The Black Obelisk

Chapter Twenty

Gently I get rid of Roth, the former postman. During the war this little fellow made deliveries in our section of the city. He was a sensitive man and took it very much to heart in those days that he was so often the unwilling bearer of ill tidings. In all the years of peace people had eagerly looked forward to his arrival with the mail, but during the war he became increasingly a figure of fear. He brought army draft notices and the dreaded official envelopes containing the announcement: “Fallen on the field of honor.” The longer the war lasted the more he brought, and his appearance became the signal for lamentation, curses, and tears. Then one day he had to deliver one of the dreaded envelopes to himself, and a week later a second. That was too much for him. He grew silent and went quietly mad; the Post Office Department had to pension him off. That meant, for him as for so many other during the inflation, being condemned to death by slow starvation. However, a few friends looked after the lonely old man, and a couple of years after the war he began to go out again. But his mind remains confused. He thinks he is still a postman and goes about in his old visored cap, bringing people fresh news; but now, after the tidings of disaster, he wants to bring only good news. He collects old envelopes and post cards wherever he can find them and delivers them as messages from Russian prison camps. Men believed dead are still alive, he announces. They have not been killed. Soon they will come home.

I look at the card he has thrust upon me. It is a very ancient printed notice, advertising the Prussian lottery—an empty joke in these days of the inflation. Roth must have fished it out of the wastebasket somewhere; it is addressed to a butcher named Sack, who has been dead for years. “Many thanks,” I say. “This is wonderful news!”

Roth nods. “They’ll soon be back from Russia, our soldiers.”

“Yes, of course.”

“They will all come home. It will just take time. Russia is so big.”

“Your sons too, I hope.”

Roth’s faded eyes light up. “Yes, mine too. I’ve already had word.”

“Once again, many thanks,” I say.

Roth smiles without looking at me and moves on. At first the Post Office Department tried to keep him from his rounds and even asked that he be imprisoned; but the townspeople opposed this, and now he is left in peace. In one of the rightist inns, to be sure, some of the regular patrons recently hit on the idea of sending Roth around to their political enemies with scurrilous letters—and to unmarried women with salacious messages. They thought it a side-splitting notion. Heinrich Kroll, too, considered it robust, earthy humor. Among his equals in the inn Heinrich is, by the way, a quite different man; he is even considered a wit.

Roth has naturally long since forgotten which houses have suffered bereavement. He distributes his cards at random and, although one of the nationalistic beer drinkers went with him to point out from a distance the houses for which the abusive letters were intended, now and again mistakes occurred. So it was that a letter addressed to Lisa was delivered to Vicar Bodendiek. It contained an invitation to sexual intercourse, in exchange for a payment of ten million marks, at one o’clock in the morning in the bushes behind St. Mary’s. Bodendiek crept up upon the observers like an Indian, suddenly appeared among them, seized two of them, knocked their heads together, without asking questions, and gave a fleeing third such a mighty kick that he shot into the air and barely succeeded in getting away. Only then did Bodendiek, that expert collector of penitents, put his questions to the two captives, re-enforcing them by blows on the ear with his huge peasant fist. The confessions were quickly forthcoming and since both captives were Catholic, he asked for their names and ordered them to appear next day either at confession or at the police station. Naturally they preferred confession. Bodendiek gave them the ego te absolvo and in doing so followed the procedure the cathedral pastor had used with me—he ordered them not to drink for a week and then to appear at confession again. Since both feared excommunication, they turned up again, and Bodendiek mercilessly ordered them to come each ensuing week and not to drink. Thus he made them into abstemious, ill-tempered, first-class Christians. He never discovered that the third sinner was Major Wolkenstein, who, as a result of the kick he received, had to undergo treatment for his prostate, and, in consequence, became more belligerent politically and finally joined the Nazis.

The doors of Knopfs house are open. The sewing machines are humming. This morning bolts of black cloth were brought home, and now mother and daughters are at work on their mourning weeds. The sergeant major is not yet dead, but the doctor has said it can only be a matter of hours or, at most, days. He has given Knopf up. Since the family would consider it a serious blow to their reputation to enter the presence of death in bright clothes, hasty preparations are under way. At the moment Knopf draws his final breath, the family will be provided with black garments, a widow’s veil for Frau Knopf, thick black stockings for all four, and black hats as well. Bourgeois respectability will have its due.

