The Game of Cards

by Adolf Schroder

  But on the short way into the hall he did not see any cats. Nor did he hear the animals. The house was quiet, as if night were already starting to fall. Selma Bruhns was standing in the hall in front of the man’s portrait; she was holding an elongated purse of the kind used by taxi drivers and waiters. She opened it and took out three hundred-mark notes.

  “You can pay me when I’ve finished,” said Markus.

  “No,” said Selma Bruhns, “you’ve been here for ten hours, and I’m paying you for ten hours.”

  She held the money out to him. Markus took it in silence. He tried to ward off the feeling that he had not earned the money. He went to the front door and opened it.

  “Are you coming back tomorrow?” she asked.

  “I don’t know yet,” he said, stepped outside and closed the door behind him.

  After Markus had bounded down the steps leading to the front door of Selma Bruhns’s house, reached the car, opened the door, and sat down behind the steering wheel, he did not drive away from the house straightaway.

  At the end of the Kurfürstenallee he turned left and, following the ring road, drove to the third crossroads. He turned off the main road, and, after passing several small side streets, halted outside a cinema whose entrance hall was dimly illuminated. He knew that films were often shown late here. He parked on double yellow lines. The cashier who was counting the takings told him the film had started half-an-hour ago, but when he insisted, she sold him a ticket. Once his eyes had grown used to the half-darkness inside the cinema, he could make out another eight or ten spectators, sitting alone some distance from each other or in pairs. Markus had not noticed what film was showing. He sat at the back on one of the folding seats. He did not try to follow the plot of the film. He was satisfied just to sit in the dark and not have to speak to anybody. He gazed at the moving figures, and heard a melody made of words and noises that was starting to lull him to sleep until the thought crossed his mind that he hadn’t locked the car and that the case with the money was easily visible on the back seat. He stayed in the cinema until the film ended and left it only during the final credits, before the house lights came up.

  THE SECOND DAY

  THE SECRETARY COMES IN, holding a shorthand pad and a pencil; she puts them both down on the desk, and, as Berger gazes out of the window with his back to her, goes to the wall on which the plan of the city is hanging, takes a chair, carries it to the left side of the desk and sits on it.

  “We can start,” she says.

  Berger swings his chair backwards, looks first at Markus, without interest, as if he were beginning to be bored by him, and then at the other man who, unsettled by his long silence, smiles at Berger.

  “You are a neighbour of Frau Bruhns, or to be more accurate you are the owner of the villa whose grounds border on those of Frau Bruhns’s property. You say that you don’t know Frau Bruhns. That you only ever saw her when she went out into her garden or to the gate when the delivery van drove up, bringing her groceries. Is that right? You claim that Frau Bruhns did not react when on one occasion you spoke to her over the garden wall. Is that right?”

  Markus thinks he can hear in Berger’s words a repressed, mute anger, one that has been building up during his previous silence.

  “What did you say to her?”

  The man clears his throat; his first words are unclear and hardly intelligible.

  “I wanted to talk to her about the neglect.”

  “What do you mean? Speak louder,” says Berger.

  “I wanted to talk to her about the neglect,” repeats the man.

  “What neglect?”

  “The garden, the house, the stench.”

  The man is stammering, and the secretary, who has not been taking down his words, says to him, “Don’t get so stressed”.

  Berger jumps out of his chair, his tripping steps do not seem ridiculous for even a moment; he walks across to the plan of the city and stares at it, his hands clasped behind his back, as if he were looking for the street on which Selma Bruhns lived.

  “When did you buy the house in the Kurfürstenallee?” Berger asks.

  “About twenty years ago,” replies the man, who is now endeavouring to make his voice sound steadier and friendlier, “but actually, I thought I was supposed to be making a statement about what I observed last night.”

  Berger continues to gaze at the plan.

  “How often did you speak to Frau Bruhns during those twenty years?” he asks. It sounds as if he has lost all interest in the answer. He goes back to the desk and swings back into his chair.

