In Red by Magdalena Tulli Read Free Book Online Page A

people’s windows and went endlessly reeling about the streets as if they were still driven by the momentum of the bullets that had lodged in them during the war. The bitterness of false glory distorted their mouths. In this way they wallowed in a cacophonous hell of indignity, and the town along with them.
    Maintaining order was proving impossible. Everywhere there were crowds of hungry, freezing men who had no intention of respecting anything. They spat in the street and peed in gateways. In broad daylight they were capable of grabbing a loaf of bread from under a woman’s arm or taking an old man’s last cigarette from him. They removed doors and their frames from the barracks to use as firewood.
    â€œSuch are the times,” Mayor Loom would say as he greeted the Stitchings uhlans at the entrance to the town hall. But they didn’t want to hear anything about the times; all they remembered were military parades, the golden sound of the bugle, and the airplane struck by a cannon shell that plummeted to earth with a crash in billows of black smoke. Now reoutfitted in police jackets, they began hounding the gangs of boys with frostbitten ears who loved to play buttons, chasing them down Factory Street. Most highly valued of all were prewar uhlan dress buttons, the ones with the crowned lion; those buttons were said to always win. The police twisted the arms of the players they caught, took away their uhlan buttons, then beat and kicked them mercilessly till their noses bled.
    The pink glow would light up the sky earlier than usual, but
still no soup tureens appeared on the table, not to mention a main course. The townspeople’s bellies were rumbling and they only wanted one thing: that the day should be over already; but on an empty stomach the dusk, which was supposed to fall after dessert, seemed an eternity in coming.
    Only Loom was able to eat his fill, but he was the very person who had no time. He worked in the town hall till late, and had his meals brought from the restaurant of the Hotel Angleterre. The papers had to be pushed to the edge of the desk, then covered silver dishes from the hotel service were placed on a snow-white cloth bearing its monogram. Loom reached for his wallet, but he only ever had bills of the highest denomination, which the boy sent from the restaurant always refused to take because he could not give change.
    â€œTake the money from the municipal account and make a note, I’ll pay it back later,” he would say casually to the bookkeeper.
    Yet there wasn’t enough money in the municipal account to cover Loom’s lunch, so he would stick the bill in the waiter’s pocket and send him away with a brusque gesture. In the meantime, plaster would be falling into his glass from the ceiling.
    In the town hall it was freezing cold and there was never enough money for anything. Loom turned every grosz in his hands three times over. He doubted the advisability of spending municipal funds on repairs. The frost, which cooled emotions and curbed surprises, ultimately failed to preserve anything. A
southern wind blew trash into the town through the cracks: stories of gunshot wounds, stories of lost elastic-sided boots, stories of war medals kept in old tobacco tins.
    Loom considered it his obligation to at least do something about Colonel Ahlberg’s cannon, which had gotten lodged on the town hall tower when it ought to stand in the middle of the market square, on a tall plinth with a commemorative inscription in gold lettering. On his instructions fifteen men calling “heave ho!” spent an entire afternoon attempting to move it from where it stood. Sweating and filthy, they walked away muttering that Loom didn’t know what he was talking about. You could want anything you like, but the axles were locked permanently in place. “It’d be better to just cut the wheels off or saw the barrel in two,” they said.
    â€œIncompetents,”