The Hotel Years

by Joseph Roth

  The poor man went off. Then the director quietly said: “Psst!”

  The man turned round.

  “Come to lunch, today, twelve-thirty sharp!”

  The poor man smiled and tried a sort of curtsey. Then he walked off.

  “Psst!” said the director quietly, a second time.

  The poor man turned round again, quicker and more trustfully than the last time.

  And the director said to the porter: “Get him a coffee with milk!” and walked off. In mid-step he stopped again and called out over his shoulder, without turning:

  “On second thoughts, make that cream!”

  And he vanished into his office.

  It wasn’t enough to persuade me that he was a good man. But I have at least attained the necessary literary objectivity towards the patron.

  Frankfurter Zeitung, 20 February 1929

  45. Leaving the Hotel

  I would like to have caught up with some of my other friends at the hotel, but I am leaving tomorrow. I have been here for long enough. If I stayed longer I would be unworthy of the great blessing of being a stranger. I might degrade the hotel to a home if I no longer left it unless I had to. I want to feel welcome here, but not at home. I want to be able to come and go. I prefer to know that a hotel is waiting for me here. I am aware that this too is a sentimentality, and that, out of fear of a more conventional one, I am falling for one of my own devising. But that’s the human heart for you.

  I will let the chief receptionist know that I am leaving. Oh, not because of any regulations! This hotel pins no “avisos” in its rooms, no “extract from the hospitality and innkeeping bye laws of 1891, Article. IV §§ 18 and 22 ff.”, no house rules and nowhere a “Guests are requested to inform the front desk of their departure in a timely fashion, so as to avoid being billed for a further night. Respectfully, The Management.” No, this hotel pins no commandments on its walls. Nor does the fact that there is a restaurant on the premises require special mention, seeing that the restaurant is a good one, and people like to eat there. If I choose to inform the receptionist of my departure today, then it’s purely because I need his kindness, and because I want to hear him murmur: “Oh dear, so soon!?”—Such a tone! It’s said so quietly, like a secret; as though my decision might be put off, so long as it’s just the two of us who know about it . . . It’s as slow and protracted as a long-running lament. It seems to issue from that indescribable distance to which I now propose to go. The good fellow!—How will he manage without me? Whom will he say goodnight to when he goes home at night in his smart suit? How well we understood one another. We conversed with looks and glances, in the truly international language of stenoscopy! Which is now at an end . . .

  But men need to be tough, and so the chief receptionist asks me which train or ship I am proposing to leave on. I merely give him my destination and an approximate time, say, “evening”. And he comes back with: what about train No. 743 with wagons-lits, leaving at 6.32 p.m., two stops, dining car until 10 p.m.? Backed up by a series of further suggestions. I leave the choice with him. It’s among the virtues of a good receptionist to separate the best trains from those less good, even though he rarely goes anywhere himself, and his guests constantly. I am happy to rely on him. And if the train he has recommended should happen to arrive three hours late, then I am convinced that all the others will have been derailed. Such luridness, when all I wanted was to be comforted . . .

  Tomorrow will be the longest day. I have, to all intents and ­purposes, left, but not gone. Word has got out. The room-service waiter, who goes off shift in the afternoon, wished me bon voyage in the morning. He will have said it with one eye on his tip, but that doesn’t make him any less sincere. The sincerest good wishes are those of people who are getting a tip. Whoever doesn’t stand to get anything from me wishes me to the devil. Lucky the man therefore who can afford to leave a tip! The good people will bless him, because they hope he will be back soon. It’s instructive to see that the waiter does me the honour of esteeming my generosity and my little gift at the same time. He likes me as much as he likes my money. (My friends all prefer my money.) And in his look I can ­distinguish between the sparkle of joy and a shimmer of melancholy. In his joy at his takings is mixed a little sorrow at parting. Well, goodbye!

