The Hotel Years

by Joseph Roth

When Annette turned twenty-eight and still hadn’t found a husband, she went to one of the jewellers in the Rue de la Providence in whose windows wedding bands of gold and silver and doublé by the dozen are looped over little velvet turrets, suggestive of tiny shimmering monuments to monogamy. She bought herself a silver wedding ring and put it on her left ring finger, in accordance with the practices of her country. She may have thought in the privacy of her own soul that one day a husband would present himself, and she would be able to exchange the silver ring for a golden one. For the time being, though, the silver one was sufficient, so to speak, as a way of putting God on notice, as moral compulsion exerted on Fate, so that it might at long last see fit to give her a spouse. Beyond that, the ring had one other, immediate function: it was able to keep the girl from the attentions of undesirable men, who are usually cowards en plus, by implying the presence of a jealous and strongly built husband lurking somewhere. It also won her a measure of respect with her female colleagues. Indeed, shortly after Annette had purchased the ring, the staff, which previously had called her “Mademoiselle Annette”, took to calling her “Madame Annette”. This might be the place to observe that the title of dame still impresses the odd spinster from a good family nowadays, who doesn’t have the sorry prospect of serving strangers for a living; how much more, then, a girl who is supposed to remain so all her life, even if she should have become a grandmother!—To Annette’s colleagues, who had so little occasion to call each other “Madame”, that title conferred a social distinction. They bestowed it on Annette, even though they half-guessed that the silver ring was merely for appearances. They felt themselves ennobled when they were able to say “Madame Annette”.

  She had been in service since her fifteenth birthday. Her father, a Normandy fisherman, sent her to a small hotel in Le Havre, to whose landlady he had had old ties from when he had been a sailor. It would appear that girls are not readily countenanced in Le Havre. Less than a month after her arrival, Annette succumbed to the belated love-lowings of a fifty-year-old shipper, who promised to marry her, and was only kept from doing so by a marriage of twenty years. Annette got a baby, and shortly afterwards a good job with some blue-blooded people outside Paris, who were originally from Normandy themselves, and who liked to recruit their staff from there. The baby was left with the landlady in Le Havre, as a paying guest, and therefore died some six months later. Annette sent money for the funeral, and, not having a picture of her child, but wanting to remember him in some way, bought a postcard of a bonny infant in a papeterie, put it in a black frame, and kept it hidden away in her trunk.

  Taught a lesson by her experience in Le Havre, and persuaded in her Norman-rustic way that any affair was bound to result in pregnancy, Annette fought off the wooings of M. de L., her new master—even though she did so with some reluctance. To save herself once and for all from temptation, she proceeded to tell Mme de L. of the attempts of her husband. As a result, how could it be otherwise, Annette was terminated straightaway, and, lest she create further confusion in another noble house, she was recommended to a large hotel in Paris, where a certain M. de L. sat on the board.

  Here began her modest career.

  She (not altogether mistakenly) thought it pleasanter in the course of a morning to clean twenty rooms of unknown and constantly changing persons, than eight or ten thoroughly established for all eternity, on whom she depended for bread and keep. She preferred tips, left behind like a form of tax by those departing, to a Christmas gift handed over with all ceremony by the lady of the house in December, and still made much of in April, at Easter. She became used to her job, because it lacked the monotony of a servant’s; had none of the shabby lustre of a patriarchal disposition, but something of the cold, clear objectivity of a trade, almost of an office; and because in addition it gave her a sense of the diversity and colour of the world, its riches and its inhabitants. Because she was observant and quick on the uptake, she attained over time an understanding of the various habits of various circles, various degrees of intimacy with luxury, with life in a culture and a nobility that has its economic foundation. These experiences raised her expectations of those men she happened to meet. And even though she liked one or other of them, she could not decide to marry any of them. The only man she met at a dance who seemed to master the arts of a gentleman, which in the opinion of the chambermaids are the preserve of the upper classes, was a zouave, a corporal from the French colonies. She was frankly a little afraid of coloured gentlemen. If a man was yellow or black, surely it was bound to show one day, be it in the form of an outbreak of madness, a sudden act of violence or just an exotic malady. Still, she was all set to take the plunge. Then war broke out, and her zouave gave his life, as was proper, for Alsace-Lorraine.

