In Red

The work was concluded; the evidence the prince had wanted was locked in a small black valise, the cameras and tripods were loaded into the hotel automobile alongside the huge pile of Natalie Zugoff’s cases. On the way to the port the axles broke. The police wrote a report. As the doctor was stitching the passenger’s injured forehead, the Commonwealth was pulling out to sea, its decks empty. It could still be seen far off as it made its way over the waves, smoke trailing from its chimney stacks. Pedro Alvarez’s return ticket was no longer valid. He sent a telegram to Buenos Aires. The reply came promptly: the prince requested above all that the black valise and its contents be mailed to him. But instead of doing so, Pedro Alvarez began furiously studying the train timetables and the brochures of the shipping lines. He kept them at hand on his bedside table; he made notes in the margins, staining the bedsheets with ink. He slept till noon. The chubby-cheeked maids would sit on his bed in their lace aprons.

“Don’t worry, sweetie, I won’t bite,” they would whisper to him, smiling and baring crooked incisors.

The desk clerk leaned to his ear and asked discreetly if he didn’t like women.

“I like very much! Like black hair, burning eyes, rum-pum-pum!” Pedro Alvarez replied emphatically. He made a shape with his hands in the air, put his arm around it, and his dark eyes flashed nostalgically.

In the hotel restaurant nothing was to his taste. He would fork up now a lump of kasha, now a slice of tongue, now a noodle; he would examine it closely then put it back on the plate.

“I hope he dies of hunger, the fussy so-and-so!” the cook would exclaim when the dishes were brought back untouched. In the evenings Pedro Alvarez would don a shirt with a frilly front. He would visit the famous Stitchings casino, which glowed with light pure as crystal, and where one can only break the bank once, for afterward one is never admitted again. He almost got out of Stitchings thanks to a connecting voyage to Genoa, where he could have transferred to the great transatlantic liner the Giuseppe Garibaldi, as a first-class passenger. He only needed to wait a couple of days, but he couldn’t keep still. He yearned for the green baize, the colored chips, the past moment of triumph. Excluded categorically from the casino because of his excessive good luck, stopped politely but firmly at the entrance each time by the doormen in their white gloves, he began to frequent the dark gambling dens down by the port, from which the relentless chink of chips could be heard all night long. In those places the ball in the roulette wheel spun faster than anywhere else, the black and the red blurred together, and the losses never ended. At such moments Pedro Alvarez had no choice but to play on, if he did not wish to be stuck in Stitchings forever. He soon discovered that his frilly shirtfront was too dazzling, and his eyes too dark, for him to be able to walk safely down Salt Street. But there was no other way from the Hotel Angleterre to the neighborhood of the portside gambling dens.

He departed for Buenos Aires in a casket lined with ice, a copy of the bill of lading stuck on its lid, a switchblade wound in his back. In the ports he was transferred from one hold to the next, borne effortlessly on the platforms of cranes. Along with the casket, the black valise and the photographic equipment were shipped too, all at the expense of the Hotel Angleterre. The invoice, sent to Buenos Aires in the hope that Prince Belorukov-Mukhin would cover the costs incurred, came back by return mail, crossed out with a flourish of the pen, without a word of explanation.

The group portrait of the hotel staff was mounted in the gilt frame that remained after the photograph of Prince Belorukov was torn to shreds. But the image began to fade from the light. One of the maids was the first to notice that the figures were disappearing in the gloom. Then later they could no longer be seen at all, as if night had fallen once and for all behind the glass.

“It’s a bad sign, the worst there could be,” the maids would say in consternation.

“You silly things, he was just skimping on the chemicals toward the end, that’s all,” said the pharmacist’s boy, laughing at them. He knew what was what: he’d watched the Argentine developing the negatives, and had even held on to a few of them on the sly as a keepsake.

Mr. Lapidus spent entire days locked in Natalie Zugoff’s darkened room.

“Gone and buried,” he kept repeating.

“She fled,” he would say at other times. “Through a gap in the clouds. Only her suitcases were left behind.”

He would raise his eyes and let his gaze stray across the plaster rosette in the very center of the ceiling, over and over, as if he were bewitched. His meals were brought from the restaurant; he ate lying on the bed, the blinds down and the bedside lamp on, like a hotel guest who has forgotten why he came.

The doctor came to auscultate his painful heart.

