They were completely undone, and I felt inconsiderate and ungrateful telling them that I would rather go back to the hotel, I would just get a bite to eat there; there was no need to call a restaurant and have the menu read to me so I could make my decision. I wasn’t hungry and would be happy with a beer and a bag of potato chips from the minibar in my room. Finally they left, saying good-bye at the steps to the hotel with a friendliness I didn’t deserve, they being so amiable and I cursing them inside, longing for the moment when I could lie down on the bed, do nothing, not speak to anyone, take off my shoes and fluff up the pillow and stare at the ceiling, enjoying all the hours ahead when I could be alone, take a walk at my pleasure, wherever I pleased, with no one beside me to subject me to implacable courtesy.
I luxuriated for a while in the German comfort of the room, which was small, with beams in the ceiling and a floor of polished wood, like an illustration in a story. I pulled up one of those warm, light eiderdowns that you don’t find in any other part of the world, but I didn’t want to fall asleep because it was early, even though it was growing dark, if I slept now I might be wide-awake at two in the morning and spend the rest of the night in one of those miserable bouts of hotel-room insomnia. So I went down to the lobby, first looking to see that none of my hosts was about, and when I went outside, I also looked both ways, like a spy in the John Le Carré novels I read as a youth, ordinary-looking men in glasses and overcoat who walk through small German cities, turning from time to time to look in the side mirror of a parked car to be sure they’re not being followed by an agent of the Stasi. There was a cold mist in the air, the dampness and smell of a river and wet vegetation. As I walked I began to recover from my exhaustion and drowsiness, and the euphoria began that tends to animate me when I go outside in a strange city and have no obligations to meet and nobody knows me.
I remember a few things clearly: a cobblestone street, houses with peaked roofs on both sides, slate roofs, wood beams crisscrossing the facades, small windows with carved wooden shutters, and through them scenes of well-lit, paneled rooms lined with books. I would hear the sharp sound of a bicycle bell behind me and be overtaken by a placidly pedaling man or woman, not necessarily young, sometimes a white-haired lady in an out-of-style hat, sometimes an executive wearing a navy-blue suit beneath his raincoat. I saw Gothic towers with gilded clocks and streetcars that floated across a street in a silence almost as ghostly as that of the bicycles. On a street corner my attention was caught by a bright pastry shop and busy sounds — though they, too, were muted, as if wrapped in the general quiet of the city — of jovial conversation and the clink of teaspoons and cups, along with the warm, pungent aroma of baking, and of cocoa and coffee, on the cold air. Because I was hungry and I’d grown cold during my long walk, I overcame the timidity that so often keeps me from going alone into a place filled with locals, that Spanish diffidence that becomes more pronounced when I’m in a foreign country. It must have been a shop from the turn of the twentieth century, preserved intact, with stucco and gilding reminiscent of the Autro-Hungarian baroque, mahogany-framed mirrors and ballroom chandeliers, and marble-top tables and slender columns of white-painted iron that gleamed with touches of gold on the capitals. There were racks holding thick German newspapers, the print heavy and black, as if from early in the century, the First World War. The waitresses wore low-cut white bodices and old-fashioned skirts, their blond hair a wheel of braids or curls secured over the ears and their round faces pink from rushing among tables crowded with people, one hand high above their heads skillfully supporting a tray laden with teapots, porcelain jugs of coffee or chocolate, and tarts — the same copious, exquisite tarts so temptingly displayed in the showcases in greater variety than I had ever seen, or have since.
