“Too thick and too stiff,” he would complain, crushing in his fingers the samples from new consignments. “None of this will do.”
He was also disappointed with the potatoes: whereas before they had brought him nothing but gain, now they rotted in the warehouses before he could turn them into rightful profit.
“Serves him right,” the women in line whispered vindictively. “Potatoes like that! At those prices! He got so greedy he must have forgotten that rot’s infectious.”
In this way the potatoes still owed him something, till finally he realized they’d never quite pay for themselves. Biting his lip in powerless anger, Chmura summoned Adaś.
“You call these shoes clean?” he shouted, hitting him on his ruddy head with a rolled-up newspaper.
But even then he never doubted his star. How could he, since it hung right over the town hall tower. The cause of his setbacks soon emerged: the circus banknote, bought for good luck, had in a moment of inattention gotten mixed in with his other hundred-crown bills. Once he realized this he laid them all out on the table like cards for solitaire and studied each one in turn by the light of a lamp, searching for one that was paler than the rest. He found four such notes. He picked them up and put them down again helplessly, continually comparing them one more time and moving them around, till ash from the cigarette in the corner of his mouth fell on them.
“How do you like that, goddammit! Look!” he exclaimed, summoning Adaś Rączka with a wave of the hand. “Is there something wrong with my eyes? Now there are eight of them!”
He got rid of them any chance he had, cursing the circus, which by now had vanished without a trace from the parade ground. Felek’s people, still standing indefatigably at every corner of Salt Street, used the notes to pay for gold wedding bands. When it was needed, they lent them to con men at loan-shark rates and for a tragically short time, taking their throats as security. They used the notes to give change in the larger transactions that occurred when sailors borne by towering waves down the middle of Salt Street crashed into them as if they were rocks. The sailors had a broad step, swaying as if they were walking the deck of a ship, not the firm ground of the town, which they swept with their broad-bottomed pants. Each sailor’s every wish could be granted in a second, even if it involved the heavyset blonde in a black garter belt who they’d dreamed of the whole voyage, or the petite Japanese woman hiding behind her fan on a matchbox label. Any object a sailor could possibly desire, Felek’s people had it at hand, and the sailors couldn’t stop themselves till they had tried everything. They woke in the early morning in fog, a blank patch in their memory, a dull pain in their forehead, and one faded banknote in their pocket. Black-eyed and blinking, they read the name of their ship, which they had forgotten, from the rim of their cap.
In time Felek Chmura’s people exchanged their oilcloth-peaked caps for felt hats. They were experts on everything; on the spot they could sell forged Portuguese passports to officers from Wrangel Island, or as a special commission could liquidate worthless prewar Trans-Siberian Railroad shares. They smelled of alcohol, tobacco, and cologne. They would leave the corners of Salt Street to occupy cheap wooden dance halls called the Tivoli or the Trocadero, which also belonged to Felek Chmura, along with the proceeds from the liquor license, the piano and accordion music, and the earnings of the professional dance partners. The accordion summoned people to the tango through swathes of smoke, and tossed them to distraction in desperate lunges and sudden half-turns, while the piano player teetered on the brink of silence, only to abruptly hammer his fists on the hollow wooden case of the upright piano – boom, boom! – upon which the accordion would issue its final word before the melody ended and destiny was fulfilled. The relentless beat of the tango pulsed in the temples beneath beads of perspiration; for a brief moment everyone took its violence as their own and barely kept it under control, swaying on a taut string with a hired dancer in garish makeup, on the borderline between light and dark, love and hate, life and death. It was precisely at such moments that Felek Chmura’s people lost their one and only treasure – hesitation. Along with it they lost feeling in their fingers, and from that time on, after a hard day’s work counterfeit banknotes would continually turn up in their wallets – first, one-hundred-crown bills, then later five-hundreds too, and finally also ordinary twenties and tens. Without feeling in the fingers life was worth nothing, and so they began to despise it. They stopped liking smoked sausage and mustard, and beer. Eventually their thinking lost its clarity, their gaze its keenness, and one by one they were found in the early morning stiff as a rock, a gunshot to the head. Their widows received a one-time compensation from Felek: a wad of banknotes that had to be spent as quickly as possible before they faded entirely.
