The Black Obelisk

Chapter Seventeen

Wilke, the coffinmaker, looks at the woman in amazement. “Why don’t you take two small ones?” he asks. “They won’t cost much more.” The woman shakes her head. “They must lie together.”

“But after all, you can put them in a single grave,” I say. “Then they will be together.”

“No, that’s not enough.”

Wilke scratches his head. “What do you think?” he asks me.

The woman has lost two children. They died on the same day. Now she wants to have a common grave—she also wants one coffin for both, a kind of double coffin. That’s why I have called Wilke into the office.

“The matter is simple enough for us,” I say. “Tombstones with two inscriptions are used all the time. There are even family tombstones with six or eight inscriptions.”

The woman nods. “That’s how it must be! They must lie together. They were always together.”

Wilke gets a carpenter’s pencil out of his vest pocket. “It would look odd. The coffin would be too wide. Almost square, the children are still very small, aren’t they? How old?”

“Four and a half.”

Wilke draws. “Like a square box,” he concludes. “Wouldn’t you rather—”

“No,” the woman interrupts. “They must remain together. They are twins.”

“You can make very pretty little single coffins for twins in white lacquer. The shape is more attractive. A short double coffin would look squat—”

“That doesn’t matter to me,” the woman says stubbornly. “They had a double cradle and a double baby carriage and now they shall have a double coffin too. They must remain together.”

Wilke sketches again. Nothing emerges but a square box, though this time decorated on top with leaves and ivy. In the case of grownups there would have been more opportunity for variation; but children are too short. “I don’t even know whether it is allowed,” he says as a last resort.

“Why shouldn’t it be allowed?”

“It is unusual.”

“It is also unusual for two children to die on the same day,” the woman replies.

“That is true, especially when they are twins.” Wilke is suddenly interested. “Did they have the same disease?”

“Yes,” the woman replies sharply. “The same disease: they were born after the war when there was nothing to eat. Twins. I didn’t even have enough milk for one—”

Wilke leans forward. “The same disease!” Scientific curiosity burns in his eyes. “They say that often happens with twins. Astrologically—”

“What about the coffin?” I ask. The woman doesn’t look as though she wanted to carry on a prolonged conversation on this subject which so fascinates Wilke.

“I can try,” Wilke says. “But I don’t know whether it’s allowed. Do you know?” he asks me.

“One could ask at the cemetery.”

“How about the priest? How were the children baptized?”

The woman hesitates. “One is Catholic, the other Evangelical,” she says. “We agreed on that. My husband is Catholic, I am Evangelical. So we agreed that the children should be divided.”

“Then you had one baptized a Catholic and the other Evangelical?” Wilke asks.

“Yes.”

“On the same day?”

“On the same day.”

Wilke’s interest in the marvels of existence is kindled afresh. “In two different churches, of course?”

“Of course,” I say impatiently. “What did you think? And now—”

“But how could you tell them apart?” Wilke interrupts me. “I mean every day. Were they identical twins?”

“Yes,” the woman says. “As alike as two eggs.”

“That’s just what I mean! How can you tell them apart, especially when they’re so small? Could you? I mean during the first days when everything is in confusion?”

The woman is silent.

“That doesn’t make any difference now,” I announce, motioning Wilke to stop.

But Wilke has the unsentimental curiosity of the scientist. “It does make a difference,” he replies. “After all, they have to be buried! One is Catholic and the other Evangelical. Do you know which the Catholic is?”

The woman is silent. Wilke warms to his theme. “Do you think you will be allowed to bury them together? If you have a double coffin, you’ll have to, of course. Then you will have to have two ministers at the grave, one Catholic, the other Evangelical! They certainly won’t agree to that! They are more jealous of God than we are of our wives.”

“Wilke, that’s none of your business,” I say, giving him a kick under the table.

“And the twins!” Wilke cries, paying no attention to me. “The Catholic twin would have to be buried with Evangelical rites and the Evangelical twin with Catholic! Just picture the confusion! No, you won’t be able to get away with a double coffin! Single coffins, that’s what it will have to be! Then each religion will have its own. The men of God can turn their backs on each other and thus bestow their blessings.”

