Grand Hotel

by Vicki Baum

  Caviar, for example, cost nine marks. Caviar was a disappointment, Kringelein decided. It tasted like herring and cost nine marks. Kringelein had gone hot and cold under the supercilious gaze of three waiters while he stared at the cart of hors-d’œuvres which had come to a stop in front of him. He had had to miss out on the prix fixe supper—at twenty-two marks—out of consideration for his ailing stomach. Burgundy was a heavy, sour wine lying in a kind of cradle, like a baby. The rich had odd tastes, it seemed. Kringelein was by no means stupid; he was very willing to learn; and it had not taken him long to see that he had been badly brought up and did not know how to make proper use of the array of knives and forks before him. During the entire evening he could not rid himself of a horrible nervous tremor. Embarrassment over tips, and wrong doors and puzzled inquiries kept him in a constant state of painful confusion. But this first evening as a man of wealth had its great moments. The shop windows, for example. In Berlin, the shop windows are lighted up at night, and the riches of the whole world are displayed there. I can buy what I like, is a novel and enchanting thought for a man like Kringelein. Or, for instance, his visit to the cinema. In Berlin you can go to the cinema as late as half-past nine. He had treated himself to one of the best seats. There is a cinema in Fredersdorf too. You went three times a week to Zickenmeier’s Hall, where the music club also held its rehearsals. Kringelein had been two or three times with his stingy Anna in the cheapest seats, right in front among the factory hands, and there he had sat with his head tilted back staring straight up at the gigantic and distorted figures on the screen. It was one of the revelations of the evening to find that the film, when seen from an expensive seat, had a totally different appearance. If you could only pay enough, it became as alive as life itself. Incidentally, this film of St. Moritz opened up a wonderful and scarcely believable world. Kringelein decided then and there that he would go to St. Moritz. Those mountains and lakes and valleys were not put there only for the Preysings, he thought to himself, and at the thought, as it recurred again and again, his heart pounded. There is a sweet, a bitter, and triumphant sense of freedom in those for whom death is decreed. Kringelein could find no word for it; but, whenever it came over him, he was forced to catch his breath in a heavy sigh.

  “Excuse me—” said Doctor Otternschlag, into the midst of these whirling thoughts, as he pushed his bony knees under Kringelein’s table. “There is not another seat left in this cursed bar. Rotten accommodation. Louisiana flip,” he said to the waiter and laid his skeleton fingers on the table between himself and Kringelein, like ten cold, heavy metal rods.

  “Delighted,” Kringelein said in his politest manner. “I am delighted to meet you again. You were so very kind to me, sir—believe me, I won’t forget it. No, indeed.”

  Otternschlag, who had never, over a stretch of untold dreary years, heard anyone describe him as kind, and who for ten years had scarcely spoken to a living soul, felt a slight scorn mixed with a certain gratification at this repeated expression of thanks on the part of the gentleman from Fredersdorf. “Well, cheers,” he said and tossed down his flip. Kringelein, who had ordered something at random that he now scarcely dared to drink, took a sip of the copper-colored fluid from a shallow metal cup.

  “The life here is a little confusing at first,” he said timidly.

  “H’m,” replied Doctor Otternschlag. “At first, yes. Doesn’t improve on acquaintance either, when you live here as I do. No. Bring me another Louisiana flip.”

  “It is not at all as one imagined it,” Kringelein said. His strong cocktail was making him reflective. “Nowadays, even in the provinces one is not out of the world. There are the newspapers. There are the cinemas. There are the pictures in the illustrated papers. But even so the real thing looks quite different. I knew, for example, that bar stools were high. But they are not so very high, after all. And the black man behind the Bar is the mixer, of course. But there’s really nothing very special about him at close quarters. As a matter of fact it’s the first time I ever saw a black man in my life. But he doesn’t seem at all strange. He even speaks German and you might think he was only made up to look black.”

  “No, he’s genuine enough. Not much use though. It’ll take some time for you to get tight here.”

  Kringelein listened to the maze of voices, to the clatter and hum, and the loud laughter of the women at the bar in front. “They are not real demi-mondaines, are they?” he asked.

