In Red (12 page)

Having handed out tips and sent the porters away, Rauch waited for a word of thanks for his solicitude in taking care of the cases, whose dispatch had been overseen in Paris by another director of a variety theater. Natalie Zugoff thanked him, and glanced with aversion at the immense pile of luggage in the hotel automobile. It drove at a snail's pace behind the
dorozhka
that the driver had had to flag down for Rauch and the artiste. The wind brought the distant sound of isolated shots. A petard went off under the horses' hooves; they took fright and bolted, the lapdog yelping in distress.

“Goddammit!” the cabbie swore, tugging at the reins. “Whoa, whoa!”

Zigzagging through the streets as if they were the tunnels of a labyrinth, arriving from the direction of the port they pulled up outside the Hotel Angleterre, where they were stopped by a police cordon.

“There's a cannon on the tower,” said Natalie Zugoff.

“It's been there since time immemorial, ma'am,” she was reassured by a policeman. He clicked his heels, gave back her documents, and saluted.

Even before dinnertime fifteen men in dark blue sweat-soaked uniforms had brought the cannon down from the town hall tower. It was fired in celebration, upon which its wheels dropped off, and its bronze barrel cracked and came to rest outside the town hall, sparing Natalie Zugoff's delicate ears another report. From the window of her hotel room she saw scraps of newspaper being swept down the street by the wind, while stray mongrels slunk by against the buildings, their tails between their legs. She sent for a train timetable, having made up her mind to break her contract and return as quickly as she could to Paris. In the evening she appeared on stage, the only performance she
agreed to give before leaving. Her voice, mournful and restless, soared over the band's fortissimo like the cry of a bird, the sounds of the saxophones rising up in its wake and gasping. The voice glided high up, trembling with bitter scorn for bourgeois harmony. It misled the musicians into sandpits of dissonance, from which they extracted themselves only with the most precipitous twists and turns, hastily closing ranks to return with fanfares, violin in the lead, onto the straight and narrow. Natalie Zugoff paid no more attention to the band than she had to the pile of luggage that had been following behind her for years. Her insouciance astounded the bank clerks sprawling in the orchestra seats in their impeccable tuxedos and shoes gleaming like mirrors.

“She's going to bomb,” predicted Alojzy Piechota, the former fireman, peeping through the curtains at the audience, before resuming his rounds. Yet when the chords of the final number died away, the dead silence among the spectators gave way to a hurricane. The bank clerks jumped to their feet as they applauded; legal interns overwhelmed by a touch of boundless freedom abandoned their good manners, leaped onto their seats and shouted at the top of their lungs.

“Voilà,” Rauch said excitedly as he listened from the director's box. He shook the black boy's hand, expecting congratulations. “They're cheering! Can you hear? Today they sound the way they should, more than ever before in this place. Let's enjoy it – the cork is out of the bottle.”

But the brand-name champagne that had been chilling in an ice bucket for Rauch to celebrate the success made him grimace in disgust. The contents of the bottle were spoiled.

For many weeks the evening shows were sold out. The house was filled to the rafters with single men listening intently to the mournful voice, mesmerized by the shiny black top hat, the ostrich-feather boa, and the pale arm bearing a ladies' cigarette in a long glass holder, all seen through wreaths of smoke in a bluish light. The chandeliers shook from the applause, and the grammar school boys, whose rules forbade them to enter Rauch's theater, threw caution to the winds and waved their dark blue caps, leaning perilously out from their seats up in the gods.

During rehearsals Rauch would take his place in the front row of the orchestra seating, legs stretched out in front of him, head drooping on his shoulder and eyes closed. Any slipup, he maintained, first appeared in the form of sound. If you wished to hold all the threads of the show in your hand you ought never to look at the stage, where movement and light beguile one's attention. He would unfailingly wake when his ear detected an insufficiently clean note, and stamp his foot furiously as a sign there was to be silence.

“Trombone! Was that meant to be a sharp? What, am I supposed to bend over to help it up? A false note is a misstep. Legs up, girls! I want to hear those feathers fluttering. Musicians – once more, from the top! Everyone from the top!”

