The Black Obelisk

Chapter Sixteen

“The sweet light,” Isabelle says. “Why is it growing weaker? Because we are tired? We lose it every night. When we are asleep the world goes away. Where are we then? Does the world always come back, Rudolf?”

We are standing at the edge of the garden looking through the trellised gate at the landscape beyond. The early evening lies on ripening fields that extend down to the woods on either side of the chestnut allée.

“It always comes back,” I say, and add carefully: “Always, Isabelle.”

“And we? Do we too?”

We? I think. Who knows? Every hour gives and takes and alters. But I don’t say it. I don’t wish to be led into a conversation that will suddenly end in an abyss.

The inmates who have been working in the fields are coming back. They return like weary peasants, and on their shoulders lies the first red of sunset.

“We too,” I say. “Always, Isabelle. Nothing that exists can ever be lost. Not ever.”

“Do you believe that?”

“We have no choice but to believe it.”

She turns around to me. She looks very beautiful on this early evening with the first clear gold of autumn in the air. “Are we lost otherwise?” she whispers.

I stare at her. “I don’t know,” I say finally. “Lost—that can mean so much—almost anything!”

“Are we lost otherwise, Rudolf?”

I am silent, irresolute. “Yes,” I say then. “But that is when life begins, Isabelle.”

“What life?”

“Our own. That’s where everything begins—courage, com-

passion, humanity, love, and the tragic rainbow of beauty. When we realize that nothing remains.”

I look at her face, illuminated by the dying light. For a moment time stands still. “You and I, don’t we remain either?” she asks.

“No, we don’t remain either,” I reply, and look past her at the landscape full of blue and red and remoteness and gold.

“Not even if we love each other?”

“Not even if we love each other,” I say, and add hesitantly and cautiously: “I think that’s why people love each other. Otherwise one could not love. Love is perhaps the desire to hand on something which one cannot keep.”

“Hand on what?”

I lift my shoulders. “There are many names for it. One’s self perhaps, in order to rescue it. Or one’s heart. Let us say our heart. Or our yearning. Our heart.”

The people from the fields are arriving at the gate. The guards open it. Suddenly a man rushes past us, pushes his way through the fleldworkers, and races off. He must have been hiding behind a tree. One of the guards sees him and starts trotting in pursuit; the other stays in his place and lets the inmates through. Below us I can see the escaped man running. He is much faster than the guard. “Do you think your colleague will catch up with him at that rate?” I ask the second guard.

“He’ll come back with him all right.”

“It doesn’t look that way.”

The guard shrugs his shoulders. “It’s Guido Timpe. He tries to escape at least once each month. Always runs to the Forsthaus Restaurant. Drinks a couple of beers. We always find him there. Never runs farther and never anywhere else. Just for the two or three beers. He likes dark beer.” He winks at me. “That’s why my colleague isn’t hurrying. He just wants to keep him in sight in case of an accident. We always give Timpe time to quench his thirst. Why not? Afterward he comes back like a lamb.”

Isabelle has not been listening. “Where does he want to go?” she asks now.

“He wants to drink beer,” I say. “That’s all! If everyone could have a goal like that!”

She doesn’t hear me. She is looking at me. “Do you want to run away too?”

I shake my head.

“There’s nothing to run away for, Rudolf,” she says. “And

no place to go. All doors are the same. And beyond them—”

She hesitates. “What’s beyond them, Isabelle?” I ask,

“Nothing. They are just doors. They are always just doors and there is nothing beyond.”

The guard locks the gate and lights his pipe. The sharp smell of cheap tobacco strikes me and conjures up a picture: A simple life, without problems, with an honest calling, an honest wife, honest children, honest rewards, and an honest death—all accepted as a matter of course, the day, the evening’s leisure, and the night, without asking what lies beyond. For an instant I am filled with yearning, and a little envy. Then I look at Isabelle. She is standing at the gate, her hands grasping the iron bars, her head pressed against them, looking out. She stands thus for a while. The light grows fuller and redder and more golden, the woods lose their blue shadows and turn black, and the sky above us is apple-green and full of sailboats touched with rosy beams.

Finally she turns around. In this light her eyes look almost violet. “Come,” she says, taking my arm.

We walk back. She leans against me. “You must never abandon me,” she says.

“I will never abandon you.”

“Never,” she says. “Never is so short.”

