It fits.

I appreciate and understand the need for a blue suit, ‘good as new’, for polka-dotted brown ties and for a brown waistcoat. That afternoon I leave with a brown cardboard box in my hand. I am to come again. The hope of travel money still hums quietly inside me.

‘You see? I’ve fitted him out,’ said Phöbus to Regina.

V

The girl’s name is Stasia. The programme of the Variétés does not bill her by name. She dances on cheap boards in front of an audience of local and Parisian Alexanders. She executes a couple of movements from an oriental dance, then sits down crosslegged before an incense burner and waits for the curtain. One can see her body, blue shadows under her arms, the swelling of a brown breast, the curve of her hip, her thigh revealed by the short tricot.

There was a farcical brass band. The absence of violins almost hurt. There were old humorous songs, rubbishy jokes by a clown, a dressed up donkey with the bottom of its ears painted red, trotting patiently back and forth. Waiters in white, smelling like beer cellars, passed between the rows carrying mugs overflowing with froth. The beam of a yellow spot shone diagonally from a capriciously sited opening in the ceiling, the dark backcloth of the stage gaped like the cry of an open mouth, the compere croaked like the bearer of evil tidings.

I wait at the stage door; once again it is like the old days when as a boy I waited in the side alley, pressed into the shadow of a doorway, melting into it until the sound of quick young steps rang out from the pavement, flowering miraculously from the barren paving stones.

Stasia came out in company with men and women, their voices mingled.

For a long time I was lonely in the midst of thousands. Now there are a thousand things which I can share: a glimpse of a dilapidated gable, a swallow’s nest in a cupboard of the Hotel Savoy, the irritating beer-yellow eye of the old lift-boy, the bitterness of the seventh floor, the mystery of a Greek name, of a suddenly living grammatical concept, the melancholy recollection of an awkward Aorist tense, the constrictions of my parental house, the laughably ponderous Phöbus Bohlaug and ‘little Alexander’s’ life saved by his transfer to the army service corps. Living things took on more life, things that were generally condemned seemed even more detestable, Heaven was nearer, the world at one’s feet.

The door of the lift was open and Stasia was seated inside. I did not hide my delight and we wished each other good evening like old acquaintances. I greeted the inevitable lift-boy drily. He pretended not to know that I should get out at the sixth floor and took us both to the seventh. Here Stasia emerged and disappeared into her room, but the lift-boy waited on, as if he had a passenger to collect: why was he waiting there with his scornful yellow eyes?

I therefore proceed slowly down the stairs, listening to hear if the lift is going to come down. Finally, when I am halfway down, I hear the watery sound of the lift in motion. I turn back. From the top storey the liftman is starting down the stairs, having sent the lift down empty, coming down himself slowly and grumpily on foot.

Stasia was probably expecting my knock.

I try to apologise.

‘No, no,’ says Stasia. ‘I would have invited you before, but I was afraid of Ignatz. He is the most dangerous person in the Hotel Savoy. I know your name, too, Gabriel Dan, and that you have come out of prison camp. I took you yesterday for a – colleague – an artiste,’ she hesitates: perhaps she fears that I shall be insulted?

I was not. ‘No,’ I reply. ‘I don’t know what I am. Earlier on I wanted to be a writer, but I went to the war and now I feel there is no point in writing. I am a solitary person and cannot write for the public.’

‘You live directly above my room,’ I say, for lack of anything more fascinating.

‘Why do you walk about all night long?’

‘I’m learning French. I’d like to go to Paris and do something. Not dancing.