The Black Obelisk

Chapter Twelve

Bodendiek swoops through the mist like a big, black crow. “Well,” he asks jovially, “are you still busy improving the world?”

“I’m observing it,” I reply. “Ah ha! The philosopher! And what have you found out?”

I look into his cheerful face, red and shiny under the broad-brimmed hat. “I’ve found out that Christianity hasn’t substantially improved the world in two thousand years,” I reply.

For an instant the benevolent superiority of his mien is altered, then it is restored. “Don’t you think you’re a trifle young for judgments like that?”

“Yes—but don’t you think that blaming someone for his youth is a poor argument? Can’t you think of anything better?”

“I can think of a great deal. But not to confute absurdities like that Don’t you know that all generalization is a sign of superficiality?”

“Yes,” I reply wearily. “I only said that because it’s raining. Besides, there’s something in it. I’ve been studying history the last few weeks when I couldn’t sleep.”

“Why? Also because of the rain?”

I ignore this harmless quip. “Because I want to guard myself against premature cynicism and provincial despair. Simple faith in the Trinity can’t blind everyone to the fact that we’re busily preparing for another war—after just losing one, which you people and your reverend colleagues of the various Protestant denominations blessed and consecrated in the name of God and love of one’s neighbor—you, I must admit, with some reserve and embarrassment, but your colleagues more cheerfully, in uniforms, rattling the cross and shouting for victory.”

Bodendiek shakes the rain from his black hat. “We gave final consolation to the dying, on the battlefield—you seem to have forgotten that.”

“You shouldn’t have let it go so far! Why didn’t you declare a strike? Why didn’t you forbid the faithful to go to war? That’s where your duty lay. But the time of martyrs is past. And so, when I had to attend divine service during the war I had to hear prayers for the victory of our arms. Do you think Christ would have prayed for the victory of the Gallileans over the Philistines?”

“The rain,” Bodendiek replies in measured tones, “seems to have made you unusually emotional and demagogic. You seem to have found out that by a little adroitness, omission, distortion, and one-sided presentation you can attack anything at all and make it questionable.”

“I know. That’s the very reason I’m studying history. When we were studying religion at school, we were always being told about the dark, primitive, cruel pre-Christian times. I’ve been reading up about that and I’ve discovered that we are not much better off now—aside from certain technical and scientific triumphs which, moreover, are used principally to kill more people.”

“It’s possible to prove anything you like if you’re determined to do it, dear friend. And the opposite too. Proofs can be found for every preconceived opinion.”

“I know that too,” I say. “The Church gave a brilliant example of it when it wiped out the Gnostics.”

“The Gnostics! What do you know about them?” Bodendiek asks in offensive surprise.

“Enough to suspect they were the more tolerant part of Christianity. And all I have learned in my life so far is to prize tolerance.”

“Tolerance—” Bodendiek says.

“Tolerance!” I repeat. “Consideration for others. Understanding of others. Letting each live in his own fashion. Tolerance, which in our beloved fatherland is a foreign word.”

“Anarchy, in short,” Bodendiek replies, softly and with sudden sharpness.

We are standing in front of the chapel. The lights are burning and the stained-glass windows shimmer comfortingly in the eddying rain. Through the open door comes the faint smell of incense. “Tolerance, Herr Vicar,” I say. “Not anarchy, and you know the difference! But you don’t dare admit it! No one possesses heaven but you! No one can give absolution but you! You have a monopoly. There is no religion but yours! You are a dictatorship! So how can you be tolerant?”

“We don’t need to be. We possess the truth.”

“Naturally,” I say, pointing to the lighted windows. “There you are! Comfort for those afraid of life. Stop thinking, I’ll do it for you! The promise of heaven and the threat of hell—playing on the simplest emotions—what has that to do with truth, the unattainable fata morgana of our brains?”

“Fine words,” Bodendiek exclaims, long since at ease again, superior and mildly derisive.

“Yes, that’s all we have—fine words,” I say, angered at myself. “And you have nothing more—just fine words.”

Bodendiek walks into the chapel. “We have the Holy Sacraments—”

“Yes—”

“And faith, which to simpletons like you, whose addled brains upset their stomachs, seems nothing but stupidity and flight from the world, you harmless earthworm in the fields of triviality.”

“Bravo!” I say. “At last you, too, are waxing poetic. Late baroque, to be sure.”

