by Vicki Baum
Hearty greetings from your moribundus, Otto Kringelein
P.S. Tell our friends at the musical society that I have gone to a sanatorium.
Kringelein read the letters through. He had composed them in the course of two sleepless nights. He was not quite satisfied. It seemed to him that something essential was left unsaid in the one to the solicitor, but he could not figure out where the omission lay. Kringelein, though he was of a diffident and modest nature, was not actually stupid. He had idealism and aspirations. For example, he called himself “moribundus” as a joke; it was an expression he had encountered in a book from the lending library, which he had read with some trouble and often discussed with the solicitor. Kringelein had lived from childhood on the ordinary life of a small provincial town, the rather dreary, uninspired and pointless life of a petty clerk. Early in life and without any strong impulse he had married Fräulein Anna Sauerkatz, the daughter of Sauerkatz the grocer. During the time between their engagement and marriage she seemed to him attractive, but very soon after the marriage he found her hateful. She was disagreeable and parsimonious and obsessed by petty cares. Kringelein had a fixed salary with a small raise every five years, and, as his health was not robust, his wife and her family pinned him from the first day to a rigid economy with the vague prospect of making provision for later on. For example, he was denied the piano that he had longed for all his life. Also he had to sell his little dog, Zipfel, as soon as a tax was put upon dogs. He always had a sore place on his neck from the frayed edges of the old collars he was forced to wear. Now and then it occurred to him that something was not quite right with his life, but what it was he did not know. Often at the meetings of the musical society, when the high tremolo of his tenor voice climbed above the other voices, he had a soaring, blissful feeling as though he himself were escaping on wings. Often in the evening he went out along the road to Mickenau, and then leaving the road and climbing across the wet ditches, he wandered into the country along the borders dividing field from field. There was a soft murmur among the stalks of the wheat, and stroking the ears with his hand, he felt a strange pleasure. He had also had some remarkable and happy experiences under the anesthesia in the hospital, though he had forgotten them. It was only in little things that Otto Kringelein, the bookkeeper, differed from his fellows. But these little things, combined perhaps with the bewildering dose of death in his veins, had brought this “moribundus” to Berlin’s most expensive hotel, and set him down before those sheets of note-paper to which he had confided his strange and pitifully motivated resolve.
Kringelein rose rather unsteadily to his feet, and as he went with his three letters through the reading room he met Doctor Otternschlag. He had a violent shock when he found the mangled side of the Doctor’s face turned inquiringly towards him.
“Well? Settled in?” Otternschlag asked listlessly. He wore a dinner jacket and looked down at the toes of his patent-leather shoes.
“Yes, rather. First-class,” Kringelein answered with embarrassment. “Thanks. Indeed it is you I have to thank, sir. You were so extremely kind—”
“Kind? I? Not at all. Oh, about the room? Not a bit. Y’see, I’ve been wanting to move on for a long time, only I’m too lazy. Miserable pub, this hotel. If you’d taken my room, I’d have been in the wagon-lits train by now for Milan or somewhere. Would have been nice. Well, it’s all the same. Beastly weather everywhere in March. Same wherever you stick it out. Might just as well stay here.”
“You travel a great deal, sir, no doubt?” Kringelein asked shyly. He was ready to attribute immense wealth or high birth to every guest in the hotel. He made a bow of the utmost Fredersdorfian elegance as he went on to say timidly: “Allow me to introduce myself—Kringelein. You have seen a lot of the world, sir.”
Otternschlag turned aside the “souvenir from Flanders.” “Oh, pretty much” he said. “Been everywhere everyone else goes—India and a few places besides.” He smiled faintly at the inordinate hunger for such experiences that shone in the blue glint behind Kringelein’s glasses.
“It is my intention to travel too,” said Kringelein. “The head of our firm, Preysing, for example, goes abroad every year. A short time ago he was in St. Moritz. Last Easter he took his whole family to Capri. That sort of thing must be wonderful.”
“Have you any family?” asked Doctor Otternschlag, laying aside his paper. Kringelein took five seconds to consider the matter and then replied:
“No.”
“No,” echoed Otternschlag, and in his mouth the word had something irrevocable about it.
