by Joseph Roth
Her little bones are delicate, her movements disjointed and timid. With her hands she tries vainly to conceal her breasts which are small and pointed and tremble continuously like young frozen animals.
At this moment Frau Jetti rings the little silver bell again, the dance stops, the pianist breaks into a thunderous beat. The lights go up and at the same moment the girls’ bodies retreat half a pace, as if the sudden brilliance of the lights had just undressed them. They turn about before goosestepping off the stage and Frau Jetti calls, ‘Toni!’
Toni, the little freckled one, came; Frau Jetti Kupfer came down from the bar as if descending from the clouds. She exudes a strong aroma of scent and liquor, and presents, ‘Fraulein Toni, our latest!’
‘Splendid!’ shouted one gentleman. It was Herr Kanner, a manufacturer of aniline, as Glanz explained to me. ‘Tonka,’ said he, making a gesture of admiration with his thumb and forefinger, and reaching for Tonka’s hips with his left hand.
‘Where are the girls hiding?’ shouts Jakob Streimer. ‘What kind of service is this? Here sit Herr Neuner and Anselm Schwadron, and you treat them as if they were … I don’t know who …’ Ignatz came gliding across the room and brought five of the naked girls, placing them at five tables. Frau Kupfer said, ‘We hadn’t reckoned on so many guests.’
Anselm Schwadron and Philipp Neuner, the manufacturers, stood up together, beckoned two girls over and ordered sloe gin cocktails.
A guest came in and was greeted with a great deal of noise, the girls seemed to be forgotten and sat on their little chairs like lost property.
The guest announces, ‘Bloomfield is in Berlin today!’
‘In Berlin,’ they all repeat.
‘When’s he arriving?’ asks Kanner of the aniline factory.
‘Any day now,’ says the newcomer.
‘And my workmen have to go on strike just at this moment,’ says Philipp Neuner, a big German with reddish blond colouring, a bull neck and a round, forceful, childish face.
‘Compromise, Neuner,’ says Kanner.
‘Twenty per cent rise for the married men?’ asks Neuner. ‘Can you afford that?’
‘I give a rise for each child born,’ caps Kanner, ‘and since then a rash of children has broken out among my workmen. I wish all my enemies had such a fertile work force. I always warn these men that they are fooling themselves, but a workman will lose his wits for two per cent on his salary and land me with a swarm of children.’
‘Listen to him, yet!’ says Streimer in a bored voice.
‘A manufacturer doesn’t negotiate! Remember that!’ snarls Philipp Neuner, who once served in the Guards with a one year commission.
‘A duellist,’ says Glanz.
‘More so than a manufacturer,’ says Streimer, ‘but this is not Prussia.’
Ignatz rushes in with a telegram. For two or three seconds he relishes the company’s silent curiosity and then speaks so softly that he can hardly be heard.
‘A telegram from Herr Bloomfield. He is coming on Thursday and is booking room 13!’
‘Thirteen? Bloomfield is superstitious,’ Kanner explains.
‘We only have a 12A and a 14,’ says Ignatz.
‘Paint on a 13,’ says Jakob Streimer.
‘Bullseye! Bravo Streimer!’ cries Neuner, appeased and holding out his hand.
‘I’m just a negotiator,’ said Streimer and put his hand in his pocket.
‘No quarrelling please,’ says Kanner, ‘not with Bloomfield coming.’
I go up to the seventh floor and it suddenly seems to me that Stasia must be there to meet me. Instead Hirsch Fisch comes out of his room holding his chamberpot.
‘Bloomfield is coming! Can you believe it?’
I no longer hear him.
IX
Santschin has suddenly fallen ill.
‘Suddenly,’ everyone says, unaware that Santschin has been for ten years unremittingly on the road to death. To the very day. In the prison camp at Simbirsk a man died suddenly like that, a year ago. A little Jew. He dropped dead one afternoon while he was washing his mess kit. He lay on his stomach, all four limbs extended, and was dead. At the time someone said, ‘Ephraim Krojanker died suddenly.’
