At 7.15 a.m. in the basement of the five-star Hotel Regent on Kurfürstendamm, activity in the kitchen service area was beginning to build. Breakfast had just begun and there would be no let-up until ten thirty, when most of the tourists would have gone sight-seeing and the few remaining businessmen had concluded their breakfast meetings.
At peak times, the ground floor kitchen with its complement of twenty chefs was supplemented by up to twelve kitchen porters, support staff who toiled one floor down in the bowels of the hotel. In sharp contrast to the tranquil and serene ambience of the restaurant, both departments were subject to a relentless barrage of heat, steam and noise that would challenge the sanity of any man. Nowhere were working conditions more arduous than in the pot-wash, where, round the clock, thousands of items of dirty crockery, cutlery, glassware and cooking utensils were cleaned, dried and returned to service with military precision.
Karl Schneider stood hunched over the giant stainless-steel trough, hands immersed in the caustic soapy water, scrubbing burnt sugar from the inside of a twenty-six-millimetre copper using a steel-wool pad. Alongside him, four of his colleagues stacked and then emptied an array of industrial-sized dishwashers, sorting and sending the clean items back upstairs in one of four dumb waiters.
Schneider had never seen inside the Hotel Regent in all the five years he had been there. He came and went by the staff entrance in the basement and had never once clapped eyes on the marble floor in the entrance lobby, the magnificent reception desk hand-carved in the finest German oak, the glittering French chandeliers, the nineteenth-century gilded portraits that lined the walls of corridors carpeted in the finest Italian wool. But he had seen photographs in a magazine and that was enough for him. He knew his place and his place was here doing what he was doing.
“Here you go, Quasi.” Section leader Helmut Fuchs dumped four more copper pans into the water, taking little care, as usual, to avoid splashing his junior colleague who, as usual, ignored the taunt. His ten-hour shift would be over in fifteen minutes when the rest of the day staff arrived and he’d be spared, for fourteen hours at least, the jibes and bullying tactics of Fuchs and the other morons.
It had started almost from day one. For many years, Schneider had suffered with chronic back pain, which along with a badly deformed left leg gave him an inelegant gait, both afflictions permanent souvenirs of a past conflict most of his colleagues knew little about. The hotel gave him the job as a concession, so they’d said, an act of charity towards the disabled, although his disabilities, such as they were, had no bearing whatsoever on his punctuality, his efficiency and his reliability. It had just been an excuse to pay him less.
As a second-class “retard” pot-washer-gofer with physical deformities, he was the obvious candidate for bullying, exacerbated by his refusal to respond, complain or react to the bullies in any way. He barely spoke to any of the others unless absolutely necessary; he just turned up on time, worked hard and went home when the night shift was over and the cycle would begin again.
Morons would come and go, each new one rapidly conforming to group pressure, consolidating the isolation of “Quasi” by their physical and verbal abuse, or else risk isolating themselves. He didn’t blame them for being weak and he actually preferred it that way. Once a spotty teenager arrived straight out of school and made an attempt to befriend the hapless “Quasi” before his advances were soundly rebuffed and he joined the pack. Schneider was and would remain in a minority of one and that was the way he liked it.
In the absence of idle banter or any rational discourse with his fellow workers, he whiled away the working hours, amusing himself with fantasies of how he would despatch each of them in an entertaining fashion: Fuchs, drugged then squeezed into No.1 dishwasher with the dial turned to “steam”; Müller, his arch-nemesis, dismembered and fed through the mincer to emerge as “Müllerwurst”, a speciality of the house; and Ziegler the queer, his dick amputated in a freak accident involving a meat cleaver and the butcher’s block. He had a final solution for them all. One day, perhaps. He looked at the wall clock. It was time.
“Oi! Quasi, you retard.” Müller as usual, with the last word of the day. “What you got on today then? Spot of bell-ringing?” He turned to his cohorts to check they’d heard and they all laughed dutifully. Müller slapped Schneider on the back of the head when he didn’t respond. “You listening, you deaf old git?” Schneider rested both hands on the edge of the trough and stared down into the soapy water. Acid bath – even better. “Retard,” scoffed Müller, turning to Ziegler, who was grinning foolishly so he slapped him too. “What are you simpering for, Nancy? A bit of retard arse?”
Schneider removed his rubber apron, exchanged it for a shabby jacket that hung on a hook on the wall then slowly headed for the door, limping heavily.
“Give Esmeralda one for me!” He heard Müller’s shout and imagined the hip thrust being performed behind his back. Karl Schneider left the building with the sound of raucous laughter ringing like bells in his ears.
***
Schneider climbed the wrought-iron staircase out of the bowels of the Hotel Regent and stepped into a shady side alley, hobbling seventy metres to emerge onto Kurfürstendamm, his eyes squinting in the bright morning sun. He stopped by Rudi’s newspaper kiosk as he did every day, exchanged perfunctory pleasantries with the owner and collected his Berliner Zeitung before limping along the street to the tram stop, amused as ever by the discomfort on the faces of his fellow travellers as they noticed that unprepossessing character who shuffled towards them.
He rode the fifteen stops to Bornstraße and stepped carefully onto the pavement. He watched the tram roll away, put both hands on his hips and straightened his back for the first time in ten hours. His left leg would always give him pain to some extent but the alleged deformity was not nearly enough to affect his gait. Karl Schneider, now tall and erect, ambled casually along Bornstraße towards his apartment.