The Black Obelisk

Chapter Two

We step outside. The strong sun of late April pours down as though a gigantic golden basin full • of light and wind were being emptied on us. We stop. The garden is aflame with green, spring rustles in the young foliage of the poplar tree as in a harp, and the first lilac is in bloom.

“Inflation,” I say. “There you have one too—the wildest of all. It looks as if even nature knows that now you can only reckon in ten thousands and in millions. Look what the tulips are up to! And that white over there and the red and yellow everywhere! And what fragrance!”

Georg nods, sniffs, and takes a puff of his Brazilian; for him nature is doubly beautiful when he can smoke a cigar at the same time.

We feel the sun on our faces and we look at all the splendor. The garden behind the house is also the showroom for our monuments. There they are drawn up like a company behind Otto, the obelisk, who stands like a thin lieutenant at his post beside the door. It is Otto that I urged Heinrich to sell, Otto, the oldest tombstone of the firm, our trademark and a prodigy of tastelessness. Directly behind him come the cheap little headstones of sandstone and poured concrete with narrow pointed socles, for the poor, who live and slave in honesty and naturally get nowhere. Then come the larger but still inexpensive ones, with two socles, for those who are always trying to improve themselves, at least in death, since in life it was not possible. We sell more of these than of the perfectly plain ones, and one doesn’t know whether to find this belated ambition on the part of the survivors touching or absurd. Next come the monuments of sandstone with inset plaques of marble, gray syenite, or black Swedish granite. These are already too expensive for the man who lives by the work of his hands. Small businessmen, foremen, artisans who own their own businesses are the clients—and of course that eternal bird of ill omen, the petty official who must always pretend to be more than he is, the honest white-collar proletarian of whom it is impossible to say how he manages to exist at all today since his raises always come far too late.

All these tombstones are still in the class of trifles—it is only behind them that you come to the blocks of marble and granite. First, those polished on one side, with front surfaces smooth but sides and backs roughhewn and socles rough all around. That is the sort for the more prosperous middle classes, the employer, the businessman, the larger store owner, and of course that diligent bird of ill omen, the higher official, who just like his lesser brother, must pay out more in death than he earned in life in order to preserve appearances.

But the aristocrats among the tombstones are those of marble and of black Swedish granite polished on all sides. Here there are no more rough surfaces and unfinished backs; everything has been brought to a high polish no matter whether one sees it or not, even the socles, of which there are not just one or two but often a third put in at an angle; and, if it is a showpiece in the real sense of the word, there is a stately cross of the same material on top. Today, of course, these are only for rich farmers, property owners, profiteers, and clever business people who deal in long-term promissory notes and so live on the Reichsbank, which keeps paying for everything with constantly replenished and unsupported paper currency.

Simultaneously we glance at the only one of these showpieces that, up to a quarter of an hour ago, still belonged to the firm. There it stands, black and glistening like the lacquer on a new car, the perfume of spring drifts around it, lilacs bend toward it; it is a great lady, cool, untouched, and, for one hour more, still virginal—then it will have the name of Otto Fleddersen, landowner, chiseled on its narrow waist in gilded Latin characters at eight hundred marks per letter. “Farewell, black Diana,” I say. “Farewell!” and I raise my hat to it. “To the poet it’s an eternal riddle that even perfect beauty is subject to the laws of fate and must perish miserably! Farewell! You will now become a shameless advertisement for the soul of the swindler Fleddersen, who cheated the poor widows of the city out of their last ten-thousand-mark bills for overpriced butter adulterated with margarine—not to mention his extortionate prices for calves’ liver, pork cutlets, and roast beef! Farewell!”

“You’re making me hungry,” Georg remarks. “Off to the Walhalla! Or do you want to buy your tie first?”

“No. I have time before the stores close. There’s no new dollar quotation Saturday afternoons. From noon today till Monday morning our currency is stable. Why? It sounds fishy to me. Why doesn’t the mark fall over the week end? Does God hold it up?”

