The man in the gray hat walked slowly, squinting because of sudden flashes of zigzag light cast by passing windshields. There was something in the air that produced an amusing feeling of dizziness, alternate waves of warm and cold flowing over his body beneath his silk shirt, a funny levity, an ethereal flutter, a loss of identity, name, profession.
He had just lunched and, theoretically, was supposed to return to his office; on this first day of spring, however, the notion of “office” had quietly evaporated.
Toward him along the sunlit side of the street came a slender bob-haired lady in a karakul coat and a boy of four or five in a blue sailor suit rolling beside her on a tricycle.
“Erica,” exclaimed the man, and stopped with outspread arms.
The boy, pedalling energetically, rolled past, but his mother paused, blinking in the sunlight.
She was now more elegant, the features of her mobile, intelligent, bird-like face seemed even more delicate than in the past. But the aura, the flame of her former charm had gone. She was twenty-six at the time they had parted.
“I’ve seen you twice in eight years,” she said, in that familiar, rasping, rapid little voice. “Once you went by in an open car, and once I saw you at the theater—you were with a tall dark lady. That was your wife, wasn’t it? I was sitting—”
“That’s right, that’s right,” he said, laughing with pleasure and weighing on his large palm her little hand in its tight white glove. “But you were the last person I expected to meet today, though it is the best day to meet. I thought you went back to Vienna. The play was King, Queen, Knave, and now they are making a film out of it. I saw you too. And what about you—are you married?”
She was talking at the same time, so that their dialogue is hard to record. Music paper would be necessary with two clefs. As he was saying: “You were the last person”…, she was already continuing: “… ten seats or so away from you. You haven’t changed, Kurt. Only your mustache is cropped now. Yes, this is my boy. No, I’m not married. Yes, mostly in Austria. Yes, yes, King, Queen, Knave.”
“Seven years,” said old Kurt. “Let’s walk here a little” (guiding the pleased boy’s tricycle into a small public garden). “You know, I just saw the first—No, not quite that much—”
“… millions! I know you are making millions. I’m getting along all right myself” (“not quite that much,” Kurt put in, “but tell me—”) “… I’m very happy. I had only four lovers after you, but to make up for it, each was richer than the last, and now I’m exceptionally nicely established. He has a consumptive wife, the daughter of a general. She lives abroad. In fact, he has just left to spend a month with her at Davos.” (“Goodness, I’ve been there last Christmas.”) “He is elderly and very chic. And he adores me. And you, Kurt, are you happy?”
Kurt smiled and gave a little push to the boy in blue, who had come to a parting of paths: the child looked up at him with round eyes; then, making a tooting noise with his lips, pedalled on.
“… no, his father is a young Englishman. And look, his hair is done just like mine, but the color is still redder. If anyone had told me then, when we stood on that stairs—”
He listened to her rapid chatter and recalled a thousand trifles, an old poem she liked to repeat (“I am the page of High Burgundy”), chocolates with liqueur inside (“No, this one is with marzipan again—always marzipan for little Erica—I want one with curaçao or at least kirsch”), the paunchy kings of moonlit stone in the Tiergarten, so dignified on a spring night with the lilacs in gray fluffy bloom under the arc lights, and moving patterns on the white stairs. Such sweet smells, oh, God … those two brief happy years when Erica had been his mistress he visualized as an irregular series of such trifles: the picture composed of postage stamps in her front hall; her way of jumping up and down on the sofa or of sitting on her hands, or of suddenly sprinkling his face with rapid little pats, and La Bohème, which she adored, the trips to the country when they had fruit wine on a terrace; the brooch she had lost there … All these vaporous frivolous pathetic memories came alive within him while Erica was telling him at top speed about her new apartment, her piano, her lover’s business.
“Are you happy at least, Kurt?” she asked again.
“Remember—” he said, and sang offkey but with feeling: “Mi chiamano Mimi …”
“Oh, I’m not Bohemian any more,” she laughed with a little shake of her head. “But you are still the same, Kurt: so (she shaped several consecutive words with her no longer maddening mouth, not finding the right one)—so lacking in common sense.”
