King, Queen, Knave

by Vladimir Nabokov

  “So you’ll be back Saturday, not later than Saturday?” asked Martha.

  Franz could see, through Dreyer’s soaked shirt, flesh-colored patches which showed now here, now there, a geography of hideous pink, depending on which country adhered to the skin in the process of rowing.

  “Saturday or Sunday,” Dreyer said zestfully and, as the surf adopted him, caught a crab.

  The rain lashed down. Martha’s robe enveloped her in heavy humidity that made her ribs ache. What could she care about neuralgia, bronchitis, irregular heart beat? She was entirely immersed in the question—was she doing the right thing or not. Yes, she was. Yes, the sun would again shine. They would go boating again, now that he had discovered this new sport. Every now and then she would glance past her husband at Franz. He must be perplexed and disappointed, poor pet. He is tired. His poor mouth is open. My baby! Never mind, we’ll soon be back, and you’ll rest, and I’ll bring you some brandy, and we’ll lock the door.

  “Lindy” was returned intact. Bending their heads under the fierce downpour, our three holidayers walked across soggy dark sand and then up slippery steps to the desolate promenade. When they finally reached their apartment, Martha was unpleasantly surprised to find her door open. The two maids she disliked most, one a thief, the other a slut, were busy, too busy, making her room, which she had told them to do always punkt at ten, and now it was almost noon. But a strange apathy weighed upon her. She said nothing, and went to wait in Dreyer’s bedroom. There she pulled off her heavy robe and sank into an armchair, feeling too tired to peel off her bathing suit and get a towel from the bathroom. Anyway, her husband was in the bathroom; she saw him through the open door. Naked, full of ruddy life, various parts of his anatomy leaping, he was giving himself a robust rub-down, and helling every time he touched his red-blotched shoulders. One of the girls knocked to say Madam’s room was ready, and Martha had to make a great effort in order to undertake the long journey into the next room.

  She washed and dressed—with infinite intervals of languor. A turtleneck thick red sweater which Franz had lent her on the esplanade the night before—or was it two nights?—looked a little too masculine but it was the warmest thing she could find. However, it hardly muffled the fits of shivering that kept tormenting her body, while her mind was enjoying such peace, such euphoria. Of course, she had done the right thing. Moreover, the dress rehearsal had gone perfectly. Everything was under control.

  “Everything is under control,” said Dreyer through the door. “I hope you are as hungry as I am. We’ll have lunch in the grill in ten minutes. I’ll be waiting for you in the reading room.”

  All she could envisage was a cup of black coffee, and a little brandy. When her husband had gone, she stepped across the corridor and knocked at Franz’s door. It was unlocked, the room was empty. His robe sprawled on the floor, and there were other untidy details, but she did not have the strength to do anything about it. She found him in a corner of the lounge. The barmaid, a skinny artificial blonde, was bothering him with vulgar small talk.

  Meanwhile the rain did not cease. The needle that marked on a roll the violet graph of atmospheric pressure acquired a sacred significance. People on the promenade approached it as they would a crystal ball. Its competitor in the gallery, a conservative barometer, also refused to be propitiated either by prayer or knuckleknock. Someone had forgotten a little red pail on the beach and it was already filled to the brim with rain water. The photographers moped; the restaurateurs rejoiced. One could find all the same faces now in one café, now in another. Toward evening the rain thinned, and then stopped. Dreyer held his breath as he made carom shots. The word spread that the needle had risen one millimeter. “Fine weather tomorrow,” said a prophet, expressively striking his palm with his fist. Red at night, sailor’s delight. Despite the cool air, many dined on public verandas. The evening mail arrived: a major event. On the promenade the after-dinner shuffling of many feet began under the lights, bemisted by the damp. There was dancing at the kursaal.

