A Game of Cards

I could not speak Russian very well. Fyodor Pavlovich had been almost patient with me at the beginning, but I noticed as time went on and he began to empty his flask of vodka he was becoming more than a little tired of my mistakes, my tangled grammar and embarrassing pronunciations. I tried to avoid speaking and kept my eyes lowered, feeling a blush spread hotly across my face.

I was not an expert on cards, either, and I had not realised what a quick learner Fyodor was when it came to card playing. He had suggested a game of durak and I had denied, knowing I had no chance at all at that unfamiliar game, and instead had offered to teach him Texas Hold’em, despite my inexperience. We had had three pilot rounds over two hours, and he had won the last two games. Slim wins, but still ... I would have to rely on the amount of alchohol he was drinking, I thought uneasily.

Texas Hold’em is a relatively uncomplicated game, but keeping a card up one’s sleeve is more difficult than one might suppose. The first time Fyodor had tipped his head back to drink, I had clumsily pushed an ace up my sleeve with a horrible feeling of guilt that settled in the pit of my stomach and remained there uncomfortably . But thank goodness for the Russian winter and long coat sleeves!

I felt like gulping down the vodka that sat temptingly beside me in the little flask, myself, but Fyodor was already lifting it and pouring out the last of it into his own glass, his hand a little unsteady. I ought never to have accepted the offer to play cards ... as if I knew anything about them, really. My palms were warm and damp, my knees pressed together to calm myself. Perhaps I shouldn’t have placed such a high sum on the table. A few rubles would have been alright, for the fun of it, but if my father could have seen me gambling away half my inheritance he would have turned in his grave. What kind of fool confidence had siezed me? Whatever it was, it had left me the moment he agreed to play.

I felt Fyodor’s eyes on me. Bleary and unfocused as they were, they frightened me half out of my wits. I couldn’t play with him staring at me that way ... he was turning me into a nervous wreck. I jumped when Smerdyakov came in and placed a bowl of hot soup by my elbow, feeling his presence uncomfortably near; it was as though he were peering right over my shoulder every minute, even when he had gone to stand by the door. I saw him looking at me whenever I turned around, and Fyodor did not ask him to leave.

The game dragged on slowly, frequently interrupted by comments from Fyodor or stories and jokes that I pulled from the back of my mind and tried to translate to Russian, in an miserable attempt to stall the inevitable. I began to wonder how it was that I found myself seated in Fyodor Pavlovich’s kitchen, playing at a game of cards, seeing Smerdyakov grinning disgustingly by the door and scalding my tongue on steaming soup. Drat my sister and her ridiculous notions! Hadn’t she said a few hours before I went to bed that when you whisper something into someone’s ear as they sleep, they dream about it? Of course. She knew that I was in the middle of reading The Brothers Karamazov, that I had read Crime and Punishment.

Perhaps, I began to think in a panic, Perhaps Rodion Romanovich will come in through the door any moment with a ...

“Look!” shrieked Smerdyakov excitedly from the doorway, pointing at the floor below my chair. “An ace slipped out of her coat sleeve!”

“What?” mumbled Fyodor, looking up. “Cheating?” He dropped his cards on the table and tried to stand up, swaying with the effect of the vodka. I couldn’t run out the door with Smerdyakov blocking it. I wanted to stand up and tell him he was a liar, but there was no use. If only he would come towards me, I would have a slim chance of running around him and flying out the door before he could put his hands on me. But it was just a dream. A dream. I would wake up any moment now, in my own bed. I was not a cheat, I never played cards, I didn’t even know what the words Texas Hold’em meant, and I most certainly was not gambling away half of all the money I owned in the world.

* * * * *

I woke up in the cellar, a bruise on my forehead. I think I must have fallen when I attempted to swerve to the side and make a dash for the door and hit my head somehow. I think Smerdyakov must have carried me into the cellar and locked the door, and I think I will be here for a very long time.

I can only hope Fyodor Dostoyevsky bothered to write a happy ending for me.