Schafkopf

He took his shoes off at the rack without being told.

He did it before Theo had shut the door: stepped out of them in the narrow passage under the coats, picked them up, put them on the rack at the end beside the trainers that had been white once, side by side, square, and went on into the room in his socks; and Mrs Hartigan, at the stove, with the tea towel over her shoulder and the long wooden spoon in her hand, turned round, and looked at his face, and then down at his feet, in their socks, on her lino, and then back at his face.

She did not say anything. She turned back to the stove.

But he had seen her mouth, at the corner, before she turned, and it was enough.

“Frederick,” said Mr Hartigan, from the chair by the window, over his glasses, as a statement of fact.

“Mr Hartigan.” Frederick stood in the middle of the room. “Legatee.”

Mr Hartigan looked at him.

“Twelve across,” said Frederick. “Heir, after a fashion. Seven letters. With a G.” He had worked it out on the Sunday, on the cream telephone, while his father was setting him the Shipping Act of the Philippines; it had come to him in the middle of the Philippines, all at once, the way the answer to a Bill did, and he had said it out loud, legatee, and his father had stopped and said I beg your pardon? and he had had to explain. “Somebody who’s left a legacy. In a will. They inherit. But they’re not the heir. Not the real one. Not the one who gets the title. Just the one who gets the thing.” He thought. “An heir, after a fashion.”

Mr Hartigan looked at him for a long time over his glasses.

Then he reached down beside the chair to the floor, to a pile of newspapers there, a week of them, folded, and took out the one from the bottom, last Friday’s, folded open at the crossword; and held it up, without a word, so that Frederick could see it.

Twelve across was filled in. In pencil. LEGATEE. In small square capitals, very neat.

And in the margin beside it, in the same pencil, smaller, Mr Hartigan had written: F. Friday?

“I had it at a quarter past six last week,” said Mr Hartigan. “Before you’d sat down.” He put the paper back on the pile. “I wanted to see if you’d come back and tell me.”

Frederick stood in the middle of the kitchen in his socks.

On the sofa, Kate lowered her phone and looked at her father, upside down, with an expression of the deepest disgust.

“Dad,” she said.

“What?”

“That’s mean.”

“It’s not mean. It’s a test.” Mr Hartigan picked up this week’s paper and unfolded it at the crossword and took the pencil from behind his ear. “He passed.” He looked at the crossword. “Four down. What the river does at the end, in short. Five letters.”

“Is there an E?”

“There might be an E.”

“I’ll tell you next Friday,” said Frederick.

Mr Hartigan did not look up. But he wrote something very small in the margin, in pencil, and did not say what.

---

Supper was a stew with noodles in it.

It was not anything he had a name for. It came in a big brown pot from the oven, and it was beef, he thought, in a dark thick gravy with onions and something sweet in it, paprika, perhaps, red; and the noodles were not like any noodles he had eaten before, short and fat and soft and irregular, as though somebody had made them in a hurry by pushing dough through something with holes in it into boiling water, which, Theo said, leaning over, was exactly what had happened, through a sort of colander, by his mother, at five o’clock, with her sleeves up.

He did not ask what it was. He ate what was on the table.

He ate two helpings, because Mrs Hartigan put a second on his plate without asking whether he wanted it, which was apparently also what happened at this table, and he found that he did; and Kringle, on the windowsill over the sink, opened one yellow eye and watched every forkful go from the plate to his mouth with an expression of patient, long-standing grievance.

“He wants the gravy,” said Theo.

“Can he have it?”

“No,” said Mrs Hartigan, without looking up.

“He gets the gravy,” said Kate, to her plate, “when Mum’s on nights.”

“He does not.”

“He does,” said Kate. “Dad gives it him. On a saucer. Under the table. Every time.” She ate. “That’s why he sits on the windowsill. He’s waiting for you to go on nights.”

Mrs Hartigan looked down the length of the table at her husband.

Mr Hartigan ate his stew with great concentration and did not look up from it at all.

