The Game of Cards
Page 13
“You can go home,” he says, walking back to the door of Selma Bruhns’s room, “I’ve been looking through the literature. It’s completely possible for someone to strangle themselves with a shawl.”
Berger opens the door and enters Selma Bruhns’s room. When he shuts it from inside, Markus is alone in the hall. Although he has heard what Berger said, and although he has also understood the meaning of Berger’s words, he does not move.
Finally he walks down the steps to the front door, opens it and goes out.
Since Markus had wasted time over lunch, he had not managed to sort out the last letters—there were only a few of them—and place them in a pile until it had grown dark. Selma Bruhns had come by at increasingly frequent intervals during the afternoon and taken the letters from him. She had stood in the open door of the small room and Markus had sensed her impatience from her silence, as she waited for him to get up and place the piles of letters in her hands. He had not followed her into the yard, but, as he continued working, he had the feeling that he could hear what she was doing in the yard, could hear her striking the match and then, when the burning match had fallen onto the paper, the flames blazing up. When she fetched the last letters, she said, having remained silent all afternoon, that he should wait for her in the hall. When she had left him, Markus looked at the three chests, as if to reassure himself that they really were empty and that all of the letters had been destroyed by the flames. He hesitated to leave the small room, listened for the noises from upstairs, bent down and picked up the briefcase from where he had laid it on the ground against the wall next to the door. When he had turned off the light, he left the small room. He walked through the hall to the front door, opened it and went out. The darkness took him by surprise. When he was able to make out the silhouettes of the bushes and the way to the gate, he sensed how familiar the garden had become to him. The idea that he would not be coming back here tomorrow, would not be squatting in a small room and sorting out her letters, seemed unreal to him. When he went back into the hall, she was waiting for him.
“We need to settle up, Herr Hauser.”
Markus was expecting her to take her purse out of the pocket of her dress and give him his money in the hall as she had done on the previous days. But Selma Bruhns went up to the door of her room and opened it.
“Come with me,” she said.
Through the open door Markus again saw the sofa under the beam of light from the standard lamp. He entered the room. Selma Bruhns closed the door. Without a word of explanation, she went to the armchair and sat down. She crossed her legs, reached into the side pocket of her dress, did not take out her purse, but her cigarettes, and lit one.
“Open the top drawer,” she was pointing to the chest of drawers that stood to the right of the door, “there’s a white silk shawl in it. Bring it to me.”
Markus obeyed her order. It was not just a polite request. He opened the drawer, took out the shawl and closed the drawer. He brought the shawl to her, she took it from him and wound it twice around her neck.
“Before you sit down, open the case,” she said.
The attaché case was lying on the table. It was the case he had bought. The locks sprang open when Markus pushed the catches sideways. He lifted the lid and looked at the banknotes that half-filled the case.
“How can you keep so much money at home,” said Markus aloud, as if the sight of the money had alarmed him.
“There are one hundred and twenty thousand marks,” said Selma Bruhns, “and it could all belong to you.”
Markus closed the lid of the case. Although he had heard her words and even understood them, he refused to believe them, and said nothing. Without waiting for her to challenge him, he sat opposite her in the armchair next to which the electric fire stood.
“Do you remember the game we played yesterday?”
She opened the drawer of the table between them, reached in and drew out a pack of cards. She took the cards out of their cardboard packet and placed them on the table.
“We’ll play it once more today,” she said, starting to speak more rapidly again, “but this time we’re going to play for a stake.”
Markus saw her hands in her lap rubbing each other, the way she knotted and loosened her fingers together, saw her face, with its tense expression, as if she were waiting impatiently for his answer, though it also looked cold and distant.
“What’s my stake?” said Markus.
“We each draw three cards again,” she said, taking no notice of Markus’ words. “The one who draws the two highest cards wins.”
“What’s my stake?”
Markus repeated his words. He knew that everything that might still happen—and he is now convinced that she had plans for him, something for which perhaps he had already been waiting for six days—depended on the answer to his question.
“If you win, the money belongs to you.”
“What’s my stake?” said Markus for the third time.
“If I win, the money still belongs to you, since I don’t need it any more.”
Markus repeated his words again.
“What’s my stake?”
