The Black Obelisk

Chapter Six

Over the woods hangs a dusky, red moon. The evening is sultry and very still. The glass man walks past silently. Now he can venture out; there is no danger that the sun will turn his head into a burning glass. However, he is wearing heavy rubbers as a precaution—there might be a thunderstorm and that is even more dangerous for him than the sun. Isabelle is sitting beside me on one of the garden benches in front of the pavilion for incurables. She is wearing a tight black dress and there are high-heeled golden shoes on her bare feet.

“Rudolf,” she says, “you abandoned me again. Last time you promised to stay. Where have you been?”

Rudolf, I think, thank God! I couldn’t have stood being Rolf tonight. I have had a depressing day and feel as though I had been shot at with rock salt.

“I have not abandoned you,” I say. “I was away—but I have not abandoned you.”

“Where were you?”

“Somewhere out there—”

Out there with the madmen is what I almost said, but I caught myself in time.

“Why?”

“I don’t know, Isabelle. People do so many things without knowing why—”

“I was looking for you last night. There was a moon—not that one up there, the red, restless, lying one—no, the other moon, the cool, clear one that you can drink.”

“It would certainly have been better for me to be here,” I say, leaning back and feeling peace flood into me from her. “How can you drink the moon, Isabelle?”

“In water. It’s perfectly easy. It tastes like opal. You don’t really feel it in your mouth; that comes later on—then you feel it beginning to shimmer inside you. It shines out of your eyes. But you mustn’t turn on a light. It wilts in the light.”

I take her hand and lay it against my temple. It is dry and cool. “How do you drink it in water?” I ask.

Isabelle withdraws her hand. “You hold a glass of water out the window—like this.” She stretches out her arm. “Then the moon is in it. You can see it, the glass lights up.”

“You mean it’s reflected in it?”

“It is not reflected. It is in it.” She looks at me. “Reflected—what do you mean by reflected?”

“A reflection is an image in a mirror. You can see your reflection in all sorts of things that are smooth. In water too. But you are not in it.”

“Things that are smooth!” Isabelle smiles, politely incredulous. “Really? Just imagine!”

“But of course. If you stand in front of a mirror you see yourself in it too.”

Isabelle takes off one of her shoes and looks at her foot. It is narrow and long and unmarred by calluses. “Well, perhaps,” she says, still politely uninterested.

“Not perhaps. Certainly. But what you see isn’t you. It is only a mirror image. Not you.”

“No, not me. But where am I when it is there?”

“You’re standing in front of it. Otherwise you couldn’t see your reflection.”

Isabelle puts her shoe on again and glances up. “Are you sure of that, Rudolf?”

“Perfectly sure.”

“I’m not. What do the mirrors do when they’re alone?”

“They reflect whatever is there.”

“And if nothing is there?”

“That’s impossible. Something is always there.”

“And at night? In the dark of the moon—when it’s perfectly black, what do they reflect then?”

“The darkness,” I say, no longer completely sure of my ground, for how can there be a reflection in complete darkness? It always requires some light.

“Then they are dead when it is completely dark?”

“Perhaps they are asleep—and when the light comes again they wake up.”

She nods thoughtfully and draws her dress closer about her legs. “And when they dream?” she asks suddenly. “What do they dream about?”

“Who?”

“The mirrors.”

“I think they dream all the time,” I say. “That is what they do all day long. They dream us. They dream us the other way around. What is our right is their left, and what is left is right.”

Isabelle turns around to me. “Then they are our other side?”

I reflect. Who really knows what a mirror is? “There, you see,” she says. “Just before, you said there was nothing in them. But now you admit they have our other side.”

“Only as long as we are standing in front of them. Not when we go away.”

“How do you know that?”

“You can see it. When you go away and look back your image is no longer there.”

“What if they just hide it?”

“How can they hide it? You know they reflect everything! That’s the very reason they are mirrors. A mirror can’t hide anything.”