---

The argument began over the plates.

He did not know, at first, that it was an argument. It began quietly, in German, after the meal, when Mrs Hartigan was clearing and Mr Hartigan had not yet gone back to his chair; she said something to him, over her shoulder, at the sink, and he said something back, from the table; and Frederick, drying, with the tea towel with Wisconsin on it, which she had handed him at the end of the meal without a word, as though it had been his for years, did not understand either of them.

He understood that it was German. He had some German. He had his father’s German, the formal kind, from the Hanoverian papers; and his cousin’s, from Berlin, faster; and a little from his great-aunt, who spoke it to him at Christmas very loudly as though he were deaf. This was not that German. It was softer, and quicker, and the vowels went in places he did not expect, and the ends of the words fell off; and every so often, in the middle of a sentence, there would be a word that was not German at all.

“…und die Rent ist wieder…”

He heard that. Die Rent.

“…ja, aber der Overtime…”

Der Overtime.

They were English words. They were English nouns, set down in the middle of the German, each one with a German article in front of it, like a stone set in a ring; die Rent, der Overtime, die Electric, das Meeting; and he understood the nouns, and nothing else, and stood at the sink with a plate in one hand and the tea towel in the other and listened to two adults argue about money in front of him in a language he did not know, in which the only words he could follow were the ones that cost something.

It got louder.

Not much. It was not shouting. It was the kind of argument he had heard in corridors at the Palace, through doors, between people who had to agree about something by Tuesday: quick, low, each sentence starting before the last one had finished. But it got louder, and quicker, and Mrs Hartigan turned round from the sink with her hands wet and said something long and fast with die Rent in it twice and das Meeting in it once and something that sounded like a date; and Mr Hartigan, at the table, put his hand flat on it, and said something back, slower, with der Overtime in it, and a number, in English, forty-two; and Mrs Hartigan said something very short.

Frederick stood at the sink with the plate.

Nobody stopped.

That was the thing he could not get over. Nobody stopped because he was there. Nobody looked at him and remembered. Nobody said not in front of, or switched to English, or lowered their voice, or took it into the other room, or said later. At the Palace, in every corridor, in every room, the moment he came round the corner every argument stopped, as though somebody had turned off a tap; the two people would look at him and smile and say sir, and wait until he had gone, and he would hear it start again behind him, through the door, as he went up the stairs. He had grown up in a building full of arguments he had never once heard the end of.

Here they did not stop. They went on, over his head, at the sink, in front of him, as though he were not there; no; as though he were there, and it did not matter, because he was at the table, and this was what was said at the table, and you did not stop saying it because somebody from the table was drying a plate.

Kate, on the sofa, had put her headphones in.

Theo, beside him at the counter, putting away, leaned over, and said, very quietly, without looking at him:

“It’s the electric.”

Frederick looked at him.

“And the rent’s going up,” said Theo. “In May. There’s a meeting. With the man from the company. Mum wants Dad to go. Dad says he’s on earlies. Mum says he can swap. Dad says if he swaps he loses the overtime, and the overtime’s what pays the electric.” He put a plate in the cupboard. “It’s every month. It’s fine. They do it every month.” He put another plate away. “It ends when Mum says something about Racine and Dad laughs.”

Frederick dried the plate in his hand.

“Why Racine?”

“The parking ticket,” said Theo. “Nine minutes for a kringle. If they ever get to Racine, it’s over.”

---

It got to Racine about four minutes later.

Frederick did not understand what was said. He understood Racine, which was the same in both languages, and he understood the look on Mrs Hartigan’s face when she said it, which was the look she gave shoes; and he understood Mr Hartigan’s face when he heard it, which went still, entirely still, the stillness of a man taking in a fact; and then, from somewhere very deep down, began to come apart; and he laughed, once, out loud, at the table, with his hand still flat on it.

And Mrs Hartigan turned back to the sink and went on washing.

And Mr Hartigan got up and went back to his chair by the window and unfolded the crossword.

