Grand Hotel

by Vicki Baum

  Then she came pirouetting to the front on her toes. Her face and arms were white as wax, and the tip of her toe as rigid and steady on the floor of the stage as if screwed tightly into it. In the end it was impossible to see her face any longer. She became nothing but a whirl of white with silver stripes, and Kringelein felt a little seasick even before the dance was over. “Marvelous,” he said with astonishment. “Splendid. What suppleness of leg. That’s first class. You can only marvel at that.” And he marveled gratefully, though he felt far from well.

  “Are you really enjoying it?” asked Doctor Otternschlag gloomily. He sat in the box and turned the damaged side of his face to the stage. It looked ghastly in the yellow stage lighting, which extended far enough to illumine it. It was difficult for Kringelein to answer this “really.” Actually ever since he had moved into Room No. 70 nothing was real to him any longer. Everything was like a fevered dream. Everything went by much too fast. Nothing stayed long enough to be enjoyed. At his urgent request for instruction and companionship, Otternschlag had taken him round to the usual sights—a drive round Berlin, the museum, Potsdam, and finally even up the radio tower, the Funkturm, where the wind blew a hurricane and Berlin lay below under a pall of smoke embroidered with lights. Kringelein would not have been surprised if he were to wake up out of the deep trance induced by anesthesia to find himself in his hospital bed again. His feet were cold, his hands cramped, and his jaws clenched. His head was like a burning cauldron, and all the thousand and one things thrown into it began to sizzle and melt.

  “Well, are you content? Are you happy now? Are you getting to know life?” Otternschlag asked from time to time. And Kringelein stoutly and obediently answered, “Yes, rather!”

  On this evening, the fifth of Grusinskaya’s appearances, the theater was poorly patronized. It was positively empty. The stalls were so scantily occupied that they looked ragged and moth-eaten, and the one or two people in the front row felt isolated and self-conscious amid so many empty seats. Kringelein was cold and ashamed. Except for the stage box, which he had taken on Otternschlag’s advice. Kringelein wished from now on always to have the best seats, at the cinema far back, at the theater well in the front and at the ballet the front row. Except for their box, which had cost him forty marks, only one other was occupied and this by the impresario, Meyerheim. Meyerheim had dispensed with the claque for this performance. It no longer justified itself and the deficit was already big enough. There was a slight outburst of applause before the intermission. Pimenov quickly rang up the curtain, and Grusinskaya came to the front of the stage and smiled. She smiled to a silent house, for the feeble applause had already expired and everyone trooped out to the buffet. Something, too, expired in Grusinskaya’s face as she stood there to acknowledge an ovation, which wasn’t forthcoming. Her skin went cold beneath the sweat and makeup. Witte threw down his baton and rushed on to the stage up the iron steps. He was anxious about Elisaveta. He found Pimenov standing there as though at a funeral, while stagehands dumped down bits of scenery right against his lean old bowed back in its old dress coat. He was always in full dress for every evening performance, as though any evening the Grand Duke Sergei might summon him to his box. Michael, with a leopard skin of spotted plush over his left shoulder and bare powdered legs, was waiting with a despondent air near the stage manager. They were all in trembling anticipation of an outbreak from Grusinskaya. They were trembling actually and literally— knees, hands, shoulders, teeth.

  “Forgive me, Madame,” Michael said in a whisper. “Pardonnez moi. It was my fault, I put you out—”

  Grusinskaya came with an absentminded air through the dust and noise made by the shifting of the scenery, trailing her old woolen cloak, and when she stood still and looked at Michael there was a meekness in her face that frightened every one of them.

