King, Queen, Knave

by Vladimir Nabokov

  That last night Franz did not go out for supper. He closed the empty chest-of-drawers, looked around, opened the window, and seated himself with his feet on the ledge. He must somehow get through this night. The best thing was not to move, not to think, to sit and listen to the far-off automobile horns, to gaze at the blue ink of the sky, at a distant balcony where a lamp glowed under its orange shade, and two happy, innocent, carefree people were playing chess, bent over the bright oasis of the happy table. That third of a man’s consciousness, the imaginable future, had ceased to exist for Franz except as a dark cage full of monstrous tomorrows huddled up in an amorphous heap. What had struck Martha as the first realistic, logical solution of all their problems had all but dealt the last blow to his sanity. It would be as she had said—or would it? A flutter of panic brushed his heart. Maybe it was not yet too late.… Maybe he should write to his mother, or to his sister and her fiancé to come and take him away. Last Sunday fate had almost saved him, it might save him again, yes—send a telegram home, come down with typhus, or perhaps lean forward a little and slip into the ever-ready embrace of greedy gravity. But the flutter passed. It would be as she had said.

  Barefoot, coatless, he sat there a long time hugging his knees without moving, without changing the position of his thighs, even though a knob on the ledge hurt him and a humming mosquito was preparing to strike at his temple. It was by now quite dark in the doomed room, but there was nobody to turn on the light and there would never be anybody if he fell off the sill. On the distant balcony the chess game had long since ended. One by one, or by twos and even threes, all the windows had grown dark. Presently he felt stiff and cold, and slowly clambered back into the room and went to bed. Sometime after midnight the landlord passed noiselessly along the corridor. He checked if there was a slit of light under Franz’s door, listened with bent head, and went back to his room. He knew perfectly well that there was no Franz behind the door, that he had created Franz with a few deft dabs of his facile fancy. Yet the jest had to be brought to some natural conclusion. It would be silly to have a figment of one’s imagination using up expensive electricity or trying to open a jugular vein with a razor. Besides, old Enricht was getting bored with this particular creature of his. It was time to dispose of him, and replace him with a new one. One sweep of his thought arranged the matter: let this be the fictitious lodger’s last night; let him go tomorrow morning—leaving the usual insolent mess as they all do. He postulated, therefore, that tomorrow was the first of the month, that the lodger himself wished to leave—that, in fact, he had paid what he owed. Everything now was in order. Thus, having invented the necessary conclusion, old Enricht, alias Pharsin, dragged up in retrospect and added to it in a lump that which in the past must have led up to this conclusion. For he knew perfectly well—had known for the last eight years at least—that the whole world was but a trick of his, and that all those people—eight former lodgers, doctors, policemen, garbage collectors, Franz, Franz’s lady friend, the noisy gentleman with the noisy dog, and even his own, Pharsin’s, wife, a quiet little old lady in a lace cap, and he himself, or rather his inner roommate, an elder companion, so to speak, who had been a teacher of mathematics eight years ago, owed their existence to the power of his imagination and suggestion and the dexterity of his hands. In fact, he himself could at any moment turn into a mousetrap, a mouse, an old couch, a slave girl led away by the highest bidder. Such magicians should be made emperors.

  The waking hour struck. With a scream, shielding his head with his arms, Franz leapt off the bed and rushed to the door; there he stopped, trembling, looking around myopically, already aware that nothing special had happened, that it was seven a.m. on a hazy, tender, melting morning with its hullabaloo of sparrows and an express train that was to leave in an hour and a half.

  He had slept in his day shirt and had sweated profusely. His clean linen was already packed and anyway it was not worth the trouble of changing. The washstand was bare except for the thin relic of what had been a beige cake of violet-scented soap. He spent a long time scraping up with his fingernail a hair that was stuck to the soap; the hair would assume a different curve but refuse to come off. Dry soap collected under his fingernails. He started to wash his face. That single hair now stuck to his cheek, then to his neck, then tickled his lip. The day before he had packed the landlord’s towel. He paused pondering—and dried himself with a corner of the bed sheet. There was no point in shaving. His hairbrush was packed but he had a pocket comb. His scalp felt scaly and itched. He buttoned up his wrinkled shirt. Never mind. Nothing mattered. Trying to ignore loathsome contacts, he attached his soft collar, which immediately grasped him around the neck like a cold compress. A broken fingernail caught in the silk of his tie. His second-best trousers, which had lain where they had been shed, at the foot of the bed, had gathered some nameless fluff. The clothes brush was packed. The ultimate disaster occurred while he was putting on his shoes: a shoelace broke. He had to suck the tip and ease it into its hole with the result that two short ends were diabolically difficult to make into a knot. Not only animals, but so-called inanimate objects, feared and hated Franz.

