King, Queen, Knave—“the passage from a hideous hell through the purgatory of the corridors and intervestibular clatter into a little abode of bliss”

The first scenes of King, Queen, Knave take place on the train as Franz Bubendorf moves from his hometown to Berlin. A great coincidence happens on this train, which certainly influences the whole course of events in the novel. Franz, deciding on impulse to travel second-class for the first time ever, ends up in a car “occupied by only two people—a handsome bright-eyed lady and a middle-aged man with a clipped tawny mustache.”

Franz doesn’t really have the stomach for many other human beings, and unlike the filthy riffraff that so disgusted him in third-class, the couple is “charming.” They begin a conversation. The man is thirsty; the woman begins talking about “such a silly thing to do,” something that’s “[his] own fault.” The narrator begins to explain: the man knows his wife is annoyed because of a visit he had with his cousin in the town. She needed “advice”; the man offered to give her son a job. “And that was what his wife could not forgive him. She called it ‘swamping the business with poor relations’; but when you come down to it, how can one poor relation swamp anything?”

The poor relation, of course, is Franz. We already know that he is heading to Berlin to get a job with his uncle, and the three of them will share a car all the way, none the wiser. When he arrives at his uncle’s doorstep the next day, all is revealed.

It’s a very Nabokovian beginning, to my mind. There’s the slowish start and the way Franz springs fully formed from the first page, with a complete set of neuroses laid out within a few paragraphs. The immediate focus is on his inner life and the kinds of thoughts he thinks (then right on to those of his uncle, Dreyer, and Martha, his wife). There’s the well described setting with plenty of specific details that all, of course, connect somehow (Dreyer is thirsty because he ate some strawberries Franz was eying before they ran into each other). Compare to Mary. There, he plunged us into the broken-elevator conversation between Ganin and Alfyarov, where we begin quite quickly to understand what kind of person each is. Then we have the layout of the pension, which creates the whole world of Russia-in-Berlin like *that*.

But who knew that we’d mostly abandon the pension and end up in the idyllic Russian countryside for the emotional high points of that novel? Or, here, that Franz’s innate disgust for nearly everyone would turn to lust for his aunt? Or that her frigidness and primness about men would lead her to vilify her husband (who is, by the way, adorable) while she falls for her creepy, weird, and pretty gross nephew who only changes his undershirt twice a week?