A Perfect Waiter Read Free

That he had now obtained from a bottle like someone having to confront a stranger, a prospective employer, or an unwelcome visitor who would persist in ringing his doorbell until he answered it. He had to open the door, there was no alternative. Yes, now he was afraid.
    When the time came to open the letter at last, he wondered if it wouldn’t be better to destroy it after all—to throw it away unread like an empty husk. After all the years in which he had never forgotten Jakob, a letter from him boded no good. So confidence was out of place, as was the pleasurable anticipation that had buoyed him up for the past two days. A letter from Jakob boded no good, period. Another drink. Half a glass, a whole glass. Hehesitated briefly, then filled his glass to the brim and put the bottle down beside him. Danger lurked in this rustling envelope. It would lunge at him in a moment, and he was unprepared. But what was the point of waiting? As soon as curiosity triumphed over common sense—the common sense that told him: “Don’t open it, throw it away, don’t look at it!”—his old wounds would open up again. He knew this but was incapable of obeying the dictates of caution. The letter would reopen his scars once more—letters could do that. He was far more afraid of the words that awaited him than of the futile passage of time.
    He sat there in the kitchen in his shirtsleeves, alive but inwardly extinct. In this get-up he was a man. Normally recognizable as a waiter only by his white linen jacket, he became an individual without one. As a waiter he was a nobody, which was just as it should be, but the jacket had to be clean and well pressed. He looked up. His gaze lingered on the only lighted window in the apartment house across the street. By now it was half-past one. A shadow stirred in the glow—it rose and fell, rose abruptly and disappeared into the adjoining room. That room was in darkness. Erneste had never seen a light on in there—the bedroom, probably. He was familiar with the shadowy figure of the sleepless woman who hurried back and forth, bobbed up and down, but he didn’t know her name and had never seen her face. He had no idea what she did, whether she read or knitted, had never seen her on the street and wouldn’t have recognized her if he had. She had no television. The light was on, night after night,whenever he came home from work. The window of that one room was always illuminated, as now. The light did not go out for days after she died, but that happened weeks later.
    Would the letter contain a photo of Jakob? He had preserved the few photos of Jakob he possessed, snapshots with serrated edges, so carefully that he’d almost forgotten about them. He had stowed them away in a box and deposited the box in the cellar. They were out of reach, as remote as Jakob’s breath and even more remote than the memories of their time together at Giessbach. He never looked at old photos. Old photos only provoked gloomy thoughts of the present.
    But he was secretly hoping for more than just words—for a portrait, a photograph of Jakob. Had time played havoc with his face? Had it been as unfair, implacable and incorruptible as it usually was? Had it ravaged Jakob’s face as well as his own, so that he tended to look away when confronted by his reflection in a mirror? Whatever was in the envelope on the table in front of him, it certainly wasn’t a photograph. His fingers would have detected a photograph through the airmail paper.
    And then, at long last, he proceeded to open the letter. He didn’t use a knife or scissors, he slit it open with the little finger of his right hand. The paper was so thin, a single movement sufficed to open the envelope, which rustled softly and tore. How Jakob had obtained his address was a mystery to which he’d already given some thought. He withdrew the letter, a single sheetfolded three times, from the envelope. Unlike