Across a boundless plain, in a first-class passenger car, wrapped in a weather-beaten greatcoat, Felek Chmura returned from the war. Outside the station he was beset by his ragged pals from the old days.
“That’s Felek Chmura, all in one piece! He’s a charmed one, he is!” they exclaimed, clapping him on the shoulder till one of them spotted something red under his collar. “What’ve you got there? Blood?” But Felek Chmura brushed off the scrap of silk embroidery thread. The wind snatched up the thread and carried it halfway across the town. It fell at the feet of Stefania Neumann as she was hurrying to the haberdasher’s. She tripped on the level sidewalk.
“I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” she said to the maid carrying her basket. “My head is splitting. Let’s go home.”
Felek paid for his hotel room in advance: he had a wad of banknotes in his pocket. The bellhop carried four immense burlap sacks and an officer’s trunk up to the second floor, where he had the best room in the hotel, with a view of the town hall.
Through the keyhole Felek was observed tossing his old foot-cloths into the stove and taking a pair of silk socks from one of the sacks. He exchanged his faded uniform for a dark jacket. He fastened a watch chain to the pocket of his vest, looked out the window and set the watch by the clock on the tower, at the exact moment when Oswald Slotzki was rounding the town hall, slumped in a dorozhka next to a pile of leather suitcases.
Slotzki had arrived by sea to rescue Strobbel’s works. His ears still rang with the crash of cannon fire and the sound of bugles. He cared little for porcelain, but he had a duty to help his uncle, who before the war had paid for his education. Covered in scars bright as flames, he gazed through lashless eyelids at the tower with its golden weathercock and with a blotched hand reached into his pocket for his watch.
“Your clock is five minutes slow,” he remarked sourly to the driver, who responded by lashing the horses. Slotzki got his five minutes back before the dorozhka pulled up on the muddy, rutted square in front of Strobbel’s porcelain factory. That very afternoon he was shown the shops to which he had traveled in such haste; they stood there empty, mold-infested, swathed to the ceiling in cobwebs, water pooling on the floor. He was introduced in turn to every one of the clerks: fat ones and thin ones, in discolored shirts and frock coats so worn that they shone, with perspiration dotting their balding foreheads. Slotzki shook many hands, and when it was all finally over, with a frown on his face he spent a long time washing the invisible dirt of the world off his hands. As he did so he thought about the wallet that had been stolen the moment he set foot on dry land. Finally he ordered a tankard of beer to be brought to Strobbel’s study.
“You know the firestorm I went through in the war, uncle,” he said, his mustache coated with foam. “Fire burns, but it also purifies. Unlike you, I’d rather deal with live fire than with the stagnant waters of thievery and idleness.”
The next day he sat down to study the books of income and expenditure, the yellowed invoices and the old business letters, amid all the intricacies tracing the long-standing negligence of the factory bookkeepers. He sweated, his neck reddening. He cast off his jacket, revealing field-gray suspenders. Successive days went by as he rummaged among the papers. The tangled trail of gaps in the documentation led him to prewar times, to consignments of goods that had later been turned into the shattered wares lying throughout the streets of the town, and he uncovered reprehensible errors in the procedure for purchasing the clay that the porcelain used to be fired from.
“How can anyone change beyond recognition like that,” the women who worked for Strobbel said, still remembering an indistinct figure in a striped silk vest. “Before the war he used to be good-looking and nice, now you can’t say a word to him.”
When Slotzki would tip his hat back on his bald head as he walked down the street, the ladies would cry out and quickly look away. He was shunned like the plague and never invited to dances in homes where there were marriageable young women. His unsightliness counted more than Strobbel’s entire works, which he was slowly setting in motion again after the wartime interruption, and which he was to inherit. He worked from morning till night, not sparing anyone, especially the bookkeepers, whom he liked to torment with abrupt summonses, occasionally even before breakfast or after supper. They would come running, only half awake, given away by their misbuttoned clothes. From behind the closed door of his office Slotzki’s raised voice and his heavy footsteps could be heard. “It’s your bounden duty!” he would shout, hammering his fist on the table. But even that failed to bring him relief, so he would grab a wooden ruler and snap it in two like a match.
