King, Queen, Knave by Vladimir Nabokov Read Free Book Online

the journey. But suddenly another, much more amusing, thought dawned upon him. Martha, accustomed to the fireworks of his face, saw his cropped mustache twitch and the rays of wrinkles on the temple side of his eyes multiply and quiver. The next instant he burst out laughing so violently that Tom, who had been jumping around him, could not help barking. Not only the coincidence tickled Dreyer but also the conjecture that Martha had probably said something nasty about his relative while the relative had been sitting right there in the compartment. Just what Martha had said, and whether Franz could have heard it, he would never be able to recall now but something there had surely been, and this itchy uncertainty intensified the humorous aspect of the coincidence. In the no-time of human thought he also recalled—while the dog drowned his cousin’s greeting—how an acquaintance once had rung him up while he was taking a tumultuous shower, and Martha had shouted through the bathroom door: “That stupid old Wasserschluss is calling”—and five paces away the telephone receiver on the table was cupping its ear like an eavesdropper in a farce.
    He laughed as he shook Franz’s hand, and was still laughing when he dropped into one of the wicker chairs. Tom continued to bark. Suddenly Martha lunged forward and, rings blazing, gave the dog a really hard slap with the back of her hand. It hurt, and with a whimper Tom slunk away.
    “Delightful,” said Dreyer (the delight quite gone), wiping his eyes with an ample silk handkerchief. “So you are Franz—Lina’s boy. After such a coincidence we must do away with formalities—please don’t call me sir but Uncle, dear Uncle.”
    “Avoid vocatives,” thought Franz quickly. Nevertheless, he began to feel at ease. Dreyer, blowing his nose in the haze, was indistinct, absurd, and harmless like those total strangers who impersonate people we know in our dreams and talk to us in phony voices like intimate friends.
    “I was in fine form today,” Dreyer said to his wife, “and you know something, I’m hungry. I imagine young Franz is hungry too.”
    “Lunch will be served in a minute,” said Martha. She got up and disappeared.
    Franz, feeling even more at ease, said: “I must apologize—I’ve broken my glasses and can hardly distinguish anything, so I get mixed up a little.”
    “Where are you staying?” asked Dreyer.
    “At the Video,” said Franz. “Near the station. It was recommended to me by an experienced person.”
    “Fine. Yes, you are a good dog, Tom. Now first of all you must find a nice room, not too far from us. For forty or fifty marks a month. Do you play tennis?”
    “Certainly,” replied Franz, remembering a backyard, a secondhand brown racket purchased for one mark at a bric-a-brac shop from under the bust of Wagner, a black rubber ball, and an uncooperative brick wall with a fatal square hole in which grew one wallflower.
    “Fine. So we can play on Sundays. Then you will need a decent suit, shirts, soft collars, ties, all kinds of things. How did you get on with my wife?”
    Franz grinned, not knowing the answer.
    “Fine,” said Dreyer. “I suspect lunch is ready. We’ll talk about business later. We discuss business over coffee around here.”
    His wife had come out on the porch. She gave him a long cold glance, coldly nodded, and went back into the house. “That hateful, undignified, genial tone he always must take with inferiors,” she reflected as she passed through the ivory-white front hall where the impeccable, hospitable white comb and white-backed brush lay on the doily under the pier glass. The entire villa, from whitewashed terrace to radio antenna, was that way—neat, clean-cut, and on the whole unloved and inane. The master of the house deemed it a joke. As for the lady, neither aesthetic nor emotional considerations ruled her taste; she simply thought that a reasonably wealthy German businessman in the nineteen-twenties, in