In Red (10 page)

At this point the circus wagon returned to town and once again the great white tent went up on Guards Street. A solitary man, aged and wrinkled, had to hire a joiner to help put up the apparatus. As it transpired from posters stuck up on advertising pillars, he intended to ride a bicycle along a rope stretched high up between the poles of the big top. Crowds hungry for spectacle thronged at the barrier; the more impossible such a feat seemed to them, the more they wished to see it.

“He already did this trick in Berlin, in Warsaw, in Vienna,” word went around. At the box office people snatched tickets from one another's hands. Felek sent a
dorozhka
for the man so he could have him reveal the secret of the trick with the banknotes. But the man just waved his hand dismissively and the
dorozhka
came back empty.

A rope had been strung beneath the roof of the tent; the performer, hoisted along with his bicycle by means of a special
device, rode out onto it to the sounds of a drumroll, fell at once, and died on the spot.

“Mr. Orlando, do you remember that stunt with the money?” shouted Adaś Rączka as he forced his way through the crowd to the man lying there. “Two monkeys in opera hats, can you hear me?” he cried, shaking the other man by the shoulder. But Orlando could no longer hear a thing. He left behind his trunk in the circus wagon, and in the trunk his britches, riding boots, and cane. Underneath were a female acrobat's tights and dress, and at the very bottom two opera hats.

On the day Stefania felt the birth pains, Felek was locked in his study examining one banknote after another under a magnifying glass. Chaos reigned throughout the house, dominated by loud instructions from the doctor. The birth was a difficult one; the servants ran up and down the stairs bearing kettles of hot water, towels, and sheets.

“You have a son,” Stefania's maid called to Felek late at night, knocking on his door without any response.

“What the hell do I need a son for,” Felek muttered to himself. “Just because Slotzki's money is in the bank, does that make it any better? It's still just paper and ink, nothing more!”

And he flung sheaves of counterfeit notes against the wall, making the wrappers tear. His magnifying glass thrust in his pocket, he waded up to his knees among the hundred-crown bills littering the floor, rustling misleadingly underfoot, tumbling from opened drawers.

He remained stubbornly silent for many days, till the morning mail brought a long-awaited dull brown official envelope.

“It's here! The license is here!” cried Adaś Rączka, taking the stairs three at a time.

The very next day Felek opened the first of his pawnshops. They operated under the aegis of Loom & Son. Large signboards, visible from far off, called to all those in pressing need of cash, including the sailors in their striped shirts.

Felek gradually got rid of the cash and came into possession of ivory-topped canes, porcelain chamber pots, copper saucepans, cut-glass decanters, sugar tongs, silver combs, and down cushions. Also rainbow-colored shells from the southern seas, shark-tooth necklaces, Chinese opium pipes. Those who left their possessions at Felek Chmura's pawnshops never came back for them. Some of these people, relieved of their cash also by the following day, sailed away never to return; others waited interminably for a change of fate, which never came. Felek weighed the copper saucepan in his hands, tapped the tongs against the decanter, put the shell to his ear to hear the sounds of the southern seas. The authenticity of the items was indisputable but useless. They lay heaped in warehouses, gathering mortal dust.

“Take all this junk,” he said to Adaś. “It's yours.”

He could no longer stand the sight of his enterprises, which were dull as dishwater, unwieldy as a ball and chain. He spat on them, turned his back on them, and spent hours staring from his window at the waves on the sea.

Till in the end, under the auspices of Loom & Son, he started buying up decrepit old sailing ships. He offered excellent prices and paid cash. In portside inns with traces of bloody altercations on their walls, his people slipped suitcases filled with cash to his contracting parties under rickety tables. In this way he converted fake money into dilapidated ships doomed to sink at the first opportunity. Felek rubbed his hands, confident that at the next stage of the game he would finally be able to get some real money from the world in return for his floating coffins.

In the meantime Chmura's clerks, clean-shaven and fragrant with lavender, received clients in the bureau on Salt Street, behind a glass door upon which the golden letters of the inscription “Overseas Shipping” formed an elegant arc above the name Loom & Son.

