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The train is on the track�

The huge black clock hand is still at rest but is on the point of making its once-a-minute gesture; that resilient jolt will set a whole world in motion. The clock face will slowly turn away, full of despair, contempt, and boredom, as one by one the iron pillars will start walking past, bearing away the vault of the station like bland atlantes; the platform will begin to move past, carrying off on an unknown journey cigarette butts, used tickets, flecks of sunlight and spittle�

And in the end of the railroad there is a capital city� And a new life waits ahead�
Vladimir Nabokov’s expressionistic style of narration adds to the story the special dynamism�

Meanwhile, shafts and ripples of life passed by, marking the course of every car. Shop windows, bursting with tense radiance, oozed, squirted, and splashed out into the rich blackness.
And at every corner, emblem of ineffable happiness, stood a sleek-hosed harlot whose features there was no time to study: another already beckoned in the distance, and beyond her, a third.

And the author always remains derisively ironic.
Three playing cards: King, Queen, Knave � a man, his wife and her lover � it’s a classical love triangle�
The queen keeps her great expectations�

With a vague resentment, she recalled that her sister had already had at least four or five lovers in succession, and that Willy Wald’s young wife had had two simultaneously. And yet Martha was already past thirty-four. It was high time. In turn, she had been given a husband, a beautiful villa, antique silver, an automobile; the next gift on her list was Franz.

And the knave is full of anticipations too�

And Franz told the pillow, in the half-obscene, half-grandiloquent idiom he affected when talking to himself: ‘Never mind � better betray my career than wait till my brain cracks. Tomorrow, yes, tomorrow, I’ll grab her and tumble her, on the sofa, on the floor, on the table, on broken crockery…�

So they are lovers� And the king stays aside, more resembling a joker than a king now� Then the knave becomes a captive of the queen and the king must be deposed�

Reality returned. And once again everything became oppressive, dark, and relentless.
‘� strangle him,� she muttered. ‘If we could simply strangle him. With our bare hands.�

But playing cards can’t change their denomination so a knave is never capable to turn into a king