The Black Obelisk

Chapter Three

It is Sunday morning. Bells are ringing from all the steeples, and last night’s will-o’-the-wisps have vanished. The dollar still stands at thirty-six thousand, time holds its breath, the crystal of the sky is as yet unmelted by the warmth of day, everything is clear and infinitely clean—it is the morning hour when even the murderer is forgiven and good and evil are empty words.

I dress slowly. Cool, sunny air sweeps through the open window. Like distant sawing, the snores of Sergeant Major Knopf reach me from next door. There is the steely flash of swallows darting through the arch. Like the office below it, my room has two windows—one opening on the courtyard, the other on the street. For a moment I lean against the rear window and look into the garden. Suddenly a dreadful scream breaks the stillness and is followed by gasping and groaning. It is Heinrich Kroll, who sleeps in the other wing. He is having his nightmare again. In 1918 he was buried by an explosion, and now, five years later, he still occasionally dreams about it.

I make coffee on my alcohol stove and pour a little kirsch into it. That’s something I learned in France, and despite the inflation I always manage to have schnaps. My salary is never enough for a new suit—I simply can’t save up the money for that, it loses its value too fast—but it takes care of the small items and, of course, a bottle of brandy now and then for comfort.

I have margarine and plum preserve with my bread. The preserve is good; it comes from Mother Kroll’s larder. The margarine is rancid, but that doesn’t matter; during the war we all ate much worse. I survey my wardrobe. I have two uniforms remodeled into suits. One has been dyed blue, the other black—there wasn’t much else to do with the gray-green material. Besides that I still have a suit from the time before I was a soldier. I have outgrown it a little, but it is a genuine civilian garment, not remodeled or adapted, and so I put it on. It goes with the tie that I bought yesterday afternoon, and that I am going to wear today so that Isabelle will see it.

I walk contentedly through the streets of the city. Werdenbrück is an ancient town of sixty thousand, with wooden buildings and baroque structures interspersed with dreadful new developments. I cross it and go out along an avenue lined with horse chestnuts, then up a little hill to the big park where the insane asylum stands. There it is, in Sabbath peace, with birds twittering in the trees. I go there to play the organ at Sunday mass in the little church attached to the institution. I learned to play it when I was studying to be a teacher, and a year ago I snapped up the post here as a secondary job. I have a number of them. Once a week I give piano lessons to the rowdy children of Karl Brill, the shoe-maker, and in return get my boots resoled and a little money—and twice a week I tutor the idiot son of Bauer, the book-seller, and as a reward I am allowed to read all the new books and am given a discount when I want to make a purchase. Naturally this discount is exploited by the entire membership of the Poets’ Club, even by the shameless Eduard Knobloch, who on these occasions suddenly becomes my friend.

The mass begins at nine o’clock. I sit down at the organ and watch the last inmates coming in. They move forward silently and take their places in the pews. A few attendants and nurses sit between them and on the sides. Everything is done softly, much more silently than in the country churches where I played when I was a schoolmaster. There is no sound except the scuffling of shoes on the stone floor; they scuffle, they do not tramp. These are the footsteps of people whose thoughts are far away.

In front of the altar the candles have been lit. The radiance from outside falls through the stained-glass window, mixing with the candle glow in a soft red and blue, transfused with gold. In this glow stands the priest in his brocaded vestments, and on the steps of the altar his assistants kneel in their red gowns and white tunics.

I pull out the stops for flutes and vox humana and begin to play. With a jerk the heads of the inmates in the front rows turn around all at once as though pulled by a string. The pale faces and dark eyes stare expressionlessly upward toward the organ. In the dim golden light they float like bright, flat disks; sometimes in winter when it is dark they look like large consecrated wafers waiting for the Holy Ghost to descend upon them. These people never grow accustomed to the organ; they have no past and no memory. Every Sunday the flutes and violins and basses strike their alienated minds as unexpected and new. Then the priest at the altar begins, and they turn toward him.

Not all the inmates follow the mass. In the rear rows there are many who do not move. They sit there as though shrouded in nameless sorrow and surrounded by an infinite void—but perhaps that is only the way it seems. Perhaps they are in different worlds where there has been no word of the crucified Saviour; perhaps they are absorbed harmlessly and innocently in a music by contrast with which the organ sounds pale and crude. Or maybe they are thinking of nothing at all, as indifferent as the sea or life or death. Only we give meaning to nature. What it may be in itself, perhaps those heads down there know, but they cannot betray the secret. What they see has made them dumb. They could be the last descendants of the builders of the Tower of Babel. Their tongues have been twisted and they cannot communicate what they have seen from the highest terraces.

