A Perfect Waiter Read Free Page A

the address, the letter itself had been typed. In many places the typewriter had pierced the paper and left tiny fissures and protrusions on the back of the sheet. Only the signature was handwritten, but the “Jakob” in the sender’s address on the back of the envelope had been replaced by “Jack” carelessly scrawled in slanting letters and terminating in a silly little squiggle. All this Erneste took in at a glance after unfolding the letter and before he’d read a single word of it. He felt that everything hitherto had been merely a dream, and now he was waking up.
    What he read was the diametrical opposite of what he had secretly been hoping for the last two days: that Jakob had changed. He hadn’t. Jakob was the same as ever, whether he called himself Jakob or Jack: interested solely in his own concerns. Erneste’s throat became more and more parched as he scanned the shatteringly impersonal, unambiguous lines again and again, but he didn’t take a drink—he couldn’t. It never even occurred to him to reach for the bottle beside him. Reading the words addressed to him again and again, he failed at first to grasp their meaning; then he grasped it only too well. And, even as he still sought to persuade himself that this Jack couldn’t possibly be the Jakob who had once been so close to him, the one with whom he’d shared the attic room in Giessbach, he naturally realized that no one other than this far-off Jakob, transmogrified into Jack, had welded these words, this request, into the deadly projectile thatnow smote him, Erneste, like a bullet from a gun. He saw the lake before him, blue as ice and cold as slate. Its waters rose and engulfed him—no, he was sinking, done for. He was and remained alone, was and remained a ridiculous individual. The request addressed to him appealed for help but not for friendship. For reasons unknown to Erneste, Jakob was banking on his assistance.
    He had written:
    Dear Erneste
,
    It’s ages since I wrote to you. You haven’t written either, didn’t you have my address? I’m writing this from New York, where I’ve been living for many years. Have you thought of me from time to time? We’re so far apart. Life is tough here, mainly because everything has turned out differently than I imagined. I badly need your help, I don’t know where else to turn. Please go to Klinger for me and ask him a favor, otherwise I’m finished. My financial position is very shaky, and not just my financial position. You can help me—you
must
help me! Please go to Klinger and ask him to send me some money. Just tell him I’m in a bad way from every angle. I went away with him that time, and now I wonder if it wasn’t a mistake. I survived the war over here, sure, but I never managed to get back to Europe. They say K has been nominated for the Nobel Prize, so he must have plenty of cash. I wanted to leave everything behind me, but I didn’t succeed, not altogether. I often think of Cologne and my mother, who’s dead now. You’ll know where to find K. He lives near you, as I’m sure you’ve heard. Please write me when you’ve had a word with him. I doubt if I’ll ever come back. I could go back to Germany if I had the money, but who’s gotany money except him? Do you have any? Are you well off? Please keep me posted. He owes me, it’s only right! Any chance I could come to Switzerland?
    All the best
,
    Jack
.

Chapter 2
    Erneste hadn’t forgotten his arrival in Giessbach on April 2, 1934, or his first day at work there. Nor had he forgotten Jakob’s arrival a year later, in May 1935, the beginning of a sojourn abroad to which Jakob probably owed his life. The young German’s spell of employment in Switzerland had saved him from being drafted into the Wehrmacht, as he inevitably would have been if he’d stayed at home for the next four years. You didn’t need to