King, Queen, Knave

by Vladimir Nabokov

  On the lawn near the porch stood a very tall beach umbrella and under it a small table and several wicker armchairs. Martha sat down, and Franz, grinning and blinking, sat down beside her. She decided that she had stunned him completely with the sight of her small but expensive garden which contained among other things five beds of dahlias, three larches, two weeping willows, and one magnolia, and did not bother to ascertain if those poor wild eyes could distinguish a beach umbrella from an ornamental tree. She enjoyed receiving him so elegantly auf englische Weise, dazzling him with undreamt-of wealth, and was looking forward to showing him the villa, the miniatures in the parlor, and the satinwood in the bedroom, and hearing this rather handsome boy’s moans of respectful admiration. And, since generally her visitors were people from her own circle whom she had long since grown tired of dazzling, she felt tenderly grateful to this provincial with his starched collar and narrow trousers for giving her an opportunity to renew the pride she had known in her first months of marriage.

  “It’s so quiet here,” said Franz. “I thought Berlin would be so noisy.”

  “Oh, but we live almost in the country,” she answered, and feeling herself seven years younger, added: “the next villa over there belongs to a count. A very nice old man, we see a lot of him.”

  “Very pleasant—this quiet simple atmosphere,” said Franz, steadily developing the theme and already foreseeing a blind alley.

  She looked at his pale pink-knuckled hand with a nice long index lying flat on the table. The thin fingers were trembling slightly.

  “I have often tried to decide,” she said, “whom does one know better—somebody one has been in the same room with for five hours or somebody one has seen for ten minutes every day during a whole month.”

  “Bitte?” said Franz.

  “I suppose,” she went on, “the real factor here is not the amount of time but that of communication—the exchange of ideas on life and living conditions. Tell me, how are you related to my husband exactly? Second cousin, isn’t it? You’re going to work here, that’s nice, boys like you should be made to work a lot. His business is enormous—I mean, my husband’s firm. But then I’m sure you’ve already heard about his celebrated emporium. Perhaps emporium is too strong a word, it carries men’s things only, but there is everything, everything—neckties, hats, sporting goods. Then there’s his office in another part of the town and various banking operations.”

  “It will be hard to begin,” said Franz, drumming with his fingers. “I’m a little scared. But I know your husband is a wonderful man, a very kind good man. My mother worships him.”

  At this moment there appeared from somewhere, as if in token of sympathy, the specter of a dog which turned out upon closer examination to be an Alsatian. Lowering its head, the dog placed something at Franz’s feet. Then it retreated a little, dissolved momentarily, and waited expectantly.

  “That’s Tom,” said Martha. “Tom won a prize at the show. Didn’t you, Tom” (she spoke to Tom only in the presence of guests).

  Out of respect for his hostess, Franz picked up the object the dog was offering him. It proved to be a wet wooden ball covered with tangible tooth marks. As soon as he took up the ball, raising it up to his face, the specter of the dog emerged with a bound from the sunny haze, becoming alive, warm, active, and nearly knocking him off his chair. He quickly got rid of the ball. Tom vanished.

  The ball landed right among the dahlias but of course Franz did not see this.

  “Fine animal,” he observed with revulsion as he wiped his wet hand against the chintzed chair arm. Martha was looking away, worried by the storm in the flowerbed which Tom was trampling in frantic search of his plaything. She clapped her hands. Franz politely clapped too, mistaking admonishment for applause. Fortunately at that moment a boy rode by on a bicycle, and Tom, instantly forgetting the ball, lunged headlong toward the garden fence and dashed along its entire length barking furiously. Then he immediately calmed down, trotted back and lay down by the porch steps under Martha’s cold eye, lolling his tongue and folding back one front paw like a lion.

  As Franz listened to what Martha was telling him, in the vibrant petulant tones he was getting used to, about the Tyrol, he felt that the dog had not gone too far away, and might bring back any moment that slimy object. Nostalgically he remembered a nasty old lady’s nasty old pug (a relative and great enemy of his mother’s pet) that he had managed to kick smartly on several occasions.

