The Game of Cards

by Adolf Schroder

  But he does not get up, and instead gazes at Markus with an expression that is simultaneously expectant, cautious, and observant, while Markus, who withstands his gaze, feels the desire to see Berger take his pipe out of the glass ashtray, fill it with tobacco, and light it.

  “After the war, the house was an auxiliary hospital for a short time, then for two years it was a children’s home for war orphans,” says Berger, “then it stayed empty until Selma Bruhns returned and the house was handed back to her.”

  Markus had been working for a long time. Squatting in the windowless small room, he did not notice that night had fallen. The light from the light-bulb fell down on him unchangingly, casting shadows on the floor.

  “Come with me.”

  Markus had got used to not noticing her arrival, to the way she would open the door to the small room at unpredictable times, perhaps approaching carefully through the hallway so as to check up on him as he worked. He stood up and was about to give her the last bundle of letters that he had been putting into order that day, but she did not take the letters from him, simply repeated her request, turned away from him and went back into the hall. He followed her hesitantly, holding a pile of letters in both hands, carefully, so as not to drop them and thereby destroy the work of the last hours. One behind the other they walked through the narrow corridor to the kitchen, left the house through the side door and stood in the yard.

  “Have you been spying on me?”

  Selma Bruhns went up to him, took the bundle of letters from him and placed them on the ground. Markus, surprised at her question, said nothing. Only now did he seem to perceive the darkness into which the light falling from the open kitchen door cut out a bright rectangle in which she stood, her back turned to the wall, so that Markus was unable to make out her face.

  “Do you live alone?” he heard her saying; he had the feeling she wasn’t talking to him but to somebody else hiding in the darkness.

  “I live with a woman,” he said, and even as he was uttering the sentence, he felt a desire to unsay these words.

  “Are you happy?”

  The question, as spoken by her, sounded like a challenge. She seemed to accept the fact that he did not answer, reached into the pocket of her dress and pulled a box of matches out.

  “Since you have been observing me and know what I do here in the yard,” she said, going up to him and holding a box of matches out to him, “this evening you will burn the letters.”

  Markus took a step backwards. Involuntarily he clasped his hands behind his back and said, afraid that his voice might fail him:

  “Why should I do that?”

  Selma Bruhns stepped out of the bright rectangle that lay clearly on the flagstones of the yard. Markus could only guess at where she was.

  “No,” he said.

  The word cost him more effort than he had expected. He saw a match flaring in the darkness. Selma Bruhns stepped back into the light, bent down and held the burning match to the pile of papers. The letters, that had become dry and brittle with the years, caught fire straight away. The flames darted up, Markus saw shadows and light flitting across her face. He thought he could make out a smile on her lips, but he was not sure. The flames wavered and went out. Selma Bruhns trod the ashes under her boots.

  “Before you go, please come into my room,” she said, stepping out of the light, and Markus saw her, a shadowy figure walking back to the kitchen door. He stayed out in the yard, went to the steps leading to the terrace, and sat on the bottom step. He could hear the animals far away in the thicket of the garden. When he stood up, he felt the pain in his legs, the result of his squatting all day long in the small room. He slowly walked up to the bright rectangle of the kitchen door. His eyes grew used to the light, as he crossed the kitchen and reached the hall, where he stood for a while and decided whether to go back into the small room or immediately take up her challenge and follow her to her room. But before he could make up his mind, the door to her room opened. Selma Bruhns did not leave the room, but stood in the door frame and said quietly, leaving her one hand on the door handle and with her other hand stroking her dress with a movement that reminded him of the young woman he had seen in the photo:

  “Come in.”

  She stepped aside, and Markus gazed through the open door at the sofa, under the beam of light from the standard lamp. Hesitantly he stepped into the room, taking care as he did so not to touch her as he walked past her. He immediately registered the natural warmth of the room, he took two steps and then stopped. Behind him, Selma Bruhns shut the door.

  “Look round,” she said and walked past him to an armchair with a green cover on which she sat down, crossing her legs and laying her hands in her lap. Only now did Markus notice the electric fire standing next to the sofa.

  “Do you feel like playing a game with me,” said Selma Bruhns. Her voice sounded softer than before. Markus took a step forward, but could not make up his mind to sit down, and gazed past her shape as she waited calmly in the armchair, his eyes fixed on the wall. In the dim light he saw a picture, a woman holding a ball or a sphere in her hands like the figure that Markus had discovered in the garden.

  “It’s child’s play,” she said, reaching into the side-pocket of her dress, pulling out a pack of cards and placing it on a low table standing next to her chair. As Markus finally sat in the easy chair, he felt the warmth of the electric fire on his legs. He observed that she took the playing cards out of their packet and, after shuffling them, as if she played this game every evening, divided them into two piles. The one pile she pushed across the table to Markus, and the other she picked up.

  “I’m not a good player,” said Markus.

  “We each draw a card,” she said, paying no attention to his objection. Her words sounded impatient, as if she wanted to end the game that she had suggested, end it as quickly as possible.

