The Black Obelisk (13 page)
"Yes I will" I reply, seating myself. "I've acquired the taste. You taught me. Many thanks."
Bodendiek draws the bottle out of the ice with a bittersweet smile. He regards the label for a moment before pouring—a quarter glass for me. His own he fills almost to the rim. I calmly take the bottle out of his hand and fill my own glass as full as his. "Herr Vicar," I say, "in many ways we are not so very different."
Bodendiek suddenly laughs. His face unfolds like a peony. "To health and happiness," he says unctuously.
The thunder rumbles near and far. The lightning falls like silent saber blows. I am sitting at the window in my room with the scraps of all Erna's letters in front of me in a hollow elephant's foot which the world traveler Hans Ledermann gave me a year ago for a wastebasket.
I am through with Erna. I have counted up all her unattractive qualities; I have rooted her out of me emotionally and humanly; as dessert I have read a couple of chapters of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. Nevertheless, I should prefer to have a tuxedo, a car, and a chauffeur so that I could now turn up at the Red Mill, accompanied by two or three famous actresses and with several hundred millions in my pocket so that I could deal that serpent the blow of her life. I dream for a time of how it would be if tomorrow morning she should read in the paper that I had won the sweepstakes or had been gravely injured while rescuing children from a burning house. Then I see a light in Lisa's room.
She opens the window and signals. My room is dark; she cannot see me; therefore I'm not the one. She says something silently, points at her breast and then at our house, and nods. The light goes out.
I lean out cautiously. It is twelve o'clock, and the windows roiffld about are dark. Only Georg Kroll's is open.
I wait and see Lisa's door move. She steps out, looks quickly in both directions, and runs across the street. She is wearing a light, bf\S,M.Y colored dress and is carrying her shoes in her hand so as not te make any noise. At the same time I hear the door of our house being opened cautiously. It must be Georg. The door has a bell above it and in order to open it without making a noise you have to get on a chair, hold the clapper, press down on the latch with your foot, and draw the door open, an acrobatic feat for which you have to be sober. Tonight I know that Georg is sober.
There is the sound of murmuring; the click of high heels. Lisa, that vain creature, has put on her shoes again to appear more seductive. The door of Georg's room sighs softly. Well, well! Who would have thought it? Still waters!
The storm returns. The thunder grows louder, and suddenly, like a cascade of silver coins, the rain pours down upon the pavement. It rebounds in dusty fountains and a breath of coolness ascends from it. I lean out the window and look into the watery tumult. The rain is already running off through the rain pipes, lightning flares, and in its intermittent flashes I see Lisa's bare arm reaching out of Georg's window into the rain, then I see her head and hear her husky voice. I do not see Georg's bald dome. He is no nature lover.
The gate to the courtyard opens under the blow of a fist. Soaking wet, Sergeant Major Knopf staggers in. Water is dripping from his cap. Thank God, I think, in weather like this I won't have to follow up his misdemeanors with a pail of water! But Knopf disappoints me. He doesn't pay any attention to his victim, the black obelisk. Cursing and slapping at the raindrops as though they were mosquitos he flees into the house. Water is his great enemy.
I pick up the elephant's foot and empty its contents into the street. The rain quickly washes away Erna's protestations of love. Money has won, I think, as always, though it is worth nothing. I go to the other window and look into the garden. The great festival of the rain is in full swing, a green nuptial orgy, shameless and innocent. In the flare of the lightning I see the plaque for the suicide. It has been put to one side; the inscription has been carved and gleams with gold. I shut the window and turn on the light. Below, Georg and Lisa are murmuring. My room suddenly seems horribly empty. I open the window again and listen to the anonymous rushing and decide to request from Bauer, the bookseller, as honorarium for my last week's tutoring, a book on yoga, renunciation and self-sufficiency. Adepts are said to achieve fabulous results through simple breathing exercises.
Before I go to sleep I pass a mirror. I stop and look into it. What is there really? I think. Whence comes the perspective which is not a perspective, the deceptive depth, the space which is a plane? And who is that who peers out questioningly and is not there?
I look at my lip swollen and crusted with blood. I touch it and someone opposite me touches his ghostly lip which is not there. I grin and the not-I grins back. I shake my head and the not-I shakes his not-head. Which of us is which? And in front? Or something else, something behind both? I feel a shudder and turn out the light.
