The History of History

EIGHTEEN • They Played Hearts


Margaret played for the ghost of Regina Strauss, and her passion welled higher and higher. It kept spouting until finally it welled over and spilled the cup.

In the morning she had heard Regina’s message, retten Sie uns, and in the afternoon the excess began. Margaret decided to go out and buy a deck of cards.

Oh, she would buy a deck of cards. Under the right conditions, going out to buy a deck of cards can be the most exciting journey of your life, assuming you think the cards will bring you communication with a ghost. And in fact, the entire walk to the shop sent quivers down her back: the close, tight streets, dodging what dogs have done, the smell of bakeries and the cool discs of faces bobbing in stride above dark clothing draped over swinging, mortal forms, the angles raying out from the vanishing points of sentinel avenues—those angles cut sharp as scissors, and all of it was promising, and all of it was fine. Margaret went down Akazienstrasse and stopped at a tobacco shop that also sold leather goods; there was a counter made of dark oak that smelled of shoe polish and another bright counter for the sale of lottery tickets and another place for the sale of cigars.

When she got home, Margaret opened the cellophane wrapper at the kitchen table. The table stood at the end of her long, narrow kitchen under a single window, and the cold light fell on the table like a spotlight.

Margaret challenged Regina Strauss, the mother of the three dead girls, she challenged her to a game of Hearts. She was not quite insane—it was not the fever, for it cannot be said she did not know this was an absurdity: trying to make a ghost play cards with her in the kitchen. But she saw herself a scientist conducting a perhaps overly ambitious experiment that was nevertheless not unwarranted by certain suggestive trends in the data. She knew the woman might be a matter of her mind, she knew it. But now she also thought she had been given a glimpse of where the ghost resided—whether physically or psychically, she chose not to try to decide.

Here is what she thought: the woman-as-ghost was present in patterning. It had first occurred to her after seeing the sky the night before, when she looked up and saw the grid of quasicrystals carved in the heavens. The pattern in the sky was a sign of the ghost’s recent visit—or at the very least, a sign that Margaret’s mind was receptive to such a wonderful illusion. When the royal standards fly over the castle, the monarch is at home. Now, if Margaret wanted to communicate with Regina, all she had to do was concentrate on quasicrystal grids, or on photographs of the ceilings of medieval mosques, or on the gilt edges of fine china where the curlicues go click-clack; the fugues of Bach in which the tonic subject loops and repeats. There was Regina, there was the very idea of a Regina, of a good visitor from the past who infiltrates the present and makes a beating counterpoint there, delivers meaning there, by way of her intricate regularity of personality. Margaret grew sure of this, and various things began to dance and tighten in her mind. The iron grates of balconies, the engraving on the lid of a silver pocket watch, the handles of rococo forks and spoons, the scabrous plaster molding around the upper edge of her bedroom, and now the playing cards and their promise of a game—it all opened up before her, conduits to a better life.

These cards. First there was the fact of their flip-side pattern—a circular snowflake in the center seemed to be exploding with mathematics before Margaret’s eyes. Surrounding it were stylized interlocking oak leaves. In both of these, Margaret saw the soul of Regina Strauss sleeping, promising enlightenment, Enlightenment.

And then once she had shuffled and cut the deck, she turned it over and it happened: she found to her joy she had bought a French deck. The queens bore names in Gothic letters: Judith, Argine, Pallas, Rachel. Margaret stared at their brocade robes. The queens had been wearing the same robes for over six hundred years—was there anything more constant in culture? Even religious rites are not so stable as playing cards. Margaret’s eyes began to swim.

She dealt out the entire deck between herself and Regina.


Easily one might say it was senseless to play Hearts with only two players—it meant you always knew what your opponent could and would do—if your opponent had any sense. But that was just the idea. Margaret wanted to play a game of cards with Regina precisely in order to allow the ghost an opportunity to make sense. To give her an opportunity to be rational.

This is how Margaret began to be greedy in her good fortune: she began, despite all intelligent ideas, to suspect that she was one of the lucky ones, one of the chosen who have been allowed contact with the Divine, and now she could not stop herself from testing it, from testing the divine idea, like a deliriously happy yet previously insecure lover demanding ever more extreme displays of romance. Margaret felt nervously triumphant, sure the ghost would jump at this chance, but that did not mean she was not teetering precariously.


Margaret went over what she knew. It happens that in the game of Hearts, the card to be avoided at all costs is the Queen of Spades. It happens that according to Diderot’s encyclopedia, the four queens in the deck—Rachel, Judith, Pallas, and Argine (anagram of Regina!)—symbolize the four means of ruling: by beauty, by piety, by wisdom, and by right of birth. It happens that the four suits are a matter of caste: hearts of the clergy, diamonds of the merchants, clubs of the soldiery, and spades of the serfs. It happens that the Queen of Spades is called Pallas, the queen who rules by wisdom. It happens that the four kings, David, Alexander, Caesar, and Charlemagne, are emblems of the four great monarchies: Jewish, Greek, Roman, and German. It happens that the husband of the Queen of Spades, that is, the King of Spades (or is he her husband?) is David, king of the Jews. It happens that the Queen of Spades is sometimes called the Black Maria. It happens that Black Marias were the vehicles used to take away Stalin’s victims during the purges. It happens that the Queen of Spades holds a tulip in her hand, a crimson flower, with its bell-like blossom inclining heavily toward her Roman nose. It happens that the Queen of Spades is the only one-eyed queen.

Margaret took her half deck in her hand, and for her Regina, she put the other half in a neat pile across from her. The chair there was a black folding chair. As soon as she put the cards down in front of it, this chair seemed to grow quieter and appeared to be weighed down, with an expression on its chair-face of an interested though uncomprehending dog. Margaret laughed at herself for thinking this, but she was not unserious.

She held her twenty-six cards in her hand. She looked—among them she did not find the Queen of Spades. So Regina must have the Queen. She looked further through her own cards. She did not find the two of clubs either.

So she wrote in large letters on a slip of paper:

Two of clubs begins the game.



She pushed the paper to the middle of the table, put her own cards in the inner pocket of her jacket, and went out of the room, quivering. She was not so far gone that she did not think: What am I doing? Do I really think it is possible to play a hand of cards with Regina Strauss?

Did she?

Her belief in Regina’s miraculous power to intervene in her life was strong, but it was not invincible; no, let us not say that it was a perfect faith. It had only taken on a certain hue: her need for the woman was so great that she was going to press her into being, ram her mind to its limits and will a miracle of intervention out of—if necessary—nothing.


It need not be described how, the next morning, Margaret woke up, and how the game of Hearts flew back into her mind, how she crept down the hall toward the kitchen full of expectancy, how she did not enter the kitchen feet-first, but peeked around the corner, leading with her head. There she saw: Regina’s half deck still in its place on the edge of the kitchen table, in front of the black metal folding chair. In the middle of the table, however—could it be? A card. Margaret went closer. A card had been played.

The two of clubs.