by Joseph Roth
‘No!’
‘It would be a great misfortune, I can tell you. What do poor people live on? What can make them rich? Must one wait until an old aunt dies, or one’s grandfather? And then the will says that everything is left to the orphanage.’
Fisch talks, holding the chamberpot in front of him, apparently forgotten. I glance at it and he notices.
‘You know, I save money by not tipping. Why would I need a floor waiter? I keep myself tidy. These people steal like magpies. Everyone has had something stolen by now, but not I. I look after myself. Ignatz says they will do rounds today. I always go out. If someone is not there, they aren’t there! If Kaleguropulos finds something not to his liking he can’t put me on a charge. Am I his recruit?’
‘Do you know the owner?’
‘Why should I know him? I’m not interested in new acquaintances. Have you heard the latest? Bloomfield is coming!’
‘Who is that?’
‘You don’t know Bloomfield? He is a child of this town and a millionaire in America. The whole town is shouting: “Bloomfield’s coming!” I’ve talked to his father, as close as I am to you, as I live and breathe!’
‘Excuse me, Herr Fisch, but I think I’ll try and sleep a little more.’
‘Do please sleep! I must tidy up.’ Fisch heads for the lavatory but on the way – I was on the stairs by then – he ran back, ‘Do you believe she’ll pay?’
‘Sure to.’
I opened the door of my room and once again, as on the previous day, I thought I glimpsed a hurrying shadow. I was too tired to look again. I slept till the sun stood high in the sky.
VI
It rang like a wave through the house: Kaleguropulos is coming! He always came in the early evening, just before sundown. He was a creature of the twilight, lord of the bath. Women were detailed to the top three floors to scour the stone floors. One can hear the sound of mops splashing in brimming buckets, the scrubbing of a stiff broom and the gentle slithering of dry cloths along the corridor. A floor waiter is rubbing the door handles, a yellow bottle of polish in his hand. Lights sparkle, push-buttons and door mouldings are shining, still more steam pours out of the laundry and sneaks down to the sixth floor. Men in blue dungarees perch unsteadily on ladders and check the wiring along the ceiling with gloved hands. Maids with fluttering skirts hang out of windows on broad belts, polishing the panes and looking like human flags. The inhabitants of the seventh floor have all vanished, their doors are open and all their untidy household chattels can be seen, bundles hastily thrown together and piles of newspaper burying things which are not permitted.
On the elegant floors the chambermaids are wearing majestic stiff coifs, like nuns, smelling of starch and giving off an air of holiday excitement, like Sunday morning. I am surprised not to hear church bells ringing. Further down someone is rubbing the palms of his hands with a handkerchief. It is the manager himself, whose eye has lighted on an armchair whose torn seat reveals a stuffing of wood shavings. The porter swiftly drapes a mat over it.
Two bookkeepers are standing at the high cash desk, taking extracts. One is leafing through the hotel register. The porter has new gold braid round his cap. A servant comes out of a small cubby-hole wearing a fresh green apron and blossoming like a meadow in springtime.
Stout men are seated in the lobby, smoking and drinking schnaps whilst hurrying waiters flit about them.
I order a schnaps and take a seat at a table at the furthest edge of the lobby, close to the carpet along which Kaleguropulos must come. Ignatz passed by, nodded more amicably than usual, looking dignified in a way which ill became a lift-boy. He seemed to be the only person in the house who had kept calm, his dress was unchanged and his cleanshaven face, bluish about the chin, was today just as parsonical as usual.
I waited half an hour. Suddenly I saw activity up front in the porter’s lodge, the manager seized the cash book, waved it high like a signal, and ran up the steps. A fat guest put down the glass of schnaps which had been half way to his lips and asked his neighbour, ‘What goes on?’ The neighbour, a Russian, said indifferently, ‘Kaleguropulos is on the first floor.’
How had he reached it?
In my room, upon the bedside table, I found a bill, with a note stamped on it.
OUR HONOURED GUESTS ARE POLITELY REQUESTED TO PAY CASH. CHEQUES ARE NOT ACCEPTED ON PRINCIPLE.
