A Perfect Waiter (15 page)

Any guests who were hungry repaired to the dining room for lunch. It was slightly cooler in there than outside because fans had been installed in all four corners of the room, causing clothes and curtains to billow in the artificial draft created by their humming electric motors. Only a small minority persisted in lunching on the terrace, their sole protection the sun umbrellas beneath which ice cubes swiftly melted and cold cuts acquired an unappetizing appearance, so the speed with which they had to eat
and drink soon generated a convivial atmosphere. Klinger's children were among those who patently enjoyed the lunchtime inferno. Josefa in silk blouses and Maximilian in open-necked, short-sleeved shirts, both wearing sandals or sometimes even barefoot, they quickly became the focal point and nucleus of a small, heat-resistant coterie whose membership varied from day to day.

Erneste was able to watch them from his post inside the dining room, where he could see and hear them laughing, and he noticed that the young Klingers never lacked for company, not always of their own age. They were a genuine attraction: young and seemingly carefree, good-looking, dreamy and romantic but also a trifle lost. The world was still their unopened oyster. Out on the terrace they were served by a Sicilian waiter who found the heat easier to contend with than his colleagues. Back in the dining room he sometimes recounted what went on outside: nothing of importance, just youthful fun, the boy still little more than a child, the girl besieged by admirers. It was she who did most of the talking, but the Germans spoke too fast for the Sicilian to understand much of what was said.

Peace descended when lunch was over. A child cried, a falcon described tight spirals in the sky, another described wider spirals below it, a crow launched itself between them, cawing loudly, clouds veiled the sun and drifted away, the only hoped-for rain in July was one violent downpour during the night, the air smelled of marjoram and eucalyptus, of indigenous herbs and others that didn't
grow there—or perhaps they did. Everyone, even those who had lunched on the terrace under sun umbrellas, disappeared by two o'clock at the latest. The waiters were the last to leave the dining room after clearing away and setting the tables afresh. Work proceeded unremittingly but in silence behind the reception desk. Herr Direktor Wagner's bowed figure emerged from his office now and then. He straightened up only when guests approached; as soon as they were gone he subsided once more. The silence was broken only by the unsuppressible ringing of the telephone, the distant cries of a child, the high-pitched scream of a bird of prey, the harsh cawing of a crow, the voice of the receptionist picking up the phone or putting it down. The conversations he conducted didn't last long as a rule. The callers were nearly always put through to the rooms upstairs, most of which had phones of their own—a rare prewar luxury in this remote part of the world. Sometimes guests ordered water, lemonade, or ice. The receptionist would then pass a brief message to the room waiter on duty in the kitchen, who was poised to receive orders and jumped up from his chair whenever the phone rang. Grateful for any interruption, the room waiter fetched what was required and carried it upstairs on a tray. And so the unwontedly long afternoons crept by in an atmosphere of unwonted lethargy. What had to be done was done with as little mental exertion as possible.

Because Jakob's work in the hotel bar could keep him up until dawn, he did not have to wait table in the middle of the day. By the time he went to bed he had exceeded
regulation working hours by such a margin that he could sleep for as long as he wanted. His services weren't required until four. The bar opened at six.

Jakob would still be asleep when Erneste got up in the mornings, having seldom gone to bed before three. The temperature scarcely fell at night, so they slept in the nude. Erneste's excitement mounted with every breath, with every breath of his own and of Jakob's, with every thought and every twitch of Jakob's fingers. It wasn't easy to resist the sight of his friend asleep, and Erneste felt no shame when he masturbated beside him.

Erneste got up and sluiced himself at the washbasin. The intimacy prevailing between the two young men seemed to have reached a ne plus ultra. Erneste had the feeling that Jakob belonged to him, or if not Jakob, then his body, just as his own body belonged to Jakob. His life had completely changed since the first day they met.

Jakob entered their room so quietly in the small hours that Erneste seldom heard him come in. When he did hear him, however, he was wide awake in an instant. He could identify each piece of clothing as it fell to the floor. Jacket, vest, shirt, trousers, underpants, socks—his state of arousal became more intense with every discarded garment.