Riesenfeld had kept his word. The courtyard is full of monuments and pedestals. The ones polished on all sides are in crates and wrapped in sacking. They are the prima donnas among tombstones and must be handled with extreme care to avoid damaging their edges.
The whole crew are in the courtyard to help and to watch. Even old Frau Kroll is wandering around, examining the blackness and quality of the granite and now and again casting a melancholy glance at the obelisk beside the door— the single remaining item of her late husband's purchases.
Kurt Bach is directing the moving of a huge sandstone block into his workroom. A dying lion is to be created out of it, but this time not one bowed with toothache but roaring a last defiance, a broken spear in his flank. It is to be a war memorial for the village of Wüstringen where there is a particularly belligerent veteran's organization under the command of Major Wolkenstein, retired. The sorrowing lion was too much like a washrag for Wolkenstein. What he would really like is one with four heads spewing fire from all mouths.
A shipment from the Württemberg Metal works, which arrived at the same time, is also being unpacked. Four eagles taking flight have been arranged in a row on the ground, two of bronze and two of cast iron. They are to become the crowning decorations for other war memorials to inspire the youth of the land to a new war—for, as Major Wolkenstein has so persuasively declared: "We must win sometime, and then woe to the vanquished!" For the moment, to be sure, the eagles look like nothing so much as giant roosters trying to lay eggs—but this will be quite different once they are enthroned on the monuments. Even generals without their uniforms are likely to look like grocers' apprentices, and Wolkenstein himself in civilian clothes would be taken for a fat athletic director. Costume and perspective are important in our beloved fatherland.
As advertising director I supervise the arrangement of the monuments. They are not to be placed haphazardly in rows but artistically located about the garden in intimate groups. Heinrich Kroll is against this. He would like to see the stones placed like soldiers in formation; anything else seems to him effeminate. Fortunately he is outvoted. Even his mother is against him. Indeed, she is always against him. Even now she cannot understand why Heinrich belongs to her and not to the wife of Major Wolkenstein, retired.
The day is blue and beautiful. Over the city the sky hangs like a giant silken tent. The cool of morning still lingers in the crowns of the trees. Birds are twittering as though nothing existed except early summer, their nests, and their young. It doesn't matter to them that the dollar, like an ugly, spongy toadstool, has puffed itself up to fifty thousand. Nor that, the morning paper contains the notices of three suicides—all people of small independent means, all committed in the favorite fashion of the poor by an open gas jet. Frau Kubalke was found in her living room with her head in the gas heater; the pensioned government clerk Hopf, freshly shaved, in his last, faultlessly brushed, much-mended suit, grasping in his hand four worthless red-seal thousand-mark notes like tickets to heaven; and the widow Glass on the floor of her kitchen, her bankbook, showing deposits of fifty thousand marks, torn in two beside her. Hopf's red-seal thousand-mark notes were his last banner of hope; for a long time there has been a belief that they would sometime or other be redeemed at full value. Whence this rumor came no one knows. They were never officially payable in gold, and even if they have been, the State, that immune betrayer, which embezzles billions and jails anyone who defrauds it of as much as five marks, would find some pretext for not paying. Only day before yesterday there was a notice in the paper that these notes would not receive preferential treatment. That's the reason Hopf's death notice is in the paper today.
From the workroom of Wilke, the coffinmaker, come the sounds of hammering, as though a giant, cheerful woodpecker lived there. Wilke's business is booming; everyone needs a coffin sooner or later, even a suicide—the time of mass graves and burial in canvas bags has passed with the war. Now once more one decays fittingly in slowly moldering wood, in shroud or backless frock coat or in a burial dress of white crepe de Chine. Niebuhr, the banker, even in all the glory of his orders and fraternal insignia; his wife insisted on it. In addition, he had been provided with a facsimile of the Harmony Singing Club's flag. He was their second tenor, and every Saturday roared his way through
"
Schweigen im Walde
"
and
"
Stolz weht die Flagge Schwarzweissrot
,"
drank almost enough beer to burst, and then went home to beat his wife—an upright man, as the pastor said at his funeral.
