Sixty-One

by The Skat Master, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

---

Hilde Wunderlich kept the list in a school exercise book with a cat on the cover, because the proper Skat pads from the stationer's cost two euros forty now and the cat book had cost sixty cents in 2019 and was not yet full. She ruled the columns herself. Three names across the top, and on Thursdays for eleven years the names had been Wunderlich, Kaltofen, Pohle.

Tonight the middle name was crossed out. Uwe Kaltofen was in the Klinikum with a new hip. Written above it, in Hilde's upright post-office capitals, was JANINE.

"You know the rules," Hilde said. It was not a question. She was shuffling, and the cards went through her hands with a sound like a bird settling.

"I played on my phone on the train," said Janine. "Four hours from Hamburg. I won most of them."

Ernst Pohle said nothing. He had his beer, a Köstritzer at three euros ten, and he had his reading glasses on their cord, and he had the habit, which his daughter had not seen for seventeen years, of laying his left hand flat on the table while the cards were dealt, as if he were holding the table down.

Outside, the November dark had come at half past four. The radiator under the window of the back room knocked twice and was quiet.

---

Three, the Skat, four, three. Ten cards each and two face down in the middle. Ernst picked his up and did not sort them. He never sorted until he had counted, and he counted without moving his lips: the Old One, the Jack of Clubs, at the top of everything, and below it nothing in sequence. The Ace of Hearts, eleven. The Ten of Hearts, ten. A King, four. A thin hand around one very fat card.

Ernst, in middlehand, passed at once, because a man holding the Old One and nothing behind it holds a card that wins one trick and is otherwise only a Jack.

Hilde, who had dealt, bid against Janine. "Eighteen."

"Yes," said Janine.

"Twenty."

"Yes."

"Twenty-two. Twenty-three. Twenty-four."

"Yes. Yes. Yes."

Hilde looked at her cards and then at Janine over the top of them. "Twenty-seven."

"Yes."

"Thirty."

"Yes," said Janine, a little louder, and Hilde passed.

Janine reached for the two cards in the middle with the confidence of somebody who has been told by an app, many times, that she is doing well.

Ernst watched her face as she turned the Skat over. He already knew one thing it would not hold. She was holding the Jack of Spades; he could see it by the way she kept her right-hand card pressed against the others, the way her mother used to. Without the Jack of Clubs she was playing without one. Clubs without one is twelve times two. Twenty-four. She had held on to thirty in the hope that the Old One was lying face down in the middle, which would have made her with two, which is thirty-six.

The Old One was in Ernst's hand. It had been there since the deal.

She discarded two cards, face down, quickly. "Clubs," she said.

She played well, in the way that people play well who have been rewarded for taking tricks. She led trumps. She cleared Hilde's Jack of Diamonds. She took the third trick, the fourth, the fifth. Ernst put the Old One on her Jack of Spades in the sixth trick and took it, and with it Hilde slid across the Ace of Spades, eleven points, and the King, four. Janine took the seventh trick, and the eighth, and the ninth, and laid the tenth down with a little flourish, and turned to her father with an expression he remembered from a school report in 2005.

"Seven tricks," she said.

"Count," said Ernst.

"I took seven out of ten."

"Count."

Hilde had already turned the opponents' tricks face up and was counting them in pairs, very fast, the way she had once counted coin. "Sixty-six," she said. "So you have fifty-four. Fifty-four with the Skat." She wrote in the cat book. "And you were overbid anyway. Clubs without one is twenty-four. To reach thirty I have to go up to thirty-six. Lost games count double. Minus seventy-two." She drew a short firm line under it.

Janine looked at the seven little stacks in front of her. Sevens. Eights. A Nine. A Queen worth three, a King worth four. Seven tricks, and most of the points had gone into the other three.

"The phone didn't—" she said, and stopped.

"The phone counts for you," said Ernst. "So you never learn that it is counting."

---

In the morning she had gone round to the flat with a roll of bin bags and a roll of tape and a list. The flat had to be cleared by the fifteenth of December. The place at the Sozialwerk residence was a single room with a kitchenette, a window onto a car park, and a wardrobe one metre twenty wide. She had measured the wardrobe on her phone from the photograph they had sent her.

She had made three piles: keep, Hamburg, and away. Away had been easy at first. Thirty years of the Osterländer Volkszeitung folded in the hall cupboard. A kitchen clock that had stopped at a quarter to two. Her mother's sewing box, which she moved, after a minute, to Hamburg.

