“No, no, no!” she exclaimed, stamping her foot.
After leaving Loom’s house the doctor suddenly felt mortally tired and had an urge to call by the tavern for a glass of juniper vodka. The place was crowded with soldiers on leave who kept asking the time and rising on unsteady legs from their tables, just as thirsty as before the festival. Firemen who had hung up the Chinese lanterns and set off the fireworks were now dozing in the corner over their tankards, with a perpetual sense of loss. The festival was winding down amid weariness, as every year. The trombones that earlier sounded on the market square, striving to drown out the Gypsy fiddles from the tavern, had now fallen silent along with them, and the musicians had gone off to their homes, lugging their noiseless instruments locked in black cases.
The rug slipped from Loom’s lap as he sat listlessly in his armchair, his collar only half fastened and protruding from his neck like a pennant.
“Adela, don’t you know the master needs to eat regularly?” Emilka admonished the cook. “Serve something, anything, but make it fast.”
She dragged her father by the hand to the dining room. They sat together in silence over their belated dinner. At this moment the butler Stanisław announced Kazimierz Krasnowolski.
“Send him away politely,” said Loom.
On his way out Kazimierz exchanged a cold bow with Augustus Strobbel in the hallway. Loom was even less inclined to see young Strobbel. With a peremptory gesture he ordered his daughter to remain at the table.
“Why?” she cried. “Why?”
“There are boundaries that should never be crossed,” explained Loom. “Can a company that doesn’t pay its promissory notes expect to be trusted? Death has to be accepted so life can retain its dignity.”
The funeral director provided a casket along with funerary candles, bouquets of flowers, and containers of ice. It wasn’t his fault that preparations for the funeral ground to a halt. In a fit of rage Emilka spilled the ice, trampled on the flowers, and tore the mourning cloths from the mirrors.
“The young miss has gone mad, God rest her soul,” came whispers from the pantry. Before anyone knew what was happening, she had run up to her room and locked herself in. She cried for three days and three nights. In the end she grew tired of weeping. On the fourth day she fell silent. The tears she’d shed had filled the room with a fine white mist.
“It’s stuffy in here,” remarked Stanisław when the door was finally unlocked. He opened a window, and the cloud of mist drifted out into the sky. Slumber overcame Emilka; she slept for a long time, then in the evening she took her forbidden French romance from its hiding place in the chest of drawers and sat down to read. She read all the following day and beyond, no longer concealing the fact from anyone. Every so often she glanced up from her book at the snow-covered street. But no one came to see her anymore.
Emilka’s compromising situation exposed Kazimierz Krasnowolski to ridicule; he had no idea whether he was supposed to be in mourning or not. In the salons the whole story was passed over in disdainful silence. But in the great hall of the officers’ mess it was only his sharp glance that wiped away knowing smirks and caused whisperings to cease.
“They’re bored, so they don’t forget a thing,” he would say later to his own reflection in the shaving mirror as he applied alum to a snick on his chin. “Here, any stain is going to last a hundred years, longer than the service regulations.”
After he came off duty he would sit playing solitaire, a Turkish cigarette hanging from his mouth; its ash would fall among ambiguously smiling queens, kings glaring under beetle brows, and knaves with foolishly bulging eyes. When the mess was about to close, as the stained tablecloths were being cleared he would down a final glass. The solitaire never came out; the destiny of the card figures was separation and eternal lack. And an insatiable hunger whose cause lay in anatomy: below the breastbone, in the place where the stomach ought to be, the esophagus joined smoothly with a second esophagus as if life were merely a joke. Two heads bred opposing views, and two hearts irreconcilable desires. When one half was filled with love, the other choked on hatred. One wished to live, the other preferred death.
“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.
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. Wi
th 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.
In Red Page 2