Rauch disdained anything that resembled ocean rollers, Ludwig Neumann’s public loudspeakers, or songs transcribed for thick glass beer mugs and voices gruff from yelling. As he left the theater after a show and had to pass the tavern, he would resort to the light repertoire. He would tap the beat with his rolled umbrella, steadfastly resisting the rhythm dictated by the thud of tankards. Transported on the raft of an amusing operetta polka, he would arrive dry-shod at Corelli’s café just in time for his evening game of billiards with the chief of police. As they chalked the tips of their cues and studied the movement of the balls on the green baize, they would consider one thought after another in silence. Crack! Rauch would make a shot as he pondered a new program starring Natalie Zugoff, which would eclipse the previous show. Crack! The chief of police would take his shot, turning over in his mind the mystery of Rączka, the fellow responsible for the petards thrown by the ragamuffins of Factory Street. The thoughts sped across the green baize and collided with one another, one driving the other forward. Rączka sold petards to the hooligans and had money. Fuses kept going missing from Loom’s munitions factory. Someone was obviously buying them up. Crack, crack, went the balls.
“Nice cannon,” acknowledged Rauch.
But the problem of Rączka remained unresolved.
“Apparently he goes around bragging he can make a bomb out of anything,” the chief of police would say, lining up his next shot. “I’m not exactly going to look good if he decides to prove it.”
RAUCH WOULD GET HOME LATE AND GO TO BED LONG AFTER midnight. He never rose before ten. Around midday he would still be wandering from room to room in his flowery silk dressing gown. He’d pick up a book, read half a page, then toss it down on the sofa; he’d go to the upright piano and tap a few notes; he’d open a flacon of perfume, smell it, then return to the piano. His pudgy fingers barely fit on the keys. He would conclude his tune with a final chord.
The theater brought in excellent takings, and Rauch swelled with satisfaction, growing bigger and heavier by the day. He even wondered if it might be possible to reopen the local record press.
“What record press?” the musicians in the band laughed. “He must have dreamed it up when he was dozing through a rehearsal.”
At exactly this time a fire broke out in the wings. The flames quickly spread to the wooden stairs that led to the dressing rooms. The young ladies of the corps de ballet didn’t smell the smoke until their exit route was already cut off. They ran in their underwear across the floor that felt like heated tin, screaming to high heaven. The fire brigade put their ladder up to the window and one by one brought the dancers down from the ledge. A crowd of gawkers greeted the shocking white of underskirts with whistles and howling applause.
“That dolt!” roared Rauch. “He ought to leave the damn posters alone. Why does he have to go traipsing round after the leading lady? He was supposed to keep watch behind the wings like a dog, to make sure no one set the place on fire!”
The stench of burning lingered for a long time in the theater. Sacked by Rauch, Alojzy the watchman loitered around the stage door, accosting members of the band as they arrived at work.
“B-b-before they rebuilt it this was the officers’ mess,” he kept repeating. He insisted that the fire must have been started during the war by German officers tipping ash from their pipes.
“Take it easy there,” the men he stopped would say, clapping him on the shoulder.
“Fire n-n-never goes out! It can smolder under the floor for years!” Alojzy would call after them as they walked away.
And he would ask himself bitterly who was supposed to understand the nature of fire if not himself, a fireman.
Rauch ordered the new watchman not to let Alojzy into the theater. Treated roughly, the buttons on his coat torn off, Alojzy hobbled up on his wooden leg and stood beneath the window of the director’s office.
“It’s smoldering! You need to find where it’s smoldering and put it out! Otherwise the theater’s going to burn and the rest of the town with it!” he shouted, stumbling over every syllable, and lifting his eyes to the balcony as if he expected a response from up there. A crowd gathered and was quickly dispersed by the police, who took Alojzy to the precinct. They held him tightly by both arms like a dangerous lunatic. Locked up in a holding cell, his suspenders and shoelaces taken away, he beat his head against the iron door.
“Who’s going to look after her?” he cried. “Who’ll protect her?”
When they let him out he was barely still alive. He went straight to Loom’s cook.
“Eat,” Adela said, pushing some apple pie in front of him. “You’ll be the death of me, you crazy man.”
Alojzy didn’t even sit down. He paced about by the kitchen table. Spitting crumbs, he cursed Rauch and repeated over and over that the floor absolutely had to be ripped up throughout the entire theater, except for the orchestra, where it had been laid after the war.
“You’d be better off going and getting some sleep.” The old butler, Stanisław, kept patting his shoulder till it made the fireman angry. He meant to stamp his foot, but he only scraped the ground with his wooden leg, which was thin as a broomstick.
“Remember my words!” he exclaimed, grabbing his cap. Before he left, he got the idea of borrowing the money Adela had set aside for a dowry.
“You’re not going to be marrying any day soon! There aren’t any eligible bachelors anymore,” Stanisław remarked maliciously. Adela threw her savings on the table and turned her back on Alojzy so he wouldn’t see the tears dripping onto her apron.
The fireman took the cash straight to the box office and demanded a loge. The news quickly spread among the musicians and the dancers. After the show he was found in his loge, in dress uniform and a crooked shining helmet, his hands gripping the arms of the seat, foam in the corners of his mouth, his gaze forever turned away from the world and fixed on the inside of his head. He woke in a straitjacket, his arms tied, in a home for the insane. From that moment on he never said another word to anyone. The dancers remembered him as a victim of Natalie Zugoff.
“Don’t cry, girl,” Stanisław repeated to Adela. “To an old man like me you look good, dowry or no dowry.”
As she sobbed she pushed his hand away from the back of her neck.
THE LOCAL EVENING NEWSPAPER REPORTED ABOUT THE slamming of seats before the end of the show; the author of the article, which was signed with a pseudonym, attributed it to Natalie Zugoff’s rebellious fondness for dissonance that was an outrage against the sacred principles of harmony. He cast doubt on the artistic sense of the director of the theater, and even his morals. It had been learned that he was the son of a German general and a French actress; during the war he had avoided active service with a desk job in some ministry, from which he had eventually been fired for egregious unpunctuality and execrable handwriting. The newspaper asserted that Natalie Zugoff ought not to sing, since neither was she able to, nor was it seemly. She was not just any old chanteuse, but — apparently — the wife of Prince Belorukov-Mukhin, a former tsarist diplomat. Yet she wore no wedding ring. Her name? Assumed. And what had become of Ambassador Belorukov? Had she left him in his hour of need, or, on the contrary, had she herself been abandoned by him? Had the prince been shot by the Bolsheviks, or had he perhaps fled, or was he still somewhere in Russia, in a patched peasant shirt?