A Perfect Waiter (12 page)

On June 19, 1936, after rumors of Klinger's arrival had been circulating for several days, some thirty people gathered in the hotel lobby to applaud him and, by their very presence, express gratitude for his unenforced and principled stand against the Nazis. Although Klinger had until recently, and even during the war of 1914—18, refrained from any political utterances, he had now come out openly against Germany's new rulers, whom he abominated. To the refugees who stood in the lobby and applauded his arrival, he represented the true values of the country they'd reluctantly been compelled to leave. He had refused to be swayed, either by flattery on the part of the regime, or by attempts to exert pressure on him.

Julius Klinger's books had not been publicly burned in Germany, just ignored. Three weeks before leaving for Giessbach, he had decided to break his silence with all the force inherent in a single sentence. His letter addressed to Goebbels on May 20, 1936, had appeared in Switzerland's
Neue Zürcher Zeitung
. It contained no word of reproach or accusation, yet it caused more of a stir, both
at home and abroad, than he had expected—and this despite its brevity, which rendered it all the more effective. Perfectly suited to being quoted in the foreign press, his letter was published even in the
New York Times
.

Quite a few people who had already left the country were beginning to have doubts about Klinger's muchinvoked integrity, but when they learned of his letter, and certainly when they learned of its contents, the tide promptly turned in his favor. Interest centered not only on him, but also on those who had been expelled from Germany. He had chosen the right moment to do what was expected of him. With a single sentence—“We true Germans will have to show you the error of your ways; we have no choice”—he had invoked the decent Germany they personified and attested the rightness of their actions. He had even, in a way, affirmed that Jews who no longer possessed any rights inside Germany were the people best qualified to uphold true German values beyond its borders until the advent of better times, when they would be summoned home again.

Klinger's letter contained no threat; it was universally construed as a warning. Whether he was alluding between the lines to his own potential departure from Germany, to which he actually made no reference, remained a moot point and was also the subject of heated arguments at Giessbach. For want of any better idea, Goebbels lambasted him like a dog barking after an intruder has fled: Klinger was what he had always believed him to be, a decadent, Jewified snob whose literary heyday had ended
long ago. “You're a man of the last century: we don't need your kind. Go and try your luck with the Bolsheviks!”

Erneste heard all these things from Jakob, who never tired of telling him what was discussed at night in the hotel bar—where Klinger never showed his face, incidentally. He and his wife, who never drank except at meals, retired to bed early, immediately after dinner as a rule. Unlike them, their children mingled with the other guests as a matter of course. The Klingers evidently had no objection to this, although the boy was seventeen at most but looked older. The daughter was reputed to be an artist, not that anyone ever saw her with a sketchbook. She seemed to be as much at a loose end as her brother. The boy was still of school age, but present circumstances entailed that he would be tutored by his mother and sister until further notice. He was said to have artistic leanings, so Jakob told Erneste, and no wonder, with parents like his, but although there were pianos in the ballroom and breakfast room he had never been seen to play them. That his mother no longer performed in public was well known. Before the birth of her daughter in 1916 she had sung at Berlin's Lindenoper under Richard Strauss and then, after four seasons, unexpectedly retired. However, two recordings of her existed:
Ah, ma petite table!
on one side and
Voi che sapete
on the other. Julius Klinger, who much preferred the German repertoire, had for some time been in close touch with Richard Wagner's widow Cosima. This was because, before the outbreak of the Great War and the success of his second novel,
Oporta
, he
had toyed with the idea—which never came to fruition—of writing a biography of his favorite composer in the style of a novel.

Klinger had not been arrested in Berlin despite his letter to Goebbels. He was allowed to leave the country for fear of reactions abroad, and also, no doubt, because the Nazis were relieved to be rid of him. No one could have foreseen what he would later assert in his only autobiographical essay, which devoted a few sentences to the subject. This was that during the first two weeks of his stay at the Grand Hotel in Giessbach, which he specifically mentioned in this context, he had been counting on a coup d'état. He had set off for Switzerland firmly convinced that certain senior German generals would shortly bring the madness in their country to an end, and he had no reason to mistrust those who had informed him that a putsch was imminent. In the event, however, Klinger waited for it as vainly as the rest of the world. No upheaval occurred, Hitler remained in power, the Germans were content, and Klinger spent several more weeks in Giessbach, during which time he made preparations to emigrate and worked on his latest book. He couldn't remain idle, being admired not least for the sheer magnitude of his output. He wrote and corrected several pages of manuscript a day. His work, his writing, was as essential to him as the air he breathed.

People became accustomed to his presence as time went by. His appearance at meals ceased to attract much attention—less attention, certainly, than that of his off-spring,
whose extravagant wardrobes seemed absolutely inexhaustible, whereas Klinger himself was notable only for his well-cut suits and English shoes and his wife mainly for her dark curls and dark-brown eyes. Marianne Klinger was “of Mediterranean appearance”, as her husband put it, but she could also have been mistaken for a Jewess. A short woman, she had become somewhat plump after the birth of her son Maximilian, but her legs still drew appreciative male stares. The only guests to maintain a certain interest in Klinger were new arrivals, who were always trying to exchange a few words with him. This wasn't easy, and not only because he tended to address strangers in a very low voice. In contrast to his children, he avoided chance encounters as far as possible. When they became unavoidable he would shake hands and sign books, smiling amiably, but he refused to inscribe his name on menus or sheets of notepaper.

