The Hotel Years

39. Arrival in the Hotel

The hotel that I love like a fatherland is situated in one of the great port cities of Europe, and the heavy gold Antiqua letters in which its banal name is spelled out (shining across the roofs of the gently banked houses) are in my eye metal flags, metal bannerets that instead of fluttering blink out their greeting.* Other men may return to hearth and home, and wife and child; I celebrate my return to lobby and chandelier, porter and chambermaid — and between us we put on such a consummate performance that the notion of merely checking into a hotel doesn’t even raise its head. The look with which the doorman welcomes me is more than a father’s embrace. As though he actually were my father, he discreetly pays my taxi out of his own waistcoat pocket, saving me from having to think about it. The receptionist emerges from his glass booth with a smile as wide as his bow is deep. My arrival seems to delight him so much that his back imparts friendliness to his mouth, and the professional and the human are mingled in his greeting. He would be ashamed to greet me with a registration form; so deeply does he understand the way I see the legal requirement as a personal insult. He will fill in my details himself, later on, when I am installed in my room, even though he has no idea where I have come from. He will write out some name or other, some place he thinks deserving of having been visited by me. He is a greater authority on my personal data than I am. Probably over the years namesakes of mine have stayed in the hotel. But he doesn’t know their details, and they seem a little suspicious to him, as if they were unlawful borrowers of my name. The liftboy takes my suitcases one under each arm. Probably it’s the way an angel spreads his wings. No one asks me how long I plan on staying, an hour or a year, my fatherland is happy either way. The receptionist whispers into my ear: “627! Is that all right?”—as if I could picture the room to myself as he can.

Well, and in fact I can! I love the “impersonal” quality of that room, as a monk may love his cell. And as other men may be happy to be reunited with their pictures, their china, their silver, their children and their books, so I rejoice in the cheap wallpaper, the spotless ewer and basin, the gleaming hot and cold taps, and that wisest of books: the telephone directory. My room of course never faces the back. It is the room of a “regular”, so it has no facing room and yet looks out over the street. Opposite are a chimney, the sky, and a cloud… But it’s not so secluded that the condensed melody of the large nearby square doesn’t reach up to me like an echo of the dear world; so that I am by myself but not isolated, alone but not forgotten, private but not abandoned. I have only to open the window, and the world steps in. From afar I hear the hoarse sirens of ships. Very near are the jaunty ting-a-lings of trams. Car horns seem to call me by name — they greet me, as they might a senator. The policeman at the heart of it orders the traffic. The newspaper boys toss the names of their newspapers into the air like so many balls. And little street scenes enact themselves for me like a series of playlets. A slight pressure on the Bakelite bell-push and a green light goes on in a back corridor, signal for the room-service waiter. And here he is already! His professional eagerness is confined to his tail-coat — in his breast under the starched shirt front is human warmth; preserved for me, kept safe for the whole duration of my absence. When he telephones my order through to the kitchen so many floors below, he doesn’t forget to add who it is for, so that the sound of my name in the cook’s memory may spark some recollection of my particular preferences. The waiter smiles. He has no need of speech. He has no need to check or confirm anything. There is no possibility of any error. I am already so familiar to him that he would be prepared to accept tips from me on credit — at a suitable rate of interest, of course. His faith in the inexhaustible sources of my income is itself inexhaustible. And if I should one day turn up in rags and as a beggar, he would take that for an ingenious form of disguise. He knows I am merely a writer. But still he gives me credit.

I pick up the telephone. Not to make a call — only to say hello to the hotel telephonist. He puts me through promptly and often. He says I am out, if required. He warns me. In the morning he relays important news items to me from the paper. And when there is money on the way, he lets me know with discreet jubilation. He is an Italian. The waiter is from Upper Austria. The porter is a Frenchman from Provence. The receptionist is from Normandy. The head waiter is Bavarian. The chambermaid is Swiss. The valet is Dutch. The manager is Levantine; and for years I’ve suspected the cook of being Czech. The guests come from all over the world. Continents and seas, islands, peninsulas and ships, Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Muslims and even atheists are all represented in this hotel. The cashier adds, subtracts, counts and cheats in many languages, and changes every currency. Freed from the constriction of patriotism, from the blinkers of national feeling, slightly on holiday from the rigidity of love of land, people seem to come together here and at least appear to be what they should always be: children of the world.

Before long I will go downstairs — to complete my arrival. The receptionist will come up to tell me his news and to hear mine. His interest is devoted to me as entirely as that of the astronomer in the first hour of a comet’s appearance over the horizon. Have I changed? Can I be said to be the same? His eye, delicate and precise as a telescope, takes in the material of my suit, the cut of my boots — and the assurance: “I’m delighted to see you looking so well, sir!”—refers not so much to my state of health as to the apparent state of my finances. Yes, you’re the same as ever — he might equally have said. — Thank God you haven’t sunk so far that you might have to seek out another hotel. You are our guest and our child! And long may you remain so!

My interest meanwhile is in everything concerning the hotel, as though I stood one day to inherit shares in it. How’s business? What ships are expected this month? Is the old waiter still alive? Has the manager been unwell? No international hotel thieves, I trust? — In that one fine hour those are my concerns. I should like to be shown the books, and check the reservations for the months ahead. Am I in any way different from a man whom love of country prompts to check the budget of his nation, the political orientation of the cabinet, the health of the head of state, the organization of the police force, the equipment of the armed forces, the number of the navy’s cruisers? I am a hotel citizen, a hotel patriot.

Before long the moment comes when the receptionist reaches into a distant pigeonhole and pulls out a bundle of letters, telegrams and periodicals for me. A glance shoots out in my direction, in advance of my post. The letters are out of date and nevertheless new. They have been waiting for me for a long time. I know already some of their contents, having been apprised of them by other means. But who knows?! Among the expected letters may be one that surprises me, perhaps unhinges me, or causes my life to change its course? How can the receptionist stand there calmly smiling as he hands me my mail? His equanimity is the product of long experience, of a bittersweet paternal wisdom. He is sure that nothing surprising will come, he understands the monotony of a hectic life; no one knows as well as he does the absurdity of my vague romantic notions. He knows passengers by their luggage, and letters by their envelopes. “Your mail, sir!” he says coolly. And yet his hand, as it delivers the bundle into my keeping, bows, as it were, at the wrist, in accordance with an ancient tradition, a ritual of receptionists’ hands…

I pull up a chair in the lobby. It is home and the world, foreign and familiar, my ancestorless gallery! Here I will start to write about my friends, the hotel personnel. Such characters they are! Cosmopolites! Students of humanity! Expert readers of languages and souls! No Internationale like theirs! They are the true internationals! (Patriotism only begins with the owners of the hotel.)

I will begin by describing my friend, the receptionist.

