King, Queen, Knave

by Vladimir Nabokov

  “What is its sex? Can you tell me?” asked Dreyer as the brown little figure stopped before him.

  “Not differentiated yet,” answered the Inventor. “But in a month or two there will be two males and one female over five feet high.”

  In other words, the infant had to grow up. It was necessary to create not only a semblance of human legs, but also the semblance of a graceful human body and expressive face. The Inventor, however, was neither an artist nor an anatomist. Dreyer therefore found him two helpers: an old sculptor whose work was so lifelike that he managed to convey the impression of acute chorea, for example, or, say, the beginning of a sneeze; and a professor of physiology who, in trying to explain the well-known capacity of waking up at a self-imposed hour, had written a long treatise which explained nothing but contained the first description of the “self-awareness” of muscles with beautiful illustrations in color. The workshop soon began to look as if those medical students had again been horsing about with dismembered cadavers. The professor of anatomy and the fantastic sculptor assisted the Inventor very successfully. One was lean, pale, nervous, with long hair combed back and a huge Adam’s apple; the other was sedate and bald, and wore a high starched collar. Their appearance afforded Dreyer a source of endless delight, since the first was the professor, and the second, the artist.

  He could now clearly imagine the full-grown, perfect, elegantly dressed automannequins walking back and forth in a huge bay window of the emporium, among potted plants, discreetly disappearing to change their clothes behind the scenes, and stalking in again to the delight of the populace. It was a poetical vision and no doubt a lucrative enterprise. In mid-May he bought the patent rights from the Inventor at a comparatively low price and now he was debating—what would be better—to create a sensation on the Kurfürstendamm by putting those figures literally into circulation or to sell the invention to a foreign syndicate: the former was richer fun, the latter, safer profit.

  As happens in the lives of many businessmen, he began to feel in that spring of 1928 that his affairs somehow or other were assuming a certain independent existence. The part of his funds that was in a state of constant fruitful gyration moved by momentum, and moved too rapidly; he seemed to be losing control over his wealth, seemed no longer able to stop this great golden wheel at will. Half of his fortune was reasonably safe; but the other, which he had created in a year of freakish luck—at a time when luck, a light touch, and his special kind of imagination were needed—had now become too lively, too mobile. An optimist by nature, he hoped that this was but a temporary loss of control and did not for an instant suppose that the increased spin might transform the wheel of fortune into the shimmer of its gyration, and that if he stopped the wheel with his hand, it would prove to have been nothing but its own golden ghost. But Martha, who now more than ever loathed her husband’s whimsical levity (even though it had once helped him to become rich), could not help feeling that he might dance his way into some financial disaster before she was able to remove him and halt the lighthearted spin herself.

  The store was doing good business but the profits did not accumulate as solidly as they should have. The stock market had recently given a sudden shiver; he had gambled on it and lost, and now was gambling again. In all this Martha saw a doomful admonition. She might have been willing to grant him a reprieve for some solid deal, for she admitted that she “trusted his scent”; but that juggling with shares was too risky. Why procrastinate when every passing month might mean a further dwindling of wealth?

  On that sunny and terrible morning, as soon as she and Franz returned from the tennis club, she led him to the study to show him the revolver. From the threshold she indicated with a rapid glance and a barely perceptible motion of the shoulder the desk at the far end of the room. There, in a drawer, lay the instrument of their happiness.

  “In a moment you’ll see it,” whispered Martha and glided toward the desk. But at that instant Tom entered the room with a bold buoyant step. “Get that dog out of here,” said Franz. “I can’t do anything with the dog here.” “Out!” cried Martha. Tom laid back his ears, extended his gentle gray muzzle, and slunk behind a chair. “Oh, get him out,” said Franz through clenched teeth with a convulsive shudder. Martha clapped her hands. Tom slipped beneath the chair and emerged on the other side. She gestured threateningly. Tom jumped back in time and, licking his chops with a hurt expression, trotted toward the door. On the threshold he looked back, one front paw raised. Martha, however, was coming at him. He submitted to the inevitable. She slammed the door shut. An obliging draft promptly banged the windowpane. “All right now, let’s hurry,” she said crossly. “Why are you sulking there? Come here.”