‘Number 748 has suddenly fallen ill,’ say the floor waiters. There were no names whatever on the top three storeys of the hotel. Everyone was known by room numbers.
Number 748 is Santschin, Wladimir Santschin. He lies half dressed on the bed, smoking, and he does not want the doctor.
‘It’s a hereditary illness,’ he says, ‘a question of the lungs. Mine might perhaps have stayed sound because I was a hearty fellow when I was born and screamed so loudly that the midwife had to block her ears. But out of anger or because there was nowhere to put anything in that little room she laid me on the window sill. Since then I’ve coughed.’
Santschin lies barefoot on the bed with only his trousers on. I observe that his feet are dirty and that his toes are disfigured by corns and all sorts of distortions. His feet remind one of odd tree roots in a forest. His big toes are knobbly and crooked.
He wants no doctor because his father and his grandfather also died without having a doctor.
Hirsch Fisch arrives, offering a health-giving tea which he hopes to sell at a price which is ‘good value’.
When he sees that no one wants his tea he asks me to step outside, ‘Perhaps you’d like to buy a lottery ticket?’
‘Let me have a look,’ I say.
‘The draw is next Friday. The numbers are certainties.’ They were 5, 8 and 3.
Stasia rushes by breathlessly, she could not even wait for Ignatz with the lift. Her face is flushed and strands of hair fly about it.
‘You must give me money, Herr Fisch,’ she says, ‘Santschin must have the doctor.’
‘Then buy the tea, too,’ says Fisch and gives me a sly glance.
‘I’ll pay the doctor,’ I say, and buy the tea.
‘Just keep calm, Herr Santschin,’ I say in Russian, ‘Stasia has gone to fetch the doctor.’
‘Why does nobody tell me?’ Santschin goes on. With some difficulty I push him back onto the bed. ‘We must open the windows, woman, do you hear me? We must empty the bucket and clear out the ash. The doctor will accuse me of smoking, naturally. All doctors are the same about that. And what’s more I haven’t shaved. Give me my cutthroat. It’s on the chest of drawers.’
But the razor was not on the chest of drawers. His wife finds it in her sewing basket, because she has been using it instead of scissors to cut off trouser buttons.
I am to bring Santschin a glass of water; he wets his face, extracts a pocket mirror from his trouser pocket, holds it in front of him with his left hand, purses his mouth, pouches his tongue in his right cheek so that the skin is taut, and shaves without soap. He only nicks himself once, ‘Because you are watching me,’ he says, and I look in embarrassment towards some corner or other. Then he sticks a cigarette paper onto the scratch.
‘Now the doctor can come.’
I recognised the doctor. He would sit everyday in the hotel’s afternoon lounge. He has been an army doctor. One can see his long service, he has the steady tread of the retired officer, as if he were wearing spurs, and he stands chest out, stomach in.
He does still affect little spurs at his heels, in spite of his civilian dress and long trousers. A distinction, as of Imperial manoeuvres, emanates from his upright carriage, his gunmetal eyes and his carrying voice.
‘Only the south can save you,’ says the doctor, ‘but if you can’t go to the south, the south must come to you; wait a moment.’
The doctor with his heavy step goes to the door and rings. He keeps on ringing as he talks, keeping his thumb on the bell: a couple of minutes pass before the waiter knocks.
The floor waiter stands to attention before the doctor who calls in his most commanding voice, ‘Bring me the winelist!’
It is very quiet in the room just now; Santschin’s eyes wander from the doctor, to Stas
ia, to me, sensing a mystery. Then the waiter returns with the winelist.
‘A bottle of Malaga and five glasses, on my bill,’ orders the doctor.
‘The only medicine,’ he says emphatically to Santschin, ‘three little glasses of wine every day, do you understand me?’
The doctor half fills all five glasses and hands them to us one after the other. I then notice that the doctor is an old man. His bony hands have many small blue veins, and tremble.
‘To your good health,’ says the doctor to Santschin and we all clink glasses. It is like a cheerful wake.
I hand the old doctor his hat and his stick, and Stasia and I escort him down the corridor.
