Grand Hotel

by Vicki Baum

  First Grusinskaya stood motionless for nearly a minute in the middle of the room just below the glass-shaded hanging light and it seemed from her face that she was lost. She stood there till her cloak fell of its own weight from her drooping arms, and then she stepped over it to the telephone on the table. It was a minute or so before she got through to the theater and again a minute or two before she got Pimenov, but she was too utterly weary to be impatient.

  “Hello, Pimenov. Yes, it’s Grusinskaya. I am in the hotel. You must forgive me. Yes, I was unwell suddenly. My heart, you know. I could scarcely breathe. Yes, like that time in Scheveningen. No, I’m better now. It must have put you in a fix, I know. How did Lucille get on? What? Oh, fair. And the audience? What’s that? No, I am not upset. You can tell me if there was a scene. No? No scene at all? Went off quietly? Not much applause? A different program you think? Good. We’ll talk it over. No, I’m going to bed. No, no doctor, please. Nor Witte either. No, no, no, I want nobody. Not Suzette either. I only want to be left in peace. You will drive, please, to the French Embassy and make my excuses. Thank you. Good night, my dear. Good night, Pimenov! Listen, Pimenov, my greetings to Witte and to Michael too and all the rest as well. No, don’t worry about me. I shall be all right tomorrow. Good night.”

  She replaced the receiver on its hook. “Good night, my dear,” she said softly after she had done so, standing alone in the hotel bedroom.

  So it was her heart, thought Gaigern. She was unwell. It had needed all his attention to follow the rapid French words. So that was why she had turned up at this worst of all possible moments. She looked wretched certainly. All to the good, for she would go to sleep and then there would be a hope of taking his leave of her. The important thing was to keep calm. He moved cautiously to the edge of the balcony and looked over. The two idiots in blue were sitting there in consultation. They had hung up two fine dark lanterns and looked as if they were prepared to put in the entire night on overtime. Gaigern’s craving for a cigarette reached the pitch of disease. He opened his mouth wide and took in a gulp of damp gasoline-laden air. Inside the room, meanwhile, Grusinskaya had gone up to the mirror with its two wings. The plundered case lay in front of it. Gaigern’s heart suddenly thumped in his chest. However, she pushed the leather case aside without a glance at it, and turning on the light over the center of the mirror, she grasped its frame with both hands and pressed her face close up to the glass, as if she meant to plunge right into it. The attention with which she then studied her face had something probing, greedy and gruesome about it. Odd creatures, women, thought Gaigern behind the curtain. Strange animals. What can she see in the glass to make such a frightful face over?

  He himself saw her as a beautiful woman, undeniably beautiful, even though the makeup on her cheeks was beginning to run. Her neck, above all, reflected twice over in the side mirrors, was incomparably delicate and flexible. Grusinskaya fixed her eyes on her face as though on the face of an enemy. With horror she saw the telltale years, the wrinkles, the flabbiness, the fatigue, the withering; her temples were smooth no longer, the corners of her mouth were disfigured, her eyelids, under the blue makeup, were as creased as crumpled tissue paper. Another fit of shuddering, more violent than the previous one in the street, came over her while she looked at herself. She tried to control her lips but could not. She hurried across the room and hastily turned out the uncompromising light suspended from the ceiling and turned on the table lamp, but even this did not lend any warmth. With a few impatient movements she tore off her costume and went naked, but for the tights that covered her as far as her hips, to the radiator and leaned her breast against the gray-colored pipes. She scarcely thought at all as she did so. She only desired warmth. Enough, she thought, enough. Never again. Finished. Enough. She whispered her irrevocable decision in every language, her teeth chattering all the while. She went into the bathroom and undressed completely. She held her hands under the hot tap and let the warmth flow over her arteries till it began to hurt. She took a friction brush and rubbed her shoulders with it. Then, suddenly, she left off in a fit of disgust and came back naked and shivering and went straight across the room to the telephone. She had to put her lips twice to the telephone before she could speak.

  “Tea,” she said. “A lot of tea and a lot of sugar.”