He didn't pull away when Jakob stretched out beside him and put his hand on his shoulder. On the contrary, he did whatever Jakob wanted, and with passionate alacrity. Instantly overcome by the same desire, he always grasped what Jakob required of him, undeterred even by the odors
with which his friend's skin had lately been impregnated, for at night he smelled of tobacco smoke and sometimes of drink, though he himself didn't drink, he claimed, and Erneste didn't doubt this. So the smells of the hotel bar condensed and mingled with the cooking smells that assailed Erneste whenever he entered the hotel kitchen, suffusing his own skin to such an extent that they were hard to wash off. Also evoked by their sweat and their kisses were the multifarious sounds of the day, the chefs' brusque voices, their colleagues' bustling footsteps, the guests' unintelligible chatter. All these clung to their skin like a film at the end of one working day and the start of the next—together, no doubt, with the fears and misgivings of which guests never spoke, no matter how evident they were.

Jakob sometimes woke up while Erneste was getting dressed. Then all it took was a twitch of the hand, a glance, a single bat of the eyelid, for Erneste to join him on the bed. Often, however, Jakob was so sound asleep that Erneste could watch him at his leisure. There were times when Jakob's eyelids quivered as his eyes moved beneath them and he clenched his fists and lashed out at some invisible adversary. Erneste never discovered who it was because they didn't talk about their dreams. Then Jakob would quieten again and lie there with his teeth just visible between his slightly parted lips, as handsome and almost inviolable as if he were remote from everything, even from himself, and Erneste had to turn away.

There were reasons enough to mistrust the future—indeed, to dread it. This war everyone was talking about—how ineluctably terrible it would be once it started, rending everything and everyone apart. Although it was all Erneste could do not to wake Jakob up, he let him sleep on. Erneste, too, felt convinced that war was inevitable. They couldn't possibly be wrong, all these people who were so much better informed than himself. They all talked about the war, and if they didn't talk about it they thought about it, you could tell that just by looking at them.

When Erneste came back to the room after lunch, Jakob was usually still in bed, sleeping, reading, or bookkeeping. He had a little cashbook in which he kept a record of his income and outgoings, and he was understandably pleased when the former exceeded the latter. He engaged in this bookkeeping as often as he could. “I'm going to be rich someday,” he said once. Erneste didn't feel any pride or respect when Jakob said such things, just a mixture of compassion and uneasiness. He felt tempted to say, “No, you'll never be rich, neither of us will, we don't have what it takes.” But because hurting Jakob was the last thing he wanted to do, and because he considered Jakob vulnerable, he said nothing and hoped his silence would be eloquent. But Jakob didn't get the message. Erneste should have been more explicit, he should have told him point-blank that success was reserved for other people. Jakob inhabited a wider world than Erneste. He possessed a confidence that Erneste
lacked, and it may have been this confidence that made him so strong. Jakob's ideas transcended his present circumstances.

Because the heat in the attic room was almost unbearable during the day, Jakob used to swathe himself in a damp towel. Cocooned in this, he would lie on the bed and sleep, pursue his extravagant daydreams, or do his sums. Quite often, too, he would read and fall asleep while reading. And so, when Erneste entered their room after lunch, he would find him either asleep, or daydreaming, or figuring, or reading. Although Jakob was making only slow progress with the big book he was reading, he didn't give up but pressed on undaunted. Several minutes could go by before he tackled the next page of Klinger's
Oporta
, but he refused to be beaten, intent on plumbing the big book's secrets. And because he gave Erneste an almost daily résumé of what he'd read, Erneste ended by knowing at least the first chapter of that much-lauded, widely read masterpiece almost as well as if he'd read it himself.

It wasn't long before the towel began to dry off. Jakob would then get up, dump it in the washbasin, run cold water over it, wring it out, wrap it around himself and lie down again. “That's better,” he would say, looking up at Erneste. And Erneste would get undressed, cup his hands under the faucet, sluice himself down at the washbasin and hold his head under the running water. Then everything would be damp: the sheets and his body, first cool, then tepid, and before long the room beneath the eaves would begin to steam like a paradisal dungeon with locks and
keys to which the outside world had no access. Erneste would lie down beside Jakob, the hush broken only by the occasional creak of a beam above the thin attic ceiling as the heat brought the timber back to life.