A crease appears between Isabelle’s brows. “What becomes of it then?”

“Of what?”

“The image! Our other side! Does it jump back into us?”

“That I don’t know.”

“It can’t just get lost!”

“It doesn’t get lost.”

“What becomes of it then?” she asked more insistently. “Is it in the mirror?”

“No. There’s nothing left in the mirror.”

“It might be there just the same! What makes you so sure? After all, you can’t see it when you are away.”

“Other people can see that it’s no longer there. They only

see their own image when they stand in front of a mirror. Not someone else’s.”

“They cover it with their own. But where is mine? It must be there after all!”

“It is there, of course,” I say, regretting that we have got on this subject. “When you step in front of the mirror again it appears there too.”

Isabelle is suddenly very excited. She kneels on the bench and bends forward. Her silhouette is black and slender against the narcissus, whose color looks sulphurous in the sultry night. “So it is there after all! lust now you said it wasn’t.”

She clings to my hand trembling. I don’t know what to say to calm her. I can’t get anywhere with the laws of physics; she would reject them contemptuously. And at the moment I am no longer so sure about them myself. All at once mirrors really seem to hold a mystery.

“Where is it, Rudolf?” she whispers, pressing herself against me. “Tell me where it is! Has a piece of me been left behind everywhere? In all the mirrors I have looked into? I have seen lots of them, countless ones! Am I scattered everywhere in them? Has each of them taken some part of me? A thin impression, a thin slice of me? Have I been shaved down by mirrors like a piece of wood by a carpenter’s plane? What is still left of me?”

I take her by the shoulders. “All of you is still here,” I say. “On-the contrary, mirrors add something. They make it visible and give it to you—a bit of space, a lighted bit of our-self.”

“Myself?” She continues to cling to my hand. “But suppose it is not that way? Suppose myself is buried all over in thousands and thousands of mirrors? How can I get it back? Oh, I can never get it back! It is lost! Lost! It has been rubbed away like a statue that no longer has a face. Where is my face? Where is my first face? The one before all the mirrors? The one before they began to steal me!”

“No one has stolen you,” I say in desperation. “Mirrors don’t steal. They only reflect.”

Isabelle is breathing heavily. Her face is pale. The red glow of the moon shimmers in her transparent eyes. “What has become of it?” she whispers. “What has become of everything? How can we tell where we are, Rudolf? Everything is running, rushing, sinking, sinking out of sight! Hold me tight! Don’t let me go! Can’t you see them?” She is staring toward the misty horizon. “There they come flying! All the dead mirror images! They come seeking blood! Can’t you hear them? The gray wings! They dart like bats! Don’t let them touch me!”

She presses her head against my shoulder and her quivering body against mine. I hold her and look into the twilight which is growing deeper and deeper. The air is still, but now the darkness is slowly advancing from the trees of the allée like a noiseless company of shadows. It seems to be trying to outflank us and cut off our retreat. “Come along,” I say. “Let’s go over there. It’s brighter beyond the drive. There’s still light there.”

She resists, shaking her head. I feel her hair on my face; it is soft and smells of hay. Her face, too, is soft, and I feel the delicate bones, her chin and the curve of her brow, and suddenly I am once more deeply astonished that behind this narrow hemisphere there lives another world with wholly different laws and that this head, which I can so easily hold in my hand, sees everything differently, every tree, every star, every relationship, and itself too. A different universe is shut up inside it, and for a moment everything seems confused and I no longer know what is real—what I see or what she sees or what is there when we are not and is unknowable because it is like the mirrors: they are there when we are and yet they never give anything back to us but our own image. Never, never shall we know what they are when they are alone or what is behind them; they are nothing and yet they hold reflections and must be something; but they will never reveal their mystery.

“Come along,” I say. “Come, Isabelle. No one knows what he is or whence he comes and where he goes—but we are together, that is all we can know.”

