The Game of Cards

by Adolf Schroder

  ADOLF SCHRÖDER

  THE GAME OF CARDS

  Translated from the German

  by Andrew Brown

  Contents

  Title Page

  THE FIRST DAY

  THE SECOND DAY

  THE THIRD DAY

  THE FOURTH DAY

  THE FIFTH DAY

  THE SIXTH DAY

  Also Available from Pushkin Press

  About the Publisher

  Copyright

  THE GAME OF CARDS

  THE FIRST DAY

  THE STENCH WAS A WALL from which Markus felt himself rebound. He heard the animals before he saw them. A curved flight of stairs led to the first floor from which the noises came—the scratching, the hissing, the screaming.

  “Are you Herr Hauser?”

  Markus had parked the car in the shade of the chestnut trees. The villa lay a good distance back. The gate hung crookedly on its hinges, and was not locked. He had walked through the garden, over flagstones half sunk into the earth.

  “Yes,” said Markus.

  On coming closer, he had noticed that all the windows in the villa were draped over. She opened the door before he could ring the bell.

  “Come in.”

  She stepped aside. Markus walked past her into the hallway. Through the open door, light fell onto a picture hanging on the far wall. The oils gleamed, dark brown, black, crisscrossed by almost imperceptible cracks.

  She closed the door. When Markus turned round, the place where she had been standing was empty. She had left him by himself. He did not dare move. As his eyes grew used to the gloom, he saw a cat lying on the bottom stair. Its eyes were dead, its paws frozen rigid in mid-movement. Next to a glass cabinet, the panes of which were cracked as if someone had flung pebbles against the glass, another cat was sitting. A black one, with a white patch on its breast, licking its fur.

  When Markus heard a sound behind him, he turned round and saw her returning. She came into the hall through a side door, behind which he guessed the cellar stairs lay. In the one hand she was carrying a spade, in the other a plastic bucket.

  “Give me a hand,” said Selma Bruhns.

  She went to the stairs, put the bucket down and lifted the cat’s body with the spade. She dropped it into the bucket. A muffled noise that startled Markus.

  “Take the bucket.”

  “The cat’s rotting,” he said.

  “Cats die,” she retorted, and went over to the door. Markus did not move; he could not bring himself to touch the handle of the bucket.

  “Follow me,” she said.

  She opened the door and went down the steps leading into the garden. Markus had not imagined the bucket could be so light. Selma Bruhns stood by the steps and waited for him to come out. She walked down a well-trodden path leading to the far end of the garden. She stopped by a beech hedge whose lower branches were bare. With a strength that Markus had not imagined she might possess, she trod the spade down into the earth until the hole was deep enough. She placed the spade down to one side and came up to him. He involuntarily took a step backwards. She took the bucket out of his hand, went to the grave and dropped the dead cat into the earth.

  “Fill in the hole and come into the house,” said Selma Bruhns.

  Without waiting for his reply, she turned round and went back the same way she had come.

  At the student job centre, it had all been the same as ever. The room they waited in was crowded, the chairs and benches all occupied. Markus had to stand, and leant against the wall, right next to the door where stood the table with the box from which each person took a number as they came in. This game of chance was repeated day in, day out. Markus had drawn number six. He had a chance. They chatted, laughed, smoked. Well-known faces—but he had no great desire to have to go through the same old questions and answers as ever. He was glad to feel the wall at his back.

  “Any luck, Markus?”

  He showed him the chit with the number six.

  “I’m out of here,” said Rufus. “Forty-five, not my day.”

  They had announced the first job. A driver was needed for two days, must know his way round town. This job went to a student who produced his chit: number two. The next opportunity (warehouse work, fifteen marks per hour) also passed Markus by.

  “Light office work for several days, ten marks per hour.”

  This wasn’t anything special, and nobody took it up. He waved his chit.

  “Come in.”

  Markus had pushed his way through the others, and stepped into the room where the two employees from the job centre had set up a provisional office.

