The Black Obelisk

Chapter Thirteen

The traveling salesman Oskar Fuchs, called Weeping Oskar, is sitting in the office. “What’s new, Herr Fuchs?” I ask. “How is the grippe progressing in the villages?”

“Pretty harmless. The farmers are well fed. In the city it’s different. I have two cases where Hollmann and Klotz are on the point of closing. A red granite monument, polished on one side, with two bossed socles, a yard and a half high, two million two hundred thousand marks—and a small one, forty inches high, one million three hundred thousand. Good prices. If you ask a hundred thousand less you’ll get them. My commission is twenty per cent.”

“Fifteen,” I reply automatically.

“Twenty,” Weeping Oskar declares. “I get fifteen from Hollmann and Klotz as it is. So why the betrayal?”

He is lying. Hollmann and Klotz, for whom he travels, pay him ten per cent and expenses. He gets expenses anyway; so he would be doing business with us for ten per cent extra.

“Payment in cash?”

“You’ll have to see to that for yourselves. The people are well off.”

“Herr Fuchs,” I say. “Why don’t you join us? We’d pay better than Hollmann and Klotz and we can use a first-class traveler.”

Fuchs winks. “It’s more fun for me this way. I’m an emotional type. When I get angry at old Hollmann I throw a job your way as revenge. If I worked for you at the time I’d get angry at you too.”

“There’s something in that,” I say.

“What I mean is, then I would betray you to Hollmann and Klotz. Traveling in tombstones is so boring you have to do something to cheer yourself up.”

“Boring? For a person who puts on such an artistic performance every time?”

Fuchs smiles like Gaston Munch of the city theater after playing the role of Karl Heinz in Alt Heidelberg. “One does the best one can,” he concedes with colossal modesty.

“They say you have developed splendidly. Without artificial aids. Simply through intuition. Is that right?”

Oskar, who formerly had recourse to slices of raw red onions before entering a house of mourning, now maintains he can produce tears freely like a great actor. Naturally that is an enormous improvement. Now he does not have to enter a house weeping, as he did when he used the onion technique, nor, if the business lasts some time, do his tears dry up—for of course he could not use the onions while he was sitting with the mourners—on the contrary, he can now go in with dry eyes and during conversation about the departed break into natural tears, which of course produces a much stronger effect. It is like the difference between genuine and artificial pearls. Oskar maintains he is so convincing that he is often comforted and cosseted by the survivors.

Georg Kroll comes out of his room. The smoke from a streaked Havana wreathes his face and he is the picture of satisfaction. “Herr Fuchs,” he says, “is it true you can weep at will, or is that just a piece of dirty propaganda on the part of our competitors to scare us?”

Instead of answering Oskar stares at him. “Well?” Georg Kroll asks. “What’s the matter? Aren’t you feeling well?”

“Just a minute! I must get into the right mood.”

Oskar closes his eyes. When he opens them again they already look rather watery. He continues to stare at Georg and after a while there are actually heavy tears in his blue eyes. A moment later they roll down his cheeks. Oskar gets out his handkerchief and dabs at them. “How was that?” he asks, drawing out his watch. “Exactly two minutes. Sometimes I can manage it in one when there is a corpse in the house.”

“Magnificent.”

Georg pours out some of the cognac he keeps for customers. “You should have been an actor, Herr Fuchs.”

“I have thought about that; but there are two few roles in which many tears are required. Othello, to be sure, but aside from him—”

“How do you do it? Is there a trick?”

“Imagination,” Fuchs replies simply. “Strong pictorial imagination.”

“What were you picturing just now?”

Oskar empties his glass. “To speak candidly, you, Herr Kroll: with splintered arms and legs, and a swarm of rats slowly gnawing your face while you were still alive but unable to keep the creatures away because of your broken arms. I beg your pardon, but for such a quick performance I needed a very strong image.”

Georg runs his hand over his face. It is still there. “Do you imagine the same sort of pictures of Hollmann and Klotz when you’re working for them?” I ask.

