Free In Red by Magdalena Tulli

something wrong with my eyes? Now there are eight of them!”
    He got rid of them any chance he had, cursing the circus, which by now had vanished without a trace from the parade ground. Felek’s people, still standing indefatigably at every corner of Salt Street, used the notes to pay for gold wedding bands. When it was needed, they lent them to con men at loan-shark rates and for a tragically short time, taking their throats as security. They used the notes to give change in the larger transactions that occurred when sailors borne by towering waves down the middle of Salt Street crashed into them as if they were rocks. The sailors had a broad step, swaying as if they were walking the deck of a ship, not the firm ground of the town, which they swept with their broad-bottomed pants. Each sailor’s every wish could be granted in a second, even if it involved the heavyset blonde in a black garter belt who they’d dreamed of the whole voyage, or the petite Japanese woman hiding behind her fan on a matchbox label. Any object a sailor could possibly desire, Felek’s people had it at hand, and the sailors couldn’t stop themselves till they had tried everything. They woke in the early morning in fog, a blank patch in their memory, a dull pain in their forehead, and one faded banknote in their pocket. Black-eyed and blinking,
they read the name of their ship, which they had forgotten, from the rim of their cap.
    In time Felek Chmura’s people exchanged their oilcloth-peaked caps for felt hats. They were experts on everything; on the spot they could sell forged Portuguese passports to officers from Wrangel Island, or as a special commission could liquidate worthless prewar Trans-Siberian Railroad shares. They smelled of alcohol, tobacco, and cologne. They would leave the corners of Salt Street to occupy cheap wooden dance halls called the Tivoli or the Trocadero, which also belonged to Felek Chmura, along with the proceeds from the liquor license, the piano and accordion music, and the earnings of the professional dance partners. The accordion summoned people to the tango through swathes of smoke, and tossed them to distraction in desperate lunges and sudden half-turns, while the piano player teetered on the brink of silence, only to abruptly hammer his fists on the hollow wooden case of the upright piano – boom, boom! – upon which the accordion would issue its final word before the melody ended and destiny was fulfilled. The relentless beat of the tango pulsed in the temples beneath beads of perspiration; for a brief moment everyone took its violence as their own and barely kept it under control, swaying on a taut string with a hired dancer in garish makeup, on the borderline between light and dark, love and hate, life and death. It was precisely at such moments that Felek Chmura’s people lost their one and only treasure – hesitation. Along with it they lost feeling
in their fingers, and from that time on, after a hard day’s work counterfeit banknotes would continually turn up in their wallets – first, one-hundred-crown bills, then later five-hundreds too, and finally also ordinary twenties and tens. Without feeling in the fingers life was worth nothing, and so they began to despise it. They stopped liking smoked sausage and mustard, and beer. Eventually their thinking lost its clarity, their gaze its keenness, and one by one they were found in the early morning stiff as a rock, a gunshot to the head. Their widows received a one-time compensation from Felek: a wad of banknotes that had to be spent as quickly as possible before they faded entirely.
    In the meantime, in Loom & Son’s esteemed store, which belonged to Felek Chmura, at prices lower than ever they sold goods of a shoddiness never seen before: tea mixed with dried nettles, flour combined with chalk and plaster, sugar mingled with semolina, beer that immediately went to one’s head and produced a pounding