The Black Obelisk

Chapter Eighteen

She is sitting in a corner of her room huddled beside the window. “Isabelle,” I say.

She does not answer. Her eyelids flutter like butterflies that children have impaled alive on pins.

“Isabelle,” I say. “I’ve come to take you out.”

She gives a start and presses herself against the wall. Her posture is cramped and rigid. “Don’t you know me any more?” I ask.

She remains motionless; only her eyes turn toward me, watchful and very dark. “The one who pretends to be a doctor sent you,” she whispers.

It is true. Wernicke did send me. “He did not send me,” I say. “I came secretly. No one knows I am here.”

She frees herself slowly from the wall. “You, too, have betrayed me.”

“I have not betrayed you. I could not get to you. You have not come out.”

“I couldn’t,” she whispers. “They were all standing outside waiting. They wanted to catch me. They managed to find out that I am here.”

“Who?”

She looks at me but does not answer. How frail she is! I think. How frail and alone in this bare room! She hasn’t even her own self. Not even the loneliness of the ego. She has exploded like a grenade into jagged fragments of fear scattered in a strange, threatening landscape of incomprehensible dread. “No one is waiting for you,” I say.

“Yes, they are.”

“How do you know?”

“The voices. Don’t you hear them?”

“No.”

“The voices know everything. Can’t you hear them?”

“It’s the wind, Isabelle.”

“Yes,” she says with resignation. “It may be the wind. If only it didn’t hurt so!”

“What hurts?”

“The sawing. They might at least cut, that would go faster, but this slow, dull sawing! Everything grows together again because they are so slow! Then they begin all over again and so it never stops. They saw through my flesh and the flesh grows together again and it never stops.”

“Who saws?”

“The voices.”

“Voices can’t saw.”

“These can.”

“Where do they saw?”

Isabelle makes a gesture as though in extreme pain. She presses her hands between her thighs. “They want to saw it out so that I can never have children.”

“Who?”

“The woman out there. She says she bore me. Now she wants to force me back into herself again. She saws and saws. And he holds me still.”

“Who holds you?”

She shudders. “He—the one inside her—”

“Inside her?”

She groans. “Don’t say it—she will kill me—I’m not allowed to know—”

I walk toward her around an easy chair upholstered in a pale rose pattern, its atmosphere of domesticity strangely inappropriate in this bare room. “What aren’t you allowed to know?” I ask.

“She will kill me. I don’t dare go to sleep. Why does no one keep watch with me? I must do everything alone. I am so tired,” she laments like a bird. “It burns and I cannot go to sleep and I am so tired. But who can sleep when it burns and no one is keeping watch? You, too, have abandoned me.

“I have not abandoned you.”

“You have been talking to them. They have bribed you. Why didn’t you hold on to me? The blue trees and the silver rain. But you didn’t want to. Never! You could have rescued me.”

“When?” I ask, feeling something begin to tremble inside me, and I do not want it to tremble but it goes on just the same, and the room no longer seems solid; it is as though the walls were shaking and did not consist of stone and mortar and plaster but of vibrations, densely concentrated vibrations of billions of fibers that stretch from horizon to horizon and beyond and are here pressed together into a square jail of fragile nooses, hangman’s nooses, in which a creature of yearning and fear is struggling helplessly.

Isabelle turns her face to the wall. “Oh, it’s lost and gone—many lifetimes ago.”

Suddenly twilight fills the window, spreading over it a veil of almost invisible gray. Everything is still there as before, the light outside, the green, the yellow of the roads, the two palms in the big majolica pots, the sky with its fields of cloud, the distant gray and red confusion of roofs in the city beyond the woods—and nothing is any longer the same. Twilight has isolated it. It has brushed it with the varnish of impermanence, prepared it like food, as housewives soak beef in vinegar, for the shadow wolves of the night. Only Isabelle is still there, clinging tight to the last thread of light, but she, too, is being drawn by it into the drama of the evening, which is not truly a drama and only seems so because we know it means impermanence. Only since we have known that we must die and only because we know it has the idyl turned into drama, the circle into a lance, and becoming into passing away and outcry and terror and flight and judgment.