Bodendiek laughs suddenly. “My dear Bodmer,” he explains, “many a Saul has become a Paul in the nearly two thousand years that the Church has existed. And during that time we have encountered more formidable dwarfs than you and survived them. Go on busily groping. At the end of every path God stands, waiting for you.”

He disappears with his umbrella into the sacristy, a well-nourished man in a black frock coat. In half an hour, garbed as fantastically as a general of Hussars, he will reappear and be a representative of God. It’s the uniform, as Valentin Busch was saying after the second bottle of Johannisberger while Eduard Knobloch lapsed into melancholy and plans for murder, simply the uniform. Take away their costumes, and nobody will want to be a soldier any more.

After the devotion I go for a walk with Isabelle along the allée. Here it is raining irregularly—as though the shadows, crouching in the trees, were sprinkling themselves with water. Isabelle is wearing a dark raincoat, buttoned up around her throat, and a small cap that hides her hair. Nothing of her is visible but her face which shines in the darkness like a thin moon. The weather is cold and windy; no one else is in the garden. I have long since forgotten Bodendiek and the black rage that sometimes wells up in me without reason, like a dirty fountain. Isabelle is walking close beside me; I hear her footsteps in the rain and I feel her movements and her warmth; it seems to me the only warm thing left in the whole world.

Suddenly she stops. Her face is pale and determined and her eyes look almost black. “You don’t love me enough,” she blurts out.

I look at her in surprise. “It’s the best I can do,” I say.

She stands in silence for a while. “Not enough,” she murmurs then. “Never enough. It is never enough.”

“Yes,” I say, “very likely it is never enough. Never in our lives, never with anyone. Very likely it is always too little, and that is the misery of the world.”

“It is not enough,” Isabelle repeats as though not hearing me. “Otherwise we would not still be two.”

“You mean otherwise we would be one?”

She nods.

I think of my conversation with Georg while we were drinking mulled wine. “We’ll always have to remain two, Isabelle,” I say cautiously. “But we can love each other and believe that we are no longer two.”

“Do you think once upon a time we were one?”

“I don’t know. No one can know a thing like that One wouldn’t be able to remember it.”

She looks at me fixedly out of the darkness. “That’s it, Rudolf,” she whispers. “One doesn’t remember. Not anything. Why not? You seek and seek. Why is everything gone? There was so much! You only remember that and nothing more. Why don’t you remember? You and I, didn’t all this happen once before? Tell met Tell me! Where is it now, Rudolf?”

The wind whirls past sprinkling us with raindrops. One often feels as though something had happened before, I remember. It comes quite close to you and stands there and you know it was just this way once before, exactly so; for an instant you almost know how it must go on, but then it disappears as you try to lay hold of it like smoke or a dead memory. “We could never remember, Isabelle,” I say. “It’s like the rain. That also has become one, one of two gasses, oxygen and hydrogen, which no longer remember they were once gasses. Now they are only rain and have no memory of an earlier time.”

“Or like tears,” Isabelle says. “But tears are full of memories.”

We walk on for a time in silence. I am thinking of those strange moments when unexpectedly a kind of second sight like a deceptive memory seems suddenly to give us glimpses of many earlier lives. The gravel crunches under our shoes. Behind the garden wall there is the prolonged blowing of a car horn like a signal to someone about to escape. “Then it’s like death,” Isabelle says finally.

“What is?”

“Love. Perfect love.”

“Who knows, Isabelle? I think no one can ever know. We only recognize things as long as each of us is still an I. If our I’s were blended, it would be like the rain. We should be a new I and unable to remember the earlier separate I’s. We should be something different, as different as rain is from air—no longer an I heightened by a you.”

“And if love were perfect so that we blended together, then it would be like death?”

“Perhaps,” I say hesitantly. “But not like annihilation. No one knows what death is, Isabelle. And so it can’t be compared with anything. But we should certainly no longer feel our former selves. We should simply become once more another lonely I.”

“Then love must always be incomplete?”

“It’s complete enough,” I say, cursing myself because in my pedantic schoolmaster’s way I have become too involved again.

Isabelle shakes her head. “Don’t evade me, Rudolf! It must be incomplete, I see that now. If it were complete, there would be a flash of lightning and then another.”

“There would be something left, though—but beyond our powers of perception.”

“Just like death?”

