The Hotel Years

by Joseph Roth

  Even so, he would straightaway break into a smile if a guest, for example myself, were to approach him now with a request. Nothing about him—and I certainly don’t understand him to the degree that I perhaps appear to—nothing about him is as remarkable as his gift of switching almost instantaneously between fury and graciousness, indifference and curiosity, cool aloofness and anxiety to be of service. It’s as though each of his feelings is lined with its obverse, and that all he needs to do is turn his mood around to transform himself. Now, ten minutes before the first guests are due off the Milan express, he moves into reception mode, which is to say, he gives a little tug at his waistcoat. “Ten minutes!” he calls out to the clerk. Then something remarkable happens: he leaves his receptionist’s eyrie. He climbs down and scatters the group of boys, each of whom now runs to his allotted place, one to the revolving doors, another to the luggage elevator, a third to the lift for persons, another to the staircase, a couple more to the cloakroom. Two more minutes, and the first automobile draws up. The chief receptionist purses his lips and issues a snake-like hiss. From a dark side entrance a baggage man in green apron sprints up. Already the humming engine of a motor-car is audible outside. Here come the first pieces of luggage. The receptionist gives them a glance, and since they are leather and there is a dark grey and green tartan rug with them, and a leather-lined pouch for walking sticks and umbrellas, he gives another tug at his waistcoat. With each new arrival he exchanges a look with the reception clerk, and each glance signifies a room number, a floor, a price, an exhortation, a warning, affability or dourness. Yes, there are some guests at whose appearance the chief receptionist gently closes one eye, with the result they are told the hotel has no vacancies. Sometimes—but this happens once a week at most—the chief receptionist makes a bow, and when he is upright again, one sees his face wreathed in smiles, smiles that, like yawns, are contagious. Then the visitor proceeds past beaming faces, as between two rows of lit lamps.

  By the bye, on this occasion I see that the chief receptionist has on a pair of grey worsted trousers, evidently the lower half of a well-cut suit, under his uniform tunic, as though to hint that only his upper half, the half with which he so rarely bows, is in livery. He tells me a little about his personal life, which I thought I knew something about. One more revelation, I imagine to myself. Certainly he has a relationship with a seamstress, and one may even assume that tailors are interested in his custom, and supply him with cut-price clothes. In the evening at six our friend disappears into the wardrobe, to emerge five minutes later in transformed dignity. For the first time one may see him responding to greetings. Taking his black silver-tipped cane in his grey-gloved left hand, with his right he touches the half top hat which he continues to affect, doffs it politely but quickly to his boys, who all bow very low to him. He has a little comradely chat with the night porter. Visitors who are sitting in the lobby or who happen to cross his path he doesn’t even look at. Once more his eyes sweep the room, spot me, and send me a little spurt of friendliness. Then he enters the revolving door. And from the slow majesty with which it spins one may tell who has just left the hotel.

  Frankfurter Zeitung, 24 January 1929

  41. The Old Waiter

  This waiter is so old that he is known all over the hotel as “the old man”, and employees and guests alike refer to him as “the old man”, and he himself probably only intermittently recollects his name, which has fallen into disuse over many years. It’s as though he had none any more, because like a mythological demi-god he has joined the ranks of those whose names no longer matter, because they represent a function. The waiter represents age in this hotel—and, as a distant second, waiterdom. He was a waiter for over forty years, now he has been “old” for another ten. And the set of tails he pulls on every afternoon has changed from professional to emblematic clothing—if you see the waiter in them, you think that that is the fitting uniform for old age.