  “Do you know this man,” says Berger. His question is directed at Markus, who had not been expecting he would have to say anything.

  “Yes, I used to see him on the street, in the morning, whenever I went to Frau Bruhns’s house.”

  Ever since he has seen the photographs—and knows that Selma Bruhns is dead—the room has changed, has become narrower, and the Superintendent is no longer a dwarfish figure, nor the secretary the friendly, uninvolved woman she had been in the outer office; the questions that Markus has to answer are now not so easy to answer.

  “And you? Do you recognize this man?”

  Now Berger turns to Selma Bruhns’s neighbour, who is apparently waiting for a chance to have his say at last.

  “Yes, I recognized him straightaway. He came out of Frau Bruhns’s house last night when it was almost dark. He was in a hurry.”

  The man is speaking rapidly, as if he wanted to get it over and done with.

  “What does ‘in a hurry’ mean in your language?” asks Berger.

  His voice has such a hostile edge to it that Markus looks up and stares at Berger. A flush has risen to the man’s face as he sits in front of Berger’s desk. He seems to sense the hostility, but can do nothing to protect himself from it; this time the secretary says nothing, this time he is all alone.

  “He came running down the steps.”

  “Running down? Which steps?”

  Berger does not give him time to reflect. His rage, that up until now has lain concealed behind his words and has not risen to the surface, can now be sensed by everyone in the room.

  “I asked you a question,” says Berger.

  Markus has taken his eyes off him. His hands, lying on his knees, are stroking his thighs. He wishes the man would finally get up, go out and leave them all alone.

  “The steps to her front door,” says the man.

  “To which front door?”

  Now the man turns to the secretary, seeking help.

  “I don’t see why I should have to put up with this,” he says.

  Christine had got up before he did. When he woke up, he could hear her busy in the kitchen. Something fell onto the tiles, a cup clattered on the saucer, the fridge door was closed. Markus sat up in bed, and leant his back against the wall, on his bare skin he could feel the bumps on the woodchip paper; he reached for the packet of cigarettes on the bedside table. The curtains were drawn, but through the fabric, the light glimmered. Markus could clearly make out the outlines of the chest of drawers and the wardrobe.

  “Are you going back to that woman’s today?” said Christine when he got up and came into the kitchen dressed only in his underpants. She had made some coffee. Markus sat at the kitchen table. He observed Christine as she stood at the sink and washed the dishes. She was wearing jeans, and a light pullover whose roll neck, it struck Markus, enfolded her neck delicately.

  “I don’t know yet,” said Markus.

  “When will you know?”

  Christine sat opposite him at the table and gazed at him.

  “She’s an old woman,” said Markus, he had to force himself to keep talking, realising how difficult it was for him to continue, “she lives with her cats in a house that’s gradually falling to pieces. It stinks. The whole house stinks of those creatures. I don’t think she knows how many of them there are. I went upstairs. She doesn’t use the upper floor, it belongs to the cats. There are cat dro
ppings everywhere. The beasts have inflamed eyes. One of them leapt up at me.”

  Markus showed Christine the scratch marks on the back of his hand. Christine laid her hand on the scabs. She smiled, and Markus thought he could guess what she was thinking.

  “I wanted to get away, I’d gone to fetch my briefcase, but she stood in my way. She’s paying me thirty marks per hour.”

  “That’s a lot of money,” said Christine, “is that why you want to go back?”

  “Yes.”

  Markus was suddenly convinced that this was the only reason that could justify his decision to go back to Selma Bruhns’s house.

  “We can use the money,” said Christine.

  Markus lit his second cigarette.

  “I’ve got to go,” she said.

  Christine went out of the kitchen. He heard her open and close the door of the flat, stood up and went over to the window. He looked down at the street and observed Christine as she left the house, walked down the path to her bike, that was padlocked to the front garden fence, unlocked it and mounted it. As she cycled off, he turned away from the window and went into the bathroom. He pulled off his pants. As the cold water of the shower rained down onto his body, he held his breath.

