The Hotel Years

by Joseph Roth

  So I went up to the gypsies, stepped between them, took them by the arm, and led them across, feeling how they trembled.

  When I got to the other side, I tipped my hat to them and let them go their ways.

  A gentleman with a large blond moustache that went out into a couple of butchers’ hooks threw me an angry look from his sky-blue eyes, full of contempt and menace and inexpressible rage.

  The two young gypsy girls didn’t turn back, they walked on. A puff of wind blew out their skirts, and they looked like two wandering flags.

  Frankfurter Zeitung, 12 May 1924

  18. Grock

  Grock is in Berlin. Grock, the great clown.

  First of all a bespectacled gentleman in dinner jacket walks on stage. He is a violinist, a virtuoso, a ten a penny virtuoso, a civilized being, there is nothing out of the ordinary about him. As he holds the violin under his chin, lifts the bow with a graceful and practised movement and begins to play, it is all of exemplary mediocrity, unobtrusive and routine.

  Then the right wall lifts quietly, and very carefully, sheepishly, and with the modest air of someone who has no business being there, a very striking creature walks onto the stage in baggy grey tails, falling too far over the baggy grey trousers, and with a round grey bowler hat on his head. The bulging eyes, which from the shape of them must be exceedingly stupid, though they have a sort of unnatural cunning, carefully test the atmosphere. A long, very soft and well-behaved chin hangs sadly down, resigned, disappointed a thousand times over, ten thousand times over, but still with a little optimism. No doubt about it: this is Grock.

  Grock is carrying a large suitcase. It contains a minuscule violin. The gentleman in the dinner jacket is vastly surprised. Grock is beginning to feel at home. Oh, it’s so nice being here! What a kindly gentleman! Now Grock will play you something. He settles himself on the chair arm, with his big, soft, yellow shoes on the seat, and plays very nobly, very movingly, and with plenty of feeling, proper grown-up notes on his tiny violin.

  Next he is to accompany the gentleman at the piano. But first he has to change. He returns in a set of tight black tails, with pitifully bowed, wavy legs in tight, implacably form-hugging trousers. And now begins the fight against life, the brutal unremitting struggle against the resistance of everything in the world, the wickedness and unfittedness of things, the grotesque illogic of ordinary circumstance. The piano is too far from the stool: he needs to move it. The lid is open: if he tries to put his top hat on it, it will fall to the floor. It’s impossible to hit the correct notes, because he is wearing thick white gloves. So he had better take them off. How is a man to come to such a conclusion unaided? Luckily, he has his sensible friend to tell him.

  Grock takes off his gloves and rolls them up. They look like an egg. An egg! Did you ever?! An extremely amusing scene surfaces in Grock’s memory: a man juggling with eggs. A conjuror. Just at that moment juggling seems more important than music making. A pair of white gloves in the guise of an egg leaves Grock with no option. It takes quite some time. Finally the gentleman calls him back to the piano.

  Grock has a wonderful, round, almost cylindrical mouth organ. It’s capable of sounding like an organ. Because of course it is a terribly dignified, positively sacred object. But when you hold it in your hands, sometimes it plays itself. It makes singular very high squeaky sounds. Grock is afraid of these sounds that seem to leap of their own accord from the interior of the instrument, exuberant little beasts, unable to stand their long imprisonment. Grock leaps away. He still has the mouth organ. A little note squirts out. Grock turns round. There is a titanic battle between the man’s will, his fingers and the obstinate instrument.

  Several times this fight reaches a sort of climax: when Grock starts to look for his cufflinks way past his elbow, where a normal person gets his vaccination; when Grock takes the violin in his right hand, the bow in his left, and is unable to play; when Grock tosses the bow high up in the air and is unable to catch it. Then he goes behind a partition to practise. Comes out, throws the bow in the air and catches it. A minute passes. Then Grock remembers he has pulled off his difficult trick, and he cheers, a cheer that is half grunt, half whoop. It is the great joy of an adorable idiot.

