5

      Lisl’s hotel – or perhaps what I should more appropriately call Werner and Ingrid’s hotel – did not run to phones in every room. The next morning at eight o’clock there was a tap at the door. It was Richard, one of Lisl’s employees whom Werner had kept on. ‘Herr Bernd,’ he said. ‘A gentleman phoned, Herr Bernd. Herr Teacher. He comes here. Twelve hours sharply.’ He was a nervous young man who had come to Berlin, as many such German youngsters came, to avoid being drafted into the Bundeswehr. He got a job at Lisl’s and met a girl and now he had no plans to return to his parents in Bremen. Every now and again his father phoned to ask if Richard was ‘keeping out of trouble’. Usually the phone calls came late at night and usually his father sounded drunk.

      Sometimes I wished Richard would not persist in using English when speaking to me but he was determined to improve his languages. His ambition was to work on the reception desk of some very big luxury hotel, but he’d asked me not to reveal this to Lisl. So I kept his secret and I answered him in English telling him that I would be having lunch downstairs and that if my visitor Herr Teacher was early he should put him in the bar and invite him to join me for lunch.

      Richard said, ‘It is exactly as you say, Herr Bernd.’ He blinked nervously. He had a comprehensive store of phrases that he could deliver in reasonable English. His problem lay in putting these fragments together so that the joins didn’t show.

      ‘Thank you, Richard.’

      ‘You are hotly welcome, Herr Bernd. Have a nice day.’

      ‘You too, Richard,’ I said.

      Once awake I was overcome with a desperate need for a cup of hot strong coffee. So at nine fifteen I was sitting in the dining room – the breakfast room was being completely re-done – with Lisl, who was waving her hand to obtain a pot of coffee from Klara. The faithful Klara wore an old-fashioned starched white apron with lacy edges on the bib. Lisl invariably referred to her as das Dienstmädchen, as if she was some newly employed teenage serving-girl, but Klara was amazingly old. She was thin and wiry, a birdlike creature with bright little eyes and grey hair drawn back into a tight bun at the nape of her neck, a style in vogue when she was young. She was bent from a lifetime of hard work, having toiled for Lisl since long before the house became a hotel.

      ‘And this time,’ Lisl told Klara emphatically, ‘put less coffee in the pot.’

      ‘Some people like strong coffee,’ I told Lisl but Lisl waved a hand to tell Klara to pay no heed to me.

      When Klara was out of earshot, Lisl explained in a loud and earnest voice, ‘She wastes coffee. It’s so expensive. Do you know how much I pay for that coffee?’

      From the corner of my eye I saw Klara turn her head to hear better what Lisl was saying. I was about to reply that it was time that Lisl stopped thinking about such things, and left the account books to Werner and Ingrid. But the last time I’d said something like that it unleashed upon me an indignant tirade forcefully assuring me that she was not too old to know how the hotel should be run. I suppose Werner and Ingrid had found some way of handling Lisl, for she gave no sign of resenting any of the changes they’d made.

      This dining room for instance had been totally refurbished. All the panelling had been stripped back to the natural wood and the nondescript prints had been junked in favour of some contemporary watercolours: Berlin street scenes by a local artist. They went well with a cruel George Grosz drawing which was the only item retained from the former decoration. The picture had always hung beside this table – which was near a window that gave on to the courtyard – and this was where Lisl liked to sit for lunch. One of Lisl’s more spiteful critics once said she was like a George Grosz drawing: black and white, a person of extremes, a jagged caricature of Berlin in the Thirties. And today this obese woman, with her long-sleeved black dress and darkly mascaraed penetrating eyes, did look the part.

      The coffee came and Klara poured some into my cup. It was a thin brew with neither aroma nor colour. I didn’t remark on it and Lisl pretended not to notice that it had come at all. Lisl sipped some milk – she wasn’t drinking coffee these days. She was very slowly working her way through a red apple with a piece of Swiss Emmenthal and a slice of black rye bread. Her arthritic old hand – pale and spotted and heavy with diamond rings – held a sharp kitchen knife and cut from the apple a very small piece. She took it between finger and thumb and ate carefully, making sure that she didn’t smudge her bright red lipstick.

      ‘Werner has his own ideas,’ said Lisl suddenly. She said it as if we’d both been talking about him, as if she was replying to a question. ‘Werner has his own ideas and he is determined.’

      ‘What ideas?’

      ‘He has been back through the records, and is using that word process machine to write letters to all the people who have stayed here over the last five years or more. Also he keeps a record of all the guests, their names, their wives’ names and what they liked to eat and any problems we have had with them.’

      ‘Excellent,’ I said. She pulled a face, so I said, ‘You don’t think that’s the way to do it?’

      ‘For years I have run the hotel without such things,’ said Lisl. She didn’t say it wasn’t the way to do it. Lisl would sit on the fence until Werner’s new ideas were tested. That was Lisl’s way. She didn’t like to be proved wrong.

      ‘Werner is very clever at business affairs,’ I said.

      ‘And the bridge evenings,’ said Lisl. ‘Frank Harrington’s people come for the bridge