In Red (15 page)

“Maybe it already is wartime,” the doctor said to the hotel proprietor, “it's just that we don't know it yet.”

Those sick with typhoid lingered for the longest time, unable to decide whether to live or die.

“Get better again? So we can just go back to wearing rags and tatters?” they would say, laughing harshly at the doctor behind his back as he ran breathless among the moldering floors of the back buildings. But in the final hour their bad blood boiled: they couldn't bring themselves to abandon even those rags when they thought about how much they'd cost at the used clothing store. Freed from the hope that had sustained their respect for boundaries, those who had died of typhoid thumbed their noses at mourning black and, making roll-up cigarettes from scraps of newspaper, lay idly on their wretched shakedowns while their family went in search of a loan to pay for the funeral. Then, when they realized no one could stop them from doing anything, they started getting up, going out to the jakes in the courtyard, visiting the pub on the corner.

Rumors spread about a tailor with a bevy of children who after he died, just as during his life, spent his days and nights at his work. About a young mother who refused to lie down in
her casket because she was busy rocking her baby. About an only child who for the sake of peace and quiet was allowed to have her fill of playing with her new doll. One jealous husband was said to have wanted to prevent his wife from remarrying; a tightfisted wife would examine the household finances every day after her death, criticizing endlessly. By all accounts the victims of typhoid by now included even universally respected industrialists, owners of large department stores, and majority shareholders in insurance companies.

“These are huge sums of money,” the town hall officials would whisper. “In essence they're mortmain property that belongs to the municipality, if it weren't for all this refusing to be buried, this hole-and-corner life, which ought to be punished with the full force of the law.”

“The dead are running the show,” the habitués of Corelli's café said. “They're affecting exchange rates, interest rates, government commissions.”

And over their coffee cups they would peer at one another through gold-rimmed spectacles. In the meantime, in the crowded tavern a man had jumped up onto a chair and was screaming hoarsely:

“We can't be made fools of so easily! Under the ground is where they belong!”

Gasping for breath, he shouted the name of old Strobbel as if he were calling for help, using all his strength to keep himself on the surface of churning waves. Strobbel, who had passed away
not long before, struck by a petard during a street disturbance, was at rest in his coffin, ostentatious in immaculate black and white, with a stern, contemptuous expression on his face. It was said he didn't even need to die, that the injuries were not life-threatening. But Strobbel had asked no one's opinion and as usual had had no time for pointless delays: he was immediately placed upon a catafalque
comme il faut
, a funerary candle at his head. All the property that remained to him – the Chinese vases from his famous private collection – he left to the town. Once his eyes were closed he did not deign to open them again; he was buried without further ado in the Strobbels' porcelain-faced family tomb. The funeral was attended by large numbers of grammar school boys, who had sewn prewar military buttons bearing a crowned lion onto their uniforms, pricking their fingers in the process. These buttons served to mark the opponents of splitting hairs, the enemies of all that was obscure. The masters at the grammar school took a ruler and rapped the knuckles of boys who wore them, but anyone who didn't could get a sock in the jaw in a dark corner, after which they would be spitting teeth. In a short while the fashion for uhlan buttons spread beyond the walls of the grammar school. They appeared on the overcoats of young men with metal-tipped walking canes who longed for a return to the order of prewar times and were resolved to use any means necessary when it came to curbing the insolence of the dead.

“Are they not right?” Stanisław would say to Adela, puffing
on a cigarette at the kitchen table. “The world has no need of freedom. It needs purity, it needs rules, it needs boundaries.”

Adaś Rączka, surrounded by youthful pyromaniacs, scoffed at britches and gaiters, and especially at slogans involving purity.

“I knew Max Fiff well,” he would say. “Before he became head of factory security he served at Slotzki's. On his hind legs.”

Max Fiff gnashed his teeth when his people repeated these words to him.

“Adaś Rączka!” he snorted contemptuously. “He used to lick Chmura's boots. He made his fortune working for him: a sack of mussels and a dozen porcelain bedpans.”