I look at her. “Who knows?” I say cautiously so as not to excite her further. “Perhaps death has a completely wrong name. We can only see it from one side. Perhaps it is perfect love between God and us.”

The wind tosses a shower of rain onto the leaves of the trees and they toss it on with ghostly hands. Isabelle is silent for a time. “Is that why love is so sad?” she asks then.

“It isn’t sad. It only makes us sad because it cannot be fulfilled and cannot be retained.”

Isabelle stops. “Why, Rudolf?” she says, suddenly very emphatic, stamping her foot. “Why must it be so?”

I look into her pale, intent face. “It’s our fate,” I say.

She stares at me. “That is fate?”

I nod.

“It can’t be! It’s misery!”

She throws herself against me and I hold her tight. I feel her sobs against my shoulder. “Don’t cry,” I say. “What’s to become of us if we cry about something like that?”

“What else is there to cry about?”

Yes, what else? I think. Everything else, the wretchedness on this accursed planet, only not about that. “It’s no misfortune, Isabelle,” I say. “It is good fortune. We simply have silly names for it like perfect and imperfect.”

“No, no!” She shakes her head violently and won’t be comforted. She weeps and clings to me and I hold her in my arms and feel that it is not I but she who is right, she who knows no compromises; that in her still burns the first, the only why, which existed before all the accumulated trash of existence, the first question of the awakening self.

“It is no misfortune,” I say nevertheless. “Misfortune is something entirely different, Isabelle.”

“What is it?”

“Misfortune is not the fact that two can never become wholly one. Misfortune is the fact that we must continually abandon each other, every day and every hour. You know

it and you cannot stop it, it runs through your hands and it is the most precious thing there is and yet you cannot hold onto it. There is always one who dies first. Always one who remains behind.”

She looks up. “How can one abandon what one does not have?”

“One can,” I reply bitterly. “Can’t one though! There are many stages of abandonment and being abandoned and each is painful and many are like death.”

Isabelle’s tears have stopped. “How do you know that?” she says. “You are not old enough.”

I am old enough, I think. Part of me has grown old by the time I came back from the war. “I know,” I say. “I found it out.”

I found it out, I think. How often had I had to abandon the day and the hour, and my existence, the tree in the morning light and my hands and my thoughts, and each time it was forever and when I came back I was a different person. One can abandon a great deal and one must always leave everything behind one when one goes to meet death; faced with that one is always naked, and if one finds the way back, one must reacquire everything one left behind.

Isabelle’s face shimmers before me in the rainy night, and I am suddenly overwhelmed by tenderness. I sense again in what loneliness she lives, undismayed, alone with her visions, threatened by them and surrendered to them, with no roof for shelter, without surcease or diversion, exposed to all the winds of the heart, without help from anyone, without complaint and without self-compassion. Beloved fearless heart, I think, untouched and aiming straight as an arrow at the essential alone, even if you do not reach it and go astray—but who does not go astray? And hasn’t almost everyone given up long since? When is the beginning of error, of stupidity, of cowardice, and where the beginning of wisdom and the final courage?

A bell begins to ring. Isabelle gives a start. “It’s time for you to go in,” I say. “They’re waiting for you.”

“Are you coming with me?”

“Yes.”

We walk toward the house. As we step out of the allée, we are greeted by a squall of rain driven around us in short gusts like a wet veil. Isabelle presses against me. I look down the hill toward the city. Nothing is to be seen. Mist and rain have isolated us. Nowhere is there a light; we are entirely alone. Isabelle walks beside me as though she belonged to me forever and as though she had no weight, and once more it seems to me as if she really had none and were like the figures in legends and dreams, obedient to different laws from those of everyday existence.

We there stand in the doorway. “Come with me!” she says.

I shake my head. “I can’t. Not today.”

She is silent, looking at me with straight, clear eyes, without reproach and without disillusionment; but suddenly something seems to have gone out in her. I lower my eyes feeling as though I had struck a child or killed a swallow. “Not today,” I say. “Later. Tomorrow.”

She turns away without a word and walks into the hallway. I see the nurse go up the stairs with her and suddenly I feel as though I had irrevocably lost something one finds but once in a lifetime.

I stand there bewildered. What could I have done? And how did I once more become involved in all this? It wasn’t my intention at all! This accursed rain!

Slowly I walk toward the main building. Wernicke, wearing a white coat and carrying an umbrella, comes out. “Have you taken Fräulein Terhoven back?”