Incense eddies from the silver censers. Bodendiek turns, the monstrance in his hands. The nuns in their black habits are kneeling in the pews like little dark heaps of submissiveness; their heads are bowed, their hands tap their covered breasts, which must never become breasts; the candles burn; and God is in the host, surrounded by golden rays, there in the room. A woman gets up, walks down the middle aisle to the communion bench, and throws herself on the floor. Most of the patients stare motionless at the golden miracle. Isabelle is not present. She has refused to go to church. She used to go, but, for the past few days, she has not. She has explained it to me. She says she doesn’t want to see the Bloody One any more.

Two nuns raise the sick woman, who has been throwing herself about and beating on the floor with her hands. I play the Tantum Ergo. The white faces of the inmates turn with a jerk toward the organ. I pull out the stops for the bass viols and the violins. The nuns sing.

The white spirals of incense eddy upward. Bodendiek puts the monstrance back in the tabernacle. The light of the candles flickers on the brocade of his vestments, where a large cross is embroidered, and is borne upward in the smoke to the great cross on which the bloodstained Saviour has been hanging for nearly two thousand years. I go on playing mechanically, thinking of Isabelle and what she has said. Then I think of the pre-Christian religions I was reading about last night. In those days the gods of Greece were merry, wandering from cloud to cloud, inclined to rascality, and always as faithless and changeable as the men to whom they belonged. They were incarnations and exaggerations of life in its fullness and cruelty and thoughtlessness and beauty. Isabelle is right: the pale man above me, with his beard and his bloody limbs, is not that. Two thousand years, think, two thousand years and through all that time life with its lights, its cries of passion, its deaths, and its ecstasies has eddied around the stone structures’ where stand the likenesses of this pale, dying man, dim, bloody, surrounded by millions of Bodendieks—and the leaden-colored shadow of the Church has reached out over the nations, smothering the joy of life, transforming Eros, the merry, into a secret, dirty, sinful bedroom incident, and forgiving nothing despite all the sermons on love and forgiveness—for true forgiveness means to accept someone as he is and not to demand expiation and obedience and submissiveness before the ego te absolvo is pronounced.

Isabelle is waiting outside. Wernicke has given her permission to stay in the garden in the evenings when someone is with her. “What were you doing in there?” she asks hostilely. “Helping to cover everything up?”

“I was playing music.”

“Music covers things up too. More than words.”

“There’s a kind of music that tears things open,” I say. “The music of drums and trumpets. It has caused a great deal of unhappiness all over the world.”

Isabelle turns around. “And your heart? Isn’t that a drum too?”

Yes, I think, a slow, soft drum, but it will make noise enough and bring unhappiness enough, and perhaps some day it will deafen me to the sweet, anonymous cry of life that is vouchsafed those who do not oppose a pompous self to life and do not demand explanations, as though they were righteous believers instead of what they are—brief wanderers who leave no track.

“Feel mine,” Isabelle says taking my hand and laying it on her thin blouse below her breast. “Do you feel it?”

“Yes, Isabelle.”

I withdraw my hand, but it is as though I had not done so. We walked around a little fountain, lamenting in the evening stillness as though it had been forgotten. Isabelle plunges her hands into the basin and throws the water into the air. “What becomes of dreams during the day, Rudolf?” she asks.

I look at her. “Perhaps they go to sleep,” I say cautiously, for I know where such questions can lead.

She plunges her arms into the basin and lets them rest there. They shimmer silvery, covered with little air bubbles under the water as though they were made of some strange metal. “How can they go to sleep?” she says. “After all, they are living sleep. You only see them when you are asleep. What becomes of them during the day?”

“Perhaps they hang like bats in great, subterranean caves—or like young owls in deep holes in the trees, waiting for the night.”

“And if night doesn’t come?”

“Night always comes, Isabelle.”

“Are you sure of that?”

I look at her. “You ask questions like a child,” I say.

“How do children ask them?”

“The way you do. They keep on asking. And soon they come to a point where the grownups have no answer and so get confused or angry.”

“Why do they get angry?”

“Because they suddenly realize that something is dreadfully wrong with them and they don’t like to be reminded of it.”

“Is something wrong with you too?”

“Almost everything, Isabelle.”

“What is wrong?”

“I don’t know. That’s just the trouble. If one knew, that in itself would make it less wrong. One just feels it.”

“Oh, Rudolf,” Isabelle says, and her voice is suddenly deep and soft. “Nothing is wrong.”

“It isn’t?”