‘He won’t live beyond two bottles,’ the doctor tells us, ‘but no need to tell him so! No point in his making a will.’
The doctor struck his stick on the flagstones and walked away to the clink of spurs. He would accept no money.
That evening I accompanied Stasia to the Variétés.
It was still the same programme. Only there was a gap, or so it seemed to me, because I knew Santschin was absent. His donkey trotted onto the stage, its long ears with their red paint rising and drooping as if on springs. It was looking for something on the boards, he missed Santschin, Santschin the merry, Santschin rolled up into a ball, Santschin’s gravelly, cracked voice, his gurgles and shouts, his clownish lamentations. The donkey felt ill at ease, rose on his hind legs, forelegs in the air, danced to a march played by the brass band and trotted offf.
I met ‘little Alexander’ Bohlaug; he had a seat in the front row and was eating a caviare roll, holding it between thumb and middle finger, splaying his childlike hand. When the dance number began and Stasia came on he winced as if something were hurting him. But this was only because he was screwing in a monocle.
I went home then with Stasia. We chose quiet little lanes, looked through lighted windows into rooms, poor little rooms in which small Jewish children were eating bread and radishes and burying their faces in great gourds.
‘Did you notice how sad Augustus was?’
‘Who’s Augustus?’
‘Santschin’s donkey, he’s been working for six years with Santschin.’
‘Well, the Hotel Savoy is going to be one short,’ I say, simply because I am afraid to say nothing.
Stasia said nothing. She was waiting for me to say something more, and just as we are about to enter the market square – we are in the last narrow lane – Stasia hesitates slightly and would gladly have lingered.
We did not utter another word until we were seated in the lift with Ignatz. We are then embarrassed by his penetrating look and only talk of trivialities.
That night Stasia carried the bedclothes of Frau Santschin and her child across to her own room and asked me to stay with Santschin.
Santschin was delighted. He thanked Stasia, took her hand and mine, and squeezed them both.
It was a dreadful night.
I recalled nights out in the freedom of the snowfields, of nights on watch at the outposts, of white nights in the Ukraine, when I was freezing and the rockets blazed across the sky tearing it like red and fiery wounds. But not a single night of my life, even the one in which I hung between life and death, was as frightening as this one.
Santschin’s temperature rises abruptly and rapidly. Stasia brings in cloths dipped in vinegar and we apply them to his head – they do no good.
Santschin is delirious, gives a free performance, and summons Augustus, his donkey. He holds out his hand as if to offer the animal a lump of sugar, as he does before every performance. He jumps up and shouts, claps his hands for applause, as he does in the Variétés. He stretches his head forward, waggles his ears, stiffens like a hound and listens for the applause.
‘Clap,’ says Stasia, and we clap. Santschin bows.
By morning Santschin lay in a cold sweat. Great drops formed like glass blisters on his brow. Everything smelt of vinegar, urine and stale air.
Frau Santschin keened gently. She pressed against the door. We left her to cry.
As Stasia and I left, Ignatz bade us good morning. He was standing in the corridor so naturally that this might have been his permanent position, here and nowhere else in the world.
‘Santschin is really going to die?’ asks Ignatz.
At this moment it seems to me that death has assumed the face of the old lift-boy and is now standing there, waiting for a soul.
X
Santschin was buried at three in the afternoon, in a remote section of the east cemetery.
Anyone who might wish to visit his grave in winter will have hard work digging his way through with spade and shovel. All paupers who are buried at the expense of the town are placed a long way out and only after another three generations will this outlying part of the graveyard reveal human occupancy.
But by then it will not be possible to find Santschin’s grave.
Not even Abel Glanz, the poor prompter, will lie so far away.
Santschin’s grave is in the cold clay – I looked into it as they were burying him – and his defenceless bones are given over to the beasts of the earth.
Santschin lay for three days at the Variétés because the Savoy is decidedly no hotel for the dead, but only for the very much alive. He lay behind the stage in a little cell-like cupboard, and his wife sat beside him and a poor sexton prayed for him. The director of the Variétés had provided the candles.
