The Black Obelisk (24 page)

"It's possible to prove anything you like if you're determined to do it, dear friend. And the opposite too. Proofs can be found for every preconceived opinion."

"I know that too," I say. "The Church gave a brilliant example of it when it wiped out the Gnostics."

"The Gnostics! What do you know about them?" Boden-diek asks in offensive surprise.

"Enough to suspect they were the more tolerant part of Christianity. And all I have learned in my life so far is to prize tolerance."

"Tolerance—" Bodendiek says.

"Tolerance!" I repeat. "Consideration for others. Understanding of others. Letting each live in his own fashion. Tolerance, which in our beloved fatherland is a foreign word."

"Anarchy, in short," Bodendiek replies, softly and with sudden sharpness.

We are standing in front of the chapel. The lights are burning and the stained-glass windows shimmer comfortingly in the eddying rain. Through the open door comes the faint smell of incense. "Tolerance, Herr Vicar," I say. "Not anarchy, and you know the difference! But you don't dare admit it! No one possesses heaven but you! No one can give absolution but you! You have a monopoly. There is no religion but yours! You are a dictatorship! So how can you be tolerant?"

"We don't need to be. We possess the truth."

"Naturally," I say, pointing to the lighted windows. "There you are! Comfort for those afraid of life. Stop thinking, I'll do it for you! The promise of heaven and the threat of hell —playing on the simplest emotions—what has that to do with truth, the unattainable fata morgana of our brains?"

"Fine words," Bodendiek exclaims, long since at ease again, superior and mildly derisive.

"Yes, that's all we have—fine words," I say, angered at myself. "And you have nothing more—just fine words."

Bodendiek walks into the chapel. "We have the Holy Sacraments—"

"Yes—"

"And faith, which to simpletons like you, whose addled brains upset their stomachs, seems nothing but stupidity and flight from the world, you harmless earthworm in the fields of triviality."

"Bravo!" I say. "At last you, too, are waxing poetic. Late baroque, to be sure."

Bodendiek laughs suddenly. "My dear Bodmer," he explains, "many a Saul has become a Paul in the nearly two thousand years that the Church has existed. And during that time we have encountered more formidable dwarfs than you and survived them. Go on busily groping. At the end of every path God stands, waiting for you."

He disappears with his umbrella into the sacristy, a well-nourished man in a black frock coat. In half an hour, garbed as fantastically as a general of Hussars, he will reappear and be a representative of God. It's the uniform, as Valentin Busch was saying after the second bottle of Johannis-berger while Eduard Knobloch lapsed into melancholy and plans for murder, simply the uniform. Take away their costumes, and nobody will want to be a soldier any more.

After the devotion I go for a walk with Isabelle along the
allèe
.
Here it is raining irregularly—as though the shadows, crouching in the trees, were sprinkling themselves with water. Isabelle is wearing a dark raincoat, buttoned up around her throat, and a small cap that hides her hair. Nothing of her is visible but her face which shines in the darkness like a thin moon. The weather is cold and windy; no one else is in the garden. I have long since forgotten Bodendiek and the black rage that sometimes wells up in me without reason, like a dirty fountain. Isabelle is walking close beside me; I hear her footsteps in the rain and I feel her movements and her warmth; it seems to me the only warm thing left in the whole world.

Suddenly she stops. Her face is pale and determined and her eyes look almost black. "You don't love me enough," she blurts out.

I look at her in surprise. "It's the best I can do," I say.

She stands in silence for a while. "Not enough," she murmurs then. "Never enough. It is never enough."

"Yes," I say, "very likely it is never enough. Never in our lives, never with anyone. Very likely it is always too little, and that is the misery of the world."

"It is not enough," Isabelle repeats as though not hearing me. "Otherwise we would not still be two."

"You mean otherwise we would be one?"

She nods.

I think of my conversation with Georg while we were drinking mulled wine. "We'll always have to remain two, Isabelle," I say cautiously. "But we can love each other and believe that we are no longer two."

"Do you think once upon a time we were one?"

"I don't know. No one can know a thing like that One wouldn't be able to remember it."

She looks at me fixedly out of the darkness. "That's it, Rudolf," she whispers. "One doesn't remember. Not anything. Why not? You seek and seek. Why is everything gone? There was so much! You only remember that and nothing more. Why don't you remember? You and I, didn't all this happen once before? Tell met Tell me! Where is it now, Rudolf?"

The wind whirls past sprinkling us with raindrops. One often feels as though something had happened before, I remember. It comes quite close to you and stands there and you know it was just this way once before, exactly so; for an instant you almost know how it must go on, but then it disappears as you try to lay hold of it like smoke or a dead memory. "We could never remember, Isabelle," I say. "It's like the rain. That also has become one, one of two gasses, oxygen and hydrogen, which no longer remember they were once gasses. Now they are only rain and have no memory of an earlier time."

"Or like tears," Isabelle says. "But tears are full of memories."

We walk on for a time in silence. I am thinking of those strange moments when unexpectedly a kind of second sight like a deceptive memory seems suddenly to give us glimpses of many earlier lives. The gravel crunches under our shoes. Behind the garden wall there is the prolonged blowing of a car horn like a signal to someone about to escape. "Then it's like death," Isabelle says finally.

"What is?"

"Love. Perfect love."