  “Name?”

  “Markus Hauser.”

  Markus had been given a pre-printed form. Selma Bruhns, Kurfürstenallee 11: that was the address given under the heading client.

  “Frau Bruhns will be phoning back shortly, we’ll tell her you’re on your way.”

  A crap job.

  Markus has to wait in the outer office.

  “Take a seat. The Superintendent will be with you straightaway.”

  The two officials nod to the secretary and leave the office. Markus sits on a chair next to a filing cabinet. Every now and again, his eyes meet those of the secretary, as she looks across at him and Markus, sensing her glance, looks up. They do not speak. The woman puts on headphones with tiny earpieces and starts to type on the computer keyboard.

  Markus listens to her fingers clattering on the keys. He imagines she must be writing a report on him. Age: twenty-two; height six foot; hair reddish; eyes grey; IQ unknown; unemployed; claims to be studying; lives off occasional jobs; single; sex life probably normal.

  The woman stops typing and takes off her headphones.

  “You won’t have much longer to wait,” she says. She prints out the document she has just been typing and starts to check it through.

  The last time he had come away from Selma’s villa, he thought he’d made it. He’d managed to get away one more time.

  “Do you know what the Superintendent wants from me?” says Markus. He isn’t interested in getting an answer, he just wants to ask a question.

  “You won’t have much longer to wait,” the secretary says again.

  Markus stands up, tired of just sitting there motionless on the chair. There isn’t enough room for him to walk up and down. As soon as Markus is standing by the chair, he realizes he has no idea what to do. The secretary looks at him as if expectantly waiting to see what he does next. The features of her face do not change. Not a smile, not a frown.

  “Where are the toilets,” asks Markus.

  “In the corridor, second door on the right,” replies the secretary. Markus has become mistrustful, and reads into her words a certain doubt on her part as to whether he really needs the toilet.

  “Be right back,” he says.

  It’s cooler in the corridor. The light comes from sections of strip lighting regularly arranged along the corridor ceiling. There are doors on the right and the left. At eye level, rectangular signs tell you the function of each room. Department IV Berger. Markus’ gaze falls on a poster in a glass case hanging on the wall. A young man in police uniform smiles at the spectator. A hand is held out in a friendly greeting; the weapon in his belt looks harmless. He slowly walks down the corridor, until he reaches the door with a simple sketch of a man’s shape on it. Before he opens the door, he looks round. The feeling that he’s being observed has been with him constantly ever since he came into this building.

  At the wash-stand there is a man, short and almost dwarf-like, with a powerful body that merely accentuates his dwarfish stature. Markus can’t see his face, as the man is bending over the basin. As he straightens up, their eyes meet in the mirror.

  “Her
r Hauser, I presume,” says the man.

  He had filled up the hole and cleaned the spade with a clump of grass. The clay clinging to the soles of his shoes hampered his steps as he made his way to the house. On the front facade, too, all the windows were draped shut. The wisteria next to the terrace steps curled up to the overhanging roof; its blossom had fallen. Markus smelled the sweetish odour from the faded clusters.

  As he stepped into the yard next to the terrace steps, looking for somewhere to put the spade away, he heard her calling.

  “Herr Hauser.”

  As if the unfamiliar voice uttering his name had startled him, his grip on the spade tightened. He walked a few steps back to the garden, heard her calling again, looked up and saw Selma Bruhns standing on the terrace.

  “Put the spade by the wall of the house, and come up here,” she said, lowering her voice so that Markus found it difficult to understand her.

  At the foot of the steps there was an iron grating on which Markus cleaned his shoes before going up the steps. Once he was standing opposite her, he felt a shy reluctance to look at her, though he didn’t know whether it was aversion or the fear that their eyes might meet. For the first time he wished he could go back and undo everything—the lottery at the job centre, the movement with which he had drawn number six out of the box, the way he had volunteered when the job was announced: light office work for several days, ten marks per hour.