Frankfurter Zeitung, 9 January 1929

* The hotel’s identity — if it has one, and is not a composite or a dream — is not known. Helmuth Nürnberger conjectures that the gently shelving port city may be Marseilles.

40. The Chief Receptionist

In the afternoon “between trains”, when the lobby is quiet and empty and an idyllic golden light floods the reception area, the chief receptionist reminds me of a kind of gold-braid and mobile saint in an iconostasis. To complete the likeness, he folds his hands over the little golden buttons that retain his belly, and commits himself to a profound contemplation of the air, the play of dust motes, and probably a few thoughts on his home life. Eventually he feels a pang at his inactivity in front of his boys, who are standing around in a small group, and in whom the unruliness of youth may at any moment stir, and so he contrives a few activities, in themselves highly superfluous but of a suggestively exemplary nature, to improve morale. He takes the heavy gold watch out of his waistcoat pocket and compares its time with that shown on the electric wall clock, whose great, round, white face hangs there like a hotel moon on two coarsely woven chains, accenting the golden afternoon with its ghostly silver. It is so quiet that each time the big hand marks a minute one hears the tick, almost human in the silence. For a long time the receptionist looks at the two chronometers, as though to catch one out by a second or two. Then with a resolute expression that is the visual equivalent of a sigh, he returns his watch to its pocket. He lays two large books over each other in such a way that their edges are exactly aligned, slides the telephone half an inch closer to the inkwell, with the flat of his hand trundles the pen into its designated hollow, examines a loose button on his cuff, and twists at it, to satisfy himself that it is in no imminent danger of falling off. No one dares disturb him. In this almost meditative hour, his assistants, a couple of fellows in grey, standing silently at the entrance, dare not approach him with a question.

There are always two different fellows posted by him, and by my reckoning there are six in all. I can’t quite be sure, because I’ve never seen them all at the same time. When one lot arrives, the others are just setting off to consulates, chemists, florists, apartments, all about other people’s business as messengers, agents or servants. For years I have been unable to establish whether they are hotel employees or personal friends of the chief receptionist’s. By all appearances, it is he and not it that is their bread-giver and the dictator of their opportunities. They obey him as hunting dogs obey the master of hounds — and no matter how far away they are on their errands, it’s always as though he had them on invisible, elasticated strings, and could reach them at any moment. He treats them like a kind of decayed relation or hereditary disease. There is undeniably something perplexing about their existence — a life without uniform and without badge. Everyone else here wears the sign of their service and their function, only they have retained the anonymity of mufti, which puts one in mind of the borders of legality, and a sort of frenzy, a pursued pursuit, of police and of forbidden paths.

But enough of them! In this quiet hour they don’t exist for the chief receptionist, they are less than the air, which he at least deigns to contemplate. He avoids looking at them, even when talking to them. He has the gift of calling down an errand from the elevation of his box without looking at any particular individual. It is as though the lobby is full of minions only waiting for an assignment. Only when a guest steps up to his desk to make an order does he gently incline his head — not the better to hear it, but only to disguise his superiority which guests do not like to have their attention drawn to.

Because, make no bones about it, he is their superior. I find in his powerful head, the wide white brow, where the hair at the temples is already beginning to silver, the wide-set pale-grey eyes above which the heavy eyebrows form two complete arches, the deep-lying root of the powerful, beaky nose, the large and down-curving mouth, shaded as the eyes by their brows by the curve of the pendulous pepper-and-salt moustache, the massive chin at the heart of which is a lost little dimple that has survived from childhood: for me this face echoes the portraits of great noblemen, a fixed expression of proud aloofness, an aura that spreads over the whole visage like a transparent layer of bitter frost. The face is a reddish brown, as though it came from a life out of doors, a life among wheat, water, wood and wind, the skin is taut — and the handful of deep frown lines above the nose, and the more delicate pleats around the eyes seem not to have come from the daily round of cares, but willingly accepted signs, tattoos administered by life and experience, and performed by wind and weather…

He bends down before the gentlemen but it is not a bow, but a physical condescension. As he accepts an instruction it is as though he were hearing a petition. When he nods in agreement, he reminds one of the merciful judges in American films (which are the only places where one sees merciful judges). The visitor is unhappy about something now. But it looks as though the chief receptionist is thinking about whose responsibility it is. And with a small, utterly tangential question he is plucked from his conscientiousness into a kind of sympathy, and a remissness becomes partiality. As though the gentleman were come to him not to complain about him but to voice a complaint to him. “Oi!” the chief receptionist shouts down to the group of idle boys. “Which of you took 375’s suit to be ironed?”—Silence. It wasn’t any of the boys, but the porter whom the receptionist has just sent on a bus to the station. He very well remembered the porter’s protest, the suit, the particular urgency of the errand. But he doesn’t for a moment feel guilty. I’m not saying he has no conscience, but it is of a different quality. It is more spacious, like a general’s maybe, preoccupied with more important things, full of concern for the whole enterprise. “On your way, and pick up the suit!” he orders. Who would give anything for the boy who ventured to ask: Where is it? Something is aroused now in the eye of the receptionist, something like the crack of the whip in a circus, a drawn poniard, a storm darkening on the horizon… The boy doesn’t stop to ask, he runs off straightaway. A brooding silence settles on the remaining boys, a clouded summer sultriness. The master of the gold braid stands all alone in his elevation, and exhales a cloud of pure silent anger into the lobby.

Even so, he would straightaway break into a smile if a guest, for example myself, were to approach him now with a request. Nothing about him — and I certainly don’t understand him to the degree that I perhaps appear to — nothing about him is as remarkable as his gift of switching almost instantaneously between fury and graciousness, indifference and curiosity, cool aloofness and anxiety to be of service. It’s as though each of his feelings is lined with its obverse, and that all he needs to do is turn his mood around to transform himself. Now, ten minutes before the first guests are due off the Milan express, he moves into reception mode, which is to say, he gives a little tug at his waistcoat. “Ten minutes!” he calls out to the clerk. Then something remarkable happens: he leaves his receptionist’s eyrie. He climbs down and scatters the group of boys, each of whom now runs to his allotted place, one to the revolving doors, another to the luggage elevator, a third to the lift for persons, another to the staircase, a couple more to the cloakroom. Two more minutes, and the first automobile draws up. The chief receptionist purses his lips and issues a snake-like hiss. From a dark side entrance a baggage man in green apron sprints up. Already the humming engine of a motor-car is audible outside. Here come the first pieces of luggage. The receptionist gives them a glance, and since they are leather and there is a dark grey and green tartan rug with them, and a leather-lined pouch for walking sticks and umbrellas, he gives another tug at his waistcoat. With each new arrival he exchanges a look with the reception clerk, and each glance signifies a room number, a floor, a price, an exhortation, a warning, affability or dourness. Yes, there are some guests at whose appearance the chief receptionist gently closes one eye, with the result they are told the hotel has no vacancies. Sometimes — but this happens once a week at most — the chief receptionist makes a bow, and when he is upright again, one sees his face wreathed in smiles, smiles that, like yawns, are contagious. Then the visitor proceeds past beaming faces, as between two rows of lit lamps.