And that was the end of it. Nobody said anything else about the rent, or the electric, or the overtime, or the meeting with the man from the company in May. Nobody looked at Frederick and said sorry you had to hear that. Nobody explained. It had happened in front of him, all of it, at the sink, in a language he did not know, with the nouns in English; and it was over; and he was drying the last plate; and he understood, drying it, that he had just been somewhere he had never been in his life, which was the inside of something.

Mrs Hartigan took the plate from him and put it on the rack.

“Thank you, Freddie,” she said.

---

“Do you know Schafkopf?” said Kate.

She had taken her headphones out. She was sitting up on the sofa, cross-legged, with her long brown hair tucked behind her ears, and she was looking at him across the room the way she had looked at him across the table at the first supper, as though he were a sum.

“No,” said Frederick.

“Do you know any card games?”

He thought about it.

“I know Patience,” he said. “My great-aunt plays it. And I know the rules of whist. My father explained them once. On a train.” He thought harder. “I’ve never played them.”

Kate looked at him for a long time.

Then she unfolded her legs, and got up off the sofa, and went to the drawer under the telephone on the counter by the fridge, the one with the takeaway menus in it and, Frederick knew, a white card with a telephone number on it from a small grey woman; and took out a pack of cards, in a battered blue box, and came back, and sat down at the table, in her father’s place, opposite the chair with the cushion tied on.

“Sit,” she said.

He sat.

“Theo. Dad.” She did not look round. “We need four.”

Theo sat down beside Frederick without a word. Mr Hartigan, in the chair by the window, sighed, very deeply, the sigh of a man who has been asked to leave a crossword at four down, and folded the paper, and put the pencil behind his ear, and came to the table, and sat down at the end, in the chair with the arms.

Kate opened the box.

They were not cards he knew. There were thirty-two of them, not fifty-two, and the suits were not hearts and spades and diamonds and clubs; they were leaves, and hearts, and bells, and acorns. Green leaves, on stems. Red hearts. Small brass bells, yellow, with clappers. And brown acorns, in their cups. The pictures on the court cards were men in old clothes, with moustaches and feathers in their hats, and one of them, the king of bells, he thought, had a face exactly like Mr Gamage of the Legion.

“Acorns,” said Kate, laying them out. “Leaves. Hearts. Bells.” She tapped each. “That’s the order. Acorns top.” She picked up a card with a pig on it. “This is the Sau.”

“The…?”

“The sow. It’s the ace. It’s got a pig on it, see.” She held it up. The ace of hearts, with a fat red pig on it, smiling. “Don’t ask why. Nobody knows why. It’s been a pig since about fifteen hundred.” She put it down. “The Obers and the Unters are trumps. All of them. Always. Plus hearts. And the Ober of acorns is the highest card in the game, and if you ever have it you don’t tell anybody, you just sit there and look like you haven’t got it.” She looked at him. “Can you do that?”

“Yes,” said Frederick.

Kate looked at him for a moment longer.

“Yeah,” she said. “I bet you can.”

---

She dealt. She dealt fast, in fours, eight each, with a snap on every card, the way Mrs Tolliver cut cake. She explained the rest as she went, in English, very quickly, with German words in it where there was no English, Rufspiel and Wenz and Solo and Schneider, which was when you lost so badly that you did not even get thirty points, and Schwarz, which was when you lost every single trick, and which she said he would get to know.

He did not understand it.

He understood the parts. He understood each rule, as she said it, the way he understood each clause of a Bill. Trumps, and suits, and the order, and the calling of the sow, and the counting of the points at the end. But he did not understand how they went together. He did not understand what to do with his eight cards when they were in his hand. He held them, fanned, the way she had shown him, leaves and hearts and bells and acorns and two Unters and a pig, and looked at them, and had no idea at all.

He lost.

