In Red (9 page)

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.

At that time the firm of Strobbel & Slotzki was beginning production of porcelain sanitary appliances. One after another, gleaming white washbasins came off the production line to be packed in wooden crates and shipped the world over by sea or land.

“You've spent your whole life making plates and bowls, uncle, I've no idea why,” Oswald Slotzki would say to the aging Strobbel. “Now they're all in dirty piles in every greasy spoon there is. All those little figures of yours!” he would add, raising his voice and pointing to a ballet dancer in a dusty porcelain tutu. “The world needs cleanliness, nothing more.”

No one noticed exactly when the snowflake that appeared on Strobbel & Slotzki's products changed its shape. From that time on, each of its four arms was bent at a right angle, like the wooden rulers with which Slotzki was so prodigal. The ballet dancer was smashed; pieces of porcelain tutu, so fine the broom could not pick them up, kept crunching underfoot in old Strobbel's study.

Slotzki spent whole days in the factory. Spotty Max Fiff would sit outside the door of his office waiting to be summoned. Slotzki would remember about him in the late afternoon.

“Go,” he would say. “Get some fresh air.”

Max would come back with a torn sleeve and a split lip, a tuft of Adaś Rączka's ruddy hair in his fist.

Felek Chmura would lose himself in his accounts and not even hear his own stomach growling from hunger. As he concluded the successive parts of his calculations, he would notice that each of them contained at least one figure whose recollection made him bite his lip. Like a pesky gadfly, a payment made in imperial five-ruble gold coins kept coming back – the price of the potatoes that were rotting in the storehouses. To work out the actual loss, Felek would add successive zeros to the round
sum, to the rhythm of growing inflation, doing so with powerless anger, since on the other hand these were thousands of dead crowns, money removed from circulation, thrown in the mud and buried there for good. He rushed into one new enterprise after another, striving to force the world to finally give him back what it owed him. But with each new million flowing into his coffers his losses grew unchecked.

From time to time he would grab the handbell and send for coffee. Toward evening he would remember about Adaś.

“Go,” he would say. “Clear your head.”

Redheaded Adaś Rączka would grab his hat and be gone. He would come back late, covered in mud, with torn pants and a black eye.

In the pink parlor, lolling on a plush sofa, Felek Chmura listened to fox-trots. The sounds floated lightly out of the horn of Madame's phonograph, mocking the whole world, especially the despair and pathos of the tango. Saxophones slid down the smooth shining steps of piano chords like clowns whose life is composed of nothing but cheap gags. Slotzki would arrive later, his eyes watering, a large box of chocolates under his arm. As the girls threw themselves on the chocolates he would sit heavily on the sofa and unfasten his collar.

“What's new at the factory?” Felek would ask. “I hear there's a strike brewing?”

“Give it a rest, Chmura,” Slotzki would reply, wiping the
perspiration from his forehead with a handkerchief. He would drink a glass of brandy and then ask Madame to dance, a trace of crimson lipstick from a welcoming kiss still on his cheek. Felek didn't like brandy. Madame would fill his glass to its gilt-edged rim with home-brewed vodka. She preferred not to dance with Slotzki, who had cloth ears. She would laugh and wink at Felek.

“Come on, girls,” she would say. “Who likes dancing?”

But the girls preferred to partner up with one another, cheek to cheek, rather than touch the blotched hand or see the disfigured body close up. Madame did not demand this of them. As the evening got under way, officers of the merchant marine appeared on the horizon wanting to sail through the rooms to the stormy sounds of the fox-trot till dawn surprised them on the way to Yokohama or Montevideo. One gray-haired sea captain would stand in the door of the pink parlor, a monocle in his trembling hand.

“A fellow's had all kinds of women in his time,” he would mutter to himself as he watched the dancers.

Called out discreetly by Madame, the girls would vanish into the rooms upstairs to which tattooed sailors were let in via the back entrance, up the creaking stairs.

Slotzki and Chmura, the backs of their satin vests gleaming, would shuffle cards to the hollow sounds of the phonograph. Max the pointer would be snoring by the sofa, slobber dripping from his muzzle. The pink parlor was his home. After his third
glass of brandy Slotzki was invigorated. The shining steps of piano chords would lead him back to the irksome matters of the past day, leaving him slightly short of breath. The four pink walls echoed with the sound of his arguments with the factory trade union about the extra half an hour that each day's work included, and that was subsequently absent from the nighttime hours.

“Thirty damn minutes,” Slotzki would repeat with a shrug. “Big deal. What I'd like to know is how they have watches.”

“It's your lead,” Felek would remind him.

“Clubs,” Slotzki would say, throwing down a card, and he would pick up where he left off. He railed at the dry rot eating away the foundations of the factory, at the filth that was everywhere – a revolting mold that filled the entire world to the brim. Slotzki suffered, his heart pained him.

“Is anyone even watching over it all?” he would ask, his eyes straying over the stucco garlands on the ceiling.

“
Mais oui!
” Madame would reply, and perch on his lap like a pink butterfly. “The two of you are.”

For out of his own pocket Slotzki paid half the rent, which rose from month to month, spinning in ever more beautiful circles. The other half was paid by Chmura.