Wilke apparently imagines that one religion is poison to the other. “Have you spoken to the priests about it?” he asks.

“My husband is doing that,” the woman says.

“You know, I’ll be really curious—”

“Will you make the double coffin?” the woman asks.

“I’ll make it, of course, but I tell you—”

“What will it cost?” the woman asks.

Wilke scratches his head. “When must it be ready?”

“As soon as possible.”

“Then I’ll have to work through the night. Overtime. It will have to be specially designed.”

“What will it cost?” the woman asks.

“I’ll tell you when I deliver it. Ill keep the price down, for the sake of science. Only I won’t be able to take it back if you are not allowed to use it.”

“I shall be allowed.”

Wilke looks at the woman in amazement. “How do you know?”

“If the priests won’t bestow their blessings, we’ll bury them without priests,” the woman says harshly. “They were always together and they shall stay together.”

Wilke nods. “Well then, agreed—the coffin will definitely be delivered. But I won’t be able to take it back.”

The woman gets a black leather purse with a nickel clasp out of her handbag. “Do you want a deposit?”

“It’s customary. For the wood.”

The woman looks at Wilke. “One million,” he says, somewhat embarrassed.

The woman gives him the bills. They have been folded and refolded. “The address—” she says.

“I’ll go with you,” Wilke announces. “To take measurements. They shall have a good coffin.”

The woman nods and looks at me. “And a headstone? When will you deliver that?”

“Whenever you like. Generally people wait for a couple of months after the funeral.”

“Can we have it right away?”

“Certainly. But it’s better to wait. The grave sinks after a while. It’s not advisable to put up the stone before that, otherwise it has to be reset.”

“Yes?” the woman says. For an instant the pupils of her eyes seem to quiver. “Nevertheless, we’d like to have the stone right away. Can’t you—isn’t there some way of setting it so it won’t sink?”

“To do that, we’d have to make a special foundation for the stone before the burial. Do you want that?”

The woman nods. “Their names must be there,” she says. “They mustn’t just lie there. It’s better if their names are there from the beginning.”

She gives me the number of the cemetery lot. “I’d like to pay right away,” she says. “How much does it come to?”

She opens the black leather purse again. I tell her the price, as embarrassed as Wilke. “Nowadays everything is in the millions and billions,” I add.

It is strange how you can sometimes tell whether people are decent and honorable by the way they fold their money. The woman unfolds one note after the other and lays them on the table beside the samples of granite and limestone. “We saved up this money for their schooling,” she says. “Now it would not be nearly enough—but for this it will just do—”

“Out of the question!” Riesenfeld says. “Have you any idea what black Swedish granite costs? It comes from Sweden, young man, and can’t be bought with German marks! You have to pay in foreign exchange! Swedish kronen! We have only a few blocks left—for friends! The last ones! They are like blue-white diamonds! I’m giving you one for the evening with Madame Watzek—but two! Have you lost your mind? I might just as well ask Von Hindenburg to become a communist.”

“What a thought!”

“Well, you see! Accept this rarity and don’t try to get more out of me than your boss did. Since you’re office boy and general manager in one, you don’t need to worry about getting ahead.”

“No, I don’t. I’m doing it out of pure love of granite. Platonic love, as a matter of fact. I don’t even intend to sell it myself.”

“You don’t?” Riesenfeld asks, pouring himself a glass of schnaps.

“No,” I reply. “I’m thinking of changing my profession.”

“What, again?” Riesenfeld pushed his chair around so he can see Lisa’s window.

“Seriously this time.”

“Back to schoolteaching?”

“No,” I say. “I’m no longer inexperienced enough for that. Or conceited enough either. Do you know of anything I could get? You get around a lot.”

“What sort of thing?” Riesenfeld asks uninterestedly.

“Anything at all in a big city. Copy boy on a newspaper perhaps.”

“Stay here,” Riesenfeld says. “You fit in here. I’d miss you. Why do you want to leave?”

