The Hotel Years

20. Bruck and Kiralyhida

Bruck-Kiralyhida was once like so: hyphenated.

Then came the revolution, it washed away the hyphen, and with that the Dual Monarchy was finished.

If the hyphen had remained, we might still have had the Duality today.

The hyphen was in reality a bridge, the bridge over the Leitha, connecting cis- and trans-. Traffic crossed the bridge completely unimpeded. On this side people spoke German and Hungarian, on the other side Hungarian and German. This side they swaggered in black and yellow, the other side they glittered in red, white and green. On this side they were loyal to the emperor, on the other to Kiraly. Those were the main differences; everything else was negligible. Here as there, the children were blond, brown- or black-haired, but always dirty. Here as there, the merchants were clever, practical-minded and sober. Here as there, one could get through money easily and painlessly. And get through it one did. Nowhere in the monarchy more easily than in Bruck-Kiralyhida.

During the war there was a penal institution in Bruck that went by the name of “Officers’ Training College”. It had the task of turning one-year volunteers “with button” into privileged detainees with a claim to pay and an ensign’s sword-knot. Every day the striplings of this institution marched across the bridge. Back then the bridge still signified the place where Austrians and Hungarians rubbed shoulders, to fight and give their lives for their joint fatherland. The ones for the Kaiser, the others for their king. Back then, it was still one person. Now one has become two. The hyphen is gone…

But no. If one looks more closely, it is still there. Only it is called something else. It has become a line of separation. Instead of conjoining, it dissevers. In a word, it is a frontier. The hyphen is an armed frontier. Defended on this side by Austrian gendarmes, on the other by Red Guards. An eerie feeling to stand close to the bridge. The heart for a moment stops beating. The end of the world. The beginning of chaos. The limits of common sense. Or of irrationality?

Frontier traffic is lively. People exchange money, goods, ideas. In the interests of fairness, the Austrian government has despatched one policeman for every Hungarian agent-provocateur. They get along extraordinarily well, and frequent the same bars. The better to observe the other, they play billiards together.

There are also middle-class people. Hungarian capitalists. They are very difficult to tell apart from the agents-provocateurs. They also speak Hungarian, are just as elegant, their wallets have the same extent and cubic volume. Only they don’t dare to cross the border, and are waiting for the fall of the Kun dictatorship. The agents-provocateurs are waiting for the dictatorship of the proletariat to reach Austria. That’s the extent of the difference.

The entente is represented as well. By four Englishmen, NCOs, on 100 crowns per diem. Only one of them speaks any German. And so the four of them hang around together all day. They eat the same food, drink the same drinks, buy the same commodities. Simply because only one of them knows any German, and so the others all fall in with him. Because it’s awkward and not very English to talk a lot and to gesticulate. The Hungarians more than make up for it. They all speak German.

If you’re not very careful, the shops, cafés, hotels, etc., will give you twenty kronen change in two-krone notes, with serial numbers all beginning with seven. It’s an unlucky seven. The money is Kun money, and therefore worthless. The best thing to do is palm it off on a clueless traveller coming from the depths of Austria to use as tips.

As I say, Bruck is a little alarming. People here come in two types: those in blue shirts, and those in white shirts. The former are police spies, the latter communist agitators. (The locals wear no collars.) As a stranger, you come in for lots of suspicious looks. Either you’re a spy or an agitator, or you decide to leave your collar behind. Then you’ll be picked up by the nearest cop and your worries will be over.

Strange city! When I wanted to stretch out at night in the too-short bed, I dreamed that my nose collided with a hyphen, at the very point where the Red Guards are. I caught a whiff of Béla Kun, awoke dripping with sweat, and was unable to get back to sleep.

I will never go to Bruck on the Leitha again. Ever since it’s stopped being Bruck-Kiralyhida, it’s become a little edgy. And all on account of one hyphen.

It’s too bad about the hyphen.

Der Neue Tag, 20 July 1919

21. Journey through Galicia: People and Place

The country has a bad reputation in Western Europe. Our complacent culture likes to associate it with squalor, dishonesty and vermin. But while it may once have been the case that the East of Europe was less sanitary than the West, to say so today is banal; and anyone doing so will have said less about the region he claims to be talking about than the originality he lacks. And yet Galicia, one of the great battlefields of the Great War, is a long way from being rehabilitated. Not even for those to whom a battlefield is eo ipso a field of honour. Even though Western European bodies fell on Galician soil. Even though out of the mouldering bones of dead Tyroleans, Austrians and Germans sprouts the characteristic maize of this country.

“Kukuruza” is what they call the ears of maize. When they are ripe, they are hung round the straw eaves of the peasants’ huts, large, yellow, naturally occurring tassels, fluffed with long yellow hairs. Pigs are fattened on Kukuruz, and geese and ducks, and then brought to market. Poor Jewish traders put their maize in pans of boiling water and wander through the streets with the hot kernels, to sell them to other poor Jews who trade in old rags, and leftovers of glass and newspapers. The Kukuruz dealers live off the ragmen. But who do the ragmen live off?

It’s difficult to live. Galicia has more than eight million inhabitants to feed. The soil is rich, the people are poor. They are peasants, traders, craftsmen, officials, soldiers, officers, merchants, bankers, landowners. There are too many traders, too many officials, too many soldiers, and too many officers. All of them live off the only productive class, namely the peasants.

These are devout, superstitious, anxious. They live in timid awe of the priest, and have boundless respect for the “city”, from which come strange horseless carriages, officials, Jews, gentry, doctors, engineers, geometers, electricity, which is known as “elektryka”; the town into which they send their daughters for them to become maids or prostitutes; the town where the law courts are, the clever lawyers a man has to be wary of, the wise judges in their gowns behind metal crosses under the colourful pictures of the Saviour in whose Holy Name a man is sentenced to months and years and sometimes even to death by the rope; the town which he feeds so that it can feed him, so that he can go there to buy colourful headscarves and aprons, the town where “commissions”, decrees, local ordinances and newspapers break out.

That’s the way it was under Emperor Franz Joseph, that’s the way it is now. There are different uniforms, different eagles, different insignia. But the basic things don’t change. Among these basic things are: the air, the human clay, and God with all His Saints that inhabit the heavens and whose images are put up by the side of the road.

