“Please, miss!” they called over one another. “Please, miss!”
Their voices rose upward, light as feathers, but sometimes no more is needed to bring down a dislodged stone. The Looms’ cornucopia slipped from the weathered hands of the little angels that had been holding it up for a century. Drawn by its own weight, it plummeted downward and brought all plans to naught.
The crash surprised Sebastian Loom at his mirror, as he was buttoning his collar. The doctor was sent for at once. Loom waited for him by Emilka’s bedside, pressing his hands to his ears so as not to hear the brass band that was still playing, though no one was dancing any longer. An inquisitive crowd had gathered beneath the windows; among them were children with rock-hard gingerbread men in their sticky hands. Before the fireworks burst into the air beneath the icy firmament of the sky, the doctor ascertained beyond the shadow of a doubt that Emilka’s heart was not beating. She herself had known this for at least fifteen minutes.
“But surely that doesn’t mean anything,” she kept repeating, wanting only one thing: to set off for the ball as soon as possible. The sleigh, however, had pulled away long since, bearing not Emilka but instead this strange news. Loom would not even hear of the ball. He took the doctor by the elbow and led him out into the hallway.
“What’s wrong with her?” he asked in a whisper.
“Her heart has stopped like a broken watch,” said the doctor with a gesture of helplessness. He knew no more; the impact had left no trace, nor had a single drop of blood sullied her lovely curls. Loom anxiously touched his own watch in its gold case where it was ticking loudly in the upper left-hand pocket of his vest.
“Please spare no efforts, doctor,” he began after a moment in which he took a deep breath, his hand on the pocket from which his watch chain dangled. “I mean, there’s always hope. . if only there are the means. .”
The doctor shook his head. There’s a remedy for everything except death, he was in the habit of saying to his patients, with a flash of his eyeglasses. Medicine knew no treatment for Emilka’s malady. So he slipped his glasses off his nose, took a deep breath, and offered Loom his condolences.
Condolences? Was Emilka not all set to leave for the ball? This circumstance, however, in his eyes adventitious and trivial, the doctor put down to deficiencies in the upbringing of Loom’s daughter, a spoiled only child. In other similar cases the phenomenon known as rigor mortis soon put an end to fancy notions. If the young lady lacked sufficient character to respect principle and custom in her final hour, if she clung to life with all her might, the aforementioned rigor was meant to save her from embarrassment, to allow her to grit her teeth and depart comme il faut. Stiffness could compensate for a want of courage. The doctor recommended absolute calm, quiet, dimmed lighting. Then desires would cool and her condition would be regularized. Emilka responded with indignation. So from now on she was supposed to make do not only without a heartbeat but also without dancing?
“No, no, no!” she exclaimed, stamping her foot.
After leaving Loom’s house the doctor suddenly felt mortally tired and had an urge to call by the tavern for a glass of juniper vodka. The place was crowded with soldiers on leave who kept asking the time and rising on unsteady legs from their tables, just as thirsty as before the festival. Firemen who had hung up the Chinese lanterns and set off the fireworks were now dozing in the corner over their tankards, with a perpetual sense of loss. The festival was winding down amid weariness, as every year. The trombones that earlier sounded on the market square, striving to drown out the Gypsy fiddles from the tavern, had now fallen silent along with them, and the musicians had gone off to their homes, lugging their noiseless instruments locked in black cases.
The rug slipped from Loom’s lap as he sat listlessly in his armchair, his collar only half fastened and protruding from his neck like a pennant.
“Adela, don’t you know the master needs to eat regularly?” Emilka admonished the cook.
“Serve something, anything, but make it fast.”
She dragged her father by the hand to the dining room. They sat together in silence over their belated dinner. At this moment the butler Stanisław announced Kazimierz Krasnowolski.
“Send him away politely,” said Loom.
On his way out Kazimierz exchanged a cold bow with Augustus Strobbel in the hallway. Loom was even less inclined to see young Strobbel. With a peremptory gesture he ordered his daughter to remain at the table.
“Why?” she cried. “Why?”
“There are boundaries that should never be crossed,” explained Loom. “Can a company that doesn’t pay its promissory notes expect to be trusted? Death has to be accepted so life can retain its dignity.”
The funeral director provided a casket along with funerary candles, bouquets of flowers, and containers of ice. It wasn’t his fault that preparations for the funeral ground to a halt. In a fit of rage Emilka spilled the ice, trampled on the flowers, and tore the mourning cloths from the mirrors.
“The young miss has gone mad, God rest her soul,” came whispers from the pantry. Before anyone knew what was happening, she had run up to her room and locked herself in. She cried for three days and three nights. In the end she grew tired of weeping. On the fourth day she fell silent. The tears she’d shed had filled the room with a fine white mist.
“It’s stuffy in here,” remarked Stanisław when the door was finally unlocked. He opened a window, and the cloud of mist drifted out into the sky. Slumber overcame Emilka; she slept for a long time, then in the evening she took her forbidden French romance from its hiding place in the chest of drawers and sat down to read. She read all the following day and beyond, no longer concealing the fact from anyone. Every so often she glanced up from her book at the snow-covered street. But no one came to see her anymore.
Emilka’s compromising situation exposed Kazimierz Krasnowolski to ridicule; he had no idea whether he was supposed to be in mourning or not. In the salons the whole story was passed over in disdainful silence. But in the great hall of the officers’ mess it was only his sharp glance that wiped away knowing smirks and caused whisperings to cease.
“They’re bored, so they don’t forget a thing,” he would say later to his own reflection in the shaving mirror as he applied alum to a snick on his chin. “Here, any stain is going to last a hundred years, longer than the service regulations.”
After he came off duty he would sit playing solitaire, a Turkish cigarette hanging from his mouth; its ash would fall among ambiguously smiling queens, kings glaring under beetle brows, and knaves with foolishly bulging eyes. When the mess was about to close, as the stained tablecloths were being cleared he would down a final glass. The solitaire never came out; the destiny of the card figures was separation and eternal lack. And an insatiable hunger whose cause lay in anatomy: below the breastbone, in the place where the stomach ought to be, the esophagus joined smoothly with a second esophagus as if life were merely a joke. Two heads bred opposing views, and two hearts irreconcilable desires. When one half was filled with love, the other choked on hatred. One wished to live, the other preferred death.
“Life and death,” the doctor said as he prescribed Kazimierz a tincture for his insomnia, “are like the labels on these bottles. Here you have distilled water, over there, pure spirit. In the bottles, though, it’s all mixed together, a little of one and a little of the other. Like in some illegal distillery. You’ll need to take it with sugar, lieutenant, otherwise you won’t be able to swallow it.”