I hold her close in my arms. She is trembling and looking at me and pressing herself against me and I hold her, we hold each other—two strangers who know nothing of one another and cling to one another because each mistakes the other for someone else: strangers who nevertheless derive a fleeting comfort from this misunderstanding which is a double and triple and endless misunderstanding and yet is the only thing that, like a rainbow, holds out the deceptive appearance of a bridge where no bridge can ever be, a reflection between two mirrors thrown onward into even more distant emptiness. “Why don’t you love me?” Isabelle murmurs.

“I love you. Everything in me loves you.”

“Not enough. The others are still here. If it were enough, you would kill them.”

I hold her in my arms and look over her head into the park where now shadows like amethyst waves are running up the fields and roads. Everything in me is clear and sharp, but at the same time I feel as though I were standing on a narrow platform high above a murmurous deep. “You wouldn’t be able to stand it if I lived outside you,” Isabelle whispers.

I don’t know what to reply. Something always moves in me when she says things like that—as though there were a deeper wisdom in them than I can recognize—as though they came from beyond the phenomenal world, from the place where there are no names. “Do you feel how cold it’s getting?” she asks on my shoulder. “Each night everything dies. The heart too. They saw it to pieces.”

“Nothing dies, Isabelle. Ever.”

“Everything does! The stone face—it cracks into pieces. In the morning it is there again. Oh, it is no face! How we lie with out poor faces! You lie too—”

“Yes—” I say. “But I don’t want to.”

“You must tear away the face until there is nothing there. Only smooth skin, nothing else! But then it will still be there. It grows back. If everything stood still, one would have no pain. Why do they want to saw me away from everything? Why do they want me back? I’m not going to betray anything!”

“What could you betray?”

“The thing that blooms. It is full of mud. It comes out of the ducts.”

She trembles again and presses herself against me. “They have stuck my eyes shut. With glue, and then they have run needles through them. But still I cannot look away.”

“Away from what?”

She pushes me off. “They have sent you too! I will betray nothing! You are a spy. They have bought you! If I told you, they would kill me.”

“I’m not a spy. And why should they kill you if you tell me? It would be much easier for them to do it before. If I know, they will have to kill me too. There would be one more who knew.”

This penetrates. She looks at me again, considering. I keep so quiet that I hardly breathe. I feel that we are standing in front of a door behind which there may be freedom. What Wernicke calls freedom. A return from the maze, to normal streets, houses, and relationships. I don’t know whether this will really be better, but I can’t speculate about that while I have this tormented creature before me. “If you explain it to me, they will leave you in peace,” I say. “And if they don’t leave you in peace, I’ll get help. From the police, the newspapers. They will become afraid and then you won’t need to be.”

She presses her hands together. “It’s not just that,” she manages to say finally.

“What is it then?”

In a second her face becomes hard and closed. The torment and indecision are washed away. Her mouth grows small and thin and the chin protrudes. Now there is something about her of the grim, puritanical, evil old maid. “Drop that!” she says. Her voice, too, has changed.

“All right, we’ll drop it. I don’t need to know.”

I wait. Her eyes glitter in the last light like wet slates. All the gray of the evening seems concentrated in them; she looks at me in a superior and mocking way. “You’d like that very much, wouldn’t you? Well, you have failed, you spy!”

For no reason I become furious, although I know that she is sick and that these transitions of consciousness come like lightning. “Go to hell,” I say angrily. “What does all that matter to me!”

I see her face changing again; but I go out quickly, full of an incomprehensible tumult.

“And?” Wernicke asks.

“That’s all. Why did you send me in to see her? It accomplished nothing. I’m no good as a nurse. You see for yourself—just when I should have spoken carefully to her, I shouted at her and ran away.”

“It was better than you think.” Wernicke gets a bottle and two glasses out from behind his books and pours drinks. “Cognac,” he says. “There’s just one thing I’d like to know—how she senses that her mother is here again.”

