A Beautiful Restoration
--Before the Nazis and the Communists, pani Anna will say, this place was a palace.
My boss is not really talking to me, she's just thinking aloud. Though the exterior of the hotel is soot-black, it is still beautful but the interior has suffered and, for pani Anna, restoration has become something of an obsession. She has spent many thousand zlotys on it. The cost of the wallpaper alone would have been enough for me to buy a small apartment. Guests like the result, especially foreigners. If I meet them in the corridor as they're going out to find breakfast and I'm off home to sleep after a night shift, they smile. In the place I was before, which hasn't changed at all since independence, I was only ever greeted by grunts and groans.
I like the night. I can get on with my work without too many interruptions and when I'm done, there's no need to pretend to be busy. Sometimes, for extra money - good money - I wash clothes for guests but mostly it's ironing, folding and stacking linen and filling up the trolley with soap, shower gel and so on. And things going wrong. A light bulb might explode, the batteries of a TV remote run down, a toilet become blocked. I don't like dealing with toilets at night: guests in their underwear standing over me and getting in the way, or sprawling on the beds and behaving as if I'm not there.
And illness - people need a doctor much more often at night than during the day when it's a lot easier to get hold of one. In the small hours I've witnessed two deaths; one from drink, one from drink and sex and heart failure combined. Drink causes a lot of trouble and mess. I deal with the mess but for trouble I call Dmitri, the night porter. He's big and strong and doesn't waste time. If the door is locked, he presses his big head against it and says:
--You have one minute before I break in.
So far, Dmitri's threat has always worked. Just as well. Pani Anna wouldn't be too happy about a broken door. In fact, I think Dmitri would be more likely to lose his job over that than a bloody nose.
And visitors: I see the girls in their narrow heels and split skirts flitting down the corridors like moths. I see them sneaked into the lift or hustled down the back stairs and out into the night. I see the rooms the next morning. The girls look better fed these days and probably own prettier underwear now that there's more than black market to choose from. Pani Anna knows this kind of thing goes on but as long as everybody is discreet, it means nothing to her. For Housekeeping it means extra work - more linen and towels to be changed, more airing of rooms and scrubbing stains off the new, soft carpets.
Pani Anna cares a lot about carpets and wallpaper, and dreams of restoring every last detail to exactly how it was before the Nazis and the Communists: the marble columns, wood panelling, crystal chandeliers and heavy damask drapes. The work is a long way from finished and she worries constantly about running out of money. As the hotel is an important historic buidling, the new government has given her some financial help but not enough.
--Not nearly enough, says pani Anna. With the costs of materials and labour rising every day. And just look at the news: Deficit may sink zloty. Where will we all be then?
Pani Anna has a friend in Germany, a man who makes money from money. He has promised, for what reason she hasn't said - though Dmitri and I have our ideas - not to let her plans collapse into tragedy or farce. But often, after a phone call, she is angry or gloomy, or both. She sits at reception, rests her pale, round elbows on the newly restored horseshoe desk, and drinks scotch soda. She won't touch Polish vodka and don't even mention Russian!
Of course the hotel has always had more interesting guests than drunken, whoring businessman. Its fame comes not only from its frozen music, as pani Anna call the architecture. These are not her own words. They belong to somebody famous, I don't know who. The hotel has been host to many famous people. In the year I was born, there was an International Congress. Important people came from all over the world to discuss what to do about our poor, devastated country.
At that time, the interior was in a very bad condition. I have seen photos of smashed floors and furniture, charred paper hanging off the walls like strips of burnt skin. There was a paper shortage then - well, there was a shortage of almost everything - and people say that pan Picasso first drew his famous fat dove of peace on his bedroom wall. The register from the congress disappeared long ago - maybe confiscated by the secret police, maybe destroyed by fire but anyway, gone, so nobody knows who slept where. Maybe the story of the dove on the wall is just a leged. A place like this has many legends, one on top of the other.
