King, Queen, Knave

by Vladimir Nabokov

  “A wonder I did not get killed,” she said sullenly. “But even our chauffeur was not hurt, which is a pity.” And slowly stretching out her hand, she helped Franz open the wicket which he was vainly pushing and rattling.

  “No question about it, cars are dangerous playthings,” he said noncommitally. Now it was definitely time to take leave.

  Martha noticed and approved his hesitation.

  “Which way are you going?” she asked, transferring her umbrella from right hand to left. The glasses he had got were very becoming. He looked like the actor Hess in The Hindu Student, a movie.

  “Don’t know myself,” said Franz, smirking rather freely. “You see I was just coming to ask Uncle’s advice about the room.” This first “Uncle” came out unconvincingly, and he resolved not to repeat it for a while so as to let the word ripen on its twig.

  “I can help too,” said Martha. “Tell me what’s the trouble.”

  Imperceptibly they had begun to move and were now walking slowly along the wide sidewalk on which broken chestnuts and claw-like crisp leaves lay here and there. Franz blew his nose and began telling her about the room.

  “Why, that’s unheard of,” Martha interrupted. “Fifty-five? I’m sure you can haggle a little.”

  A forethrill of triumph went through Franz but he decided not to rush things.

  “The landlord is a closefisted old codger, the devil himself would not make him budge.”

  “You know what?” Martha said suddenly. “I would not mind going there and talking to him myself.”

  Franz exulted. What luck! To say nothing of how splendid it was to stroll along with this red-lipped beauty in her moleskin coat! The sharp autumn air, the susurration of tires—this was the life! Add a new suit and a flaming tie—and his happiness would be complete.

  “Where is Mr. Tom today?” he inquired. “I thought I saw him going for a walk.”

  “No, he’s locked up in the gardener’s shed. He’s a good dog but a little neurotic. As I always say, dogs are acceptable pets if they are clean.”

  “Cats are cleaner,” said Franz.

  “Oh, I abominate cats. Dogs understand when you scold them, but cats are hopeless—no contact with human beings, no gratitude, nothing.”

  “We shot lots of stray ones back home, a school friend and I. Especially along the river in spring.”

  “There’s something wrong with my left heel,” said Martha. “I need your support for a moment.” She placed two light fingers upon his shoulder as she glanced backward and downward. It was nothing. With the tip of her umbrella she scraped off the dead leaf her heel had transfixed.

  They reached the square. At least two future stories of the new corner house could be discerned through the scaffolding of the present.

  Martha pointed with her umbrella. “We know,” she said, “the man who works for the partner of the director of the cinema company who is building that house there.”

  It would not be ready till sometime next year. The workmen were moving as in a dream.

  Franz frantically racked his brain for some more fruitful theme. The coincidence!

  “I still can’t forget how strangely we met on the train. It’s incredible!”

  “Yes, a coincidence,” said Martha, thinking her own thoughts.

  “Listen,” she said as they started to climb the steep staircase of the fifth floor, “I’d rather my husband did not know I helped you. No, there is no mystery here. Simply, I would rather he did not.”

  Franz made a bow. It was no concern of his. Yet he wondered if what she had said were flattering or insulting. Hard to decide. They had now been standing for some time before the door. No one answered the bell. Franz rang again. The door flew open. A little old man with hanging braces and no collar thrust out a rumpled face, and let them in silently.

  “I’m back again,” said Franz. “Could I see the room once more?”

  The old fellow made a kind of rapid salute and shuffled ahead through a long darkish passage.

  “Good heavens, what a squalid hole,” thought Martha squeamishly. Was she right in coming here? She imagined her husband’s mischievous smile: You reproached me, and now you’re helping him yourself.

  The room, however, turned out to be reasonably bright and clean. By the left-hand wall stood a wooden, probably creaky bed, a washstand, and a stove. On the right, two chairs and a pretentious armchair of moth-eaten plush. There was a small table in the center and a chest-of-drawers in a corner. Over the bed hung a picture. Puzzled, Franz stared at it. A bare-bosomed slave girl on sale was being leered at by three hesitant lechers. It was even more artistic than the bathing September nymph. She must have been in some other room—yes, of course, in the one with the stench.