  She quickly yanked open the drawer. She lifted the brown briefcase. Under it, a gleaming object showed. Franz mechanically extended his hand and took it. He turned it this way and that.

  “Are you sure—” he began apathetically.

  He heard Martha snort, and looked up. She uttered a dry laugh and walked away.

  “Put it back,” she said, standing at the window and drumming on the pane. No wonder Willy had laughed.

  “I said put it back. You see perfectly well it’s a cigar lighter.”

  “Yes, of course. But really quite like a little revolver. Very fancy, isn’t it? I think I saw a couple of them at the store.” Noiselessly, he shut the drawer.

  That day Martha realized a saddening thing. Until then she had thought she was acting no less judiciously than she had acted or wanted to act all her life. Now she saw that some kind of atrocious dreamland was encroaching upon her charts. A beginner’s self-confidence might be pardonable—but that pardonable phase had come and gone. All right—she should never have accepted to marry that clown with the foul-smelling monkey in his arms; all right—she should not have been impressed by his money, she should not have hoped in her youthful naivete to make an ordinary, dignified, obedient husband out of that joker. But at least she had arranged her life the way she wished. Almost eight years of grim struggle. He wanted to take her to Ceylon or Florida, if you please, instead of buying this elegant villa. She needed a sedentary husband. A subdued and grave husband. She needed a dead husband.

  There were several days when she retired as it were into the remotest deserts of her spirit to review her blunders and collect her forces so as to return purified to the task, and thenceforth commit none of the former errors. Elaborate combinations, complicated details, phony weapons—all this was to be abandoned. From now on the motto would be: simplicity and routine. The sought-for method must be absolutely natural, absolutely pure. Intermediaries please abstain. Poison was a procuress; the pistol, a pimp. Each might betray her. One must stop buying novelettes about the Borgias. One cannot kill a man with a cigar lighter as some had apparently thought she had thought.

  Franz shook his head or nodded it, according to this or that turn of her earnest speech. The little room was brimming with sunlight. He was sitting on the window ledge. The panes were thrown open and secured with wedges of wood. In spite of its being a holiday, the builders were stubbornly at work, clinking and knocking higher and higher. A girl’s voice cried something from a window below, and another girl’s voice, still more angelic, responded from a balcony on the opposite side of the street. This was the season of guitar music on the river at home, of rafts gently singing in the shadow of the willows.

  His back began to feel hot. He slid off the window ledge onto the floor. With her legs tightly crossed, showing a strip of fat thigh under her skirt, Martha sat sideways at the table. In the inexorable light her skin looked coarser and her face seemed broader, perhaps because her chin was propped on her fist. The corners of her damp lips were lowered, her eyes looked upward. A complete stranger within Franz’s consciousness observed in passing that she rather resembled a toad. Martha moved her head. Reality returned. And once again everything became oppressive, dark, and relentless.

  “… strangle him,” she muttered. “If we could simpl
y strangle him. With our bare hands.”

  The great Dr. Hertz had told her a couple of years before that her cardiogram showed a remarkable, not necessarily dangerous, but certainly incurable abnormality which he had seen only in one other woman, a Hohenzollern, who was still alive at almost forty, and now it seemed to Martha that her heart would burst, unable to withstand the feeling of hatred that Dreyer’s every move and sound aroused in her. Sometimes at night, when he approached her with a tender little laugh, she felt an urge to dig her hands into his neck and squeeze, squeeze with all her might. And vice versa, when on a recent occasion she had made him promise not to sell the best of his three apartment houses for the ridiculous price he was offered by Willy, and in generous compensation had offered him of her own accord a brief caress, his unexpected lack of manly response had revolted her as much as his advances. She realized how difficult it was in these circumstances to reason logically, to develop simple, smooth, elegant plans, when everything within her was screaming and raging. Yet if she must survive something had to be done. Dreyer was spreading out monstrously before her, like a conflagration in a cinema picture. Human life, like fire, was dangerous and difficult to extinguish; but, as in the case of fire, there must be, there simply must be, some universally accepted, natural method of quenching a man’s fierce life. Enormous, tawny-haired, tanned from tennis; wearing bright yellow pajamas, redly yawning; radiating heat and health, and making the various grunting noises that a man who cannot control his gross physicality makes when waking up and stretching, Dreyer filled the whole bedroom, the whole house, the whole world.