“Am I alive?” the proprietor asked in a fading voice.

“You know perfectly well yourself, Mr. Lapidus,” the doctor replied as he put away his stethoscope. “Since you asked the question, you know the answer.”

The doctor assured him that he had encountered all sorts of strange cases in the course of his practice. He said that the heart can hurt for a long time after death.

“Life,” he would say, “in itself is neither bad nor good. It’s the same with death. The key is getting the right proportions. Alas, my good sir, as with all things, so with this one, hardest of all is to find the right point.”

During this time the doctor was preoccupied above all else by the typhoid fever that had broken out in the back buildings on Salt Street. Typhoid is a wartime disease, and in the corner stores along the street people were saying that since there was typhoid, war must be on its way. The housewives were once again sifting flour into impregnated canvas sacks.

“Maybe it already is wartime,” the doctor said to the hotel proprietor, “it’s just that we don’t know it yet.”

Those sick with typhoid lingered for the longest time, unable to decide whether to live or die.

“Get better again? So we can just go back to wearing rags and tatters?” they would say, laughing harshly at the doctor behind his back as he ran breathless among the moldering floors of the back buildings. But in the final hour their bad blood boiled: they couldn’t bring themselves to abandon even those rags when they thought about how much they’d cost at the used clothing store. Freed from the hope that had sustained their respect for boundaries, those who had died of typhoid thumbed their noses at mourning black and, making roll-up cigarettes from scraps of newspaper, lay idly on their wretched shakedowns while their family went in search of a loan to pay for the funeral. Then, when they realized no one could stop them from doing anything, they started getting up, going out to the jakes in the courtyard, visiting the pub on the corner.

Rumors spread about a tailor with a bevy of children who after he died, just as during his life, spent his days and nights at his work. About a young mother who refused to lie down in her casket because she was busy rocking her baby. About an only child who for the sake of peace and quiet was allowed to have her fill of playing with her new doll. One jealous husband was said to have wanted to prevent his wife from remarrying; a tightfisted wife would examine the household finances every day after her death, criticizing endlessly. By all accounts the victims of typhoid by now included even universally respected industrialists, owners of large department stores, and majority shareholders in insurance companies.

“These are huge sums of money,” the town hall officials would whisper. “In essence they’re mortmain property that belongs to the municipality, if it weren’t for all this refusing to be buried, this hole-and-corner life, which ought to be punished with the full force of the law.”

“The dead are running the show,” the habitués of Corelli’s café said. “They’re affecting exchange rates, interest rates, government commissions.”

And over their coffee cups they would peer at one another through gold-rimmed spectacles. In the meantime, in the crowded tavern a man had jumped up onto a chair and was screaming hoarsely:

“We can’t be made fools of so easily! Under the ground is where they belong!”

Gasping for breath, he shouted the name of old Strobbel as if he were calling for help, using all his strength to keep himself on the surface of churning waves. Strobbel, who had passed away not long before, struck by a petard during a street disturbance, was at rest in his coffin, ostentatious in immaculate black and white, with a stern, contemptuous expression on his face. It was said he didn’t even need to die, that the injuries were not life-threatening. But Strobbel had asked no one’s opinion and as usual had had no time for pointless delays: he was immediately placed upon a catafalque comme il faut, a funerary candle at his head. All the property that remained to him — the Chinese vases from his famous private collection — he left to the town. Once his eyes were closed he did not deign to open them again; he was buried without further ado in the Strobbels’ porcelain-faced family tomb. The funeral was attended by large numbers of grammar school boys, who had sewn prewar military buttons bearing a crowned lion onto their uniforms, pricking their fingers in the process. These buttons served to mark the opponents of splitting hairs, the enemies of all that was obscure. The masters at the grammar school took a ruler and rapped the knuckles of boys who wore them, but anyone who didn’t could get a sock in the jaw in a dark corner, after which they would be spitting teeth. In a short while the fashion for uhlan buttons spread beyond the walls of the grammar school. They appeared on the overcoats of young men with metal-tipped walking canes who longed for a return to the order of prewar times and were resolved to use any means necessary when it came to curbing the insolence of the dead.

“Are they not right?” Stanisław would say to Adela, puffing on a cigarette at the kitchen table. “The world has no need of freedom. It needs purity, it needs rules, it needs boundaries.”

