In this enormous Hotel Savoy with its 864 rooms, and indeed in the whole town, there were perhaps only two people awake, the girl overhead and myself. We might as well lie side by side, I, Gabriel, and the brown girl with the friendly face and the big grey eyes with dark eyelashes. To hear the tread of this gazelle so clearly the hotel ceilings must be very thin. I imagined to myself that I could detect the scent of her body. I decided to find out if the steps were really those of the girl.
In the corridor there burned a little dark red glowworm of a light; shoes, boots, women’s shoes stood outside the bedroom doors, all as expressive as human faces. No such light burned on the seventh floor, but feeble light shone from opaque glass. A thin yellow beam shone through a chink from room 800, this must be the room of the restless pacer. I can see through the keyhole and it is the girl. She is walking in some white garment – it is a bath robe – back and forth, stopping for a moment to glance at a book before resuming her pacing.
I make an effort to divine her face, but only glimpse the gentle curve of her chin, a quarter of her profile when she stands still, a cascade of hair and now and again as she takes a long stride the peignoir parts to reveal a glimmer of brown skin. From somewhere came a painful cough, someone spat resonantly into a spittoon. I went back to my room. As I closed my door I thought I saw a shadow in the corridor. I pulled the door open, so that the light from my room shone into the corridor. But no one had been there.
Overhead the pacing had stopped. The girl was probably asleep by now. I lay down on the bed in my clothes, and drew the curtains back. The soft greyness of first light slid gently over the room’s furnishings.
The inescapable onset of morning was announced by a bell ringing and the rough shout of a man’s voice in some unrecognisable language.
A floor waiter came, wearing a green baize apron. His rolled up sleeves revealed his muscular forearms, dark with curly hair as far as his elbows. Evidently maid service was only for the first three floors. The coffee was better than might have been expected, but what was the use of that without a maid in a white cap? This was a disappointment and I wondered whether there were any possibility of moving to the third floor.
IV
Phöbus Bohlaug sits in front of a gleaming copper samovar, eating ham and scrambled egg and drinking tea with milk. ‘My doctor has prescribed eggs for me,’ he says, wiping his moustache with a napkin and proffering his face to be kissed as he sits in the chair. His face smells of shaving soap and eau de Cologne. It is smooth, soft and warm. He wears a wide bath robe and must just have come out of his shower. On a chair lies a newspaper and a heart-shaped piece of his hairy chest is visible since he has not yet put on a shirt.
He makes the point once for all, ‘You look fine.’
‘How long have you been here?’
‘Since yesterday.’
‘Why have you come today?’
‘I came yesterday, but I heard that you had company, and wearing this suit I didn’t want …’
‘Good Lord – it’s a perfectly good suit! No one is ashamed these days. Millionaires don’t wear better suits than that these days! Even I only have three suits. A suit costs a fortune.’
‘I didn’t know that. I’ve only just come back from prisoner-of-war camp.’
‘Did you get on all right? Everyone says it’s pretty good in prison camp.’
‘It was pretty bad, too, at times, Uncle Phöbus.’
‘I see, and now do you mean to continue your journey?’
‘Yes. I need money.’
‘I need money, too,’ joked Phöbus Bohlaug, ‘we all need money.’
‘Probably you have some.’
‘Have I? How do you know I have? I came back from being on the run and pulled my affairs together again. In Vienna I gave your father money – his illness cost me a pretty penny – and I raised a tombstone to your late mother, a lovely tombstone – even then it cost me around two thousand.’
‘My father died in a hospital for incurables.’
‘But your mother, bless her, died in a nursing home.’
‘What are you shouting for? Don’t excite yourself, Phöbus!’ says Regina. She comes out of the bedroom, holding her corsets in her hand, garters dangling.
‘This is Gabriel.’ Phöbus introduced us.
I kissed Regina’s hand. She sympathised with me about my sufferings during imprisonment, and about the war, the times, the younger generation, and her husband.