These holy pictures in among the wide cornfields, on the edges of the meadows, were destroyed in the Great War, riddled with holes and hacked at and crippled and then put up again, repainted, and given inscriptions that indicate the peasants’ sacrifice was as great as their devotion was profound. This is not the way everywhere. One little village in East Galicia still has that celebrated Christ whose cross was shot away, leaving only the stone Saviour, his bleeding feet nailed to a stump, his arms spread wide in incomprehension of a silent God and a trigger-happy world; a Redeemer crucified without a cross; the symbolic consequence of the odds of war. The miracle was rightly left to stand. All round it, the trenches slowly grow over.

But they leave ugly scars that are like a disfiguring skin disease of the earth. I try to avoid the kind of reportage that looks out of a railway window and jots down fleeting impressions with a rush of satisfaction. But I can’t. My eyes always move from the speaking features of my fellow travellers to the melancholy flat world without limits, the mild sorrow of the fields into which the battlegrounds have grown, to subsequent details. Around me, a strange and typical man may just be explaining a world, his world — I can’t take my eyes off the little station.

All these stations are small and narrow, consisting of a pavement with a couple of rails in front of it. The platform looks like a scrap of road stuck between fields. As though it was a busy street corner by a stock exchange, dark-haired and red-haired Jewish traders take up position here. They aren’t expecting anyone, they aren’t seeing off any friend, they are going to the station because it is part of the profession of a small trader to go to the station to watch the train come in, the passengers get out, the once-a-day train, the only connection to the world beyond, that brings with it something of the world’s hubbub and something of the great deals that are concluded across the world. The train brings German-language newspapers from Vienna and Prague and Ostrava. Someone reads aloud. Later, the traders go home, talking in little groups, along the path that connects the little town to the station, fields on the left, fields on the right; on the right is the picture of Jesus, on the left a saint’s shrine, and between them go the Jews with lowered heads, careful not to touch the cross, and to avoid the saint, between the Scylla and the Charybdis of the alien, deliberately ignored faith. Mud splashes up from the street.

From a distance the mud has a sheen like dirty silver. At night you might take the roads for murky rivers, in which the sky with its moon and stars is reflected a thousandfold, as in a dirty, distorting crystal. Twenty times a year they pour stones into the mud, rough blocks, mortar and rust-brown bricks, and call it ballast. But the mud comes out on top; it gulps down the blocks of stone, the mortar, the bricks, and its deceptive surface mimics something solid and flat, as whole mountain chains slumber under gurgling water, a line of hills painfully driven through narrows. Many baggage trains have flogged down these roads, gun carriages left deep tracks, the horses sank down to the saddle — I remember it, I was there. Once, I tramped down these roads and others just like them, a pack man among pack animals, and the endless mud swallowed us alive, as it swallows the ballast of the roads.

Just as a mountain river will widen out to form lakes, so the road widens out into a circular marketplace. This is where the town was born. It is an offspring of the road. There are secret laws by which a small town will be created in one place, and a village in another. The one round and wide, the other longish and slender. The market produces a hamlet, which produces a little town. It will never make a city. The careers of places are as preordained as those of men.

For it appears that in this land the conditions for development are not given. Things don’t grow. They warp and distort. In this maltreated, scorned corner of Europe, the Gothic is very much alive. There are places where everything seems unreal: families living in summer from the sale of cucumber juice and in winter from saying prayers for the dead; haunted castles; small barefoot boys selling drinking water in the station, just water, nothing else. In Lemberg it happened that a big shire horse fell through an open drain cover. The drain covers in Lemberg are no bigger, the horses no smaller than in the rest of Europe. But God allows miracles to happen. Every Sunday He outdoes Himself.

A man in the small towns of Galicia is different from a man in the small towns of Western Europe. There he grows into pleasures, bounded by a glass of wine in the morning, and the cosy Stammtisch at night. The small town in Galicia knows no pleasures. It even turns its philistines into a phenomenon. It encourages eccentricity. The frenzy of the great cities of the world rampages through the small towns of Galicia. There is movement without discernible purpose and for no evident reason.

But the same wind keeps blowing across the flat land, though one hardly feels it. Hills, intimations of the Carpathians, ring the distance in blue. Ravens circle over the forests. They were always at home here. Since the war they have prospered. Nothing in the way of industry, advertisements, soot. In the markets people sell the sort of primitive wooden figurines that were current in Europe a couple of centuries ago. Has Europe come to an end here?

No, it hasn’t. The connection between Europe and this half-banished land is vital and unbroken. In the bookshops I saw the latest literary titles from France and England. A cultured wind carries seeds into the Polish soil. Strongest of all is the line to France. Even to Germany, more obliquely situated, occasional sparks fly back and forth.

Galicia lies in unworldly seclusion and yet is not isolated; it was banished but not severed; it has more culture than one might suppose from its deficient sewage system; plenty of disorder and still more eccentricity. Many remember it from the War, but then it hid its true nature. It wasn’t a nation. It was either hinterland or Front. But it has its own delights, its own songs, its own people, and its own allure: the sad allure of the place scorned.

Frankfurter Zeitung, 20 November 1924

22. The Polish California

Dear Friend,

I have just been to visit one of the most interesting parts of Europe, the part of Mala-Polska where the oil wells are. As you will know, it lies in Galicia, on the northern edge of the Carpathians, and its centre is the strange town of Boryslav. Oil has been produced here since the middle of the nineteenth century. The dark wooden drilling towers are positioned over an area of ten square miles or so. Compared to the towers of Baku, these seem less cruel to me, and less inimical to the earth’s surface. The earth in the Caucasus clearly suffers the curse that makes up for the blessing buried beneath. There is nothing green there, only yellow-grey desert sand and dirty brown ponds that seem not to want to dry, even though everything seems condemned to dry in the southern sun. Here in Boryslav, dubbed “the Polish Baku”, the sun is moderate, the drilling towers thin and rickety and in spite of their numbers still not the only things growing. There are still woods, which are slow to make room for the towers, seeming more to surround them fraternally than to flee from them in dread. One’s eye moves from the planked wells to the green hills, which are rendered somewhat respectable by virtue of the fact that they are part of the Carpathians. Were it not for the dust, which really is the brother of the Caucasian dust, there would only be the towers that evoke Baku.

