The lift attains the fifth floor. I’m perspiring so, I’m afraid I may have melted the chocolates. I should never have gripped them so tightly against my arm, and now I hold them away from the heat of my body. The lift doesn’t stop evenly with the floor of the hall and I trip with my first step out. I struggle to regain my balance, feeling ridiculous, holding my chocolate box and the flowers for balance, like an acrobat falling from his rope. Behind me, I imagine I hear the liftboy smirk, although perhaps he merely coughed.
The hall is empty and, as I reach room 519, it occurs to me that I am a fool to have come this late. Surely, they are sleeping. There is no light beneath the door. Ida hated being woken in the middle of the night. Or was that Ester? Of course, who doesn’t hate being woken in the middle of the night? I myself am not particularly fond of the experience.
Still, despite my misgivings, I rap softly, with a crooked knuckle, against the wood.
“Ida? Ida? Ida?” I whisper. “It’s your Chaim.”
It’s impertinent, I know, but how long must I wait before seeing her?
I press my ear against the door. I cannot hear anyone stirring.
I rap again. The light tapping cracks like thunder inside the quiet hallway. God forbid I have gotten the wrong room! Or even another Ida Kaminski! Nothing about this enterprise is certain. I’m suddenly afraid of disturbing her neighbors. How humiliating to be caught here at her door and have to explain myself to them. What was I thinking?
Creeping back down the hallway, quickly, quickly, my flowers wilting and with my melted sweets, I reach the lift and summon it hurriedly, pressing the button on the wall.
Tomorrow is another day. In the light of morning, everything will be clearer.
I’ll send a note to Ida first thing, a discreet inquiry as to her situation, announcing my presence here. Was I really so boorish as to think I could burst in on her without even so much as a warning! It might have sent her into shock, seeing me. No, instead, I’ll arrange to meet with her, accompanied by my family. That way, no one will be compromised, not Ida, not Ester or myself.
The liftboy rises out of nowhere, like an actor through a trapdoor on a stage.
What a sight I must be. Seeing this haggard fool before him, he hides his smirk behind his hand and conceals it with an artificial cough. So he did smirk! And he did cough! And why not? Who wouldn’t laugh at me, a corpse courting his long-dead bride? Ridiculous!
I step in and stand beside him. He shifts his levers and, together, we ascend, side by side, to my proper floor.
50
Ester opens the door, barring my way. Her white and grey hair has fallen from its bun, framing her fleshy face with its thin wisps. Her robe has come open and her belly is big and white beneath her slip, with great swells of dimpled fat. With coarse, reddened hands, she pulls the folds of her robe across her granny’s breast.
She turns her broad back on me without a word. But anything is better than looking into these angered eyes. Not knowing what to do with them, I had leaned the flowers and the candy at a door across the hall with a note, “From a distant admirer,” so at least I did not have to explain to Ester.
Moving past her, through the suite, I unbutton my vest and shirt, exposing my own large belly to the air. In the bedroom, I allow my pants to drop to my ankles, keys jangling in my pockets. Sitting on the bed, I remove my socks. For no reason at all, I place them on my hands. They look like puppets in a children’s play about two monks. I take them off and throw them at the corner.
I dress in the nightgown and the tasseled cap the chambermaids left for me, when they turned down our bed. There’s a fresh pair of undergarments inside the chest of drawers. I crawl under the covers and sit up, against the headboard, waiting for Ester. When she doesn’t come, I call to her.
“Esterle?”
“A minute, a minute!”
I get out of bed and, in slippers, pad into the sitting room, where I find her, ironing out our wrinkled clothes.
My suit now hangs on a hanger without its recently acquired creases.
“Ester,” I say. “What are you doing?”
“What am I doing?” she says. “What does it look like I’m doing?”
She throws her thick body into the work, moving the hot iron across a board that folds out from the wall.
“Leave it for the maids,” I say.
“Go to bed, Chaim.”
“But Esterle—”
“Now, Chaim, don’t argue with me! Go to bed!”
She turns her dress over on the board and begins ironing its back.
I return to the cold bed and stare up at the ceiling. I’m more than half asleep when I feel the mattress tilt and sink beneath her weight. Without disturbing my covers, she pulls the blankets over herself and rolls her substantial body into mine. Brief kisses are clumsily exchanged between us in the dark. She pats my chest paternally and I am again asleep, baking in her heat.
51
I wake up, uncertain of the time. I reach for Ester but she isn’t there. “Esterle,” I call, sitting up. My first thought is she must be ironing again, or cleaning the silverware, but no light shines in from the other room. Running my hand across her sheets, I find that they are cold. I switch on the electric lamp and stare at my pocketwatch, which I have left on the small stand beside my bed, until my sleep-filled eyes will themselves to focus.
Four o’clock in the morning. Insane! Where could she be at such a time?
On the stand near her side of the bed I see the small blue appointment card. Handwritten on it in an elaborate cursive script are her names Ester Blumenfeld Skibelski, and the time of her appointment, 2:00 AM.
Certainly, she should have returned by now.