In the meantime, in Loom & Son’s esteemed store, which belonged to Felek Chmura, at prices lower than ever they sold goods of a shoddiness never seen before: tea mixed with dried nettles, flour combined with chalk and plaster, sugar mingled with semolina, beer that immediately went to one’s head and produced a pounding headache, linen that turned into cotton wool after a single washing.
“What did they expect?” Felek would guffaw, winking at Adaś and poking him with a pencil to make him laugh along. “I mean, the riffraff say they want cheap goods, and either way they can’t afford expensive things.”
Felek Chmura’s debtors were easy to spot by their pallor, their shallow breathing, their hair clumped with cold sweat. Before long all of Strobbel’s workers were suffering from headaches and stomachaches.
“Get moving, my machines are running idle!” Slotzki would say in exasperation as he strode across the shop floor. “All you know how to do is eat and drink, you don’t give a damn about working.”
Each evening he would frown at the bins filled with defective items. Every day for a quarter of an hour or even more the factory operated to the detriment of the firm of Strobbel & Slotzki, the machinery wasted electricity and porcelain clay, the fire blazed unnecessarily in the ovens, the glaze was stirred needlessly in the vats. Slotzki came to realize beyond the shadow of a doubt that as Chmura made money hand over fist from the sale of his stupendously cheap goods, he was taking part of his costs from Slotzki’s own pocket. At this time the factory was expanding, taking on more and more employees, and so losses were rapidly multiplied. Unable to rid himself of Chmura once and for all, Slotzki tried other ways to stop himself from being robbed. He began moving the hands of the factory clock back fifteen minutes during the day, then at night moving them forward by the same amount. He was searching for a truer measure of a day’s work, for which he paid what was due, to the penny.
Chmura took a pencil and, scrawling clumsy figures, multiplied the pennies that fifteen minutes of work was worth by the ever-increasing number of workers employed at Strobbel’s. In this way he calculated how much cash the porcelain factory was taking from him with the trick involving the clocks. Because all the wages paid were owed to him, a year in advance. Meanwhile Slotzki & Strobbel’s profits were being deposited in inaccessible foreign bank accounts. In the wee hours of the morning Chmura was tormented by anxiety. He would ring the handbell to summon a sleepy Adaś Rączka and explain to him that actual money was oozing from Stitchings in the form of the porcelain dispatched by Slotzki all over the world in crates packed with sawdust. Via the railroad station. And via the port that led its own existence – an existence that even gave rise to a store selling English tea of the highest quality.
“But does anyone ever buy anything there? Only the clerks from the shipping companies, and they don’t belong to Stitchings. Neither does the port, or the railroad,” Adaś consoled him sleepily. “Stitchings has been divided up very precisely, sir: Slotzki took the hands, and you have the stomachs. There may not even be any actual money. In your place I’d be sleeping peacefully.” And he’d barely finished talking when he was already sound asleep, standing up, the back of his head resting against the wall.
SLOTZKI SINCERELY WISHED BANK
RUPTCY ON FELEK WHEN THE latter took over the sewing shops that had continued to operate as before under the company of Loom & Son, yet which were less and less profitable now that the lucrative war contracts had come to an end.
“You’re going to trip up with those sewing shops,” he would mutter over cards as he threw his aces on the table and gathered the pot.
But Felek’s faith was unshakeable.
“The right card will always turn up eventually,” he would say when he lost for too long. And he would double the ante. The right card always did turn up, sooner or later.
The shelves of the sewing shop warehouses were piled to the ceiling with reels of musty thread for which the war had finished too soon. Before the thread could be used, the troops had been demobilized. The commissariat left the job of buying underwear to the soldiers’ wives. And the wives, fussier than the commissariat, would turn the garment inside out and check the seams before taking out their purses. New times required new threads. Felek incurred additional costs, which he docked from the seamstresses’ wages. He refused to budge on this matter.
