar. In the entrance hall Franz saw an opulent suitcase of real leather and a splendid pair of hickory skis of a type they did not have at the store. In the parlor husband and wife stood facing each other. He was talking rapidly, and she was smiling like an angel and nodding in silence.
“Ah, Franz, there you are,” he said, turning, and caught his nephew by his stuffed shoulder. “You’ve come just at the right moment. I’m off for three weeks or so.”
“What are those skis doing there?” asked Franz, and realized with surprise that Dreyer had ceased to frighten him.
“Mine. I’m going to Davos. And take this” (five dollars).
He kis
sed his wife on the cheek. “Nurse your cold, dear. Have a good time over the holidays. Tell Franz to take you to the theater. Don’t be cross with me, darling, for leaving you behind. Snow is for men and single girls. You can’t change that.”
“You’ll be late for your train,” said Martha, slitting sweet eyes at him.
He glanced at his golden watch, mimicked panic, and grasped his valise. The taxi driver helped with the skis. Uncle, aunt and nephew crossed the garden. After all that frost a drizzle had set in! Hatless and wearing her moleskin coat, Martha strolled to the wicket with an indolent swing of the hips, her hands invisibly clasped in her joined coat-sleeves. It took quite a long time to arrange the long skis on the roof of the taxi. At last the door slammed. The taxi drove off. Franz mechanically noted its license number: 22221. This unexpected “1” seemed odd after so many “2”s. They walked slowly back toward the house along the crunching path.
King, Queen, Knave Page 14