The Black Obelisk

Chapter Fourteen

The Poets’ Club is meeting at Eduard’s. The expedition to the bordello has been decided on. Otto Bambuss hopes to achieve a blood transfusion for his verse; Hans Hungermann wants to gain inspiration for his “Casanova” and for a free-verse cycle to be called “The Demon Woman”—and even Mathias Grand, the author of the “Book of Death,” thinks he can pick up a few racy details for the final delirium of a paranoiac. “Why don’t you come along, Eduard?” I ask.

“Don’t need to,” he announces in a superior fashion. “I’m well taken care of as it is.”

“Really? Are you?” I know what he is trying to convey and I know it is a lie.

“He sleeps with all the chambermaids in his hotel,” Hungermann explains. “If they refuse he dismisses them. He is a true friend of the people.”

“Chambermaids! That’s your style! Free verse, free love! Not I! Never in my own house! That’s an old axiom.” “What about guests?”

“Guests.” Eduard turns his eyes toward heaven. “There, of course, you often can’t help yourself. The Countess von Bell-Armin, for example—” “For example of what?” I ask as he falls silent Eduard demurs. “A cavalier is discreet.” Hungermann is overcome by an attack of coughing. “A fine discretion! How old is she? Eighty?”

Eduard smiles scornfully—but the next moment his smile drops from his face like a mask with a broken cord: Valentin Busch has entered. He, to be sure, is no man of letters, but nevertheless he has decided to come with us. He wants to be present when Otto Bambuss loses his virginity. “How goes it, Eduard?” he asks. “Nice that you’re still alive, eh? Otherwise you wouldn’t have been able to enjoy that affair with the countess.”

“How do you know about it?” I ask in surprise. “I overheard you outside in the hall. You’re talking pretty loud. No doubt you’ve had quite a bit to drink. However, I do not begrudge Eduard the countess. I’m just happy that it was I who could rescue him for that.”

“It was long before the war,” Eduard declares quickly. He scents a new attack on his wine cellar.

“All right, all right,” Valentin replies agreeably. “Since the war you’ve no doubt had some fine experiences too.” “In times like these?”

“Especially in times like these! When a person is desperate he is more open to adventure. And countesses, princesses, and duchesses are especially desperate just now. Inflation, the republic, no more imperial army, that’s enough to break an aristocratic heart! How about a good bottle, Eduard?”

“I haven’t time just now,” Eduard replies with presence of mind. “Sorry, Valentin, but it won’t do tonight. The club is making an expedition.”

“Are you going along?” I ask.

“Of course! As treasurer! I have to, after all! Just didn’t think of it a moment ago! Duty is duty.”

I laugh. Valentin winks at me and says nothing about coming with us. Eduard smiles because he thinks he has saved himself a bottle. Thus everything is in complete harmony.

We get up and leave. It is a splendid evening. We are going to No. 12 Bahnstrasse. The city has two cat houses, but the one in Bahnstrasse is the more elegant. Situated outside the city, it is a small house surrounded by poplar trees. I know it well; I spent part of my youth there without knowing what it was. On afternoons when we had no school we used to go out of the city to fish and look for salamanders in the streams and ponds and butterflies and beetles in the fields. On one particularly hot day, in search of an inn where we could get lemonade, we arrived at No. 12 Bahnstrasse. The big taproom on the ground floor looked like any other taproom. It was cool, and when we asked for soft drinks we got them. After a while a number of women in morning gowns or flowery clothes came in too. They asked us what we were doing and what class we were in at school. We paid for our drinks and came back again on the next hot day, this time with the books we had taken with us to study outdoors beside a stream. The kindly women were there again and took a motherly interest in us. We found the place cool and agreeable, and since no one but us was there in the afternoons, we stayed and began to do our lessons. The women looked over our shoulders and helped us as though they were our teachers. They saw to it that we did our written exercises, they checked up on our marks, they listened to us recite what we had to learn by heart, and gave us chocolate when we were good or, on occasion, a gentle cuff on the ear when we were lazy. We thought nothing of it; we were still at that happy age when women mean nothing. After a short time, these ladies, smelling of violets and roses, assumed the roles of mother and teacher; they were very much interested in us, and the moment we appeared at the door one of these goddesses was likely to ask excitedly: “How did the geography class go? All right?” At that time my mother was in the hospital a great deal, and so it happened that I got part of my education in the Werdenbrück cat house, and I can only say that it was stricter than if I had got it at home. We went there for two summers, then we began to take long hikes and so had less time, and my family moved to another part of the city.

