King, Queen, Knave

by Vladimir Nabokov

  “That will do,” said Martha quietly.

  He stopped speaking, sitting naked on the edge of the bed and staring at the floor.

  “Oh, darling, darling,” she said cheerlessly and impetuously. “Does this matter? Don’t you feel the days are going by while we keep aimlessly discussing things, not knowing where to begin? Don’t you see, this way we’ll drive ourselves to the point where one fine day we’ll simply pounce on him, tear him apart?… We can’t go on like that. We’ve got to think of something. And you know lately he’s been so terribly alive. Is he stronger than we? Is he more alive than this, and this, and this?”

  But she was right, oh, she was right! The old boy was aflame with rich life. He was young, his backhand was now as good as his forehand, his digestion was a dream, he would go to Brazil or Zanzibar next winter. Isolda was expensive and unfaithful but every once in a while he purged himself erotically with her in the pretty little flat he had rented for both of the sisters (Ida however had soon been whisked away to Dresden by a jealous lover); at a party given by the Commercial Consul of Luxembourg, tall Martha with her black silks, lovely shoulders and emerald ear pendants, had eclipsed all the other ladies. He had decided to conceal from her, until the proper moment, his special project, although it was true that on three or four occasions he had hinted at a new extraordinary undertaking. But then again how would he go about explaining to her what absorbed him. It was impossible. She would dismiss it as an inane whim. Mechanical mannequins indeed! What next, Pygmalion? You, Galatea. No, that was a hopeless line. She would say: “You’re spending your time on rubbish.” Yes, but what marvellous rubbish. He smiled at the thought that she too had her eccentricities. The iced rose water applied to her face at bed time. Those Hindukitsch gymnastics nearly every day. He ran his cane clatteringly along the pales of a fence. They were walking along the sunlit side of the street. His companion, the black-bearded Inventor, kept hinting that it might not be a bad idea to cross over to the other, shady, sidewalk. But Dreyer did not listen. If he enjoyed the sun, others were bound to enjoy it too. “It’s still quite a long way,” sighed his companion. “Are you quite sure you want to walk?” “With your permission,” said Dreyer absentmindedly, and quickened his pace. What fun it was to be alive. At that moment, for example, this black-bearded genius was taking him to see something most amusing. If he were to stop a passer-by and ask him, “Try to guess, friend, what I’m on my way to see, and why I must see it?” The passer-by would never be able to answer. And, as if that were not enough, all those people in the street scurrying by, waiting at streetcar stops: what a bunch of secrets, astonishing professions, incredible recollections. That fellow, for instance, with the cane and the very English yellow mustache: who knows, perhaps during the war he had been assigned the dreary and preposterous task of transmuting for national use sundry elements of captured enemy uniforms; but after two years of it, the material had begun to dwindle, and he was sent to the front where he enjoyed the exhilaration of at least one good battle among the ruins of a village, once renowned for its hops and hogs, and then hostilities were suspended, and a last soldier was killed by a sack of declaration-of-peace leaflets dropped from an airplane. But why assign one’s own memories to strangers? That old man there on the bench had been in his youth—oh, I don’t know—perhaps, a celebrated acrobat; or that black-bearded foreigner, rather a dull companion between us be it said, had perhaps made a spectacular invention. Nothing was known, and anything was possible.

  “To the right,” said the dull companion, breathing heavily. “That building over there with the statues.”