‘Little Alexander is here, otherwise we would have asked you to stay with us,’ she said.
Little Alexander appears in blue pyjamas, bows and clicks his bedroom slippers. During the war he had transferred opportunely from the cavalry to the service corps. He is now in Paris, studying ‘export’, as Phöbus has it, and is spending his leave at home.
‘You’re putting up at the Savoy?’ asks Alexander with the assurance of a man of the world. ‘There’s a beautiful girl staying there’ – and he winks in the direction of his father – ‘her name is Stasia and she dances at the Variétés; unapproachable, I can tell you. I wanted to take her to Paris with me’ – he moved nearer to me – ‘but she says she’ll go on her own, when it pleases her. A fine girl.’
I stayed to lunch. Phöbus’ daughter came with her husband. The son-in-law ‘helped in the business’. He was a well set up, good-humoured, reddish blond man with a bull neck, who spooned away bravely at his soup, left a clean plate and never opened his mouth while the conversation rolled over him.
‘I am just thinking,’ said Frau Regina, ‘that your blue suit would fit Gabriel.’
‘I have a blue suit, yet?’ asked Phöbus.
‘Yes,’ said Regina, ‘I’ll fetch it.’
I tried in vain to fend it off. Alexander clapped me on the shoulder, the son-in-law said ‘quite right’ and Regina brought the blue suit. I try it on in Alexander’s room, in front of the big standing mirror. It fits.
I appreciate and understand the need for a blue suit, ‘good as new’, for polka-dotted brown ties and for a brown waistcoat. That afternoon I leave with a brown cardboard box in my hand. I am to come again. The hope of travel money still hums quietly inside me.
‘You see? I’ve fitted him out,’ said Phöbus to Regina.
V
The girl’s name is Stasia. The programme of the Variétés does not bill her by name. She dances on cheap boards in front of an audience of local and Parisian Alexanders. She executes a couple of movements from an oriental dance, then sits down crosslegged before an incense burner and waits for the curtain. One can see her body, blue shadows under her arms, the swelling of a brown breast, the curve of her hip, her thigh revealed by the short tricot.
There was a farcical brass band. The absence of violins almost hurt. There were old humorous songs, rubbishy jokes by a clown, a dressed up donkey with the bottom of its ears painted red, trotting patiently back and forth. Waiters in white, smelling like beer cellars, passed between the rows carrying mugs overflowing with froth. The beam of a yellow spot shone diagonally from a capriciously sited opening in the ceiling, the dark backcloth of the stage gaped like the cry of an open mouth, the compere croaked like the bearer of evil tidings.
I wait at the stage door; once again it is like the old days when as a boy I waited in the side alley, pressed into the shadow of a doorway, melting into it until the sound of quick young steps rang out from the pavement, flowering miraculously from the barren paving stones.
Stasia came out in company with men and women, their voices mingled.
For a long time I was lonely in the midst of thousands. Now there are a thousand things which I can share: a glimpse of a dilapidated gable, a swallow’s nest in a cupboard of the Hotel Savoy, the irritating beer-yellow eye of the old lift-boy, the bitterness of the seventh floor, the mystery of a Greek name, of a suddenly living grammatical concept, the melancholy recollection of an awkward Aorist tense, the constrictions of my parental house, the laughably ponderous Phöbus Bohlaug and ‘little Alexan
der’s’ life saved by his transfer to the army service corps. Living things took on more life, things that were generally condemned seemed even more detestable, Heaven was nearer, the world at one’s feet.
The door of the lift was open and Stasia was seated inside. I did not hide my delight and we wished each other good evening like old acquaintances. I greeted the inevitable lift-boy drily. He pretended not to know that I should get out at the sixth floor and took us both to the seventh. Here Stasia emerged and disappeared into her room, but the lift-boy waited on, as if he had a passenger to collect: why was he waiting there with his scornful yellow eyes?
