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flowing down the middle of the street, quiet as memory, freezing in the chill and marking the way from Neumann’s house to the barracks with an icy trail, so that in the evening, when Kazimierz returned beneath Stefania’s window, he slid and had to take care that the ground didn’t slip from under his feet.
    With time his condition began to improve. One day he ripped up the photograph of Emilka and tossed it in a drawer. The eyes found themselves parted. One fastened its gaze on the fan held in a hand, while the other stared into space. The innocence that had emanated from Emilka’s eyes and that during her life had eased Kazimierz’s sadness, then after her unseemly death had
become a source of uncertainty and reminiscence, was finally lost amid torn edges and shreds of Turkish tobacco.
    Felek the orderly would bring Stefania letters from Kazimierz. But instead of coming back quickly with a reply, he would visit Adela, Loom’s cook. On the way he would meet the butcher’s whelp, a freckled twelve-year-old with whom he would conduct hurried business. He’d take from his pocket a crumpled parchment containing uniform buttons that bore a crowned lion, and exchange them for smoked sausage, one button for each length. He would eat the sausage in the gateway, then knock at the kitchen door. Adela would regale him with what was left of her apple pie, if it hadn’t all been eaten by the fireman Alojzy Piechota, whom she liked as much as she did Felek. Because of the orderly’s daily visits to Loom’s house, Kazimierz’s boots were never properly cleaned. Shouted at and struck on his bristly head with a rolled-up newspaper, Felek would feign remorse.
    â€œI swear to God I’ll do better, lieutenant,” he would promise, beating his breast till it echoed.
    But he had dark deeds on his conscience and did all he could to draw Kazimierz’s attention away from them.
    â€œMrs. Stefania is so beautiful,” he would say enthusiastically, rolling his eyes.
    â€œNever you mind about that, oaf.”
    Kazimierz would glower at the photograph, which resembled the ripped-up one it had replaced. When he took out his wallet
to pay in the officers’ mess, the photograph would abruptly remind him of the thés dansants that Stefania attended several times a week. He would visit her on the sly in the late evening – he was a stranger to somnolence. Amid their kisses, all of a sudden he would ask how many times she’d danced with the young Strobbel, and whether they had whispered to one another about porcelain. Stefania compressed her lips in pain, deeply hurt. Kazimierz would return angrily to the mess so as to get drunk and forget. Augustus Strobbel had so gotten under his skin that he longed to challenge him to a duel and shoot him to death. At balls his gaze, hard as a bullet, penetrated one room after another in search of the familiar countenance, that recalled porcelain embellished with cobalt blue. As they made their way back to the barracks his fellow officers would calm him down as best they could, clapping him on the shoulder with an unwonted alacrity in an attempt to extinguish the invisible flames that were crawling along his collar and epaulette from the direction of his heart, and that earlier they themselves had fanned with careless jibes tossed as casually as matches. One or another of them would not have hesitated to be his second in any other affair but this one, which blinded the lieutenant’s eyes with the mists of madness. Only one thing remained: to obtain a ring and propose, which he did, in the hope of keeping Stefania in the circle of light from the lamp, bending over her embroidery. But she was unwilling to promise him she’d spend
her life within four walls, needlework in hand. She asked for time to think; the engagement ring awaited her decision right next to the ripped-up photograph, in a velvet-lined box, in the locked drawer.
    By night