I draw her with me. Perhaps there is really nothing else when everything is falling to pieces, I think, except this bit of togetherness and even that is a sweet deception, for when someone else really needs you you cannot follow him or stand by him. I have noticed that often enough in the war when I looked into the face of a dead comrade. Each of us has his own death and must suffer it alone; no one can help him then.

“You won’t leave me alone?” she whispers.

“I won’t leave you alone.”

“Swear it,” she says, stopping.

“I swear,” I reply.

“All right, Rudolf.” She sighs as though many of her problems were now lessened. “But don’t forget. You forget so often.”

“I won’t forget”

“Kiss me.”

I draw her to me. I have a very slight feeling of horror and am uncertain what to do. I kiss her with dry, closed lips.

She raises her hand to my head and holds it. Suddenly I feel a sharp bite and push her back. My lower lip is bleeding. She has bitten into it. I stare at her. She is smiling. Her face has changed. It is mean and sly. “Blood!” she says softly and triumphantly. “You were going to betray me again. I know you! But now you can’t do it. It is sealed. You cannot go away again!”

“I cannot go away,” I say soberly. “AH right! But that’s no reason to attack me like a cat. How it bleeds! What am I to say to the Mother Superior if she sees me like this?”

Isabelle laughs. “Nothing,” she replies. “Why do you always have to say something? Don’t be such a coward!”

I taste the warm blood in my mouth. My handkerchief is no good—the wound will have to close itself. Isabelle is standing in front of me. Now she is Jennie. Her mouth is small and ugly and she wears a sly, malicious smile. Then the bells begin to ring for the May devotion. An attendant comes along the path. Her white coat shimmers dimly in the twilight.

During the devotion my wound stopped bleeding, I have received my thousand marks, and I am now sitting at table with Vicar Bodendiek. Bodendiek has taken off his silk vestments in the little sacristy. Fifteen minutes ago he was still a mythical figure—shrouded in the smoke of incense he stood there in the candlelight clothed in brocade, raising the golden monstrance with the body of Christ in the Host above the heads of the pious sisters and the skulls of those of the insane who had received permission to attend devotion—but now in his shabby black coat and slightly sweat-stained while collar, which fastens behind instead of in front, he is just a simple agent of God, good-natured, powerful, with red cheeks and a red nose whose burst veins reveal the wine lover. He does not know it but for many years before the war he was my confessor, in the days when the school made us confess and take communion every month. Those of us who were smart went to Bodendiek. He was hard of hearing, and since one whispers at confession, he could not understand what sins we were admitting to. Therefore, he gave the lightest penances. A couple of Our Fathers and you were free of all sin and could go and play football or try to get forbidden books out of the public library. It was a different story with the cathedral pastor to whom I went once because I was in a hurry and there was a line standing in front of Bodendiek’s booth. The cathedral pastor gave me a crafty penance; I was to come to him for confession in one week, and when I did so he asked me why I was there. Since you can’t lie in the confessional, I told him and he gave me a dozen rosaries as penance and the command to appear at the same time next week. That went on until I was almost in despair—I saw myself chained for life to the cathedral pastor by these weekly confessions. Fortunately in the fourth week the holy man came down with measles and had to stay in bed. When my day for confession came, I went to Bodendiek and explained the situation to him—the cathedral pastor had instructed me to confess that day but he was sick. What was I to do? I could not go to his house since measles are contagious. Bodendiek decided that I might just as well confess to him; a confession is a confession and a priest a priest. I did it and was free. From then on, however, I avoided the cathedral pastor like the plague.

We are sitting in a little room near the big assembly hall used by the inmates who are not under restraint. It is not really a dining room; there are bookcases in it, a pot with white geraniums, a few straight and easy chairs, and a round table. The Mother Superior has sent us a bottle of wine and we are waiting for the meal. Ten years ago I would never have dreamed that someday I would be drinking a bottle of wine with my father confessor—but then, neither would I have dreamed that I would someday kill men and be decorated for it instead of being hanged—nevertheless, that is what happened.