  He thanks the audience for their applause, comes out in front of the curtain, bows, and then can’t find his way offstage. Grock is cut off from the scenery, left to the mercy of the people in the stalls who now, of all things, applaud him—but for how long, how long? Soon, they will start to laugh at his helpless condition just as they laughed at his intentional jokes before—evil people. No one makes a move, no one shows him where to go, the curtain has innumerable pleats, yes, it seems to consist of nothing but pleats, one of them must be the way out, but which one. What an awful pickle. Mustn’t show that he’s stuck, whatever he does! Another nice, smiling, adorable bow. The people are to believe that he’s staying out of gratitude, sheer heartfelt gratitude. Then while they’re still clapping, quickly pick up the curtain, and slip under it! Saved.

  Grock appears once more, but it is a different Grock, a Grock without bald patch, with a sad face full of noble ugliness, an aristocrat in a crude world, a man of noble truth betrayed a thousand times, an honest, yes, a humble striver who always comes a cropper, a man born for despair who forces himself to believe, a clumsy so-and-so, a hero, a lofty man in the depths, defeated a thousand times but always victorious.

  Frankfurter Zeitung, 10 December 1924

  19. The Dapper Traveller

  The dapper traveller enters the compartment carrying in his hand a small case of soft leather, accompanied by a porter who hoists a suitcase of tough leather into the luggage net. The dapper traveller pays him quietly without looking and without responding to his goodbye. Straightaway he drops into the seat and bounces up once before his body comes to rest. He peels off his grey leather gloves and lays them in the soft little case, from which he takes out a pair of grey thread gloves. These he puts on, stroking each finger straight. Thereupon he looks in a mirror with leather backing, runs his right hand lightly through his hair, and looks out of the window without fixing any particular object or person.

  The traveller is clad in a discreet grey, set off by an exquisite iridescent purple tie. With complacent attention he examines his feet, his leather shoes, and the fine knots in the broad laces. He stretches out his legs in the compartment, both arms are casually on the arm rests to either side. Before long the grey traveller pulls out his mirror again, and brushes his dense, black parted hair with his fingers, in the way one might apply a feather duster to a kickshaw. Then he burrows in his case, and various useful items come to light: a leather key-holder, a pair of nail scissors, a packet of cigarettes, a little silk handkerchief and a bottle of eau de cologne.

  Then the traveller pushes a cigarette between his lips and pats his pockets for matches. Now, where are his matches? Yes, where are they, the elegant, flat matches for his waistcoat pocket, with their little yellow youthful phosphorus heads?

  They are forgotten, lost, stolen, spoiled, disappeared, they are not there. The dapper traveller no longer dominates the compartment. Yes, he even feels a little trivial, with his impeccable outfit and no matches. His distinguished, sensual, olive-yellow face takes on a pale brown coloration. With his soft little leather case in his hand, he marches off in the direction of the dining car.

  When he returns, fed, a little grease at the corners of his lips, he pulls a leather-bound volume from the pocket of his travelling cloak. He writes with a silver pencil, engrossed, dreamy. He is surely a poet.

  Yes, clearly, a popular poet. He invents female characters so ethereal, so morphinistically thin that one may not see that they are spun from nothing at all. He is a poet on laid paper, his hand signs three hundred and fifty-one book jackets a year.

  But as he leans forward and puts his book down on his knee, I see that what he was writing and totting up were columns of figures.
The beautiful book contains profane calculations.

  Then he puts a cigarette between his lips and his olive yellow face turns brown, and because I am getting off soon, I offer him my matches. But he refuses them. Because mine is a common or garden matchbox, bulky, just the thing to spoil the line of a waistcoat pocket, and full of common or garden red-tipped matches, not to be carried in a leather case without compromising oneself.

  Frankfurter Zeitung, 8 August 1924

  III

  Austria and Elsewhere

  20. Bruck and Kiralyhida

  Bruck-Kiralyhida was once like so: hyphenated.

  Then came the revolution, it washed away the hyphen, and with that the Dual Monarchy was finished.

  If the hyphen had remained, we might still have had the Duality today.

