by Joseph Roth
I understood Henry Bloomfield.
He was homesick, like Zwonimir and me.
People were still arriving from Berlin and other cities. They were loud people who shouted and lied at the top of their voices, so as to deafen their conscience. They were cheats and braggarts and all of them came from the film industry and had a lot to tell about the world, but they saw the world through their goggle eyes, held it to be a commercial failure on the part of God and intended to compete with him and to go into business on an equally large scale.
They lived on the first three storeys and had Zlotogor cure their headaches. Many of them came with their wives and mistresses and thus Zlotogor finally found a lot of work to do.
Much was changing in the Hotel Savoy.
They gave soirees for the ladies and gentlemen and formed dance clubs, and at midnight the gentlemen would flood into the bar and pinch the naked girls and Frau Jetti Kupfer.
Upstairs ‘little’ Alexander wandered around in tails and shiny shoes. So did Zlotogor in a coat buttoned up to the neck, behaving mysteriously and looking like a mischievous youngster.
Bloomfield came with Bondy. Bondy did the talking, but the women looked only at Zwonimir, and since he said nothing it seemed as though they were eavesdropping on his silence, as though they had the power to overhear what he was thinking and hiding.
The people from the upper storeys also came to me, and there was no end to this. I saw that none of them lived at the Hotel Savoy of his own free will. Each of them was gripped by some misfortune, and the Hotel Savoy was the misfortune and they were no longer capable of choosing between this and that. Every piece of bad luck came to them through this hotel and they believed that Savoy was the name of their misfortune.
There was no end to them. Santschin’s widow came too. She was now living at her brother-in-law’s in the country and had hard work to do in the house. She had heard of Bloomfield’s arrival, and how he helped everyone.
I do not know if Santschin’s widow achieved anything. I do not know how many people Bloomfield helped. All of a sudden the very policeman turned up whose family sat every evening at the Variétés.
He was a young, stupid fellow, a back slapper and a sabre rattler, and there was nothing special about him. He had taken over room 80 from his predecessor. All police officers posted here lived inescapably in room 80.
For the past week the officer had been wearing a uniform of dark blue cloth, with a decoration on his chest. I believe he had been promoted a substantive senior lieutenant. He was stilted and pompous and often enough his sabre ended between his legs while he twirled a pair of yellow buckskin gloves in his right hand. He came into the bar, drinking at every table and at everyone else’s expense, ending up at Alexander’s table.
The two got on famously.
The police officer wears his beard trimmed short. His nose is short and flat and his large red ears stand out from a small, clean-shaven skull. His hair grew far down his forehead in a sharp triangle above his nose. He must have worn his service cap well down over his eyes or this ridiculous hair style would have been visible.
I am not familiar with the duties of a police officer, but I do know that he does very little work. Our policeman rose at ten, had lunch at noon and then read the newspapers. This was hard work and he would always take off his sword when he was reading the papers.
He returned to civilian life, so to speak.
In the evening he danced on air – he was a talented dancer. He drenched himself in lily of the valley, smelt like a florist’s shop and danced in narrow trousers which were fastened to his boots with rubber laces. The trousers had a thin red stripe at the seam which showed up beautifully, like blood, in that light. His huge ears were deep purple flames and he wiped the drops of sweat from his nose with a little pocket handkerchief.
The police officer was called Jan Mrock. He was very polite and affable and smiled all the time. His smile was his salvation. Some kind fairy godmother had bequeathed it to him.
When I looked at him, with his rosy skin and his unsuspecting mouth, I knew that he had not altered at all since he was seven. He looked exactly like a schoolboy. Twenty years, war and misery had left him untouched.
Once, he came into the bar with Stasia. A fortnight had passed since I last saw her. She is brown, fresh and smiling and her eyes are large and grey.
‘Are you still here?’ says Stasia, and flushes because she is pretending and knows very well that I have not gone away.
‘Are you disappointed?’
‘You’ve let our friendship drop.’
I never let friendship drop. Stasia is herself guilty of this charge.
Two weeks lie between us. Two hundred years could not have wrought more desolation. I have waited and trembled for her, at the Variétés, pressed into the shadow of a wall. We have drunk tea together and a gentle warmth has enveloped us. She was my first glimpse of love in the Hotel Savoy and neither of us cared for Alexander.
I have peered through her keyhole and seen her pacing back and forth, learning her French vocabulary. It is to Paris that she wishes to go.
I would so gladly have travelled to Paris with her. I would so gladly have remained here with her, for a year, or two years, or ten.
A great store of loneliness has grown in me, six years of solitude.
I look for reasons why I am so far from her, and find none. I look for reproaches – with what should I reproach her? She accepted flowers from Alexander and did not send them back. It is stupid to return flowers. Perhaps I am jealous. If I compare myself with Alexander Bohlaug, everything is clearly in my favour.
In spite of which, I am jealous.
I am not an adventurer, neither do I seek favours. If something comes my way I accept it and am grateful. But Stasia offered me nothing. She wished to be courted.
