The Black Obelisk (5 page)

"How can it look? Gray, probably, or black. And silvery when the moon is shining."

Isabelle shakes her head. "Just as I thought! Just like the doctor!"

"How does it look then?"

She stops. A gust of wind blows over us laden with bees and the smell of flowers. The yellow dress billows like a sail. "It isn't there at all," she says.

We walk on. An old woman in asylum clothes comes past us along the
allée
.
Her face is red and glistening with tears. Two helpless relatives walk beside her. "What
is
there, then, if the grass isn't?" I ask.

"Nothing. It's only there while you're watching. Sometimes if you turn around very fast you can still catch it."

"What? The grass not being there?"

"No—but the way it scurries back to its place. That's how they all are—the grass and everything that's behind you. Like servants who have gone to a dance. You just have to be very quick in turning around. Then you can catch them —otherwise they're already there, acting as innocent as if they'd never been away."

"Who, Isabelle?" I ask very cautiously.

"Things. Everything behind you. They're just waiting for you to turn around so they can disappear!"

I consider that for a moment. It would be like having an abyss behind you all the time. "Am I not there either when you turn around?" I ask.

"You aren't there either. Nothing is."

"Really?" I say somewhat bitterly. "But for me I am always there. No matter how fast I turn around."

"You turn around in the wrong direction."

"Are there different directions too?"

"For you there are, Rolf."

I recoil once more at the hated name. "And for you? What about you?"

She looks at me, smiling absently, as though she did not know me. "I? But I'm not here at all!"

"Really? You certainly are for me." Her expression changes. She knows me again. "Is that true? Why then don't you say it to me more often?"

"But I say it to you all the time."

"Not enough." She leans against me. I feel her breath and her breasts under the thin silk. "Never enough," she says with a sigh. "Why doesn't anyone know that? Oh, you statues!"

Statues, I think. What other role is left for me? I look at her. She is beautiful and exciting, I am aware of her, and every time I am with her it is as if a thousand voices were telephoning through my veins; then suddenly all are cut off as though they had a wrong number, and I find myself helpless and confused. One cannot desire a madwoman. Perhaps some can, not I. It is as though you were to desire a clockwork doll. Or someone hypnotized. But that does not alter the fact that you are aware of her.

The green shadows of the
allée
part, and in front of us beds of tulips and narcissuses lie in the full sun. "You must put your hat on, Isabelle," I say. "The doctor wants you to."

She throws her hat among the flowers. "The doctor! What doesn't he want! He wants to marry me, but his heart is starved. He's a sweating owl."

I don't think that owls can sweat, but the image is convincing nevertheless. Isabelle steps among the tulips like a dancer and crouches there. "Can you hear them?"

"Of course," I reply in relief. "Anyone can hear them. They're bells. In F sharp."

"What is F sharp?"

"A musical note. The sweetest of all."

She throws her wide skirt over the flowers. "Are they ringing in me now?"

I nod, looking at her slender neck. Everything rings in you, I think. She breaks off a tulip and looks at the open blossom and the fleshy stem from which sap is oozing. "They are not sweet."

"All right—then they're bells in C sharp."

"Must it be sharp?"

"It could be flat."

"Can't it be both at the same time?"

"Not in music. There are certain rules. It can be only one or the other. Or one after the other."

"One after the other!" Isabelle looks at me with mild contempt. "You always use these pretexts, Rolf. Why?"

"I don't know either. I wish things were otherwise."

Suddenly she straightens up and throws away the tulip she has picked. With a leap she is out of the bed and is vigorously shaking her dress. Then she pulls it up and looks at her legs. Her face is twisted with disgust. "What happened?" I ask in alarm.

She points at the bed. "Snakes—"

I glance at the beds. "There aren't any snakes there, Isabelle."

"Yes there are! Those there!" She points at the tulips. "Don't you see what they want?"

"They don't want anything. They are flowers," I say un-comprehendingly.

"They touched me!" She is trembling with disgust and staring at the tulips.

I take her by the arm and turn her around so that she can no longer see the bed. "Now you're turned around," I say. "Now they're not there any more, Isabelle."

She is breathing heavily. "Don't permit it! Stamp on them, Rudolf."

"They're not there any more. You have turned around and now they're gone. Like the grass at night and the things."

She leans against me. Suddenly I am no longer Rolf. She presses her face against my shoulder. She doesn't have to explain anything more to me. I am Rudolf and must know. "Are you sure?" she asks, and I feel her heart beating against my hand.

"Perfectly sure. They're gone. Like servants on Sunday."

"Don't permit it, Rudolf."

"I won't permit it," I say, not knowing what she means. But that's unimportant. She is already growing calmer.

We walk back slowly. Almost without transition she becomes tired. A nurse marches up on flat heels. "You must come and eat, Mademoiselle."

"Eat," Isabelle says. "Why must one eat all the time, Rudolf?"

"So that you won't die."

"You're lying again," she says wearily, like a helpless child.

"Not this time. This time it's true."

"Really? Do stones eat?"

"Are stones alive?"

"Of course. More intensely than anything. So intensely that they are eternal. Don't you know what a crystal is?"

"Only from my physics lessons. That's sure to be wrong.*'

"Pure ecstasy," Isabelle whispers. "Not like those over there—" She makes a gesture back toward the flower bed.