“I can’t exactly explain. If I could, it wouldn’t be so necessary. Sometimes I don’t even know myself; only once in a while, but then I know damn well.”

“And you know now?”

“I know now.”

“My God!” Riesenfeld says. “You’ll wish you were back!”

“Absolutely, that’s why I intend to go.”

Suddenly Riesenfeld jumps as though he had laid hold of an electric wire with a wet paw. Lisa has turned on the light in her room and has stepped to the window. She appears not to see us in the half-darkened office and she slowly takes off her blouse. She is wearing nothing under it.

Riesenfeld snorts aloud. “God in Heaven, what breasts! You could easily put a half-liter stein on them with no danger of its falling!”

“That’s an idea,” I say.

Riesenfeld’s eyes sparkle. “Does Frau Watzek do that all the time?”

“She’s pretty casual. No one can see her—except us over here, of course.”

“Man alive!” Riesenfeld says. “And you want to give up a position like this, you total idiot?”

“Yes,” I say, and am silent while Riesenfeld steals to the window like a Württemberg Indian, his glass in one hand, the bottle of schnaps in the other.

Lisa is combing her hair. “Once I wanted to be a sculptor,” Reisenfeld says without removing his eyes from her. “With a model like that it would have been worthwhile! Damn it, the chances a man neglects!”

“Did you plan to work in granite?”

“What’s that got to do with it?”

“When you use granite the models grow old before the work of art is finished,” I say. “It’s so hard. With a temperament like yours you should have chosen clay. Otherwise you’d have left nothing but unfinished works.”

Riesenfeld groans. Lisa has taken off her skirt but has then turned out the light and gone into the next room. The head of the Odenwald Works clings to the window for a while longer, then turns around. “It’s easy for you!” he growls. “You have no demon sitting on your neck. A suckling calf at most.”

“Merci” I say. “It’s not a demon in your case either; it’s a billy goat. Anything else?”

“A letter,” Riesenfeld announces. “Will you deliver a letter for me?”

“To whom?”

“Frau Watzek! Who else?”

I am silent.

“I’ll look around for a job for you,” Riesenfeld says.

I continue to be silent, watching the perspiring, disappointed sculptor. I intend to keep faith with Georg, even if it costs me my future.

“I’d have done it anyway,” Riesenfeld explains hypocritically.

“I know you would,” I say. “But why write? Letters never do any good. Besides, you’re leaving tonight. Postpone the whole thing till you come back.”

Riesenfeld finishes his schnaps. “It may seem odd to you, but one is extremely disinclined to postpone matters of this sort.”

At this moment Lisa comes out of her front door. She is wearing a black tailor-made dress and the highest heels I have ever seen. Riesenfeld spies her at the same instant I do. He snatches his hat from the table and rushes out. “This is the moment!”

I watch him shoot down the street. Hat in hand, he respectfully strolls up beside Lisa, who has looked around twice. Then the two disappear around the comer. I wonder what will come of it. Georg Kroll will be certain to let me know. Quite possibly the lucky fellow will get a second Swedish-granite monument out of the business without losing Lisa.

Wilke, the coffinmaker, is coming across the courtyard. “How about a meeting tonight?” he shouts through the window. I nod. I have been expecting him to propose it. “Is Bach coming?” I ask.

“Yes. I’ve just been getting cigarettes for him.”

We are sitting in Wilke’s workshop surrounded by shavings, coffins, potted geraniums, and pots of glue. There is a smell of resin and fresh-cut pine wood. Wilke is planing down the cover for the twins’ coffin. He has decided to include a garland of flowers, gratis, and to embellish it with artificial gold leaf. When his interest is aroused, he cares nothing about profit. And now it is aroused.