By the bye, on this occasion I see that the chief receptionist has on a pair of grey worsted trousers, evidently the lower half of a well-cut suit, under his uniform tunic, as though to hint that only his upper half, the half with which he so rarely bows, is in livery. He tells me a little about his personal life, which I thought I knew something about. One more revelation, I imagine to myself. Certainly he has a relationship with a seamstress, and one may even assume that tailors are interested in his custom, and supply him with cut-price clothes. In the evening at six our friend disappears into the wardrobe, to emerge five minutes later in transformed dignity. For the first time one may see him responding to greetings. Taking his black silver-tipped cane in his grey-gloved left hand, with his right he touches the half top hat which he continues to affect, doffs it politely but quickly to his boys, who all bow very low to him. He has a little comradely chat with the night porter. Visitors who are sitting in the lobby or who happen to cross his path he doesn’t even look at. Once more his eyes sweep the room, spot me, and send me a little spurt of friendliness. Then he enters the revolving door. And from the slow majesty with which it spins one may tell who has just left the hotel.

Frankfurter Zeitung, 24 January 1929

41. The Old Waiter

This waiter is so old that he is known all over the hotel as “the old man”, and employees and guests alike refer to him as “the old man”, and he himself probably only intermittently recollects his name, which has fallen into disuse over many years. It’s as though he had none any more, because like a mythological demi-god he has joined the ranks of those whose names no longer matter, because they represent a function. The waiter represents age in this hotel — and, as a distant second, waiterdom. He was a waiter for over forty years, now he has been “old” for another ten. And the set of tails he pulls on every afternoon has changed from professional to emblematic clothing — if you see the waiter in them, you think that that is the fitting uniform for old age.

I should say that this old man bears none of the familiar badges of old age. He is clean shaven, his skull is completely hairless, and even his eyebrows have remained pale, by some freak of nature. He seems to have refused the respectable silver of old age. Either that, or he is so old that he has passed through the epoch of white hair and is well on the way to petrifaction, a species of human mineral, perhaps regressing to the world’s original condition, the inertness of the so-called inorganic. If you watch him leaning against one of the stout pillars in the hotel lobby for an hour, a stubby clay pipe (extinguished) in the corner of his mouth, lower lip pouting, his slightly pendulous cheeks the gleaming waxy red of some Tyrolean apples, his little expressionless eyes of shiny cobalt fixing some distant world, his crisp shirtfront of a pure, almost otherworldly white, the deep black of the impeccably fitting tails without a crease or speck of dust, in his gleaming shoes the steady reflections of lamps and candles — then you might suppose the waiter was his own monument, a deity of the hotel and the tourist trade, and you would feel unable to pass him without a small bow. But then all at once — and just when you least expect it, he starts to move — and the sight is so improbable that you start to wonder about the pillar as well, and suspect that it too will shortly change location. Where is the old man going? — To the restaurant. He walks from the knees down, his feet take tiny shuffling steps, if someone is in his way, he will stop, a mechanism stalls, and you think you hear somewhere under the tails that a little cog has suddenly ground to a halt. Then he starts to move again. A quarter of an hour later, the old man reaches the restaurant.

He never moves — though this is not always immediately apparent — without some end in view. Guests have arrived whom he waited on twenty or thirty years before and whose approach he saw while he was leaning against the pillar, his eyes apparently fixed on some other world. His alertness is unchanged, only his movements have slowed down. This was how he watched people arriving forty years before. Only then he got there quicker, he materialized in front of them, he ran to the kitchen, he was back. Imperceptibly but steadily over the years and the decades his feet have grown feebler, his hands more shaky, his movements slower; imperceptible as the movement of an hour hand on a clock, but just as unstoppable, age and feebleness have overtaken the body of the old waiter. Every day his walk has grown a little slower — till finally at the end of forty years it has become a glacial shuffle.

Now he is standing before his familiar guests, a bow is something he can still manage. A second waiter, a young and nimble one, is at the side of the old man, pad in hand, ready to take the order. It’s as though the old guests spoke in a language that the young waiter doesn’t understand, the language of a vanished generation, perhaps a vanished world. For the old man repeats everything the guests have said verbatim to his young colleague — but it looks as though he were interpreting it. It is as though the orders were only turned into edible dishes, to courses, to delicacies, by grace of the old waiter’s intervention. If the young fellow were to take them down directly, they might prove to be inedible. Although the guests speak softly (the table they are seated at an oasis of silence in the room full of noise and talk and clattering plates and clinking glasses), the old man hears every word of what they have to say — the young one presumably wouldn’t be capable of it. For the former has the gift of intuition; he guesses what the guests want — and further, he is capable of changing their order should he choose to do so. For it is possible that they might order a dish whose quality on a given day the old man is unwilling to vouch for. Then he will pretend they have ordered something else. And that is why the guests are willing to wait for him while he slowly approaches their table. There is an ancient relationship between them and him, they are all coevals; just as one might share a certain provenance, they and he are, so to speak, patriots of an epoch, which is a dearer and more important thing than a fatherland anyway, because times are quick to disappear, while fatherlands remain what they were; one can cast aside or mislay the former, while the latter keep us in their grasp. The guests and the old waiter: they share the language of a gone epoch. That’s why they understand one another, that’s why they wait on and for one another.

It happens sometimes that an ancient old lady with the icy, dismissive look that is the consequence of a long, rich and carefree life, with a cane on which she leans, garbed in a matronly dress of dark grey silk, a lustrous pearl necklace (on which the heirs are already waiting) round her wrinkled neck — that this timidly or respectfully treated lady makes straight for the old waiter, and without a word, gives him her hand. Then he will bow deeply and smile distantly. The old and by all indications frosty lady and the waiter have known each other for decades — and she will not always have given him her hand in that time. When they were both still young, the separations of caste stood between them. Now that they have grown old a process of levelling has begun that will end in the equality of death. Already both are preparing for the grave, the same earth, the same dust, the same worms — maybe even, if faith has managed to survive such a long life — the same hereafter.

At one in the morning, the old man gets into the lift — not the service lift, the one for guests — and has himself taken up to the top floor. There he occupies a small room, a grace and favour room. He has never been married, has no children, no brothers or sisters. He was always alone, a waiter in the hotel, a child of the hotel. Never more than a waiter. He has occupied his room for ten years now. He didn’t want to retire. He was no longer capable of braving the street and going home at the end of the day. So, like an old grandfather clock, he stayed in the hotel. One day he will die in his grace and favour room. No question. His body will be carried out through the hotel’s service entrance and loaded into a black car without windows. Because it’s not conceivable that one could transport a body through the lobby of the hotel.