  Her grief was greater than her love had ever been, because she endowed the dead man with greater gifts than the living one had had. She remained convinced that she had lost the embodiment of manliness. Compared to her image of the dead man, the hotel guests were so many botched jobs. Even boxers and aviators were left trailing by her zouave. Not having his photograph, and as idealized pictures of zouaves were not offered on sale, she endowed him with all the traits of all the heroes whose pictures she saw in illustrated newspapers. In her pious brain that over the course of a few years did all the work that normally was performed by generations in the making of a legend, the departed became a coloured demi-god. Her memory of him kept her safe, it should be noted, from the seduction attempts of white, half-drunk and irresponsible hotel-guests.

  If one has a great sorrow, it is a good thing to change one’s abode. She came here, to the hotel I am writing about, basically because it is owned by the same company as the hotel in Paris. This is where she bought her wedding band, this is where she became known as Madame Annette, and as a consequence, came into an easier roster of duties. She is now, so to speak, the right hand of the housekeeper, has only five or six rooms to clean, and the girls on two floors under her wing. She no longer wears a blue dress, but a black one, and is not compelled to wear the customary white bonnet. But she likes to wear it just the same—out of a coquettishness she claims is modesty. She is extremely pretty. Yes, it seems to me that sometimes she doesn’t realize herself how beautiful she is capable of being. Because to be aware of one’s own beauty requires free time and a measure of material independence. Sometimes I think a man must tell her:

  “Listen to me, Madame Annette (or even just plain Annette!), with your black hair, your pale grey eyes and your tan complexion you are a rare composition of nature. Even though you only wear silk stockings on Wednesdays, which are your day off, one can observe the charming curve of your leg on other days as well, the soft transition from the muscle of the calf to the sinew of the ankle. Don’t imagine that your narrow hips, small breasts and strong, hard-working but shapely hands mark you out to the observer as not belonging to the social class you take for superior. You are easily capable of passing for a lady, even when you are just taking instructions, your bright eyes on a guest and then lingering in the empty space behind his turned back, your narrow, strangely red mouth (for which, with your complexion, you should really use a lighter shade of lipstick) pressed shut, as though to ward off any inappropriate behaviour, and your soft chin slightly upraised, as though that was the seat of attention, but also of pride. There’s no doubting your beauty, Annette!”

  Unfortunately, it’s not likely that anyone has spoken to her in such a way. The mirrors she likes to stop in front of are satisfactory but silent. And time is brief and nimble. Annette has some superficial practice in tidying up. The washstand takes her five minutes, the bed three, the table two. Gentlemen like to leave their suits draped over chair backs. That creates complications. In addition there are papers, books, letters on the desk. The hotel rules forbid meddling with guests’ informal arrangements. But the room still needs to be cleaned. Each piece of paper has to stay where it is. That can take up to twenty minutes! Then she has to super
vise her girls. They’re such chatterboxes, the signals go off, green and persistent, and they simply ignore them. Annette has to bring them up to the mark. She works from twelve noon to nine at night. One hour off for lunch. Downstairs, next to the kitchen, at the long staff table that reminds you of mealtimes in an orphanage. If Annette goes on working so hard, she will surely make it to housekeeper herself—and will be able to go on working.

  One day, a Wednesday, I ran into her outside one of the big cinemas. She was looking at the stills, scenes from a rich background. (Nothing is so interesting to the poor as the lives of the rich.) I permitted myself, since we had known each other for so long, to treat her. We saw one of those films that pass for “socially conscious”. One of those films in which a well-off young man persistently tries to take a poor girl to supper, when she doesn’t know whether you eat ice-cream with a fork, or use a nutcracker on an apple. The audience of course knows, and brays its approval to the film industry. At least on that evening, it was braying. Madame Annette said: “Don’t you think that girl might have learned a thing or two from films? Surely she’ll have been to the cinema, seeing as the film is set in New York.”