 

 

BEFORE DAWN FELEK, SPRAWLED ON THE PLUSH SOFA WITH eyes shut and mouth open, his shallow breath whistling, would
turn a handsome profit speculating in shares in South African diamond mines, only to lose it all later in the shipwreck of a freighter, having invested in the shipping of expensive Indian saffron – his British insurance company found a way not to have to pay up, filling him with an infinite bitterness that was yellow as the saffron itself.

In the meantime Slotzki, his head tipped back on the headrest of the armchair, was examining his washbasins, smooth and white, stacked all the way up to the ceilings of his warehouses. Dazzlingly pure, if one ignored the rusty stains that appeared on them out of nowhere. Where did those stains come from? he would ask. Well, if stains have come out, it must mean they were already there before, the foremen would stammer in explanation. Get rid of them, Slotzki would shout, scrub them till you're blue in the face, I don't want to see the slightest trace of them. And so the workers cleaned the washbasins, scrubbing with powder and lye, till they scraped off the enamel and the surfaces became coated with a uniform dirty grayness that in places looked as if it were bleeding.

Chmura and Slotzki would rise in the morning all out of shape, their collars digging into their necks, and thrust their swollen feet into their shoes. Hurrying each to his own affairs, without sitting down they would drink a mug of sour milk that the old serving woman had brought them out of pity.

“Spending the night on the sofas! Right where they fell asleep! It's not like we're short of beds here!” she would mumble to
herself as she took the empty mugs back into the kitchen. “Poor guys, no one here looks after them.”

Madame would not allow anyone to wake her before eleven. A bed jacket thrown around her shoulders, a glass of brandy in her hand – for the toothache that always troubled her in the morning – she would go and count the sheets just brought back from the press.

“
Parbleu!
” she would exclaim. “The hems are coming unstitched again. Do something about it. Get a seamstress.”

And she would set the gilt-rimmed glass down by the shank of beef for making broth and the large basket of soup vegetables, as the butcher's boy was already wringing his cap in his hands, smiling awkwardly on the doorstep. Madame quickly checked the bill and gave him his money, then she paid the laundrywoman and the coal merchant and, recalling a thought from the day before, she sent to the soap shop for floor polish or turpentine.

“Those women alone never want for cash,” the clerk would whisper to the next customer with a knowing look as he leaned over the soapflake-strewn counter.

 

 

“THOSE WOMEN ALONE HAVE NO WORRIES IN LIFE,” SAID Stefania Chmura as she paced her bedroom from the bed to the wardrobe and back again. She ran a soup kitchen for war invalids and she always had to worry about where she would
get the ingredients for the next day's meal. Every morning the cooks had to boil huge cauldrons of water; day after day they had to chop up bones, peel potatoes, and stoke the stove all morning. At lunchtime the former soldiers would crowd outside the closed gateway till they were let in. A quarter of an hour later they would reemerge onto the street, smoking cigarettes and complaining – the ingrates – about the awful food. They would fall sick and die to spite Stefania. Their wives, on the other hand, were resolved to put up with anything. But they worked themselves to death over their tubs of laundry. Their daughters went into service and were not a problem. Stefania established an orphanage for the boys, to stop them from wandering the streets unsupervised.

“They're not boys, they're wild animals,” she would say of them bitterly. They smeared ink on the walls and broke the chairs. They ripped their shirts and pants in endless attempts to escape from the grim barracks-like building on Guards Street. Philanthropy came at a cost. Stefania was in constant need of cash. Every time Felek left his wife's bedroom he placed a wad of banknotes on the mahogany dressing table.

As Madame's girls stood at the mirror putting on their crimson lipstick they would gossip about Slotzki and Chmura. They speculated about their benefactors' intentions, but it was impossible to guess what these two men were after. The living fire that one of them had survived had forever marked his body with its hideous stamp and had reduced his desire to ashes. That one
wanted nothing more than a kiss in greeting from Madame. While the other's only wish was for house slippers to be always waiting for him by the sofa in the pink parlor; for everything else he preferred to pay his wife, Stefania.

“The hussy,” the girls declared indignantly. “And of top of everything she's older than him!”

Stefania would reach for Felek's money the moment the door closed behind him; she would study both sides of each banknote closely. There were more and more counterfeit bills of various denominations in circulation. They were used to pay for coal, for bread, for the rent. The longer they were passed around the paler they became, gradually coming to resemble scraps of ordinary wrapping paper on which nothing at all could be made out. In the early morning such a slip of paper had gone from hand to hand like a hot brick, then by afternoon no one wanted it anymore. But it always managed to wind up in the pocket of some overworked washerwoman. She would try to use it to pay for a basket of coal or a loaf of bread, as she wandered among the coal yards and from one bakery to another. The storekeepers didn't even need to look at the watermark, the loss of value had happened elusively but suddenly. Those kinds of notes were spotted from afar.

“You can still use them to light the fire,” the impudent shop boy would call out as the woman was on her way out.

In the end it came to it that nothing but counterfeit money was found in the town, and it all flowed into Felek's coffers. In
Stitchings at that time even the bank used a double accounting system and dealt in suspiciously pale banknotes. In the hotel restaurant Chmura would toss them down for the waiters without even counting them, in the street he would do the same with the organ-grinders. Sooner or later they had to come back to him, it couldn't have been any other way. His wallet weighed like a stone in his pocket. Huge bundles of false bills filled his safes. He would stick wrappers around them and stash them wherever he could, stacking them in drawers, and later also under beds, in armchairs, on side tables.