Grand Hotel

by Vicki Baum

  “Flämmchen,” he whispered to her warm young body, “Flämmchen, don’t let me die, please don’t let me die.”

  Flämmchen immediately held him even closer, and began to comfort him.

  “Die—what nonsense! I won’t hear of it. People don’t die right away from being a bit sick like that. I’ll look after you. I know a man on Wilmersdorfer Strasse who can work miracles. He has cured people who were far worse than you. He’ll soon fix you up. We’ll go to him first thing tomorrow. He’ll prescribe a treatment for you, and then you’ll be all right again, you’ll see. Then we’ll set off at once for London, Paris, to the South of France. It will be warm there. We’ll lie in the sun all day and get suntanned and be happy. And now it’s time to go to sleep.”

  She let her benign health and strength stream into his exhausted being, and he believed her. He fell asleep blissfully in a blaze of gold that looked like Flämmchen’s breast and was also a mound of broom in flower.

  And then, two floors up, there is Doctor Otternschlag dreaming the dream that comes to him every week. He is going through a dream town that he knows well and he enters a dream house that he has forgotten. A dream woman lives there and she has had a dream child while he was a prisoner of war—a horrible child of whom he is not the father. It howls in its neat baby carriage whenever it sees his mangled face. And then, as usual in the dream, he has to race breathlessly after his Persian cat, Gurbä, all through the dream town, and to fight on a roof with a stray tomcat with a human face, and finally he crashes down through a burning sky of bursting shells until he’s on his bed in the hotel. When the dream reaches this point, Doctor Otternschlag wakes up.

  “It’s enough,” he said to himself. “I’ve had it up to here. How much longer? What’s the use anyway? No, let’s make an end of it.”

  He got up, and fetched his little case. He washed the syringe and broke the tops of one glass tube after another. Ten of them—twelve. He filled the syringe, and washed his arm, which was covered with inflamed little needle punctures. Then he paused. He began to tremble. All the strength ran out of his hands. He emptied the syringe without using it, squirting all its precious and surreptitiously acquired contents into the air with the exception of a few harmless drops with which he appeased the craving of his body. Then he lay down again, fell asleep, and heard nothing more.

  Count Rohna emerged from his room just after half-past three, after being alerted by the night porter, noiseless and circumspect and smelling of toilet water, just as if it were broad daylight. He went to Room No. 71, took it all in at a glance and gave the necessary instructions. He ordered a cognac for the shattered Preysing and flicked away a winter fly that buzzed round the dead man’s body. He stood for a quarter of a minute with folded hands and bowed head over the body. It looked as if he was praying, and perhaps he did indeed pray for the dead man—his equal by birth, and, like him, an outcast. It can’t have been easy for him either, he was perhaps thinking, and then he went into his little office and began to talk on the telephone with Police Commissioner Jädicke, whose special duty it was to keep an eye on the hotels.

  A little later, when the first street-sweepers were already at work on the streets, four gentlemen in overcoats appeared, who, as a group, bore the sinister title the Murder Commission. Rohna himself took them up to the second floor in the elevator. The wheels of justice were beginning to grind. The hotel management begged the police to use discretion in order to avoid a scandal, to hush things up, if possible . . .

  But it was not possible. Soon even Fredersdorf would know what happened. Soon Frau Generaldirektor Preysing will arrive in Berlin with her apoplectic father, and in a succession of frightful scenes renounce her husband. The fact that he had killed a man—that she could get over, in spite of her horror. But the disgusting affair with that woman—to which Preysing, stammering and perspiring, had to confess, to his own undoing, at the second hearing before the magistrate—that was utterly incomprehensible to her, and utterly unpardonable.