  It will be the longest day. It’s as well that the room contains nothing, not one item that would seek to attach my eye painfully to itself. No quaint sugar box, no great-uncle’s writing-desk, no maternal grandmother’s portrait, no basin decorated with red flowers and a little crack, no familiar creaking floorboard that one suddenly falls in love with because one is about to leave, no mouth-watering smells issuing from the kitchen, and no brass ornamental pestle and mortar on the hall dresser.—Nothing. When my suitcases are gone, others will take their place. When my soap is packed away, someone else’s will nestle by the basin. When I am no longer standing by the window, someone else will be. This room doesn’t seek to deceive itself or you or me or anyone. By the time I look round it one last time before I go, it will already have ceased to be my room. The day is so long because there is no melancholy to fill it.

  I don’t need to pay any farewell calls in this city. I’m happy to think that the old man doesn’t live here who hates me and whom I hate, and whom I keep having to say hello to. Nor even a younger man who is all of a heap when he sees me still alive, and who would be offended if he didn’t see me. Nor is there my dear friend who walks me to the station and even as we shake hands for the last time remains convinced that he is doing worse out of our friendship than me. There is not even a lady with whom (out of gallantry) I am in love, and who, even as her eye blinks back a tear, is already happy that another man has looked her up and down. I am a stranger in this town. That’s why I was so at home here.

  There will be only one brief sentimental moment: when the porter has stowed away my suitcases and is standing on the platform, cap in hand, and his other hand under his apron, for fear lest it should involuntarily extend itself. Because it’s quite a complicated business, this tipping. He takes it quickly, but clumsily. It’s almost like a form of handshake, swift, and a little bungled. Then he takes a couple of steps back, the old fellow, still facing me. He puts his cap back on. One last time the letters that spell the dear name of the hotel flash at me.

  Then I hoist sails, and board my train.

  Frankfurter Zeitung, 24 February 1929

  46. The Hotel

  The lobby is brightening with a specifically hotel morning. The broad mirroring glass is already variegated with the grey of the day ahead, while a few lamps hang from the ceiling like isolated stars. It’s as though their tardy gleam is bound up with the presence of the night porter who switched them on the night before. They are his lights. When he leaves they will pale, and the day will break.

  Sturdy cleaning women are moving about like huge, blue-aproned monsters on the stripped marble of the formal staircase; on the landing, where a plaster cherub has been spewing water into a precious basin for eternities, and an ancient palm gives unnecessary shade, leans a glistening bundle of brass stair rods, newly polished, a little heap of rays or weapons. With flying tails, the early waiters circumnavigate the blue-aproned monsters, discreetly steaming trays on their splayed hands. From backward corridors where it is still completely night-time drones the indefatigable song of the vacuum. Like a patient storm it wanders like an all-flattening fury over the maroon carpets. Just now the head waiter enters the hotel. He is wearing a mouse grey coat and green hat and looks like a forester. But just wait. The modest rustic garb covers the festive gleam of his tails. Soon you will see that he resembles a servant or a marquis in an old comedy. With a ­magnificent gesture, like someone drawing a pair of gorgeous curtains he throws open the lofty doors to the breakfast room. It’s as though the day had lurked all night in the breakfast room, perhaps been shut in there overnight, and only now were allowed to dawn in the lobby an
d the rest of the hotel. All at once the blue cleaning women, the phantoms of early morning, are gone. Suddenly the lamps, the tardy stars, are extinguished. Suddenly, his fair face dusted with shaving powder, there stands the chief receptionist in his eyrie. The night porter is already swallowed by his bed. Suddenly the maroon carpets lie snugly over the formal staircase, and it’s as though morning in person is coming down the stairs. The elevator hums. The first breakfast guests appear. Elderly ladies and gentlemen who don’t sleep much and who therefore have made it a healthful habit to rise early. Taut, with a determined show of opposition to their own years, looking neither left nor right, they step out in the direction of the breakfast room, like groups come together for a procession or coronation; each one his own morning. Day is at hand.

