“Oh yes, prince have everything private,” he assured them in broken German. To compensate the proprietor of the hotel for his failure to appear, the prince had sent him a large portrait photograph in a gilt frame, signed with a flourish. He looked down from it with one bulging, lascivious eye. The other was covered with a black patch like a pirate’s.
Pedro Alvarez took a nail and a small hammer from his traveling case and personally hung the prince’s portrait over the reception desk, after which he showed them a Spanish-language newspaper in which, though they could not understand a word, they all could see the name of Natalie Zugoff outlined in mourning black.
“Funeral lovely as wedding,” the photographer recounted. “Was band, crowds, gold coffin, all covered in flowers white as snow, everyone cry.”
The proprietor of the hotel, perspiring and pale, had to ask whether Natalie Zugoff had really died in Buenos Aires.
“Oh no, she never come Buenos Aires. Prince long for her. Prince bury his longing.”
The photographer was in a hurry. He was immediately given access to Natalie Zugoff’s room, where, attended by the hotel staff, he set up his tripod and mounted on it a box with a glass lens that protruded like Prince Belorukov-Mukhin’s one eye. The shutter snapped over and again, preserving on negatives, from every possible angle, the bed piled with gowns.
“Prince, he love detail,” explained the photographer. Then he disappeared into the theater dressing room, amid still lifes of dried roses, tubs of powder, and tubes of lipstick. He concluded his work by taking pictures of the streets of Stitchings. Narrow and rather dark, they required long exposures. On the negatives the passersby left barely visible blurs; in places the semitransparent figure of a shopkeeper would appear in an open doorway, arms folded, his presence having been too brief to leave a clearer trace.
The people with whom Natalie Zugoff had had dealings in Stitchings were of no interest whatsoever to the prince. When the hotel maids pestered the photographer, to begin with he couldn’t understand what they wanted, but when he finally realized, he granted their request. He stayed up all night developing pictures in a dark closet with the help of the pharmacist’s boy. Just before he left he went down to the reception desk with a large group portrait still bearing the smell of reagents that was unsettling as the passing of time. The entire staff gathered in a moment, everyone wanted to see. In the back row they examined the figures of the desk clerk and the messengers, caps in hand, staring gravely straight at the camera. In the middle row the bellhops sat stiffly on chairs, their mouths curled in sneers, while at the bottom of the picture the maids assumed the poses of grand ladies.
The work was concluded; the evidence the prince had wanted was locked in a small black valise, the cameras and tripods were loaded into the hotel automobile alongside the huge pile of Natalie Zugoff’s cases. On the way to the port the axles broke. The police wrote a report. As the doctor was stitching the passenger’s injured forehead, the Commonwealth was pulling out to sea, its decks empty. It could still be seen far off as it made its way over the waves, smoke trailing from its chimney stacks. Pedro Alvarez’s return ticket was no longer valid. He sent a telegram to Buenos Aires. The reply came promptly: the prince requested above all that the black valise and its contents be mailed to him. But instead of doing so, Pedro Alvarez began furiously studying the train timetables and the brochures of the shipping lines. He kept them at hand on his bedside table; he made notes in the margins, staining the bedsheets with ink. He slept till noon. The chubby-cheeked maids would sit on his bed in their lace aprons.
“Don’t worry, sweetie, I won’t bite,” they would whisper to him, smiling and baring crooked incisors.
The desk clerk leaned to his ear and asked discreetly if he didn’t like women.
“I like very much! Like black hair, burning eyes, rum-pum-pum!” Pedro Alvarez replied emphatically. He made a shape with his hands in the air, put his arm around it, and his dark eyes flashed nostalgically.
In the hotel restaurant nothing was to his taste. He would fork up now a lump of kasha, now a slice of tongue, now a noodle; he would examine it closely then put it back on the plate.
