She was afraid to go to her room.

‘What are you afraid of?’

‘There is a bill there,’ says Stasia, ‘and I can’t pay it. Ignatz will have to come again with his seal.’

‘What sort of seal would that be?’

‘Later,’ says Stasia. She is very excited. I can see her little breasts through her thin blouse.

On her bedside table lay a bill. It was sizeable. Had I wished to pay it, it would have eaten up over half my ready money.

Stasia easily recovered her self-possession. In front of the mirror she discovers a bouquet of carnations and summer flowers.

‘The flowers are from Alexander Bohlaug,’ she says, ‘but I never send flowers back. It’s not the flowers’ fault.’

She then sends for Ignatz. Ignatz came with an enquiring look and bowed deeply to me.

‘Your seal, Ignatz,’ says Stasia.

Ignatz brings a chain out of his trouser pocket and reaches for a vanity case in front of the mirror.

‘That makes three,’ says Ignatz and binds the chain four times round the vanity case. His expression is lustful, as if he were binding Stasia and not her case. He ties a little padlock to the end of the chain, folds the bill and puts it away in his well-worn pocketbook.

Ignatz lends money to anyone with a trunk. He pays the bill of anyone who is willing to pawn their own luggage. The trunks remain in the owners’ rooms and are sealed by Ignatz so that they cannot be opened. Ignatz himself invented the patent lock and he comes round every morning to check that ‘his’ trunks have not been tampered with.

Stasia makes do with two dresses. She has pawned three trunks. I decide to redeem one trunk and think it might be as well to leave the Hotel Savoy without delay.

The hotel no longer appealed to me: neither the stifling laundry, nor the gruesomely benevolent lift-boy nor the three floors of prisoners. This Hotel Savoy was like the world. Brilliant light shone out from it and splendour glittered from its seven storeys, but poverty made its home in its high places, and those who lived on high were in the depths, buried in airy graves, and the graves were in layers above the comfortable rooms of the well nourished guests sitting down below, untroubled by the flimsy coffins overhead.

I belong to those who are buried on high. Do I not live on the sixth floor and shall I not be driven by Fate onto the seventh? To the eighth, the tenth, the twentieth? How high can one fall? Into Heaven and ultimate bliss?

‘You are so far away,’ says Stasia.

‘Forgive me,’ I say. Her voice has touched me.

VII

Phöbus Bohlaug never forgot to draw attention to the blue suit. He called it ‘a splendid suit’ which ‘might have been made to measure’, and then he would smile. On one occasion at my uncle’s I met Glanz, Abel Glanz, a small, shabbily dressed, unshaven person, who shrank nervously together when one addressed him and who had the ability automatically to make himself smaller still, through some mysterious mechanism in his nature. His skinny neck with its restlessly sliding Adam’s apple could contract like an accordion and vanish into his wide stiff collar. Only his brow was large, his scalp was thin on top, his red ears stood out at right angles and gave the impression that they had chosen this position so that everyone should be absorbed by them. Abel Glanz’s little eyes observed me with distaste. Perhaps he looked on me as a rival.

Abel Glanz had been frequenting Phöbus Bohlaug’s house for years. He is one of those regular teatime callers whom the town’s more prosperous householders feel will be the ruin of them and whom nevertheless they cannot muster the courage to banish.

‘Have a cup of tea,’ said Phöbus Bohlaug.

‘No thank you,’ says Abel Glanz, ‘I am as full of tea as a samovar. That’s the fourth cup I’ve had to refuse already. Since lunch it’s been nothing but tea. Don’t insist, Herr Bohlaug!’

Bohlaug will not be deflected.

‘In all your lifetime you’ve not drunk tea like this, Glanz.’

‘What can you mean, Herr Bohlaug? I was once invited by Princess Basikoff, Herr Bohlaug, remember that,’ says Abel Glanz as threateningly as is possible for him.

‘And I am telling you that even Princess Basikoff never drank such a tea as this.