Hotel Savoy
Joseph Roth titles
published by The Overlook Press
The Radetzky March
The Emperor’s Tomb
Tarabas
Confession of a Murderer
Job
Flight Without End
The Silent Prophet
The Spider’s Web and Zipper and His Father
Hotel Savoy
Three Novellas:
The Legend of the Holy Drinker
Fallmerayer the Stationmaster
The Bust of the Emperor
Right and Left
This paperback edition first published in the United States in 2003 by
The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.
Woodstock & New York
WOODSTOCK:
One Overlook Drive
Woodstock, NY 12498
www.overlookpress.com
[for individual orders, bulk and special sales, contact our Woodstock office]
NEW YORK:
141 Wooster Street
New York, NY 10012
Copyright © 1975 and 1976 by Verlag Allert de Lange Amsterdam
Translation copyright © 1986 John Hoare
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system now known or to be invented without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.
ISBN: 978-1-59020-958-5
Contents
Copyright
BOOK ONE
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Chapter X
Chapter XI
Chapter XII
Chapter XIII
BOOK TWO
Chapter XIV
Chapter XV
Chapter XVI
Chapter XVII
Chapter XVIII
Chapter XIX
Chapter XX
Chapter XXI
Chapter XXII
Chapter XXIII
Chapter XXIV
Chapter XXV
Chapter XXVI
Chapter XXVII
Chapter XXVIII
I arrive at the Hotel Savoy at ten o’clock in the morning. I am determined to rest for a couple of days or a week. My relations
live in this town – my parents were Russian Jews. I mean to raise enough money to continue my journey westwards.
I am on my way back from three years as a prisoner of war, having lived in a Siberian camp and having wandered through Russian
towns and villages as workman, casual labourer, night watchman, porter and baker’s assistant.
I am wearing a Russian blouse which someone gave me, breeches which I inherited from a dead comrade, and a pair of still wearable
boots the origins of which I cannot myself remember. After five years I stand again at the gates of Europe. The Hotel Savoy,
with its seven storeys, its gilded coat of arms and its uniformed porter, seems to me more European than any other hotel in
the east. It holds out the promise of water, soap, English lavatories, a lift, chambermaids in white caps, a chamberpot gleaming
like some precious surprise in the little brown-panelled night cupboard; electric lamps blooming in shades of green and rose,
like flowers from their calyx; bells which ring at the push of a button; and beds plump with eiderdowns, cheerful and waiting
to receive one’s body.
I am thankful once again to strip off an old life, as I so often have during these years. I look back upon a soldier, a murderer,
a man almost murdered, a man resurrected, a prisoner, a wanderer.
I can sense the first light, the roll of the drums as the company marches, rattling the windowpanes of the top floors. I can
glimpse a man in white shirt-sleeves, the sharply moving limbs of the soldiers, a gleam of light through the woods shining
on the dew. I dive into the grass facing the ‘imaginary enemy’ and feel the overwhelming wish to go on lying there in the
silky grass which tickles my nose.
I can hear the silence of the hospital ward, the white silence. One summer morning I get up, hear the healthy trill of the
larks, relish the morning cocoa and buttered rolls and the smell of iodine, the first ‘regulation diet’ of the day.
I inhabit a white world of sky and snow. Barracks cover the ground like yellow scabs. I enjoy the last sweet drag on a scavenged
cigarette butt and read the personal columns of an age-old newspaper from home, repeating the names of familiar streets, recognising
the owner of the corner grocery, and a porter and a certain blonde Agnes with whom I have slept.
I listen to the delicious rain during a sleepless night, to fast melting lumps of ice in morning’s laughing sunshine. I grasp
the splendid breasts of a woman met along the way and laid down on the moss; the white pride of her thighs. I sleep the sleep
of the dead in the hay barn. I stride across ploughed fields and listen to the thin voice of a balalaika.
One can absorb such a lot and yet remain unchanged in body, in walk, in behaviour. One can drink from a million glasses and
never quench one’s thirst. A rainbow may quiver with all its colours but can never change the spectrum.
I could arrive at the Hotel Savoy with a single shirt, I could leave with twenty trunks and still be the same old
Gabriel Dan. Perhaps it is because this notion has made me self-confident, lordly and arrogant that the hall porter salutes
me, the wanderer with the Russian blouse, and that a page boy takes me in hand although I have no luggage.
A lift bears me upwards, each of its sides a mirror. The lift-boy, a man in middle age, lets the rope glide through his hand,
the cabin rises, I sway and find myself thinking that I could enjoy this upward motion for quite a long time. I enjoy the
swaying feeling and calculate how many wearisome steps I would have had to climb but for this noble lift. As I rise ever higher,
I throw my bitterness, my wanderings and homelessness, all my mendicant past, down the liftshaft from which it can never reach
me again.
My room – one of the cheapest – is on the sixth floor, number 703. I like the number – I am superstitious about them – for
the zero in the middle is like a lady flanked by two gentlemen, one older and one younger. A yellow coverlet lies on the bed;
not, thank God, a grey one to remind me of the army. I turn the light on and off a couple of times, open the door of the cupboard
for night-time use, the mattress gives beneath my hand and bounces back, water sparkles in its carafe, the window gives onto
a courtyard in which cheerfully coloured laundry is flapping, children are shouting and hens are wandering at will.
I wash myself and slowly slide into bed, treasuring every second. I open the window, the hens are cackling loudly and merrily,
like a sweet lullaby.
I sleep dreamlessly the whole day through.
The late sunshine reddened the topmost windows of the house opposite; laundry, chickens, children had vanished from the courtyard.
As I arrived that morning it had been drizzling. Because in the meantime it had cleared up I felt as if I had slept for three
days, not one. My weariness had left me and I was in good heart.
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