I therefore proceed slowly down the stairs, listening to hear if the lift is going to come down. Finally, when I am halfway down, I hear the watery sound of the lift in motion. I turn back. From the top storey the liftman is starting down the stairs, having sent the lift down empty, coming down himself slowly and grumpily on foot.
Stasia was probably expecting my knock.
I try to apologise.
‘No, no,’ says Stasia. ‘I would have invited you before, but I was afraid of Ignatz. He is the most dangerous person in the Hotel Savoy. I know your name, too, Gabriel Dan, and that you have come out of prison camp. I took you yesterday for a – colleague – an artiste,’ she hesitates: perhaps she fears that I shall be insulted?
I was not. ‘No,’ I reply. ‘I don’t know what I am. Earlier on I wanted to be a writer, but I went to the war and now I feel there is no point in writing. I am a solitary person and cannot write for the public.’
‘You live directly above my room,’ I say, for lack of anything more fascinating.
‘Why do you walk about all night long?’
‘I’m learning French. I’d like to go to Paris and do something. Not dancing. A stupid fellow wanted to take me with him to Paris and since then I keep thinking I’ll go.’
‘Alexander Bohlaug?’
‘You know him, and you arrived yesterday?’
‘You know me, too.’
‘Have you been talking to Ignatz already?’
‘No, but Bohlaug is my cousin.’
‘Oh! Excuse me!’
‘No, no, I beg of you. He is a stupid fellow.’
Stasia has a couple of chocolate bars, and brings out a spirit stove from the bottom of a hatbox.
‘Nobody must know about this. Even Ignatz doesn’t know. I hide it in a different place every day. In the hatbox today, yesterday in my muff, once between the cupboard and the wall. The police forbid spirit stoves in the hotel. But it is only possible – I mean for people like us – to live in hotels, and the Savoy is the best I know. Are you staying long?’
‘No, just for a few days.’
‘Oh, then you won’t get to know the Hotel Savoy. Santschin and his family live next door. Santschin is our clown – would you like to meet him?’
I wouldn’t, but Stasia needs some tea.
The Santschins do not live next door, but at the far end of the laundry, by the laundry. The roof slopes here and is so low that one is afraid of bumping the ceiling. In reality one does not reach it by a long way. It only gives the illusion of threatening. Generally speaking all dimensions shrink in this corner, as the result of the grey steam from the laundry which blinds you, shortens all distances and puffs out the walls. It is hard to accustom oneself to the air which is constantly steaming, blurs outlines, smells damp and warm, and turns people into unreal shapes.
Santschin’s room is steamy, too, and his wife quickly shuts the door behind us as if some wild animal lurked outside. The Santschins, who have lived here for six months, are well versed in shutting doors quickly. Their lamp, burning in a grey corona, reminds one of photographs of constellations surrounded by nebulae. Santschin rises to his feet, slips one arm into a dark jacket and nods in greeting to his guests. His head seems to rise out of the clouds like some supernatural manifestation in a religious picture.
He smokes a long pipe and talks very little. The pipe limits his conversation. By the time he is half way through a sentence he has to stop, reach for his wife’s darning needle and scratch about with it in the bowl of the pipe. Or a fresh match has to be struck and the matches have to be found. Frau Santschin is warming milk for the child and needs the matches just as often as her husband. The matchbox moves endlessly from beside Santschin to the washbasin on which the spirit stove stands, but sometimes it is left on the way and disappears without trace in the mist. Santschin bends down, knocks over a chair, the milk is hot and is taken off the stove whose flame flickers until something else is put on to warm, because of the risk of the matches not turning up again.
I offered my own box of matches first to one Santschin and then to the other, but neither of them wished to avail themselves of it and went on searching instead, leaving the stove to burn in vain. Finally Stasia spotted the matchbox in a fold of the coverlet on the bed.
