He remained stubbornly silent for many days, till the morning mail brought a long-awaited dull brown official envelope.
“It’s here! The license is here!” cried Adaś Rączka, taking the stairs three at a time.
The very next day Felek opened the first of his pawnshops. They operated under the aegis of Loom & Son. Large signboards, visible from far off, called to all those in pressing need of cash, including the sailors in their striped shirts.
Felek gradually got rid of the cash and came into possession of ivory-topped canes, porcelain chamber pots, copper saucepans, cut-glass decanters, sugar tongs, silver combs, and down cushions. Also rainbow-colored shells from the southern seas, shark-tooth necklaces, Chinese opium pipes. Those who left their possessions at Felek Chmura’s pawnshops never came back for them. Some of these people, relieved of their cash also by the following day, sailed away never to return; others waited interminably for a change of fate, which never came. Felek weighed the copper saucepan in his hands, tapped the tongs against the decanter, put the shell to his ear to hear the sounds of the southern seas. The authenticity of the items was indisputable but useless. They lay heaped in warehouses, gathering mortal dust.
“Take all this junk,” he said to Adaś. “It’s yours.”
He could no longer stand the sight of his enterprises, which were dull as dishwater, unwieldy as a ball and chain. He spat on them, turned his back on them, and spent hours staring from his window at the waves on the sea.
Till in the end, under the auspices of Loom & Son, he started buying up decrepit old sailing ships. He offered excellent prices and paid cash. In portside inns with traces of bloody altercations on their walls, his people slipped suitcases filled with cash to his contracting parties under rickety tables. In this way he converted fake money into dilapidated ships doomed to sink at the first opportunity. Felek rubbed his hands, confident that at the next stage of the game he would finally be able to get some real money from the world in return for his floating coffins.
In the meantime Chmura’s clerks, clean-shaven and fragrant with lavender, received clients in the bureau on Salt Street, behind a glass door upon which the golden letters of the inscription “Overseas Shipping” formed an elegant arc above the name Loom & Son.
“I’d like a word with Mr. Loom, it’s a confidential matter,” a patron would whisper on his first visit to the office.
“I’m sorry, but Mr. Loom never sees visitors,” the polite and matter-of-fact clerk would reply. He was fully authorized to enter into contracts with senders of shipments. The leaky ships dispatched over the seas and oceans by the company of Loom & Son sailed across the waves, their holds filled with invisible goods. The crews were assembled from sailors who never sobered up. For only drunken men were willing to trust to an uncertain fate and sail under captains whose names were notorious from long-ago shipwrecks. Anyone who had run aground on a coral reef or collided with an iceberg ought to have gone to the bottom along with his crew. For that reason, when the dishonored survivors appeared in Stitchings, no navy officer would shake their hand, with the exception of the stray ship’s pilots that the company of Loom & Son had had released from prisons, mental institutions, and homes for syphilitics.
Felek Chmura’s sailing ships did what they were supposed to: they settled on the ocean bed. Their decks became overgrown with sea anemones and urchins. The bulging eyes of an octopus peered from the porthole of the bridge, seaweed sprouted in the hold. But Loom & Son lost its court cases against the insurance companies, just as in the prophetic dream Felek Chmura had had on the sofa in the pink parlor. The insurance companies had entered into secret agreements with his clients. Devastating verdicts came down one after another as the loathsome insurers burdened Loom & Son with the entire cost of damages owed to the owners of the invisible goods. The avalanche swallowed up successive stores, coal yards, apartment buildings, all of which were successively put up for auction. He made the last payments with unprotected promissory notes.
Yet even then he did not doubt his lucky star.
“A little while longer and the right card will turn up,” he would say to Adaś Rączka. “You’ll see, it always does.”
Stefania’s migraines were becoming more and more wearing. In addition her son was not doing well, prey to an unidentified illness. He did not sleep nights, but tossed and turned in his bed.
“Close your eyes,” Stefania would say, laying a hand on his forehead. He would close them, but then he would be immersed in an infinity of red.
“Help!” he would scream terrifyingly, like a drowning passenger.
The doctor recalled a similar, equally hopeless case of insomnia from his long years of practice.
“Heredity?” wondered Stefania, recalling the officer’s chest, the handkerchiefs with the intricate monogram, the fondness for Turkish tobacco, and that lovely, mad gaze. She laughed bitterly. “Oh well! Felek never did fully understand the difference between what’s one’s own and what belongs to someone else.”
The doctor recommended trips to the south.
“Never get married,” Felek Chmura advised Adaś, grimacing as if he’d just swallowed absinthe. “A home is a yoke around your neck, a heap of troubles, nothing more.”
In fact, his home was the least of the many troubles besetting him. He was carrying an excessive burden, one that made the ground give way under his feet — wherever he stepped, the earth collapsed beneath him.
“Goddam foundations,” he fulminated, glaring over at his warehouses from the window of the countinghouse. And he would squeeze his eyes shut with all his strength. But it did no good. With eyes closed he could see even more clearly the cracks in the brick walls, unmistakable signs drawn by the inimical hand of fate, an ominous portent of a blow from which there was no escape. The architectural expert he consulted sketched a cross section of the footing as they sat locked in his study.
“It’s too warm,” he explained.
The foundations had once rested against a stratum of frozen groundwater. Felek expected absolute discretion. He destroyed the drawings without showing them to another soul, crumpling them into the stove to prevent them from falling into the wrong hands. Yet his workers quit one after another. Adaś Rączka learned the truth from Max Fiff by chance as they were scuffling one evening behind the factory, shouting “flunky!” at one another.
“You’re both losers, you and that boss of yours!” grunted Max as he sat astride Adaś’s belly, blood dripping from his nose onto the other man’s overcoat. “The whole town’s laughing at you because you built on ice!”
Adaś smashed Max in the mouth.
“Take back what you said.”
Max snarled and bit. A piece of ear came off in his teeth. The pain sent Adaś into a rage. He grabbed Max by the throat till his eyes almost popped out; Max turned blue and, coughing blood, took it all back.
Yet Felek Chmura’s warehouses collapsed with a crash anyway one night. When the sun came up the next morning they were gone without a trace. Onlookers couldn’t stop staring at the astonishing empty space.
“They used to be here,” they shouted, tracing the remembered outlines in the air with their fingers. “They were here and now they’re gone; it’s like in the circus.”
The telegram from Hamburg, in which the notary gave word that complaints had been brought regarding the promissory notes, reached Felek in the pink parlor. He was just lighting a cigarette, but then he put the lit end in his mouth and cursed prodigiously.
“What’s this you’ve brought me, you damn fool?” he shouted at Adaś.
Slotzki picked the crumpled telegram from the floor with his blotchy hand and began reading it aloud, squinting through his lashless eyelids. Felek snatched the paper from him. He elbowed the girls aside and staggered toward the door. Madame took him by the sleeve. Wouldn’t he stay for supper?