Kurt Bach is sitting on a black lacquered coffin with fittings of imitation bronze; I on a showpiece of natural oak in a dull finish. We have beer, sausage, bread, and cheese before us and have decided to keep Wilke company during the ghostly hour. Between twelve and one at night, the coffinmaker usually grows melancholy, sleepy, and rather scared. It is his weak hour. One wouldn’t believe it, but at that time he is afraid of ghosts, and the canary that hangs over his workbench in a parrot cage is not company enough for him. It is then that he becomes discouraged, talks about the pointlessness of existence, and takes to drink. We have often found him next morning snoring on a bed of shavings in his largest coffin, the one he was so badly cheated on four years ago. The coffin was built for the giant of the Bleichfeld Circus, which was playing for a time in Werdenbrück. After a dinner of Limburger cheese, hard-boiled eggs, bologna, army bread, and schnaps, he died—apparently died, that is, for while Wilke was slaving through the night, in defiance of all ghosts, to complete the giant’s coffin, the latter suddenly rose with a start from his deathbed, and, instead of informing Wilke on the spot, as a decent person would have done, finished up a half-bottle of schnaps that was left over and went to sleep. Next morning, he maintained he had no money and, besides, had not ordered a coffin for himself, an objection to which there was no answer. The circus moved on, and since no one would admit to having ordered the coffin, Wilke was left with it on his hands, and thereby acquired for a time a somewhat embittered view of the world. He was particularly incensed at young Dr. Wullmann, whom he considered responsible for the whole thing. Wullmann had been an army doctor and had seen two years’ service; as a result he had grown venturesome. By treating so many half-dead and three-quarters-dead soldiers in the field hospital without being answerable to anyone for their deaths or misset bones, he had picked up a lot of interesting experience. For this reason he slipped in at night to have one more look at the giant and gave him an injection of some sort. He had often seen dead men come to life in the field hospital. The giant, too, promptly responded. Since that time, Wilke has had a certain prejudice against Wullmann, which the latter has not been able to eradicate despite the fact that he has recently behaved more sensibly and has sent families of his ex-patients to Wilke. For Wilke, the giant coffin has been a permanent warning against credulity, and I believe it was also what prompted him to go home with the twins’ mother—he wanted to assure himself that the dead were not galloping around on hobbyhorses. It would have been too much for Wilke’s self-respect to have been left with a square, twins’ coffin, in addition to the unsalable giant coffin, and thus to have become a kind of Barnum of the coffinmaker’s guild. The thing that angered him most about the Wullmann business was that he had no chance for private conversation with the giant. He would have forgiven anything for an interview about the Beyond. After all, the giant had been as good as dead for several hours, and Wilke, as amateur scientist and dreader of ghosts, would have given a great deal to get information about existence on the other side.

Kurt Bach has no patience with all this. A son of nature, he is still a member of the Society of Freethinkers in Berlin, whose motto is: “Live and rejoice while you are here, beyond the grave there’s naught to fear.” It’s strange that, despite this fact, he has become a sculptor of the Beyond, portraying angels, dying lions, and eagles, but that was not his original intention. As a young man he considered himself a kind of nephew to Michelangelo.

The canary is singing. The light keeps it awake. Wilke’s plane makes a hissing sound. Beyond the open windows lies the night. “How are you feeling?” I ask Wilke. “Do you hear the Beyond knocking yet?”

“So-so. It’s only eleven thirty. At this hour I feel as if I were out for a walk in a décolleté gown and a full beard. Uncomfortable.”

“Be a monist,” Kurt Bach urges. “When you don’t believe in anything, you never feel especially bad. Or ridiculous either.”

“Nor good, for that matter,” Wilke says.

“Perhaps. But certainly not as though you had a full beard and were wearing a décolleté” gown. I only feel that way when I look out the window at night and there is the sky with all its stars and the millions of light years and I am supposed to believe that over all this sits a kind of superman who cares what becomes of Kurt Bach.”

The son of nature contentedly cuts himself a piece of sausage and begins to chew. Wilke is growing more nervous. Midnight is near, and at this hour he does not relish such conversation. “Cold, isn’t it?” he says. “Autumn already.”