  “You can wash your hands,” said Selma Bruhns. Her voice was still calm and even. The words were uttered one after the other, without any emphasis, the interval between words remained constant, they sounded neither friendly nor disapproving. For a moment, Markus had the feeling that he wasn’t there. Not there, standing in front of her on the tiles of the terrace. He had never filled in a cat’s grave. He hadn’t walked to her house across flagstones half sunk into the earth.

  She went over to the door, and Markus, who hadn’t replied, followed her. They stepped into a twilit room with a parquet floor gleaming dully; only a grand piano and a piano stool stood in front of the glass facade that curved outwards. Apart from that, the room was empty. No pictures. But white rectangular patches on the wallpaper showed that pictures had once hung there.

  Markus stood close to the door while Selma Bruhns sat on the stool at the grand piano and laid her hands on her knees.

  “I need you to put my papers in order. Did they tell you that?”

  “No,” said Markus.

  “It’s an easy job. This way.”

  She stood up and walked through the empty room. Markus followed her even though she hadn’t requested him to do so. They left the room and went into an anteroom shrouded in half-light, where Selma Bruhns pointed to a door, in the upper quarter of which a pane of glass had been set. Markus opened it and switched on the light. It was the bathroom. He went in, and closed the door behind him, but did not lock it. He turned on the tap and washed his hands. He avoided looking into the mirror. The stone floor was streaked with dirt. On the white of the washbasin, a layer of grey had settled; over time it had hardened into something that felt furry to the touch. When Markus lifted the toilet lid, a musty smell rose to his nostrils from the water standing in the waste pipe; on its surface, little bubbles were floating. The room had only one opening for ventilation, and the ceiling light was reflected from its tiled walls. Markus came out of the bathroom. As he hadn’t been able to find a towel, he had dried his hands on his trousers.

  Selma Bruhns led him through various rooms, and Markus quickly lost his bearings. Eventually they were in the hall.

  “It’s here,” she said, and stood aside. Markus gazed into a small windowless room. In it there was neither a table nor a chair, just three chests in the middle. They were made of wood and had sturdy padlocked lids.

  “You’ll find the papers in the chests. Your job is simple. You need to put them in chronological order, using the dates recorded on the papers.”

  She uttered these instructions to him in the same tone of voice she had used when speaking to him on the terrace. Nothing suggested that she expected any reply.

  “The keys,” and she held out a bunch of keys to him. “When you go home, lock up the chests again and give me back the keys.”

  Selma Bruhns left him to himself. She closed the door through which he could reach the stairwell and the hall. Markus listened to her footsteps. When they had faded into the distance, he again opened the door of the small room and left it propped open so that he would be able to hear when she came back. He unlocked the padlock on the first chest. It was not easy to lift the lid. The hinges had become rusty. He heard a noise, and paused. A cat appeared round the crack of the door, first its head, then the whole body—under the red fur the ribs of the emaciated creature.

  Markus shuts himself away in one of the cubicles, flushes the toilet, and waits until he hears the outer door open and close. The man has left the toilets. Markus unbolts the cubicle door; there is a space between the cubicle wall and the floor and ceiling. He goes to the washbasin. He holds his head under the tap, lets cold water pour over his hair, straightens up, and with both hands smoothes the wet hair down. Now it sticks firm and cool to the skin of his scalp.

  “How did you meet Frau Bruhns?” asks Berger.

  Markus had left the toilets and gone back across the corridor to the room in which he had been waiting. The secretary looked at him, and made a barely perceptible gesture with her head, which Markus immediately understood. She said that Superintendent Berger was waiting for him.

  “Through the student job centre. She telephoned there,” answers Markus.

  On opening the door into the second room, he sees that the little man is standing at the window and looking towards him.

  “So it was just chance that it was you who went to Frau Bruhns’s place.”

  Without uttering a word of greeting, Berger had pointed to the chair in front of the desk. Markus said nothing either. He sat down, avoiding the man’s gaze.

  “Of course it was just chance. What else could it be,” says Markus.

