In Red (11 page)

Truly, the sewing shops of Loom & Son would not have been big enough for all of them at once. The oldest ones had gone blind during the war retying snapped threads, the younger ones slaving over long johns for civilians; the most recent arrivals had not entirely lost their sight when the boom ended. Some of them could still see a little – outlines, light – and shook their fists at the façade of Neumann's house. Those who were completely blind simply pounded their white canes on the sidewalk.

“Stupid cows,” Felek exclaimed in anger. “What are they after? Money? How did I profit from them going blind, dammit?”

“We deserve something!” the seamstresses wailed.

“Sure you do!” he wheezed, sticking his head under the quilt. “A whole reel of nothing!”

But when he was informed that they had pooled their last remaining money, hired a lawyer, and brought a lawsuit against him, he laughed to bursting, he roared with laughter till his belly ached, shaking the heavy bed on which the bailiff had already placed his seal.

The firms with which he had business ties declared bankruptcy one after another. The stenographers, who had filled the offices with the clatter of typewriters and flirted with the pomaded interns, lost their positions just like that, and began to have the worst possible opinion about men. They hung about in gateways late into the night, smoking and accosting passersby. Nightclubs called the Tivoli or the Trocadero went out of business; the real estate market choked on a sudden surfeit, and gold
could no longer be bought for cash. A policeman stood day and night outside Felek Chmura's door.

The crash affected the entire town, as if a wind had blown sand into the cogs of the factory machines and swept displays from the store windows, after which it quieted down, leaving the channels of turnover frozen in lifeless immobility. Agents of the insurance companies bought properties once owned by Felek Chmura, at knockdown prices.

The dry rustle of banknotes still in his ears, he floundered in the arid hell of lost faith. And the whole town with him. One night, waking unexpectedly, he pulled the bell cord and ordered a sleepy Adaś to open the drapes. Raising himself in bed, he looked for his star over the town hall. There was no trace of it there.

“Then everything is clear. The right card is never going to turn up,” he said in a hollow voice. The policeman would never go from his front door, the vilified name of Loom would never recover its ring of trustworthiness, the pink parlor would remain off limits, and in the fire of fever his strength would finally burn itself out. Adaś Rączka bolted the shutter and drew the plush drapes that were heavy as a theater curtain.

“How is that possible?” Chmura repeated in angry confusion. “Is everything over?”

Then his head fell back on the pillows and the glare stopped dazzling him. The world had finally given back what it owed him, the accounts were balanced. Felek Chmura departed this life without leaving a single penny behind. He was buried at
the cost of the municipality. His son was put in the orphanage that Stefania had founded. In the house that was to be sold at auction the servants packed their things and aired the rooms. Miasmas of fever drifted from the opened windows. The contaminated air circulated among the bordello, Neumann's house, and Strobbel's works.

In the pink parlor Slotzki drank mockingly to the empty place on the sofa. The girls gobbled chocolates as the carefree sounds of fox-trots wafted from the horn of the phonograph. In celebrating Felek Chmura's death, Slotzki did not realize that he himself was dying. The doctor summoned in the night spread his hands helplessly.

“It's too late,” he declared.

Slotzki burned up in the flames of fever, in the blink of an eye: not like fresh firewood, but like a log that is already completely fire-blackened, like a dry briquette of charcoal. Max the black pointer crept out from under the sofa and howled, jolting awake those drunk and dozing. The girls hushed him, but he howled louder and louder, till Max Fiff dragged him out onto the street by his studded collar. Under cover of darkness a handful of men carried the body to Strobbel's private apartment. From that moment everything took its proper place: black mourning crepe and funerary candles, and lastly the band.

The funeral march had barely fallen silent when a night storm passed through the pink parlor and destroyed the phonograph with the gold-colored horn. It shattered the gilt-rimmed wineglasses,
the unwashed dishes, the porcelain dancers in tutus. The hour of purification had come, and it raged back and forth through the rooms, leaving upturned furniture with broken legs in the middle of the floor. The next day policemen strove to establish how many pairs of hobnailed boots had stomped around on the polished parquet floor, and whether all of the faces were unfamiliar. Madame refused to speak to the police. Her lips trembled; she reached impatiently for the lone surviving teacup with the broken handle and filled it, spilling brandy on the tabletop.