  Then, still naked, she went to the mirror and looked in it with gloomy intensity. Her body, however, was of unique and faultless beauty. It was the body of a sixteen-year-old ballet pupil, which the severe and disciplined work of a lifetime had preserved unaltered. Suddenly the hatred she felt for herself changed into tenderness. She clasped her shoulders and stroked their smooth sheen. She kissed the hollow of her right arm and cupped her hands like shells to receive her small and perfect breasts. She stroked the delicate upward curve of her stomach and her slender shadowed hips. She bent her head down and kissed her poor slim sinewy knees as though they were sick children whom she loved. “Bjednaiaia, malenkaia,” she murmured to them. It was an endearment from her early days. You poor one, you little one, it meant.

  Unconsciously Gaigern, between the curtains, showed pity and admiration in his face. He was embarrassed by what he saw. He knew many women, but he had never seen one whose body was so delicately and perfectly formed. Yet this was really a secondary consideration. It was the helplessness, the lost and tremulous despair of this pitiful Grusinskaya as she stood before the mirror that impressed him most. It inspired a sweet and painful sympathy and made him flush to his ears. Though he was a crook, ready to carry off stolen pearls worth five hundred thousand marks in his pocket, Gaigern was far from being inhuman. He let go of the pearls and took his hands out of his pockets. He felt in his hands and in his arms a compelling desire to support this poor lonely woman, to take her away and console and warm her—to do anything to put a stop to that terrible shuddering and almost crazed, despairing whispering.

  The room-service waiter knocked at the outer door. Grusinskaya put on her dressing gown—the same one that had startled Gaigern in the darkness—and went to the door in her worn slippers. The tea was discreetly handed in and Grusinskaya locked the door behind the retreating waiter. It had come to this, she thought. She poured out a cup of tea and took a vial of Veronal from the bedside table. She swallowed a tablet, drank some tea, and then took a second. She got up and began to walk rapidly back and forth across the room, four paces this way, four paces that.

  What is the use of it all? she thought. What is the use of living? What is there to wait for? Why endure the torture? Oh, I am tired. You don’t know, any of you, how tired I am. I promised myself to stop when the time came. Tiens, the time has come. Am I to wait till I am hissed off the stage? It is time, malenkaia—poor little one. Gru is not going to go to Vienna tomorrow. Gru gives up. Gru is going to sleep. You don’t know how cold it is to be famous. Not a soul to care for me, not one. They all live off me. Nobody lives for me. Nobody. Not one. I know no one who is not either vain or anxious. I have always been alone. And who troubles about a Grusinskaya who dances no more? Finished. No, I shall not parade about Monte Carlo, stiff and fat and old like the other famous women who have grown old. “You should have seen me in the days when the Grand Duke Sergei was still alive!” No, that is not for me. And where else am I to go? To Tremezzo to grow orchids, to keep two white peacocks, to have money troubles and to be alone, utterly alone, and to rusticate and die? That is what it comes to in the end—to die. Nijinsky is in an asylum waiting to die. Poor Nijinsky! Poor Gru! I am not going to wait. The moment has come—now—now—now—now—

  She stood still and listened as though she heard her name being called. The Veronal was already humming drowsily in her ears and its narcotic influence subdued her to a welcome indifference. Gaston, she thought as she went to the table. Dear Gaston, you were good to me once. How young you were! And how long ago it was! Now you are a minister, fat and bearded and sleek. Adieu Gaston. Adieu pour jamais, n’est ce pas? There is such an easy way of not growing older . .
.

  Grusinskaya poured herself another cup of tea. She was now posing a little, playing in sweet sadness a little tragic scene. There was a manner and a grace in her despairing resolve. With a rapid gesture she took the bottle of Veronal tablets and emptied them all into her tea, then waited for them to melt. It took too long and she tapped them impatiently with the teaspoon. Then getting up she went once more to the mirror and began mechanically powdering her face, which was suddenly covered with delicate, cool perspiration. Her lips ceased trembling and assumed a fixed stage smile. She put her hands in front of her face and whispered: God! God! God! Now she too noticed the funereal scent that rose from the baskets of faded flowers and hung in the air of the room. She went unsteadily over to the table with the cup of tea and tasted it with the tip of the spoon. The taste was very bitter. She dropped in one lump of sugar after another with the sugar tongs and waited for them to dissolve. This took a minute or perhaps longer. In the stillness the clock and the watch raced each other breathlessly.