But there is the dust, white and extremely thick. It’s as though it were not the chance outcome of rubble and dead matter, but its own element like water, fire and earth, less to do with these than with the wind, before which it spins in thick veils. It sheets the road, like flour, powder or chalk, coating every vehicle and every walker, as if it had a will or inclination of its own. It has a special relationship with the sun when it burns, as though it were fulfilling its task. And when it rains, then it turns into an ash-grey, wet, sticky mass, which forms greenish pools in every hollow.

So this is where they found oil. A few decades ago, Boryslav was no more than a village, today 30,000 people live here. A single street — four miles long — connects three places without showing any of the joins. Along the front of the houses is a wooden boardwalk mounted on short stout posts. It’s not possible to make a conventional stone pavement, because pipes run beneath the road, carrying the oil to the station. The gap in height between the boardwalk and the little houses is quite considerable; the pedestrian reaches or overtops the roofs and looks diagonally down into the rooms. The houses are all wood. Only occasionally a larger brick house comes along, whitewashed and stony, and breaks the sequence of crooked, mouldering, crumbling dwellings. All were built overnight: at a time when the stream of naphtha-seekers first began to flow here. It’s as though the boards hadn’t been hastily assembled by human hands, but the breath of human greed had blown chance materials together, and not one of these fleeting homes seems to exist for the purpose of accommodating sleeping humans, but to preserve and exacerbate the sleeplessness of excited individuals. The rancid reek of the oil, a stinking miracle, brought them here. The anomie of subterranean laws — not even predictable by geology — raised the tension of the diggers to a kind of frenzy, and the constant possibility of being a thousand feet away from billions was bound to give rise to an intoxication that was stronger than the intoxication of actual ownership. And even though they were all consigned to the unpredictability of a lottery and roulette, none of them gave in to the fatalism of waiting that was a mild prelude to disappointment. Here, at the source of petroleum, everyone believed that all it took to compel destiny was his labour; and then his zeal magnified the sorry outcome to a calamity he was no longer able to bear.

The small digger could only be freed from the intolerable cycle of hope and discouragement by the mighty hand of the greater one, and of the “societies”. They were able to buy up many claims at once, and with the relative calm that is a masculine aspect of wealth, abide the whims of the subterranean element. In amongst these mighty ones, whose patience costs them nothing and who could happily plough in millions overnight to reap billions at their leisure, the medium-sized speculators inserted themselves with their moderate credit and moderate risk-proneness and so further squeezed the little adventurer. These gradually forsook their dreams. They kept their huts. Some inscribed their names over the doors and started to deal in commodities, in soap, in shoelaces, in onions, in leather. They returned from the violent and tragic realms of the hunter of fortune to the sorry modesty of the small grocer. The huts that had been built to last a few months stayed up for years and their rickety provisionality settled into something like a local character. They suggested posed photographs in ateliers or crude book jackets for Californian adventures or just plain hallucinations. It seems to me, knowing several great industrial zones as I do, that commerce nowhere has such a fantastical aspect as here. Here capitalism lurches into expressionism.

And it seems likely that the place will keep its fantastical aspect. The town is on the march, and not just in a metaphorical sense. As the old wells begin to stagnate, new ones are opened, and the dusty road sets off after the petroleum. It pushes its houses outward, turns a corner, and bounds onward to catch up with the capricious mineral. If most of the wells in Boryslav and in Tustanowice are now idle, then the drillers are hammering day and night in Mraznica. I can’t help thinking this road will go on for ever, a long, white, dusty ribbon going over humps and hollows, twisty and straight, provisional and durable, as unpredictable as human fortune, and as abiding as human desire.

I will admit that the sight of this great town, consisting as it does of one street, made me forget the actual laws of its social order. For the space of a few hours I thought speculation and greed were elemental and almost mysterious. The gargoyle faces of the lust for profit, the everywhere tense atmosphere, in which overnight catastrophes are a continual possibility, roused my interest in the literary possibilities of the milieu more than the actual beings that lived there. The fact that there were workers here and officials, cabbies and unemployed, tended to disappear behind the novelistic aspect of individuals. Imagination was livelier than conscience.

At least the oil workers are considerably better off than coal miners. They are specialists, even here. The average wage of an assistant is nine zloty, or four marks fifty, for an eight-hour day. A foreman gets twelve zloty. Conditions are relatively tolerable. Work is in — if not an airy space, at least one that is aired — and the smell of oil is not unpleasant, and even said to be good for the lungs. To the layman the tools used in drilling are disappointingly primitive. Motors drive the drills. A man walks round and round a sort of basin with a horizontal iron pole in his hand. The movement and the action look straightforward, but it may be a lot harder in practice. Experts say that the art of the worker lies in judging the degree of difficulty, or if you prefer, sensing the resistance to the drill of various types of geological terrain. The worker’s hand must have a pronounced sensitivity, given that it stands in for the eye, which is not involved in drilling. If the borehole is choked by some object, as for instance a broken screw, then clever and cunning means are used to remove the obstacle — there are instruments of canny reach and clutch that feel in the dark. Their endeavours remind me of efforts to extract a cork from some narrow-necked container. It can cost you hours and months and money.

Money, money, lots of money! Consider that to drill to a depth of a mile costs maybe 90,000 dollars. Neither you nor I will ever own an oil well. It’s become a lottery for people who basically don’t need it, for banks and consortia and American billionaires. The people who once experienced the sensation of fortune bubbling up out of the ground, have already lost the capacity to feel happiness from material gain. There is a certain opposition between the fairy-tale way the earth gives up treasure, and the share-holdings of the naphtha diggers, and the stoic calm with which they await the miracle. These poor treasure diggers sit a very long way away from the miracle of nature, in the great metropolises of the West, and the fact that they are so far away, mighty, invisible and almost impersonal, gives them the lustre of godhead, directing the efforts of engineers and worker teams with mysterious glory. By far the greater part of the Polish sources is in the hands of foreign financiers. The workforces are paid out of a mystically replenished exchequer. Far away, on the great trading floors of the world, the shares are bought and sold, and transactions concluded according to opaque laws. The being and becoming of heavenly bodies are better understood by astronomers than changes in ownership by the local managers and people in charge of the wells. The petty officials can only sit there trembling when the noise of the great tempests on the world markets reaches their ear. Only recently, three large enterprises, “Fanto”, “Nafta” and “Dombrowa”, were sold to a French conglomerate. There was a meeting in Paris, and three or four gentlemen took out their pens and scrawled a signature, nothing more. In Boryslav and environs though, it means 500 employees thrown out of work, and hunger peers in at their windows, and rattles the doorknobs, because some god in Paris said the word: Efficiencies! And because it was a French god — and not as it might have been, a British one — diplomatic motives are woven into the lamentations of the alarmed Polish newspapers. Sceptics claim to understand that the new owners are only interested in the coup on the market, and in selling on the shares at a higher price, and not the exploitation of the resources at all. Even for optimists, though, gods are less than reliable, and at least as remote from any social feeling as from their workers and officials.

