Hours and hours and hours on end, she wrote out receipts, as if at a gallop, glued yellow stripes, rubber-stamped, tum tum tum tum-pum! Banker’s Association: To-in Trieste, to-in Constantinople, to-in Belgrade, to-in, to-in, to-in, tum tum tum tum-pum! At 5 P.M. she received a letter from the gallant uncle. She turned all red in the face and tore it right up. The gall of him!
She galloped onwards over the receipts, hop hop hop höööhwoh!: “Dear girl, if you do it like this, it’s much easier.” “Thank you kindly.”
Many receipt recipients attempted to touch her fingertips. Some even skimmed, as if to stroke, her soft white hand. Only the bank clerks maintained a stony stiffness. Snobs!
Finally she got tired, slowed down to an easy trot, started to pen out her signature in calligraphy.
At 7 P.M., right before closing, a gentleman in a wide coat handed her a letter to be posted registered mail.
“Oh—,” said the very young novice, “you’ve put on much too much postage. West Africa is still a part of the World Wide Postal Union.”
She got all giddy over this splendid term “World Wide Postal Union.” As if just saying it made her in a certain sense a member of this far-flung family.
“No matter,” replied the gentleman, “all the more likely that the letter actually reaches its destination.”
“Impractical—,” thought the novice.
“What is the lady’s name?!” she inquired, as she wished to fill out the receipt.
“Miss Wāh-Badûh.”
“In two words?!”
“Naturally.”
“A Negress, I suppose.”
“Indeed, Miss.”
“And in West Africa, Christiansborg?!”
“Yes.”
She gave him the receipt with her calligraphic signature.
The gentleman glanced at her, glanced down at her soft white hands and left. In her heart she felt: “A frosty profession?! Not on your life. Like a ride into the land of romance—.”
But the dowdy old postal worker observed: “Why do you have to go and tell such a goddamn nut that he put too much postage on?! If the state can’t profit off of that sort?! What else are they good for?!”
Conversation with a Chambermaid
“Listen up, my dear Anna, I’m in heaven. An admirer, but not the kind you might imagine, just on account of my books, is going to pay my rent here in town this summer for as long a time as I spend in the country for my really very necessary rest and relaxation.”
She turned pale upon hearing this. She thought: “Jesus, there goes my monthly housekeeping tip of six Crowns! If he isn’t here then he definitely doesn’t need to pay for tidying up the cabinet he even keeps locked up with a Yale lock! He’d be downright batty if he did!”
Whereupon I replied: “Naturally you’ll still be paid your six Crowns a month. Why should you have to suffer a loss just because I want a little relaxation in the country?!”
To which she said: “How nicely and comfortably a person could live if there were a lot of people around like you! Why in forty years a person could perhaps even think of retiring! But honestly, Mr. von Altenberg, what’s the use if there’s just one poet among the many thousands and all the others are such cheapskates?!?”
When my dear and most devoted beloved read this “Sketch from Daily Life,” she said: “You see, here you compensate for your absence in the country, but who, pray tell, makes it up to me?!”
Afternoon Break
Chitchat between two stunning young domestics, on their afternoon break, on the fifth floor in the darkened corridor outside my dear little lighted room:
“Jesus, what a fine and fancy broom you’ve got up here! Ours down in the café kitchen is a sight! Like a plucked chicken!”
“I’ll give you mine! Peter’ll buy me another!”
“What Peter?!”
“Ya know, Peter. Peter Altenberg. He’s a slob, I mean, poor guy, he ain’t got nothin’, but for practical hardware he’s got a heart. Can you believe it, that guy bought a duster for the photographs on his wall, 100 % young gray ostrich feathers, it cost him five whole Crowns!”
“Oh, I’d like to get my hands on that one. It must be lovely to wipe with!”
“Yeah, well, that one he don’t give to nobody. A hundred times already I must’ve pleaded with him! He says: ‘In my will!’ But he’s got a good ten years to go. People like that that never lift a finger in their life, except for a little scribbling, they last!”
The Mouse
I checked into the quiet little room on the fifth floor of the good old Stadthotel with two pairs of socks and two large bottles of slivovitz for unseen eventualities.
“If it please, Sir,” said the concierge, “shall I have your luggage brought up?!?”
“I have none,” I said straight out.
Then he said: “Would you like electric lighting?!”
“Yes.”
“It’ll cost you fifty Heller a night. But you can also make do with a candle,” he said, considering my circumstances.
“No, I’d rather have electric, please.”
At midnight, I heard sounds of wallpaper being torn and scratched. Then a mouse appeared, climbed up into the wash basin, made all sorts of curious circular perambulations, and leaped back down to the floor, since porcelain did not suit its purpose. Having no definite, far-reaching plans for the future, it finally found the darkness under the cabinet a rather convenient refuge, under the circumstances.
In the morning, I said to the chambermaid: “Say, last night there was a mouse in my room. That’s some clean house you keep!”
“There are no mice in this establishment — that’s a good one! Where’s a mouse to crawl out of, pray tell?! No one can say such a thing about this hotel!”
After that, I said to the concierge: “Your chambermaid has some nerve. There was a mouse in my room last night.”
“There are no mice in this establishment. Where’s a mouse to crawl out of, pray tell?! No one can say such a thing about this hotel!”
When I stepped into the hotel lobby, the doorman and the porter looked at me, as did the other two chambermaids and the manager, the way one looks at a person who checks in with two pairs of socks and two bottles of slivovitz and proceeds to see mice that aren’t there.
My book, What the Day Brings, lay open on my table, and I once caught the chambermaid reading it.
Under these regrettable circumstances, my credibility in regard to mice was rather dubious. On the other hand, however, I did reap the benefits of a certain aura: No one argued with me any longer, they even allowed for little weaknesses to go unnoticed, shut an eye on eccentricities, behaved in an exceptionally accommodating manner as one would with an invalid or a person over whom one takes special pains for some other reason.
Still, the mouse made its regular nightly appearance, scratched at the wallpaper, and often climbed into my wash basin.
One evening, I bought myself a mousetrap complete with bacon, marched ostentatiously with the contraption past the doorman, the porter, the manager, room service, and the three chambermaids, and set the trap in my room. The next morning, I found the mouse in it.