RESPECTFULLY
KALEGUROPULOS, HOTELIER
The manager appeared a quarter of an hour later and apologised. It was an oversight and the bill had been intended for a guest who had asked for it. The manager took his leave. He was really put out and there was no end to his apologies. He was overcome with remorse as if he had condemned an innocent man to death. He bowed again, deeply and for the last time, holding the doorknob and shamefacedly hiding the bill in the tails of his cutaway.
Later the house came to life, a beehive into which the residents swarmed with their loads of honey. Hirsch Fisch came, and the Santschin family and lots of others whom I did not know. Stasia came, too. She was afraid to go to her room.
‘What are you afraid of?’
‘There is a bill there,’ says Stasia, ‘and I can’t pay it. Ignatz will have to come again with his seal.’
‘What sort of seal would that be?’
‘Later,’ says Stasia. She is very excited. I can see her little breasts through her thin blouse.
On her bedside table lay a bill. It was sizeable. Had I wished to pay it, it would have eaten up over half my ready money.
Stasia easily recovered her self-possession. In front of the mirror she discovers a bouquet of carnations and summer flowers.
‘The flowers are from Alexander Bohlaug,’ she says, ‘but I never send flowers back. It’s not the flowers’ fault.’
She then sends for Ignatz. Ignatz came with an enquiring look and bowed deeply to me.
‘Your seal, Ignatz,’ says Stasia.
Ignatz brings a chain out of his trouser pocket and reaches for a vanity case in front of the mirror.
‘That makes three,’ says Ignatz and binds the chain four times round the vanity case. His expression is lustful, as if he were binding Stasia and not her case. He ties a little padlock to the end of the chain, folds the bill and puts it away in his well-worn pocketbook.
Ignatz lends money to anyone with a trunk. He pays the bill of anyone who is willing to pawn their own luggage. The trunks remain in the owners’ rooms and are sealed by Ignatz so that they cannot be opened. Ignatz himself invented the patent lock and he comes round every morning to check that ‘his’ trunks have not been tampered with.
Stasia makes do with two dresses. She has pawned three trunks. I decide to redeem one trunk and think it might be as well to leave the Hotel Savoy without delay.
The hotel no longer appealed to me: neither the stifling laundry, nor the gruesomely benevolent lift-boy nor the three floors of prisoners. This Hotel Savoy was like the world. Brilliant light shone out from it and splendour glittered from its seven storeys, but poverty made its home in its high places, and those who lived on high were in the depths, buried in airy graves, and the graves were in layers above the comfortable rooms of the well nourished guests sitting down below, untroubled by the flimsy coffins overhead.
I belong to those who are buried on high. Do I not live on the sixth floor and shall I not be driven by Fate onto the seventh? To the eighth, the tenth, the twentieth? How high can one fall? Into Heaven and ultimate bliss?
‘You are so far away,’ says Stasia.
‘Forgive me,’ I say. Her voice has touched me.
VII
Phöbus Bohlaug never forgot to draw attention to the blue suit. He called it ‘a splendid suit’ which ‘might have been made to measure’, and then he would smile. On one occasion at my uncle’s I met Glanz, Abel Glanz, a small, shabbily dressed, unshaven person, who shrank nervously together when one addressed him and who had the ability automatically to make himself smaller still, through some mysterious mechanis
m in his nature. His skinny neck with its restlessly sliding Adam’s apple could contract like an accordion and vanish into his wide stiff collar. Only his brow was large, his scalp was thin on top, his red ears stood out at right angles and gave the impression that they had chosen this position so that everyone should be absorbed by them. Abel Glanz’s little eyes observed me with distaste. Perhaps he looked on me as a rival.
Abel Glanz had been frequenting Phöbus Bohlaug’s house for years. He is one of those regular teatime callers whom the town’s more prosperous householders feel will be the ruin of them and whom nevertheless they cannot muster the courage to banish.
‘Have a cup of tea,’ said Phöbus Bohlaug.
‘No thank you,’ says Abel Glanz, ‘I am as full of tea as a samovar. That’s the fourth cup I’ve had to refuse already. Since lunch it’s been nothing but tea. Don’t insist, Herr Bohlaug!’
Bohlaug will not be deflected.
‘In all your lifetime you’ve not drunk tea like this, Glanz.’