  “You? Oh no, my dear,” she said gently, when she had mastered the breaking of her voice and collected her breath, which the last exacting dance had exhausted. “You were very good. You are in very good form today. So am I. We were all good—”

  She turned abruptly and walked quickly away, taking her unfinished sentence with her into the darkness at the back of the stage. Witte did not venture to follow her. Grusinskaya sat down on a step of gilt wood that lay at the back among a pile of stage lumber, and there she sat during the whole time the scene was being changed. At first she clasped her hands round her right calf in the silken flesh-colored tights. Mechanically she re-tied the crossed strings of the ballet shoe. For a few minutes she stroked this tired, silken and slightly soiled leg as though it were an animal—with unthinking compassion. A little while after, she removed her hands from her leg and put them round her bare neck. She missed the pearls keenly. Again and again it had calmed her to let them slip through her fingers like a rosary. What more? What more do you want, she thought deeply within herself. I have never danced so well as now. Not when I was young, not in the Petersburg days, not in Paris, not in America. I was stupid in those days and not very industrious. Now—oh, now I work. Now, I know. Now, I can dance. What more do you want of me? More still? More I have not got. Must I give the pearls away? Surrender them? Well, I’m ready to. Oh, leave me alone—all of you. I am tired.

  “Michael,” she whispered. She recognized his shadowy form as it glided past the back of the backdrop scenery.

  “Madame,” answered Michael with cautious reserve. He had changed his costume and now wore a brown velvet doublet and carried a bow and arrow in his hand, for he was dancing his Archer Dance after the interval.

  “Aren’t you going to get ready, Gru?” he asked, carefully avoiding a sympathetic tone, when he saw how small and crumpled she looked as she sat huddled amidst the lumber. The manager’s bells rang from eight places at once.

  “Michael, I am tired,” said Grusinskaya, “I want to go home. Lucille can dance my numbers. It won’t matter to anyone. They don’t care whether it is I who dance or someone else.”

  Michael started so violently that he stiffened in every muscle. Grusinskaya, sitting on the step with his knee close to her face, saw the magnificent muscle of his thighs distend and this involuntary movement in a body she knew so well comforted her a little. Michael had gone pale under his paint. “Nonsense,” he said. He was rude from dismay.

  Grusinskaya smiled tenderly. She put out a finger and tapped Michael on the leg.

  “How often do I have to tell you to dance in tights,” she said with unusual tenderness in her voice. “You will never really warm up, never be really supple without tights. Believe me when I tell you that, you—revolutionary.” She let her hand rest for a few seconds on the warm powdered and youthful skin beneath which his fine muscles stood out. But no, the touch communicated no strength. The bell sounded for the third time. On the other side of the drop scene, with its painting of a little temple, the ballet shoes of the dancers were already scraping over the floor of the stage. Suzette was running up and down the dressing-room passage in an agony like a stray hen, because Madame was sitting there instead of changing her costume. Witte, standing at the conductor’s desk, took his baton with trembling hand and waited with a set face for the red light which ought already to have signaled the commencement of the next dance.

  “What are you thinking of?” asked Doctor Otternschlag in the box above. Kringelein just at that moment was thinking of Fredersdorf and of the patch of sunlight that on summer afternoons fell on the shabby green wall of the dingy accounts office. But he came back at once, and very gladly, to Berlin and the Theater des Westens, to the tinsel and glamour of life and his red plush box at forty marks.

  “Homesick?” asked Otternschlag.

  “No question of that,” replied Kringelein with all the callousness of a man of the world.

  Witte below raised his baton and the music began.

  “Rotten orchestra,” said Otternschlag, who was getting heartily sick of his role of an amiable mentor and finding the ballet more and more depressing. But this time Kringelein r
efused to be distracted. The music was just what he wanted. He sank into it as he had into his hot bath at the hotel. He had a chill and heavy feeling in his stomach like a lump of lead. It was a bad symptom, the doctor had said. It did not hurt in the least. It stayed at that unpleasant state when a pain is expected but does not come. That was all. That little bit was what you died from. And then came the music to console him a little with its pianissimo on the flutes above the tremolo of the violas. Kringelein’s spirits rose, and he floated away on the music, right off into a blue moonlit landscape where a temple was painted on a painted seacoast.

  The program proceeded. Michael as an archer appeared with his snow-white calves and brown velvet doublet. He braced his youthful body and shot with a leap across the stage. He sprang high into the air as though on wires. His gestures made it clear that he wished to shoot a bird, a dove that belonged to the temple. After a prodigal display of leaps and spins he finally vanished into the wings after his arrow.