  In an annex to the courthouse, the police had staged an exhibition of crime. One respectable burgher, who suddenly, for no good reason, had dismembered a neighbor’s child, was found to have in his apartment an artificial woman. She could walk, wring her hands, and make water, and was now in that police museum. Impelled by professional anxiety, the Inventor wanted to take a look at her. They were led to her by a retired gendarme whom Dreyer bribed to make the mechanism work. The poor woman turned out to be rather crudely made, and the mysterious substance of which the papers had spoken was, thank God, only gutta-percha. Her power to move was also exaggerated. A clockwork device permitted her to close her glass eyes and spread her legs. They could be filled up with hot water. Her body hair was real, and so were the brown locks falling over her shoulders. All things considered, there was nothing new about her—merely a vulgar doll. The scornful and happy Inventor left at once but Dreyer, always afraid of missing something entertaining, strolled through all the rooms. He examined the faces of criminals, enlarged photographs of ears, messy fingerprints, kitchen knives, ropes, faded shreds of clothing, dusty jars, dirty test tubes—a thousand trivial articles that had been wronged—and again rows of photographs, the pasty faces of unwashed, badly dressed murderers, and the puffy faces of their victims who in death came to resemble them; and it was all so shabby, so stupid, that Dreyer could not help smiling. He was thinking what a talentless person one must be, what a poor thinker or hysterical fool, to murder one’s neighbor. The deathly gray of the exhibits, the banality of crime, pieces of bourgeois furniture, a frightened little console on which a bloody imprint had been found, hazel nuts injected with strychnine, buttons, a tin basin, again photographs—all this trash expressed the very essence of crime. How much those simpletons were missing! Missing not only the wonders of everyday life, the simple pleasure of existence, but even such instants as this, the ability to look with curiosity upon what was essentially boring. And then the final Bore: at dawn, breakfastless, pale, top-hatted city fathers driving to the execution. The weather is cold and foggy. What an ass one must feel in a top hat at five in the morning! The condemned man is led into the prison yard. The executioner’s assistants plead with him to behave decently, and not to struggle. Ah, here’s the axe. Presto—the audience is shown the severed head. What should a frock-coated burgher do when looking at it—give it a nod of commiseration, a frown of reproach, a smile of encouragement as if to say: “See, how simple and quick it all was”? Dreyer caught himself thinking that it might be interesting to wake up at the crack of dawn and, after a thorough shave and a hearty meal, go out in striped prison pajamas into the yard, touch the plump executioner’s muscles with some appropriate joke, give the whole assembly a friendly wave of the hand, take a good last stare at the white official faces.… Yes, all those faces are uncommonly pale. Here, for example, is a young chap who chopped his parents to death: how big-eared and pimply he is. Here is a sullen gentleman who left a trunk at the station with his fiancée’s corpse. And here’s Dr. Guillotin’s invention—oh, no, that’s a medieval Swiss contraption of exactly the same type—board, wooden collar, two uprights, the blade between them. Monsieur Guillotin, you are an impostor! Ah, the American dentist’s chair. The dentist is masked. The patient also has a mask with holes for the eyes. They slit his trouserleg at the calf to attach the electrode. Aha. The current is turned on. Hop-hop, as over a bumpy road. What dreary fools! A collection of idiotic faces and tormented objects.

  It was lovely outside, a lush wind was blowing. The soles of passers-by left silver traces on the sun-glorified asphalt. How lovely, blue and fragrant, our Berlin is in the summer. It woudn’t be bad by the sea either. Those clouds are radiant—vacation clouds. Workmen lazily repairing the pavement. How good it all is. How amusing it would be, he thought, to search the faces of those workmen, of those passers-by, for the facial expressions he had just seen in countless photographs. And to his surprise, in everyone he met Dreyer recognized a criminal, past, present, or future; soon he was so carried away with this game that he began inventing a special crime for each. He watched a round-shouldered man with a suspicious suitcase; he went up to him and asked for a light. The man shook the ashes off his cigarette and made the commonplace little connection but Dreyer noticed how that hand trembled, and felt sorry that he could not reveal a detective’s badge. Face after face slipped by, eyes avoided his, and
even in plump, motherly housewives he distinguished the skeletons of murder. Thus he walked, spinning his cane like a propeller, having an exceptionally good time, grinning involuntarily at strangers, and noting with pleasure their momentary embarrassment. Then he grew tired of the game, felt hungry and thirsty, and quickened his step. As he drew near the gate, he noticed his wife and nephew in the garden. They were standing motionless side by side, watching him approach. And he felt a pleasant relief at seeing at last two familiar, two perfectly human faces.

  11

  “Please, my dear,” said Willy Wald, “don’t. You have already taken two stealthy looks at your wrist and then at your husband. Really, it’s not late.”

  “And have some more strawberries,” said Willy’s wife.

  Dreyer said: “We’ll have to stay a while, my love. Because I can’t remember my story.”

  “Please try to recall it,” said Willy from the depths of his armchair.

  “… or some liqueur, perhaps,” said Mrs. Wald in her tired, melodious, affected voice.

  Dreyer pounded his forehead with his fist. “I’ve got the beginning and the middle. My emporium for the end!”

  “Don’t worry, it will come,” said Willy. “If you go on worrying your wife will get even more bored. She’s a strict lady. I’m afraid of her.”

  “… at this time tomorrow we shall be on our way to Paris,” said Mrs. Wald, gathering momentum, but her husband interrupted.

