someone was heard to say: âYou can smell the snow he predicted.â âHeâ was the weather broadcaster.
The house was not quiet. Time and again, steps were heard on the winding stairs which led not only to the library but also to the various bedrooms; among them a swift, light scurrying as of an animalâs paws. Then there was a scratching at the outside door, and someone admitted a cat, which lay under the table during the rest of the game. It had a dark head, with yellow eyes; when the eyes were closed, the whole head was black.
In a basement room, a cello was being played, a heavy, long-drawn-out rumbling, which, in a manner of
speaking, gave the whole house a musical foundation. The cello notes made the time pass more slowly; almost everyone who went by the house stopped to listen; and sometimes the players inside suspended their movements, as though for them, under the spell of Orpheusâ voice, things had stopped moving for a while. At the same time it was shipâs music; the library with its paneled ceiling was the salon, and the little oval windows in the gable were the portholes.
The cello fell silent. A bottle of wine was uncorked. The telephone rang in the entrance hall (âNot for me,â said the master of the house, while someone who could not have been an adult ran down the stairs). In the dark garden, the evergreen leaves of a holly tree glistened; the dull-black shape in it was a sleeping blackbird. A single stone lion, no larger than a hare, crouched on a pedestal near the garden gate. Down in the city, people were besieging the one open shop where cigarettes and newspapers were available. The trains at the railroad station looked colorful and massive, like components of the big cities they had come from or were going to; the tracks were a recumbent pyramid. And far from the station, the broken bottles atop the prison wall suggested pyramids of a very different kind.
Our game on the mountainside was fitful. If one player let his thoughts wander, did that suffice to make the others lose interest? Yet we were all serious about the game. I had seldom played so resolutely and I persisted in playing every hand. But there was no joy in it; only a dogged determination to win. And we couldnât stop. Instead of becoming, as usual, more intimate as
the game went on, we became more estranged. None of us could look his partner in the eye. We observed the rules punctiliously, yet our looks and gestures were those of cheats; and to cheat in this way is to play at playing. A lost feeling came over us. We all felt out of place. And in the place where we should have been long ago, âeverything was too late.â On the one hand, five lost card players were on the verge of tears; on the other hand, each went on doing, and overdoing, his own thing: the master of the house kept pouring more wine; the painter, at every glance, discovered and exclaimed about some new color in the room (for instance, those spots of mold on the spine of a book); and the priest, in his capacity as a recognized authority on tarok, author of a treatise on the history of the game in the various countries of Europe, surprised the company by invoking weird and unusual exceptions and sub-exceptions to the rules (though these did not always work in his favor).
Only the politician tried, so to speak, to make the wind change. He proceeded as though he were responsible for the evening, which for him was not just another evening but a time of testing. Especially in his leisure hours, he always felt called upon to prove himself, to show that he could handle any situation. He would jump at the slightest opportunity to demonstrate his capacity for immediate action. If a mouse was sighted, he was the one to wake the sleeping cat and put it on the scent; if a glass fell to the floor, he would instantly block off the disaster zone where splinters threatenedâand signal like a traffic cop to the person who arrived with
The house was not quiet. Time and again, steps were heard on the winding stairs which led not only to the library but also to the various bedrooms; among them a swift, light scurrying as of an animalâs paws. Then there was a scratching at the outside door, and someone admitted a cat, which lay under the table during the rest of the game. It had a dark head, with yellow eyes; when the eyes were closed, the whole head was black.
In a basement room, a cello was being played, a heavy, long-drawn-out rumbling, which, in a manner of
speaking, gave the whole house a musical foundation. The cello notes made the time pass more slowly; almost everyone who went by the house stopped to listen; and sometimes the players inside suspended their movements, as though for them, under the spell of Orpheusâ voice, things had stopped moving for a while. At the same time it was shipâs music; the library with its paneled ceiling was the salon, and the little oval windows in the gable were the portholes.
The cello fell silent. A bottle of wine was uncorked. The telephone rang in the entrance hall (âNot for me,â said the master of the house, while someone who could not have been an adult ran down the stairs). In the dark garden, the evergreen leaves of a holly tree glistened; the dull-black shape in it was a sleeping blackbird. A single stone lion, no larger than a hare, crouched on a pedestal near the garden gate. Down in the city, people were besieging the one open shop where cigarettes and newspapers were available. The trains at the railroad station looked colorful and massive, like components of the big cities they had come from or were going to; the tracks were a recumbent pyramid. And far from the station, the broken bottles atop the prison wall suggested pyramids of a very different kind.
Our game on the mountainside was fitful. If one player let his thoughts wander, did that suffice to make the others lose interest? Yet we were all serious about the game. I had seldom played so resolutely and I persisted in playing every hand. But there was no joy in it; only a dogged determination to win. And we couldnât stop. Instead of becoming, as usual, more intimate as
the game went on, we became more estranged. None of us could look his partner in the eye. We observed the rules punctiliously, yet our looks and gestures were those of cheats; and to cheat in this way is to play at playing. A lost feeling came over us. We all felt out of place. And in the place where we should have been long ago, âeverything was too late.â On the one hand, five lost card players were on the verge of tears; on the other hand, each went on doing, and overdoing, his own thing: the master of the house kept pouring more wine; the painter, at every glance, discovered and exclaimed about some new color in the room (for instance, those spots of mold on the spine of a book); and the priest, in his capacity as a recognized authority on tarok, author of a treatise on the history of the game in the various countries of Europe, surprised the company by invoking weird and unusual exceptions and sub-exceptions to the rules (though these did not always work in his favor).
Only the politician tried, so to speak, to make the wind change. He proceeded as though he were responsible for the evening, which for him was not just another evening but a time of testing. Especially in his leisure hours, he always felt called upon to prove himself, to show that he could handle any situation. He would jump at the slightest opportunity to demonstrate his capacity for immediate action. If a mouse was sighted, he was the one to wake the sleeping cat and put it on the scent; if a glass fell to the floor, he would instantly block off the disaster zone where splinters threatenedâand signal like a traffic cop to the person who arrived with
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