What follows is, as far as the memory of an old man can be trusted, a true story about real people, at a real place, at a real but now long-ago time.
This will make it for many lovers of hard porn -- which is mostly about just - almost depersonalized - sex, of limited interest, however sexy such memories are to the tellers of such stories.
This story is offered without apology. The readers' figures and marks will tell if its teller should have kept silent.
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At 5 25am on the dot, I knocked on the door of 312. Over the last three days it had become a looked-forward-to task in my morning shift. When she opened the door, I politely lowered my eyes:
"Good Morning, Madam. Your bath will be ready in five minutes."
Although we were instructed not to gawk, I knew that Mrs. Fraser was smiling at me from under her sleep-tousled hair and that her breasts were ready to tumble out of her nighty as she bent forward.
I went back to the lift and waited for her. She had changed from her too revealing nighty into a dressing gown as I watched her stride down the at this time of the morning deserted hallway. When she stepped into the lift, I closed its doors and pressed the button for the basement. Then, again as was the rule, I turned to politely face her.
The hotel's fifty years' old lift was slow. She occasionally smiled as she ran her eyes over me on the ride the five stories down. Mrs. Frazer was average height and I, in my new, brass-buttoned, navy-blue uniform towered over her.
In the basement, I opened the door for her to the hotel's sanctum. It consisted of three, separate rooms, each with a beautifully tiled in-ground basin, filled with the health-giving waters of our town's thermal springs. The domain was ruled by the authoritative figure, dressed in clinical white, of the hotel's Bademeister.
It was 1949. A year earlier, a currency reform had created the Austrian Schilling, and with it ended the war and post-war rationing and scarcity of goods. Only many of the goods that were previously unavailable, were now unaffordable on the Austrian low wages.
But the hotels in the from the war-destruction spared Austrian alpine countryside -- as beautiful as the much more expensive Switzerland -- could reopened their doors to offer their services to almost exclusively foreign guests. The favorable exchange rate meant that their ten dollars or five Pounds covered all their daily expenses in the five-star hotel I worked. In Austrian Schillings it equaled the average weekly income of a qualified Austrian worker.
My job-description of taking the guests to their early morning baths, of being of general help, and of relieving the receptionist, head-porter and switch-board operator when needed, put me in a constant helping-contact with the guests. It was, therefore, a rare day on which I got less in tips than my father, as a long-term municipal employee, earned in a week.
I had turned eighteen in January. Having lost two years of schooling in the turmoil of the war's end, I needed another year to graduate from secondary education for university admission.
Nevertheless, my maturity and manners, combined with my six years of school English and three years of French stood me in good stead when I applied for the job. It suited me admirably, as my school holidays almost matched the hotel's high summer season to the day.
So, while I appeared suited for the job, my almost childlike innocence about the realities of sex had left me ill-prepared for the lack of moral restraint in the sexual conduct among guests and staff in our hotel.
I was, of course, not ignorant of the mechanics of procreational sex, and afflicted by and aware of the urging maleness of my maturing body. What I could not yet do, is reconcile the unclean, animalistic rawness of what I knew and bodily felt with my idealistic belief in romantic love.
Still, the raunchy, sexily explicit talk among the hotel's staff about who was fucking whom, neither disturbed nor surprised me. It only confirmed my arrogant belief that I was more human, less of an animal than them.
Altogether, it was a mindset that did not prepared me for falling head over crotch in lust with Mrs. Frazer. And it had to be lust and not love. Love it could not be, for Mrs. Frazer was, I thought, old and probably married and possibly a mother and so unlike Lore, the girl I had secretly mooned over for the past two years.
Over the last three mornings, on the lift's slow progress the five floors up, she had not only smiled at me, asked for my name, and complimented me on my looks and command of English. Still hot and, perhaps - as rumors had it - animated by the doctor-prescribed twenty-five minutes in the magical thermal water, on each of the mornings her dressing gown had gaped slightly more open.
And yesterday, as instructed, I had to politely face Mrs. Frazer, answer her questions while pretending not to see the lushness of one of her breasts and the dark curls of half her pubic triangle between her gown's parted cloth.
Today, twenty-eight minutes to the dot after depositing her at the bath, I waited with bated breath to take Mrs. Frazer back to her floor. When she walked out from the bathrooms and saw me waiting at the lift's opened door, she smiled:
"Waiting again, just for me? You are spoiling me, Robert."
As I probably blushed, I noticed the laugh wrinkles in the corners of her eyes. For the first time, I consciously registered how pretty she was for a woman as old as my mother.
She stepped into the lift: I closed its door, pressed the button, and turned. With a broad smile, she asked:
"Would you join me for a drink and chat this evening, Robert?... You are from here; you could tell me what walks and climbs I could do, and what mischief I could get up to."
I blushed, "I am sorry, Madam, the staff is not allowed to drink with a guest in the bar."
"But you could join me in my room after work, Robert; couldn't you?" she laughed. "And Madam!... Why so formal! Call me Rose!"
Gesticulating while she talked had caused her dressing gown to fall open. When the lift stopped on her floor, the way she unhurriedly, with a grin, clasped it closed, told even inexperienced me that it had not been accidental.
Still, as always, I stood at attention as I opened the lift's door. In passing me, Mrs. Frazer -- Rose - pressed her body briefly onto me and whispered, "I hope, you can come tonight, Robert."
Dumbfounded I stood and watched as she, giggling, skipped light-footed down the at this time in the morning deserted corridor to her room.
However much a sexual adventure with Mrs. Frazer excited and tempted me, my feelings did not match the mischievous light-heartedness with which she had propositioned me.
For her, it seemed, sex between us would be merely a matter of fun.
For me -- and for people of my kind and makeup in the Austria of 1949 -- any free sex outside of marriage was more problematic.
Firstly, while often irresistibly tempting, it was, besides the restraining strictures of morals and its sinfulness in the Catholic canons, loaded with the actual dangers of unwanted pregnancies, illegitimate abortions, and the range of still difficult to treat venereal diseases.
Secondly, when it came to the sexual act, too many of us too often were repulsively undesirable partners with smelly and unwashed bodies and privates. It was OK for a swift and furtive humping, but - for the sensitive and refined amongst us - not for a sensuous, whole-body experience.
Our lack in hygiene was, of course, not by choice but caused by the condition of public and rental housing in which most of us lived.
My lower middle-class parents and my sister and I lived in a three room flat on a municipal housing estate. Our substantial, fifty-year-old building had two flats on each of its three stories. At the end of the hallway on each floor, was a shared toilet and a cold-water tap. Together with cold-water-taps in the communal laundry in the cellar, this was the building's total plumbing.
We, like everybody else, washed ourselves in the kitchen. My and my father's ingrained modesty -- living with two females, my mother and a sister, neither of whom I had ever seen in a state of undress -- made a sponge-bath in the kitchen awkward to arrange.
So, all four of us went -- not always once a week even though we were a better class of people that could afford the expense - to the conveniently-near municipal baths. This contrasted with the poorer folks and the people on the farms that surrounded our famous spa town.
Rumors had it that the latter bathed only once a year before Easter. At Christmas it was for them much too cold to strip down in the open outdoor laundry-sheds to bath in their largest tubs.
All these awarenesses and complexes about the sinfulness, dangers, and unsavory physicality associated with human copulation, and the likelihood that I might engage in such sex with Mrs. Frazer, kept assailing my mind all through the day.
But I still fevered in waiting for the evening.
At eight o' clock I signed off work for the day with the head porter. Still in my uniform, I could walk unsuspiciously up to the third floor. After checking that the floor's chamber maids were not around, I knocked on Mrs. Frazer's familiar door.
As if she had been waiting, the door opened quickly. She waved me in. Then she grinned, stretched her head out the door and quickly peeked left and right.
"I checked." I said and laughed in relief.
Her silly gesture had shown me that for her as much as for me, my visiting her was naughtily exciting. So, although Rose was still formally dressed - as all our guests were for dinner - I knew now that I had come to play.
As I stepped up to her, she smiled. Reaching for my coat's brass buttons she said, "We are rather over-dressed, Robert; aren't we?" And after she had helped me out of my uniform and put it on a chair, she took her costume's top off too. Then we sat down on a two-seat sofa.
On the coffee-table facing it, were two glasses, a carafe with water, and an unfamiliar dark bottle. She took it and poured a generous slug in the glasses:
"I hope you like Scotch whisky, Robert. It's my favorite drink, with a bit of your mountain water, perhaps? My father was a Highlander laird. He never had a son. To my mother's despair, he raised me rough. I still share his taste for a proper drink."
She handed me the glass, "To us then, Robert! If you like it, you are my kind of man!"
I only knew about whisky from foremost American writers I had read. But now, watching Rose, I bravely took a generous sip. To my surprise it filled my mouth's hollow with wondrous fumes before it flowed soothingly down my throat. It was so incomparably better than the home-distilled schnapps of my rural relatives.