Fuchs shakes his head. “I picture them reaching the age of a hundred, still rich and healthy, and finally being carried off painlessly in their sleep by a heart attack—then tears of rage stream down my cheeks.”

Georg pays him the commission for the last two betrayals. “I have recently developed an artificial hiccup too,” Oskar says. “Very effective. It speeds up the agreement. The people feel guilty because they think it is a result of my sympathy.”

“Herr Fuchs, join us!” I say again impulsively. “You belong in an establishment that is run along artistic lines—not with mere money grubbers.”

Weeping Oskar smiles good-naturedly, shakes his head, and prepares to depart. “I can’t just now. Without a little betrayal I would be nothing but a dripping washrag. Betrayal gives me poise. Do you understand?”

“We understand,” Georg says. “We are crushed by regret but we respect personality above everything.”

I note the addresses for the tombstones on a piece of paper and give it to Heinrich Kroll, who is in the courtyard, pumping up the tires of his bicycle. He looks at the slip contemptuously. To an old Nibelung like him, Oskar is a common scoundrel, though he is happy, also like an old Nibelung, to profit from him. “We never used to need this sort of thing,” he exclaims. “Lucky my father didn’t live to see it.”

“According to what I’ve heard about that pioneer of the gravestone business, your father would have been beside himself with joy to play such a trick on the competition,” I reply. “He was a fighter by nature—not like you, on the field of honor, but in the trenches of uncompromising business warfare. By the way, are we going to get the rest of the payment for that war memorial you sold in April? There are two hundred thousand marks still due. You know what that’s worth now? Not so much as a socle!”

Heinrich mutters something and puts the slip of paper in his pocket. I go back, pleased to have taken him down a bit. In front of the house stands the piece of gutter pipe that broke off during the last rainstorm. The workmen have just finished; they have replaced the broken section. “What about the old pipe?” the foreman asks. “You don’t need it Shall we take it along?”

“Sure,” Georg says.

The pipe is leaning against the obelisk, Knopfs open-air pissoir. It is several yards long and has a right angle at one end. Suddenly I have an inspiration. “Leave it here,” I say. “We can use it.”

“What for?” Georg asks.

“For this evening. You’ll see. It will be an interesting performance.”

Heinrich Kroll pedals off. Georg and I stand in front of the door, drinking glasses of beer that Frau Kroll has handed out through the kitchen window. The weather is very hot. Wilke, the coffinmaker, steals by, carrying bottled beer. He is on his way to take a siesta in a coffin upholstered with shavings. Butterflies play around the memorial crosses. The Knopf family’s pied cat is pregnant. “Where does the dollar stand?” I ask. “Have you phoned?”

“Fifteen thousand marks higher than this morning. If it goes on like this we’ll be able to pay Riesenfeld’s promissory note with the price of a small headstone.”

“Marvelous. Only it’s too bad we haven’t kept any of it That takes away some of the necessary zest, doesn’t it?”

Georg laughs. “Some of the seriousness of the business too. Except for Heinrich, of course. What are you doing this evening?”

“I’m going up the hill to see Wernicke. There, at least, they know nothing about the seriousness and silliness of business. Up there the only stake is existence—always the whole of being, life and nothing short of life. There’s no smaller wager. If you lived up there for a while, our absurd haggling over trivialities would seem insane.”

“Bravo,” Georg replies. “For this nonsense you deserve a second glass of ice-cold beer.” He takes our glasses and hands from in through the kitchen window.” Gnädige Frau, the same thing again, please.”

Frau Kroll sticks her gray head out. “Would you like a fresh herring and a pickle with it?”

“Absolutely! And a slice of bread. The proper petit déjeuner for any kind of Weltschmerz,” Georg replies, handing me my glass. “Do you suffer from it?”

“A respectable man of my age always suffers from Weltschmerz,” I reply firmly. “It’s the prerogative of youth.”