“Please stop tormenting me,” she kept repeating, staring dully at the table. “Please leave me alone.”

No one cleared up the smashed drawers, the trampled sheets, ripped pillows, broken glass. The girls each went their separate ways, in haste, even before dinner. Madame was the last to leave.

“Merde!”
she exclaimed in farewell as she took her seat in the
dorozhka
. She was seen with a suite of porters, leaning heavily on her parasol, the purple swelling of a broken nose hidden behind a thick veil, as she boarded the eleven fifty-five Warsaw express.

 

 

WHOEVER WISHES TO LEAVE STITCHINGS CAN AVAIL HIMSELF of two methods. If he is an outsider – for example, a traveling salesman of his own virtues, obliged to compete for a favorable
market, or a collector of experiences whom life has taught humility – without a second thought he ought to ascend at dawn in a passenger cabin suspended beneath a dirigible balloon. For it's easy to sail among the clouds, where the sun casts its pink rays over the cranes of the port and the docks, over the roofs of the banks, over the stock exchange, over Ludwig Neumann's works producing radio sets, Slotzki & Co.'s sanitary appliance factory, and Loom's munitions plant, whose chimneys send dark smoke curling into the morning sky. If this person wishes before starting preparations for his journey to study the train timetables or the brochures of shipping lines, he'll quickly realize that the desire to leave bears no relation whatsoever to the calendar or the clock. The right moment never comes at any time. Neither after breakfast, when an exceptionally advantageous transaction is within arm's reach; nor before lunch, when the smell of a roast excites the senses; nor all the more in the sweltering evening that glitters with the enchanting promise of golden saxophones and ostrich feathers.

The entrance to the theater was festooned with lights, which were unnecessary since dusk was not falling and daylight always lasted till late into the night. Crowds pressed around the glass display cases with photographs of the new cabaret program, while signs at the box office announced that tonight's show was sold out. From the windows of a big department store a mannequin gazed out provocatively from beneath artificial eyelashes, wearing an evening dress that the very next day could come to
life in the foyer of the theater; next to it, sets of plated cutlery dazzled with a pure silver gleam.

“How's your health?” people asked as they tipped their hats. “Is it true you're getting married, my good sir?”

Outsiders always had something to do and had no intention whatsoever of ascending into the sky; rather, they regarded walking on solid ground as their solemn obligation. None of those tramping the streets could recall anymore how long he had been in Stitchings.

For locals, on the other hand, the most certain way of retreat led downward, toward the antipodes, in the steps of the salt miners whom nobody remembered any longer. Anyone who wished to leave Stitchings immediately by any other route had first of all to forget that he'd had a new delivery of coal brought to the cellar only yesterday; leave behind the laundry hung out to dry on the clothesline, and the apple pie that had just been put into the oven; let a barely started barrel of sauerkraut go to waste. And set off with his belongings piled on a wagon – bedding, pots and pans, sofa and stacked chairs, with screaming kids, the canary in its cage, and the cat trying to scramble out of its basket.

Red banners with the circled emblem of Slotzki's sanitary appliance factory flapped in a hot wind. Every evening the outdoor loudspeakers, manufactured at Neumann's, would broadcast the drumrolls of military marches whose rhythm could be heard faintly over the hoarse roar of the surf.

Trains pulled up to the platforms with full loads of passengers then left empty, curtains flapping in their open windows, the wind turning the pages of abandoned newspapers as it blew through the cars. The large letters of the headlines, sounding the alarm with exclamation points and question marks, had no one to warn any longer.

Huge passenger steamers lowered their gangways and passengers disembarked endlessly till finally, emptied, the ships would depart with a long sad whistle. Some traveler who had not gone ashore would lean on the railing with the look of an old sea wolf, the only figure on any of the decks fore and aft, upper and lower. He would raise his collar against the gusty wind and wave farewell with his glove to some unknown person: perhaps it was to the little boats made of newspaper that contended with the waves behind the keel and, half sunk already, continued to ship water.