After that I was in Bahnstrasse on one other occasion, during the war. It was the day before we were to go to the front. We were just eighteen, some of us not quite eighteen, and most of us had never been with a woman. But we didn’t want to be shot without knowing something about it and therefore we went, five in number, to Bahnstrasse, which we already knew from that earlier time. Business was brisk there and we were served with schnaps and beer. After we had drunk enough to feel courageous we decided to make our bid for happiness. Willy, more enterprising than the rest of us, was the first. He stopped Fritzi, the most seductive of the ladies present. “Darling, how about it?”

“Sure,” Frizi replied through the noise and smoke, without really looking at him. “Have you the money?”

“More than enough.” Willy showed her his pay and the money his mother had given him to have a mass said for his safe return from the war.

“Well then! Long live the fatherland!” Fritzi said somewhat absently, looking in the direction of the beer bar. “Come upstairs!”

Willy got up and put his cap on the table. Fritzi stared at his fiery red hair. It was of a unique brilliance and, of course, she recognized it at once even after seven years. “Just a minute,” she said. “Isn’t your name Willy?”

“Absolutely!” Willy declared beaming.

“And didn’t you use to do your schoolwork here?”

“Right!”

“So—and now you want to come up to my room with me?”

“Of course! We already know each other.”

Willy was grinning all over. The next second he received a terrific blow on the ear. “You pig!” Fritzi said. “You want to come to bed with me? That’s the limit!”

“What do you mean?” Willy stammered. “All the others—”

“All the others? What do they matter to me? Have I studied the catechism with them? Have I done their homework? Have I seen to it that they didn’t catch cold, you snot-nosed rascal?”

“But now I’m seventeen and a half—”

“Shut up! Why, it’s like wanting to rape your mother! Out of here, you juvenile delinquent!”

“He’s going to war tomorrow,” I said. “Have you no patriotism?”

She looked me in the eyes. “Aren’t you the one who let the snakes loose? We had to shut the place up for three days while we searched for those reptiles!”

“I didn’t let them loose,” I said in self-defense. “They got away from me.” Before I could say any more, I, too, had been boxed on the ear. “Lousy rascals! Out with you!”

The noise brought the Madame in. Indignantly Fritzi explained the situation to her. She, too, recognized Willy instantly. “The redhead!” she gasped. She weighed two hundred and forty pounds and shook with laughter like a mountain of jelly in an earthquake. “And you! Isn’t your name Ludwig?”

“Yes,” Willy answered for me. “But we’re soldiers now and we have a right to sexual intercourse.”

“So, you have a right!” The Madame heaved with renewed laughter. “Do you still remember, Fritzi, how scared he was that his father would find out he had thrown a stink bomb in Bible class? Now he has a right to sexual intercourse! Ho ho ho!”

Fritzi couldn’t see the humor of the situation. She was genuinely angry and offended. “As though my own son—”

The Madame had to be held upright by two men. Tears streamed down her face. Bubbles of saliva formed at the corners of her mouth. She held her belly with both hands. “Lemonade,” she gasped. “Waldmeister lemonade! Wasn’t that—” coughing, gasping—”your favorite drink?”

“We drink schnaps and beer now,” I replied. “Everyone grows up sometime.”

“Grows up!” a renewed attack of gasping on the part of the Madame, mad barking by her two bulldogs which heard her and thought she was being attacked. We withdrew cautiously. “Out, you thankless swine!” the irreconcilable Fritzi screamed after us.

“All right,” Willy said at the door. “Then we’ll just have to go to Rollstrasse.”

We stood outside in our uniforms with our deadly weapons and our stinging ears. But we did not get to Rollstrasse, the city’s other cat house. It was a two-hour walk, all the way to the other side of Werdenbrück, and so we had ourselves shaved instead. This, too, was for the first time in our lives, and since we had no experience of intercourse, the difference did not seem as great to us as it would later on—especially since the barber insulted us too, by recommending erasers for our beards. Later on we met more of our friends and got pretty drunk and forgot the whole thing. So it came about that we marched into the field as virgins and seventeen of us fell without ever knowing what a woman is. Willy and I lost our virginity half a year later in an estaminet in Houthoulst in Flanders. On that occasion Willy got a dose, was taken to the field hospital, and thus escaped the Battle of Flanders in which the seventeen virgins fell. This proved, as we could see even at that time, that virtue is not always rewarded.