Georg’s bald head floats toward me like half a cheese above the window sill. He is accompanied by Weeping Oskar.

“How’s the dollar doing?” I ask as they enter.

“Exactly one billion at twelve o’clock,” Georg replies. “We can celebrate it as a jubilee if you like.”

“So we can. And when are we going broke?”

“When we have sold out. What will you have to drink, Herr Fuchs?”

“Whatever you have. Too bad there’s no vodka in Werdenbrück!”

“Vodka? Were you in Russia during the war?”

“And how! I was commandant of a cemetery there, as a matter of fact. What fine days those were!”

We stare at Oskar questioningly. “Fine days?” I ask. “You say that when you’re so sensitive you can weep on request?”

“They were fine days,” Weeping Oskar announces firmly, sniffing at his schnaps as though he thought we intended to poison him. “Lots to eat and drink, agreeable duties far behind the front—what more can you ask? A fellow gets used to death fast enough, the way you do to a contagious disease.”

Oskar sips his schnaps in a dandified fashion. We are a little confused by the profundity of his philosophy. “Some people get used to death the way you do to a fourth man in a game of skat,” I say. “Liebermann, the gravedigger, for instance. For him a job in the cemetery is like working in a garden. But an artist like you!”

Oskar smiles in a superior way. “There’s a tremendous difference! Liebermann lacks true metaphysical sensitivity. Awareness of eternal death and recurrence.”

Georg and I look at each other in amazement. Are we to consider Weeping Oskar a poet manqué? “Do you have that all the time?” I ask. “This awareness of death and recurrence?”

“More or less. At least unconsciously. Don’t you have it; gentlemen?”

“We have it rather sporadically,” I reply. “Principally before meals.”

“One day word came that His Majesty was going to visit us,” Oskar says dreamily. “God, what excitement! Fortunately there were two other cemeteries nearby and we could trade.”

“Trade what?” Georg asks. “Tombstones? Or flowers?”

“Oh, all that was taken care of. True Prussian efficiency, you know. No, corpses.”

“Corpses?”

“Corpses, of course! Not because they were corpses, of course, but for what they had once been. It goes without saying that every cemetery had lots of privates as well as lance corporals, noncoms, vice sergeant majors, and lieutenants—but trouble began when it came to higher commissioned officers. My colleague at the nearest cemetery, for example, had three majors; I had none. But to make up for that I had two lieutenant colonels and one colonel. I traded him one of my lieutenant colonels for two majors. I got a fat goose out of the deal besides; my colleague felt it was such a disgrace not to have any lieutenant colonels. He didn’t see how he could meet His Majesty without a single dead lieutenant colonel.”

Georg hides his face in his hand. “I dare not think of it even now.”

Oskar nods and lights a thin cigar. “But that was nothing compared to the other cemetery commandant,” he remarks contentedly. “He didn’t have any brass at all. Not even a major. Lieutenants, of course, in quantity. He was in despair. I had a well-balanced assortment but just to be obliging I finally traded him one of the majors I got for my lieutenant colonel in exchange for two captains and a full sergeant major. I had captains myself, but a full sergeant major was rare. You know those swine always sat way behind the front and almost never got killed; that’s why they were such beastly slave drivers—well, I took all three to be agreeable and because it gave me joy to have a full sergeant major who couldn’t shout at me.”

“Didn’t you have a general?” I ask.

Oskar raises his hands. “A general! A general killed in action is as rare as—” He searches for a comparison. “Are you beetle collectors?”

“No,” Georg and I reply in chorus.

“Too bad,” Oskar says. “Well, as the giant stag beetle, Lucanus Cervus, or, if you are butterfly collectors, as the death’s head moth. Otherwise, how could there be wars? Even my colonel died of a stroke. But this colonel—” Suddenly Weeping Oskar grins. It produces a strange effect; from so much weeping his face has acquired as many folds as a bloodhound’s and usually wears the same look of sad solemnity.

