The Black Obelisk

Chapter Five

A woman in mourning slips unobstrusively through the gate and stands irresolute in the courtyard. I go out. Someone shopping for a small tombstone, I think, and ask: “Would you like to look at our exhibition?”

She nods, but then says immediately: “No, no, that’s not really necessary.”

“You can look around at leisure. You don’t have to buy. If you like I’ll leave you alone.”

“No, no! It’s just—I simply wanted—”

I wait. Pressure has no place in our business. After a while the woman says: “It’s for my husband—”

I nod and continue to wait. At the same time I turn toward the row of little Belgian headstones. “These are very much in demand,” I say finally.

“Yes—It’s just that—”

She breaks off again and looks at me almost beseechingly. “I don’t know whether it’s permissible—” she finally forces herself to say.

“What, to put up a tombstone? Who could possibly forbid that?”

“The grave is not in the churchyard—”

I look at her in surprise. “Our pastor will not allow my husband to be buried in the churchyard,” she says softly and quickly with averted face.

“But why not?”

“He committed—because he did violence to himself,” she bursts out. “He took his own life. He could not stand it any longer.”

She stands there staring at me. She is still frightened by what she has said. “You mean because of that he may not be buried in the churchyard?” I ask.

“Yes. Not in the Catholic cemetery. Not in consecrated earth.”

“But that’s nonsense!” I say angrily. “He should be buried in doubly consecrated earth. No one takes his own life except in despair. Are you quite sure that’s right?”

“Yes. Our pastor says so.”

“Pastors talk a lot. That’s their business. Where is he to be buried then?”

“Outside the cemetery. On the other side of the wall. Not on the consecrated side. Or in the municipal cemetery. But that won’t do at all! All sorts of people are buried there.”

“The municipal cemetery is more beautiful than the Catholic one. And there are Catholics buried there too.”

She shakes her head. “He was pious,” she whispers. “He must—” Her eyes are suddenly full of tears. “He can’t possibly have remembered that this way he would not be allowed to lie in consecrated earth.”

“He probably didn’t think about it at all. But don’t grieve at what your pastor says. I know thousands of very pious Catholics who lie in unconsecrated earth.”

She turns to me. “Where?”

“On the battlefields in Russia and France. They lie there all together in mass graves, Catholics and Jews and Protestants, and I don’t think it makes a bit of difference to God.”

“They fell in battle. But my husband—”

Now she is weeping openly. In our business tears are taken for granted, but these are different. Besides, the woman is a little bundle of straw; she looks as though the wind could sweep her away. “Very likely at the last minute he repented,” I say just to say something. “In that case everything is forgiven.”

She looks at me. She is so hungry for a bit of comfort. “Do you really think so?”

“I certainly do. Of course the priest would not know. Only your husband knows. And he cannot tell you now.”

“The pastor says that mortal sin—”

“Dear lady,” I interrupt her, “God is far more compassionate than the priests, believe me.”

I know now what torments her. It is not so much the un-consecrated grave; it is the thought that her husband, as a suicide, must burn in hell for all eternity and that he could perhaps get off with a couple of hundred thousand years in purgatory if he could be buried in the Catholic cemetery.

“It was on account of the money,” she says. “It was in the savings bank, a guaranteed deposit for five years; he could not withdraw it. It was the dowry for my daughter by my first marriage. He was her guardian. When he withdrew the money two weeks ago, it was not worth anything at all, and her fiance broke off the engagement. He thought we would have a good dowry. Two years ago it would still have been enough, but now it’s not worth anything. My daughter did nothing but weep. That’s what he couldn’t stand. He thought it was his fault; he should have paid stricter attention. But after all, it was a guaranteed deposit; we couldn’t withdraw it. That way the interest was higher.”

“How was he expected to pay stricter attention? This sort of thing happens to lots of people nowadays. After all, he wasn’t a banker—”

“No. A bookkeeper. The neighbors—”

“Don’t bother about what the neighbors say. They’re all malicious gossips. Just leave everything to God.”

I feel that I am not very convincing, but what can one say to a woman in such circumstances? Certainly not what I really think.

