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.