I did not at that time understand – I had been long alone and without the company of women – why girls are so devious, so patient and so full of pride. Stasia, indeed, was not to know that I would not have accepted her triumphantly but thankfully. Nowadays I realise that it is in the nature of women to hesitate and that their lies are stillborn.
I paid too much attention to the Hotel Savoy, to its inhabitants and to their improbable destinies; too little to my own. Here was a lovely woman, waiting for the right word, and I said nothing, like some stammering schoolboy.
I did stammer. It seemed to me as if Stasia were responsible for my long loneliness, but of course she could not have known it. I held it against her that she was no seer.
I realise now that women are aware of everything that goes on in us, but nonetheless wait for the spoken word.
God built hesitation into the soul of women.
Her presence enticed me. Why did she not come to me? Why did she allow the police officer to escort her? Why did she ask if I were still there? Why did she not say: ‘Thank God, you’re here?’
But perhaps a poor girl will not say to a poor man: ‘Thank God, you’re here!’ It is perhaps not the time to love Gabriel Dan, a poor man without so much as a trunk, let alone a house. This is perhaps the time for girls to love Alexander Bohlaug.
Today I realise that being escorted by the policeman was accidental, and that her question was a statement. But at the time I was lonely and embittered and behaved as if I were the girl and Stasia the man.
She grows still prouder and cooler and I feel how she is widening the distance between us so that we become more and more alien to each other.
‘I am off in ten days quite definitely,’ say I.
‘When you reach Paris, send me a postcard.’
‘Of course, gladly.’
Stasia could have said: ‘I would like to go to Paris with you.’
Instead of which she asked me for a postcard.
‘I will send you one of the Eiffel Tower.’
‘Whatever you fancy,’ says Stasia, and she is not referring to the postcard but ourselves.
That is our final conversatio
n. I know it is the last time we shall talk. Gabriel Dan, you expect nothing from girls, because you are a poor man, Gabriel Dan!
The next morning I see Stasia going downstairs on Alexander’s arm. Both of them smile at me. I am breakfasting downstairs. I know then that Stasia has done something foolish.
I understand her.
Women make their mistakes not out of carelessness or frivolity, but because they are very unhappy.
XXIV
I love the courtyard onto which my bedroom window gives.
It reminds me of the first day in the hotel, the day of my arrival. I can still see children playing, hear a dog barking and take pleasure in the colourful washing flapping like flags.
My room feels uneasy since I began to receive Bloomfield’s visitors. The whole hotel feels uneasy, the corridors, the afternoon lounge and the whole town beneath its pall of coal dust.
When I look out of my window I see something peaceful which has been saved. The cocks are crowing, just the cocks.
There was another light shaft in the Hotel Savoy, a narrow one, looking like a shaft for suicides. Carpets were beaten in it and there the dust was shaken out along with the cigarette ash and rubbish of pullulating life.
My court, however, seemed as if it did not belong to the Hotel Savoy. It was hidden behind enormous walls. I would like to know what became of that court.
It is the same with Bloomfield. When I call him to mind I wonder if he still wears his yellow horn-rimmed glasses. Also I would like to have news of Christopher Columbus, the barber. What empty gap in life is he filling now?
Great events often cast shadows before them in barbers’ shops. In Christopher Columbus’ saloon in the Hotel Savoy it happened that one of Neuner’s striking workmen started a row.
The business was going well. In Columbus’ saloon one heard the latest news every morning. The prominent townsfolk, even the police officer, all the foreign residents of the hotel and most of the locals went to this barber. And once a workman came in, a bit drunk, and outstared the looks of disapproval with supreme indifference.
He had himself shaved and did not pay. Christopher Columbus would have let him go – he was a goodhearted man. But Ignatz threatened him with the police. Then the workman hit out at Ignatz and the police arrested him.
That afternoon his comrades marched on the Hotel Savoy and shouted ‘Pfui!’ before going on to the prison.
And in the night they marched through the startled streets, singing songs.
In the newspaper, in big print and standing out from the middle of the front page, stood the news. A mile or two further on the workers in a textile factory had come out to join the strike. The newspaper called on the army, the police, the administration, and God. The writer declared that all the trouble started with the returning soldiers who had brought with them ‘into this blameless land the bacillus of revolution’. The writer was a pathetic fellow who sprayed ink to stem an avalanche and built dams of paper against the raging tempest.
XXV
For a week it has been raining on the town. The evenings are clear and cool, but during the day it rains.
It blends in well with the rain that at this season the flood of soldiers coming home should surge with renewed force.
They go on through the thin, slanting rain. Russia, mighty Russia, is shaking them out. There is no end to them. They have all travelled the same road in their grey clothes, the dust of the wandering years on their feet, on their faces. It is as if they belonged to the rain. They are as grey and as enduring.
They are an endless river of grey in this grey town. Their canteens rattle like the rain in the runnels. A great homesickness emanates from them, a longing which drives them onward, the overwhelming memory of home.
On the way they are hungry. They steal and they beg and are indifferent to both. They kill geese and chickens and calves, for peace has come to the world, which only means that there is no more need to kill men.
Geese, chickens and calves, however, have nothing to do with peace.