“The fat fool's gone mad,” the girls in the corps de ballet would mutter. “Bringing her all the way from Paris. For what.”

On the posters stuck up on advertising columns in front of the theater Natalie Zugoff bled red lipstick and her eyes were scratched out. Every morning, on his own initiative, his wooden leg thumping on the sidewalk, the former fireman Alojzy would stomp around outside the building with a roll of fresh posters and a bucket of glue, as if he were trying to put out a fire. Then before the evening show he would go all the way out onto the street and wait there for the arrival of the
dorozhka
, so he could hobble at a respectful distance of five paces behind the artiste as she walked to the rear entrance, which led via a narrow staircase to the dressing rooms. On only one occasion, when a gusty wind was stirring unease in people's hearts, did Alojzy approach from the other direction and stand in her way. He rose up suddenly in front of her right on the street corner, like an advertising column.

“What do you want?” she asked.

“P-. . . pl-. . . pl-. . . ,” the fireman began, then fell silent with his mouth open as if he'd choked on the consonants. He stood there taut as a string, the wind flapping the tails of his old overcoat.

“You'll catch cold,” the artiste said. “You should button your coat.”

Every evening he would peer at the house through the curtains. Then he would return home, unstrap his wooden leg, and go to bed in his unheated attic room. His real leg, invisible and
incorporeal, was racked with pain. Tangled hopelessly in his bedding, Alojzy Piechota was unable even to turn onto his other side.

“There's no escape,” he would moan in his sleep. “There's nothing to be done.”

 

 

NATALIE ZUGOFF'S DRESSING ROOM WAS ALWAYS OVERFLOWING with flowers: baskets of azaleas from old Mr. Strobbel, who had once apparently been a partner in Slotzki & Co.; unimaginative bunches of carnations from the chief of police; exalted orchids from Mr. Lapidus, the proprietor of the Hotel Angleterre; bouquets of fresh wildflowers from Captain d'Auxerre of the French military mission, picked in who knows what meadows, and flown here through the clouds. And solemn dark roses from Rauch.

“He never knows what's acceptable and what isn't,” she would complain. She believed that roses from a theater director bring bad luck. For she was superstitious. Wasteful too: she would wear stockings only once, quickly get rid of a coin she had dropped and someone else had picked up for her – she herself would never have stooped down for it. And any gown she wore on a bad day she would give to the hotel maid just like that. “What did flowers ever do to you?” her dresser would reply, and change the water in the bowl of roses. Boxes of chocolates lay scattered among the vases. The artiste pushed them toward anyone who came in, not even getting up from the swivel chair
at her dressing table. The gossip-mongering disorder of her dressing room irked Rauch. The plush armchair that was the only piece of furniture sturdy enough to support his immense body was forever occupied by someone else. Rauch would shoo away the trombonist or violinist with a wave of the hand and drop wheezing into his throne.

“This is the only moment of rest that I get,” he would sigh. Then he would complain of loneliness. He'd grumble about having constantly to ensure the trombone didn't drink before rehearsals, because then he played out of tune. Or that the dancers didn't gorge themselves on chocolates, which completely sapped their energy. No one was willing to really put their back into it, to the point where Rauch had to sit at the piano himself and show the pianist how it should be done.

“How can anyone be that fat?” Natalie Zugoff said one day to her dresser. “On top of which, he's gotten it into his head that he can play the piano. It's frightful. Not an ounce of grace, the poor fellow.”

Before the words were even out, she covered her mouth in an anxious gesture. “He couldn't have heard,” the dresser reassured her, but that failed to dispel the artiste's fears. Saying bad things about people brought bad luck the same way roses did. In her ears she could already hear the echoes of whistles from the audience, the worst tragedy she knew. She set her mind on getting Rauch a gift, and waited for advice. It couldn't be just some cheap trifle. She sought the one right object, a present
with which she would be able to repair the wrong and turn aside the specter of failure. The dresser tidied away various catalogs from department stores.

After a show Natalie Zugoff would be so exhausted she'd drift into a sleepy trance at her dressing table. But when she was told the crowd was cheering in front of the theater, she would open her eyes again and glance in the mirror.

“I look awful!” she would exclaim in despair. “Powder, quick!”