  The hyphen was in reality a bridge, the bridge over the Leitha, connecting cis- and trans-. Traffic crossed the bridge completely unimpeded. On this side people spoke German and Hungarian, on the other side Hungarian and German. This side they swaggered in black and yellow, the other side they glittered in red, white and green. On this side they were loyal to the emperor, on the other to Kiraly. Those were the main differences; everything else was negligible. Here as there, the children were blond, brown- or black-haired, but always dirty. Here as there, the merchants were clever, practical-minded and sober. Here as there, one could get through money easily and painlessly. And get through it one did. Nowhere in the monarchy more easily than in Bruck-Kiralyhida.

  During the war there was a penal institution in Bruck that went by the name of “Officers’ Training College”. It had the task of turning one-year volunteers “with button” into privileged detainees with a claim to pay and an ensign’s sword-knot. Every day the striplings of this institution marched across the bridge. Back then the bridge still signified the place where Austrians and Hungarians rubbed shoulders, to fight and give their lives for their joint fatherland. The ones for the Kaiser, the others for their king. Back then, it was still one person. Now one has become two. The hyphen is gone . . .

  But no. If one looks more closely, it is still there. Only it is called something else. It has become a line of separation. Instead of conjoining, it dissevers. In a word, it is a frontier. The hyphen is an armed frontier. Defended on this side by Austrian gendarmes, on the other by Red Guards. An eerie feeling to stand close to the bridge. The heart for a moment stops beating. The end of the world. The beginning of chaos. The limits of common sense. Or of irrationality?

  Frontier traffic is lively. People exchange money, goods, ideas. In the interests of fairness, the Austrian government has despatched one policeman for every Hungarian agent-provocateur. They get along extraordinarily well, and frequent the same bars. The better to observe the other, they play billiards together.

  There are also middle-class people. Hungarian capitalists. They are very difficult to tell apart from the agents-provocateurs. They also speak Hungarian, are just as elegant, their wallets have the same extent and cubic volume. Only they don’t dare to cross the border, and are waiting for the fall of the Kun dictatorship. The agents-provocateurs are waiting for the dictatorship of the proletariat to reach Austria. That’s the extent of the difference.

  The entente is represented as well. By four Englishmen, NCOs, on 100 crowns per diem. Only one of them speaks any German. And so the four of them hang around together all day. They eat the same food, drink the same drinks, buy the same commodities. Simply because only one of them knows any German, and so the others all fall in with him. Because it’s awkward and not very English to talk a lot and to gesticulate. The Hungarians more than make up for it. They all speak German.

  If you’re not very careful, the shops, cafés, hotels, etc., will give you twenty kronen change in two-krone notes, with serial numbers all beginning with seven. It’s an unlucky seven. The money is Kun money, and therefore worthless. The best thing to do is palm it off on a clueless traveller coming from the depths of Austria to use as tips.

  As I say, Bruck is a little alarming. People here come in two types: those in blue shirts, and those in white shirts. The former are police spies, the latter communist agitators. (The locals wear no collars.) As a stranger, you come in for lots of suspicious looks. Either you’re a spy or an agitator, or you decide to leave your collar behind. Then you’ll be picked up by the nearest cop and your worries will be over.

  Strange city! When I wanted to stretch out at night in the too-short bed, I dreamed that my nose collided with a hyphen, at the very point where the Red Guards are. I caught a whiff of Béla Kun, awoke dripping with sweat, and was unable to get back to sleep.

  I will never go to Bruck on the Leitha again. Ever since it’s stopped being Bruck-Kiralyhida, it’s become a little edgy. And all on account of one hyphen.

  It’s too bad about the hyphen.

  Der Neue Tag, 20 July 1919

  21. Journey through Galicia: People and Place

  The country has a bad reputation in Western Europe. Our complacent culture likes to associate it with squalor, dishonesty and vermin. But while it may once have been the case that the East of Europe was less sanitary than the West, to say so today is banal; and anyone doing so will have said less about the region he claims to be talking about than the originality he lacks. And yet Galicia, one of the great battlefields of the Great War, is a long way from being rehabilitated. Not even for those to whom a battlefield is eo ipso a field of honour. Even though Western European bodies fell on Galician soil. Even though out of the mouldering bones of dead Tyroleans, Austrians and Germans sprouts the characteristic maize of this country.