  “She’s taking me to Paris! I know it’s a fizzy city, but it always gives me heartburn. Still I’m going, I’m going. By the way, you haven’t told me of your own summer plans. I’ve heard of a fellow who could not remember a funny story and burst a blood vessel.”

  “It’s not the fact that I can’t remember it that hurts,” Dreyer said plaintively. “What hurts is that I’ll remember it the minute we part. No, we haven’t decided yet. Isn’t that so, my love? We haven’t decided yet? In fact” (turning to Willy), “we haven’t discussed it at all. I know she hates the Alps. Venice means nothing to her. It’s all very difficult. There was a twist at the end, such an amusing one.…”

  “Drop it, drop it,” puffed Willy. “How come you haven’t decided yet? It’s the end of June. High time.”

  “Perhaps,” said Dreyer with a quizzical glance at his wife, “perhaps we might go to the seaside.”

  “Water,” nodded Willy. “Lots of blue water. That’s good. So would I, with delight. But I’m being dragged off to Paris. I am a remarkably good diver, though you wouldn’t believe it.”

  “I can’t even swim,” glumly answered Dreyer. “I’m no good at some sports. Same thing with skiing. I seem always to stay at the same point: the swing, the knack, the equipoise, just aren’t there. I’m not sure those new skis were the right ones for me. My love, I know you hate the seaside but let’s go there once more. We’ll take Franz and Tom with us. We’ll splash and puddle. And you’ll go boating with Franz, and get as brown as milk chocolate.”

  And Martha smiled. Not that she realized whence came that breath of moist freshness. The magic lantern of fancy slipped a colored slide in—a long sandy beach on the Baltic where they had once been in 1924, a white pier, bright flags, striped booths, a thousand striped booths—and now they were thinning, they broke off, and beyond for many miles westward stretched the empty whiteness of the sands between heather and water. Water. What do you do to extinguish a fire? An infant could tell you that.

  “We’ll go to Gravitz,” she said, turning to Willy.

  She grew unusually animated. Her glossy lips parted. Her elongated eyes flashed like jewels. Two sickle-shaped dimples appeared on her flaming cheeks. Excitedly she began telling Elsa Wald about a little dressmaker (they are always “little”) whom she had discovered. And ecstatically she praised Elsa’s perfume. Dreyer, eating strawberries, watched her and rejoiced. She had simply never beamed and babbled so prettily when visiting the Walds (“they are your friends, not mine”).

  “We’ll have to have a serious talk,” she said on the way home. “Sometimes you do get good ideas. Look, tomorrow morning you write and reserve two adjacent rooms and a single one at the Seaview Hotel. But the dog we’ll leave—it would only be a bother. You’d better make haste or there’ll be no rooms left.”

  Being a little drunk, he glued himself to her warm nape. She pushed him away quite good-naturedly and said:

  “I see you’re not only a lecher but also a liar.”

  He suddenly looked worried. “What do you mean?”

  “I thought,” she said, “you told me—when was that?, A year ago?—that you were taking lessons at the Freibad, and that you now swam like a fish.”

  “An inexcusable exaggeration,” he answered, much relieved. “A very poor fish, really. I keep afloat for three meters, and then I sink like a log.”

  “Except that logs don’t sink,” said Martha merrily.

  Make haste! But now haste was lighthearted. With waves and sunlight all around, how easy to breathe, to kill, to love. The single word “water” had resolved everything. Although Martha knew nothing about mathematical problems and the pleasure of elegant proof, she recognized the solution of her problem at once by its simplicity and limpidity. This harmonious obviousness, this elementary grace made her ashamed—as well she might be—of her gropings and clumsy fancies. She felt an inordinate desire to see Franz that very minute, or at least to do something—to cable him the code word at once, but for the time being the message ran MIDNIGHT TAXI STOP RAIN GATE FRONT HALL STAIRS BEDROOM PLEASE STOP ALL RIGHT HURRY UP GOOD NIGHT. And tomorrow was Sunday—how do you like that! She had warned Franz that if the weather did not improve she would not go to see him because Dreyer would not be playing tennis. But even this delay, which once would have driven her into a rage, now seemed trifling in the light of her newfound confidence.

  She woke up a little later than usual, and her first sensation was that the night before something exquisite had happened. On the terrace Dreyer had finished his coffee and was reading the newspaper. When she came down, radiant, wearing pale-green crepe, he rose and kissed her cool hand as he always did at their Sunday morning meetings, but this time he added to it a good-natured twinkle of gratitude. The silver sugar bowl blazed blindingly in the sun, dimmed slowly, and flamed forth again.