We wander through the mild summer night. Otto Bambuss sticks to me as the only one who admits to knowing the cat house. The others have been there too, but act innocent, and the only one who brags that he has been an almost daily guest there, the dramatist and author of the monograph “Adam,” Paul Schneeweiss, is lying: he has never been there.

Otto’s hands are sweating. He expects priestesses of lust, bacchantes, and demonic beasts of prey and is not quite sure but that he will be driven back in Eduard’s Opel car with his liver torn out or at least without testicles. I comfort him. “People don’t get mangled in the bordello more than once or twice a week at most, Otto! And the injuries are usually not too serious. Day before yesterday Fritzi tore off a guest’s ear; but so far as I know you can have an ear sewn on again or replaced by a very natural-looking celluloid one.”

“An ear?” Otto stops.

“Of course there are ladies who don’t tear them off,” I reply. “But you’d hardly want to know them. What you want, after all, is the primeval woman in all her splendor.”

“An ear is a pretty big sacrifice,” Otto remarks, drying the lenses of his spectacles.

“Poetry demands sacrifices. With an ear torn off you would be in the truest sense a blood-drenched lyricist. Come along!”

“Yes, but an ear! Something that can be seen so easily!”

“If I had my choice,” Hans Hungermann says, “I would much rather have an ear torn off than be castrated, to speak frankly.”

“What’s that?” Otto stops again. “You’re joking! That doesn’t happen!”

“It happens all right,” Hungermann declares. “Passion is capable of anything. But be calm, Otto: Castration is a punishable offense. The woman would get at least a couple of months in jail—and you would be avenged.”

“Nonsense!” Bambuss stammers, smiling painfully. “You’re just making fun of me!”

“Why should he make fun of you?” I say. “That would be mean. I recommended Fritzi to you for that very reason. She is an ear fetishist. Overcome by passion she convulsively gets hold of her partner’s ears, with both hands. So you can be absolutely sure you won’t be injured elsewhere. She doesn’t have a third hand.”

“But she still has two feet,” Hungermann explains. “Sometimes they perform wonders with their feet. They let the nails grow and sharpen them.”

“You’re just pretending,” Otto says in torment. “Don’t talk nonsense!”

“Listen to me,” I reply. “I don’t want you to be maimed. You would profit emotionally, but your soul would be impoverished and your poetry would suffer. I have here a pocket nail file, small, handy, and made for accomplished worldlings who must always be elegant. Take it. Keep it hidden in the palm of your hand or slip it into the mattress before things start If you see that it’s getting too dangerous, a little harmless prick in Fritzi’s derrière will be enough to do the trick. No blood need flow. Whenever anyone is bitten, even by a gnat, he lets go and reaches for the bite, that’s one of the axioms of life. In the meantime you’ll escape.”

I take out a red leather pocket case in which there are a comb and a nail file. It was a gift from the faithless Erna. The comb is made of artificial tortoise shell. A belated wave of rage rises in me as I take it out. “Give me the comb too,” Otto says.

“You can’t hack at her with a comb, you innocent satyr,” Hungermann declares. “That’s no weapon for the battle of the sexes. It will break on the convulsed flesh of the maenad.”

“I don’t want to hack at her. I want to comb my hair afterward.”

Hungermann and I look at each other. It seems that Bambuss no longer believes us. “Have you a first-aid package with you?” Hungermann asks me.

“We don’t need one. The Madame has a whole apothecary shop.”

Bambuss stops again. “That’s all nonsense! But what about venereal disease?”

“This is Saturday. All the ladies were examined this afternoon. No danger, Otto.”

“You know everything, don’t you?”

“We know what’s necessary for life,” Hungermann replies. “And usually that is something entirely different from what you learn in school and in the institutions of higher learning. That’s why you’re such a unique specimen, Otto.”

“I was brought up too piously,” Bambuss sighs. “I grew up in fear of hell and of syphilis. With such a start how can you turn into an earthy lyricist?”