“Yes.”

“Good. Pay a little more attention to her, won’t you? Visit her now and then during the day if you have time.”

“Why?”

“You’ll get no answer to that,” Wernicke replies. “But she is calmer when she has been with you. It’s good for her. Is that enough?”

“She takes me for someone else.”

“That makes no difference. I don’t care about you—only about my patient.” Wernicke squints through the shower. “Bodendiek praised you this evening.”

“What?—He certainly had no cause!”

“He maintains that you are on the road back. To the confessional and communion.”

“What an idea!” I exclaim, genuinely incensed.

“Don’t underestimate the wisdom of the Church! It is the only dictatorship that has not been overthrown in two thousand years.”

I walk down to the city. Mist waves its pennants in the rain. My thoughts are haunted by Isabelle. I have left her in the lurch; that’s what she believes now, I know. I ought not to go there any more, I think. It simply confuses me, and I am confused enough already. But how would it be if she were no longer there? Wouldn’t it be like losing the most important thing, the thing that can never grow old or stale or commonplace because one never possesses it?

I arrive at the house of Karl Brill, the shoemaker. The sounds of a phonograph come from the workroom. I have been invited here tonight for a stag evening. It is one of the famous occasions when Frau Beckmann is to exhibit her acrobatic art. I hesitate for a moment—I really am not in the mood—but then I go in. For that very reason.

I am greeted by a wave of tobacco smoke and the smell of beer. Karl Brill gets up and embraces me, staggering slightly. His head is just as bald as Georg Kroll’s, but to make up for it he wears all his hair under his nose in a huge mustache. “You’ve come at just the right moment,” he exclaims. “The bets are down. All we need is some better music than this miserable phonograph? How about the ‘Beautiful Blue Danube’?”

“It’s a deal!”

The piano has already been brought in and is standing beside the resoling machines. In the front of the room the shoes and leather have been pushed to one side and straight and easy chairs have been placed wherever possible. A cask of beer stands ready; several bottles of schnaps are already empty. A second battery stands in readiness on the workbench. There, too, lies a big nail wrapped in cotton beside a large cobbler’s hammer.

I pound out the “Blue Danube.” Karl Brill’s drinking companions stagger about through the haze. They are already well loaded. Karl puts a glass of beer and a double Steinhäger schnaps on the piano. “Clara is getting ready,” he says. “We have over three million in bets. I only hope she’s in top form; otherwise I’ll- be half bankrupt.”

He squints at me. “Play something very spirited when the time comes. That always warms her up. You know she’s crazy about music.”

“I’ll play the ‘March of the Gladiators.’ But how about a small side bet for me?”

Karl glances up. “Dear Herr Bodmer,” he says in an injured voice, “surely you’re not going to bet against Clara! How could you play with any conviction then?”

“Not against her. On her. A side bet.”

“How much?” Karl asks quickly.

“A measly eight thousand,” I reply. “It’s my whole fortune.”

Karl thinks it over for a moment. Then he turns around. “Is there anyone here who wants to bet another eighty thousand? Against our piano player?”

“I do!” A fat man steps forward. Taking some bills out of a small suitcase, he slaps them down on the workbench.

I put my money beside them. “May the God of thieves defend me,” I say. “Otherwise lunch is all I’ll have tomorrow.”

“Let’s get going!” Karl Brill says.

The nail is shown around. Then Karl steps to the wall, places the nail at the height of the human buttocks, and drives it a third of the way in. He pounds less vigorously than his gestures would suggest. “It’s driven in good and strong,” he says, pretending to give the nail a powerful tug.

“We’ll just see about that.”

The fat man who has bet against me steps forward. He moves the nail and grins. “Karl,” he said, laughing contemptuously, “I could blow that out of the wall. Just give me the hammer.”

“First blow it out of the wall.”

The fat man does not blow. He gives a strong tug and the nail comes out. “I can drive a nail through a table top with . my hand,” Karl Brill says. “But not with my rear end. If you make conditions like that, let’s call the whole thing off.”

The fat man makes no reply. He takes the hammer and drives the nail into another place in the wall. “Now, how’s that?”

Karl Brill tests it. Some six or seven centimeters of the nail still protrude from the wall. “Too hard. You can’t even pull it out with your hand.”

“Take it or else,” the fat man declares.