Fortunately at ten o'clock Heinrich Rroll disappears with his bicycle and his striped pants to visit the villages. All this new granite makes his salesman's soul restless; he has to be on his way to let the sorrowing survivors know about it.
Now we can become more expansive. First of all we give ourselves a recess and are served liverwurst sandwiches and coffee by Frau Kroll. Lisa appears in the gateway. She is wearing a blazing red silk dress. Old Frau Kroll scares her away with a glance. She can't stand Lisa, although she is no prude herself. "That dirty tramp," she exclaims with emphasis.
Georg promptly falls into the trap. "Dirty? What do you mean dirty?"
"Can't you see she's dirty? Unwashed under all that finery."
I see Georg involuntarily grow thoughtful. Dirt is not something you like to think of in connection with your beloved—unless you're a decadent. For an instant there is a kind of flash of triumph in his mother's eyes; then she changes the subject. I look at her in admiration; she is a general of mobile units—she strikes swiftly, and when her opponent gets ready to defend himself she is already somewhere else. Lisa may be a tramp; she is certainly not obviously dirty.
The three daughters of Sergeant Major Knopf come flitting out of the house. They are seamstresses like their mother, small, roly-poly, and nimble. Their machines whir all day long. Now they dart off, carrying bundles of exorbitantly costly silk shirts for profiteers. Knopf, the old soldier, does not hand over one pfennig of his pension for household expenses; that's something for the four women to see to.
Cautiously we unpack the two black war memorials. They really ought to stand at the entrance to make an impressive effect, and in winter we would place them there; but it is May and, strange though it may seem, our courtyard is an arena for cats and lovers. The cats begin to scream from the monuments in February and chase each other behind the cement grave borders; the lovers, however, put in their appearance as soon as it is warm enough to make love in the open— and when is it too cold for that? Hackenstrasse is a quiet, remote street, our gate is inviting, and our garden old and large. The somewhat macabre display does not disturb the lovers; on the contrary, it seems to stir them to particular frenzy. Only two weeks ago, a chaplain from the village of Halle, who like all men of God was accustomed to rise with the roosters, came to see us at seven in the morning to order four of the smallest headstones for the graves of four charitable nuns who had died during the preceding year. As I, drunk with sleep, was leading him into the garden I was able to remove, just in time, a rose-colored stocking of artificial silk that was floating like a flag from our last memorial cross, left there by some enthusiastic nocturnal pair. Unquestionably there is something conciliatory, in the broad, poetic sense, about sowing life in a place of death, and Otto Bambuss, the poet schoolmaster of our club, when I told him about it, promptly stole my idea and worked it up into an elegy with cosmic humor—on the other hand it can be rather disturbing, especially when an empty brandy bottle stands there too, gleaming in the morning sun.
I supervise the display. It makes a pleasant effect, as far as one can say that of tombstones. The two crosses stand on their pedestals shimmering in the sunlight, symbols of eternity, hewn fragments of a once-glowing earth, now cooled, polished, and ready to preserve forever the name of some successful businessman or rich profiteer—for even a scoundrel does not like to depart from this planet without leaving some trace behind.
"Georg," I say, "we'll have to take care your brother doesn't sell our Werdenbrück Golgotha to some miserable farmer who won't pay until after the harvest. On this lovely day, amid the song of birds and the aroma of coffee, let us take a holy oath not to sell these two crosses except for cash on the line!"
Georg smiles undismayed. "It's not as dangerous as that We have to redeem our note in three weeks. As long as we get the money before that we are ahead of the game—even if we sell at cost."
"Ahead of the game!" I reply. "And illusion until the next dollar quotation."
"Sometimes you're too commercial." Georg meticulously lights a cigar worth five thousand marks. "Instead of complaining, you should rather regard the inflation as a reversed symbol of life. At the end of each day your life has one day's duration less. We live our life on capital, not income. Each day the dollar rises, but each night your life is quoted at one day less. There you have the subject for a sonnet."
"That's a theme for Eduard Knoblach." I look at the self satisfied Socrates of Hackenstrasse. Small beads of sweat adorn his bald head like pearls on a bright dress. "It's amazing how philosophical a fellow can be when he has not slept by himself," I say.