  In the afternoon, she had lain down under a quilt and two blankets; but the chill endured. For supper she could eat only a pickle and a couple of pale cooked cherries. Now, in the Tanz Salon, she felt a stranger to the icy noise around. The black petals of her vaporous dress did not seem right, as if they would come apart at any moment. The tight touch of silk on her calves and the strip of garter along her bare thigh were infernal contacts. A colored snowstorm of confetti left its flakes sticking to her bare back, and at the same time, limbs and spine did not belong to her. A pain, of another musical tone than intercostal neuralgia or that strange ache which a great cardiologist had told her came from a “shadow behind the heart,” entered into excruciating concords with the orchestra. The dance rhythm did not lull or delight her as it usually did, but, instead, traced an angular line, the graph of her fever, along the surface of her skin. With every movement of her head, a compact pain rolled like a bowling ball from temple to temple. At one of the best tables around the hall, she had for a right-hand neighbor the dance instructor, a famous young man who flitted all summer from resort to resort like a velvet butterfly; on her left was Schwarz, the dark-eyed student, son of a Leipzig millionaire. The slipper under the table had apparently been kicked off by her. She heard Martha Dreyer ask questions, supply answers, comment on the horror of the thundering hall. The fizzy little stars of champagne pricked an unfamiliar tongue, without warming her blood or quenching her thirst. With an invisible hand she took Martha by the left wrist and felt her pulse. It was not there, however, but somewhere behind her ear or in the neck, or in the grinning instruments of the band, or in Franz and Dreyer, sitting opposite her. All around, growing from the hands of the dancers, glossy blue, red, green balloons bobbed on long strings and each contained the entire ballroom, and the chandeliers, and the tables, and herself. The tight embrace of the foxtrot engendered no heat in her body. She noticed that Martha was dancing also, holding high a green world. Her partner in full erection against her leg was declaring his love in panting sentences from some lewd book. Again the stars of champagne crept upwards, and the balloons resumed their bobbing, and again most of Martha’s leg was in Weiss’s crotch, and he moaned as his cheek touched hers, and his fingers explored her naked back.

  She was sitting again at the table. Red, blue, green spots were swimming in Franz’s glasses. Dreyer was guffawing vulgarly slapping the table with his palm and leaning back. She extended her foot beneath the table and pressed. Franz gave a start, stood up, and bowed. She placed her hand on his dear bony shoulder. How happy they had been in the rhythm of that earlier novel in those first chapters, under the picture of the dancing slave girl between the whirling dervishes. For one delicious moment the music pierced her private fog, reached her, enveloped her. Everything was fine again, for this was he, Franz, his shy hands, his breath, the soft fuzz on the back of his neck, under her fingernails, and those precious, adorable motions that she had taught him.

  “Closer, closer,” she murmured. “Make me feel warm.”

  “I’m tired,” he murmured back. “I’m tired to death. Please don’t do what you are doing, please.”

  The music reared its trumpets and then collapsed. Franz followed her back to the table. People around her were clapping. The dancing instructor slipped past her with a bright-yellow girl. Walnut-brown Mr. Vinomori, the iris brimming meaningfully in the white of his eyes, was bowing to her, enticing. She saw Martha Dreyer nestle up to him and begin a tango.

  Uncle and nephew remained sitting alone. Dreyer was beating time with his finger, watching the dancers, waiting for the recurrent return of his wife’s green earrings, and, with a kind of awe, listening to the strong voice of a girl singer. Stocky and joyless, she bawled out, straining her throat and prancing in time to the music: “Montevideo, Montevideo is not the right place for meinen Leo.” She was jostled by the dancers; endlessly she repeated the ear-splitting refrain; a fat man in tuxedo, her owner, hissed at her, telling her to choose s
ome other song because nobody was enjoying it; Dreyer had heard this Montevideo both yesterday and the day before, and he was again filled with a bizarre melancholy, and felt embarrassed for the poor dumpy girl when her voice cracked on a note and she recovered the tune with a brave smile. Franz sat beside him, shoulder to shoulder, and seemed also to be watching the dancers. He was a little drunk and his muscles ached from that morning’s rowing. He felt like letting his forehead fall onto the table to remain thus forever, between a full ashtray and an empty bottle. A reptile, a supple dragon was tormenting him elaborately and hideously, turning him inside out—and there was no end to that torment. A human being, and after all he was a human being, was not supposed to go on enduring such oppression.

  It was at that moment that Franz regained consciousness like an insufficiently drugged patient on the operating table. As he came to, he knew he was being cut open, and he would have howled horribly if he were not in an invented ballroom. He looked around, toying with the string of a balloon tied to a bottle. He saw, reflected in a rococo mirror, the meek back of Dreyer’s head nodding in time to the music.