“Because the stock exchanges are shut. Any more questions?”

“Yes. Does man live from inside out or from outside in?”

“Man lives, period. There’s goulash at the Walhalla, goulash with potatoes, pickles, and salad. I saw the menu as I was coming back from the bank.”

“Goulash!” I pick a primrose and put it in my buttonhole. “Man lives, you’re right! Whoever seeks further is already lost. Come along, let’s annoy Eduard Knobloch.”

We enter the big dining room of the Hotel Walhalla. At sight of us Eduard Knobloch, the owner, a fat giant with a brown toupee and a floating dinner coat, makes a face as though he had chewed on a bullet in his venison.

“Good morning, Herr Knobloch,” Georg says. “Fine weather today. Gives one a great appetite!”

Eduard jerks his shoulders nervously. “Eating too much is unhealthy! It damages the liver, the gall bladder, everything.”

“Not at your place, Herr Knobloch,” Georg answers genially. “Your noonday meal is wholesome.”

“Wholesome, yes. But too much of what is wholesome can be harmful too. According to the latest scientific investigations, too much meat—”

I interrupt Eduard by giving him a gentle slap on his soft belly. He leaps back as though someone had touched his privates. “Leave us alone and resign yourself to your fate,” I say. “We won’t eat you out of house and home. How’s the poetry?”

“Gone begging. No time! In these times!”

I do not laugh at this idiotic word play. Eduard is not only an innkeeper, he is a poet too—but he’ll have to do better than that. “Where’s a table?” I ask.

Knobloch looks around. His face suddenly brightens. “I’m extremely sorry, gentlemen, but I’ve just noticed there’s not a table free.”

“That doesn’t matter. We’ll wait.”

Eduard glances around again. “It looks as if none will be free for quite some time,” he announces beaming. “The customers all seem to be just beginning their soup. Perhaps if you would care to try the Altstädter Hof or the Railroad Hotel. They say you can eat quite passably there.”

Passably! The day seems to be dripping with sarcasm. First Heinrich and now Eduard. But we will fight for the goulash even if it takes an hour—it’s the best dish on the Walhalla’s menu.

But Eduard seems to be not only a poet but a mind reader as well. “No point in waiting,” he says. “We never have enough goulash, we always run out of it early. Or would you like to try a German beefsteak? You can have it here at the counter.”

“I’d rather be dead,” I say. “We’ll get goulash even if we have to cut you up.”

“Really?” Eduard is all fat, skeptical triumph.

“Yes,” I reply and give him a second slap on the belly. “Come, Georg, here’s a table for us.”

“Where?” Eduard asks quickly.

“Where that gentleman is sitting, the one who looks like a fashion plate. Yes, the redhead over there with the elegant lady. There, the one who’s getting up and waving to us. My friend Willy, Eduard. Send a waiter. We want to order!”

Eduard emits a hissing sound behind us like a punctured tire. We go over to Willy.

