Grand Hotel

by Vicki Baum

  Kringelein had started in a loud voice, but as he was speaking his voice sank, became sadder and less loud. Preysing, with his hands behind his back, walked back and forth in the small room. His boots creaked under his weight, and the fact that Flämmchen was sitting there all the time listening as her eyes went from one to the other of them, made him furious. Suddenly he came to a stop in front of Kringelein, pressing his corpulent belly menacingly against Kringelein’s new jacket.

  “What exactly do you want of me? I don’t know you at all. You come in here,” he said in a chilling nasal voice, “you have the impertinence to come in here spouting Communist tirades. What do I care about your twentieth anniversary? I can’t bother myself with every single employee in our firm. I have other things to think about. I don’t sleep on a bed of roses myself, not by any means. Anyone who stands out for his efficient performance is paid accordingly and will be promoted. The rest don’t concern me. You don’t concern me. I know nothing about you. I have had enough of this now—”

  “All right, you don’t know me. But I know you well enough. I knew you long ago when you first came to Fredersdorf as a trainee and lived in the shoemaker’s back bedroom and owed money to my father-in-law for butter and sausage. I remember the day very well when you began to stop being the first to say good morning, Herr Preysing, and when you began courting the old man’s daughters. I’ve kept track of you, Herr Preysing, and don’t think that anything has been overlooked or omitted. And if one of us had made such blunders in little things as you have made in big ones, he would have been sacked long ago. And the arrogant expression you have as you go along the passage, looking right through anyone you meet as if he didn’t exist. And when there was an error in my books for the first and the only time, and three hundred and ten marks damages—the tone in which you reprimanded me then was something I shall never forget. And the eight hundred workmen you dismissed, they curse you to this day, that’s certain. And when you come along in your automobile and open the exhaust so that we get our bellyful of stink, then you think you’re somebody. But I tell you . . .”

  Kringelein had gotten sidetracked. He poured out all the experiences and all the hatred of twenty-seven years, mixing the important with the trivial, the real with the imaginary, and office gossip with what he knew first hand. His outburst in this hotel room was nothing but the grievance of a sensitive and unsuccessful man against one who had simply and with a certain brutality made his way—a genuine grievance, however unjust and absurd . . . Preysing, for his part, completely incapable of any sympathetic understanding, fell deeper and deeper into an ungovernable rage. When Kringelein mentioned the money he had owed in his days as an apprentice to the little dull grocery-store owner, Sauerkatz, he became quite dizzy and was afraid he would have a stroke. He heard himself gasp for breath. The tiny veins in his eyes were so charged with blood that his vision was red and turbid. He took two steps toward Kringelein, seized him by the waistcoat and shook him like a bundle of rags. Kringelein’s new hat fell off his head. Preysing deliberately stepped on it as if it were an insect. Strangely enough, Kringelein felt a peculiar pleasure at this savagery. Yes, he thought with satisfaction, go ahead and strike a defenseless man who is at death’s door. That’s just like you. Flämmchen behind the breakfast tray, whispered to herself:

  “Don’t—don’t do that.”

  Preysing threw Kringelein up against the wall and pulled open the door.

  “Enough,” he shouted. “Not another word. Get out. At once. You will be fired. I’m firing you. You’re fired, fired, from this moment—”

  Kringelein had picked up his hat and now, with a face as white as a sheet, he stood between the double doors of which the inner was open and the outer shut, and, as he leaned trembling and perspiring against the white-painted wood, he began to laugh with his mouth wide open, he laughed in Preysing’s furious face.

  “You’re firing me? You threaten me? But you cannot fire me. You can do nothing to me at all, nothing at all. I am ill. Fatally ill, I tell you. I’m going to die. I have only a week or two left. No one can do anything to me. I’ll be dead by the time you can fire me—” he cried, shaking with laughter and at the same time with tears smarting in his eyes. Flämmchen got up from the sofa and leaned forward. Preysing, too, leaned forward. First his clenched hands fell to his side, and then he put them in his trouser pockets.

  “Man, are you crazy?” he said softly. “I think the man is still laughing. I believe he’s glad to be fatally ill. Have you gone mad?”

  At these words Kringelein suddenly became sober and thoughtful, also a little embarrassed. He stood where he was between the two doors a moment longer, and his eyes took in the small hotel suite with a quick, encompassing glance. He saw Flämmchen standing in a ray of sunlight near the window, the corpulent and sobered general manager with his hands in his pockets, and the view, through the open door, to bedroom and bathroom beyond. It all was blurred because of the involuntary tears that came to his eyes as a result of his tense emotional condition. He bowed.

  “I hope the young lady will forgive the intrusion,” he said to Flämmchen once again, in his high-pitched, pleasing voice.

  Preysing, with a husband’s bad conscience, considered this vulgar and offensive. He took his hands from his pockets.

  “Get out,” was all he said.

  But Kringelein was already gone.