“First I should like to go to Paris,” said Kringelein. “Paris must be a beautiful city?”
Doctor Otternschlag, who up to now had shown a glimmer of warmth and interest, seemed to be falling asleep. He frequently had such moments of enervation in the course of the day, and the only resource he had against them was of a secret and vicious kind. “You must go to Paris in May,” he murmured.
“I shan’t have time for that,” Kringelein said quickly.
Doctor Otternschlag got up abruptly to leave. “I’m going up to my room to lie down a bit,” he said, more to himself than to Kringelein, who was left standing in the reading room with his three letters. The newspaper that Otternschlag had been glancing through fell to the ground. It was penciled over with scribbles of little men and over each little man was a thick cross. Kringelein, slightly dashed, left the reading room too, and timidly went in search of the dining room. Sounds of music issued from it, insistent though subdued, and the alternating drag and beat echoed all through the big hotel.
THE CURTAIN came down. It met the stage with the dull thud of heavy iron. Grusinskaya, who but a moment before had circled as light as a flower among her troupe of girls, crept panting into the nearest wing. Utterly dazed, she grasped the brawny arm of a stagehand. Her hand shook and she gasped for breath like a wounded animal. Sweat ran along the wrinkles below her eyes. The clapping made no more noise than distant rain and then it came suddenly near—a sign that the curtain had gone up. A man in the wings opposite was laboriously winding it up with great swings of the crank handle. Grusinskaya adjusted her smile like a cardboard mask and danced forward to make her curtsey before the footlights.
Gaigern, whose boredom had been immeasurable, clapped feebly three times merely from good nature and left the stalls for one of the crowded exits. In the front rows and in the gallery a few stalwarts shouted and clapped. Farther back there was a general stampede for the cloakrooms. To Grusinskaya on the stage it looked like a rout, a panic. All the white shirtfronts and dress-coated backs and theater cloaks streamed out in one direction. She smiled. She lifted her head on her long thin neck. She made a skip to the right, then to the left. She flung out her arms in greeting to the public that was now in full retreat. The curtain came down, rose again. The ballet stood its ground rigidly posed and disciplined. “Curtain! Curtain up!” shouted Pimenov the ballet master hysterically. He took charge of the curtain. Slowly it went up while the man at the crank worked like mad. One or two people in the stalls, who were just leaving, stopped and turned round, smiling vacantly and clapping. There was some applause too from a box. Grusinskaya pointed to the girls in gauze, who were grouped around her. Modestly she diverted the meager applause from herself to these unimportant young creatures. And now a few more came back with their coats and cloaks on and surveyed the scene with an air of amusement. Witte, the old German conductor, down below in the orchestra pit, was exerting his authority with frantic gestures—for the musicians were already packing up. “No one is to go,” he whispered nervously. He too was trembling and perspiring. “No one is to go, gentlemen, please. Perhaps the Spring Waltz will have to be repeated.”
“No fear of that,” said a bassoon. “No encores today. Finished for today. There, what did I say?”
In truth the applause died down. Grusinskaya caught sight of the laughing musician’s cavernous black mouth just as the curtain separated her from the house. The applaus
e abruptly terminated and the sudden silence on the other side of the curtain yawned ominously. In the silence the tips of the ballet girls’ silk shoes could be heard scraping the stage.
“May we go off?” whispered Lucille Lafitte, the première danseuse, in French, to Grusinskaya’s trembling powdered back.
“Yes, off. Everyone off. Go to the devil!” Grusinskaya answered in Russian. She meant to shout it, but it died in her throat like a sob. All the gauze rustled off in a scare. The footlights went out and Grusinskaya stood alone for a moment on the stage, freezing in the gray light as though at a rehearsal.
Suddenly a sound was heard like the snapping of a branch or the clatter of a horse’s hoofs. It was unmistakable. One man was clapping by himself in the empty house. Not that there was anything extraordinary in this. It was only the impresario, Meyerheim, making a desperate and courageous attempt to retrieve the day. He struck his resounding palms together with all his might as though in frantic enthusiasm and at the same time threw an angry glance up at the seats that an undutiful claque had too quickly deserted. Baron Gaigern was the first to hear this solitary outburst. He came back to see what was going on and to join in the fun, and hurriedly pulling off his gloves swelled the applause. He even stamped his feet like an excited student, as some of the claque and a few more inquisitive persons came in again from the cloakrooms. They were joined delightedly by others. It grew to a small spontaneous ovation and at last there were about sixty people, all clapping and calling for Grusinskaya.