Frankfurter Zeitung, 27 January 1929

42. The Cook in His Kitchen

Of uncommon significance, though invisible, yes, unknown to most, the cook dwells in the underworld of the hotel. Most of the day he spends sitting in the middle of his big kitchen, in a glass-walled pavilion, a little hut, in other words, made entirely of glass, visible from all sides, seeing to all sides. The underworld of the hotel is composed of these three elements: glass, tiles, and a white, silvery, matte metal. A fourth is water, pouring incessantly, quietly, melodiously, over the white tiled walls, continually alert and soothing at the same time, a delicate, glittering veil of bridal-hygienic innocence, precious, prodigal, and in places where the light falls, rainbow-coloured.

Eight cooks and four trainee cooks stand and run about, arrayed in white, with snow-white sailors’ caps on their heads, wooden spoons in their hands, at eight metal cauldrons, from which at irregular intervals silvery steam rises and in whose underbellies a reddish, unreal, theatrical fire glows. A never-ending white silence, comparable to the silence of the Russian taiga, blows over the tiles, the metal, the glass and the cooks, whose movements are inaudible, like those of white shadows, and whose footfall is probably swallowed up by the sound of the rushing water. This, the only sound in the room, doesn’t break the silence, merely accompanies it; it seems to be the audible melody of silence, the song of muteness. Ever so occasionally the vent of a cauldron allows a suppressed hiss to escape which straightaway dies down, shocked and ashamed and soon forgotten in the stillness, like the choked caw, say, of a raven in the white depthless silence of winter.

The kitchen might be the engine room of a modern ghost-ship. The cook might be a captain. The cooks the seamen. The trainees cabin boys. The destination unknown and in point of fact unreachable.

As dreamy as the silence is, that’s how real, bright and alive the cook is in his festive, material, palpable optimism. Just watching him is enough to make one forget all the bad stories one’s heard and exchange them for cheery memories of fairy tales, of Cockaigne for instance, of enchanting, brightly coloured illustrations in books. Here is the creator of the roast chickens that go flying into your mouth. His white brimless top hat of striped canvas, equally reminiscent of a turban, night-cap, and the under-lining of a royal crown, deepens the natural russet of his cheeks, the lustrous metallic black of his dense, bushy eyebrows, and the golden brown of his small, darting eyes, that playfully move over his comfortable cheeks, supervise the sous-chefs, watch the cauldrons, pursue the movements of the long spoons. In its crooked exuberance the hat grazes his red, throbbing, right ear, which seems to manifest an optimism all of its own. His red lips are set in an unvarying smile. The broad soft chin is bedded on a comfortable jowl. The broad nostrils sniff the smells of the dishes and the nuances of the smells. And under the white apron curves his capacious and benevolent belly, where a second and particular heart would find room.

That’s what I call a cook! He seems to step straight out of my childhood dreams, though in reality, as I believe I have already intimated, he is from Czechoslovakia. Of the four nationalities that live in that country, the Czechs, the Germans, the Slovaks and the Jews, he unites all the positive qualities: he has the application of the Czech, the method of the German, the imagination of the Slovak, and the cunning of the Jew. This ideal mixture makes for a contented, kindly man who lives at ease with others and himself, who is even capable of having a harmonious marriage over decades. Absurd, the very idea that he might fly into a temper! Where would rage find a place in somewhere already so filled with peace, contentment and freedom from care! And what would need to happen to knock this man off kilter? On the little table where he mostly sits, there is a large open diary in which he occasionally scribbles a note, and next to it a telephone that rings as often as twenty times an hour. Each time the cook picks up the receiver with the same tranquillity, he picks it up while it is still ringing, lays it carefully on the table, lets it rasp a little longer, and only when it has gone quite still does he lift it with a casual movement of the forearm not to his ear but to the proximate vicinity of his ear. It looks as though he first tames an unruly, noisy creature before agreeing to involve himself with it. He doesn’t, like all the world, speak into the tube, but again only into its vicinity, and he doesn’t raise his voice by half a degree, if anything he lowers it a little, and then the words he speaks to the telephone are all of velvet. Every quarter of an hour or so one of the four kitchen boys comes into the glass pavilion bearing a minuscule sample of food from one of the cauldrons on a small dish. Sometimes it is enough for the cook to cast one of his hurried golden glances at it (as if his eye can taste) and approve the dish with a gentle nod. Often, though, the cook raises the dish to his mouth, licks at it with his tongue, and sends the boy back with a quiet word or two. Why he only looks here and tastes there is his own secret. I imagine he knows the whims of the cauldrons very well and the abilities of the cooks, and also he would do damage to his tongue if he over-exercised it. It is a very precious tongue, it has the versedness of a colossally pampered palate, and also the ability to feed a stomach. Because very often the cook will eat nothing all evening, without feeling hungry. He never eats in the kitchen. He only takes off his white uniform, his roomy white uniform, and then stands there in a dark suit. He takes his hat off, and he has thick, curly hair, and a white smooth forehead. Over his poplin shirtfront, masking his collar, is the small grey silk bow tie with black dots. Its delicate coquettish wings tone down the gravity of his appearance, and give the cook a look of something enterprising, dashing and boyish. He walks into the dining room. A corner table is reserved for him next to the pillar. He is served silently and with élan, he doesn’t even need to order. He is given tiny portions that lie on the plate like so many precious stones. Slabs of meat would offend the cook. He eats gracefully and effortlessly and doesn’t even need to dab his lips with a napkin. After his coffee he takes a small cognac. Before pouring, the waiter shows him the bottle. Sometimes the cook will silently take the bottle from the waiter’s hands and set it down on his table. However tiny the little glasses are, he will only drink a few drops at a time. Then he gets up with effortless grace, not like a man who has been eating and drinking heavily, but as though he had been resting in a forest clearing in the morning, and is now walking out towards the sun. From a thin oval cigarette he blows blue fragrant clouds.

