The hotel manager stood at the reception desk and sniffed his palms. It occurred to Marta what he may have touched.

“That Indian woman in the newly-wed suite has gone mad.”

He looked up at the ceiling as if expecting to find some explanation there.

“All the time you were off she was screaming blue murder. Maybe the storm screwed her up.”

Marta just nodded that she understood. She was not going to let herself be provoked by the reference to her absence. Today he was wearing a tie with hand-painted guitars on it. Marta never ceased to be amazed at how this man without any education, standards or taste had successfully run a respectable family hotel for so many years.

“Sorry, I was outside with Lola. Puberty, you know. I’m trying to keep it all at least a bit under control,” she forced a smile and turned her eyes heavenwards to indicate her helplessness.

The manager gestured dismissively. “Sure. I’m just worried we’re not going to be able to sort that mad woman out very discreetly. Knock her on the head, wrap her up in a carpet and take her away with the rubbish.”

Marta did not bother to feign amusement. That was simply beneath her level. At least she didn’t poke her navel, which is what the manager would do when he was upset. She always felt like laughing out hysterically at this bad habit of his.

“That was quite a storm last night, eh?”

Marta smiled. “I slept alright.”

“Heck,” the manager gestured. “I was running around the place all night long making sure there wasn’t a leak in the basement. What a storm!” and he shook his head in disgruntlement while snorting rhythmically.

“And was there a leak?” asked Marta as she put on her work blazer.

The manager nodded as his forefinger moved dangerously close to his belly button. “It was this close. Just this close! The water stopped just a centimetre short of the window. But the neighbours have a swimming pool in their living room and their greenhouse was smashed in by the hailstones. As big as pigeon’s eggs, I swear. The manager raised both hands to indicate the size of pigeon’s eggs and Marta saw circles of sweat expanding under his shirt armpits.

She knit her brows to show sympathy and exasperation over such outrageous climatic conditions, and logged on to the reception computer.

“And at the hotel here,” he drew a large semicircle with his forefinger, “the electricity was right out and it took ten minutes for the power unit to get going.”

“Oh, I do know,” she nodded soberly and shrugged her shoulders. How could she not? The night shift were still exchanging stories in the morning of their ten minutes of horror like airship wreck survivors. Guests staggering silently through the dim hotel corridors, curses yelled out in the dark, yes, someone was even making love on the mezzanine, while in the hotel lobby somebody bumped into a glass table and cut themselves nastily. Somebody borrowed three bottles of tequilla from the hotel bar, which had closed by that time, and there was vomit all over the stairs between the second and the third floors. All that within ten minutes. Turn your back and order turns to total chaos within ten minutes.

Marta checked her e-mail box and then browsed through the news in her RSS feed, set to pick up the crime and calamity columns. A standard ritual that she went through every day automatically. Hundreds of news reports whose headlines she went through first, like an experienced inspector who can easily spot the fare dodger among a sea of passengers’ faces as he suddenly, unobtrusively moves towards the exit. Marta held her breath. Schoolchildren discover human remains in Central Bohemian quarry. She clicked on the title, quickly read the full report and then reread it. She was aware of coming over all weak and of breathing superficially, at half cock. That’s not it, she said to herself. That isn’t my skeleton. And after some time she was feeling fine again. That’s not it. Unless…

The woman in the newly-wed suite on the fifth was yelling for quite a long time. Even yesterday she wasn’t looking so well. She ordered several meals from room service, but the tray always ended up outside the door with the food uneaten but all mixed up: with fried egg floating in orange juice together with bits of toast, the prawn brochette skewered some grey-blue business cards and four pairs of cuff links lay in a cup of cappuccio dregs.

She had not been out of her room for several days.

This morning she started to yell. She knew some quite rude English words for an Indian bride. Then she began to kick the door. Marta leant on the wall outside her room on the fifth floor with folded arms and attempted a calm, therapeutic tone, recalling her hours spent at the therapist’s.

“Excuse me, madam, but the other guests are being disturbed. Can we do anything for you?”

“Fuck youuu!”

Richard the ops manager burst out laughing uncontrollably. Marta scowled at him and he grew solemn.

“A cup of hot chocolate perhaps? Or tea? I have a mild sedative here…it might help you to relax…Madam?”

“Bring me my man back! Or else fuck off!”

Marta sighed quietly: “That again!”

Richard nodded: “Sure. He has to screw someone the same day we have a funeral reception for fifty people.”

“What on earth is going on?” Mr Strnad, a permanent guest at the hotel, who stopped off in the lobby early almost every evening for a glass of pastis, discreetly leant over towards Marta. Today, however, he was also playing the role of bereaved mourner accompanying his wife after a shared journey of fifty-five years.

Marta smiled and shook her head: “Everything is fine, Mr Strnad. Nothing to disturb your reception. A lady on the top floor isn’t feeling well. She’ll probably need a doctor.

“I am a doctor,” Mr Strnad pointed out, theatrically swelling a little.

Marta parted her lips in a radiant smile: “I definitely wouldn’t ask that of you on this of all days, Doctor.”

Mr Strnad waved his hand. It was the sort of gesture that reduced everything else in the world to the level of rising damp.

She fleetingly glanced at her Facebook page. In her real world, the world in which she searched for and collected potentially doomladen information, nothing had happened. At least she hoped it hadn’t.

Marta shrugged: “Alright then. I’ll call you if need be.”

Mr Strnad gave a little tight-lipped smile and took both her hands in his.

“My dear Marty. Guess what I ordered for my first course.”

Marta turned her gaze towards the restaurant lounge area. The mourners had now moved on from sympathetic silence to hushed talk to ordinary conversation.

“Oh, not fried garlic toast?” she knit her brows and brought her gaze back to the hotel lobby. We shouldn’t have changed that interior, she thought, as she looked at the defiant vertical of the glass and stone wall which divided the room. It disturbs me. Yes, it even annoys me ― it’s too dominant, massive, all-consuming like a glacial valley. The kiss of death from an overpriced architectural study.

Mr Strnad winked at her conspiratorially: “Clever girl! Serves them right! Especially Aunt Irma! Did I ever tell you Aunt Irma was such a go-getter she took out a mortgage for her boob job?”

It struck her just how irritating she found modern architecture to be. Was she getting old?

“That was a right old storm last night, eh?”

 

Translated by Melvyn Clarke