  “But somehow, you know,” Martha was saying, “one felt hemmed in. One imagined those mountains might crash down on the hotel, in the middle of the night, right on our bed, burying me under them and my husband, killing everybody. We were thinking of going on to Italy but somehow I lost the lust. He’s pretty stupid, our Tom. Dogs that play with balls are always stupid. A strange gentleman arrives but for him it’s a brand-new member of the family. This is your first visit, isn’t it, to our great city? How do you like it here?”

  Franz indicated his eyes with a polite pinkie: “I’m quite blind,” he said. “Until I get some new glasses, I cannot appreciate anything. All I see are just colors, which after all is not very interesting. But in general I like it. And it’s so quiet here, under this yellow tree.”

  For some reason the thought crossed his mind—a streak of fugitive fancy—that at that very moment his mother was returning from church with Frau Kamelspinner, the taxidermist’s wife. And meanwhile—wonder of wonders—he was having a difficult but delicious conversation with this misty lady in this radiant mist. It was all very dangerous; every word she said might trip him.

  Martha noticed his slight stammer and the nervous way he had of sniffing now and then. “Dazzled and embarrassed, and so very young,” she reflected with a mixture of contempt and tenderness, “warm, healthy young wax that one can manipulate and mold till its shape suits your pleasure. He should have shaved, though, before coming.” And she said by way of experiment, just to see how he would react:

  “If you plan to work at a smart store, my good sir, you must cultivate a more confident manner and get rid of that black down on your manly jaws.”

  As she had expected, Franz lost what composure he had.

  “I shall get new spectables, I mean respectacles,” he expostulated, or so his flustered lisp sounded.

  She allowed his confusion to spin itself out, telling herself that it was very good for him. Franz really did feel most uncomfortable for an instant but not quite in the way she imagined. What put him off was not the remonstrance but the sudden coarseness of her tone, a kind of throaty “hep!,” as if, to set the example, she were jerking back her shoulders at the word “confident.” This was not in keeping with his misty image of her.

  The jarring interpolation passed quickly: Martha melted back into the glamorous haze of the world surrounding him and resumed her elegant conversation.

  “Autumn is chillier around here than in your native orchards. I love luscious fruit but I also like a crisp cold day. There is something about the texture and temperature of my skin that simply thrills in response to a breeze or a keen frost. Alas, I have to pay for it.”

  “Back home there is still bathing,” observed Franz. He was all set to tell her about the celebrated limpid lyrical river running through his native town under arched bridges, and then between cornfields and vineyards; about how nice it was to go swimming there in the buff, diving right off the little “nicker raft” you could hire for a few coppers; but at that instant a car honked and drew up at the gate, and Martha said: “Here is my husband.”

  She fixed her eyes on Dreyer, wondering if his aspect would impress the young cousin, and forgetting that Franz had seen him before and could hardly see him now. Dreyer came at his fast bouncy walk. He wore an ample white overcoat with a white scarf. Three rackets, each in a differently colored cloth case—maroon, blue, and mulberry—protruded from under his arm; his face with its tawny mustache glowed like an autumn leaf. She was less vexed by his exotic attire than that the conversatio
n had been interrupted, that she was no longer alone with Franz, that it was no longer exclusively she who engrossed and amazed him. Involuntarily her manner toward Franz changed, as if there had been “something between them,” and now came the husband, causing them to behave with greater reserve. Besides, she certainly did not want to let Dreyer see that the poor relative whom she had criticized before knowing him had not turned out too bad after all. Therefore when Dreyer joined them she wanted to convey to him by means of an inconspicuous bit of pantomime that his arrival would now liberate her at last from a boring guest. Unfortunately Dreyer as he approached did not take his eyes off Franz who, peering at the gradually condensing light part of the mottled mist, got up and was preparing to make a bow. Dreyer, who was observant in his own way and fond of trivial mnemonic tricks (he often played a game with himself, trying to recollect the pictures in a waiting room, that pathetic limbo of pictures), had immediately, from a distance, recognized their recent travelling companion and wondered if perhaps he had brought the unopened letter from a milliner that Martha had mislaid during the journey. But suddenly another, much more amusing, thought dawned upon him. Martha, accustomed to the fireworks of his face, saw his cropped mustache twitch and the rays of wrinkles on the temple side of his eyes multiply and quiver. The next instant he burst out laughing so violently that Tom, who had been jumping around him, could not help barking. Not only the coincidence tickled Dreyer but also the conjecture that Martha had probably said something nasty about his relative while the relative had been sitting right there in the compartment. Just what Martha had said, and whether Franz could have heard it, he would never be able to recall now but something there had surely been, and this itchy uncertainty intensified the humorous aspect of the coincidence. In the no-time of human thought he also recalled—while the dog drowned his cousin’s greeting—how an acquaintance once had rung him up while he was taking a tumultuous shower, and Martha had shouted through the bathroom door: “That stupid old Wasserschluss is calling”—and five paces away the telephone receiver on the table was cupping its ear like an eavesdropper in a farce.