Bodendiek samples the wine. “A Schloss Reinhartshausener from the estate of Prince Heinrich von Preussen,” he remarks reverently. “The Mother Superior has sent us something very good. Do you know anything about wine?”

“Very little.”

“You ought to learn. Food and drink are gifts of God. They should be enjoyed and understood.”

“Death is surely a gift of God also,” I reply, glancing through the window into the dark garden. It has grown windy and the black treetops are tossing. “Ought one to enjoy and understand it too?”

Bodendiek looks at me with amusement over the rim of his wine glass. “For a Christian death is no problem. He doesn’t exactly have to enjoy it; but he can understand it without difficulty. Death is entrance into eternal life. There’s nothing to fear there. And for many it is a release.”

“Why?”

“A release from sickness, pain, loneliness, and misery.”

Bodendiek takes an appreciative sip and swirls it inside his red cheeks.

“I know,” I say. “Release from this earthly vale of tears. Why did God create it in the first place?”

At the moment Bodendiek does not look as though he were finding the earthly vale of tears hard to bear. He is comfortably replete and has spread the skirts of his priest’s robe over the arms of his chair so that they will not be creased by the weight of his ponderous bottom. Thus he sits, an expert on wine and the beyond, his glass firm in his hand.

“Why really did God create this earthly vale of tears?” I repeat. “Couldn’t He have admitted us at once to eternal life?”

Bodendiek shrugs his shoulders. “You can read about that in the Bible. Man, paradise, the fall—”

“The fall, the eviction from paradise, original sin, and with it the curse of one hundred thousand generations. The God of the longest wrath on record.”

“The God of forgiveness,” Bodendiek replies, holding his wine up to the light. “The God of love and of justice Who is always ready to forgive and Who has given His own son to redeem mankind.”

“Herr Vicar Bodendiek,” I say suddenly very angry, “why really did the God of love and justice make people so unequal? Why is one miserable and sick and another healthy and mean?”

“He who is humiliated here will be exalted in the next life. God is compensatory justice.”

“I’m not so sure of that,” I reply. “I knew a woman who had cancer for ten years, who survived six frightful operations, who was never without pain, and who finally doubted God when two of her children died. She gave up going to mass, to confession, and to communion, and according to the rules of the Church she died in a state of mortal sin. According to those same rules she is now burning for all eternity in the hell which the God of love created. Is that justice?”

Bodendiek looks for a while into his wine. “Was it your mother?” he asks then.

I stare at him. “What has that to do with it?”

“It was your mother, wasn’t it?”

I swallow. “Suppose it was my mother—”

He is silent. “A single second is enough to reconcile oneself with God,” he says then cautiously. “One second before death. A single thought. It doesn’t even have to be spoken.”

“I said that a couple of days ago too—to a woman who was in despair. But suppose the thought was not there?”

Bodendiek looks at me. “The Church has rules. She has rules for prevention and for education. God has none. God is love. Which of us can fathom His judgment?”

“Does He judge?”

“We call it so. It is love.”

“Love,” I say bitterly. “A love full of sadism. A love that torments people and makes them miserable and pretends to compensate for the horrible injustice of this world by the promise of an imaginary heaven.”

Bodendiek smiles. “Don’t you think that other people before you have thought about that too?”

“Yes, countless people. And smarter than I am.”

“I think so too,” Bodendiek replies comfortably.

“That doesn’t prevent me from doing it too.”

“Certainly not,” Bodendiek fills his glass. “Only do it thoroughly. Doubt is the other side of faith.”

I look at him. There he sits, a tower of security which nothing can shake. Behind his strong head stands the night, Isabelle’s unquiet night, which blows and tosses and is endless and full of unanswerable questions. Bodendiek, however, has an answer for everything.