  He got dressed and went back into the kitchen. Next to the fridge stood his briefcase, the one he had put down in the hall the night before, when he had come home late, found Christine asleep, and tried to close the doors quietly. When he opened the briefcase to take out the notebook he had bought six weeks ago, and in which he had still not written a word, he discovered the little pack in aluminium foil that Christine must have put in the briefcase. He opened it. When he saw that it contained a cheese sandwich, he remembered that, during break at school, he had swapped his sandwich for his first cigarettes.

  At the crossroads he turned into the Kurfürstenallee, the sun was still low in the sky and dazzled him, he pulled down the sun visor, drove more slowly and let the car coast along to a stop. He came to a halt in front of her house.

  Berger has left them. He had jumped up. For a moment he stood next to his desk, without looking at anyone, either the man in front of him, who observed him in amazement, nor the secretary, whose face betrayed nothing but a bored composure, nor Markus, who, involuntarily, stared at Berger as if he had asked him a question and were waiting expectantly for the answer; he then walked past his desk through the room, without a word of explanation or justification, until he reached the door, which he slammed behind him.

  “What’s all this about?” says the man who is here to make a statement, “I don’t understand.”

  On his last day in Selma Bruhns’s house, at around midday when even the animals seemed to be asleep, Markus went out into the garden. The stinging nettles had taken over the beds. Growing to the height of a man they had overrun the other plants and were throttling them. You could no longer make out the path, just now and again a white pebble gleamed out between the clumps of grass. In a niche on the rear wall that demarcated her property from that of her neighbours, Markus discovered a sandstone statue, on a pedestal in the shape of a column, covered in moss, a young woman, squatting on the ground and holding a ball. Markus sat down in the grass against the wall, leant back and felt the stones through the thin fabric of his shirt. Bushes and trees concealed her house from his sight.

  “If he’s going, I can go too,” says the man sitting in front of the Superintendent’s desk; he pushes his chair back and stands up, evidently braver and angrier now that Berger has left the office.

  “Sit down,” says the secretary, “I’ll bring you a coffee.”

  “I don’t want a coffee,” says the man. Markus looks away and gazes out of the window. Every morning, when he parked his car, this man had been standing on the opposite path and, making no attempt to conceal his curiosity, had observed Markus getting out of his car, taking his briefcase from the rear seat, and locking the car door. Every morning Markus had had the feeling that the man wanted to speak to him, maybe call across the street, and Markus had hurried to open the gate.

  While Selma Bruhns’s neighbour remains standing next to his chair, staring fixedly at the secretary as if expecting her to say something that might pacify him, Markus hears for the first time this morning the ticking of the clock standing on the desk. The secretary, whose facial expression betrays neither annoyance nor irritation, now stands up, walks to the desk, and picks up the receiver of Berger’s telephone. She dials two digits and waits. Markus can even quite clearly hear the ringing tone from the earpiece. He imagines that somewhere in this building, in some room or another where Berger might have gone, the telephone is ringing, and Berger, who may in actual fact be in that room, does not pick up the receiver, but is walking up and down with tripping steps, and perhaps does not hear the ringing, just as he, Markus, only heard the ticking of the clock on the desk when he was ready to do so. The secretary hangs up.

  “Sit down,” she says to the man standing in front of her, separated from her by nothing more than the desk, “what I’m doing is wrong, but I think you need an explanation.”

  The turn of her voice has changed, and no longer sounds indifferent, but chilly and determined, almost unfriendly, as if she were rebuking Markus and the man for forcing her to give them this explanation.

  “Superintendent Berger asked to go on leave a year ago,” and while she speaks the woman also goes back to her place, “a close member of his family was seriously ill. Herr Berger took the sick woman into his house and looked after her until she died. He’s been back on the job for only six weeks. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not authorised to apologise on Superintendent Berger’s behalf. And he doesn’t need it. But I thought I ought to tell you.”

