The Black Obelisk (27 page)

"That's it," I say. "Really that's it! If we could grasp it fully we would go mad."

"Another glass of beer?" Frau Kroll asks through the kitchen window. "There's raspberry jam here too. Fresh."

"Rescued!" I say.
" 
Gnädige Frau
,
you have just rescued me. I was like an arrow on its way to the sun and to Wernicke. Thank God everything is still here! Nothing has burned up! Sweet life continues to frolic around us with flies and butterflies, nothing has been reduced to ashes, it is here, it still has all its laws, even those we impose upon it like a bridle on a thoroughbred! However—no raspberry jam with beer, please! Instead, a piece of runny Harz cheese. Good morning, Herr Knopf! A fine day! What's your opinion of life!"

Knopf stares at me. His face is gray and there are sacks under his eyes. After a while he gesticulates at me angrily and closes his window. "Weren't you going to say something to him?" Georg asks.

"Yes, but not till tonight."

We go into Eduard Knobloch's restaurant. "Look over there," I say, stopping as though I had run into a tree. "Life seems to be up to its tricks here too! I should have guessed it!"

Gerda is sitting at a table in the wine room with a vase of tiger lilies in front of her. She is alone and is hacking away at a venison steak that is almost as big as the table. "What do you say to that?" I ask Georg. "Doesn't it smell of betrayal?"

"Was there anything to betray?"

"No. But what about unfaithfulness?"

"Was there anything to be faithful to?"

"Oh stop it, Socrates!" I reply. "Can't you see Eduard's fat paw at work here?"

"I see it all right. But who has betrayed you? Eduard or Gerda?"

"Gerda! Who do you think? The man's never responsible."

"Nor the woman either."

"Then who?"

"You."

"All right," I say. "It's easy for you to talk. You don't get betrayed. You are a betrayer yourself."

Georg nods with self-satisfaction. "Love is a matter of emotion," he instructs me. "Not of morality. Emotion, however, knows nothing of betrayal. It increases, disappears, or changes—so where is the betrayal? There is no contract. Didn't you deafen Gerda with your howling about your sufferings over Erna?"

"Only at the beginning. You know she was there when we had our row in the Red Mill."

"Then don't yammer now. Give up or do something." Some people get up from a table near us. We sit down. Freidank, the waiter, veers away. "Where's Herr Knobloch?"

I ask.

Freidank glances around. "I don't know—he had been here all along, at that table over there with the lady."

"Simple, isn't it?" I say to Georg. "That's where we stand now. I am a natural victim of the inflation. Once again. First with Erna, now with Gerda. Am I a born cuckold? Things like this don't happen to you."

"Fight!" Georg replies. "Nothing is lost yet Go over to Gerda!"

"What am I to fight with? Tombstones? Eduard gives her venison and dedicates poems to her. In poems she can't see differences of quality—in food unfortunately she can. And I, fool that I am, have only myself to blame! I brought her here and aroused her appetite. Literally!"

"Then give up," Georg says. "Why fight? One can't fight about emotions anyway."

"No? Then why did you advise me to a minute ago?"

"Because today is Tuesday. Here comes Eduard—in his Sunday best with a rosebud in his buttonhole. You're done for."

Eduard is taken aback when he sees us. He peers over toward Gerda and then greets us with the condescension of a victor. "Herr Knobloch," Georg says, "is loyalty the badge of honor, as our beloved field marshal has declared, or isn't it?"

"It all depends," Eduard replies cautiously. "Today we have Königsberger meat balls with gravy and potatoes. A fine meal."

"Does a soldier strike his comrade in the back?" Georg asks, undeterred. "Does a brother strike his brother? Does a poet strike a fellow poet?"

"Poets attack each other all the time. That's what they live for."

"They live for open battle, not for stabs in the belly," I interpose.

Eduard grins broadly. "To the victor the spoils, my dear Ludwig; catch as catch can. Do I whine when you come in here with your miserable coupons that aren't worth peanuts?"

"Yes, you do," I say, "and how!"

At this instant Eduard is pushed aside. "Why, there you

are, children," Gerda says affectionately. "Let's eat together! I was hoping you would come!"

"You're sitting in the wine room," I reply venomously. "We're drinking beer."

"I prefer beer too. I'll sit down with you."

"With your permission, Eduard?" I ask. "Catch as catch can?"

"What has Eduard's permission to do with it?" Gerda asks. "Why, he's delighted for me to eat with his friends, aren't you, Eduard?"

The serpent is already calling him by his first name.

Eduard stammers. "Of course, no objection, naturally, a pleasure—"

He makes a fine picture, red, raging, and making an effort to smile. "That's a pretty rosebud you're wearing," I say. "Are you going courting? Or is it simple delight in nature?"

"Eduard has a very fine feeling for beauty," Gerda replies.

"So he has," I agree. "Did you have the regular lunch? Detestable Königsberger meat balls in some sort of flavorless German gravy?"

Gerda laughs. "Eduard, show them you're a cavalier. Let me invite your two friends to lunch! They keep saying you're dreadfully stingy. Let's prove they're wrong. We have—"

"Konigsberger meat balls," Eduard interrupts her. "All right, invite them to have meat balls. I'll see that they're extra good."

"Saddle of venison," Gerda says.

Eduard now resembles a defective steam engine. "These are no friends," he declares.

"What's that?"

"We're blood brothers like Valentin," I say. "Don't you remember our last conversation at the Poets' Club? Shall I repeat it? In what verse form are you writing now?"

"What were you talking about?" Gerda asks. "About nothing at all," Eduard replies abruptly. "These two never say a word of truth! Jokers, miserable jokers, that's what they are! Don't you ever realize the seriousness of life?"