Endless baskets of flowers and boxes of chocolates were delivered, and Captain d'Auxerre, the French airman, asked via a messenger if he could entertain the hope that Natalie Zugoff would have just one moment for him. At that point the dresser, anticipating the request, would break an ampoule with a practiced gesture and place a needle on a silver tray upon the marble top of the dressing table.

Left to his own resources, the little black boy would get bored as he lay about on a soft rug in the hotel room. Isolated from the tiresome buzz of foreign speech, he would listen intently to the transparent tunes of music boxes cleansed of any words. When one fell silent, a second and third would still be playing away. The rehearsal of the music box orchestra never ended. The little black boy turned the keys patiently, counting beats, stopping and starting the mechanisms. Then all at once he would jump up and raise his arms in a triumphant gesture, like a conductor whose intention the orchestra has finally grasped. His
eyes shone as he tapped the multiple rhythms with his feet and hummed the interwoven melodies. But the music boxes heard nothing, locked fast in their little decorated cases, reluctant to harmonize. Forced into repeated encounters, they would evade one another by ever differing fractions of a beat. In the evening, exhausted, as if he'd spent the entire day winding the cogs of fate in a vain attempt to summon the simultaneity he longed for, he would fall asleep on the rug. The wound-up music boxes would play on for a short while still, each telling its own story. The whole room rang with a cacophony of sounds; across the hallway, the maids in their storeroom clapped their hands over their ears. As soon as everything fell silent they picked him up off the floor, undressed him, and put him in the hotel bed. He would be breathing lightly and peacefully, a cluster of music box keys clenched in his black fingers.

In the mornings Natalie Zugoff alternately slept and sobbed noiselessly, her cheek pressed into the pillow. The little boy would sneak into her room through the connecting door and, with furtive glances, place a wound-up music box on the pillow next to a strand of her unbraided hair. He would kneel at her bed head and kiss her inert hand. Natalie Zugoff would slowly open her eyes.

“Pass me – ,” she would begin.

The boy would give her a cigarette in the long holder.

“There's simply no reason to get up,” she would sigh, flipping through the morning newspapers in a cloud of bluish smoke.

The black boy would crack the window open to let out the smoke, and if it was a Sunday, muffled drumbeats of military bands from Ludwig Neumann's loudspeakers would force their way into the room in a tattered cloud. The Chinese lapdog was terrified of them. It would unerringly recognize a marching rhythm and scramble under a pile of Natalie Zugoff's gowns with a desperate, high-pitched yapping. It would thrash around beneath them till the boy retrieved it half-suffocated from among the silks.

Out of the blue, a messenger brought a diamond ring in a velvet-lined box. The sender was someone by the name of Fiff; no one at the hotel had ever heard of him.

“What's his idea!” Natalie Zugoff exclaimed, touched to the quick. “How dare he!”

She only calmed down when Mr. Lapidus himself sought out the impertinent admirer, who turned out to be the head of security at Slotzki's factory, and returned the box in person. After which he gave Natalie Zugoff a detailed report, recounting how he had met with a young person in gaiters and cheap woolen britches, and how this man had dropped the box onto the sidewalk, crushed it with his hobnailed boot, and kicked the diamond ring into the drain.

From that moment on the seats cracked like pistols during every show. Men in britches and gaiters, wearing armbands with the Slotzki factory emblem, would leave before the end, choking on their own arrogance. They were disgusted by the
audience's stillness and silence and they refused to wait for the applause that burst out after the final number, so they went directly to the tavern across from the theater. There, waiters in greasy aprons crisscrossed the room bearing clinking beer mugs over the customers' heads. They wove through the crush, amid a commotion that never let up even for a moment from afternoon till late at night, their ears filled with the crash of ocean rollers that men's voices became as they shouted themselves hoarse over the long beer-stained tables. The racket took on the form of a song, a prideful legato that clumsily rounded off the successive lines of the verses, while empty tankards with dried white foam inside hammered the rhythm on the table top, four beats to the bar. But when, as happened from time to time, a petard was tossed unexpectedly into the tavern, sowing confusion, the choir split into individual voices, into the cries of shipwrecked sailors cast on the waves of cacophony.