Georg does not move an eyelash. "What would you expect?" he asks me calmly. "Philosophy out to be serene, not tormented. To mix it up with metaphysical speculation is just like mixing sensual pleasure with what the members of your Poets' Club call ideal love. It makes an intolerable mishmash.
"Mishmash?" I say, somehow hurt. "Hold on a minute, you bourgeois adventurer! You butterfly collector, trying to impale everything on needles! Don't you know that without what you call mishmash you're as good as dead?"
"Absolutely not. I just keep things separate." Georg blows cigar smoke into my face. "I prefer to endure the transitoriness of life with dignified philosophic melancholy rather than commit the vulgar error of confusing some Minna or Anna with the chilly secret of existence and of assuming that the world would come to an end if Minna or Anna preferred some other Karl or Josef. Or if an Erna preferred some overgrown infant in English tweeds."
He grins. I stare coldly into his disloyal eye. "A cheap crack, worthy of Heinrich!" I say. "You simple connoisseur of what's available! Will you please tell me then why you read so much passion the magazines that are crammed full of unattainable sirens, scandals of high society, great ladies of the theater, and movie queens?"
Georg once more blows three hundred marks' worth of smoke into my eyes. "I do that for purposes of fantasy. Have you never heard of heavenly and earthly love? Only a short time ago you were trying to combine them in your Erna and learned a sound lesson, you simple-minded delicatessen dealer in love, trying to keep sauerkraut and caviar on the same shelf! haven't you found out yet that then the sauerkraut will never taste like caviar but the caviar will always taste like sauerkraut? I keep them carefully separated. Now come, let's go and torment Eduard Knoblach. Today he's serving beef stew with noodles."
I nod and go without a word to get my hat. Inadvertently Georg has dealt me a heavy face blow—but I'm damned if I'm going to let him know it.
When I return Gerda Schneider is sitting in the office. She is wearing a green sweater, a short dress, and big earrings with artificial stones. On the left side of her sweater she has pinned one of the roses from Riesenfeld's bouquet, which must be extraordinary durable. Pointing at it, she says: "Merci! Everyone was envious. That was a bush for a prima donna."
I look at her and think: very likely there sits exactly what Georg means by earthly love—clear, determined, young and without affectation. I sent her flowers, and she has come, and that's all there is to it. She has interpreted the flowers as any intelligent person should. Instead of acting a tedious part, here she is. She has accepted, and there is really nothing more to talk about.
"What are you doing this afternoon?" she asks.
"I'm working until five. Then I'm going to give a tutoring lesson to an idiot."
"What in? Idiocy?"
I grin. "Come to think of it, yes."
"That would be until six. Come to the Alstädter Hof afterward. I exercise there."
"All right," I say without pausing to consider.
Gerda gets up. "Well then—"
She hold up her face to me. I am surprised. I hadn't expected so much from my gift of flowers. But why not, really? Very likely Georg is right: one oughtn't to combat the pains of love with philosophy—only with another woman. Cautiously I kiss Gerda on the cheek. "Dummkopf!" she says and kisses me warmly on the mouth. "Traveling artistes don't have time for foolery. In two weeks I must be off. Well then, till tonight."
She walks out, erect, with her firm, strong legs and strong shoulders. On her head she has a red Basque beret. She seems to love color. Outside she stops beside the obelisk and glances at our Golgotha. "That's our inventory," I say.
She nods, "Does it bring you any income?"
"So-so—in these times—"
"And you're employed here?"
"Yes. Funny, isn't it?"
"Nothing's funny," Gerda says. "What about me spending my time in the Red Mill sticking my head backward between my legs? Do you think God had that in mind when he made me? Well, till six."
Old Frau Kroll comes out of the garden with a sprinkling can in her hand. "That's a respectable girl," she says, glancing after Gerda. "What is she?"
"She's an acrobat."
"Well, an acrobat. She can do saltos, handstands, and dislocations like a human serpent."
"You seem to know quite a lot about her. Did she want to buy something?"
"Not yet."
She laughs. Her spectacles glitter. "My dear Ludwig," she says, "you can't imagine how silly your present way of life will seem to you some day when you're seventy."
"I'm not so very sure about that," I tell her. "It seems pretty silly to me right now. What, by the way, is your opinion of love?"
