One of the first to enlist as a volunteer was Alojzy the fireman.
“Have you gone nuts? Are you tired of living?” asked Stanisław the butler. Alojzy Piechota had had enough of the holes in his boots, through which his frozen toes poked out.
“Y-y-your health,” he said, drinking a farewell to Stanisław, as Adela packed him onion, lard, and tobacco in a cardboard box. “Death n-n-never misses anyone. While I’m still alive I want to at least have warm feet.”
The railroad station was thronged with recruits. A German major with an entourage of officers stood at the narrow passageway leading to the platforms. A milksop of a second lieutenant turned back those who did not salute in the appropriate manner. A long string of wooden cars extended behind the puffing locomotive. There were clouds of steam, and sparks scattered; mothers were crying, fiancées waved handkerchiefs as they rose on tiptoe. Somewhere an accordion was playing; the buddies of the men leaving sang in husky voices behind the barrier and tossed their caps in the air. Those departing for the war didn’t know whether to weep or wave their handkerchiefs or sing, while some of them even before the train set off had begun to deal out cards or open a bottle, as if fearful that otherwise they wouldn’t have time to play a few hands or have a drink before the end of their little story.
At this time the sewing shops were working full tilt. Instead of lovely whalebone corsets, each seamstress every day sewed several dozen pairs of long johns for the soldiers, struggling with the musty threads. Loom crammed his warehouses with them right up to the ceiling, probably hoping the war would never end, and every pair of long johns would be moldering in the earth before the cheap thread came undone at the seams. Poring over the repeatedly breaking stitch, the seamstresses narrowed their eyes to see the thread, which was harder and harder to make out in the gloom that saved lighting costs for the shop. Outside the gate there was a host of women desperate for work. The seamstresses were going blind, but they hid it as long as they could, and even those who could no longer see a thing still kept sewing long johns for the soldiers.
The armies bled themselves out at the fronts, and toward the end of the war the soldiers arriving in Stitchings on leave had only white phlegm inside them. Their skin was transparent, their eyes pallid and fixed from staring at the barbed wire that defaced the emptiness of snow-covered fields; their ears were deaf from the roar of cannon fire. Madame, sipping her morning brandy, which by now she bought extravagantly on the black market in defiance of her straitened circumstances, could complain only about slack business. In the parlor the girls brushed one another’s hair, arranging it then undoing it endlessly, till eventually they fell asleep from boredom, curling up on the upholstered sofas.
There was no longer anything in Stitchings capable of distracting the attention of those soldiers who had miraculously survived from the puddles of beer on the tabletop in which they moved their fingers, making canals to join far-apart lakes, transforming small coves into vast oceans, inundating the last remnants of dry land.
When the black letter script of the railroad signs had become barely legible, grammar school students pulled down the signboards along with cobblers’ apprentices and bakers’ boys. They trampled on the German inscriptions and took away the weapons of the railroad patrol. They went looking for the lieutenant who was the second commandant of Stitchings, but they didn’t find anyone except the watchman’s wife. She had last seen the lieutenant early that morning, in civvies, suitcase in hand.
The third and final commandant of Stitchings was the drunken sergeant who had carried papers and wiped chairs with his sleeve. His self-appointed term lasted from breakfast time till lunch. He just had time to order the gentlemen of the town council to stand to attention, and have one of them do squat jumps. He called them a band of filthy hippopotamuses, to which they said nothing, seeing as he was tossing a hand grenade in his palm while he spoke. Afterwards he accidentally blew himself up with it. He left a stain on the deserted barracks yard.
Those who had been drawn to the yellow flag of gangrene by the recruitment posters returned from the war in tattered greatcoats. They came back with wooden crutches or wounds that would not heal. They climbed into the streetcar outside the train station. The conductor could no longer even look at them. None of them had money for a ticket and each one hit on the same idea.
“This is my ticket,” he would say as he thrust his bandages in the conductor’s face.
The other passengers would laugh as they heard this for the umpteenth time, and avert their eyes from the dried bloodstains black as mourning.
“Come off it, pal,” the conductor would answer as he pushed the soldier down the steps.
One man missing an eye, another with a scar on his forehead, would ask about work at Strobbel’s or Neumann’s, because that was all they knew. But the factories had stopped working for good, having first been turned into military depositories, then thoroughly plundered and left empty with broken windows. So they would go to the power plant, where the steam turbine was operating, offering to transport coal in baskets from the coal barges to the furnaces.