  “We do it three times. The one who draws a higher card twice wins.”

  She was speaking more and more quickly, and by the end, her voice had lost all its friendliness. Markus was not looking at her and had repressed a desire to get up and leave the room, leave her house. He did not try to find out why she had asked him into her room and had suggested a game whose meaning he did not understand, but, perhaps precisely because its meaning remained hidden from him, he sensed danger.

  “I’ll go first,” she said, pulling a card from a pile and laying it on the table, “the King.”

  Markus, who could not conceal from her the fact that his hand was trembling, drew his card. It was a jack. Without a pause, Selma Bruhns drew the second card. It was a seven. Just as quickly, so that he would not have to think for a single moment what they were doing now, Markus laid his second card on the table. It was a ten.

  “The third card decides the result,” she said. Markus thought he could detect a quiet note of triumph in her words.

  “You draw first.”

  From the middle of his pile, Markus drew the third card. A queen. Selma Bruhns laid her card onto the table next to it.

  “An ace,” she said.

  “You’ve won,” answered Markus in relief, as if he were happy to have lost this game.

  “I always win,” said Selma Bruhns.

  THE SIXTH DAY

  THEY WALK THROUGH the front garden to her house.

  Before they drove off, Berger had pulled on a coat that concealed his jacket and, since it reached down to his ankles, enveloped his figure. On the drive over to the Kurfürstenallee, during which Berger did not speak, as if he needed to concentrate on finding his way, and drove so slowly that the cars behind him started to hoot and then so fast that he didn’t have time to break at junctions, Markus had tried to work out why Berger had taken him to his house, into his room, where his pipe was lying in a glass ashtray. Berger’s car had made its way only slowly along the ring road. Berger had leant back in his seat, taking his hands off the wheel and, without turning to Markus, said: “If this woman was living in such pitiful circ
umstances, why did you not turn to the relevant authorities?”

  As if he’d needed time to answer, or as if he needed to decide whether to answer Berger’s question, Markus had observed the car ahead of them as it moved slowly forward.

  “She was not living in pitiful circumstances.”

  Once they had driven over the junction, Berger could again drive more quickly.

  “Did you think she was compos mentis?” he had asked Markus.

  He did not take his eyes off the road, and yet changed lanes only at the last minute to turn off for the villa district. Markus had not known whether Berger was asking these questions to find out something about Selma Bruhns or to discover what Markus had thought about her.

  “Yes,” he had replied.

  “Her family were separated. Her father was deported to Auschwitz. The two women were taken to Treblinka.”

  Perhaps Berger had asked the previous questions merely in order to prepare Markus for this statement. Ever since Markus had been in Berger’s house, he had had the feeling that Berger’s voice had altered.

  “Which women?” he had asked.

  Berger had stopped the car outside her house.

  “Selma Bruhns’s mother and her sister.”

  He had opened the driver’s door and got out of the car.

  When they reach the front door, Markus sees the seal with which her door has been barred, a strip of paper with an official stamp glued across the crack in the door. Berger takes a key out of his coat pocket, inserts it into the lock and opens the door, tearing the seal.

  “Her sister was called Almut,” says Markus before entering her house. Berger closes the door. They walk up the few steps into the hall and stand in the twilight coming in through the still draped windows over the stairs. Markus listens for the animals, wondering whether they are still in possession of the rooms and might at any minute come charging down the stairs. As they stand facing each other, he turns over in his mind the question of whether Berger, although he has not expressed his suspicion a single time, has brought him here in the hope that Markus might make a confession.

  “The animals that were sick were put down. The others were taken to a cats’ home,” says Berger, taking a step forward and laying his hand on the rear wall of the hall, where the bright rectangle on the wallpaper is.

  “There was a picture hanging there,” he says, “the picture of an old man. She sold it to get the money that, so you claim, she gave you.”

  He goes to the door leading to the room in which Selma Bruhns had lived, but does not open it, although he is already holding the handle.

  “This is where she was found,” he says.

  Without looking at Markus, as if he had not spoken to him, Berger goes to the stairs and sits on the lowest of them.

  “Did you watch as she put the money in the case, did you try to steal it and, when she caught you at it, lose your nerve and tighten the white shawl until she had stopped breathing?”

  Markus feels he can breathe more freely now that Berger has expressed his suspicion.

  “Who was the old man in the picture?” he says.

  “It was Selma Bruhns’s father,” replies Berger, “the picture hung in the municipal museum until she came back.”

  Berger stands up.

  Markus lit a cigarette and leaned his head against the edge of the bed so that he could see across the blanket into the room, looking at the wall on which Christine had nailed a poster to the wallpaper. Even when he had stubbed out his cigarette, he hesitated to get up.

  When, the previous evening, he had come back home, he had found on the kitchen table a note that Christine had put there in which, in a single sentence, without adding any justification, she had told him she was spending the night at a female friend’s place. He had torn up the note and thrown the pieces of paper into the bin. He had gone into the living room and looked up the telephone number of the friend with whom Christine was staying.