Adaś Rączka, surrounded by youthful pyromaniacs, scoffed at britches and gaiters, and especially at slogans involving purity.

“I knew Max Fiff well,” he would say. “Before he became head of factory security he served at Slotzki’s. On his hind legs.”

Max Fiff gnashed his teeth when his people repeated these words to him.

“Adaś Rączka!” he snorted contemptuously. “He used to lick Chmura’s boots. He made his fortune working for him: a sack of mussels and a dozen porcelain bedpans.”

Max Fiff’s people went looking for Adaś Rączka all over town, starting at the Hotel Angleterre and ending in the moldering back buildings, musty basements, and dusty attics. In vain. He was too well hidden to allow himself to be prized out; instead, Max Fiff kept receiving ticking packages that had to be hurriedly carried out onto open ground and silenced with a pistol shot. Adaś Rączka was thriving, and had even begun to produce first-rate grenades that were thrown inaccurately but to good effect. Instead of bigwigs, the victim would be some chimney sweep, a nanny with a child, a dorozhka driver’s horse. At the hotel the desk clerk wagered that Fiff would shoot Rączka like a dog. The maître d’ put his money on Rączka — sooner or later, he maintained, he would wring Fiff’s neck. But Rączka had disappeared. Word went around that Loom’s munitions plant had given him a steady position with a generous salary and a company apartment by the factory lab. The bellhops, waiting for the conflict to be resolved, had to content themselves with another sensation — the funeral of the hotel’s proprietor. He had been hit in the temple by a brick thrown into a hotel room through the window, wrapped in a crumpled piece of paper that bore a scribbled message: “Into the ground!” The man who threw it was forced to admit he’d made a mistake with Mr. Lapidus, who the following morning lay on a catafalque, stretched out in impeccable evening dress despite the early hour.

WHEN EMILKA LOOM, TORMENTED BY HER MANY YEARS OF unending tedium, went for a new consignment of books, the men would come out of the tavern onto the street and accompany her all the way to the used bookstore. They would hold loud discussions about aspenwood stakes for driving through hearts. Their arteries pulsed beneath their collars as they peered through the store window into the interior stacked with books up to the ceiling. The bookseller wore a metal-rimmed pince-nez that was always steaming up.

“It really is possible to live without French romances, Miss Loom. It’d be better to stay at home,” he would whisper, turning his eyes away timorously.

On the gateway to Loom’s building there appeared the word “morgue” scrawled in chalk. From that moment on Adela and Stanisław argued perpetually. Violent disagreements would flare up over breakfast; raised voices and vulgar imprecations would be heard from the kitchen, punctuated by the crash of plates being hurled in anger. Emilka’s bed went unmade till evening. Stanisław, who had served at Loom’s since he was a child, now dragged his old traveling trunk down from the attic. He tossed the Sunday suit that was inside into the stove, and began packing so he could live or die elsewhere, without Adela, who, being in a delicate condition, was unwilling and unable to leave.

“When will you finally leave me alone?” he would say, clapping his hands over his ears so as not to hear her complaints.

A few yards from the station his bald head was set about with clubs; the trunk opened and underwear spilled out onto the street, where it was later trampled underfoot by the stretcher bearers.

Adela took refuge in the orphanage. She worked there beyond her strength, scrubbing kettles and hauling vats right up till her time. The boys made fun of the pregnant woman, stuffing pillows under their shirts. They stole sugar and peed in the laundry tub. Every morning they would line up in two rows in the courtyard. Drawn up stiff as recruits, their heads completely shaven, they would rest their bloodshot eyes on the prewar sergeant major of the Stitchings uhlans, and if necessary, in silence they would play leapfrog till they dropped.

By night the walls would be bursting from the clamor of bad thoughts. Insomnia spread through the orphanage like an infectious disease. By the red glow from the half-open doors of the stoves they killed time by throwing knives into the floorboards. The gate would open for those who had reached a sufficient age. They would leave and merge into the crowd, a red glint in their eye.

The sky would cover with clouds.

“Those are snow clouds,” the housewives jabbered. Just in case, they hurried to make sure their windows were snug. But what snow could there be, how could there suddenly be snow in that perpetual heat?

In the meantime the negatives stolen from the Argentine were passed from hand to hand, acquiring the traces of greasy fingers.