“Four rulers since yesterday,” word would go around the factory.
A porcelain washbasin with a soap dish and water jug were placed in his office. Once a week he received business visitors, who had to make an appointment ahead of time. A spotty boy who ran errands would go out into the corridor and call suppliants in turn, deliberately mispronouncing their names. Slotzki’s black pointer lay by the door and followed those entering the office with his eyes, fangs bared.
“Good dog,” one or another of them would mumble, squeezing against the wall in the passageway.
The water in the jug ran out even before midday.
“Max!” Slotzki would yell, raising his hands and pushing them away from himself so as not to dirty his clothes. Boy and dog would jump to their feet simultaneously, for both had the same name. Slotzki got through about as many jugs of water as he did rulers. He disliked heartbreaking stories, and made no bones about showing it. Women left his study sniffling and wiping their eyes on a corner of their apron; men would be gritting their teeth till they made a grinding sound. Seeing this, the dog would begin to growl, all set to leap at their throats.
“Down, you bad boy,” Max Fiff would hiss in his ear, struggling as he held on to the dog’s collar with all his strength. Slotzki would poke his head out into the corridor.
“What’s going on out here?” he’d snap.
Out of breath, Max Fiff would roll back his sleeve and show the bite marks on his forearm. But Slotzki barely glanced at them.
“Both of you calm down, dammit!” he’d exclaim, and slam the door so hard the walls shook.
Felek in the meantime every morning would plod across the heaps of broken porcelain, crunching pink roses on a white background into the black mud. He didn’t spare a single glance for earth or sky; he only looked at the stores, the shops, the boarded-up fuel depots. He spent his afternoons at Corelli’s café. A Turkish cigarette in the corner of his mouth, he would laboriously read the announcements of real estate sales in the newspapers, following the words with his finger. The pages gave off a promising grayness that mingled with the cigarette smoke; the waiters floated in it as if in turbid water, raising their trays over the heads of the customers. As they passed Felek they would look askance at the clumsy handwriting in which he was making notes with an indelible pencil on a paper napkin. He sweated over his reading, wiping his forehead on a white handkerchief that bore the elaborate monogram of Kazimierz Krasnowolski, who had fallen in the war.
“Check,” he would call the moment he was done with the newspaper. His tips secured him polite treatment. Though he bore himself like a civilian, the desk clerk at the Hotel Angleterre clicked his heels when he saw him and called him lieutenant.
“It’s only Felek Chmura,” the maids would whisper, giggling and casting glances.
“Not to you he isn’t, not anymore, you silly creatures,” the desk clerk would scold them. “And don’t even think of trying to be familiar.”
In short order Felek seduced every one of the maids in turn, without any promises or declarations of love. Their names vanished from his memory right away. More than anything else, awake and in his sleep, he was preoccupied with estimating the value of all the movable and immovable property his eye came to rest upon. He had abacuses brought to his hotel room. In the early morning he would go and stand outside an apartment bu
ilding he’d seen the previous day, unsure whether the guttering was actually copper, or the basements occupied.
“There’s a place overlooking the street on the second floor that’s available,” the concierge would inform him, coming out with a broom.
“Let me tell you the history of this building.” A beggar would call out to him, grabbing his sleeve in the gateway.
Soon Stitchings had no secrets from him: he knew exactly how much it was worth at market prices, or converted to demolished state.
“Does he still have money?” the owner of the Hotel Angleterre asked the desk clerk, leaning across the counter. “What on earth does he do all day?”
Real estate was cheap at that time. Felek bought empty lots on Factory Street, fenced them off, and ordered bricks.
“Who builds anything here?” passersby asked, and for want of a reply would answer themselves, saying that Neumann’s and Strobbel’s factories were probably putting up new warehouses.
