The Black Obelisk (40 page)

He put his hat on. "Come along," he says. "We'll see what sort of days our gold bird will'call up in Eduard Knobloch's memory.

"Isabelle!" I say deeply astonished.

I see her sitting on the terrace in front of the pavilion for the incurables. There is no trace of the twitching, tormented creature I saw last time. Her eyes are clear, her face is calm, and she seems to me more beautiful than I have ever seen her—but this may be because of the contrast to last time.

It has rained during the afternoon and the garden is glistening with moisture and sunlight. Above the city, clouds float against a pure, medieval blue, and the whole fenestrated front of the building has been transformed into a gallery of mirrors. Unconcerned about the hour, Isabelle is wearing an evening dress of very soft black material and her golden shoes. On her right arm hangs a bracelet of emeralds—it must be worth more than our whole business, including the inventory, the buildings, and the income for the next five years. She has never worn it before. It's a day of rarities, I think. First the golden Wilhelm II and now this! But the bracelet does not move me.

"Do you her them?" Isabelle asks. "They have drunk deep and well and now they are calm and satisfied and at peace. They are humming deeply like a million bees."

"Who?"

"The trees and all the bushes. Didn't you hear them screaming yesterday when it was so dry?"

"Can they scream?"

"Naturally. Couldn't you hear it?"

"No," I say, looking at her bracelet, which sparkles as though it had green eyes.

Isabelle laughs. "Oh, Rudolf, you hear so little!" she says tenderly. "Your ears have grown shut like a boxwood hedge. And then you make so much noise too—that's why you hear nothing."

"I make noise? How do you mean?"

"Not with words. But in other ways you make a dreadful amount of noise, Rudolf. Often one can hardly stand you. You make more noise than the hydrangeas when they are thirsty, and they're really terrific screamers."

"What is it in me that makes the noise?"

"Everything. Your wishes, your heart, your dissatisfaction, your vanity, your uncertainty—"

"Vanity?" I say. "I'm not vain."

"Of course you are—"

"Absolutely not!" I reply, knowing that what I'm saying is untrue.

Isabelle kisses me quickly. "Don't make me tired, Rudolf! You're always so precise with words. Besides, you're not really named Rudolf, are you? What is your name?"

"Ludwig," I say in surprise. It is the first time she has asked me.

"Yes, Ludwig. Aren't you sometimes tired of your name?"

"To be sure. Of myself too."

She nods as though it were the most natural thing in the world. "Then go ahead and change it. Why not be Rudolf? Or someone else. Take a trip. Go to another country. Each name is a different country."

"I happen to be called Ludwig. How can I change that? Everyone here knows it."

She appears not to have heard me. "I, too, am going to go away soon," she says. "I feel it. I am weary and weary of my weariness. Everything is beginning to be a little empty and full of leave-taking and melancholy and waiting."

I look at her and suddenly feel a quick fear. What does she mean? "Doesn't everyone change continually?" I ask.

She looks over toward the city. "That's not what I mean, Rudolf. I think there is another kind of change. A greater one. One that is like death. I think it is death."

She shakes her head without looking at me. "It smells of it everywhere," she whispers. "Even in the trees and the mist. It drips at night from Heaven. The shadows are full of it. And there is weariness in one's joints. It has slipped in unobserved. I don't like to walk any more, Rudolf. It was nice with you, even when you did not understand me. At least you were there. Otherwise I should have been quite alone."

I do not know what she means. It is a strange moment. Everything is suddenly very quiet, not a leaf moves. Only Isabelle's hand with its long fingers swings over the arm of the cane chair and the green stones of her bracelet ring softly. The setting sun gives her face a tint of such warmth that it is the very opposite of any thought of death—and yet it seems to me as though a coolness were spreading like a silent dread, as though Isabelle may no longer by there when the wind begins to blow again—but then it suddenly moves in the treetops, it rustles, the ghost is gone, and Isabelle straightens up and smiles. "There are many ways to die," she says. "Poor Rudolf! You know only one. Happy Rudolfl Come, let's go into the house."

"I love you very much," I say.

Her smile deepens. "Call it what you like. What is the wind and what is stillness? They are so different and yet both are the same thing. For a while I have ridden on the painted horses of the carrousel and I have sat in the golden gondolas that are lined with blue satin and turn round and round and move up and down at the same time. You don't like them, do you?"

"No, I used to prefer the varnished stags and lions. But with you I would ride in the gondolas."

She kisses me. "The music!" She says softly. "And the lights of the carrousel in the mist! What has become of our youth, Rudolf?"

"Yes, what?" I say, suddenly feeling tears in my eyes without understanding why. "Did we have one?"

"Who knows?"

Isabelle gets up. Above us there is a rustling in the leaves. In the glowing light of the late sun I see that a bird has let fall its droppings on my jacket. Just about where the heart is. Isabelle sees it too, and doubles up with laughter. I use my handkerchief to wipe away the excrement of the sarcastic chaffinch. "You are my youth," I say. "I know that now. You are everything it ought to be. Also that one only recognizes it when it is slipping away."

