Donáth purposefully strides the length and breadth of the boiler-room.
The mornings are foggy now and the sky is leaden more often than not. Autumn is knocking on the metal door. Only now can everyone see it, but Donáth awoke from sentimental summer daydreams a long time ago. He’s forced his fire-toughened body to perform its stiff practised movements. All the equipment has to be got ready for the winter. At this stage he goes without food.
Slimmed down, he works, or stands at the door and makes a low mooing sound meant to convey his diligence, stabbing his chest with a crooked, hardened index finger. In a moment he will explain to all the hotel staff that he’s hard at work. Now he’ll have to heat the water. A lot of it will be needed. The guests take a lot of baths and they have to be kept happy. Donáth doesn’t mind. In winter he stokes all the boilers. There are six of them. Donáth can manage. He clicks his heels like an old waiter. Come and take a look if you don’t believe him, but they all seem to believe him. Everyone gets on with their work. From the open ventilators of the laundry room billows thick steam, pleasantly smelling of soap. Gypsy women, wearing only full-length aprons, smoke in the yard. They laugh at Donáth and scream as they let themselves be chased round the heaps of coal in the yard. Now and then they lift their aprons and show him they’re not wearing knickers and shout “Bugger the Virgin Mary” at him in Romany. Who could stand that heat? But Donáth is only interested in the gypsies when they do as he tells them. Six boilers. Donáth counts them with his eyes closed. Number one, number two, and so on. Number four is out of operation. Donáth can prove it. It’s not allowed. It’s a safety hazard. A hazard! Donáth pronounces that word with relish, feeling it makes him important. It gives him the indefinable charisma of people who look death in the eye every day. “Hazard.” Here they use coal. All the other boiler-rooms in the neighbourhood have switched to oil or gas. This one, Donáth insists, is a classic. Another word. “Classic.” How much meaning and charm can be found in a single word!
* * *
It seems as if time stands still in Donáth’s boiler-room. In the winter, the gaping red-hot muzzles of the furnaces whine hungrily. In the darkness, illuminated now and then by nervous flashes of fire, the heaps of greasy black coal glisten. The boiler-room supplies heat to almost an entire side of the street, from the Hotel Ambassador to the crossroads. There are only shops there. Shops selling household goods, a chemist’s, a car parts shop, and a leather goods shop. The old stoker has to keep the fire going in five boilers. One is out of order. Winters are bad here. The furnaces have to be fed every hour with black fodder, day and night, ceaselessly. That doesn’t bother Donáth. He divorced his wife a long time ago, he has no home and he won’t sleep in a dormitory. He’s been working here for many years. His shelter is a little room behind the boiler-room, but he’s never to be found there. He’s mostly in the boiler-room. He also sleeps there, on a bench behind a solid, rough-hewn old table. He lugs coal from the coal-room in a wheelbarrow, feeding the roaring furnaces by shovelling it in. He keeps the ashes in metal drums, hosing them down with water and lifting them up to the yard in a special lift. Mounds of grey and black ashes stay there all winter. A truck comes in spring and takes the ashes to a nearby brickworks.
Donáth is completely alone in this work. Four men used to work there in shifts. But now people use oil and gas, nobody wants to mess with greasy heavy black coal. The boiler-room is obsolete and there’s a lot of work. Donáth has let his superior, the manager of the Hotel Ambassador, know that he’s really tired and exhausted and that they should find someone new, although he will try to stay on for the summer. Donáth has a place to go to. The manager has tried to talk him into staying, but the old man won’t hear of it. He was meant to retire seven years ago. He needs to live a little, to relax, and take it easy.
Donáth has checked the furnaces and is now sitting in the basement. He is waiting for someone to take his place. No one is coming. Donáth has been working in this hotel for over fifty years. The work is heavy and demanding, but he doesn’t complain. He likes it, and so on. True, he should have retired a long time ago. But he is still working. They respect him. They couldn’t find anyone like him. Lately he’s been getting tired. Sometimes he gets drunk; sometimes he gets a headache. Donáth doesn’t complain. It’s all part of life.
It is only the end of August, but the wind is blowing through the city streets. The time has come to put the boiler-room in order. You have to work systematically and not overdo it. After you hit thirty, you’re not Mr Muscleman any more. He’s alone; he lives here. He works all the time. There used to be four men taking alternate shifts here. Only Donáth is still alive. Years go by and you can’t stop time. The gentlemen upstairs in the administration are still fiddling the books to make it look as if four men still worked in the boiler-room. Two salaries and all collective bonuses go to Donáth. Even the bonuses for socialist competition go to him. This means he’s competing against himself. He’s a one-man collective. Two salaries stay upstairs in the office. The gentlemen will share them.
Donáth knows every nut and bolt here. He is old school. Not long ago, anyone who tried to take over his work would be asking to be killed. But years pass. He’s not the same any more. He used to threaten the people upstairs with quitting, but he never meant it seriously. Old age has put him in a quandary. And so has love. Love, in his old age! The people upstairs will have to find out one day. He can imagine how they’ll react. But who’ll do the work in the boiler-room? There’s the question. Donáth paces up and down and sweeps the floor.
The manager enters with the hotel lawyer. The manager is stupid. His father-in-law helped get him through Hotel College and then found him a job in the Hotel Ambassador. Without the lawyer, the manager can’t even tie his shoelaces. The lawyer is full of bitterness. He’s heard that Donáth wants to leave. He considers this a betrayal. Isn’t Donáth, after all, going to miss all this? They gave Donáth a nice shelter. All he had to do was to bail out the water. They even gave him a radio. It’s a nice radio. He doesn’t spend a penny on food. Behind the lawyer’s back he eats in the hotel kitchen, but the lawyer knows everything. And yet he knows nothing, since he turns a blind eye. There’s hot food, a little room, a radio, and two salaries. That’s not bad. Most people aren’t that lucky.
But Donáth has made his mind up. He won’t be here by winter. Someone else can work in the boiler-room, if he may say so.
The manager has his say too. He does not look either Donáth or the lawyer in the face. Quietly he notes that he tries to be a good but strict supervisor to his employees. Maybe not all of them can see that what he does is only for their own good. But he doesn’t discriminate. What would become of us, if everyone discriminated? Systematic and people-oriented work will bear fruit one of these days. “Today only I understand it,” says the manager, “tomorrow others will understand as well. And the day after tomorrow, even a hopeless idiot will understand.” In the manager’s opinion, one has to set oneself ever-higher goals and not rest on one’s laurels. And prove it not merely with words, but with honest work. Aim ceaselessly higher. That’s the slogan of the day. Not least of all, of course. Enough empty words and grand statements!