by Vicki Baum
In the last two rounds the black man, Kringelein’s black man, seemed to be getting the upper hand. Again and again repeated blows from his fist drummed on the body of the white man, who twice was forced to lean on the ropes with outstretched arms. Both of them smiled like people who’ve been narcotized. Their breaths came from their bodies as if from machines. The last round was accompanied by an uninterrupted roar and thunderous foot-stamping throughout the hall. Kringelein roared and stamped too. Then the gong, and it was over. Kringelein leaned back in his chair, covered with sweat. The megaphone made itself heard. The megaphone made an announcement. It announced that the white man had won.
“What? What’s that? Outrageous!” roared Kringelein. He roared it through fourteen thousand throats. He climbed onto his seat. They all climbed up on their seats and roared against the decision. The hall went raving mad; Kringelein went raving mad. On with it, get on with it, fight it out! The gallery was in an uproar, whistling, screeching. The wooden tiers seemed likely to collapse in the dust and haze and tumult of a mass of indignant and outraged humanity. The boxers stood in the brilliant light inside the white ropes, shook hands awkwardly with their clumsy gloves on, and smiled as if they were being photographed. The hall began to rain down boxes, cigarette packets, oranges, and finally glasses and bottles. The clean floor of the ring was covered with trampled wreckage. A continuous shrill whistling echoed under the roof. Towards the rear some were kicking and hitting each other. The confused tumult of the fourteen thousand presented a scene of near panic. Something very hard and heavy landed on Kringelein’s head, but he did not even feel it. Kringelein’s fists were clenched. Kringelein wanted to be in the thick of the fray, to hit out, to fight, to beat up the unfair referee for his decision. He looked round for Gaigern. Gaigern was in front right near the ring. He stood out, tall, and he was laughing as one laughs when caught in a spring shower, half thirsty and half satisfied. Kringelein in his unbounded excitement was seized by a sudden and powerful attraction to this man who stood there laughing and looking like Life itself. Gaigern grabbed hold of him and led him out of the hall—now filled by a frantic mob. Kringelein walked out behind him as though protected by a warm and impenetrable shield.
On they went. Past the Gedächtniskirche, whose walls were white in the reflected light of the thousand lights all round, and tire tracks gleaming on the oily asphalt. Everybody was silhouetted in black against the brilliance of the illuminated shop windows of the Tauentzienstrasse. Then abruptly came the silence and darkness under the trees of the Bavarian quarter. Little squares broke up the darkness, with gravel and hedges and lamps. And on they went, until finally they reached the gambling club.
It occupied the large rooms of an old-fashioned Berlin apartment that had been re-fitted as a club. The stale smell of human beings clung to the paneled walls. Men in dinner jackets moved noiselessly about. There were many coats in the tiled cloakroom. Kringelein recognized the pale, lean figure, smartly dressed in black, smoothing his thin hair off his forehead, as himself. It came as a surprise to encounter himself in the mirror. I can really take a good deal, he thought. For the space of a second he thought of his friend, Kampmann, the solicitor. It seemed as if he had known him once in a dream. They stopped for a short while in a room with standing lamps and an open fire, where people were just talking and drinking. In the next room there were a few tables of bridge games. This wasn’t much more elegant than the card game skat, thought Kringelein, who was hungering for new sensations.
“We are going to the back,” said Gaigern to one of the gentleman. “Come with me, Herr Direktor, we’ll go to the back.”
The back was at the end of a narrow, ugly corridor with many doors opening onto it. Through the last brown folding door they entered a smallish room, which was in such a dark-brown gloom that the walls were scarcely visible. All the light was concentrated on a table in the middle as it had been on the ring in the sports arena. A few people were sitting or standing round the table, twelve or fourteen at most. They had an intent and businesslike air and exchanged brief remarks that were quite unintelligible to Kringelein.
“How much do you want to stake?” asked Gaigern who had gone over to a desk where a lady in black, with the air of a governess, was sitting as though at a checkout counter. “What do you think—?”
Kringelein had been thinking ten marks. “I don’t quite know, Herr Baron,” he said hesitantly.
“Let’s say five hundred marks for a start,” Gaigern proposed. Kringelein, incapable of protest, took out his old wallet and produced five one-hundred mark notes. A handful of brightly colored chips were thrust into his hand, green, blue, and red. He heard others like them falling onto the table with little clicks beneath the square green lampshade. He waited impatiently for what was to follow.