‘What can you mean, Herr Bohlaug? I was once invited by Princess Basikoff, Herr Bohlaug, remember that,’ says Abel Glanz as threateningly as is possible for him.
‘And I am telling you that even Princess Basikoff never drank such a tea as this. Ask my son if you can find tea like this in all of Paris.’
‘Do you really think so?’ says Abel Glanz, pretending to think the matter over.
‘One could try it all the same, trying never did any harm.’ And Glanz moves his chair nearer to the samovar.
Abel Glanz had been prompter in a Roumanian little theatre but felt himself called to be a producer and could not bear to be in his prompt box and thus forced to look on while people made ‘mistakes’. Glanz told his tale to everybody. He had succeeded one day in obtaining a trial as a producer. A week later he was called up and ended in a field ambulance because the sergeant thought that souffleur had medical associations.
‘And that’s the way Fate plays with people,’Abel Glanz would conclude.
‘Glanz lives in the Savoy, too,’ Phöbus Bohlaug once remarked and it seemed to me as if my uncle wished to draw some comparison between myself and the prompter. To Phöbus Bohlaug we were two of a kind, some kind of ‘artist’, some kind of semi-parasite, although one had to admit that the prompter made an honest effort to master a respectable profession. He wanted to become a merchant, and that was the best trade of all because one ‘made deals’.
‘Mind you, Glanz makes good deals,’ says Uncle Phöbus.
‘What sort of deals?’
‘With currency,’ says Phöbus Bohlaug, ‘it’s dangerous but at the same time a sure thing. It’s a matter of luck. If someone has a magic touch he can be a millionaire overnight.’
‘Uncle,’ say I, ‘why don’t you deal in currency?’
‘God forbid,’ shouts Phöbus, ‘I want nothing to do wiith the police! If one is down and out one deals in currency.’
‘Phöbus Bohlaug should deal in currency, yet?’ asks Abel Glanz. ‘A man lays his head on the block – it is a Jewish destiny. One runs around all day long. If you’re after Roumanian lei everyone will offer you Swiss francs. As if you need francs. It is a business of witchcraft. Your uncle says I make good deals? A rich man believes everyone makes good deals.’
‘Who told you I was a rich man?’ asks Phöbus.
‘Who told me? There’s no need to tell you. The whole world knows that Bohlaug’s signature is as good as money.’
‘The world is lying!’ shouts Bohlaug, and his voice reaches a high pitch. He shouted as if ‘the world’ had accused him of a great crime.
‘Little Alexander’ made his entrance, wearing a suit in the latest fashion, a yellow hairnet over his crew-cut hair. He smelt of all sorts of things, of mouth wash and brilliantine, and he was smoking a scented cigarette.
‘There is nothing to be ashamed of in having money, Father,’ he said.
‘It’s true,’ cried Glanz happily, ‘your father is ashamed of it.’
Phöbus Bohlaug poured out more tea. ‘And so much for one’s own children,’ he grumbled.
At this moment Phöbus Bohlaug has turned into quite an old man. His face is ashen, his eyelids finely lined, his shoulders stooped, as if someone had transformed him.
‘None of us lives the right life,’ says he, ‘one works and drudges one’s whole life long, and then one is buried.’
All at once it must have become very quiet. Evening is falling, too.
‘We must have some light!’ says Bohlaug.
This was said for Glanz’s benefit.
‘I’ll be on my way now, many thanks for the good tea.’
Phöbus Bohlaug gives him his hand and says to me, ‘Let’s see more of you, too.’
Glanz led me along unknown lanes, past courtyards and untidy backyards, vacant lots with dirt and rubbish heaps, where pigs grunted and poked about for scraps with their dirty noses. Swarms of green flies buzzed about dark brown heaps of human excrement. The town had no drainage, all the houses stank, and from this combination of every kind of stink Glanz prophesied a sudden rainstorm.
‘This is how our affairs go,’ says Glanz, ‘Bohlaug is a rich man with a small heart. You see, Herr Dan, people’s hearts aren’t bad, just far too small. There isn’t enough to go round, just enough for a wife and children.’
We come to a little alley. Jews are standing about, strolling in the middle of the street, carrying umbrellas ludicrously rolled and with crooked shafts. They either stand still looking thoughtful or else walk ceaselessly to and fro. Here, one will disappear. There, one will emerge from a house door, look enquiringly to left and to right and begin to stroll about.
