Magdalena Tulli: In Red

“There’s no escaping it,” said Alojzy, gazing at his frostbitten toes sticking out as before.

When isolated bullets stopped whistling overhead, the town council took charge of Stitchings once again. It was led by Loom. Anyone who had not managed to buy bread with their German ration cards had to go hungry for three weeks until the sealed railroad car guarded by sharpshooters arrived with new cards and new stamps. But no one ate the three-week-old bread, which was hard as rock. The line for ration cards had more twists and turns than under the German occupation, while the amount of buckwheat in the shipment never matched what it said on the invoice.

“We have to cheat on the scales,” Stanisław told the shop clerks. “The times are to blame. And not a word to the master, he has worries enough of his own.”

The labors of the town council were nightmarish. Nothing was functioning as it should have, neither factories, nor stores, nor offices. Drought had afflicted the channels of turnover — no one was crying anymore, even the fiancées of fallen soldiers. For there was a shortage of salt, which everyone knows is the essence of tears.

Every morning the unemployed demobilized soldiers, a snarl of anger frozen on their faces, would read the newspapers, in which there was not a single piece of good news for them. They lit one roll-up cigarette from the previous one, and blew the acrid smoke up toward the ceiling. They paced from wall to wall in their basements, irritable and gruff.

“I wouldn’t mind some black pudding,” one or another of them would grumble.

But there was no black pudding in the house, nor did they have two cents to rub together. “What world is he living in, that he doesn’t know that?” his wife would tut, herself skinny as a rake. Till finally she’d lose patience. “How do you like that, it’s black pudding he wants, the cripple!” she would exclaim, arms akimbo. “He’d like black pudding every day, or better still pork chops! Go fill your belly with all those medals you keep in the dresser.”

At night the demobilized soldiers yelled to one another outside people’s windows and went endlessly reeling about the streets as if they were still driven by the momentum of the bullets that had lodged in them during the war. The bitterness of false glory distorted their mouths. In this way they wallowed in a cacophonous hell of indignity, and the town along with them.

Maintaining order was proving impossible. Everywhere there were crowds of hungry, freezing men who had no intention of respecting anything. They spat in the street and peed in gateways. In broad daylight they were capable of grabbing a loaf of bread from under a woman’s arm or taking an old man’s last cigarette from him. They removed doors and their frames from the barracks to use as firewood.

“Such are the times,” Mayor Loom would say as he greeted the Stitchings uhlans at the entrance to the town hall. But they didn’t want to hear anything about the times; all they remembered were military parades, the golden sound of the bugle, and the airplane struck by a cannon shell that plummeted to earth with a crash in billows of black smoke. Now reoutfitted in police jackets, they began hounding the gangs of boys with frostbitten ears who loved to play buttons, chasing them down Factory Street. Most highly valued of all were prewar uhlan dress buttons, the ones with the crowned lion; those buttons were said to always win. The police twisted the arms of the players they caught, took away their uhlan buttons, then beat and kicked them mercilessly till their noses bled.

The pink glow would light up the sky earlier than usual, but still no soup tureens appeared on the table, not to mention a main course. The townspeople’s bellies were rumbling and they only wanted one thing: that the day should be over already; but on an empty stomach the dusk, which was supposed to fall after dessert, seemed an eternity in coming.

Only Loom was able to eat his fill, but he was the very person who had no time. He worked in the town hall till late, and had his meals brought from the restaurant of the Hotel Angleterre. The papers had to be pushed to the edge of the desk, then covered silver dishes from the hotel service were placed on a snow-white cloth bearing its monogram. Loom reached for his wallet, but he only ever had bills of the highest denomination, which the boy sent from the restaurant always refused to take because he could not give change.

“Take the money from the municipal account and make a note, I’ll pay it back later,” he would say casually to the bookkeeper.

Yet there wasn’t enough money in the municipal account to cover Loom’s lunch, so he would stick the bill in the waiter’s pocket and send him away with a brusque gesture. In the meantime, plaster would be falling into his glass from the ceiling.

In the town hall it was freezing cold and there was never enough money for anything. Loom turned every grosz in his hands three times over. He doubted the advisability of spending municipal funds on repairs. The frost, which cooled emotions and curbed surprises, ultimately failed to preserve anything. A southern wind blew trash into the town through the cracks: stories of gunshot wounds, stories of lost elastic-sided boots, stories of war medals kept in old tobacco tins.

Loom considered it his obligation to at least do something about Colonel Ahlberg’s cannon, which had gotten lodged on the town hall tower when it ought to stand in the middle of the market square, on a tall plinth with a commemorative inscription in gold lettering. On his instructions fifteen men calling “heave ho!” spent an entire afternoon attempting to move it from where it stood. Sweating and filthy, they walked away muttering that Loom didn’t know what he was talking about. You could want anything you like, but the axles were locked permanently in place. “It’d be better to just cut the wheels off or saw the barrel in two,” they said.

“Incompetents,” declared Loom in irritation. He climbed the tower, looked the cannon over closely, and saw that it hadn’t even budged.

In the course of his inspection he was hit by a stray bullet, the first and at the same time the last bullet of the war in Stitchings: it was the same one that had clipped the metal weathercock and set it spinning for a brief moment. It had circled the earth an unknown number of times since the day of Kazimierz Krasnowolski’s departure; suffice it to say it pierced Loom’s cold heart that afternoon, when he had gone to examine the cannon. He swayed, his moist hand slid down his watch chain and stopped at the gold pocket watch, and that very moment black, tainted blood spattered onto his clothing.

“Dash it,” he grunted. “This is a new coat!”

And he slipped to the ice-covered ground, into a pale blue and purple emptiness. Because of the frost, rigor mortis stiffened his body so quickly that he ended up lying on his catafalque with his dead fingers gripping his watch, which ticked loudly, to the embarrassment of those attending the funeral. One lusterless blue eye peered at the timepiece from beneath a half-closed lid.

Loom had left behind his sewing shops, his fuel depots, his stores and warehouses, along with the priceless goods he kept in them: bolts of fabric, barrels of kerosene, sacks of grain. He left his account books, his mortgage bonds, his stocks, his promissory notes, and his cash. The only thing he took with him was his watch.

“He did a greater service to the town by dying than with the whole of the rest of his life,” the gentlemen of the town council murmured discreetly as they gave one another a light. The transfer of these possessions by mortmain would have been deliverance for the town’s empty coffers, the beginning of a new chapter in the history of Stitchings. Everyone was waiting for this, since they had all had enough of the chapter that was ending. Yet an obstacle was presented in the form of the ambiguous and most unseemly presence of Emilka, who resided in Loom’s house as if it were the most natural thing in the world, amid well-thumbed French romances that were piled on windowsills, armchairs, sofas.