The Game of Cards

by Adolf Schroder

  “I’d like you to drive into town, please,” said Selma Bruhns, standing in the frame of the door, without coming into the room. Markus, who had to look up to see her, waited for her to speak again while he straightened up, expecting her to refer to the morning when she had spotted him out on the street with Christine and had been observed by them as if she were some rare creature of the sort only ever seen in a zoo. But without another word, Selma Bruhns turned away and went into the hall ahead of him. As she stared at him, and he thought he could recognize in her eyes traces of a weariness that she had kept from him in previous days, she reached into the pocket of her dress and pulled out the purse from which, every evening before he left the house, she paid him.

  “Is the leather shop still there on the corner of the Marktstrasse by the Himmelpforte,” says Selma Bruhns, without giving her words the intonation of a question. Since the shop had existed there for as long as Markus could remember, and was located in the lively shopping street, since it was conspicuous for its three big display windows in which suitcases, briefcases and other leather articles were put on show, and since, between its display windows, it offered a way into the Himmelpforte which many pedestrians used as a short cut, her question could only mean that she had not been into town for many years.

  “Yes,” said Markus.

  Selma Bruhns opened the purse, took out three one-hundred-mark notes, and gave them to Markus.

  “We’ll settle up when you come back,” she said, “I need an attaché case, black leather, simple clasps, I don’t know what it will cost, but I reckon three hundred marks should be enough.”

  And as if they had already been standing facing one another in the hall for too long, as if she had already had to use too many words to utter her request, Selma Bruhns turned away and went over to the door behind which lay the room that was the only one in the house she lived in, and that Markus had not yet entered. As her hand lay on the handle and she was just about to open the door, she paused, and said, without turning round: “Please,” in such a low voice that Markus heard it only indistinctly.

  She left him by himself, and he went back into the small room to fetch his briefcase. Only once he had left the house could he allow himself to feel a sense of relief, as if someone had opened a door for him, and after a long period of imprisonment he could again see the light of day. He took his time.

  After driving into town, he had left his car in a multi-storey car park. He took his briefcase from the rear seat, locked the driver’s door, and went over to the lift. Inside it, apart from himself, there was only a boy, so small that he could barely reach the lift buttons. Markus returned the smile with which the boy looked at him. On the ground floor, as the lift doors opened, he let the boy go ahead of him, walked through the cool concrete vault, and left the car park.

  The sun dazzled him as he stepped out into the street. He came to such an abrupt halt that the man who was about to leave the car park just after him bumped into him and murmured an incomprehensible apology. Markus did not go into the town centre to carry out Selma Bruhns’s errand straightaway. He turned right and walked down Grabenstrasse towards the ramparts. He caught himself gazing into the eyes of the pedestrians coming the other way, as if he wanted to determine whether he had ever met them before. He listened out for the words that he might catch as they passed by, eager not to miss a single one, and happy when he could establish some link between the words. When he came to the bridge that led over the moat, he stood in the middle, leant over the parapet and gazed down into the water on which leaves were floating. He had the feeling that the longer he stayed here, the further behind him he would leave the small room in which he had been sitting an hour ago. He tried to make out his face in the reflections on the water, and felt the desire to throw a stone in, so as to observe the expanding ripples in whose centre the stone had fallen. A feeling of lightness started to fill him, and for a long while he stood immobile at the parapet, so as not to drive this feeling away.

  “Markus!”

  Almost reluctantly he turned round and saw Rufus coming up to him.

  Dear Almut,

  Yesterday we moved into Herbert’s parental home. His mother died after a year spent fighting against the animal inside her body that devoured her from within. It is a big house, too big for the two of us, since we are still alone and will remain so in these rooms through whose windows I can look out to sea, which consoles me, since, however strange it may sound, if I can still feel love, it extends to the sea and the sky as well. I think that memories arise like the morning haze from the silky breakers that rear up over its surface and only in memories am I close to you, and only then can I still sense the warmth that keeps me alive. They are often just a few shards that I gather up in my memory and piece together painstakingly, and I am in despair when the fragments refuse to fit together until a picture emerges in which I can see you. Do you remember that leather shop in the Markstrasse through which you could reach the Himmelpforte and in which, once when we were both on a secret expedition in town, you took a black leather key-ring, was it in the shape of a snake, or was it a spider, and surreptitiously stuck it in your pocket, although neither of us had any use for it and it was just the leather animal that had led you astray, do you remember how Father forced us to go back to the shop and confess, which made both of us almost die of shame, until the shop assistant laughed and let us keep the silly little pendant? No, it was not silly. It was a sign of life, now I think of it.