  Grusinskaya got up and went to the balcony door. She was having trouble breathing and longed to look at the sky. She drew back the lace curtain and collided with a shadowy figure.

  “Please do not be alarmed, Madame,” Gaigern said with a bow.

  •

  Grusinskaya’s first movement was not one of alarm, but—oddly enough—of shame. She drew her kimono more closely round her and looked mutely and pensively at Gaigern. What is this? she thought dreamily. Surely I have been through this before? Perhaps she even felt a certain relief at this postponement of the draught of Veronal. She stood gazing at Gaigern for nearly a minute while her thin, arched eyebrows met in a frown above the bridge of her nose. Her lips still trembled, and a sharp, quick breath issued from between them.

  Gaigern, too, felt his teeth beginning to chatter, but he controlled them perfectly. He had never been in such extreme danger as at this moment. All his previous enterprises—there had been only three or four of them—had been carefully prepared and so cautiously executed that not even the faintest suspicion had fallen on him. And now here he stood, caught red-handed in another person’s bedroom with pearls worth five hundred thousand marks in his pocket, and nothing lay between him and imprisonment but the little white bell-push surmounted by the enameled sign requesting you to ring twice for the valet. An access of sheer fury seized him, but he did not allow it to explode. He kept it inside himself until it turned into strength and calm. It cost him a tremendous effort not to strike the woman to the ground. He was like a powerful locomotive under steam, fuelled and charged with great pressure causing it to vibrate from the center, and ready run down everything in its path.

  For the present he bowed. He could have made a wild dash for the hotel façade. He could have killed Grusinskaya or silenced her with threats. It was the prompting of his better nature that chose a bow, an unpremeditated but courteous bow, instead of violence and murder. He did not know that he had turned bluish-white under the eyes. Remotely he was even aware of the danger as an enjoyment, like intoxication or falling endlessly in a dream.

  “Who are you? How did you come here?” Grusinskaya asked. Her tone was almost polite.

  “Pardon me, gnädige Frau, I stole into your room. I am—it is terrible that you should have found me here. You came back earlier than usual. It is my bad luck. I can give you no explanation.”

  Grusinskaya stepped back into the room a pace or two, without taking her eyes off him, and switched on the chandelier that hung from the ceiling with its cold light. Very likely she might have called for help if it had been a rough and ugly man that she had discovered on her balcony. But this man, the handsomest man she had ever seen in her life—as she now remembered through the cloud of Veronal— caused her no alarm. Strangely enough though, it was Gaigern’s charming blue silk pajamas that most filled her with confidence.

  “But what did you want here?” she asked and involuntarily lapsed into the more familiar French.

  “Nothing. Only to sit here. Only to be in your room,” he said softly. He took a deep breath. There was nothing for it now but to tell the woman a fairy tale. He could see that, with a faint gleam of hope. The telltale socks over his shoes worried him; adroitly and surreptitiously he stepped on each in turn and pulled them off.

  Grusinskaya shook her head. “In my room? Mon Dieu! What for?” she asked in her high-pitched bird-like Russian voice, while a strange look of expectancy shone in her face.

  Gaigern, still on the balcony, replied: “I will tell you the truth, Madame. It’s not the first time I have been in your room. Many a time I have sat in your room when you were at the theater. I have breathed the air you breathe. I have left flowers for you. Forgive me—”

  The tea with the Veronal in it was cold. Grusinskaya smiled faintly, but she was no sooner conscious of doing so than she recovered herself and asked severely, “And who let you in? The chambermaid? Suzette? How did you get in?”

  Gaigern resolved on a bold stroke. He pointed behind him into the night. “From there,” he said, “from my balcony.”

  Again Grusinskaya had the feeling, as though in a dream, of having been through this before. Suddenly the memory came back. One evening at a castle in the south, down in Abas Tuman, where the Grand Duke Sergei used to take her, a young officer, a mere boy, had hidden himself in her room. It was at the risk of his life, and indeed he died later through a mysterious accident while out shooting. It was thirty years ago at least. This forgotten incident suddenly came back to her as she stepped out onto the balcony, and looked in the direction in which Gaigern had pointed. She saw the young officer’s face. Pavel Jerylinkov was his name. She remembered his eyes and one or two kisses too. The air was cold and she felt at once that the man beside her on the little balcony radiated warmth. She gave a fleeting glance to the seven meters of the hotel front that separated her balcony from the next one.