“Just leave the window open,” I tell him as he is about to close it. “That won’t do you any good; ghosts can go through glass. Instead, take a look at that acacia out there. It’s the Lisa Watzek of acacias. Listen to the wind rustling in it! Like silk petticoats rustling to the music of a waltz. But someday it will be cut down and you will make coffins out of it—”

“Not of acacia wood. Coffins are made of oak or pine with mahogany veneer—”

“All right, all right, Wilke! Is there any schnaps left?”

Kurt Bach hands me the bottle. Wilke suddenly jumps and almost cuts a finger off. “What was that?” he asks in alarm.

A beetle has flown against the electric light. “Just quiet down, Alfred,” I say. “That’s not a messenger from the Beyond. Just a simple drama of the animal world. A dung beetle striving toward the sun—represented for him by a one-hundred-watt bulb in the back house at No. 3 Hackenstrasse.”

By agreement, from shortly before midnight until the end of the ghostly hour we call Wilke by his first name. It makes him feel more secure. After that we become formal again.

“I don’t understand how anyone can live without religion,” Wilke says to Kurt Bach. “What do you do when you wake up at night during a thunderstorm?”

“In the summer?”

“In the summer, of course; there aren’t any thunderstorms in winter.”

“You drink something cold,” Kurt Bach explains, “and then go back to sleep.”

Wilke shakes his head. During the ghostly hour he is not only scared but very religious.

“I used to know a man who went to a bordello during thunderstorms,” I say. “He was absolutely compelled to. At other times he was impotent; thunderstorms changed that. One sight of a thunderhead and he would reach for the telephone and make an appointment with Fritzi. The summer of 1920 was the finest time of his life; there were thunderstorms all the time. Often four or five a day.”

“What’s become of him?” Wilke, the amateur scientist, asks with interest.

“He’s dead,” I say. “Died during the last and biggest thunderstorm, in October 1920.”

The night wind slams a door in the house opposite. Bells ring from the steeples. It is midnight Wilke gulps down a schnaps.

“How about a stroll to the cemetery?” asks the sometimes unfeeling atheist Bach.

Wilke’s mustache quivers with horror in the wind blowing in through the window. “And you call yourselves friends!” he says reproachfully.

Immediately thereafter he is startled again. “What was that?”

“A pair of lovers out there. Stop working for a while, Alfred. Eat! Ghosts stay away from people while they’re eating. Haven’t you any sprats?”

Alfred gives me the look of a dog that has been kicked while answering the call of nature. “Do you have to remind me of that now? Of my unhappy love life and the loneliness of a man in his best years?”

“You’re a victim of your profession,” I say. “Not everyone can say that of himself. Come to souper! That’s what this meal is called in the fashionable world.”

We go to work on the sausage and cheese and we open the bottles of beer. The canary is given a lettuce leaf and breaks into a song of praise, with no thought as to whether it is an atheist or believer. Kurt Bach raises his clay-colored face and sniffs. “It smells of stars,” he exclaims.

“What’s that?” Wilke puts down his bottle among the shavings. “What in the world does that mean?”

“At midnight the world smells of stars.”

“Cut out the jokes! How can anyone even want to go on living when he believes in nothing and yet talks like that?”

“Are you trying to convert me?” Kurt Bach asks. “You celestial inheritance hunter?”

“No, no! Or yes, if you like. Wasn’t that something rustling?”

“Yes,” Kurt says. “Love.”

Outside we hear more cautious footsteps. A second pair of lovers vanishes into the forest of tombstones. The white blur of a girl’s dress can be seen disappearing into the darkness.

“Why do people look so different when they’re dead?” Wilke asks. “Even twins.”

“Because they’re no longer disguised,” Kurt Bach replies.

Wilke stops chewing. “Disguised how?”

“By life,” says the monist

Wilke smooths his mustache and goes on chewing. “At this hour you might at least stop this nonsense! Isn’t anything sacred to you?”

Kurt Bach laughs tonelessly. “You poor vine! You always have to have something to cling to.”

“And you?”

“So do I.” Bach’s eyes in the clay-colored face gleam as though made of glass. The son of nature is usually taciturn, just an unsuccessful sculptor with broken dreams; but sometimes those latent dreams rise again as they did years ago, and then he suddenly becomes a superannuated satyr with visions.