  Martha felt the mattress. It was firm and hard. She took off one glove, stroked the bed table, and consulted the face of her finger. A fashionable song she liked, Black-eyed Natasha, came from two different radios on two different levels, mingling buoyantly with the musical clanking of construction work somewhere outside.

  Franz looked hopefully at Martha. She pointed her umbrella at the barish right-hand wall and inquired in a neutral voice without looking at the old man: “Why did you remove the couch? Obviously, you had something here before.”

  “The couch was beginning to sag and is being repaired,” answered the old man and cocked his head.

  “You will put it back later,” observed Martha, and raising her eyes, she switched on the light for an instant. The old man looked up too.

  “All right,” said Martha and again extended her umbrella. “You furnish sheets, don’t you?”

  “Sheets?” repeated the old man after her with surprise. Then, cocking his head to the other side, he pursed his lips, thought for a moment, and replied: “Yes, we can dig up some sheets.”

  “And how about service and cleaning?”

  The old man poked himself in the chest.

  “I do everything,” he said. “I make everything. I alone.”

  Martha went over to the window, looked at a truck with planks in the street, then walked back.

  “And how much was it you wanted?” she asked with indifference.

  “Fifty-five,” alertly said the man.

  “Including electricity and morning coffee?”

  “Has the gentleman got a job?” the old man inquired, nodding in the direction of Franz.

  “Yes,” promptly said Franz.

  “Fifty-five for everything,” said the old man.

  “That is expensive,” said Martha.

  “That is not expensive,” said the old man.

  “That is extremely expensive,” said Martha.

  The old man smiled.

  “Oh well,” shrug-sighed Martha and turned toward the door.

  Franz realized that the room was about to float away forever. He squeezed and tortured his hat as he tried to catch Martha’s eye.

  “Fifty-five,” the old man repeated pensively.

  “Fifty,” said Martha.

  The old man opened his mouth, and closed it again firmly.

  “Very well,” he said at last. “But the lights have to be out by eleven.”

  “Naturally,” flowed in Franz. “Naturally—I quite understand.”

  “When do you wish to move in?” asked his landlord.

  “Today, right now,” said Franz. “I just have to get my suitcase from the hotel.”

  “How about a small deposit?” the old man proposed with a subtle smile.

  The room itself seemed to be smiling. How strange to recall the cluttered attic of his youth! His mother at the Singer machine while he tried to sleep. How could he have endured it so long? When they emerged again onto the street, there remained in his consciousness a warm hollow formed as it were by his new room’s sinking into a soft mass of minor impressions. As she bade him good-by at the corner, Martha saw the glitter of gratitude behind his glasses. And as she headed for the photo shop with some undeveloped Tyrol snapshots, she recalled the convers
ation with legitimate pride.

  A drizzle had set in. The doors of flower shops opened wide to catch the moisture. Now it was really raining. She could not find a taxi; raindrops were managing to get under her umbrella and wash the powder off her nose. A dull restlessness replaced elation. Both yesterday and today were novel and absurd days, and certain not quite intelligible, but significant, outlines were showing through confusedly. And, like that darkish solution in which mountain views would presently float and grow clear, this rain, this delicate pluvial damp, developed shiny images in her soul. Once again a rain-soaked, ardent, strong, blue-eyed man, a vacational acquaintance of her husband’s, took advantage of a cloudburst in Zermatt to bluster her into the recess of a porch and push against her and pant out his passion, his sleepless nights, and she shook her head, and he vanished behind the corner of memory. Once again in her drawing room that fool of a painter, a languid rascal with dirty fingernails, glued his lips to her bare neck and she waited a moment to make out what she felt, and feeling nothing, struck him in the face with her elbow. Once again—and this image was a recent one—a wealthy businessman, an American with bluish-gray hair and a long upper lip, murmured as he played with her hand that certainly she would come to his hotel room, and she smiled and regretted vaguely that he was a foreigner. In the company of these chance phantoms rapidly touching her with cold hands, she reached home, shrugged her shoulders and cast them aside as casually as she did her open umbrella which she left on the porch to dry.

