A Perfect Waiter (2 page)

There was no hurry. He let two days go by before he finally decided to open the letter during the early hours of Sunday morning. He gave his imagination free rein while he waited table, thinking of the letter. By not opening it he brought time to a halt. He didn't read it on Friday, nor on Saturday. The time he brought to a halt—the time concealed in the envelope—burned through his waiter's dickey and seared his chest. He carried the letter around for two whole days. At night he put it on the bedside table and fell asleep looking at it—a titillating pleasure. He brought time to a standstill by not opening the letter, not yet. He waited, trying to imagine what was in it.

The letters he had received in the last ten years could be counted on the fingers of both hands. Customers didn't
write, colleagues wrote to the entire staff, and of friends he had none. Any mail he received consisted of bills or circulars, Christmas mail-order catalogs advertising water-colors by disabled artists, some clumsily executed, others painted with surprising skill, using the feet or the mouth, and an occasional postcard from his cousin in Paris.

He put off reading the letter until he felt he knew its unseen contents. For two whole days, from Friday morning until the early hours of Sunday, his thoughts revolved almost exclusively around this unopened letter from America, this rare excitement in a life so devoid of it. All his emotions were centered on the envelope and its contents. Whatever he did he did mechanically, thinking of the letter inside, of the long-written, still unread words penned by the same hand that had inscribed his address in unfamiliar capitals, for the Jakob that Erneste knew had never written to him. At the Grand Hotel there was no need, and Jakob had deemed it just as unnecessary to write to him later on. In the room they shared, the rushing waters of the Giessbach had drowned all other sounds. Erneste could still hear them after all this time.

“Monsieur Erneste!” Erneste hurried over to the table with the check. He took the money and the tip, pulled back the lady's chair and stepped aside, helped her into her coat, then her male companion.

If his expression suddenly brightened, illumined by the ghost of a smile, it surely passed unnoticed. The couple were preoccupied with themselves, which was just as it should be. Under no circumstances should patrons be
given cause to concern themselves with those whose task it was to attend to their wellbeing. His thoughts had strayed because they were constantly revolving around Jakob's letter, but that remained a secret he was unable and unwilling to share with anyone else. The letter was like a hand reaching for him, its pressure neither heavy nor light. Two days of waiting, two days' delay, were not a waste of time, not a symptom of reluctance—no, of joyful expectancy. He wasn't afraid, or not yet. He wasn't overcome by a vague feeling of apprehension until just before he opened the letter. His imagination was still as nourished by uncertainty about its contents as a hungry man by the prospect of a slice of meat.

Two days were long enough. Erneste could endure it no longer. He reached for the morsel, eager to devour it.

He wasted no time drinking in bars on Saturday night. Although he couldn't see well in the darkness, he wore no glasses. He was slightly out of breath. Jakob had something to tell him; now he wanted to know what it was. He debated the question while walking home from work. “Has Jakob written to
me
or only in general terms?” he wondered. “Has he written from his new world to our old world in order to give it something it doesn't possess? Would you recognize me on the street, Jakob, now that our youth is long past and bereft of interest, and would I recognize you? Probably not. We'd pass by without a
second glance, like two men who have never seen each other before.” He was fraught with recollections of a young man. Happiness was easily acquired and quickly lost.

Home by a quarter to one, he opened the door of his apartment and a bottle of Scotch, in that order.

His hands were trembling. He poured himself another glass, filled it to the brim and drained it in two gulps, then deposited the bottle on the dresser behind him. He often sat in his little kitchen, where there was nothing to distract him. He didn't possess a television set. When, discounting Sundays, would he have had the time to take advantage of such an expensive acquisition? The 500 francs in his savings book wouldn't have stretched to a TV.

Impatience and curiosity were one thing, but courage was required to satisfy them. That he had now obtained from a bottle like someone having to confront a stranger, a prospective employer, or an unwelcome visitor who would persist in ringing his doorbell until he answered it. He had to open the door, there was no alternative. Yes, now he was afraid.

When the time came to open the letter at last, he wondered if it wouldn't be better to destroy it after all—to throw it away unread like an empty husk. After all the years in which he had never forgotten Jakob, a letter from him boded no good. So confidence was out of place, as was the pleasurable anticipation that had buoyed him up for the past two days. A letter from Jakob boded no good, period. Another drink. Half a glass, a whole glass. He
hesitated briefly, then filled his glass to the brim and put the bottle down beside him. Danger lurked in this rustling envelope. It would lunge at him in a moment, and he was unprepared. But what was the point of waiting? As soon as curiosity triumphed over common sense—the common sense that told him: “Don't open it, throw it away, don't look at it!”—his old wounds would open up again. He knew this but was incapable of obeying the dictates of caution. The letter would reopen his scars once more—letters could do that. He was far more afraid of the words that awaited him than of the futile passage of time.

He sat there in the kitchen in his shirtsleeves, alive but inwardly extinct. In this get-up he was a man. Normally recognizable as a waiter only by his white linen jacket, he became an individual without one. As a waiter he was a nobody, which was just as it should be, but the jacket had to be clean and well pressed. He looked up. His gaze lingered on the only lighted window in the apartment house across the street. By now it was half-past one. A shadow stirred in the glow—it rose and fell, rose abruptly and disappeared into the adjoining room. That room was in darkness. Erneste had never seen a light on in there—the bedroom, probably. He was familiar with the shadowy figure of the sleepless woman who hurried back and forth, bobbed up and down, but he didn't know her name and had never seen her face. He had no idea what she did, whether she read or knitted, had never seen her on the street and wouldn't have recognized her if he had. She had no television. The light was on, night after night,
whenever he came home from work. The window of that one room was always illuminated, as now. The light did not go out for days after she died, but that happened weeks later.

Would the letter contain a photo of Jakob? He had preserved the few photos of Jakob he possessed, snapshots with serrated edges, so carefully that he'd almost forgotten about them. He had stowed them away in a box and deposited the box in the cellar. They were out of reach, as remote as Jakob's breath and even more remote than the memories of their time together at Giessbach. He never looked at old photos. Old photos only provoked gloomy thoughts of the present.

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

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

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

He had written:

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