In Red (4 page)

The artillerymen loaded the cannon as they were ordered to, and waited. The fuse was not lit till the following day, between the soup and the main course. There was a crash. The cannon recoiled, the town hall shook to its foundations, brick dust came crumbling down the chimney flues. Missing its target, the shell
sailed over the rooftops and smashed into the snowy wilderness at the end of Salt Street. It destroyed the underground mine galleries there and left a hole that was as deep as the town hall was high.

The airplane taunted the colonel. Time and again it appeared out of the blue, only to soar upward at the last minute, before the very noses of the artillerymen. The cannon was hurriedly reloaded and fired again. The aircraft, its undercarriage in shreds, went spinning halfway across the sky, trailing clouds of smoke as black as pitch, and crashed into the brick rotunda of the municipal gasworks. There was an explosion, and gas lighting went out across the entire town.

“The enemy's occupied the mine, there are soldiers everywhere, they're sending civilians back to their homes!” exclaimed Stanisław the butler as he burst into Loom's study without being summoned.

“Did I ring for you?” Loom asked caustically. He raised his head above the accounts he was poring over by the light of a candle, amid shadows dancing from one corner to another. And he pointed to the door.

Having fired the cannon twice, Colonel Ahlberg waited calmly for the enemy staff. He could not be accused of giving up the town without firing a single shot. He also found time to inspect his own ranks, which were white with plaster and black from soot. He gave orders for the depot to be opened and
for the men to put on dress uniform. When the surrender was signed he went to his quarters and released the safety catch of his revolver.

“The end at last,” he laughed.

“Bang!” went the gun.

But it was not yet the end. It turned out that the dress uniforms had no buttons. Someone had cut them off with a knife, leaving only the loops. In the meantime Ahlberg's head had already fallen on the arm of his chair, mouth agape, eyes staring. Consternation ensued, and no one was there to take charge – aside from the enemy commander, who smiled sarcastically as he issued marching orders. The Stitchings uhlans were taken into captivity, pulling together the sides of their braided jackets and holding up their pants.

 

 

THE CRATER THAT THE ARTILLERY SHELL HAD MADE AT THE END of Salt Street drew crowds. The townspeople stared down into the gaping depths; the bottom was filling with water in which clouds were reflected. As the soldiers set up checkpoints they included the crater as part of the town and put up barbed wire to fence it off from the snowy emptiness of the fields.

For the entertainment of the foreign officers a wooden stage was quickly installed in the officers' mess. The show reminded the audience – which enjoyed the lights, the ostrich feathers,
the band – of a procession of cavalry mares along the principal avenue of the capital.

“Look at her on the left,” the officers would say in German, handing one another their field glasses. Every number was given a standing ovation. Evening after evening the place was packed. The coarse guffaw of drumrolls set the rhythm for the self-assured trombones, the trumpet announced that life was beautiful, while the violin, barely keeping up, wept drunkenly that it was too fleeting. For the band, hastily assembled from the firemen's brass and the Gypsy fiddles, played without rehearsing.

The officers hung about in the mess from early morning waiting for the show; they read the wartime press with a sneer and, taking a napkin and an indelible pencil, sketched out maps that were covered with jumbled arrows pointing east and west, north and south. In Corelli's café, where the glass display case filled with frosted cakes ran the whole length of the room, pink-faced, chubby-cheeked one-year volunteers worked on forgetting their recent Latin and algebra lessons. They got drunk on the surprises that life brings, as they sat at the marble-topped tables greedily eyeing women over their glasses of mint-flavored liqueur. The blind pianist hunched over his keyboard spread the tinselly brilliance of Viennese waltzes through clouds of bluish smoke.