“I thought they’d stolen your youth in the army?”

“That’s right. I’m still searching for it and I can’t find it. That’s why I have double Weltschmerz. The way an amputated foot hurts twice as much.”

The beer is wonderfully cold. The sun burns the tops of our heads, and suddenly, despite all the Weltschmerz, there occurs another of those instants when you look at very close range into the green-gold eyes of life. I finish my beer thoughtfully. It seems all at once as though my veins had had a sunbath. “We keep forgetting that we only live on this planet for a short time,” I say. “And so we have a completely crazy attitude toward the world. Like men who would live forever. Have you noticed that?”

“And how! It’s humanity’s cardinal mistake. That’s why otherwise entirely sensible people leave millions of dollars to horrible relations instead of spending it on themselves.”

“Good! What would you do if you knew you were going to die tomorrow?”

“No notion.”

“No? All right, perhaps, one day is too short. What would you do if you knew you’d be gone in a week?”

“Still no notion.”

“But you’d have to do something! Suppose you had a month’s time?”

“Very likely I’d go on living the way I do now,” Georg says. “Otherwise I’d have the miserable feeling all month that I’d lived my life wrong up to then.”

“You’d have a month’s time to correct it.”

Georg shakes his head. “I’d have a month to regret it.”

“You could sell our inventory to Hollmann and Klotz, rush to Berlin, and for a month live a breathtaking life with actors, artists, and elegant whores.”

“The funds wouldn’t last a week. The ladies would only be barmaids. And besides, I prefer to read about it. Imagination never disappoints you. But how about you? What would you do if you knew you were going to die in four weeks?”

“I?” I say, caught off my guard.

“Yes, you.”

I glance around. There lies the garden, hot and green, in all the colors of midsummer. There the swallows sail, there is the endless blue of the heavens, and upstairs old Knopf goggles down at us from his window, just emerging from his drunk and clad in suspenders and a checked shirt. “I’d have to think about it,” I say. “I can’t answer right away. There’s too much. Right now all I have is a feeling I’d explode if I understood it all as I’d like to.”

“Don’t think too hard; otherwise well have to take you to Wernicke. And not to play the organ.”

“That’s it,” I say. “Really that’s it! If we could grasp it fully we would go mad.”

“Another glass of beer?” Frau Kroll asks through the kitchen window. “There’s raspberry jam here too. Fresh.”

“Rescued!” I say. “ Gnädige Frau, you have just rescued me. I was like an arrow on its way to the sun and to Wernicke. Thank God everything is still here! Nothing has burned up! Sweet life continues to frolic around us with flies and butterflies, nothing has been reduced to ashes, it is here, it still has all its laws, even those we impose upon it like a bridle on a thoroughbred! However—no raspberry jam with beer, please! Instead, a piece of runny Harz cheese. Good morning, Herr Knopf! A fine day! What’s your opinion of life!”

Knopf stares at me. His face is gray and there are sacks under his eyes. After a while he gesticulates at me angrily and closes his window. “Weren’t you going to say something to him?” Georg asks.

“Yes, but not till tonight.”

We go into Eduard Knobloch’s restaurant. “Look over there,” I say, stopping as though I had run into a tree. “Life seems to be up to its tricks here too! I should have guessed it!”

Gerda is sitting at a table in the wine room with a vase of tiger lilies in front of her. She is alone and is hacking away at a venison steak that is almost as big as the table. “What do you say to that?” I ask Georg. “Doesn’t it smell of betrayal?”

“Was there anything to betray?”

“No. But what about unfaithfulness?”

“Was there anything to be faithful to?”

“Oh stop it, Socrates!” I reply. “Can’t you see Eduard’s fat paw at work here?”

“I see it all right. But who has betrayed you? Eduard or Gerda?”

“Gerda! Who do you think? The man’s never responsible.”

“Nor the woman either.”

“Then who?”

“You.”

“All right,” I say. “It’s easy for you to talk. You don’t get betrayed. You are a betrayer yourself.”

