A Perfect Waiter

by Alain Claude Sulzer

  But he was secretly hoping for more than just words—for a portrait, a photograph of Jakob. Had time played havoc with his face? Had it been as unfair, implacable and incorruptible as it usually was? Had it ravaged Jakob’s face as well as his own, so that he tended to look away when confronted by his reflection in a mirror? Whatever was in the envelope on the table in front of him, it certainly wasn’t a photograph. His fingers would have detected a photograph through the airmail paper.

  And then, at long last, he proceeded to open the letter. He didn’t use a knife or scissors, he slit it open with the little finger of his right hand. The paper was so thin, a single movement sufficed to open the envelope, which rustled softly and tore. How Jakob had obtained his address was a mystery to which he’d already given some thought. He withdrew the letter, a single sheet folded three times, from the envelope. Unlike the address, the letter itself had been typed. In many places the typewriter had pierced the paper and left tiny fissures and protrusions on the back of the sheet. Only the signature was handwritten, but the “Jakob” in the sender’s address on the back of the envelope had been replaced by “Jack” carelessly scrawled in slanting letters and terminating in a silly little squiggle. All this Erneste took in at a glance after unfolding the letter and before he’d read a single word of it. He felt that everything hitherto had been merely a dream, and now he was waking up.

  What he read was the diametrical opposite of what he had secretly been hoping for the last two days: that Jakob had changed. He hadn’t. Jakob was the same as ever, whether he called himself Jakob or Jack: interested solely in his own concerns. Erneste’s throat became more and more parched as he scanned the shatteringly impersonal, unambiguous lines again and again, but he didn’t take a drink—he couldn’t. It never even occurred to him to reach for the bottle beside him. Reading the words addressed to him again and again, he failed at first to grasp their meaning; then he grasped it only too well. And, even as he still sought to persuade himself that this Jack couldn’t possibly be the Jakob who had once been so close to him, the one with whom he’d shared the attic room in Giessbach, he naturally realized that no one other than this far-off Jakob, transmogrified into Jack, had welded these words, this request, into the deadly projectile that now smote him, Erneste, like a bullet from a gun. He saw the lake before him, blue as ice and cold as slate. Its waters rose and engulfed him—no, he was sinking, done for. He was and remained alone, was and remained a ridiculous individual. The request addressed to him appealed for help but not for friendship. For reasons unknown to Erneste, Jakob was banking on his assistance.

  He had written:

  Dear Erneste,

  It’s ages since I wrote to you. You haven’t written either, didn’t you have my address? I’m writing this from New York, where I’ve been living for many years. Have you thought of me from time to time? We’re so far apart. Life is tough here, mainly because everything has turned out differently than I imagined. I badly need your help, I don’t know where else to turn. Please go to Klinger for me and ask him a favor, otherwise I’m finished. My financial position is very shaky, and not just my financial position. You can help me—you must help me! Please go to Klinger and ask him to send me some money. Just tell him I’m in a bad way from every angle. I went away with him that time, and now I wonder if it wasn’t a mistake. I survived the war over here, sure, but I never managed to get back to Europe. They say K has been nominated for the Nobel Prize, so he must have plenty of cash. I wanted to leave everything behind me, but I didn’t succeed, not altogether. I often think of Cologne and my mother, who’s dead now. You’ll know where to find K. He lives near you, as I’m sure you’ve heard. Please write me when you’ve had a word with him. I doubt if I’ll ever come back. I could go back to Germany if I had the money, but who’s got any money except him? Do you have any? Are you well off? Please keep me posted. He owes me, it’s only right! Any chance I could come to Switzerland?

  All the best,

  Jack.

