The Black Obelisk (28 page)

Suddenly I hear Knopfs footsteps in the alley. I look at the clock. It is half-past two; that slave driver of generations of unhappy recruits must be well loaded. I turn out the light Inexorably Knopf steers his course straight for the black obelisk. I seize the end of the rain pipe, press my mouth close to the opening and say: "Knopf!"

It makes a hollow sound at the other end, behind the sergeant major's back, as though it came from the grave. Knopf looks around; he can't see where the voice is coming from. "Knopf!" I repeat. "You pig! Aren't you ashamed of yourself? Did I create you to get drunk and piss on tombstones, you sow?"

Knopf whirls around again. "What?" He stammers. "Who is that?"

"Filthy loafer!" I say, and it sounds ghostly and supernatural. "How dare you ask questions! Is it your place to question your superiors? Stand at attention when I address you!"

Knopf stares at his house, whence the voice comes. All the windows are dark and closed. The door, too, is closed. He cannot see the pipe on the wall. "Stand at attention, you insubordinate scoundrel of a sergeant major!" I say. "Was it for this I bestowed on you braid for your collar and a long saber, so that you could defile monuments destined to stand in God's acre?" And more sharply in a hissing tone of command: "Heels together, you worthless tombstone wetter!"

The tone of command has its effect. Knopf comes to attention, his hand at the seams of his trousers. The moon is reflected in his wide-open eyes. "Knopf," I say in ghostly tones, "you will be degraded to second-class private if I catch you at it again! You blot on the honor of the German soldier and the United Association of Retired Sergeants Major."

Knopf listens, his head extended sidewise, like a moonstruck hound. "The Kaiser?" he whispers.

"Button up your pants and vanish!" I whisper hollowly. "And mark you this! Indulge in your nastiness just once more and you will be degraded and castrated. Castrated, I say! And now off with you, you slovenly civilian! Forward march!"

In consternation Knopf stumbles toward the door of his house. Immediately thereafter the pair of lovers start up out of the garden like two startled does and rush into the street. That, of course, was no part of my plan.

"Guests." Eduard turns his eyes toward heaven. "There, of course, you often can't help yourself. The Countess von Bell-Armin, for example—""For example of what?" I ask as he falls silent Eduard demurs. "A cavalier is discreet." Hungermann is overcome by an attack of coughing. "A fine discretion! How old is she? Eighty?"

Eduard smiles scornfully—but the next moment his smile drops from his face like a mask with a broken cord: Valentin Busch has entered. He, to be sure, is no man of letters, but nevertheless he has decided to come with us. He wants to be present when Otto Bambuss loses his virginity. "How goes it, Eduard?" he asks. "Nice that you're still alive, eh? Otherwise you wouldn't have been able to enjoy that affair with the countess."

"How do you know about it?" I ask in surprise. "I overheard you outside in the hall. You're talking pretty loud. No doubt you've had quite a bit to drink. However, I do not begrudge Eduard the countess. I'm just happy that it was I who could rescue him for that."

"It was long before the war," Eduard declares quickly. He scents a new attack on his wine cellar.

"All right, all right," Valentin replies agreeably. "Since the war you've no doubt had some fine experiences too." "In times like these?"

"Especially in times like these! When a person is desperate he is more open to adventure. And countesses, princesses, and duchesses are especially desperate just now. Inflation, the republic, no more imperial army, that's enough to break an aristocratic heart! How about a good bottle, Eduard?"

"I haven't time just now," Eduard replies with presence of mind. "Sorry, Valentin, but it won't do tonight. The club is making an expedition."

"Are you going along?" I ask.

"Of course! As treasurer! I have to, after all! Just didn't think of it a moment ago! Duty is duty."

I laugh. Valentin winks at me and says nothing about coming with us. Eduard smiles because he thinks he has saved himself a bottle. Thus everything is in complete harmony.

We get up and leave. It is a splendid evening. We are going to No. 12 Bahnstrasse. The city has two cat houses, but the one in Bahnstrasse is the more elegant. Situated outside the city, it is a small house surrounded by poplar trees. I know it well; I spent part of my youth there without knowing what it was. On afternoons when we had no school we used to go out of the city to fish and look for salamanders in the streams and ponds and butterflies and beetles in the fields. On one particularly hot day, in search of an inn where we could get lemonade, we arrived at No. 12 Bahnstrasse. The big taproom on the ground floor looked like any other taproom. It was cool, and when we asked for soft drinks we got them. After a while a number of women in morning gowns or flowery clothes came in too. They asked us what we were doing and what class we were in at school. We paid for our drinks and came back again on the next hot day, this time with the books we had taken with us to study outdoors beside a stream. The kindly women were there again and took a motherly interest in us. We found the place cool and agreeable, and since no one but us was there in the afternoons, we stayed and began to do our lessons. The women looked over our shoulders and helped us as though they were our teachers. They saw to it that we did our written exercises, they checked up on our marks, they listened to us recite what we had to learn by heart, and gave us chocolate when we were good or, on occasion, a gentle cuff on the ear when we were lazy. We thought nothing of it; we were still at that happy age when women mean nothing. After a short time, these ladies, smelling of violets and roses, assumed the roles of mother and teacher; they were very much interested in us, and the moment we appeared at the door one of these goddesses was likely to ask excitedly: "How did the geography class go? All right?" At that time my mother was in the hospital a great deal, and so it happened that I got part of my education in the Werdenbrück cat house, and I can only say that it was stricter than if I had got it at home. We went there for two summers, then we began to take long bikesand so had less time, and my family moved to another part of the city.