“Of course not. Wrong and right are something that only God knows about. But if He is God, there is no wrong or right. Everything is God. It would only be wrong if it were outside Him. But if anything could be outside Him or against Him, He would be only a limited God. And a limited God is no God at all. And so everything is right or there is no God. It’s so simple.”

I look at her in amazement. What she says really does sound simple and illuminating. “Then there wouldn’t be any devil or hell either,” I say. “Or if there were, there would be no God.”

Isabelle nods. “Of course not, Rudolf. We have so many words. Who invented them all?”

“Confused human beings,” I reply.

She shakes her head and points toward the chapel. “The people in there! They have captured Him in there,” she whispers. “He can’t get out. He would like to. But they have nailed Him to the cross.”

“Who?”

“The priests. They keep Him captive.”

“Those were the other priests,” I say. “Two thousand years ago. Not these.”

She leans against me. “They are always the same, Rudolf,” she whispers, close to my face, “don’t you know that? He would like to get out, but they hold Him prisoner. He bleeds and bleeds and wants to come down from the cross. But they won’t let Him. They keep Him in their prisons with the high towers, and they give Him incense and prayers and do not let Him out. Do you know why?”

“No.”

Now the pale moon is hanging above the woods in the ash-colored blue. “Because He is very rich,” Isabelle whispers. “He is very, very rich. But they want to keep His fortune. If He should come out, they would have to give it back, and then they would all suddenly be poor. It’s like someone who has been confined up here; then the others have control of his fortune and do what they like with it and live like rich people. Just as in my case.”

I stare at her. Her face is intense but betrays nothing. “What do you mean?” I ask.

She laughs. “Everything, Rudolf. But you know about it too! They brought me here because I was in their way. They want to keep my fortune. If I were to come out they would have to give it back to me. It doesn’t matter; I don’t want it.”

I keep staring at her. “If you don’t want it you can explain that to them; then there would be no reason for keeping you here any more,” I say cautiously.

“Here or someplace else—after all, it’s just the same. So why not here? At least they aren’t here. They are like gnats. Who wants to live with gnats?” She bends forward. “That’s why I disguise myself,” she whispers.

“You disguise yourself?”

“Of course! Didn’t you know that? You have to disguise yourself, otherwise they will nail you to the cross. But they are stupid. You can fool them.”

“Do you fool Wernicke too?”

“Who is he?”

“The doctor.”

“Oh, him! He just wants to marry me. He is like the others. There are so many prisoners, Rudolf. And those outside are afraid of them. But the One up there on the cross—He’s the one they’re most afraid of.”

“Who are?”

“All those who make use of Him and live on Him. They are innumerable. They say they are good. But they bring about a great deal of evil. Anyone who is bad can do very little. You recognize him and are on your guard against him. But the good—what don’t they accomplish! Oh, they’re bloody!”

“Yes, they are,” I say, strangely excited myself by the voice whispering in the darkness. “They have done many dreadful things. The self-righteous are merciless.”

“Don’t go there any more, Rudolf!” she whispers. “They must let Him go! Him on the cross. He would like to laugh again and sleep and dance.”

“Do you think so?”

“Everyone would like to, Rudolf. They must let Him go. But He is too dangerous for them. He is not like them. He is the most dangerous of all—He is the kindest.”

“Is that why they keep Him prisoner?”

Isabelle nods. Her breath touches me. “Otherwise they would have to crucify Him again.”

“Yes,” I say, looking at her. “I think so too. They would have to kill Him again; the same people who now pray to Him. They would kill Him, just as countless people have been killed in His name. In the name of justice and love of one’s neighbor.”

Isabelle shivers. “I don’t go there any more,” she says, pointing to the chapel. “They always say one must suffer. The black sisters. Why, Rudolf?”

I make no reply.

“Who makes us suffer?” she asks, pressing hard against me.

“God,” I say bitterly. “If there is a God. He who created us.”

“And who will punish God for that?”

“What?”

“Who will punish God for making us suffer?” Isabelle whispers. “Here, among human beings, you are put in jail or hanged if you do that. Who will hang God?”

“I never thought about that,” I say. “I’ll ask Vicar Bodendiek sometime.”

We walk back along the allée. A few fireflies dart through the darkness. Suddenly Isabelle stops. “Did you hear that?” she asks.

“What?”

“The earth. It made a leap like a horse. When I was a child I used to be afraid I would fall off when I went to sleep. I wanted to be tied tight to my bed. Can you trust gravitation?”

“Yes, just as much as death.”