Georg nods with self-satisfaction. “Love is a matter of emotion,” he instructs me. “Not of morality. Emotion, however, knows nothing of betrayal. It increases, disappears, or changes—so where is the betrayal? There is no contract. Didn’t you deafen Gerda with your howling about your sufferings over Erna?”

“Only at the beginning. You know she was there when we had our row in the Red Mill.”

“Then don’t yammer now. Give up or do something.” Some people get up from a table near us. We sit down. Freidank, the waiter, veers away. “Where’s Herr Knobloch?”

I ask.

Freidank glances around. “I don’t know—he had been here all along, at that table over there with the lady.”

“Simple, isn’t it?” I say to Georg. “That’s where we stand now. I am a natural victim of the inflation. Once again. First with Erna, now with Gerda. Am I a born cuckold? Things like this don’t happen to you.”

“Fight!” Georg replies. “Nothing is lost yet Go over to Gerda!”

“What am I to fight with? Tombstones? Eduard gives her venison and dedicates poems to her. In poems she can’t see differences of quality—in food unfortunately she can. And I, fool that I am, have only myself to blame! I brought her here and aroused her appetite. Literally!”

“Then give up,” Georg says. “Why fight? One can’t fight about emotions anyway.”

“No? Then why did you advise me to a minute ago?”

“Because today is Tuesday. Here comes Eduard—in his Sunday best with a rosebud in his buttonhole. You’re done for.”

Eduard is taken aback when he sees us. He peers over toward Gerda and then greets us with the condescension of a victor. “Herr Knobloch,” Georg says, “is loyalty the badge of honor, as our beloved field marshal has declared, or isn’t it?”

“It all depends,” Eduard replies cautiously. “Today we have Königsberger meat balls with gravy and potatoes. A fine meal.”

“Does a soldier strike his comrade in the back?” Georg asks, undeterred. “Does a brother strike his brother? Does a poet strike a fellow poet?”

“Poets attack each other all the time. That’s what they live for.”

“They live for open battle, not for stabs in the belly,” I interpose.

Eduard grins broadly. “To the victor the spoils, my dear Ludwig; catch as catch can. Do I whine when you come in here with your miserable coupons that aren’t worth peanuts?”

“Yes, you do,” I say, “and how!”

At this instant Eduard is pushed aside. “Why, there you

are, children,” Gerda says affectionately. “Let’s eat together! I was hoping you would come!”

“You’re sitting in the wine room,” I reply venomously. “We’re drinking beer.”

“I prefer beer too. I’ll sit down with you.”

“With your permission, Eduard?” I ask. “Catch as catch can?”

“What has Eduard’s permission to do with it?” Gerda asks. “Why, he’s delighted for me to eat with his friends, aren’t you, Eduard?”

The serpent is already calling him by his first name.

Eduard stammers. “Of course, no objection, naturally, a pleasure—”

He makes a fine picture, red, raging, and making an effort to smile. “That’s a pretty rosebud you’re wearing,” I say. “Are you going courting? Or is it simple delight in nature?”

“Eduard has a very fine feeling for beauty,” Gerda replies.

“So he has,” I agree. “Did you have the regular lunch? Detestable Königsberger meat balls in some sort of flavorless German gravy?”

Gerda laughs. “Eduard, show them you’re a cavalier. Let me invite your two friends to lunch! They keep saying you’re dreadfully stingy. Let’s prove they’re wrong. We have—”

“Konigsberger meat balls,” Eduard interrupts her. “All right, invite them to have meat balls. I’ll see that they’re extra good.”

“Saddle of venison,” Gerda says.

Eduard now resembles a defective steam engine. “These are no friends,” he declares.

“What’s that?”

“We’re blood brothers like Valentin,” I say. “Don’t you remember our last conversation at the Poets’ Club? Shall I repeat it? In what verse form are you writing now?”