Earlier tonight, while I was ironing pillowcases and looking up from those endless bleached squares at the old, stained wallpaper in my Housekeeping room, I was thinking about pan Picasso and wondering how many times the walls had been papered since he stayed here.
Now, after a long absence, we have international visitors again, for the music festival. Sometimes musicians practise in their rooms. From room seventy-seven I have been hearing the most heavenly singing. The voice belongs to a young Italian who even after being up very late - I know how late! - will stop in the corridor, sweep back his thick, dark hair, put a hand on his heart and bow. This is an act: I know I am a substitute for his concert audience but still I blush and simper and scurry off as if I've just remembered some urgent task. Really, I'm embarassed and ashamed of my dry, colourles hair, my cheap shoes.
Dmitri says he's a gay. He says this because the singer - whose name, I think, should be Angleo but is Giuseppe - doesn't sing in his deep speaking voice but high, like a woman.
--Sounds like castrato, Dmitri says. And the costume - have you seen his costume! A gay. Crime against nature, he says, pleased with himself and his certainty.
Everybody knows that this country has seen real crimes against nature - and not just seen them. But I don't argue. In the night there is no-one else to call on and sometimes I really need big, bison-headed Dmitri to help me out. And yes, I've seen the singer's clothes. I have some of them with me at this moment; the shirt with the lace cuffs, the high boots with the silver buckles.
He called me to his room, around one a.m. He was wearing jeans and a white t-shirt. His chin was blue with stubble and his arms were covered with thick dark hair, like fur. He is not tall and his nose is too big to call his face perfect but what does perfect mean but a set of rules? He was tired and a little tipsy - not drunk, not like the stringless puppets you can see on every street corner - but bright-eyed, lit up. His bedside table was strewn with bouquets for flowers, still in their cellophane.
--Please, one moment, I said, and rushed out of the room.
All I had in my cupboard was an ugly ceramic jug with a crazy slogan on the side: The Flowering State. That jug would not do. I phoned reception.
--Bring me vases, Dmitri. Blue ones. Two or three.
--Blue ones are only for the dining room.
--Blue vases, Dmitri. And quickly.
I paced about in front of the lift, worrying that the singer would be angry at me for rushing off without an explanation. Dmitri never does anything quickly. I should have fetched the vases myself. So the flowers would be in water sooner, so the singer could bury his face in the blooms, turn his big nose from side to side, breathe in their perfume... Dmitri's head appeared in the glass window of the lift. The door clanked open and he stepped out, a blue glass vase wedged in the crook of each arm.
--Who puts flowers in water at this time of night?
--One of the singers.
--Which one?
--You know which one.
Dmitri noisily sucked air through his crowded teeth and clumped back into the lift. By the time I returned to room seventy seven I was breathless and sweating. It's still so hot, even at night, though the leaves on the trees have turned gold and begun to fall. I knocked on the door with my elbow. When Giuseppe opened it, he gave me such a smile that I thought I would drop the vases and break them as well as my toes but then... then! He took my hot face in his cool hands and kissed me on both cheeks. He filled the vases with water and asked me to help him arrange the flowers. This is not normally part of my duties but who would refuse such a sweet-smelling task?
Roses, lilies, chrysanthemums; the perfume curled around us, drifted into our nostrils, mouths, our hair. The angel Giuseppe didn't crush the stems the way Dmitri does when he has to arrange displays for the dining room. He balanced them on an open palm and used his fingertips to guide them into position. Stems matter. Stems are like arteries. I've told Dmitri this but he continues to clamp them in his thick fist. So, I suppose, he doesn't look like a gay.
While we were filling the vases the angel Giuseppe spoke to me, in Italian. I know the sound of the language because, on night shift, I sometimes listen to opera on the radio. I like it better than the American pop music people can't get enough of these days. I couldn't understand a word but I could hear his voice squeaking and grating.
--Too much singing, he said in English, pointing to his open mouth.
His lips were red from wine, teeth white: no gaps, no twisted stumps. His tongue, I could see his tongue, pink and curling. My ears burned: I was blushing again. I slipped the last few stems into the vase and stood up
--Something else you want? I said, in my horrible English.