I peer toward the front rows. On the right side in a flicker of rose and blue I see Isabelle’s dark head. She is kneeling in her pew very straight and slim. She did not look around when the organ began. Often she does look around, but today she seems so drawn into herself that she hears nothing. Her narrow head is inclined to one side like a Gothic statue. She is not praying, she is some place whither no one can follow her. I push back the basses and the vox humana and pull out the vox caeiestis. That is the softest and most rapturous of the organ registers. We are approaching the divine transformation. Bread and wine are becoming the flesh and blood of God. It is a miracle like that other one, the creation of man out of dust and clay. Riesenfeld maintains that the third is man’s failure to do anything with that miracle except to exploit and kill his fellow man in increasingly wholesale fashion and to crowd into the brief interval between death and death as much egoism as possible—although only one fact is really certain from the start: that he must die. That’s what Riesenfeld says, Riesenfeld of the Odenwald Granite Works, one of the sharpest, most enterprising manipulators in the business of death. Agnus Dei qui tollis peccata mundi.

After mass the nurses of the institution give me breakfast of eggs, cold cuts, bouillon, bread, and honey. That’s part of my salary. It takes care of the midday meal, for Eduard’s coupons are not good on Sunday. In addition, I receive two thousand marks, a sum just sufficient to pay my streetcar fare there and back, if that’s what I wanted to use it for. I have never asked for a raise. Why, I do not know; when it comes to Karl Brill and the tutoring lessons for the son of Bauer, the bookseller, I fight for one like a wild goat.

After breakfast I go for a walk in the asylum park. It is a handsome, spacious estate with trees, flowers, and benches surrounded by a high wall; one might think he was in a rest home if he did not notice the bars at the windows.

I love the park because it is quiet and I don’t have to talk to anyone about war, politics, or the inflation. I can sit in silence and do such old-fashioned things as listen to the wind and the birds and watch the light filtering through the bright green of the treetops.

Those of the inmates who are allowed out are strolling by. Most are quiet, a few are talking to themselves, one or two carry on lively discussions with one another or with visitors and attendants, and many sit silent and alone, heads bowed and motionless as though turned to stone in the sun—until they are herded back into their cells.

It took me some time to get used to this sight—and even now there are moments when I stare at the madmen as I did in the beginning, with a mixture of curiosity, dread, and a nameless third emotion that reminds me of the first time I saw a corpse. I was twelve then, and the body was that of Georg Hellmann; a week before, I had been playing with him, now he lay there amid wreaths and flowers, a thing unspeakably alien, made of yellow wax, a thing that, in a horrible way, had nothing more to do with us, that had departed for an unthinkable eternity and yet was still there, a speechless, strange, chill threat. Of course, later, in the war, I saw countless dead men and felt scarcely any more emotion than if I had been in a slaughterhouse—but that first one I never forgot, just as one never forgets any first time. He was death. And it is this same death that sometimes peers at me from the extinguished eyes of the madmen, a living death, more bewildering, almost, and more incomprehensible than that other, silent one.

Only with Isabelle it is different.

I see her coming toward me along the path from the women’s pavilion. A yellow dress billows around her like a bell of shantung silk, and in her hand she is carrying a broad, flat straw hat.

I get up and go to meet her. Her face is narrow, and one really sees only the eyes and mouth. The eyes are gray and green and very transparent; the mouth is as red as that of a consumptive or as though it were heavily painted. The eyes, however, can suddenly become shallow, slate-colored, and small, and the mouth narrow and bitter like that of an old maid. When she is that way, she is Jennie, a distrustful, unattractive person, discontented with everything you do—otherwise she is Isabelle. Both are illusions, for in reality she is Geneviève Terhoven and is suffering from an illness that has the ugly and rather spectral name of schizophrenia—a division of consciousness, a split personality—and that is the reason she considers herself either Isabelle or Jennie—someone other than she really is. She is one of the youngest patients in the asylum. Her mother is said to live in Alsace and to be quite rich but to pay little attention to her. In any event, I have not seen her here since I have known Geneviève, and that is now six weeks.

Today she is Isabelle, as I see immediately. At such times she lives in a dream world divorced from reality and seems light and weightless and I would not be surprised if the sulphur butterflies, playing around us, came and settled on her shoulders.