She dried her eyes. “I ought not to tell you all this. What concern is it of yours? Forgive me! Sometimes one doesn’t know where to—”

“It doesn’t matter,” I say. “We are used to it. All the people who come here have lost somebody.”

“Yes—but not the same way as—”

“Oh yes,” I explain. “In these times that happens much oftener than you think. Seven in the last month alone. They were people who no longer knew which way to turn. Respectable people, I mean; the disreputable ones get by.”

She looks at me. “You think that one can put up a tombstone even when it’s not in consecrated ground?”

“If you have a permit for a grave, you certainly can. Unquestionably in the municipal cemetery. If you wish you can pick one out now. You don’t need to take it until everything is arranged.”

She looks around. Then she points to the third smallest headstone. “What does one like that cost?”

It’s always the same. The poor never ask the price of the smallest ones first: it’s as though they avoided doing it out of a strange courtesy toward death and the dead. They do not want to ask about the cheapest first; whether they take it later on is another matter.

There’s nothing I can do to help her; that piece of stone costs one hundred thousand marks. She opens her tired eyes in alarm. “We can’t afford that. It’s much more than—”

I can well imagine it is more than is left of the inheritance. “Then take this small one,” I say. “Or simply a plaque without a stone. Look, here is one—it costs forty thousand marks and is very handsome. After all, what you want is for people to know where your husband is buried, and a plaque is just as good for that as a stone.”

She examines the sandstone plaque. “Yes—but—”

She probably has barely enough for the next month’s rent. Nevertheless, she doesn’t want to buy the cheapest—as though that made any difference at all to the poor devil! If, instead, she had had more understanding earlier and had carried on less about her daughter, perhaps he would still be alive. “We could gild the inscription,” I say. “Then it will look very dignified and distinguished.”

“Will the inscription cost extra?”

“No. It’s included in the price.”

That is not true. But I can’t help myself; she is so sparrow-like in her black clothes. Now if she wants a long quotation from the Bible I am sunk; the cutting would cost more than the plaque. But all she wants is the name and the dates 1875-1923.

She pulls a package of bills out of her pocket; they have been crumpled and then carefully smoothed out and tied in a bundle. I take a deep breath—payment in advance! That hasn’t happened for a long time. Earnestly she counts out two piles. There is not much left over. “Forty thousand. Will you count it?”

“I don’t need to. I’m sure it’s correct.”

It must be correct. She has certainly counted it over many times. And who but she would stoutly pay in advance? Why else had her husband committed suicide? “I’ll tell you something,” I say. “We’ll give you a cement grave enclosure too. Then it will look very neat and separate.”

She looks at me anxiously. “For nothing,” I say.

The ghost of a sad little smile flits across her face. “That’s the first time anyone has been kind to me since it happened. Not even my daughter—she says the disgrace—” .

She wipes the tears away. I am very much embarrassed and feel like the actor Gaston Münch in Sudermann’s Honor at the city theater. Once she is gone, I pour myself a drink of schnaps as a bracer. Then I remember that Georg has not yet returned from his interview with Riesenfeld at the bank and I become suspicious of myself; perhaps I have been kind to this woman simply to bribe God. One good deed in return for another—a grave enclosure and an inscription against Riesenfeld’s acceptance of a ninety-day note and a fat shipment of granite. This cheers me up so much that I have a second drink. Then I see on the obelisk outside the traces left by Sergeant Major Knopf, and I get a pail of water to wash them away, cursing him aloud. Knopf, however, in his bedroom is sleeping the sleep of the just.

“Only six weeks,” I say in disappointment.

Georg laughs. “A six-week note is not to be sneezed at. The bank wouldn’t stand for any more. Who knows where the dollar will be then? Besides, Riesenfeld has promised to come by again in a month. Then we can make a new agreement.”

“Do you believe he will?”

Georg shrugs his shoulders. “Why not? Perhaps Lisa will draw him here again. He was raving about her at the bank like Petrarch about Laura.”

“Good thing he didn’t see her close up in the daylight.”

“That’s true of a lot of things.” Georg stops short and looks at me. “But why Lisa? She really doesn’t look so bad.”