"Of what?"
"Love. Heavenly and earthly love."
Frau Kroll laughs heartily. "That's something I've forgotten long since, thank God!"
I am Arthur Bauer's bookstore. This is payday for the tutor. Arthur Jr. has seized the opportunity to put a few tacks on my chair by way of greeting. I wanted to stick his sheep's head in the goldfish bowl that decorates their plush-upholstered living room, but I had to control myself—otherwise Arthur, Sr. would not have paid, and Arthur, Jr. knows this.
"So it's yoga," says Arthur, Sr., jovially pushing toward me a stack of books. "I've put aside all we have. Yoga, Buddhism, asceticism, omphaloskepsis—do you plan to become a fakir?"
I look at him disapprovingly. He is a little man with a pointed beard and nimble eyes. Another shot, I think, aimed at my beleaguered heart! But I'll get the best of you, you cheap mockingbird; you're no Georg! I say to him sharply: "What's the meaning of life, Herr Bauer?"
Arthur looks at me as expectantly as a poodle. "We'll?"
"Well what?"
"What's the point? You're making a joke, aren't you?"
"No," I reply cooly. "That's a test question for the salvation of my young soul. I'm putting it to a lot of people, especially those who ought to know."
Arthur plucks at his beard as though it were a harp. "So you seriously ask a nonsensical question like that on a Monday afternoon at the busiest time in this shop and expect an answer too?"
"Yes, I do," I say. "But admit it at once! You don't know either! Despite all your books!"
Arthur relinquishes his beard to run his hands through his hair. "Good God, the things people think of to worry about! Take the matter up in your poetry club!"
"In the poetry club there's nothing but poetical evasion. What I want is the truth. Otherwise why am I alive and not a worm?"
"The truth?" Arthur bleats. "That's something for Pontius Pilate! It has nothing to do with me. I am bookseller, husband, and father; that's enough for me."
I look at the bookseller, husband, and father. He has a mole on the right side of his face beside his nose. "So that's enough," I say cuttingly.
"That's enough." Arthur replies firmly. "Indeed, sometimes it's too much."
"Was it enough when you were twenty-five?"
Arthur opens his blue eyes wide as he can. "When I was twenty-five? No. I still wanted to become it at that time."
"What?" I ask hopefully. "A human being?"
"Owner of this bookstore, husband, and father. A human being I am anyway. But not yet a fakir."
He waddles quickly away after this harmless second shot to wait on a lady with a copious, drooping bosom who is looking for a novel by Rudolf Herzog. I quickly leaf through the books about the happiness of renunciation and promptly lay the aside. During the day one is considerably less receptive to this sort of thing than at night when one is alone and there is nothing else available.
I walk over to the shelves that contain the works on religion and philosophy. They are Arthur Bauer's pride. Here he has, collected in one place, pretty much everything that humanity has thought in a couple of thousand years about the meaning of life, and so it should be possible for a couple of hundred thousand marks to become adequately informed on the subject—for even less really, let us say for twenty to thirty thousand marks; for if the meaning of life were knowable, a single book should suffice. But where is it? I glance up and down the rows. The section is very extensive, and this suddenly makes me distrustful. It seems to me that with truth and the meaning of life the situation is the same as with hair tonics—each firm praises its own as the only satisfactory one, and yet Georg Kroll, who has tried them all, still has a bald head just as he should have known from the beginning he would have. If there were a hair tonic that really grew hair, there would be only that one and all the others would long ago have gone out of business.
Bauer comes back. "Well, found something?"
"No."
He looks at the volumes I have pushed aside. "So then, there's no point in being a fakir, eh?"
I do not directly contradict the silly joker. Instead I say: "There's no point in any books at all. If you look at everything that is written here and then at the way things are in the world, all you'll want to read is the menu in the Wal-halla and the family notes in the daily paper."
"What's that?" asks the bookseller, husband, and father in quick alarm. "Reading is education! Everyone knows that."
"Really?"
"Of course! Otherwise what would become of us booksellers?"
Arthur rushes off again. A man with a closely trimmed mustache is asking for a work entitled
Undefeated in the Field
.
It is the great success of the postwar period. In it an unemployed general proves that the German army was victorious in battle to the end.