“There you are again!” she says, smiling. “Where have you been all this time?”

When she is Isabelle she says du to me. This is no particular distinction; at such times she says du to everyone. “Where have you been?” she asks again.

I make a gesture in the direction of the gate. “Somewhere—out there—”

She looks at me for an instant inquiringly. “Out there? Why? Are you looking for something?”

“I guess so—if I only knew what!”

She comes close to me. “Give it up, Rolf. One never finds anything.”

I recoil at the name Rolf. Unfortunately, she often calls me that, for just as she takes herself for someone else, so, too, does she me, and not always for the same person. She alternates between Rolf and Rudolf, and once a certain Raoul turned up. Rolf is a boring fellow whom I cannot stand; Raoul seems to be a sort of gay deceiver—what I like best is when she calls me Rudolf, then she is enthusiastic and in love. My real name, Ludwig Bodmer, she ignores. I have told it to her often, but it simply does not make any impression.

During the first weeks this was all very confusing, but now I am accustomed to it. At that time I had the common conception of mental illnesses: nothing but continuous violence, attempts at murder, and gibbering idiots. They exist, of course, and they are more frequent than the other; but just by contrast Geneviève is all the more surprising. At first I could hardly believe that she was sick at all, so playful seemed her alternations of name and personality, and even now that still sometimes happens to me. Finally I realized, however, that in the silence, behind these fragile structures, was a quivering chaos. It did not quite penetrate, but it was close at hand, and this, combined with the fact that Isabelle was just twenty and, because of her illness, sometimes of an almost tragic beauty, gave her a strange fascination.

“Come, Rolf,” she says, taking my arm.

I try again to escape the hated name. “I am not Rolf,” I explain. “I’m Rudolf.”

“You are not Rudolf.”

“Oh yes, I’m Rudolf. Rudolf, the unicorn.”

She called me that once. But I have no success. She smiles, as one does at a stubborn child. “You’re not Rudolf and you are not Rolf. But neither are you what you think you are. Now come, Rolf!”

I look at her. For a moment I again have the feeling that she is not sick at all and is only pretending. “Don’t be boring,” she says. “Why do you always want to be the same person?”

“Yes, why?” I reply in surprise. “You’re right! Why does one want to be? What is there so precious about a person? And why does one take oneself so seriously?”

She nods. “You and the doctor! But in the end the wind blows over^ everything. Why won’t you two yield to it?”

“The doctor too?” I ask.

“Yes, the man who calls himself that. The things he wants to find out from me! But he knows nothing at all. Not even how the grass looks at night when no one is watching.”

“How can it look? Gray, probably, or black. And silvery when the moon is shining.”

Isabelle shakes her head. “Just as I thought! Just like the doctor!”

“How does it look then?”

She stops. A gust of wind blows over us laden with bees and the smell of flowers. The yellow dress billows like a sail. “It isn’t there at all,” she says.

We walk on. An old woman in asylum clothes comes past us along the allée. Her face is red and glistening with tears. Two helpless relatives walk beside her. “What is there, then, if the grass isn’t?” I ask.

“Nothing. It’s only there while you’re watching. Sometimes if you turn around very fast you can still catch it.”

“What? The grass not being there?”

“No—but the way it scurries back to its place. That’s how they all are—the grass and everything that’s behind you. Like servants who have gone to a dance. You just have to be very quick in turning around. Then you can catch them—otherwise they’re already there, acting as innocent as if they’d never been away.”

“Who, Isabelle?” I ask very cautiously.

“Things. Everything behind you. They’re just waiting for you to turn around so they can disappear!”

I consider that for a moment. It would be like having an abyss behind you all the time. “Am I not there either when you turn around?” I ask.

“You aren’t there either. Nothing is.”

“Really?” I say somewhat bitterly. “But for me I am always there. No matter how fast I turn around.”

“You turn around in the wrong direction.”

“Are there different directions too?”

“For you there are, Rolf.”

I recoil once more at the hated name. “And for you? What about you?”

She looks at me, smiling absently, as though she did not know me. “I? But I’m not here at all!”

“Really? You certainly are for me.” Her expression changes. She knows me again. “Is that true? Why then don’t you say it to me more often?”

“But I say it to you all the time.”

“Not enough.” She leans against me. I feel her breath and her breasts under the thin silk. “Never enough,” she says with a sigh. “Why doesn’t anyone know that? Oh, you statues!”

