Grand Hotel

by Vicki Baum

  “No. Bookkeeper. Junior bookkeeper in the accounting office. Room 23. Block C. Third floor,” said Kringelein conscientiously but without enthusiasm.

  “I see—” said Preysing again and sank into reflection. He preferred to say no more for the present about the undesired and incomprehensible presence of a junior clerk from Fredersdorf in the Yellow Pavilion of the Grand Hotel. “I want to speak to you, Fräulein Flamm,” he said, withdrawing his hand from the back of her chair. “It is about a new typing job,” he explained in his office tone, and this was particularly aimed at the fellow from Fredersdorf.

  “Right,” said Flämmchen. “What time would suit you, then? Seven, half-past seven?”

  “No. Immediately,” Preysing said peremptorily wiping his face. The individual from Fredersdorf also had a handkerchief in his breast pocket, a silk flag of mutiny and impertinence.

  “I am sorry, I can’t immediately,” said Flämmchen amiably. “I am engaged—as you see. I cannot very well desert these gentlemen. I have promised Herr Kringelein a dance.”

  “Herr Kringelein will be so good as to forgo it,” said Preysing stiffly. It was a command. Kringelein could feel his rigid lips expanding into the obsequious smile of twenty-five years of subordination. He forced it back. He appealed for help and strength to Gaigern. The Baron had a cigarette in the corner of his mouth. The smoke ascended past the eyelashes of his left eye and he screwed up this eye into a roguish and knowing wink.

  “I have no intention of forgoing it,” said Kringelein. No sooner had he got it out, than he stiffened like a hare pretending to be dead in a farm field. Suddenly this obstinate demeanor on Kringelein’s part made Preysing recollect his case. He had been considering it only a few days before.

  “That is remarkable, indeed,” he said with the dreaded nasal tone of the factory. “Very remarkable. Now I’ve got the picture. You reported sick, isn’t that so? Herr Kringelein, eh? Your wife is in receipt of support from the sick fund on account of your serious illness. We gave you six weeks’ sick leave at full pay, and here you are amusing yourself in Berlin, indulging in a style of living quite out of keeping with your position and your income. Remarkable. Quite remarkable, Herr Kringelein. Your books shall be very carefully examined. You may depend upon that. Your pay will be stopped, since you are so well off, Herr Kringelein. You will—”

  “Now, children, don’t quarrel here. Keep that for your office,” said Flämmchen with disarming good humor. “We are here to amuse ourselves. Come along, Herr Kringelein. We’re going to dance now.”

  Kringelein got to his feet. His knees felt like rubber, but they became noticeably firmer when Flämmchen laid her hand on his shoulder. The music was rattling off something pretty fast—something akin to the 115 kilometers-an-hour drive in the car and the airplane propeller. It inspired him with the strength to say the words, for which twenty-five years of a subordinate’s existence had prepared him. As Flämmchen dragged him away towards the middle of the room, he turned his head and exclaimed loudly: “Do you think you own the world, Herr Preysing? Are you different from me? Has a man like me no right to live?”

  “Now, now, now,” said Flämmchen. “This is not the place to squabble. You’re here to dance. And don’t look at your feet, but at my face, and just walk, just walk straight ahead, and I’ll guide you.”

  “If that’s not a case of embezzlement—” Preysing blurted out, trembling with rage.

  Gaigern continued to smoke. The word aroused in him an odd feeling of professional sympathy, and with it a strong and contemptuous dislike of the corpulent and perspiring general manager. You need a few leeches applied to you, my friend, he thought to himself.

  “Let the poor devil have his fun,” he said half aloud. “You can see he’s not long for this world.”

  I didn’t ask for your advice, thought Preysing; but he did not venture to say it, for he suspected that he would meet more than his match in the Baron. “Would you be so good as to inform Fräulein Flamm that I’ll be waiting for her in the Lobby on a matter of urgent importance. If she does not come by six o’clock, I shall not require her services,” he said, bowed stiffly, and retired.

  Alarmed by this ultimatum, Flämmchen appeared in the Lobby at three minutes to six. Preysing, who had been sitting, waiting on pins and needles, got up with a smile of heartfelt relief. He smiled so seldom, that it came as an engaging surprise.