A second later Frau Santschin is looking for the keys so as to extract the tea from the trunk – it could ‘after all’ be stolen from its tin. ‘I hear something rattling somewhere,’ says Santschin in Russian. We all stand still and listen for the rattling of keys, but nothing stirs. ‘They can’t rattle of their own accord,’ yells Santschin, ‘move around, all of you, then we’ll hear them soon enough.’
But they made themselves heard only when Frau Santschin found a milk stain on her blouse and reached rapidly for her apron so as to avoid a repetition of the accident. The keys turn out to be in the apron, but not a single tea leaf is in the trunk.
‘Are you looking for the tea?’ asks Santschin suddenly. ‘I finished it this morning.’
‘Why do you sit there like a clot, saying nothing?’ screams his wife.
‘In the first place I have said something,’ replies Santschin, who is a man of logic, ‘and in the second place no one has asked me. In this household you should realise, Herr Dan, that I always come last.’
Frau Santschin had an idea: one could buy tea from Herr Fisch, if he were not actually asleep. There was no chance of his lending any. For profit he would gladly sell it.
‘Let’s go to Fisch,’ says Stasia.
First, Fisch must be woken. He lives in the last room of the hotel, 864, and free of charge, because the merchants and industrialists of the town and the distinguished guests on the lowest floors are paying for him. Rumour has it that he was at one time married, well thought of, and a well-to-do factory owner. Now he has lost everything along the way; through carelessness, who can tell? Private charity keeps him going, but he does not admit it and calls himself a ‘lottery dreamer’. He has the faculty of dreaming lottery numbers which must infallibly win. He sleeps all day, lets himself dream lottery numbers, and bets them. But even before a draw he has another dream, sells his ticket, buys another with the proceeds, the first one wins, the second one does not. Many people have become rich through Fisch’s dreams and live on the first floor of the Savoy. Out of gratitude they pay for his rooms.
Fisch – his first name is Hirsch – lives in constant anxiety because somewhere, at some time, he has read that the government is going to abolish the lottery and introduce tombola.
Hirsch Fisch must have dreamed ‘lovely numbers’, for it is a long time before he gets up. He admits no one to his room, greets me in the corridor, listens to Stasia’s wish, shuts the door again and after quite a time opens it with a packet of tea in his hand.
‘We’ll put that on our account, Herr Fisch,’ says Stasia.
‘Good evening,’ says Fisch, and goes to bed.
‘If you have any money,’ Stasia recommends, ‘buy a ticket from Fisch,’ and she tells me about the Jew’s wonderful dreams.
I laugh, because I am ashamed to give in to my belief in miracles, something to which I am very prone. But I am determined to buy a ticket if Fisch will part with one.
The life stories of Santschin and Hirsch Fisch filled my mind. Everyone here seemed to be shrouded in secrecy. Have I dreamed that steam from the laundry? What lived behind this
door and that one? Who had built this hotel? Who was Kaleguropulos, the manager?
‘Do you know Karegulopulos?’
Stasia did not know him. Nobody knew him. Nobody had set eyes on him, but if one had the time and the inclination one could position oneself just at the time he did his rounds of inspection, and then look at him.
‘Glanz tried it once,’ says Stasia, ‘but he didn’t see Kaleguropulos. Incidentally, Ignatz says there will be an inspection tomorrow.’
Even before I can go downstairs, Hirsch Fisch buttonholes me. He wears a shirt and long white underpants and holds a chamberpot stiffly out in front of him. Tall and haggard as he is, he looks in the dim half-light like someone risen from the dead. The stubbly hair of his grey beard stands up threateningly like small sharp spears. His eyes are deep set, overshadowed by powerful cheekbones.
‘Good morning, Herr Dan! Do you think that the little lady will pay me for my tea?’
‘Surely she’s likely to?’
‘Listen, I’ve dreamed some numbers! A certainty! I shall bet today. Have you heard that the government means to abolish the lottery?’