Karl tries again. The fat man puts the hammer on the workbench, overlooking the fact that each time Karl tests the nail he loosens it a little. “I can’t take an even-money bet on that,” Karl says finally. “Only two to one and I’ll lose anyway.”

They agree on six to four. A pile of money rises on the workbench. Karl has tugged indignantly twice more at the nail to show how impossible the bet is. Now I play the “March of the Gladiators” and shortly thereafter Frau Beckmann comes rustling into the workroom in a loose salmon-colored

Chinese kimono enbroidered on the back with peonies and a phoenix.

She is an imposing figure, with the head of a bulldog. She has abundant, curly black hair and bright, shoe-button eyes—the rest is pure bulldog, especially the chin. Her body is huge and all of iron. Her breasts, hard as stone, project like a bulwark, then comes the comparatively slender waist and after that the famous bottom, the present point of interest. It is powerful and it, too, is hard as stone. A blacksmith is said to have failed in an attempt to pinch it when Frau Beckmann contracted her muscles; he would have broken his fingers. Karl Brill has already won bets on that subject too, just in the circle of his most intimate friends to be sure. Tonight, with the fat man present, only the other experiment will be tried: the extraction of the nail, from the wall with her seat

Everything is conducted in a very sportsmanlike and gentlemanly fashion; Frau Beckmann greets the company, of course, but is otherwise reserved and almost aloof. She regards the occasion solely from a sporting and business angle. Calmly she places her back against the wall behind a low screen, makes a few expert adjustments, and then stands still, her chin raised, serious and ready, as befits a great sporting event.

I break off the march and strike two deep quavers, which are supposed to sound like the roll of drums that heralds the death leap in Kine’s circus. Frau Beckmann stiffens, then relaxes. She stiffens once more. Karl Brill grows nervous. Frau Beckmann stiffens again, her eyes turned to the ceiling, her teeth gritted. There is a tinkle and she steps away from the wall; the nail lies on the floor.

I play the “Virgin’s Prayer,” one of her favorites. She acknowledges it with a gracious inclination of her powerful head, says melodiously, “Good night all,” pulls her kimono closer around her and disappears.

Karl Brill distributes the cash. He hands me mine. The fat man inspects the nail and the wall. “Unbelievable,” he says.

I play the “Alpine Sunset” and the “Song of the Weser,” two more of Frau Beckmann’s favorites. She can hear them on the floor above. Karl grins over at me proudly; after all, he is the proprietor of those impressive pincers. Steinhäger, beer, and schnaps flow. I have a couple of drinks and continue to play. I want not to be alone just now. I want to think and at the same time that’s the last thing in the world I want to do. My hands are full of an unaccustomed tenderness, something swirls about me and seems to press against me; the workroom disappears and the rain is there again, the mist and Isabelle and the darkness. She is not sick, I think, and yet I know that she is—but if she is sick, then all the rest of us are sicker—

A noisy altercation rouses me. The fat man has not been able to forget the figure Frau Beckmann cut. Inflamed by numerous drinks, he has made Karl Brill a triple offer—five million for afternoon tea with Frau Beckmann—one million for a short conversation now, during which he no doubt intends to invite her to an honorable dinner without Karl Brill—and two million for a couple of good grasps oh the showpiece of the Beckmann anatomy, here in the workshop among brothers in happy comradeship, therefore completely honorable.

But now Karl’s character asserts itself. If the fat man had no more than a sporting interest, he could perhaps have had his grasps in return for some such nominal sum as a hundred thousand marks—but such a gesture with lascivious intent strikes Karl as a serious insult. “You miserable bastard!” he roars. “I thought everyone here was a cavalier!”

“I am a cavalier,” the fat man says thickly. “That’s why I made the offer.”

“You’re a pig.”

“That’s true too, otherwise I wouldn’t be a cavalier. You ought to be proud of the impression the lady makes—have you no heart? What can I do if my nature grows unruly? Why are you insulted? After all, you aren’t married to her?”

I see Karl Brill jump as though someone had shot him. He lives in common-law marriage with Frau Beckmann, who is bis housekeeper. No one knows why he does not marry her—-unless perhaps it is that same stubbornness of character which makes him cut a hole in the ice so that he can go swimming in winter. Nevertheless, it is his weak point.