“Her mother is here?”

Wernicke nods. “Since day before yesterday. She hasn’t seen her. She couldn’t have, even from her window.”

“Why not?”

“She’d have to hang out too far and have eyes like a telescope.” Wernicke inspects the color of his cognac. “But sometimes patients of that sort do sense these things. Or perhaps she just guessed. I have been pushing her in that direction.”

“Why?” I say. “Now she’s sicker than I have ever seen her.”

“No,” Wernicke replies.

I put down my glass and glance at the thick books on his shelves. “She’s so miserable it makes your stomach turn.”

“Miserable, yes; but not sicker.”

“You ought to have left her in peace—the way she was during the summer. She was happy. Now—it’s horrible.”

“Yes, it’s horrible,” Wernicke says. “It’s almost as though what she imagines were really happening.”

“It’s as though she were in a torture chamber.”

Wernicke nods. “People outside always think torture chambers don’t exist any more. They exist all right. Here. Each one has his own in his skull.”

“Not just here.”

“Not just here,” Wernicke agrees with alacrity, taking a swallow of cognac. “But there are many of them here. Do you want to be convinced? Put on a white coat. It’s almost time for my evening rounds.”

“No,” I say. “I remember the last time.”

“That was the war; it keeps right on raging here. Do you want to see more of the wards?”

“No. I remember very well.”

“Not all. You only saw some of them.”

“It was enough.”

I recall those creatures, standing in cramped postures in the corner, motionless for weeks at a time, or continually running against the walls, clambering over beds, or groaning and shrieking, white-eyed, in strait jackets. The inaudible thunders of chaos beat down on them, and pre-existence, worm, claw, scale, writhing, footless, and slimy, the creeping things before thought, the carion existences, reach upward from below to seize their bowels and testicles and spines, to draw them down into the gray confusion of the beginning, back to scaly bodies and eyeless retchings—apd, shrieking like panic-stricken monkeys, they seek refuge on the last bare branches of the brain, chattering, hypnotized by the ever-rising coils, in the final horrible dread, not of the brain, worse, the cells’ dread of destruction, the scream above all screams, the fear of fears, the death fear, not of the individual, but of the veins, the blood, the subconscious entelechy that silently control liver, glands, the pulse of the blood, and the fire at the base of the skull.

“All right,” Wernicke says. “Then drink your cognac, give up your excursions into the unconscious and praise life.”

“Why? Because everything in it is so wonderfully ranged? Because one eats the other and then himself?”

“Because you’re alive, you harmless hair-splitter! You’re much too young to deal with the problem of pity, and too inexperienced. When you’re old enough, you’ll see it doesn’t exist.”

“I’ve had a certain amount of experience.”

Wernicke dismisses the idea. “Don’t be so self-important, you veteran of the wars! What you know has nothing to do with the metaphysical problem of pity—it’s part of the universal idiocy of the human race. Great pity begins elsewhere—and ends elsewhere too—beyond weeping willows like you and also beyond the peddlers of comfort like Bodendiek—”

“All right, superman,” I say. “Does that give you the right to let hell loose in the minds of your patients whenever you feel like it, or the fires of the stake or slimy death?”

“The right—” Wernicke replies with abysmal contempt. “How agreeable an honest murderer is in comparison with a lawyer like you! What do you know about right? Even less than about pity, you scholastic sentimentalist!”

He raises his glass, grinning, then glances contentedly into the night. The artificial light in the room falls ever more goldenly on the brown and gilt spines of the books. Light never seems so precious or so symbolic as up here where the polar night of the mind reigns. “Neither one was foreseen in the design of the universe,” I say. “But I cannot reconcile myself, and if that means human inadequacy to you, I’ll be glad to remain inadequate as long as I live.”

Wernicke gets up, takes his hat from the hook, puts it on, then bows to me, removes it, hangs it on the hook, and sits down again. “Long live the beautiful and good!” he says. “That’s what I meant. And now out with you! It’s time for my evening rounds.”