  He laughed as he shook Franz’s hand, and was still laughing when he dropped into one of the wicker chairs. Tom continued to bark. Suddenly Martha lunged forward and, rings blazing, gave the dog a really hard slap with the back of her hand. It hurt, and with a whimper Tom slunk away.

  “Delightful,” said Dreyer (the delight quite gone), wiping his eyes with an ample silk handkerchief. “So you are Franz—Lina’s boy. After such a coincidence we must do away with formalities—please don’t call me sir but Uncle, dear Uncle.”

  “Avoid vocatives,” thought Franz quickly. Nevertheless, he began to feel at ease. Dreyer, blowing his nose in the haze, was indistinct, absurd, and harmless like those total strangers who impersonate people we know in our dreams and talk to us in phony voices like intimate friends.

  “I was in fine form today,” Dreyer said to his wife, “and you know something, I’m hungry. I imagine young Franz is hungry too.”

  “Lunch will be served in a minute,” said Martha. She got up and disappeared.

  Franz, feeling even more at ease, said: “I must apologize—I’ve broken my glasses and can hardly distinguish anything, so I get mixed up a little.”

  “Where are you staying?” asked Dreyer.

  “At the Video,” said Franz. “Near the station. It was recommended to me by an experienced person.”

  “Fine. Yes, you are a good dog, Tom. Now first of all you must find a nice room, not too far from us. For forty or fifty marks a month. Do you play tennis?”

  “Certainly,” replied Franz, remembering a backyard, a secondhand brown racket purchased for one mark at a bric-a-brac shop from under the bust of Wagner, a black rubber ball, and an uncooperative brick wall with a fatal square hole in which grew one wallflower.

  “Fine. So we can play on Sundays. Then you will need a decent suit, shirts, soft collars, ties, all kinds of things. How did you get on with my wife?”

  Franz grinned, not knowing the answer.

  “Fine,” said Dreyer. “I suspect lunch is ready. We’ll talk about business later. We discuss business over coffee around here.”