I left the area on a peaceful golden evening that gave no indication of the type of terrain that lay beneath. The workers trudged home with the serenity of peasants coming home from the fields, and it was as though they carried scythes over their shoulders, as their grandfathers before them had done. A few paupers stood by murky puddles and scooped up oil in tin canisters. They were the minor colleagues of the great French Dreyfus. Their tools are buckets, not shares. Such oil as they find they sell in minute quantities or they use it to light their temporary hovels with. That’s all that a lavish nature has accorded them. Their huts stood crooked, brown and humble in the flat gleam of the sun. They seemed to huddle together a little more, to grow small, and to almost disappear completely. By tomorrow they wouldn’t be there anymore.

I hope, my dear friend, that I have managed to give you some sense of the atmosphere in this Polish California. I chose to write about it to prove to you that I am not exclusively wedded to idylls in this country.

I remain your humble servant,

J.R.

Frankfurter Zeitung, 29 June 1928

23. Hotel Kopriva

In P. is the “Hotel Kopriva”. It has eighty rooms on two floors. It has a front-of-house manager who doubles as room-service waiter and porter. He is short and frail-looking and not really imposing enough to serve in a hotel of two storeys and eighty rooms. He meets guests at the station. If the town of P. had a larger station concourse, as would befit a town that harbours within itself a hotel like the Kopriva, then one wouldn’t even be able see him. He owes his visibility entirely to the dimensions of the station hall in P. and the anxious visitors, looking where they may sleep.

The “Hotel Kopriva” is almost always full. And yet, one almost always finds room in it. There are hotels in which the law of solid geometry is suspended and replaced by another law, which goes as follows: “A room that already has one traveller in it may under certain circumstances accommodate a second.” It is to this law that the “Hotel Kopriva” owes its wealth; and to the circumstance that it doesn’t show itself to its visitors first, its unchallenged standing. Many hotel managers could learn from it. Complaints do not exist where they cannot be made. There is no such thing as inaudible dissatisfaction. It is true to say therefore that all its guests are fully satisfied with the “Hotel Kopriva”.

Other hotels have glossy, exchangeable names. They are called things like the Imperial, the Savoy, the Grand, the Central, the Paris, or the Metropole. But this hotel is called plainly and confidence-inspiringly: the Kopriva. Other hotels have had eighty or eighty-odd rooms. But the “Hotel Kopriva” has one hundred and twenty beds in its eighty rooms; because of the eighty, forty are “dual occupancy”.

Now, dual-occupancy rooms in towns where lovers or, on occasion, married couples stay are a necessity. But in the town of P. and in the “Hotel Kopriva” in particular where almost exclusively single, rivalrous, anxious travellers put up, dual-occupancy rooms give rise to awkward scenes. The conviction that one does not snore depends on the physiological impossibility of listening to oneself in sleep; the belief that others do follows an old tradition. But an even stronger objection to dual occupancy is the prejudice that a man of distinction should and must sleep alone. So there are repeated productions of the following scene:

“I always sleep alone. On principle!”

“Whose are those things? You told me you had a room! You don’t have a room at all!”

“But there is the room!”

“I’m not paying for a room with two beds!”

“Nor am I!”

“You will pay for it both together!”

“No!” said simultaneously by both visitors.

But the porter, who understands the pliancy of human nature, says: “All right then, room seventy-six.”

“Unbelievable!” say both travellers. One would think they really didn’t like each other. But the imagination of the porter in seeing them as sleeping companions has made them into such. Their hostility to the idea welds them together.

“Er — do you snore?” asks the first.

“I beg your pardon!” replies the other.

“I hasten to say, I don’t…!”

“You know — I don’t mean this in any way personally — but I can’t stand snoring!”

“That’s exactly what I say! Once, I was on my way to…” And there follows the obligatory anecdote that ushers in friendships and firms up alliances.

More noxious meanwhile than any snoring is the blaring gramophone. Downstairs, somewhere in the dining room it scratches out marches, waltzes and two-steps with the inert implacability of a machine. Its insidiousness lies in the fact that its sound becomes clearer and more penetrating the further you stand from its funnel. This well-established characteristic of physics leaves the sleepless guest convinced that intervention is impossible, an illusion. Its range is limitless. The acoustic persecution is more traumatically effective in the remotest room on the second floor than anywhere on the first. It would be easier to find sleep in the sonorous throat of the funnel itself than in the illusory, delusory distance.

Sometimes there are fairs in P. It is never possible to anticipate them. They occur like natural catastrophes. They break out like storms. And then the rooms cost more. In fact, they cost twice as much. Also the fairs are surreptitious. There is no sign of them on the evening of one’s arrival. You get tangled up in a fair as in a waiting net.