  “I’m an idiot,” she said. “What’s the matter? What’s wrong with me? Why worry? It must happen sooner or later. It is inevitable.”

  Her mood changed again. With pleasure she gave Frieda a dressing down because the dog had somehow got back into the house and tracked dirt on the carpet. She devoured a pile of small sandwiches at tea. She called the garage to find out if Dreyer had rented a car as he had promised. She called the cinema to reserve two tickets for the première on Friday; then called her husband; and then old Mrs. Hertwig when it turned out that Dreyer would be busy. And Dreyer was indeed very busy. He had grown so absorbed in an unexpected offer from another firm, in a series of cautious negotiations and courteous conferences that for several days he did not remember Franz; or rather he would remember him at the wrong moments—while relaxing neck-deep in warm water; while driving from office to factory; while smoking a cigarette in bed. Franz would appear gesticulating wildly at the wrong telescope end of his mind; Dreyer would mentally promise to attend to him soon, and immediately would start thinking about something else.

  To Franz that was no comfort. When the first agreeable excitement of housewarming had passed, he asked himself what he should do next. Martha had taken down his landlord’s telephone number but nothing happened after that. He did not dare to phone himself nor did he dare call on the Dreyers without warning, not trusting chance, which last time had so magnificently transfigured his inopportune visit. He must wait. Evidently, sooner or later, he would be summoned. But he did not relish the delay. At half past seven on the very first morning the landlord in person brought him a sticky cup of weak coffee and on a saucer two lumps of sugar, one with a brown corner, and remarked in an admonishing tone: “Now don’t be late for work. Drink this and jump into your clothes. Do not flush the toilet too hard. Take care not to be late.”

  Franz decided that he had no alternative but leave the house for the whole day in order to perform the job that the old fellow had invented for him, and stay out until five or six, and then have a bite in town before returning. Thus perforce he explored the city, or rather what seemed to him its most metropolitan section. The obligatory nature of those excursions envenomed the novelty. By evening he would be much too exhausted to carry out his plan, his old glorious plan, of sauntering along seductive streets and taking a good preliminary look at genuine harlots. But how to get there? His map seemed to be curiously misleading. One cloudless day, having strayed far enough, he found himself on a broad dreary boulevard with many steamship line offices and art shops: he glanced at the street sign and realized it was the world-famous avenue that had seemed so sublime in his dreams. Its rather skimpy lindens were shedding their leaves. The winged arch at one end was sheathed in scaffolding. He traversed wildernesses of asphalt. He walked along a canal: in one place there was a rainbow-like splotch of oil on the water, and an intoxicating aroma of honey, reminding him of childhood, wafted from a barge where pink-shirted men were unloading mountains of pears and apples; from a bridge he saw two women in glistening bathing caps, intently snorting and rhythmically striking out with their arms as they swam side by side. He spent two hours in a museum of antiquities, examining with awe statues and sarcophagi, and the revolting profiles of brown men driving chariots. He took long rests in shabby pubs and on the fairly comfortable benches of an immense park. He plunged into the depths of the subway and, perched on a red leather seat, looking at the shiny stangs, up which raced golden reflections, waited impatiently for the coaly clattering blackness to be replaced at last by paradises of luxury and sin that kept eluding him. He also wanted very much to find Dreyer’s emporium about which they used to speak with such reverence in his hometown. The fat telephone directory, however, listed only his home and office. Evidently it must have some other name. And continuing to remain unaware that the heart of the city had moved to the west, Franz dismally wandered through the central and northern streets where he thought the smartest stores and the liveliest trade must be.

