The Black Obelisk

Chapter Nineteen

“Would you like to see something that will touch your heart almost like a Rembrandt?” Georg asks. “Go ahead.”

He unfolds his pocket handkerchief and lets an object fall ringing on the table. It takes me a while to recognize it. I gaze at it with emotion. It is a gold twenty-mark piece. The last time I saw one was before the war. “Those were the days!” I say. “Peace reigned, security prevailed, insults to His Majesty were still punishable by imprisonment, the steel helmet was unknown, our mothers wore corsets and their blouses had high, whalebone-stiffened collars, dividends were paid, the mark was as untouchable as God, and every quarter you contentedly clipped the coupons from your government bonds and were paid in gold. Let me kiss you, you glittering symbol of a vanished era!”

I weigh the gold piece in my hand. It bears the likeness of Wilhelm n, who is now sawing wood in Holland and growing a pointed beard. On the coin he still wears the proudly waxed mustache which once meant: It has been achieved. It certainly has been achieved. “Where did you get it?” I ask.

“From a widow who inherited a whole chest of them.”

“Good God! What’re they worth?”

“Four billion paper marks apiece. A small house, or a dozen beautiful women. A week at the Red Mill. Eight months’ pension for one of the severely wounded war—”

“Enough—”

Heinrich Kroll enters, the bicycle clips on his striped pants. “This will enchant your loyal, subservient heart,” I say, sending the golden bird spinning to him through the air. He catches it and stares at it with tear-filled eyes. “His Majesty,” he says with emotion. “Those were the days! We still had our army!”

“Apparently they were different days for different people,” I reply.

Heinrich looks at me reproachfully. “You’ll have to admit they were better days than these!”

“Possibly!”

“Not possibly! Certainly! We had order, we had a stable currency, we had no unemployed, but a thriving economy

instead, and we were a respected people. Won’t you agree to that?”

“At once.”

“Well then! What have we today?”

“Disorder, seven million unemployed, a false economy, and we are a conquered people,” I reply.

Heinrich is taken aback. He hadn’t thought it would be so easy. “Well then,” he repeats. “Today we are sitting in the muck and then we were living on the fat of the land. Even you can probably draw the logical conclusion, can’t you?”

“I’m not sure. What is it?”

“It’s damn simple! That we must have a Kaiser and a decent national government again!”

“Hold on!” I say. “You’ve forgotten something. You’ve forgotten the important word because. That is the heart of the evil. It’s the reason that today millions like you raise their trunks again and trumpet this nonsense. The little word because.”

“What’s that?” Heinrich asks blankly.

“Because!” I repeat. “The word because! Today we have seven million unemployed and inflation and we have been conquered because we had the national government you love so much! Because that government in its megalomania made war! Because we had your beloved blockheads and puppets in uniform as our government! And we must not have them back to make things go better; instead we must be careful that they don’t come back, because otherwise they will drive us into war again and into the muck again. You and your friends say: Yesterday things went well; today they are going badly—so let’s have the old government back. But in reality it should be: Today things are going badly because yesterday we had the old government—so to hell with it! Catch on? The little word because! That’s something your friends like to forget! Because!”

“Nonsense!” Heinrich splutters in rage. “You communist!”

Georg breaks into wild laughter. “For Heinrich everyone is a communist who isn’t on the extreme right.”

Heinrich inflates his chest for an armored retort. The image of the Kaiser has made him strong. At this moment, however, Kurt Bach comes in. “Herr Kroll,” he asks Heinrich, “is the angel to stand at the right or left of the text: ‘Here lies Master Tinsmith Quartz’?”

“What’s that?”

“The bas-relief angel on Quartz’s tombstone.”

“On the right, of course,” Georg says. “Angels always stand on the right.”

Heinrich exchanges the role of national prophet for that of tombstone salesman. “I’ll come with you,” he announces ill-humoredly and puts the gold piece back on the table. Kurt Bach sees it and picks it up. “Those were the days!” he says enthusiastically.