In the bedroom wardrobe, behind the winter coat, rolled in brown paper and tied with string, she had found a sheet of thin card nearly a metre long. When she unrolled it on the bed it was a whole pack, uncut: thirty-two cards printed in four rows of eight, the Jacks and Queens and Kings in their red and blue, the Aces with their small scenes in the corners, the margins marked with registration crosses and a pencilled date, 14.3.2003, and two letters, E.P.

His last shift at the card factory. Thirty-eight years. He had not told her about it at the time. She had been fifteen and had not asked.

She had rolled it up again and put it on away, because it would not fit into a wardrobe one metre twenty wide, and because it was a pack of cards that nobody could play with.

When she came back from the bins at noon the roll was standing in the corner beside the keep pile. Not on it. Beside it. Her father was in the kitchen making coffee, with his back to her, in his slippers. Neither of them said anything about it, and at half past six they had walked down to the Gaststätte together, and he had kept to her pace on the steep part and she had pretended not to notice.

---

The evening went on. Hilde won a Hearts hand, cleanly. Ernst lost a Null, which happens; a Null is a game of having nothing, and sometimes one has slightly too much. The list grew down the page in three columns. The landlord brought a second Köstritzer and a plate of Fettbemmen with onions nobody had ordered and nobody sent back.

Janine began to count.

She did it badly at first, holding her cards close to her chest and moving her thumb along them, and once, Ernst noticed, under the table on her fingers. Ace eleven, Ten ten, King four, Queen three, Jack two. Then the trumps, then where the trumps would end. In the hand before ten o'clock Hilde said, "Twenty-two?" and Janine looked at her cards for a long time, longer than is polite, and then said, "Pass," and laid the cards face down. When the hand was played, Ernst saw what she had been holding: Hearts without one. Twenty. She had been exactly right to stop.

He did not say anything. He drank some beer.

At a quarter past ten Hilde said, "Last round," as she said every Thursday at a quarter past ten, and dealt.

Ernst picked up his cards and laid his left hand flat on the table and counted.

The Old One. The Jack of Spades. With two. The Ace, the King and the Nine of Clubs. The Ten of Hearts. The Ten of Spades. Two small Hearts and the Eight of Diamonds, nothing at all.

A Grand, perhaps, with only the Jacks as trumps. Twenty-four times three. Seventy-two. But two unguarded Tens are two Tens waiting to be taken by somebody else's Ace.

Janine, in forehand, passed at twenty-two, quickly this time. Hilde bid him to thirty-six and passed.

He picked up the Skat. The Jack of Diamonds, and the Ace of Hearts.

He sat still for some time. Then he took the Ten of Hearts and the Ten of Spades and laid them face down in the middle where the Skat had been. Twenty points, put away before the first card was played, and belonging to him at the end whatever happened at the table.

"Grand," he said.

It was not an easy Grand. Hilde's Jack of Hearts fell under the Old One in the first trick, as it had to. But she was sitting behind his Clubs with the Ten. She kept it back under his Ace, and when he led the King she took it, which was correct, and then Janine did something Ernst had not taught her. On Hilde's next winning trick, when her own Ace of Spades was not needed to win it, she laid it down anyway, eleven points thrown onto her partner's trick to bank them on the right side of the table. Schmieren, the Altenburgers call it. Greasing. She did not look at him while she did it.

The opponents took four tricks. Ernst took six. When the last card was down Hilde turned the opponents' stacks face up and counted them in pairs, slowly this time, and Janine counted with her, aloud, in a low voice, the way a child does.

"Fifty-nine," said Janine.

Ernst turned his six tricks over and did not count them. He turned over the Skat instead: the Ten of Hearts and the Ten of Spades, side by side on the green cloth.

"Sixty-one," said Hilde. She wrote it in the cat book. "Grand with two. Seventy-two." She drew a line.

It was the smallest margin there is.

---

They walked back up through the town at eleven. It was cold enough for their breath to show under the streetlights, and the cobbles were wet. On the little square below the castle the Skat fountain stood in the dark, the four bronze Jacks wrestling on top of it as they had wrestled since 1903, the Old One forever on top. The water had been turned off for the winter. Below, on the stone of the basin, were the two bronze pig heads that the town touches for luck, the snouts rubbed bright by more than a century of hands.

Ernst did not believe in luck. He believed in counting what you hold before you say a number out loud.

He stopped at the fountain all the same, took off his glove, and laid his bare hand flat on the cold snout of the nearer pig, the way he laid it on the table during the deal, and held it there.

Janine waited for him. She was carrying the long brown roll under her arm. She had brought it from the flat at half past six, and had kept it on the bench beside her all evening, where nobody could knock beer onto it.

---

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, Kalendīs Octōbribus (1 October 2026), ā Magistrō Skatī per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

The Skat Master, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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