“What were you talking about?” Gerda asks. “About nothing at all,” Eduard replies abruptly. “These two never say a word of truth! Jokers, miserable jokers, that’s what they are! Don’t you ever realize the seriousness of life?”

“I’d like to know who realizes it more than we do, except gravediggers and coffinmakers,” I say.

“There you go! All you know about death is its ridiculous aspect,” Gerda suddenly remarks, out of a clear sky. “And that’s why you don’t know more about the seriousness of life.”

We stare at her dumbfounded. That is unmistakably Eduard’s style! I feel I am fighting for a lost cause, but I don’t give up.

“From whom did you hear that?” I ask. “From the sibyl beside the dark abysses of melancholy?”

Gerda laughs. “With you life always gets around to tombstones, the first thing. That doesn’t happen so fast with other people. Eduard, for example, is a nightingale!”

A blush spreads over Eduard’s fat cheeks. “Well, how about the rack of venison?” Gerda asks him.

“Well, all right, why not?”

Eduard disappears. I look at Gerda. “Bravo!” I say. “A first-rate job. What are we to make of it?”

“Don’t look like a husband,” she replies. “Be glad you’re living.”

“What is living?”

“Whatever’s happening at the moment.”

“Bravo!” Georg says. “And my warmest thanks for the invitation. We really love Eduard; he just doesn’t understand us.”

“Do you love him too?” I ask Gerda.

She laughs. “How childish he is,” she says to Georg. “Can’t you open his eyes a little to the fact that not everything always’ belongs to him? Especially when he’s not around?”

“I try constantly to enlighten him,” Georg replies. “The only trouble is he has a lot of internal handicaps which he calls ideals. If he ever happens to notice that they’re euphemistic egoism, he’ll improve.”

“What is euphemistic egoism?”

“Youthful self-importance.”

Gerda laughs so hard the table shakes. “I’m rather fond of that,” she remarks. “But too much of it gets tiring. After all, facts are facts.”

I refrain from asking her whether facts really are facts. She sits there, honest and secure, waiting, knife in hand, for her second portion of venison. Her face is rounder than before: she had already gained weight on Eduard’s food, and she beams at me without a trace of embarrassment. And why should she be embarrassed? What kind of claim do I really have on her? And just now who is betraying whom? “It’s true,” I say. “I am hung with egoistic atavisms like a rock with moss. Mea culpa!”

“Right, my pet,” Gerda replies. “Enjoy your life and only think when you have to.”

“When does one have to?”

“When one needs money or wants to get ahead in the world.”

“Bravo,” Georg says again. At this moment the venison appears and conversation comes to an end. Eduard supervises us like a mother hen with its chicks. This is the first time he has not begrudged us our food. He wears a new smile that puzzles me. He is full of fat superiority, which now and then he communicates to Gerda as though it were a clandestine note exchanged in jail. But Gerda still has her old, completely open smile which, when Eduard is looking the other way, she turns on me as innocently as a child at first communion. She is younger than I am, but I have the feeling that she has at least forty years’ more experience. “Eat, baby,” she says.

I eat with a bad conscience and strong misgivings; the venison, a delicacy of the first order, suddenly has no savor. “Another little piece?” Eduard asks me. “Or a little more bilberry sauce?”

I stare at him, feeling as though my former recruiting sergeant had asked me to kiss him. Even Georg is alarmed. I know that later he will maintain that the reason for Eduard’s incredible openhandedness is that he has slept with Gerda—but this time I know better. She will get rack of venison only as long as she has not allowed that. Once he has had her, the most she can expect is Königsberger meat balls with German gravy. And I am perfectly sure that Gerda knows this too.

Nevertheless, I decide to go away with her after the meal. Trust, to be sure, is trust, but Eduard has too many different kinds of liqueur in the bar.

Silent and star-filled, the night hangs over the city. I am seated at the window of my room waiting for Knopf, for whose benefit I have arranged the rain pipe. It extends straight into my window and thence runs above the entrance gate to Knopf’s house where the short end makes a right-angle turn in the direction of the courtyard. It cannot, however, be seen from the courtyard.