“You might marry.”

“That’s my third complex. Fear of marriage. My mother drove my father crazy. Simply by weeping. Isn’t that strange?”

“No,” Hungermann and I say in unison and shake hands on it. That mean’s we’ll have seven more years to live. Good or ill, life is life; you only realize that when you have to risk it.

Before we enter the cozy-looking house with its poplar trees, its red lanterns, and the blooming geraniums at the windows we fortify ourselves with a few swallows of schnaps. We have brought a bottle with us and we hand it round. Even Eduard, who has driven ahead in his Opel and has been waiting, joins us; it isn’t often he gets a free drink and he enjoys it. The same drink that we are now having at a cost to ourselves of some ten thousand marks will be priced at forty thousand in the cat house—that’s why we brought the bottle. Up to the doorsill we live economically—after that we’re at the mercy of Madame.

At first Otto is seriously disillusioned. He expected not a taproom but an oriental setting with leopard skins, swinging lamps, and heavy perfume; instead, the ladies, lightly clad, rather resemble servant maids. He asks me in a low voice whether there aren’t any Negresses or Creoles. I point to a thin, black-haired creature. “That one over there has Creole blood. She is just out of the penitentiary. Murdered her husband.”

Otto doubts it. But he brightens when the Iron Horse comes in. She makes an imposing picture in high, laced boots, black underwear, a kind of lion tamer’s uniform, a gray astrakhan cap, and a mouth full of gold teeth. Generations of young poets and editors have passed their examination in life on her, and she has been selected for Otto, too, by prearrange-ment. She or Fritzi. We have insisted that she appear in full regalia—and she has not disappointed us.

She is taken aback when we introduce Otto. No doubt she expected to be handed something fresher and younger. Bambuss looks as though he were made of paper—pale, thin, pirnply, with a straggly mustache, and he is twenty-six years old. In addition, he is sweating at the moment like a salted horseradish. The Iron Horse bares her golden fangs in a good-humored grin and nudges the shuddering Bambuss in the ribs. “Come on, stand us a cognac,” she says companionably.

“What does a cognac cost?” Otto asks the waitress.

“Sixty thousand.”

“What’s that?” Hungermann asks in alarm. “Forty thousand, not a pfenning more!”

“Pfenning,” says the Madame. “That’s a word I haven’t heard in a long time.”

“Forty thousand was yesterday, my pet,” the Iron Horse explains.

“It was forty thousand this morning. I was here this morning on behalf of the committee.”

“What committee?”

“The Committee for the Rebirth of Poetry through Personal Experience.”

“My pet,” says the Iron Horse, “that was before the dollar quotation.”

“It was after the eleven o’clock exchange.”

“It was before the afternoon one,” explains the Madame. “Don’t be such skinflints!”

“Sixty thousand is based on the dollar exchange for day after tomorrow,” I say.

“On the one for tomorrow. Every hour brings you nearer to it Calm down! The dollar exchange is like death. You can’t escape it. Isn’t your name Ludwig?”

“Rolf,” I reply firmly. “Ludwig did not come back from the war.”

Hungermann is suddenly seized by a horrid suspicion. “And the tariff?” he asks. “How much is that? Our agreement was for two million. Undressing and a half-hour’s conversation afterward included. The conversation is important for our candidate.”

“Three million,” the Iron Horse replies phlegmatically. “And that’s cheap.”

“Comrades, we have been betrayed!” Hungermann roars.

“Do you know what you have to pay now for high boots that reach almost to your bottom?” the Iron Horse asks.

“Two million and not a centime more. When agreements are no longer respected even here, what’s to become of the world?”

“Agreements! What are agreements when the exchange wobbles like a drunken man?”

Mathias Grund, who as author of the “Book of Death” has been appropriately silent until now, gets up. “This is the first cat house that has been undermined by National Socialism,” he announces angrily. “Treaties are scraps of paper, eh?”

“Treaties and money,” the Iron Horse replies imperturbably. “But high boots are high boots and fancy black underwear is fancy black underwear. Madly expensive. Why don’t you pick a cheaper class for your candidate for confirmation? The way they do with funerals—you can have them either with or without plumes. Second class is plenty good enough for him!”

There is nothing to be said to that. The discussion has reached a dead end. Suddenly Hungermann discovers that Bambuss has quietly downed both his own and the Iron Horse’s cognac.