“Well, the other commandant naturally had to have a staff officer. He offered me anything I wanted, but my collection was complete; I even had my full sergeant major, to whom I had given a nice corner grave in a conspicuous spot. Finally I gave in—for three dozen bottles of the best vodka. I gave him my colonel, to be sure, not my lieutenant colonel. For thirty-six bottles! Hence, gentlemen, my present taste for vodka. Of course you can’t get it here.”

By way of compensation Oskar pours himself another glass of schnaps. “Why did you go to so much trouble?” Georg asks. “You had to transfer all the bodies. Why didn’t you simply put up a few crosses with fictitious names and let it go at that? You could even have had a lieutenant general.”

Oskar is shocked. “But, Herr Kroll!” he says in mild reproof. “How could we risk that? It would have been forgery. Perhaps even desecration of the dead—”

“It would only have been desecration if you had given a dead major some lower rank,” I say. “Not if you promoted a private to general for a day.”

“You could have put fictitious crosses on empty graves,” Georg adds. “Then it would not have been desecration of the dead at all.”

“It would still have been forgery. And it might have been discovered,” Oskar replies. “Perhaps through the grave-diggers. And what then? Besides—a false general?” He shudders. “His Majesty surely knew his generals.”

We let it rest at that. So does Oskar. “You know the funniest thing about the whole affair?” he asks.

We are silent. The question can only be rhetorical and requires no answer.

“On the day before the inspection the whole thing was called off. His Majesty did not come at all. We had planted a field of primroses and narcissuses.”

“Did you give back the corpses?” Georg asks.

“That would have been too much work. Besides the papers had been changed. And the families had been notified that their dead had been transferred. That often happened. Cemeteries came under fire and then everything had to be rearranged. The only one who was furious was the commandant who had given me the vodka. He and his chauffeur even tried to break in and get the cases back, but I had found an excellent hiding place. An empty grave.” Oskar yawns. “Yes, those were the days! I had several thousand graves under me. Today—” he takes a paper out of his pocket—”two medium-sized headstones with marble plaques, Herr Kroll, that, alas, is all.”

I am walking through the darkening gardens of the asylum. Isabelle was at devotion today for the first time in a long while. I am looking for her, but can’t find her. Instead, I run into Bodendiek, who smells of incense and cigars. “What are you at the moment?” he asks. “Atheist, Buddhist, skeptic, or already on the way back to God?”

“Everyone is constantly on the way to God,” I reply, weary of argument. “It just depends on what you mean by that.”

“Bravo,” Bodendiek says. “Wernicke is looking for you, I believe. What makes you fight so stubbornly about something as simple as faith?”

“Because there is more rejoicing in heaven over one fighting skeptic than over ninety and nine vicars who have been singing hosannas since childhood,” I reply.

Bodendiek looks pleased. I don’t want to get into a fight with him; I remember the kick in the bushes behind St. Mary’s. “When will I see you at confession?” he asks.

“Like the two sinners of St. Mary’s?”

That startles him. “So, you know about them? Well, no, not like that. You will come of your own free will! Don’t wait too long!”

I make no reply and we part cordially. As I walk toward Wernicke’s room falling leaves flutter through the air like bats. Everywhere there is the smell of earth and autumn. What has become of the summer? I think. It was hardly here!

Wernicke pushes a pile of papers aside. “Have you seen Fraulein Terhoven?” he asks.

“In church. Not since.”

He nods. “Don’t meet her any more for the time being.”

“Fine,” I say. “Any further orders?”

“Don’t be a fool! Those aren’t orders. I’m doing what I consider best for my patient.” He looks at me more closely. “You aren’t by any chance in love?”

“In love? With whom?”

“With Fräulein Terhoven, who else? She’s pretty, after all. Damn it, that’s a factor in the situation I hadn’t thought about.”

“Neither had I. And what situation?”

“Then it’s all right.” He laughs. “Besides, it wouldn’t have been bad for you at all.”

“Really?” I reply. “Up to now I had thought that only Bodendiek was God’s representative here. Now we have you as well. You know exactly what’s bad and what’s good, eh?”