Zwonimir and I stand on the outskirts of the town, by the hutments, looking for a familiar face. All the faces are alien to us, all familair. One marched beside me in extended order, another gave me physical training. We stand sideways on and look at them, but it is just as if we were marching with them. We are like them, Russia has shaken us out, too, and we are all heading home.
One brings a dog with him, carrying it in his arms, and his canteen bangs against his hip at every step. I know he will bring the dog home: home lies in the south, in Agram or Sarajevo and he will faithfully bring the dog home to his cottage. His wife is sleeping with another man and his children will not know the man who has been given for dead. Only the dog will know him, a dog, homeless too.
The homecomers are my brothers and they are hungry. They never used to be my brothers, not in battle when, driven by some incomprehensible will, we would kill unkown men, nor at the base, where we would all move legs and arms in unison at the command of some bad-tempered man. But today I am not alone in the world. I am part of the homecoming soldiers.
They drifted through the town in groups of five or six, separating at the beginning of the hutments. They sang songs about farmyards and houses, in broken, rusty voices and in spite of this the songs were lovely, just as on March evenings the wheezy barrel organ is lovely.
They ate in the soup kitchen. The helpings grew smaller and their hunger greater.
The striking workmen sat and drank away their strike pay in the station waiting-rooms, and the women and children went hungry.
In the bar, Neuner the industrialist reached for the breasts of the naked girls and the important townswomen had their headaches hypnotised away by Xaver Zlotogor. Xaver
Zlotogor was unable to hypnotise away the hunger of the poor women.
His art only applied to minor ailments. Hunger and discontent were beyond his skills.
Neuner the industrialist would not accept Kanner’s advice and placed all the blame on Bloomfield.
But what had Bloomfield to do with this district and its hunger and general situation? His dead father, Jechiel Blumenfeld, was not hungry and it was because of him that Henry Bloomfield had come here.
The town acquired a cinema and a fireworks factory, and what did that mean to the workers’ women? The fireworks were for the prosperous people and a toy meant nothing to a working man. With Chinese crackers and catherine wheels and the cinema they could forget Neuner, but not their hunger.
Zwonimir said once, ‘The revolution is here.’
When we sit in the hutments and talk to the soldiers coming home – outside, the slanting rain falls ceaselessly -we can sense the revolution. It is coming from the East and no army or newspaper can halt it.
‘The Hotel Savoy,’ said Zwonimir to the homecomers, ‘is a rich palace and a prison. Down below live the wealthy people, Neuner’s friends, the factory owners, in fine wide rooms, and up above live the poor devils who cannot pay for their rooms, whose luggage is in pawn to Ignatz. The proprietor of the hotel is a Greek. No one knows him, not even we know him and we’re shrewd fellows.
‘Many years have passed since we lay in such lovely soft beds as the fine folk have on the lower floors of the Hotel Savoy.
‘Many long years have passed since we possessed such beautiful naked girls as the ones in the bar where the gentlemen go in the Hotel Savoy.
‘This town is a grave for poor people. The workmen in Neuner’s factory swallow dust from his brushes and they all die in their fiftieth year.’
‘Pfui!’ shout the homecomers.
The worker who had gone for Ignatz was not released from prison.
Every day the workmen demonstrated in front ot the Hotel Savoy and the prison.
Every day the headlines in the paper are about the strike in the textile industry.
I can smell revolution. The banks – according to Christopher Columbus – are packing their valuables and sending them to other towns. ‘They are going to
reinforce the police,’ announces Abel Glanz.
‘They are going to intern the returning soldiers,’ Hirsch Fisch informs us.
‘I shall head for Paris,’ says Alexander.
‘One cannot even get away,’ wails Phöbus Bohlaug.
‘Typhus has broken out,’ announces the army doctor.
‘How does one protect oneself from typhus?’ asks Kanner’s younger daughter.
‘Death will take us all,’ says the military doctor, and Fraulein Kanner turns pale.
For the time being, however, death only takes a couple of women workers. Their children fall ill and are taken to hospital.
The soup kitchen is closed so as to limit the danger of infection, so the hungry receive no more soup.
The returning soldiers could no longer be confined to the hutments. There were too many of them.
There were whole hordes of them.
The police officer says that reinforcements have been requested. The police officer was not excited. He carries a service revolver and gets out of bed at nine instead of ten. He twiddles his doeskin gloves as if there were no typhus.
The disease attacked a couple of poor Jews. I saw them buried. The Jewish women raised a great lament and their cries hovered on the air.
Ten, twelve people died every day.
The rain falls thinly and shrouds the town, and through the rain flow homecomers.
The newspapers are ablaze with bad news and every day Neuner’s workmen parade in front of the hotel and shout.
XXVI
One morning Bloomfield, Bondy, the chauffeur and Christopher Columbus are gone.
In Bloomfield’s room a letter was waiting for me, and Ignatz brought it.
Bloomfield writes:—
‘Dear Sir,
I am grateful for your help and permit myself to leave you a fee. You will understand the reason for my abrupt departure. If your road should ever lead you to America I hope you will not fail to call on me.’
I found a fee in a special sort of envelope. It was a princely fee.
