But there remained a small hitch. “I don’t want one room; I want two rooms,” declared Molkho with a worried look at his little Russian, who had just arrived with her trunk and collapsed into a chair, her eyelids drooping with fatigue, oblivious of the swords and old maritime maps hanging over her. “Two roomps?” echoed the Germans sadly. “Two roomps again?” Doubtfully they rechecked the register, but there were no two roomps, only van roomps, and that, too, by a stroke of luck. “Only van roomps?” asked Molkho softly with a despairing glance at the little dining room that was already set for breakfast. He crossed the lobby, which seemed to have grown even tinier, and peered through the open door of the kitchen behind the reception desk. Everything looked dearly familiar. By the elevator the trunk and suitcases were impatiently waiting. “Can’t you find another room?” he pleaded with the proprietor. “But how?” asked the German with an ironic look at his puritanical guest who traveled around the world two-roompsing different women. “All right,” sighed Molkho, giving in and handing them his passport, for it was getting dark outside and the little Russian was exhausted. “We’ll start with van roomps and see.”
The grandfather of the family was summoned from the kitchen to celebrate the capitulation. He, too, recognized the newcomer at once and even made some German joke that led to peals of laughter. I certainly made an impression, thought Molkho, taking the elevator with his Russian to the second floor, where they were given a room next to the legal adviser’s—in fact, so like it, apart from the picture on the wall, that Molkho was flooded with warm memories. Soon they were joined by the suitcases and the trunk (which Prussian ingenuity fitted into a closet that would have defeated the Austrians) and were left to unpack, the little Russian laying her coat and jacket on the bed that she would have to share with him. How, he wondered, should he tell her? “I’ll be back in a jiffy,” he announced, hoping she might realize by herself. Then, her Hebrew vocabulary having reached the vanishing point as it always did when she was tired, he repeated, “I will be back soon.”
HE BYPASSED THE ELEVATOR and bounded down the narrow, familiar stairs two at a time, though once in the lobby he couldn’t say what the rush had been. Perhaps he simply wished to chat with the proprietor, who was already pouring a drink for his first customer, a dark, quiet Indian in evening dress. Were there any other reasonably priced hotels in the vicinity? Molkho asked, still looking for a way to find two roomps. Not that he knew of, frowned the German. That is, there was an establishment a few blocks away, but it didn’t cater to the best clientele and wasn’t clean; indeed, he couldn’t recommend it at all for a foreign woman. “I see,” nodded Molkho, eyeing the chairs in the lobby, from which perhaps a makeshift bed might be rigged.
Meanwhile, shaking drops of rain from his battered jacket, the tall student arrived with his books for the night shift and smiled a friendly hello. Whatever you say about her, thought Molkho of the legal adviser, she knew how to pick a place with the human touch. “Are the old prices still in effect?” he asked the student, who was organizing himself at the desk. They were indeed. And would his room be available the following night too? It most certainly would be. And how about the night after that? The night after that was a problem. “Well, then,” declared Molkho, his anxiety abating, “hold it for tomorrow anyway.”
Through the open door of the kitchen, he could see the family getting ready for dinner. The grandfather clock on the wall struck eight, and more courtly Indians began descending from above, some with white, sacerdotal turbans. Off to the opera, they filed past the desk to hand their keys to the student, who deftly hung each dove-shaped holder over its cubbyhole until there were eleven little pendulums in a row, all swinging slowly to a stop, so that Molkho, who held the twelfth in his hand and didn’t feel at all tired after napping on the train, had an urge to hand it in too, go dine on wurst and fries in his working-class restaurant, and take in an opera himself, perhaps even his lost Don Giovanni. But, instead, he climbed slowly back up the stairs, passed his old number Seeks, now inhabited by turbaned Sikhs, and knocked lightly on the little Russian’s door.
There was no answer. He knocked again. Still no answer. If she’s fallen asleep, so much the better, he thought—but just then he heard a barefoot patter and she came to the door, a little woman barely taller than a child. “We have a problem,” he smiled glumly. “This is the only room there is, which means I’ll have to sleep in it too.” Far from sounding despairing, however, the gusty sigh he sat down with seemed to say that this was but a minor setback in a boldly conceived plan that not only had brought them safely in a matter of hours from Vienna to Berlin but had deposited them unerringly on the doorstep of a hotel that actually had a free room, though unfortunately only one. No, he thought as she gaped at him with her big and slightly bleary eyes, I have nothing against those baby blues at all, but they definitely do not turn me on. Still, concerned for her faith in the honorable intentions of the middle-aged widower she was entrusted to, he began to pace up and down, trying to overlook the clothing she had flung all over the room. Suppose she had some organic deformity that a night with her would reveal? After all, there must be some reason she was single, some hidden flaw that might not come to light in airports and department stores but only in more intimate circumstances. Could she be missing a breast? He would have liked to stroke her curly head paternally, but unsure if the gesture would meet with her approval, he tried thinking more practically, for time was passing and they still had to eat and get to sleep if they were to rise refreshed in the morning, when they would try to find a hole in the Iron Curtain big enough for her to slip through.
He began unpacking his things, for which as usual there were not enough hangers. (The reason hotel hangers were always in short supply, his wife had once explained to him, was the management’s fear that desperate guests might hang themselves on them, a theory perhaps less farfetched than it seemed.) Opening the closet, he removed the steamer trunk, which left no space for anything else, carried it as gently as a baby’s casket to the side of the bed, and made of it a table for his suitcase, from which he took out his toilet articles and the clothes for Paris that he wished to keep from getting creased. Had the double bed had two mattresses, he could have laid one on the floor, but he was not about to sleep on the bare rug, nor for that matter in a chair. With a smile at the barefoot Russian, who stood mesmerized by his flurry of activity, he entered the bathroom and locked the door behind him. The sink was full of soaking laundry, pairs of underpants and bras whose suds aroused in him a flicker of hope. Should he take them out and hang them up? In the end he used the faucet in the bathtub, where he washed and brushed his teeth before placing his toothbrush beside hers in its cup on a basis of perfect equality. Silently he peed into the toilet bowl, surprised at how clearheaded he felt. Should he phone his mother-in-law that he was back in Berlin or keep it as a surprise.