  I should say that this old man bears none of the familiar badges of old age. He is clean shaven, his skull is completely hairless, and even his eyebrows have remained pale, by some freak of nature. He seems to have refused the respectable silver of old age. Either that, or he is so old that he has passed through the epoch of white hair and is well on the way to petrifaction, a species of human mineral, perhaps regressing to the world’s original condition, the inertness of the so-called inorganic. If you watch him leaning against one of the stout pillars in the hotel lobby for an hour, a stubby clay pipe (extinguished) in the corner of his mouth, lower lip pouting, his slightly pendulous cheeks the gleaming waxy red of some Tyrolean apples, his little expressionless eyes of shiny cobalt fixing some distant world, his crisp shirtfront of a pure, almost otherworldly white, the deep black of the impeccably fitting tails without a crease or speck of dust, in his gleaming shoes the steady reflections of lamps and candles—then you might suppose the waiter was his own monument, a deity of the hotel and the tourist trade, and you would feel unable to pass him without a small bow. But then all at once—and just when you least expect it, he starts to move—and the sight is so improbable that you start to wonder about the pillar as well, and suspect that it too will shortly change location. Where is the old man going?—To the restaurant. He walks from the knees down, his feet take tiny shuffling steps, if someone is in his way, he will stop, a mechanism stalls, and you think you hear somewhere under the tails that a little cog has suddenly ground to a halt. Then he starts to move again. A quarter of an hour later, the old man reaches the restaurant.

  He never moves—though this is not always immediately apparent—without some end in view. Guests have arrived whom he waited on twenty or thirty years before and whose approach he saw while he was leaning against the pillar, his eyes apparently fixed on some other world. His alertness is unchanged, only his movements have slowed down. This was how he watched people arriving forty years before. Only then he got there quicker, he materialized in front of them, he ran to the kitchen, he was back. Imperceptibly but steadily over the years and the decades his feet have grown feebler, his hands more shaky, his movements slower; imperceptible as the movement of an hour hand on a clock, but just as unstoppable, age and feebleness have overtaken the body of the old waiter. Every day his walk has grown a little slower—till finally at the end of forty years it has become a glacial shuffle.

  Now he is standing before his familiar guests, a bow is something he can still manage. A second waiter, a young and nimble one, is at the side of the old man, pad in hand, ready to take the order. It’s as though the old guests spoke in a language that the young waiter doesn’t understand, the language of a vanished generation, perhaps a vanished world. For the old man repeats everything the guests have said verbatim to his young colleague—but it looks as though he were interpreting it. It is as though the orders were only turned into edible dishes, to courses, to delicacies, by grace of the old waiter’s intervention. If the young fellow were to take them down directly, they might prove to be inedible. Although the guests speak softly (the table they are seated at an oasis of silence in the room full of noise and talk and clattering plates and clinking glasses), the old man hears every word of what they have to say—the young one presumably wouldn’t be capable of it. For the former has the gift of intuition; he guesses what the guests want—and further, he is capable of changing their order should he choose to do so. For it is possible that they might order a dish whose quality on a given day the old man is unwilling to vouch for. Then he will pretend they have ordered something else. And that is why the guests are willing to wait for him while he slowly approaches their table. There is an ancient relationship between them and him, they are all coevals; just as one might share a certain provenance, they and he are, so to speak, patriots of an epoch, which is a dearer and more important thing than a fatherland anyway, because times are quick to disappear, while fatherlands remain what they were; one can cast aside or mislay the former, while the latter keep us in their grasp. The guests
and the old waiter: they share the language of a gone epoch. That’s why they understand one another, that’s why they wait on and for one another.

  It happens sometimes that an ancient old lady with the icy, dismissive look that is the consequence of a long, rich and carefree life, with a cane on which she leans, garbed in a matronly dress of dark grey silk, a lustrous pearl necklace (on which the heirs are already waiting) round her wrinkled neck—that this timidly or respectfully treated lady makes straight for the old waiter, and without a word, gives him her hand. Then he will bow deeply and smile distantly. The old and by all indications frosty lady and the waiter have known each other for decades—and she will not always have given him her hand in that time. When they were both still young, the separations of caste stood between them. Now that they have grown old a process of levelling has begun that will end in the equality of death. Already both are preparing for the grave, the same earth, the same dust, the same worms—maybe even, if faith has managed to survive such a long life—the same hereafter.