Wernicke is silent for a moment. “So it really happened,” he says presently. “Well, what does it matter? Too bad I couldn’t have listened to you two! Those must have been fine mooncalf dialogues! Take a cigar. Have you noticed that it’s autumn?”

“Yes,” I say. “That’s something I can agree with you about.”

Wernicke offers me the cigar box. I take one just in order not to hear, if I refuse, that this is a further sign of being in love. I am suddenly so miserable I want to vomit. Nevertheless, I light the cigar.

“I owe you an explanation,” Wernicke says. “Her mother! She has been here twice. She finally broke down. Husband died early; mother pretty, young; friend of the family, with whom the daughter was obviously infatuated; mother and family friend careless, daughter jealous, surprises them, perhaps she has been observing them for some time—you understand?”

“No,” I say. All this is as repulsive to me as Wernicke’s stinking cigar.

“Well then, we’ve got that far,” Wernicke continues with gusto. “Daughter hates mother for it, revulsion complex, escapes through a splitting of personality—typical flight from reality and recourse to a dream life. Mother then marries the family friend, which brings the whole thing to a crisis—understand now?”

“No.”

“But it’s so simple,” Wernicke says impatiently. “The only hard thing was to get to the heart of the matter, but now—” He rubs his hands. “Besides, by good fortune the other man, the former family friend called Ralph or Rudolf or something of the sort, is no longer in the way. Divorced three months ago, killed in the last couple of weeks in an automobile accident. So the cause has been eliminated, the road is free—now at last you must catch on?”

“Yes,” I say and would like to slap a chloroform mask oh the cheerful scientist’s mouth.

“Well, you see! Now we have to face the solution. Suddenly the mother is no longer a rival, the meeting can happen, carefully prepared for—I’ve been working on it for a week already and everything’s going well; you’ve seen for yourself, Fraulein Terhoven went to devotion this evening—”

“You mean you’ve converted her? You, the atheist, and not Bodendiek?”

“Nonsense!” Wernicke says, irritated by my dullness. “That’s not the point at all! I mean that she has become more open, more accessible, freer—didn’t you notice that the last time you were here?”

“Yes.”

“Well, you see!” Wernicke rubs his hands again. “Coming after the first severe shock, that was a very cheering result—”

“Was the shock, too, a result of your treatment?”

“It was in part.”

I think of Isabelle in her room. “Congratulations,” I say.

In his absorption Wernicke does not notice my irony. “The first short meeting and the treatment naturally brought everything back; that was the intention, of course—but since then—I have great hopes! You understand that right now I don’t want anything to distract—”

“I understand. You don’t want me.”

Wernicke nods. “I knew you would understand! You, too, have a certain amount of scientific curiosity. For a time you were useful, but now—what’s wrong with you? Are you too hot?”

“It’s the cigar. Too strong.”

“On the contrary!” the tireless scientist explains. “These Brazilians look strong—but they’re the mildest of all.”

That’s true of many other things, I think, laying the weed aside.

“The human mind!” Wernicke says enthusiastically. “When I was young I wanted to be a sailor and adventurer and explorer of primeval forests—ridiculous! The greatest adventure lies here!” He taps his forehead. “I guess I explained that to you once before.”

“Yes,” I say. “Often.”

The green husks of the chestnuts rustle under my feet. In love like a mooncalf! I think. What does that fact-finding beetle mean? If it were only as simple as that! I walk to the gate and almost bump into a woman coming slowly from the opposite direction. She is wearing a fur stole; she does not belong to the institution. I see a pale, faded face in the darkness, and the scent of perfume lingers behind her. “Who was that?” I ask the watchman at the exit.

“Someone to see Dr. Wernicke. Been here a couple of times before. I believe she has a patient here.”

Her mother, I think, hoping it is not true. I stop outside and stare up at the buildings. A sudden rage seizes me, anger at having been ridiculous and then a contemptible self-pity—but in the end all that is left is helplessness. I lean against a chestnut tree and feel the cool trunk and do not know what to do or what I want.

