Magdalena Tulli - In Red

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.