Felek Chmura’s people bought up imperial Russian gold coins on the black market, in any amounts. They located deposits of them unerringly, capable of sniffing them out anywhere, even if they had been underground. In the countinghouses they threw fistfuls of them on the tabletop; occasionally a lump of dried soil would crumble from them. During this time the local marketplace was dominated by empty wallets, suitcases with broken locks, and stolen clothing, among which starving ragamuffins roamed, on the lookout for a potato left behind in a puddle, which they would pick up and eat, even raw. But there wasn’t a single one, for where would it have fallen from? The stalls offered everything except foodstuffs, which seemed to have vanished from the face of the earth, hiding from unreliable Polish crowns and German marks. Potatoes, if they even existed, were far away, buried in clamps by people who no longer believed in any currency whatsoever. It was only out of a habit deeper than faith that they were prepared to accept tsarist five-ruble gold coins long withdrawn from circulation.
By night, wagons heaped with potatoes would pull up in front of Felek Chmura’s warehouses. The goods were unloaded in a hurry, under cover of darkness, as the star of good fortune twinkled over the town hall clock. Felek personally saw to it that nothing went missing. In the early morning still-sleepy storekeepers, anemic and transparent as air, would appear and collect their wares, three hundredweight each. Felek would not agree to any more. His right-hand man, red-haired Adaś Rączka, in outsized knickerbockers, would scrupulously measure out the potatoes.
“That’s enough,” he would say. “Next.” In the afternoon, in Corelli’s café Felek would fall still over his coffee cup, newspaper in hand, cigarette between his lips. Eventually he would be woken by the clatter of a falling spoon. He would set the paper aside, pay, rise from the table and, cigarette in his mouth the whole time, would cross the street to the hotel.
“He’s bored,” the hotel staff would remark.
As Chmura took his room key, a cone of cigarette ash would fall and scatter on the open registration book.
“You’ll find the best entertainment these days on the old parade ground, sir,” the desk clerk said to him one day as he obligingly slid an ashtray toward him. He suddenly pulled a banknote from his pocket. “Take a look.”
“A hundred Polish crowns. You’re doing pretty well for yourself.”
“I’ll say,” the desk clerk chortled with a wink.
On the parade ground on Guards Street people were crowding into a large white tent. Horses with feather headdresses and ribbons in their tails galloped around a sand-covered ring. A featherlight female rider danced on their backs, while Orlando the lion tamer cracked his whip, the lion jumped through a burning hoop, two monkeys in gleaming opera hats shuffled cards and tossed wads of almost certainly counterfeit banknotes from hand to hand. Applause rang out, the band played a flourish, the horses paraded to the beat of the shrill music, and lion tamer and horseback performer gave a low bow as the monkeys ran round and round, applauding themselves.
During the day curious passersby would peer into the circus wagon through a dusty window.
“There’s nothing in there,” they’d say.
The monkeys would be grooming one another. Orlando the lion tamer would be asleep on a wooden bunk, wrapped in his overcoat and snoring. The horseback performer would be darning her stockings.
Felek had them show him one of the circus banknotes again. It was no different from any other hundred-crown bill, perhaps just a little paler, but the watermark was in the right place, if not quite as distinct. He bought it, overpaying without batting an eye, and from that moment he always carried it with him for good luck in a side compartment of his wallet, so it wouldn’t get mixed in with the thick bundles of bills with which he did business.
Potatoes flowed onto the Stitchings market in an even stream, and their mass, once it had passed the critical point, opened the floodgates to an under-the-counter trade in gold.
“It worked!” shouted Felek Chmura, running down the middle of the street with his hands raised in a gesture of triumph. From that time on his people stood on every corner of Salt Street, turning wedding rings into cash, which was immediately taken to the little stores to pay overdue debts and renew credit. The legs of the women standing in line swelled up, while at home a throng of hungry children waited, along with a pile of torn stockings to be darned. The work never ended, tubs of soapy water stood perpetually in the kitchens.