  “There you are—” he said foolishly.

  For hours he had been possessed and tormented by one single thought—was Flämmchen to be had? His experiences with women had been modest and in the long ago past. He had only the vaguest notions about the girls of the younger generation, though at bachelor parties and in the course of companionable talks on his business journeys, he had often heard it said that they were easily persuaded to enter into temporary liaisons. He looked Flämmchen up and down from her crossed silk-clad legs, to her cut-glass beads and painted lips that she was just touching up at that moment, and he was at a loss to know where in her whole unconcerned person the answer to his intentions was to be found.

  Flämmchen snapped her compact shut and asked: “Well, what is this about?”

  Preysing, holding on to his cigar, said it all in one breath.

  “I have to go to England and I would like to take a secretary with me. In the first place for my correspondence, but also for the sake of a little company. I am very nervous, very nervous,” he said this in an unconscious bid for her sympathy, “and I need someone on the journey who will take care of me. I don’t know if you understand me. I offer you a confidential post in which it—in which you—in which—”

  “I understand perfectly,” Flämmchen said quietly, when he got all tangled up.

  “I think we could put up with each other very well on the journey,” said Preysing. The curious surging and throbbing in his veins had been banished by the difficulty of this conversation, but as he looked at Flämmchen, he had the consoling impression that she could very quickly conjure it all up again if she only would. “You told me that you had travelled last year, too, with somebody and that made me think—I think it might work out very well if you only would. Will you?”

  “I must think it over first,” she said, and then she sat lost in reflection, puffing at her indispensable cigarette.

  Flämmchen thought it over for five long minutes.

  “To England?” she said at last. The golden brown of her skin had become a little lighter, and this perhaps showed that she had grown paler. “I have never been to England. And for how long?”

  “For—I can’t say exactly at the moment. It depends. If the business I have there goes off well, I would possibly take a fortnight’s holiday afterwards. We could stay in London or go to Paris.”

  “It will go off well, I’m sure. I could tell that from the letters,” said Flämmchen with assurance. Optimism was the element she lived in. Preysing was cheered by the fact that she knew about the matter he was involved in and that she prophesied success.

  “You must tell me, too, what salary you ask,” he said in a flattering tone.

  This time it took Flämmchen even longer to reply. She had to draw up a comprehensive balance sheet. The renunciation of the incipient affair with the handsome Baron figured on it, also Preysing’s ponderous fifty years, his obesity, and his heavy breathing. Then there were one or two little bills. The need for new underwear, pretty shoes—the blue ones were nearly finished. The small capital that would be necessary to launch her on a career in the films, in revue or elsewhere. Flämmchen made a clear and unsentimental survey of the chances the job offered her. “A thousand marks,” she said. It sounded like a princely amount, and she was under no illusions as to the sums that were nowadays laid at the feet of pretty girls.

  “Perhaps a little extra for clothes to travel in,” she added, a little more timidly than was usual with her. “You want me to look my best, naturally.”

  “You need no clothes for that. On the contrary,” Preysing said wit
h warmth. He considered this a most apt rejoinder. Flämmchen greeted it with a melancholy smile that looked strange on her lively pansy-like face.

  “That’s settled, then?” said Preysing. “There are one or two things I have to see to here tomorrow. We must also have our passports in order. Then we could set off the day after. Are you glad to go to England?”

  “Very,” answered Flämmchen. “Then I’ll bring my little portable here tomorrow and you could start dictating any letters right away.”

  “And tonight—if you’d like it, I thought we might go to the theater. We must at any rate have a glass of wine to seal our contract.”

  “Tonight, already,” said Flämmchen. “Very well then, tonight, too.” She blew her lock of hair aloft and dropped her extinguished cigarette butt into the ashtray. She could hear the music from the Yellow Pavilion distinctly. One can’t have everything, she thought. A thousand marks. New clothes. London, too, was not to be despised. “I have to telephone my sister,” she said as she got up. Preysing felt a hot impassioned wave of gratitude rise and overwhelm him. He went behind her and carefully took hold of her elbows. They were lightly pressed to her sides.

