This new head of staff told Angelina that she must leave the King’s palace.
So Angelina sought the only woman she really knew, the midwife Pocci. Her poor little woven straw box, which she had carried so cheerfully with her into Paris, grew more massive and heavy. Soon she was hardly able to drag herself along, so she put her burden down at pavement’s edge and sat on it. She believed that all her distress and utter desolation was due solely to the exhaustion of her feet. As she sat there, however, she felt after a moment an uneasiness even greater than her fatigue. Strange dangers seemed to be closing in and were already lurking at the next corner. When she looked up she saw menacing clouds blowing by close over the rooftops. From a nearby street came the confused shouts of the rejoicing people who were cheering for the King and cursing the defeated Emperor. The crowd neared and she could clearly hear it cry: “Long live the King!” Tears came to her eyes. She was afraid to be seen weeping; it could put her in grave danger. The noise faded. Angelina now continued along with slow, measured, and deliberate steps. She was alone, afraid, and beaten — just like the Emperor, she thought. This thought lightened her deep despair. She believed herself to be walking so hopelessly through the streets for him, for the Emperor. He was also invisibly treading the most agonizing of paths. Who knew, maybe it was not true that he had been exiled; he could still be living in his capital, disguised as a common soldier for example, and she could encounter him and converse with him on various subjects.
Dusk was falling as she stood before the house and looked up at the familiar window. It was dark, so perhaps the midwife Pocci had also left. Angelina waited a while, afraid that she was right, but with a trembling hope that someone would emerge from the house and let her in. At the same time, however, she feared that person would be the Polish shoemaker who worked during the day in the dark passage outside his door. She had known him for two years already but was still afraid of him. She had feared him from the first moment she saw him. With his wooden leg, which made an eerie noise on the tiles of the hallway and on the cobbles in front of the house; with his ashen-colored and exotic Polish Legion lancer’s mustache; with his hard, foreign accent, which ground the words instead of enunciating them; with the ill-tempered demeanor of a barbarous soldier; and with his leather-blackened hands; with all of this, he inspired Angelina with a vague but serious fear. She kept forgetting his foreign name and had reservations about pronouncing it. This made the cobbler seem even more sinister.
But she was wrong. His name was no more difficult to pronounce — for the cobbler was named Jan Wokurka, and his name was painted in clear red letters on a black board upon the front door — than his character was grim, not to mention menacing or sinister. Everything about him was quiet and gentle, except his clattering wooden leg. He was a volunteer Legionnaire, had participated in the Emperor’s losing campaign, and after being injured had journeyed to Paris, where he felt he could count upon his pension and where, in addition, he would be able to work at his profession with a better prospect of earning a living than in his native village. He succeeded in obtaining both pension and profit. Still, he longed for his homeland. He was quite lonely. For although he enjoyed talking at length and in detail to all his neighbors, most of them could not understand him. He understood everything that was said to him, so he thought that the people understood him also. But as soon as the neighbors left his company, he was always struck with the bitter certainty that they found him incomprehensible. Thus it was that after each conversation all was silent and his loneliness and homesickness grew, while his left hip hurt more than before and even his leg, which was probably buried somewhere on the Oder, ached.
He was therefore determined to save money and return to Poland. He was just waiting for a “round sum,” as he put it. But as soon as he secured that amount, he felt sorry and delayed his departure. In addition, despite his disability, he wished to find a wife to love him — and since he had been shy even as an unscathed man, he was now completely disheartened. His longing for a woman grew even stronger. He brushed his bold mustache, attempted to cultivate a military gleam within his light, good-humored eyes, and fell in love quickly and sincerely.
He liked Angelina because of her shy face and demeanor. But he only inspired fear in her. Even when she was standing lost and lonely, looking up at the window, she feared the cobbler more than the night that was relentlessly falling. There was still no light in the midwife Pocci’s room. She went over anyway and entered the house. The cobbler was hammering away happily as usual. He soon spotted her. When he noticed her crate, he got up, his wooden leg taking astonishingly long strides, and with amazing speed he was at her side and had taken hold of the box. The full light of his three-candled lantern flashed through the large dangling cobbler’s globe, casting illumination into the shadowy passageway and onto his own face. He hobbled down the three steps leading to his room, laid the box down, and was back in the hall with admirable speed. Angelina had tried to get a hold of the box but he was too quick. Wokurka took her hand and spoke rapidly and therefore with even less clarity than usuaclass="underline" “They’re all gone! Madame Pocci this morning. Madame Casimir was here until yesterday evening. All quite afraid. Not me. Come, Mademoiselle!” He let go of her hand but grabbed hold of her arm and pulled her toward the steps. Angelina went down. She needed to be with her box.
She sank immediately into the only armchair, next to the table. The cobbler Wokurka steered her left, right, and forward, as if he thought he could thus make her seat more comfortable. When he felt he had achieved that goal, he went to the hearth, blew on the glimmering coals, and began to heat some red wine with water. Now and again he glanced over at Angelina. When it looked as if her eyes were shut, joy swiftly filled him and he blew happily upon the glowing coals.
But Angelina’s eyes were not actually closed. She was watching the cobbler’s actions and taking note of all the objects in the little room. The large glass ball was swaying very gently in front of the strange lantern, whose copper decorations made it look like a glass bird cage. It was like a cage in which three flickering candle flames were imprisoned. A dark-green curtain that must have hidden Wokurka’s bed awakened in Angelina a remote memory of that dream-like night ten years earlier — although it seemed more like a hundred years ago — and the heavy creases of the mighty Imperial portière. Yes, and at the moment when the cobbler placed a cup of hot fragrant red wine in front of her, she thought of the crystal decanter from long ago. The cup bore an image of the Emperor framed with a green laurel wreath, the well-known, familiar, and proud picture that reminded her of the large portrait on the wall of that mysterious room. Everything now seemed to her just as unreal as it had been then. All that she saw here, the miserable imprisoned candles, the wretched curtain, the cheap wine, the gaudy mini-portrait of the Emperor: everything seemed to be somehow connected with the expensive and exalted objects that she had found in the Imperial chamber. Perhaps they were the same objects, dilapidated and deteriorated over the course of the many, many years and through the misfortune that had befallen their lord and master.
The cobbler Wokurka stood opposite her. He was supporting himself with one hand on the edge of the table and looking at her silently. His head, with its full combed-back gray-blond hair, almost touched the dangling globe and was given a surreal glow by its odd light. “Drink!” said Wokurka finally. The gentle urging of his voice, along with the warm and seductive scent that wafted from the cup, led her to lean forward and take a gulp. It warmed her heart and she was able to look up into the cobbler’s large gray eyes. They were completely different eyes from the ones she thought she had known for so long. There was no hungry lust in them after all, only a smiling light. And his prodigious mustache was no longer terrifying, but hung over the man’s unseen mouth like a hairy, protective apron.