  Preysing with creaky steps walked back and forth three times across the room. His temples throbbed and his forehead was flushed.

  “Well?” asked Flämmchen.

  Suddenly the general manager ran to the door, pulled it open, and, trumpeting like an angry elephant, shouted down the silent corridor:

  “You won’t escape. I’ll have you watched. We’ll find out where you stole the money from so that you could hang out around here. You Communist—you embezzler—you insolent, rotten lout! I’ll have you locked up—locked up—”

  But there was nothing more to be seen or heard of Kringelein.

  “Actually, he was really a nice man. He was even crying at the end,” Flämmchen, who hadn’t opened her mouth during the entire scene, said in conclusion.

  •

  “Leave your stockings on. It looks so pretty,” said Preysing. He was sitting on the sofa in Flämmchen’s bedroom, in Room No. 72.

  “No,” said Flämmchen, “It’s embarrassing. I can’t walk around in nothing but shoes and stockings.”

  Her body gleamed in the light of the night-table lamp. There were red shadows on its smooth gold. There were soft reflections on her knees and shoulders where the skin was stretched and rounded. She sat down on the edge of the bed and first slipped off her blue shoes and then solemnly and carefully her new stockings. The light reached into the tender hollow between her breasts as she bent down, and her spine rippled smoothly. These were phenomena that Preysing observed with bated breath.

  “You are sweet,” he said, but he did not venture to move from where he was. Flämmchen nodded to him over her shoulder with good-natured encouragement. She took her stockings to a chair where she had already laid her dress and her few silk underthings as tidily as a schoolgirl. Preysing now got up and went to her on squeaking shoes. Cautiously he stretched out one forefinger, on which there was a tuft of light-colored hair, and with it he lightly touched Flämmchen’s back as though she were a strange, untamed, and dangerous animal. Flämmchen smiled. “Well?” she said amiably. She was a little nervous and impatient. On her side there was nothing but willingness to carry out every detail of the unwritten agreement. After all, a self-respecting person could not take a thousand marks and a trip to England and a new suit and much else besides, and give nothing in return. But this general manager was so horribly clumsy. This was now the second evening that he had squirmed around (this at least was how Flämmchen described Preysing’s embarrassed and constricted style of wooing). And it was more than unpleasant. It felt like having a tooth filled by a singularly incompetent dentist. She wished the worst were al
ready over, but it went on and on, and never got anywhere; and it was getting on her nerves. She moved her back closer to Preysing’s hand, but the timorous forefinger had already moved away and sought refuge in his waistcoat pocket, where it now rested from its bold adventure next to a fountain pen. Flämmchen sighed and turned to face the general manager. Her complete nakedness both enchanted and scared him.

  “You see, now I see you. Now I can see you,” he said stupidly. Her body exhaled so inviolable a freshness and cleanness that it caused him more alarm than intoxication. “The way you look now . . . In the picture in the magazine you looked quite different,” he said, almost aggrieved.

  “Different? How do you mean, different?”

  “More coquettish. There was something so inviting about it, you know . . .”

  Flämmchen understood. She was aware of the hidden disappointment at her cool integrity and of the repressions in Preysing’s sluggish blood, the stagnation of his conventional nature, but she could do nothing to help him. I am what I am, she thought. “Yes,” she said, “photographers always put you in some idiotic pose to be photographed. And then they touch it up as well. Did you like the photograph better than the real me?”

  “What do you think—you’re so sweet,” Preysing replied. His vocabulary of endearments was limited. “But won’t you say ‘darling’ to me? Please, do!”

  Flämmchen shook her head emphatically.

  “Oh, no,” she said.

  “No? But why not?”

  “Just no. I can’t do it. I really can’t. You are a stranger to me, so how can I call you ‘darling’? In every other way—in every other way, I’ll do anything you like. But to call you ‘darling’ is impossible.”

  “You’re an odd creature, Flämmchen,” said Preysing, and he looked at her naked, gleaming skin and her painted lips. “It takes something to get to know you.”

  “Not odd in the least,” said Flämmchen with an obstinate pout of the lips. She had her own variety of shyness. “One must think of the future,” she tried to explain. “I can go with you to England and all that, but when it’s over, it’s over; and if I say ‘darling,’ it isn’t over. If I meet you in six months’ time, I shall say, ‘Hello, Mr. General Manager.’ And you will say, ‘That is the little typist I took with me to Manchester.’ And that will be all right. But it wouldn’t be very pleasant, would it, if I met you with your wife and said, ‘Hello, darling, how goes it?’ ”

  The general manager positively shriveled up at this. To be reminded at this moment of his Mulle back home was all that was needed to complete his discomfiture. Nevertheless, the sense of forbidden sin and of the taint of vice ran in a hot current through his veins, and added to this was the rather too-high blood pressure of a well-fed man threatened with arterial sclerosis. He sat down on the nearest chair and sighed. The chair sighed too. Boards creaked, furniture groaned, and doors banged at every encounter with Preysing’s heavy person. He stretched out his hands, and, in an access of courageous ardor, laid them on the fine curve of her body above the hips. He was surprised and disappointed, for instead of the expected softness he encountered a taut, elastic firmness. He drew Flämmchen onto his knees, controlling their tendency to tremble.