He goes home. He has a nice house, three children, an attractive young wife whose picture he keeps in the drawer of the table in the glass pavilion next to the put-away diary. He let me see her once. I’m sure he doesn’t show the picture to anyone else, and only sees it each time he opens or closes the drawer and he gives her a quick caress. He has never loved another woman and he isn’t the man to succumb to a sudden infatuation. (His salary is higher than the hotel manager’s.) Before the war he worked in many of the world’s great cities. Always in an atmosphere of tiles, glass, water and silvery metal. He went to war in 1914, calmly, without zeal and without fear, because he knew his uncommon gift would not fail to make an impression on the general staff officers. For four years he sat a dozen miles behind the front, in idyllic villages, with hot saucepans and abundant supplies. Sometimes he talks about that time. He never forgets to add: “The gentlemen on my staff dined better than they fought.” It’s the only aphorism that’s ever occurred to him. It will last him to the end of his days, and it’s meant as praise not blame. Once I asked him if he had been back to visit his newly independent homeland. “No,” he said, “there’s no need. This is where I pay my taxes.” I asked him whether he wanted his son to follow him into the profession. “Maybe!” replied the cook. “If he has the talent.” But there was doubt in his gentle voice. Perhaps, like many, he thinks the sons of geniuses turn out badly.

Frankfurter Zeitung, 3 February 1929

43. “Madame Annette”

When Annette turned twenty-eight and still hadn’t found a husband, she went to one of the jewellers in the Rue de la Providence in whose windows wedding bands of gold and silver and doublé by the dozen are looped over little velvet turrets, suggestive of tiny shimmering monuments to monogamy. She bought herself a silver wedding ring and put it on her left ring finger, in accordance with the practices of her country. She may have thought in the privacy of her own soul that one day a husband would present himself, and she would be able to exchange the silver ring for a golden one. For the time being, though, the silver one was sufficient, so to speak, as a way of putting God on notice, as moral compulsion exerted on Fate, so that it might at long last see fit to give her a spouse. Beyond that, the ring had one other, immediate function: it was able to keep the girl from the attentions of undesirable men, who are usually cowards en plus, by implying the presence of a jealous and strongly built husband lurking somewhere. It also won her a measure of respect with her female colleagues. Indeed, shortly after Annette had purchased the ring, the staff, which previously had called her “Mademoiselle Annette”, took to calling her “Madame Annette”. This might be the place to observe that the title of dame still impresses the odd spinster from a good family nowadays, who doesn’t have the sorry prospect of serving strangers for a living; how much more, then, a girl who is supposed to remain so all her life, even if she should have become a grandmother! — To Annette’s colleagues, who had so little occasion to call each other “Madame”, that title conferred a social distinction. They bestowed it on Annette, even though they half-guessed that the silver ring was merely for appearances. They felt themselves ennobled when they were able to say “Madame Annette”.

She had been in service since her fifteenth birthday. Her father, a Normandy fisherman, sent her to a small hotel in Le Havre, to whose landlady he had had old ties from when he had been a sailor. It would appear that girls are not readily countenanced in Le Havre. Less than a month after her arrival, Annette succumbed to the belated love-lowings of a fifty-year-old shipper, who promised to marry her, and was only kept from doing so by a marriage of twenty years. Annette got a baby, and shortly afterwards a good job with some blue-blooded people outside Paris, who were originally from Normandy themselves, and who liked to recruit their staff from there. The baby was left with the landlady in Le Havre, as a paying guest, and therefore died some six months later. Annette sent money for the funeral, and, not having a picture of her child, but wanting to remember him in some way, bought a postcard of a bonny infant in a papeterie, put it in a black frame, and kept it hidden away in her trunk.

Taught a lesson by her experience in Le Havre, and persuaded in her Norman-rustic way that any affair was bound to result in pregnancy, Annette fought off the wooings of M. de L., her new master — even though she did so with some reluctance. To save herself once and for all from temptation, she proceeded to tell Mme de L. of the attempts of her husband. As a result, how could it be otherwise, Annette was terminated straightaway, and, lest she create further confusion in another noble house, she was recommended to a large hotel in Paris, where a certain M. de L. sat on the board.

Here began her modest career.

She (not altogether mistakenly) thought it pleasanter in the course of a morning to clean twenty rooms of unknown and constantly changing persons, than eight or ten thoroughly established for all eternity, on whom she depended for bread and keep. She preferred tips, left behind like a form of tax by those departing, to a Christmas gift handed over with all ceremony by the lady of the house in December, and still made much of in April, at Easter. She became used to her job, because it lacked the monotony of a servant’s; had none of the shabby lustre of a patriarchal disposition, but something of the cold, clear objectivity of a trade, almost of an office; and because in addition it gave her a sense of the diversity and colour of the world, its riches and its inhabitants. Because she was observant and quick on the uptake, she attained over time an understanding of the various habits of various circles, various degrees of intimacy with luxury, with life in a culture and a nobility that has its economic foundation. These experiences raised her expectations of those men she happened to meet. And even though she liked one or other of them, she could not decide to marry any of them. The only man she met at a dance who seemed to master the arts of a gentleman, which in the opinion of the chambermaids are the preserve of the upper classes, was a zouave, a corporal from the French colonies. She was frankly a little afraid of coloured gentlemen. If a man was yellow or black, surely it was bound to show one day, be it in the form of an outbreak of madness, a sudden act of violence or just an exotic malady. Still, she was all set to take the plunge. Then war broke out, and her zouave gave his life, as was proper, for Alsace-Lorraine.

Her grief was greater than her love had ever been, because she endowed the dead man with greater gifts than the living one had had. She remained convinced that she had lost the embodiment of manliness. Compared to her image of the dead man, the hotel guests were so many botched jobs. Even boxers and aviators were left trailing by her zouave. Not having his photograph, and as idealized pictures of zouaves were not offered on sale, she endowed him with all the traits of all the heroes whose pictures she saw in illustrated newspapers. In her pious brain that over the course of a few years did all the work that normally was performed by generations in the making of a legend, the departed became a coloured demi-god. Her memory of him kept her safe, it should be noted, from the seduction attempts of white, half-drunk and irresponsible hotel-guests.

If one has a great sorrow, it is a good thing to change one’s abode. She came here, to the hotel I am writing about, basically because it is owned by the same company as the hotel in Paris. This is where she bought her wedding band, this is where she became known as Madame Annette, and as a consequence, came into an easier roster of duties. She is now, so to speak, the right hand of the housekeeper, has only five or six rooms to clean, and the girls on two floors under her wing. She no longer wears a blue dress, but a black one, and is not compelled to wear the customary white bonnet. But she likes to wear it just the same — out of a coquettishness she claims is modesty. She is extremely pretty. Yes, it seems to me that sometimes she doesn’t realize herself how beautiful she is capable of being. Because to be aware of one’s own beauty requires free time and a measure of material independence. Sometimes I think a man must tell her:

“Listen to me, Madame Annette (or even just plain Annette!), with your black hair, your pale grey eyes and your tan complexion you are a rare composition of nature. Even though you only wear silk stockings on Wednesdays, which are your day off, one can observe the charming curve of your leg on other days as well, the soft transition from the muscle of the calf to the sinew of the ankle. Don’t imagine that your narrow hips, small breasts and strong, hard-working but shapely hands mark you out to the observer as not belonging to the social class you take for superior. You are easily capable of passing for a lady, even when you are just taking instructions, your bright eyes on a guest and then lingering in the empty space behind his turned back, your narrow, strangely red mouth (for which, with your complexion, you should really use a lighter shade of lipstick) pressed shut, as though to ward off any inappropriate behaviour, and your soft chin slightly upraised, as though that was the seat of attention, but also of pride. There’s no doubting your beauty, Annette!”