“Now stake wherever you like,” said Gaigern. “It’s no use my explaining. Stake what and where you like. Beginners usually win.”
How many times that day had Kringelein put himself in peril? He knew now that this was the way it was with life. He knew now that fear and pleasure go together like the nut and the shell. He had an inkling that in the next hour or two he might lose as much as he had earned in the forty-seven years of his half-dead Fredersdorf existence. He knew that in this dim room with the laconic men hovering over the green baize-covered table he could only let himself whirl on as before and so gamble away the three or four weeks of vagabond life that remained to him. And Kringelein high up in this new form of looping the loop, was almost curious to know what would happen next, and after that, and then . . .
His ears and lips felt hot as he stepped up to the table and began to play. His hands felt as if they were full of sand. He placed a bet. A little shovel appeared and took up his green chip with the rest. Someone said something that he did not understand. He put down another, this time somewhere else. He lost. Another. He lost again. Gaigern across the table staked something, won once, then lost again. Kringelein threw a quick imploring glance across to him, but it was not observed. Here everyone was concerned with himself alone. Every eye was riveted on the green surface of the table. Each man bent all his force and will power to draw the winnings to himself. “No luck,” someone said somewhere. It was an ominous word to hear in this brown back room beneath the green billiard-room lamp. Kringelein, utterly preoccupied with himself, went to the lady in black and got chips for another five hundred marks. He returned to the table. Another man was now shoveling up the chips. They made a gentle rattling sound. Restless fingers arranged them meticulously in little piles. Kringelein took his supply of chips in his left hand and staked at random and almost unconsciously with his right hand. He staked and lost. Staked and won. What a surprise when his green chip returned to him, accompanied by a red one! He staked and won and staked and won again. He put a few chips in his pocket because he didn’t know what else to do with them. He staked and lost three times in succession. He stopped for a few minutes. Gaigern, too, had stopped playing. He stood with his hands in his pockets and smoked. “Finished for today,” he said. “My money’s gone.” “Allow me, Herr Baron,” Kringelein whispered and thrust one of the two red counters he still possessed into Gaigern’s hand, which he took slowly out of his pocket. “I don’t feel in top form tonight,” Gaigern muttered. He had a keen nose for good luck. This was part of his questionable way of life, and at present luck was against him, unless his love affair with Grusinskaya could be called luck. Kringelein returned to the table and continued.
A clock rasped out one o’clock as Kringelein with a little propeller whirling behind his forehead stopped playing and cashed his chips at the counter. He had won three thousand four hundred marks. He felt his wrists go limp and begin to quiver, but he controlled them bravely. Nobody troubled about him and his winnings. Kringelein had won as much as he would have earned in a year at Fredersdorf. He pushed it all into his torn leather wallet.
Gaigern stood by yawning, watching him. “I’m broke, Herr Direktor. You must take care of
me. I haven’t a penny,” he said in a casual tone of voice. Kringelein with his wallet in his hands stood there not knowing what to do or what was expected of him.
“I shall have to ask you for a substantial loan tomorrow,” said Gaigern.
“Yes, please do,” replied Kringelein with an elegant air. “And now what happens next?”
“Good Lord. You’re persevering. There’s nothing now but drink or women,” Gaigern replied. Kringelein turned white-faced from the mirror after putting his hat on ready to go. He put fifty pfennigs into the open palm of an undersized club servant who opened the street door for them. Again he put his hand in his pocket and this time it was a hundred-mark note he came upon and he shoved the tightly folded piece of paper into a pageboy’s hand as they stepped out into the dark and silent street. He had quite lost his senses. He no longer knew what money was. In a world where you spent a thousand marks in the morning and won three thousand at night, Kringelein, the Fredersdorf bookkeeper, wandered as though in a labyrinth, an enchanted forest where no path, no light directed his steps. The little four-seater was waiting under a street lamp, silent but alive. There was something of the patience of a dog in its faithful waiting there that stirred Kringelein to gratitude.