  Thereupon—from a slightly hasty, slightly honest reaction against the whole business—I asked Madame Annette to accompany me to dinner in a good restaurant. Here and there sat a guest from the hotel. Here and there an appraising look brushed Madame Annette, not a recognizing one—because a real gentleman never imagines a chambermaid could be sitting in the same restaurant as himself. En passant, I make mention of the fact that Madame Annette was wearing a dark high-necked dress that made her look pale, and her mouth even redder—and a string of artificial pearls that threw a silvery-blue reflection on the lower half of her yellow-brown face. What seems more important to me is to stress that she handled her cutlery better than those men in the film industry with whom I have had occasion to eat, or as they like to say, to “dine”.

  Frankfurter Zeitung, 9 February 1929

  44. The Patron

  It is among the characteristics of the hotel manager that it’s not possible to tell his age. The observer is mystified to see a fifty-year-old hotel manager at eleven in the morning, who by three o’clock will be a dashing forty, and late at night, fifty again, as he was in the morning. Not as rapidly as his physiognomy, but still remarkably fast are the changes in his hair and beard. There are times when little threads of silver seem to infiltrate his coal-black moustache. A couple of days later they are gone. Sometimes one seems to catch the hair on his head beginning to thin. Then a day or two later, there it is again, in all its familiar silky, almost feminine abundance.

  Even though he is the utterly cosmopolitan manager of an utterly cosmopolitan hotel, the staff only ever refers to him as le patron. Maybe it’s a challenge to the poor employees, even though they spend their whole lifetimes in the vicinity of modern capital, to conceive of a publicly owned company as their bread-giver, to serve an abstract notion sprung from thin ribbons of tickertape; and to see the man who hires and fires them, who orders them to do one thing and forbids them to do something else, merely as the employee of a mysterious joint-stock company. It’s simpler to take him for a “patron”. If he were the actual owner, yes, even if he were only a shareholder, then—that’s my sense of him—he surely wouldn’t stand for the populist, provincial, and faintly demeaning title of “patron”. But as things stand, the director is quite pleased, even a little flattered, to be addressed as “patron”.

  Such secrets of his soul as I sometimes think I can guess at, along with other, more evident traits of his, have long kept me from warming to the director as I would have liked. Writerly objectivity demands a certain sympathy for the person one describes, a literary sympathy, that in certain circumstances can even be expended on a louse. But my private heart beats in a sentimental (and now rather unfashionable) way for the lesser beings who are given orders and who obey, obey, obey, and rarely allows me to feel anything but objectivity for the others who order, order, order. As far as the director is concerned, then, I sometimes repeat the extenuating circumstance: he too receives orders; only from his shareholders! But the orders he receives are given him once a year, and they hold good for all 365 days, they are general instructions, written down on thick paper, almost like official documents. He can impart them to those below as he thinks fit, and if they seem harsh, as often, he can make them still harsher, which does something to make his own lot seem easier to him by comparison. Insofar as the ladder leading up to the company board is visible, then he, the director, is on its topmost rung.

  Even so, I would long have become reconciled to all this, were it not among his habits to appear very quietly in unexpected places. Suddenly he appears in a remote part of a corridor. He looks as though he’s been standing there for ever, and only started moving when he heard my approach. Another time there he is, striding through the lobby with lowered head, as though to indicate that he has no interest in anyone. But I know well that his eyes, which are set wide apart by the temples, like a bird’s or a lizard’s, swiftly and reliably take in the scenes around him, and that a short stroll is enough for the director to know who is in the lobby, what the porter’s up to, and whether all the liftboys and errand boys are present. His glance hooks itself into the scene like a harpoon. He could as well take it back to his office to have it developed or stuck in an album.