Thousands of sample cases wander through the “Hotel Kopriva”. Its beds house commercial travellers of every kind. They sit at the single long table in the dining room. The traveller in children’s toys with the doleful face. He looks like someone who should be travelling in sacred relics. But no, he carries with him the gaudy joys of life: red wooden horsemen; yellow silk clowns; bouncy monkeys on thin elastics; colourful spinning tops; chimneysweeps no bigger than Tanagra figurines, with eyes that open and close; little black devils with tongues of flame; abacuses strung with wooden beads that convert mathematics to a game. But beside him the traveller in soaps at least is cheerful. He smells of musk, patchouli, powder. The paper seller plays solitaire. The man with the fountain pens is a little old-fashioned, he reminds you of goose quills. Tobacco smoke hangs under the ceiling. And no one has any time. Everyone is between arrival and departure. The “Hotel Kopriva” is always between trains. Its eighty rooms and hundred and twenty beds whirl round and round. The “Hotel Kopriva” doesn’t exist. It merely seems to exist. The gramophone tumbles upstairs and down. The sample cases fly through the air. The manager rushes from room to room. The room-service waiter runs to the train. The porter is knocked for six. The manager is the room-service waiter. The porter is the manager. The room-service waiter is the porter. The room numbers are departure times. The clock is a timetable. The visitors are tied to the station on invisible elastics. They bounce back and forth. The gramophone sings train sounds. Eighty makes a hundred and twenty. A hundred and twenty rooms trundle through eighty beds.

Prager Tagblatt, 4 December 1923

24. The All-Powerful Police

At the end of two days I have taken against the porter of my Roman hotel. His professional friendliness is vitiated with that ill-concealed curiosity that betrays the mediocre spy. He simply wasn’t born to serve the police. He has been in the hotel business for twenty years — if I can believe anything he says — and he was a hotel porter when visitors in Italy were merely guests, and not yet objects of official scrutiny. A change in regime is something a traveller sees first in a hotel porter. His first move after welcoming the guest is to ask for his passport. I will admit, I have a deep suspicion of states that demand the surrender of your passport in a hotel. (Some travellers are less particular in this regard.) All the traditional hospitality of a country that has been getting by on tourism for many years, and seems likely not to be able to get by without it for many more, becomes suspicious to me when hotel personnel start to behave in a semi-official capacity and take away my passport, and thereby my freedom of movement, even if it’s only for half a day. But the hotel porter does more. When I go to him for stamps, he takes the trouble to read the names of my addressees. So concerned is he for my comfort that he will not let me walk a few steps to the letter box. He insists on posting my letters himself. The outcome is that they arrive a day or two later than they should have done.

He has some curious friends, my hotel porter. Several times a day one sees him in the company of two or three gentlemen who are certainly not guests at the hotel. Curious fellows, who, as I hand in my key, straightaway fall into a deep silence. As I walk away, I feel their glances boring into my neck. Sometimes I run into one or other of them in a café, whom just half an hour ago I heard sharing a silence with my hotel porter. Haven’t we met somewhere before? Aha!

I know there are travellers who have eyes only for the ruins, and who are prepared to let spies be spies. But my sensitivity, nurtured and developed by stays in police states — which is to say, states with an anxious police — is such that no amount of tourist attractions is enough to distract me from the lively espionage culture.

When I call on the gentleman my friend in Milan recommended me to, the janitor looks me up and down. This gentleman, a businessman and devout Catholic, was under police suspicion for a time. As we leave the building together he greets the porter, to whom he sometimes gives tips, with a smile and a tad too politely. “The man is dangerous,” says my host. “He could report me any moment.” “What for?” “Who knows?”

Indeed, one may not know why one incurs the suspicions of the janitor and the intimate of the police. The bourgeois lives in permanent dread of incurring suspicion. The law surrenders him entirely into the hands of the police. Here, perhaps a little excursus on the helplessness of the citizen in present-day Italy.

According to Mussolini himself (as of 26 May 1927), Fascist Italy has: 60,000 gendarmes, 15,000 policemen, and a 10,000-strong rail, post and communications militia. In addition to these there are the frontier militia and a 300,000-strong volunteer Fascist militia for “national security”.

The mere existence of these units would be sufficient to trim the f reedoms of the Italian citizen. But then there are Fascist laws, which are such as to completely destroy them.

The Italian is not allowed to travel in his own country unless he carries with him a carte d’identité issued by the police authority of his regular abode. Without it, no hotel is allowed to take him in. (He will even be turned away by hospitals.) Leaving the country is a near-impossibility. The authorities issue no passports for abroad. A twenty thousand lire fine and a minimum of three years in prison is the punishment for anyone caught trying to cross the border without a passport.

Further, Italy has the concept of a so-called citizen “of ill repute”. A citizen of this kind has no personal freedoms. He is under constant supervision. The police tell him when he may leave his flat. A police commission is empowered to tell him where he has to live — anywhere in Italy, or the colonies. The police, and they alone, determine his day, his work, his constitutional, his siesta, his sleep. Mussolini’s explanation for this measure goes: “We remove these individuals from normal society in the same way as doctors isolate patients with infectious diseases.”

To extend the dictator’s simile: one would suppose that the isolation of someone struck down with anti-Fascism would be sufficient, and let the healthy do as they please. Alala! Not so! Every public event — whether of a scientific, sporting, or even charitable nature — must give at least one month’s notice to the prefect of police. He must approve the time and place. He is allowed to ban the event. A commission advises him on the course to take. And who sits on this commission? The secretary of the Fascist League of the province in question and next to him the “Podesta”—the commandant of the garrison! Professors, civil servants, students and high school pupils are disbarred from associating in any way — not even for scholarly purposes. (Neither czarist nor contemporary Russia has laws like that.) Not even a memorial service may be held without police permission. The police reserve the right to determine place and time of any public meeting. And it isn’t hard to imagine that where the police, for certain reasons, finds itself unable or unwilling to ban something outright, it will still set a time and a place that will make the meeting impractical or ineffectual in advance.

You understand why my host goes in fear of his janitor. The janitor has become, by police practice, a sort of conduit of opinion. The law is aware of citizens “generally regarded as of ill repute”, and the catspaws of these laws are unable to walk into buildings and listen and hear the sources of this ill repute for themselves. They rely instead on tale-bearers. From the time of Metternich, janitors have been the eyes and ears of the police.

The Italian citizen goes in fear of the newspaper vendor on the corner, the cigarette seller and the barber, the porter and the beggar, the neighbour in the tram, and the conductor. And the cigarette seller, the barber, the neighbour, the traveller and the conductor are all afraid of one another. When I asked my friend, in a café in Milan on the day of Nobile’s arrival, not expecting a serious reply and really only to break his gloomy silence: “What do you think of Nobile then?” he promptly replied: “I take no interest in politics.” “You mean the North Pole?” “No,” he insisted, “in politics.” And he opened his newspaper and immersed himself in an article about military manoeuvres.

