The Black Obelisk (37 page)

There is a crackling and whispering in the courtyard, and once more stealthy footsteps. "Two weeks ago there was a fight out there," Wilke says. "A locksmith had forgotten to take his tools out of his pocket, and during the stormy encounter they must have got into so unfortunate a position that the lady was suddenly pricked by a sharp awl. She was up in a flash and grabbed a small bronze wreath. She beat the mechanic over the head with it—didn't you hear it?" he asks me.

"No."

"Well, she slams the bronze wreath down over his ears so hard he can't get it off. I turn on the light and ask what's going on. The fellow gallops off in terror with the bronze wreath around his skull like a Roman senator—didn't you notice the bronze wreath was missing?" he asks me.

"No."

"What a way to run a business! So he runs out as though a swarm of wasps was after him. I go down. The girl is still standing there, looking at her hand. 'Blood!' she says. 'He stabbed me. And at such a moment!'

"I see the awl on the ground and guess what has happened. I pick up the awl. This could give you blood poisoning,' I say. 'Very dangerous! You can put a tourniquet on a finger, but not on a buttock. Even so enchanting a one.' She blushes—"

"How could you tell in the darkness?" Kurt Bach asks.

"There was a moon."

"You can't see a blush in the moonlight. Colors don't show."

"You feel it," Wilke explains. "So she blushes, but continues to hold up her dress. It's a light dress, and blood makes spots that are hard to get out. 'I have iodine and adhesive plaster,' I say. 'And I'm discreet. Come in!' She comes in and isn't even frightened." Wilke turns to me. "That's the nice thing about your yard," he says enthusiastically. "Anyone who makes love among tombstones isn't afraid of coffins either. So it happened that, after the iodine and adhesive tape and a swallow of blended port wine, the giant's coffin served another purpose."

"It became a bower of love?" I ask to make sure.

"A cavalier enjoys his pleasures but says nothing," Wilke replies.

At this instant the moon comes out from behind the clouds, lighting the white marble and making the crosses glimmer darkly. Scattered among them we see four pairs of lovers, two on marble beds, two on granite. For a moment everyone is motionless, transfixed by surprise—there are only two courses open to them, to flee or to ignore the altered situation. Flight is not without danger; you can get away in an instant, but you may sustain such a psychic shock that it will lead to impotence. I learned that from a lance corporal who was once taken by surprise by a sergeant major when he was out in the woods with a cook—he was ruined for life, and two years later his wife divorced him.

The pairs of lovers do the right thing. Like stags scenting danger they lift their heads—then, with eyes directed at the single lighted window, ours, which was lighted before, they remain as they are, as though carved by Kurt Bach. It is a picture of innocence, a trifle ridiculous at most, just like Bach's sculptures. Immediately thereafter the shadow of a cloud obscures that part of the garden, leaving only the obelisk in the light. And who stands there, a glittering fountain? The fearlessly pissing Knopf, like that statue in Brussels which every soldier who has gone on leave in Belgium knows so well.

He is too far away for me to do anything. Besides, I don't feel like it tonight. Why should I behave like a housewife? I decided this afternoon to leave this place, and therefore life rises to meet me with double strength. I feel it everywhere, in the smell of the shavings and in the moonlight, in the tiptoeing and rustling in the courtyard and in the ineffable word September, in my hand which can move and lay hold of it, and in my eyes without which all the museums of the world would be empty, in ghosts, in spirits, in transitoriness, and in the wild career of the earth past Cassiopeia and the Pleiades, in the anticipation of boundless foreign gardens under foreign stars, of positions on great, foreign newspapers, and of rubies now crystallizing underground into lustrous gems; I feel it and it keeps me from heaving an empty beer bottle in the direction of Knopf, that half-minute fountain—

At this moment the clock strikes. It is one. The ghostly hour is past; we can speak formally to Wilke again and either go on getting drunk or descend into sleep as into a mine where there are corpses, coal, white salt palaces, and buried diamonds.

She is sitting in a corner of her room huddled 
beside the window. "Isabelle," I say. 

She does not answer. Her eyelids flutter like butterflies that children have impaled alive on pins. 

"Isabelle," I say. "I've come to take you out."

She gives a start and presses herself against the wall. Her posture is cramped and rigid. "Don't you know me any more?" I ask.

She remains motionless; only her eyes turn toward me, watchful and very dark. "The one who pretends to be a doctor sent you," she whispers.

It is true. Wernicke did send me. "He did not send me," I say. "I came secretly. No one knows I am here."

She frees herself slowly from the wall. "You, too, have betrayed me."

"I have not betrayed you. I could not get to you. You have not come out."

"I couldn't," she whispers. "They were all standing outside waiting. They wanted to catch me. They managed to find out that I am here."

"Who?"

She looks at me but does not answer. How frail she is! I think. How frail and alone in this bare room! She hasn't even her own self. Not even the loneliness of the ego. She has exploded like a grenade into jagged fragments of fear scattered in a strange, threatening landscape of incomprehensible dread. "No one is waiting for you," I say.

"Yes, they are."

"How do you know?"

"The voices. Don't you hear them?"

"No."

"The voices know everything. Can't you hear them?"

"It's the wind, Isabelle."

"Yes," she says with resignation. "It may be the wind. If only it didn't hurt so!"

"What hurts?"

"The sawing. They might at least cut, that would go faster, but this slow, dull sawing! Everything grows together again because they are so slow! Then they begin all over again and so it never stops. They saw through my flesh and the flesh grows together again and it never stops."