Statues, I think. What other role is left for me? I look at her. She is beautiful and exciting, I am aware of her, and every time I am with her it is as if a thousand voices were telephoning through my veins; then suddenly all are cut off as though they had a wrong number, and I find myself helpless and confused. One cannot desire a madwoman. Perhaps some can, not I. It is as though you were to desire a clockwork doll. Or someone hypnotized. But that does not alter the fact that you are aware of her.

The green shadows of the allée part, and in front of us beds of tulips and narcissuses lie in the full sun. “You must put your hat on, Isabelle,” I say. “The doctor wants you to.”

She throws her hat among the flowers. “The doctor! What doesn’t he want! He wants to marry me, but his heart is starved. He’s a sweating owl.”

I don’t think that owls can sweat, but the image is convincing nevertheless. Isabelle steps among the tulips like a dancer and crouches there. “Can you hear them?”

“Of course,” I reply in relief. “Anyone can hear them. They’re bells. In F sharp.”

“What is F sharp?”

“A musical note. The sweetest of all.”

She throws her wide skirt over the flowers. “Are they ringing in me now?”

I nod, looking at her slender neck. Everything rings in you, I think. She breaks off a tulip and looks at the open blossom and the fleshy stem from which sap is oozing. “They are not sweet.”

“All right—then they’re bells in C sharp.”

“Must it be sharp?”

“It could be flat.”

“Can’t it be both at the same time?”

“Not in music. There are certain rules. It can be only one or the other. Or one after the other.”

“One after the other!” Isabelle looks at me with mild contempt. “You always use these pretexts, Rolf. Why?”

“I don’t know either. I wish things were otherwise.”

Suddenly she straightens up and throws away the tulip she has picked. With a leap she is out of the bed and is vigorously shaking her dress. Then she pulls it up and looks at her legs. Her face is twisted with disgust. “What happened?” I ask in alarm.

She points at the bed. “Snakes—”

I glance at the beds. “There aren’t any snakes there, Isabelle.”

“Yes there are! Those there!” She points at the tulips. “Don’t you see what they want?”

“They don’t want anything. They are flowers,” I say un-comprehendingly.

“They touched me!” She is trembling with disgust and staring at the tulips.

I take her by the arm and turn her around so that she can no longer see the bed. “Now you’re turned around,” I say. “Now they’re not there any more, Isabelle.”

She is breathing heavily. “Don’t permit it! Stamp on them, Rudolf.”

“They’re not there any more. You have turned around and now they’re gone. Like the grass at night and the things.”

She leans against me. Suddenly I am no longer Rolf. She presses her face against my shoulder. She doesn’t have to explain anything more to me. I am Rudolf and must know. “Are you sure?” she asks, and I feel her heart beating against my hand.

“Perfectly sure. They’re gone. Like servants on Sunday.”

“Don’t permit it, Rudolf.”

“I won’t permit it,” I say, not knowing what she means. But that’s unimportant. She is already growing calmer.

We walk back slowly. Almost without transition she becomes tired. A nurse marches up on flat heels. “You must come and eat, Mademoiselle.”

“Eat,” Isabelle says. “Why must one eat all the time, Rudolf?”

“So that you won’t die.”

“You’re lying again,” she says wearily, like a helpless child.

“Not this time. This time it’s true.”

“Really? Do stones eat?”

“Are stones alive?”

“Of course. More intensely than anything. So intensely that they are eternal. Don’t you know what a crystal is?”

“Only from my physics lessons. That’s sure to be wrong.”

“Pure ecstasy,” Isabelle whispers. “Not like those over there—” She makes a gesture back toward the flower bed.

The attendant takes her arm. “Where is your hat, Mademoiselle?” she asks after a few steps, looking around. “Wait a moment, I’ll get it.”

She goes to retrieve the hat from among the flowers. Behind her Isabelle comes over to me hastily, her expression distraught. “Don’t abandon me, Rudolf!” she whispers.

“I won’t abandon you.”

“And don’t go away! I have to leave. They are taking me! But don’t you go away!”

“I won’t go away, Isabelle.”

The attendant has rescued the hat and now marches up to us like fate on broad soles. Isabelle stands there looking at me. It is as though it were farewell forever. It’s always as though it were a farewell forever. Who knows how she will be when she returns?

“Put your hat on, Mademoiselle,” says the attendant.

Isabelle takes it and lets it hang loose from her hand. The light in her eyes goes out. She turns and goes back to the pavilion. She does not look around.

