Magdalena Tulli - In Red

“You’d be better off going and getting some sleep.” The old butler, Stanisław, kept patting his shoulder till it made the fireman angry. He meant to stamp his foot, but he only scraped the ground with his wooden leg, which was thin as a broomstick.

“Remember my words!” he exclaimed, grabbing his cap. Before he left, he got the idea of borrowing the money Adela had set aside for a dowry.

“You’re not going to be marrying any day soon! There aren’t any eligible bachelors anymore,” Stanisław remarked maliciously. Adela threw her savings on the table and turned her back on Alojzy so he wouldn’t see the tears dripping onto her apron.

The fireman took the cash straight to the box office and demanded a loge. The news quickly spread among the musicians and the dancers. After the show he was found in his loge, in dress uniform and a crooked shining helmet, his hands gripping the arms of the seat, foam in the corners of his mouth, his gaze forever turned away from the world and fixed on the inside of his head. He woke in a straitjacket, his arms tied, in a home for the insane. From that moment on he never said another word to anyone. The dancers remembered him as a victim of Natalie Zugoff.

“Don’t cry, girl,” Stanisław repeated to Adela. “To an old man like me you look good, dowry or no dowry.”

As she sobbed she pushed his hand away from the back of her neck.

THE LOCAL EVENING NEWSPAPER REPORTED ABOUT THE slamming of seats before the end of the show; the author of the article, which was signed with a pseudonym, attributed it to Natalie Zugoff’s rebellious fondness for dissonance that was an outrage against the sacred principles of harmony. He cast doubt on the artistic sense of the director of the theater, and even his morals. It had been learned that he was the son of a German general and a French actress; during the war he had avoided active service with a desk job in some ministry, from which he had eventually been fired for egregious unpunctuality and execrable handwriting. The newspaper asserted that Natalie Zugoff ought not to sing, since neither was she able to, nor was it seemly. She was not just any old chanteuse, but — apparently — the wife of Prince Belorukov-Mukhin, a former tsarist diplomat. Yet she wore no wedding ring. Her name? Assumed. And what had become of Ambassador Belorukov? Had she left him in his hour of need, or, on the contrary, had she herself been abandoned by him? Had the prince been shot by the Bolsheviks, or had he perhaps fled, or was he still somewhere in Russia, in a patched peasant shirt?

“What nonsense,” one or another seasoned reader of newspapers declared in Corelli’s café. “She’d be older.”

“She is older,” the chief of police would reply with a smirk from behind the billiard table.

“Is it true what they’re saying here about her?” regulars of the café called to Rauch from their tables, waving the paper. Rauch grimaced, as if amid the ascetic click of billiard balls he had suddenly heard ocean rollers, Ludwig Neumann’s public loudspeakers, or the thump of thick glass tankards.

“The truth is a fraud,” he would reply tartly. “I’m just a director of a theater selling tickets to shows, it’s all above board.”

The next day Natalie Zugoff came across this all-knowing newspaper beside the mirror in her dressing room. She read German with difficulty, but she struggled through to the end of the article and for a long while stared searchingly at her own reflection, after which she abruptly crushed her glass cigarette holder between her fingers. Her hand bled; the artiste blanched and fainted. Amid the ensuing confusion and chaotic to-and-fro people called for smelling salts and for ice to put on her temples. After this incident an icy glint remained in her eyes, making the little boy shudder the following morning.

As the maids put him to bed in the evening they felt his hot breath on their faces. The doctor, summoned in Natalie Zugoff’s absence, took the boy to the town hospital. It was something contagious; some of the hotel guests saw door handles being disinfected, though the proprietor of the hotel reassured them for all he was worth. The next day the artiste sent the black boy a gift — a new music box wrapped in rustling golden paper. As he lay in his hospital bed he wound it up over and over with a weakening hand, then the Sisters of Charity did it for him. He fell asleep to the mechanical melody, which slowed down like his pulse. The strain of typhoid was an unusual one, the course of the sickness rocky, the prognosis poor.

“I’m terribly sorry,” the doctor said as he took Natalie Zugoff’s hand. She gave a sob, burying her face in the starched folds of the doctor’s white coat.

“The press is a swamp. Those hacks have no heart,” she stammered with a lump in her throat.

Laid out by the venom of the typhoid, the black boy was unable to take part in the excursion by hot-air balloon on which d’Auxerre invited Natalie Zugoff one Sunday. Reduced to despair, heedless of the complex and uncertain laws of aerodynamics, she consented to board the basket suspended beneath the balloon. Her long scarf fluttered behind as they rose over the old parade ground. Then they disappeared in a gap in the clouds and that was the last the spectators staring into the sky saw of them.

The tiny Chinese lapdog was left behind at the hotel. When Natalie Zugoff had wanted to tuck it into her muff, it transpired that it had vanished into thin air; several hours later it was found, sick from cigarette smoke, asleep beneath a pile of costumes. The windows had to be opened. Suitcases lay piled in the corner; the breeze ruffled the clothing scattered about on chairs. In the next room a dozen or more music boxes littered the floor. The telephone at the reception desk rang off the hook.

“We know nothing, sir. She didn’t check out of her room. Very well, I’ll pass on the message immediately if only I have the opportunity,” the desk clerk would say into the receiver.

A concerned crowd gathered noisily in front of the theater until Rauch appeared on the balcony like a regent when the queen is absent.

“Please go back to your homes and be of good hope,” he appealed. “I’ll put up an announcement the moment I have any news.”

In the meantime performances had to be canceled, causing losses for the theater — the box office refunding the cost of unused tickets.

During her morning rounds the maid found the proprietor of the hotel in Natalie Zugoff’s room clutching an armful of rustling gowns.

“Leave it,” he ordered when she began to strip the bedding to have it laundered. He loosened his cravat and lay down on the unmade bed, pressing his cheek into the pillows that still retained the scent of Natalie Zugoff’s tears.

The search that the chief of police immediately ordered drew a blank. The balloon had vanished without a trace, the French military mission knew nothing of the whereabouts of the missing Captain d’Auxerre. Successive hypotheses concerning the case crashed into one another in ever more complicated collisions, like hard and immaculately smooth billiard balls trapped in a frame lined with green baize.

“If you want to know what I think,” the chief of police would say to Rauch over their evening game of billiards, exhausted as he was by the hopelessness of the search that had been going on for weeks, “when someone in full command of their senses gives no sign of life, the worst has to be suspected — that’s how things look in the experience of the police.”

“So it’s possible. .?”

“I’m afraid it may be certain,” the chief of police confirmed. His arm twitched, causing a premature shot. Missing its target, the ball rocketed around the table all on its own, bouncing off the cushions.