  He did not dare buy anything, and this tormented him. In this short time he had already managed to spend quite a bit of money and now Dreyer had disappeared. Everything was somehow uncertain, everything filled him with uneasiness. He tried to make friends with his landlord who so insistently turned him out of the house for the whole day. But the old man was untalkative and kept lurking in the unknown depths of his little apartment. The first night, however, he met Franz in the corridor, warned him again that the water closet chain should be pulled very gently or it would be jerked off and explained to him at length the mysteries of the district police station for which he supplied him with some forms where Franz had to fill in name, marital status, and place of birth. “And another thing,” said the old fellow, “about that lady friend of yours. She must not visit you here. I know you are young. I was young once myself. I would be quite ready to give you my permission but there is my wife, you see—she happens to be away temporarily—but I know she would never allow such visits.”

  Franz flushed and hastily nodded in assent. His landlord’s assumption flattered and excited him. He imagined her fragrant, warm-looking lips, her creamy skin, but cut short the habitual swell of desire. “She is not for me,” he thought glumly, “she is remote and cold. She lives in a different world, with a very rich and still vigorous husband. She’d send me packing if I were to grow enterprising; my career would be ruined.” On the other hand, he thought he might find himself a sweetheart anyway. She too would be shapely, sleek, ripe-lipped and dark-haired. And with this in mind he decided to take certain measures. In the morning, when the landlord brought him his coffee, Franz cleared his throat and said: “Listen, if I paid you a small supplement, would you.… Would I.… What I mean is, could I entertain anyone if I wished?”

  “That depends,” said the old man.

  “A few extra marks,” said Franz.

  “I understand,” said the old man.

  “Five marks more per month,” said Franz.

  “That’s generous,” said the old man, and as he turned to go added in a sly admonitory tone: “But take care not to be late for work.”

  Thus Martha’s haggling had all been for nought. Having resolved to pay the extra sum secretly, Franz knew perfectly well he had acted rashly. His money was melting away, and still Dreyer did not telephone. For four days running he left the house in disgust punctually at eight, returning at nightfall in a fog of fatigue. He was completely fed up by now with the celebrated avenue. He sent a postcard to his mother with a view o
f the Brandenburg Gate, and wrote that he was well, and that Dreyer was a very kind uncle. There was no use frightening her, though perhaps she deserved it. And only on Friday night, when Franz was already lying in bed and saying to himself with a tremor of panic that they had all forgotten him, that he was completely alone in a strange city, and thinking with a certain evil joy that he would stop being faithful to the radiant Martha presiding over his nightly surrenders and ask lewd old Enricht, his landlord, to let him have a bath in the grimy tub of the flat and direct him to the nearest brothel. At that instant Enricht in a sleepy voice called him to the telephone.

  With terrible haste and excitement, Franz pulled on his pants and rushed barefoot into the passage. A trunk managed to bang him on the knee as he made for the gleam of the telephone at the end of the corridor. Owing perhaps to his being unaccustomed to telephones, he could not identify at first the voice barking in his ear. “Come to my house this minute,” the voice said clearly at last. “Do you hear me? Please hurry, I am waiting for you.”

  “Oh, how are you, how are you?” Franz babbled, but the telephone was dead. Dreyer put down the receiver with a flourish and continued rapidly jotting down the things he had to do tomorrow. Then he glanced at his watch, reflecting that his wife would be back from the cinema any moment now. He rubbed his forehead, and then with a sly smile took from a drawer a bunch of keys, and a sausage-shaped flashlight with a convex eye. He still had his coat on, for he had just come home and without shedding it had strode right to his study as he always did when he was in a hurry to write something down or telephone someone. Now he noisily pushed back his chair, and began taking off his voluminous camel-hair coat as he walked to the front hall to hang it up there. Into its capacious pocket he dropped the keys and the flashlight. Tom, who was lying by the door, got up and rubbed his soft head against Dreyer’s leg. Dreyer resonantly locked himself up in the bathroom where three or four senile mosquitoes slept on the whitewashed wall. A minute later, turning down and buttoning up his sleeves at the wrists, he proceeded with another leisurely homy gait toward the dining room.