  At last he was ready. He put on his wristwatch and pocketed the alarm clock. Yes, it was time to leave for the station. He donned his raincoat and hat, responded with a shudder to his reflection in the mirror, picked up the suitcases, and, bumping against the door jamb as if he were a clumsy passenger in a speeding train, went out into the corridor. The remnants of his physical self that he left behind were a little dirty water at the bottom of the wash basin and a full chamber pot in the middle of the room.

  He stopped in the passage, stunned by an unpleasant thought: good manners bade him take leave of old Enricht. He put down the suitcases and knocked hurriedly at the landlord’s bedroom door. No answer. He pushed the door and stepped in. The old woman whose face he had never seen sat with her back to him in her usual place. “I’m leaving; I want to say good-by,” he said, advancing toward the armchair. There was no old woman at all—only a gray wig stuck on a stick and a knitted shawl. He knocked the whole dusty contraption to the floor. Old Enricht came out from behind a screen. He was stark naked and had a paper fan in his hand. “You no longer exist, Franz Bubendorf,” he said dryly, indicating the door with his fan.

  Franz bowed and went out without a word. On the stairs he felt dizzy. Setting down his load on a step, he stood clutching the banister. Then he bent over it as over a ship’s side and was noisily and hideously sick. Weeping, he collected his valises, re-clicked the reluctant lock. As he proceeded downstairs, he kept meeting various traces of his misadventure. At last the house opened, let him out, and closed again.

  12

  The main thing of course was the sea: grayish blue, with a blurred horizon, immediately above which a series of cloudlets glided single-file as if along a straight groove, all alike, all in profile. Next came the curve of the bathing beach with its army of striped booth-like shelters, clustering especially densely at the root of the pier which stretched far out amid a flock of rowboats for hire. If one looked from the Seaview Hotel, the best at Gravitz, one could catch now and then one of the booths suddenly leaning forward and crawling over to a new location, like a red-and-white scarab. On the land side of the beach ran a stone promenade, bordered by locust trees on whose black trunks, after the rain, snails would come to life and stick out of their round shells a pair of sensitive yellow little horns that made no less sensitive Franz’s flesh creep. Still farther inland came in a row the facades of lesser hotels, pensions, souvenir shops. The balcony of the Dreyers acted the hotel’s name. Franz’s room sulkily faced a town street parallel to the promenade. Beyond that stretched the second-class hotels, then another parallel lane with the third-class accommodations. The further from the sea the cheaper they grew as if the sea were a stage and they, rows of seats. Their names attempted in one way or another to suggest the sea’s presence. Some of them did it with matter-of-fact pride, others preferred metaphors
and symbols. Here and there occurred feminine names such as “Aphrodite” to which no boarding house could really live up. There was one villa that either in irony or owing to a topographical error called itself Helvetia. As the distance from the beach increased, the names grew more and more poetical. Then abruptly they gave up and became Central Hotel, Post Hotel, and the inevitable Continental. Hardly anybody hired any of the poor boats near the pier, and no wonder. Dreyer, a wretched sailor, could not imagine how he or any other tourist would care to go out rowing on that desolate expanse of water, when there were so many other things to do at the seaside. For instance? Well, sunbathing; but the sun was a little cruel to the russet of his skin. Sitting around in cafés was not unpleasant although it could be overdone too. There was the Blue Terrace café where the pastry, he thought, was so good. The other day as they were having ice chocolate there, Martha counted at least three foreigners among the crowd. One, judging by his newspaper, was a Dane. The other two were a less easily determinable pair: the girl was trying in vain to attract the attention of the café cat, a small black animal sitting on a chair and licking one hind paw rigidly raised like a shouldered club. Her companion, a suntanned fellow, smoked and smiled. What language were they speaking? Polish? Esthonian? Leaning near them against the wall was some kind of net: a bag of pale-bluish gauze on a ring fixed to a rod of light metal.