  “Can the courts still be wet?” said Martha.

  “I’ve telephoned,” he answered, and went back to his paper. “They are soaked. An archeologist has found a tomb in Egypt with toys and blue thistles three thousand years old.”

  “Thistles are not blue,” said Martha, reaching for the coffee pot. “Have you written about the rooms?”

  He nodded without raising his eyes and went on nodding even more gently as he read his paper, cheerfully reminding himself between the nods and the lines to dictate it tomorrow at the office.

  Oh, keep nodding … keep playing the fool … it does not matter now. He’s a first-rate swimmer—that’s not tennis for you! She, too, was born on the banks of a big river, and could stay afloat for hours, for days, forever.

  She used to lie on her back, and the water would lap and rock her, so delicious, so cool. And the bracing breeze penetrating you as you sat naked with a naked boy of your age among the forget-me-nots. These thoughts came without effort. She need not invent, she had only to develop what was already there in outline. How happy her darling would be! Should she ring him up and say only one word: Wasser?

  Dreyer noisily folded his paper as if wrapping a bird in it and said: “Let’s go and have a walk, eh? What do you say?”

  “You go,” she replied. “I have to write some letters. We must head off Hilda, you know.”

  He thought: what if I ask her, tenderly, tenderly. It’s a free morning. We are lovers again.

  But emotional energy had never been his forte, and he said nothing.

  A minute later, Martha, from the terrace, saw him walk to the gate with his raincoat over his arm, open the wicket, let Tom pass first like a lady, and saunter of
f, lighting up a cigar as he went.

  She sat motionless. The sugar bowl alternately blazed and dimmed. All at once a gray little spot appeared on the tablecloth; then another beside it. A drop fell on her hand. She rose, looking up. Frieda began hurriedly clearing away the dishes and the tablecloth, also glancing now and then at the sky. Thunder rumbled, and an astonished sparrow landed on the balustrade—and darted away. Martha went into the house. The door of the hallway toilet was banging. Frieda, already half-drenched, with the tablecloth in her embrace, laughing and muttering to herself, rushed from the terrace kitchenward. Martha stood at the center of the oddly dark parlor. Now everything outside was gurgling, murmuring, breathing. She wondered if she should first ring him up, but her impatience was too strong—the fuss with the telephone would be a waste of time. She put on her mackintosh with a rustling sound and snatched up an umbrella. Frieda brought her hat and handbag from the bedroom. “You ought to wait it out,” said Frieda. “It’s a regular deluge.” Martha laughed and said she had quite forgotten an appointment at a café with Mrs. Bayader and another lady, an expert in rhythmic respiration (“Mixed respiration,” Frieda, who knew more than she ought to have known, kept snorting every now and then the whole morning.) The rain began drumming on the taut silk of her umbrella. The wicket swung shut, splashing her hand. She walked quickly along the mirrory sidewalk, hurrying toward the taxi stand. The sun struck the long streams of rain causing them to slant, as it were, and presently they turned golden and mute. Again and again the sun struck, and the shattered rain now flew in single fiery drops, and the asphalt cast reflections of iridescent violet, and everything grew so bright and hot that wet-haired Dreyer shed his raincoat as he walked, and Tom, who was somewhat darker after the rain, perked up and marched on a brown dachshund. Tom and the dachshund circled in one spot, or rather Tom circled while the dackel turned abruptly in one piece every now and then, until Dreyer whistled. He walked slowly, looking right and left, trying to find the newly built cinema that Willy had mentioned the night before. He found himself in a district he had seldom visited although it was not far from his house. He turned into a park to give the dog more exercise and then cut across a piece of wasteland adjoining an unfamiliar boulevard. A little farther he crossed a square and saw at the corner of the next street a tall house bared of most of its scaffolding: its first story was ornamented with a huge picture, advertising the film to be shown on the opening night, July 15, based on Goldemar’s play King, Queen, Knave which had been such a hit several years ago. The display consisted of three gigantic transparent-looking playing cards resembling stained-glass windows which would probably be very effective when lit up at night: the King wore a maroon dressing gown, the Knave a red turtleneck sweater, and the Queen a black bathing suit. “Must not forget to order those rooms tomorrow,” reflected Dreyer, and to dictate another important note that the faithful Miss Reich would write over her signature: Dr. Eier must leave the city and to his great regret cannot continue to pay for the flat where you persist in receiving other idiots, or something along those lines.