“Can’t you give Geneviève Terhoven a sleeping pill?” I ask.

“I can, but it won’t cure her.”

“Why don’t you let her have some peace today?”

“I am giving her peace. And I’ll give her a sleeping pill too.” He winks at me. “You were better for her today than a whole college of doctors. Many thanks.”

I look at him uncertainly. To hell with his errands, I think. To hell with his cognac! And to hell with his god-like speeches! “A strong sleeping pill,” I say.

“The best there is. Were you ever in the Orient? In China?”

“How could I have been in China?”

“I was there,” Wernicke says. “Before the war. At the time of the floods and the famine.”

“Yes,” I say. “I can imagine what’s coming now and I don’t want to hear it. I’ve read it. Will you go to Geneviève Terhoven right away? First of all?”

“First of all. And I’ll leave her in peace,” Wernicke smiles. “But to even things up I’ll destroy some of her mother’s peace.”

“What do you want, Otto?” I ask. “I’m not interested in discussing the form of the ode today! Go and find Eduard!”

We are sitting in the assembly room of the Poets’ Club. I have come here in order not to think about Isabelle, but suddenly everything about the place repels me. What’s the purpose of these jingles when the world reeks of fear and blood? I know this is a cheap conclusion and, in addition, a false one—but I am weary of continually catching myself in dramatized banalities. “Well, what’s up?” I ask.

Otto Bambuss looks at me like an owl fed on buttermilk. “I was there,” he says reproachfully. “Again. First you drive me there and then you don’t even want to hear about it!”

“That’s life for you. Where were you?”

“In Bahnstrasse, in the bordello.”

“What’s new about that?” I ask, without really hearing him. “We were all there together, we paid for you, and you ran away. You want us to put up a statue to you for that?”

“I went again,” Otto says. “Alone. Please listen to me, won’t you?”

“When?”

“After the evening in the Red Mill.”

“So what?” I ask without interest. “Did you run away from the facts of life again?”

“No,” Otto explains. “Not this time.”

“My respects! Was it the Iron Horse?”

Bambuss blushes. “That doesn’t matter.”

“All right,” I say. “Why are you talking about it then? It’s not exactly a unique experience. A good many people in the world sleep with women.”

“You don’t understand. It’s the consequences.”

“What consequences? I’m sure the Iron Horse isn’t sick. People always imagine that sort of thing, especially at first”

Otto has a tormented expression. “That’s not what I mean! You know why I did it. Everything was going fine with both my cycles, especially with ‘The Scarlet Woman,’ but I thought I needed even more inspiration. I wanted to end that cycle before I had to go back to the village. That’s why I went to Bahnstrasse again. Properly, this time. And, just imagine, since then nothing! Nothing! Not a line! It’s as though it had been cut short! The opposite should have happened!”

I laugh, although I’m not in the mood for laughter. “That’s just artist’s luck!”

“It’s all right for you to laugh,” Bambuss says excitedly, “but consider my position! Eleven faultless sonnets, and this misfortune while I’m working on the twelfth! It simply won’t move any more! My imagination has gone! It’s all over! I’m done for!”

“It’s the curse of fulfillment,” says Hungermann, who has come up to us and obviously knows about the matter. “It leaves nothing over. A hungry man dreams of food. A satisfied man is repelled by it.”

“He will get hungry again and his dreams will return,” I reply.

“They will for you, but not for Otto,” Hungermann explains with great satisfaction. “You are superficial and normal, Otto is profound. He has replaced one complex by another. Don’t laugh—perhaps it’s the end of him as a writer. It is, as one might say, a funeral in a house of joy.”

“I’m empty,” Otto says despondently. “Emptier than I have ever been. I have ruined myself. Where are my dreams? Fulfillment is the enemy of yearning. I should have known!”

“Write something about it,” I say.

“Not a bad idea!” Hungermann says, getting out his notebook. “I had it first, as a matter of fact. Besides, it’s nothing for Otto; his style isn’t hard enough.”