"Who knows, Isabelle? I think no one can ever know. We only recognize things as long as each of us is still an I. If our I's were blended, it would be like the rain. We should be a new I and unable to remember the earlier separate I's. We should be something different, as different as rain is from air—no longer an I heightened by a you."

"And if love were perfect so that we blended together, then it would be like death?"

"Perhaps," I say hesitantly. "But not like annihilation. No one knows what death is, Isabelle. And so it can't be compared with anything. But we should certainly no longer feel our former selves. We should simply become once more another lonely I."

"Then love must always be incomplete?"

"It's complete enough," I say, cursing myself because in my pedantic schoolmaster's way I have become too involved again.

Isabelle shakes her head. "Don't evade me, Rudolf! It must be incomplete, I see that now. If it were complete, there would be a flash of lightning and then another."

"There would be something left, though—but beyond our powers of perception."

"Just like death?"

I look at her. "Who knows?" I say cautiously so as not to excite her further. "Perhaps death has a completely wrong name. We can only see it from one side. Perhaps it is perfect love between God and us."

The wind tosses a shower of rain onto the leaves of the trees and they toss it on with ghostly hands. Isabelle is silent for a time. "Is that why love is so sad?" she asks then.

"It isn't sad. It only makes us sad because it cannot be fulfilled and cannot be retained."

Isabelle stops. "Why, Rudolf?" she says, suddenly very emphatic, stamping her foot. "Why must it be so?"

I look into her pale, intent face. "It's our fate," I say.

She stares at me. "That is fate?"

I nod.

"It can't be! It's misery!"

She throws herself against me and I hold her tight. I feel her sobs against my shoulder. "Don't cry," I say. "What's to become of us if we cry about something like that?"

"What else is there to cry about?"

Yes, what else? I think. Everything else, the wretchedness on this accursed planet, only not about that. "It's no misfortune, Isabelle," I say. "It is good fortune. We simply have silly names for it like perfect and imperfect."

"No, no!" She shakes her head violently and won't be comforted. She weeps and clings to me and I hold her in my arms and feel that it is not I but she who is right, she who knows no compromises; that in her still burns the first, the only
why
, which existed before all the accumulated trash of existence, the first question of the awakening self.

"It is no misfortune," I say nevertheless. "Misfortune is something entirely different, Isabelle."

"What is it?"

"Misfortune is not the fact that two can never become wholly one. Misfortune is the fact that we must continually abandon each other, every day and every hour. You know

it and you cannot stop it, it runs through your hands and it is the most precious thing there is and yet you cannot hold onto it. There is always one who dies first. Always one who remains behind."

She looks up. "How can one abandon what one does not have?"

"One can," I reply bitterly. "Can't one though! There are many stages of abandonment and being abandoned and each is painful and many are like death."

Isabelle's tears have stopped. "How do you know that?" she says. "You are not old enough."

I am old enough, I think. Part of me has grown old by the time I came back from the war. "I know," I say. "I found it out."

I found it out, I think. How often had I had to abandon the day and the hour, and my existence, the tree in the morning light and my hands and my thoughts, and each time it was forever and when I came back I was a different person. One can abandon a great deal and one must always leave everything behind one when one goes to meet death; faced with that one is always naked, and if one finds the way back, one must reacquire everything one left behind.

Isabelle's face shimmers before me in the rainy night, and I am suddenly overwhelmed by tenderness. I sense again in what loneliness she lives, undismayed, alone with her visions, threatened by them and surrendered to them, with no roof for shelter, without surcease or diversion, exposed to all the winds of the heart, without help from anyone, without complaint and without self-compassion. Beloved fearless heart, I think, untouched and aiming straight as an arrow at the essential alone, even if you do not reach it and go astray —but who does not go astray? And hasn't almost everyone given up long since? When is the beginning of error, of stupidity, of cowardice, and where the beginning of wisdom and the final courage?

A bell begins to ring. Isabelle gives a start. "It's time for you to go in," I say. "They're waiting for you."

"Are you coming with me?"

"Yes."

We walk toward the house. As we step out of the
allee,
we are greeted by a squall of rain driven around us in short gusts like a wet veil. Isabelle presses against me. I look down the hill toward the city. Nothing is to be seen. Mist and rain have isolated us. Nowhere is there a light; we are entirely alone. Isabelle walks beside me as though she belonged to me forever and as though she had no weight, and once more it seems to me as if she really had none and were like the figures in legends and dreams, obedient to different laws from those of everyday existence.

We there stand in the doorway. "Come with me!" she says.

I shake my head. "I can't. Not today."

She is silent, looking at me with straight, clear eyes, without reproach and without disillusionment; but suddenly something seems to have gone out in her. I lower my eyes feeling as though I had struck a child or killed a swallow. "Not today," I say. "Later. Tomorrow."

She turns away without a word and walks into the hallway. I see the nurse go up the stairs with her and suddenly I feel as though I had irrevocably lost something one finds but once in a lifetime.

I stand there bewildered. What could I have done? And how did I once more become involved in all this? It wasn't my intention at all! This accursed rain!

Slowly I walk toward the main building. Wernicke, wearing a white coat and carrying an umbrella, comes out. "Have you taken Fräulein Terhoven back?"

"Yes."

"Good. Pay a little more attention to her, won't you? Visit her now and then during the day if you have time."