“I'd like a word with Mr. Loom, it's a confidential matter,” a patron would whisper on his first visit to the office.

“I'm sorry, but Mr. Loom never sees visitors,” the polite and matter-of-fact clerk would reply. He was fully authorized to enter into contracts with senders of shipments. The leaky ships dispatched over the seas and oceans by the company of Loom & Son sailed across the waves, their holds filled with invisible goods. The crews were assembled from sailors who never sobered up. For only drunken men were willing to trust to an uncertain fate and sail under captains whose names were notorious from long-ago shipwrecks. Anyone who had run aground on a coral reef or collided with an iceberg ought to have gone
to the bottom along with his crew. For that reason, when the dishonored survivors appeared in Stitchings, no navy officer would shake their hand, with the exception of the stray ship's pilots that the company of Loom & Son had had released from prisons, mental institutions, and homes for syphilitics.

Felek Chmura's sailing ships did what they were supposed to: they settled on the ocean bed. Their decks became overgrown with sea anemones and urchins. The bulging eyes of an octopus peered from the porthole of the bridge, seaweed sprouted in the hold. But Loom & Son lost its court cases against the insurance companies, just as in the prophetic dream Felek Chmura had had on the sofa in the pink parlor. The insurance companies had entered into secret agreements with his clients. Devastating verdicts came down one after another as the loathsome insurers burdened Loom & Son with the entire cost of damages owed to the owners of the invisible goods. The avalanche swallowed up successive stores, coal yards, apartment buildings, all of which were successively put up for auction. He made the last payments with unprotected promissory notes.

Yet even then he did not doubt his lucky star.

“A little while longer and the right card will turn up,” he would say to Adaś Rączka. “You'll see, it always does.”

Stefania's migraines were becoming more and more wearing. In addition her son was not doing well, prey to an unidentified illness. He did not sleep nights, but tossed and turned in his bed.

“Close your eyes,” Stefania would say, laying a hand on his forehead. He would close them, but then he would be immersed in an infinity of red.

“Help!” he would scream terrifyingly, like a drowning passenger.

The doctor recalled a similar, equally hopeless case of insomnia from his long years of practice.

“Heredity?” wondered Stefania, recalling the officer's chest, the handkerchiefs with the intricate monogram, the fondness for Turkish tobacco, and that lovely, mad gaze. She laughed bitterly. “Oh well! Felek never did fully understand the difference between what's one's own and what belongs to someone else.”

The doctor recommended trips to the south.

“Never get married,” Felek Chmura advised Adaś, grimacing as if he'd just swallowed absinthe. “A home is a yoke around your neck, a heap of troubles, nothing more.”

In fact, his home was the least of the many troubles besetting him. He was carrying an excessive burden, one that made the ground give way under his feet – wherever he stepped, the earth collapsed beneath him.

“Goddam foundations,” he fulminated, glaring over at his warehouses from the window of the countinghouse. And he would squeeze his eyes shut with all his strength. But it did no good. With eyes closed he could see even more clearly the cracks in the brick walls, unmistakable signs drawn by the inimical
hand of fate, an ominous portent of a blow from which there was no escape. The architectural expert he consulted sketched a cross section of the footing as they sat locked in his study.

“It's too warm,” he explained.

The foundations had once rested against a stratum of frozen groundwater. Felek expected absolute discretion. He destroyed the drawings without showing them to another soul, crumpling them into the stove to prevent them from falling into the wrong hands. Yet his workers quit one after another. Adaś Rączka learned the truth from Max Fiff by chance as they were scuffling one evening behind the factory, shouting “flunky!” at one another.

“You're both losers, you and that boss of yours!” grunted Max as he sat astride Adaś's belly, blood dripping from his nose onto the other man's overcoat. “The whole town's laughing at you because you built on ice!”

Adaś smashed Max in the mouth.

“Take back what you said.”

