The Ballad of the Last Guest, page 11
But how do you feel about this: that on the evenings here, wherever you sought refuge, the local innkeepers welcomed you and, until the last minute of last call and usually beyond it as well—no, didn’t “cater” to you, but for a while considerately left you in peace, and later invited you to participate in the goings-on for a while, if not, as on the last of those evenings, actually urged you to pitch in, to help out in the “taproom,” “kitchen,” “cellar,” etc., etc.?
How I felt about it? True: I can’t explain why they accepted me that way, from pub to pub. All I can offer, by way of a partial explanation, is negative observations: the attention I received from these innkeepers—which had nothing professional and certainly nothing calculating about it, and that was true of the proprietor as well as the staff, each in his or her own way—was directed at me less as a regular or as a solitary fixture. Only now, a while later, do I see myself as specifically sought after for such attention. At the time—That one?—Yes, that one, I took the attention for granted, yes. And may it remain that way—Why are you laughing all of a sudden?—No “why.” I suddenly saw myself standing there in the kitchen, in the Indian-Pakistani restaurant, way in back, by the sink, washing dishes, wearing an apron that was ludicrously short, like the one James Stewart wears when he’s serving as a kitchen helper in the restaurant where he meets his future wife in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance … And after all the other guests had left, I was invited by the proprietor and manager to stay at my table to watch the staff’s “small-ball” polo match and then watch the players—the proprietor, waiters, and cooks—romping through the otherwise empty dining room with their improvised mallets …
During the first hour of the evening, it felt sufficient to sit there as a guest among guests. A goodly number of guests occupied the tables and were standing at the bar as well, but from his point of view there could have, should have been more, many more. “Get you to the Old Farmer’s Inn”—not its real name—“whoever you are! There are still seats at my table, several if we squeeze together. And pardon me for stammering—I’ve hardly opened my mouth all day.”
Weren’t there references in one of the Gospels, the good tidings, to poor Lazarus, stricken with leprosy and forced to sleep on a manure heap, to whom Jesus promised that one day he would sit and rest “in the bosom of Abraham”? With all due respect to Abraham, he, Gregor, sat and rested, like a second Lazarus, in this terrestrial inn—nothing could be more terrestrial.
One of its features, among many, was that, at least on those few evenings, each of the guests who wasn’t with friends kept his distance, and even if a few words were exchanged from table to table, not one ever thought of moving to the next table. But from the moment Gregor stepped inside and, without a searching look or, heaven forbid, a critical one, took in the people inside, staff as well as guests, none of them looked like strangers. On every one of the evenings in question, it seemed as though the very existence of the dining room created the effect that when those in charge wished him “Good evening, sir,” they were actually promising him a good evening, and the same was true of those in residence, so to speak, as guests, even if, at table after table, on chair after chair, the occupants either glanced up at the new arrival only briefly and wordlessly or, preoccupied, engrossed in something, didn’t even register his presence. And the appearance of being welcomed, approved of, by the assembled guests, even more effective than being wished a “good evening” by those in charge, such an appearance, such an impression—of this Gregor was certain the moment he set foot in the dining room—was based on something that was inexplicable at first but then almost immediately didn’t need an explanation: the interplay between the guests—on those two or three evenings, all of them—and the seating area—indeed, all the guest areas. Later, when he tried to sketch at least a few of those guests, for the Chronicle of My Entirely Different One-Man Expedition, intentionally leaving the images incomplete and in no sense (!) “fully formed,” “recognizable,” etc., just outlines, silhouettes, sedentary postures, and of the faces neither frontal views nor half profiles, not even a lost profile, nothing but single lines, strokes, oddly curved ones, some curves almost like garlands, suggesting shoulders, the backs of heads—a term unexpectedly came to Gregor Werfer the sketch artist that helped him pinpoint what all the guests had in common: “well intentioned.” Yes, those outlines, those silhouettes, those postures, even profiles—lost or not, for all he cared—he discovered after the fact that they had radiated good intentions, also goodwill, and that’s what they continued to radiate now, from the lines, strokes, and curves. So on only one of the one to three evenings of being hosted and served, as a guest among guests, did you actually experience that, also under the influence of your dead brother, yet you speak of it as if it were something lasting, durable, valid for all time. Yes, and? All that’s missing is your waving a banner with the words “Well-intentioned people of the world, unite!” That would be lovely!
