Magdalena Tulli: In Red

When the mess was about to close for the night, Kazimierz would rest his forehead on the table amid the scattered cards and through tightly closed eyelids he would see unclearly, as if through fog or dust clouds, pennants and horses and cannon pulled by gun carriages. Yet there were too few of them and they were too far away to be able to relieve him in his torment. Immediately before the outbreak of war he had a waking dream of bayonet attacks in which the cold glint of metal cut through a swirling tangle of desires. Uniforms of undetermined color weltered in red. A trail of the same red, seeping from who knew where, stained his daily thoughts.

Before the engagement came about, war was to draw the young lieutenant into its machinery, along with his bootjack, his handkerchiefs with their intricate monogram, and his cheery orderly, who walked behind carrying his officer’s trunk. The war, about which the newspapers wrote that it had been caused by the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in heat-scorched Sarajevo, from another point of view was the result of an icy stagnation in which dark clouds were swelled by the vapors of hate-filled thoughts and turned easily into death. To look at the war from this perspective, it was Kazimierz himself who had provoked it, tipping the scales of dynastic interests and diplomatic tensions with the weight of his sighs.

“I heard you’ve gotten a grip on yourself,” said Commander Ahlberg to Lieutenant Krasnowolski as he received him in his quarters one afternoon. “I’m glad.”

From his desk he took out a half-empty bottle — evidence of the responsibility with which the colonel bore the honor of an officer. And a sign that the previous day it had required all his strength to set the bottle aside before he could see its bottom. He took out two glasses and slowly filled them. Kazimierz downed his, set the glass aside, and took a deep breath.

“Colonel, you’re well aware that a defense of this mound of snow is out of the question,” he declared. “Even if we were all to perish. And perishing won’t be easy either.”

He meant a proper death, from bullets. Colonel Ahlberg harbored no illusions regarding the effectiveness of any resistance that could be presented to the enemy in that open space where there was only the howling of German and Austrian and Russian winds, and he agreed with the other man at once, though he gave a hearty laugh as he did so.

“Perishing will be difficult, I like that! At the last hour, bang, you fall down, and it’s all over. It’s the easiest of all the things we have to do in this life.”

Kazimierz listened with furrowed brow. The colonel glanced at him, stopped laughing, and reached for his handbell. His orderly reported in with an empty pail, and took away one that was full from a leak in the ceiling. Through Kazimierz’s bloodshot eyes the water in the pail flashed with a red gleam. The colonel was already discoursing on holes in the roof; his gaze did not reach any further. In a hoarse voice he listed the reasons why the roof tiles had broken. Yet everything all around was cracking at the seams, the entire order of Stitchings, and through the gaps that once a lone officer in a tropical helmet had taken advantage of, not just streams of water but foreign armies could inundate the town at any moment. Stammering with agitation, Kazimierz asked to be discharged and released from his oath, because waiting for him somewhere was a combat uniform, squadrons of cavalry, artillery batteries.

“Be my guest, go, if you have the good fortune not to be kept by anything here,” replied Ahlberg calmly, refilling their glasses. “Who wouldn’t wish to leave and to forget?”

That very afternoon he signed the necessary documents and sent them to Stockholm, to the Ministry of War, which had not waged war in a hundred years and had no intention of doing so. The response came by return mail. As the pale blue and purple flowers on Stefania’s tambour proliferated, Kazimierz with a single tug was snapping the threads that enwrapped his heart. Free of all ties, he headed for where there was gunfire. He was leaving so as to forget. In a farewell gesture he took aim at the metal rooster on the town hall tower and pulled the trigger. The shot rang dully through the sleeping town. The rooster spun and came to rest, its beak gaping open as before. But the sparrows on the window ledges didn’t even stir.

Stefania waited, but never received a letter. “It doesn’t mean anything,” she whispered as she threaded her needle. She believed steadfastly in Kazimierz’s return, because the engagement ring was still waiting for her decision, the story of the proposal didn’t yet have an ending. With the help of her maid, Stefania was sewing her trousseau. The already-finished items were piled neatly in a chest of drawers. Kazimierz’s expected return seemed an obvious consequence of her work in hemstitching the sheets and linen hand towels, and embroidering damask tablecloths. But a rumor reached her that before his departure Kazimierz had sold the ring to pay off his gambling debts. Stefania dropped her needlework on the table and stared at the wall. She sat this way for the entire day, then in the evening, with a trembling hand, she reached for some silk whose hue was as powerful as the scent of a rose.

The dark red blossomed upon the tambour and brought sudden confusion among the lilies. The design looked as if it had been stained. Stefania was frightened by the rose, which had escaped from under her dexterous fingers. Her cheeks burning feverishly, she unpicked the silk threads. Gusts of air swept them up and carried them all over the world. Obedient to electrostatic forces, the threads settled on the roofs of military trains and on uniforms. Every man on whom a scrap of red silk thread came to rest was struck by a bullet in the war. Before Stefania had finished the sachet adorned with lilies, Kazimierz returned on a train, free of cares, with a red thread tangled in his hair, in a long box fastened with nails. The casket was buried in the town cemetery in the sector containing the graves of army officers; the salute rang out and came back as an echo. And that was an end of it. In the meantime the roof over Colonel Ahlberg’s quarters was still leaking, and after successive attempts at repair the wretched pail had to be emptied even more often than before.

Without Kazimierz the war went on, it even expanded in ever-widening circles. An official telegram came for gentle Augustus Strobbel, who one day, holding a box of cigars given him by his uncle, was bid farewell by stiff and solemn clerks, then left the porcelain works and got on a train that took him to where a combat uniform awaited him and a thorough knowledge of porcelain manufacture was of no use.

After Felek the orderly had gone to war the fireman Alojzy could have had all the leftover apple pie to himself, but his appetite failed him. He would linger for hours in Loom’s kitchen, staring out the window at the Russian, Austrian, and German clouds bathed in a garish glow. He would sit there motionless and silent, till Adela stopped paying any attention to him whatsoever.

“After f-f-fire like that, water has to c-c-come,” he would say finally. For experience had taught him that fire and water remain in equilibrium. But what water? Where could water come from, when there was nothing but snow and more snow as far as the eye could see?

One day, between the soup and the main course, from over the rooftops there came a sound like the roar of ocean waves. People went up to their windows and peered into the sky. From the barracks yard, through binoculars Colonel Ahlberg observed an airplane. The wind was flapping the pilot’s scarf, while his goggles flashed crimson.

“People imagine seeing all kinds of things,” murmured the garrison commandant. He summoned a soldier passing with a pail.