Unfortunately, it’s not likely that anyone has spoken to her in such a way. The mirrors she likes to stop in front of are satisfactory but silent. And time is brief and nimble. Annette has some superficial practice in tidying up. The washstand takes her five minutes, the bed three, the table two. Gentlemen like to leave their suits draped over chair backs. That creates complications. In addition there are papers, books, letters on the desk. The hotel rules forbid meddling with guests’ informal arrangements. But the room still needs to be cleaned. Each piece of paper has to stay where it is. That can take up to twenty minutes! Then she has to supervise her girls. They’re such chatterboxes, the signals go off, green and persistent, and they simply ignore them. Annette has to bring them up to the mark. She works from twelve noon to nine at night. One hour off for lunch. Downstairs, next to the kitchen, at the long staff table that reminds you of mealtimes in an orphanage. If Annette goes on working so hard, she will surely make it to housekeeper herself — and will be able to go on working.

One day, a Wednesday, I ran into her outside one of the big cinemas. She was looking at the stills, scenes from a rich background. (Nothing is so interesting to the poor as the lives of the rich.) I permitted myself, since we had known each other for so long, to treat her. We saw one of those films that pass for “socially conscious”. One of those films in which a well-off young man persistently tries to take a poor girl to supper, when she doesn’t know whether you eat ice-cream with a fork, or use a nutcracker on an apple. The audience of course knows, and brays its approval to the film industry. At least on that evening, it was braying. Madame Annette said: “Don’t you think that girl might have learned a thing or two from films? Surely she’ll have been to the cinema, seeing as the film is set in New York.”

Thereupon — from a slightly hasty, slightly honest reaction against the whole business — I asked Madame Annette to accompany me to dinner in a good restaurant. Here and there sat a guest from the hotel. Here and there an appraising look brushed Madame Annette, not a recognizing one — because a real gentleman never imagines a chambermaid could be sitting in the same restaurant as himself. En passant, I make mention of the fact that Madame Annette was wearing a dark high-necked dress that made her look pale, and her mouth even redder — and a string of artificial pearls that threw a silvery-blue reflection on the lower half of her yellow-brown face. What seems more important to me is to stress that she handled her cutlery better than those men in the film industry with whom I have had occasion to eat, or as they like to say, to “dine”.

Frankfurter Zeitung, 9 February 1929

44. The Patron

It is among the characteristics of the hotel manager that it’s not possible to tell his age. The observer is mystified to see a fifty-year-old hotel manager at eleven in the morning, who by three o’clock will be a dashing forty, and late at night, fifty again, as he was in the morning. Not as rapidly as his physiognomy, but still remarkably fast are the changes in his hair and beard. There are times when little threads of silver seem to infiltrate his coal-black moustache. A couple of days later they are gone. Sometimes one seems to catch the hair on his head beginning to thin. Then a day or two later, there it is again, in all its familiar silky, almost feminine abundance.

Even though he is the utterly cosmopolitan manager of an utterly cosmopolitan hotel, the staff only ever refers to him as le patron. Maybe it’s a challenge to the poor employees, even though they spend their whole lifetimes in the vicinity of modern capital, to conceive of a publicly owned company as their bread-giver, to serve an abstract notion sprung from thin ribbons of tickertape; and to see the man who hires and fires them, who orders them to do one thing and forbids them to do something else, merely as the employee of a mysterious joint-stock company. It’s simpler to take him for a “patron”. If he were the actual owner, yes, even if he were only a shareholder, then — that’s my sense of him — he surely wouldn’t stand for the populist, provincial, and faintly demeaning title of “patron”. But as things stand, the director is quite pleased, even a little flattered, to be addressed as “patron”.

Such secrets of his soul as I sometimes think I can guess at, along with other, more evident traits of his, have long kept me from warming to the director as I would have liked. Writerly objectivity demands a certain sympathy for the person one describes, a literary sympathy, that in certain circumstances can even be expended on a louse. But my private heart beats in a sentimental (and now rather unfashionable) way for the lesser beings who are given orders and who obey, obey, obey, and rarely allows me to feel anything but objectivity for the others who order, order, order. As far as the director is concerned, then, I sometimes repeat the extenuating circumstance: he too receives orders; only from his shareholders! But the orders he receives are given him once a year, and they hold good for all 365 days, they are general instructions, written down on thick paper, almost like official documents. He can impart them to those below as he thinks fit, and if they seem harsh, as often, he can make them still harsher, which does something to make his own lot seem easier to him by comparison. Insofar as the ladder leading up to the company board is visible, then he, the director, is on its topmost rung.

Even so, I would long have become reconciled to all this, were it not among his habits to appear very quietly in unexpected places. Suddenly he appears in a remote part of a corridor. He looks as though he’s been standing there for ever, and only started moving when he heard my approach. Another time there he is, striding through the lobby with lowered head, as though to indicate that he has no interest in anyone. But I know well that his eyes, which are set wide apart by the temples, like a bird’s or a lizard’s, swiftly and reliably take in the scenes around him, and that a short stroll is enough for the director to know who is in the lobby, what the porter’s up to, and whether all the liftboys and errand boys are present. His glance hooks itself into the scene like a harpoon. He could as well take it back to his office to have it developed or stuck in an album.

He has the habits, movements and gifts of a detective. Born in the Levant to Greek parents, he has the quick-wittedness one ascribes to Greeks and Levantines. What he opens his eyes on he sees, and what he sees he understands. He is fluent in very many languages. There is not one in which he can write an error-free letter. He dictates a few key points to his secretary, probably sensible ones; he leaves the details to her. Of average height, though thin enough to make him appear much taller, he looks like a noble example of a very distant and very alien race. In his dark brown, narrow and seemingly planed-off face, the hooked nose stands out like a weapon, a curved skin and bone dagger. The right half of the narrow brow is covered by a wave of black hair. The trimmed moustache is curved like a black wire — it is shaved above and below — seeming to lie in the middle of the long upper lip. He rarely opens his mouth, not even to speak. If he had no teeth, one wouldn’t know it.

