Read In Red for Free Online

those men were gone, all the more these ones could not survive – plain cards from an incomplete deck, regular foot soldiers of the kind that are sent to their destruction without a second thought.
    After them, Madame’s establishment was visited by soldiers of the most mediocre sort: privates in middle age, sickly and stooping. In their wallets, instead of banknotes they kept family photographs, and house keys jangled in the pockets of their outsized tunics. One glance was enough to see they were worth no more than a ragged set of cards for old maid. They themselves knew it best. For that reason they usually died unceremoniously, out in the open, amid the zing of bullets, their kettle dangling from their pack. The train that had brought them to their destination had barely set off back when already they were greeted with artillery fire and showers of earth. Their keys jangled faintly in their pockets as they fell into the snow.
    The German commandant of the town, Colonel von Treckow,
had been sent to Stitchings because of a heart problem that limited his usefulness at the front. His headquarters had been set up in the town hall. In order to attend council meetings von Treckow had to walk down an icy corridor, followed by a sergeant bearing official documents who would hurry ahead to open the door for the colonel and wipe his chair with an obliging sleeve. Because the chimney flues were blocked and the stoves weren’t working, the entire town hall was freezing cold. The colonel would don his gold-rimmed monocle and sign orders with a patient expression in his steel-gray eyes. He would announce the requisitioning of undertakers’ horses, the seizure of factories for use as military depositories, and a German government monopoly on all products of mills and malt houses.
    On the first floor of the Looms’ apartment building was the Loom & Son colonial store, in which at one time the discreet scent of vanilla had risen over mahogany countertops and an automatic till with nickel-plated keys. By a decree of the German authorities, the store was now responsible for distributing rationed goods. The needy, shivering crowd emptied their noses on the floor, slid around in the mud and the sawdust, and uttered the worst profanities. Afterward, the clerks lingered there till late at night amid the empty shelves. They yawned and kept having to go back to the beginning as they tried to add up endless columns of figures, in the fear that a stupid mistake would send them straight to the gallows. With the greatest difficulty
they navigated the reefs of German orthography and, cursing, glued ration cards printed in Gothic – for sugar, flour, cooking fat – in even rows on large sheets of wrapping paper.
    In his office, von Treckow would take each sheet of paper in his numb hands and inspect everything personally as he chewed on eucalyptus candies. He worked in a fur coat worn over his uniform – the one and only departure from the regulations he ever committed. He ate little, slept little, and was not drawn to the company of women. He held himself straight and never shook anyone’s hand. Before he went to bed he would caress the flintlock pistols he had confiscated from the grammar school boys.
    But he never managed to add them to the magnificent collection he kept at his family estate somewhere in East Prussia – and all because of a group of unshaven Hungarian hussars. It was unclear what destiny had dropped them in Stitchings toward the end of the Great War, wearied by their wanderings about the world. They were looking for their regiment, yet they were getting farther and farther away from it with every day, sent first this way then that, because no one understood their language. As they were galloping around the market square in the early morning, swearing loudly in Hungarian, the colonel was roused from his sleep and went out to them in his nightcap, the fur coat thrown over his nightshirt. He asked