The rank and file, meanwhile, were sitting at heavy tables in the tavern drinking juniper vodka, or wandering the streets
armed and in their pickelhaubes. In light of the price of gold and silver thread, and the number of yards of velvet required for the facings, and ribbon for the stripes, the need for a new uniform design without facings or braid had proved an urgent matter right from the beginning of the war. At that time private soldiers did not live long, and what they left behind was in any case thoroughly stained, torn, destroyed. Loom sold the army gray-green fabric to make uniforms for the soldiers who later made a racket outside his window and got on his nerves. At night, when the shouts would carry across the whole town, he would toss and turn, wishing sudden death upon the soldiers. But they were not in the least afraid of death, for they were cheery grenadiers with staunch hearts to whom life seemed everything that they could possibly have desired and that it hardly ever actually is. They cared not the slightest for the people of Stitchings or for Loom himself, a military supplier whose name they had never even heard.

The streetcar line built with the manpower of the German army formed an equilateral triangle joining the train station, the brothel, and the barracks. It was only then that the grenadiers stopped freezing to death drunk in snowdrifts. The electric streetcar, brought in by rail on an open platform car, was war booty and still bore the traces of Russian inscriptions. It was kept in motion by a steam turbine taken from Neumann's factory – electric current flowed through cables that hung above the streets. In compliance with an ordinance from the German
authorities, day and night municipal workers cleared snow from the tracks so the streetcar could run.

Those same authorities sent a platoon of fifteen men to remove Colonel Ahlberg's cannon, the one that had shot down the airplane. But the cannon had gotten stuck on the town hall tower, wedged in in such a way that a wall would probably have had to be taken apart to shift it. Or it could be cut up with metal saws, wheels and barrel separately, declared some artillery officer. Instead of the cannon, they brought down from the tower the bronze bell, its tongue carefully wrapped in rags, and transported it out of town on the same railroad platform. That imperfect ordinance, with a mouth too wide and a barrel in which the shell thrashed about on a tether, needed to be melted down in an ironworks and turned into a suitable instrument, one capable of performing
con brio
, as the hundred and first field gun of its caliber, its assigned part in the dazzling score of the war.

Left prey to foreign forces, Stitchings filled with stories that previously no one had ever heard or wanted to hear. In the house of pleasure, in the downstairs parlor, at night officers in jackets unbuttoned in contravention of the regulations fell madly in love, sang, and laughed; during the day the other ranks were let in through a side door and took the creaking stairs to the second floor. They thronged the poorly lit corridor, wreathed in cigarette smoke, grasping metal tokens in their sweaty palms. Madame complained about them in French and wrung her
hands, because they were never willing to turn in their knives at the door, and bloody scuffles were forever breaking out on the staircase. After living through the stormwinds of artillery fire, they had grown wild and impudent from the closeness of death.

One of them in a fit of rage burst into the empty officers' parlor with a looted pistol that no one had seen fit to confiscate. He shot up the frosting-pink walls and put bullet holes in the portrait of Kaiser Wilhelm. His alarmed comrades came running at the sound of gunfire; they tried to calm him down and reason with him, but the wretched fellow heard nothing till he fell on the rug, stabbed with a knife, a metal token clenched between his teeth.

“Awful,” shuddered Madame the very next day, reaching for the cup of coffee on a tray brought to her in bed around noon. She called back the maid as she was on her way out and had her pour a glass of cognac, a bottle of which, given to her by some major, she kept in her bedside table for emergencies. The soldiers who had happened to take part in the subduing of the madman were by now already on the Russian front; the following day they became tangled in barbed wire out in no-man's-land, where they remained, covered in snow.

In place of the fallen, others came, still alive, and one after another they tossed their sweaty tokens into the bowl with a clatter. One of them sobbed, suddenly made sentimental by the touch of a woman's hand; another remembered homemade
preserves. In the meantime the tokens grew cold and with every moment lost their power; one soldier, urged to hurry, fell silent in mid-sentence and walked out into the dim corridor, shirt in hand. Some of them, troubled by a premonition of sudden death, right from the door fished out crumpled banknotes and gave them to the girls.