Without question, the man has the imagination to produce and cater for so-called “luxury”. If there is any creature that knows what “comfort” means, then it is the patron. All the details of décor speak for him. Throughout the hotel there are no high-edged tables that make your arm go to sleep when you rest it on them. The bedside lamps are comfortably within reach on adjustable boards in little safe-like niches. You don’t lie in bed, afraid to reach for a glass of water for fear of knocking over the lamp. The ashtrays are all deep, wide and heavy. Every bed is curtained off, so as to be discreetly out of sight in the daytime. Framed by the two doors that lead out into the corridor, the room is large enough for the room-service waiter to be able to leave a small table out with your order, in case he is not able to enter the room. Along with the post, the guest is brought a selection of newspapers from various countries. Never is a mailman allowed to come up with registered mail without being telephoned through. All night, the so-called “pantry” is kept open, for orders of fruit, sandwiches, tea, coffee, and brandy. The large revolving door is open all night, so that you never need to ring the bell and waken the night porter. At three in the morning, there are as many lights on as there are at nine at night. All these details pay tribute to the director.

And yet the way he instructs a liftboy to follow him to his office is embarrassing to me. He doesn’t say: Come with me! Nor does he wave at him or glance at him. He stops in front of the unhappy boy, looks at him, takes a step away, and turns round. I don’t know what goes on behind the office door. But I can see employees as they come out. They straighten their tunics, swivel their heads in their collars as though to straighten their vertebrae, and give themselves a little shake, before going back on duty, as though they were emerging from a different world and needed a little time to adjust. Even if they weren’t gone for any more than ten minutes! You could ask them a question — they wouldn’t hear you. Their ears are still booming with a terrible noise that drowns out every subsequent sound.

It may be that this is only natural, and comes with the territory. But what is unnatural is his way of always uttering the same banalities and asking unanswerable questions. “Have you come from very far away? Did you have a good time? Pleasure to see you again, really, a great pleasure!” And, according to the weather and the season: “Dull old day, isn’t it! It looks like rain!” Or: “Lovely, clear autumn we’re having. It’s the best thing for you. Have a nice day.” And concluding with a bow that turns his body into a question mark: “The hotel safe’s always at your disposal! Goodbye!”

And yet I once witnessed the following scene:

At about ten in the morning, a man came through the revolving door into the lobby. The director was just standing in front of the door of the reception clerk and was about to be on his way. The poor man stopped in the middle of the lobby, as though someone had left him there and forgotten all about him. His raincoat was flapping around him. His stumpy red hands looked like stockings. His face was bony, but clean-shaven and bleeding. The thin neck wobbled about in the stiff collar that was far too big for it. A little below, one sensed the presence of (but did not see) a soft, striped, not terribly clean shirt.

The director said to the man: “Get out, and come back through the goods entrance.”

The man did so. He stepped out as though from a stage set. His behaviour was a little theatrical as it was. He took a rubber band off a letter case, and pulled out a few papers.

The director instructed the man to unfold them. He didn’t move to take them from him, merely gave them one of his cursory glances. Then he shook his head.

The poor man went off. Then the director quietly said: “Psst!”

The man turned round.

“Come to lunch, today, twelve-thirty sharp!”

The poor man smiled and tried a sort of curtsey. Then he walked off.

“Psst!” said the director quietly, a second time.

The poor man turned round again, quicker and more trustfully than the last time.

And the director said to the porter: “Get him a coffee with milk!” and walked off. In mid-step he stopped again and called out over his shoulder, without turning:

“On second thoughts, make that cream!”

And he vanished into his office.

It wasn’t enough to persuade me that he was a good man. But I have at least attained the necessary literary objectivity towards the patron.

Frankfurter Zeitung, 20 February 1929

45. Leaving the Hotel

I would like to have caught up with some of my other friends at the hotel, but I am leaving tomorrow. I have been here for long enough. If I stayed longer I would be unworthy of the great blessing of being a stranger. I might degrade the hotel to a home if I no longer left it unless I had to. I want to feel welcome here, but not at home. I want to be able to come and go. I prefer to know that a hotel is waiting for me here. I am aware that this too is a sentimentality, and that, out of fear of a more conventional one, I am falling for one of my own devising. But that’s the human heart for you.

I will let the chief receptionist know that I am leaving. Oh, not because of any regulations! This hotel pins no “avisos” in its rooms, no “extract from the hospitality and innkeeping bye laws of 1891, Article. IV §§ 18 and 22 ff.”, no house rules and nowhere a “Guests are requested to inform the front desk of their departure in a timely fashion, so as to avoid being billed for a further night. Respectfully, The Management.” No, this hotel pins no commandments on its walls. Nor does the fact that there is a restaurant on the premises require special mention, seeing that the restaurant is a good one, and people like to eat there. If I choose to inform the receptionist of my departure today, then it’s purely because I need his kindness, and because I want to hear him murmur: “Oh dear, so soon!?”—Such a tone! It’s said so quietly, like a secret; as though my decision might be put off, so long as it’s just the two of us who know about it… It’s as slow and protracted as a long-running lament. It seems to issue from that indescribable distance to which I now propose to go. The good fellow! — How will he manage without me? Whom will he say goodnight to when he goes home at night in his smart suit? How well we understood one another. We conversed with looks and glances, in the truly international language of stenoscopy! Which is now at an end…

But men need to be tough, and so the chief receptionist asks me which train or ship I am proposing to leave on. I merely give him my destination and an approximate time, say, “evening”. And he comes back with: what about train No. 743 with wagons-lits, leaving at 6.32 p.m., two stops, dining car until 10 p.m.? Backed up by a series of further suggestions. I leave the choice with him. It’s among the virtues of a good receptionist to separate the best trains from those less good, even though he rarely goes anywhere himself, and his guests constantly. I am happy to rely on him. And if the train he has recommended should happen to arrive three hours late, then I am convinced that all the others will have been derailed. Such luridness, when all I wanted was to be comforted…

Tomorrow will be the longest day. I have, to all intents and purposes, left, but not gone. Word has got out. The room-service waiter, who goes off shift in the afternoon, wished me bon voyage in the morning. He will have said it with one eye on his tip, but that doesn’t make him any less sincere. The sincerest good wishes are those of people who are getting a tip. Whoever doesn’t stand to get anything from me wishes me to the devil. Lucky the man therefore who can afford to leave a tip! The good people will bless him, because they hope he will be back soon. It’s instructive to see that the waiter does me the honour of esteeming my generosity and my little gift at the same time. He likes me as much as he likes my money. (My friends all prefer my money.) And in his look I can distinguish between the sparkle of joy and a shimmer of melancholy. In his joy at his takings is mixed a little sorrow at parting. Well, goodbye!