The reason Eduard puts on this act is simple enough. Some time ago one could pay for meals at his place with coupons. One bought a book with ten tickets and thereby got the single meals somewhat cheaper. Eduard did this, at the time, to increase business. In the last weeks, however, the avalanche of the inflation has upset his calculations; if the first ticket Still bore some relation to the price of a meal, by the tenth the value had shrunk substantially. Eduard therefore decided to give up selling books of tickets. He was losing too much money. But here we had been clever. We found out about his plan in time and six weeks ago we invested the proceeds of a small war memorial in the wholesale purchase of tickets at the Walhalla. To keep Eduard from noticing what we were up to we employed a variety of people: the coffinmaker Wilke, the cemetery watchman Liebermann, our sculptor Kurt Bach, Willy, a few of our other friends and war comrades, and even Lisa. All of them bought books of tickets for us at the cashier’s desk. When Eduard gave up selling coupons he expected that in ten days they would all be used up; each book contained ten tickets, and he assumed that any sensible man would buy one book at a time. But we each had over thirty books in our possession. Two weeks later Eduard became uneasy when we continued to pay with coupons; at the end of four weeks he had a slight attack of panic. At that time we were already eating for half-price; at the end of six weeks for the price of ten cigarettes. Day after day we appeared and handed over our coupons. Eduard asked how many we still had; we replied evasively. He tried to block the coupons; at the next meal we brought a lawyer with us whom we had invited to share a Wiener schnitzel. After dinner the lawyer gave Eduard a lesson in the laws governing contracts and obligations—and paid for his meal with one of our coupons. Eduard’s lyricism took on a darker coloration. He proposed a compromise; we declined. He wrote a didactic poem on “Ill-gotten Gains,” and sent it to the daily paper. The editor showed it to us; it was sprinkled with malicious references to “gravediggers of the nation”; there were references, too, to tombstones and “Kroll the Shyster.” We invited our lawyer to share a pork cutlet with us at the Walhalla. He instructed Eduard in the concept of public slander and its consequences—and paid once more with one of our coupons. Eduard, who was formerly a simple floral lyricist, began now to write hymns of hate. But that was all he could do; the battie rages on uninterruptedly. Eduard is in daily hope that our supply will be exhausted; he does not know that we still have tickets for over seven months.

Willy rises. He is wearing a new dark green suit of first-rate material in which he looks like a redheaded tree toad. His tie is adorned with a pearl and on the index finger of his right hand he is wearing a heavy seal ring. Five years ago he was assistant to our company cook. He is the same age as I—twenty-five.

“May I present my friends and former buddies?” Willy asks. “Georg Kroll and Ludwig Bodmer—Mademoiselle Renée de la Tour of the Moulin Rouge in Paris.”

Renée de la Tour nods in a reserved but not unfriendly way. We stare at Willy. Willy stares back proudly. “Sit down, gentlemen,” he says. “I assume Eduard is trying to keep you from eating here. The goulash is good, though it could stand a few more onions. Sit down, we’re happy to make room for you.”

We arrange ourselves at the table. Willy knows about our war with Eduard and follows it with the interest of a born gambler. “Waiter!” I shout.

A waiter who is waddling by on flat feet four paces away is suddenly stricken deaf. “Waiter!” I shout again.

“You’re a barbarian,” Georg Kroll says. “You’re insulting the man with his profession. Why did he take part in the 1918 revolution? Herr Ober!”

I grin. It is true the German revolution of 1918 was the least bloody there has ever been. The revolutionaries were so terrified by themselves that they at once cried for help from the magnates and the generals of the former government to protect them from their own fit of courage. The others did it. Generously too. A bunch of revolutionaries were executed, the princes and officers received magnificent pensions so that they would have time to plan future riots, the officials received new titles—high-school teachers because academic counselors, school inspectors became educational counselors, waiters were given the right to be addressed as “Ober” or headwaiter, former secretaries of the party became excellencies, the Social Democratic minister of the army, in seventh heaven, was entitled to have real generals under him in his ministry—and the German revolution sank back into red plush, Gemütlichkeit, and a yearning for uniforms and commands.

“Herr Ober!” Georg repeats.

The waiter remains deaf. It is one of Eduard’s childish tricks; he tries to disconcert us by telling his waiters to ignore us.

Suddenly the dining room resounds to the thunder of a first-class Prussian barrack-room roar: “Ober! You there, can’t you hear?” It has the instant effect of a trumpet call on an old war horse. The waiter stops as though shot in the back, and spins around; two others dash up to the table, somewhere there is the sound of heels clicking, a military-looking man at one of the nearby tables softly exclaims, “Bravo!”—and even Eduard Knobloch, with his dress coat streaming, rushes in to investigate this voice from the higher spheres. He knows that neither Georg nor I could sound so commanding.