  At one in the morning, the old man gets into the lift—not the service lift, the one for guests—and has himself taken up to the top floor. There he occupies a small room, a grace and favour room. He has never been married, has no children, no brothers or sisters. He was always alone, a waiter in the hotel, a child of the hotel. Never more than a waiter. He has occupied his room for ten years now. He didn’t want to retire. He was no longer capable of braving the street and going home at the end of the day. So, like an old grandfather clock, he stayed in the hotel. One day he will die in his grace and favour room. No question. His body will be carried out through the hotel’s service entrance and loaded into a black car without windows. Because it’s not conceivable that one could transport a body through the lobby of the hotel.

  Frankfurter Zeitung, 27 January 1929

  42. The Cook in His Kitchen

  Of uncommon significance, though invisible, yes, unknown to most, the cook dwells in the underworld of the hotel. Most of the day he spends sitting in the middle of his big kitchen, in a glass-walled pavilion, a little hut, in other words, made entirely of glass, visible from all sides, seeing to all sides. The underworld of the hotel is composed of these three elements: glass, tiles, and a white, silvery, matte metal. A fourth is water, pouring incessantly, quietly, melodiously, over the white tiled walls, continually alert and soothing at the same time, a delicate, glittering veil of bridal-hygienic innocence, precious, prodigal, and in places where the light falls, rainbow-coloured.

  Eight cooks and four trainee cooks stand and run about, arrayed in white, with snow-white sailors’ caps on their heads, wooden spoons in their hands, at eight metal cauldrons, from which at irregular intervals silvery steam rises and in whose underbellies a reddish, unreal, theatrical fire glows. A never-ending white silence, comparable to the silence of the Russian taiga, blows over the tiles, the metal, the glass and the cooks, whose movements are inaudible, like those of white shadows, and whose footfall is probably swallowed up by the sound of the rushing water. This, the only sound in the room, doesn’t break the silence, merely accompanies it; it seems to be the audible melody of silence, the song of muteness. Ever so occasionally the vent of a cauldron allows a suppressed hiss to escape which straightaway dies down, shocked and ashamed and soon forgotten in the stillness, like the choked caw, say, of a raven in the white depthless silence of winter.

  The kitchen might be the engine room of a modern ghost-ship. The cook might be a captain. The cooks the seamen. The trainees cabin boys. The destination unknown and in point of fact unreachable.

  As dreamy as the silence is, that’s how real, bright and alive the cook is in his festive, material, palpable optimism. Just watching him is enough to make one forget all the bad stories one’s heard and exchange them for cheery memories of fairy tales, of Cockaigne for instance, of enchanting, brightly coloured illustrations in books. Here is the creator of the roast chickens that go flying into your mouth. His white brimless top hat of striped canvas, equally reminiscent of a turban, night-cap, and the under-lining of a royal crown, deepens the natural russet of his cheeks, the lustrous metallic black of his dense, bushy eyebrows, and the golden brown of his small, darting eyes, that playfully move over his comfortable cheeks, supervise the sous-chefs, watch the cauldrons, pursue the movements of the long spoons. In its crooked exuberance the hat grazes his red, throbbing, right ear, which seems to manifest an optimism all of its own. His red lips are set in an unvarying smile. The broad soft chin is bedded on a comfortable jowl. The broad nostrils sniff the smells of the dishes and the nuances of the smells. And under the white apron curves his capacious and benevolent belly, where a second and particular heart would find room.