  The old people are still at breakfast when the young ones come down. The lawful couples are not to be distinguished from the unlawful ones. Both have in common the successfully overcome night. Breakfast together is like an asseveration of their love. They eat as though they had been eating together for decades, but the head waiter knows what’s what. They don’t prod at doubtful eggs. They drink their coffee lukewarm. The night just past hovers over them, and the one ahead moves into view. The young man ignores his newspaper. Anyone who has no eyes for the newspaper is young and in love.

  In the afternoon there is the “five o’clock tea”. The potted palms seem to have reproduced. Thanks to them the tropical climate of the Negro dances (supported also by the central heating) becomes a wholly successful illusion. At tiny miniature tables, with tiny miniature coffee cups resembling thimbles, sit corpulent ladies who have been prescribed Marienbad, trying to keep their movements refined, while their daughters, with less need to be careful, let themselves fall into the arms of gigolos. Stirred by the gentle breeze of so many passing waiters, the leathery leaves of the palms distribute heat and cool at once, and even though there is no shortage of noise, their gentle clicking becomes a sort of sonorous silence. Every noise that is created here has a component of silence as well, and every sound is so discreet that all the sounds put together make up the soul of discretion. Minor disturbances seem to apologize for themselves, even as they happen.—Serious men foregather in the conference room, far from the music. To look at them, you would think they were deciding the fate of the world, here, in a spare half hour between first-class trains. They determine our prices, our wages, and the degree of our hunger. Impossible to understand the things they say. Because they are speaking in one place, it is possible to dance in another. That’s all. They are not speaking in spite of the dancing in the other room. No, they speak here so that there may be music and the world can continue on its merry way. All wheels will grind to a halt when their grim word says so.

  And then the night porter comes along, and lights the evening. Fresh, youthful, shaved and powdered, in blue and gold livery, he rises like a second morning when the world has evening. Trains have arrived from exotic parts, and exotic visitors are wafting through the glass wings of the revolving doors into the lobby. Those who have been here for a day already and are sitting in the lobby, they are no longer strangers. No, they are long-established, the dark red carpets are their turf which they will not leave, and they cast slighting, suspicious looks at the new arrivals. The suitcases pile up in front of the reception desk, plastered with labels from hotels in foreign places, Venice, Merano, Buenos Aires and San Francisco, all trying to legitimate these new guests. The head waiter surfaces for a moment to assess who can afford to buy ­themselves a meal under the palms (breakfast, of course, is compris). Sceptically, in spite of himself, he turns to face again the familiar meals, his friendliness is put together from understanding of the world, his faith in humanity is lined with suspicion, his cheery optimism is his pessimism turned inside out, when he smiles he is crying somewhere about the poverty of this world.

  Before long, in about two hours, he will put on his little green hat and slip into his mouse grey coat, and with grand gestures he will shut the dining room—and then, in a corner, go over the accounts with the waiters, an accountant himself now, no longer a maître d’hôtel, a plain forester from the hunting grounds of reality. He will say a hurried goodnight to the night porter, whose day is now beginning. Already fresh stars are glimmering in the lobby’s pale sky.

  Frankfurter Zeitung, 23 November 1930

  VII

  Pleasures and Pains

  47. Spring

  I am woken by the sound of carpets being beaten overhead. The muffled thudding provokes my neighbour’s canary, and he cheeps and twitters and warbles like a bird song imitator. In the yard a window flies open, a second, a third: the whole building seems to be tearing off its windows.

  A ray of sunshine splashes in my violet inkwell. The bronze maiden on my desk protects her bosoms from the intrusive beam and sweetly tans.

  A hurdy-gurdy is playing in the yard. The streams of melody burst through, melting and freed.

  From these and other signs, one notices eventually that it’s spring.

  On Kurfürstendamm the cafés put out spring awnings, the ladies have new wardrobes, the gentlemen natty yellow twittering gloves. In side streets the children play with shiny buttons and marbles. The blue-bedizened sky checks its reflection in the brass shaving bowl outside the barber’s shop.

