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 headache, linen that turned into cotton wool after a single washing.
“What did they expect?” Felek would guffaw, winking at Adaś and poking him with a pencil to make him laugh along. “I mean, the riffraff say they want cheap goods, and either way they can’t afford expensive things.”
Felek Chmura’s debtors were easy to spot by their pallor, their shallow breathing, their hair clumped with cold sweat. Before long all of Strobbel’s workers were suffering from headaches and stomachaches.
“Get moving, my machines are running idle!” Slotzki would say in exasperation as he strode across the shop floor. “All you know how to do is eat and drink, you don’t give a damn about working.”
Each evening he would frown at the bins filled with defective items. Every day for a quarter of an hour or even more the factory operated to the detriment of the firm of Strobbel & Slotzki, the machinery wasted electricity and porcelain clay, the fire blazed unnecessarily in the ovens, the glaze was stirred needlessly in the vats. Slotzki came to realize beyond the shadow of a doubt that as Chmura made money hand over fist from the sale of his stupendously cheap goods, he was taking part of his costs from Slotzki’s own pocket. At this time the factory was expanding, taking on more and more employees, and so losses were rapidly multiplied. Unable to rid himself of Chmura once and for all, Slotzki tried other ways to stop himself from being robbed. He began moving the hands of the factory clock back fifteen minutes during the day, then at night moving them forward by the same amount. He was searching for a truer measure of a day’s work, for which he paid what was due, to the penny.
Chmura took a pencil and, scrawling clumsy figures, multiplied the pennies that fifteen minutes of work was worth by the ever-increasing number of workers employed at Strobbel’s. In this way he calculated how much cash the porcelain factory was taking from him with the trick involving the clocks. Because all the wages paid were owed to him, a year in advance. Meanwhile Slotzki & Strobbel’s profits were being deposited in inaccessible foreign bank accounts. In the wee hours of the morning Chmura was tormented by anxiety. He would ring the handbell to summon a sleepy Adaś Rączka and explain to him that actual money was oozing from Stitchings in the form of the porcelain dispatched by Slotzki all over the world in crates packed with sawdust. Via the railroad station. And via the port that led its own existence — an existence that even gave rise to a store selling English tea of the highest quality.
“But does anyone ever buy anything there? Only the clerks from the shipping companies, and they don’t belong to Stitchings. Neither does the port, or the railroad,” Adaś consoled him sleepily. “Stitchings has been divided up very precisely, sir: Slotzki took the hands, and you have the stomachs. There may not even be any actual money. In your place I’d be sleeping peacefully.” And he’d barely finished talking when he was already sound asleep, standing up, the back of his head resting against the wall.
SLOTZKI SINCERELY WISHED BANKRUPTCY ON FELEK WHEN THE latter took over the sewing shops that had continued to operate as before under the company of Loom & Son, yet which were less and less profitable now that the lucrative war contracts had come to an end.
“You’re going to trip up with those sewing shops,” he would mutter over cards as he threw his aces on the table and gathered the pot.
But Felek’s faith was unshakeable.
“The right card will always turn up eventually,” he would say when he lost for too long. And he would double the ante. The right card always did turn up, sooner or later.
The shelves of the sewing shop warehouses were piled to the ceiling with reels of musty thread for which the war had 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.