  More and more often, and with a recklessness she no longer noticed, Martha escaped from that triumphant presence to her lover’s room, arriving even at hours when he was still at the store and the vibrant sounds of construction in the sky were not yet replaced by nearby radios, and would darn a sock, her black brows sternly drawn together as she awaited his return with confident and legitimate tenderness. Without his obedient lips and young body she could not live more than a single day. At that instant in their meeting when still feeling the receding ripples of pleasure she would open her eyes, it seemed strange to her that Dreyer had not been destroyed by her lover’s thrusts. She would soon try to entice sluggish Franz anew, and having succeeded not without trouble (that job at the store exhausted the poor pet!), she would feel again that Dreyer was perishing, that each frantic stroke wounded him more deeply, and finally, that he collapsed in terrible pain, howling, discharging his intestinal fluids, and dissolving in the unbearable splendor of her joy.

  Yet, as if nothing had happened, he would revive, walk noisily through all the rooms and, cheerful and hungry, sit opposite her at meals, folding a slice of ham, spearing it with an energetic fork, and making a circular motion with his mustache as he chewed.

  “Help me, Franz, oh, help me,” she would murmur sometimes, shaking him by the shoulders.

  His eyes were totally submissive behind their well-wiped lenses. However, he could not think of anything. His imagination was at her command; it was ready to work for her, but it was she who had to give his fancy its impulse and food. Outwardly he had changed a great deal during these last months: he had lost weight, his protruding cheekbones made him look more than ever like a hungry Hindu, a curious debility blurred his movements as if he were existing only because existing was the proper thing to do; but one did it unwillingly and would have been glad to return at any moment to a state of animal stupor. His day ran its course automatically but his nights were formless and full of terror. He took sleeping pills. The morning jolt of his alarm clock was like a coin dropped into a vending machine. He would rise; shuffle to the smelly toilet (a little dark hell in its own right), shuffle back, wash his hands, brush his teeth, shave, wipe the soap from his ears, dress, walk to the subway station, get on a non-smoking car, read the same old advertisement ditty overhead, and to the rhythm of its crude trochee reach his destination, climb the stone staircase, squint at the mottled pansies in the bright sun on a large flowerbed in front of the exit, cross the street, and do everything in the store that he was supposed to do. Returning home in the same way, he would do once again all that was expected of him. After her departure, he would read the newspaper for a quarter of an hour or so because it was customary to read newspapers. Then he would walk over to his uncle’s villa. At supper he would sometimes repeat what he had read in the paper, reproducing every other sentence verbatim but strangely jumbling the facts in between, so that Dreyer had fun egging him on and then correcting him. Around eleven he would leave. He would make his way home always along the same sidewalks. A quarter of an hour later he would be undressing. The light would go out.

  His thoughts were characterized by the same monotony as his actions, and their order corresponded to the order of his day. Why has he stopped the coffee? Can’t flush if the chain comes off every time. Dull blade. Piffke shaves with his collar on in the public washroom. These white shorts are not practical. Today is the ninth—no, the tenth—no, the eleventh of June. She’s again on the balcony. Bare arms, parched geraniums. Train more crowded every morning. Clean your teeth with Dentophile, every minute you will smile. They are fools who offer their seats to big strong women. Clean your teeth with Dentophile, clean your minute with your smile. Out we file.