The door opens. Our meal is brought in round dishes stacked on top of one another on a big tray. They fit into one another the way they do in hospitals. The kitchen nurse spreads a cloth over the table, lays out the knives, forks, and spoons and disappears. Bodendiek lifts the top dish. “What do we have tonight? Bouillon,” he says delicately. “Bouillon with marrow balls. First class! And red cabbage with Sauerbraten. A revelation!”

He fills his own plate and begins to eat. I am annoyed at myself for having argued with him and I feel his obvious superiority although that has nothing to do with the problem. He is superior because he is not seeking anything. He knows. But what does he really know? He can prove nothing. Nevertheless, he can play with me as he wishes.

The doctor comes in. It is not the director; it is the resident physician. “Will you eat with us?” Bodendiek asks. “In that case you’ll have to go to it. Otherwise there’ll be nothing left.”

The doctor shakes his head. “I haven’t time. There’s going to be a thunderstorm. That’s when the patients are always most restless.”

“There’s no sign of a storm.”

“Not yet. But it will come. The patients feel it in advance.

We’ve already had to put some of them in baths. It will be a difficult night”

Bodendiek divides the rest of the Sauerbraten between us. He takes the larger portion for himself. “All right, Doctor,” he says. “But at least have a glass of wine with us. It’s a 1915. A gift of God! Even for this young heathen here.”

He winks at me, and I would like to pour my Sauerbraten gravy down his slightly greasy collar. The doctor sits down with us and accepts a glass. The pale nurse puts her head through the door. “I won’t eat now, Nurse,” the doctor says. “Put a couple of sandwiches and a bottle of beer in my room.”

He is a man of about thirty-five, dark, with a narrow face, close-set eyes, and big, projecting ears. His name is Wernicke, Guido Wernicke, and he hates his first name as much as I hate Rolf.

“How is Fräulein Terhoven?” I ask.

“Terhoven? Oh yes—not especially well, unfortunately. Didn’t you notice anything today? Any change?”

“No. She was the same as ever. Perhaps a little excited, but you just said that was due to the thunderstorm.”

“We’ll see. You can never tell much in advance up here.”

Bodendiek laughs. “Certainly not. Not here.”

I look at him. What a rude Christian, I think. But then it occurs to me that he is a guardian of souls by profession; in such cases there is always some loss of sensibility in the interests of competence—just as with doctors, nurses, and tombstone salesmen.

I hear him conversing with Wernicke. Suddenly I have no more desire to eat and I get up and go to the window. Beyond the tossing, black treetops all at once there has risen a wall of pale-edged cloud. I stare out. All at once everything is very strange, and behind the familiar scene of the garden another, wilder one silently forces its way forward, pushing the old one aside like an empty husk. I recall Isabelle’s cry: “Where is my first face? My face before all the mirrors?” Yes, where is the first face of all? I think. The first landscape before it was turned into the landscape of our senses, into parkland and wood and house and man—where is Bodendiek’s face before it became Bodendiek, where is Wernicke’s before it had a name? Do we still know anything about that? Or are we caught in a net of concepts and words, of logic and deceptive reasoning, behind which lie the lonesome, glowing primeval fires to which we no longer have access because we have transformed them into utility and warmth, into kitchen fires and central heating and deceit and certainty and respectability and walls and, most of all, into a Turkish bath of sweaty philosophy and science? Where are they? Do they still stand, ever unseizable and pure and unattainable, behind life and death, before they became life and death for us, and are the only persons still close to them maybe those who now crouch in this house in their barred rooms and creep and stare and feel the thunderstorm in their blood? Where is the boundary between chaos and order and who can cross it and return, and if anyone could what would he then know of it? Would not the one wipe out the memory of the other? Who are the unbalanced, the branded, the excluded—we without boundaries, our reason, our orderly picture of the world or the others through whom chaos rages and flashes and who are exposed to infinity like rooms with three walls into which lightning strikes and storm and rain pour while we others sit proudly enclosed in rooms protected by four walls and doors and think we are superior because we have escaped from chaos? But what is chaos? And what is order? And who possesses them? And why? And who will ever escape?

