Joseph Roth titles
published by The Overlook Press
The Radetzky March
The Emperor’s Tomb
Tarabas
Confession of a Murderer
Job
Flight Without End
The Silent Prophet
The Spider’s Web and Zipper and His Father
Hotel Savoy
Three Novellas:
The Legend of the Holy Drinker
Fallmerayer the Stationmaster
The Bust of the Emperor
Right and Left
Copyright
This paperback edition first published in the United States in 2003 by
The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.
Woodstock & New York
WOODSTOCK:
One Overlook Drive
Woodstock, NY 12498
www.overlookpress.com
[for individual orders, bulk and special sales, contact our Woodstock office]
NEW YORK:
141 Wooster Street
New York, NY 10012
Copyright © 1975 and 1976 by Verlag Allert de Lange Amsterdam
Translation copyright © 1986 John Hoare
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system now known or to be invented without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.
ISBN: 978-1-59020-958-5
Contents
Copyright
BOOK ONE
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Chapter X
Chapter XI
Chapter XII
Chapter XIII
BOOK TWO
Chapter XIV
Chapter XV
Chapter XVI
Chapter XVII
Chapter XVIII
Chapter XIX
Chapter XX
Chapter XXI
Chapter XXII
Chapter XXIII
Chapter XXIV
Chapter XXV
Chapter XXVI
Chapter XXVII
Chapter XXVIII
BOOK ONE
I
I arrive at the Hotel Savoy at ten o’clock in the morning. I am determined to rest for a couple of days or a week. My relations live in this town – my parents were Russian Jews. I mean to raise enough money to continue my journey westwards.
I am on my way back from three years as a prisoner of war, having lived in a Siberian camp and having wandered through Russian towns and villages as workman, casual labourer, night watchman, porter and baker’s assistant.
I am wearing a Russian blouse which someone gave me, breeches which I inherited from a dead comrade, and a pair of still wearable boots the origins of which I cannot myself remember. After five years I stand again at the gates of Europe. The Hotel Savoy, with its seven storeys, its gilded coat of arms and its uniformed porter, seems to me more European than any other hotel in the east. It holds out the promise of water, soap, English lavatories, a lift, chambermaids in white caps, a chamberpot gleaming like some precious surprise in the little brown-panelled night cupboard; electric lamps blooming in shades of green and rose, like flowers from their calyx; bells which ring at the push of a button; and beds plump with eiderdowns, cheerful and waiting to receive one’s body.
I am thankful once again to strip off an old life, as I so often have during these years. I look back upon a soldier, a murderer, a man almost murdered, a man resurrected, a prisoner, a wanderer.
I can sense the first light, the roll of the drums as the company marches, rattling the windowpanes of the top floors. I can glimpse a man in white shirt-sleeves, the sharply moving limbs of the soldiers, a gleam of light through the woods shining on the dew. I dive into the grass facing the ‘imaginary enemy’ and feel the overwhelming wish to go on lying there in the silky grass which tickles my nose.
I can hear the silence of the hospital ward, the white silence. One summer morning I get up, hear the healthy trill of the larks, relish the morning cocoa and buttered rolls and the smell of iodine, the first ‘regulation diet’ of the day.
I inhabit a white world of sky and snow. Barracks cover the ground like yellow scabs. I enjoy the last sweet drag on a scavenged cigarette butt and read the personal columns of an age-old newspaper from home, repeating the names of familiar streets, recognising the owner of the corner grocery, and a porter and a certain blonde Agnes with whom I have slept.
I listen to the delicious rain during a sleepless night, to fast melting lumps of ice in morning’s laughing sunshine. I grasp the splendid breasts of a woman met along the way and laid down on the moss; the white pride of her thighs. I sleep the sleep of the dead in the hay barn. I stride across ploughed fields and listen to the thin voice of a balalaika.
One can absorb such a lot and yet remain unchanged in body, in walk, in behaviour. One can drink from a million glasses and never quench one’s thirst. A rainbow may quiver with all its colours but can never change the spectrum.
