The Black Obelisk (19 page)

I creep down the stairs and tap out the beginning of the "Hohenfriedberger March" on Georg's door. His bald head appears. I tell him what has happened. "Damn it," he says, "Go and try to get him away."

"At this hour?"

"Try it! Exercise your charm."

I wander out, yawn, pause, and then stroll over to Watzek. "Nice evening," I say.

"Nice evening, shit," Watzek replies.

"Well, of course," I concede.

"It won't last much longer," Watzek says suddenly and fiercely.

"What won't?"

"What? You know exactly what! This filthiness! What else?"

"Filthiness?" I ask in alarm. "What do you mean?"

"Well, what do you think? Don't you see it yourself?"

I glance at the knife in his boot and I already see Georg lying with throat cut among the monuments. Not Lisa, of course; that's man's old idiocy. "It depends on how you look at it," I say diplomatically. I can't understand why Watzek hasn't already climbed through Georg's window. It's on the ground floor and open.

"All that will be atoned for," Watzek declares grimly. "Blood will flow. The guilty will pay."

I look at him. He has long arms and a thickset frame; he looks very strong. I could catch him in the chin with my knee and when he staggered to his feet kick him between the legs—or if he tried to run I could trip him up and then pound his head on the pavement. That would do for the moment—but what about later on?

"Did you hear him?" Watzek asks.

"Who?"

"You know! Him! Who else? There's only one after all!"

I listen. I haven't heard a thing. The street is quiet. Georg's window has now been cautiously closed.

"Who did you expect me to hear?" I ask loudly to win time and warn the others so that Lisa can disappear into the garden.

"Man alive, him! The
Führer!
Adolf Hitler!"

"Adolf Hitler!" I repeat in relief. "Him!"

"What do you mean, him?" Watzek asks challengingly. "Aren't you for him?"

"And how! Especially just now! You can't imagine how much!"

"Then why didn't you listen to him?"

"But he wasn't here."

"He was on the radio. We heard him at the stockyard. A six-tube set. He will change everything! Marvelous speech! That man knows what's wrong. Everything must be changed."

"That's obvious," I say. There, in one sentence, lies the whole stock in trade of the world's demagogues. "Everything must be changed! How about a beer?"

"Beer? Where?"

"At Blume's, around the corner."

"I'm waiting for my wife."

"You can wait for her just as well at Blume's. What did Hitler talk about? I'd like to know. My radio is caput."

"About everything," the butcher says, getting up. "That man knows everything! Everything, I tell you, comrade!"

He puts his chair back in the hall and we wander com-panionably off toward the Dortmunder beer in Blume's Garden Restaurant.

In the mild twilight the glass man is standing motionless in front of a rose bed. Gregory VII is strolling along the avenue of chestnut trees. A middle-aged nurse is taking a bent old man for a walk; he keeps trying to pinch her muscular posterior and after each attempt giggles happily. Two men are sitting beside me on a bench, each explaining to the other why he is mad and neither paying the slightest attention. Three women

in striped dresses are watering the flowers, moving silently through the evening with their tin cans.

I am perched on a bench beside the rose bed. Here everything is peaceful and right. No one is disturbed because the dollar has risen twenty thousand marks in a single day. No one hangs himself on that account, as an elderly couple did last night in the city. They were found this morning in the wardrobe—each on a length of clothesline. Except for them there was nothing in the wardrobe; everything had been sold or pawned, even the bed and the wardrobe itself. When the purchaser of the furniture came to get it he discovered the bodies. They were clinging together and their swollen, bluish tongues were pointed at each other. They were very light and could be taken down quickly. Both were freshly washed, their hair brushed, and their clothes clean and neatly mended. The purchaser, a full-blooded furniture dealer, vomited when he saw them and announced that he did not want the wardrobe. It was not until evening that he changed his mind and sent for it. By then the bodies were lying on the bed and had to be removed because the bed, too, was to be taken. Neighbors loaned a couple of tables which served as biers for the old people, their heads covered with tissue paper. The tissue paper was the only thing in the apartment that still belonged to them. They left a letter in which they said they had originally intended to kill themselves by gas, but the gas company had turned it off because the bill was so long overdue. And so they asked the furniture dealer's pardon for the trouble they were causing him.

Isabelle approaches. She is wearing blue shorts that leave her knees bare, a yellow blouse, and an amber necklace.

I have not seen her for some time. After devotion in church I have slipped away each time and gone home. It was not easy to forgo the fine meal and the wine with Bodendiek and Wernicke, but I preferred peace and quiet with sandwiches and potato salad and Gerda.

"Where have you been?" Isabelle asks me as she always does.

"Out there," I say vaguely. "Where money is the one thing of importance."

She sits down on the arm of the bench. Her legs are very brown, as though she had spent a lot of time in the sun. The two men beside me look up ill-temperedly, then rise and walk away. Isabelle slides down onto the bench. "Why do children die, Rudolf?" she asks.

"I don't know."

I do not look at her. I am determined never again to become involved with her; it is bad enough that she is sitting there beside me with her long legs and her tennis shorts as though she had guessed that from now on I intend to live by Georg's recipe.

"Why are they born if they are going to die right away?"