We ourselves look around speechless at Renée de la Tour. She is sitting there, calm and maidenly, wholly uninvolved. But she is the only one who could have shouted—we know Willy’s voice.

The waiter is standing at our table. “What may I do for you, gentlemen?”

“Noodle soup, goulash, and pie for two,” Georg replies.

“And be quick about it, otherwise well burst your eardrums, you slug.”

Eduard arrives. He can’t make out what is happening. He glances under the table. No one is hidden there, and a ghost could hardly roar like that. Nor could we, as he knows. He suspects a trick of some sort. “I must urgently insist,” he says finally, “that such an uproar must not occur in my establishment.”

No one replies. We just look at him with empty eyes. Renée de la Tour is powdering her nose. Eduard turns around and departs.

“Innkeeper! Step over here!” The same thunderous voice suddenly summons him.

Eduard whirls around and stares at us. We still have the same empty smile on our mugs. He fixes Renée de la Tour with his eye. “Did you just—?”

Renée closes her compact with a click. “What’s that?” she asks in a delicate silvery-clear soprano. “What is it you want?”

Eduard gapes. He no longer knows what to think. “You haven’t been overworking, have you, Herr Knobloch?” Georg asks. “You seem to be suffering from hallucinations.”

“But someone here just—”

“You’re out of your mind, Eduard,” I say. “You’re not looking well either. Take a vacation. We have no wish to sell your relatives a cheap headstone of imitation Italian marble, and that’s certainly all you’re worth—”

Eduard blinks his eyes like an old horned owl. “You seem to be a strange sort of person,” says Renée de la Tour in her flutelike soprano. “You hold your guests responsible for the fact that your waiters can’t hear.” She laughs, an enchanting swirl of bubbling silvery music like a forest brook in fairy tales.

Eduard clasps his forehead. His last support has collapsed. It cannot have been the young lady either. Anyone who laughs like that can’t have a barrack-room voice. “You may go now, Knobloch,” Georg remarks casually. “Or did you intend to join in our conversation?”

“And don’t eat so much meat,” I say. “Perhaps that’s what’s wrong. Remember what you were saying to us a few minutes ago? According to the most recent scientific investigations—”

Eduard turns quickly and rushes off. We wait till he is some distance away. Then Willy’s great body begins to quiver with soundless laughter. Renée de la Tour smiles gently. Her eyes are sparkling.

“Willy,” I say, “I’m a superficial sort of fellow and therefore this has been one of the finest moments of my young life—but now tell us what’s going on!”

Willy, shaking with silent merriment, points to Renée, “Excusez, Mademoiselle,” I say. “Je me—”

Willy’s laughter redoubles at my French. “Tell him, Lotte,” he bursts out.

“What?” Renée asks with a gentle smile in a soft, growling bass.

We stare at her. “She is an artist,” Willy gasps. “A duettist. She sings duets. Do you understand now?”

“No.”

“She sings duets. But alone. One verse high, one low. One soprano and one bass.”

A great light dawns. “But the bass—?” I ask.

“Talent!” Willy explains. “And then of course practice. You must hear her sometime when she does a spat between husband and wife. Lotte is fabulous.”

We agree. The goulash appears. Eduard sneaks around at a distance watching our table. His mistake is that he always wants to find out why something happens. That spoils his poetry and makes him distrustful in life. At the moment he is brooding over the mysterious bass voice. He doesn’t know what lies ahead of him. Georg Kroll, a cavalier of the old school, has invited Renée de la Tour and Willy to be his guests to celebrate our victory. Later, in payment for our excellent goulash, he will hand the infuriated Eduard four bits of paper whose combined worth today would hardly buy a couple of soup bones.