“They don’t snap in the machines,” he would say. “It’s for your own convenience, and it’s more profitable. I’m not going to pay for it out of my own pocket.”
Once again the pedals of the sewing machines rattled fretfully, belts whizzed round, needles danced like crazy. The seamstresses toiled over long johns for civilians, by lamps that were too dim, for money that was too pale and had an insufficiently distinct watermark, without complaining, since they had not complained before. The wedding bands that had been converted into cash left a mark on their ring fingers, and a gold-tinged memory. A hand without a wedding band grows light; their husbands would lightly buy a third-class ticket and vanish without a trace, while they would be left with debts for spareribs bought at Felek’s butcher shop and long since eaten, or for coal from his coal yard that at some unnoticed moment had gone up in smoke. The profits from the sewing shops crowned Felek Chmura’s achievement in the town. All the cash circulating from one store to another flowed, via an ingenious system of canals and locks reaching from the port to the train station, straight into his coffers.
AT THAT POINT CHMURA TOOK FROM A DRAWER THE LITTLE BOX containing the ring that before the war Stefania had refused to accept from Kazimierz Krasnowolski, demanding time to think.
“Has she not done enough thinking by now?” he asked as he fastened his wing collar at the mirror and reached for his vest, which Adaś was holding in readiness. Once in his new suit he went directly to Neumann’s to ask for her hand.
“There’s not a lot of choice,” Neumann said that evening to Stefania, who was sitting mending some gloves in stubborn silence. “Unless you marry one of those clowns who take out a loan by mortgaging their own property and live off that. Remember, child, I’m getting on, and the factory is ruined.”
“Kazimierz’s orderly!” Stefania retorted. “Think what you’re saying, papa.”
She fell sick with longing for Kazimierz Krasnowolski. She trudged after him through mists of fever, through miry, treacherous swamps of love, till he threw her one of his beautiful crazy glances over his shoulder. But what was this? He had the features of Felek Chmura. The priceless image, tossed into the endless stream of weekdays and Sundays, had at some unknown moment been effaced. Stefania bit her lip and tossed on her tear-stained pillows.
“Are they not alike as two peas?” she would whisper and then, overcome by another wave of fever, start shouting that she’d even prefer Slotzki’s scars. The doctor offered no hope of a speedy recovery. Yet one day she rose from her bed, with rings under her eyes, but calm, and ordered her bath to be prepared. In the afternoon she laid out the cards for solitaire. The sequences came together of their own accord, as if they’d been waiting for weeks merely for the hand that would introduce the right order in the pack. The next day Stefania accepted the engagement ring from Felek Chmura.
“I get a blinding headache at the mere sight of the man,” she complained to her doctor. “How will I be able to put up with him under the same roof?”
Medicine knew no remedy for such an ailment.
ON THE DAY OF THE WEDDING THE BRASS BAND PLAYED ON the market square; the residents of Factory Street, Salt Street, Coal Street, and Guards Street danced to their hearts’ content, while children prowled among the long tables gripping rock-hard gingerbreads you could break your teeth on. As evening approached, Ludwig Neumann’s home was lit up like a lighthouse, Felek Chmura’s people stood cheering under the windows as they drank the happy couple’s health with liquor from a barrel the bridegroom had had rolled out for them, and the Gypsy band was drowned out by the firemen’s trombones. As the wedding guests raised a toast to Felek Chmura in the Neumanns’ dining room, Stefania snuck away to her old bedroom. “What have I done!” she asked herself in despair, pressing her temples. In the meantime a suckling pig roasted whole, an apple in its snout and festooned with plump sausages, was brought to the table.
“Where’s the bride gotten to?” asked the doctor, looking around. But his gaze, distracted and hungry, fastened on the serving dishes. Besides, amid the hubbub of exclamations and the clatter of glassware no one could hear anyone else.