Erneste felt best of all when they lay silently side by side, when no words were needed and any word would only have broken the spell. He disliked it intensely when Jakob made disparaging remarks about some guest, which sadly happened more and more often. “You've no right to speak that way,” he would tell him sternly. “Not about someone who helps to provide your bread and butter.” But his rebukes fell on deaf ears. Jakob merely laughed at him, and his laughter was infectious. “Bread and butter, bread and butter!” he scoffed, imitating Erneste's Alsatian accent, and in the end Erneste laughed too.

Erneste couldn't shake off the suspicion that Jakob's opinions of certain guests weren't really his own, and that he'd picked them up from someone else. Some of their fellow employees were always gossiping about the guests. “I'm not interested,” Erneste would say. “It's no business of mine. We aren't like them and they aren't like us. As long as they let us get on with our work we shouldn't concern ourselves with them. If they find fault with us, they probably have good reason to.” But usually he said little when Jakob inveighed against German philistines and avaricious Jews. “How do you know?” he would retort. “You can't possibly know about such things.” Alternatively, he would let Jakob talk until he ran out of ideas.

One day Erneste came across a 5-franc piece under Jakob's pillow. When he asked him how the freshly minted coin had gotten there—it was dated 1936—and why he hadn't put it away with the rest of his savings, Jakob hesitated briefly. His hesitation aroused Erneste's suspicions, and Erneste's raised eyebrows made Jakob waver. The money was Jakob's, of that he had no doubt: it was under his pillow and Erneste hadn't missed any money. Jakob hesitated, but then he opened his hand and Erneste dropped the coin into it, a small addition to the slowly growing nest egg with which Jakob hoped to secure his future after the war, if war actually came: a small hotel in Cologne or a roadhouse beside the Rhine—something of the kind.

“How did the money get under your pillow?” Jakob couldn't remember at first. Then he did remember after all: it was a tip from a guest who had checked out a few days earlier. He said his name, and Erneste recalled the man in question. Five francs was a lot of money, but ever since Jakob had been working in the hotel bar his personal gratuities had been piling up. They were a reward for the obliging way he attended to his customers in the bar at night—customers who sat drinking until the small hours and would have resented it if a barman seemed eager to get rid of them. Jakob's face betrayed no such impatience. Having worries enough of their own, the refugees couldn't abide other people's. They may also have been purchasing his silence, for many of the émigrés stranded here had a dread of German informers. Were they afraid Jakob might be one?

Jakob was holding the coin in his fist. “It probably fell out of my pocket when I was getting undressed,” he said. He kissed Erneste and stretched out on the bed with his arms behind his head. Erneste forgot all about his discovery. He was reminded of it eleven days later.

Shortly after one o'clock he boarded the local train that ran along the lakeshore in an easterly direction. The journey took thirty-seven minutes. The car in which he was sitting was only sparsely occupied, for the most part by elderly folk and a few children. The train was on time. Passengers alighted at every station but none got in, so he had the car to himself after the fourth stop. The place where Klinger lived obviously wasn't a tourist resort, and the commuters who used the local train every day were at work. Erneste tried to concentrate on the scenery—lake on the left, little villages and vineyards on the right—but his thoughts were elsewhere. His eyes skimmed the unfamiliar countryside, most of which slid past him unnoticed. The individual stations left no lasting impression. On one occasion he was struck by the brownish foliage of some parched geraniums on the windowsill of a waiting room. Seated on the bench outside was a girl of around seventeen. She was looking infinitely bored—as neglected as the flowers behind her. Another time his window was lashed by a sudden rainstorm, but the sun
reappeared within minutes. He registered this without surprise.

Erneste was wearing a pale-blue polka-dot tie with his gray suit, the only suit he possessed, which did for all occasions, and over it a light raincoat. His umbrella he'd wedged between the seat and the armrest. It fell over twice, and twice he wedged it back again. He tried hard to concentrate. It still wasn't too late to change his mind, but if he didn't change his mind he had to be well prepared. But that meant trying to imagine something that defied his imagination: a meeting with Klinger, face to face.