But has anyone ever seen vessels that cannot be capsized or sunk? Oak basins? Pastry boards? Plates and bowls, also known as vessels, were even less well suited to sailing; in the water they would have sunk at once, like a stone. It was only the large chests of drawers kept in dark corners of drawing rooms that offered the promise of any kind of security. Their tops provided shelter for the once mass-produced figures of young maidens, merchants, and guardsmen with excessively red cheeks and startled porcelain expressions.

No sleep, no respite. Bright daylight twenty-four hours a day,
aside from a single moment of dark decline that passed unnoticed long before the clanging of the first streetcars. It was hot and close, the way it is before a storm. Restless crowds surged along the bottlenecks of the streets. There was a painful shortage of space. On the shop signboards two languages were at odds with one another, tattered bilingual posters fluttered on the walls, a leftover from a referendum held in accordance with international treaties. One and the same town hall clock measured out a common time for the multitude of pocket watches and wristwatches; one golden weathercock was reflected in a thousand pairs of eyes. Anyone who wanted the space, the clock, and the weathercock for himself alone would first need to find a way to get rid of the crowds of others desiring the same thing, stepping in his way, treading on his heels.

The cries were silent still, compressed like air in a bottle of spoiled wine about to explode. Amid a furious honking of horns, horse-drawn cabs would be weaving between gasoline-powered cabriolets with chrome-plated radiators. A newspaper seller in a checkered cycling cap would collide with a corpulent bank clerk; an argument would follow, and within moments a flock of onlookers was obstructing the traffic. In a streetcar an insolent Realschule student would refuse to give up his seat to a professor from the classical grammar school, who would respond by striking the boy on the forehead with his cane so infelicitously that the streetcar had to be stopped and a doctor summoned. Workers from the factories of Slotzki, Neumann, and Loom,
marching grimly down the street and occupying its whole width, found their way blocked by detachments of mounted gendarmes, who in the ensuing fracas forced them into the dark depths of gateways from which there was no escape.

 

 

NO ONE WAS WAITING FOR NATALIE ZUGOFF ON THE STATION platform when she alighted from the sleeping car of the Paris express beneath the cast-iron arches of a glass roof high as the sky, and dulled and darkened from soot. With a miniature Chinese lapdog curled up in her muff and a little black boy in livery who stared at everything and pressed his ear to a music box, Natalie Zugoff headed for the exit without troubling herself about her luggage. The cylinder of the music box revolved indefatigably, repeating its little tune amid the hubbub, unchanging as the stamp of a solitary fate impressed on random pictures in the main hall of the station, and just as faint.

That same morning the director of the theater, a corpulent gentleman by the name of Jacques Rauch, looked about for Natalie Zugoff then began to make his way through the crowd of travelers leaving the platform, toward her abandoned luggage. The porters he summoned picked up the suitcases, monogrammed and extraordinarily heavy – fifteen items, not including hatboxes – lugged them the length of the platform, and crammed them with the utmost difficulty into an automobile sent from the Hotel Angleterre.

“What's she bringing?” they grumbled. “Rocks?”

“Women! They say she took all this stuff and left Russia to get away from the Bolsheviks,” Rauch said to the chauffeur, who had placed his cap with the band marked “Angleterre” on the dashboard and was squatting and examining the overloaded wheels.

“I just hope the axles hold out,” he murmured.

Natalie Zugoff seemed accustomed to the fact that her bags followed her of their own accord. There had never yet been a lack of volunteers willing to see to them. They'd been looked after by officials of the British legation in Odessa, White Russian officers, sailors of the Black Sea Fleet, and agents of the French immigration authorities. The stationmaster, whom she had cast merely a fleeting glance, had without being asked taken the small valise from her hands and carried it himself to the hotel automobile in hopes that the velvety gaze would rest once again on his vulgar person. Called away by urgent business, in a farewell gesture he leaned down to the hand clad in a net glove; the Chinese lapdog snarled and bared its teeth.