"I'd like to know who realizes it more than we do, except gravediggers and coffinmakers," I say.

"There you go! All you know about death is its ridiculous aspect," Gerda suddenly remarks, out of a clear sky. "And that's why you don't know more about the seriousness of life."

We stare at her dumbfounded. That is unmistakably Ed-uard's style! I feel I am fighting for a lost cause, but I don't give up.

"From whom did you hear that?" I ask. "From the sibyl beside the dark abysses of melancholy?"

Gerda laughs. "With you life always gets around to tombstones, the first thing. That doesn't happen so fast with other people. Eduard, for example, is a nightingale!"

A blush spreads over Eduard's fat cheeks. "Well, how about the rack of venison?" Gerda asks him.

"Well, all right, why not?"

Eduard disappears. I look at Gerda. "Bravo!" I say. "A first-rate job. What are we to make of it?"

"Don't look like a husband," she replies. "Be glad you're living."

"What is living?"

"Whatever's happening at the moment."

"Bravo!" Georg says. "And my warmest thanks for the invitation. We really love Eduard; he just doesn't understand us."

"Do you love him too?" I ask Gerda.

She laughs. "How childish he is," she says to Georg. "Can't you open his eyes a little to the fact that not everything always' belongs to him? Especially when he's not around?"

"I try constantly to enlighten him," Georg replies. "The only trouble is he has a lot of internal handicaps which he calls ideals. If he ever happens to notice that they're euphemistic egoism, he'll improve."

"What is euphemistic egoism?"

"Youthful self-importance."

Gerda laughs so hard the table shakes. "I'm rather fond of that," she remarks. "But too much of it gets tiring. After all, facts are facts."

I refrain from asking her whether facts really are facts. She sits there, honest and secure, waiting, knife in hand, for her second portion of venison. Her face is rounder than before: she had already gained weight on Eduard's food, and she beams at me without a trace of embarrassment. And why should she be embarrassed? What kind of claim do I really have on her? And just now who is betraying whom? "It's true," I say. "I am hung with egoistic atavisms like a rock with moss.
Mea culpa!
"

"Right, my pet," Gerda replies. "Enjoy your life and only think when you have to."

"When does one have to?"

"When one needs money or wants to get ahead in the world."

"Bravo," Georg says again. At this moment the venison appears and conversation comes to an end. Eduard supervises us like a mother hen with its chicks. This is the first time he has not begrudged us our food. He wears a new smile that puzzles me. He is full of fat superiority, which now and then he communicates to Gerda as though it were a clandestine note exchanged in jail. But Gerda still has her old, completely open smile which, when Eduard is looking the other way, she turns on me as innocently as a child at first communion. She is younger than I am, but I have the feeling that she has at least forty years' more experience. "Eat, baby," she says.

I eat with a bad conscience and strong misgivings; the venison, a delicacy of the first order, suddenly has no savor. "Another little piece?" Eduard asks me. "Or a little more bilberry sauce?"

I stare at him, feeling as though my former recruiting sergeant had asked me to kiss him. Even Georg is alarmed. I know that later he will maintain that the reason for Eduard's incredible openhandedness is that he has slept with Gerda—but this time I know better. She will get rack of venison only as long as she has not allowed that. Once he has had her, the most she can expect is Königsberger meat balls with German gravy. And I am perfectly sure that Gerda knows this too.

Nevertheless, I decide to go away with her after the meal. Trust, to be sure, is trust, but Eduard has too many different kinds of liqueur in the bar.

Silent and star-filled, the night hangs over the city. I am seated at the window of my room waiting for Knopf, for whose benefit I have arranged the rain pipe. It extends straight into my window and thence runs above the entrance gate to Knopf's house where the short end makes a right-angle turn in the direction of the courtyard. It cannot, however, be seen from the courtyard.

I wait, reading the newspaper. The dollar has clambered up another ten thousand marks. Yesterday there was only one suicide, but to make up for it there were two strikes. After long negotiations the government employees have finally received an increase in pay which, in the meantime, has fallen so far in value that now they can barely get an extra liter of milk a week for it. Very likely no more than a box of matches next week. The number of unemployed has risen by an additional hundred and fifty thousand. Unrest has broken out through the whole Reich. New recipes for the use of garbage in the kitchen are being recommended. The wave of grippe is still on the rise. A pension increase for the aged and infirm has been turned over to a committee for further study. Their report is expected in a few months. Meanwhile, the pensioners and invalids try to keep from starvation by begging or by borrowing from friends and relatives.

Outside, there is the sound of soft footsteps. I peer cautiously out of the window. It is not Knopf; it is a pair of lovers stealing on tiptoe through the courtyard into the garden. The season is now in full swing, and lovers' necessities are more pressing than ever. Wilke was right: where are they to go to be undisturbed? If they try to slip into their furnished rooms, the landlady lies in wait to drive them out, like an angel with a flaming sword, in the name of morality and envy—in the public parks and gardens, they would be shouted at by the police or arrested—and they haven't enough money for a hotel room—so where are they to go? In our courtyard they are undisturbed. The larger memorials furnished seclusion from other couples; there they are not seen and can lean against the monuments and in their shadow whisper and embrace. The big memorial crosses are always there for stormy lovers on wet days when they cannot lie on the ground; then the girls hold onto them and are pressed close by their wooers, the rain beats upon their heated faces, mist drifts around them, their breath comes in quick pants, and their heads are held high like those of whinnying horses by their lovers' hands in their hair. The signs I have put up recently have done no good. Who worries about his toes when his whole being is aflame?