I go on and as I walk I feel hetter. Let them talk, Isabelle, I think, let them laugh at us as mooncalves. You sweet, beloved life, flying untrammeled, walking safely where others sink, skimming where others tramp in high boots, but caught and bleeding in webs and on boundaries the others cannot see, what do they want of you? Why must they so greedily pull you back into their world, into our world; why won’t they permit you your butterfly existence beyond cause and effect and time and death? Is it jealousy? Is it insensibility? Or is it true, as Wernicke says, that he must rescue you from something worse, from nameless fears that would come, fiercer than those that he himself conjured up, and finally from decline into toadlike idiocy? But is he sure he can? Is he sure that he will not break you with his attempts at rescue or force you more quickly into what he wants to save you from? Who knows? What does this butterfly collector, this scientist, know of flying, of the wind, or the dangers and ecstasies of the days and nights outside space and time? Does he know the future? Has he drunk the moon? Does he know that plants scream? He laughs at that. For him it is all just a retreat reaction caused by a brutal experience. But is he a prophet who can see in advance what is going to happen? Is he God to know what must happen? What did he know about me? That it would be quite all right if I were a little in love? But what do I myself know about that? It bursts forth and streams and has no end; what intimation did I have of it? How can one be so devoted to someone else? Didn’t I myself constantly reject it during those weeks that are now as unattainable as the sunset on the far horizon? But why do I lament? What am I afraid of? May not everything turn out all right and Isabelle be cured and—

There I stop short. What then? Will she not leave? And then her mother will be part of the picture, with a fur stole, with discreet perfume, with relations in the background and ambitions for her daughter. Isn’t she lost to me, somebody who can’t even scrape together enough money to buy a suit? And is that perhaps the reason I am so confused? Out of stupid egoism—and all the rest is just decoration?

I step into a cellar café. A few chauffeurs are sitting there; behind the buffet in a wavy mirror reflects my haggard face, and in front of me in a glass case lie a half-dozen dry rolls and some sardines that have turned up their tails with age. I drink some schnaps and felt as though my stomach had a deep, tearing hole in it. I eat the rolls and sardines and some old, cracked Swiss cheese; it tastes awful, but I stuff it into me and then devour some sausages that are so red they can almost whinny, and I feel more and more unhappy and more and more hungry and as if I could eat the whole buffet.

“Boy, you have a wonderful appetite,” says the owner.

“Yes,” I say. “Have you anything else?”

“Pea soup. Thick pea soup; if you just break some bread into it—”

“All right, give me the pea soup.”

I devour the pea soup, and the owner brings me as a gift another slice of bread with lard on it. I polish it off too, and am hungrier and more unhappy than before. The chauffeurs begin to take an interest in me. “I once knew a man who could eat thirty hard-boiled eggs at a sitting,” one of them says.

“That’s impossible. He would die; that’s been proved scientifically.”

I stare at the scientist angrily. “Have you seen it happen?” I ask.

“It’s a fact,” he replies.

“It’s not a fact at all. The only thing that has been scientifically proved is that chauffeurs die young.”

“Why would that be?”

“Because of the gasoline fumes. Slow poisoning.” The owner appears with a kind of Italian salad. A sporting interest has prevailed over his sleepiness. Where he got the salad and mayonnaise is a puzzle. Surprisingly, it is fresh. Perhaps it is part of his own supper that he has sacrificed. I consume it too, and leave—with a burning stomach that still feels empty—and no whit comforted.

The streets are gray and dimly lighted. There are beggars everywhere. They are not the familiar beggars of other times—now they are amputees and the dispossessed and the unemployed and quiet old people with faces that look as though they were made of rumpled, colorless paper. I am suddenly ashamed that I have eaten so thoughtlessly. If I had given what I have devoured to two or three of these people, they would be filled for a night and I would be no hungrier than I am. I take what money I have with me out of my pocket and give it away. It is not much and I am not impoverishing myself; by ten o’clock tomorrow morning, when the dollar is announced, it will have lost a quarter of its worth. This fall the German mark has had tenfold galloping consumption. The beggars know it and disappear immediately, since every minute is costly; the price of soup can rise several million marks in an hour. It all depends on whether the proprietor has to market tomorrow or not—and also on whether he is businesslike or himself a victim. If he is a victim, then he is manna for the smaller victims because he raises his prices too late.

