The corridor above was very narrow, the ceiling was lower, grey steam poured out of a laundry and the place smelt of damp clothing. Two or three doors must have been ajar because one heard voices arguing. As I suspected, no clock hung on this floor. I was on the point of going downstairs when the lift ground to a halt, the gate opened, the liftman gave me a puzzled look and a girl stepped out. She was wearing a small, grey, sports hat, and turned in my direction. Her face was brown and she had large grey eyes with black eyelashes. I said good evening to her and proceeded down stairs. On the bottom stair something made me look up again and I thought I glimpsed the beer-coloured eyes of the liftman looking in my direction. I locked my door because I was unaccountably frightened. I began reading an old book.

III

I am not sleepy. A bell from a church tower sends regular strokes into the gentle night. Above me I hear cautious, soft, unceasing footsteps, which must be a woman’s. Was it the young girl from the seventh floor who walked so restlessly back and forth? What was troubling her?

I looked up at the ceiling under the sudden impression that it had become transparent. Perhaps one might see the delicate soles of the girl in grey. Would she go barefoot or in slippers? Would she be wearing grey stockings of half-silk? I remembered how I and many of my comrades had longed for a leave which would enable us to ease our longing for a pair of buckskin shoes. The legs of healthy peasant girls were there to be stroked, they would have broad feet, their big toe widely spaced from walking through the muddy fields and along the muddy roads. The hard ground of the autumn fields was the nuptial bed beneath their bodies. Strong thighs. A minute of rapid love in the dark before the command to fall in interrupted. I thought back to the schoolteacher, no longer young, in a village in the military zone. She was the only woman in the place who had not taken flight from the war and its onslaught. She was a sharp-tongued young woman, over thirty and known as the ‘barbed wire entanglement’, but there was not a man within a radius of some kilometres, far and wide, who would not have courted her. She was the only woman with shoes, even if her stockings had holes in them.

In this enormous Hotel Savoy with its 864 rooms, and indeed in the whole town, there were perhaps only two people awake, the girl overhead and myself. We might as well lie side by side, I, Gabriel, and the brown girl with the friendly face and the big grey eyes with dark eyelashes. To hear the tread of this gazelle so clearly the hotel ceilings must be very thin. I imagined to myself that I could detect the scent of her body. I decided to find out if the steps were really those of the girl.

In the corridor there burned a little dark red glowworm of a light; shoes, boots, women’s shoes stood outside the bedroom doors, all as expressive as human faces. No such light burned on the seventh floor, but feeble light shone from opaque glass. A thin yellow beam shone through a chink from room 800, this must be the room of the restless pacer. I can see through the keyhole and it is the girl. She is walking in some white garment – it is a bath robe – back and forth, stopping for a moment to glance at a book before resuming her pacing.

I make an effort to divine her face, but only glimpse the gentle curve of her chin, a quarter of her profile when she stands still, a cascade of hair and now and again as she takes a long stride the peignoir parts to reveal a glimmer of brown skin. From somewhere came a painful cough, someone spat resonantly into a spittoon. I went back to my room.