  “But that is very dangerous,” she said, thinking more of Jerylinkov than of the present moment.

  “Not very,” replied Gaigern.

  “It is cold. Shut the door,” said Grusinskaya curtly and went quickly past him into the room.

  Gaigern obeyed. He followed her and closed the door behind him, drawing the curtains closed as well. Then he waited with his hands hanging at his sides—a strikingly handsome, unassuming and rather foolish young man, who committed romantic follies in order to enter the bedroom of a celebrated dancer. He, too, after all, had some talent for acting and his profession demanded it. And now life and death hung on the role he was about to play. Grusinskaya bent down to pick up her costume, which lay where she had thrown it, and took it into the bathroom. Her eye caught the glitter of the red cut glass intended to simulate the drop of blood. The sight cut her to the quick. No encore. No uproar when another danced in her place. Oh, the cruel public. Cruel Berlin. Cruel loneliness. She had got beyond those painful thoughts, but now they were back again and the anguish of them stabbed at her heart. For a few seconds she forgot the intruder who looked like young Jerylinkov. Then suddenly she went back and stood close in front of him, so close that she felt his warmth.

  “Why do you do this?” she asked without looking at him. “Why do you take such a risk? Why do you sit secretly in my room? Do you want something of me?”

  Gaigern took the plunge. Here we go, he thought. Without raising his eyes to her face, he said softly:

  “You know why—because I love you.”

  He said it in French. It would have been too painful in his native tongue. Having said it, he waited in silence to see its effect. This is sheer madness, he thought meanwhile. He was bitterly ashamed of this humiliating farce. Such a breach of taste was an agony to him. Still—unless she rang for the hotel valet—perhaps he was saved.

  Grusinskaya drank in these few words of French open-mouthed. They entered into her like medicine. In a few seconds she even ceased to shiver. Poor Grusinskaya! It was years since anyone had said anything like that to her. Her life rattled past like an e
mpty express train. Rehearsal, work, contracts, sleeping-cars, hotel rooms, stage fright, agonies of stage fright, and then more work and more rehearsals. Successes, failures, critiques, interviews, official receptions, quarrels with managers. Three hours of work by herself, four hours’ performance, each day like the last. Old Pimenov. Old Witte. Old Suzette and not another soul, never any warmth. You held your hands to hotel radiators and that was all. And then just as it was all over and done with and life had come to the verge of the abyss, a man appeared in your room at night and spoke those long-forgotten words with which in other times the whole world had rung. Grusinskaya collapsed. She felt a sharp pang as in childbirth. But it was only two tears released at last, at last from the stress of that night. She was conscious of these tears through her whole body, even in her toes and the tips of her fingers and then in her heart, and at last they reached her eyes and rolled off her long, thickly blacked eyelashes to fall on the open palms of her hands.

  Gaigern saw all this as it happened, and it made him feel hot. Poor creature, he thought, poor little woman. Now she is crying. This is really silly.

  After the first two painful tears had been wrung from her it was easier. They were followed by a light but copious shower, warm and cool at once, like summer rain—Gaigern could not help thinking of the beds of hydrangea at Ried, though he did not know why—then came a passionate downpour, a torrent that brought with it all the black mascara from her eyelashes, and finally Grusinskaya threw herself on her bed and sobbed out many words in Russian with her hands clasped and pressed against her mouth. At the sight of this, Gaigern changed from a hotel thief, who had been close to knocking the woman to the ground, into a simple, good-natured, big-hearted man who couldn’t see a woman weep without wanting to help her. He was no longer afraid, and if his heart beat quickly it was simply from pity. He went over to the bed and resting his arms on either side of the little sobbing body he bent over her and mingled his whispered consolations with her sobs. He had nothing particular to say. He would have comforted a crying child or a hurt animal with much the same words. “Poor little woman,” he said. “Poor little woman, poor little Grusinskaya, she’s crying. It does you good, doesn’t it, to cry? Then cry, poor little hurt creature. What have they done to you? Have they treated you badly? Are you glad I’m here? Shall I stay? Are you afraid of anything? Is that why you’re crying? Oh, you poor little woman.”