I could arrive at the Hotel Savoy with a single shirt, I could leave with twenty trunks and still be the same old
Gabriel Dan. Perhaps it is because this notion has made me self-confident, lordly and arrogant that the hall porter salutes me, the wanderer with the Russian blouse, and that a page boy takes me in hand although I have no luggage.
A lift bears me upwards, each of its sides a mirror. The lift-boy, a man in middle age, lets the rope glide through his hand, the cabin rises, I sway and find myself thinking that I could enjoy this upward motion for quite a long time. I enjoy the swaying feeling and calculate how many wearisome steps I would have had to climb but for this noble lift. As I rise ever higher, I throw my bitterness, my wanderings and homelessness, all my mendicant past, down the liftshaft from which it can never reach me again.
My room – one of the cheapest – is on the sixth floor, number 703. I like the number – I am superstitious about them – for the zero in the middle is like a lady flanked by two gentlemen, one older and one younger. A yellow coverlet lies on the bed; not, thank God, a grey one to remind me of the army. I turn the light on and off a couple of times, open the door of the cupboard for night-time use, the mattress gives beneath my hand and bounces back, water sparkles in its carafe, the window gives onto a courtyard in which cheerfully coloured laundry is flapping, children are shouting and hens are wandering at will.
I wash myself and slowly slide into bed, treasuring every second. I open the window, the hens are cackling loudly and merrily, like a sweet lullaby.
I sleep dreamlessly the whole day through.
II
The late sunshine reddened the topmost windows of the house opposite; laundry, chickens, children had vanished from the courtyard.
As I arrived that morning it had been drizzling. Because in the meantime it had cleared up I felt as if I had slept for three days, not one. My weariness had left me and I was in good heart. I felt curious about the town and my new life. My room seemed friendly, as if I had lived there for a long time. The bell was familiar, and the doorhandle, the light switch, the green lampshade, the clothes cupboard and the washbasin. Everything was homely, like a room in which one has spent one’s childhood. Everything was consoling and warm, like returning again to someone beloved.
The only new thing was the notice on the door which read:
br /> QUIET IS REQUESTED AFTER IO PM NO RESPONSIBILITY CAN BE TAKEN FOR VALUABLES LEFT IN THE ROOM. THERE IS A SAFE IN THE HOTEL.
KALEGUROPULOS. HOTELIER
The name was foreign, Greek, and I amused myself by declensions: Kaleguropulos, Kaleguropulu, Kaleguropulo – a vague recollection of boring school periods; of a Greek master resurrected from forgotten years in a bottle-green jacket. I buried the memory. Next I decided to stroll through the town, perhaps to look up a relation if time permitted, and to enjoy whatever the evening and the town might offer.
I go along the corridor to the main staircase and take pleasure in the handsome square flagstones of the hotel passage, in the clean red stone and the steady echo of my footsteps.
I walk slowly downstairs. From the lower floors come voices, but up here everything is silent. All the doors are shut, one moves as if it were an old monastery, past the doors of monks at prayer. The fifth floor looks exactly like the sixth, one could easily confuse them. Up above and here, too, a standard clock hangs facing the stairs, but the two clocks do not tell the same time. The one on the sixth floor says seven o’clock, on this floor it says ten past and on the fourth floor it says ten to seven.
Upon the flagstones on the third floor lie dark red carpets with green borders and one no longer hears one’s footsteps. The room numbers are not painted on the doors but mounted on little porcelain signs. A maid passes with a feather duster and a wastepaper basket. They seem here to pay more attention to cleanliness. This is where the rich live, and the cunning Kaleguropulos lets the clocks run slow, because the rich have time.
On the mezzanine the two wings of a door were standing wide open.
This was a large room with two windows, two beds, two chests of drawers, a green plush sofa, a brown tiled stove and a stand for luggage. Kaleguropulos’ sign was not to be seen on the door – perhaps the residents at this level were allowed to be noisy after ten o’clock, and perhaps the management did take responsibility for valuables – or did they already know about the safe, or did Kaleguropulos inform them personally?