But now back to Gregor, the guest. On his very first evening in one of the restaurants, as he sat silently hour after hour at his table, sipping his wine now and then after the meal, one of the fits of ambition for which he’d been known even as a child came over him. (His ambition as a child, for example: to invent riddles for which no solution existed. Another example: to create mathematical equations with so many unknowns that some of those who knew him found it worrisome. Third and last example: to think up, for the classmates who saw him as a kind of child prodigy, games in which any path one took turned out to be a zigzag course leading not to a goal but only to culs-de-sac and dead ends, with no winners but also no losers.)
Likewise, simili modo, he now became positively greedy to be the last guest. And, as the hours passed and the tables gradually emptied, he began to regard the few remaining holdouts as competitors. In what sort of competition? Why? Because he thought of himself as the last guest writ large—LAST GUEST—as someone with power. What kind of power? Power to bring good luck. The last guest brings luck. But watch out: The last guest brings you, the hosts, and everyone in general, luck only if I’m the last guest—me! If someone other than me is the last guest, that person will bring nothing but misfortune. Do you hear that, hosts? No more guests, this place deserted!
What for a while was an idée fixe, a superstitious belief that he promptly saw through, didn’t take seriously, a little game, subsequently turned lucky, including for him: The Last Guest notion seemed to Gregor, again in a flash, to offer a prospect for the future, for him, who’d now been roaming around for almost a week. An old saying—he didn’t recall whose—came back to him: “I was trembling with eagerness to discover the connection,” and he revised it for himself: “I’m trembling with eagerness to be the last guest.”
And that worked out for him on the very first evening. Initially, however, he was the forgotten guest, the one who, although, like all the others in the room, he’d given the waiter his order, waited and waited, but for whom no food appeared. But he was quite prepared to be the forgotten guest: the few times over the years and the decades when he’d gone to a restaurant by himself, the same thing had happened, as if it were meant to be. And so, after he’d waited for a suitable time—maybe he’d underestimated how long it would take to cook his meal—he repeated his order when an occasion presented itself.
Looking back, Gregor wondered whether the fact, or the role, of the “forgotten guest” hadn’t contributed decisively, on this evening and also the next, to enabling him to remain at his table, not being pressured to leave but indeed cordially invited to stay. First of all, he’d been served much later than the rest of his fellow diners and drinkers (and he’d also, in his ambition to be the last guest, protracted finishing the meal and emptying his glass even longer than his usual slowness as an eater dictated), and then, it went almost without saying, those responsible owed him, as the “forgotten one,” some kind of bonus—how nice to see them recognize that! And how fortunate it turned out to be that he’d begun this particular evening as the forgotten guest. And what’s more, in retrospect he almost believed in fate—saw himself as one of those with a fate.
But how many last guests were still sitting there, how many last guests showed no sign, none at all, of getting ready to leave, until finally he became the last guest of all! Wasn’t this essentially a time, if not the era, of the LAST GUESTS, and the outsiders, marginal figures, warped personalities, odd ducks, and weirdos, initially rather few, an inconsequential minority, were in the process, as last guests, especially at night, of not merely increasing their numbers but also, urbi et orbi, turning up everywhere, and many—indeed, almost all—of them, if one looked more closely and listened attentively, were coming into focus as serious individuals (a term used derisively, and not only in the newspapers’ local pages), deserving of being taken seriously as hardly any of the more “trending” types were.