  His wife had come out on the porch. She gave him a long cold glance, coldly nodded, and went back into the house. “That hateful, undignified, genial tone he always must take with inferiors,” she reflected as she passed through the ivory-white front hall where the impeccable, hospitable white comb and white-backed brush lay on the doily under the pier glass. The entire villa, from whitewashed terrace to radio antenna, was that way—neat, clean-cut, and on the whole unloved and inane. The master of the house deemed it a joke. As for the lady, neither aesthetic nor emotional considerations ruled her taste; she simply thought that a reasonably wealthy German businessman in the nineteen-twenties, in Berlin-West, ought to have a house exactly of that sort, that is, belonging to the same suburban type as those of his fellows. It had all the conveniences, and the majority of those conveniences went unused. There was, for example, in the bathroom a round, face-sized swivel mirror—a grotesque magnifier, with an electric light attached. Martha had once given it to her husband for shaving but very soon he had grown to detest it: it was unbearable every morning to see one’s brightly illuminated chin swollen to about three times its natural volume and studded with rusty bristles that had sprouted overnight. The chairs in the parlor resembled a display in a good store. A writing desk with an unnecessary upper stage, consisting of unnecessary little drawers, supported, in place of a lamp, a bronze knight holding a lantern. There were lots of well dusted but uncaressed porcelain animals with glossy rumps, as well as varicolored cushions, against which no human cheek had ever nestled; and albums—huge arty things with photographs of Copenhagen porcelain and Hagenkopp furniture—which were opened only by the dullest or shyest guest. Everything in the house, including the jars labelled sugar, cloves, chicory, on the shelves of the idyllic kitchen, had been chosen by Martha, to whom, seven years previously, her husband had presented on its green-turfed tray the freshly built little villa, still empty and ready to please. She had acquired paintings and distributed them throughout the rooms under the supervision of an artist who had been very much in fashion that season, and who believed that any picture was acceptable as long as it was ugly and meaningless, with thick blobs of paint, the messier and muddier the better. Following the count’s advice, Martha had also bought a few old oils at auctions. Among them was the magnificent portrait of a noble-looking gentleman, with sidewhiskers, wearing a stylish morning coat, who stood leaning on a slender cane, illuminated as if by sheet lightning against a rich brown background. Martha bought this with good reason. Right beside it, on the dining-room wall, she placed a daguerreotype of her grandfather, a long-since-deceased coal merchant who had been suspected of drowning his first wife in a tarn around 1860, but nothing was proved. He also had sidewhiskers, wore a morning coat, and leaned on a cane; and his proximity to the sumptuous oil (signed by Heinrich von Hildenbrand) neatly transformed the latter into a family portrait. “Grandpa,” Martha would say, indicating the genuine article with a wave of her hand that indolently included in the arc it described the anonymous nobleman to whose portrait the deceived guest’s gaze shifted.

  Unfortunately, though, Franz was able to make out neither the pictures nor the porcelain no matter how skillfully Martha directed his attention to the room’s charms. He perceived a delicate blend of color, felt the freshness of abundant flowers, appreciated the yielding softness of the carpet underfoot, and thus perceived by a freak of fate the very quality that the furnishings of the house lacked but that, in Martha’s opinion, ought to have existed, and for which she had paid good money: an aura of luxury, in which, after the second glass of pale golden wine, he began slowly to dissolve. Dreyer refilled his glass, and breakfastless Franz, who had not dared to partake of the enigmatic first course, realized that his lower extremities had by now dissolved completely. He twice mistook the b
are forearm of the servant maid for that of Martha but then became aware that she sat far away like a wine-golden ghost. Dreyer, ghostly too, but warm and ruddy, was describing a flight he had made two or three years ago from Munich to Vienna in a bad storm; how the plane had tossed and shaken, and how he had felt like telling the pilot “Do stop for a moment”; and how his chance travelling companion, an old Englishman, kept calmly solving a crossword puzzle. Meanwhile Franz was experiencing fantastic difficulties with the vol-au-vent and then with the dessert. He had the feeling that in another minute his body would melt completely leaving only his head, which, with its mouth stuffed with a cream puff, would start floating about the room like a balloon. The coffee and the curaçao all but finished him. Dreyer, slowly rotating before him like a flaming wheel with human arms for spokes, began discussing the job awaiting Franz. Noting the state in which the poor fellow was, he did not go into details. He did say, however, that very soon Franz would become an excellent salesman, that the aviator’s principal enemy is not wind but fog, and that, as the salary would not be much at first, he would undertake to pay for the room and would be glad if Franz dropped in every evening if he desired, though he would not be surprised if next year air service were established between Europe and America. The merry-go-round in Franz’s head never stopped; his armchair travelled around the room in gliding circles. Dreyer considered him with a kindly smile, and, in anticipation of the tongue-lashing Martha would give him for all this jollity, kept mentally pouring out upon Franz’s head the contents of an enormous cornucopia, for he had to reward Franz somehow for the exhilarating fun lavished upon him by the imp of coincidence through Franz. He must reward not only him, but cousin Lina too for that wart on her cheek, for her pug, for the rocking chair with its green sausage-shaped nape rest bearing the embroidered legend “Only one little half hour.” Later, when Franz, exhaling wine and gratitude, bade his uncle good-by, carefully descended the steps to the garden, carefully squeezed through the gate, and, still holding his hat in his hand, disappeared round the corner, Dreyer imagined what a nice nap the poor boy would have back in his hotel room, and then himself felt the blissful weight of drowsiness and went up to the bedroom.