  Otternschlag turned the undisfigured side of his face to him. “You’d like something rather more alluring?” he said. “No, they’re not the real thing. This is a solid, respectable sort of place. No women admitted unless accompanied by men. They’re not demi-mondaines, nor real ladies, either. Do you want to get to know a girl?”

  Kringelein gave a little cough. “Thank you, not in the least. As a matter of fact I could have got to know a girl this evening. Yes, I assure you. A young lady invited me to dance with her.”

  “Indeed? You? Where was that?” asked Doctor Otternschlag and the half of his mouth showed a wry smile.

  “I was in a place, Casino something or other it was called, not far from Potsdammer Platz,” said Kringelein, trying to copy the staccato speech of the man of the world as he heard it on Otternschlag’s lips. “Great, great, I tell you. The lighting. Positively fairylike.” He tried to find a more expressive word but gave up. “Fairylike. Little fountains with variegated lights changing all the time. Expensive, of course. Champagne only. They take you for twenty-five marks a bottle. Unfortunately I can only stand a little. Not in the best of health, you see.”

  “So I see. I know all about that. When a man’s collar is nearly an inch too wide for him, I don’t need to be told anything more.”

  “Are you a doctor?” asked Kringelein in a cold sweat. Involuntarily he put two fingers inside his collar. Yes, it had got too large.

  “Have been. Been everything one time or another. I was sent by the government as a doctor to Southwest Africa. Filthy climate. Taken prisoner in September ’14. Prison camp in Nairrti, British East Africa. Sent home on a promise not to fight again. Went through the whole rotten business as an army doctor till the finish. Shell in the face. Diphtheria germs messing about in the wound till 1920. Two years lying in an isolation ward. There, that’s enough. Period. Been everything pretty well. Who cares?”

  Kringelein gazed in horror at this ruin of a man whose fingers lay cold and lifeless on the table between them. The bar provided a running accompaniment of assorted sounds and a Charleston could just be heard from the Yellow Pavilion. Kringelein had caught extremely little of Otternschlag’s telegraphed report; nevertheless tears started to his eyes. Tears came with ignominious ease ever since his operation, which had not cured him.

  “And have you no one then, who—I mean—are you quite alone?” he asked in embarrassment, and Otternschlag noticed for the first time what a high, charming voice he had, a human, resonant, inquiring, tentative voice. He put out his cold fingers in front of him on the table, and withdrew them again immediately. Kringelein looked reflectively at the numerous white stitches and scars in Otternschlag’s face and a sudden resolution unloosed his lips.

  Being alone—he knew what that meant—this was more or less what he said—he too was alone in Berlin, absolutely alone. He had cut the threads. He had severed various ties (such were the carefully chosen phrases he used) and now he was alone in Berlin. After spending all his life in Fredersdorf he felt stupid of course in a great city, but not so stupid that he could not see his own stupidity. He knew little of life, but now he wanted to get to know it. He wanted to know life as it really was. That was why he was here. “But,” he went on, “where is real life? I have not come on it yet. I have been to a casino, and here I am sitting in the most expensive hotel, but all the time I know it isn’t the real thing. All the time I have a suspicion that real, genuine actual life is going on somewhere else and is something quite different. When you don’t belong to it it’s not at all so easy to
get into it, if you see what I mean?”

  “Yes, but what’s your notion of life?” replied Doctor Otternschlag. “Does life even exist as you imagine it? The real thing is always going on somewhere else. When you’re young you think it will come later. Later on you think it was earlier. When you are here, you think it is there—in India, in America, on Popocatepetl or somewhere. But when you get there, you find that life has doubled back and is quietly waiting here, here in the very place you ran away from. It is the same with life as it is with the butterfly collector and the swallowtail. As you see it flying away, it is wonderful. But as soon as it is caught, the colors are gone and the wings bashed.”

  These were the first consecutive remarks that Kringelein had heard Doctor Otternschlag utter, and he was impressed; but he was not convinced. “I don’t believe that,” he said modestly.

  “Take it from me, it is so. It is the same as with the bar stool,” Otternschlag replied; his elbows were propped on his knees and his hands trembled faintly.

  “What bar stool?” asked Kringelein.