  Applause. Pizzicato in the orchestra. Grusinskaya made her appearance on the stage. She had after all in breathless haste put on the costume of the wounded dove. A large ruby-red drop of blood trembled on her white silk bodice. She is utterly tired out but as light as air, and her arms move in rapid and tremulous wing-beats while she gradually glides towards her piteous death. Three times she rallies but she can fly no longer. At last her long delicate neck falls forward, she lays her head on her knees and dies, a poor dove shot through the heart. A shaft of limelight through a disc of blue glass is directed upon her wound.

  Curtain and applause. There was even fairly vigorous applause considering how empty the theater was and how few there were to clap. “Encore?” asked Grusinskaya without stirring from her pose. “No,” whispered Pimenov in a loud and desperate whisper from the wings. The applause was over. It was over. Grusinskaya still lay where she was for a few minutes like a flake of foam, just as she had died in her dance and with the dust of the stage on her hands and arms and temples. For the first time in her life there was no encore for this dance. I can do no more, she thought. No, I have done enough. I can do no more.

  “Clear the stage for the next scene,” shouted the stage manager. Grusinskaya had no wish to get up. She wished to lie there in the middle of the stage and to fall asleep—to sleep and forget it all. Finally Michael came and raised her to her feet. “Spassibo—thank you,” she said in Russian and walked stiffly away to the ladies’ dressing rooms. Michael took the nearest way through the wings to the left and made himself ready for the pas de deux.

  Grusinskaya stole away to her dressing room and pushed the door open with the toe of her ballet shoe. Sinking into a chair in front of the mirror, she fixed her eyes on the shoe’s dusty and somewhat worn silk. Her feet were weary, unutterably weary. They were heavy and they had had their fill, more than their fill, of dancing. In the mirror beneath the glare of the electric light she saw Suzette’s old and careworn face. The costume for the pas de deux rustled in her hands.

  “Leave me alone,” Grusinskaya whispered hoarsely. “I am not well. I can’t go on again. Leave me alone everyone. Give me something to drink,” she added, however. She wanted to strike Suzette’s worn and helpless face because she suddenly saw in it an indefinable likeness to her own. “Fiche moi la paix,” she said imperiously. Suzette vanished. Grusinskaya sat listlessly where she was for a few minutes, and then she suddenly tore the silk shoes from her feet. Enough, she thought, enough, enough!

  Still in tights and wearing her dove costume, Grusinskaya took flight. She had only kicked off her ballet shoes and put on some others and thrown her old cloak round her, and thus, oppressed and wretched, she deserted the theater. Suzette, when she came hurrying back from the bar with a glass of port, found the dressing room empty. A note was stuck in the mirror. “I can do no more. Lucille must dance in my place.” Suzette stumbled onto the stage with it and for ten minutes after that the theater was in confusion; then, however, the curtain went up and the program proceeded as on any other evening, with Russian Folkdances, the pas de deux and the Bacchanal. Pimenov and Witte saw the evening through like two old generals whose king has fled the field and who have to cover the retreat after a defeat.

  But while on the stage the ballet dancers as Bacchantes twirled and swirled muslin veils and strewed the stage with four hundred paper roses, and while Michael executed his leaps as a faun and Suzette talked helplessly with Berkeley on the telephone in the manager’s office—all this while, Grusinskaya stumbled in blind despairing flight along the Tauentzienstrasse.

  Berlin was brilliantly lighted, noisy, and teeming. Passers-by looked with curiosity and amusement at her painted, distraught and half-unconscious face. Berlin was a cruel town. Grusinskaya, as she crossed the street to the less-frequented side, cursed the city. A fit of the shivers took possession of her, though the air was mild and damp on this March evening and her woolen cloak steamed. Grusinskaya tried to utter her grief in words that turned into sobs and stuck in her throat and hurt her. She felt she might cry, but she did not. Her eyes under the blue-painted lids only became hotter and drier.