  He has the habits, movements and gifts of a detective. Born in the Levant to Greek parents, he has the quick-wittedness one ascribes to Greeks and Levantines. What he opens his eyes on he sees, and what he sees he understands. He is fluent in very many languages. There is not one in which he can write an error-free letter. He dictates a few key points to his secretary, probably sensible ones; he leaves the details to her. Of average height, though thin enough to make him appear much taller, he looks like a noble example of a very distant and very alien race. In his dark brown, narrow and seemingly planed-off face, the hooked nose stands out like a weapon, a curved skin and bone dagger. The right half of the narrow brow is covered by a wave of black hair. The trimmed moustache is curved like a black wire—it is shaved above and below—seeming to lie in the middle of the long upper lip. He rarely opens his mouth, not even to speak. If he had no teeth, one wouldn’t know it.

  Without question, the man has the imagination to produce and cater for so-called “luxury”. If there is any creature that knows what “comfort” means, then it is the patron. All the details of décor speak for him. Throughout the hotel there are no high-edged tables that make your arm go to sleep when you rest it on them. The bedside lamps are comfortably within reach on adjustable boards in little safe-like niches. You don’t lie in bed, afraid to reach for a glass of water for fear of knocking over the lamp. The ashtrays are all deep, wide and heavy. Every bed is curtained off, so as to be discreetly out of sight in the daytime. Framed by the two doors that lead out into the corridor, the room is large enough for the room-service waiter to be able to leave a small table out with your order, in case he is not able to enter the room. Along with the post, the guest is brought a selection of newspapers from various countries. Never is a mailman allowed to come up with registered mail without being telephoned through. All night, the so-called “pantry” is kept open, for orders of fruit, sandwiches, tea, coffee, and brandy. The large revolving door is open all night, so that you never need to ring the bell and waken the night porter. At three in the morning, there are as many lights on as there are at nine at night. All these details pay tribute to the director.

  And yet the way he instructs a liftboy to follow him to his office is embarrassing to me. He doesn’t say: Come with me! Nor does he wave at him or glance at him. He stops in front of the unhappy boy, looks at him, takes a step away, and turns round. I don’t know what goes on behind the office door. But I can see employees as they come out. They straighten their tunics, swivel their heads in their collars as though to straighten their vertebrae, and give themselves a litt
le shake, before going back on duty, as though they were emerging from a different world and needed a little time to adjust. Even if they weren’t gone for any more than ten minutes! You could ask them a question—they wouldn’t hear you. Their ears are still booming with a terrible noise that drowns out every subsequent sound.

  It may be that this is only natural, and comes with the territory. But what is unnatural is his way of always uttering the same banalities and asking unanswerable questions. “Have you come from very far away? Did you have a good time? Pleasure to see you again, really, a great pleasure!” And, according to the weather and the season: “Dull old day, isn’t it! It looks like rain!” Or: “Lovely, clear autumn we’re having. It’s the best thing for you. Have a nice day.” And concluding with a bow that turns his body into a question mark: “The hotel safe’s always at your disposal! Goodbye!”

  And yet I once witnessed the following scene:

  At about ten in the morning, a man came through the revolving door into the lobby. The director was just standing in front of the door of the reception clerk and was about to be on his way. The poor man stopped in the middle of the lobby, as though someone had left him there and forgotten all about him. His raincoat was flapping around him. His stumpy red hands looked like stockings. His face was bony, but clean-shaven and bleeding. The thin neck wobbled about in the stiff collar that was far too big for it. A little below, one sensed the presence of (but did not see) a soft, striped, not terribly clean shirt.

  The director said to the man: “Get out, and come back through the goods entrance.”

  The man did so. He stepped out as though from a stage set. His behaviour was a little theatrical as it was. He took a rubber band off a letter case, and pulled out a few papers.

  The director instructed the man to unfold them. He didn’t move to take them from him, merely gave them one of his cursory glances. Then he shook his head.