A scented woman with a grey feather boa rustled out of a neighbouring room. This is a lady, I say to myself, and walk close behind her down the last few stairs, admiring her little polished bootees. The lady pauses for a while at the hall porter’s, I reach the doors at the same time as her, the porter salutes and I feel flattered that perhaps the porter thinks that I am the rich lady’s escort.
I decided, since I had no idea of what direction to take, that I would follow her. She turned right out of the narrow street in which the hotel stood, and there the market square widened out. It must have been market day. Hay and chaff were scattered about the pavements, shops were just being shut, locks were clicking, chains rattling, householders were making for home with little handcarts, women wearing bright headscarves were hurrying, carefully carrying full pots in front of them and bursting market bags over their arms, with wooden spoons sticking out of the top. A few lanterns cast their silvery light into the dusk, the pavements turned into a parade where men in uniform and in civilian clothes twirled their slender canes, and waves of Russian scent ebbed and flowed. Coaches came bumping along from the railway station, piled high with luggage, their passengers muffled up. The road surface was poor, uneven and potholed, the worst places covered with rotten duckboards which rattled surprisingly.
Even so, the town looked friendlier in the evening than by day. In the morning it was grey, coal dust from the gigantic chimneys of nearby factories drifted over it, dirty beggars crouched at the street corners, garbage and night soil buckets were piled in the back alleys. Darkness, however, hid everything; filth, vice, pestilence and poverty alike; darkness was kindly, motherly, forgiving and concealing.
Houses which are merely decrepit and tumbledown look ghostly and secret in the dark, their architecture capricious. Crooked gables become delicate in the shadows, dim light beckons mysteriously through half-darkened window panes, two paces further on a blaze of light streams out from windows as tall as a man giving onto a confectioner’s where mirrors reflect crystal and candelabra and from whose ceiling amiable angels swoop and stoop. This is the rich world’s confectioner and in this industrial town it earns and spends money.
This was the lady’s destination but I did not follow her in because it occurred to me that my money must last me for quite a time before I could continue my journey.
I sauntered along, saw dark groups of busy Jews in kaftans, listened to loud gossip, to greetings and greetings returned, to cross words and long talk. Talk of feathers, percentages, hops, steel, coal and lemons flew into the air, out of mouths and aimed at ears. Suspicious looking men with rubber collars seemed to be policemen. I reached unconciously for my breast pocket where I kept my passport, just as I had reached in my army days for my cap if one of my superiors was about. I was coming home, my papers were in order, I had nothing to fear.
I went up to a policeman and asked directions to the Gibka, where my relations lived, my rich uncle Phöbus Bohlaug. The policeman spoke German, a lot of people hereabouts spoke German; German manufacturers, engineers and merchants dominated society, business and industry in this town.
It was about a ten minute walk and I thought about Phöbus Bohlaug, of whom my father used to speak with envy and hatred on returning tired and depressed from unproductive committee meetings. Every member of the family spoke the name Phöbus with respect, almost as if they were indeed referring to the Sun God. Only my father called him ‘Phöbus, that oaf’ – because he had allegedly done some curious business with my mother’s dowry. My father had always been too cowardly to demand the dowry. All he used to do, and always at the same time of year, was to look in the visitors’ list and see if Phöbus Bohlaug had arrived at the Hotel Imperial. If he had, he would invite his brother-in-law to tea in the Leopoldstadt. My mother would wear a black dress and, by then, rather scanty artificial jewellery. She admired her rich brother as if he were someone very strange and royal, as if the same womb had not borne them both and the same two breasts suckled them. My uncle used to come, bringing a book for me. An aroma of gingerbread would emanate from the kitchen, in which my grandfather lived and from which he only emerged on special occasions, as if newly minted, freshly washed, with a white starched dickey, twinkling through spectacles which were much too weak, leaning forward to look at his son Phöbus, pride of his old age. Phöbus had an expansive laugh, an expansive double chin and red rolls of fat at the back of his neck. He smells of cigars, and sometimes of wine, and kisses everyone on both cheeks. He talks a lot, loudly and cheerfully, but if asked whether business is good his eyes start out of his head, he shrinks into himself and might at any moment begin to tremble like some freezing beggar. His double chins disappear behind his collar. ‘Business is no good these days. When I was small I could buy a poppyseed cake for half a kopeck, and today a loaf of bread costs ten. The children – touch wood – are growing up and cost money, Alexander asks for pocket money every day.’
