Excerpts from "In Red"

Abstract

Whoever has been everywhere and seen everything should be sure to travel to Sciegi. Simply sit in a sleigh and, before succumbing to sleep, speed across a plain that is empty as a sheet of white paper, boundless as life. Sooner or later this person-perhaps a commercial traveler with a suitcase full of samples-will see the great piles of snow extending along the streets in the four directions towards the bare, frozen expanses. They will see columns of icicles, pillars of snowy caps sinking in the darkness of a wintry sky. They will draw into their lungs air sharp as a razor cutting feeling away from breath. They will come to appreciate the virtues of a climate forever free of disquieting springtime breezes, the torpor of summer heat, the misty sorrows of the fall. They will take a liking to the frost, which conserves feelings and capital, protecting the one and the other from the canker of decay. Winter on every day of the year, and darkness, which softens contrasts and smoothes the sharpness of angles. The gloom in Sciegi dissipated for a short while during dinner time. Before the soup a pink glow lit up the sky; during the main course the sun would cast a few oblique rays over the rooftops, then after dessert dusk would irreversibly set in. The stars in the local sky were strangers to movement and change, just like the gaslights, which held their place amid the constellations. In the darkness there developed the company of Loom & Son, Strobbel's plant and Neumann's factory, the affairs of which were interwoven with the affairs of the Swedish garrison. In that wilderness, frozen solid, where only the winds howled from all four directions, the garrison abided in its daily routine, needed only for ceremonies. Its very existence must be recognized as an indication of a particular good fortune, bearing in mind the fact that a Swedish garrison is better than a Russian, Prussian, or Austrian garrison in every respect, just as the Swedish partition is better than all other possible partitions. The officers' casino, the barracks, the stables, the riding school, the powder magazine, and the drill-ground covered in packed, slippery snow-on which, if it was necessary, the men played leapfrog in full uniform to the point of exhaustion-emerged from around successive corners, unexpectedly, like sudden changes of fate. For Guards Street took its form from the winding melody of the last post played every evening on a bugle. The golden sound of the instrument rose high and soared over the roofs of the apartment buildings. Yet on the other side of the market square it dropped in the labored flight of a stunned bird. Because there, in the shanty town, boys in caps with ear-flaps threw snowballs at anything that managed to rise above that which is earth-bound. The factory whistle carried low, just above ground level, howling every morning on a single note capable of expressing only the immensity of the darkness that flowed down the ravine of Factory Street through all the hours of day and night. The wailing of the whistle reverberated against the unbaked brick exterior of the barracks like peas against a wall. Guards Street and Factory Street fled from each other in opposite directions. Strobbel's plant was a porcelain factory. In its warehouses were stacks of hotel services: mute piles of plates and bowls, large and small, countless silent gravy boats and soup tureens with the sign of a four-pointed snowflake on the bottom. In Neumann's gramophone record factory, noble tenors, supercilious baritones, terrifying or amusing basses, and crystal-clear sopranos were beaten with the aid of unmelodiously noisy machines into black vulcanite, where they remained invisible yet audible, forever enwrapped in the cotton of incomprehensible Italian words. The factory workers, falling asleep over their soup after work, could see spinning discs, white in the case of those from Strobbel's plant, black for those from Neumann's factory. …