Onward and onward. It was raining now. The windshield wiper made its half-circular sweeps, and Kringelein watched it going to and fro, to and fro. The by-now familiar smell of gasoline made him feel at home. Long streaks of red and blue and yellow were reflected in the wet surface of the street. A glaring jet of flame burning on persistently in the dead of night threw up in black relief a gang of workmen soldering a rail. The car was moving much too slowly to please Kringelein. He gave Gaigern a sidelong glance. Gaigern was smoking, his eyes on the road, his thoughts heaven knew where. The city at half-past one at night looked as though some accident had occurred. It was completely alert and crowded with people, almost more crowded than by day. At the crossings, where now no police were on duty, there was a continuous warning hoot of cars. Above it was a red and fiery sky like a portent of disaster, traversed at regular intervals by jerking shafts of light from the revolving searchlights of the Radio Tower. On they went.
A staircase filled with noise and music issuing from three floors. Little flags and paper snakes below, halfway up blind mirrors in gilt stucco frames, people, some drunk, some melancholy, cadaverous girls with black makeup around the eyes. Kringelein forced his way upstairs past their powdered backs. The whole place was full of cigarette smoke. It hung in thick blue clouds around the paper shades that gave an up-to-date air to the electric light fixtures on the staircase. Below, the noise was loud and uproarious. On the first floor a less disorderly music issued from behind curtained doors where dancing was in progress. One floor higher, there was silence. A girl in virulent green trousers was sitting on the stairs with a glass in her hand and pretending to be asleep as they passed by. Her bare shoulders brushed Kringelein’s new clothes and made him feel expectant. They entered a long, almost dark room. On the floor there were a few lanterns with paper shades that shone dimly. There was music here too, but you could not see where it came from. Girls’ legs could be seen dancing in the light of the lanterns, distinct only as far as the knee; beyond that all was swallowed in darkness. Kringelein wanted to keep tight hold of Gaigern’s hand like a little boy. Everything here was dim and indistinct. What went on beyond the painted partitions that separated the ottomans and low tables was left to the imagination. Kringelein realized that he was drinking iced champagne. He had visions of many forms. They crowded in upon him with a strange and eerie sweetness. Kringelein sang a soft accompaniment in his high tenor to the melody of two invisible violins. Kringelein rocked to and fro. His head lay pressed in the cool hollow of a girl’s arm.
“Another bottle?” a stern waiter asked. Kringelein ordered another bottle. Kringelein was sorry for the waiter, who looked like a consumptive when he bent down to the light of the lantern to write down the order. Kringelein was in a softhearted mood. He was absurdly sorry for the waiter and for the girls who were so jolly and were all legs and had to dance so late at night, and he was absurdly sorry for himself. He drew the limp, warm, totally unfamiliar body of a girl across his lap. His knees began to tremble as he sought her face. A drunken rapture of sadness came over him with the scent of powder from this unknown woman. He could be heard singing. Gaigern, lost in his reflections, was sitting bolt upright on a wicker chair nearby. He heard the high tremulous voice singing, “Rejoice in life while the l-a-amp still burns.” Philistine, thought Gaigern with malevolence. On the way back I’ll get hold of his wallet, and then on to Vienna, he thought frowning, as he clung to the very edge of his perilous existence . . .
Kringelein was standing in a little stuffy men’s room rinsing the cold sweat from his face. He pulled out the little bottle of Hundt’s Elixir, swallowed three mouthfuls, and hoped for the best. I’m not tired, he said to himself, not a bit. Not a trace of tiredness. He had big things to do still that night. He savored the cinnamon taste on his tongue and went back to the girl in the upholstered gloom. Onward—onward still!
Kringelein alighted on a mouth, as if on some incredible island of adventure. With his lips there, he lay stranded a while. Little waves of drunkenness washed him away. “Be nice, Bubi,” a voice was saying, meaning him. He became motionless, listening intently to his inner self. For the space of one dreamy moment he had his hands full of ripe red juicy raspberries from Mickenau Forest—and then something came swiftly nearer, something dreadful, like a sword and a flash of lightning and a wing of flame.
Suddenly Gaigern heard him groan. It was a piercing and incredible sound, full of fear and tortured humanity.
“What’s the matter?” Gaigern asked in the utmost alarm.