The attendant takes her arm. "Where is your hat, Mademoiselle?" she asks after a few steps, looking around. "Wait a moment, I'll get it."

She goes to retrieve the hat from among the flowers. Behind her Isabelle comes over to me hastily, her expression distraught. "Don't abandon me, Rudolf!" she whispers.

"I won't abandon you."

"And don't go away! I have to leave. They are taking me! But don't you go away!"

"I won't go away, Isabelle."

The attendant has rescued the hat and now marches up to us like fate on broad soles. Isabelle stands there looking at me. It is as though it were farewell forever. It's always as though it were a farewell forever. Who knows how she will be when she returns?

"Put your hat on, Mademoiselle," says the attendant.

Isabelle takes it and lets it hang loose from her hand. The light in her eyes goes out. She turns and goes back to the pavilion. She does not look around.

It all began one day early in March when Geneviève suddenly came up to me in the park and began to talk to me as though we had known each other for a long time. There was nothing unusual about that—in the asylum you don't need to be introduced; you are beyond formalities here, and people speak to each other when they feel like it, without lengthy preambles. They speak at once about whatever comes into their heads, and it makes no difference if the other does not understand—that's unimportant. One doesn't want to persuade or to explain; one is there and one speaks, and often two people talk to each other splendidly because neither listens to what the other is saying. Pope Gregory Vü, for example, a little man with bandy legs, does not argue. He does not need to persuade anyone that he is pope. He is, and that's the end of it. He is having serious troubles with Henry IV; Canossa is not far off, and sometimes he talks about it It doesn't matter that his interlocutor is a man who believes he is made entirely of glass and begs everyone not to jostle him because he is already cracked—the two talk together, Gregory about the king who must do penance in his shirt, and the glass man about how he cannot stand the sun because it is reflected in him—then Gregory bestows the papal blessing, the glass man for an instant takes off the cloth that protects his transparent head against the sun, and both take leave of each other with the courtesy of past centuries. So I was not surprised when Geneviève came up to me and began to talk; I was only surprised at how beautiful she was, for at that moment she was Isabelle.

She talked to me for a long time. She was wearing a light cape of blond fur that was worth at least ten or twenty memorial crosses of the best Swedish granite; with it she wore an evening dress and gold sandals. It was eleven o'clock in the morning, and in the world beyond the walls this costume would have been surprising. Here, however, it was simply exciting; as though someone had drifted down in a parachute from some happier planet.

It was a day of sun, showers, wind, and sudden stillness. They whirled together in confusion; one hour it was March, the next April, and then without transition a day in May or June. Into this confusion came Isabelle from God knows where—from somewhere beyond boundaries, where the light of reason penetrates only in distorted streams, like the aurora borealis, across skies that know neither day nor night, only their own echoing beams and the echoes of those echoes and the pale light of the Beyond and of timeless vastness.

She confused me from the start, and all the advantages were on her side. I had, to be sure, got rid of many bourgeois concepts in the war, but this had only made me cynical and a little desperate, not superior and free. So I sat there and stared at her as though she were a creature without weight hovering in the air while I stumbled awkwardly after her. Moreover, a strange wisdom often flickered in what she said; it was only displaced and then, astoundingly, it would reveal vistas that made one's heart pound; but when one tried to hold onto it, veils of mist intervened, and Isabelle was already somewhere else.

She kissed me on the first day, and she did it so naturally that it seemed to mean nothing at all; but that did not keep me from feeling it. I felt it, it excited me, and then it struck like a wave against the barrier reef—I knew she did not mean me at all; she meant someone else, some figure of her fantasy, Rolf or Rudolf; and perhaps she did not mean them either, perhaps they were just names thrown up from dark, subterranean streams, without roots or connections.

From then on she came into the garden almost every Sunday; when it was raining she came to the chapel. The Mother Superior allowed me to practice on the organ after mass when I felt like it. I did it on rainy days. I did not really practice, my playing was good enough to be called that; I simply played for myself, as I did on my piano, vague fantasies of one sort or another, dreams and yearning for the unknown, for the future, for fulfillment, and for my own self; to do that one does not have to play especially well. Sometimes Isabelle came with me and listened. On those days she would sit below me in the half-dark, the rain would beat against the stained-glass windows, and the organ tones would go out over her dark head—I did not know what she was thinking, and it was strange and rather touching, but suddenly in the background loomed the question Why, the screaming terror, the fear, and the silence. I felt all that and I felt, too, something of the incomprehensible loneliness of the creature when we were in that empty church with the twilight and the organ tones, only we two alone as though we were the last creatures, held together by the half-light, the music, and the rain, and nevertheless separated forever, without a bridge, without understanding, without words, with only the strange glow of the little campfires on the outskirts of the life within us which we saw and misunderstood, she in her fashion, I in mine, blind and deaf and dumb without being either dumb or deaf or blind, and for that reason much poorer and more bereft. What was it in her that had made her come up to me? I did not know and would never know—it was buried under the rubble of a landslide—nor did I understand why this strange relationship should confuse me so since I knew what was wrong with her and that she did not mean me. Nevertheless, it filled me with undefined yearning and disturbed me and sometimes made me happy and unhappy without rhyme or reason....