But back now to the special one among all the last guests, and to his midnight hour in the eatery, where the lights had been dimmed as a favor to him, with soft light and the sounds of washing up coming from the kitchen, accentuating the stillness. (The episode with Gregor and the dishwasher’s apron belongs to the next evening, or some other one.) The restaurant’s curtainless windows looked out on a dimly lit square, neither large nor small, which served as the plaza in front of a local railway station—also dark, because it was closed at this hour—and the site of the weekly market. He heard the clanging of canopy poles, not visible from where Gregor was sitting, but otherwise not a sound from outside.
But what did “out there” suggest to the last guest? And how about “inside”? For him there was no more outside or inside. Or maybe thus: outside was inside and inside was outside. And as he sat there, he was traveling at the same time, or rather being transported. It was a gentler motion than he’d ever experienced (another first? yet another? another still?), and he wished it would go on for a long time, moving him along. “I’m in motion”: take that in a different sense, fundamentally different.
What happened next: during this ride, scenes from his crisscrossing of the area on the previous days were recapitulated, without any effort on his part, inside him as well as before his eyes—by no means all the scenes, only a few, very few. But those few packed a punch. They appeared to him not as they had when he first experienced them, and they didn’t merely appear to him in a different guise; they presented themselves as the real thing, the one that mattered, yes, the only thing worthy of being recorded and passed along, and they came with this stern admonition: The form in which you see this recapitulated, as a recapitulation, is how it was, how it is, how it will have been, you hear? And that’s how it is to be, you hear? Understood, Last Guest?
Remarkable, or maybe not, that among the recapitulated scenes were a few that belonged somewhere else entirely, to other locations, to another time, or to one context or another that he hadn’t consciously registered in the moment. “Do I live on what reveals itself only in retrospect?”
That’s enough now, he told himself, of my first night of adventures as the Last Guest! And all at once he wished that the guests he’d seen earlier that evening as his competitors, the others, the other last guests, hadn’t left. What if—after an adequate communal, unanimous silence from one table to the next—not unexpectedly—indeed, expected any minute by all of them—one of them, these members of the Society of Last Guests, had uttered a word—and what a word!—a word that had broken the ice, after which, obviously, from one table to the next, word would have followed word, making the story’s continuation possible, then and thenceforth.
The clicking of the market-tent poles fell silent, followed by the rolling out of the polyethylene canopies (a reassuring rumbling) to protect the market carts that wouldn’t arrive until very early the next morning. Time for the last guest to go. Instead, he matter-of-factly strolled into the kitchen, and was received in that spirit by the chef (or sous-chef?), who was busy making out the shopping list for market day. Or was it the night watchman? After the two of them, the guest and the host, had drained one or two more glasses, Gregor was offered a bed for the night in one of the back rooms—of which there were several—and promptly accepted; the chef, who was also one of the owners, lived far outside the city limits, and once a week, because of market day, slept at the restaurant, formerly an inn. When the chef asked which back room he’d prefer, Gregor responded, “The one farthest in the back!”
The next morning, Gregor Werfer, long since out and about again, wending his way from one quarter to the next, from one village remnant to the next (each offering fresh discoveries), asked himself how he’d slept in his back room in the former village inn. And his answer? “As peacefully as in the bomb crater. No, peacefully in a different way.”
In the old bed, the only piece of furniture in the room left from the inn, he lay awake for some time, while a sentence spoken by another innkeeper, back at his post after a longish absence, a sentence he’d heard, or read in a book, kept running through his head: “At last I can be an innkeeper again!” Yes, being an innkeeper, a professional host: the perfect way to be of service! And what vigilance was required of a good host, the good host. At every step through the dining room, the building, the property, it was vital to be on the lookout for those who needed something of me, 360-degree vigilance, looking around and around, making the rounds almost exclusively with one’s eyes, hardly moving one’s head or body, with eyes in one’s back, no joke (a lame excuse: “Do you expect me to have eyes in the back of my head?”)! Imagining the immortality of the good host, of good hosts altogether. When I turn up next year, in the next decade, or those who come decades after me: they’ll receive me, him, them, the guests after me, just as they did today—last night, one and all. Who will sing “The Ballad of the Good Host” someday, with its line, “At last I can be an innkeeper again!”? Thank goodness, that doesn’t lend itself to becoming an earworm, unlike Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” or “I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major-General”; it’s as unsuitable, for instance, as “Simon of Cyrene Helps Jesus Bear the Cross.”