  The man skips over to his desk. Swinging round in what seems to Markus a well-practised way, he sits on the somewhat more comfortable chair behind the desk. His face betrays nothing but a rather distant friendliness.

  “What did Frau Bruhns want you for? What kind of job were you supposed to do?”

  The Superintendent’s voice is too deep for his body.

  “I was supposed to sort out her papers,” he answers. “She called them papers, but they were letters, thousands of letters.”

  “Thousands?” says Berger.

  “I didn’t count them.”

  When the man had introduced himself, Markus had hardly been listening. Now, as he waits for the next question, he tries to remember the name.

  “What kind of letters? Business letters? Love letters?”

  On the first evening, when Markus left Selma Bruhns and walked through the garden to the gate, he stopped, turned round, and observed the windows of the villa. He had been filled with the desire to see one of the windows open. In his imagination it would be the man whose portrait hung in the hall of the house, opening the window and gazing down at him.

  “What kind of letters?”

  The desk is much too big for the man’s little figure. Only his powerful body stops Markus feeling sorry for him.

  “Just letters. Private letters,” he answers.

  Markus stares out of the window and waits for the next question. Berger says nothing. It is not an aggressive silence. Markus takes it as a permission to observe the cranes, rising above a building site opposite Police Headquarters. With their wide outstretched arms they swing drum-like containers over a hole in the ground. When they reach the desired position, they open at the bottom and a grey mass pours out into the moulds.

  “Would you like a coffee too?” says the Superintendent. He stands up without waiting for an answer and goes across the room to a table on which there is a coffee machine and several cups. Next t
o the table there is washbasin, and over that a water heater. Berger opens the coffee machine, takes the used filter out and throws it into a rubbish bin under the basin. He puts a new filter in, and counts out six spoonfuls of coffee powder into the filter, pours enough water for six cups—Berger measures this out carefully too—into the upper part of the machine, places the glass container on the hotplate and switches the machine on.

  “Making coffee looks easier than it actually is.” Markus says nothing. He remembers that his mother used to pour the coffee powder straight into the coffee pot and then add the boiling water.

  “Do you take milk and sugar?” asks Berger.

  “Just milk,” answers Markus.

  Both wait for the water to trickle through the machine. Markus sits motionless, on his chair, Berger remains standing next to the table. He pours the coffee into two cups.

  “The letters,” he says, “that you were supposed to sort out—did you read them?”

  “No,” says Markus.

  “I don’t believe you.”

  Berger carefully carries the cups over to the desk and places one before Markus. He holds the other, walks over to the window, and now and then takes a sip, after stirring the milk in.

  “I did read a few letters,” says Markus, “they were all addressed to a certain Almut Bruhns.”

  “Frau Bruhns’s first name is Selma,” says Berger.

  He squatted down next to the chests, the backs of his knees were growing stiff. And as he hesitantly continued with his task, he listened out for any noise from the rest of the house that might reach him here in the small room. A door was closed. An object fell onto the floor and broke. Then silence. On the grand piano a chord was sounded. Then another chord. Then followed the beginning of a prelude from the Well-Tempered Clavier. Markus sat up when the music broke off and silence reigned again, a silence suddenly interrupted by a hissing, yowling, banging noise over Markus’ head, a fight that ended as quickly as it had begun. He cautiously took a few steps to the door and pushed it open. The hall was empty. Step-by-step, treading lightly—he didn’t want to alarm the animals—he made his way towards the front door. Once again, his gaze fell on the portrait of the old man. Markus looked round once more, then left the house. When he reached the street and opened his car door, he decided never to come back. He started up the engine and drove down the peaceful street lying in the shade of the chestnut trees. At the crossroads he followed the route into the inner city. Shortly before the market, he turned into the parking bay of a hamburger restaurant. A slide stood in the play area next to the restaurant. Markus ordered a coffee, chips and two hamburgers. He carried the tray to a table from where he could see out onto the street.