It all began one day early in March when Geneviève suddenly came up to me in the park and began to talk to me as though we had known each other for a long time. There was nothing unusual about that—in the asylum you don’t need to be introduced; you are beyond formalities here, and people speak to each other when they feel like it, without lengthy preambles. They speak at once about whatever comes into their heads, and it makes no difference if the other does not understand—that’s unimportant. One doesn’t want to persuade or to explain; one is there and one speaks, and often two people talk to each other splendidly because neither listens to what the other is saying. Pope Gregory Vü, for example, a little man with bandy legs, does not argue. He does not need to persuade anyone that he is pope. He is, and that’s the end of it. He is having serious troubles with Henry IV; Canossa is not far off, and sometimes he talks about it It doesn’t matter that his interlocutor is a man who believes he is made entirely of glass and begs everyone not to jostle him because he is already cracked—the two talk together, Gregory about the king who must do penance in his shirt, and the glass man about how he cannot stand the sun because it is reflected in him—then Gregory bestows the papal blessing, the glass man for an instant takes off the cloth that protects his transparent head against the sun, and both take leave of each other with the courtesy of past centuries. So I was not surprised when Geneviève came up to me and began to talk; I was only surprised at how beautiful she was, for at that moment she was Isabelle.

She talked to me for a long time. She was wearing a light cape of blond fur that was worth at least ten or twenty memorial crosses of the best Swedish granite; with it she wore an evening dress and gold sandals. It was eleven o’clock in the morning, and in the world beyond the walls this costume would have been surprising. Here, however, it was simply exciting; as though someone had drifted down in a parachute from some happier planet.

It was a day of sun, showers, wind, and sudden stillness. They whirled together in confusion; one hour it was March, the next April, and then without transition a day in May or June. Into this confusion came Isabelle from God knows where—from somewhere beyond boundaries, where the light of reason penetrates only in distorted streams, like the aurora borealis, across skies that know neither day nor night, only their own echoing beams and the echoes of those echoes and the pale light of the Beyond and of timeless vastness.

She confused me from the start, and all the advantages were on her side. I had, to be sure, got rid of many bourgeois concepts in the war, but this had only made me cynical and a little desperate, not superior and free. So I sat there and stared at her as though she were a creature without weight hovering in the air while I stumbled awkwardly after her. Moreover, a strange wisdom often flickered in what she said; it was only displaced and then, astoundingly, it would reveal vistas that made one’s heart pound; but when one tried to hold onto it, veils of mist intervened, and Isabelle was already somewhere else.

She kissed me on the first day, and she did it so naturally that it seemed to mean nothing at all; but that did not keep me from feeling it. I felt it, it excited me, and then it struck like a wave against the barrier reef—I knew she did not mean me at all; she meant someone else, some figure of her fantasy, Rolf or Rudolf; and perhaps she did not mean them either, perhaps they were just names thrown up from dark, subterranean streams, without roots or connections.

From then on she came into the garden almost every Sunday; when it was raining she came to the chapel. The Mother Superior allowed me to practice on the organ after mass when I felt like it. I did it on rainy days. I did not really practice, my playing was good enough to be called that; I simply played for myself, as I did on my piano, vague fantasies of one sort or another, dreams and yearning for the unknown, for the future, for fulfillment, and for my own self; to do that one does not have to play especially well. Sometimes Isabelle came with me and listened. On those days she would sit below me in the half-dark, the rain would beat against the stained-glass windows, and the organ tones would go out over her dark head—I did not know what she was thinking, and it was strange and rather touching, but suddenly in the background loomed the question Why, the screaming terror, the fear, and the silence. I felt all that and I felt, too, something of the incomprehensible loneliness of the creature when we were in that empty church with the twilight and the organ tones, only we two alone as though we were the last creatures, held together by the half-light, the music, and the rain, and nevertheless separated forever, without a bridge, without understanding, without words, with only the strange glow of the little campfires on the outskirts of the life within us which we saw and misunderstood, she in her fashion, I in mine, blind and deaf and dumb without being either dumb or deaf or blind, and for that reason much poorer and more bereft. What was it in her that had made her come up to me? I did not know and would never know—it was buried under the rubble of a landslide—nor did I understand why this strange relationship should confuse me so since I knew what was wrong with her and that she did not mean me. Nevertheless, it filled me with undefined yearning and disturbed me and sometimes made me happy and unhappy without rhyme or reason....

A little nurse comes up to me. “Mother Superior would like to speak to you.”

