Cards

The cards appear most prominently during the protagonist's stay at the lodging house in Vaterland, a period of deepening poverty and creative paralysis. The landlord, a man who "sat, day after day, and played cards with anybody who happened to come in—played for nothing, only just to kill time, and have something in hand," uses the game as a means of filling empty hours, never moving "except as much as his lazy limbs felt inclined" while his wife bustled about the house. This card playing is not a pastime but a symptom of the household's inertia; the landlord's only other activity is to move "just as much as his lazy limbs felt inclined," and he never does anything else. The game itself is cent et un, a simple, repetitive pursuit that requires no skill or engagement, perfectly suited to a man who has surrendered to a life of minimal effort. The cards become a fixture of the common room, where the protagonist is forced to sleep on the floor after losing his private room to a paying sailor. The sound of the cards being shuffled and slapped on the table, the muttered scores, and the occasional laughter of the players form the constant background noise against which the protagonist tries and fails to write his allegory about a bookshop fire. The cards are also a source of conflict. When the old, paralyzed grandfather, tormented by the children, spits at one of his tormentors, the landlord "flung the cards on the table at which he sat, and sprang over towards the bed," his anger erupting not from concern for the old man but from the disruption of his game. Later, when the landlady's tirade against the protagonist escalates, one of the card players stands up and says, "Well, if it is me you want to get quit of, ma'am, there will be nothing in the way as far as I am concerned," and the other players rise as well, the card game dissolving into the general chaos. The cards thus serve as a symbol of the stagnant, oppressive environment from which the protagonist can find no escape, a world where time is killed rather than lived, and where even the most trivial activity can become a source of violent confrontation. They are the opposite of the creative inspiration he desperately seeks; where he needs a single spark to complete his work, the cards offer only endless, meaningless repetition. The protagonist's own relationship with cards is nonexistent—he never joins the game, never touches a card, and remains an outsider to this central ritual of the household. This exclusion underscores his alienation, his inability to participate in the simple, mindless sociability that might offer a temporary respite from his hunger and despair. The cards, in their ceaseless, pointless motion, become a metonym for the grinding, purposeless existence that poverty has forced upon him, a life where even the most basic forms of human connection have been reduced to a game played for nothing.