Excerpt from Nadja Dietrich’s Novel Emperor’s Eyrie
For his research at the conference hotel, which was built at the legendary site of „Emperor’s Eyrie“, Carlo slips into the role of a maid – a completely new experience for him.
So this is what life as a maid feels like. It’s a bit like being a hotel accessory that has been given a soul by a programming error of creation.
Early in the morning or, according to my perception, in the middle of the night, they get you out of your storeroom and order you into the kitchen. There you hiss and clink and clatter frantically for some time. You are a breakfast automaton, and while you wither away inside from sleeplessness, you spray out a pick-me-up cocktail of coffee aroma and the flavour of freshly sliced fruit.
To crown your morning work, you mutate into a tablecloth. You reverently soak up splashes of egg yolk and spills of jam, you courteously ignore whispers about the secrets of the night and you don’t make a sound when the hot coffee drips onto your back. After all, you’re just a tablecloth, and tablecloths don’t feel any pain.
After breakfast, you turn into a garbage chute. You gulp down the stale remnants of night-time hugs, the sour traces of many a binge, the sticky residue of breakfast. You suck in the stuffy air and release it back into the room, fresh and flavoured. You pick the grains of dust out of the corners and give the abused beds the appearance of never having been used.
At lunchtime, you become a chopping board. The smell of thinly sliced onions envelops you, the blood of raw meat seeps through the pores of your face, you tremble under the weight of countless potatoes being quartered on top of you. In the end, a fierce jet of water makes the fine veins on your skin burst.
In the afternoons, you often freeze into a broad, all-absorbing smile. You merge with the reception desk, handing out keys and chip cards with many arms while offering champagne glances. You’re a kindness automaton, radiating all your warmth to the outside world while cooling down inside.
Occasionally you are also used as a stair lift. Then the travellers‘ dreams, their lofty plans and anxious precautions pile up on you. Cautiously, you carry the burden of visions over into the realm of reality, sometimes like Charon gifted with a superstitious coin to fertilise the seeds of dreams. And all the while, your face is like a mountain lake on a clear summer’s day, a brightly shimmering mirror for the hopes of the guests.
In the evening, you turn into a magic potion. You pour yourself into the glasses of customers who are fuelling their libido at the bar, you burn muddled words on their lips, you glow promisingly in their veins. Flickering glances whizz around you as you patiently endure the throbbing of the swelling volcano.
Sometime after midnight, you end up back in your storeroom – even if some people would still like to use you as a sofa, as a gently vibrating massage cushion that lulls them to sleep and presents them with fleeting, non-committal dreams that they will have forgotten the next morning.
Image: Dexmac: Female robot (Pixabay)
Planet Literature 
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