My father would twitch at his cuffs and put his hands back on the edge of the table, smiling when Phöbus addressed him, but sulky and weak and praying for his brother-in-law to have a heart attack. After two hours
Phöbus would stand up, press a silver coin into my mother’s hand, another into Grandfather’s, and slip one into my pocket. My father would see him down the steps, because it was dark, holding the petrol lamp high in his hands and my mother would call, ‘Nathan, mind the shade!’ Father minded the shade and, since the front door was still open, one could hear the resonant voice of Phöbus.
Two days later Phöbus would be gone and my father would announce that ‘the oaf had already left.’
‘Stop it Nathan,’ my mother would say.
I came to the Bibka, an elegant street on the outskirts of town, with low white houses, new and yet ornamental. I saw lighted windows in the Bohlaugs’ house but the door was closed. I debated for a while whether I should go up at such a late hour — it must have been ten al
ready – and then I heard the sound of a piano and a cello, a woman’s voice, and a rattle of cards being shuffled. I thought that it would not do for me to join that company in the suit I was wearing. Everything depended on my first arrival, so I decided to put off my visit to the next day and returned to the hotel. The journey in vain had put me out of sorts. The porter did not salute me as I entered the hotel. The liftman did not bestir himself when I rang the bell, but came over unhurriedly, studying my face. He was a uniformed man in his fifties, an elderly lift-boy. I was annoyed that in this hotel the lift was not operated by small rosy-cheeked youngsters.
It occurred to me that I had intended to take a look at the seventh floor, and so walked upstairs. The corridor above was very narrow, the ceiling was lower, grey steam poured out of a laundry and the place smelt of damp clothing. Two or three doors must have been ajar because one heard voices arguing. As I suspected, no clock hung on this floor. I was on the point of going downstairs when the lift ground to a halt, the gate opened, the liftman gave me a puzzled look and a girl stepped out. She was wearing a small, grey, sports hat, and turned in my direction. Her face was brown and she had large grey eyes with black eyelashes. I said good evening to her and proceeded down stairs. On the bottom stair something made me look up again and I thought I glimpsed the beer-coloured eyes of the liftman looking in my direction. I locked my door because I was unaccountably frightened. I began reading an old book.
III
I am not sleepy. A bell from a church tower sends regular strokes into the gentle night. Above me I hear cautious, soft, unceasing footsteps, which must be a woman’s. Was it the young girl from the seventh floor who walked so restlessly back and forth? What was troubling her?
I looked up at the ceiling under the sudden impression that it had become transparent. Perhaps one might see the delicate soles of the girl in grey. Would she go barefoot or in slippers? Would she be wearing grey stockings of half-silk? I remembered how I and many of my comrades had longed for a leave which would enable us to ease our longing for a pair of buckskin shoes. The legs of healthy peasant girls were there to be stroked, they would have broad feet, their big toe widely spaced from walking through the muddy fields and along the muddy roads. The hard ground of the autumn fields was the nuptial bed beneath their bodies. Strong thighs. A minute of rapid love in the dark before the command to fall in interrupted. I thought back to the schoolteacher, no longer young, in a village in the military zone. She was the only woman in the place who had not taken flight from the war and its onslaught. She was a sharp-tongued young woman, over thirty and known as the ‘barbed wire entanglement’, but there was not a man within a radius of some kilometres, far and wide, who would not have courted her. She was the only woman with shoes, even if her stockings had holes in them.