I get up and follow her, feeling uncomfortable. Perhaps one of the nurses has been spying and the Mother Superior is going to tell me that I am not to speak to inmates under sixty, or she may even dismiss me, although the physician in charge has said that it is a good thing for Isabelle to have company.

The Mother Superior receives me in her reception room. It smells of floor wax, virtue, and soap. Not a breath of spring has penetrated here. The Mother Superior, a gaunt, energetic woman, greets me. cordially; she considers me a model Christian who loves God and believes in the Church. “Soon it will be May,” she says, looking me straight in the eye.

“Yes,” I reply, examining the snowy white curtains and the bare, shining floor.

“We have been wondering whether we could not hold some May devotions.”

I am silent and relieved. “In the city churches there are devotions every evening at eight during May,” the Mother Superior explains.

I nod. I know those May devotions. Incense wells up through the twilight, the monstrance gleams, and after the devotion young people wander about in the squares for a time under the old trees where the June bugs buzz. To to sure, I never attend; but I know about them from the time before I was a soldier. That was my first experience with girls. It was all very exciting and secret and harmless. But I wouldn’t think of coming up here every evening for a month to play the organ.

“We would like to have a devotion at least on Sunday evenings,” says the Mother Superior. “I mean a formal one with organ music and the Te Deum. There are simple prayers every evening for the nuns as it is.”

I reflect. Sunday evenings are tiresome in the city, and the devotion lasts barely an hour. “We can pay you very little,” the Mother Superior explains. “The same as for the mass. That’s probably not much now, is it?”

“No,” I say. “It’s not much now. We have an inflation outside.”

“I know.” She stands there undecided. “The Church’s way of dealing with requests is unfortunately not adapted to these times. The Church thinks in centuries. We must accept that. After all, one works for God and not for money. Don’t you agree?”

“One can work for both,” I reply. “That’s a particularly happy situation.”

She sighs. “We are bound by the decisions of the Church authorities. They are taken once a year, no oftener.”

“For the salaries of the pastors, the cathedral chaplains, and the bishop too?” I ask.

“I don’t know about that,” she says, flushing a little. “But I think so.”

Meanwhile, I have made up my mind. “This evening I haven’t time,” I explain. “We have an important business meeting.”

“But today is still April. Now, next Sunday—or if you can’t do it on Sundays perhaps some day of the week. After all, it would be nice to have proper May devotions. The Divine Mother will certainly reward you.”

“Unquestionably. Then there is only the problem of supper. Eight o’clock is just in between. Afterward is too late and beforehand it would be a scramble.”

“Oh, as far as that is concerned, of course you could eat here if you liked. His Reverence always eats here too. Perhaps that’s a solution.”

It is exactly the solution I wanted. The food here is almost as good as at Eduard’s, and if I eat in company with the priest there is certain to be a bottle of wine as well. Since Eduard refuses to accept tickets on Sunday, this is indeed a splendid solution.

“All right,” I say. “I’ll try to do it. We don’t need to say any more about the money.”

The Mother Superior sighs with relief. “God will reward you.”

I walk back. The garden paths are empty. For a time I wait for the yellow sail of shantung silk. Then the bells of the city ring for midday, and I know it’s time for Isabelle’s nap and after that the doctor; there is nothing more to be done until four o’clock. I walk through the big gate and down the hill.

Beneath me lies the city with its steeples green with verdigris and its smoking chimneys. On both sides of the allée, beyond the horse chestnut trees, stretch the fields where on weekdays the nondangerous inmates work. The institution is part public, part private. The private patients, of course, do not have to work. Beyond the fields are woods, streams, ponds, and clearings. When I was a boy I used to fish there and catch salamanders and butterflies. That was only ten years ago, but it seems to belong to a different life—to a vanished time in which existence proceeded in orderly organic sequence and everything belonged together, from childhood on. The war changed that; since 1914 we live scraps of one life and then scraps of a second and a third; they do not belong together and we are not able to put them together. For this reason it is really not so hard for me to understand Isabelle and her different lives. Only she is almost better off in this respect than we are; when she is in one, she forgets all the others. With us they are hopelessly confused—childhood, cut short by the war, the time of hunger and fraud, of trenches and lust for life—something of all these has been left over and remains with us even now, making us restless. You cannot simply push it away. It keeps bobbing back disconcertingly, and then you are confronted by irreconcilable contrast: the skies of childhood and the science of killing, lost youth and the cynicism of knowledge gained too young.