A Perfect Waiter

by Alain Claude Sulzer

  So Jakob had struck him, even then, as remote, and this alarmed him. He seemed remote because he was trying to detach himself. Wasn’t that it? Wasn’t that what worried him?

  Erneste, who hadn’t mourned his parents’ death and had little appreciation of Jakob’s homesickness, let him go instead of trying to restrain him. He left him standing on the platform. Had he clung to him, Jakob might well have shaken him off, and that would have hurt more than any other form of separation. Unable to restrain Jakob, he’d had to let him go.

  “Till next year. See you at the end of March—late March or early April.” Those had been Jakob’s parting words on the platform, so Erneste had had no need to say them himself. It was clear from Jakob’s tone that he really meant them, and that he hoped to pick up the thread where they had been compelled to leave it. Yes, he was being sincere, and perhaps everything would turn out the way they’d so often envisioned in the foregoing days and nights: nothing would have changed when they saw each other again; their temporary separation would be only a minor obstacle on their way into the future, and no more to be avoided than the future itself.

  Erneste had known he couldn’t count on getting any mail from Jakob, or a New Year’s card at most. One week after New Year’s, if not before, he realized he couldn’t expect even that. It wasn’t the fault of the mails. The fault lay with Jakob himself, with the distractions that were claiming his time, with his friends and family, perhaps with his work. Perhaps it also had something to do with the turn of the year, which was celebrated quite differently in Germany than in France.

  Although Erneste had already written Jakob several postcards and some letters—which he fervently hoped his mother hadn’t opened—Jakob had never replied. He had no choice but to endure Jakob’s silence patiently. But his patience ran out after only an hour or two. For the rest of the day, not only while at work but even more intensely when off duty, he thought of nothing but Jakob. In the end he couldn’t dismiss the notion that Jakob was being unfaithful to him just as he himself had briefly been tempted, for a few days only, to fall for a youngster employed at the Lutétia as an elevator attendant. Their relationship had remained purely physical, however, because his hankering for Jakob soon became too much for him and he broke it off after their fourth assignation.

  Those winter months in Paris had left no lasting impressions behind. Discounting the elevator attendant, his memory of them was almost a blank. If he preserved any general recollection of them, it resembled an aftertaste rather than a palpable image. There was no room in it for the place where he had hoped to spend the winter with Jakob. In Paris he had already been leading the lonely existence in which he would later make his permanent home. Together with his little affair, it foreshadowed what was to come, but of that he was still unaware.

  He had sometimes been afraid, when even more depressed than usual, that he would never see Jakob again, so he was relieved as much as overjoyed when, on April 26, 1936, they were reunited in the same station and on the same platform where they had exchanged a farewell handshake six months before, the difference being that even more people were hurrying to and fro, this time without coats or scarfs because it was a really warm spring day. And this time he found it even harder not to take Jakob in his arms. It was all he could do not to kiss him on the neck, possibly the body’s most sensitive area.

  At that moment, although the hour hand of the station clock had rotated over four thousand times in the previous six months, Erneste fancied that it had registered the same lapse of time in a single, whirlwind circuit of the dial. He was standing just where he had stood six months earlier, never having budged from the spot. The passers-by had changed their clothes, but that was all. Whatever had happened in the interim didn’t matter—it meant nothing: the hands hadn’t moved an inch, nor had he, nor had Jakob. But the belief that nothing had changed was a fleeting illusion. It was soon borne in on Erneste that almost everything had changed.

  His winter in Paris, with its lingering disappointment, tedious work and short-lived affair, was obliterated when he gripped Jakob’s hand and released it. The warmth of their handshake seemed to convey that they had never been apart. But then, as he looked into Jakob’s eyes, he was overcome with despair. It was Jakob’s green eyes that inspired this feeling. They seemed to have seen things of which he would never speak.

  At the same time, he had become even more handsome, a young man with the firm handshake of an adult who smiled at Erneste in a slightly detached and condescending manner. Although Erneste knew nothing, and his ignorance threatened to choke him, the one thing he grasped at that moment was that this new and unfamiliar Jakob was going to leave him, possibly even for a woman. Not today or tomorrow, perhaps, but sooner or later. He felt puny and insignificant—a nobody compared to this tall, good-looking young man whom he would never succeed in capturing and keeping. No matter how much security and affection he offered, Jakob would always remain one step ahead of him.