Two weeks after their arrival the Klingers were joined by Frau Moser, their Berlin housekeeper, who would later accompany them into exile. Erneste met her at the landing stage with two junior waiters. In addition to a wardrobe trunk, five suitcases had to be conveyed to the hotel. A quiet young woman who never wore make-up, Frau Moser moved into a small room in the hotel and took her meals at the Klingers' table. Certain guests viewed this with disapproval and incomprehension. Since she looked less like an employee than an underprivileged member of the family, however, even the most loudly disapproving guests eventually became inured to her presence in the dining
room, especially as she never ventured to speak unless expressly asked a question by Klinger or his wife. The rest of the time she remained silent. She made a demure, reserved impression, quite unlike the young Klingers, who were always the first to get up and go, sometimes even while their parents were still at the dessert stage. According to Erneste, who was responsible for the family's table, Klinger seemed quite unaware of their bad manners, whereas his wife noticed but did nothing about them. It didn't disturb her, either, if Klinger started to smoke while she was still eating, nor did she persist when she failed to get an answer to her questions. Yet she never looked resentful or offended. She struck Erneste as a kindly and considerate but rather inscrutable woman. Despite the couple's middle-class exterior, some thought they detected a lingering trace of bohemianism in them because they had once belonged to that unconventional world, he as a novelist and she as a singer. And although they had divested themselves of all outward signs of their colorful past when they married, if not before, they remained artists still—and to the other guests that naturally excused many of their little quirks, which were really only trivial.

Erneste did not find waiting on the Klingers particularly congenial, so he offered no objection when Jakob, who waited table at the other end of the room, asked to take over from him. He sympathized with Jakob's interest in the German author, although Klinger never seemed to notice hotel staff even when they gave him a light or
pushed his chair in. Besides, Erneste had meantime made a discovery that rendered it easy for him to move to the other end of the dining room.

Julius Klinger was a perceptive but hypersensitive person, a man who saw it as his sole task to pursue his own thoughts and find the right words to express them. He practiced a profession of which his readers were largely ignorant. They probably believed that words popped into a successful writer's head as readily as dividends flowed into a successful speculator's bank account.

His real life did not unfold in dining rooms or drawing rooms, but on the sheets of paper on his desk. Anything else was of only marginal interest to him, either as a pastime or, better still, as a literary stimulus. Only attractions of an exceptional nature could cause him to listen or look up. That such attractions existed, only those closest to him knew: his wife, his daughter, and possibly Frau Moser.

Klinger regarded it as his true if not exclusive purpose to find words for things and situations that had, he knew, been described innumerable times by other authors from the most diverse cultures. The very fact that he was determined to rename the old and eternally similar took up nearly all his time—his time at his desk, compared to which the time he spent in hotel dining rooms was wholly unimportant. It was, however, relaxing and, above all, profitable because he used it to observe the most trivial incidents that completely escaped other people, who
noticed at most that he looked abstracted, which he wasn't. No one could have concentrated harder at such moments than Klinger. Although he seemed self-absorbed, he was really observing and analyzing those around him.

What he wrote had to bear comparison with the writings of his acknowledged and unacknowledged literary exemplars, which was why the time he spent at his desk was the most important time of all. It was possible to restate in another way what had already been written, because different words shed new light on what everyone saw or failed to see. Of course, what he felt he had to say didn't really need saying again. Although the world would continue to revolve if it remained unsaid, nothing could deter him from trying to say it. That was his mission, his daily occupation, his struggle: finding the right words. Nothing could be harder, and if he failed to find the right words he was sometimes forced to abandon scenarios that were already clearly mapped out in his mind's eye. The result of such reluctant demolition work was that many subsidiary characters fell by the wayside. That could happen, but that was also how he came to evolve other characters: through the intimate medium of the words he used to describe them and make them say and do things of which similar individuals in similar real-life situations might have been quite incapable.

Klinger liked to describe himself as a literary character without ever defining exactly what he meant by that. Whether and to what extent he exploited those around
him for literary purposes, no one except his wife could probably have said. But his wife never discussed him with strangers on principle, and the forty-eight-year-old author shunned would-be biographers. So Klinger remained largely a mystery, which suited him perfectly. Everything about him was literature, as he put it. He was forever in search of the
mot juste
, forever trying to avoid even the most latent platitude, for if there was anything his work couldn't tolerate, it was empty words and phrases, which he regarded—and described—as “prejudices in wrapping paper.” He could pontificate on this subject for hours and ruthlessly did so in the family circle. There he had no need to mince his words, no need to interrupt his flow for courtesy's sake or fear interruption from others. There he could say anything, and anything naturally entailed repeating himself. There he had no need to fear making a fool of himself. He talked and the others listened. Their attention might stray, but that didn't worry him. By talking he sometimes hit on other ideas, which was the main thing. What Marianne Klinger thought about this remained a secret from the outside world.

Usually, however, he sat at his desk, weighing one word against another. It could be a long time, hours or even days, before he was satisfied with his choice, and when he was he experienced feelings of unadulterated bliss. Because that didn't happen every day, or even every week, his consequent ill humor was known and dreaded by those closest to him, his wife and his children, who had long feared nothing in the world so much as their famous
father's moods. But their fear of him had also taught them not to be afraid of anything else because, compared to Klinger's moods, anything else was innocuous.