“I don’t know. Haven’t you ever flown?”

“In an airplane?”

“Airplane,” Isabelle says with a light contempt. “Anyone can do that. In dreams.”

“Yes. But can’t anyone do that too?”

“No.”

“I think everyone has dreamed at some time that he was flying. It’s one of the commonest dreams.”

“You see!” Isabelle says. “And you trust gravitation! Suppose it stops some day? What then? Then we should fly around like soap bubbles! And then who would be Kaiser? The one with the most lead tied to his feet or the one with the longest arms? And how would you get down from a tree?”

“I don’t know. But even lead wouldn’t help. Then it would be light as air.”

Suddenly she is all playfulness. The moon shines in her eyes as though pale fires were burning behind them. She throws back her hair, which looks colorless in the cold light. “You look like a witch,” I say. “A young and dangerous witch!”

She laughs. “A witch,” she whispers then. “Have you finally recognized me? How long it took!”

With a jerk she pulls open the full skirt fluttering around her hips, lets it fall, and steps out of it. She is wearing nothing but shoes and a short white blouse which she pulls open. Slender and white she stands in the darkness, more boy than woman, with pale hair and pale eyes. “Come,” she whispers.

I look around. Damn it, I think, suppose Bodendiek were to come now! Or Wernicke or one of the nuns, and I am angry at myself for thinking it. Isabelle never would. She stands before me like a spirit of air that has taken on a body, ready to fly away. “You must put on your clothes,” I say. She laughs. “Must I, Rudolf?” she asks mockingly. Slowly she comes closer. She seizes my tie and pulls it loose. Her lips are a colorless gray-blue in the moon, her teeth are chalk-white, and even her voice has lost its color. “Take that off!” she whispers, pulling open my collar and shirt. I feel her cool hands on my naked breast. They are not soft; they are narrow and hard and they hold me fast. A shudder runs over my skin. Something I had never suspected in Isabelle suddenly bursts out of her. I feel it like a strong wind and a blow; it has come from far off and has compressed itself in her as the soft winds of the open plains are suddenly compressed into a storm in a narrow pass. I try to keep hold of her hands and I glance around. She pushes my hands aside. She is no longer laughing; suddenly in her there is the deadly seriousness of the creature for whom love is superfluous byplay, who knows only one goal and for whom death is not too great a price to attain it.

I cannot hold her off. From somewhere she has gained a strength against which only brute force will avail. To avoid this I draw her to me. She is more helpless thus, but she is also closer to me, her breast pressed against mine. I feel her body in my arms and I feel her crushing herself closer to me. It won’t do, I think; she is sick; it is rape, but isn’t it always rape? Her eyes are close to mine, empty and without recognition, fixed and transparent. “Afraid,” she whispers. “You are always afraid!”

“I’m not afraid.”

“Of what? Of what are you afraid?”

I do not reply. Suddenly there is no fear any more. Isabelle’s gray-blue lips are pressed against my face, cool, nothing in her is hot, but I am shivering from a cold heat, my skin contracts, only my head is glowing. I feel Isabelle’s teeth; she is a small, rearing animal, a phantom, a spirit of moonlight and desire, a dead woman, one of the living, risen dead; her skin and her lips are cold. Horror and a forbidden desire whirl through me. I wrench myself away in silence and thrust her back so that she falls—

She does not get up. She cowers on the ground, a white lizard, hissing curses at me, insults, a flood of whispered truck drivers’ curses, soldiers’ curses, whores’ curses, curses that even I have never heard, insults that cut like knives and whiplashes, words I never thought she knew, words to which the only reply is a blow.

“Be quiet!” I say.

She laughs. “Be quiet!” she mocks me. “That’s all you know! Be quiet! Go to the devil!” she suddenly hisses at me more loudly. “Go, you whining dishrag, you eunuch—”

“Shut up,” I say furiously. “Or—”

“Or what? Just try it!” She arches herself toward me on the ground, her hands braced behind her in a shameless posture, her mouth open in a contemptuous grimace.

I stare at her. She should be repulsive to me, but she is not. Even in this obscene position there is nothing of the whore about her, in spite of anything she does or says; there is something desperate and wild and innocent in it and in her; I love her; I would like to pick her up and carry her off, but I don’t know where. I lift my hands; they are heavy; I feel bewildered and helpless and conventional and provincial—

“Get away from here!” Isabelle whispers from the ground. “Go! Go! And never come back! Don’t dare come back, you senile man, you church toady, you plebeian, you gelding! Go, you simpleton, you blockhead, you soul of a salesman! Don’t ever dare come back!”

