by Joseph Roth
Henry Bloomfield took flight in total silence. With dimmed headlights, on silent wheels, without a sound of the horn and in the dark of the night Henry Bloomfield fled before the typhus and the revolution. He has paid his respects to his dead father and he will never come home again. He will suppress his homesickness, will Henry Bloomfield. Money cannot shift all obstacles.
That evening the guests met in the bar, drank and discussed the sudden departure of Henry Bloomfield.
Ignatz brought a special issue of a newspaper from the neighbouring town. There the workmen were fighting the soldiers from the capital.
The police officer informs us that there have already been urgent requests for soldiers.
Alexander Bohlaug intended to travel to Paris in the next day or two.
Frau Jetti Kupfer rang at once. The naked girls should come.
Just then there was a report and a couple of bottles tumbled down from the buffet.
One heard the tinkle of broken window panes.
The police officer ran out. Frau Jetti Kupfer locked the door.
‘Open up,’ yells Kanner.
‘Do you think we want to perish in this place of yours?’ shouts Neuner, and the duelling scars on his cheek stand out as if they had been painted red.
Neuner shoves Frau Jetti Kupfer out of the way and opens the door.
The porter lies bleeding in his chair.
A couple of workers are standing in the lobby. One of them has tossed a hand grenade.
Outside in the narrow lane a big crowd stands and shouts.
Hirsch Fisch appeared in his underwear.
‘Where’s Neuner?’ asks the workman who threw the hand grenade.
‘Neuner’s at his home,’ says Ignatz.
He did not know whether to run to the army doctor or back into the bar to warn Neuner.
‘Neuner’s at home!’ shouts the worker to the people outside.
‘To Neuner’s, to Neuner’s!’ yells a woman.
The lane empties.
The porter is dead. The army doctor says nothing. I have never seen him so pale.
All the bar customers are cursing. Neuner allows himself to be escorted out by the police officer.
Dawn breaks to the accompaniment of a thin rain, like all the previous mornings. A police cordon stands outside the Hotel Savoy. Police bar both ends of the narrow lane. The crowd stands in the market square and throws stones into the empty lane. There are enough lying there to pave it afresh.
The police officer stands with his doeskin gloves in the entrance. He holds back Zwonimir and myself when we want to leave.
Zwonimir pushes him aside. We slip along close to the walls to avoid being hit by the stones. We pass through the police cordon and force our way through the crowd.
Zwonimir has many friends. They call, ‘Zwonimir!’
A man is talking from a fountain, ‘Friends, the soldiers are expected. They’ll be here this evening.’
We walk through the town, which is silent. The shops are closed. We meet a Jewish funeral. The pallbearers are running with the corpse on their shoulders and the women go hurrying after them, lamenting.
We know that we shall never again see the Hotel Savoy. Zwonimir smiles slyly, ‘We haven’t settled for our room!’
We come to the very tobacconist outside which the winners of the little lottery were written up. I remember my own ticket.
The shopkeeper is afraid and the shop is tight shut but the draw is pinned to the wall alongside the green shop door. I did not see my numbers, perhaps yesterday they had been written up in chalk and the rain had washed them away.
We meet Abel Glanz in the Jewish quarter. He has not slept in the hotel at all, and brings news. ‘Neuner’s house is in ruins, he and his family have driven away in their car.’
‘Kill them!’ shouts Zwonimir.
We return to the hotel, the crowd will not make way.
‘Forward!’ yells Zwonimir.
A couple of homecomers take up the cry.
A man forces his way through the crowd, stands in front of it. Suddenly I see him stretch his hand forward. There is a report, the police cordon wavers and the mob is into the lane.
The police officer shouts a sharp order, a few scattered shots ring out, a couple of men fall and a few women scream.
‘Hurrah!’ shout the returning soldiers.
‘Make way!’ shouts Taddeus Montag the draughtsman. He is tall and thin and stands half a head above anyone else. For the first time in his life he shouts.
They let him out, and others follow him. Many of the hotel’s residents push their way through the crowd and into the market square.
The manager of the hotel stands in the square, which he has reached unobserved. He cups his mouth with both hands and strains his head in the direction of the seventh storey window,
‘Herr Kaleguropulos!’
I hear him yelling and fight my way across to him. So much is going on here, but Kaleguropulos concerns me.
‘Where is Kaleguropulos?’
‘He won’t come out,’ cries the manager, ‘he just won’t!’
At this moment the skylight opens and Ignatz, the old liftboy, appears. Could his lift have taken him as high as that?
‘The hotel is on fire,’ screams Ignatz.
‘Come on down then,’ calls the manager.
At this instant a bright tongue of flame breaks out of the skylight and Ignatz’s head disappears.
‘We must rescue him,’ says the manager.
A yellow burst of flame leaps out like an animal.
The sixth floor is on fire, and the fourth. Every floor is ablaze as the mob storms the hotel.
I can see Zwonimir in the maelstrom, and call to him.
The bells from the town’s towers and steeples toll heavily among all the noise.
There comes a menacing roll of drums and the hard step of hobnailed boots. A shouted order explodes.
XXVII
The soldiers have come more quickly than I had thought. They are marching exactly as we too once marched in broad double columns, taking plenty of room with an officer at their head and a drummer on the flank. They are carrying fixed bayonets and as they march through the rain the mud splashes up and the whole solid mass of soldiery stamps like a machine.
A word of command dissolves the solid double ranks. The soldiers stand there like a thin line of trees, some way apart from each other, on the Ringplatz.
They surround the whole block, the mob is trapped inside the hotel and in the narrow lane.
I never do see Zwonimir again.
XXVIII
I waited all night for Zwonimir.
Many were killed. Perhaps Zwonimir was among them?
I wrote to his old father and told him that Zwonimir had died in captivity. Why should I tell the old man that death had taken his strong son on the journey home?
Many returning soldiers met their death in the Hotel Savoy. For six long years, in war and captivity, death had lain in wait for them, and death never misses.
The grey light of dawn silhouetted the half burned ruins of the hotel. The night was cool and windy and had fanned the flames. Morning brings grey, slanting rain to douse the glowing embers.
I walk with Abel Glanz to the station. We sit in the empty waiting-room. The next train will be allowed to leave that evening.
‘Do you realise that Ignatz was in fact Kaleguropulos -and that Hirsch Fisch was also burnt in the hotel?’
‘A pity,’ says Abel Glanz, ‘it was a good hotel.’
We travel in a slow train with returning soldiers who are southern Slavs. They sing. Abel Glanz sings, ‘When I reach my uncle in New York … ’
I think to myself: America; that is what Zwonimir would have said, just America.
this book with friends