  As for the dead man, Baron Felix Benvenuto Amadei von Gaigern, his case was unclear, although benign enough. Not a single person in the Grand Hotel had anything to say against him. There was no previous conviction against him. He was not under any suspicion. He was not known to the police. He had some debts, and how he had come by his small car (which, in any case, was already pledged as security for a loan) could not be determined. But that proved nothing against him. He was a gambler, fond of women, occasionally drunk, but always good natured. Some of the hotel staff wept when they heard the whispered news of his death. The pageboy Karl Nispe, with the gold cigarette case in his pocket, wept. He was one of the first witnesses to be questioned, and he was able to declare that the Baron was not in his room shortly before twelve o’clock. A lady on the first floor, in Room No. 18, the room below No. 71, heard the noise of a fall at about the same time. She knew the exact time because the racket up there had annoyed her. But what had happened between twelve and half-past three that night, and why had Herr Preysing not notified the police at once? The story was supplemented at this point by the clear, if reluctant statements of the witnesses Flamm and Kringelein—those very accounts which were read in the midday papers and gave the final blow to Preysing’s bourgeois existence. As for the weapon that Preysing talked about, there was no trace of it, no revolver was found, not even a little pistol such as non-violent burglars sometimes employ merely to frighten people. This weighed heavily against Preysing. If he lied with regard to this point, then he was to be distrusted on all others. True, his wallet was discovered in the dead man’s pajama pocket. But, asked the examining magistrate, getting more deeply into the matter, might not Preysing himself have purposely placed the wallet on Gaigern’s person in order to give credence to the fiction of self-defense against a burglar? There remained the fact that Gaigern was wearing socks over his light boxing shoes. There remained, too, a photograph that Baron Gaigern’s chauffeur had given the second chambermaid on that floor, and this photograph enabled the wide-awake police officials to determine that at least this chauffeur was a known thief and convicted criminal. If they could succeed in getting their hands on him, additional light could perhaps be thrown on the matter.

  For the time being, however, Herr Preysing remained in custody awaiting trial, and suffering from optical delusions. He was constantly seeing Baron Gaigern before his eyes, not however as he had lain there dead on the floor, but alive and as close and clearly—with the scar above his chin, the long eyelashes, every single pore in his skin—as he had seen him when they collided outside the telephone booth. Whenever he succeeded in chasing away the image, it was immediately replaced by a red haze beneath his closed eyelids, and then Flämmchen appeared, Flamm the Second—or rather a part of her only—her hips, as they were shown in a magazine photograph that fell into the general manager’s hands, when the moment came for Destiny to send him rolling headlong down into the abyss . . .

  It is an odd thing about the guests in a big hotel. Not a single one goes out through the revolving door the same as when he came in. Preysing, the pattern of propriety, went out as a prisoner and a broken man, escorted by two men. Gaigern was silently and secretly carried out down the steps of the service entrance by four men —Gaigern, this vibrant man who made the whole lobby smile when he passed through in his blue overcoat and his kid gloves, with his alert glance and the smell of lavender and perfumed English cigarettes. Kringelein, however, after he and Flämmchen had given their evidence and were free to depart, left the hotel like a king, walking past many bowing staff and hands held out for tips. It’s likely that his glory won’t last longer than a week, when his next attack of acute pain will end it.

  But there is just a chance that this courageous “moribundus” may develop fresh resources and remain alive in defiance of every diagnosis. That, in any case, is Flämmchen’s belief. And Kringelein, borne aloft in ecstasy, wants to believe it too. And, after all, it is not so very important how long Kringelein has to live. For,
long or short, Life is what you put into it. Two full days may be longer than forty empty years. That was the wisdom Kringelein took away with him, when he stepped out of the Grand Hotel at Flämmchen’s side and got into the car that took them to the station.

  That was at ten o’clock in the morning. The hotel wore its customary aspect. The cleaning woman swept out the Lobby with damp sawdust while Rohna looked on in silent disapproval. The fountain splashed. In the breakfast room men with briefcases sat smoking black cigars and talking business. The staff whispered together in the passages, but so far nothing had reached the ears of the guests. Room No. 71 has been locked by order of the police and both windows remained wide open the entire chilly March day. Next door in Room No. 72 the beds have been made up fresh, and the area behind the wardrobe has been damp mopped. At eight o’clock the hall porter, Senf, came on duty. His face was puffy, for he had spent the whole night sitting in the cold hospital corridor waiting to hear whether his wife would survive till morning. He scarcely heard all that little Georgi had to tell him, and he swayed unsteadily as he sorted the morning’s mail.