A pale light darts high above the garden wall and after a time is answered by soft rumbling. Our room seems like a cabin full of light afloat in a night which has become uncanny, as though somewhere captive giants were straining at their chains to leap up and annihilate the race of dwarfs that has for a time confined them. A cabin of light in the darkness, books and three orderly minds in a house like a beehive where the uncanny is locked up in cells and flashes lightning-like in the disturbed brains around us! What if in the next second a flash of recognition should run through them all and they should find their way together in revolt, what if they broke the locks, forced open the bars, and foamed up the stairs like a gray wave to sweep away the lighted room, this cabin of sound, well-grounded reason, into the night and into what stands, nameless and mighty, behind the night?

I turn around. The man of faith and the man of science are sitting in the full brilliance of the ceiling light. For them the world is not a vague, quivering unrest, it is not a muttering from the depths or a lightning flash in the icy spaces of the void—they are men of faith and of science, they have sounding lines and plummets and scales and measures, each of them a different set but that does not matter, they are sure, they have names to put on everything like labels, they sleep well, they have a goal that contents them, and even horror, the black curtain in front of suicide, has a well-recognized place in their existence, it has a name, it has been classified and thereby rendered harmless. Only what is nameless or has burst its name is deadly.

“There’s lightning,” I say.

The doctor looks up. “Really?”

He has just been explaining the nature of schizophrenia, Isabelle’s ailment. His dark face is slightly flushed with excitement. He describes how patients of this sort leap lightning-like from one personality to another in a matter of seconds and how this may be the reason that in ancient times they were regarded as seers and holy men and in later times as possessed of the devil and were looked upon by the people with superstitious respect. He philosophizes about the causes, and suddenly I wonder how he comes to know all this and why he describes it as a sickness. Could it not equally well be regarded as a particular asset? Doesn’t every normal person have a dozen personalities in him too? And isn’t the distinction simply that the healthy person suppresses them and the sick one gives them scope? Who then is sick?

I walk over to the table and empty my glass. Bodendiek watches me benevolently, Wernicke as a doctor might watch a wholly uninteresting case. For the first time I feel the wine; I feel it is good, self-contained, mature, and not unsettled. It no longer has chaos in it, I think. It has transformed chaos, transformed it into harmony. But transformed it, not replaced it. It has not disappeared. Suddenly, for a second’s time, I am unreasonably, unspeakably happy. So it can be done, I think. One can transform chaos! It does not have to be one or the other. It can also be one through the other.

Another pale flash lights the window and expires. The doctor gets up. “Now it’s starting. I must go over to the confined cases.”

The confined cases are the patients who never come out. They remain locked up until they die in rooms where the furniture is screwed down, the windows barred, and the doors can only be opened from outside with a key. They are in cages like dangerous beasts and no one likes to talk about them.

Wernicke looks at me. “What’s the matter with your lip?”

“Nothing. I bit myself in my sleep.”

Bodendiek laughs. The door opens and the little nurse brings in another bottle of wine and three glasses. Wernicke leaves with the nurse. Bodendiek reaches for the bottle and fills his glass. Now I understand why he invited Wernicke to drink with us; the Mother Superior thereupon sent a new bottle. A single one would not have been enough for three men. That sly fellow, I think. He has repeated the miracle of the loaves and fishes. From a single glass for Wernicke he has made a whole bottle for himself. “You probably won’t be drinking any more, will you?” he asks.

“Yes I will” I reply, seating myself. “I’ve acquired the taste. You taught me. Many thanks.”

Bodendiek draws the bottle out of the ice with a bittersweet smile. He regards the label for a moment before pouring—a quarter glass for me. His own he fills almost to the rim. I calmly take the bottle out of his hand and fill my own glass as full as his. “Herr Vicar,” I say, “in many ways we are not so very different.”