He lost the first game in about four minutes. He played a card he thought was good, and Kate played one that was better, and Theo played one that was his partner’s, which was apparently a disaster, and Mr Hartigan played one without looking at it, and the trick went to Kate, and so did the next one, and the next, and at the end she counted the points with her finger, very fast, and said “Schneider,” and looked at him, and gathered the cards, and dealt again.

He lost the second.

He lost the third, in which he was Mr Hartigan’s partner, and Mr Hartigan, at the end, looked at the cards on the table and then at Frederick over his glasses, for a long time, and said, as a statement of fact, “You had the Ober of acorns,” and Frederick said “You said not to tell anybody,” and Mr Hartigan put his face in his hands.

He lost the fourth and the fifth and the sixth.

He began to understand it at about the seventh. He began to see how the parts went together; not all of it, but some. He began to see that the order mattered, the order you played things in, and that what you did not play was as important as what you did, and that you could tell what somebody had in their hand by what they did not do, the way you could tell what a Bill was for by what it left out. He lost the seventh, but less. He lost the eighth, but only just, by four points.

And Kate began to laugh.

She did not laugh at first. For the first six she had been brisk and fast and impatient, dealing with a snap, counting with her finger, saying Schneider the way Mrs Lockyer said Grant. But at about the seventh, when he lost by less, something happened to her face. And at the eighth, when he lost by four points and sat at the table looking at the cards with the expression he had worn at Mr Gamage’s chain, the expression of somebody who has nearly worked out how a thing is made, she put her hand over her mouth.

“Again,” said Frederick.

“Again?”

“I nearly had it.”

Kate looked at him across the table with her hand over her mouth, and her shoulders began to go.

“Gell?” she said.

He did not know what it meant. He had heard her say it six times by then, at the end of every game, when she gathered the cards; a short soft word with a question in it, gell?, which he thought was probably the German for see?, or didn’t I say?, or told you. She said it again now, through her hand, with her shoulders going, and dealt.

He lost the ninth.

He lost the tenth, by two points, and Kate, counting, began to laugh out loud, and could not stop; and Theo, beside him, who had been his partner for the tenth and had been laughing silently into his own cards since about the fifth, put his head down on the table; and even Mr Hartigan, at the end, in the chair with the arms, took his glasses off and wiped them with his handkerchief very slowly, for a long time, without looking at anybody.

Mrs Hartigan, at the sink, was not washing anything. She was standing with her back to the sink and her arms folded and the tea towel over her shoulder, watching.

“Eleven,” said Kate, dealing, with tears running down her face. “Eleven. Last one. If you lose this one it’s eleven.” She dealt the last card. “Nobody’s ever lost eleven. Theo lost nine, when he was seven. Dad lost eight in 1999. Nobody’s lost eleven.”

He picked up his cards.

He looked at them.

He had the Ober of acorns.

He did not tell anybody. He sat there and looked as though he did not have it, which was the easiest thing in the world, it was the face from the library, the face from the balcony, the face he had been doing since he was an hour old on the steps of a hospital in Stockholm; and he played the hand the way he had begun, in the eighth, to see it played, in order, holding back what should be held back, until the moment when the Ober of acorns ought to be played, and then he played it.

It took the trick. It took the next one with it, somehow, because of what it drew out.

He was going to win. He could see it. He sat at the table on the chair with the cushion tied on and counted the points in his head, and they were enough, they were just enough, by one, if Theo played what he ought to play next.

Theo played the pig.

The wrong pig. The sow of leaves, when the sow of bells was the one that was needed; and the trick went to Kate, by a single card, and with it, when she counted, with her finger, slowly, with the tears running down her face, the game. By one point.

“Eleven,” said Kate.

And she slid off her chair.