The chorus girls had to go past the dead Santschin in order to reach the stage, the brass band made its usual noise, even Augustus the donkey came past but Santschin did not move.
No one in the audience knew that a corpse lay behind the stage. At first the police wanted to forbid it but a police officer, who always received free seats – his relations filled a quarter of the theatre – brought permission.
The funeral procession started from the Variétés and the director accompanied it to the edge of the town, where the slaughterhouses stand – in this town the dead take the same route as the cattle. His colleagues, with Stasia, myself and his wife, followed him to the graveside.
As we reached the gates of the cemetery, Xaver Zlotogor, the mesmerist, was standing there arguing with the keeper of the cemetery. Unobserved Zlotogor had led Santschin’s donkey to the open grave, and left it there.
‘He can’t be buried like that!’ shouted the keeper.
‘That’s the way he’s going to be buried!’ said Zlotogor.
There was a short pause while the Greek Orthodox priest decided the matter and since Xaver Zlotogor whispered something in his ear he decided that the beast could stay.
The donkey stood with a mourning lappet behind his drooping ears, and did not move. He stood right at the graveside and did not move and everyone went round him, not daring to push him aside.
I returned with Xaver Zlotogor and the donkey, along the wide, gravel paths of the cemetery, past imposing tombs. The dead of all confessions lie here, not far from one another, only the Jewish cemetery is separated by two railings. Jewish beggars stand by the railings and on the paths all day long, like human cypresses. They live by the generosity of wealthy heirs and scatter their blessings over all who give to them.
I had to express my appreciation to Xaver Zlotogor. He had fought bravely for the donkey. I did not yet have any acquaintance with the mesmerist, who did not appear every day but only on Sundays and special occasions. Often he travelled ‘independently’ through small and middling towns and gave demonstrations.
He lives in the Hotel Savoy on the third floor. He can afford to.
Xaver Zlotogor is a widely travelled man who knows Western Europe and India, where he learned his art from fakirs, so he says. He may well be about forty but one can put no age to him, so well does he control his expression and movements.
From time to time I feel he may be tired and as we go along I think he may be giving a little at the knees and, because it is a long way and I’m no longer fresh myself, I have it in mind to propose that we
sit down for a little on a stone. But lo and behold: Xaver leaps over the stone, knees up and well clear, like a fourteen-year-old boy. At this moment he has the look of a boy, an olive green, Jewish boy’s face, with mischievous eyes. A minute later his mouth is tired, his lower lip pendulous and it looks as if his chin weighs so much that he rests it on his chest.
Xaver Zlotogor transforms himself so rapidly and in so little time that I begin to find him unattractive and am forced to think that the whole splendid episode with the donkey was a mean practical joke, that this Xaver Zlotogor was not always so named, that perhaps – and the name suddenly comes to me – he was called Solomon Goldenberg in his little Galician home. Odd that his idea of bringing the donkey to the cemetery had made me forget that he was a mesmerist, an insolent magician who betrayed the Indian fakirs for money and only knew as much about the secrets of a strange world as was afforded by its little set pieces of magic. And God allowed him to live and did not punish him.
‘Herr Zlotogor,’ I say, ‘I must unfortunately leave you to yourself. I have a very important appointment.’
‘With Herr Phöbus Bohlaug?’ asks Zlotogor.
I was taken aback and would have liked to ask, ‘How do you know?’ but I suppressed this question and said ‘No’, followed at once by ‘Good evening’, although twilight was not approaching and the sun would be enjoying its stay in the heavens for some time yet.
I walked off rapidly in the opposite direction. I saw that I was not heading for the town, heard Zlotogor call something after me but did not look round.
Bundles of new mown hay smelled strong, out of a pigsty came grunts. Behind the huts stood a scatter of lean-tos and their tin roofs glowed as if molten. I wanted to be on my own till evening. I thought of many things, important and unimportant, and they came into my mind like strange birds, only to fly off again.
Late in the evening I returned home. Fields and paths lay in darkness and the crickets were chirping. Yellow lights were shining in the village cottages, bells were striking.