Bodendiek suddenly laughs. His face unfolds like a peony. “To health and happiness,” he says unctuously.

The thunder rumbles near and far. The lightning falls like silent saber blows. I am sitting at the window in my room with the scraps of all Erna’s letters in front of me in a hollow elephant’s foot which the world traveler Hans Ledermann gave me a year ago for a wastebasket.

I am through with Erna. I have counted up all her unattractive qualities; I have rooted her out of me emotionally and humanly; as dessert I have read a couple of chapters of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. Nevertheless, I should prefer to have a tuxedo, a car, and a chauffeur so that I could now turn up at the Red Mill, accompanied by two or three famous actresses and with several hundred millions in my pocket so that I could deal that serpent the blow of her life. I dream for a time of how it would be if tomorrow morning she should read in the paper that I had won the sweepstakes or had been gravely injured while rescuing children from a burning house. Then I see a light in Lisa’s room.

She opens the window and signals. My room is dark; she cannot see me; therefore I’m not the one. She says something silently, points at her breast and then at our house, and nods. The light goes out.

I lean out cautiously. It is twelve o’clock, and the windows round about are dark. Only Georg Kroll’s is open.

I wait and see Lisa’s door move. She steps out, looks quickly in both directions, and runs across the street. She is wearing a light, bf\S,M.Y colored dress and is carrying her shoes in her hand so as not te make any noise. At the same time I hear the door of our house being opened cautiously. It must be Georg. The door has a bell above it and in order to open it without making a noise you have to get on a chair, hold the clapper, press down on the latch with your foot, and draw the door open, an acrobatic feat for which you have to be sober. Tonight I know that Georg is sober.

There is the sound of murmuring; the click of high heels. Lisa, that vain creature, has put on her shoes again to appear more seductive. The door of Georg’s room sighs softly. Well, well! Who would have thought it? Still waters!

The storm returns. The thunder grows louder, and suddenly, like a cascade of silver coins, the rain pours down upon the pavement. It rebounds in dusty fountains and a breath of coolness ascends from it. I lean out the window and look into the watery tumult. The rain is already running off through the rain pipes, lightning flares, and in its intermittent flashes I see Lisa’s bare arm reaching out of Georg’s window into the rain, then I see her head and hear her husky voice. I do not see Georg’s bald dome. He is no nature lover.

The gate to the courtyard opens under the blow of a fist. Soaking wet, Sergeant Major Knopf staggers in. Water is dripping from his cap. Thank God, I think, in weather like this I won’t have to follow up his misdemeanors with a pail of water! But Knopf disappoints me. He doesn’t pay any attention to his victim, the black obelisk. Cursing and slapping at the raindrops as though they were mosquitos he flees into the house. Water is his great enemy.

I pick up the elephant’s foot and empty its contents into the street. The rain quickly washes away Erna’s protestations of love. Money has won, I think, as always, though it is worth nothing. I go to the other window and look into the garden. The great festival of the rain is in full swing, a green nuptial orgy, shameless and innocent. In the flare of the lightning I see the plaque for the suicide. It has been put to one side; the inscription has been carved and gleams with gold. I shut the window and turn on the light. Below, Georg and Lisa are murmuring. My room suddenly seems horribly empty. I open the window again and listen to the anonymous rushing and decide to request from Bauer, the bookseller, as honorarium for my last week’s tutoring, a book on yoga, renunciation and self-sufficiency. Adepts are said to achieve fabulous results through simple breathing exercises.

Before I go to sleep I pass a mirror. I stop and look into it. What is there really? I think. Whence comes the perspective which is not a perspective, the deceptive depth, the space which is a plane? And who is that who peers out questioningly and is not there?

I look at my lip swollen and crusted with blood. I touch it and someone opposite me touches his ghostly lip which is not there. I grin and the not-I grins back. I shake my head and the not-I shakes his not-head. Which of us is which? And in front? Or something else, something behind both? I feel a shudder and turn out the light.