It is early evening. I am sitting beside the window in my room over the office. The house is low, angular, and old. Like this Whole part of the street, it once belonged to the church that stands in the square at the foot. Priests and church officials used to live in it; but for sixty years it has belonged to Kroll and Sons. The property consists of two low houses joined by an arched entryway; in the second lives Knopf, the retired sergeant major, with his wife and three daughters. Then comes the beautiful old garden with our array of tombstones, and behind that at the left a kind of two-story wooden coach house on the ground floor of which Kurt Bach, our sculptor, has his workroom. He models mourning lions and mounting eagles for our war memorials and he draws the inscriptions on the tombstones which are later chipped out by the masons. In his free time he plays the guitar and wanders and dreams of the gold medals which at some future date will be awarded to the renowned Kurt Bach. He is thirty-two years old.

The upper floor of the coach house is rented to the coffin-maker Wilke. Wilke is an emaciated man, and nobody knows whether he has a family or not. Our relations with him are friendly, resting on mutual advantage. When we have a brand-new corpse not yet provided with a coffin, we recommend Wilke or tip him off; he does the same for us when he knows of a body that has not yet been snapped up by our competitors’ hyenas; for the battle for the dead is bitter and is fought tooth and nail. Oskar Fuchs, the traveler for Hollmann and Klotz, even resorts to the use of onions. Before going into a house where there is a corpse, he gets out a couple of cut onions and smells them until his eyes are full of tears—then he marches in, proves his sympathy for the dear departed, and tries to make a sale. For this reason he is called Weeping Oskar. It’s a strange fact that if the survivors had only paid half as much attention to many of the departed when they were still alive as they do when it no longer matters, then the corpses would most certainly have foregone the most expensive mausoleum—but that’s what mankind is like: they only prize what they no longer possess.

Silently the street fills with the transparent smoke of twilight. There is already a light in Lisa’s room, but this time the curtains are drawn, a sign that the horse butcher is home. Next to her house lies the garden of Holzmann, the wine merchant. Lilacs hang over the wall and from the cellars comes the fresh vinegary smell of the casks. Through the gate of our house marches the retired sergeant major, Knopf. He is a thin man and he wears a cap with a visor and carries a walking stick; despite his profession and although he has never read any book except the drill manual, he looks like Nietzsche. Knopf goes down Hackenstrasse and at the corner swings to the left into Marienstrasse. Toward midnight he will return, this time from the right—that will mean he has completed methodically, as befits an old military man, his circuit through the inns of the city. Knopf drinks nothing but corn schnaps, Werdenbrücker schnaps to be exact, nothing else. But on that subject he is the greatest connoisseur in the world. There are in the city some three or four firms that distill schnaps. To us they all taste more or less alike. Not so to Knopf; he can distinguish them even by smell. Forty years of unwearying application have so refined his taste that when it’s a question of the same brand he can tell which inn it comes from. He maintains that there are differences between the inns’ cellars and he can tell them apart. Naturally not with bottled schnaps, only with schnaps in the cask. He has won many a bet on it.

I get up and look around my room. The ceiling is low and slanting and there is not much space, but I have what I need—a bed, a shelf of books, a table, a couple of chairs, and aa old piano. Five years ago, when I was a soldier in the trenches, I never thought I would be so well off again. At that time we were in Flanders; it was the big attack on Kemmelberg, and we lost three-quarters of our company. On the second day, Georg Kroll was taken to the hospital with a stomach wound, but almost three weeks passed before I was knocked out by a shot in the knee. Then came the collapse, and I finally became a schoolmaster as my sick mother had wished and as I had promised her before she died. She was sick so often that she thought if I had an official position with life tenure nothing bad could happen to me any more. She died in the last months of the war, but I took my examinations just the same and was sent to a village on the heath, where I stayed till I grew sick of dinning into children things I did not believe myself and being buried alive amid memories I wanted to forget.