  “Will you be kind to me?” he asked softly. And just as softly, with her eyes cast down to the raspberry-colored carpet, Flämmchen answered: “If it’s not forced on me—”

  •

  Kringelein, Motorist, Flier and Conqueror, went on with the day on which he had begun to live. Perhaps he felt very like those daredevil stunt fliers who come within a hair’s breadth of death as they loop the loop. He had begun to throw himself into it headlong, and now he was whirled onward in obedience to forces he could not control. To turn around would mean a crash, and so he had to go through with it—forward, downward, upward, he could no longer tell where, for he had lost any sense of direction. He was a small, hurtling comet that soon would splinter into atoms.

  Once more the car hummed along the Kaiserdamm, once more they were at the hub of modern Berlin. The radio tower, revolving, cut bright sections out of the city. Outside the arena the pavement was black with throngs of people, like bees clotted at the entrance to a hive, motionless and humming busily. Kringelein had never seen anything so immense as the interior of the hall and never such a mass of people in one spot. He made his way to his seat through an elbowing crowd, following Gaigern who went on before like a tower. It was well to the front, close to the bare and brilliantly illuminated square patch on which the eyes of fourteen thousand people were concentrated. Gaigern went into many explanations, but Kringelein did not understand a word. He was already afraid again, for he could not bear the sight of blood and fighting and barbarity. He was tormented at the moment by memories of his duties as a medical ward orderly, which the war had imposed on him since he had been unfit for anything else. He looked with alarmed amazement at the men of muscle as they stepped into the ring and took off their dressing gowns, exposing their hard flesh. He heard the stentorian voice of the announcer, and clapped whenever everybody else clapped. If it gets too bad, I’ll look away, he thought in secret when the first round began. But, at first, it looked to him as if the two fine, sinewy fellows up there with their flattened noses were only fooling around. “They are playing like kittens,” he said to himself and smiled with relief. Gaigern, on the other hand, was now so intense and excited that it made Kringelein wonder. The hall was still, and so were the boxers. Sometimes they could be heard drawing in careful breaths through their nostrils and their quick feet in their boxing shoes were almost silent. Then, in the midst of the stillness, came the dull round thud of leather—and a thrill went through the hall from end to end and right up to the gallery, below the roof, where a thousand faces loomed through the haze. More, thought Kringelein, for the sound of the blow filled him with a sweet and feverish satisfaction that quickly turned to hunger. The gong sounded, and in no time men sprang over the ropes with jugs, chairs, sponges, and towels. The boxers sat in their corners, breathing hard. Their tongues hung out like the tongues of hunted animals. Water was sprinkled over them, but they were not allowed to drink even a mouthful. Some of the splashes even fell on Kringelein below, and he wiped the drops from his coat with awe and a wonderful sense of fellowship with the man in the corner nearest him. Gong. Immediately the square of light was cleared again for the fight.

  The murmur of the spectators abruptly ceased and turned to rapt attention. Blow followed blow. Shouts from the gallery—then silence. Another blow. The first blood trickled down over the eyes of one of the two—and he laughed. Blow, blow, and now and then a panting. Kringelein realized his fists were clenched inside his coat pockets. They seemed to him like two hard inanimate objects he had found there. Gong. Again the corners of the ring were a turmoil of flapping handkerchiefs and tapping and massaging hands. The bodies of the two now gleamed with sweat. Below them in the hall, every face looked cold and green in the hard light and men were getting up from their seats and engaging in excited debate.

  “Now at last it’s really going to start,” said Gaigern just after the third round began. Kringelein shuddered slightly at this typically Gaigernian anticipation of stirring events. The boxers above—he could not distinguish one from the other, for both had broken noses and it was only between the rounds that he sided with the man in the corner nearest him—now went for each other wildly. When they got in a clinch it sometimes looked like an enraged and misplaced tenderness. “Break it up,” shouted fourteen thousand throats. Kringelein shouted too. They ought to fight—those two up there, not reel locked together against the ropes. He wanted above all to hear once more the round full thud of the leather glove on flesh.