I get out of bed, pulling the robe about my shoulders. Moving the fabric of the curtain, I peer through the window. It’s completely dark outside. Even here, in the World to Come, there is no moon, and the meager starlight is obscured tonight by a thick skein of clouds. The lights from the hotel are ablaze, but as far as I can tell, no one is stirring or moving about on either side of the lighted windows. So much for Markus’ cleaning crews working furiously through the night. I’ll have to chide him about this in the morning, over coffee and hot porridge.
The hallway is empty as well. I quietly close my door, slipping the key into the pocket of my robe, and pad down the carpeted hallway in my slippers. I stop outside Sarah and Markus’ door, rapping softly with my ring.
“Children? Sarah?” I whisper.
No one answers, but why should they? It’s four in the morning. They’re probably asleep or not yet returned from taking the steam. I’m about to turn away when I notice the thin line of light between the carpet and their door. I knock again and, again, receiving no answer, try the knob. It clicks softly.
“Hello,” I call under my breath. “Markus? Sarah? Your door is unlocked. Children, are you here?”
But the rooms are empty, the beds in furious disarray. Every light in the suite is on. The windows have been left open, and a cold wind shrills, blowing the curtains in and out of the room. I cross to secure the windows. I’m disturbed to notice that all the luggage is gone. I unfasten the doors of the wardrobes, pull out the dresser drawers. They are bare.
I hurry from their rooms to Hadassah and Naftali’s suite across the hall. It is empty as well. Neither is anyone in Mirki and Marek’s suite, nor in Edzia and Pavel’s. I’m running through the halls, like a madman, banging on doors. Every room, every suite in the long corridor has apparently been abandoned. “Hello!” I shout to no one. “Can anybody hear me?” Passing my reflection in the mirrored walls, I see a ridiculous man in a nightgown and robe running through the hallways, a cap’s tassel dancing, like a sprite, upon his head.
How long have I been sleeping?
Not knowing exactly what I’m doing, I crank the levers in the lift and feel the floor give way beneath me with a sudden lurch. Corridor after corridor rise and disappear through the lift’s meshed cage. Doors to suites have
been left open, but no one is in the halls. “Jews!” I shout at every floor, unable to stop the lift. “Jews, where have you gone?”
The lobby, as well, is deserted. No one mans the front desk, the bars are closed and vacant. “Jews?” My voice pierces the emptiness uselessly, resounding off the blotchy walls, from which the murals and tapestries have disappeared. In their places are unfaded squares of paint.
The winds spit in thick gales of snow through the heavy foyer doors. I manage to shut them, pushing with my bulk against each wooden half. Behind the front desk, the Direktor’s office is locked. I pound upon the word Private stenciled into a small brass plate. “Herr Direktor!” I shout, but finally I have to kick it in. Inside, the bookshelves are bare and the desk drawers have nothing in them. I pick up the phone. There is no connection. “My God!” the words slip from my mouth.
Behind the front desk, I open the cash register. It contains nothing at all, no currency, no coins of any kind. The concierge’s registry book, which I searched through only this evening, is new, its pages virgin and uncut.
“Rebbe!” I shout, running through the hotel’s empty chambers.
“Ester! Children!”
My words return to me, echoing off the atrium’s curved ceilings.
I sit in the bar, slumped forward on a stool. Not even a bottle of vodka has been left behind! I try to think, but it isn’t any good. I can’t clear my head.
I cross my arms, perplexed, and am unnerved to hear, from above, a rumbling that seems to be coming from behind the scoured walls. Its scraping noises descend, growing nearer and louder.
“What’s going on?” I demand of the air. I spring behind the bar and leap upon the cupboard doors of a dumbwaiter, flinging them apart.
Inside, two lengths of rope move counterclockwise in measured intervals. I can hear the pulleys squeaking inside its chamber.
Slowly, as I watch, the box enters the cupboard, stuffed tightly with suitcases, many with colorful labels from various hotels. Several of their owners’ names, written on tags, are familiar to me as they pass before my nose.
The box drops a foot or two at a time, in a stuttered descent.
There is someone else in the hotel.
52
I summon up the courage to search for the servants staircase, which I find near the laundry in the far eastern wing. The stairwell is pitch black and so I hunt through the laundry room, looking for a candle or a torch. Large vats filled with trousers and scarves send up curling lines of steam, as though they had been abandoned only moments before. Their waters are warm, the steam presses still hot. I nearly scald a hand touching their gleaming surfaces.
How easy it would be to return to my rooms, hurriedly dress and escape through the forests. This is the course a sensible man might take. A sensible man, I tell myself, would depart this queer hotel at once, hesitating only long enough to randomly choose a direction in which to flee. But the anguish of separating again from my wife and my children will not let me take that path, no matter how sensible.
I find a small candle in a medicine kit tucked away behind a furnace. Lighting it, I cross the hall and enter the servants stairwell to follow the suitcases, down to the bottom floor.
