Magdalena Tulli - In Red

“Then everything is clear. The right card is never going to turn up,” he said in a hollow voice. The policeman would never go from his front door, the vilified name of Loom would never recover its ring of trustworthiness, the pink parlor would remain off limits, and in the fire of fever his strength would finally burn itself out. Adaś Rączka bolted the shutter and drew the plush drapes that were heavy as a theater curtain.

“How is that possible?” Chmura repeated in angry confusion. “Is everything over?”

Then his head fell back on the pillows and the glare stopped dazzling him. The world had finally given back what it owed him, the accounts were balanced. Felek Chmura departed this life without leaving a single penny behind. He was buried at the cost of the municipality. His son was put in the orphanage that Stefania had founded. In the house that was to be sold at auction the servants packed their things and aired the rooms. Miasmas of fever drifted from the opened windows. The contaminated air circulated among the bordello, Neumann’s house, and Strobbel’s works.

In the pink parlor Slotzki drank mockingly to the empty place on the sofa. The girls gobbled chocolates as the carefree sounds of fox-trots wafted from the horn of the phonograph. In celebrating Felek Chmura’s death, Slotzki did not realize that he himself was dying. The doctor summoned in the night spread his hands helplessly.

“It’s too late,” he declared.

Slotzki burned up in the flames of fever, in the blink of an eye: not like fresh firewood, but like a log that is already completely fire-blackened, like a dry briquette of charcoal. Max the black pointer crept out from under the sofa and howled, jolting awake those drunk and dozing. The girls hushed him, but he howled louder and louder, till Max Fiff dragged him out onto the street by his studded collar. Under cover of darkness a handful of men carried the body to Strobbel’s private apartment. From that moment everything took its proper place: black mourning crepe and funerary candles, and lastly the band.

The funeral march had barely fallen silent when a night storm passed through the pink parlor and destroyed the phonograph with the gold-colored horn. It shattered the gilt-rimmed wineglasses, the unwashed dishes, the porcelain dancers in tutus. The hour of purification had come, and it raged back and forth through the rooms, leaving upturned furniture with broken legs in the middle of the floor. The next day policemen strove to establish how many pairs of hobnailed boots had stomped around on the polished parquet floor, and whether all of the faces were unfamiliar. Madame refused to speak to the police. Her lips trembled; she reached impatiently for the lone surviving teacup with the broken handle and filled it, spilling brandy on the tabletop.

“Please stop tormenting me,” she kept repeating, staring dully at the table. “Please leave me alone.”

No one cleared up the smashed drawers, the trampled sheets, ripped pillows, broken glass. The girls each went their separate ways, in haste, even before dinner. Madame was the last to leave.

“Merde!” she exclaimed in farewell as she took her seat in the dorozhka. She was seen with a suite of porters, leaning heavily on her parasol, the purple swelling of a broken nose hidden behind a thick veil, as she boarded the eleven fifty-five Warsaw express.

WHOEVER WISHES TO LEAVE STITCHINGS CAN AVAIL HIMSELF of two methods. If he is an outsider — for example, a traveling salesman of his own virtues, obliged to compete for a favorable market, or a collector of experiences whom life has taught humility — without a second thought he ought to ascend at dawn in a passenger cabin suspended beneath a dirigible balloon. For it’s easy to sail among the clouds, where the sun casts its pink rays over the cranes of the port and the docks, over the roofs of the banks, over the stock exchange, over Ludwig Neumann’s works producing radio sets, Slotzki & Co.’s sanitary appliance factory, and Loom’s munitions plant, whose chimneys send dark smoke curling into the morning sky. If this person wishes before starting preparations for his journey to study the train timetables or the brochures of shipping lines, he’ll quickly realize that the desire to leave bears no relation whatsoever to the calendar or the clock. The right moment never comes at any time. Neither after breakfast, when an exceptionally advantageous transaction is within arm’s reach; nor before lunch, when the smell of a roast excites the senses; nor all the more in the sweltering evening that glitters with the enchanting promise of golden saxophones and ostrich feathers.

The entrance to the theater was festooned with lights, which were unnecessary since dusk was not falling and daylight always lasted till late into the night. Crowds pressed around the glass display cases with photographs of the new cabaret program, while signs at the box office announced that tonight’s show was sold out. From the windows of a big department store a mannequin gazed out provocatively from beneath artificial eyelashes, wearing an evening dress that the very next day could come to life in the foyer of the theater; next to it, sets of plated cutlery dazzled with a pure silver gleam.

“How’s your health?” people asked as they tipped their hats. “Is it true you’re getting married, my good sir?”

Outsiders always had something to do and had no intention whatsoever of ascending into the sky; rather, they regarded walking on solid ground as their solemn obligation. None of those tramping the streets could recall anymore how long he had been in Stitchings.

For locals, on the other hand, the most certain way of retreat led downward, toward the antipodes, in the steps of the salt miners whom nobody remembered any longer. Anyone who wished to leave Stitchings immediately by any other route had first of all to forget that he’d had a new delivery of coal brought to the cellar only yesterday; leave behind the laundry hung out to dry on the clothesline, and the apple pie that had just been put into the oven; let a barely started barrel of sauerkraut go to waste. And set off with his belongings piled on a wagon — bedding, pots and pans, sofa and stacked chairs, with screaming kids, the canary in its cage, and the cat trying to scramble out of its basket.

Red banners with the circled emblem of Slotzki’s sanitary appliance factory flapped in a hot wind. Every evening the outdoor loudspeakers, manufactured at Neumann’s, would broadcast the drumrolls of military marches whose rhythm could be heard faintly over the hoarse roar of the surf.

Trains pulled up to the platforms with full loads of passengers then left empty, curtains flapping in their open windows, the wind turning the pages of abandoned newspapers as it blew through the cars. The large letters of the headlines, sounding the alarm with exclamation points and question marks, had no one to warn any longer.

Huge passenger steamers lowered their gangways and passengers disembarked endlessly till finally, emptied, the ships would depart with a long sad whistle. Some traveler who had not gone ashore would lean on the railing with the look of an old sea wolf, the only figure on any of the decks fore and aft, upper and lower. He would raise his collar against the gusty wind and wave farewell with his glove to some unknown person: perhaps it was to the little boats made of newspaper that contended with the waves behind the keel and, half sunk already, continued to ship water.

But has anyone ever seen vessels that cannot be capsized or sunk? Oak basins? Pastry boards? Plates and bowls, also known as vessels, were even less well suited to sailing; in the water they would have sunk at once, like a stone. It was only the large chests of drawers kept in dark corners of drawing rooms that offered the promise of any kind of security. Their tops provided shelter for the once mass-produced figures of young maidens, merchants, and guardsmen with excessively red cheeks and startled porcelain expressions.