  Although Markus does his best, he can no longer hear the ticking of the table clock, which means he can hear even more clearly the man sitting next to him breathing in and out. He doesn’t look at anyone. He doesn’t even look out of the window. His eyes are half-closed, and all he sees is the light grey floor surface beneath his shoes. He can feel a pressure in his neck, as if someone has forced him to swallow something against his will. When he realises that tears are gathering in the corners of his eyes and decides that he can no longer stand the implausibility of the situation, he hears the door being opened behind him. Berger has come back.

  “Did you stand at the window and observe Selma Bruhns?”

  Silently, as if his slight shape were too light to cause any noise, he has opened the door and closed it, walked right past the chair of the man who is still waiting to make his statement, given an exaggeratedly friendly nod—or so it seems to Markus—to the secretary, the only person in this room who can be familiar to him, and entrenched himself behind his desk.

  “Why were you standing at the window on that evening?”

  Markus thinks he can still hear in Berger’s questions traces of the anger that had compelled him to leave the room and that he himself perhaps does not understand. Selma Bruhns’s neighbour, who must have informed the police yesterday evening, clears his throat again, before he replies to Berger. Did they break into the house, Markus wonders, as, without looking at the man, he awaits his answer, did they break open the door and plunge into the stench, did they stand in the hall, with the mighty tumult of the creatures above them, and then eventually discover the room, perhaps thanks to the slender ray of light under the door, the room in which she was sitting on the armchair, a white shawl firmly tied around her neck?

  “I happened by chance to be in our bedroom that evening, it’s on the first floor of the house, and from that window I can see into Frau Bruhns’s front garden.”

  “By chance,” and Markus wishes that Berger would stop, would finally leave the man alone and let him just make his brief report.

  “Was it really chance, or an unhealthy habit you had of spying on your neighbour, a woman to whom you had only spoken once?”

  The secretary, who has said nothing up to now, and has not even shown by an exchange of glances tha
t she is taking part, stands up and, turning her back on Markus and the man, says to Berger:

  “Can I have a quick word with you in private?”

  For a long time Markus had squatted in a small room next to the wooden chest and the artificial light from the light-bulb. He had gradually lost all sense of time. Was it minutes or hours in which he’d done nothing but take the letters out of the chest so as to open them up, smooth them down to decipher the date, and try to arrange them in chronological order? As well as losing all sense of time, he had no idea how late it was getting, when he heard her voice.

  “Herr Hauser.”

  Not loud, not excited, but clear and determined.

  Was she standing in the hall in front of the old man’s portrait?

  “Herr Hauser.”

  Markus straightened up. On the floor lay the sorted and piled letters. He went to the door and walked out of the room.

  “Where are you?” he said, only half aloud, when he went into the hall and she was not there.

  On the first day, around midday, when it had stopped raining and the sun was directly above Selma Bruhns’s house, he had gone out of the small room into the hall, through the hall to the front door, walked down the steps leading into the front garden, and leant against the wall of the house. He breathed in the fresh air quickly and deeply so as to recover from the smell of cats that had taken over her house. The light was reflected from the rain-damp flagstones leading to the gate. Now Markus walked down the steps until he was standing on the narrow path that wound its way through the grass that grew in luxurious profusion along the wall of the house. Did the cats use it on their forays into the garden? He followed the path. When he was standing under the kitchen windows, draped shut like all the others, he stopped. Here, almost concealed by grass and weeds, there lay empty crates for bottles, weathered and half-rotten. Had Selma Bruhns opened the windows and thrown the crates out? Markus selected one of the crates that still looked sturdy enough to bear his weight, placed it close to the house wall and climbed onto it. The kitchen towels with which the windows were hung, bleached by the sun, had a gap in them, through which Markus could peer into the half-dark kitchen. He unabashedly pressed his face close to the windowpane and shielded his eyes from the light with his hands. He saw Selma Bruhns. She was sitting on the hard chair at the kitchen table, her gaze fixed at the wall. She was smoking. Slowly, in slow motion, she raised the cigarette to her mouth.