Is she slipping away from me? I think. What am I talking about? Have I, then, ever possessed her? And why should she slip away? Because she says so? Or because there is suddenly this cool, silent fear? She has said so much before and I have so often been afraid. "I love you, Isabelle," I say. "I love you more than I ever knew. It is like a wind that rises, and you think it is only a playful breeze and suddenly your heart bows down before it like a willow tree in a storm. I love you, heart of my heart, single quietude in all this confusion. I love you, you who can hear when the flowers are thirsty and when time is weary like a hunting dog in the evening. I love you and love streams out of me as though through the just-opened gate of an unknown garden. I do not altogether understand it and I am amazed at it and am still a little ashamed of my big words, but they tumble out of me and resound and do not ask my leave; someone whom I do not know is speaking out of me, and I do not know whether it is a fourth-class melodramatist or my heart, which is no longer afraid—"

With a start Isabelle has stopped walking. We are in the same
allee
through which, that other time, she walked back naked in the night, but everything now is different. The 
allée
 
is full of the red light of evening, full of unlived youth, of melancholy, and of a happiness that trembles between sobbing and jubilation. It is no longer an
allée
of trees; it is an avenue of unreal light, where trees bend toward each other like dark fans striving to contain it, a light we stand in as though we were almost weightless, soaked in it, like cakes on Sylvester's Eve drenched in rum until they are ready to fall apart. "You do love me?" Isabelle whispers.

"I love you and I know I shall never love anyone else the way I love you because I shall never again be as I am at this moment, which is passing while I speak of it and which I cannot keep even if I were to give my life—"

She looks at me with great, shining eyes. "Now at last you know!" she whispers. "Now at last you have felt it—the nameless happiness and the sadness and the dream and the double face! It is the rainbow, Rudolf, and you can walk across it, but if you have doubts you will fall! Do you believe that at last?"

"Yes," I murmur, knowing that I believe it and that a moment ago I believed it too, and that I already did not quite believe it. The light is still strong, but at the edges it is already gray; dark patches push slowly forward and the contagion of thought breaks out again beneath them, just covered over, but not healed. The miracle has passed me by; it has touched but not changed me; I still have the same name and I know I will probably bear it to the end of my days; I am no phoenix; resurrection is not for me; I have tried to fly but I am tumbling like a dazzled, awkward rooster back to earth, back behind the barbed wires.

"Don't be sad," Isabelle says, watching me.

"I can't walk on the rainbow, Isabelle," I say. "But I should like to. Who can?"

She brings her face close to my ear. "No one," she says.

"No one? Not even you?"

She shakes her head. "No one," she repeats. "But it's enough to have the longing."

The light is rapidly becoming gray. Once before everything was like this, I think, but I cannot remember when. I feel Isabelle near me and suddenly I take her in my arms. We kiss as if we were desperate and accursed, like people being torn apart forever. "I have failed in everything," I say breathlessly. "I love you, Isabelle."

"Quiet!" she whispers. "Don't speak!"

The pale patch at the end of the 
allée
 
begins to glow. We walk toward it and stop at the park gate. The sun has disappeared and the fields are colorless; but in contrast a mighty sunset hangs over the woods and the city looks as though its streets were burning.

We stand for a time. "What arrogance," Isabelle says suddenly, "to believe that a life has a beginning and an end!"

I do not immediately understand her. Behind us the garden is already settling itself for the night; but in front, beyond the iron lattice, a wild alchemy flames and seethes. A beginning and an end? I think, and then I comprehend her meaning; it is arrogant to try to isolate and define a tiny existence in this seething and hissing and to make our meaguer consciousness the judge of its own duration, whereas it is at most a snowflake briefly floating on its surface. Beginning and end, invented words for an invented concept of time and the vanity of an amoeba-like consciousness unwilling to be submerged in a greater one.

"Isabelle," I say. "You sweet, beloved life, I think I have finally felt what love is! It is life, nothing but life, the highest reach of the wave toward the evening sky, toward the paling stars and toward itself—the reach that is always in vain, the mortal reach toward what is immortal—but sometimes Heaven bends down to the wave and they meet for an instant and then it is no longer piracy on the one hand and rejection on the other, no longer lack and superfluity and the falsification of the poets, it is—"

I break off. "I don't know what I'm saying," I tell her. "It's like a rushing stream and perhaps part of it is lies, but if so they are lies because words are deceptive and like cups used to catch a fountain—but you, you will understand me even without words; it is so new for me I can't express it; I didn't know that even my breath can love and my nails can love and even my death, and to hell with how long it lasts and whether I can hold on to it or express it—"

"I understand," Isabelle says.

"You understand?"

She nods with sparkling eyes. "I was worried about you, Rudolf."

Why should she be worried about me? I wonder. After all, I'm not sick. "Worried?" I say. "Why worry about me?"

"Worried," she repeats. "But now I'm not any more. Farewell, Rudolf."

I look at her and hold her hands tight. "Why do you want to go? Have I said something wrong?"

She shakes her head and tries to free her hands. "Yes, I have!" I say. "It was false! It was arrogant, it was words, it was a speech—"

"Don't spoil it, Rudolf! Why do you always have to spoil the things you want the minute you have them?"

"Yes," I say. "Why?"

"The fire without smoke or ashes. Don't spoil it. Farewell, Rudolf."

What is this? I think. It is like a play, but it cannot be one! Is this farewell? But we have often said farewell, every evening. I hold Isabelle tight. "We'll stay together," I say.

She nods and lays her head on my shoulder and I suddenly feel her crying. "Why are you crying?" I ask. "After all, we're happy!"

"Yes," she says and kisses me and frees herself. "Good-by, Rudolf."

"Why are you saying good-by? This is not a leave-taking! I'll come again tomorrow."

She looks at me. "Oh, Rudolf," she says as though again there were something she could not make clear to me. "How is one ever to be able to die when one cannot say good-by?"