On the day of the annual festival on the town hall square, beneath the Chinese lanterns hung out by the firemen, the brass band struck up. Hungry children biting on rock-hard gingerbreads got in the way of the dancers. Paper streamers flew overhead, wrapping around people’s necks with a rustle, then ending underfoot, torn to pieces.
Rauch, wearing a black tailcoat, immediately after an early lunch had himself carried into the theater to supervise preparations for the gala show in person. But he didn’t even make it into the foyer. Both the front and the back of the building were being picketed by vigilantes gripping metal-tipped canes, one or another of them wearing a cocked hat from the theater’s prop room, a false mustache, and carrying a halberd.
“No passage,” they said.
“Who are these people? Where did they come from?” Rauch exclaimed, pushing them away with his hands.
But the porters had already put the armchair down on the sidewalk, and Max Fiff appeared next to it, the Slotzki factory emblem on his sleeve, a black pointer at his heel.
“Gala’s off, Mr. Rauch,” he said. He smashed the glass of the display case with his metal-tipped cane and tore up the photos. The wind carried the shreds over the street then dropped them among the trampled streamers. “It’s time to think of a new repertoire, the old one is rotten, it’s starting to stink. Your theater is polluting pure spring water. There’s no truth other than the truth of harmony! Us, if need be we’ll take a sharp knife and rip the truth out of people’s guts.”
“What are you planning to put on, sir, if I may ask?” Rauch responded, describing a circle with his hands that included Max Fiff’s people loitering about with their halberds. “Truth! Harmony! Sheer kitsch. First of all a good ear is what’s needed.”
“Take the chair away,” snapped Max Fiff, jabbing at the porters with the tip of his cane. “And I don’t want to see you here again. Quick march!”
The halberdiers sang in hoarse tuneless voices. From the direction of Factory Street standards began to arrive bearing the Slotzki emblem in a circle that was steeped in bloody red. Amid the gray walls the red glowed like embers in ash. The wind carried the echoes of the choral songs after their waves had already broken against the long rows of apartment buildings.
The Gypsy musicians hid their fiddles under their cloaks and fled as fast as their legs would carry them. One after another they bumped into the French-horn player from the brass band, who was hurrying in the opposite direction, staggering under the weight of his large black case. Some people blocked their path as they ran and dragged them into gateways. Twisting their arms back, they checked whether the musicians had a pulse.
The crowd that had gathered on the market square broke down the door of Loom’s house and surged inside, where at once there was a jam. They had to squeeze along dark and stuffy hallways, up to their knees in piles of dusty faded books that were falling apart with age. Emilka was as usual still in bed, closing her ears to the sounds of the outside world. Her cheeks burning, she was turning the second to last page of a French romance when someone snatched the book from her hand. That was the end. Those standing on the stairs passed a black coffin from hand to hand; it sailed high over their heads till it reached its destination. Seeing it, Emilka gave a piercing scream, then a moment later, her mouth already gagged, locked in an iron grip and unable to move hand or foot, she caught sight of the aspenwood stake.
“Any moment is as good as any other,” said those who later carried the black coffin down the stairs. “Either way it had to be done sooner or later.”
Her heart pierced with an aspenwood stake, Emilka was no longer able to return home. She remained where they buried her, in the cemetery, right by the wall, which, raised higher several times for a clearer demarcation of boundaries, at that point was more than two stories tall. A respect for rules had been restored, a source of outrage removed by force. But all this was too little and brought relief to no one. Neither the splendid afterglow in the western sky, nor the hard gingerbreads with colored frosting, not even the loud petards could assuage their suffering.
“Where’s the tailor?” people asked. “Where’s the mother of the baby?”
No one was minding the orphanage anymore; the boys had run away, and their shaven heads were seen everywhere. They burst in on the residents of basements and stuffed their pockets with bread and pinchbeck jewelry. In one attic they found a dusty chest containing a number of homemade grenades. Later, grenades in hand, they ran at the head of the crowd, took aim at those running away, and hit their targets. “Anyone that gets up, grab them and don’t let go!” they shouted. But there was no one to grab; those struck died once and for all.
Where were the bankers, the owners of large department stores, and the industrialists; where was the mortmain property that everyone deserved a small part of? A rumor circulated that Loom, Neumann, and Slotzki were one person, and that they had assumed the form of a black pointer with red eyes. In their hunt for the dog, the surging mob found itself in front of the theater. The last grenade was tossed, yet it did not go off but simply fell to the ground and spun. Lured by the explosions, Adaś Rączka followed the noises, wearing his hat and carrying an umbrella. He recognized his own work from the sound.
“A botched job,” he murmured as he reached down for the last of the grenades. In the meantime cobblestones dug up from the street were already being thrown at the pointer. But they did not attain their target. Many people saw the dog disappear through the doors of the theater, which a moment later turned out to be locked tight, though the sounds of a party could be heard coming from the upstairs windows. Someone saw the flash of a red eye behind a pane and threw a stone. A short moment later there was not a single window still intact in the whole of Rauch’s theater.
Drafts ran riot through the corridors and storerooms and cellars, blowing into every corner and fanning the forgotten embers still burning beneath the floor. Flames crept through cracks in the floorboards. Jars of powder burst from the heat, while above them dried roses burned in swirling pastel clouds. Mirrors suddenly vanished, shattering into pieces. In the director’s office Max Fiff’s halberdiers ran to the cabinets and started blocking the windows with them, feeling no heat other than the one that burned their innards, determined to defend themselves against the stone-throwing mob. In this way they cut off their own escape route. The office door came crashing down from the violent breath of the fire, and a dark, acrid smoke filled the entire room up to the ceiling. Coughing and bumping into one another, they thrashed about in the black fog lit time and again by a frenzied red. Max Fiff groped his way to the exit and thus was the first to plunge into a flaming hell of needless love and impotent hatred; he was followed by his people, on their knees, crawling, dying as they went. Max made it down the stairs and staggered to the side door; with his last remaining strength he managed to get outside, where he stumbled over the body of Adaś Rączka. Once the flames had consumed the cabinets they shot out through the windows. A great gala of red split the theater open and took possession of the whole town.