Silent as shadows, people pass each other. It is an assembly of ghosts and the long dead gather here. For thousands of years this race has been wandering in narrow alleys.
As one approaches one can see how two of them will stop, murmur for a second and walk on without a greeting, only to meet again a few minutes later and murmur half a sentence.
A policeman appears. His boots are yellow and they squeak. His sabre swings at his side as he strides up the middle of the street, past the Jews who make way for him, greet him, call to him, smile at him. No greeting and no call will make him pause as he strides along the street with measured tread, like some woundup clockwork mechanism. His passage has startled nobody.
Somebody at Abel Glanz’s side whispers, ‘Streimer’s coming,’ and there, all at once, stands Jakob Streimer.
At that moment a man in blue overalls lights a gas lamp, almost as if in honour of the new arrival.
Abel Glanz becomes uneasy; all the Jews do.
Jakob Streimer stands at the end of the alley looking even more splendid than the policeman, waiting for the crowd to move towards him, like some eastern potentate waiting for a deputation of his subjects bearing some request. He has gold pince-nez, a well-trimmed brown beard and wears a top hat.
It was soon rumoured that Jakob Streimer was in the market for German reichsmarks.
Abel Glanz entered a shop inside which a woman seemed to be waiting for customers. The woman left her post, a door opened, a bell rang and a man came out of the shop.
Glanz returned, beaming, ‘I’ve bought marks at eleven and three eighths. Think of that! Streimer is buying at twelve and three quarters.’
I begin to ask a question. Glanz slips his hand into my breast pocket, with uncanny certainty, pulls out my wallet, extracts all the paper money, stuffs a bundle of crumpled bank notes into my hand and says, ‘Come along.’
‘Ten thousand,’ says he, and stands before Jakob Streimer.
‘And this gentleman?’ asks Streimer.
‘Yes; Herr Dan.’ Streimer nods.
‘Savoy,’ he says.
‘Congratulations, Herr Dan,’ says Glanz, ‘Streimer has invited you.’
‘How come?’
‘Didn’t you hear? He said “Savoy”. Let’s go. If your Uncle Phöbus Bohlaug had a generous heart, you could go to h
im, borrow money, but German marks – in a couple of hours you could earn a hundred thousand. But he won’t give you anything. So you’ve only earned five thousand.’
‘That’s a lot, too.’
‘Nothing is a lot. A lot is a milliard,’ says Glanz, dreamily. ‘Today, there is no such thing as a lot. Who knows what tomorrow will bring forth? Tomorrow there’s a revolution. The day after, the Bolsheviks arrive. The old fairy stories have come true. Today you put a hundred thousand in the safe, you go back there tomorrow and there are only fifty thousand. These miracles happen nowadays. Nowadays when not even money stays money! What more do you expect?’
We arrived at the Savoy, Glanz opened a little door at the end of a passage, and there stood Ignatz.
The room was dark red and in it stood a bar. Behind the bar stood a woman with red hair, and a couple of made-up girls sat casually at little tables drinking lemonade through thin straws.
Glanz said ‘Good day, Frau Kupfer’ and introduced us, ‘Herr Dan, Frau Jetti Kupfer, our alma mater.’
‘That’s Latin,’ he informs Frau Kupfer.
‘I know you’re an educated man,’ says Frau Kupfer, ‘but you need to earn more money, Herr Glanz.’
‘Now she’s getting back at me for my Latin.’ Glanz is embarrassed.
The room was in half darkness, in a corner hung a lamp giving out a reddish light. A black grand piano stood before a small stage.
I drank two schnaps and slipped into a leather armchair. At the bar sat gentlemen eating rolls with caviare. A pianist sat down to play.
VIII
We are seated at little tables and everyone knows everyone; it is just one big family. Frau Jetti Kupfer rings a little silver bell and naked women come on stage. It becomes quiet and dark, people shift into position and look at the stage. The girls are young and white with powder. They dance badly and each of them keeps time according to her own fancy. Among the lot – there are ten of them – one thin little creature attracts me. She has blue eyes and carefully powdered freckles.
