The officer of the German colonial forces, in white jacket with gold buttons and tropical pith helmet, had arrived in Stitchings no one knew where from. One Wednesday he appeared out of the blue, at lunchtime, right between the soup and the main course. He unfastened the button at his collar and wiped his brow; he was evidently unaffected by Stitchings’s frosts. The sun had just appeared for a brief moment over the Looms’ house and was casting a few slanting rays onto the rooftops through gaps in the clouds, only to vanish in darkness soon afterward as it did day after day. The new arrival from the distant colonies walked by the town hall, whose golden weathercock blazed on its tower in the first and last rays of the sun, and entered the hotel restaurant just as Councilor Krasnowolski, his cheeks pink as could be, had emptied his frost-covered glass and was rubbing his hands in anticipation of the pork knuckle. The officer removed his pith helmet.
“Today I am taking your wife to South-West Africa,” he said, clicking his heels.
“Surely you are joking, sir.”
“I never joke,” the officer said laconically, showing the councilor a letter.
The latter began to read, but his face flushed. All at once he tossed the sheet of paper on the table as if it had burned his fingers. The German colonial officer folded the letter carefully, put it away, then clicked his heels once again in farewell. He walked away with the brisk step of a man who knows where he is going. He vanished behind the cloud of white steam rising from the mountainous portion of greasy pork knuckle that had just at that moment been served. Councilor Krasnowolski ate, choking on his tears and wiping his spectacles on a checkered handkerchief. For he was every inch the civilian.
The councilor’s wife left him with a stack of blank letter paper, wrinkled from her tears, a torn-up telegram, empty photograph frames, and a pincushion stained with blood from a pricked finger. She never contacted him again. Perhaps when she arrived at her destination she was devoured by African lions. For a long time Councilor Krasnowolski was sick from his woes, till one night he died.
The job of caring for Kazio fell to his aunts, each of whom took him in reluctantly and was glad to see him go, all because of his wearisome affliction — he could not fall asleep. In the night he would rise from his bed and wander the rooms, tormented by tedium. From time to time a floorboard or door would creak. In the morning he would be kneeling on the floor in his nightshirt. In a reddish glow from the half-open door of the stove he would open his boxes of lead soldiers. The hullabaloo from skirmishes between the uhlans of Stitchings and the German colonial forces echoed against the pink wallpaper of the children’s rooms, waking infants and nannies. Uncles would quarrel with aunts by night in their mahogany-furnished bedrooms. Kazio’s fate would be weighed amid muffled whispers, sarcastic questions, sobs, angry exclamations. Once they got their way, the uncles ensured that Kazio was sent to cadet school in Sweden; his aunts would shed tears every evening as they recalled his sorry story.
Shortly before her seventeenth birthday Loom’s only daughter became engaged to Councilor Krasnowolski’s son, who had returned to Stitchings as a professional officer; he was most handsome, especially in his dress uniform, with his splendid mustache and that absent look in his dark eyes, always faintly ringed with sleeplessness.
“He never falls asleep because he never wakes up either,” women would say bitterly when he jilted them. The merchant had heard the rumors about Kazio’s romances, but for him neither romances nor military service were serious things and he nursed the hope that after marrying, his son-in-law would exchange his uniform for a snuff-colored frock coat and devote himself entirely to the company.
“Not on your life,” the young lieutenant would declare as he shuffled cards in the mess. The other officers would exchange knowing looks over the card table and smirk, asking themselves why in that case was he marrying into Loom & Son.
He would deal and look about, blinking, as if the unuttered question had disturbed his peaceful sleep. Then he would pat the pockets of his uniform in search of a little pasteboard rectangle. He always carried a photograph of his fiancée. With a rapid glance he would look right through the childlike countenance, in which there was nothing unspoken, no secret, nothing that would be capable of hurting him.
The spitting image of the other officers, whose polished boots gave off the same gleam and the same smell of wax, he ate, drank, and lived reasonably happily until the arrival from Germany of Augustus Strobbel, nephew of old Strobbel the owner of the porcelain factory. Thanks to his long lashes and sweet-tempered gaze, this polite young man became the favorite of the young ladies. At the thés dansants he would blush, surrounded by a giggling throng that would sing “Meine lieber Augustus, Augustus, Augustus. .” The aunts sitting along the edges of the room said nothing, alarmed, though they recognized a song that was older than they were, as one after another they lowered their lorgnettes to resume their interrupted conversation. Augustus Strobbel positively glowed when he expatiated upon porcelain. He maintained that it was the most durable substance in the world, and that the thinner it is the more durable it becomes, because its fragility makes people handle it with utmost care, which, he claimed, could most clearly be seen in the Chinese vases in Strobbel’s private collection. Augustus Strobbel wore a striped silk vest of a kind never before seen in Stitchings; beneath it beat his heart, noble and delicate as a porcelain handbell. Nothing irked Kazimierz so much as porcelain, especially that stupid little bell.
The day of the annual festival, commemorated with a lavish celebration on the market square and dances in people’s salons, was for Loom marked by a festive tedium of broth and boiled beef with horseradish sauce at the ceremonial dinner of the town council, which he had served on since time immemorial. As his black tailcoat was being prepared for him, his daughter, Emilka, put on her ball gown with the help of a maid and began looking out for the sleigh that was to take her to the dance, straight into the arms of Kazimierz Krasnowolski — or perhaps Augustus Strobbel? “Embarras de richesses, de richesses, de richesses,” she sang, her hand upon her heart, which was beating wildly. She ran, now to the mirror, now to the window, till all her happiness and agitation made her head start to spin.
At long last the sleigh pulled up and Emilka was just about to take her seat when Kazimierz’s jaunty orderly ran out of Guards Street and in front of Loom’s house bumped into Augustus Strobbel’s melancholy manservant, who was hurrying from Factory Street. They appeared before Emilka at the same time, twisting their caps in their hands, holding under their arms notes in Strobbel’s rounded hand and Krasnowolski’s angular writing, not knowing what to do with them, for both had been instructed to hand them to her in secret. So both men raised their eyes to the little angels that crowned the façade of the building.