I felt curious about the town and my new life. My room seemed friendly, as if I had lived there for a long time. The bell was familiar, and the doorhandle, the light switch, the green lampshade, the clothes cupboard and the washbasin. Everything was homely, like a room in which one has spent one’s childhood. Everything was consoling and warm, like returning again to someone beloved.

The only new thing was the notice on the door which read:

QUIET IS REQUESTED AFTER IO PM NO RESPONSIBILITY CAN BE TAKEN FOR VALUABLES LEFT IN THE ROOM. THERE IS A SAFE IN THE HOTEL.

KALEGUROPULOS. HOTELIER

The name was foreign, Greek, and I amused myself by declensions: Kaleguropulos, Kaleguropulu, Kaleguropulo – a vague recollection of boring school periods; of a Greek master resurrected from forgotten years in a bottle-green jacket. I buried the memory. Next I decided to stroll through the town, perhaps to look up a relation if time permitted, and to enjoy whatever the evening and the town might offer.

I go along the corridor to the main staircase and take pleasure in the handsome square flagstones of the hotel passage, in the clean red stone and the steady echo of my footsteps.

I walk slowly downstairs. From the lower floors come voices, but up here everything is silent. All the doors are shut, one moves as if it were an old monastery, past the doors of monks at prayer. The fifth floor looks exactly like the sixth, one could easily confuse them. Up above and here, too, a standard clock hangs facing the stairs, but the two clocks do not tell the same time. The one on the sixth floor says seven o’clock, on this floor it says ten past and on the fourth floor it says ten to seven.

Upon the flagstones on the third floor lie dark red carpets with green borders and one no longer hears one’s footsteps. The room numbers are not painted on the doors but mounted on little porcelain signs. A maid passes with a feather duster and a wastepaper basket. They seem here to pay more attention to cleanliness. This is where the rich live, and the cunning Kaleguropulos lets the clocks run slow, because the rich have time.

On the mezzanine the two wings of a door were standing wide open.

This was a large room with two windows, two beds, two chests of drawers, a green plush sofa, a brown tiled stove and a stand for luggage. Kaleguropulos’ sign was not to be seen on the door – perhaps the residents at this level were allowed to be noisy after ten o’clock, and perhaps the management did take responsibility for valuables – or did they already know about the safe, or did Kaleguropulos inform them personally?

A scented woman with a grey feather boa rustled out of a neighbouring room. This is a lady, I say to myself, and walk close behind her down the last few stairs, admiring her little polished bootees. The lady pauses for a while at the hall porter’s, I reach the doors at the same time as her, the porter salutes and I feel flattered that perhaps the porter thinks that I am the rich lady’s escort.

I decided, since I had no idea of what direction to take, that I would follow her. She turned right out of the narrow street in which the hotel stood, and there the market square widened out. It must have been market day. Hay and chaff were scattered about the pavements, shops were just being shut, locks were clicking, chains rattling, householders were making for home with little handcarts, women wearing bright headscarves were hurrying, carefully carrying full pots in front of them and bursting market bags over their arms, with wooden spoons sticking out of the top. A few lanterns cast their silvery light into the dusk, the pavements turned into a parade where men in uniform and in civilian clothes twirled their slender canes, and waves of Russian scent ebbed and flowed. Coaches came bumping along from the railway station, piled high with luggage, their passengers muffled up. The road surface was poor, uneven and potholed, the worst places covered with rotten duckboards which rattled surprisingly.

Even so, the town looked friendlier in the evening than by day. In the morning it was grey, coal dust from the gigantic chimneys of nearby factories drifted over it, dirty beggars crouched at the street corners, garbage and night soil buckets were piled in the back alleys. Darkness, however, hid everything; filth, vice, pestilence and poverty alike; darkness was kindly, motherly, forgiving and concealing.

Houses which are merely decrepit and tumbledown look ghostly and secret in the dark, their architecture capricious. Crooked gables become delicate in the shadows, dim light beckons mysteriously through half-darkened window panes, two paces further on a blaze of light streams out from windows as tall as a man giving onto a confectioner’s where mirrors reflect crystal and candelabra and from whose ceiling amiable angels swoop and stoop. This is the rich world’s confectioner and in this industrial town it earns and spends money.

This was the lady’s destination but I did not follow her in because it occurred to me that my money must last me for quite a time before I could continue my journey.

I sauntered along, saw dark groups of busy Jews in kaftans, listened to loud gossip, to greetings and greetings returned, to cross words and long talk. Talk of feathers, percentages, hops, steel, coal and lemons flew into the air, out of mouths and aimed at ears.