Selma Bruhns did not reply immediately but instead picked up the cards, began to shuffle them and place them into equal piles.
“If I win, you must help me to die.”
Markus was not startled, it was as if he had expected her words.
“No,” he said. He felt her looking at him, and as if he owed it to her, he looked up and returned her gaze. He saw her smile, and it frightened him more than her words.
“It’s quite easy. You just have to pull the shawl tight.”
“No.”
She vehemently stood up, and went over to the door as if to open it and throw Markus out of the room. Her back was turned to him.
“You’ll never be a writer,” he heard her saying, “you have too many scruples. I know what I’m talking about. I have been writing for forty years. Even if it was only letters.”
Perhaps because she was talking about the letters that he had sorted out for her without knowing that it was she who had written them, he stood up, but did not take a step towards her.
“Why?” he said simply.
They stood facing each other, Selma Bruhns erect, her gaze directed past Markus to the wall. She was the first to move, walking up to Markus and laying her hand on his cheek, for such a short instant that, as she went past Markus and sat down in the armchair again, he was not sure whether he had been mistaken. As she still said nothing, and Markus did not know whether her silence was a challenge to him either to sit down again or to leave her alone, he turned round to her and said it again.
“Why?”
Selma Bruhns leant forward, pulled out the stool from under the table, placed it next to her, took the attaché case from the table and placed it next to the stool on the floor. Although she still had not uttered a single word, Markus realised what she expected him to do. He went over to her and sat on the stool. He saw her knee, skinny and bony under her dress, saw her hands, saw the white skin and the brown flecks on it. When he eventually looked up, he saw her face. She had closed her eyes.
“I’ll tell you about a game that could only be played in Germany,” she said, “you’re the first German to hear about it.”
Then she opened her eyes. Markus looked at her hands again.
“The war was on, and there were two of us. Almut and Selma. And there was a pass that guaranteed Brazilian citizenship. Since Almut and Selma were the children of Jewish parents, this pass meant life. It had been issued to Almut Bruhns, but since the sisters were twins and were easily mistaken for one another, either of them could use the pass.”
Her hands fidgeted, stroking the material on the arms of the chair.
“I don’t remember whose suggestion it was, Almut’s or Selma’s. They were sitting in the park and on a bench where, as Jewish children, they should not have been sitting, at an empty table. It was autumn, and getting chillier. T
here was nobody else in the park to disturb them. I don’t remember which of us placed the pack of cards on the table.”
When she did not continue and he sensed the heat of the electric fire as if this was the first time he had noticed it, he heard her breathing, calmly and regularly.
“Almut took the cards out of their packet. She shuffled them and divided them into two equal piles. Each of us had to draw three cards. The one with the highest cards would use the pass to escape.”
She was again starting to speak more quickly.
“Almut drew a jack. I drew a ten. I could breathe again. Then Almut drew a nine. I drew an ace. Do you realise, Herr Hauser, what the last card meant? I drew an eight. I was sure of winning. Almut drew a seven. I had lost.”
When Markus left Selma Bruhns’s house and walked through the front garden in the darkness, there was such a heavy downpour of rain that even before he reached his car Markus was soaked to the skin. He held the attaché case over his head and began to run.
“I made a mistake,” she had said after they had both sat in silence and only the distant noise of the animals could be heard.
“Take the attaché case and leave.”
Markus had not moved, and only when she had repeated her words in a sharp, unfriendly tone of voice, had he stood up and left her alone in her house.
When he turned off into the street where he lived, immediately found a parking spot, turned off the windscreen wipers that were still going even though if it had long since stopped raining, and switched off the engine, he did not get out straight away. He gazed through the windscreen up at the houses and saw that the windows of their flat were lit up. Christine had come home. He picked up his attaché case from the rear seat, opened it and took the notebook out. He opened it, reached for his ballpoint pen and on the first page wrote two words: Why me.
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Copyright
English translation © Andrew Brown 2007 First published in German as
Das Kartenspiel © Schöffling & Co. 2001
First published by Pushkin Press in 2007
This ebook edition published in 2012 by Pushkin Press, 71-75 Shelton Street, London WC2H 9JQ
ISBN 9781908968739
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Cover: Claude Cahun c 1940 © The Jersey Heritage Trust
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