“Such a nitwit,” he said, and gave the little boy, expectantly hunched over the handlebars, another push; tried to stroke his curly head, but he was already too far.
“You haven’t replied; are you happy?” insisted Erica. “Tell me, please, please.”
The poem’s lilt kept coming back to him and he quoted:
“Her lips were pale, but when kissed, glowed red,
And if the end one guesses,
Still I must not tell what I leave unsaid
About a queen’s caresses.
Don’t you remember, Erica, you would recite it with curtseys, oh, don’t you remember?”
“I certainly don’t. But I was asking you, Kurt. Does your wife love you?”
“Well, how should I put it. You see.… She is not what you’d call a passionate woman. She does not make love on a bench in the park, or on a balcony like a swallow.”
“Is she faithful to you, your queen?”
“Ihr’ blasse Lippe war rot im Kuss.…”
“I bet she deceives you.”
“But I’m telling you she’s cold and reasonable, and self-controlled. Lovers! She does not know the first letter of adultery.”
“You’re not the best witness in the world,” laughed Erica. “You never knew I deceived you until his fiancée rang you up. Oh, I can just see what you do with your wife. You love her and don’t notice her. You love her—oh, ardently—and don’t bother about what she’s like inside. You kiss her and still don’t notice her. You’ve always been thoughtless, Kurt, and in the long run you’ll always be what you’ve been, the perfectly happy egotist. Oh, I have studied you carefully.”
“So have I,” he said.
“Thus speaks the page of High Burgundy
The train of a queen he bears,
Dum-dee-dee her mouth, her mouth dum-dee,
On the marble-pillared stairs.”
“You know, Kurt, to be quite frank, there were moments when you made me simply miserable. I would realize that you were merely—skimming along the surface. You seat a person on a little shelf and think she’ll keep sitting like that forever. But, you know, she tumbles off, and you think she still is sitting there, and even when she vanishes you don’t give a hoot.”
“On the contrary, on the contrary,” he interrupted, “I’m very observant. The color of your hair was blond and now it is reddish.”
As in the past, she gave him a tap of assumed exasperation.
“I’ve long stopped being cross with you, Kurt. Come and have coffee with me soon. He won’t be back till mid-May. We’ll have a chat, we’ll remember old times.”
“Certainly, certainly,” he said, feeling suddenly bored, and knowing perfectly well that he would never do it.
She handed him her card (which a couple of minutes later he tore up and crammed into the ashtray of a taxi); she shook his hand many times in parting, still chattering very fast. Funny Erica.… That little face, the batting eyelashes, the turned-up nose, the hoarse hurried patter.…
The boy on the tricycle also proffered his hand and immediately wheeled away, his knees coming high and fast. Dreyer looked back as he walked and waved his hat several times; then he begged pardon of a clumsy lamppost, put on his hat, and walked on. On the whole—an unnecessary encounter. Now I shall never remember Erica as I remembered her before. Erica number two will always be in the way, so dapper and quite useless, with the useless litt
le Vivian on his tricycle. Now was it right to let her infer that I am not quite happy? In what way am I unhappy? Why talk like that? Why should I want a hot little whore in my house? Perhaps her whole charm lies in the fact that she is so cold. After all, there should be a cold shiver in the sensation of true happiness. She’s exactly that chill. Erica with her dyed hair cannot understand that the queen’s coldness is the best guarantee, the best loyalty. I should not have answered like that. And besides, everything around, those sparkling puddles—why do bakers wear rubbers without socks, I don’t know—but every day, every instant all this around me laughs, gleams, begs to be looked at, to be loved. The world stands like a dog pleading to be played with. Erica has forgotten a thousand little sayings and songs, and that poem, and Mimi in her pink hat, and the fruit wine, and the spot of moonlight on the bench that first time. I think I’ll make a date with Isida tomorrow.
Next day Dreyer was particularly cheerful. At the office he dictated to Miss Reich an absolutely impossible letter to an old respectable firm. In the evening, in the strangely lighted workshop where a miracle was slowly coming to life, he gave the inventor such slaps on the back that the latter doubled up. He telephoned he would be late for supper, and when he came home at half past ten, he kidded poor Franz, examining him on the science of salesmanship, asking him absurd questions such as: What would you do if my wife visited your department and before your very eyes stole Ronald? Franz, to whom humor, and especially Dreyer’s humor, came a little hard, would open his eyes and spread his hands. This amused Dreyer, who was easily amused. Martha toyed with a teaspoon, now and then touching a glass with it and extinguishing the vibration with a cold finger.