  Had he turned on his heel, his life would have taken a different direction. Not that he knew it, he was merely prolonging the agony.

  Chapter 8

  He sometimes caught himself yearning for the authentic Jakob while the real one was lying beside him. Although he could feel the warmth of him, he kept thinking of the Jakob who had left him behind on the platform in Basel and then, far away in Cologne, dissolved into thin air. Jakob’s body, which he knew even better than his own, seemed to have been inhabited by a stranger since his return from Germany. His voice was still the same, but his way of speaking and the words he used to convey what he saw and heard were different.

  He had developed a cocky manner unseemly in a waiter, no matter how handsome and popular. Erneste, who was concerned for Jakob’s career and reputation, was distressed by this and tried to make this clear to him. “Be careful what you say, Jakob,” he told him a couple of times, and: “Jakob, don’t talk so big, people don’t like it.” But it was no use, Jakob just smiled and rubbed his right eye with his forefinger or rested his hand on Erneste’s belly and said, “If you say so.” He was too self-assured to be impressed by Erneste’s warning that he would sooner or later get into serious trouble with Herr Direktor Wagner or with one of the guests. But he didn’t get into trouble, even though he wasn’t his former self. The changes Erneste perceived in him failed to impair his popularity; on the contrary, they seemed to enhance it.

  Erneste was compelled to accept that this Jakob was the only one who now inhabited the body that never refused itself to him, day or night. Yet he clung to the hope that the real Jakob would one day reoccupy this body he knew so well, as if he had simply been away for a while. He could hold that body, but nothing more. What lay hidden within it escaped his grasp. It was a stranger who lay beside him, and he pined for the Jakob he knew and had lost, who was hidden behind the stranger’s façade. The new Jakob was merely granting him a reprieve. He loved the old Jakob, but the old one had gone.

  Erneste felt sure that Jakob would leave him sooner or later. He knew his fate and wouldn’t fight it. Fate was taking its course despite him.

  The changes in Jakob had their advantages as well. The pleasure he gave Erneste became ever more intense, night after night. This, Erneste assumed, had to do with his winter in Cologne, where he had learned things of which they never spoke. He had developed an almost insatiable appetite, and since there was nobody else around to assuage it, Erneste was the one who ensured that he eventually drifted off to sleep. But for Jakob’s daily demands to satisfy him regardless of all else, Erneste might have gone mad—mad for love of the real Jakob, whom he had lost and couldn’t rediscover. But this may have been an idea that didn’t occur to him until later on, when it was all over and he had been forced to acknowledge that the letter he craved from America would never come. Meantime, what mattered in Giessbach was to satisfy the requirements of the guests who were now arriving in unprecedented numbers. The demand for rooms was so great that applicants had to be turned away daily, especially as
regular guests were given precedence. It was as if the whole world wanted to assemble at Giessbach’s Grand Hotel before disintegrating into its separate components.

  Most of the guests came from Germany, many of them being Jews who had managed to get all or at least some of their assets out of the country and were now waiting at the Grand, either for a British or American visa, or for speedy permission to settle in Switzerland, or for a fundamental change in the political situation in Germany. The latter was a vain hope, and there was little prospect of acquiring a Swiss resident’s permit, which was not particularly sought-after in any case, given that one couldn’t feel much safer in Switzerland than elsewhere in Europe. The Germans, as Jakob, too, reported, were going after all their potential enemies, particularly the Jews, who had been subject to special legislation since the previous September. But there were also guests who would naturally return to Germany in due course because there was no reason for them to leave the country for good. This resulted in the formation of cliques that either mingled or shunned each other’s company, and Monsieur Flamin had to employ all his strategic skill in seating guests appropriately, not only in the dining room but more particularly in the far smaller breakfast room, because some of them were afraid of eavesdroppers, even though many of the people they felt in need of protection from were harmless elderly couples. Appearances could be deceptive—they were Germans, after all—but the real danger, everyone agreed, came from the younger ones. Monsieur Flamin knew what had to be done and he did it with a touch of pleasure at his ability to resolve awkward situations.