  Franz looked away; his gaze became entangled amid the legs of the dancers and attached itself desperately to a gleaming blue dress. The foreign girl in the blue dress danced with a remarkably handsome man in an old-fashioned dinner jacket. Franz had long since noticed this couple; they had appeared to him in fleeting glimpses, like a recurrent dream image or a subtle leitmotiv—now at the beach, now in a café, now on the promenade. Sometimes the man carried a butterfly net. The girl had a delicately painted mouth and tender gray-blue eyes, and her fiancé or husband, slender, elegantly balding, contemptuous of everything on earth but her, was looking at her with pride; and Franz felt envious of that unusual pair, so envious that his oppression, one is sorry to say, grew even more bitter, and the music stopped. They walked past him. They were speaking loudly. They were speaking a totally incomprehensible language.

  “Your aunt dances like a goddess,” said the student, sitting down beside him.

  “I’m very tired,” remarked Franz irrelevantly. “I rowed a lot today. Rowing is a very healthy sport.”

  Meanwhile Dreyer was saying with an ingratiating wink: “Am I also permitted to invite you for a dance? If I promise not to tread on your feet?”

  “Get me out of here,” said Martha. “I’m not feeling well.”

  13

  Barely awake and still blinking, his yellow pajamas unbuttoned on his pink stomach, Dreyer went out on the balcony. The wet foliage scintillated blindingly. The sea was milky-bluish, sparked with silver. On the adjacent balcony his wife’s bathing suit was drying. He returned to his darkish bedroom, in a hurry to dress and leave for Berlin. At eight o’clock there was a bus that took forty minutes to reach Swistok and its railway; a taxi would bring him there in less than half an hour to catch an earlier train. He tried not to sing under the shower so as not to disturb neighbors. He had an enjoyable shave on the balcony in front of an absolutely stable and unbreakable new type of mirror screwed onto the balustrade. Diving back into the penumbra, he briskly dressed.

  Very softly he opened the door into the adjacent bedroom. From the bed came Martha’s rapid voice: “We’re going to a tombola in a gondola. Please hurry.”

  She often talked in her sleep babbling about Franz, Frieda, Oriental gymnastics.

  As he slapped his sides to check if he had distributed everything among the proper pockets, Dreyer laughed and said: “Good-by, my love. I’m leaving for the city.”

  She muttered something in a waking voice, then said distinctly: “Give me some water.”

  “I’m in a hurry,” he said. “You get it yourself. Okay? Time for you to go swimming with Franz. Heavenly morning.”

  He bent over the dark bed, kissed her hair and walked through his own bedroom into the long corridor leading to the lift.

  He had his coffee on the Kurhaus terrace. He had two rolls with butter and honey. He consulted his watch and ate a third. On the beach one could see the bright robes of early swimmers and the sea was growing more and more luminous. He lit a cigarette and popped into the taxi that the concierge had called.

  The sea was left behind. By that time a few more bathers were dotting the flashing green-blue. From every balcony came the delicate tinkle of breakfast. Automatically tucking a hateful ball under his arm, Franz marched down the corridor and knocked at Martha’s door. Silence. The door was locked. He knocked at Dreyer’s door, entered and found his uncle’s room in disorder. He concluded, correctly, that Dreyer had already left for Berlin. A terrible day was in store. The door into Martha’s room was ajar. It was dark there. Let her sleep. This was good. He started to tiptoe away but from the darkness came Martha’s voice: “Why don’t you give me that water?” she said with listless insistence.

  Franz located a decanter and a glass and moved toward the bed. Martha slowly raised herself, freed a bare arm, and drank avidly. He put the decanter back on the dresser and was about to resume his stealthy retreat.

  “Franz, come here,” she called in that same toneless voice.

  He sat down on the edge of her bed, grimly expecting she would command him to fulfill a duty that he had managed to evade since they came here.

  “I think I am very ill,” she said pensively, not raising her head from the pillow.

  “Let me ring for your coffee,” said Franz. “It’s sunny today and here it’s so dark.”