I wait, reading the newspaper. The dollar has clambered up another ten thousand marks. Yesterday there was only one suicide, but to make up for it there were two strikes. After long negotiations the government employees have finally received an increase in pay which, in the meantime, has fallen so far in value that now they can barely get an extra liter of milk a week for it. Very likely no more than a box of matches next week. The number of unemployed has risen by an additional hundred and fifty thousand. Unrest has broken out through the whole Reich. New recipes for the use of garbage in the kitchen are being recommended. The wave of grippe is still on the rise. A pension increase for the aged and infirm has been turned over to a committee for further study. Their report is expected in a few months. Meanwhile, the pensioners and invalids try to keep from starvation by begging or by borrowing from friends and relatives.

Outside, there is the sound of soft footsteps. I peer cautiously out of the window. It is not Knopf; it is a pair of lovers stealing on tiptoe through the courtyard into the garden. The season is now in full swing, and lovers’ necessities are more pressing than ever. Wilke was right: where are they to go to be undisturbed? If they try to slip into their furnished rooms, the landlady lies in wait to drive them out, like an angel with a flaming sword, in the name of morality and envy—in the public parks and gardens, they would be shouted at by the police or arrested—and they haven’t enough money for a hotel room—so where are they to go? In our courtyard they are undisturbed. The larger memorials furnished seclusion from other couples; there they are not seen and can lean against the monuments and in their shadow whisper and embrace. The big memorial crosses are always there for stormy lovers on wet days when they cannot lie on the ground; then the girls hold onto them and are pressed close by their wooers, the rain beats upon their heated faces, mist drifts around them, their breath comes in quick pants, and their heads are held high like those of whinnying horses by their lovers’ hands in their hair. The signs I have put up recently have done no good. Who worries about his toes when his whole being is aflame?

Suddenly I hear Knopfs footsteps in the alley. I look at the clock. It is half-past two; that slave driver of generations of unhappy recruits must be well loaded. I turn out the light Inexorably Knopf steers his course straight for the black obelisk. I seize the end of the rain pipe, press my mouth close to the opening and say: “Knopf!”

It makes a hollow sound at the other end, behind the sergeant major’s back, as though it came from the grave. Knopf looks around; he can’t see where the voice is coming from. “Knopf!” I repeat. “You pig! Aren’t you ashamed of yourself? Did I create you to get drunk and piss on tombstones, you sow?”

Knopf whirls around again. “What?” He stammers. “Who is that?”

“Filthy loafer!” I say, and it sounds ghostly and supernatural. “How dare you ask questions! Is it your place to question your superiors? Stand at attention when I address you!”

Knopf stares at his house, whence the voice comes. All the windows are dark and closed. The door, too, is closed. He cannot see the pipe on the wall. “Stand at attention, you insubordinate scoundrel of a sergeant major!” I say. “Was it for this I bestowed on you braid for your collar and a long saber, so that you could defile monuments destined to stand in God’s acre?” And more sharply in a hissing tone of command: “Heels together, you worthless tombstone wetter!”

The tone of command has its effect. Knopf comes to attention, his hand at the seams of his trousers. The moon is reflected in his wide-open eyes. “Knopf,” I say in ghostly tones, “you will be degraded to second-class private if I catch you at it again! You blot on the honor of the German soldier and the United Association of Retired Sergeants Major.”

Knopf listens, his head extended sidewise, like a moonstruck hound. “The Kaiser?” he whispers.

“Button up your pants and vanish!” I whisper hollowly. “And mark you this! Indulge in your nastiness just once more and you will be degraded and castrated. Castrated, I say! And now off with you, you slovenly civilian! Forward march!”

In consternation Knopf stumbles toward the door of his house. Immediately thereafter the pair of lovers start up out of the garden like two startled does and rush into the street. That, of course, was no part of my plan.