About the game · Third edition, unnumbered

The true account of Point 63

Corrected by Dr. V. K⁠—, who is owed this much.

[This document arrives in installments, postmarked from a village that has no post office. We did not solicit it, we do not authorize it, and we print it as it comes, because the alternative — a drawer of unprinted installments, accumulating — was discussed once and will not be discussed again. The account it corrects is here. —Eds.]

First installment

Postmarked 2 April

I went back. The reader of the second edition will know that I advised against April, and the reader of anything at all will know what such advice is worth to the man who gives it. Pechorin kept a journal for the same reason I keep a surveyor's chain: not to learn the truth, but to have somewhere to put it afterward.

The man who walks people in was waiting at the milestone. I had told no one the train. He did not ask my name; he said it, in my grandmother's pronunciation, which I have heard from no living person, and then he walked, and I followed, because the only other direction was the platform, and I have written elsewhere what platforms are for.

[An enclosure is referenced here — "the photograph of the milestone." The envelope contained no photograph. It contained a second envelope, smaller. We have not opened it. —Eds.]

Second installment

Postmarked 9 April

The barracks. W. gave you his paces and I gave you my scorn for them, and I record now, with the chain laid flat and the pegs driven properly, the following measurements. The exterior: as before. The interior: the length of my grandmother's fifth field. I measured that field in the year 19—, at her instruction, with this same chain, and I never published the number, and I never told it to anyone, and the barracks knows it to the link.

I do not ask the reader to believe this. Belief is a currency for the second edition. I ask the reader to note that the fifth field was the one my grandmother did not report, in the country where W.'s fragments say what is not a crop does not exist — and that it was therefore the only field that stayed hers. There was a word in her village for people who kept five fields and reported four. The word was «жив».

A grainy black-and-white photograph of a surveyor's chain laid in a straight line across a snowfield toward a distant treeline, footprints alongside. — Enclosure to the second installment: the chain, laid true. Dr. K— writes that the field is not identified. It is identified. The footprints go out. We have examined the plate at length and are prepared to say only that the footprints go out. —Eds.

Third installment

Postmarked 17 April

The tin was where the fragments said it would be. Not where W. said — where the fragments said. There is a difference, and the difference is the whole of scholarship. I brought, as I promised, an empty tin of my own, and I made the exchange the way one pays a debt: quickly, without counting, in front of no witnesses except the floor.

W.'s tin held thirty-one scraps, or twenty-nine, or thirty-three. Mine, when I opened it on the train south, held one. My inventory does not disagree with itself. I invite the editors to admire this, in their drawer, at their leisure.

«ПЯТАЯ МАСТЬ ИГРАЕТСЯ ОДНА.»

Fragment 1 of 1 — indelible pencil, hand of Dr. V. K—, who was not there when it was written, and who has stopped offering that sentence as a defense.

It is in my handwriting. It is in my grandmother's spelling. Gogol's madman, deep into the diary, dated an entry the 86th of Martober and believed it; I date this installment 17 April and I am no longer certain my calendar is in a position to laugh at his.

Fourth installment

Postmark illegible

Concerning the turnip rules, which are the true rules: I have written them out in full — the fifth suit, the unreported field, the trick that is won by losing it — and I have sent them to the application's developers, twice. They reply that the fifth suit is "out of scope." I have lived a long time and buried better euphemisms than that one. In my grandmother's village, "out of scope" was the whole science of survival: the fifth field was out of scope, the second tin was out of scope, the game itself, played after dark on a bunk with cards made of margins, was out of scope. The State implemented only the first four suits too. You see what kind of company the developers keep.

[Fourteen pages omitted here, concerning turnips. We are not being droll. Fourteen. —Eds.]

The fifth suit is played alone. That is not a variant. That is an instruction, and I am, at last, in a position to follow it. I am staying the winter. The stove works. The commentary to this edition will be written by whoever the man at the milestone walks in next, and I will be patient with their errors, as no one was with mine, and I will keep a separate pencil for the one word, as is the custom of the house.

[The installments stopped in November. The envelopes continue. They are empty; they are postmarked from the village with no post office; and they are no longer addressed to us. They are addressed to the next reader, care of this page, and we would return them to the sender if the sender had left us any way to say which April. —Eds.] [If a fourth edition of this account exists, we have not printed it. —Eds.]