I have been browsing in Mussolini’s speeches, and the following passage caught my eye: “I want you to be convinced that in Fascist Italy every minister and every secretary of state is nothing but a soldier. They will go wherever their commander orders them, and when I tell them to stay, they stay.” I look up, and catch a familiar face. Two tables away from me, with a floppy red and white necktie on his chest, a sleekly pomaded head craning forward to listen, a thin cane on the chair beside him, a hand with flashing pink nails dangled over the chairback, a cowardly smile that he thinks is engaging — there is the friend of my hotel. He has picked up that we are talking in a foreign language. What an important moment. In return for two lire fifty he will tell the police about it. Alala!

Frankfurter Zeitung, 11 November 1928

25. Where the World War Began

The World War began in Sarajevo, on a balmy summer afternoon in 1914. It was a Sunday; I was a student at the time. In the afternoon a girl came round. Girls wore plaits in those days. She was carrying a large yellow straw hat in her hand, it was like summer coming to call, with hay, grasshoppers and poppies. In her straw hat was a telegram, the first special edition I had seen, crumpled and terrible, a thunderbolt on paper. “Guess what,” said the girl, “they’ve killed the heir to the throne. My father came home from the café. But we’re not going to stay here, are we?”

I didn’t manage to be quite as deadly serious as her father who had left the café. We rode on the back platform of a tram. Out in the suburbs there was a place where the tram brushed past some jasmine bushes that grew close to the track. We drove along, jingle-jangle, it was like a sleigh-ride in summer. The girl was light-blue, soft, close, with cool breath, a morning on an afternoon. She had brought me the news from Sarajevo, the name was visible over her, picked out in dark red smoke, like an inferno over a clueless child.

A year and a half later — strange how durable love could be in peacetime! — there she was again, at the goods station, surrounded by smoke, platform two, music was blaring out, wagons screeched, locomotives whistled, little shivering women hung like withered wreaths on green men, the brand new uniforms smelled of finish, we were an infantry company, our destination secret, but thought to be Serbia. Probably we were both thinking of that Sunday, the telegram, Sarajevo. Her father hadn’t been to a café since, he was in a mass grave.

Today, thirteen years after that first shot, I am seeing Sarajevo. Innocent, accursed city, still standing! Sorry repository of the grimmest catastrophes. Unmoved! No rain of fire has descended on it, the houses are intact, girls are just going home from school, though plaits are no longer in fashion. It’s one o’clock. The sky is blue satin. The station where the Archduke arrived, Death waiting for him, is some way outside the city. A wide, dusty road, part-asphalted, part-gravel, leads off to the left into the city. Trees, thickly crowned, dark and dusty, leftovers from a time when the road was still an avenue, are now irregularly sprinkled along its edge. We are sitting in a spacious courtesy bus from the hotel. We drive through streets, along the river bank — there, that corner there is where the World War began. Nothing has changed. I am looking for bloodstains. They have been removed. Thirteen years, innumerable rains, millions of people have washed away the blood. The young people are coming home from school; did they learn about the World War, I wonder?

The main street is very quiet. At the top end of it is a small Turkish cemetery, stone flowers in a small garden for the dead. At its lower edge an Oriental bazaar begins. Just about the middle of it, facing one another, are two big hotels, with café terraces. The wind browses indifferently through old newspapers and fallen leaves. Waiters stand by at the doors, more to verify than to assist the tourist trade. Old policemen lean against the walls, recalling peace, the pre-War. One has whiskers, a ghost of the old double monarchy. Very old men, probably retired notaries, speak the army German of Austrian days. A bookseller deals in paper and books and literary journals — mostly for symbolic purposes. I pick up a Maupassant from him (although he has Dekobra in stock as well) for a night ahead on a train without a wagon-lit. We get to talking. I learn that literary interest has ebbed in Sarajevo. There is a teacher who subscribes to a couple of literary weeklies. (It’s good to know that such teachers still exist!)

In the evening, there’s the passeggiata of the lovely, chaste women. It’s the passeggiata of a small town. The beautiful women walk in twos and threes, like convent girls. The gentlemen are continually doffing their hats, people here know each other so well that I feel a threefold stranger. I might almost be watching a film, a historical costume drama, where the people don’t know each other, the scenes of their greetings have been left in the cutting room, I am a stranger among strangers, the auditorium is dark; only the bright, garish intervals frighten me. It might be good to read a newspaper, to discover something about the world I have left behind in order to see something of the world.

By ten o’clock everything is quiet, there’s the distant glimmer of a single late bar down a side street; it’s a family gathering. Across the river, on the Turkish side, the houses climb up in flat terraced trays, their lights dissolve in the fog, they remind me of the wide staircase to a lofty altar.

There is a theatre and opera, there is a museum, hospitals, a law court, police, everything a city could want. A city! As if Sarajevo were a city like any other! As though the war to end all wars hadn’t begun here in Sarajevo! All the monuments, all the mass graves, all the battlefields, all the poison gas, all the cripples, the war widows, the unknown soldiers: they all came from here. I don’t wish destruction upon this city, how could I? It has dear, good people, beautiful women, charming innocent children, animals that are grateful for their lives, butterflies on the stones in the Turkish cemetery. And yet the War began here, the world was destroyed, and Sarajevo has survived. It shouldn’t be a city, it should be a monument to the terrible memory.

Frankfurter Zeitung, 3 July 1927

26. The Opened Tomb

In cinema newsreel footage you can see the Russian czar and the Imperial family on one of their last outings in Petersburg, the czarina, the little czarevich, the whole court, the rigid Honour Guard. This sequence is followed by the recording of the May Day parade which was recently taken by Trotsky in Moscow. Through the distance between these two slices of history the audience begins to understand how much has happened.