“I hope he dies of hunger, the fussy so-and-so!” the cook would exclaim when the dishes were brought back untouched. In the evenings Pedro Alvarez would don a shirt with a frilly front. He would visit the famous Stitchings casino, which glowed with light pure as crystal, and where one can only break the bank once, for afterward one is never admitted again. He almost got out of Stitchings thanks to a connecting voyage to Genoa, where he could have transferred to the great transatlantic liner the Giuseppe Garibaldi, as a first-class passenger. He only needed to wait a couple of days, but he couldn’t keep still. He yearned for the green baize, the colored chips, the past moment of triumph. Excluded categorically from the casino because of his excessive good luck, stopped politely but firmly at the entrance each time by the doormen in their white gloves, he began to frequent the dark gambling dens down by the port, from which the relentless chink of chips could be heard all night long. In those places the ball in the roulette wheel spun faster than anywhere else, the black and the red blurred together, and the losses never ended. At such moments Pedro Alvarez had no choice but to play on, if he did not wish to be stuck in Stitchings forever. He soon discovered that his frilly shirtfront was too dazzling, and his eyes too dark, for him to be able to walk safely down Salt Street. But there was no other way from the Hotel Angleterre to the neighborhood of the portside gambling dens.
He departed for Buenos Aires in a casket lined with ice, a copy of the bill of lading stuck on its lid, a switchblade wound in his back. In the ports he was transferred from one hold to the next, borne effortlessly on the platforms of cranes. Along with the casket, the black valise and the photographic equipment were shipped too, all at the expense of the Hotel Angleterre. The invoice, sent to Buenos Aires in the hope that Prince Belorukov-Mukhin would cover the costs incurred, came back by return mail, crossed out with a flourish of the pen, without a word of explanation.
The group portrait of the hotel staff was mounted in the gilt frame that remained after the photograph of Prince Belorukov was torn to shreds. But the image began to fade from the light. One of the maids was the first to notice that the figures were disappearing in the gloom. Then later they could no longer be seen at all, as if night had fallen once and for all behind the glass.
“It’s a bad sign, the worst there could be,” the maids would say in consternation.
“You silly things, he was just skimping on the chemicals toward the end, that’s all,” said the pharmacist’s boy, laughing at them. He knew what was what: he’d watched the Argentine developing the negatives, and had even held on to a few of them on the sly as a keepsake.
Mr. Lapidus spent entire days locked in Natalie Zugoff’s darkened room.
“Gone and buried,” he kept repeating.
“She fled,” he would say at other times. “Through a gap in the clouds. Only her suitcases were left behind.”
He would raise his eyes and let his gaze stray across the plaster rosette in the very center of the ceiling, over and over, as if he were bewitched. His meals were brought from the restaurant; he ate lying on the bed, the blinds down and the bedside lamp on, like a hotel guest who has forgotten why he came.
The doctor came to auscultate his painful heart.
“Am I alive?” the proprietor asked in a fading voice.
“You know perfectly well yourself, Mr. Lapidus,” the doctor replied as he put away his stethoscope. “Since you asked the question, you know the answer.”
The doctor assured him that he had encountered all sorts of strange cases in the course of his practice. He said that the heart can hurt for a long time after death.
“Life,” he would say, “in itself is neither bad nor good. It’s the same with death. The key is getting the right proportions. Alas, my good sir, as with all things, so with this one, hardest of all is to find the right point.”
During this time the doctor was preoccupied above all else by the typhoid fever that had broken out in the back buildings on Salt Street. Typhoid is a wartime disease, and in the corner stores along the street people were saying that since there was typhoid, war must be on its way. The housewives were once again sifting flour into impregnated canvas sacks.
“Maybe it already is wartime,” the doctor said to the hotel proprietor, “it’s just that we don’t know it yet.”
Those sick with typhoid lingered for the longest time, unable to decide whether to live or die.