"Who saws?"

"The voices."

"Voices can't saw."

"These can."

"Where do they saw?"

Isabelle makes a gesture as though in extreme pain. She presses her hands between her thighs. "They want to saw it out so that I can never have children."

"Who?"

"The woman out there. She says she bore me. Now she wants to force me back into herself again. She saws and saws. And he holds me still."

"Who holds you?"

She shudders. "He—the one inside her—"

"Inside her?"

She groans. "Don't say it—she will kill me—I'm not allowed to know—"

I walk toward her around an easy chair upholstered in a pale rose pattern, its atmosphere of domesticity strangely inappropriate in this bare room. "What aren't you allowed to know?" I ask.

"She will kill me. I don't dare go to sleep. Why does no one keep watch with me? I must do everything alone. I am so tired," she laments like a bird. "It burns and I cannot go to sleep and I am so tired. But who can sleep when it burns and no one is keeping watch? You, too, have abandoned me.

"I have not abandoned you."

"You have been talking to them. They have bribed you. Why didn't you hold on to me? The blue trees and the silver rain. But you didn't want to. Never! You could have rescued me."

"When?" I ask, feeling something begin to tremble inside me, and I do not want it to tremble but it goes on just the same, and the room no longer seems solid; it is as though the walls were shaking and did not consist of stone and mortar and plaster but of vibrations, densely concentrated vibrations of billions of fibers that stretch from horizon to horizon and beyond and are here pressed together into a square jail of fragile nooses, hangman's nooses, in which a creature of yearning and fear is struggling helplessly.

Isabelle turns her face to the wall. "Oh, it's lost and gone —many lifetimes ago."

Suddenly twilight fills the window, spreading over it a veil of almost invisible gray. Everything is still there as before, the light outside, the green, the yellow of the roads, the two palms in the big majolica pots, the sky with its fields of cloud, the distant gray and red confusion of roofs in the city beyond the woods—and nothing is any longer the same. Twilight has isolated it. It has brushed it with the varnish of impermanence, prepared it like food, as housewives soak beef in vinegar, for the shadow wolves of the night. Only Isabelle is still there, clinging tight to the last thread of light, but she, too, is being drawn by it into the drama of the evening, which is not truly a drama and only seems so because we know it means impermanence. Only since we have known that we must die and only because we know it has the idyl turned into drama, the circle into a lance, and becoming into passing away and outcry and terror and flight and judgment.

I hold her close in my arms. She is trembling and looking at me and pressing herself against me and I hold her, we hold each other—two strangers who know nothing of one another and cling to one another because each mistakes the other for someone else: strangers who nevertheless derive a fleeting comfort from this misunderstanding which is a double and triple and endless misunderstanding and yet is the only thing that, like a rainbow, holds out the deceptive appearance of a bridge where no bridge can ever be, a reflection between two mirrors thrown onward into even more distant emptiness. "Why don't you love me?" Isabelle murmurs.

"I love you. Everything in me loves you."

"Not enough. The others are still here. If it were enough, you would kill them."

I hold her in my arms and look over her head into the park where now shadows like amethyst waves are running up the fields and roads. Everything in me is clear and sharp, but at the same time I feel as though I were standing on a narrow platform high above a murmurous deep. "You wouldn't be able to stand it if I lived outside you," Isabelle whispers.

I don't know what to reply. Something always moves in me when she says things like that—as though there were a deeper wisdom in them than I can recognize—as though they came from beyond the phenomenal world, from the place where there are no names. "Do you feel how cold it's getting?" she asks on my shoulder. "Each night everything dies. The heart too. They saw it to pieces."

"Nothing dies, Isabelle. Ever."

"Everything does! The stone face—it cracks into pieces. In the morning it is there again. Oh, it is no face! How we lie with out poor faces! You lie too—"

"Yes—" I say. "But I don't want to."

"You must tear away the face until there is nothing there. Only smooth skin, nothing else! But then it will still be there. It grows back. If everything stood still, one would have no pain. Why do they want to saw me away from everything? Why do they want me back? I'm not going to betray anything!"

"What could you betray?"

"The thing that blooms. It is full of mud. It comes out of the ducts."

She trembles again and presses herself against me. "They have stuck my eyes shut. With glue, and then they have run needles through them. But still I cannot look away."

"Away from what?"

She pushes me off. "They have sent you too! I will betray nothing! You are a spy. They have bought you! If I told you, they would kill me."

"I'm not a spy. And why should they kill you if you tell me? It would be much easier for them to do it before. If I know, they will have to kill me too. There would be one more who knew."

This penetrates. She looks at me again, considering. I keep so quiet that I hardly breathe. I feel that we are standing in front of a door behind which there may be freedom. What Wernicke calls freedom. A return from the maze, to normal streets, houses, and relationships. I don't know whether this will really be better, but I can't speculate about that while I have this tormented creature before me. "If you explain it to me, they will leave you in peace," I say. "And if they don't leave you in peace, I'll get help. From the police, the newspapers. They will become afraid and then you won't need to be."

She presses her hands together. "It's not just that," she manages to say finally.

"What is it then?"

In a second her face becomes hard and closed. The torment and indecision are washed away. Her mouth grows small and thin and the chin protrudes. Now there is something about her of the grim, puritanical, evil old maid. "Drop that!" she says. Her voice, too, has changed.