“For he’s a jolly good fellow!” they sang at the tavern, tossing the pharmacist’s boy all the way up to the ceiling. “And so say all of us!”

Depressed at having been sacked for drinking some of the surgical spirit, the pharmacist’s boy felt some consolation. In the negatives every little store could be recognized. In some of them the semitransparent, incorporeal figure of a shopkeeper would hover with folded arms in a doorway. The human eye is fallible and can easily be misled by appearances; negatives see more clearly. If the door frame and inscription on the window showed through his body, what on earth could this mean?

“It’s obvious,” the men with metal-tipped canes would say as they strolled down the street. “Negatives don’t lie.”

They made chalk marks on the wall so that at the hour when accounts would be settled they would be led to the right addresses. Time after time there came the sound of breaking glass, and twisted shop signs would crash to the sidewalk. It started at the pharmacy but did not end there. By evening they were stomping through flour spilled from ripped-open sacks as they carried off loops of sausage under their arms.

Merchants locked themselves in their storerooms along with their wives and children, barricading the door, so as to wait out the worst and then simply flee — to the port or the train station. But what port were they talking about! They must have dreamed it. See — there was nothing but a boarded-up harbor building, the narrowest of jetties with a dilapidated bench at the end, over which a hurricane lamp hanging from a pole was lit after lunch and put out come what may after supper. By the landing stage a peeling fishing boat rocked on the waves, its skipper afraid to take it out to sea. A real ship could surely only enter this harbor by mistake. And what kind of train station was that, its ticket offices bolted shut, the chintz curtains drawn from inside, with scraps of timetables blowing about the waiting room by the unlit stove. With handcars rusting in the siding, and the stationmaster’s hens pattering about on a platform overgrown with weeds that were already coated with hoarfrost. A thin film of ice on the surface of puddles, the first snowflakes swirling in the air.

On the day of the annual festival on the town hall square, beneath the Chinese lanterns hung out by the firemen, the brass band struck up. Hungry children biting on rock-hard gingerbreads got in the way of the dancers. Paper streamers flew overhead, wrapping around people’s necks with a rustle, then ending underfoot, torn to pieces.

Rauch, wearing a black tailcoat, immediately after an early lunch had himself carried into the theater to supervise preparations for the gala show in person. But he didn’t even make it into the foyer. Both the front and the back of the building were being picketed by vigilantes gripping metal-tipped canes, one or another of them wearing a cocked hat from the theater’s prop room, a false mustache, and carrying a halberd.

“No passage,” they said.

“Who are these people? Where did they come from?” Rauch exclaimed, pushing them away with his hands.

But the porters had already put the armchair down on the sidewalk, and Max Fiff appeared next to it, the Slotzki factory emblem on his sleeve, a black pointer at his heel.

“Gala’s off, Mr. Rauch,” he said. He smashed the glass of the display case with his metal-tipped cane and tore up the photos. The wind carried the shreds over the street then dropped them among the trampled streamers. “It’s time to think of a new repertoire, the old one is rotten, it’s starting to stink. Your theater is polluting pure spring water. There’s no truth other than the truth of harmony! Us, if need be we’ll take a sharp knife and rip the truth out of people’s guts.”

“What are you planning to put on, sir, if I may ask?” Rauch responded, describing a circle with his hands that included Max Fiff’s people loitering about with their halberds. “Truth! Harmony! Sheer kitsch. First of all a good ear is what’s needed.”

“Take the chair away,” snapped Max Fiff, jabbing at the porters with the tip of his cane. “And I don’t want to see you here again. Quick march!”

The halberdiers sang in hoarse tuneless voices. From the direction of Factory Street standards began to arrive bearing the Slotzki emblem in a circle that was steeped in bloody red. Amid the gray walls the red glowed like embers in ash. The wind carried the echoes of the choral songs after their waves had already broken against the long rows of apartment buildings.

The Gypsy musicians hid their fiddles under their cloaks and fled as fast as their legs would carry them. One after another they bumped into the French-horn player from the brass band, who was hurrying in the opposite direction, staggering under the weight of his large black case. Some people blocked their path as they ran and dragged them into gateways. Twisting their arms back, they checked whether the musicians had a pulse.

