A stupid fellow wanted to take me with him to Paris and since then I keep thinking I’ll go.’

‘Alexander Bohlaug?’

‘You know him, and you arrived yesterday?’

‘You know me, too.’

‘Have you been talking to Ignatz already?’

‘No, but Bohlaug is my cousin.’

‘Oh! Excuse me!’

‘No, no, I beg of you. He is a stupid fellow.’

Stasia has a couple of chocolate bars, and brings out a spirit stove from the bottom of a hatbox.

‘Nobody must know about this. Even Ignatz doesn’t know. I hide it in a different place every day. In the hatbox today, yesterday in my muff, once between the cupboard and the wall. The police forbid spirit stoves in the hotel. But it is only possible – I mean for people like us – to live in hotels, and the Savoy is the best I know. Are you staying long?’

‘No, just for a few days.’

‘Oh, then you won’t get to know the Hotel Savoy. Santschin and his family live next door. Santschin is our clown – would you like to meet him?’

I wouldn’t, but Stasia needs some tea.

The Santschins do not live next door, but at the far end of the laundry, by the laundry. The roof slopes here and is so low that one is afraid of bumping the ceiling. In reality one does not reach it by a long way. It only gives the illusion of threatening. Generally speaking all dimensions shrink in this corner, as the result of the grey steam from the laundry which blinds you, shortens all distances and puffs out the walls. It is hard to accustom oneself to the air which is constantly steaming, blurs outlines, smells damp and warm, and turns people into unreal shapes.

Santschin’s room is steamy, too, and his wife quickly shuts the door behind us as if some wild animal lurked outside. The Santschins, who have lived here for six months, are well versed in shutting doors quickly. Their lamp, burning in a grey corona, reminds one of photographs of constellations surrounded by nebulae. Santschin rises to his feet, slips one arm into a dark jacket and nods in greeting to his guests. His head seems to rise out of the clouds like some supernatural manifestation in a religious picture.

He smokes a long pipe and talks very little. The pipe limits his conversation. By the time he is half way through a sentence he has to stop, reach for his wife’s darning needle and scratch about with it in the bowl of the pipe. Or a fresh match has to be struck and the matches have to be found. Frau Santschin is warming milk for the child and needs the matches just as often as her husband. The matchbox moves endlessly from beside Santschin to the washbasin on which the spirit stove stands, but sometimes it is left on the way and disappears without trace in the mist. Santschin bends down, knocks over a chair, the milk is hot and is taken off the stove whose flame flickers until something else is put on to warm, because of the risk of the matches not turning up again.

I offered my own box of matches first to one Santschin and then to the other, but neither of them wished to avail themselves of it and went on searching instead, leaving the stove to burn in vain. Finally Stasia spotted the matchbox in a fold of the coverlet on the bed.

A second later Frau Santschin is looking for the keys so as to extract the tea from the trunk – it could ‘after all’ be stolen from its tin. ‘I hear something rattling somewhere,’ says Santschin in Russian. We all stand still and listen for the rattling of keys, but nothing stirs. ‘They can’t rattle of their own accord,’ yells Santschin, ‘move around, all of you, then we’ll hear them soon enough.’

But they made themselves heard only when Frau Santschin found a milk stain on her blouse and reached rapidly for her apron so as to avoid a repetition of the accident. The keys turn out to be in the apron, but not a single tea leaf is in the trunk.

‘Are you looking for the tea?’ asks Santschin suddenly. ‘I finished it this morning.’

‘Why do you sit there like a clot, saying nothing?’ screams his wife.

‘In the first place I have said something,’ replies Santschin, who is a man of logic, ‘and in the second place no one has asked me.