Max Fiff's people went looking for Adaś Rączka all over town, starting at the Hotel Angleterre and ending in the moldering back buildings, musty basements, and dusty attics. In vain. He was too well hidden to allow himself to be prized out; instead, Max Fiff kept receiving ticking packages that had to be hurriedly carried out onto open ground and silenced with a pistol shot. Adaś Rączka was thriving, and had even begun to produce first-rate grenades that were thrown inaccurately but to good effect. Instead of bigwigs, the victim would be some chimney sweep, a nanny with a child, a
dorozhka
driver's horse. At the hotel the desk clerk wagered that Fiff would shoot Rączka like a dog. The maître d' put his money on Rączka – sooner or later, he maintained, he would wring Fiff's neck. But Rączka had disappeared. Word went around that Loom's munitions plant had given him a steady position with a generous salary and a company
apartment by the factory lab. The bellhops, waiting for the conflict to be resolved, had to content themselves with another sensation – the funeral of the hotel's proprietor. He had been hit in the temple by a brick thrown into a hotel room through the window, wrapped in a crumpled piece of paper that bore a scribbled message: “Into the ground!” The man who threw it was forced to admit he'd made a mistake with Mr. Lapidus, who the following morning lay on a catafalque, stretched out in impeccable evening dress despite the early hour.

 

 

WHEN EMILKA LOOM, TORMENTED BY HER MANY YEARS OF unending tedium, went for a new consignment of books, the men would come out of the tavern onto the street and accompany her all the way to the used bookstore. They would hold loud discussions about aspenwood stakes for driving through hearts. Their arteries pulsed beneath their collars as they peered through the store window into the interior stacked with books up to the ceiling. The bookseller wore a metal-rimmed pince-nez that was always steaming up.

“It really is possible to live without French romances, Miss Loom. It'd be better to stay at home,” he would whisper, turning his eyes away timorously.

On the gateway to Loom's building there appeared the word “morgue” scrawled in chalk. From that moment on Adela and Stanisław argued perpetually. Violent disagreements would flare
up over breakfast; raised voices and vulgar imprecations would be heard from the kitchen, punctuated by the crash of plates being hurled in anger. Emilka's bed went unmade till evening. Stanisław, who had served at Loom's since he was a child, now dragged his old traveling trunk down from the attic. He tossed the Sunday suit that was inside into the stove, and began packing so he could live or die elsewhere, without Adela, who, being in a delicate condition, was unwilling and unable to leave.

“When will you finally leave me alone?” he would say, clapping his hands over his ears so as not to hear her complaints.

A few yards from the station his bald head was set about with clubs; the trunk opened and underwear spilled out onto the street, where it was later trampled underfoot by the stretcher bearers.

Adela took refuge in the orphanage. She worked there beyond her strength, scrubbing kettles and hauling vats right up till her time. The boys made fun of the pregnant woman, stuffing pillows under their shirts. They stole sugar and peed in the laundry tub. Every morning they would line up in two rows in the courtyard. Drawn up stiff as recruits, their heads completely shaven, they would rest their bloodshot eyes on the prewar sergeant major of the Stitchings uhlans, and if necessary, in silence they would play leapfrog till they dropped.

By night the walls would be bursting from the clamor of bad thoughts. Insomnia spread through the orphanage like an infectious disease. By the red glow from the half-open doors of the
stoves they killed time by throwing knives into the floorboards. The gate would open for those who had reached a sufficient age. They would leave and merge into the crowd, a red glint in their eye.

The sky would cover with clouds.

“Those are snow clouds,” the housewives jabbered. Just in case, they hurried to make sure their windows were snug. But what snow could there be, how could there suddenly be snow in that perpetual heat?

In the meantime the negatives stolen from the Argentine were passed from hand to hand, acquiring the traces of greasy fingers.

“For he's a jolly good fellow!” they sang at the tavern, tossing the pharmacist's boy all the way up to the ceiling. “And so say all of us!”