  Chapter 2

  Erneste hadn’t forgotten his arrival in Giessbach on April 2, 1934, or his first day at work there. Nor had he forgotten Jakob’s arrival a year later, in May 1935, the beginning of a sojourn abroad to which Jakob probably owed his life. The young German’s spell of employment in Switzerland had saved him from being drafted into the Wehrmacht, as he inevitably would have been if he’d stayed at home for the next four years. You didn’t need to know much about politics in 1935 to guess what was to be expected from Germany if Hitler remained in power there. You had only to open one of the newspapers displayed in the hotel lobby or overhear some German or Austrian visitor talking. No matter what attitude individual guests adopted toward the new German regime—whether they endorsed or condemned it, whether they sought to understand or excuse, belittle or oppose it—everything indicated that the cataclysm of which so many people spoke had not been consummated by Hitler’s accession to power but was really still to come. The fire had been kindled but had not yet burst into a blaze. The word “war” was on everyone’s lips. It was said that

  German policy would inevitably result in chaos and another millionfold bloodbath.

  Erneste could still picture certain hotel guests after thirty years. A few names and faces had lodged in his mind. He pictured them in the morning, when they appeared in the breakfast room looking bleary, dazzled by the light and often unwashed. He pictured them, too, wide awake in the evening, when they entered the spacious dining room overlooking the Giessbach, eager for attention and recognition and thirsting for adventure where little or none was to be had, or, when the temperature permitted, sinking into the softly creaking wickerwork chairs on the terrace overlooking the lake, lighting their cigars or cigarettes or having them lighted if a waiter was nearby, ordering their cocktails, putting glasses filled with ice cubes to their lips, and broaching a preliminary bottle of wine, white before red. The waiters were run off their feet, and if several guests were seated at a table, further bottles would be opened as the evening wore on.

  The guests dined and talked, drank and laughed, hailed new arrivals and took note of those who contrived to draw attention to themselves, scanned the room for acquaintances and waved to them. But it was considered bad form to change tables during dinner or even thereafter, so they remained seated. One could always meet up later on the terrace or in the hotel bar.

  Particular interest was devoted to those who ate alone, especially on the first night of their stay. It was tactless to stare but impolite to ignore them. Those who benefited from a good vantage point could tell their table companions a great deal about such new arrivals. The majority of them were on the elderly side. Some drank nothing but water in a positively defiant manner, others visibly overindulged themselves in port or sherry, many skimmed through newspapers or books before or after the meal or between courses, and most were at pains to make a nonchalant, abstracted impression. But few of them succeeded in grandly ignoring the other guests’ surreptitious glances, and many such loners became more and more obviously insecure in the course of a meal. Hauteur made but a frail suit of armor when a person had to eat in solitary state.

  The wealthier the guests, the more attention they were entitled to demand and the more attention people devoted to those aspects of their existence that should definitely have been exempt from public scrutiny. The private lives of some unaccompanied guests were a trifle disreputable. People suspected them of hiding something, so they never took their eyes off them. Thus, Erneste became acquainted with the characteristics of the beau monde, the social class that was wont to relax, untroubled by politics or business, in the hotel’s luxurious ambience. It did not, however, escape him that few of the guests came from the very highest reaches of society, for the Grand Hotel’s great days were over. Any aristocrats still to be seen in Giessbach were of junior status only.

  Guests tended to keep to themselves. Some considered themselves superior to others and let them feel it, the more unobtrusively, the more effectively.
Within this setting, which was also populated by sundry eccentrics and unprepossessing bores, members of the hotel’s omnipresent and indispensable staff were perceived only out of the corner of the eye, on the visual periphery. Since most of them were young, dark, and from Southern Europe, cases of mistaken identity were of almost daily occurrence. In order to make their mark, waiters had to be exceptionally attractive or unattractive in appearance. To most of the guests they all looked the same.

  It was advisable to treat lone guests with particular consideration, not least because they were the best tippers. In contrast to married couples, who spent most of the day supervising their children, they were more inclined to converse with members of staff. They exchanged friendly words with them in the corridors, on the curving staircase, on the terrace in the morning, in the gardens in the afternoon. Such conversations tended to become protracted, so hotel employees would have to hurry to fulfill their other duties without making guests feel that they had detained them unnecessarily. These brief exchanges, which nearly always took place in public and were watched with interest, brought staff and guests somewhat closer, even though the social divide was always preserved. No one took exception to these chance encounters and brief chats. On the contrary, the management expressly encouraged members of staff to devote time to unaccompanied guests whenever possible.