  Never again, she thought, never again. Enough. It’s over. She stumbled on as though being chased by this thought. There was no grace left in her movements. She had no control over her body and it drooped forward at every step. A florist’s window threw a glare of white light at her feet. She stopped and looked in. There were great bowls with bunches of magnolia. There were cactuses and spiral glasses with orchids growing out of them. But she found not the faintest comfort in all the delicate beauty of the flowers. Her hands were cold, she now realized for the first time, and she began to search for gloves in the pockets of her old cloak. This was quite absurd, because for the last eight years she had only worn this cloak backstage as a protection against the drafts that blow through every theater in the world. In her mind’s eye she saw the stage machinery and the iron doors with red lamps above them, and the smooth slant of the stage sloping away at her feet. Never again, she thought, never again. The old-fashioned cloak was long. It hid her costume, but it hindered her movements. She pulled it up higher after leaving the window of the flower shop and turned aimlessly into quieter streets. She saw a Buddha in a shop window as she passed by. His quiet gilded bronze hands looked as if they wished to bring calm to her crumbling world. Never to dance again. Never, never again. She tried to gain comfort from consoling words, but they came in sobs from her throat. Sergei, she cried, Gabriel, Gaston. She called on the names of her few lovers. Anastasia, too, her daughter, and finally even Ponpon, her little grandson in Paris, whom she had never seen. But she was still alone with no one to console her. Suddenly she stopped with a start. What am I doing, she thought. I have run away from the theater. I can’t have done that. It isn’t possible. I must go back. A church clock struck eleven slowly, clearly, and close at hand, though no church tower was to be seen. Grusinskaya took her hands out of the pockets of her cloak and let them fall in front of her. The gesture recalled the death of the wounded dove. Too late, the gesture said. The performance must be just ending. Grusinskaya threw back her head and looked at the street she was on, and found that she did not know where she was. She saw a small entrance framed in blue and yellow electric lights and over it the words: “Russian Bar.” She went across and stood at the door. She blew her nose like a child while she made up her mind. Russian Bar, she thought. Suppose I go in? They would recognize me, and the red-shirted orchestra would play the Grusinskaya waltz. What a sensation.

  No sensation at all, she thought wretchedly a moment later. I can’t go in looking as I do. And perhaps I wouldn’t even be recognized any longer. Besides if they did recognize me—looking as I do now—tant pis, tant pis.

  She signaled to an old rattletrap of a taxi and, with a face that was suddenly fixed and cold, had herself driven to the hotel.

  •

  Gaigern stood like a sentry between the curtains and the lace hangings in Room No. 68 and waited for the men in blue overa
lls down below to finish their job. But instead of this they went on crawling back and forth on the window ledges of the first story. They had left to get wire and pliers and they called out to each other with much zeal, but still the lights did not go on. Consequently, the whole front of the hotel was so much better illuminated by the street lamps, by the lighting at the five hotel entrances, and by the electric signs opposite which advertised now a brand of champagne, now a variety of chocolate. Moreover, Gaigern had not been standing there waiting more than twenty minutes before the door of Room No. 68 opened. The light was turned on and by the very modest illumination peculiar to hotel bedrooms he saw Grusinskaya enter the room.

  This, from Gaigern’s point of view, was a thoroughly rotten business. The shock of it went through him like a cold steel blade. What on earth was the woman doing in the hotel at twenty minutes past eleven? What could you do when you couldn’t even count on the length of a theater performance? His luck had run out, he thought with clenched teeth. Gaigern had a dread of bad luck. And now what but bad luck could account for these cursed complications in which he seemed to be trapped? The light from the room penetrated the lace curtain behind which he stood and imprinted the shadow of its openwork pattern on the balcony. There was nothing for it but to calm himself and keep his spirits up. The string of pearls in his pocket had absorbed the warmth of his body. They ran like peas through his fingers. For a moment it seemed to him idiotic and absurd that this handful of pearl-colored kernels should be worth a fortune. Four months of lying in wait, seven meters at the risk of his life, and no sooner was one risk over than a new one took its place. One danger after another. His life was nothing but a string of dangers. And the life of this Grusinskaya was a string of pearls. Gaigern shook his head and laughed in spite of the fix he was in. Gaigern was no thinker. Life often made him laugh in astonished amazement, almost simplemindedly, for it was somewhat beyond his comprehension. Now, at any rate, he pulled himself together and, turning towards the room on the other side of the lace curtains, he proceeded to wait.