I try to read, but it is no weather for reading. Spring makes you restless, and in the twilight it is easy to lose yourself. There are no boundaries then and you feel breathless and confused. I turn on the light and at once feel more secure. On the table lies a yellow portfolio with the poems I have pecked out in triplicate on the Erika typewriter. From time to time I send a few of these to the newspapers. They either come back or there is no answer; then I peck out new copies and try again. I have only twice succeeded in publishing anything in our local newspaper, and then, to be sure, with Georg’s help, for he knows the editor. Nevertheless, that was enough for me to be made a member of the Werdenbrück Poets’ Club, which meets each week at Eduard Knobloch’s in the Old German Room. Eduard recently tried to have me expelled because of the coupons, alleging moral turpitude; but the club declared, in opposition to Eduard, that I had behaved most honorably, just as the business and industrial leaders of our beloved fatherland had been doing for years—and, besides, art had nothing to do with morals.

I push the poems aside. They suddenly seem to me flat and childish, typical of the attempts almost every young man makes at one time or another. I began to write during the war, but then it made some sense—for minutes at a time it took me away from what I was seeing. It was like a little hut of protest and of belief that something else existed beyond destruction and death. But that was a long time ago; today I know that there exists a great deal more besides and I even know that both can exist simultaneously. I no longer need my poems for that; in the books on my shelf it has all been said much better and more convincingly. But what would become of us if that were a reason for giving something up? Where should we all be? So I go on writing, though what I write often seems gray and wooden in comparison with the evening sky which is now growing spacious and apple green above the roofs while twilight fills the streets with a drift of violet-colored ashes.

I go downstairs, past the darkened office and into the garden. The Knopfs’ door is open, and inside the three daughters of the family sit around the lamp as though in a fiery cage, busy at their sewing machines. The machines whir. I glance at the window next to the office. It is dark; so Georg has already disappeared somewhere. Heinrich, too, has gone to the reassuring haven of his customary restaurant. I take a turn around the garden. Someone has been sprinkling it; the earth is damp and smells very strong. Wilke’s coffin shop is empty, and there is no sound from Kurt Bach. His windows are open; a half-finished, mourning lion cowers on the floor as though it had a toothache, and beside it stand peacefully two empty beer bottles.

Suddenly a bird begins to sing. It is a thrush perched on top of the memorial cross that Heinrich Kroll has bartered away. Its voice is much too big for that little black ball with its yellow beak. It rejoices and mourns and moves my heart. For a moment I reflect that its song, which for me means life and future and dreams and everything undefined, strange, and new, no doubt means to the worms that are working their way up through the damp garden soil around the monument nothing but the dreadful signal of lacerating death from a murderous beak. Nevertheless, I cannot help myself; it carries me away, releasing everything within me; all at once I stand there helpless and lost, amazed that I am not torn apart or that I do not rise like a balloon into the evening sky—until finally I pull myself together and stumble back through the garden and the nocturnal fragrance, up the stairs to my piano, where I pound and caress the keys, trying to be something like the thrush and to pour out what I feel. But nothing much comes of it and in the end it is only a flood of arpeggios and shreds of sentimental ditties and folk songs and bits from the Rosenkavalier and Tristan, a hopeless medley till finally someone on the street shouts up: “Hey, you, why don’t you learn to play?”

I stop abruptly and steal to the window. A dark figure is disappearing into the night; it is already too far away to bit. And why, after all? He is right. I cannot really play. Either at the piano or at life; never, never have I been able to. I have always been too hasty, too impatient; something always intervenes and breaks it up. But who really knows how to play, and if he does know, what good is it to him? Is the great dark less dark for that, are the unanswerable questions less inscrutable, does the pain of despair at eternal inadequacy burn less fiercely, and can life ever be explained and seized and ridden like a tamed horse or is it always a mighty sail that carries us in the storm and, when we try to seize it, sweeps us into the deep? Sometimes there is a hole in me that seems to extend to the center of the earth. What could fill it? Yearning? Despair? Happiness? What happiness? Fatigue? Resignation? Death? What am I alive for? Yes, for what am I alive?