The Hotel Years

  These buildings, which are still haunted by the architect’s soul, make me indescribably sad, because they are so compromised. They were built for a purpose, which was to be habitable and durable, and full of light and air. But they aspired to be beautiful, and as impractical as beauty always is. They were forced to yield to the ridiculous duress of their physical being, and only in their upper reaches was it permitted to them to be luxurious, and even then under conditions of strict practicality. They symbolize the lives of thousands of architects, and the gulf between what they intended and what they actually built.

  Some people like to say veran-dah. That sounds as though they had already fallen off them, with a flowerpot and half a window to follow. Because here everyone loves their veran-dah, and tricks it out with geraniums and begonias and pelargoniums, and other blooms that sounds like faraway countries. That comes from the longing of people who spend half their lives trying to set themselves apart from the rest of us, and the other half (in accordance with the proverb) to create order.* They may never get to anywhere with a name like one of their flowers. They plant these exotic things outside their houses and in their hearts, and so make the symbol of the thing-attained-with-difficulty domestic. In the same way their love of outdoors is best seen in brick promontories where they spend a great part of their lives, either with a watering can, or with love, appetite and illumination.

  The light is dimmed to pink, and looks like a small-scale forest fire on the horizon, or a Light Everlasting in a wayside chapel somewhere. Now God has given me sufficient desire for beauty on the one hand to multiply the forest fires, and to quench them, and also a devoutness that is susceptible to the occasional wayside chapel. But a whole parade of these wayside chapels, plastered on a row of trees, and animated by the earthly rattle of dinner-plates and clink of cutlery, is able to knock a sizeable hole in my spirit of reverence. So I sometimes direct an impious eye at the inner life of my neighbours, which they have turned inside out, to give it some air on their veran-dahs. On occasion I am ashamed of my overweening mind and my secret shame, which prevents me from doing as my neighbours. I see isolated lights and I think of the wayside chapels. Maybe, I think, people would be more discreet and pious, if the essence of the veran-dah didn’t consist in giving the illusion of being cast away on a desert island of swinging baskets. And the pinkish light—as I’ve discovered—is only another illusion. The one who sees it thinks he is not seen. And is seen, in the pink . . . Perhaps people actually want to be seen.

  One thing is certain: that I am all alone in this strange city, and that as I make my way through its streets, a shudder of homelessness will befall me one morning in the midst of so much homely activity. The energetic sound of a matutinal piano; the white net curtains behind a window; a man in shirtsleeves; a woman in her nightcap; a Litfass column dripping with fresh glue; a porter gone out to Brasso the doorknob; a spit-and-shined shoe-polish boy; a crisp lady baker; a hairdresser standing outside his premises like a white atomizer—they all are strange to me, because they don’t know me, even though they tell me everything. They greet each other with familiar expressions, and every eye reflects the other’s experiences.

  People here are so clean. They smell of soap, those brown cubes of soap that my aunt used to use on me. The women here wear their hair straight back, exposing their ears. There’s an atmosphere of spiritual chastening about them. Their hours overbrim with busy-ness, and their papers are all in order. They carry their souls in the palms of their hands. Their past is as stainless as the brass sink outside the barber’s shop. Their pursuit is shopping. Their future is doing sums. They collect their days in an album, like so many stamps. They are collectors of days and years.

  Never was anything mysterious in their lives, nor yet anything ugly. They grew and prospered in the shadow of their virtues.

  How I envy them.

  Every day I meet a gentleman on the stairs, who is by profession a representative.

  I don’t know what or whom he represents, but he’s a representative. Even when he isn’t wearing gloves, his hands are solemn, as though carrying mourning candles. He has a straw hat on, but I understand that it’s really a topper. His stride is managerial. His eye rests heavily, punishingly on things. He is quiet, but I can hear the drone of his voice—a deep voice with thunderous aspects. I don’t greet him, but it feels as though I did. Perhaps he is an undertaker, and is on his way to today’s funeral.

  He was a good and industrious son. Surely he was the apple of someone’s eye once. I would sit down next to him in class, and unhesitatingly copy his answers.