He was already half asleep when an idea came to him (see “Ideas in Half Sleep as Instigators of Action”) that woke him up: converting his parents’ house, long since deeded to him, into an inn, with his mother in the kitchen, and his sister (?) in charge of the dining room, already almost as big as a restaurant’s, and his father? He wasn’t sure whether he’d staff the dining room or the guest rooms, serve as maître d’, or perhaps be a very special mysterious guest—most likely the latter? Please explain: your royal line in a pure service role? Without any power? That was the idea, part of which was that all those involved loved it. To continue: once he was asleep, in a sleep so sound it couldn’t have been any sounder, sentences came to him, so clear they couldn’t have been clearer: “Rope yourself to the mountain of the people! But where? Wherever you look, nothing but slick surfaces!” And, awakened for the second time during this night in the farthest back of the back rooms, which couldn’t have been farther back, Gregor found himself thinking, for the first time during his roaming around and continuing to avoid returning to his family, of his future godchild, whose baptism was scheduled for the morning before his departure, and he pictured his sister’s son growing up in an inn, helping, even as a young child, to bring out the food and beverages, clumsy and careful at the same time, and he sensed, actually visualized, his idea of the inn forming roots. Aerial roots? So what if they are? The children of inns can be trusted: they’re authentic, couldn’t be more authentic. Children of inns: they, too, live forever!
Before his last night, the one before the morning baptism and the evening flight back to the other land, Gregor’s friend the priest, guardian of the space and the key to the vestry in the decommissioned church, asked him where he’d spent the previous five, six, or however many nights in his former hometown. And Gregor answered with a time-honored expression in that region, still in use: “À droite et à gauche, à gauche et à droite”—actually, the evasive formula favored by the homeless, of whom the area had more and more. Of course, his friend didn’t believe him—on the one hand, because Gregor’s suit really couldn’t be described as “shabby,” having only a few minuscule snags and worn spots, barely perceptible to the naked eye, and, on the other, because the priest and moviegoer had heard that his friend had spent one of his nights in the Palace Hotel, which, long before the construction of the New Town, had been the sole building on an island in the river, very popular in its heyday as a movie set. That information was accurate, except that that one night in luxury, which included not only the bed, the linens, etc., had been not simply dreadful, compared with the other four or five nights, but truly evil, a miserable, wretched night such as he’d never experienced before, of which the only part he could have revealed—but to whom?—was the dream that he’d received a second message about his brother’s death, to the effect that in the body of the dead man, shot through the head by a “stray bullet,” the heart continued to beat and beat, not audible from the outside. And he, in his luxurious “sleep cocoon,” à la the Odyssey, kept silent on and on, true to his hasty prayer, soon to be lifelong, “Come hither, come, Age of Keeping Silent!”
How small, veritably shrunken amid the New Town’s high-rise buildings, the almost thousand-year-old church appeared, out of commission at present, or for good, when he, after another evening as the Last Guest, approached: it seemed to be only a chapel, a dark hut surrounded by office towers, some of which grazed the sky. But how roomy it turned out to be once he’d unlocked the side door and switched on light after light (so the electricity still worked), and there was the Eternal Light, still flickering in a corner, considerably dimmer than the rest of the lights. How many people this little church could have held, hundreds of them! And look at that: the garland of flowers around the baptismal font. See how it concealed the cracks in the stone, the granite, which had split in a medieval earthquake. And over there: the many medieval builders’ marks, not, as was more common, on the exterior walls, but here on the interior, the marks not just scratched into the blocks of granite but engraved, inscribed by the masons, each of whom had his own script and icons. And he wondered what mark would have been suitable for his brother, the journeyman builder. A plain engraving of a long rectangle: “This is my house!”?