“Get better again? So we can just go back to wearing rags and tatters?” they would say, laughing harshly at the doctor behind his back as he ran breathless among the moldering floors of the back buildings. But in the final hour their bad blood boiled: they couldn’t bring themselves to abandon even those rags when they thought about how much they’d cost at the used clothing store. Freed from the hope that had sustained their respect for boundaries, those who had died of typhoid thumbed their noses at mourning black and, making roll-up cigarettes from scraps of newspaper, lay idly on their wretched shakedowns while their family went in search of a loan to pay for the funeral. Then, when they realized no one could stop them from doing anything, they started getting up, going out to the jakes in the courtyard, visiting the pub on the corner.
Rumors spread about a tailor with a bevy of children who after he died, just as during his life, spent his days and nights at his work. About a young mother who refused to lie down in her casket because she was busy rocking her baby. About an only child who for the sake of peace and quiet was allowed to have her fill of playing with her new doll. One jealous husband was said to have wanted to prevent his wife from remarrying; a tightfisted wife would examine the household finances every day after her death, criticizing endlessly. By all accounts the victims of typhoid by now included even universally respected industrialists, owners of large department stores, and majority shareholders in insurance companies.
“These are huge sums of money,” the town hall officials would whisper. “In essence they’re mortmain property that belongs to the municipality, if it weren’t for all this refusing to be buried, this hole-and-corner life, which ought to be punished with the full force of the law.”
“The dead are running the show,” the habitués of Corelli’s café said. “They’re affecting exchange rates, interest rates, government commissions.”
And over their coffee cups they would peer at one another through gold-rimmed spectacles. In the meantime, in the crowded tavern a man had jumped up onto a chair and was screaming hoarsely:
“We can’t be made fools of so easily! Under the ground is where they belong!”
Gasping for breath, he shouted the name of old Strobbel as if he were calling for help, using all his strength to keep himself on the surface of churning waves. Strobbel, who had passed away not long before, struck by a petard during a street disturbance, was at rest in his coffin, ostentatious in immaculate black and white, with a stern, contemptuous expression on his face. It was said he didn’t even need to die, that the injuries were not life-threatening. But Strobbel had asked no one’s opinion and as usual had had no time for pointless delays: he was immediately placed upon a catafalque comme il faut, a funerary candle at his head. All the property that remained to him – the Chinese vases from his famous private collection – he left to the town. Once his eyes were closed he did not deign to open them again; he was buried without further ado in the Strobbels’ porcelain-faced family tomb. The funeral was attended by large numbers of grammar school boys, who had sewn prewar military buttons bearing a crowned lion onto their uniforms, pricking their fingers in the process. These buttons served to mark the opponents of splitting hairs, the enemies of all that was obscure. The masters at the grammar school took a ruler and rapped the knuckles of boys who wore them, but anyone who didn’t could get a sock in the jaw in a dark corner, after which they would be spitting teeth. In a short while the fashion for uhlan buttons spread beyond the walls of the grammar school. They appeared on the overcoats of young men with metal-tipped walking canes who longed for a return to the order of prewar times and were resolved to use any means necessary when it came to curbing the insolence of the dead.
“Are they not right?” Stanisław would say to Adela, puffing on a cigarette at the kitchen table. “The world has no need of freedom. It needs purity, it needs rules, it needs boundaries.”
Adaś Rączka, surrounded by youthful pyromaniacs, scoffed at britches and gaiters, and especially at slogans involving purity.
“I knew Max Fiff well,” he would say. “Before he became head of factory security he served at Slotzki’s. On his hind legs.”
Max Fiff gnashed his teeth when his people repeated these words to him.
“Adaś Rączka!” he snorted contemptuously. “He used to lick Chmura’s boots. He made his fortune working for him: a sack of mussels and a dozen porcelain bedpans.”