  I don’t see his forehead, but it is certainly high and rounded. It must have room for the many solemn thresholds in his brain.

  Sometimes I see him taking a blue-eyed girl by the hand, by the name of Lili. On those occasions he is ex officio. Once he bent down to her because she had lost her glove and it was as though an emperor had suddenly begun to laugh, or something human had happened to him.

  I am getting to feel more at home in the strange city.

  Berliner Börsen-Courier, 21 August 1921

  * Die Ordnung ist das halbe Leben: order or organization is half of life.

  54. Travel

  Guarded by customs inspectors and framed by passport regulations, abroad only starts to blossom beyond national frontiers; and that object of our desires called Far Away is only another jurisdiction with its own head of state and military, population statistics and tax regime. If you take an exotic sound for a cry of longing, it was probably nothing more than a locomotive’s whistle. All the world’s stations smell of anthracite rather than distant promise. The express train is muggy, stuffed with snoring well-set individuals who look nothing like travellers, are not redolent of mystery, but carry sandwiches in greaseproof paper, and exhibit all the frailties of their wretched humanity in the cramped compartment, sending the alarmed observer scuttling into the next one instead. Once, a beautiful damsel entered my compartment and my soul gave a lurch. The next morning, her eyes blinked open in the direction of the luggage rack, and I saw a creature in feminine apparel, her complexion ravaged by an agitated night with little sleep. The wind that came whistling through the open window mixed soot among her powder, and sleep had gummed up her eyelids. I dread to think what I looked like.

  I entered another country, and pressed my ticket into the hands of a strange porter, instead of the visiting card I should have had. In the other city, I saw green copper cupolas and Gothic towers climbing into the sky. Beggars clustered outside church doors, ­stubble-faced lady beggars among them. They lay in wait for believers, and assaulted their impressionable souls with a litany of ills. Children, old people and women dropped coins in the laps of the beggars, thinking: God is my witness.

  I looked into strange offices, and the desk-clerks who were working in them wore black sleeve-protectors, just as they do here at home. Blond and other variously dyed secretaries perched at typewriters, and pined for six o’clock, which is the hour of relief for the women of this century. It was a shade after two. A nearby clock rang the quarter-hour, and the girls pricked up their ears, hoping a miracle had taken place and they would hear it strike six. But just as obdurately as though it had been here at home it stuck to its assigned quarter past two, and the girls went back to their clacking. In other countries too, clocks are soulless pieces of machinery. And girls, increasingly, as well . . .

  I came to a hospital, and it too, like every other hospital in the world, smelled of camphor and iodine. The sisters fluttered from bed to bed in their white wimples like starched wings, and the patients groaned in such a familiar fashion, I had the sense I was at home. Evidently, so I thought, people only speak foreign languages when they are well. But pain is the greatest, all-conquering international movement there is, and truly its expression is as universal as music.

  I visited the parks and gardens of the strange city too, those places where love flowered. Men
and women came and went, and sat down together on benches, and assured one another of their feelings, which was unnecessary, because they were perfectly evident. Evening prowled along the footpaths, presumably waiting for night to fall. A constable plodded up and down, not noticing, even though he had a whole notebook for suspicious behaviour.

  The people spoke differently. Their houses looked unfamiliar. (It was after all abroad.) But the representative things, the things that show the nation’s face to the world, namely the border police and the customs inspectors—they are the same everywhere. They all have the same rapacious hands, and prying intrusive looks that feel like hands.

  I have no idea what a man finds to say for himself after he’s been abroad. I could sit at home for years on end, and be perfectly content. If only it weren’t for the stations. You swear a shrill sound that pierces the night is just the whistle of a locomotive. It is a cry of longing. And every so often, exquisitely beautiful women walk into your compartment . . .