“I’m no longer worried about the future,” Ludwig Neumann was saying on the other side of the table, beaming with satisfaction. He helped himself to a mighty portion of roast, which the doctor forbade with gestures over the animated hum. Neumann laughed till his belly shook, and waved a starched napkin at the doctor. “My dear fellow, you should know that roast meat is only harmful on weekdays, never on a holiday.”
The merriment was beginning to subside by the time the fireworks burst upward toward the turbid vault of the sky. The trombones squeaked wetly and out of tune, the fiddle was tangled in idiotic cadenzas. On the market square dogs with mud-spattered tails jumped onto the table laid out for the common people and gobbled up the leftovers.
“Get down there!” the odd person cried, trying to reach for a stick, but late at night the body would no longer leap after the voice, and legs were heavy as stones.
Ludwig Neumann suffered a twisting of the bowels soon after the last guests had left.
“I’d have eaten my fill of sausage as well if I’d known. Now it’s too late, too late,” he moaned in convulsions before he gave up the ghost.
ON THE PRETEXT OF MOURNING, STEFANIA AVOIDED FELEK. She had the servants set a separate table for him, in the kitchen or wherever else, so long as it was out of her sight. Eventually they stopped laying a place for him at all: exhausted, he would forget to eat. Yet Stefania was still tormented mercilessly by an unbearable pain in the temples that lasted whole days and nights.
Felek Chmura toiled like an ox to get Neumann’s factory up and working again. The old machines for producing wax cylinders, unused since the time of Ludwig Neumann Senior, were taken out of storage and repaired. Advertisements for the Stitchings mechanical instrument factory soon appeared in the newspapers, where they were noticed by demobilized soldiers tearing paper to make roll-up cigarettes. Barrel organs began appearing in the courtyards of apartment buildings. On the front of their cases, smelling of fresh lacquer, was the inscription “Ludwig Neumann” in gold copperplate, above a decorative flourish. The handles were turned by war invalids in tattered army greatcoats – one lame, another blind in one eye. The unfamiliar sounds played havoc with the operatic arias that filled Stefania’s home all day long.
“An Argentinean tango,” she would say, her ear cocked. “Tragic and vulgar. Rum-pum-pum-pum! When you’ve heard one, you’ve heard them all.”
And indeed, one was enough for the whole town, ringing from every direction. Near and distant sounds mingled together and got in each other’s way. The melody had no ending. It would break off, usually in midbar, while mongrels in woolen jackets would endlessly circulate beneath the windows carrying a hat into which nothing but pennies were thrown. These were collected afterward by Felek Chmura. The contracts stipulated
that the barrel organs were to remain the property of Neumann’s factory till they were paid off in full.
In her own home Stefania would stumble over sacks full of small change; she would choke on her contempt. When Felek’s footsteps sounded on the stairs she would hurriedly turn off the music. But Felek would walk into the drawing room without batting an eyelid. Simple-heartedly charmed by the mechanism concealed in the box, he would switch the music back on and roar with laughter as he sprawled in Ludwig Neumann’s armchair. Coloratura made him laugh till he cried.
“That’s enough!” Stefania would exclaim. “Stop it!”
Felek couldn’t help himself, rocking with uncontrollable contractions of the diaphragm. Compressing her lips, she would turn off the phonograph. Like a billet-doux with an insincere declaration of love dropped from an upper balcony, the high C would spin slowly down to the hollow bottom of the sub-contra octave. Stefania would collapse in sobs onto the sofa, and all at once a loud bang would shake the walls and bring plaster sprinkling from the ceiling into the horn of the phonograph. Adaś Rączka had placed caps under the legs of the furniture. In a hoarse voice she would exclaim that she wanted to die; she would fling the record at Felek’s feet, shattering it into tiny pieces. Shards of vulcanite would shoot in every direction. Felek brushed them off his vest onto the floor. He was about to open his mouth, but in the end he merely shrugged, picked up his hat, and left the house. He would eat his Sunday lunch in the hotel restaurant. Over coffee, scattering cigarette ash left and right, he would sit down at the table where Oswald Slotzki was finishing his dessert.
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