  “My head’s going round and round,” he said to excuse himself. “You’d never believe what a difference the lack of a little sleep makes. And you say Pilzheim spotted that chauffeur. Pilzheim’s a smart fellow, and I’ve always said so. If we had put him on the track of that Baron at the outset, all this would never have happened to mess up the reputation of the hotel. Breakfast for No. 22,” he shouted out meanwhile to the waiters’ room, and then went on sorting the letters. “Here are some letters for him. What’s to be done with them now? Hand them over to the police? Right. Good morning, Herr Doktor, I wish you a good morning,” he said to Doctor Otternschlag, who had come up to the mahogany desk, yellow, haggard, and glass-eyed, after making his usual perambulation round the Lobby.

  “Any letters for me?” asked Otternschlag. The hall porter looked for one, partly from civility, but partly, too, because in the last day or two a note had been handed in for Otternschlag by Kringelein.

  “I am afraid not. Nothing today, Herr Doktor,” he said.

  “Telegram?” asked Otternschlag.

  “No, Herr Doktor.”

  “Anyone asked for me?”

  “No. No one so far.”

  Otternschlag walked around the Lobby heading to his usual seat. Pageboy No. 7 flitted behind him, and the waiter brought him coffee. Otternschlag stared through his glass eye at the girl at the flower-stand arranging her flowers, but he did not see her.

  “Good morning, sir. Good morning, madam,” the hall porter said to a married couple from the provinces, who had positioned themselves in front of his desk. “A room. Certainly. No. 70 is free, a very fine room, double bed and bath; then there is 72, with two beds, but unfortunately no bathroom. Possibly 71 will be free today or tomorrow. That has a bathroom, a charming suite. Perhaps you would accommodate yourselves next door meanwhile. What? Hello? I didn’t catch that!” he called into the telephone. “What is it? Yes, I’ll come. I must go to the telephone, on a private matter. It’s from the hospital,” he said to little Georgi and stumbled off through the Lobby and along Corridor 2 to the telephone room and into Booth 4, as the operator had indicated.

  Doctor Otternschlag got up, wooden as he was, and came across to the porter’s desk.

  “Is Herr Kringelein still in his room?” he asked.

  “No, Herr Kringelein has left,” Georgi answered.

  “Left. I see. Did he leave nothing for me?” he asked, after a pause.

  “No. Nothing, I am afraid,” Georgi replied with a politeness copied from the hall porter.

  Otternschlag turned around and went back to his seat, this time making a beeline straight across the Lobby—a most remarkable event in his case. The hall porter ran past him. His blond and dependable sergeant’s face was wet with perspiration as after some gigantic exertion. He came to a stop behind his desk, as though he had reached a haven.

  “It is a little girl. They had to induce the delivery artificially. But she is here and weighs five pounds. No danger at all now. None at all. Both of them alive and kicking,” he panted, and took his cap off— thereby revealing the radiantly happy face of a purely private person, but he put it on again immediately as Rohna looked over his glass screen. The married couple from the provinces got into the elevator and were taken up to Room No. 72, the room with two beds and without a bath. The light scent of Flämmchen’s violet powder still lingered there.

  “Open the window,” said the wife.

  “Yes, and then there’ll be a draft,” said the husband.

  •

  In the Lobby, Doctor Otternschlag sat and talked to himself. “It’s dismal,” he said. “Always the same. Nothing happens. One is always alone, dismally alone. The earth is an extinct planet—no warmth left in it. At Rouge Croix ninety-two men were buried in a landslide and never seen again. Perhaps I’m one of them and sit there with the rest ever since the end of the war and am dead and don’t even know it. If only something worthwhile would happen in this great big pub. But no, not a thing. ‘He left.’ Adieu, Herr Kringelein. I could have given you a prescription for those pains of yours. But no, gone without a word. And so it goes. In—out, in—out, in—out—”

  Little Georgi, however, behind the mahogany desk was turning over a few simple and extremely banal thoughts. Marvelous the life you see in a big hotel like this, he was thinking. Marvelous. Always something going on. One man goes to prison, another gets killed. One leaves, another comes. They carry off one man on a stretcher by the back stairs, and at the same moment another man hears he has a baby. Very interesting actually! But that’s Life!

  Doctor Otternschlag sat in the middle of the Lobby, a fossilized image of Loneliness and Death. He has his regular place, and so he stays on. His yellow hands hang down like lead, and with his glass eye he stares out into the street, which is full of sunshine that he cannot see . . .

  The revolving door turns and turns and turns.