“In the morning she sometimes has regular sacks under her eyes. And she certainly doesn’t look romantic. Vulgar rather. In a vigorous style.”

“Romantic!” Georg snorts contemptuously. “What does that mean? There are different kinds of romanticism! And robustness and vulgarity have their own charm!”

I look at him sharply. Can he by any chance have his own eye on Lisa? He is strangely secretive about his personal affairs. “I think what Riesenfeld means by romanticism is an adventure in high society,” I say. “Not an affair with a horse butcher’s wife.”

Georg waves my objection aside. “Where’s the difference? High society often behaves more vulgarly than a horse butcher.”

Georg is our expert on high society. He subscribes to the Berliner Tageblatt and reads it principally for the news about art and society. He is extremely well informed. No actress can marry without his knowing it; every important divorce in the aristocracy is diamond-scratched in his memory; he never makes a mistake even after three or four marriages; it’s as though he were a bookkeeper of society. He keeps track of all the theatrical performances, reads the critics, knows precisely about the high life on the Kurfürstendamm. And not only that: he follows international social life as well: film stars and the queens of society—he reads the movie magazines, and a friend in England sometimes sends him the Tatler and a few other elegant periodicals. Then he is exhilarated for days. He himself has never been in Berlin and has been abroad only as a soldier in France. He hates his profession, but he had to take it over after his father’s death; Heinrich was too simpleminded. The magazines and pictures help to assuage his disappointment; they are his weakness and his recreation.

“A vulgar lady of high society is for connoisseurs,” I say. “Not for Riesenfeld. That cast-iron devil has the sensitiveness of mimosa.”

“Riesenfeld!” Georg makes a contemptuous face. He considers the director of the Odenwald Works, with his superficial fancy for French ladies, a miserable upstart. What does he know about the delicious scandal involved in the divorce of the Countess Homburg? Or about Elisabeth Bergner’s last première? He doesn’t even know their names! But Georg knows the Almanach de Gotha and the artist’s lexicon almost by heart. “We really ought to send Lisa a bouquet of flowers,” he says. “She helped us without knowing it.”

Once more I look at him sharply. “Do it yourself,” I reply. “And tell me, did Riesenfeld throw in a memorial cross polished on all sides?”

“Two. We have Lisa to thank for the second. I told him we would put it where she couldn’t help seeing it. It seemed to be important to him.”

“We could put it here in the office window. Then when she gets up in the morning it will make a strong impression. I could paint ‘Memento Mori’ on it in gold. What’s the lunch at Eduard’s today?”

“German beefsteak.”

“Hacked meat, eh? Why is hacked meat German?”

“Because we’re a warlike people and even in time of peace we hack up each other’s faces in duels. You smell of schnaps. Why? Surely not because of Erna?”

“No. Because we all must die. Sometimes that fact staggers me even though I’ve known it for some time.”

“That’s very creditable. Especially in our profession. Do you know what I’d like?”

“Of course. You would like to be the mate on a whaler, or a copra dealer in Tahiti, or the discoverer of the North Pole, an explorer in the Amazon, Einstein or Sheik Ibrahim with a harem of women of twenty different nationalities, including the Circassians, who are supposedly so fiery you have to put on an asbestos mask to embrace them.”

“That of course. But in addition I’d like to be dumb; beaming and dumb. That’s the greatest gift in our times.”

“Dumb like Parsifal?”

“A bit less of the savior. Credulously, peacefully, healthily dumb.”

“Come along,” I say. “You’re hungry. Our mistake is that we are neither dumb nor clever. Always betwixt and between like monkeys in the branches. That makes us weary and sometimes sad. Man needs to know where he belongs.”

“Really?”

“No,” I reply. “That only makes him lazy and fat. But how would it be if we went to a concert this evening to make up for the Red Mill? They’re playing Mozart.”

“I’m going to sleep early tonight,” Georg explains. “That’s my Mozart. You go alone. Expose yourself bravely and alone to the onslaught of the good. That is not without danger and often creates more havoc than simple evil.”