She slid off it sideways, very slowly, onto the floor of the kitchen, onto the lino, and lay there, on her back, beside the table, with the cards still in her hand and her long brown hair spread out round her head, and laughed. She laughed the way his mother laughed in the car at the red light: the one that went on and got away from her; except that his mother’s had always, in the end, been put away into a handkerchief, and Kate’s was not put away anywhere. It went on. It went up and up and broke and went on again. She lay on the kitchen floor of flat sixteen and laughed until she could not breathe, holding the cards against her chest, kicking one foot against the leg of the table, saying eleven and the Ober and he had the OBER and Theo played the wrong PIG; and on the windowsill Kringle stood up, and arched his back, and looked down at her with an expression of profound disgust, and lay down again facing the other way.

Frederick sat at the table and looked down at her.

He had lost eleven games of a card game he had learned that evening, in front of a whole family, by one point at the end, because the person on his side had played the wrong pig. He had been beaten by a girl of fifteen who was now lying on the floor laughing at him. He had never in his life been laughed at like that, by anybody, to his face, lying down.

He did not know what to do with his face.

So he looked at the cards on the table, at the last trick, with the wrong pig in it, and the Ober of acorns two tricks back that had nearly been enough; and at Kate, on the floor, with tears running into her hair; and he said, to her, quite seriously, because he had been listening to it all evening and he thought he knew now what it meant:

“Gell.”

Kate stopped laughing.

She stopped all at once, on the floor, and turned her head on the lino, and looked up at him, at the table, from underneath, with her eyes streaming.

“What did you say?”

“Gell,” said Frederick. “That’s what you say. At the end. When somebody’s lost.” He considered. “Isn’t it?”

There was a silence in the kitchen.

Then Kate put both hands over her face, on the floor, with the cards still in one of them, and made a sound he had never heard a human being make, high and helpless and hiccupping; and Theo, beside him, slid off his chair too, onto the floor, beside his sister, and the two of them lay on the kitchen floor of flat sixteen side by side and laughed at the ceiling; and Mr Hartigan, at the end of the table, in the chair with the arms, put his glasses back on, and looked at Frederick over them for a long time, and said, as a statement of fact:

“He’s got it, Anneliese.”

“He’s got it,” said Mrs Hartigan, at the sink, with her arms folded. “Ja.” Her voice was not quite steady. “Gell.”

---

“It means right?” said Theo, on the doorstep, at nine. “Sort of. Or isn’t it. Or see. You put it on the end of things. It’s cold, gell? You lost, gell?” He was standing in his socks on the step of number forty, in the light from the hall. “Kate says it all the time. Mum says it when she’s cross. Dad never says it at all.” He considered. “It’s the first word anybody’s ever said in our house that wasn’t German or English. It’s just ours.”

“Is it wrong? To say it?”

“It’s not wrong.” Theo looked up the street at the dark blue car under the streetlamp at the corner, and the man in it with the crossword, and lifted his hand, and the finger came up off the steering wheel. “You said it right. That’s why she’s on the floor.” He looked back at Frederick. “Nobody outside our family’s ever said it at our table. Not even Mrs Thursby.”

Frederick stood on the pavement in his mother’s scarf.

“Is that all right?”

Theo looked at him for about three seconds, in the light from the hall.

“Gell,” he said, and grinned, and went in, and shut the green door with the brick in it behind him; and Frederick stood on the pavement of Dunmore Street in the dark, across from the depot, with the buses coming in through the gates under the lamps, and heard, through the door, up the stairwell, four floors up, faintly, somebody still laughing.

---

“How far did you get?” he said, in the car, at the lights on Canal Street.

“Nineteen, sir,” said Castellanos. “Out of thirty-two.” He started the engine. “I’m getting quicker.”

“Do you know four down? What the river does at the end, in short. Five letters. There might be an E.”

Castellanos looked at the road for the whole of Canal Street.

“No, sir,” he said. “But I’d say you’ll be back on Friday to tell him.”

“Gell,” said Frederick, to the window.

Castellanos looked at him in the mirror. It was the look from the second day, two seconds long. And then something happened at the corner of his mouth, and was not put away at all; and he drove them up Canal Street towards the river and the bridge and the Axis, past the shops, past the stop, in the dark, without saying anything, with it still there.