“So, for you too,” Georg replies. “What sort of days were they, then, for you?”

“The days of free art! Bread cost pfennigs, schnaps a fiver, life was full of ideals, and with a couple of those gold pieces you could travel to the blessed land of Italy without any fear that they would be worthless when you got there.”

Bach kisses the eagle, lays the coin back, and grows ten years older. Heinrich and he disappear. As a parting shot Heinrich calls from the door, a darkly threatening look on his fat face: “Heads will roll yet!”

“What was that?” I ask Georg in amazement. “Wasn’t it one of Watzek’s favorite phrases? Are we, perhaps, about to see the embattled cousins joining forces?”

Georg stares thoughtfully after Heinrich. “Perhaps,” he says. “Then it will become dangerous. Do you know what’s so hopeless? In 1918 Heinrich was a rabid opponent of the war. Since then he has forgotten everything that made him oppose it, and the war has become a jolly adventure.” He puts the twenty-mark piece into his vest pocket. “Everything you survive becomes an adventure. It makes one sick! And the more horrible it was, the more adventurous it seems in recollection. Only the dead could really judge the war; they alone experienced it completely.”

He looks at me. “Experienced?” I say. “Expired.”

“They and the ones who have not forgotten it,” he goes on. “But there are very few of them. Our damnable memory is a sieve. It wants to survive. And survival is only possible through forgetfulness.”

He put his hat on. “Come along,” he says. “We’ll see what sort of days our gold bird will call up in Eduard Knobloch’s memory.

“Isabelle!” I say deeply astonished.

I see her sitting on the terrace in front of the pavilion for the incurables. There is no trace of the twitching, tormented creature I saw last time. Her eyes are clear, her face is calm, and she seems to me more beautiful than I have ever seen her—but this may be because of the contrast to last time.

It has rained during the afternoon and the garden is glistening with moisture and sunlight. Above the city, clouds float against a pure, medieval blue, and the whole fenestrated front of the building has been transformed into a gallery of mirrors. Unconcerned about the hour, Isabelle is wearing an evening dress of very soft black material and her golden shoes. On her right arm hangs a bracelet of emeralds—it must be worth more than our whole business, including the inventory, the buildings, and the income for the next five years. She has never worn it before. It’s a day of rarities, I think. First the golden Wilhelm II and now this! But the bracelet does not move me.

“Do you her them?” Isabelle asks. “They have drunk deep and well and now they are calm and satisfied and at peace. They are humming deeply like a million bees.”

“Who?”

“The trees and all the bushes. Didn’t you hear them screaming yesterday when it was so dry?”

“Can they scream?”

“Naturally. Couldn’t you hear it?”

“No,” I say, looking at her bracelet, which sparkles as though it had green eyes.

Isabelle laughs. “Oh, Rudolf, you hear so little!” she says tenderly. “Your ears have grown shut like a boxwood hedge. And then you make so much noise too—that’s why you hear nothing.”

“I make noise? How do you mean?”

“Not with words. But in other ways you make a dreadful amount of noise, Rudolf. Often one can hardly stand you. You make more noise than the hydrangeas when they are thirsty, and they’re really terrific screamers.”

“What is it in me that makes the noise?”

“Everything. Your wishes, your heart, your dissatisfaction, your vanity, your uncertainty—”

“Vanity?” I say. “I’m not vain.”

“Of course you are—”

“Absolutely not!” I reply, knowing that what I’m saying is untrue.

Isabelle kisses me quickly. “Don’t make me tired, Rudolf! You’re always so precise with words. Besides, you’re not really named Rudolf, are you? What is your name?”

“Ludwig,” I say in surprise. It is the first time she has asked me.

“Yes, Ludwig. Aren’t you sometimes tired of your name?”

“To be sure. Of myself too.”

She nods as though it were the most natural thing in the world. “Then go ahead and change it. Why not be Rudolf? Or someone else. Take a trip. Go to another country. Each name is a different country.”

“I happen to be called Ludwig. How can I change that? Everyone here knows it.”