  “What muscles you all have. Just like boys—” he murmured huskily.

  “All of us? Who do you mean?”

  “You—and the other girls I know,” answered Preysing, who was thinking of his daughters, Babs and Pepsy, in their bathing suits. Flämmchen was beginning to feel cold, and the warmth of Preysing’s body was comforting.

  “There now,” she said more familiarly, “he knows girls,” and she stroked Preysing’s hair to which the Berlin barber had given a stylish cut the day before and a pleasing fragrance. (Well, after all, it isn’t going so badly, Flämmchen was thinking.)

  “Of course I know girls. What do you think? I am not made of cardboard. I’m a match any day for the handsome young fellows you dance with at your five-o’clock tea dances. Feel how strong I am,” he said, and tensed his biceps. He felt that he was getting back into the joyful intoxication, all the proud buoyancy with which he had emerged from the successful conference the day before and had rushed on into this incredible adventure. “Just feel how strong I am,” he repeated. He held out his arm for Flämmchen to feel. Flämmchen gratified him by feeling it. And in truth she came upon an astonishingly firm and well-developed bicep under the worsted sleeve.

  “Mmm,” said Flämmchen, impressed. “Like iron.” She got up from her uncomfortable perch on Preysing’s knees and walked back a step or two. She put her hands behind her neck and looked at him through half-closed lids. There were the same light-colored wisps of hair under her arms as over her forehead. Preysing suddenly felt a choking sensation.

  “Will you be kind to me?” he whispered.

  “Oh, yes. Gladly,” answered Flämmchen, politely ready to oblige. The next moment the general manager threw himself upon her. In his face there was the expression of a man who had burst the cords that tied him, broken through walls, and escaped from prison. He was running away from himself, this correct and conscientious and hesitant Preysing. He discharged himself like a rocket and landed in Flämmchen’s arms. There! thought Flämmchen, a little taken aback by the anxious and passionate surrender that Preysing’s distracted state expressed. She put her arms round his neck and he felt her warmth break over him in waves in which he let himself drown, while telegram forms, innumerable telegram forms rioted in front of his closed eyes, turning dark red and dark blue, and disappearing, as soon as his mouth drank in the taste of violets from Flämmchen’s painted lips.

  •

  It was late in the evening. A hint of dance music from the Yellow Pavilion vibrated melodically through all the walls of the Grand Hotel. Hall Porter Senf had handed over his duties to the night porter more than an hour ago. Doctor Otternschlag had gone up to his room and lay now with eyes shut and mouth open on his bed. He looked like an inebriated mummy. His small trunk was packed for departure, but now, as before, he had not yet summoned up the necessary resolution for this final formality.

  In Room No. 68 a typewriter rattled on stubbornly. The representative of an American film company had taken up quarters there, and on the brass bedstead which had witnessed Grusinskaya’s night of love, lay heaped strips of celluloid. The American examined them while he finished up his business letters. The bell of the typewriter could be heard in Room No. 70, where Kringelein sat in his bath, watching the antics of a tablet of bath salts on the white enamel. He was sad, and because he was sad he sang softly and shyly—to cheer himself up. He sang in his bath like a child in the woods. It had been a bad day and disappointing. The confrontation with Preysing had taken a lot of strength and left him prostrate and worn out. And, worst of all, Gaigern, the dynamo, this source of energy, this revitalizing, and warm-blooded, and unhesitating fellow with his hundred-and-twenty-kilometers-an-hour pace had vanished from sight. Kringelein, as he lay in the analgesic, soothing hot water, felt that he had already finished reading the last page of his life and turned it over, and that now there was no more to come, nothing at all, nothing more . . .

  Pageboy No. 18, Karl Nispe, crept up the stairs and stopped, crept on, stopped and crept on again. The rings under his eyes were as black as if they had been painted. He swallowed his saliva—for he was suffering from those nervous pangs of hunger that afflict most hotel employees. He came from a wretched slum, a rear courtyard, to his duties in the hotel lobby with its pillars, its carpets, its Venetian fountain, and it was to that slum, with its drab poverty, that he disappeared when his time on duty was over. He was a callow youth of seventeen, but he had a girl, and she made demands of him that his scanty earnings could not meet. And now he had the gold cigarette case that he had found in the Winter Garden. For four days he had kept it buried and hidden away and that was very much the same as having stolen it. Now he had come to the point. He had screwed himself up. He was going to part with it and give it back as if he had
just found it. There he stood in front of Room No. 69, with beating heart. He took off his cap; and at this his face suddenly lost its uniformed air and became human. When he had stood there for some minutes, shaken by the pounding of his own heart, he knocked.