Grand Hotel

by Vicki Baum

  “Not everything, but most of it. You speak French so fast,” Gaigern answered. During the months of lying in wait for the pearls he had often been to Grusinskaya’s performances, and they had without exception profoundly bored him. He was deeply astonished to find that Grusinskaya seemed to drag this ballet show round with her as a kind of martyrdom. She lay, nestling so lightly against him and she had such a pretty and charmingly modulated chirruping voice, and at the same time she spoke such somber words. What was he to say in reply? He sighed and reflected.

  “That was good what you said just now about the people at evening with their stiff hands. You ought to dance that,” he said at last with some embarrassment.

  Grusinskaya only laughed at this.

  “That? But one can’t dance that, Monsieur. Do you think they’d want to see me as an old woman with a shawl over her head and gout in her fingers, sitting like a block of wood and resting—?”

  She broke off in the middle of her sentence. Even while she spoke her body took hold of the idea and grew tense. She saw the scene and she knew a crazy young painter in Paris who could paint it. She saw the dance, she felt it in her hands and in the bent vertebrae of her neck. She lay silent with open mouth in the darkness. She was so wrought up that she did not breathe. The room was crowded with impersonations she had never danced and still might dance. A hundred true and living figures rose before her eyes. A beggar woman stretched out trembling hands; an old peasant woman danced for the last time at her daughter’s wedding. A haggard woman stood in front of a booth at a fair and went through her poor tricks. A prostitute waited for men under a street lamp. Here stood a servant girl who had broken a dish and was beaten for it, and here was a fifteen-year-old child forced to dance naked before a large, flashy man, a gentleman, a grand duke, and here stood the skinny caricature of a governess. There was one who ran as though pursued though no one followed her, one who wanted to sleep and dared not, one who was afraid of a mirror, and there was one who drank poison at last and died.

  “Keep still, don’t speak and don’t move,” Grusinskaya whispered and she stared up at the ceiling with its sword of light. The room had taken on that utterly strange and enchanted appearance often encountered in hotel bedrooms. Beneath the window a number of cars whirred and groaned like wild beasts, for the banquet of the League of Humanity was over and the departures from Entrance No. II were in full swing. The night had grown cooler. Grusinskaya came back out of her whirl of ideas with a start and a shudder. Pimenov— with his new butterfly ballet—will think I have gone out of my mind. Perhaps I have? Her flight of fancy had only lasted a minute, yet she returned from it to her bed as though from a long journey. Gaigern was still there. She was almost astonished to find this man still there against her shoulder and to feel his hair, his hands, his breath.

  “What kind of man are you?” she asked again as she laid her face close to his in the darkness. She was deeply conscious at this moment of her astonishment at such intimate closeness, when they were really strangers. “Yesterday I didn’t even know you. Tell me who you are,” she asked with her lips close to his. Gaigern had been about to fall asleep. Now he put his arms round her. She felt like his lean greyhound bitch back home.

  “Me? There’s little to be said about me,” he answered obediently, but without opening his eyes. “I am a prodigal son. I am the black sheep of a good flock. I am a mauvais sujet and I shall end on the gallows.”

  “Yes?” she asked with a little gurgling laugh deep in her throat.

  “Yes,” said Gaigern with conviction. He had begun to recite the old phrases from the homilies of his school days in fun, but now the warm scent of thyme from the bed inspired in him a desire to confess and reform.

  “I am undisciplined,” he went on into the darkness. “I am quite without character and unspeakably inquisitive. I can’t live an orderly life and I am good for nothing. At home I learned to ride and play the gentleman. At school, to say my prayers and lie. In the war, to shoot and take cover. And beyond that I can do nothing. I am a gypsy, an outsider, an adventurer.”

  “Yes, and what else?”

  “I am a gambler who is not above cheating. I have stolen too before now. Properly speaking I ought to be in prison. Meanwhile, I have a jolly good time and do as I please and live off the fat of the land. Now and then, too, I get drunk, and I ought to add that I have been work-shy since birth.”

  “Go on,” whispered Grusinskaya in delight. Her throat quivered with suppressed laughter.

  “Further, I am a criminal. A cat-burglar,” Gaigern said sleepily.

  “Nothing more? A murderer, perhaps?”

  “Yes, of course. A murderer, too. I almost killed you,” Gaigern asserted.

  Grusinskaya went on laughing a little above his face, which she could feel but could not see. All the same she became suddenly serious. She clasped her fingers behind his neck, and whispered very softly in his ear.

  “If you had not come in yesterday I wouldn’t be alive now!”

