In Red by Magdalena Tulli

other half was paid by Chmura.
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    BEFORE DAWN FELEK, SPRAWLED ON THE PLUSH SOFA WITH eyes shut and mouth open, his shallow breath whistling, would
turn a handsome profit speculating in shares in South African diamond mines, only to lose it all later in the shipwreck of a freighter, having invested in the shipping of expensive Indian saffron – his British insurance company found a way not to have to pay up, filling him with an infinite bitterness that was yellow as the saffron itself.
    In the meantime Slotzki, his head tipped back on the headrest of the armchair, was examining his washbasins, smooth and white, stacked all the way up to the ceilings of his warehouses. Dazzlingly pure, if one ignored the rusty stains that appeared on them out of nowhere. Where did those stains come from? he would ask. Well, if stains have come out, it must mean they were already there before, the foremen would stammer in explanation. Get rid of them, Slotzki would shout, scrub them till you’re blue in the face, I don’t want to see the slightest trace of them. And so the workers cleaned the washbasins, scrubbing with powder and lye, till they scraped off the enamel and the surfaces became coated with a uniform dirty grayness that in places looked as if it were bleeding.
    Chmura and Slotzki would rise in the morning all out of shape, their collars digging into their necks, and thrust their swollen feet into their shoes. Hurrying each to his own affairs, without sitting down they would drink a mug of sour milk that the old serving woman had brought them out of pity.
    â€œSpending the night on the sofas! Right where they fell asleep! It’s not like we’re short of beds here!” she would mumble to
herself as she took the empty mugs back into the kitchen. “Poor guys, no one here looks after them.”
    Madame would not allow anyone to wake her before eleven. A bed jacket thrown around her shoulders, a glass of brandy in her hand – for the toothache that always troubled her in the morning – she would go and count the sheets just brought back from the press.
    â€œ Parbleu! ” she would exclaim. “The hems are coming unstitched again. Do something about it. Get a seamstress.”
    And she would set the gilt-rimmed glass down by the shank of beef for making broth and the large basket of soup vegetables, as the butcher’s boy was already wringing his cap in his hands, smiling awkwardly on the doorstep. Madame quickly checked the bill and gave him his money, then she paid the laundrywoman and the coal merchant and, recalling a thought from the day before, she sent to the soap shop for floor polish or turpentine.
    â€œThose women alone never want for cash,” the clerk would whisper to the next customer with a knowing look as he leaned over the soapflake-strewn counter.
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    â€œTHOSE WOMEN ALONE HAVE NO WORRIES IN LIFE,” SAID Stefania Chmura as she paced her bedroom from the bed to the wardrobe and back again. She ran a soup kitchen for war invalids and she always had to worry about where she would
get the ingredients for the next day’s meal. Every morning the cooks had to boil huge cauldrons of water; day after day they had to chop up bones, peel potatoes, and stoke the stove all morning. At lunchtime the former soldiers would crowd outside the closed gateway till they were let in. A quarter of an hour later they would reemerge onto the street, smoking cigarettes and complaining – the ingrates – about the awful food. They would fall sick and die to spite Stefania. Their wives, on the other hand, were resolved to put up with anything. But they worked themselves to death over their tubs of laundry. Their daughters went into service and were not a problem. Stefania established an orphanage for the boys, to stop them from wandering the streets unsupervised.
    â€œThey’re not boys, they’re wild animals,” she would say of them bitterly. They