“Get yourself something to remember me by,” they would say, but the girls wouldn't understand a word. They would simply embrace them, the way they had done with the grenadiers whose bones were by now in the ground. Since those men were gone, all the more these ones could not survive – plain cards from an incomplete deck, regular foot soldiers of the kind that are sent to their destruction without a second thought.

After them, Madame's establishment was visited by soldiers of the most mediocre sort: privates in middle age, sickly and stooping. In their wallets, instead of banknotes they kept family photographs, and house keys jangled in the pockets of their outsized tunics. One glance was enough to see they were worth no more than a ragged set of cards for old maid. They themselves knew it best. For that reason they usually died unceremoniously, out in the open, amid the zing of bullets, their kettle dangling from their pack. The train that had brought them to their destination had barely set off back when already they were greeted with artillery fire and showers of earth. Their keys jangled faintly in their pockets as they fell into the snow.

The German commandant of the town, Colonel von Treckow,
had been sent to Stitchings because of a heart problem that limited his usefulness at the front. His headquarters had been set up in the town hall. In order to attend council meetings von Treckow had to walk down an icy corridor, followed by a sergeant bearing official documents who would hurry ahead to open the door for the colonel and wipe his chair with an obliging sleeve. Because the chimney flues were blocked and the stoves weren't working, the entire town hall was freezing cold. The colonel would don his gold-rimmed monocle and sign orders with a patient expression in his steel-gray eyes. He would announce the requisitioning of undertakers' horses, the seizure of factories for use as military depositories, and a German government monopoly on all products of mills and malt houses.

On the first floor of the Looms' apartment building was the Loom & Son colonial store, in which at one time the discreet scent of vanilla had risen over mahogany countertops and an automatic till with nickel-plated keys. By a decree of the German authorities, the store was now responsible for distributing rationed goods. The needy, shivering crowd emptied their noses on the floor, slid around in the mud and the sawdust, and uttered the worst profanities. Afterward, the clerks lingered there till late at night amid the empty shelves. They yawned and kept having to go back to the beginning as they tried to add up endless columns of figures, in the fear that a stupid mistake would send them straight to the gallows. With the greatest difficulty
they navigated the reefs of German orthography and, cursing, glued ration cards printed in Gothic – for sugar, flour, cooking fat – in even rows on large sheets of wrapping paper.

In his office, von Treckow would take each sheet of paper in his numb hands and inspect everything personally as he chewed on eucalyptus candies. He worked in a fur coat worn over his uniform – the one and only departure from the regulations he ever committed. He ate little, slept little, and was not drawn to the company of women. He held himself straight and never shook anyone's hand. Before he went to bed he would caress the flintlock pistols he had confiscated from the grammar school boys.

But he never managed to add them to the magnificent collection he kept at his family estate somewhere in East Prussia – and all because of a group of unshaven Hungarian hussars. It was unclear what destiny had dropped them in Stitchings toward the end of the Great War, wearied by their wanderings about the world. They were looking for their regiment, yet they were getting farther and farther away from it with every day, sent first this way then that, because no one understood their language. As they were galloping around the market square in the early morning, swearing loudly in Hungarian, the colonel was roused from his sleep and went out to them in his nightcap, the fur coat thrown over his nightshirt. He asked sharply where their regiment was, though only for the sake of thoroughness, for he was absolutely convinced it had to be stationed at least
two hundred miles to the south and that this was a matter for the military police, whom he intended to summon without delay. A mustachioed hussar responded by lashing him with his whip from the saddle. Von Treckow clapped a hand to his cheek, then to his heart; he fell as if struck by lightning and never got up. A platoon of soldiers was sent to fetch his body, by now dressed in uniform.

After the soldiers there came an elderly lady with a steely gaze, accompanied by a butler and a maid. Rapping her walking stick on the floor, she cried: “Fritz! Where is Fritz?” Her voice echoed down the empty corridors of the town hall. She was shown the coffin with its gilded lid; she instructed them to open it, then close it again. The soldiers obeyed her orders without a murmur, though the maid fainted at the powerful smell that is wont to be given off in such circumstances.