  “Shrimp catchers,” said Martha. “I want shrimps for dinner tonight.” (She clicked her front teeth.)

  “No,” said Franz. “That’s not a fisherman’s net. That’s for catching mosquitoes.”

  “Butterflies,” said Dreyer, lifting an index finger.

  “Who wants to catch butterflies?” remarked Martha.

  “Oh, it must be good sport,” said Dreyer. “In fact, I think to have a passion for something is the greatest happiness on earth.”

  “Finish your chocolate,” said Martha.

  “Yes,” said Dreyer. “I think it’s fascinating, the secrets you find in most ordinary people. That reminds me: Piffke—yes, yes, fat pink Piffke—collects beetles and is a famous expert on them.”

  “Let’s go,” said Martha. “Those arrogant foreigners are staring at you.”

  “Let’s go for a good ramble,” suggested Dreyer.

  “Why don’t we hire a boat?” said Martha for a change.

  “Count me out,” said Dreyer.

  “Anyway, let’s go somewhere else,” said Martha.

  As she passed the cat’s chair, she tilted it and said “Shoo,” and the cat, magically four-legged again, slipped off the seat and vanished.

  Dreyer strolled off alone, leaving his wife and nephew on another terrace. This was the second or third tour he was making of the local display windows. Immemorial souvenirs. Picture postcards. The most frequent object of their derision was human obesity and its necessary opposite, Herr and Frau Matchshin of Hungerburg. A monstrous bottom in bathing tights was being pinched by a red crab (resurrected from the boiled), but the nipped lady beamed, thinking it was the hand of an admirer. A red dome above the water was the belly of a fat man floating on his back. There was a “Kiss at Sunset,” emblemized by a pair of huge pygal-shaped impressions left on the sand. Skinny, spindle-legged husbands in shorts accompanied pumpkin-bosomed wives. Dreyer was touched by the many photographs going back to the preceding century: the same beach, the same sea, but women in broad-shouldered blouses and men in straw hats. And to think that those over-dressed kiddies were now businessmen, officials, dead soldiers, engravers, engravers’ widows.

  A sea breeze made the awnings clack. Little bags of pink muslin were crammed with seashells—or was it hard candy? A barometer in the image of a gents’ and ladies’ lavatory with different sexes emerging according to differences in the weather engaged for a while his awed attention. A second-rate store of men’s clothes advertised a liquidation sale. Local seascapists depicted storm-tossed ships, foam-spattered rocks, and the reflection of a yellow moon in an indigo sea. And for no particular reason Dreyer suddenly felt very sad.

  Weaving his way among the ramparts of sand that surrounded each bather’s ephemeral domain, hurrying to nowhere in order to prove by a great show of haste how much his merchandise was in demand, an itinerant photographer, ignored by the lazy crowd, walked with his camera, yelling into the wind: “The artist is coming! The divinely favored, der gottbegnadete artist is coming!”

  On the threshold of a shop that sold only Oriental wares—silks, vases, idols (who needed all that at the seaside?)—stood an ordinary untanned little man who followed with his dark eyes the promenaders as he waited in vain for a customer. Whom did he resemble? Yes, poor old Sarah’s sick husband.

  In the café where he presently joined our two farcical schemers, Martha was brought the wrong pastry and flew into a rage; for a long time she called to the overworked waiter, a mere boy, while the pastry (a splendid creamoozing éclair) lay on its plate, lonely, despised, unwanted.

  Less than a week had passed, and several times already that tender melancholy had come over Dreyer. True, he had experienced it before (“the melting heart of an egotist,” Erica had once called it, adding: “You can hurt people or humiliate them, you are touched not by the blind man but by his dog”); but of late the melancholy had become less tender, or the tenderness more demanding. Perhaps it was the sun that had softened him up or maybe he was growing old, losing maybe something, and coming to resemble in some obscure way the pictureman whose services no one wanted and whose cry the children mocked.