  “The bar stool you spoke of a moment ago. Bar stools are not so very high, you said. You imagined they would be higher, eh? Didn’t you say that? Well, then, one imagines everything higher than it is, till one sees it. You come on your travels from your little provincial town with false ideas about life. Grand Hotel, you think. Most expensive hotel, you think. God knows what marvels you expect from a hotel like this. You’ll soon know all about it. The whole hotel is only a rotten pub. It is exactly the same with the whole of life. The whole of life is a rotten pub, Herr Kringelein. You arrive, stay for a while and go on again. Passing through. Isn’t that it? For a short stay, what? What do you do in a big hotel? Eat, sleep, lounge about, do business, flirt a little, dance a little, eh? Well, and what do you do in life? A hundred doors along one corridor and nobody knows a thing about his next-door neighbors. When you leave, another arrives and takes your bed. Finito. Sit for an hour or two in the Lobby and keep your eyes open. You’ll see that the people there have no individuality. They’re dummies, all of ’em. Dead, all the lot and don’t know it. Charming pub, a big hotel like this. Grand Hotel, bella vita, eh? Well, the main thing is—have your bags packed and ready.”

  Kringelein took a considerable time for reflection. Then it seemed to him that he had grasped the meaning of Otternschlag’s discourse. “Yes, to be sure,” he agreed. He put almost too much emphasis on the words.

  Otternschlag, who was on the point of dozing off, woke up again.

  “Did you want me to do anything for you? Do you want me to introduce you to Life? You’ve made a fine choice I must say. I am always at your service, Herr Kringelein.”

  “I had no wish to be a nuisance to you, sir,” Kringelein said with a sad air of humility. He went on thinking. The polished phrases he had prepared found no utterance. Since he had come to the Grand Hotel he felt that he was in a foreign land. He spoke his native tongue like a foreign language that he had learnt from books and newspapers. “You were so extremely kind,” he said. “I was hoping— but, of course, for you everything has another aspect than it has for me. You have it all behind you. You have had your fill. I have it all ahead of me. That makes one impatient. Please forgive me.”

  Otternschlag looked so hard at Kringelein that even the stitched-up eyelid above his glass eye seemed to be focusing on him. He saw Kringelein clearly and completely. He saw his wasted figure in the clerk’s suit of stout gray worsted, rather shiny in places. He saw the sad and yearning expression round the bloodless lips and beneath that absurd mustache. He saw the wasted neck inside the wide, frayed collar, the clerk’s hands and untended nails; he even saw the blacked boots, turned slightly in, on the thick carpet under the table. And finally he saw Kringelein’s eyes, the blue human eyes behind the bookkeeper’s pince-nez, eyes filled with so much yearning expectation, wonder and curiosity. In them was hunger for life, and knowledge of death.

  God knows whether some warmth from those eyes penetrated the frigid being of Doctor Otternschlag. Perhaps it was pure boredom that made him say: “True. Quite true. You’re right. How very right you are. I have it behind me. Yes, I have had my fill. It’s all behind me now down to the last unimportant formality. And you say, then, that for you it is all ahead of you. You’ve the appetite, eh? Of the soul, I mean. Now what do you have in mind? The usual men’s paradise—Champagne? Women? Races? Gambling? Drink? Tiens! And so you tumbled for it the very first evening, eh? An acquaintance right off?” Otternschlag said impassively, thankful though he was for the warmth in Kringelein’s eyes.

  “Yes, quite early on. A lady absolutely wanted to dance with me. A very pretty girl. Perhaps not quite—I mean something of a bird of paradise” (he took “bird of paradise” from the Mickenauer Journal). “But most elegant. Well educated, too.”

  “Well educated, too! Well—there! And how did you get on?” Otternschlag murmured.

  “Unfortunately I can’t dance. One must be able to dance. Apparently it is very important,” said Kringelein. His cocktail made him feverishly enterprising and at the same time sad.

  “Very important. Very. Important above all things,” replied Doctor Otternschlag in a surprisingly alert tone of voice. “One must know how to dance. The mutual embrace in time with the music, the dizzy turning and twirling of two as one, eh? One ought not to turn down any lady. One must know how to dance. Oh, how right you are, Herr Kringelein. Learn quickly, as soon as you can find time. Then you will never have to say no to a lady again, Herr Kringelein—your name is Kringelein, isn’t it?”

