Richard Weiner - The Game for Real

“No, it’s not here, you’re mistaken.” Mr. Steel came in right behind the unwelcome little saint.

“But it’s there. I’m certain of it.”

Then our man had another look at the basin. Today, he’d almost say that he did indeed notice something there this time: a double-dealing wallflower, still crouching, but now only still crouching. . Today. . Only, today is not yesterday.

Yesterday it wasn’t the wallflower standing there; it was Mr. Steel, and he was looking in vain where there was nothing.

“Ridiculous! It’s not here.” And the words “You didn’t happen to see a bracelet, did you?” were more to take him for their witness than to ask him.

That’s just when things started to get ugly. That is, today he might almost say that things had started to get ugly just then. But today is not yesterday. Yesterday it was “merely starting to get to him.” Mr. Steel’s passing from room to room was working on his nerves; the alternating “I’m certain it’s there” — “I’m telling you it’s not” — bore into him like an auger; the wretched repetition of “a nasty business” was as irritating as an old woman rattling off her rosary. But he clenched his teeth and, despite this not being his fire to put out, he helped rummage: he poked around in his linen, his ties, he even opened his already-closed duffle and dug around in there. At last he exploded, “A nasty business, yes, and especially for me. This is the thanks I get!”

That’s right! “This is the thanks I get,” he said, the moron. What could have compelled him to say “this is the thanks I get”?! That’s how to get in with them. — And he nevertheless managed to drop the whole thing immediately and go outside. Weird. — Weird? And what’s weird about it, if you please? Might he not have a clean conscience? He’d had quite enough of this. Had he acted rashly? Sure. And what of it? Yesterday it didn’t look like he’d set a trap for destiny. (Oh, destiny has something up its sleeve.) Yesterday it looked merely as though he were fleeing an unpleasant marital scene that had nothing to do with him. He was stricken with blindness, just like that — like anyone who should be destroyed. Had he not been stricken with blindness, how would he, now sitting again at the table and waiting for his supper, have overlooked the disorder visited upon him? Stricken with blindness? I should say so! How else would it have escaped him that things had gotten off track? And he, meanwhile, was as if in a trance. It’s true: he’d been stricken a bit by Zinaida’s having stopped speaking naturally to him. Yes, but it had struck him in his naïve and unsuspecting mind (yes: he literally says “naïve and unsuspecting”). But how did it happen that he was able not to sense that tremendous breakdown, tarrying all by his lonesome in the garden, so long and so late? Nothing doing; not even those three old perfectionist schoolmarms. . How’s that? Not even the schoolmarms? Argh! But all the same, they came; all the same, he saw them come back from their walk, sit down, beckon toward him; he thanked them, after all. . God, how to confront the fact that he saw, he saw with his own eyes, when the maidservant ran up, when she whispered something to them. . that he saw them hastily stand up and trot away . . that he saw them ally themselves with the prattling little circle in front of the kitchen. . How to confront the fact that he saw everything as though not seeing it?

He caught a heavy aftertaste; not, it happened, on his palate, but by some importunately new sense he surmised that he was entirely within it, within this aftertaste, and that it was the aftertaste of yesterday. Not from the iniquity, the calumny and injustice, so much as from the pestilent circle of disdain that had wreathed him yesterday in the garden, and from how unctuously simpleminded he’d been in allowing himself to be wreathed in it. Weird! Yesterday, nothing. He tastes this pestilent taste of contempt only now that he’s been cleared again, now that they’ve asked his forgiveness. Weird? Yes — if they’ve cleared him rightfully, asked his forgiveness, if they’ve rightfully regaled him with a glass of champagne (for when it was “all over,” they regaled him with a glass of champagne). But what if it wasn’t rightful? — And he immediately beheld, like it was an exact, like it was a sharp drawing — graphically, somehow, devil take it! — that he was depraved, blameworthy, worse than blameworthy, because he had been cleared through deceit. He saw it as a hazardous footpath by which, with courage, he would surely get where he had to go, where he would be relieved of “it all”. ., but that was just it: now the lonely view upon this footpath, from below, from its very base, gave him such vertigo, such massive vertigo, that he bent his head as though before a blow. Only it was him! He, such a virtuoso at circumventing tough roads! He who excels in the art of concocting easy detours, and, in an art much tougher still: that of assuring himself that those highways laid down at someone else’s expense are actually more difficult than the trails leading to. . Well, no, he won’t say where, he won’t! He might as well just throw himself into the abyss.

The window was wide open, the cock’s crow waning, the hens were harassing him. Only the lark’s song, a song as conspicuous as a custom-made, valuable treasure, strove to be worthy of the new day and the gurgling of the stream, which was answered by nothing besides its own quieting at the verge of the pool (that pool), like on a Sunday; and it was, in fact, a Sunday.

“Depraved, blameworthy, and worse than blameworthy! The pestilent aftertaste of contempt! As though stricken with pestilence!” — “Really? Really?” he pokes fun at himself.

And why, I ask? — Because the old schoolmarms had scurried off in fright? He strokes his knees. Scurrying old schoolmarms! Maybe they had a poor old woman’s terror of being infected by a marked man. . Retrospective condolences for your past terrors, respected ladies! What a fool he is! A moment earlier he’d been running down the whole litany of yesterday’s iniquities: that they had all come to ask his forgiveness afterward he’d somehow forgotten to mention. How funny it had been, their rash flight from “the unclean”! Or else the shuffling innkeeper! (Zinaida had hardly left with the registration card.) But of course! The victim of all these faux pas was actually the innkeeper. Poor man, what a situation! To convey such a message! How he’d forced it out of himself! How comical he was in his fidgeting short pants, and that finger with which he traced his bald spot! “A nasty business, a nasty business.” “What business is that, then?” “The business with the bracelet, sir. The lady’s bracelet has gone missing, sir. 400,000.” “400,000?” “It happened as things were being moved. From your former room to the new one.” “The one you forced on me.” “You were there.” “To help. There were others there as well.” “The servants were there as well, but we’ve already searched them.” “Too bad.” “Yes, sad, since it wasn’t them.” “All the better.” “All the better for them, yes. If it wasn’t them. .” “If it’s not them?” “A nasty business, nasty. If you would be so wise. .” “A moment ago you were saying ‘if you would be so kind.’” “If you would be so wise, you’d ask me to search you before the gendarmes arrive.” –

The wrinkles of the person sitting on the bed fade away, one after the other; his bottom lip has again flattened its mean fold. Who would say of that slovenly, impertinent nose that it belonged to a sleuthhound? The corners of his mouth turned upward — oh, barely enough to notice — the upper lip puckered, the eyelids rose afresh, the outstretched arms moved slowly from the ankles to the thighs — you there, boy, rejuvenated, how’d you get in here? — and look, here’s the smile, here’s the person , the one who was thinking: