The newcomer, now standing on the steps of the Donati Station, put his hand on his hat and stared through the Central Square. There were carts there, and wagons, and several automobiles. Toward the east, over the rooftops, steam from the dyeworks steadily rose. Women passed with their bundles. Boys chased each other in the open air. Then the Pole pointed to where, on the far side of the Rumkowsky Monument, a flag was flying over the Hotel Europa. Trumpelman, with his teeth protruding a little, smiled. Then he picked up his bags and walked down the steps, into the square. The tails of his coat, as if angry at something, lashed round his legs.

The Hotel Europa, still intact also, though now the site of a state ministry, is even larger than the main station. It was generally thought to be the equal of the Britannia in Warsaw, and finer than the Zoppot Casino-Hotel in Gottentow-Lanz. The pastry shop on the ground floor had an international reputation. It made butter tarts, with crumb crusts that were toasted, and those traveling east-west, Paris-Moscow, or north-south, Danzig-Budapest, would buy them in between trains. In this hotel, in a corner room with a washstand, Isaiah C. Trumpelman stayed for three nights and three days.

It seems he spent this time walking, in wider and wider circles, so as to cover the entire town. Thus the first day he stayed near the Central Square, in the commercial district, and especially on Alexsandrowska Boulevard, with its travel posters and elegant shops. The next day he went to the residential sections, the Walburska quarter, the twin avenues, Leczyca and Pabianice, whose large houses were set into gardens and decorated with a pattern of banana leaves. Finally, he went past the New Market, to the working-class district known as the Baluty Suburb: here everything smelled from the tanneries, the dyeworks and mills were always steaming, and there was mud in all of the roads. So much for Trumpelman’s days. At night, at least for the first night and the second, no person saw him. Probably he was sleeping, or reading, or staring out the single round window high up on the wall of his room.

The third night was different. The Lithuanian walked out the front door of the hotel. Now he wore blue—the trousers, the jacket, the blue, white-dotted tie. A white shirt also. And a pair of long, narrow, shiny black shoes. Dressed in these clothes, which set off his eyes, and with his whitish hair brushed over his collar, he must have made a striking figure. He walked through the square and onto a side street, down which, blinking excitedly, were the lights from the Astoria Café.

That nitespot was not then as famous as it later became. Trumpelman took a table at the back. He ate a beefsteak and drank a clear liqueur. He bought four cigarettes. A thin comedian, losing his hair, told a number of jokes. About the Jew and the bathtub. About the landowner and the crow. Then a woman with black bangs and painted lips began to sing songs. She looked, with her straight, bare shoulders, like a statuette, like an Egyptian. The visitor at the far table ordered a hothouse flower and, when the songs were over, sent it to the stage. The singer pinned the rose to her waist, just above the split in her tight, gleaming gown. Then she blew that patron a kiss. It was in this manner that I. C. Trumpelman celebrated his forty-ninth birthday.