She appears not to have heard me. “I, too, am going to go away soon,” she says. “I feel it. I am weary and weary of my weariness. Everything is beginning to be a little empty and full of leave-taking and melancholy and waiting.”

I look at her and suddenly feel a quick fear. What does she mean? “Doesn’t everyone change continually?” I ask.

She looks over toward the city. “That’s not what I mean, Rudolf. I think there is another kind of change. A greater one. One that is like death. I think it is death.”

She shakes her head without looking at me. “It smells of it everywhere,” she whispers. “Even in the trees and the mist. It drips at night from Heaven. The shadows are full of it. And there is weariness in one’s joints. It has slipped in unobserved. I don’t like to walk any more, Rudolf. It was nice with you, even when you did not understand me. At least you were there. Otherwise I should have been quite alone.”

I do not know what she means. It is a strange moment. Everything is suddenly very quiet, not a leaf moves. Only Isabelle’s hand with its long fingers swings over the arm of the cane chair and the green stones of her bracelet ring softly. The setting sun gives her face a tint of such warmth that it is the very opposite of any thought of death—and yet it seems to me as though a coolness were spreading like a silent dread, as though Isabelle may no longer by there when the wind begins to blow again—but then it suddenly moves in the treetops, it rustles, the ghost is gone, and Isabelle straightens up and smiles. “There are many ways to die,” she says. “Poor Rudolf! You know only one. Happy Rudolf! Come, let’s go into the house.”

“I love you very much,” I say.

Her smile deepens. “Call it what you like. What is the wind and what is stillness? They are so different and yet both are the same thing. For a while I have ridden on the painted horses of the carrousel and I have sat in the golden gondolas that are lined with blue satin and turn round and round and move up and down at the same time. You don’t like them, do you?”

“No, I used to prefer the varnished stags and lions. But with you I would ride in the gondolas.”

She kisses me. “The music!” She says softly. “And the lights of the carrousel in the mist! What has become of our youth, Rudolf?”

“Yes, what?” I say, suddenly feeling tears in my eyes without understanding why. “Did we have one?”

“Who knows?”

Isabelle gets up. Above us there is a rustling in the leaves. In the glowing light of the late sun I see that a bird has let fall its droppings on my jacket. Just about where the heart is. Isabelle sees it too, and doubles up with laughter. I use my handkerchief to wipe away the excrement of the sarcastic chaffinch. “You are my youth,” I say. “I know that now. You are everything it ought to be. Also that one only recognizes it when it is slipping away.”

Is she slipping away from me? I think. What am I talking about? Have I, then, ever possessed her? And why should she slip away? Because she says so? Or because there is suddenly this cool, silent fear? She has said so much before and I have so often been afraid. “I love you, Isabelle,” I say. “I love you more than I ever knew. It is like a wind that rises, and you think it is only a playful breeze and suddenly your heart bows down before it like a willow tree in a storm. I love you, heart of my heart, single quietude in all this confusion. I love you, you who can hear when the flowers are thirsty and when time is weary like a hunting dog in the evening. I love you and love streams out of me as though through the just-opened gate of an unknown garden. I do not altogether understand it and I am amazed at it and am still a little ashamed of my big words, but they tumble out of me and resound and do not ask my leave; someone whom I do not know is speaking out of me, and I do not know whether it is a fourth-class melodramatist or my heart, which is no longer afraid—”

With a start Isabelle has stopped walking. We are in the same allée through which, that other time, she walked back naked in the night, but everything now is different. The allée is full of the red light of evening, full of unlived youth, of melancholy, and of a happiness that trembles between sobbing and jubilation. It is no longer an allée of trees; it is an avenue of unreal light, where trees bend toward each other like dark fans striving to contain it, a light we stand in as though we were almost weightless, soaked in it, like cakes on Sylvester’s Eve drenched in rum until they are ready to fall apart. “You do love me?” Isabelle whispers.