  “Yesterday?” thought Gaigern. “Now?” The night in Room No. 68 had lasted an eternity. It was years since he stood on the balcony watching her. He gave a start. His arms gripped her as tightly as a wrestler’s, but her sinewy muscles held out against his pressure, which he felt with a strange joy.

  “You must never do anything like that again. You must stay here. I shall never let you go. I need you,” he said. He heard himself saying these astounding words in a husky voice that seemed to come directly from the depths of his heart.

  “No, now everything has changed. Now it is all right again. You are with me now,” Grusinskaya whispered. He could not understand it, for she said it in Russian. But he heard the tone of her voice, and this was enough to turn the night once more to rapture. Dreambirds started from the branches of the hotel wallpaper. He forgot the pearls in the pocket of his pajamas, and she forgot her failure and the deadly dose of Veronal in the teacup.

  Neither ventured on that fragile word—love. Together they glided into the vortex of their night of love. They went from an embrace to whispered talk, from whisperings to sleep and dreams, from dreams to more embraces. These two had come together from the ends of the world to meet for a few hours in the hotel bed of Room No. 68 where so many had slept before them . . .

  •

  Love had played no great part in Grusinskaya’s life. All the passion of her body and soul went into dancing. She had had one or two lovers, because, like the pearls and a car and clothes from the best dressmakers of Paris and Vienna, they were part of the life of a celebrated dancer. Though she had been besieged, courted, and pursued by men who had fallen in love with her, she did not in her heart believe in the existence of love. It seemed to her as unreal as the painted drop scenes, the temples of love, and the banks of roses that formed the settings for her dances. But though she was cold and insensitive to love, she was esteemed a wonderful mistress. She herself practiced love as a duty imposed by her profession, a part to be played that might sometimes please but always fatigued her and called for a high degree of art. To the nights she spent with her lovers she gave all the suppleness of her body, its hovering grace, its subtlety, its tenderness and its sensibility, its impulse and its élan, its appeal and its delicacy, and in short all the qualities she had brought to perfection in her dancing. She could intoxicate but she could not be intoxicated. When she danced she could let herself go in self-oblivion, and often her partners heard her utter low cries or sing low birdlike snatches to herself while she executed the most difficult and intricate figures. In love, however, she never lost her self-awareness. She stood outside and watched herself. She did not believe in love and she did not need it, and yet, strange to say, she could not live without it.

  For love, she knew, was an ingredient of success. As long as she was young, as long as flowers and notes poured into her dressing room, as long as men stood rooted to the ground wherever she passed, as long as they were ready to ruin themselves, to commit any folly, to sacrifice t
heir families and fortunes for her sake, she was conscious of success. It could be assessed in terms of declarations of love, threats of suicide, pursuits across the world and costly presents just as it could in terms of applause, critiques and the number of curtain calls. She might not know it, but the lover whom she bewitched and delighted was to her really only a public with whom she had a success. And the first time she realized, with a shock of horror, that success was deserting her was when Gaston left her and married an insignificant woman of good family. The atmosphere in which she lived began to cool off after being for so many years in a continual glow. The shadows lengthened to an inconceivable evening. It was a decline that led downward by a hundred thousand steps so small that one scarcely noticed. And yet the distance she had traversed was immense. Before the war, she had danced the whole world into an ecstasy of romantic delight. Now she begged for her meager applause from hostile and disillusioned cynics. And at the end of it all lay utter loneliness and a fatal dose of Veronal.

  Hence the man on the balcony was much more than just a man to Grusinskaya. He was a miracle. At the eleventh hour he had made his appearance in Room No. 68 to rescue her. He was success coming to her in a visible shape; the world intruding eagerly on her; proof that the years of romance when a young Jerylinkov had been shot for her sake were not yet over. She had allowed herself to fall, and there he had stood to catch her as she fell.

  There was a dance in Grusinskaya’s repertoire in which love and death danced a pas de deux. Youthful poets had occasionally sent her verses with the recurrent, rather banal, theme that love and death were brother and sister. In the course of this night Grusinskaya experienced this poetic truism personally. The dazed agony of the prior evening had changed to rapture. It had become an ecstasy of gratitude, a feverish grasping and taking and feeling and holding. The frozen years had thawed. The secret shame of her coldness, concealed all her life within herself, melted away. It was true of her no longer. She had been so wretched and lonely for years past that sometimes she had begged a pittance of warmth from the warm young body of her partner, Michael. And now tonight, in this ordinary hotel bedroom, in this mass-produced bed of polished brass, she felt herself burning, changing. She discovered a Love she had not believed existed.

