Read Online Telegrams of the Soul by Peter Altenberg - Free Book Online Page B

expression of sympathy and devotion, even though my luggage consisted exclusively of two pairs of socks, two empty slivovitz bottles and a mousetrap!

The Hotel Room
    At three A.M . the birds started quietly chirping, suggestively. My worries grew and grew. It started in the brain, as if with a little rolling stone, tore all the joys of hopefulness along with it, the joys that brighten your life, swelled into a sweeping avalanche, burying under the ability to endure the day and the merciless commanding hour! To rise to happenstance! A quiet storm brewed in the branches before my window. For no reason, for absolutely no reason I had burned and bothered the life of sweet Ms. J. And one of my benefactors cut off his modest monthly largesse as of next month. He’d heard something or other about me and my views. They were too radical for him, too uncharitable. My aesthetic ideal, Ms. W., belongs now to those who can pay her. I who pursued the “mystic cult of beauty” was always too inelegantly dressed for her, too incomprehensible and too altogether mad. When I sank to my knees before her, deeply, so deeply stirred by her noble bodily perfection, she said I had perverse inclinations, it wasn’t her fault! My hotel room is lighting up, my soul is darkening. Morning is breaking.
    The song of the birds in the treetops grows clearer with shreds of simple melody. Quiet storms disseminate the scent of meadows. It would be the perfect hour to hang myself from the window box—.

Elevator
    The elevator is still a great mystery to me.
    I am not so dumb as to spoil the thrill of the blessings of modern culture by allowing myself to get too accustomed to them!
    I still feel it as something wonderful, this secret stair-transcendence, this preservation of my knee joints, of my heart, of my oh! by no means costly time.
    The door of my elevator closes slowly, automatically, which proves to be downright annoying to people with packages or baskets, albeit rather pleasant for a writer.
    I have no idea by what mechanical devices my elevator dangles. I am merely informed every now and then by the super that something’s not quite right today and that the electrical fitter is there. And while I don’t understand just what kind of catastrophe was in the making, or what an electrical fitter does, both seem to be linked to a possibly life-threatening situation.
    It’s awful to ride up with a stranger. You feel compelled to initiate a conversation and obsess on it from one floor to another. You suffer a delayed tension like that of the baccalaureate exam. Your face takes on a frozen glower. Finally you say: “Goodbye!” with a kind of intonation as if you you’d just ended a friendship for life. That’s why, so as to sidestep all these unpleasantries, I never get home before six in the morning. At that hour the elevator isn’t up and running yet.

Visit
    He rode up to her in an open cast-iron elevator. It was like a wondrous cage, like a pierced parrot house. Upstairs there was a little white hall with white lacquered walls. The hall wafted with the scent of fine women’s garments and Violette de Parme.
    The woman stood there in a very small room which was rather warm.
    â€œIt really is a little cage—,” she said to the man. “Make yourself comfortable. Feel free to smoke—.”
    â€œWhat are you looking at?” she said. “Oh, back into my youth. That one there on the wall is a picture of the room in which I grew up. It’s a big homeland, even if it looks very small.”
    â€œA big homeland?!” remarked the tattered Tartar.
    â€œThat’s right. My guardian loved me—. So did his son. His wife’s name was Evelyn and she always sat in an easy chair under fruit trees that didn’t give off much shade. She only really needed the sun, and the shade of the fruit trees was superfluous. One time she said to me: ‘Anita—.’ And then she