Magdalena Tulli: In Red

“Life and death,” the doctor said as he prescribed Kazimierz a tincture for his insomnia, “are like the labels on these bottles. Here you have distilled water, over there, pure spirit. In the bottles, though, it’s all mixed together, a little of one and a little of the other. Like in some illegal distillery. You’ll need to take it with sugar, lieutenant, otherwise you won’t be able to swallow it.”

The doctor’s medication affected Kazimierz adversely. It propelled him into an even greater torpor, to the point where he lost interest in the service. This new affliction he treated with gambling.

“You need to eat, sir, you need to sleep,” his orderly Felek Chmura would chide him; then to cheer him up he would add: “It’s too bad about Miss Emilka, she was really nice.”

At such moments Kazimierz would suddenly awaken and leap to his feet as if he’d been roused by a trumpet.

“What do you mean by that?” he’d ask mistrustfully, grabbing the orderly by the shirt and shaking him abruptly. But Felek had no reply. Kazimierz pushed him away angrily. “Don’t look at me like that, you damn fool!” he would roar.

IN RECOGNITION OF THE HIGH REGARD IN WHICH HE HELD Councilor Krasnowolski, Ludwig Neumann, the owner of the phonograph-record factory, invited Kazimierz to his house to distract him from his cards and his oppressive thoughts. After dinner, coffee was served. The master of the house and his guest took their seats in deep armchairs and lit up a cigarette. A black ebonite disk from Neumann’s press was spinning on the turntable of the phonograph; the tenor voices of invisible knaves rose amid skeins of bluish smoke all the way to the plaster stuccowork of the ceiling, where they twined with the queens’ sopranos light as perfume, till there sounded a kinglike baritone capable of bringing every note crashing to the ground. The dark alto of spades sang every shade of bitterness as the coffee grew cold in the cups. Struck a mortal blow to the very heart, the baritone faded beyond hope in the low octaves, as his scepter fell to the floor with the crash of a cymbal. Amid the crackle and buzz came the squeak of indestructible jokers lurking at the edges of the drama. Meanwhile the passionless voice of Ludwig Neumann offered comments on items from the newspaper as his hand tapped ash into the ashtray. Over and again Kazimierz drew into his nostrils the barely perceptible scent of ladies’ perfume.

He was shown girlhood embroideries made by Stefania, who had recently come back to her father’s after an unhappy and short-lived marriage. “And now she won’t touch any handiwork and can’t find anything to occupy herself,” complained Neumann. That afternoon Kazimierz did not see Stefania: she was said to be suffering from a migraine. As he was leaving, shown out by a footman, in the dim hallway his path was crossed by a voice. In spite of being muffled by several heavy doors, the voice shone in the upper registers like sunrise reflected on water. The depths of the lower tones were lost in shadow. Kazimierz fought for breath, but made it to the balustrade. The wave followed him down the stairs in a warm cascade of coloratura, finally flowing down the middle of the street, quiet as memory, freezing in the chill and marking the way from Neumann’s house to the barracks with an icy trail, so that in the evening, when Kazimierz returned beneath Stefania’s window, he slid and had to take care that the ground didn’t slip from under his feet.

With time his condition began to improve. One day he ripped up the photograph of Emilka and tossed it in a drawer. The eyes found themselves parted. One fastened its gaze on the fan held in a hand, while the other stared into space. The innocence that had emanated from Emilka’s eyes and that during her life had eased Kazimierz’s sadness, then after her unseemly death had become a source of uncertainty and reminiscence, was finally lost amid torn edges and shreds of Turkish tobacco.

Felek the orderly would bring Stefania letters from Kazimierz. But instead of coming back quickly with a reply, he would visit Adela, Loom’s cook. On the way he would meet the butcher’s whelp, a freckled twelve-year-old with whom he would conduct hurried business. He’d take from his pocket a crumpled parchment containing uniform buttons that bore a crowned lion, and exchange them for smoked sausage, one button for each length. He would eat the sausage in the gateway, then knock at the kitchen door. Adela would regale him with what was left of her apple pie, if it hadn’t all been eaten by the fireman Alojzy Piechota, whom she liked as much as she did Felek. Because of the orderly’s daily visits to Loom’s house, Kazimierz’s boots were never properly cleaned. Shouted at and struck on his bristly head with a rolled-up newspaper, Felek would feign remorse.

“I swear to God I’ll do better, lieutenant,” he would promise, beating his breast till it echoed.

But he had dark deeds on his conscience and did all he could to draw Kazimierz’s attention away from them.

“Mrs. Stefania is so beautiful,” he would say enthusiastically, rolling his eyes.

“Never you mind about that, oaf.”

Kazimierz would glower at the photograph, which resembled the ripped-up one it had replaced. When he took out his wallet to pay in the officers’ mess, the photograph would abruptly remind him of the thés dansants that Stefania attended several times a week. He would visit her on the sly in the late evening — he was a stranger to somnolence. Amid their kisses, all of a sudden he would ask how many times she’d danced with the young Strobbel, and whether they had whispered to one another about porcelain. Stefania compressed her lips in pain, deeply hurt. Kazimierz would return angrily to the mess so as to get drunk and forget. Augustus Strobbel had so gotten under his skin that he longed to challenge him to a duel and shoot him to death. At balls his gaze, hard as a bullet, penetrated one room after another in search of the familiar countenance, that recalled porcelain embellished with cobalt blue. As they made their way back to the barracks his fellow officers would calm him down as best they could, clapping him on the shoulder with an unwonted alacrity in an attempt to extinguish the invisible flames that were crawling along his collar and epaulette from the direction of his heart, and that earlier they themselves had fanned with careless jibes tossed as casually as matches. One or another of them would not have hesitated to be his second in any other affair but this one, which blinded the lieutenant’s eyes with the mists of madness. Only one thing remained: to obtain a ring and propose, which he did, in the hope of keeping Stefania in the circle of light from the lamp, bending over her embroidery. But she was unwilling to promise him she’d spend her life within four walls, needlework in hand. She asked for time to think; the engagement ring awaited her decision right next to the ripped-up photograph, in a velvet-lined box, in the locked drawer.

By night the uneasy breathing of the officer leaning over his games of solitaire would fill the room with the vapors of hateful thoughts. The orderly dozing in the corner was woken by the fug and hurried to open a window; the vapors billowed into the sky. Dark clouds like dismal armies gathered over the barracks.

“That was how it looked before the Russian-Japanese War,” the housewives would comment. And so they set about clarifying butter, bolting flour, and sifting buckwheat into impregnated canvas sacks.

In the officers’ mess, as always the gas lamps burned and the smoke-blackened mirrors were crowded with uniforms above which the faces showed indistinctly, blurred and all alike. When baccarat was played at one of the tables, in the mirrors braided sleeves shuffled the cards and gathered undeserved winnings. They knocked ash from pipes and turned the pages of newspapers with indecipherable backward headlines.