Magdalena Tulli: In Red

Left prey to foreign forces, Stitchings filled with stories that previously no one had ever heard or wanted to hear. In the house of pleasure, in the downstairs parlor, at night officers in jackets unbuttoned in contravention of the regulations fell madly in love, sang, and laughed; during the day the other ranks were let in through a side door and took the creaking stairs to the second floor. They thronged the poorly lit corridor, wreathed in cigarette smoke, grasping metal tokens in their sweaty palms. Madame complained about them in French and wrung her hands, because they were never willing to turn in their knives at the door, and bloody scuffles were forever breaking out on the staircase. After living through the stormwinds of artillery fire, they had grown wild and impudent from the closeness of death.

One of them in a fit of rage burst into the empty officers’ parlor with a looted pistol that no one had seen fit to confiscate. He shot up the frosting-pink walls and put bullet holes in the portrait of Kaiser Wilhelm. His alarmed comrades came running at the sound of gunfire; they tried to calm him down and reason with him, but the wretched fellow heard nothing till he fell on the rug, stabbed with a knife, a metal token clenched between his teeth.

“Awful,” shuddered Madame the very next day, reaching for the cup of coffee on a tray brought to her in bed around noon. She called back the maid as she was on her way out and had her pour a glass of cognac, a bottle of which, given to her by some major, she kept in her bedside table for emergencies. The soldiers who had happened to take part in the subduing of the madman were by now already on the Russian front; the following day they became tangled in barbed wire out in no-man’s-land, where they remained, covered in snow.

In place of the fallen, others came, still alive, and one after another they tossed their sweaty tokens into the bowl with a clatter. One of them sobbed, suddenly made sentimental by the touch of a woman’s hand; another remembered homemade preserves. In the meantime the tokens grew cold and with every moment lost their power; one soldier, urged to hurry, fell silent in mid-sentence and walked out into the dim corridor, shirt in hand. Some of them, troubled by a premonition of sudden death, right from the door fished out crumpled banknotes and gave them to the girls.

“Get yourself something to remember me by,” they would say, but the girls wouldn’t understand a word. They would simply embrace them, the way they had done with the grenadiers whose bones were by now in the ground. Since those men were gone, all the more these ones could not survive — plain cards from an incomplete deck, regular foot soldiers of the kind that are sent to their destruction without a second thought.

After them, Madame’s establishment was visited by soldiers of the most mediocre sort: privates in middle age, sickly and stooping. In their wallets, instead of banknotes they kept family photographs, and house keys jangled in the pockets of their outsized tunics. One glance was enough to see they were worth no more than a ragged set of cards for old maid. They themselves knew it best. For that reason they usually died unceremoniously, out in the open, amid the zing of bullets, their kettle dangling from their pack. The train that had brought them to their destination had barely set off back when already they were greeted with artillery fire and showers of earth. Their keys jangled faintly in their pockets as they fell into the snow.

The German commandant of the town, Colonel von Treckow, had been sent to Stitchings because of a heart problem that limited his usefulness at the front. His headquarters had been set up in the town hall. In order to attend council meetings von Treckow had to walk down an icy corridor, followed by a sergeant bearing official documents who would hurry ahead to open the door for the colonel and wipe his chair with an obliging sleeve. Because the chimney flues were blocked and the stoves weren’t working, the entire town hall was freezing cold. The colonel would don his gold-rimmed monocle and sign orders with a patient expression in his steel-gray eyes. He would announce the requisitioning of undertakers’ horses, the seizure of factories for use as military depositories, and a German government monopoly on all products of mills and malt houses.

On the first floor of the Looms’ apartment building was the Loom & Son colonial store, in which at one time the discreet scent of vanilla had risen over mahogany countertops and an automatic till with nickel-plated keys. By a decree of the German authorities, the store was now responsible for distributing rationed goods. The needy, shivering crowd emptied their noses on the floor, slid around in the mud and the sawdust, and uttered the worst profanities. Afterward, the clerks lingered there till late at night amid the empty shelves. They yawned and kept having to go back to the beginning as they tried to add up endless columns of figures, in the fear that a stupid mistake would send them straight to the gallows. With the greatest difficulty they navigated the reefs of German orthography and, cursing, glued ration cards printed in Gothic — for sugar, flour, cooking fat — in even rows on large sheets of wrapping paper.

In his office, von Treckow would take each sheet of paper in his numb hands and inspect everything personally as he chewed on eucalyptus candies. He worked in a fur coat worn over his uniform — the one and only departure from the regulations he ever committed. He ate little, slept little, and was not drawn to the company of women. He held himself straight and never shook anyone’s hand. Before he went to bed he would caress the flintlock pistols he had confiscated from the grammar school boys.

But he never managed to add them to the magnificent collection he kept at his family estate somewhere in East Prussia — and all because of a group of unshaven Hungarian hussars. It was unclear what destiny had dropped them in Stitchings toward the end of the Great War, wearied by their wanderings about the world. They were looking for their regiment, yet they were getting farther and farther away from it with every day, sent first this way then that, because no one understood their language. As they were galloping around the market square in the early morning, swearing loudly in Hungarian, the colonel was roused from his sleep and went out to them in his nightcap, the fur coat thrown over his nightshirt. He asked sharply where their regiment was, though only for the sake of thoroughness, for he was absolutely convinced it had to be stationed at least two hundred miles to the south and that this was a matter for the military police, whom he intended to summon without delay. A mustachioed hussar responded by lashing him with his whip from the saddle. Von Treckow clapped a hand to his cheek, then to his heart; he fell as if struck by lightning and never got up. A platoon of soldiers was sent to fetch his body, by now dressed in uniform.

After the soldiers there came an elderly lady with a steely gaze, accompanied by a butler and a maid. Rapping her walking stick on the floor, she cried: “Fritz! Where is Fritz?” Her voice echoed down the empty corridors of the town hall. She was shown the coffin with its gilded lid; she instructed them to open it, then close it again. The soldiers obeyed her orders without a murmur, though the maid fainted at the powerful smell that is wont to be given off in such circumstances.

In this situation there was nothing to think about: Colonel von Treckow left behind his flintlock pistols, thrust into a hiding place behind the stove in his hotel room, and departed without further ado, accompanied by the soldiers drinking from their canteens, in a freight train. He listened calmly to their obscenities, their dirty songs, their bidding at cards, and he asked no more questions. The hussars, in turn, were dealt with first by the German, then by the Austrian military police, and it seems none of them returned in one piece to their beautiful homeland, where one can communicate with the utmost ease in Hungarian at any time of the day or night.