Max snarled and bit. A piece of ear came off in his teeth. The pain sent Adaś into a rage. He grabbed Max by the throat till his eyes almost popped out; Max turned blue and, coughing blood, took it all back.

Yet Felek Chmura's warehouses collapsed with a crash anyway one night. When the sun came up the next morning they were gone without a trace. Onlookers couldn't stop staring at the astonishing empty space.

“They used to be here,” they shouted, tracing the remembered outlines in the air with their fingers. “They were here and now they're gone; it's like in the circus.”

The telegram from Hamburg, in which the notary gave word that complaints had been brought regarding the promissory notes, reached Felek in the pink parlor. He was just lighting a cigarette, but then he put the lit end in his mouth and cursed prodigiously.

“What's this you've brought me, you damn fool?” he shouted at Adaś.

Slotzki picked the crumpled telegram from the floor with his blotchy hand and began reading it aloud, squinting through his lashless eyelids. Felek snatched the paper from him. He elbowed the girls aside and staggered toward the door. Madame took him by the sleeve. Wouldn't he stay for supper?

“Let me go, you painted ape!” He pushed her away unceremoniously and just as he had stood there, he tottered down the stairs.

“Drunk as a skunk,” declared Slotzki, drawing back the curtain as Felek tripped on the curb.

“Mr. Chmura, don't forget your overcoat, your cap!” Adaś Rączka called after him. Windows opened and closed. Felek Chmura halted for a moment and took a deep breath. It was chilly. In the meantime the heavy door had already slammed shut. He rang and knocked in vain.

“Open up, you won't regret it,” Felek called to the watchman
through the locked door. “I'll give you fifty thousand just for turning the key.”

But the door remained closed, and Adaś had disappeared. Felek Chmura sat down on the sidewalk and started crying. A wad of banknotes fell from his hand. The wind snatched them up and for a moment they fluttered above the street. One got stuck on the roof tiles, another sank into a puddle.

The next day Chmura did not get out of bed. In the kitchen, from early morning they made infusions of linden flowers, a homeopathic remedy the doctor had prescribed for his ailment. He would drink a cup and drift into sleep. He slept like this the whole day, quite unaware that his wife, Stefania, was packing her bags. At lunchtime, when he was in his deepest slumber, an English tea planter appeared at his house with an Indian servant in a white turban. Stefania's cases already stood in the hallway. As the Indian carried them down the steps, Stefania slipped quietly into Felek's bedroom and put her diamond ring in its velvet-lined box on the bedside table. Adaś Rączka ran after them into the street, but all he could see was the hood of the departing
dorozhka
. He chased it all the way to the port. There, gasping for breath, for a moment he watched from a distance as the English planter offered Stefania his arm. When they merged into the throng, Adaś spat and turned on his heel. Fearfully exhausted, he dragged himself along one step at a time, his hand in his pocket clutching the box with the ring.

Chmura was sick for a long time; the fever did not abate
for a moment. He couldn't stop shaking from cold, though the stoves were heated day and night. He ordered the room to be kept dark. He would not let anyone light a lamp; the door had to be cracked ajar to let in a little light from the hall. But when someone opened it too wide, the glare reflected off the edges of the furniture and Chmura would raise an outcry, accusing the servants of deliberately tormenting him by shining a light in his eyes. His eyelids were permanently lowered, and for this reason he didn't notice the cigarettes missing from the box or the diminishing volume of liqueur in the decanter. He spent hours staring at the striped pattern of the wallpaper; meanwhile furniture – chairs, armchairs, sofas – was being removed from the drawing room. The bailiff pulled out the workings of the gold clock in order to weigh it; Felek was told about this by the servants as the doctor was cupping him.

“What did you all expect?” he mumbled to himself. He couldn't even move. The cups on his back clinked against one another.

The sewing shops had to be closed and the seamstresses let go from one day to the next without any severance pay. A crowd of women in calico headscarves came from the locked gates to outside Neumann's building. Their lamentations could be heard on the second floor through closed windows and lowered shades.

“Move along there, move along,” the policemen shouted. “How are there suddenly so many of you?”