  Kringelein looked questioningly and uneasily through his glasses into Otternschlag’s face. “Why do you ask that?” he asked, and felt that he was being made a fool of. But Otternschlag went on seriously. “Believe me,” he said, “believe me, Kringelein, when I say: A man who does not live as a man, who ignores his own sexuality, is a dead man. Waiter, the bill.”

  Kringelein paid too after this abrupt conclusion and stood up embarrassed. He followed Doctor Otternschlag, whose dinner jacket was stretched tightly over his thin shoulder blades, out of the Bar and, stumbling over to the porter, got his key.

  “Any letters for me?” Otternschlag asked the night porter. He seemed suddenly to have forgotten Kringelein entirely.

  “No,” the porter said, without so much as looking, for one porter isn’t like another, and sensibility of soul is not put on with a porter’s cap. “Madame’s key was taken upstairs by Mademoiselle,” he said in French to a lady immediately afterward. Kringelein could almost understand it, thanks to his experience with the foreign correspondence.

  As the lady passed him there was a breath of delicate bittersweet perfume from her golden evening cloak, open at the neck. Kringelein stared at her, for his manners were lost in boundless amazement. Her hair was black and smooth and she wore a diadem in it. Her drooping eyelids were painted blue-black. Her cheeks, temples and chin were ivory white and the veins were blue. Her mouth was carmine, almost purple, and it was rouged in such long curves that the corners seemed to stretch upwards to her nostrils in a fixed smile. Her hair was drawn down over her cheeks in two smooth black wings and where cheeks and hair met there was an ochre shadow laid on with extreme art. She looked tall, though she was scarcely of medium height, and this (as even Kringelein could tell) was due to the perfect proportions of her body and to the lightness of her carriage. She was accompanied by a little old gentleman with a top hat in his hand who looked like a musician. “Could you be at the theater at half-past eight, my dear?” the lady asked, just as she passed Kringelein. “I should like to work half an hour before the rehearsal.”

  Kringelein, who had never seen such a work of art as this lady, was amazed and delighted, and it showed in his in his face. He pulled Otternschlag by the sleeve and whispered in an undertone: “Who is that?”

  “Don’t you know, my dear fellow? It’s Grusinskaya,” Otternschlag said impatiently and stalked over to the elevator. Kringelein stood rooted to
the spot. Grusinskaya! Good heavens! Grusinskaya, he thought. For Grusinskaya’s fame was such that it had even reached Fredersdorf. So she really exists! That’s what she looks like. One doesn’t just read about her in the newspapers. She’s actually here on earth. I’ve stood beside her, brushed against her, and the whole place smells of her as she goes by. I must write to Kampmann about this.

  He set off with speed in order to see her once more and to take a good look at her. At this very moment a little comedy of good manners was being enacted in front of the elevator. An exceptionally well-set-up, elegant and handsome fellow stepped ostentatiously back two paces from the elevator and made way for Grusinskaya with an easy and at the same time chivalrous gesture, as though it were not merely a question of giving her precedence into the elevator, but of laying the conquest of an empire at the feet of a queen. Otternschlag, who was standing alone by the wall on the other side of the corridor, muttered, “Sir Walter Raleigh!” Kringelein, on the other hand, now in full career, shot past him and pressed into the elevator on the heels of the chivalrous young man. Thus it was that his recently acquired friend remained alone below, since only four could go up at once. They stood somewhat crowded in the little cage of wood and glass.

  The handsome young man in particular squeezed far back into a corner.

  “Ah! So you too are in Berlin, Baron?” Witte, the old conductor, asked, and Baron Gaigern answered:

  “Yes, to be sure. I am here too.”

  Kringelein listened with awe to this talk between refined people. The one-armed man turned the handle, the elevator stopped at the first floor, and they all marched off along the raspberry-red carpet to their rooms, Grusinskaya leading, then Witte, then the Baron, then Otto Kringelein. The doors of Room Nos. 68 and 69 and 70 were opened. It was two o’clock and an old grandfather clock at the turning of the passage struck officiously. The sound of music could be heard faintly from the Yellow Pavilion, where they were playing the last dance.