“I love you and I know I shall never love anyone else the way I love you because I shall never again be as I am at this moment, which is passing while I speak of it and which I cannot keep even if I were to give my life—”

She looks at me with great, shining eyes. “Now at last you know!” she whispers. “Now at last you have felt it—the nameless happiness and the sadness and the dream and the double face! It is the rainbow, Rudolf, and you can walk across it, but if you have doubts you will fall! Do you believe that at last?”

“Yes,” I murmur, knowing that I believe it and that a moment ago I believed it too, and that I already did not quite believe it. The light is still strong, but at the edges it is already gray; dark patches push slowly forward and the contagion of thought breaks out again beneath them, just covered over, but not healed. The miracle has passed me by; it has touched but not changed me; I still have the same name and I know I will probably bear it to the end of my days; I am no phoenix; resurrection is not for me; I have tried to fly but I am tumbling like a dazzled, awkward rooster back to earth, back behind the barbed wires.

“Don’t be sad,” Isabelle says, watching me.

“I can’t walk on the rainbow, Isabelle,” I say. “But I should like to. Who can?”

She brings her face close to my ear. “No one,” she says.

“No one? Not even you?”

She shakes her head. “No one,” she repeats. “But it’s enough to have the longing.”

The light is rapidly becoming gray. Once before everything was like this, I think, but I cannot remember when. I feel Isabelle near me and suddenly I take her in my arms. We kiss as if we were desperate and accursed, like people being torn apart forever. “I have failed in everything,” I say breathlessly. “I love you, Isabelle.”

“Quiet!” she whispers. “Don’t speak!”

The pale patch at the end of the allée begins to glow. We walk toward it and stop at the park gate. The sun has disappeared and the fields are colorless; but in contrast a mighty sunset hangs over the woods and the city looks as though its streets were burning.

We stand for a time. “What arrogance,” Isabelle says suddenly, “to believe that a life has a beginning and an end!”

I do not immediately understand her. Behind us the garden is already settling itself for the night; but in front, beyond the iron lattice, a wild alchemy flames and seethes. A beginning and an end? I think, and then I comprehend her meaning; it is arrogant to try to isolate and define a tiny existence in this seething and hissing and to make our meaguer consciousness the judge of its own duration, whereas it is at most a snowflake briefly floating on its surface. Beginning and end, invented words for an invented concept of time and the vanity of an amoeba-like consciousness unwilling to be submerged in a greater one.

“Isabelle,” I say. “You sweet, beloved life, I think I have finally felt what love is! It is life, nothing but life, the highest reach of the wave toward the evening sky, toward the paling stars and toward itself—the reach that is always in vain, the mortal reach toward what is immortal—but sometimes Heaven bends down to the wave and they meet for an instant and then it is no longer piracy on the one hand and rejection on the other, no longer lack and superfluity and the falsification of the poets, it is—”

I break off. “I don’t know what I’m saying,” I tell her. “It’s like a rushing stream and perhaps part of it is lies, but if so they are lies because words are deceptive and like cups used to catch a fountain—but you, you will understand me even without words; it is so new for me I can’t express it; I didn’t know that even my breath can love and my nails can love and even my death, and to hell with how long it lasts and whether I can hold on to it or express it—”

“I understand,” Isabelle says.

“You understand?”

She nods with sparkling eyes. “I was worried about you, Rudolf.”

Why should she be worried about me? I wonder. After all, I’m not sick. “Worried?” I say. “Why worry about me?”

“Worried,” she repeats. “But now I’m not any more. Farewell, Rudolf.”

I look at her and hold her hands tight. “Why do you want to go? Have I said something wrong?”

She shakes her head and tries to free her hands. “Yes, I have!” I say. “It was false! It was arrogant, it was words, it was a speech—”

“Don’t spoil it, Rudolf! Why do you always have to spoil the things you want the minute you have them?”

“Yes,” I say. “Why?”

“The fire without smoke or ashes. Don’t spoil it. Farewell, Rudolf.”