“Yes,” I say, thinking of the sparrow-like woman of this morning.

It is late afternoon. I am reading the family items in the newspapers and cutting out the death notices. That always cheers me and restores my faith in humanity—especially after the evenings when we have had to entertain our suppliers or agents. If things went according to the death notices, man would be absolutely perfect. There you find only first-class fathers, immaculate husbands, model children, unselfish, self-sacrificing mothers, grandparents mourned by all, businessmen in contrast with whom Francis of Assisi would seem an infinite egotist, generals dripping with kindness, humane prosecuting attorneys, almost holy munitions makers—in short, the earth seems to have been populated by a horde of wingless angels without one’s having been aware of it. Pure love, which in reality is to be found so seldom, shines on all sides in death, and is the commonest thing of all. The highest virtues are to be found in abundance, sincere concern, profound piety, selfless devotion; even the survivors know what parts to play—they are bowed with grief, their loss is irreparable, they will never forget the dear departed—it is elevating to read all this, and one can feel proud to belong to a race possessed of such noble feelings.

I cut out the death notice of Niebuhr, the baker. He is described as a kindly, conscientious, and well-loved husband and father. I myself have seen Frau Niebuhr rushing from the house with flying braids when the kindly Niebuhr was after her with his leather belt; and I have seen son Roland’s broken arm which his conscientious father inflicted by throwing him out of. a second-story window in a sudden attack of rage. Nothing better could have happened to the careworn widow than for that blustering tyrant finally to be carried off by a stroke as he was baking breakfast rolls and pastry; nevertheless, she does not think so now. All the woe that Niebuhr caused her has suddenly disappeared. He had become an ideal. Man, the eternal liar, finds brilliant scope for his particular talent when death occurs and calls it piety, and the astonishing thing about it is that he believes as firmly in it as though he had put a rat into a hat and then drawn out a snow-white rabbit.

Frau Niebuhr has undergone this magical transformation at the moment when that clod of a baker, who beat her daily, was being dragged upstairs to their apartment. Instead of falling on her knees and thanking God for her deliverance, there began in her immediately the transfiguration through death. She cast herself weeping on the corpse, and since then her eyes have not been dry. When her sister reminded her of the frequent beatings and of Roland’s crookedly set arm, she announced indignantly that these trifles were due to the heat of the baking oven; Niebuhr, in his never-wearying consideration for his family, had worked too hard and the heat of the oven had resulted in something like a sunstroke. Thereupon she showed her sister the door and went on mourning. In other respects she is a sensible, diligent, and alert woman who knows what’s what; but now she suddenly sees Niebuhr as he never was and firmly believes in the picture—that’s what’s so marvelous about it. Man is not only an eternal swindler but also eternally credulous; he believes in the good, the beautiful, and the perfect even when they are not to be found or only in very rudimentary form—and that is the second reason why I find reading the death notices uplifting and why it makes me an optimist.

I put the Niebuhr notice with the seven others I have cut out. On Mondays and Tuesdays we always have a few more than usual. That’s a result of the week end; a celebration, eating, drinking, quarreling, excitement—and this time the heart, the arteries, or the brain cannot hold out any longer. I put Frau Niebuhr’s notice in the pigeonhole for Heinrich Kroll. It’s a case for him. He is a straightforward fellow without irony and he has the same conception of the transfiguring effect of death that she has, provided she orders the tombstone from him. It will be easy for him to talk about the dear, unforgettable departed, especially since Niebuhr was a fellow habitué of Blume’s Restaurant.

My work for the day is finished. Georg Kroll has retired into his den beside the office with the new issues of the Berliner Tageblatt and the Elegant World. I could do some more work with colored chalk on the drawing of a war memorial that I have made, but tomorrow is time enough for that. I shut the typewriter and open the window. A phonograph is playing in Lisa’s apartment. She appears fully dressed this time, waves a tremendous bouquet of red roses out the window, and throws me a kiss. Georg, I think. What a sly one! I point toward his room. Lisa leans out of the window and shouts across the street in her hoarse voice: “Many thanks for the flowers! You may be vultures but you’re cavaliers too!”