  When he went to bed that night he could not go to sleep—an unusual occurrence. On the previous day the sun, under the pretense of a caress, had so mutilated his back that he yearned for a spell of dull weather. They had been playing plop-catch, standing in the water up to their hips, Martha, Franz, two other young men, one of them a dancing instructor, the other a college student, the son of a Leipzig furrier. The dancing instructor had knocked Franz’s blue glasses off with the ball, and the glasses had nearly drowned. Afterwards Franz and Martha had swum far out. He had stood and watched from the beach, cursing his lack of buoyancy. He borrowed a telescope from a kind ten-year-old stranger and for quite a while had kept an envious round eye on the two dark heads bobbing side by side in their blue safe round world. As soon as his back healed, he thought, he would start to take lessons in the hotel pool. Ouch, really burns! Impossible to find a painless position. Wooing sleep, he lay with closed eyes and saw the circular moat they had been digging to make their beach booth stand more cozily; he saw the tensed hairy leg of Franz digging nearby; then, the impossibly bright page of the verse anthology he had tried to read as he lay in the sun. Oh, how it burns! Martha had promised it would get well tomorrow, definitely, would never hurt again. Yes, of course, the skin would grow stronger. Skin or no skin, I must win that bet tomorrow. Silly bet. Women can measure distances in centimeters, up skirts and down sleeves, but not leagues of water or miles of sand, or the upright glare of a door ajar. He turned over to the wall and in order to put himself asleep (not realizing how drowsy he was already despite the upright glare now between his shoulders) he began to repeat in his mind their sunset walk to Rockpoint. She liked bets and boats. She had maintained that a rowing-boat would make it faster there than a man on foot—even a man whose back burned in each of the four positions. He re-assumed the initial one, facing her door, and started to walk westward again but this time alone—she was in the other bedroom, and had not yet put out her light. If one walked westward with the slit of the sun in one’s eyes along the bay after leaving the populated part of the beach, one found that the sandy strip between the heath on your left and the sea on your right gradually narrowed until your progress was stopped by an agony of jumbled rocks. I think I shall turn … good God.…

  If instead of following the concave brink of the bay one takes a concentric path slightly inland as I am doing now, Rockpoint is reachable, I think, in twenty minutes or less, let us rearrange our left arm … how much more comfortable a limbless sleep
er would be … and here is that path leading west from the poor back of the hotel. I traverse a hamlet and continue through a beech grove for a couple of kilometers. How quiet, how soft.… He stopped to rest on a bed in the grove but then gave a start and again saw the vertical line of burning pain.

  He continued his wager walk. Oh, he must hurry. Or was his pedometer slow? Or was that aspirin working at last? He emerged from the woods into heather, and presently the path, turning right, with a change of pillow, joined the coastline again at the spur called Rockpoint. Here one could stop and wait for the absurd little boat with Martha rowing like mad and enjoy the view. He enjoyed the view. He heard himself emitting a hippopotamian snore and regained consciousness. Rockpoint was a lonely little promontory, but she would come to one’s bed if one won the bet. On one’s right.… He rolled onto his right side and stopped hearing his heart. That’s better. Aspirin comes from sperare, speculum, spiegel. Now he could see the sweep of the beach parallel to the trail one had followed, and followed, and followed. That shimmer over there, beyond a tiny rocky island, three kilometers east as the acrobat flies, was our stretch of the Gravitz beach with the sugar lumps of hotels. The little black boat with Martha in black evening dress, her eardrops blazing, had to skirt of course that little black island on the outside but otherwise geometrically speaking the seaway was shorter, the string of the bow, the sting of the bay, though even so, even a weary walker.…

  When finally her husband’s snore found a permanent rhythm, Martha got up, closed the door, and went back to her uncomfortable bed—it was much too soft and too far from the window which was open: beyond, there rose a steady soft incessant noise as if the black garden were a bath being run. Alas, it was not the sounding sea but the rain. Never mind, rain or no rain. Let him take an umbrella.

  She put out the light, but it was no use trying to sleep. She stepped with Franz into the fatal bark, and he rowed her to the promontory. The process that had put her husband to sleep kept her awake. The rustle of the rain mingled with the buzz in her ears. Two hours passed—it was a much longer journey than anybody could have expected. She picked up her watch from the bed table and pondered its phosphorescent information. The sun was still in Siberia.