“Then he can write it as an elegy. Or a lament. Cosmic despair, stars dropping like golden tears, God himself sobbing because He has made such a mess of the world, the autumn wind harping a requiem—”

Hungermann is writing busily. “What a coincidence!” he says as he writes. “I said exactly the same thing in almost the same words a week ago. My wife heard me.”

Otto has pricked up his ears slightly. “Besides all that, I am afraid I may have caught something,” he says. “How long does it take before you know?”

“With a dose three days, with lues four weeks,” Hungermann, the married man, replies promptly.

“You haven’t caught anything,” I say. “Sonnets don’t get lues, but you can take advantage of your state of mind. Put the rudder hard over! If you can’t write for, write against! Instead of a hymn to the woman in scarlet and purple, a biting satire. Pus drips from the stars, Job writhes with boils, probably the first syphilitic, amid the shards of the universe, the Janus face of love, smiling sweetly on one side, nose eaten away on the other—” I see Hungermann writing again. “Did you say that to your wife, too, a week ago?” I ask.

He nods beaming.

“Why are you writing it down then?”

“Because I’d already forgotten it. I often forget these small inspirations.”

“It’s easy for you to make fun of me,” Bambuss says, offended. “I can’t write against anything. I am a hymn writer.”

“Then write hymns to virtue, purity, the monastic life, loneliness, absorption in the nearest and farthest thing there is, one’s self.”

Otto listens for a moment with his head on one side like a hunting dog. “I’ve already done that,” he says, cast down. “Besides, it’s not altogether my style.”

“To hell with your style! Don’t make so many demands!”

I get up and go into the next room. Valentin Busch is sitting there. “Come and drink a bottle of Johannisberger with me,” he says. “That will annoy Eduard.”

“I don’t want to annoy anyone today,” I reply, leaving him.

As I come out into the street, Otto Bambuss is standing there, staring dejectedly at the plaster Valkyries that adorn the entrance to the Walhalla. “What a misfortune!” he says aimlessly.

“Don’t cry,” I tell him in order to get rid of him. “Apparently you belong among those who reach their peak early, Kleist, Burger, Rimbaud, Buchner, the finest stars in the firmament of poets—so don’t take it to heart.”

“But they all died young!”

“You can still do that too if you like. Besides, Rimbaud lived for many years after he had stopped writing. As an adventurer in Abyssinia. What about that?”

Otto looks at me like a doe with three legs. Then he stares once more at the thick bottoms and busts of the plaster Valkyries. “Listen,” I say impatiently. “Write another cycle: The Temptations of Saint Anthony! There you have both lust and renunciation, and a lot of other things as well.”

Otto’s face lights up. A moment later he is concentrating as much as is possible for an astral sheep with sensual desires. Apparently for the moment German literature has been saved, for I am clearly much less important to him already. Absently he waves to me and hurries down the street toward his writing desk. I look after him enviously.

The office is dark and empty. I switch on the light and find a note: “Riesenfeld gone. You have tonight off. Use the time to polish your buttons, improve your mind, cut your fingernails, and pray for Kaiser and Reich. Signed Kroll, Sergeant Major and human being. P.S. He who sleeps sins too.”

I go up to my room. The piano shows its white teeth at me. Books by dead men stare down coldly from the shelves. I toss off a succession of sevenths. Lisa’s window opens. She stands in the warm light; her dressing gown hangs open, and she is holding up a wagon wheel of flowers. “From Riesenfeld,” she shouts. “What an idiot! Have you any use for these vegetables?”

I shake my head. If I sent them to Isabelle, she would think her enemies were attempting something underhanded—and I haven’t seen Gerda in so long a time she would misinterpret the gesture. There’s no one else I know.

“Really not?” Lisa asks.

“Really not.”

“You bird of bad luck! But don’t take it too hard! I think you’re going to grow up.”

“When is one grown up?”

Lisa considers this for a moment. “When you think more of yourself than of others,” she croaks, slamming the window.