She shows her predatory teeth and trembles with laughter at her joke. Then she gets out a letter. “ ‘My lady,’” she caws. “‘An admirer of your beauty takes the liberty of laying these roses at your feet.’” She catches her breath with a hoot. “And the address! ‘To the Circe of Hackenstrasse 5.’ What is a Circe?”

“A woman who turns men into swine.”

Lisa rocks with laughter. The little house seems to rock with her. That’s not Georg, I think. He hasn’t completely lost his mind. “Who’s the letter from?” I ask.

“Alex Riesenfeld,” Lisa croaks. “By courtesy of Kroll and Sons. Riesenfeld!” She is almost choking. “Is that the little runt you were with in the Red Mill?”

“He is not little and not a runt,” I reply. “He’s a giant sitting down and very virile. Besides, he’s a billionaire!”

A thoughtful expression crosses Lisa’s face. Then she waves and smiles again and disappears. I close the window. Suddenly for no reason I remember Erna. I begin to whistle uncomfortably and wander across the garden to the shed where Kurt Bach’s studio is.

He is sitting on the front steps with his guitar. Behind him shimmers a sandstone lion which he has just completed for a war memorial. It is the same old cat, dying of toothache.

“Kurt,” I say, “if you could have a wish instantly fulfilled what would you wish?”

“A thousand dollars,” he replies without reflection, and strikes a resounding chord on his guitar.

“Pfui Teufel! I thought you were an idealist.”

“I am an idealist. That’s why I wish I had a thousand dollars. I don’t need to wish idealism for myself. I have that in abundance already. What I need is money.”

There is no possible reply to that. It’s perfect logic. “What Would you do with the money?” I ask, still hopeful.

“I would buy a block of houses and live on the rent.”

“You couldn’t live on the rent,” I say. “It’s too low and you’re not allowed to raise it. You couldn’t even pay for repairs and you would soon have to sell your houses again.”

“Not the houses I’d buy. I’d keep them until the inflation is over. Then they would earn proper rents again and all I’d have to do is rake them in.” He strikes another chord. “Houses,” he says thoughtfully as though he were speaking of Michelangelo. “For as little as a hundred dollars you can buy a house that used to be worth forty thousand gold marks. What a profit you could make on that! Why haven’t I a childless uncle in America?”

“Kurt,” I say in disappointment, “you’re a disgusting materialist. A house owner, that’s all you want to be! And what’s to become of your immortal soul?”

“A house owner and a sculptor.” Bach executes a glissan-do. Upstairs, Wilke, the carpenter, is keeping time with his hammer. He is working hard on a white coffin for a child and is getting paid overtime. “Then I’d never need to make another damn dying lion or ascending eagle for you! No more animals! Never any more animals. Animals are something to eat or shoot or tame or admire. Nothing else! I have had enough of animals. Especially heroic ones.”

He begins to play the “Hunter from the Kurpfalz.” I see that I will get no decent conversation out of him tonight. Especially not the sort to make a man forget unfaithful women. “What is the meaning of life?” I ask as I leave.

“Eating, sleeping, and intercourse.”

I dismiss the idea with a gesture and wander back. Unconsciously I walk in time with Wilke’s hammering; then I notice it and change the rhythm.

Lisa is standing in the gateway. She has the roses in her hand and holds them out to me. “Here! Take them! I have no use for them.”

“Why not? Haven’t you any feeling for the beauty of nature?”

“No, thank God. I’m no cow. Riesenfeld!” She laughs in her night-club voice. “Tell the boy I’m not the sort of person you give flowers to.”

“What then?”

“Jewelry,” Lisa replies. “What did you think?”

“Not clothes?”

“Only when you’re on more intimate terms.” She squints at me. “You look miserable. Want me to cheer you up?”

“No thanks,” I reply. “I’m cheerful enough. Go along by yourself to the cocktail hour at the Red Mill.”

“I didn’t mean the Red Mill. Do you still play the organ for those crazy people?”

“Yes,” I say in surprise. “How did you know about that?”

“Word gets around. Do you know, I’d like to go with you to that loony bin sometime.”