In the course of that month she and Franz had investigated several new methods, and as before, she spoke of this or that procedure with such austere simplicity that Franz felt no fear, no discomfort, for a strange rearrangement of emotions was taking place in him. Dreyer had divided in two. There was the dangerous irksome Dreyer who walked, spoke, tormented him, guffawed; and there was a second, purely schematic, Dreyer, who had become detached from the first—a stylized playing card, a heraldic design—and it was this that had to be destroyed. Whatever method of annihilation was mentioned, it applied precisely to this schematic image. This Dreyer number two was very convenient to manipulate. He was two-dimensional and immobile. He resembled those photographs of close relatives cut out along the outline of the figure and reinforced with cardboard that people fond of cheap effects place on their desks. Franz was not conscious of the special substance and stylized appearance of this inanimate personage, and therefore did not pause to wonder why those sinister discussions were so easy and harmless. Actually Martha and he spoke of two different individuals: Martha’s subject was deafeningly loud, intolerably vigorous and vivacious; he threatened her with a priapus that had already once inflicted upon her an almost mortal wound, smoothed his obscene mustache with a little silver brush, snored at night with triumphant reverberations; while Franz’s man was lifeless and flat, and could be burned or taken apart, or simply thrown away like a torn photograph. This elusive gemination had already begun when Martha rejected poisoning as “an attempt on human life with inadequate means” (a bit of subtle legality treated extensively in the long-suffering encyclopedia), and as something incompatible with matter-of-fact modern mores. She began talking of firearms. Her chilly rationality, combined, alas, with clumsy ignorance, produced rather weird results. Subliminally mustering recruits from the remotest regions of her memory, unknowingly recalling the details of elaborate and nonsensical shootings described in trashy novelettes, and thereby plagiarizing villainy (an act which after all had been avoided only by Cain), Martha proposed the following: first, Franz would acquire a revolver; then (“By the way, I know how to shoot,” Franz interjected)—fine, that helped (“Though you know, darling, you still ought to practice a little, somewhere in a quiet lane”). The plan was this: She would keep Dreyer downstairs until midnight (“How will you manage that?” “Don’t interrupt, Franz, a woman knows how”). At midnight, while Dreyer was celebrating her sudden submissiveness with champagne, she would go to the window in the next room, draw back the curtain, and stand there for a while with a sparkling flute glass in her raised hand. That would be the signal. From his post near the garden fence Franz would clearly see her within the fire-bright rectangle. She would leave the window open and rejoin Dreyer on the parlor divan. He would probably be sitting, his clothes in disarray, drinking champagne and eating chocolates. Franz would immediately vault the gate in the dark (“It’s easy to do; of course, there are some iron spikes on it but you’re such a fine athlete”) and, quickly crossing the garden, on tiptoe so as not to leave any telltale foot traces, would enter through the French window she would have left ajar. The door to the parlor would be open. From its threshold he would fire half a dozen times in quick succession, as they do in American movies. For appearance’s sake, before vanishing, he would take the dead saloonkeeper’s wallet and perhaps the two ancient French silver candlesticks from the mantelpiece. Then he would go the way he had come. Meanwhile she would run upstairs, undress, and go to bed. And that was all.
Franz nodded.
Another way was as follows: She would go to the country alone with Dreyer. The two of them would go for a good tramp. He loved walking. She and Franz would have chosen beforehand a nice lonely spot (“In the woods,” said Franz, picturing to himself a dark grove of pines and oaks and that old dungeon on its wooded hill where cobolds had haunted his childhood). He would be waiting behind the tree with the reloaded revolver. When they had again killed him, Franz would shoot her through the hand (“Yes, that’s necessary, darling, it is always done, it must look as if we had been attacked by robbers”). Franz would again take the wallet (which he could return to her later with the candlesticks).
Franz nodded.