  A nod or a slight turn of the body sufficed to convey that a guest wished to terminate a conversation. The hotel employee had then to respond in an appropriate manner, neither precipitately nor too deliberately. He learned all these things, after committing the usual blunders, by experience and empathy. It was up to him to develop the proper sensitivity to a guest’s wishes.

  Lone guests had a predilection for chatting with waiters during meals in the dining room. This was when a few casual words on their part could best demonstrate the spurious nonchalance that was designed to conceal from their fellow guests how vulnerable they felt without a table companion. Aspiring waiters, in their turn, were thereby enabled to converse with denizens of another world of which they could never learn enough, for everything they learned helped them to treat the inhabitants of that other world with even greater understanding in the future. The better acquainted they were with their habits and body language, the more promptly and efficiently they could fulfill their requirements.

  When requested to do so, as they were on rare occasions, waiters were even at liberty to touch upon personal matters. The management turned a blind eye to these intimacies, if they were noticed at all. A guest generally began by asking a waiter’s age and place of origin, then his background and future plans, his family circumstances and whether he planned to marry soon or had no intention of marrying at all—inquiries fraught with an implicit interrogation mark. When asked such questions, which it wasn’t really proper for a waiter to answer frankly, it took some practice for him not to blush, let alone tremble or spill something. Loud laughter was unseemly—not a ground for dismissal, but reason enough for the management to reprimand or subject him to unwelcome surveillance.

  All these things were quickly learned. Erneste himself had learned them as quickly as Jakob was soon to do. One picked them up in passing, so to speak, and it nearly always paid off in the end. Lonely guests were generous when they left, not only with their tips but sometimes with their tears. Yes, Erneste had seen tears, some suppressed but others that flowed with relative abandon. Tears not only in the eyes of the bachelor whose face and name he’d forgotten, unlike the weight of his body, a Belgian nobleman d’un certain âge whose advances he had not rejected because he had no need to feel ashamed of himself on that account. Cold, clear tears, too, in the eyes of widows whose chagrin was not necessarily associated with one particular individual, still less with a humble hotel employee, but simply with the fact that their departure was inevitable, and that every departure, every farewell, denoted the end of something: the end of the summer, of pleasant evenings on the terrace, of strolls beside the Giessbach Falls, of leisurely boat trips across the Lake of Brienz to Interlaken, of a vacationer’s existence. For what came after their vacation would be far worse than their present solitude. No one would be awaiting them on their return—no one, at least, who was eager to lavish affection on them; just their servants, their daily irritations and the eternal, monotonous routine of everyday life. But of this they spoke allusively at most. Who wanted to know the nature of their world-weariness? Most of them were tactful enough to refrain from burdening hotel employees with their woes, which probably stemmed from the very affluence for which the less affluent yearned.

  Erneste had nothing to reproach himself for, nor had he deluded himself. The Belgian had wept, not for him but for himself. The tears he shed on that morning in early spring—a few tears only—had been shed, not for Erneste but for Erneste’s youth and, thus, for the Belgian’s age. They derived from the biological fact that a gulf yawned between them—one that nothing could bridge or offset, neither words nor physical contact nor money. Erneste was twenty or thirty years younger, and at that moment those years formed an even greater barrier than wealth between two men who shared the same secret. The young waiter had nothing, whereas the older man possessed all the makings of a pleasurable existence, but Erneste’s youth outweighed that a hundred times over, whereas the Belgian’s vanished youth could never be retrieved or bought back. Had he allowed it to pass him by? Erneste didn’t know. He saw the man weep, nothing more, treating himself to nostalgia like the ring on his finger and the eau de Cologne on his skin. He couldn’t regain his youth as he might have recouped a dud investment; he could only buy its semblance for a while—in this case, through the medium of a young man named Erneste. You didn’t get any younger if you looked in the mirror; on the contrary, the younger your companion, the older you seemed to yourself. The Belgian had certainly never wondered how many years of his life the young waiter would have given for a small fraction of his money; that didn’t interest him. He merely surrendered to the bitter-sweet pain of melancholy before departing a few hours later.