  That’s what I call a cook! He seems to step straight out of my childhood dreams, though in reality, as I believe I have already intimated, he is from Czechoslovakia. Of the four nationalities that live in that country, the Czechs, the Germans, the Slovaks and the Jews, he unites all the positive qualities: he has the application of the Czech, the method of the German, the imagination of the Slovak, and the cunning of the Jew. This ideal mixture makes for a contented, kindly man who lives at ease with others and himself, who is even capable of having a harmonious marriage over decades. Absurd, the very idea that he might fly into a temper! Where would rage find a place in somewhere already so filled with peace, contentment and freedom from care! And what would need to happen to knock this man off kilter? On the little table where he mostly sits, there is a large open diary in which he occasionally scribbles a note, and next to it a telephone that rings as often as twenty times an hour. Each time the cook picks up the receiver with the same tranquillity, he picks it up while it is still ringing, lays it carefully on the table, lets it rasp a little longer, and only when it has gone quite still does he lift it with a casual movement of the forearm not to his ear but to the proximate vicinity of his ear. It looks as though he first tames an unruly, noisy creature before agreeing to involve himself with it. He doesn’t, like all the world, speak into the tube, but again only into its vicinity, and he doesn’t raise his voice by half a degree, if anything he lowers it a little, and then the words he speaks to the telephone are all of velvet. Every quarter of an hour or so one of the four kitchen boys comes into the glass pavilion bearing a minuscule sample of food from one of the cauldrons on a small dish. Sometimes it is enough for the cook to cast one of his hurried golden glances at it (as if his eye can taste) and approve the dish with a gentle nod. Often, though, the cook raises the dish to his mouth, licks at it with his tongue, and sends the boy back with a quiet word or two. Why he only looks here and tastes there is his own secret. I imagine he knows the whims of the cauldrons very well and the abilities of the cooks, and also he would do damage to his tongue if he over-exercised it. It is a very precious tongue, it has the versedness of a colossally pampered palate, and also the ability to feed a stomach. Because very often the cook will eat nothing all evening, without feeling hungry. He never eats in the kitchen. He only takes off his white uniform, his roomy white uniform, and then stands there in a dark suit. He takes his hat off, and he has thick, curly hair, and a white smooth forehead. Over his poplin shirtfront, masking his collar, is the small grey silk bow tie with black dots. Its delicate coquettish wings tone down the gravity of his appearance, and give the cook a look of something enterprising, dashing and boyish. He walks into the dining room. A corner table is reserved for him next to the pillar. He is served silently and with élan, he doesn’t even need to order. He is given tiny portions that lie on the plate like so many precious stones. Slabs of meat would offend the cook. He eats gracefully and effortlessly and doesn’t even need to dab his lips with a napkin. After his coffee he takes a small cognac. Before pouring, the waiter shows him the bottle. Sometimes the cook will silently take the bottle from the waiter’s hands and set it down on his table. However tiny the little glasses are, he will only drink a few drops at a time. Then he gets up
with effortless grace, not like a man who has been eating and drinking heavily, but as though he had been resting in a forest clearing in the morning, and is now walking out towards the sun. From a thin oval cigarette he blows blue fragrant clouds.

  He goes home. He has a nice house, three children, an attractive young wife whose picture he keeps in the drawer of the table in the glass pavilion next to the put-away diary. He let me see her once. I’m sure he doesn’t show the picture to anyone else, and only sees it each time he opens or closes the drawer and he gives her a quick caress. He has never loved another woman and he isn’t the man to succumb to a sudden infatuation. (His salary is higher than the hotel manager’s.) Before the war he worked in many of the world’s great cities. Always in an atmosphere of tiles, glass, water and silvery metal. He went to war in 1914, calmly, without zeal and without fear, because he knew his uncommon gift would not fail to make an impression on the general staff officers. For four years he sat a dozen miles behind the front, in idyllic villages, with hot saucepans and abundant supplies. Sometimes he talks about that time. He never forgets to add: “The gentlemen on my staff dined better than they fought.” It’s the only aphorism that’s ever occurred to him. It will last him to the end of his days, and it’s meant as praise not blame. Once I asked him if he had been back to visit his newly independent homeland. “No,” he said, “there’s no need. This is where I pay my taxes.” I asked him whether he wanted his son to follow him into the profession. “Maybe!” replied the cook. “If he has the talent.” But there was doubt in his gentle voice. Perhaps, like many, he thinks the sons of geniuses turn out badly.

  Frankfurter Zeitung, 3 February 1929

  43. “Madame Annette”