"New Complete Hoyle" section

Usage examples of skat.

We were all happy: Kobyella had kept his pride, Jan Bronski had found all his skat cards including the seven of spades, and Oskar had a new drum which beat against his knee at every step while Jan and a man whom Jan called Victor carried the janitor, weak from loss of blood, downstairs to the storeroom for undeliverable mail.

Then he sits with protruding ear by the radio, or goes to the movies in Viersen, or plays skat with two officers of the Refugee Party, to which he also gives his vote, because he holds that the cemeteries to the left and right of the Vistula estuary, especially the one in Steegen, are richer in ivy than any of the cemeteries between Krefeld and Erkelenz.

Willy Eggers briefs him on the frontier traffic between Gross-Rosseln and Klein-Rosseln, he brings, because the Dulleck brothers in the hills of the upper Weser had nothing to offer him but country air and three-handed skat, a good case of urban and French-occupied gonorrhea.

For a good two weeks, for all three soon run out of topics of conversation, he plays skat with them, after which he turns to further visitations.

For those two were my accusers, they turned their unclouded Bronski eyes on me and, quite oblivious of the time I was having with this brain fever I had acquired while playing skat in the Polish Post Office, expected me to comfort them with a kind word, to reassure them about Jan's last hours, spent between terror and card houses.

He had been perfectly happy in his new world, in the land of milk and honey and believers of Skat Mandu ready to pay him money for a wisp of smoke and a shimmer of light.

Chance, or if you will a chance pliant to our wishes, brought it about that on the evening of the bathing day just described -- we were eating blueberry soup followed by potato pancakes -- Matzerath informed Maria and me, ever so circumspectly, that he had joined a little skat club made up of members of the local Party group, that he would meet his new skat partners, who were all unit leaders, two evenings a week at Springer's restaurant, that Sellke, the new local group leader, would attend from time to time, and that that in itself obliged him to be present, which unfortunately meant leaving us alone.

Certain that this family skat game, briefly interrupted by scrambled eggs, mushrooms, and fried potatoes, would go on far into the night, I scarcely listened to the hands that followed, but tried to find my way back to Sister Inge and her white, sleepy-making uniforms.

He had a hard and not undangerous time of it, for the bulwark of sandbags had been partly swept away, collecting the skat cards that had been scattered all over the room.