Italian for me is no more than a wish, a dream.
--Si, momentito...
He went into his bathroom and came out with the boots and the shirt.
--Clean please?
--No problem. Thank you, please, I said, nodding and backing out of the room like the silly servant in too many bad films.
The door to Housekeeping is locked and I'm alone with stack of ironed linen and towels. The bed linen is all white. Most of the towels are white too. There are, though, plenty of good enough red towels from before independence but pani Anna won't have them used unless a guest disgraces him or herself. I don't think many guests understand pani Anna's towel code. Nearly always, it's a man who slips up, or a man and woman together but I try to be open-minded, not to discriminate.
There has been - and sadly still is, too much discrimination. Already, in the newly restored old town, over fresh, cheerful paint in colours we haven't seen for decades, the spray can and stencil graffiti are again making their ugly, hateful marks. After living with grey crumbling buildings for so long, with broken windows, broken promises and captive spirits, could we not, for a short while, enjoy the brightness of fresh paint, the calm sheen of unsmashed glass? It's a small thing, not important, I know, but this country has seen so much destruction. Too much, too many lives crushed by one set of rules or another, this country which has the shape of a jellyfish -a strong, stubborn jellyfish all the same, one which refuses to die no matter how many times it's stamped on. But what is it like to live in a country with fixed, definite outlines - like Italy's high-heeled boot dipping its toe in the Mediterranean?
Carefully I put down the angel Guiseppe's boots, so as not to mark the leather which is soft and supple and smells like new bank notes. I pick up the shirt; such fine cotton it's almost transparent, weighs nothing. I press it to my face and breathe in sun and salt. I breathe in and in until my head spins and I have to sit down on the old battered chair on which I've passed many quiet night hours.
Most of the guests will be asleep by now. Dmitri will be dozing at reception, hoping that none of the stragglers falling in from the casinos will want room service. The angel Giuseppe will be lying on his big bed, his head resting on the pillowslip I ironed last night. How differently I'd have ironed his linen, had I imagined him lying on the bed. I've have pressed it smooth with the flat of my hand, the weight of my body.
I fill the sink. Like a baby's bath, I test the temperature with my elbow. Too hot. I leave it to cool. In time it will reach the ideal temperature - blood heat. The room, too, is hot, airless, a tatty box. I take off my cardigan and toss it on to the chair. No need to be tidy. Nobody ever comes here. Soon I'll wash the shirt, polish the boots....
Taking off my cardigan isn't enough. It feels like another half-measure, another compromise. Once all my clothes are piled on the chair, it's easy to pull the crumpled shirt over my head, slip my rough, blunt fingers through the lace cuffs and let the fine white cotton slide down and over the neglected architecture of my body, its frozen music. The boots, which are dusty - you can't have restoration without dust... the boots too. Only a little too big. Not heavy at all and cool against my legs. I unpin my hair, let it fall around my shoulders. It doesn't exactly swing when I turn my head, it doesn't fall over my face like a curtain when I place my hand on my heart and bow. No heavenly music comes from my mouth but here, in my ugly little room, dressed in the angel Giuseppe's shirt and boots, it occurs to me that my Housekeeping room could once have been a bedroom. Anybody might have slept in it, even pan Picasso. With the spatula I use to shift clots of mud from the shower cubicles, I pick loose a corner of wallpaper and begin to scrape. The strip peels off quite easily at first, right down to the yellow plaster. Then it becomes stubborn and clings to the wall. In the top corner of the plaster, a faint curving line swings between two raw edges of paper. I go back to where I started from and loosen the next strip. It, too, curls away. Beneath it, the curve continues across the newly-bared patch of wall. Could that small black dot above the curve be an eye? I keep scraping. With the angel's voice in my head, the memory of his mouth on my cheeks, I too become part of a beautiful restoration.
© Dilys Rose.
This story was previously published in the Times Literary Supplement.