I took a seat at a small corner table and waited for my tea and the cheese-and-blackberry tart I had succeeded in ordering, using sign language. I entertained myself looking at the faces around me, enjoying the warm room and the tranquillity of not having to pay attention to a language I didn’t understand. Most of the clientele were older, prosperous retired couples or groups of ladies in hats and coats, and the general tone was one of solid and civilized pleasure, heads nodding and hands with extended pinkies lifting teacups, prudent laughter, lively conversation. Pairs of light eyes sometimes registered my presence with a slight flicker of curiosity, or perhaps rejection. I was undoubtedly the only stranger in the place, and in the mirror in front of me I suddenly saw myself as if from the outside — as the waitress bringing my tea and tart must have seen me, or the man with very blue eyes and very white hair who had turned slightly and was examining me as he continued talking to the lady with gold earrings, jet-black-dyed hair, and white gloves sitting next to him, whose excessive makeup accentuated the countless creases that ringed her crimson lips. I saw my own black hair, dark eyes, white shirt — no necktie — and the five o’clock shadow that gave me the appearance of a Bulgarian or Turk. My suit jacket, wrinkled after several days of travel and neglect, looked like the jackets immigrants wear, the ones you see in 1960s photographs of Spaniards in Germany.
I was tired; professional trips wear me out, and new acquaintances make my head spin, and I sleep badly in hotels. I was beginning to see the faces and objects around me as through a fog, although no one was smoking in the pastry shop and the only vapor came from the cups and the breath of people walking in from the cold. How strange I hadn’t noticed earlier that everyone except the waitresses was old, the men and women as carefully preserved as the decor and the plaster molding of the tearoom, and equally decrepit: false teeth, canes, toupees, blond or white-powdered wigs, bi- and trifocal eyeglasses, orthopedic shoes and stockings, Miss Marple hats, and parchment-skinned, arthritic hands tremulously conveying forkfuls of tart and delicate porcelain teacups. Even the rosy, plump waitresses were somehow ancient despite their ballooning skirts, braids and curls, bodices and lace-filled décolletages. I looked at the man who had been examining me a moment before, and it occurred to me that he must be over seventy, maybe eighty. His face and hands were ruddy, as if he spent a lot of time outdoors, and he had the haughty air of a retired military man. In 1940 he wouldn’t have been more than thirty. I saw him in a uniform, those light eyes shaded by the visor of a silver cap. In the Germany of the 1930s and later, during the war, what would he have been doing, where would he have been? I must have been staring at him, because I caught an expression of irritation when his eyes met mine.
I considered the other people in the tearoom in the light of the chandeliers glittering in gilded moldings and multiplied in the mirrors, and I imagined every face, man’s or woman’s, as it might have been fifty or sixty years back. The transformation was at first disquieting, then threatening: those placid features became young and cruel, the mouths sipping chocolate or tea opened in cries of fanatic enthusiasm, the hands with age spots and knuckles deformed by arthritis so elegantly holding teacups shot up like bayonets in an unanimous salute. How many of those around me had yelled Heil Hitler? What was on their conscience, in their memories? How would they have looked at me had I been wearing a yellow star stitched on my overcoat? Had I been in this same pastry shop, would one of those men, in a black leather coat, have approached me and asked for my papers? The stranger with the southern European look draws sidelong glances; cupping his tea in his hands to warm them, he doesn’t know that some conscientious citizen has already called the Gestapo. So many people called in those days, without anyone forcing them, they called out of a sense of duty, and maybe one of these elderly people in the tea shop made such a call, a denunciation like the ones in the archives, proof that the crime was nearly universal, that a multitude of individuals supported the bloody edifice of tyranny. More eyes are focused on me, and my face in the mirror that expands space and multiplies people has also been modified: I am odder, darker. My discomfort grows. I wish I had a book or newspaper, something to distract me and occupy my hands. I feel through the pockets in my overcoat, but I haven’t brought anything except my passport and wallet. Tired of waiting, I gather my courage and stand up to leave, but immediately sit back down — I even think I blush — because the waitress has arrived with the tray and a paper-doll smile, saying something I don’t understand. I pay her before she leaves, drink a little tea, and nibble the overly sweet tart. Dizzy from the excessive warmth, I go outside and am grateful for the solitude and the cold, clean air. I start off through a park, believing it’s the one I walked through on my way from the hotel, but when I come out of it along a high railing and see the lights of a modern street I don’t remember having seen before, I realize, with all the sudden lucidity of waking from a dream, that I am lost.