Depressed at having been sacked for drinking some of the surgical spirit, the pharmacist's boy felt some consolation. In the negatives every little store could be recognized. In some of them the semitransparent, incorporeal figure of a shopkeeper would hover with folded arms in a doorway. The human eye is fallible and can easily be misled by appearances; negatives see more clearly. If the door frame and inscription on the window showed through his body, what on earth could this mean?

“It's obvious,” the men with metal-tipped canes would say as they strolled down the street. “Negatives don't lie.”

They made chalk marks on the wall so that at the hour
when accounts would be settled they would be led to the right addresses. Time after time there came the sound of breaking glass, and twisted shop signs would crash to the sidewalk. It started at the pharmacy but did not end there. By evening they were stomping through flour spilled from ripped-open sacks as they carried off loops of sausage under their arms.

Merchants locked themselves in their storerooms along with their wives and children, barricading the door, so as to wait out the worst and then simply flee – to the port or the train station. But what port were they talking about! They must have dreamed it. See – there was nothing but a boarded-up harbor building, the narrowest of jetties with a dilapidated bench at the end, over which a hurricane lamp hanging from a pole was lit after lunch and put out come what may after supper. By the landing stage a peeling fishing boat rocked on the waves, its skipper afraid to take it out to sea. A real ship could surely only enter this harbor by mistake. And what kind of train station was that, its ticket offices bolted shut, the chintz curtains drawn from inside, with scraps of timetables blowing about the waiting room by the unlit stove. With handcars rusting in the siding, and the stationmaster's hens pattering about on a platform overgrown with weeds that were already coated with hoarfrost. A thin film of ice on the surface of puddles, the first snowflakes swirling in the air.

On the day of the annual festival on the town hall square, beneath the Chinese lanterns hung out by the firemen, the brass
band struck up. Hungry children biting on rock-hard gingerbreads got in the way of the dancers. Paper streamers flew overhead, wrapping around people's necks with a rustle, then ending underfoot, torn to pieces.

Rauch, wearing a black tailcoat, immediately after an early lunch had himself carried into the theater to supervise preparations for the gala show in person. But he didn't even make it into the foyer. Both the front and the back of the building were being picketed by vigilantes gripping metal-tipped canes, one or another of them wearing a cocked hat from the theater's prop room, a false mustache, and carrying a halberd.

“No passage,” they said.

“Who are these people? Where did they come from?” Rauch exclaimed, pushing them away with his hands.

But the porters had already put the armchair down on the sidewalk, and Max Fiff appeared next to it, the Slotzki factory emblem on his sleeve, a black pointer at his heel.

“Gala's off, Mr. Rauch,” he said. He smashed the glass of the display case with his metal-tipped cane and tore up the photos. The wind carried the shreds over the street then dropped them among the trampled streamers. “It's time to think of a new repertoire, the old one is rotten, it's starting to stink. Your theater is polluting pure spring water. There's no truth other than the truth of harmony! Us, if need be we'll take a sharp knife and rip the truth out of people's guts.”

“What are you planning to put on, sir, if I may ask?” Rauch
responded, describing a circle with his hands that included Max Fiff's people loitering about with their halberds. “Truth! Harmony! Sheer kitsch. First of all a good ear is what's needed.”

“Take the chair away,” snapped Max Fiff, jabbing at the porters with the tip of his cane. “And I don't want to see you here again. Quick march!”

The halberdiers sang in hoarse tuneless voices. From the direction of Factory Street standards began to arrive bearing the Slotzki emblem in a circle that was steeped in bloody red. Amid the gray walls the red glowed like embers in ash. The wind carried the echoes of the choral songs after their waves had already broken against the long rows of apartment buildings.

The Gypsy musicians hid their fiddles under their cloaks and fled as fast as their legs would carry them. One after another they bumped into the French-horn player from the brass band, who was hurrying in the opposite direction, staggering under the weight of his large black case. Some people blocked their path as they ran and dragged them into gateways. Twisting their arms back, they checked whether the musicians had a pulse.