There is a crackling and whispering in the courtyard, and once more stealthy footsteps. “Two weeks ago there was a fight out there,” Wilke says. “A locksmith had forgotten to take his tools out of his pocket, and during the stormy encounter they must have got into so unfortunate a position that the lady was suddenly pricked by a sharp awl. She was up in a flash and grabbed a small bronze wreath. She beat the mechanic over the head with it—didn’t you hear it?” he asks me.

“No.”

“Well, she slams the bronze wreath down over his ears so hard he can’t get it off. I turn on the light and ask what’s going on. The fellow gallops off in terror with the bronze wreath around his skull like a Roman senator—didn’t you notice the bronze wreath was missing?” he asks me.

“No.”

“What a way to run a business! So he runs out as though a swarm of wasps was after him. I go down. The girl is still standing there, looking at her hand. ‘Blood!’ she says. ‘He stabbed me. And at such a moment!’

“I see the awl on the ground and guess what has happened. I pick up the awl. This could give you blood poisoning,’ I say. ‘Very dangerous! You can put a tourniquet on a finger, but not on a buttock. Even so enchanting a one.’ She blushes—”

“How could you tell in the darkness?” Kurt Bach asks.

“There was a moon.”

“You can’t see a blush in the moonlight. Colors don’t show.”

“You feel it,” Wilke explains. “So she blushes, but continues to hold up her dress. It’s a light dress, and blood makes spots that are hard to get out. ‘I have iodine and adhesive plaster,’ I say. ‘And I’m discreet. Come in!’ She comes in and isn’t even frightened.” Wilke turns to me. “That’s the nice thing about your yard,” he says enthusiastically. “Anyone who makes love among tombstones isn’t afraid of coffins either. So it happened that, after the iodine and adhesive tape and a swallow of blended port wine, the giant’s coffin served another purpose.”

“It became a bower of love?” I ask to make sure.

“A cavalier enjoys his pleasures but says nothing,” Wilke replies.

At this instant the moon comes out from behind the clouds, lighting the white marble and making the crosses glimmer darkly. Scattered among them we see four pairs of lovers, two on marble beds, two on granite. For a moment everyone is motionless, transfixed by surprise—there are only two courses open to them, to flee or to ignore the altered situation. Flight is not without danger; you can get away in an instant, but you may sustain such a psychic shock that it will lead to impotence. I learned that from a lance corporal who was once taken by surprise by a sergeant major when he was out in the woods with a cook—he was ruined for life, and two years later his wife divorced him.

The pairs of lovers do the right thing. Like stags scenting danger they lift their heads—then, with eyes directed at the single lighted window, ours, which was lighted before, they remain as they are, as though carved by Kurt Bach. It is a picture of innocence, a trifle ridiculous at most, just like Bach’s sculptures. Immediately thereafter the shadow of a cloud obscures that part of the garden, leaving only the obelisk in the light. And who stands there, a glittering fountain? The fearlessly pissing Knopf, like that statue in Brussels which every soldier who has gone on leave in Belgium knows so well.

He is too far away for me to do anything. Besides, I don’t feel like it tonight. Why should I behave like a housewife? I decided this afternoon to leave this place, and therefore life rises to meet me with double strength. I feel it everywhere, in the smell of the shavings and in the moonlight, in the tiptoeing and rustling in the courtyard and in the ineffable word September, in my hand which can move and lay hold of it, and in my eyes without which all the museums of the world would be empty, in ghosts, in spirits, in transitoriness, and in the wild career of the earth past Cassiopeia and the Pleiades, in the anticipation of boundless foreign gardens under foreign stars, of positions on great, foreign newspapers, and of rubies now crystallizing underground into lustrous gems; I feel it and it keeps me from heaving an empty beer bottle in the direction of Knopf, that half-minute fountain—

At this moment the clock strikes. It is one. The ghostly hour is past; we can speak formally to Wilke again and either go on getting drunk or descend into sleep as into a mine where there are corpses, coal, white salt palaces, and buried diamonds.