What is this? I think. It is like a play, but it cannot be one! Is this farewell? But we have often said farewell, every evening. I hold Isabelle tight. “We’ll stay together,” I say.

She nods and lays her head on my shoulder and I suddenly feel her crying. “Why are you crying?” I ask. “After all, we’re happy!”

“Yes,” she says and kisses me and frees herself. “Good-by, Rudolf.”

“Why are you saying good-by? This is not a leave-taking! I’ll come again tomorrow.”

She looks at me. “Oh, Rudolf,” she says as though again there were something she could not make clear to me. “How is one ever to be able to die when one cannot say good-by?”

“Yes,” I say. “How? I don’t understand that either. Neither the one nor the other.”

We are standing in front of the pavilion where she lives. No one is in the hallway. A bright scarf is lying on one of the cane chairs. “Come,” Isabelle says suddenly.

I hesitate for an instant, but now I cannot say no again and so I follow her upstairs. She walks into her room without looking around. I stand in the doorway. With a quick gesture she kicks off her light gold shoes and lays herself on the bed. “Come, Rudolf!” she says.

I sit down beside her. I do not want to disappoint her again, but I do not know what to do nor what I am to say if a nurse or Wernicke comes in. “Come,” Isabelle says.

I lean back and she lays herself in my arms. “At last,” she murmurs, “Rudolf.” And after a few deep breaths she falls asleep.

The room grows dark. The window is pale in the oncoming night. I hear Isabelle’s breath and now and again murmurs from the next room. Suddenly she wakes with a start. She thrusts me from her and I feel her body go rigid. She holds her breath. “It is I,” I say. “I, Rudolf.”

“Who?”

“I, Rudolf. I have stayed with you.”

“You have slept here?”

Her voice has changed. It is high and breathless. “I have stayed here,” I say.

“Go!” she whispers. “Go at once!”

I do not know whether she recognizes me. “Where is the light?” I ask.

“No light! No light! Go! Go!”

I stand up and feel my way to the door. “Don’t be afraid, Isabelle,” I say.

She twists about on the bed as though trying to pull the blankets over her. “Do go!” she whispers in her high, altered voice. “Otherwise she’ll see you, Ralph! Quick!”

I close the door behind me and go down the stairs. The night nurse is sitting in the hall. She knows I have permission to visit Isabelle. “Is she quiet?” she asks.

I nod and walk across the garden to the gate through which the sick and the well come and go. What was that now? I think. Ralph, who can he be? She has never called me that before. And why did she think I must not be seen? I have often been in her room in the evening.

I walk down toward the city. Love, I think, and my high-flown speeches recur to me. I feel an almost unbearable longing and a faint horror and something like a desire to escape. I walk faster and faster toward the city with its lights, its warmth, its vulgarity, its misery, its commonplaceness, and its healthy revulsion against secrets and chaos, whatever names they may go by....

During the night I am awakened by voices. I open the window and see Sergeant Major Knopf being carried home. It is the first time this has happened; he has always got back under his own power even when schnaps was running out of his eyes. He is groaning loudly. Lights go on in a few windows.

“Damned drunkard!” a voice screeches from one of them. It is the widow Konersmann, who has been lying in wait there. She has nothing to do and is the neighborhood snoop. I have had reason to suspect that she is spying on Georg and Lisa too.

“Shut your trap!” an anonymous hero answers from the dark street.

I don’t know whether he knows the widow Konersmann. In any case, after a few seconds of silent indignation such a deluge of abuse descends upon him, upon Knopf, upon the customs of the city, of the country, and of humanity that the Street re-echoes.

Finally the widow stops. Her last words are that Hindenburg, the bishop, the police, and the employer of the unknown hero will be informed. “Shut your trap, you disgusting old hag!” replies the man, who seems, under cover of darkness, to possess unusual staying power. “Herr Knopf is seriously ill. I wish it was you.”