“We’re lost,” he says. “We’ll have to pay what these Wall Street hyenas demand. You shouldn’t have done that to us, Otto! Now we’ll have to arrange your initiation into life in a simpler fashion. Without plumes and with only a cast-iron horse.”

Fortunately at this moment Willy comes in. He is full of curiosity about Otto’s transformation into a man and he pays the difference without the quiver of an eyelash. Then he orders schnaps for all of us and announces that he has made twenty-five million today on his stocks. He intends to drink up part of it. “Off with you, boy,” he says to Otto. “And come back a man!”

Otto disappears upstairs.

I sit down beside Fritzi. The old quarrel has been long since forgotten; since her son was killed in the war she no longer regards us as half-children. He was a noncom and was shot three days before the armistice. We talk about the times before the war. She tells me her son studied music in Leipzig. He wanted to be an oboe player. Beside us the huge Madame is sleeping, a bulldog on her knees.

Suddenly a scream resounds from upstairs. Uproar follows and then Otto appears in his underdrawers followed by the furious Iron Horse, who is beating him over the head with a tin washbasin. Otto has good running form; he races through the front door, and three of us stop the Iron Horse. “That damned half-portion!” she wheezes. “He went to work on me with a knife!”

“It wasn’t a knife,” I say, realizing what has happened.

“What do you mean?” The Iron Horse turns around and points to a red spot above her black underwear.

“It’s not bleeding. It was only a nail file.”

“A nail file?” The Horse stares at me. “That’s a new one on me! And that beggar prince pricks me instead of me pricking him! Don’t my boots mean anything? And my collection of whips? I wanted to be decent to him and give him a little taste of sadism as a bonus; just a playful slap across his skinny shanks with a whip, and the deceitful, spectacled snake went to work on me with a pocket nail file! A sadist! Do I need a sadist? I, the dream girl of the masochists? What an insult!”

We quiet her down with a double kümmel. Then we go to look for Bambuss. He is standing behind a lilac bush, feeling his head.

“Come along, Otto, the danger is past,” Hungermann calls.

Bambuss refuses. He asks us to throw his clothes to him. “Absolutely not,” Hungermann declares. “Three million are three million! We have paid for you.”

“Ask for the money back! I won’t let myself be cut to pieces.”

“A cavalier never asks a lady to return money. And we’re going to make you into a cavalier if we have to smash your head doing it. The whip was just an act of friendship. The Iron Horse is a sadist”

“What?”

“A rigorous masseuse. We just forgot to tell you. But you should be happy to have had an experience of that kind. It’s rare in small cities!”

“I’m not happy. Throw my things out here.”

We succeed in luring him in again after he has dressed behind the lilac bush. We give him a drink. But we cannot get him to leave the table. He maintains that the mood is gone. Finally Hungermann reaches an agreement with the Iron Horse and the Madame. Bambuss is to have the right to return within a week without additional payment.

We go on drinking. After a while I notice that Otto seems to have caught fire despite everything. He keeps glancing across at the Iron Horse and pays no attention to the other ladies. Willy orders more kümmel. After a while we miss Eduard. He appears a half-hour later sweating, saying that he has been for a walk. The kümmel gradually produces its effect Suddenly Otto Bambuss gets out paper and pencil and begins secretly making notes. I look over his shoulder. The title is “The Tigress.” “Hadn’t you better wait a while with your free verse?” I ask.

He shakes his head. “The first impression is the most important.”

“But after all, you only had one slash across your bottom with a whip and then a couple of bangs on the head with a washbasin! What’s tigerish about that?”

“Just leave it to me!” Bambuss pours another kümmel through his straggly mustache. “That’s where the power of imagination comes in! I am already blooming with verses like a rosebush. What am I saying? Like an orchid in the jungle!”

“Do you think you’ve had enough experience?”

Otto shoots a look full of lust and dread in the direction of the Iron Horse. “I don’t know. But certainly enough for a small volume in boards.”

“Speak up! Three million has been paid out for you. If you don’t need it, let’s drink it up.”

“Let’s drink it up!”

Bambuss tosses down another kümmel. It’s the first time we’ve seen him like this. He has shunned alcohol like the pest, especially schnaps. His poetry thrived on coffee and elderberry wine.

