In Red by Magdalena Tulli Read Free Book Online

conductor’s face.
    The other passengers would laugh as they heard this for the umpteenth time, and avert their eyes from the dried bloodstains black as mourning.
    â€œCome off it, pal,” the conductor would answer as he pushed the soldier down the steps.
    One man missing an eye, another with a scar on his forehead, would ask about work at Strobbel’s or Neumann’s, because that was all they knew. But the factories had stopped working for good, having first been turned into military depositories, then thoroughly plundered and left empty with broken windows. So they would go to the power plant, where the steam turbine was operating, offering to transport coal in baskets from the coal barges to the furnaces.
    â€œYou’re too late,” the clerk in oversleeves and a snuff-stained jacket would say as he turned them away.
    â€œWhat happened to the mine?” the demobilized soldiers would ask as they stood by the flooded crater at the end of Salt Street. They hated their fate and in desperation were prepared to abandon it and at least become miners in clothing stiff from
salt. Alojzy Piechota the fireman was barely able to hobble. “It’s come, the w-w-w . . . the w-w-w . . . ,” he kept repeating as he shuffled by on his crutches.
    â€œWhat mine? You must be imagining things,” some wagon driver would call to them from his seat, tapping his forehead to show they were mad.
    Alojzy came back from the war without his elastic-sided boots; they had been removed from his feet in the field hospital and that was the last he saw of them. From under his bed he pulled out his old shoes, one more riddled with holes than the other. After the war he only needed one; but as if out of spite, that particular one was falling apart.
    â€œThere’s no escaping it,” said Alojzy, gazing at his frostbitten toes sticking out as before.
    When isolated bullets stopped whistling overhead, the town council took charge of Stitchings once again. It was led by Loom. Anyone who had not managed to buy bread with their German ration cards had to go hungry for three weeks until the sealed railroad car guarded by sharpshooters arrived with new cards and new stamps. But no one ate the three-week-old bread, which was hard as rock. The line for ration cards had more twists and turns than under the German occupation, while the amount of buckwheat in the shipment never matched what it said on the invoice.
    â€œWe have to cheat on the scales,” Stanisław told the shop
clerks. “The times are to blame. And not a word to the master, he has worries enough of his own.”
    The labors of the town council were nightmarish. Nothing was functioning as it should have, neither factories, nor stores, nor offices. Drought had afflicted the channels of turnover – no one was crying anymore, even the fiancées of fallen soldiers. For there was a shortage of salt, which everyone knows is the essence of tears.
    Every morning the unemployed demobilized soldiers, a snarl of anger frozen on their faces, would read the newspapers, in which there was not a single piece of good news for them. They lit one roll-up cigarette from the previous one, and blew the acrid smoke up toward the ceiling. They paced from wall to wall in their basements, irritable and gruff.
    â€œI wouldn’t mind some black pudding,” one or another of them would grumble.
    But there was no black pudding in the house, nor did they have two cents to rub together. “What world is he living in, that he doesn’t know that?” his wife would tut, herself skinny as a rake. Till finally she’d lose patience. “How do you like that, it’s black pudding he wants, the cripple!” she would exclaim, arms akimbo. “He’d like black pudding every day, or better still pork chops! Go fill your belly with all those medals you keep in the dresser.”
    At night the demobilized soldiers yelled to one another
outside