  So Erneste and Jakob and all their many fellow employees were kept at full stretch, with little time to reflect on their personal circumstances. A strange euphoria seemed to prevail, mainly among the younger guests—a mixture of frivolity and fear, dejection and optimism. They were happy to have escaped, even if they didn’t know where they would end up, because all were now convinced that another war was inevitable. Some of them, who had only become acquainted in Giessbach, often sat talking in the bar until all hours. Jakob told Erneste where they came from and what they talked about. He had been the first to volunteer for night duty behind the bar because he wanted to see “the international set”, as he put it.

  Julius Klinger turned up in June of 1936, accompanied by his wife and two children. His arrival caused more of a stir than that of any other guest from Germany, and not only because he was famous. Apart from Erneste and the other foreign employees, everyone in Giessbach seemed to know his name, even Jakob, who had never read a word Klinger had written. Jakob said that every child in Germany knew of him. His novels had been filmed, he said, and he went on to quote the titles of various books and movies that meant nothing to Erneste, who had long ago forgotten the titles of any movies he’d seen, and in most cases their story lines as well.

  On June 19, 1936, after rumors of Klinger’s arrival had been circulating for several days, some thirty people gathered in the hotel lobby to applaud him and, by their very presence, express gratitude for his unenforced and principled stand against the Nazis. Although Klinger had until recently, and even during the war of 1914—18, refrained from any political utterances, he had now come out openly against Germany’s new rulers, whom he abominated. To the refugees who stood in the lobby and applauded his arrival, he represented the true values of the country they’d reluctantly been compelled to leave. He had refused to be swayed, either by flattery on the part of the regime, or by attempts to exert pressure on him.

  Julius Klinger’s books had not been publicly burned in Germany, just ignored. Three weeks before leaving for Giessbach, he had decided to break his silence with all the force inherent in a single sentence. His letter addressed to Goebbels on May 20, 1936, had appeared in Switzerland’s Neue Zürcher Zeitung. It contained no word of reproach or accusation, yet it caused more of a stir, both at home and abroad, than he had expected—and this despite its brevity, which rendered it all the more effective. Perfectly suited to being quoted in the foreign press, his letter was published even in the New York Times.

  Quite a few people who had already left the country were beginning to have doubts about Klinger’s muchinvoked integrity, but when they learned of his letter, and certainly when they learned of its contents, the tide promptly turned in his favor. Interest centered not only on him, but also on those who had been expelled from Germany. He had chosen the right moment to do what was expected of him. With a single sentence—“We true Germans will have to show you the error of your ways; we have no choice”—he had invoked the decent Germany they personified and attested the rightness of their actions. He had even, in a way, affirmed that Jews who no longer possessed any rights inside Germany were the people best qualified to uphold true German values beyond its borders until the advent of better times, when they would be summoned home again.

  Klinger’s letter contained no threat; it was universally construed as a warning. Whether he was alluding between the lines to his own potential departure from Germany, to which he actually made no reference, remained a moot point and was also the subject of heated arguments at Giessbach. For want of any better idea, Goebbels lambasted him like a dog barking after an intruder has fled: Klinger was what he had always believed him to be, a decadent, Jewified snob whose literary heyday had ended long ago. “You’re a man of the last century: we don’t need your kind. Go and try your luck with the Bolsheviks!”