I walk on. Some people are coming out of the city hospital. They are clustered around a woman whose right arm is in a sling. A smell of disinfectants comes from her. The hospital stands in the darkness like a mountain of light. Almost all the windows are bright; every room seems to be occupied. In the inflation people die fast. That’s something we have noticed too.

In Grossestrasse I go to a delicatessen store that is usually open after the official closing time. We have made a deal with the woman who owns it. She received a medium-sized headstone for her husband, and we in return have a credit of six dollars at the exchange rate of September 2. Trading has long since become the style. People trade old beds for canaries and knickknacks, jewelry for potatoes, china for sausages, furniture for bread, pianos for hams, old razor blades for vegetable parings, old furs for remade military blouses, and the possessions of the dead for food. Four weeks ago Georg had a chance to acquire an almost new tuxedo in exchange for a broken marble column and foundation. He gave it up with a heavy heart simply because he is superstitious and believes that in a dead man’s possessions something of the departed lingers for a long time. The widow explained to him that she had had the tuxedo chemically cleaned; therefore it was really completely new and one could assume that the chlorine fumes had driven the departed out of every seam. Georg was sorely tempted, for the tuxedo fitted him, but in the end he gave it up.

I press the latch of the door, but it is locked. Naturally, I think, staring hungrily at the display in the window. At last I walk wearily homeward. In the courtyard stand six small sandstone plaques, still virginal, no names engraved on them. Kurt Bach has turned them out. It is really a prostitution of his talent, being considered stonemason’s work, but at the moment we have no commissions for dying lions or war memorials in bas-relief—therefore Kurt has been turning out a supply of very small inexpensive plaques, which we can always use—especially in the fall when, as in the spring, we can count on a large number of deaths. Grippe, hunger, bad food, and lowered resistance will see to that.

The sewing machines behind Knopf’s door hum quietly. Light from the living room where the mourning clothes are being sewn shines through the glass. Old Knopf’s window is dark. Probably he is already dead. We ought to put the black obelisk on his grave, I think, like a sinister stone finger pointing from earth toward heaven. For Knopf it would be a second home, and two generations of Krolls have failed to sell the dark accuser.

I go into the office. “Come in here!” Georg shouts from his room.

I open the door and stop in amazement. Georg is sitting in his easy chair, with illustrated magazines strewn in front of him as usual. The Reading Club of the Elegant World, to which he subscribes, has just supplied him with new provender. But that is not all—he is wearing a tuxedo with a starched shirt and a white vest to boot, a perfect magazine version of the fashionable bachelor. “After all!” I say. “You disregarded the warnings of instinct and succumbed to worldly self-indulgence. The widow’s tuxedo!”

“Not at all!” Georg preens himself complacently. “What you see is evidence of woman’s superiority in the matter of inspiration. It is a different tuxedo. The widow traded hers to a tailor for this one, and so I get paid without injury to my sensibilities. Look at this—the widow’s tuxedo was lined in satin—this one has pure silk. It fits me better, too, under the arms. The price was the same in gold marks because of the inflation; the suit is more elegant. Thus, by exception, sensibility has paid out.”

I look at him. The tuxedo is good but not altogether new. I avoid injuring Georg’s feelings by pointing out that this suit in all likelihood comes from a dead man too. What, after all, doesn’t come from the dead? Our language, our customs, our knowledge, our despair—everything. During the war, especially in the last year, Georg wore so many dead men’s uniforms, sometimes still showing faded bloodstains and mended bullet holes, that his present disinclination is more than neurotic sensibility—it is rebellion and the wish for peace. For him peace means, among other things, not to have to wear dead men’s clothes.

“What are the movie actresses up to—Henny Porten, Erika Morena, and the incomparable Lia de Putti?” I ask.

“They have the same problems we do!” Georg explains. “To turn their money into commodities as fast as possible—cars, furs, tiaras, dogs, houses, stocks, and film productions—only it’s easier for them than for us.”