  “Blynx is groggy. He can’t hold out much longer,” Gaigern muttered, and his strong teeth were visible under his upper lip. Again and again the referee in his white silk shirt jumped in to separate the two bleeding muscular bodies. Kringelein thought it good-natured of them to let him do it. He fixed his eyes on the one who was “groggy,” a technical term which appeared to mean that, though he did not know it, he was coming to the end of his tether. This man Blynx now had a blue swelling that hung like a fruit over his right eye. His back and shoulders were smeared with blood, and sometimes he also spat out blood at the referee’s feet. He held his head sunk low; this might be correct but it made an impression of great cowardice on the inexperienced Kringelein. Whenever this Blynx received a blow Kringelein felt a vivid and bestial joy rise from the depths of his being. He could not get enough of it. He greeted every blow that went home with a little cry of relief and then, with mouth ajar and head stretched forward, he waited for the next. Gong. Interval. Round. Gong. Interval. Round. Interval. Round—

  In the seventh round Blynx was knocked out. He reeled, head first, fell to the ground, turned on his back, and lay there. Twenty-eight thousand hands thundered applause. Kringelein heard himself yelling hoarsely and saw his hands clapping like mad. He was not very clear about what was going on in the ring above. The man in the silk shirt was standing over the prostrate Blynx and making hammer-like counts with one arm. Once Blynx moved as horses do when they have fallen on the ice, but he did not get up. There was a fresh outburst of applause from the hall. People climbed over the ropes. There were embraces, kisses, roaring through the megaphone, and frenzy in the gallery. When Blynx had been carried out, Kringelein collapsed in utter exhaustion on his hard seat. He had overtaxed himself and his shoulders and arms hurt.

  “There, you are quite played out with enthusiasm,” Gaigern said to him. “You get carried away, don’t you?”

  Kringelein remembered an evening he had spent a thousand years before.

  “It’s something quite different from yesterday evening at Grusinskaya’s ballet,” he answered, and he thought with pity and distaste of the empty theater, of the ghostly and sadly circling nymphs, of the wounded dove in the moonlight, and of the feeble applause accompanied by Otternschlag’s comments.

  “Grusinskaya!” said Gaigern. “Well, yes, that’s quite another affa
ir.” He began smiling to himself. “There’s too much chi chi with Grusinskaya,” he went on. He could see her at that moment. He could actually see her in her dressing room in Prague, resting and thinking how tired the night before had made her, how tired, but how young, how full of courage—

  “This fight wasn’t a big thing. The real event comes now,” he said to Kringelein. Kringelein was glad to hear it. He himself had thought that there must be more to come—the thud of heavier blows, louder panting, and even more frenzied participation. More, he thought. More. More. On with it! On with it!

  Two gigantic forms stepped into the ring, a white man and a black man. The black man was tall and slim with velvety skin from which the light was reflected in gleams of silver. The white man was thickset. The muscles stood out in his shoulders and he had a square, brutish face. Kringelein loved the black man at once. The entire hall loved the black man. The megaphone announced the fight, and an incredible silence ensued. And then it all began again as before. There was the same initial play and the nimble footwork, the skipping, the stealthy approach with lowered head, and the elastic jump back. When they fought at close quarters, the white body and the black were enlaced with the grim ardor of passion. Blow upon blow and nothing between but the gong for breathing space. Three minutes’ fighting, one minute’s breathing space, three minutes alternating with one minute fifteen times for one whole hour. But this time the entire fight went faster and more furiously, with sudden ambushes by the black man and an eruption of wildness from the white man, blazing like a stubborn fire.

  Kringelein becomes assimilated. Kringelein is no longer alone, cooped up no longer in his dilapidated body. Kringelein is now one of fourteen thousand, one green distorted face among countless others, and his voice is indistinguishable in the one great roar that issues from every throat at once. He breathes when the others breathe, and he holds his breath when the whole hall gasps in sympathy with the boxers. His ears burn, his fists are clenched, his lips are dry, his stomach chilled, and he swallows the sweet spittle of excitement down his hoarse throat. More, more—