  Erneste heard all these things from Jakob, who never tired of telling him what was discussed at night in the hotel bar—where Klinger never showed his face, incidentally. He and his wife, who never drank except at meals, retired to bed early, immediately after dinner as a rule. Unlike them, their children mingled with the other guests as a matter of course. The Klingers evidently had no objection to this, although the boy was seventeen at most but looked older. The daughter was reputed to be an artist, not that anyone ever saw her with a sketchbook. She seemed to be as much at a loose end as her brother. The boy was still of school age, but present circumstances entailed that he would be tutored by his mother and sister until further notice. He was said to have artistic leanings, so Jakob told Erneste, and no wonder, with parents like his, but although there were pianos in the ballroom and breakfast room he had never been seen to play them. That his mother no longer performed in public was well known. Before the birth of her daughter in 1916 she had sung at Berlin’s Lindenoper under Richard Strauss and then, after four seasons, unexpectedly retired. However, two recordings of her existed: Ah, ma petite table! on one side and Voi che sapete on the other. Julius Klinger, who much preferred the German repertoire, had for some time been in close touch with Richard Wagner’s widow Cosima. This was because, before the outbreak of the Great War and the success of his second novel, Oporta, he had toyed with the idea—which never came to fruition—of writing a biography of his favorite composer in the style of a novel.

  Klinger had not been arrested in Berlin despite his letter to Goebbels. He was allowed to leave the country for fear of reactions abroad, and also, no doubt, because the Nazis were relieved to be rid of him. No one could have foreseen what he would later assert in his only autobiographical essay, which devoted a few sentences to the subject. This was that during the first two weeks of his stay at the Grand Hotel in Giessbach, which he specifically mentioned in this context, he had been counting on a coup d’état. He had set off for Switzerland firmly convinced that certain senior German generals would shortly bring the madness in their country to an end, and he had no reason to mistrust those who had informed him that a putsch was imminent. In the event, however, Klinger waited for it as vainly as the rest of the world. No upheaval occurred, Hitler remained in power, the Germans were content, and Klinger spent several more weeks in Giessbach, during which time he made preparations to emigrate and worked on his latest book. He couldn’t remain idle, being admired not least for the sheer magnitude of his output. He wrote and corrected several pages of manuscript a day. His work, his writing, was as essential to him as th
e air he breathed.

  People became accustomed to his presence as time went by. His appearance at meals ceased to attract much attention—less attention, certainly, than that of his off-spring, whose extravagant wardrobes seemed absolutely inexhaustible, whereas Klinger himself was notable only for his well-cut suits and English shoes and his wife mainly for her dark curls and dark-brown eyes. Marianne Klinger was “of Mediterranean appearance”, as her husband put it, but she could also have been mistaken for a Jewess. A short woman, she had become somewhat plump after the birth of her son Maximilian, but her legs still drew appreciative male stares. The only guests to maintain a certain interest in Klinger were new arrivals, who were always trying to exchange a few words with him. This wasn’t easy, and not only because he tended to address strangers in a very low voice. In contrast to his children, he avoided chance encounters as far as possible. When they became unavoidable he would shake hands and sign books, smiling amiably, but he refused to inscribe his name on menus or sheets of notepaper.

  Two weeks after their arrival the Klingers were joined by Frau Moser, their Berlin housekeeper, who would later accompany them into exile. Erneste met her at the landing stage with two junior waiters. In addition to a wardrobe trunk, five suitcases had to be conveyed to the hotel. A quiet young woman who never wore make-up, Frau Moser moved into a small room in the hotel and took her meals at the Klingers’ table. Certain guests viewed this with disapproval and incomprehension. Since she looked less like an employee than an underprivileged member of the family, however, even the most loudly disapproving guests eventually became inured to her presence in the dining room, especially as she never ventured to speak unless expressly asked a question by Klinger or his wife. The rest of the time she remained silent. She made a demure, reserved impression, quite unlike the young Klingers, who were always the first to get up and go, sometimes even while their parents were still at the dessert stage. According to Erneste, who was responsible for the family’s table, Klinger seemed quite unaware of their bad manners, whereas his wife noticed but did nothing about them. It didn’t disturb her, either, if Klinger started to smoke while she was still eating, nor did she persist when she failed to get an answer to her questions. Yet she never looked resentful or offended. She struck Erneste as a kindly and considerate but rather inscrutable woman. Despite the couple’s middle-class exterior, some thought they detected a lingering trace of bohemianism in them because they had once belonged to that unconventional world, he as a novelist and she as a singer. And although they had divested themselves of all outward signs of their colorful past when they married, if not before, they remained artists still—and to the other guests that naturally excused many of their little quirks, which were really only trivial.