She is looking at me, on her knees now, her mouth has grown small, her eyes are flat and slate-colored and wicked. With a weightless spring she is on her feet, seizes the wide, blue skirt and walks away, quick and swaying; she steps out of the allée into the moonlight on her long legs, a naked dancer, waving the blue skirt like a flag.

I want to run after her and shout to her to put on her clothes, but I stay where I am. I do not know what she would do next—it occurs to me that this is not the first time that someone here has turned up naked at the entrance door. Women in particular do that often.

Slowly I walk back down the allée. I straighten my shirt, feeling guilty, but I do not know why.

Late at night I hear Knopf approaching. His footsteps make me realize that he is quite drunk. I am really not in the mood for it, but for that very reason I move over to the rain pipe. Knopf pauses in the gateway, and like an old soldier first surveys the field. Everything is quiet. Cautiously he approaches the obelisk. I have not expected the retired sergeant major to give up his practices after a single warning. Now he stands in readiness in front of the tombstone and pauses once more. Cautiously his head revolves. Thereupon, like an expert tactician he makes a feigned maneuver; his hand descends, but it is a bluff, he is only listening. Then, as everything continues quiet, he takes up an anticipatory pose, a smile of triumph around the Nietzsche mustache, and lets go.

“Knopf!” I howl in subdued tones through the rain pipe. “You swine, are you there again? Have I not warned you?”

The change in Knopf’s face is not bad. I have always distrusted the description of eyes widened in horror; I thought one always squinted then in order to see better; but Knopf actually widens his eyes like a terrified horse when a heavy shell goes off. He even rolls them. “You are not worthy to be a retired sergeant major in the Sappers and Miners,” I declare hollowly. “I herewith degrade you! I demote you to private, second class, you pisser! Dismissed!”

A hoarse bellow emerges from Knopfs throat. “No! No!” he croaks, trying to recognize the place from which God is speaking. It is the corner between the gate and the wall of his house. There is no window there, no opening; he can’t understand whence the voice comes. “It’s all over with the long saber, the visored cap, and the braid!” I murmur. “All over with the dress uniform! From now on you are a private, second class, Knopf, you louse!”

“No!” Knopf howls, cut to the quick. It is easier for a true Teuton to lose a finger than a title. “No! No!” he whispers, raising his paws in the moonlight.

“Adjust your clothes!” I command. And suddenly I remember all the things Isabelle screamed at me, and I feel my stomach turn, and misery descends on me like a hailstorm.

Knopf has obeyed. “Only not that!” he croaks again, his head thrown back to the little, moonlit clouds above. “Not that, Lord!”

I see him standing there like the middle figure in the Laocoön group, wrestling with the invisible serpents of dishonor and demotion. That’s just about the way I was standing a few hours ago, I reflect, while my stomach begins to writhe again. Unlooked-for sympathy lays hold of me; for Knopf and for myself. I become more humane. “Very well then,” I whisper. “You don’t deserve it, but I will give you one more chance. You will only be demoted to lance corporal on probation. If you piss like a civilized human being until the end of September, you will be repromoted to noncom; at the end of October to sergeant, at the end of November to vice sergeant major; at Christmas you will once more become a permanent company sergeant major, retired. Understand?”

“Yes, certainly, your—your—” Knopf is groping for the right term of address. I am afraid that he is hesitating between your majesty and your divinity, and I interrupt him in time. “This is my last word, Lance Corporal Knopf! And don’t think, you swine, that you can begin again after Christmas! Then it will be cold and you can’t wash away the traces of your misdeeds. They will freeze solid. Stand against that obelisk once more and you will get an electric shock and inflammation of the prostate that will knock you bowlegged! Now off with you, you dung heap with chevrons!”

Knopf disappears with unaccustomed speed into the darkness of his doorway. I hear subdued laughter from the office. Lisa and Georg have witnessed the performance. “Dung heap with chevrons,” Lisa giggles huskily.

A chair turns over, there is a scuffle, and the door to Georg’s meditation room closes. Riesenfeld once presented me with a bottle of Holland Geneva, with the message: “For trying hours.” Now I get it out. The label on the square bottle says: Friesseher Genever van P. Bokma, Leeuwarden. I open it and pour a big glassful. The Geneva is strong and spicy and does not curse at me.