  When he had dialled the number and heard it ring six times, he put the receiver down. Quickly, as if he had wanted to prevent himself from reflecting on his actions, he picked up the receiver again and dialled enquiries.

  “Selma Bruhns,” he had said, “She lives in the Kurfürstenallee.”

  He had waited until the impersonal voice told him that there was no number listed under this name and address, or that it might be a private number that was not available on the public system. He had slept uneasily.

  The front door was locked when, later than usual, he parked his car and walked up to her house. As there was no bell, Markus knocked on the door. He did it twice, then gave up, walked down the steps leading to the front door and gazed up at the house, as if hoping she would show herself at one of the windows. When one of the cats with a black and white coat emerged from the thicket of weeds and slunk up the narrow path along the house, evidently unafraid of him, he followed it. He walked round the house into the yard where the marks left by the ashes were still visible. The kitchen door barely stood open. Markus watched as a young cat emerged through the crack in the door into the yard, stopped, turned its head to the light, and then came up to Markus. He bent down and picked it up. To begin with, the cat seemed to enjoy this, but then started to struggle and drag its claws across the back of his hand. They left tiny scratches. He held it firmly by the paws and went into the kitchen.

  “Frau Bruhns.”

  It seemed to him, from the echo of his voice, that there was nobody at home. But he carried on, pressing the young cat to himself, through the house until he reached the bright room whose windows faced the garden and in which the grand piano had stood.

  “Frau Bruhns.”

  He slowly retraced his steps, and only once he was out in the yard again did he bend, carefully place the cat on the ground, and walk around the house to the street. Undecided what to do, he stood next to his car, but although he had already taken the key out of his pocket, he turned away and walked down the street until he reached the phone box.

  He dialled the number.

  “I’d like to speak to Frau Baumann.”

  He had to wait, then he heard Christine’s voice.

  “Are you at her place again?” she said.

  Markus did not reply immediately.

  “Markus,” said Christine.

  “Today I’ll finish the job,” he said. The feeling he had to justify himself to her confused him, since he didn’t understand it.

  “Will you be at home this evening?”

  As he uttered the question, he knew that the only reason he had come to the phone box was to ask this question.

  “What about you? Will you be at home?” said Christine. “Will you get up in the middle of the night again and read her letters?”

  “I’ll be at home,” he said.

  Now Christine fell silent. In the background he heard a man’s voice saying something loud that he could not catch.

  “I’ll be there, Markus,” said Christine and hung up before Markus could reply. He left the phone box, but a shrill beeping called him back since he had forgotten to take his phone card out of the machine. As he walked back, a taxi drove past him. It halted outside Selma Bruhns’s house. He saw her getting out of the taxi. She was wearing a light-coloured coat that was not long enough to cover her red dress. She was holding the black attaché case that he had bought. As she bent forwards to pay the driver, Markus came up to her. As she straightened up, she looked at him quite without surprise. She held the attaché case out to him.

  “Bring it in,” she said, opened the gate, and walked up to her house.

  The taxi driver turned the car round and drove back up the Kurfürstenallee.

  Dear Almut,

  In haste. The freight ship that is bringing me back is approaching the coast. The lights of the lighthouses and the buoys show the way into the great river. I sit in my cabin, with the packed chests next to me. I do not dare to go up on deck, stand there in the grey light and hear the crying of the gulls that, now we are clos
e to land, accompany the ship. I am afraid to see land slowly rising up on the horizon, the land I left such a long time ago. What is awaiting me? Black flags? Was it a mistake to yield to the yearning to be close to you? Will I be able to write to you again if I am so close to you? In the house in which we both lived?

  Do you remember, Almut?

  The great river in which we both swam right up to the ships, so as to rock in their waves even though we had been forbidden to do so? The river on which we observed the black clouds of geese in the evening sky as they rose from the meadows next to the river and filled the air with their cries so that we could no longer understand our own words? On which we saw the ships sailing downstream with the stowaways in their holds? Do you remember, Almut?

  These words lose their strength the closer I come to the harbour in which the ship will be docking. In which I will be leaving it and plunging into the language that for so long I have not spoken, that I have missed for so long, and from which I fled.

  Do you remember, Almut?

  You said have a good trip, and I said what have we done, and you said we’ll soon be seeing each other again, and I knew that was not true. I said, I’m staying, and you again said have a good trip, and I said we’ve done something wrong, and you said no. You said we’ll see each other again, and I knew that was not true. I said let’s go back in time, and you said it’s only a game. I did not reply.

  When my thoughts lose their strength, I can hear the throbbing of the diesel engine, as if it were proof of my silence, and I think I can feel the throbbing of the ship’s propellers in the trembling of the table. In haste, Almut. I went up on deck. The pilot boat is approaching our ship.

  They went upstairs, up the steps covered in cat droppings, past the draped windows, Berger first, Markus following him.

  “If she asked for enquiries to be made about you she must’ve wanted something from you,” says Berger, at the top of the stairs he steps into the corridor, goes to one of the doors that to right and left leads to the rooms, and opens it.