53
My progress is slow. The passageway is narrow and the wooden, creaking steps are crooked and positioned badly in haphazard fashion. Perhaps the builder felt that here he could scrimp on a structure no paying customer would ever see. I press my hand against the dank, pitted wall, holding the candle with the other, near to my chest. The light it gives off is negligible. I inch my feet carefully from one step to the next, uncertain of the drop. A second step may fall six inches from the first only to be followed by a ten- to twelve-inch dip. Somewhere water drips with a purling tinkle. I sense that I am underground, although I have no proof of this other than the changing quality of sound and the dampening air.
At the edge of my small circle of light, a door appears. A heavy door, made of dented metal and painted a muted puce. Dirty handprints mar its surface, and its paint has cracked and peeled. It no longer fits snugly into its frame, if it ever did, and so cannot be locked. I place my candle on a step behind me and, pushing with my shoulder, manage to force the enormous rectangle from its frame. It creaks and groans and opens. I jump across its threshold. It bangs behind me with a thundering boom.
The place, of course, is unknown to me, but I seem to be in a back storeroom of some kind. Huge bulging sacks of flour are stacked upon pallets and piled, against the walls, nearly to the ceiling. Large mechanical mixers and big dented brass tubs lay about in broken pieces.
Perhaps it is the kitchen.
At the far end of this room, through a screened doorway, a warm light glows. How reassuring it is to hear human voices and the sounds of people working! Churning machines, banging doors, tables being pounded. Instructions are shouted over the din and several conversations are going on at once. There must be a radio, for I can hear a waltz.
I peer around the edge of the wall of flour sacks. On the other side of the screened doors, several dozen men work beneath buzzing electrical lights. Bakers, by the looks of them. Each wears a white smock and a knotted kerchief. Puffy hats sit upon their heads, like large deflating mushrooms. At wide tables, they pound great hills of dough with their fists and flatten them out with floury pins. Half a dozen bread mixers churn and grind. A big metal oven, nearly ten feet high, stands at the back of the room, giving off an exhaustive heat. One of the bakers opens its bottom door and throws in more wood. Inside, a red fire rages and glows.
“Hans, more wood!” they call out.
“Yes, sir!”
“Quickly, quickly!”
I edge closer, bending to hide myself behind a tall breadrack, wishing I had taken time to change my clothes. Ridiculous playing the spy in a flowing nightshirt and a tasseled cap, my legs bare and freezing. These slippers are not the most dependable of shoes, and every now and again, a frosty winter breeze blows beneath my hem, chilling my buttocks.
All the bakers appear completely bald beneath their fluffy hats. A flowing mustache is the only hair each seems to have. The oldest baker barks his orders, for instance, through a thatch of white snow. The first assistants wear ribbons of grey. The intermediate men smirk beneath luxuriant black bristles as thick as horse brushes. The apprentices breathe through mouths left open below scraggly fringes of down.
“The oven is hot enough, ja?”
Using a long metal stick, an apprentice unlatches and opens the oven’s bottom doors. He feeds a fresh cord of wood into the raging fire and checks its temperature at a circular gauge. Wiping wood chips from his hands, he nods affirmatively to his chief.
“Eins, zwei, drei, vier!” a middle baker calls out, and he and some of his fellows lift the apprentice and pretend to throw him into the fire. He kicks and struggles, but without strength, and this only makes the bakers giggle more. Finally they relent.
The head baker chuckles to himself, his eyes crinkling in delight.
“Much work, much work to do,” he sings sweetly to the rest of them, lest in their merriment they forget their chores.
The other bakers puff their cheeks and blow out sighs. “Ach!” says one, crooking an arm against a tired back. “This work …”
“Enough of your complaints,” his partner scolds. “We’re almost done already for the night.”
Not trusting the final preparation to any of his assistants, the head baker himself opens the oven’s upper doors with the long metal stick. Picking up a paint brush and a bowl of melted butter, he layers the oven’s inner shelves with a thick coat of grease.
“There will again be sweetness in the world!” he sings, pleased with the job he is making.
His assistants rush in to carefully take from him the bowl and the brush when he is through. One of the middle bakers offers him a towel and the head baker wipes his hands.
“Bring in the next batch,” he orders, chuckling to himself.
“Hansel!�
� one of the middle bakers calls out, and he and his fellows move towards a large pantry. “Hansel, stick your finger out so I can see if you are fat enough!” The others respond with much jovial laughter.
The men open the pantry door, disappearing inside.
“There will again be sweetness in the world,” the head baker sings, rubbing his hands in glee.
54
The sweetish burning smells nauseate me. My stomach heaves into my throat. My hand slips and I lurch against a stack of precariously piled pots and pans, knocking them with a crash to the floor. The startled bakers look up from their work and with blinking eyes search in my direction. I scramble hastily to my feet.
“Madmen!” I shout, shaking my fists furiously, wanting to hit any who approach me.
“You’re late,” one of the middle bakers says, a little cross.
“Hand over your appointment card and we will begin,” the head baker demands, turning his pointed belly in my direction.
The others move towards me, rolling up their sleeves. I pick up a hooked mixing oar to fend them off.
A Blessing on the Moon Page 14