  When the Belgian nobleman was leaving, Erneste felt briefly tempted to yield to an absurd impulse: to embrace him in front of everyone just as he was shaking hands with the manager in the hotel lobby. Instead, he took the bill he was given and bowed. But, when their eyes met, it was Erneste who triumphed. He was young, the other man old. He never forgot him, strangely enough. One thought was enough to conjure up a vision of the Belgian’s body, though he couldn’t remember his face. The lasting impression the Belgian had made on him was in stark contrast to the brevity of their relationship.

  Hotel guests, whether bachelors, widows or married couples, could leave at any time, whereas Erneste and his colleagues had no choice but to await the arrival of more guests, who were not long in coming at the height of the season. In Erneste’s memory thirty years later they had become fused into a faceless mass consisting mainly of clothes whose wearers were engaged in relaxing, sunbathing in the grounds, strolling around, going for little excursions, eating, drinking, smoking in the bar, and talking a great deal.

  Erneste listened to them with only half an ear or not at all. Uninterested in politics, he concentrated on fulfilling their wishes. Hotel staff, whose political opinions it never occurred to anyone to ask, were employed to keep guests happy regardless of what was happening elsewhere. Although their own lives would certainly not be unaffected by political developments in the outside world, their job consisted solely in melting into the walls and wallpaper past which they bustled to and fro as briskly but silently as possible. They didn’t advertise their personal opinions; that would have damaged the hotel’s reputation. It was only natural, however, that many hotel employees had a relatively clear idea of the future that lay in store for them if war broke out. The majority hoped someday to be able to return home with their savings, there to embark on a new life entirely different from that of their neighbors, who would continue to live in penury for the rest of their days. Erneste was a stranger to such dreams
. His own dream had already come true. He would never go home and hadn’t the least desire to exchange his present existence for another. Hotel staff seldom spoke of their plans for the future, perhaps for fear of failing to fulfill their ambitions if they wasted too many words on them in advance. They worked and slept, worked and slept, roused from oblivion by the alarm clocks that signaled the start of each new day.

  Because Erneste spoke fluent German and French as well as some English and Italian, the management used to send him down to the landing stage whenever guests or new additions to the staff were expected. At the height of the season this could often happen several times a day. Depending on the number of guests, their luggage was conveyed to the hotel in a cable car by one or two floor waiters, or, if they were busy elsewhere, by a couple of pages. Erneste’s job was to deal with the guests’ requests and queries. While awaiting the arrival of the cable car in which the Grand Hotel could be comfortably reached in any weather, they surveyed the scenery. They particularly admired the emerald-green lake whose pellucid waters were a temptation to swim in them all year around. This was inadvisable except in August, however, because the water was icy cold and not to be braved by any but the hardiest and most thick-skinned males. Most guests preferred to retire to the shade of the trees, where cool drinks—light white wine or assorted cocktails—were served. Now and then, when overcome with boredom, they would bestir themselves sufficiently to go for a stroll, either to the Giessbach Falls or down to the Lake of Brienz. To the lake on foot and back by cable car was worth the modicum of effort required—indeed, it was a pleasure.

  On the last Sunday in May 1935 Erneste went down to the landing stage by himself. The sky was clear, but a thick layer of mist floated above the water. It was considerably colder than the day before, and had rained heavily that morning. No hotel guests were expected this Sunday. The most recent arrivals, a Russian family from Paris complete with grandmother and two servants, had checked in last night.