Magdalena Tulli - In Red

“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.