He glances lovingly at a picture of a Hollywood party. It is a ball of incomparable elegance. The gentlemen are wearing tuxedos like Georg’s or tails. “When are you going to get a dress suit?” I ask.

“After I’ve been to my first ball in this tuxedo. I’ll skip off to Berlin for that! For three days! Some time when the inflation is over and money is money again and not water. Meanwhile, I’m making preparations, as you see.”

“You still need patent-leather shoes,” I say, irritated to my own surprise at this self-satisfied man of the world.

Georg takes the gold twenty-mark piece out of his vest pocket, tosses it into the air, catches it, and puts it back without a word. I watch him with gnawing envy. There he sits, with no cares to speak of, in his vest pocket a cigar that will not taste like gall, as Wernicke’s Brazilian did, across the street lives Lisa, who is infatuated with him simply because his family were businessmen when her father was a day laborer. She idolized him when he was a child wearing a white collar and a sailor cap on his curls while she traipsed about in a dress made from one of her mother’s old skirts—and this admiration has endured. Georg need do nothing more; his glory is secure. I don’t believe Lisa even knows he is bald—for her he is still the merchant prince in a sailor suit.

“You’re lucky,” I say.

“I deserve to be,” Georg replies, closing the copies of the reading circle Modernitas. Then he takes a box of sprats from the window seat and points to a half-loaf and a piece of butter. “How about a simple supper and a glance at the night life of a medium-sized city?”

They are the same sort of sprats that made my mouth water when I saw them in the store in Grossestrasse. Now I can’t bear the sight of them. “You amaze me,” I say. “Why are you eating here? Why aren’t you dining on caviar and sea food in the former Hotel Hohenzollern, now the Reichshof?”

“I love contrast,” Georg replies. “How else could I exist, a tombstone dealer in a small city with a yearning for the great world?”

He stands in full splendor at the window. Suddenly from across the street conies a husky cry of admiration. Georg turns full face, his hands in his trouser pockets to show the white vest to full advantage. Lisa dissolves, as far as that is possible for her. She draws her kimono around her, executes a kind of Arabian dance, unwraps herself, suddenly stands naked and dark, silhouetted in front of her lamp, throws the kimono on again, puts the lamp at her side and is once more like a gardenia in her greedy mouth. Georg accepts this homage like a pasha and grants me a eunuch’s share. In a single moment he has consolidated for years to come the position of the lad in the sailor suit who so impressed the tattered girl. Tuxedos are nothing new to Lisa, who is at home among the profiteers in the Red Mill; but Georg’s, of course is something entirely different. Pure gold. “You’re lucky,” I say again. “And how easy! Riesenfeld could burst a blood vessel, compose poems, and ruin his granite works without accomplishing what you have done by just being a mannequin.”

Georg nods. “It’s a secret! But I’ll reveal it to you. Never do anything complicated when something simple will serve as well. It’s one of the most important secrets of living. Very hard to apply. Especially for intellectuals and romanticists.”

“Anything more?”

“No. But don’t pose as an intellectual Hercules when a pair of new trousers will produce the same result. You won’t irritate your partner and she won’t have to exert herself to follow you; you remain calm and relaxed, and what you want will fall, figuratively speaking, into your lap.”

“Be careful not to get grease on your silk lapels,” I say. “Sprats are drippy.”

“You’re right,” Georg takes off his coat. “One must never press one’s luck. Another important rule.”

He reaches once more for the sprats. “Why don’t you write mottos for a calendar company?” I inquire bitterly of that cheerful purveyor of worldly wisdom. “It’s a shame to waste them on the universe at large.”

“I present them to you. For me they’re a stimulus, not platitudes. Anyone who is melancholy by nature and has to work at a business like mine must do all he can to cheer himself up and mustn’t be choosy about it. Another maxim.”

I see that I cannot get the better of him and withdraw into my room as soon as the box of sprats is empty. But even there I can find no relief—not even at the piano, because of the dead or dying sergeant major—and as for funeral marches, the only possible thing to play, I have enough of them in my head as it is.