It will be the longest day. It’s as well that the room contains nothing, not one item that would seek to attach my eye painfully to itself. No quaint sugar box, no great-uncle’s writing-desk, no maternal grandmother’s portrait, no basin decorated with red flowers and a little crack, no familiar creaking floorboard that one suddenly falls in love with because one is about to leave, no mouth-watering smells issuing from the kitchen, and no brass ornamental pestle and mortar on the hall dresser. — Nothing. When my suitcases are gone, others will take their place. When my soap is packed away, someone else’s will nestle by the basin. When I am no longer standing by the window, someone else will be. This room doesn’t seek to deceive itself or you or me or anyone. By the time I look round it one last time before I go, it will already have ceased to be my room. The day is so long because there is no melancholy to fill it.

I don’t need to pay any farewell calls in this city. I’m happy to think that the old man doesn’t live here who hates me and whom I hate, and whom I keep having to say hello to. Nor even a younger man who is all of a heap when he sees me still alive, and who would be offended if he didn’t see me. Nor is there my dear friend who walks me to the station and even as we shake hands for the last time remains convinced that he is doing worse out of our friendship than me. There is not even a lady with whom (out of gallantry) I am in love, and who, even as her eye blinks back a tear, is already happy that another man has looked her up and down. I am a stranger in this town. That’s why I was so at home here.

There will be only one brief sentimental moment: when the porter has stowed away my suitcases and is standing on the platform, cap in hand, and his other hand under his apron, for fear lest it should involuntarily extend itself. Because it’s quite a complicated business, this tipping. He takes it quickly, but clumsily. It’s almost like a form of handshake, swift, and a little bungled. Then he takes a couple of steps back, the old fellow, still facing me. He puts his cap back on. One last time the letters that spell the dear name of the hotel flash at me.

Then I hoist sails, and board my train.

Frankfurter Zeitung, 24 February 1929

46. The Hotel

The lobby is brightening with a specifically hotel morning. The broad mirroring glass is already variegated with the grey of the day ahead, while a few lamps hang from the ceiling like isolated stars. It’s as though their tardy gleam is bound up with the presence of the night porter who switched them on the night before. They are his lights. When he leaves they will pale, and the day will break.

Sturdy cleaning women are moving about like huge, blue-aproned monsters on the stripped marble of the formal staircase; on the landing, where a plaster cherub has been spewing water into a precious basin for eternities, and an ancient palm gives unnecessary shade, leans a glistening bundle of brass stair rods, newly polished, a little heap of rays or weapons. With flying tails, the early waiters circumnavigate the blue-aproned monsters, discreetly steaming trays on their splayed hands. From backward corridors where it is still completely night-time drones the indefatigable song of the vacuum. Like a patient storm it wanders like an all-flattening fury over the maroon carpets. Just now the head waiter enters the hotel. He is wearing a mouse grey coat and green hat and looks like a forester. But just wait. The modest rustic garb covers the festive gleam of his tails. Soon you will see that he resembles a servant or a marquis in an old comedy. With a magnificent gesture, like someone drawing a pair of gorgeous curtains he throws open the lofty doors to the breakfast room. It’s as though the day had lurked all night in the breakfast room, perhaps been shut in there overnight, and only now were allowed to dawn in the lobby and the rest of the hotel. All at once the blue cleaning women, the phantoms of early morning, are gone. Suddenly the lamps, the tardy stars, are extinguished. Suddenly, his fair face dusted with shaving powder, there stands the chief receptionist in his eyrie. The night porter is already swallowed by his bed. Suddenly the maroon carpets lie snugly over the formal staircase, and it’s as though morning in person is coming down the stairs. The elevator hums. The first breakfast guests appear. Elderly ladies and gentlemen who don’t sleep much and who therefore have made it a healthful habit to rise early. Taut, with a determined show of opposition to their own years, looking neither left nor right, they step out in the direction of the breakfast room, like groups come together for a procession or coronation; each one his own morning. Day is at hand.

The old people are still at breakfast when the young ones come down. The lawful couples are not to be distinguished from the unlawful ones. Both have in common the successfully overcome night. Breakfast together is like an asseveration of their love. They eat as though they had been eating together for decades, but the head waiter knows what’s what. They don’t prod at doubtful eggs. They drink their coffee lukewarm. The night just past hovers over them, and the one ahead moves into view. The young man ignores his newspaper. Anyone who has no eyes for the newspaper is young and in love.

In the afternoon there is the “five o’clock tea”. The potted palms seem to have reproduced. Thanks to them the tropical climate of the Negro dances (supported also by the central heating) becomes a wholly successful illusion. At tiny miniature tables, with tiny miniature coffee cups resembling thimbles, sit corpulent ladies who have been prescribed Marienbad, trying to keep their movements refined, while their daughters, with less need to be careful, let themselves fall into the arms of gigolos. Stirred by the gentle breeze of so many passing waiters, the leathery leaves of the palms distribute heat and cool at once, and even though there is no shortage of noise, their gentle clicking becomes a sort of sonorous silence. Every noise that is created here has a component of silence as well, and every sound is so discreet that all the sounds put together make up the soul of discretion. Minor disturbances seem to apologize for themselves, even as they happen. — Serious men foregather in the conference room, far from the music. To look at them, you would think they were deciding the fate of the world, here, in a spare half hour between first-class trains. They determine our prices, our wages, and the degree of our hunger. Impossible to understand the things they say. Because they are speaking in one place, it is possible to dance in another. That’s all. They are not speaking in spite of the dancing in the other room. No, they speak here so that there may be music and the world can continue on its merry way. All wheels will grind to a halt when their grim word says so.

And then the night porter comes along, and lights the evening. Fresh, youthful, shaved and powdered, in blue and gold livery, he rises like a second morning when the world has evening. Trains have arrived from exotic parts, and exotic visitors are wafting through the glass wings of the revolving doors into the lobby. Those who have been here for a day already and are sitting in the lobby, they are no longer strangers. No, they are long-established, the dark red carpets are their turf which they will not leave, and they cast slighting, suspicious looks at the new arrivals. The suitcases pile up in front of the reception desk, plastered with labels from hotels in foreign places, Venice, Merano, Buenos Aires and San Francisco, all trying to legitimate these new guests. The head waiter surfaces for a moment to assess who can afford to buy themselves a meal under the palms (breakfast, of course, is compris). Sceptically, in spite of himself, he turns to face again the familiar meals, his friendliness is put together from understanding of the world, his faith in humanity is lined with suspicion, his cheery optimism is his pessimism turned inside out, when he smiles he is crying somewhere about the poverty of this world.

Before long, in about two hours, he will put on his little green hat and slip into his mouse grey coat, and with grand gestures he will shut the dining room — and then, in a corner, go over the accounts with the waiters, an accountant himself now, no longer a maître d’hôtel, a plain forester from the hunting grounds of reality. He will say a hurried goodnight to the night porter, whose day is now beginning. Already fresh stars are glimmering in the lobby’s pale sky.

Frankfurter Zeitung, 23 November 1930