"You must ask Vicar Bodendiek about that. He maintains that God keeps a record of every hair that falls from everyone's head and that all of it has a meaning and a moral lesson."

Isabelle laughs. "God keeps a record? Of whom? Of Himself? Why? After all, He knows everything, doesn't He?"

"Yes," I said, suddenly angry without knowing why. "He is omniscient, just, kind, and filled with love—nevertheless, children die and the mothers they need die and no one knows why there is so much misery in the world."

Isabelle turns toward me with a start. She is no longer laughing. "Why isn't everyone simply happy, Rudolf?"

"I don't know. Perhaps because then God would be bored."

"No," she says quickly. "That's not the reason."

"What is it then?"

"Because He is afraid."

"Afraid? Of what?"

"If everyone were happy, there would be no more need of God."

Now I am looking at her. Her eyes are very transparent. Her face is brown and thinner than before. "He only exists for unhappiness," she says. "That is when you need Him and pray to Him. That's why He causes it."

"There are people, too, who pray to God because they are happy."

"Really?" Isabelle smiles incredulously. "Then they pray because they are afraid they won't stay happy. Everything is fear, Rudolf. Don't you know that?"

The cheerful old man is led past us by his muscular nurse. From a window in the main building comes the high whine of a vacuum cleaner. I look around. The window is open but barred, a black hole out of which the vacuum cleaner screams like a damned soul.

"Everything is fear," Isabelle repeats. "Aren't you ever afraid?"

"I don't know," I reply, still on my guard. "I guess so. I was often afraid in the war."

"That's not what I mean, that is reasonable fear. I mean nameless fear."

"Of what? Of life?"

She shakes her head. "No. An earlier fear."

"Of death?"

She shakes her head again. I ask no further questions. I don't want to become involved. We sit in silence for a time in the twilight. Once more I have the feeling that Isabelle is not sick, but I suppress the thought. If it arises, confusion will follow, and I don't want that. Finally Isabelle moves. "Why don't you say something?" she asks.

"What do words amount to?"

"A great deal," she whispers. "Everything. Are you afraid of them?"

I consider the question. "Very likely we are all a little afraid of big words. They have been used to tell such dreadful lies. Perhaps we're afraid of our feelings too. We no longer trust them."

Isabelle draws her legs up on the bench. "But you need them, darling," she murmurs. "Otherwise how can you live?"

The vacuum cleaner has stopped whining. Suddenly it is very quiet. The cool smell of damp earth rises from the flower beds. A bird calls in the chestnut trees, always the same call. The evening is suddenly a scale with an equal weight of the world on both sides. I feel as though it were balanced weightlessly on my breast. Nothing can happen to me, I think, as long as I go on breathing quietly.

"Are you afraid of me?" Isabelle whispers.

No, I think, shaking my head; you are the one human being I am not afraid of. Not even in words. In your presence they are never too big and they are never ridiculous. You always understand them, for you still live in a world where words and feelings and lies and vision are one and the same thing.

"Why don't you say something?" she asks.

I shrug my shoulders. "Sometimes you can't say anything, Isabelle. And often it is hard to let go." "Let go of what?"

"One's self. There are many obstacles." "A knife can't cut itself, Rudolf. Why are you afraid?" She is perched on the bench, beautiful and confiding and completely strange. "It can only grow dull," she says, "if you don't use it. Is that what you want?" "I don't know, Isabelle."

"Don't wait too long, darling. Otherwise it will be too late. One needs words," she murmurs.

I make no reply. "Against fear, Rudolf," she says. "They are like lamps. They help. Do you see how gray everything is getting? Blood is not red any more. Why don't you help me?"

I stop resisting. "You sweet, strange, and beloved heart," I say. "If only I could help you!"

She bends forward and puts her arms around my shoulders. "Come with me! Help me! They are calling!"

"Who is calling?"

"Can't you hear them? The voices. They are always calling!"

"No one is calling, Isabelle. Only your heart. But what is it calling?"

I feel her breath brushing my face. "Love me, then it won't call any more," she says.

"I love you."

She lets herself sink down beside me. Now her eyes are closed. It grows darker and I see the glass man once more slowly strutting past. A nurse is bringing in a few old people who have been sitting on the benches, bent and motionless, like dark bundles of woe. "It's time," she says in our direction.

I nod and stay where I am. "They're calling," Isabelle whispers. "You can never find them. Who has so many tears?"

"No one," I say. "No one in the world, beloved heart."

"She makes no reply. She is breathing like a tired child at my side. Then I pick her up and carry her along the
allee
to the pavilion where she lives.

As I set her down she wavers and clings to me. She murmurs something I cannot understand and lets me lead her indoors. The entry is bright with a shadowless, milky light. I put her in a cane chair in the hall. She lies there with closed eyes as though she had been taken down from an invisible cross. Two nuns in black come by. They are on their way to chapel. For a moment they seem to be coming to remove Isabelle and bury her. Then the attendant in white arrives and leads her off.

The Mother Superior has sent us a second bottle of Moselle. Nevertheless, Bodendiek, to my amazement, left directly after the meal. Wernicke is still at table. The weather is calm and the patients are as quiet as they ever are.

"Why aren't the completely hopeless cases killed?" I ask.