  Berliner Börsen-Courier, 2 October 1921

  55. The “Romance” of Travel

  The joyful anticipation before a journey is always outweighed by the irritation of actually going. Nothing so irritating as a hulking station that looks like a monastery, at the sight of which I always wonder whether I shouldn’t slip off my shoes, instead of hailing a porter. Nothing so irritating as an iron rail before a ticket office. In front of me hovers a rucksack. Behind me a pair of knitting needles pushed through the side of a basket stab me in the back. I need to practically bend double to tell the obtuse employee my destination. He has just one little window through which he takes in money and destinations. I am sure he would rather listen to my hands . . .

  All I know of the porter who has made off with my things is his number. I am dependant on his recollection of faces. What if he has none? What if some double of mine shows up? What if the porter has some kind of mishap? My friend needs a platform ticket if he is to see me off. What’s the point of a platform ticket? The rails are off limits, and yet you pay to go on the platform. A man who sets foot on the platform in order not to travel, is doubly left behind. You might as well ask everyone in the whole station to have a ticket.

  Next, there are the dauntingly high steps up to my carriage. Why not just have ladders? You clamber up into the carriage as into an attic to dry clothes. The compartments are like matchboxes sitting on one of their emery board sides. The seats are so parsimoniously designed that there is not an inch of space between my knees and those of the fellow opposite. We could set out a chess board on them. We can’t open our eyes to look up—that would mean looking at the other. If we’re really unlucky, then there are people either side of us as well. To take a cigarette out of our pockets we poke our neighbour in the ribs.

  The so-called music of the wheels feels like hammer blows on my cerebellum and temples. If I stretch my leg, I involuntarily brush my neighbour’s trousers. And we look at each other continuously: while cutting apples, eating sausages, peeling oranges. Of course we squirt juice into the other’s eyes.

  Our hands, our collars, our shirts, our handkerchiefs are blackened. The locomotive pours soot on my face. Often it takes us through so-called tunnels, which are the pride of modern engineering. We ride through the underworld, no coal-miners we. If we move to open a window, those with colds protest. If I leave the compartment I need to issue half a dozen excuse-me’s first. The so-called communication cord is sealed. If you use it to communicate, you pay a fine. In case of a difference of views, the conductor’s decision is final. Always to my disadvantage . . .

  If I should elect to go in a sleeping-car, that entails sharing a small cupboard with a large gentleman. A shared night is a night halved. (Passengers are segregated by sex, worse luck.) Wives require proof. If I eat lunch on board, plates, waiters and wine-­bottles are all kept shaking in iron rings. Woe if they were set at liberty . . . !

  Conductors change about as often as April weather. They are there to draw lines on your ticket. Just lines. For that purpose, they like to wake me. These simple lines (sometimes perforations) I could do myself. Head-conductors like to check up on the lines left by the conductors. Lethally heavy suitcases teeter on luggage racks. At the frontier, customs inspectors come on board, and help themselves to my cigars. In the corridors are framed axes and saws, forever hinting at the worst.

  When you reach your destination, you fall over suitcases. If your suitcase is travelling separately, it entails waiting for it for an hour. All stations are built on a prodigal scale, but with very narrow exits to the world beyond. Tickets need to be surrendered. I wonder what the railways do with so much cardboard.

  No one is so badly off as a traveller. It’s a curious thing that this mediaeval torture of travelling should strike everyone as being so romantic. Our clothes are wrecked. We ruin our digestion with hot sausages and cold beers. We all have reddened eyes and dirty, greasy hands. And that should make us happy . . . !

  Sometimes in films I see the saloon cars of American millionaires. They dictate business letters to typists. They sit in tubs and bathe, whilst travelling. A black valet rubs them dry. A cook prepares their favourite dish. Some travel in automobiles, which are independent of rails. A few take to the skies—capitalist birds. Why don’t we demand these things? Our train tickets cost enough. We shouldn’t have to pay for cinema seats as well.

  Our so-called modes of transport lag far behind the times. They stand in no relation to the pride we take in our advanced civilization and the contempt we feel for post-chaises. Anyway, railway compartments are more like post-chaises than the railway authorities like to think. We’re living in the wireless age, and still they like to punch holes in cardboard! The contemporaries of the dirigible balloon still lug their own suitcases! We are contemplating travelling to the moon. We are thinking about Mars. We have hit upon the Theory of Relativity. Just because we don’t understand it doesn’t mean we are happy to roost on chicken ladders when we have shelled out for beds.