  And behind these regular everyday thoughts, as behind words written on glass, lay darkness, a darkness into which one ought not to peer. One was treated, however, to strange glimpses. Once it seemed to him that a police official, smelling strongly of cheese, with a briefcase under his arm, kept looking at him with suspicion from the opposite seat. His mother’s letters contained terrifying insinuations: she maintained for example that he misspelled words or left them unfinished. At the store, the face of a rubber sea lion, intended for the amusement of bathers, began to resemble the face of Dreyer, and Franz was glad when a Mrs. Steller, Robbe Avenue I, had him pack it and send it to her. Catching a whiff of blooming lindens, he would remember nostalgically the schoolyard in his hometown where they touched the bark of a lime in a game of tag. Once a young girl with bouncing breasts, in a short red frock, almost ran into him; she carried a bunch of keys in her hand, and he fancied he recognized in her a janitor’s daughter he had longed for, many ages ago. These were mere ephemeral glints of consciousness; he would instantly revert to semi-existence.

  Then at night, in his drugged sleep, something more significant would burst through. Together with naked Martha, he would be sawing off the head of Piffke in a public toilet, even though in the first place he was undistinguishable from the Dreyers’ dead chauffeur, and in the second, was called Dreyer in the language of dreams. Horror and helpless revulsion merged in those nightmares with a certain nonterrestrial sensation, known to those who have just died, or have suddenly gone insane after deciphering the meaning of everything. Thus, in one dream, Dreyer stood on a ladder slowly winding a red phonograph, and Franz knew that in a moment the phonograph would bark the word that solved the universe after which the act of existing would become a futile, childish game like putting one’s foot on every flag edge at every step. The phonograph would croon a familiar song about a sad Negro and the Negro’s love, but by Dreyer’s expression and shifty eyes Franz would understand that it was all a ruse, that he was being cleverly fooled, that within the song lurked the very word that must not be heard, and he would wake up screaming, and could not identify a pale square in the distance until it became a pale window in the dark, and then he would drop his head on the pillow again. All at once Martha, her face dreadful—waxy, glossy, heavy-jowled, with the wrinkles of age and gray hair—would run in, grab him by the wrist, and drag him onto a balcony suspended high above the street, and on the pavement below stood a policeman holding something in front of him, and slowly growing until his face reached the balcony and, holding a newspaper, in a loud voice he read Franz’s death sentence to him.

  His colleagues in the sports department, athletic Schwimmer and his effeminate Swedish frien
d (who now sold bathing suits), happened one day to notice his pallor and advised him to sunbathe on the banks of the Grunewald lake on Sundays. But an icy indolence hung upon Franz, and besides, an hour of leisure meant an hour with Martha. As for her, she mistook his moodiness for the malady from which she herself suffered, the white-hot fever of incessant murderous thought. It gladdened her when, in Dreyer’s presence, upon meeting her gaze, Franz would sometimes start clenching and unclenching his hands, breaking matches, or fiddling with the saltcellar. She believed that her death rays ran clear through him, and that she had only to stab him with that beam of light, and then a tense particle of his soul where the imprisoned image of death lay hidden would explode and make a gigantic Franz stamp on the crawling hornet. Conversely, she was irritated when Franz complained. She would shrug her shoulders as she listened to his muttering.

  “Don’t you understand—he is insane,” Franz would repeat. “I know he’s insane.”

  “Nonsense, not insane, a little peculiar. This is even an advantage. Stop twitching, please.”

  “But it’s horrible,” Franz insisted. “He has stopped bringing me coffee, I don’t know when, and then he suddenly appeared with a bowl of red beef tea.”

  “Oh, stop. Who cares? He is quite harmless. He has a sick wife.”

  Franz kept shaking his head. “One never sees her. I’ve rattled the door thousands of times to get him out of the toilet but it’s always he, not she. I don’t like it.”

  “Silly. Why, I tell you, that’s an advantage. Nobody snoops on us. It’s my impression that we are very lucky in this respect.”

  “God knows what goes on in that room of theirs,” sighed Franz. “Such strange noises come from there sometimes. Not laughter, rather the clucking of a hen.”