“You’ll get there soon enough without me.”

“Well, we’ll just see which of us is the first,” Lisa says carelessly, laying the flowers on the curb. “Here, take these vegetables! I can’t keep them in the house. My old man is jealous.”

“What?”

“Jealous as a razor! And why not?”

I do not know what is jealous about a razor; but the image is convincing. “If your husband is jealous, how can you keep on disappearing at night?” I ask.

“He does his butchering at night. I make my own arrangements.”

“And when he isn’t butchering?”

“Then I have a job as hat-check girl in the Red Mill.”

“Have you really?”

“God, you are stupid!” Lisa replies.

“And the clothes and jewelry?”

“All cheap imitations.” Lisa grins. “Every husband believes that! You can persuade men of anything! Well then, take your green groceries. Send them to some calf. You look as though you sent flowers.”

“Never.”

Lisa throws me an abysmal glance over her shoulder. Then without replying she walks back across the street on her beautiful legs. She is wearing shabby red slippers; one has a pompom, on the other it is missing.

The roses gleam in the twilight It is an impressive bouquet. Nothing shabby about Riesenfeld. Fifty thousand marks, I estimate. Glancing around cautiously, I pick them up like a thief and go to my room.

Upstairs the window is red with sunset. The room is full of shadows and reflections; suddenly loneliness falls upon me as though from ambush. I know it’s nonsense; I am no more lonely than an ox in a herd of oxen, but I cannot help myself. Loneliness has nothing to do with a lack of company. It occurs to me that perhaps I was too hasty with Erna last night. Quite possibly there could be an innocent explanation for everything that has happened. She was jealous; that was clear in everything she said. And jealousy is love. Everyone knows that.

I stare through the window, realizing that jealousy is not love but possessiveness—but what does it matter? The twilight distorts your thoughts, and you ought not to argue with women, Georg says. But that’s exactly what I have been doing! Full of remorse I smell the fragrance of the roses, which have transformed my room into a Venusberg. I realize that I am melting into universal forgiveness, universal conciliation and hope. Quickly I write a few lines, seal the envelope without even rereading them, and go into the office to get the issue paper in which the last shipment of porcelain angels was sent. I wrap up the roses and go to look for Fritz Kroll, the youngest sprig of the firm. Fritz is twelve years old. “Fritz,” I say, “do you want to earn two thousand?”

“You bet,” Fritz replies. “Same address?”

“Yes.”

He disappears with the roses—the third clearheaded person this evening. They all know what they want, Kurt, Lisa, Fritz—I alone have no idea. It’s not Erna either; I realize that the minute it’s too late to call Fritz back. But what is it? Where are the altars, where the gods and where the sacrifices? I decide to go to the Mozart concert—even though I shall be alone and the music will make it still worse.

The sky is full of stars when I come back. My steps reverberate in the street and I am full of excitement. Quickly I open the office door, turn on the light, and stop short. There are the roses beside the Presto mimeographing machine and there, too, is my letter, unopened, and beside it a scarp of paper with a message from Fritz. “The lady says to go bury yourself. Sincerely Fritz.”

Bury myself! A thoughtful joke! There I stand, disgraced to the marrow, full of shame and rage. I put Fritz’s note into the cold grate. Then I sit down in my chair and brood. My rage outweighs my shame, as always happens when one is really ashamed and knows he ought to be. I write another letter, pick up the roses, and go to the Red Mill. “Please give these to Fräulein Gerda Schneider,” I say to the doorman. “The acrobat.”

The man in the braided uniform looks at me as though I had made him an immoral proposal. Then he gestures haughtily over his shoulder with his thumb. “Give them to a page.”

I find a page and tell him to present the bouquet during the performance.

He promises to do so. I hope Erna will be there to see it. Then I wander for a while through the city until I grow tired and go home.

I am greeted by a melodious tinkle. Knopf is once more standing in front of the obelisk relieving himself. I say nothing; I want no more arguments. I take a pail, fill it with water, and empty it at Knopf’s feet. The Sergeant Major gapes, “Inundation,” he mutters. “Had no idea it had rained.” And he staggers into the house.