  Modern aeroplanes are more comfortable than trains. If I were of an aphoristic bent—which God knows I’m not—then I would say: It’s better to crash by aeroplane than arrive by train. There are no parachutes for train crashes. Nor have I seen life-jackets, come to that . . .

  Even doing fifty mph, you’re still not travelling at the speed of time. Time passes at a hundred thousand miles per second. While I’m sitting in a speeding train, I’m still racing ahead of it. That’s what the Theory of Relativity allows . . .

  I can transmit my likeness in an instant by telegraph. Transporting myself takes twelve hours. By the time I arrive, I’m no longer recognizable. You can’t shave on a train. My beard grows faster than the train travels. You can’t use the toilet at “station stops”. While the train is moving it’s continually occupied.

  In third class you sit on wooden pallets, as in prison. If someone turns off the overhead lamp, there is no option but sleep all round. It’s too dark to read the paper. When the light’s on, the editorial jumps all over the place. You take the feuilleton page and bend it over your knee, just to prove it can be done.

  If you put your head out of the window, you’ll never see it again. It’ll be in a well somewhere. If you lean against a door, you’ll fly out like a piece of orange peel. And yet, it’s forbidden to throw things out.

  “All infractions are punishable.” Luggage thieves “may be prosecuted”. Not that you’ll ever get your luggage back. Anyone supplying information leading to the conviction of a thief will be rewarded. But anyone who’s ever tried will know how hard it is to get a reward from the railways.

  On the contrary, there are often “supplementary fares” to be paid. (You even get given a receipt.) You can stick it in the mirror of the toilets—which are blind anyway.

  Jumping onto a moving train is not allowed. Jumping off one is for criminals. In any case, ordinary humans are incapable of opening the door, unless, that is, they
have the misfortune to lean against it accidentally while the train is in motion. Children must be kept on a leash. Dogs may not be taken at all. Meanwhile, chatty travellers are left criminally unmuzzled . . .

  There are luxury trains, expresses, local trains, various fees and classes, a forest of instructions, prohibitions, discouragements. All these are felt to be “romantic”.

  Even so, I would sooner travel to Monte Carlo first class than fill in a tax declaration on foot . . .

  Ed.: We assure our readers that in spite of everything he says about “romance”, our author spends very little time at home.

  Frankfurter Zeitung, 6 June 1926

  56. The Lady in the Compartment

  A beautiful lady entered the compartment where I was reading the newspaper. She looked at my newspaper, not at me, told the porter to put up a large silver-studded leather case, sat down, and didn’t have the right change. There was a long moment, filled with the silence of the porter, who was in a hurry. One could clearly feel the intensity with which the man was looking for an expression of impatience, haste, and possibly also bitterness. But seeing as he had no business looking impatient and embittered, he emanated a silence that was as pungent as any oath. At that moment I felt a great irritation with the beautiful lady. She was forcing me out of my tranquillity deepened by the enjoyment of the exciting newspaper to a painful pondering of how to find a swift and satisfactory solution to this predicament. Other men think on their feet, make remarks that win them the admiration of both ladies and porters. Whereas I was in the position that if I didn’t quickly do something, I would be despised by the one, and laughed at by the other. I therefore asked: “What are you owed?”; was informed, gave the porter a tip that compelled him to thank me more loudly than I would have liked, and sat back to await developments. The lady, still hunting for change, came up with a big bill, and not looking at me, asked me whether I could change it for her. “No!” I said, and the lady looked some more. Her confusion must be very great; I resolved to take pity on her, but I couldn’t do it, because I needed all my pity for myself. Was I to exclaim: “How delightful to be in credit with such a ravishing individual!” What a compliment! Was it not impertinent to disturb her in her search, was it not glib to seek to base an acquaintance on such a vulgar premise? I was unable to watch the lady, her hurried movements were of a private, even an intimate nature, and I thought I shouldn’t stare at the contents and lining of her handbag.