“What do you make of that?” I ask Hungermann.

“It was the blows on the head with the washbasin.”

“It was nothing at all,” Otto howls. He has downed another double kümmel and pinches the Iron Horse on the bottom as she goes by.

The Horse stops as though struck by lightning. Then she turns around slowly and examines Otto as though he were some rare insect. We stretch out our arms to protect him from the expected blow. For ladies in high boots a pinch of this sort is an obscene insult. Otto gets up wavering, smiles absently out of nearsighted eyes, walks around the Horse, and unexpectedly lands a hearty blow on the black underwear.

Silence falls. Everyone expects murder. But Otto seats himself again unconcernedly, lays his head on his arms, and goes to sleep instantly. “Never kill a sleeping man,” Hungermann beseeches the Horse. “The eleventh commandment!”

The Iron Horse opens her mighty mouth in a silent grin. All her gold plumbing glitters. Then she strokes Otto’s thin, soft hair. “Children and brothers,” she says, “to be so young and so silly again!”

We leave. Eduard drives Hungermann and Bambuss back to the city. The poplars rustle. The bulldogs bark. The Iron Horse stands in the second-story window and waves at us with her Cossack cap. Behind the cat house stands a pale moon. Mathias Grund, the poet of the “Book of Death,” clambers out of a ditch. He thought he could cross it like Christ crossing the Sea of Gennesaret. It was a mistake. Willy is walking beside me. “What a life!” he says dreamily. “And to think you actually make money in your sleep! Tomorrow the dollar will be even higher and my shares will be climbing up after it like agile little monkeys!”

“Don’t spoil the evening for me. Where’s your car? Is it having puppies like your shares?”

“Renée has it. It looks well in front of the Red Mill. She takes her colleagues driving between performances—they burst with envy.”

“Are you going to marry her?”

“We’re engaged,” Willy explains, “if you know what that means.”

“I can imagine.”

“It’s funny!” Willy says. “Nowadays she often reminds me very much of Lieutenant Helle, that damned slave driver who made life so miserable for us in preparation for a hero’s death. Exactly the same, in the dark. It’s a scary and refined sort of pleasure to have Helle on the back of his neck defiling him. I’d never have guessed I would get fun out of something like that, you can believe me!”

“I believe you.”

We walk through the dark, gloomy gardens. The scent of unrecognized flowers is born to us. “How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank,” someone says, rising like a ghost from the ground.

It is Hungermann. He is as wet as Mathias Grund. “What’s going on?” I ask. “It hasn’t been raining here.”

“Eduard put us out. We sang too loud for him—the respectable hotelkeeper! Then, when I tried to refresh Otto, we both fell into the brook.”

“You too? Where is Otto? Looking for Mathias Grund?”

“He’s fishing.”

“What?”

“Damn it!” says Hungermann. “I just hope he hasn’t fallen in. He can’t swim.”

“Nonsense. The brook is only a yard deep.”

“Otto could drown in a puddle. He loves his native land.”

We find Bambuss clinging to a bridge over the brook and preaching to the fishes.

“Are you ill, Saint Francis?” Hungermann asks.

“Yes indeed,” Bambuss replies, giggling as though that were madly funny. Then his teeth begin to chatter. “Cold,” he stammers. “I’m no open-air man.”

Willy gets a bottle of kummel out of his pocket. “Who’s rescuing you again? Uncle Willy, the provider. Rescuing you from inflammation of the lungs and cold death.”

“Too bad Eduard isn’t here,” Hungermann says. “Then you could rescue him, too, and found a society with Valentin Busch. Eduard’s Rescuers. That would kill him.”

“Spare us your bad jokes,” says Valentin, who has been standing behind him. “Capital should be sacred to you, or are you a communist? I will divide mine with no one. Eduard belongs to me.”

We all have a drink. The kummel sparkles in the moonlight like a yellow diamond. “Are you going somewhere else?” I ask Willy.

“To Bodo Ledderhose’s singing club. Come along. All three of you can dry out there.”

“Splendid,” Hungermann says.

It occurs to no one that it would be simpler to go home. Not even to the poet of death. Tonight liquids seem to have an irresistible attraction.

We walk on beside the brook. The moon shimmers on its surface. You can drink it—who was it who said that once and where and when?