I toss another succession of sevenths, this time in a minor key, through the window. They have no visible effect. I close the piano and wander downstairs again. Wilke’s light is still on. I climb up to his shop. “How did the problem of the twins turn out?” I ask.

“Tiptop. The mother won. The twins were buried in their double coffin. In the municipal cemetery, not the Catholic, to be sure. Funny that the mother bought a grave in the Catholic cemetery first—she ought to have known it wouldn’t work when one of the twins was Evangelical. Now she has the first grave on her hands.”

“The one in the Catholic cemetery?”

“Of course. It’s excellent—dry, sandy, with a lot of aristocrats lying nearby. She’s lucky to have it!”

“What for? For herself and her husband? She’ll want to be buried in the municipal cemetery because of the twins.”

“As a capital asset,” Wilke says, impatient at my stupidity. “Today a grave is a first-class asset, everyone knows that! She could make a profit of a couple of million right now if she wanted to sell. Commodities are rising like mad!”

“Right. I’d forgotten about that for the moment. Why are you still here?”

Wilke points to a coffin. “For Werner, the banker. Cerebral hemorrhage. Expense no object, solid silver fittings, finest workmanship, real silk, overtime price—how about helping me out? Kurt Bach isn’t here. In return you can sell them a monument tomorrow morning. No one knows about it yet. It happened after business hours.”

“Not tonight. I’m dead tired. Go to the Red Mill a little before midnight, come back at one o’clock and finish up then—that will solve the problem of the ghostly hour.”

Wilke thinks it over. “Not bad,” he announces. “But won’t I need a tuxedo?”

“Not even in your dreams.”

Wilke shakes his head. “Out of the question just the same! That one hour would cost me more than I’ll make in the whole night. But I might go to a bar.”

He looks at me gratefully. “Put down Werner’s address,” he says.

I write it down. Strange, I think, this is the second time tonight that someone has taken my advice—only I haven’t any for myself. “It’s odd you’re so afraid of ghosts,” I say, “when you’re something of a freethinker.”

“Only during the day. Not at night. Who is a freethinker at night?”

I point toward Kurt Bach’s room below us. Wilke shakes his head. “It’s easy to be a freethinker when you’re young. But at my age, with a rupture and encapsulated tuberculosis—”

“Do a turnabout. The Church loves repentant sinners.”

Wilke lifts his shoulders. “Then what would become of my self-respect?”

I laugh. “You have none at night, eh?”

“Who has any at night? You?”

“No. But perhaps a night watchman, or a baker who plies his trade at night. Do you absolutely have to have self-respect?”

“Naturally. After all, I am a human being. Only animals and suicides haven’t any. It’s a miserable thing, this division! However, tonight I’m going to try Blume’s Restaurant. The beer there is excellent.”

I wander back across the dark courtyard. In front of the obelisk there is a pale shimmer. It is Lisa’s wreath of flowers. She has put it there before going to the Red Mill. For a moment I stand undecided; then I pick it up. The thought that Knopf might desecrate it is too much. I take it to my room and put it in a terra-cotta urn I bring up with me from the office. The flowers at once take over the whole room. There I sit with the brown and yellow and white chrysanthemums that smell of earth and of the cemetery as though I were about to be buried! But in fact haven’t I buried something?

By midnight the scent is too much for me. I see that Wilke has gone out to spend the ghostly hour in the bar. I pick up the flowers and take them into his workroom. The door is open. The light is still on so that the ghost dreader will not be terrified when he comes back. A bottle of beer is standing on the giant’s coffin. I drink it, put glass and bottle on the window sill and open the window so that it will look as though some ghost had grown thirsty. Then I strew the chrysanthemums all the way from the window to Banker Werner’s half-finished coffin, and at the end I set down a handful of valueless thousand-mark notes. Let Wilke make what he can of that! If it results in Werner’s coffin not being ready on time, that won’t matter—the banker used the inflation to cheat dozens of small householders out of their meager possessions.