“Curtain! Curtain!” shouted Pimenov at the top of his voice. Grusinskaya danced hysterically on to the stage and off again. “Michael! Where is Michael? Michael must come on too,” she cried laughing. Blue makeup, perspiration and tears were mingled round her eyes. Witte pushed the dancer Michael on from the wings. Without looking Grusinskaya took his hand. It was so moist and slippery that she could scarcely grasp it. Then, standing just in front of the prompter’s box, they made their bows with the beautiful harmonious grace of bodies trained to match each other. No sooner had the curtain fallen than Grusinskaya gave vent to her excitement by making a scene. “You bungled everything. It was all your fault. You wobbled in the third arabesque! Such a thing would never have happened to me with Pimenov.”
“For mercy’s sake—I? But, Gru!” Michael whispered despairingly in his comical Baltic accent. Witte quickly drew him away behind the third wing and put his aged hand on his lips. “For God’s sake, don’t answer her back. Leave her alone,” he whispered. Grusinskaya took the curtain call alone. In between, while the curtain was down, her rage broke out. She cursed them all unmercifully. She called them swine, hounds, rotten slackers, one and all. She accused Michael of drunkenness and Pimenov of worse. She threatened the departed ballet with dismissal and accused Witte, the conductor, who was still there, sad and silent, of driving her to suicide by his murder of the tempo. All the while her heart fluttered in her breast like a lost and weary bird and tears streamed down over her waxen, painted smile. At last the man in charge of the lighting ended it by turning off the light. The theater was in darkness and an impatient attendant spread gray cloths over the rows of seats. The curtain remained down and the man who worked the crank went home.
“How many ‘curtains,’ Suzette?” Grusinskaya asked the elderly woman who threw a worn, old-fashioned woolen cloak over her shoulders before opening the iron door that led off the stage. “Seven? I counted eight. Seven you say? Even so that was not bad. But was it a success?”
She listened with impatience to Suzette’s protestations, according to which the success had been immense, almost as immense as at Brussels three years before. Madame remembered? Madame did remember. As though one forgot a great success! Madame sat in the little dressing room, staring at the electric bulb that hung in a wire cage over the looking glass and consulted her memory. No, she thought gloomily, it was not such a success as at Brussels. She was tired to death. She stretched out her moist limbs. She sat there, like a boxer who lies in his corner after a hard round, and let Suzette rub her down and chafe her and remove the paint. The dressing room was overheated, dirty, and small. It smelt of old dresses, of glue, of grease paint, of a hundred exhausted bodies.
Perhaps Grusinskaya fell asleep for a few seconds, for she saw herself in the stone-paved entrance hall of her villa on Lake Como, but in a moment she was back again with Suzette and her gnawing and feverish dissatisfaction over the performance. It had not been a great success. No, it had not been a great success. And what a wretched, incomprehensible world to deprive Grusinskaya of a great success.
No one knew how old Grusinskaya was. There were old Russian aristocrats in exile, living in furnished rooms in Wilmersdorf, who asserted that they had known Grusinskaya for forty years. This assuredly was an exaggeration. But there was none in crediting her with twenty years as an international celebrity, and twenty years of celebrity and success are an age. Sometimes Grusinskaya said to old Witte, who had been her friend and accompanist since the beginning of her career: “Witte, it is my fate to support a weight far too heavy for me, on and on, all my life long.” And Witte answered earnestly: “Please let no one see it, Elisaveta Alexandrovna. Do not speak of heaviness. The world has grown heavy. It is your mission, Elisaveta, if you will allow me to say so, to be lightness. Please do not change. That would be the world’s misfortune . . .”