  “Kukuruza” is what they call the ears of maize. When they are ripe, they are hung round the straw eaves of the peasants’ huts, large, yellow, naturally occurring tassels, fluffed with long yellow hairs. Pigs are fattened on Kukuruz, and geese and ducks, and then brought to market. Poor Jewish traders put their maize in pans of boiling water and wander through the streets with the hot kernels, to sell them to other poor Jews who trade in old rags, and leftovers of glass and newspapers. The Kukuruz dealers live off the ragmen. But who do the ragmen live off?

  It’s difficult to live. Galicia has more than eight million inhabitants to feed. The soil is rich, the people are poor. They are peasants, traders, craftsmen, officials, soldiers, officers, merchants, bankers, landowners. There are too many traders, too many officials, too many soldiers, and too many officers. All of them live off the only productive class, namely the peasants.

  These are devout, superstitious, anxious. They live in timid awe of the priest, and have boundless respect for the “city”, from which come strange horseless carriages, officials, Jews, gentry, doctors, engineers, geometers, electricity, which is known as “elektryka”; the town into which they send their daughters for them to become maids or prostitutes; the town where the law courts are, the clever lawyers a man has to be wary of, the wise judges in their gowns behind metal crosses under the colourful pictures of the Saviour in whose Holy Name a man is sentenced to months and years and sometimes even to death by the rope; the town which he feeds so that it can feed him, so that he can go there to buy colourful headscarves and aprons, the town where “commissions”, decrees, local ordinances and newspapers break out.

  That’s the way it was under Emperor Franz Joseph, that’s the way it is now. There are different uniforms, different eagles, different insignia. But the basic things don’t change. Among these basic things are: the air, the human clay, and God with all His Saints that inhabit the heavens and whose images are put up by the side of the road.

  These holy pictures in among the wide cornfields, on the edges of the meadows, were destroyed in the Great War, riddled with holes and hacked at and crippled and then put up again, repainted, and given inscriptions that indicate the peasants’ sacrifice was as great as their devotion was profound. This is not the way everywhere. One little village in East Galicia still has that cel
ebrated Christ whose cross was shot away, leaving only the stone Saviour, his bleeding feet nailed to a stump, his arms spread wide in incomprehension of a silent God and a trigger-happy world; a Redeemer crucified without a cross; the symbolic consequence of the odds of war. The miracle was rightly left to stand. All round it, the trenches slowly grow over.

  But they leave ugly scars that are like a disfiguring skin disease of the earth. I try to avoid the kind of reportage that looks out of a railway window and jots down fleeting impressions with a rush of satisfaction. But I can’t. My eyes always move from the speaking features of my fellow travellers to the melancholy flat world without limits, the mild sorrow of the fields into which the battlegrounds have grown, to subsequent details. Around me, a strange and typical man may just be explaining a world, his world—I can’t take my eyes off the little station.

  All these stations are small and narrow, consisting of a pavement with a couple of rails in front of it. The platform looks like a scrap of road stuck between fields. As though it was a busy street corner by a stock exchange, dark-haired and red-haired Jewish traders take up position here. They aren’t expecting anyone, they aren’t seeing off any friend, they are going to the station because it is part of the profession of a small trader to go to the station to watch the train come in, the passengers get out, the once-a-day train, the only connection to the world beyond, that brings with it something of the world’s hubbub and something of the great deals that are concluded across the world. The train brings German-language newspapers from Vienna and Prague and Ostrava. Someone reads aloud. Later, the traders go home, talking in little groups, along the path that connects the little town to the station, fields on the left, fields on the right; on the right is the picture of Jesus, on the left a saint’s shrine, and between them go the Jews with lowered heads, careful not to touch the cross, and to avoid the saint, between the Scylla and the Charybdis of the alien, deliberately ignored faith. Mud splashes up from the street.