These two projects were the basic ones. The others were merely variations on the theme. Believing, with so many novelists, that if the details were correct the plot and characters would take care of themselves, Martha carefully worked out the theme of the burglarized villa and that of the forest robbery (the two unfortunately tended rather to get mixed up). Here Franz turned out to have an unexpected and most fortunate gift: he could imagine with diagrammatic clarity his movements and those of Martha and coordinate them in advance with those concepts of time, space, and matter which had to be taken into account. In this lucid and flexible pattern only one thing remained always stationary, but this fallacy went unnoticed by Martha. The blind spot was the victim. The victim showed no signs of life before being deprived of it. If anything, the corpse which had to be moved and handled before burial seemed more active than its biological predecessor. Franz’s thoughts travelled around this fixed point with acrobatic agility. All the necessary movements and their sequence were admirably calculated. The thing called Dreyer at the present time would differ from the future Dreyer only inasmuch as a vertical line differs from a horizontal. A difference of angle and perspective—nothing more. Martha unwittingly encouraged Franz in those abstractions because she always took for granted that Dreyer would be caught unawares and have no time to defend himself. For the rest, she imagined quite vividly and realistically how he would raise his eyebrows on seeing his nephew point a pistol at him, how he would begin to laugh, assuming that the weapon was a toy, and how he would finish his laughter in another world. When, in order to abolish all risk, she placed Dreyer in the position of a piece of merchandise, packaged, tied up and ready to be delivered, she did not realize how much easier this made things for Franz. “Smart boy,” she would laugh, kissing him on the cheek, “bright, bright darling.” Reacting to her praise, he presented a kind of estimate (which had to be burned afterwards, unfortunately): the number of paces from fence to window; the number of seconds needed to cover that distance; the distance from window to door and from door to armchair (into which Dreyer had been transferred from the couch at a certain point in their planning), an
d from the revolver hanging as it were in mid-air to the back of the conveniently placed head. And while Dreyer was actually sitting in that armchair and reading the Sunday papers in a shaft of April sunlight, Martha with a glowing comb in her chignon, wearing a new pink tailor-made dress, and coatless Franz, with Tom following them, a black ball in his jaws, would busily pace to and fro in the garden and along the wall of the villa up to the parlor window, and back again to the wicket, counting steps, memorizing them, rehearsing approaches and retreats, and Dreyer, arms akimbo, would come out on the terrace and presently join them in the garden and help discuss in his turn the new arrangement of flagged paths and flowerbeds that she and Franz were so diligently planning.
They continued their planning when alone in the drab beloved little room, with the still unsold big-nippled slave girl above the bed and a brand-new expensive, unwanted tennis racket in its frame. It was time to think of obtaining the weapon. As soon as they got to that stage, a ridiculous obstacle arose. They were both certain that a permit had to be obtained for the purchase of a revolver. Neither Martha nor Franz had the least idea how one obtained such a permit. They would have to make inquiries, go to the police maybe, and that might mean having to write and sign applications. It now became apparent that the acquisition of the tool was something many times vaguer than the image of its use. Martha could not tolerate such a paradox. She eliminated it by seeking out insurmountable difficulties in the execution of the project as well. There was for example the gardener—who acted also as a (bribable? druggable?) watchman—a level-headed husky old rascal who had sharp eyes for intruders and squashed caterpillars with a special juicy squeak and a special horrible twitch of iron-nailed finger and thumb which caused Franz, the first time he witnessed that green garrotte, to cry out like a girl. There was the policeman who frequently passed along the street as though strolling; miscalculations and flaws also turned up in the forest plan: after an excursion to Grunewald, Franz reported that it contained more picnickers than pines. There were lots of other woods in the suburbs, but one had to find a way to get him to go there. And when the fulfillment of these projects receded to its proper place, the question of procuring the weapon no longer seemed so insoluble: there existed probably friendly gun dealers in the northern part of the city who did not bother about permits, and once the gun was there, surely chance was on their side, and would place the target in the right position at the right moment. Thus Martha satisfied in passing her innate sense of correct relationships (“First things first” and “If you want two noses, you should be content with one eye” were her favorite proverbs).
King, Queen, Knave Page 17