It should have been reversed: first the scenes with the red multitudes, under the command of a man with no military education and whose orientation is primarily literary, and then the last czar with his family. Following the picture of the czar the screen should be left white, clear and white as a funeral shroud, and a rigid silence must overlay it, compared to which the silence of the Siberian taiga would be noisy commotion. For not even an ignorant and insentient screen can show the scenes of these ten by ten dead, and more-than-dead people without emotion; this vision of ghosts who were dead at the moment they were filmed fresh and frolicsome, and who when they were murdered were not murdered; what was extinguished in them was not life so much as an unreality which bore an uncanny resemblance to life. The last czar ruled, banished and executed; he permitted branding, looting and killing in his name. Yes, he was even wound up for the piece of film. But, as the film shows, he didn’t live. Even graves have a breath. This blew so deceptively through the bodies of the czar’s family that one supposed they were all alive, the Archduke, the Archduchess, the rigid Guard and the little czarevich.

In the van strides the czar. He is wearing a richly stitched and braided tunic, a kind of hussar’s uniform, and his face is mounted on a pointed little imperial beard screwed to the middle of his chin. His heavy eyelids are like lowered blinds. Their glassy regard is probably levelled at the camera. It’s like the stare down the barrels of rifles a few years later. The czar walks briskly, with the movements of a creature that is part puppet, part shadow. He vanishes half-right, there where the white screen bleeds into black background. Not for an instant do you think a piece of film has come to an end in the projector behind you. This is the invocation of an undead soul at a spiritist séance.

The czarina and all the court ladies are wearing the fashions of the pre-War age, the big hats with wide rims, bent down at the front and up at the back, secured to the lofty coiffures by means of pins to keep them from swaying. The hats are worn at an angle and shade one profile, in order to show the other quite unprotected. They look terribly bold; they have the false boldness of robber hats at mask balls, the futile coquetterie of a scent that would be alluring but is only musty. The dresses are long and closed at the top, whalebone rings the throat like a closely fitted garden fence, and the bosom, at once respectable and emphatic, arches under a great deal of impenetrable material. The hair is pulled painfully up behind the ears.

These ladies are even older and deader than the Hussars’ uniforms. They sashay past in a swift gaggle, and although they are all clad in white, they look like so many mourning veils.

It’s all over in three minutes. It’s no more than one of the numerous terrible moments of world history that show crowned heads at play. This one happened to have been caught by a camera and handed down to posterity. The film is a little worn, the pictures flicker, but one can’t say whether it is punctures made in it by the tooth of time, or molecules of natural dust that have shrouded these seemingly living subjects. It is the most terrible irreality that film has ever shown; a historical dance of death, an opened tomb that once looked like a throne…

Frankfurter Zeitung, 31 December 1925

27. His K. and K. Apostolic Majesty*

There was once an Emperor. A great part of my childhood and youth happened under the often merciless lustre of His Majesty, which I am entitled to write about today because I was so vehemently opposed to it then. Of the two of us, the Emperor and me, I came out on top — which isn’t to say that I should have done. He lies buried in the Kapuzinergruft, and under the ruins of his crown, while I, living, stumble about among them. Faced by the majesty of his death and its tragedy — not his — my political convictions are silent, and only memory is awake. No external occasion has wakened it. Perhaps just one of those hidden, inner, private things that sometimes cause a writer to raise his voice, without him caring whether there is anyone listening to him or not.

When he was buried, I stood, one of the many soldiers of his Viennese garrison, in my new field grey uniform that we were to go to war in a few weeks later, a link in the long chain that lined the streets. The shock that came from understanding that the day was an historic one encountered a complicated sadness about the passing of a fatherland that had raised its sons to opposition. Even as I was condemning it, I already began to mourn it. And while I bitterly measured the proximity of the death to which the dead Emperor was sending me, I was moved by the ceremony with which His Majesty (and this was Austria-Hungary) was being carried to the grave. I had a clear sense of the absurdity of the last years, but this absurdity was also part of my childhood. The chilly sun of the Habsburgs was being extinguished, but it had at least been a sun.

The evening we marched back to barracks in our double rows — parade march on the wider streets — I thought about the days a childish piety had led me to seek out the physical proximity of the Emperor, and I mourned the passing not of the piety but of those days. And because the death of the Emperor spelt the end of the country and of my childhood, I mourned Emperor and fatherland as my childhood. Since that evening I have often thought about the summer mornings when I would go out to Schönbrunn at six, to watch the Emperor’s annual departure for Bad Ischl. The war, the revolution and my radical politics could neither deface nor eclipse those summer mornings. I think those mornings were responsible for my susceptibility to ceremony, my capacity for reverence at religious occasions, and the parade on the 9 November in Red Square in the Kremlin, before every moment of human history whose beauty accords with its grandeur, and each tradition that at least confirms the existence of a past.

Those summer mornings often fell on a Sunday; as a matter of principle, it never rained. The city had laid on extra trams. Many people went out for the naïve purpose of providing a send-off. In a curious way the very lofty, very distant and very rich trilling of larks combined with the hurrying strides of hundreds of people. They went along in shade, the sun just grazing the second floor of the buildings and the crowns of the tallest trees. A damp chill emanated from the ground and the walls, but above us the summer air was already palpable, so that we felt spring and summer simultaneously, two seasons coincidentally instead of sequentially. The dew was still shining and already evaporating, and the lilac came over the garden walls with the fresh vehemence of a scented wind. The sky was a taut, bright blue. It struck seven from the church tower.

Just then a gate opened, and an open carriage slowly rolled out, high-stepping white horses with lowered heads, an impassive coachman on a terribly high box in the yellow-grey livery, the reins so loose in his hand that they dangled over the horses’ backs, and we couldn’t understand why they trotted so briskly, since they obviously had leave to go at their own pace. The whip was disregarded, an instrument not even of exhortation, much less chastisement. I began to sense that the coachman had other powers at his command than his fists, and other means than reins and whip. His hands, I should say, were two dazzling white spots in the midst of the shady green of the avenue. The large and elegant wheels of the coach, whose frail spokes resembled whirring conductor’s batons, a children’s game and an illustration in a book, these wheels completed a few mild turns on the gravel, which remained silent, as if it had been fine milled sand. Then the coach came to a stop. None of the horses moved so much as a foot. An ear may have twitched, but even that will have struck the coachman as unseemly. (Not that he moved to remonstrate.) But the distant shadow of a distant shadow moved across his face, convincing me that his ire wasn’t from him but from the atmosphere above him. All was still. Midges danced in the treetops, and the sun grew gradually warmer.