  Owing to the similarity between Rooms No. 68 and No. 69, Gaigern did not at once realize where he was when he awoke. Thinking that he was turning towards the wall in his own room, he encountered the sleeping, breathing form of Grusinskaya. Then he remembered. The deep and wonderful intimacy of their first sleep together weighed sweetly on his limbs. He slipped his cramped arm out from under her neck and thought with a tender solemnity of the events of the night. No doubt about it, he was in love, in love in a sweet and utterly grateful fashion such as he had never known. Quite apart from the pearls he thought, not without shame, quite apart from this ill-fated affair of the pearls, I am a rotten bastard. I climb into a room; I act out an atrocious farce, and the woman believes it. She actually demands it. Every man acts a part and every woman believes it. At the outset actually every man is a swindler and a burglar, but then later on—well, it has come true. I love you, little Mouna, dear little Neuwjada. Yes, I love you, je t’aime, je t’aime. You have made a fine conquest, little woman . . .

  It was cool in the room. Outside it must be nearly daylight. The street was silent. A streak of dawn-gray light came through the curtain. The pattern of the wallpaper began to creep out from the walls in the first glimmer of day. Grusinskaya was fast asleep with her chin pressed on her shoulder. Now that the excitement of the night was over, the two Veronal powders seemed to be taking effect. Gaigern took the hand that hung over the edge of the bed and tenderly pressed his hot eyelids to its coolness and then put this limp little hand under the bedclothes as though Grusinskaya were an infant. He felt his way in the half-light to the door of the balcony and slowly drew the curtains. Grusinskaya did not wake up. Now, thought he, I must put this business of the pearls to rights again. He was surprised at himself for taking it so calmly. A lost round, he thought without ill humor. He often applied sporting terms like this to his adventurous undertakings. Next he groped about for his pajamas, and, laughing softly as he collected his scattered articles of clothing, he went into the bathroom. The water made the wound on his right hand throb and begin to bleed again. He sucked it casually for a moment and then let it be. The bitter and faded scent of laurel was stronger than ever. Eager for fresh air he stepped out onto the balcony. His breast was still full of a new and sweet anxiety.

  Outside a thin drifting early morning mist hung over the street. Not a car or passerby was to be seen. In the distance could be heard the noise of the streetcars starting out. The sun had not yet risen and the light was an unrelieved milky gray. Footsteps rang out at the corner of the street; then there was silence again. A piece of paper fluttered a moment over the asphalt like an ailing bird and then lay still. The tree that stood near Entrance No. II stirred its branches in a dream. On this March morning, a sleepy bird high up on a budding twig tried its voice in the midst of the great city. A truck laden with cases of bottled milk careered past noisily and confidently. The drifting mist smelled of automobile fumes. The balcony railing shone with moisture. Gaigern found his thief’s socks on the balcony and stuffed them hurriedly into his pockets along with the gloves, the flashlight, as well as the pearls worth five hundred thousand marks, which he still had to get rid of. He turned back into the room, leaving the curtains open; the gray light fell in a triangle on the carpet and as far as the bed and the sleeping Grusinskaya.

  She lay now stretched out, her head thrown back sideways on the pillow. The bed was far too large for her small, slender form. Gaigern, for whom most hotel beds were too short, was amused and touched. He had a sudden tender inspiration. He took the teacup full of Veronal from the table and the empty glass vial too, and went with them into the bathroom. He emptied the cup, washed it as carefully as a nurse would for a child, and dried it on his handkerchief. Childishly, he kissed the sleeves of Grusinskaya’s bathrobe, which he found there. Since there was nowhere else to put the empty glass vial, he put it in his pocket with the pearls. Grusinskaya sighed in her sleep as he returned. He bent over her attentively, but she was still asleep. It had grown lighter and he now saw her face quite clearly. Her hair had fallen smoothly back from her face, exposing the narrow temples with their shadowed hollows. Two deep wrinkles beneath the closed eyes showed the approach of age. Gaigern saw it, but it did not displease him. Her mouth over the delicate though faded chin was wonderful. There was a little powder still on her forehead with its indented line of hair. Gaigern remembered with a smile that she had pulled out a powder-compact from under the pillow before she allowed him to turn on the bedside lamp. I see you now anyway, he thought with a primitive feeling of triumph in his conquest. He scrutinized her face, as though it were new country in which he went to seek adventure. He found two mysterious symmetrical lines descending from her temples past her ears to her neck as thin as threads, and lighter in color than the rest of her skin. He passed his finger lightly over them. They were fine scars that framed her face as though they were the edges of a mask. Suddenly Gaigern realized what they were. They were vanity scars, incisions in the skin, with the object of stretching it and preserving its youth. He had read of such things. He shook his head, smiling, incredulous. Involuntarily he touched his own temples. They were smooth and braced by the strong and healthy beat of his pulse.