“Are they not right?” Stanisław would say to Adela, puffing on a cigarette at the kitchen table. “The world has no need of freedom. It needs purity, it needs rules, it needs boundaries.”
Adaś Rączka, surrounded by youthful pyromaniacs, scoffed at britches and gaiters, and especially at slogans involving purity.
“I knew Max Fiff well,” he would say. “Before he became head of factory security he served at Slotzki’s. On his hind legs.”
Max Fiff gnashed his teeth when his people repeated these words to him.
“Adaś Rączka!” he snorted contemptuously. “He used to lick Chmura’s boots. He made his fortune working for him: a sack of mussels and a dozen porcelain bedpans.”
Max Fiff’s people went looking for Adaś Rączka all over town, starting at the Hotel Angleterre and ending in the moldering back buildings, musty basements, and dusty attics. In vain. He was too well hidden to allow himself to be prized out; instead, Max Fiff kept receiving ticking packages that had to be hurriedly carried out onto open ground and silenced with a pistol shot. Adaś Rączka was thriving, and had even begun to produce first-rate grenades that were thrown inaccurately but to good effect. Instead of bigwigs, the victim would be some chimney sweep, a nanny with a child, a dorozhka driver’s horse. At the hotel the desk clerk wagered that Fiff would shoot Rączka like a dog. The maître d’ put his money on Rączka — sooner or later, he maintained, he would wring Fiff’s neck. But Rączka had disappeared. Word went around that Loom’s munitions plant had given him a steady position with a generous salary and a company apartment by the factory lab. The bellhops, waiting for the conflict to be resolved, had to content themselves with another sensation — the funeral of the hotel’s proprietor. He had been hit in the temple by a brick thrown into a hotel room through the window, wrapped in a crumpled piece of paper that bore a scribbled message: “Into the ground!” The man who threw it was forced to admit he’d made a mistake with Mr. Lapidus, who the following morning lay on a catafalque, stretched out in impeccable evening dress despite the early hour.
WHEN EMILKA LOOM, TORMENTED BY HER MANY YEARS OF unending tedium, went for a new consignment of books, the men would come out of the tavern onto the street and accompany her all the way to the used bookstore. They would hold loud discussions about aspenwood stakes for driving through hearts. Their arteries pulsed beneath their collars as they peered through the store window into the interior stacked with books up to the ceiling. The bookseller wore a metal-rimmed pince-nez that was always steaming up.
“It really is possible to live without French romances, Miss Loom. It’d be better to stay at home,” he would whisper, turning his eyes away timorously.
On the gateway to Loom’s building there appeared the word “morgue” scrawled in chalk. From that moment on Adela and Stanisław argued perpetually. Violent disagreements would flare up over breakfast; raised voices and vulgar imprecations would be heard from the kitchen, punctuated by the crash of plates being hurled in anger. Emilka’s bed went unmade till evening. Stanisław, who had served at Loom’s since he was a child, now dragged his old traveling trunk down from the attic. He tossed the Sunday suit that was inside into the stove, and began packing so he could live or die elsewhere, without Adela, who, being in a delicate condition, was unwilling and unable to leave.
“When will you finally leave me alone?” he would say, clapping his hands over his ears so as not to hear her complaints.
A few yards from the station his bald head was set about with clubs; the trunk opened and underwear spilled out onto the street, where it was later trampled underfoot by the stretcher bearers.
Adela took refuge in the orphanage. She worked there beyond her strength, scrubbing kettles and hauling vats right up till her time. The boys made fun of the pregnant woman, stuffing pillows under their shirts. They stole sugar and peed in the laundry tub. Every morning they would line up in two rows in the courtyard. Drawn up stiff as recruits, their heads completely shaven, they would rest their bloodshot eyes on the prewar sergeant major of the Stitchings uhlans, and if necessary, in silence they would play leapfrog till they dropped.
By night the walls would be bursting from the clamor of bad thoughts. Insomnia spread through the orphanage like an infectious disease. By the red glow from the half-open doors of the stoves they killed time by throwing knives into the floorboards. The gate would open for those who had reached a sufficient age. They would leave and merge into the crowd, a red glint in their eye.
The sky would cover with clouds.
“Those are snow clouds,” the housewives jabbered. Just in case, they hurried to make sure their windows were snug. But what snow could there be, how could there suddenly be snow in that perpetual heat?
In the meantime the negatives stolen from the Argentine were passed from hand to hand, acquiring the traces of greasy fingers.
“For he’s a jolly good fellow!” they sang at the tavern, tossing the pharmacist’s boy all the way up to the ceiling. “And so say all of us!”
Depressed at having been sacked for drinking some of the surgical spirit, the pharmacist’s boy felt some consolation. In the negatives every little store could be recognized. In some of them the semitransparent, incorporeal figure of a shopkeeper would hover with folded arms in a doorway. The human eye is fallible and can easily be misled by appearances; negatives see more clearly. If the door frame and inscription on the window showed through his body, what on earth could this mean?
“It’s obvious,” the men with metal-tipped canes would say as they strolled down the street. “Negatives don’t lie.”
They made chalk marks on the wall so that at the hour when accounts would be settled they would be led to the right addresses. Time after time there came the sound of breaking glass, and twisted shop signs would crash to the sidewalk. It started at the pharmacy but did not end there. By evening they were stomping through flour spilled from ripped-open sacks as they carried off loops of sausage under their arms.
Merchants locked themselves in their storerooms along with their wives and children, barricading the door, so as to wait out the worst and then simply flee — to the port or the train station. But what port were they talking about! They must have dreamed it. See — there was nothing but a boarded-up harbor building, the narrowest of jetties with a dilapidated bench at the end, over which a hurricane lamp hanging from a pole was lit after lunch and put out come what may after supper. By the landing stage a peeling fishing boat rocked on the waves, its skipper afraid to take it out to sea. A real ship could surely only enter this harbor by mistake. And what kind of train station was that, its ticket offices bolted shut, the chintz curtains drawn from inside, with scraps of timetables blowing about the waiting room by the unlit stove. With handcars rusting in the siding, and the stationmaster’s hens pattering about on a platform overgrown with weeds that were already coated with hoarfrost. A thin film of ice on the surface of puddles, the first snowflakes swirling in the air.