Max Fiff’s people went looking for Adaś Rączka all over town, starting at the Hotel Angleterre and ending in the moldering back buildings, musty basements, and dusty attics. In vain. He was too well hidden to allow himself to be prized out; instead, Max Fiff kept receiving ticking packages that had to be hurriedly carried out onto open ground and silenced with a pistol shot. Adaś Rączka was thriving, and had even begun to produce first-rate grenades that were thrown inaccurately but to good effect. Instead of bigwigs, the victim would be some chimney sweep, a nanny with a child, a dorozhka driver’s horse. At the hotel the desk clerk wagered that Fiff would shoot Rączka like a dog. The maître d’ put his money on Rączka – sooner or later, he maintained, he would wring Fiff’s neck. But Rączka had disappeared. Word went around that Loom’s munitions plant had given him a steady position with a generous salary and a company apartment by the factory lab. The bellhops, waiting for the conflict to be resolved, had to content themselves with another sensation – the funeral of the hotel’s proprietor. He had been hit in the temple by a brick thrown into a hotel room through the window, wrapped in a crumpled piece of paper that bore a scribbled message: “Into the ground!” The man who threw it was forced to admit he’d made a mistake with Mr. Lapidus, who the following morning lay on a catafalque, stretched out in impeccable evening dress despite the early hour.
WHEN EMILKA LOOM, TORMENTED BY HER MANY YEARS OF unending tedium, went for a new consignment of books, the men would come out of the tavern onto the street and accompany her all the way to the used bookstore. They would hold loud discussions about aspenwood stakes for driving through hearts. Their arteries pulsed beneath their collars as they peered through the store window into the interior stacked with books up to the ceiling. The bookseller wore a metal-rimmed pince-nez that was always steaming up.
“It really is possible to live without French romances, Miss Loom. It’d be better to stay at home,” he would whisper, turning his eyes away timorously.
On the gateway to Loom’s building there appeared the word “morgue” scrawled in chalk. From that moment on Adela and Stanisław argued perpetually. Violent disagreements would flare up over breakfast; raised voices and vulgar imprecations would be heard from the kitchen, punctuated by the crash of plates being hurled in anger. Emilka’s bed went unmade till evening. Stanisław, who had served at Loom’s since he was a child, now dragged his old traveling trunk down from the attic. He tossed the Sunday suit that was inside into the stove, and began packing so he could live or die elsewhere, without Adela, who, being in a delicate condition, was unwilling and unable to leave.
“When will you finally leave me alone?” he would say, clapping his hands over his ears so as not to hear her complaints.
A few yards from the station his bald head was set about with clubs; the trunk opened and underwear spilled out onto the street, where it was later trampled underfoot by the stretcher bearers.
Adela took refuge in the orphanage. She worked there beyond her strength, scrubbing kettles and
hauling vats right up till her time. The boys made fun of the pregnant woman, stuffing pillows under their shirts. They stole sugar and peed in the laundry tub. Every morning they would line up in two rows in the courtyard. Drawn up stiff as recruits, their heads completely shaven, they would rest their bloodshot eyes on the prewar sergeant major of the Stitchings uhlans, and if necessary, in silence they would play leapfrog till they dropped.
By night the walls would be bursting from the clamor of bad thoughts. Insomnia spread through the orphanage like an infectious disease. By the red glow from the half-open doors of the stoves they killed time by throwing knives into the floorboards. The gate would open for those who had reached a sufficient age. They would leave and merge into the crowd, a red glint in their eye.
The sky would cover with clouds.
“Those are snow clouds,” the housewives jabbered. Just in case, they hurried to make sure their windows were snug. But what snow could there be, how could there suddenly be snow in that perpetual heat?
In the meantime the negatives stolen from the Argentine were passed from hand to hand, acquiring the traces of greasy fingers.
“For he’s a jolly good fellow!” they sang at the tavern, tossing the pharmacist’s boy all the way up to the ceiling. “And so say all of us!”
Depressed at having been sacked for drinking some of the surgical spirit, the pharmacist’s boy felt some consolation. In the negatives every little store could be recognized. In some of them the semitransparent, incorporeal figure of a shopkeeper would hover with folded arms in a doorway. The human eye is fallible and can easily be misled by appearances; negatives see more clearly. If the door frame and inscription on the window showed through his body, what on earth could this mean?
“It’s obvious,” the men with metal-tipped canes would say as they strolled down the street. “Negatives don’t lie.”
In Red Page 11