Yesterday I would have sold half my soul for a fare and today Alexander was offering me freedom and money. And yet it seemed to me that Alexander Bohlaug had come too late. I should have rejoiced, and said so, but I did nothing of the kind and assumed a thoughtful expression. Alexander ordered one schnaps after another, but the more I drank the more melancholy I became, and the thought of travelling further and the thought of freedom vanished into thin air.

‘You don’t want to, dear cousin?’ asked Alexander and, to indicate that he was indifferent, began to tell me about the revolution in Berlin at which he had by chance been present.

‘You know, these bandits are wandering around for two days, and one isn’t sure if one will get away with one’s life. I spend the whole day sitting about in the hotel. Below they are preparing the armoured cellars against all possibilites. A couple of diplomats live there, too. I’m thinking, so long, my lovely life – I escaped the war and now the revolution is going to catch me. It was a stroke of luck that I had Vally along. A couple of us were friends and called her Vally, the comforter, because she was our comfort in time of need, as it says in the Bible.’

‘That’s not in the Bible.’

‘No matter – you should have seen her ankles, my dear cousin, and when she let her hair down it reached to her bum. Those were wild times, and all about what? Tell me why all these dramas were necessary?’

Alexander sat with legs apart. So as to preserve the creases he stretched them out in front of him and tapped on the floor with his heels.

‘So I shall have to look for another room,’ says Alexander, ‘if you don’t want to,’ and, ‘I won’t insist. But perhaps you’ll think it over till tomorrow, my dear Gabriel; perhaps?’

Certainly I will think it over. At present I have drunk schnaps and the sudden offer has stunned me even more. I will think it over.

XII

We separated at eleven in the morning, and I had time enough – a whole summer afternoon, an evening, a night.

All the same, I would gladly have had longer, a week, two weeks, a month. Yes, I would like to have chosen a town like this for a longer holiday. It was a really amusing town full of all kinds of wonderful people; there was no one like them in all the world.

There stood this Hotel Savoy, a magnificent hotel, with a porter in uniform, and a gilded coat of arms, promising a lift and scrubbed chambermaids in starched nuns’ coifs. There stood Ignatz, the old lift-boy with his scornful eyes, yellow as beer, but what did he matter to me since I paid and had no luggage to pawn? There was Kaleguropulos, certainly the worst of the lot – I did not know him, no one knew him.

It would have been rewarding to stay on if only for the sake of this Kaleguropulos – mysteries have always fascinated me – and if one stayed longer one would surely have a chance to cross the path of this unseen man.

Certainly it was better to stay on.

Abel Glanz, that remarkable prompter, lived there, there was money to be earned from Herr Kanner, and in the Jewish quarter there was money in the mud on the streets. It would not be bad to enter Western Europe as a rich man. One might arrive at the Hotel Savoy with a single shirt and leave it as the owner of twenty trunks.

And still be the same Gabriel Dan.

Yet do I not wish to go westwards? Have I not spent years in imprisonment? I can still see the yellow hutments, covering the white plain like a dirty scab, I can still taste the last sweet drag on a cigarette butt picked up somewhere. Then the years of wandering, the bitterness of the highway – those grim, frozen ploughed fields which hurt the soles of my feet.

What does Stasia mean to me? The world is full of girls, girls with brown hair, with big, grey, clever eyes and dark lashes, with little feet in grey stockings. One can unite two solitudes and weather pain together. Let Stasia stay with the Variétés and fall prey to Alexander from Paris.

On your way, Gabriel!

It turns out that I am strolling once more, in farewell, through the town, looking at the grotesque architecture of its warped gables and fragmentary chimneys, at the broken window panes patched with newspaper, at poor hovels and the slaughterhouse at the city limits with factory chimneys on the horizon and workers’ tenements, brown with white roofs and pots of geraniums in the windows.

The land round about has the sad beauty of a woman past her flowering, autumn is on the air everywhere although the chestnut leaves are still deep green. One should be somewhere else in autumn, in Vienna, looking along the Ringstrasse, the golden leaves all above, the houses like palaces, the streets straight and cleaned as though distinguished guests were expected.

The wind is blowing from the factory area, smelling of soft coal; grey soot clings to the houses, the whole atmosphere is like a railway station. Time to travel on. The whistle of a train comes over shrilly, people are travelling in the world.

Bloomfield comes into my mind – where can he be, in fact? For a long time he has been supposed to be coming, the industrialists are excited, in the Savoy everything is prepared; where is Bloomfield?

Hirsch Fisch is waiting longingly for him. Perhaps Fisch now has a chance to escape his unending poverty, after all he has known Bloomfield’s father to talk to. His name was Blumenfeld, Jechiel Blumenfeld.

I remember the lottery ticket I had from Hirsch Fisch, the numbers 5, 8 and 3 are sure to win a triple chance. What if I had a winning ticket? Then I could stay on for a while in this interesting town and take it easy for a little longer. I am in no hurry.