“If I had such a jewel,” the fat man mutters, “I would carry her in my arms and clothe in her satin and silk. Silk, red silk—” He is almost sobbing and is tracing voluptuous forms in the air. The bottle beside him is empty. He is a tragic case of love at first sight. I turn away and go on playing. The picture of the fat man trying to carry Frau Beckmann in his arms is more than I can stand. “Get out!” Karl Brill shouts. “This is too much. I don’t like to throw a guest out, but—”

A dreadful scream comes from the back of the room. We leap up. A little man is dancing around there. Karl jumps toward him, seizes a pair of shears and turns off one of the machines. The little man faints. “Damn it! Who would expect anyone to play with a soling machine when drunk?” Karl cries indignantly.

We examine the hand. A few threads hang out of it. The machine has caught him in the soft flesh between the thumb and index finger—fortunately. Karl pours schnaps on the wound, and the little man comes to. “Amputated?” he asks in horror, seeing his hand in Karl’s paw.

“Nonsense, the arm is still attached.”

The man sighs in relief as Karl shakes his arm in front of his eyes. “Blood poisoning, do you think?” he asks.

“No. Only the machine will get rusty from your blood. We’ll wash your flipper with alcohol, put some iodine on it, and tie it up.”

“Iodine? Doesn’t that hurt?”

“It stings for a second. Just as though your hand had drunk a very strong schnaps.”

The little man pulls his hand away. “I’d rather drink the schnaps myself.”

He gets a not-too-clean handkerchief out of his pocket, wraps up his paw, and reaches for the bottle. Karl grins. Then he looks around uneasily. “Where’s Fatty?”

No one knows. “Perhaps he’s made himself thin,” someone says and earns a round of laughter.

The door opens and the fat man appears. Bent double he staggers in, behind him Frau Beckmann in her salmon-pink kimono. She has twisted his arm behind him and is propelling him into the workshop. With a mighty shove she lets him go. The fat man falls on his face in the women’s shoe section. Frau Beckmann makes a gesture as though dusting her hands and goes out. With a mighty leap Karl Brill is beside the fat man and yanks him to his feet. “My arm!” whimpers the rejected lover. “She has twisted it out of the socket! And my belly! Oh, my belly! What a kick!”

He doesn’t need to explain. Frau Beckmann is a fair antagonist for Karl Brill, winter swimmer and first-class gymnast. She has already broken his arm twice, not to mention what she can do with a vase or a poker. One night less than six months ago she surprised two burglars who had broken into the workshop. Afterward both were in the hospital for weeks; one of them has never recovered from a blow on the skull which also cost him an ear. He still can’t talk straight.

Karl drags the fat man into the light. He is white with rage, but there’s nothing more he can do—the fat man is finished. It would be like beating up a typhus patient. The fat man must have received a frightful blow in the organ with which he intended to sin. He is unable to walk. Karl can’t even throw him out. We lay him in the back of the shop on a pile of leather trimmings.

“The nice thing about Karl’s is that it’s always so jolly here,” says a man who is trying to give the piano a drink of beer.

I walk homeward along Grossestrasse. My head is swimming; I have drunk too much, but that was what I intended to do. The mist sweeps past the isolated lights still burning in the show windows and weaves a golden veil around the street lamps. In the window of a butcher shop an alpine rosebush is blooming beside a slaughtered pig with a lemon gripped in its waxy snout. Sausages are arranged in a cosy circle around them. It is an affecting picture, harmoniously combining beauty with utility. I stand in front of it for a time and then wander on.

In the dark courtyard I collide with a shadow. It is old Knopf, who is once more standing in front of the black obelisk. I have run against him with my full weight and he staggers and throws both arms around the obelisk as though intending to climb it. “Sorry I ran into you,” I say. “But why are you standing here? Can’t you attend to your necessities in your own house? Or, if you’re an exhibitionist, why not on a street corner?”

Knopf lets go of the obelisk. “Damn it, now it’s down my trousers,” he mutters.

“That won’t hurt you. Well, you can finish up here nowas far as I’m concerned.”

“Too late.”

Knopf staggers across to his door. I go upstairs and decide to send Isabelle a bouquet of flowers tomorrow with the money I have won at Karl Brill’s. That sort of thing, to be sure, usually brings me nothing but bad luck. However, I don’t know of anything else to do. For a time I stand at the window looking out into the night and then I begin very softly and somewhat shamefacedly to repeat words and sentences I would like sometime to say to somebody, but for whom I have no one except possibly Isabelle—who doesn’t even know who I am. But who does know that about anyone?