Yet even then he did not doubt his lucky star.
“A little while longer and the right card will turn up,” he would say to Adaś Rączka. “You’ll see, it always does.”
Stefania’s migraines were becoming more and more wearing. In addition her son was not doing well, prey to an unidentified illness. He did not sleep nights, but tossed and turned in his bed.
“Close your eyes,” Stefania would say, laying a hand on his forehead. He would close them, but then he would be immersed in an infinity of red.
“Help!” he would scream terrifyingly, like a drowning passenger.
The doctor recalled a similar, equally hopeless case of insomnia from his long years of practice.
“Heredity?” wondered Stefania, recalling the officer’s chest, the handkerchiefs with the intricate monogram, the fondness for Turkish tobacco, and that lovely, mad gaze. She laughed bitterly. “Oh well! Felek never did fully understand the difference between what’s one’s own and what belongs to someone else.”
The doctor recommended trips to the south.
“Never get married,” Felek Chmura advised Adaś, grimacing as if he’d just swallowed absinthe. “A home is a yoke around your neck, a heap of troubles, nothing more.”
In fact, his home was the least of the many troubles besetting him. He was carrying an excessive burden, one that made the ground give way under his feet – wherever he stepped, the earth collapsed beneath him.
“Goddam foundations,” he fulminated, glaring over at his warehouses from the window of the countinghouse. And he would squeeze his eyes shut with all his strength. But it did no good. With eyes closed he could see even more clearly the cracks in the brick walls, unmistakable signs drawn by the inimical hand of fate, an ominous portent of a blow from which there was no escape. The architectural expert he consulted sketched a cross section of the footing as they sat locked in his study.
“It’s too warm,” he explained.
The foundations had once rested against a stratum of frozen groundwater. Felek expected absolute discretion. He destroyed the drawings without showing them to another soul, crumpling them into the stove to prevent them from falling into the wrong hands. Yet his workers quit one after another. Adaś Rączka learned the truth from Max Fiff by chance as they were scuffling one evening behind the factory, shouting “flunky!” at one another.
“You’re both losers, you and that boss of yours!” grunted Max as he sat astride Adaś’s belly, blood dripping from his nose onto the other man’s overcoat. “The whole town’s laughing at you because you built on ice!”
Adaś smashed Max in the mouth.
“Take back what you said.”
Max snarled and bit. A piece of ear came off in his teeth. The pain sent Adaś into a rage. He grabbed Max by the throat till his eyes almost popped out; Max turned blue and, coughing blood, took it all back.
Yet Felek Chmura’s warehouses collapsed with a crash anyway one night. When the sun came up the next morning they were gone without a trace. Onlookers couldn’t stop staring at the astonishing empty space.
“They used to be here,” they shouted, tracing the remembered outlines in the air with their fingers. “They were here and now they’re gone; it’s like in the circus.”
The telegram from Hamburg, in which the notary gave word that complaints had been brought regarding the promissory notes, reached Felek in the pink parlor. He was just lighting a cigarette, but then he put the lit end in his mouth and cursed prodigiously.
“What’s this you’ve brought me, you damn fool?” he shouted at Adaś.
Slotzki picked the crumpled telegram from the floor with his blotchy hand and began reading it aloud, squinting through his lashless eyelids. Felek snatched the paper from him. He elbowed the girls aside and staggered toward the door. Madame took him by the sleeve. Wouldn’t he stay for supper?
“Let me go, you painted ape!” He pushed her away unceremoniously and just as he had stood there, he tottered down the stairs.
“Drunk as a skunk,” declared Slotzki, drawing back the curtain as Felek tripped on the curb.
“Mr. Chmura, don’t forget your overcoat, your cap!” Adaś Rączka called after him. Windows opened and closed. Felek Chmura halted for a moment and took a deep breath. It was chilly. In the meantime the heavy door had already slammed shut. He rang and knocked in vain.
“Open up, you won’t regret it,” Felek called to the watchman through the locked door. “I’ll give you fifty thousand just for turning the key.”
But the door remained closed, and Adaś had disappeared. Felek Chmura sat down on the sidewalk and started crying. A wad of banknotes fell from his hand. The wind snatched them up and for a moment they fluttered above the street. One got stuck on the roof tiles, another sank into a puddle.
The next day Chmura did not get out of bed. In the kitchen, from early morning they made infusions of linden flowers, a homeopathic remedy the doctor had prescribed for his ailment. He would drink a cup and drift into sleep. He slept like this the whole day, quite unaware that his wife, Stefania, was packing her bags. At lunchtime, when he was in his deepest slumber, an English tea planter appeared at his house with an Indian servant in a white turban. Stefania’s cases already stood in the hallway. As the Indian carried them down the steps, Stefania slipped quietly into Felek’s bedroom and put her diamond ring in its velvet-lined box on the bedside table. Adaś Rączka ran after them into the street, but all he could see was the hood of the departing dorozhka. He chased it all the way to the port. There, gasping for breath, for a moment he watched from a distance as the English planter offered Stefania his arm. When they merged into the throng, Adaś spat and turned on his heel. Fearfully exhausted, he dragged himself along one step at a time, his hand in his pocket clutching the box with the ring.
Chmura was sick for a long time; the fever did not abate for a moment. He couldn’t stop shaking from cold, though the stoves were heated day and night. He ordered the room to be kept dark. He would not let anyone light a lamp; the door had to be cracked ajar to let in a little light from the hall. But when someone opened it too wide, the glare reflected off the edges of the furniture and Chmura would raise an outcry, accusing the servants of deliberately tormenting him by shining a light in his eyes. His eyelids were permanently lowered, and for this reason he didn’t notice the cigarettes missing from the box or the diminishing volume of liqueur in the decanter. He spent hours staring at the striped pattern of the wallpaper; meanwhile furniture – chairs, armchairs, sofas – was being removed from the drawing room. The bailiff pulled out the workings of the gold clock in order to weigh it; Felek was told about this by the servants as the doctor was cupping him.
“What did you all expect?” he mumbled to himself. He couldn’t even move. The cups on his back clinked against one another.
The sewing shops had to be closed and the seamstresses let go from one day to the next without any severance pay. A crowd of women in calico headscarves came from the locked gates to outside Neumann’s building. Their lamentations could be heard on the second floor through closed windows and lowered shades.
“Move along there, move along,” the policemen shouted. “How are there suddenly so many of you?”
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.
In Red Page 8