Free In Red by Magdalena Tulli Page B

finished too soon. Before the thread could be used, the troops had been demobilized. The commissariat left the job of buying underwear to the soldiers’ wives. And the wives, fussier than the commissariat, would turn the garment inside out and check the seams before taking out their purses. New times required new threads. Felek incurred additional costs, which he docked from the seamstresses’ wages. He refused to budge on this matter.
    â€œThey don’t snap in the machines,” he would say. “It’s for your own convenience, and it’s more profitable. I’m not going to pay for it out of my own pocket.”
    Once again the pedals of the sewing machines rattled fretfully, belts whizzed round, needles danced like crazy. The seamstresses toiled over long johns for civilians, by lamps that were too dim, for money that was too pale and had an insufficiently distinct watermark, without complaining, since they had not complained before. The wedding bands that had been converted into cash left a mark on their ring fingers, and a gold-tinged memory. A hand without a wedding band grows light; their
husbands would lightly buy a third-class ticket and vanish without a trace, while they would be left with debts for spareribs bought at Felek’s butcher shop and long since eaten, or for coal from his coal yard that at some unnoticed moment had gone up in smoke. The profits from the sewing shops crowned Felek Chmura’s achievement in the town. All the cash circulating from one store to another flowed, via an ingenious system of canals and locks reaching from the port to the train station, straight into his coffers.
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    AT THAT POINT CHMURA TOOK FROM A DRAWER THE LITTLE BOX containing the ring that before the war Stefania had refused to accept from Kazimierz Krasnowolski, demanding time to think.
    â€œHas she not done enough thinking by now?” he asked as he fastened his wing collar at the mirror and reached for his vest, which Adaś was holding in readiness. Once in his new suit he went directly to Neumann’s to ask for her hand.
    â€œThere’s not a lot of choice,” Neumann said that evening to Stefania, who was sitting mending some gloves in stubborn silence. “Unless you marry one of those clowns who take out a loan by mortgaging their own property and live off that. Remember, child, I’m getting on, and the factory is ruined.”
    â€œKazimierz’s orderly!” Stefania retorted. “Think what you’re saying, papa.”
    She fell sick with longing for Kazimierz Krasnowolski. She
trudged after him through mists of fever, through miry, treacherous swamps of love, till he threw her one of his beautiful crazy glances over his shoulder. But what was this? He had the features of Felek Chmura. The priceless image, tossed into the endless stream of weekdays and Sundays, had at some unknown moment been effaced. Stefania bit her lip and tossed on her tear-stained pillows.
    â€œAre they not alike as two peas?” she would whisper and then, overcome by another wave of fever, start shouting that she’d even prefer Slotzki’s scars. The doctor offered no hope of a speedy recovery. Yet one day she rose from her bed, with rings under her eyes, but calm, and ordered her bath to be prepared. In the afternoon she laid out the cards for solitaire. The sequences came together of their own accord, as if they’d been waiting for weeks merely for the hand that would introduce the right order in the pack. The next day Stefania accepted the engagement ring from Felek Chmura.
    â€œI get a blinding headache at the mere sight of the man,” she complained to her doctor. “How will I be able to put up with him under the same roof?”
    Medicine knew no remedy for such an ailment.
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    ON THE DAY OF THE WEDDING THE BRASS BAND PLAYED ON the market square; the residents of Factory Street, Salt Street, Coal Street, and Guards Street danced to