“Oh—pains,” came the answer, wrung from the darkness near Kringelein’s face. Gaigern picked up one of the lanterns and put it on the table. There sat Kringelein rigid and upright on the upholstered seat with his two hands clasped like the links of a chain. The lamp was blue, and it turned Kringelein’s face blue, with a great round black mouth from which groans were issuing. Gaigern knew this mask of pain from severely wounded cases in the war. He quickly put an arm under Kringelein’s head and, like a good comrade, supported his heaving shoulders.
“Dead drunk?” asked the girl. She was very young still and very common in her dress of black sequins.
“Be quiet,” Gaigern answered.
Kringelein raised his eyes to him, tortured and torn with pain. He forced himself to a piteous and heroic attempt at good form. “Now it’s I who am groggy,” he said with his blue lips, and he was referring to his dazed, almost unconscious, all-fought-out and collapsing condition. It was a lame but courageous joke that broke in the middle and ended in groans.
“But what’s the matter with you?” asked Gaigern in alarm.
And Kringelein replied almost inaudibly: “I think—I’m going— to die—”
IT’S JUST a silly fairy tale that says hotel chambermaids spy through keyholes. Hotel chambermaids have no interest whatsoever in the people behind the keyholes. Hotel chambermaids have a lot to do and are tired out, and they are all a little disillusioned, and besides they are entirely occupied with their own affairs. Nobody bothers about anyone else in a big hotel. Everybody is alone with himself in this great pub that Doctor Otternschlag not inaptly compared with life in general. Everyone lives behind double doors and has no companion but his reflection in the mirror or his shadow on the wall. People brush past one another in the passages, say good morning or good evening in the Lobby, sometimes even enter into a brief conversation painfully raked together out of the barren topics of the day. A glance at another doesn’t go up as far as the eyes. It stops at his clothes. Perhaps it happens that a dance in the Yellow Pavilion brings two bodies into contact. Perhaps someone steals out of his room into another’s. That is all. Behind it lies an abyss of loneliness. Each in his own room is alone with his own ego and is little concerned with anothe
r’s. Even the honeymoon couple in Room No. 134 are separated by a vacancy of unspoken words as they lie in bed. Some wedded pairs of boots and shoes that stand outside the doors at night wear a distinct expression of mutual hatred on their leather visages, and some have a jaunty air though they are desperate and floppy eared. The valet who collects them suffers terribly from chronic indigestion, but who cares? The chambermaid on the second floor has started an affair with Baron Gaigern’s good-looking chauffeur, and now he has gone off without a word, and she is very hurt by it; there is no question of her looking through keyholes. At night she tries to think, but she is too sleepy, and she cannot sleep because the chambermaid in the other bed is a consumptive and sits up and turns on the light and coughs. Everyone within his four walls has his secrets; even the lady with the expressionless face in Room No. 28, who is always humming, and the gentleman in Room No. 154 who gargles so frantically and is only a salesman. Even page-boy No. 18 has a secret of his own behind his sleekly brushed fore-head—an oppressive and horrible secret that weighs on his conscience. For he has found a gold cigarette case that Baron Gaigern left in the Winter Garden, and has not turned it in. For fear that it would be found on him when he goes off duty, he has left it, for the present, stuffed in between the seat and the back of an easy chair, and Morality and the Rights of the Proletariat wage a bitter war in his seventeen-year-old soul.
Senf the hall porter has his eye on the boy—Karl Nispe is his name when he is not just a number—for he slouches about the entrance with a distracted air and black rings under his eyes. But Senf, too, has other things to think about. His wife has now been in the hospital for days. There can be no question now of a normal delivery. The pains have stopped and strange cramps have set in, but the baby’s heart can still be heard beating; yet they are still waiting before expediting the birth by artificial means. Senf had gone there at midday, but he was not allowed to see her. She was lying in a drowsy state of exhaustion which the doctors termed sleep. This is how things stand with Hall Porter Senf as he carries on in his mahogany cage, occupied now with the board where the room keys hang and now with the railway timetables. Rohna has offered him a few days off, but he does not want time off. He is glad to be in harness and not to have to think. As for Rohna himself, this highly competent Count Rohna, who puts in fourteen hours’ work a day, he is a fine fellow, but a hopeless outcast from his own class, and what he thinks about that, nobody knows. Perhaps he is proud of his position; perhaps he is ashamed whenever a man of his own class registers his name. His bright, narrow, red-blond face betrays nothing. It has become nothing but a mask.