Grusinskaya did not change. She had weighed ninety-six pounds since the age of eighteen, and in this lay part of her success and her capabilities. Her partners, once accustomed to this lightness, could not dance with anyone else afterwards. Her neck, her figure that seemed to be all joints, the beautiful oval of her face, never changed. Her arms obeyed her will like wings. The smile that shone out beneath her long eyelashes was in itself a work of art. Grusinskaya bent all her force to one aim, to be as she had been. And she did not realize that it was exactly this of which the world began to tire.
Perhaps the world would have loved her as she really was, as she looked now, for example, sitting in her dressing room—a poor, delicate, tired old woman with worn-out eyes, and a small, care-worn human face. When Grusinskaya did not have a success—and this sometimes happened nowadays—she shrank into herself and became very old in an instant, seventy years old, a hundred years old, older even than that. Suzette in the background muttered her complaints in French as she stood over the grimy hand-basin and the hot water would not flow properly. Finally, however, she succeeded in producing the steaming compresses, and Grusinskaya resigned her face to the tingling heat, while Suzette loosed the pearls from her neck, those world-famed almost fabulously beautiful pearls that came from the days of her Grand Duke.
“You can put the pearls away. I shall not wear them any more today,” said Grusinskaya, catching sight of their rosy shimmer from beneath her half-closed eyelids.
“Not the pearls? But Madame ought to look her best for the banquet.”
“No. There, that’s enough. Make the best of me without the pearls, Suzette,” Grusinskaya said, and gave herself up with a resigned air to the fingertips and the compresses and the rouge of her self-effacing factotum. She had to go to a supper given in her honor by the Stage Society and for this she must be painted in as deadly earnest as an Aztec warrior before he went to meet his enemies.
Witte walked to and fro in the passage outside the dressing room as patiently as a sentry. He tapped the case of the watch he wore in old-fashioned style in the pocket of his white waistcoat. His old musician’s face betrayed anxiety and sadness. After a while, Pimenov, the ballet master, joined him, and then finally Michael came along. His eyelashes shone with Vaseline and he was heavily powdered.
“Are we waiting for Gru?” he asked cheerfully. “Are we all going together?”
“I would advise you to vanish, my boy,” said Witte, “however little you may have wobbled.”
“But I didn’t wobble. Pimenov, did I wobble?” he exclaimed almost in tears. Pimenov merely shrugged his shoulders. He too was an old man. He
had a large nose that was full of character, and he loved to wear the old-fashioned cravats from the time of Edward
VII. He did not dance any longer but only conducted the rehearsals and composed Grusinskaya’s divertissements, in the severe style of classical choreography, full of birds and flowers and allegories, danced en pointe. “Go to bed, don’t face Gru tonight. Lucille has disappeared already,” he said sagely.
Michael’s youthful face became indignant, and he knocked on the dressing-room door. “Good night, Madame,” he called out. “I am not coming with you. What time is the rehearsal tomorrow morning?”
“Of course you’re coming. You must sit next to me,” Grusinskaya called back. “Don’t make me unhappy, chéri. We can talk about the rehearsal later. Wait for me. I’m just about ready.”
“Tiens—she’s had her cry,” Witte whispered with the air of a conspirator.
“Larmes, oh, douces larmes,” Pimenov declaimed, with his chin sunk in his collar.
“I wouldn’t condemn my worst enemy to dance a pas de deux with Gru—if you’ll pardon me, my dear fellow,” Michael affirmed in his comical Baltic German.
On the other side of the door Grusinskaya was dabbing powder behind the lobes of her ears in front of the brilliantly lighted dressing-room mirror. “Michael must be there,” she thought, “I always have old people about me—Pimenov, Witte, Lucille, Suzette.” She had a sudden spasm of hatred for the worn-out hat that Suzette behind her was putting over her gray hair. She pushed her aside with an abrupt movement and went out into the passage carrying her cloak of black and gold and ermine over her arm. She turned her shoulders to Michael to have her cloak put on. He did this with feminine delicacy, as he did everything. It was a little ceremony of reconciliation. But it was something more. It was an outspoken pleading on Grusinskaya’s part for the freemasonry of youth. Michael was young, for Grusinskaya frequently changed her dance partner, irritable and exacting as she was with her personal partners. The rest had grown old with her in her service.