The crowd that had gathered on the market square broke down the door of Loom’s house and surged inside, where at once there was a jam. They had to squeeze along dark and stuffy hallways, up to their knees in piles of dusty faded books that were falling apart with age. Emilka was as usual still in bed, closing her ears to the sounds of the outside world. Her cheeks burning, she was turning the second to last page of a French romance when someone snatched the book from her hand. That was the end. Those standing on the stairs passed a black coffin from hand to hand; it sailed high over their heads till it reached its destination. Seeing it, Emilka gave a piercing scream, then a moment later, her mouth already gagged, locked in an iron grip and unable to move hand or foot, she caught sight of the aspenwood stake.

“Any moment is as good as any other,” said those who later carried the black coffin down the stairs. “Either way it had to be done sooner or later.”

Her heart pierced with an aspenwood stake, Emilka was no longer able to return home. She remained where they buried her, in the cemetery, right by the wall, which, raised higher several times for a clearer demarcation of boundaries, at that point was more than two stories tall. A respect for rules had been restored, a source of outrage removed by force. But all this was too little and brought relief to no one. Neither the splendid afterglow in the western sky, nor the hard gingerbreads with colored frosting, not even the loud petards could assuage their suffering.

“Where’s the tailor?” people asked. “Where’s the mother of the baby?”

No one was minding the orphanage anymore; the boys had run away, and their shaven heads were seen everywhere. They burst in on the residents of basements and stuffed their pockets with bread and pinchbeck jewelry. In one attic they found a dusty chest containing a number of homemade grenades. Later, grenades in hand, they ran at the head of the crowd, took aim at those running away, and hit their targets. “Anyone that gets up, grab them and don’t let go!” they shouted. But there was no one to grab; those struck died once and for all.

Where were the bankers, the owners of large department stores, and the industrialists; where was the mortmain property that everyone deserved a small part of? A rumor circulated that Loom, Neumann, and Slotzki were one person, and that they had assumed the form of a black pointer with red eyes. In their hunt for the dog, the surging mob found itself in front of the theater. The last grenade was tossed, yet it did not go off but simply fell to the ground and spun. Lured by the explosions, Adaś Rączka followed the noises, wearing his hat and carrying an umbrella. He recognized his own work from the sound.

“A botched job,” he murmured as he reached down for the last of the grenades. In the meantime cobblestones dug up from the street were already being thrown at the pointer. But they did not attain their target. Many people saw the dog disappear through the doors of the theater, which a moment later turned out to be locked tight, though the sounds of a party could be heard coming from the upstairs windows. Someone saw the flash of a red eye behind a pane and threw a stone. A short moment later there was not a single window still intact in the whole of Rauch’s theater.

Drafts ran riot through the corridors and storerooms and cellars, blowing into every corner and fanning the forgotten embers still burning beneath the floor. Flames crept through cracks in the floorboards. Jars of powder burst from the heat, while above them dried roses burned in swirling pastel clouds. Mirrors suddenly vanished, shattering into pieces. In the director’s office Max Fiff’s halberdiers ran to the cabinets and started blocking the windows with them, feeling no heat other than the one that burned their innards, determined to defend themselves against the stone-throwing mob. In this way they cut off their own escape route. The office door came crashing down from the violent breath of the fire, and a dark, acrid smoke filled the entire room up to the ceiling. Coughing and bumping into one another, they thrashed about in the black fog lit time and again by a frenzied red. Max Fiff groped his way to the exit and thus was the first to plunge into a flaming hell of needless love and impotent hatred; he was followed by his people, on their knees, crawling, dying as they went. Max made it down the stairs and staggered to the side door; with his last remaining strength he managed to get outside, where he stumbled over the body of Adaś Rączka. Once the flames had consumed the cabinets they shot out through the windows. A great gala of red split the theater open and took possession of the whole town.

“How beautiful it is,” said one of the blind seamstresses in delight, sitting at her window. In the darkness she inhabited, only that which shone with its own light could be seen.

The porters, their faces smudged with soot, ran in as fast as their feet would carry them to bear Rauch out of his apartment in the armchair.

“I didn’t call for you,” the director exclaimed from the piano. “Get out!”

“Suit yourself,” the porters panted as they fled. “Hope you burn in hell.”

Jacques Rauch remained at the white piano as if he were fastened to it by an invisible chain. In the hot air the high notes sounded ever lower, while the low ones growled, barely audible. The strings performed a music that flowed directly from the world’s innards, the kind that requires no keyboard. The white piano was playing off key. Rauch bowed his head and listened.

