Magdalena Tulli - In Red

“An Argentinean tango,” she would say, her ear cocked. “Tragic and vulgar. Rum-pum-pum-pum! When you’ve heard one, you’ve heard them all.”

And indeed, one was enough for the whole town, ringing from every direction. Near and distant sounds mingled together and got in each other’s way. The melody had no ending. It would break off, usually in midbar, while mongrels in woolen jackets would endlessly circulate beneath the windows carrying a hat into which nothing but pennies were thrown. These were collected afterward by Felek Chmura. The contracts stipulated that the barrel organs were to remain the property of Neumann’s factory till they were paid off in full.

In her own home Stefania would stumble over sacks full of small change; she would choke on her contempt. When Felek’s footsteps sounded on the stairs she would hurriedly turn off the music. But Felek would walk into the drawing room without batting an eyelid. Simple-heartedly charmed by the mechanism concealed in the box, he would switch the music back on and roar with laughter as he sprawled in Ludwig Neumann’s armchair. Coloratura made him laugh till he cried.

“That’s enough!” Stefania would exclaim. “Stop it!”

Felek couldn’t help himself, rocking with uncontrollable contractions of the diaphragm. Compressing her lips, she would turn off the phonograph. Like a billet-doux with an insincere declaration of love dropped from an upper balcony, the high C would spin slowly down to the hollow bottom of the sub-contra octave. Stefania would collapse in sobs onto the sofa, and all at once a loud bang would shake the walls and bring plaster sprinkling from the ceiling into the horn of the phonograph. Adaś Rączka had placed caps under the legs of the furniture. In a hoarse voice she would exclaim that she wanted to die; she would fling the record at Felek’s feet, shattering it into tiny pieces. Shards of vulcanite would shoot in every direction. Felek brushed them off his vest onto the floor. He was about to open his mouth, but in the end he merely shrugged, picked up his hat, and left the house. He would eat his Sunday lunch in the hotel restaurant. Over coffee, scattering cigarette ash left and right, he would sit down at the table where Oswald Slotzki was finishing his dessert.

At that time the firm of Strobbel & Slotzki was beginning production of porcelain sanitary appliances. One after another, gleaming white washbasins came off the production line to be packed in wooden crates and shipped the world over by sea or land.

“You’ve spent your whole life making plates and bowls, uncle, I’ve no idea why,” Oswald Slotzki would say to the aging Strobbel. “Now they’re all in dirty piles in every greasy spoon there is. All those little figures of yours!” he would add, raising his voice and pointing to a ballet dancer in a dusty porcelain tutu. “The world needs cleanliness, nothing more.”

No one noticed exactly when the snowflake that appeared on Strobbel & Slotzki’s products changed its shape. From that time on, each of its four arms was bent at a right angle, like the wooden rulers with which Slotzki was so prodigal. The ballet dancer was smashed; pieces of porcelain tutu, so fine the broom could not pick them up, kept crunching underfoot in old Strobbel’s study.

Slotzki spent whole days in the factory. Spotty Max Fiff would sit outside the door of his office waiting to be summoned. Slotzki would remember about him in the late afternoon.

“Go,” he would say. “Get some fresh air.”

Max would come back with a torn sleeve and a split lip, a tuft of Adaś Rączka’s ruddy hair in his fist.

Felek Chmura would lose himself in his accounts and not even hear his own stomach growling from hunger. As he concluded the successive parts of his calculations, he would notice that each of them contained at least one figure whose recollection made him bite his lip. Like a pesky gadfly, a payment made in imperial five-ruble gold coins kept coming back — the price of the potatoes that were rotting in the storehouses. To work out the actual loss, Felek would add successive zeros to the round sum, to the rhythm of growing inflation, doing so with powerless anger, since on the other hand these were thousands of dead crowns, money removed from circulation, thrown in the mud and buried there for good. He rushed into one new enterprise after another, striving to force the world to finally give him back what it owed him. But with each new million flowing into his coffers his losses grew unchecked.

From time to time he would grab the handbell and send for coffee. Toward evening he would remember about Adaś.

“Go,” he would say. “Clear your head.”

Redheaded Adaś Rączka would grab his hat and be gone. He would come back late, covered in mud, with torn pants and a black eye.

In the pink parlor, lolling on a plush sofa, Felek Chmura listened to fox-trots. The sounds floated lightly out of the horn of Madame’s phonograph, mocking the whole world, especially the despair and pathos of the tango. Saxophones slid down the smooth shining steps of piano chords like clowns whose life is composed of nothing but cheap gags. Slotzki would arrive later, his eyes watering, a large box of chocolates under his arm. As the girls threw themselves on the chocolates he would sit heavily on the sofa and unfasten his collar.

“What’s new at the factory?” Felek would ask. “I hear there’s a strike brewing?”

“Give it a rest, Chmura,” Slotzki would reply, wiping the perspiration from his forehead with a handkerchief. He would drink a glass of brandy and then ask Madame to dance, a trace of crimson lipstick from a welcoming kiss still on his cheek. Felek didn’t like brandy. Madame would fill his glass to its gilt-edged rim with home-brewed vodka. She preferred not to dance with Slotzki, who had cloth ears. She would laugh and wink at Felek.

“Come on, girls,” she would say. “Who likes dancing?”

But the girls preferred to partner up with one another, cheek to cheek, rather than touch the blotched hand or see the disfigured body close up. Madame did not demand this of them. As the evening got under way, officers of the merchant marine appeared on the horizon wanting to sail through the rooms to the stormy sounds of the fox-trot till dawn surprised them on the way to Yokohama or Montevideo. One gray-haired sea captain would stand in the door of the pink parlor, a monocle in his trembling hand.

“A fellow’s had all kinds of women in his time,” he would mutter to himself as he watched the dancers.

Called out discreetly by Madame, the girls would vanish into the rooms upstairs to which tattooed sailors were let in via the back entrance, up the creaking stairs.

Slotzki and Chmura, the backs of their satin vests gleaming, would shuffle cards to the hollow sounds of the phonograph. Max the pointer would be snoring by the sofa, slobber dripping from his muzzle. The pink parlor was his home. After his third glass of brandy Slotzki was invigorated. The shining steps of piano chords would lead him back to the irksome matters of the past day, leaving him slightly short of breath. The four pink walls echoed with the sound of his arguments with the factory trade union about the extra half an hour that each day’s work included, and that was subsequently absent from the nighttime hours.

“Thirty damn minutes,” Slotzki would repeat with a shrug. “Big deal. What I’d like to know is how they have watches.”

“It’s your lead,” Felek would remind him.

“Clubs,” Slotzki would say, throwing down a card, and he would pick up where he left off. He railed at the dry rot eating away the foundations of the factory, at the filth that was everywhere — a revolting mold that filled the entire world to the brim. Slotzki suffered, his heart pained him.