  She began to speak again. “He’s used up all the aspirin. Go to the pharmacy and get me some. And tell them to take that oar away—it keeps hurting me.”

  “Oar? That’s your hot-water bottle. What’s the matter with you?”

  “Please, Franz. I can’t speak. And I’m cold. I need lots of blankets.”

  He brought one from Dreyer’s room, and clumsily, carelessly, fuming at a woman’s whim, covered her with it.

  “I don’t know where the pharmacy is,” he said.

  Martha asked: “You brought it? What have you brought?”

  He shrugged and went out.

  He found the pharmacy without difficulty. Besides the aspirin tablets he bought a tube of shaving cream and a postcard with a view of the bay. The package had safely arrived but Emmy wondered in her last letter if he was quite right in the head and he thought he’d send her a few words of protest and reassurance. As he walked back to the hotel along the sunny promenade, he stopped to look down at the beach. He had separated the aspirin container from the shaving cream which he now put into his pocket. A sudden breeze took possession of the paper baglet which had contained both. At that moment the puzzling foreign couple overtook him. They were both in beach robes and walked rapidly, rapidly conversing in their mysterious tongue. He thought that they glanced at him and fell silent for an instant. After passing him they began talking again; he had the impression they were discussing him, and even pronouncing his name. It embarrassed, it incensed him, that this damned happy foreigner hastening to the beach with his tanned, pale-haired, lovely companion, knew absolutely everything about his predicament and perhaps pitied, not without some derision, an honest young man who had been seduced and appropriated by an older woman who, despite her fine dresses and face lotions, resembled a large white toad. And generally speaking, tourists at these swanky resorts are always inquisitive, mocking, cruel people. He felt the shame of his hairy nudity barely concealed by the charlatan robe. He cursed the breeze and the sea and, clutching the container with the tablets, entered the lobby of his hotel. The flimsy paper he had lost fluttered along the promenade, settled, fluttered again, and slithered past the happy couple; then it was wafted toward a bench in an embrasure of the balustrade, where an old man sitting in the sun meditatively pierced it with the point of his cane. What happened to it next is not known. Those hurrying to the beach did not follow its fate. Wooden steps led down to the sand. One was anxious to reach the sea’s slow shining folds. The white sand sang underfoot. Among a hundred similarly striped shelters it was easy to rec
ognize one’s own—and not only by the number it bore: those rentable objects grow accustomed to their chance owner remarkably fast, becoming part of his life simply and trustfully. Three or four shelters away was the Dreyers’ niche; now it stood empty—neither Dreyer, nor his wife, nor his nephew was there. A huge rampart of sand surrounded it. A little boy in red trunks was climbing all over that rampart, and the sand trickled down, sparkling, and presently a whole chunk of it crumbled. Mrs. Dreyer would not have liked to see strange children ruining her fortress. Within its confines and around them the impatient elements had already had time to scramble the prints of bare feet. None could distinguish now Dreyer’s robust imprint from Franz’s narrow sole. A while later Schwarz and Weiss came over, saw with surprise that nobody was there yet. “Fascinating, adorable woman,” one of them said, and the other looked across the beach at the promenade, at the hotels beyond it, and replied: “Oh, I’m sure they’ll be down in a few minutes. Let’s go for a swim and come back later.” The shelter and its moat remained deserted. The little boy had run back to his sister who had brought a blue pailful of toy water and after magic manipulations and pattings was carefully shaking out of the pail an impeccably formed cone of chocolate sand. A white butterfly went by, battling the breeze. Flags flapped. The photographer’s shout approached. Bathers entering the shallow water moved their legs like skiers without their poles.

  And in the meantime a cluster of these seaside images—gleams on the green folding wave—were travelling south at fifty miles an hour comfortably collected in Dreyer’s mind, and the further he travelled from the sea in the Berlin express, the more insistently they demanded attention. The foretaste of the affairs awaiting him in the city grew a little insipid at the thought that at the very moment he was being transformed again into a businessman with a businessman’s schemes and fancies, and that there, by the sea, on the white sand of true reality, he was leaving freedom behind. And the closer he came to the metropolis, the more attractive seemed to him that shimmering plage that one could see like a mirage from Rockpoint.