Sea winds blew down Salt Street. Dealers took deep drags on cigarettes to catch their breath, and dried their throats with a mouthful of contraband spirit. Salt Street was glutted with cigarettes; they were peddled from cardboard boxes slung around the necks of children shuffling along in oversized shoes, who also had liquor in their inside pockets and sold it on the side. They would start their business with a few small coins taken from their mother’s purse. The next day, having increased their reserves of cash, they would return to Felek Chmura’s warehouse for more goods. While the mothers were still looking for their missing pennies, their children were already sitting on the dirty steps of apartment buildings on Factory Street counting thick bundles of banknotes. They would jump up at the sound of footsteps and flee to the attic, hiding among the sheets hung out to dry on washing lines.
In stormy weather the channels of commerce would seethe, swelling with dirty foam, and deals would fall through. Traders, soaking wet and exhausted, would spend their last money on alcohol and cigarettes. Their losses would rankle in them like a festering wound. The children would move among them cautiously, fearful for their wares and their money. Robbed and beaten, they would whimper in corners and stay out of the way of their overworked mothers, who bent over their never-ending tubs of laundry.
“Why should I care about that? This isn’t a shelter,” Felek would say as he bought jewelry in any amount from the traders, paying cash. Through his hands flowed a torrent of watches, wedding bands engraved on the inside with unnecessary initials, and diamond rings, the multiplicity of which rendered them commonplace. One day the nameless river of mementos taken from their hiding places and hurriedly converted into ready money tossed up on its banks Kazimierz Krasnowolski’s engagement ring, in a velvet-lined box to which shreds of prewar tobacco stuck like algae.
Felek Chmura’s firm offered its clients complete discretion. His business never had any slow moments; he was always willing to conduct some profitable transaction, even at half past four in the morning, woken from the deepest sleep, and it never happened at any time that he was short of Polish crowns. It was for this reason Ludwig Neumann did not hesitate to send for him when it came time to sell the gold clock from his drawing room. Felek entered through the kitchen door, as he used to before the war.
“Nice clock, it’s a pity to destroy it,” he declared. “But to weigh it the workings will have to be taken out.”
“He only knows the value of scrap metal,” put in Stefania. She stood abruptly from her armchair; her father’s unstitched frock coat fell from her lap to the floor. “I be
g you, father, don’t listen to him. Send him away.”
“The collar’s all worn,” remarked Felek as he picked up the frock coat. “Are you really going to repair it yourself, Mrs. Stefania?”
“That’s none of your business, Felek,” said Stefania. The door slammed behind her, and that was the last he saw of her that afternoon. Little golden angels bore the face of the clock beneath its bell glass; the pendulum swung, tick tock.
“Very well, Mr. Neumann,” Felek murmured. “How much did you want for it?”
And he paid cash, without haggling. Carrying the unwieldy clock with its angels and pendulum under his arm, he left by the kitchen stairs and came out onto the courtyard. There his head spun from the rainbow of gleaming pink, gold, and pale blue, and his precious new acquisition almost slipped from his grip.
“Dawn,” he whispered. He was so astounded he had a coughing fit. He never looked at the sky, and so he had no idea the sunrise could be so beautiful. Given wings by the sight of luminous satins beneath lace and English embroidery light as clouds, he had a yen for something more – but what? His heart suddenly ached from pink-and-gold-and-blue longing, before he realized it was the servants airing out the masters’ bedding. At that point he raised his eyes high up toward the third-floor windows where the curtains were drawn. Concealed somewhere behind them was a silk-wrapped item of furniture with a soft mattress upon which at that very moment Stefania lay sobbing in desperation.
“Ha!” said Felek. “You won’t get away from me now.”
He had a huge mirror put in his hotel room. He was thinking about ordering a new suit; his attention distracted over the accounts, he took fabric samples from Loom’s warehouse out of his pocket. Now the warehouse belonged to him; he kept the old signboards but sent the former suppliers packing with their prewar materials, for which they charged through the nose.
In Red Page 5