  Herbert has become wealthy as a result of the death of his parents and wants to grant my every wish, but even if I did have any wishes saved up from the time when I still believed in wishes, Herbert would not be able to grant them for me. Only you, Almut, you would be able to do so. Often I cannot stand it when Herbert touches me, I can read the pleading in his eyes and know that I am doing him an injustice, but the injustice started much earlier. Why did I not have the strength to remain alone, and avoid entangling a stranger—and Herbert has remained a stranger to me, since I was unable to take a step towards him—in this injustice, an injustice that was inflicted on me and that I am inflicting on others. I can feel a painful spot in my body, under the left breast, and I know that it is a wound that will fail to close, to scar over or even to let a scab grow round its edges. And when I feel this spot in my body, often unexpectedly, in my sleep or during a conversation with people who are friendly towards me, then I know that I am inflicting an injustice, even on you, Almut. But as time goes by it soothes even this pain, and the letters I write you, every day, give me the courage to smile when I walk down the steps that lead from the house to the beach, as if I were walking towards you. Here the sun is so hot it seems to want to cut into the day with its beams, so I go out only in the evening, when darkness is falling. I’ve found a job, Almut, not because I need to, and not because I view my work as valuable, I do it to protect myself against destructive time, every day I drive down into town, sit in an office to which the emigrants from Europe come, I arrange accommodation for people whose faces are veiled by exhaustion and try to find a place for them to work, and I do all of this with the feeling that I am committing an injustice. Do you remember, Almut, you were fourteen and we had travelled with our parents to the sea for the first time. A storm blew up, so strong we could lean right into the wind, it lashed up great waves and brought them crashing down on the beach, with foaming crests in which the seagulls sat. You said: the waves are coming from the far side of the earth. This is where I have come to, Almut, and I can see that you were right.

  Glowna stands up. Holding the report he has just read out, he walks round his desk. He halts in front of Markus, who is no longer looking at him but has lowered his gaze as if he were ashamed. Not of anything he has done, but of something that both men have done, or that he thinks they have done, making him their accomplice without his knowing it. Glowna holds the report out to him; there are two pieces of paper, each written on one side; he waits for a while, as if he wants to see how Markus reacts,
and says: “The report is yours. There are only two copies. One is in my possession, and I handed the other one over to Selma Bruhns. The police probably found it in Selma Bruhns’s house.”

  As Markus does not make any move to take the two sheets of paper, Glowna lays them on his lap. He takes a step backwards, says, “I’m sure we’ll meet again, Herr Hauser,” and walks past Markus’ chair to the door. “I’ll leave you to it,” he says, then goes out of the room.

  Markus suppresses the desire to jump up and follow Glowna, as if the latter’s friendliness had touched him after all. He looks over to Berger, who has sunk back deep down into his armchair so that Markus can see only his legs and his hands.

  “How much are you going to tell me,” he hears Berger saying. He is glad that their eyes do not meet. He stands up and goes back to the windows. The man outside has finished cleaning his car and vanished.

  “So you want me to tell you that I’m not responsible for my actions, and that’s why I did it,” he says eventually, not taking his gaze off the street, where, in the shade of the house opposite, two children have begun throwing a ball to each other. His words have a strange ring to them, as if it were someone else, not Markus, who had spoken and as if this other person were trying to restore the earlier situation.

  “That’s not what I want you to tell me,” says Berger from behind Markus, “I want you to tell me the truth, or what you think is the truth.”

  Markus places his hand on the windowpane. Under his fingers he senses the chill of the glass in which he can see his reflection. He begins to talk. He does not begin at the beginning. He describes the days in which he was sedated with drugs—sedated so deeply that he lost all sensation, so that when, every morning, after getting up in the room which he had shared with three other men, he stood at the washbasin and observed himself in the mirror as he cleaned his teeth, he had no longer been able to recognize himself. He describes how, in the hours during which he had sat motionless on a bench in the garden of the hospital ward surrounded by a wall, he had begun to sense time going by, on his dry lips, in the throb of his pulse, in the brief blinking of his eyes.

  He talks on and on, without moving away from the window, without turning round to Berger. He describes the walks he went on after he had been moved from the closed ward where at night the patients, confused and unable to sleep, would wander down the corridors, opening the door of the room where he was asleep, and breathing full into his face. He describes how he had felt that the steps he took down the paths in the park were shaking his whole body so severely that, if he had stamped on the ground, he could have been destroyed. He describes how he had first become aware of the birds in the park, and then started to observe them more alertly and attentively. When he was taken off the drugs, he says, he spent a long time lying peacefully on the patch of lawn outside the patients’ cafe and felt the warmth of the sun penetrating first under his skin and then right into his muscles.

  Berger does not interrupt him. He seems no longer to be present, and only in the silences when Markus pauses does he hear Berger’s tranquil breathing. Then Markus finally describes how it began.

  “It was nothing out of the ordinary,” he says, “she left me and went off with someone else.”