Uniformed policemen, who until now had been on duty, suddenly and silently disappeared. It was among the coolly calculated orders of the old Emperor that no armed official was to be seen in his vicinity. The plainclothes police wore grey caps instead of the usual green, so as to avoid detection. Committee members in top hats with yellow and black ribbons maintained order, and kept the affection of the people within decorous bounds. The crowd too didn’t dare move a foot. Sometimes we heard its muffled muttering, it was like choral praise. Still, there was a feeling of privilege and intimacy. Because it was the Emperor’s habit to leave for the summer without pomp, and early in the morning, in that hour when the Emperor is at his most human, the one in which he has just quit bed and bath and dressing-room. Hence the low-key livery of the coachman, no more than the coachman of a rich man might have worn. Hence the open carriage, with no seat at the rear. Hence no one on the box but the coachman himself, while the carriage was standing by. It wasn’t the Spanish ceremony of the Habsburgs, the ceremony of the Spanish midday sun. It was the minor Austrian ceremony of an early morning in Schönbrunn.

But just because this was so, his lustre was the more readily discernible, and it seemed to be personal to the Emperor and not from the laws that hedged him about. The light was modest, which made it visible rather than dazzling. We could, so to speak, see to the heart of the lustre. An Emperor in the morning, going on his summer holiday, in an open carriage, without retainers: an Emperor tout privé. A human majesty. He was leaving behind the business of government and going on holiday. Every cobbler could imagine it was himself giving the Emperor permission to go away. And because subjects bow most deeply when they imagine they are giving their master something, this morning found his people at their most submissive. And because the Emperor was not separated from them by any ceremonial, they themselves made up their own ceremonial in the privacy of their hearts, in which everyone placed themselves and the Emperor. They hadn’t been invited to Court. So each one invited the Emperor to Court instead.

From time to time we felt how a shy, distant rumour arose, without the courage to make itself public, but just entertaining the possibility of an “airing”. Suddenly it seemed the Emperor had already left the palace, we seemed to feel how he received the declamation of a poem from an infant, and in the same way as the first intimation of a still distant storm is a wind, so the first thing one sensed of the approaching Emperor was the grace that wafts ahead of majesties. Shaken by it, a couple of the committee gentlemen went into a little tizz, and from their excitement, as on a thermometer, we read the temperature, the state of things that were going on within.

At long last, the heads of those standing at the front were uncovered, and those standing further back felt suddenly restless. What was this? Disrespect? By no means! Only their awe had become a little curious, and was eagerly looking about for an object. Now they scraped with their feet, even the disciplined horses pinned back their ears, and then the most unbelievable thing happened: the coachman himself pursed his lips like a child sucking a sweet, and so gave the horses to understand that they were not allowed to behave like the people.

And then it was really the Emperor. There he was, old and stooped, tired after the poem declamations and already a little rattled, so early in the morning, by the display of loyalty on the part of his people, perhaps also a little journey-proud, in that condition that the newspaper reports were pleased to refer to as “the youthful freshness of our monarch”, and with that slow old man’s step that was called “supple”, almost tippling along and with gently jingling spurs, an old and slightly dusty black officer’s cap on his head, as might have been worn at the time of Radetzky, no higher than four fingers’ width. The young lieutenants scorned this design of cap. The Emperor was the only one in the army who kept so rigidly to the rules. Because he was an Emperor.

An old cloak, lined with a dull red, enwrapped him. The sabre dragged a little at his side. His diligently waxed and polished cavalry boots shone like dark mirrors, and we saw his narrow black trousers with the wide red general’s stripe, unpressed trousers, that in the old way were of a tubular roundness. The Emperor kept raising his hand in salute. He nodded and smiled. He had the look in his eye of someone who seems to see nothing in particular and everyone in general. His eye described a semicircle like the sun, scattering beams of grace to all who were there.

At his side walked his adjutant, almost his age but not so tired, always half a step behind His Majesty, more impatient and probably very nervous, impelled by the deep desire that the Emperor might already be seated in his carriage and the loyalty of his subjects have come to a natural end. And as though the Emperor weren’t heading towards his carriage, but were perfectly capable of losing himself somewhere in the throng, were it not for the adjutant, he continued to make tiny inaudible comments in the ear of the Emperor, who after every whisper on the part of the adjutant, seemed to turn his head very slightly away. Finally they had both reached the carriage. The Emperor sat and issued greetings in a smiling semicircle. The adjutant walked round the back of the carriage and sat down. But even before doing so, he made a movement as though to sit not at the side of the Emperor but facing him, and we could clearly see the Emperor move something away to encourage the man to sit at his side. At that moment a servant appeared with a blanket, which was slowly lowered over the legs of both old men. The servant turned sharply, and leaped up onto the box, alongside the coachman. He was the Emperor’s personal valet. He too was almost as old as the Emperor, but as lissom as a youth; service had kept him supple, just as ruling had caused his master to age.

Already the horses were pulling, and we picked up the silver sheen from the Emperor’s dundrearies. The crowd shouted their “Hurrah!” and “Long Live the Emperor!” At that instant a woman plunged forward, and a piece of paper fluttered into the carriage like a consternated bird. A petition! The woman was seized, the carriage stopped, and while plainclothes policemen took her by the shoulders, the Emperor smiled at her, as though to allay the pain the police was doing her. And everyone was convinced the Emperor didn’t know the woman would be locked away. Meanwhile she was taken to a police station, questioned, and released. Her petition would have its effect. The Emperor owed it to himself.

The carriage was gone. The even clopping of the hooves disappeared in the shouting of the crowd. The day had turned oppressively hot. A heavy summer’s day. The clock on the tower struck eight. The sky was a deep azure blue. The trams jingled. The sounds of the world awoke.

Frankfurter Zeitung, 6 March 1928

*Majesty: between 1867 and 1915, the Habsburgs were Emperors of Austria (the Holy Roman Empire) and Kings of Hungary—kaiserlich (imperial) and königlich (royal). This gave rise to the designation ‘Dual Monarchy’, the emblem of the double-headed eagle and the abbreviation “k. and k.”, sometimes jocularly — as by Robert Musil — termed “Kakania”.