  Everyone is freshly varnished and “please don’t touch”. Slips of girls wander about on the asphalt in sheer stockings and new boots looking like costumed willow trees.

  In the afternoon I sit in the window and think that Sunday is on its way. To Grunewald, for instance.

  After six or still later, a girl in purple rings the doorbell. Love is like that.

  Freie Deutsche Bühne, 16 June 1921

  48. People in Glass Cages

  It is the time of year when a yen for freedom cruelly evicts bundled-up individuals from their cosy flats and into their brazen winter gardens.

  In the morning a sunbeam or streak of rain strikes a coffee cup. And in the evening a traffic light bleeds to death.

  Turned out and visible to all, the bosom of the family, with whatever had kept it hidden all winter. Intimate gestures are enacted in full sight of the prying neighbours.

  Lips explode in kisses clattering along the streets, and forks drop from the hands of unfettered paterfamiliases with a whimpering jingle.

  Walls have eyes. Man is in a glass cage, shown for what he is in helplessness, rage and shirtsleeves, barely concealed by the odd flower pot. He hangs suspended over the pavement like his own canary.

  Dew anoints a nose sniffing the clouds, and a chill evening wind brushes a hairy chest, swelling the tourist’s shirt like a sail.

  A sultry haze of aired bedding and other matters fights down the shy scent of a debatably flowering lilac. Oh, the struggle to lead a useful life weighed down by nappies in a rear courtyard!

  Das Blaue Heft, 8 July 1922

  49. People on Sunday

  On Sundays the world is as bright and empty as a balloon. Girls in white dresses wander about the streets like so many church bells, all smelling of jasmine, sex and starch.

  The sky is invariably freshly painted. The buildings swim in sunshine, and the towers scramble nimbly upwards. At the edge of the city Nature takes over, as one can tell by the proliferation of Do Not signs. It is mostly green, and consists of postcard views tacked together.

  Nature is particularly important on Sundays. Basically, Sunday has been instituted for the sake of nature. All the communications disrupted on weekdays between nature and humanity are restored on Sunday. In fact, Sunday is the bridge to the forgotten and discarded Holies of the world: such things as woods, the Wannsee, the Luna Park and the Almighty.

  People ring in Sundays with bells, the beating of carpets, and indolent coffee in bed. They throw open their windows and sniff freedom. They ransack wardrobes and chests of drawers and put on special items to celebrate the day of idlenes
s on which their souls dangle.

  On Sunday I stand by the window. The house opposite has thrown open all its windows like glass butterfly wings as though—whoosh, didn’t you see it!?—to fly away. It can’t, though, it is too weighed down by furniture, people and destinies.

  Which have changed as well: my neighbour, a double-entry bookkeeper only yesterday (at the same firm for twenty-five years “without a bonus”)—and today, not even a single entry. With God in his heart and the taste of coffee still in his mouth, he hurries over to the window in his shirtsleeves to fill his lungs with a draft of freedom.

  When I see him in the week in his threadbare jacket his hands are dangling from his sleeves as though the fingers were a frayed part of the jacket; now he looks to me like the hero of a story, or several stories.* He could, I am thinking, be offered a much better-paid job, but he is unable to resign. Perhaps he even stood once or twice outside his boss’s double doors, and his courage was quelled, as the movements outside the double door are quelled, and his heart resembled a squishy cushion, one of those plump leather cushions a manager likes to sit on.

  One Monday morning, after he’s stuffed himself full of courage the whole of the day before, he went to work, and the boss walked in and presented him with some trifling thing, maybe a fountain pen, or an inkwell, and the employees put flowers on his desk, because that Monday marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of his entry into the firm, and he had forgotten about it. And so now he can’t resign.

  I think I am going to call him Gabriel.

  Today, Sunday, Gabriel will set his gramophone on the table in front of him. And a Caruso record put together from shellac and warble will pour over Gabriel the chant and melody of an unfamiliar world where figures and steel nibs are unknown.