“You’re too late,” the clerk in oversleeves and a snuff-stained jacket would say as he turned them away.
“What happened to the mine?” the demobilized soldiers would ask as they stood by the flooded crater at the end of Salt Street. They hated their fate and in desperation were prepared to abandon it and at least become miners in clothing stiff from salt. Alojzy Piechota the fireman was barely able to hobble. “It’s come, the w-w-w . . . the w-w-w . . . ,” he kept repeating as he shuffled by on his crutches.
“What mine? You must be imagining things,” some wagon driver would call to them from his seat, tapping his forehead to show they were mad.
Alojzy came back from the war without his elastic-sided boots; they had been removed from his feet in the field hospital and that was the last he saw of them. From under his bed he pulled out his old shoes, one more riddled with holes than the other. After the war he only needed one; but as if out of spite, that particular one was falling apart.
“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 thos
e 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.
“There has to be a will somewhere,” people kept repeating.
In the feverish search someone broke the bottle that had been handed down by the first of the Looms, inside which for generations an English galleon had been sailing the high seas full sail, driven by gusts of desire and greed. The Looms has gotten used to the idea that their life did not end: so long as it had been possible, at the appropriate moment each of them had been able to replace his predecessor unobtrusively, and so they were not in the habit of leaving wills, let alone bequests to the town, which they regarded as their own property in its entirety, from the heaps of snow lining the streets to the golden gleam of the weathercock on the town hall tower.
The English galleon ran aground with shattered masts on the shallows of the floor and saved Stitchings. For where else could the ocean, salty as tears, have come from to fill the invisible channels of turnover to the benefit of trade and commerce, if not from that accidentally broken bottle?
ANYONE WHO MAKES IT TO STITCHINGS APPRECIATES ITS promising misty grayness and the moist warm breeze in which desires flourish so handsomely. A wide choice of furnished rooms with all modern conveniences, and homemade meals available just around the corner, cheap and filling. Daybreaks and sunsets at fixed times. A moderate climate, flowers throughout the year. It’s well worth making the long steamboat journey, putting up with seasickness, till the port of Stitchings comes into view crowded with freighters flying various flags. Or for the same number of days rattling along in a train, dozing from tedium, rocking to the rhythmic clatter of the wheels. The visitor – for instance a traveling salesman with a valise bursting at the seams, as if instead of a few samples he had stuffed it with all of his possessions – can choose to come by land or by sea, restricted only by the properties of the place from which he sets out. But his choice of route determines the fate that awaits him upon his arrival.
Those who chose the train emerged from the station directly onto Coal Street, where there was a crush of wagons carrying their loads of coke over the cobblestones. The two chimneys of the power station filled the sky with smoke, whose swirling substance was reflected in black puddles. New arrivals would look down the streets with their coating of ash, and
frown, as if in the first moment they wished to say that this was not what they were after, and that the arduous journey had been in vain. There was no sign of a dorozhka. Street urchins loitered among the travelers, picking up cigarette butts. At an opportune moment one of them would suddenly grab some piece of luggage and run away with it across the mounds of coal and heaps of planking.
“Help! My valise!” the victim would want to shout, but his cry would be cut off by fear like a knife to the throat.
Those arriving by sea would pass through the gateway of the harbor into Salt Street, where amid a perfect harmony of every possible shade of gray, people in caps pulled down over their eyes would be creeping along before vanishing into dark entranceways at the back of insurance firms, maritime trade offices, and shipping companies. The façades of these establishments, faced in gray sandstone and bearing engraved silver signboards, promised reliable professional service with a two-hundred-year-old tradition, discretion, and the hush of interiors with bulky desks, models of sailing ships, faded astronomical maps in oak frames, and collections of sextants displayed in glass cases. At the sight of such venerable buildings the traveler would rub his hands contentedly, convinced he had found himself in the right place at the right time. Filled with hope, he would flag down a dorozhka – five shining black cabs would vie for the fare – and be taken to the Hotel Angleterre, quite unaware that he’d already been relieved of his wallet.
Over the tower of the town hall a star of good fortune twinkled every night, almost able to fit into the gaping beak of the golden weathercock. The cock, itself cut out of a flat sheet of metal, would sooner or later have swallowed the star had the two not been permanently attached by an unseen wire. The unchanging order of this constellation inspired faith in the permanence of the boom, encouraging long-term enterprises and investment in real estate. Every transaction, giving birth to new desires, strengthened the perpetual illusion that the esophagus leads directly to the stomach and that possession is possible.
In Red Page 4