  He describes how he had sat motionless in his room staring at the wall before jumping to his feet and starting to break up the furniture in his room, going about it almost systematically, first picking up the chair where he had been sitting and smashing it across the table, then overturning the bookshelves, tearing the pictures down, grabbing the flowerpots on the windowsill and hurling them at the wall. Until, Markus continues, it was all over, just as suddenly as it had begun. He had pulled on his jacket and gone downstairs. He describes how he managed to pick up some over-the-counter sleeping pills for himself in three different chemists, came back to his trashed room, and dissolved them in a glass of water. There were sixty pills, says Markus, and before he drank the glass with the cloudy liquid in it, he had tried to ascertain what he was feeling, but had merely felt a sense of emptiness and a muffled pain as if he had been hit on the head. He describes how he had awoken after being unconscious for thirty hours. He was lying on the bed in his own piss, not knowing where he was or what had happened. He had crawled, says Markus, to the telephone lying on the floor, and—something that he was still capable of, much to his own surprise, as he now clearly remembers—called the emergency services. Markus describes how the doctor came and gave him an injection.

  Then, as if his stock of words has all been used up, Markus falls silent. He turns towards Berger, sees him sitting in the armchair, their eyes meet, and the coolness in Berger’s gaze calms Markus. He does not feel ashamed.

  “What kind of incident was the one referred to in the report,” says Berger, and his voice sounds as if this were a routine question and answering it a mere formality. He is now leaning forward as if he wanted to stand up, and reaches out to the two pages that Glowna had laid in Markus’ lap and that Markus had, on his way to the window, dropped onto the desk. While Markus is talking, Berger folds the sheets together until they are only as big as an envelope.

  “I made another attempt,” says Markus, “I hoarded tablets and when I thought I’d got enough, I swilled them down.”

  Once again, between one sentence and the next, the suspicion awakes that Glowna and Berger had achieved the aim for which they had lured him into this room.

  He had, says Markus, woken up in the middle of the night, half-dazed, but still able to feel the anguish, its huge power, a power that he could have described only later, when it had passed. It had been a mortal anguish, says Markus, he had rung for the night nurses, they had poured down his throat a concentrated salt solution that made him vomit several times.

  Only now, as he falls silent, can Markus feel the sweat on his forehead and the exhaustion in all his limbs as if he had been running a great distance. He looks at the window again. The children have abandoned their ball game and are now decorating the pavement with brightly coloured chalks.

  He had gone with Rufus into the café in the Market Square. They sat down opposite one another on white plastic chairs, shaded from the sun by the awning.

  “Are you working?” said Rufus, and although Markus knew that Rufus’ question meant whether he had been writing anything, he replied yes.

  “What are you working on?” said Rufus, pushing aside the coffee cups that the waiter had placed on the table, so as to prop his elbows on it. He looked at Markus attentively. On his face—his mouth gave the impression of being small and, as it were, tacked on after the rest—sunbeams danced whenever the narrow, hanging edges of the awning fabric stirred. He had combed back his black hair with gel, so that under the greasy sheen the individual strands could be made out. Markus caught himself observing him as if he were seeing him for the first time, as if he had never noticed the dirty fingernails under the transparent varnish that Rufus applied to his nails, as if he had never seen him in the black leather jacket with the fringed sleeves, as if he had not already observed the way that Rufus raised a cigarette to his mouth, took a deep drag and inhaled the smoke deeply as if he wanted to swallow it.

  “I’m earning,” said Markus who could still feel, although it was fading, the sense of lightness he had felt on the bridge.

  With his right hand he reached into his trouser pocket as if he needed to make sure that the three banknotes that Selma Bruhns had given him were still there. He rubbed the banknotes together, without taking them out of his pocket. He listened to Rufus who, without asking any more questions, was telling him about his encounter with a woman that, as far as Markus could make out, he had got to know the previous evening, and he thought of the portrait hanging in her hall.

  “You’re not listening to me,” said Rufus, “what kind of job have you got?”

  “I’m sorting out a woman’s letters,” said Markus, delighted for once to get his voice back, “I’m sorting them out by year and date, and afterwards she burns t
hem in the backyard of her house.”

  Markus had expected Rufus to burst out into his incredible laugh, with which he always succeeded in startling people, but Rufus merely said she was obviously an intelligent woman and stood up.

  “You paying?” he said.

  From the pocket of his leather jacket he pulled out a piece of paper, folded together so narrowly that it was no bigger than a stamp. He gave it to Markus.

  “My latest poem,” he said, and placed his hand on Markus’ head, for just a moment, as if he felt how far away Markus was from him, turned round and walked across the Market Square. At the town hall he turned off into a side street, and Markus, gazing after him with a feeling that he had failed, called over the waiter and paid.

  Markus threw the attaché case that he had, as she requested, purchased in the shop next to the Himmelpforte onto the back seat of his car. He drove down the winding ramp of the car park and put his ticket into the ticket machine at the exit, so that the barrier rose and he could drive out. After the half-light in the car park, the brightness took him by surprise. He waited until the light changed for him to turn off, driving slowly, as if at any moment he might wish to stop, past the shops, and only at the crossroads did he decide not to drive back to her house immediately. He followed the winding streets of the city centre until he reached the other side, crossed to the moat and halted in the street where the tax office in which Christine worked was located. Through the windscreen he looked up at the building in which Christine was sitting behind a window in her office, he imagined her bent over figures, with a female colleague sitting opposite her occupied at the same task, in absolute silence, broken only by the barely audible humming of the machines.