The widow immediately bursts forth again with redoubled energy, a thing no one would have thought possible. With the aid of a pocket flashlight she is trying to identify the malefactor from her window, hut the beam is too weak. “I know who you are!” she screeches. “You are Heinrich Brüggemann! Imprisonment is what you’ll get for insulting a helpless widow, you murderer! And as for your mother—”

I stop listening. The widow has a good audience. Almost all the windows are open now. Grunts and applause come from them. I go downstairs.

Knopf is just being brought into the courtyard. He is white, perspiration is running down his face, and the Nietzsche mustache hangs moistly over his lips. With a scream he suddenly frees himself, reels forward a few steps, and unexpectedly springs at the obelisk. He embraces it with both arms and legs like a frog, presses himself against the granite and howls.

I look around. Behind me stands Georg in his purple pajamas, behind him old Frau Kroll without her teeth, in a blue bathrobe, with curling papers in her hair, and behind her Heinrich, who, to my astonishment, is in pajamas without either steel helmet or decorations. However, the pajamas are striped in the Prussian colors, black and white.

“What’s the trouble?” Georg asks. “Delirium tremens? Again?”

Knopf has already had it a few times. He saw white elephants coming out of the wall and airships that go through keyholes. “Worse,” says the man who has held his ground against the widow Konersmann. It is in fact Heinrich Brüggemann, the plumber. “His liver and kidneys. He thinks they have burst.”

“Why are you bringing him here then? Why not to St. Mary’s Hospital?”

“He won’t go to the hospital.”

The Knopf family appear. In front Frau Knopf, behind her the three daughters, all four rumpled, sleepy, and terrified. Knopf howls aloud under a new attack. “Have you telephoned for a doctor?” Georg asks.

“Not yet. We had our hands full getting him here. He wanted to jump into the river.”

The four female heads form a mourning chorus around the sergeant major. Heinrich, too, has gone up to him and is trying to persuade him as a man, a comrade, a soldier, and a German to let go of the obelisk and go to bed, especially since the obelisk is swaying under Knopfs weight. Not only is Knopf in danger from the obelisk, Heinrich explains, but. the firm would have to hold him responsible if anything happened to it. It is costly, highly polished SS granite and will certainly be damaged if it falls.

Knopf cannot understand him; with wide-open eyes he is whinnying like a horse who has seen a ghost. I hear Georg in the office telephoning for a doctor. Lisa enters the courtyard in a slightly rumpled evening dress of white satin. She is in blooming health and smells strongly of kümmel. “Cordial greetings from Gerda,” she says to me. “She wants you to show up some time.”

At this instant a pair of lovers shoot at a gallop from behind the crosses and out of the courtyard. Wilke appears in raincoat and nightgown; Kurt Bach, the other freethinker, follows in black pajamas with a Russian blouse and belt. Knopf continues to howl.

Thank God it is not far to the hospital. The doctor appears shortly. The situation is hurriedly explained to him. It is impossible to pry Knopf loose from the obelisk. And so his comrades pull down his trousers far enough for his skinny rear cheeks to be bared. The doctor, accustomed to difficult situations by his war experience, swabs Knopf with cotton dipped in alcohol, hands Georg a small flashlight, and drives a hypodermic into Knopfs brilliantly lighted posterior. Knopf half looks around, lets go a resounding fart, and slides down from the obelisk. The doctor has jumped back as though Knopf had shot him. Knopfs escorts pick him up. He is still holding on to the foot of the obelisk with his hands, but his resistance is broken. I understand why he rushed to the obelisk in his dread; he has spent beautiful, carefree moments there free of renal colic.

They carry him into the house. “It was to be expected,” Georg says to Brüggemann. “How did it happen?”

Brüggemann shakes his head. “I’ve no idea. He had just won a bet against a man from Münster. Named correctly a schnaps from Spatenbrau and one from Blume’s Restaurant. The man from Münster brought them in his car. I was umpire. Then while the man from Münster is fiddling with his wallet, Knopf suddenly gets white as a sheet and begins to sweat. Right after that he is on the floor writhing and vomiting and howling. You’ve seen the rest. And do you know the worst of it? In all the confusion that fellow from Münster ran off without paying the bet. None of us knows him and in the excitement we didn’t get his license number.”