“The music of the spheres is out of tune,” he asserted.

The flames engulfed his back, reflected in the raised lid as if in a mirror. All at once the fire shot toward the ceiling and the frame of the piano collapsed with a crash.

Meanwhile, at the tavern the firefighters, exhausted from the work of preparing the festivities, had collapsed over their beer mugs in the corner, so sound asleep a cannon could have been fired right over their heads and they wouldn’t have woken. People tugged at the aiguillettes on their dress uniforms and poured buckets of cold water over their heads. But the Hotel Angleterre was already in flames.

The red-hot air caused the locks to open on Natalie Zugoff’s famous fifteen suitcases that were as heavy as boulders. Letters from admirers came spilling out. On the opened envelopes a green or brown Nicholas, Wilhelm, or Franz Joseph rested his medals against the yellowed border of a postage stamp. They had nothing but medals, not even pants or boots. The letters must have gotten wet at some moment, for the ink was smudged and the handwriting illegible. The streams of words cast generously onto the paper no longer had any substance. It was only in the fire that they spoke: they burned with a vivid flame that was as fierce, as predatory, as destructive as rapture or despair. They showed what they truly were, then in the blink of an eye they turned to ash. At that moment, in the neighboring room the music boxes suddenly began to play. The blockades on the mechanisms were released, the taut springs set the machinery in motion, the cylinders began to turn, and in the chaos of the blaze the decorative little cases emitted every melody at once, halting and overlapping one another, then obstinately going back to the beginning till the thin little copper strips winding around the axes of the cylinders caused a series of deafening explosions.

In the red glow there emerged a harmony of cracking ceilings, an arrangement of large sofas and of three-door wardrobes crashing pell-mell to the ground. In the gaps that suddenly opened up there appeared furious currents of air begotten from that which was most unstable — the truth of flaming red, lovely and futile. And under their onrush that which was made of brick and had foundations began to quake and crumble.

Throughout the night the inhabitants of Stitchings threw buckets of water at the flames; in the early morning the smoldering ruins turned into mounds of mud strewn with colored gambling chips and bent playing cards, shattered toilet bowls made by Slotzki & Co., condensers from Ludwig Neumann’s warehouses, and even spent shell casings from Loom’s munitions plant, which before dawn had erupted in multicolored fireworks beneath the vault of the soot-blackened sky.

The history of Stitchings survived the fire. Stories are indestructible. They were repeated in the lines for field kitchens as if nothing had happened. They endured, sewn together any old how, so long as the thick threads held cause and effect in the right order. Memory yields most easily to the shape of ready-made patterns. Even if the decayed fabric has gotten overstretched and tears with a loud noise, never mind the rips, for they are not what the eye lingers upon.

The story of the shreds of red silk that settled on uniforms led to the one about the counterfeit money put into circulation by circus monkeys. They in turn led inevitably to the one about the conspiracy among the dead financiers that resulted in the town being consumed by a conflagration.

No one wept. Not for the merchants who perished barricaded in their stores; nor for the seamstresses plunged in darkness; nor for the drunken sailors who went to the bottom; nor for the hoodwinked soldiers of the Great War. Nor, all the more, for the monkeys. Subsequent events were lost in the gathering gloom, growing sluggish in the frosty air. Where can new stories be found? Their number is limited, all of them without exception known through and through since time immemorial. They do not require one’s attention. Just the strength to carry them, old rags moldering in unwieldy bundles that make one’s arms ache.

Military police in steel helmets maintained order in the town. Papers were checked on street corners.

“Excuse me, which way to the sea?” called a chauffeur leaning from the window of a limousine.

What sea? He must be imagining things, the locals thought to themselves in surprise.

“There’s no sea here! You need to go that way!” they shouted back, pointing toward the snowdrifts that extended all the way to the horizon.

STORIES ARE NOT SUBJECT TO ANYONE’S WILL, FOR THEY HAVE their own; it is unbreakable, like a steel spring concealed in the depths of a mechanical instrument, which sooner or later will unwind fully, and the cylinder will play its melody to the end.

Traveling salesman in search of happiness or deliverance: if you wish to leave Stitchings, you must not hesitate for a moment: you have to do it between the capital letter and the period, without clinging to any broken-off thought, without waiting for the final word.