Read Online In Red by Magdalena Tulli - Free Book Online

grabbing his sleeve in the gateway.
    Soon Stitchings had no secrets from him: he knew exactly how much it was worth at market prices, or converted to demolished state.
    â€œDoes he still have money?” the owner of the Hotel Angleterre asked the desk clerk, leaning across the counter. “What on earth does he do all day?”
    Real estate was cheap at that time. Felek bought empty lots on Factory Street, fenced them off, and ordered bricks.
    â€œWho builds anything here?” passersby asked, and for want of a reply would answer themselves, saying that Neumann’s and Strobbel’s factories were probably putting up new warehouses.
    Felek Chmura’s people bought up imperial Russian gold coins on the black market, in any amounts. They located deposits of them unerringly, capable of sniffing them out anywhere, even if they had been underground. In the countinghouses they threw fistfuls of them on the tabletop; occasionally a lump of dried soil would crumble from them. During this time the local marketplace was dominated by empty wallets, suitcases with broken locks, and stolen clothing, among which starving ragamuffins roamed, on the lookout for a potato left behind
in a puddle, which they would pick up and eat, even raw. But there wasn’t a single one, for where would it have fallen from? The stalls offered everything except foodstuffs, which seemed to have vanished from the face of the earth, hiding from unreliable Polish crowns and German marks. Potatoes, if they even existed, were far away, buried in clamps by people who no longer believed in any currency whatsoever. It was only out of a habit deeper than faith that they were prepared to accept tsarist five-ruble gold coins long withdrawn from circulation.
    By night, wagons heaped with potatoes would pull up in front of Felek Chmura’s warehouses. The goods were unloaded in a hurry, under cover of darkness, as the star of good fortune twinkled over the town hall clock. Felek personally saw to it that nothing went missing. In the early morning still-sleepy storekeepers, anemic and transparent as air, would appear and collect their wares, three hundredweight each. Felek would not agree to any more. His right-hand man, red-haired Adaś Rączka, in outsized knickerbockers, would scrupulously measure out the potatoes.
    â€œThat’s enough,” he would say. “Next.” In the afternoon, in Corelli’s café Felek would fall still over his coffee cup, newspaper in hand, cigarette between his lips. Eventually he would be woken by the clatter of a falling spoon. He would set the paper aside, pay, rise from the table and, cigarette in his mouth the whole time, would cross the street to the hotel.

    â€œHe’s bored,” the hotel staff would remark.
    As Chmura took his room key, a cone of cigarette ash would fall and scatter on the open registration book.
    â€œYou’ll find the best entertainment these days on the old parade ground, sir,” the desk clerk said to him one day as he obligingly slid an ashtray toward him. He suddenly pulled a banknote from his pocket. “Take a look.”
    â€œA hundred Polish crowns. You’re doing pretty well for yourself.”
    â€œI’ll say,” the desk clerk chortled with a wink.
    On the parade ground on Guards Street people were crowding into a large white tent. Horses with feather headdresses and ribbons in their tails galloped around a sand-covered ring. A featherlight female rider danced on their backs, while Orlando the lion tamer cracked his whip, the lion jumped through a burning hoop, two monkeys in gleaming opera hats shuffled cards and tossed wads of almost certainly counterfeit banknotes from hand to hand. Applause rang out, the band played a flourish, the horses paraded to the beat of the shrill music, and lion tamer and horseback performer gave a low bow as the monkeys ran round and round, applauding themselves.
    During the day curious passersby would