“That is indeed horrible,” Georg says.

“Fate is what I’d call it.”

“Fate,” I remark. “If you want to avoid your fate, Herr Brüggemann, then don’t go back by way of Hackenstrasse. The widow Konersmann is checking the passers-by; she has borrowed a strong flashlight and she has that in one hand and a beer bottle in the other. Isn’t that right, Lisa?”

Lisa nods energetically. “It’s a full bottle. If she cracks you on the skull with that, you’ll be cooled off for good.”

“Damn it!” Brüggemann says. “How can I get out? Is this a blind alley?”

“Fortunately not,” I reply. “You can work your way through the back gardens to Bleibtreustrasse. I advise you to leave soon; it’s getting light.”

Brüggemann disappears, Heinrich Kroll is examining the obelisk for damage, then he likewise disappears. “Such is man,” Wilke says rather platitudinously, nodding up at Knopfs windows and over at the garden through which Brüggemann is creeping. Then he starts to move up the stairs again to his workshop. Apparently he is sleeping there tonight and not working.

“Have you observed more floral manifestations on the part of spirits?” I ask.

“No, but I have ordered some books on the subject.”

Frau Kroll has suddenly realized that she has forgotten her teeth and takes flight. Kurt Bach is devouring Lisa’s bare, brown shoulders with the eye of a connoisseur, but moves on when he finds no answering look.

“Is the old man going to die?” Lisa asks.

“Probably,” Georg replies. “It’s a wonder he hasn’t been dead long since.”

The doctor comes out of Knopfs house. “What’s the trouble?” Georg asks.

“His liver; it’s been due for a long time. I don’t think he’ll make it this time. Everything wrong. A day or two and it will be all over.”

Knopfs wife appears. “You understand, not a drop of alcohol!” the doctor tells her. “Have you searched his bedroom?”

“Thoroughly, Herr Doctor. My daughter and I. We found two more bottles of that devil’s brew. Here!”

She gets the bottles, uncorks them and is about to empty them. “Stop!” I say. “That’s not entirely necessary. The important thing is that Knopf shouldn’t have any, isn’t that right, Doctor?”

“Of course.”

A strong smell of good schnaps arises. “What am I to do with them in the house?” Frau Knopf complains. “He’ll find them anywhere. He’s a terrific bloodhound.”

“We can relieve you of that responsibility.”

Frau Knopf hands one bottle to the doctor and one to me. The doctor throws me a glance. “One man’s destroyer is another’s nightingale,” he says, leaving.

Frau Knopf closes the door behind her. Only Lisa, Georg, and I remain outside. “The doctor thinks that he’s going to die, doesn’t he?” Lisa asks.

Georg nods. His purple pajamas look black in the late night. Lisa shivers and stands still. “Servus,” I say and leave them alone.

From above I see the widow Konersmann like a shadow on patrol in front of her house. She is still on the lookout for Brüggemann. After a while I hear a door being gently closed downstairs. I stare into the night, thinking of Knopf and then of Isabelle. Just as I am getting sleepy I see the widow Konersmann crossing the street. No doubt she believes Brüggemann is hiding and she runs the beam of her flashlight around our courtyard. In front of me on the window sill rests the old rain pipe I used to terrify Knopf. Now I almost regret it. But then I catch sight of the circle of light wavering across our courtyard and I cannot resist. Cautiously I bend forward and breathe into the pipe in a deep voice: “Who disturbs me here?” and add a sigh.

The widow Konersmann stands still as a post. Then the circle of light begins to dance frantically across the courtyard and the tombstones. “May God have mercy on your soul too—” I breathe. I should like to imitate Brüggemann’s style of talking, but control myself. On the strength of what I have said so far the widow Konersmann cannot file a complaint if she should find out what has happened.

She does not find out. She steals along the wall to the street and rushes across to her door. I can hear her begin to hiccup, then all is silent.