After that I was in Bahnstrasse on one other occasion, during the war. It was the day before we were to go to the front. We were just eighteen, some of us not quite eighteen, and most of us had never been with a woman. But we didn't want to be shot without knowing something about it and therefore we went, five in number, to Bahnstrasse, which we already knew from that earlier time. Business was brisk there and we were served with schnaps and beer. After we had drunk enough to feel courageous we decided to make our bid for happiness. Willy, more enterprising than the rest of us, was the first. He stopped Fritzi, the most seductive of the ladies present. "Darling, how about it?"

"Sure," Frizi replied through the noise and smoke, without really looking at him. "Have you the money?"

"More than enough." Willy showed her his pay and the money his mother had given him to have a mass said for his safe return from the war.

"Well then! Long live the fatherland!" Fritzi said somewhat absently, looking in the direction of the beer bar. "Come upstairs!"

Willy got up and put his cap on the table. Fritzi stared at his fiery red hair. It was of a unique brilliance and, of course, she recognized it at once even after seven years. "Just a minute," she said. "Isn't your name Willy?"

"Absolutely!" Willy declared beaming.

"And didn't you use to do your schoolwork here?"

"Right!"

"So—and now you want to come up to my room with me?"

"Of course! We already know each other."

Willy was grinning all over. The next second he received a terrific blow on the ear. "You pig!" Fritzi said. "You want to come to bed with me? That's the limit!"

"What do you mean?" Willy stammered. "All the others—"

"All the others? What do they matter to me? Have I studied the catechism with them? Have I done their homework? Have I seen to it that they didn't catch cold, you snot-nosed rascal?"

"But now I'm seventeen and a half—"

"Shut up! Why, it's like wanting to rape your mother! Out of here, you juvenile delinquent!"

"He's going to war tomorrow," I said. "Have you no patriotism?"

She looked me in the eyes. "Aren't you the one who let the snakes loose? We had to shut the place up for three days while we searched for those reptiles!"

"I didn't let them loose," I said in self-defense. "They got away from me." Before I could say any more, I, too, had been boxed on the ear. "Lousy rascals! Out with you!"

The noise brought the Madame in. Indignantly Fritzi explained the situation to her. She, too, recognized Willy instantly. "The redhead!" she gasped. She weighed two hundred and forty pounds and shook with laughter like a mountain of jelly in an earthquake. "And you! Isn't your name Lud-wig?"

"Yes," Willy answered for me. "But we're soldiers now and we have a right to sexual intercourse."

"So, you have a right!" The Madame heaved with renewed laughter. "Do you still remember, Fritzi, how scared he was that his father would find out he had thrown a stink bomb in Bible class? Now he has a right to sexual intercourse! Ho ho ho!"

Fritzi couldn't see the humor of the situation. She was genuinely angry and offended. "As though my own son—"

The Madame had to be held upright by two men. Tears streamed down her face. Bubbles of saliva formed at the corners of her mouth. She held her belly with both hands. "Lemonade," she gasped. "Waldmeister lemonade! Wasn't that—" coughing, gasping—"your favorite drink?"

"We drink schnaps and beer now," I replied. "Everyone grows up sometime."

"Grows up!" a renewed attack of gasping on the part of the Madame, mad barking by her two bulldogs which heard her and thought she was being attacked. We withdrew cautiously. "Out, you thankless swine!" the irreconcilable Fritzi screamed after us.

"All right," Willy said at the door. "Then we'll just have to go to Rollstrasse."

We stood outside in our uniforms with our deadly weapons and our stinging ears. But we did not get to Rollstrasse, the city's other cat house. It was a two-hour walk, all the way to the other side of Werdenbrück, and so we had ourselves shaved instead. This, too, was for the first time in our lives, and since we had no experience of intercourse, the difference did not seem as great to us as it would later on—especially since the barber insulted us too, by recommend
ing erasers for our beards. Later on we met more of
our
friends and got pretty drunk and forgot the whole thing. So it came about that we marched into the field as virgins and seventeen of us fell without ever knowing what a woman is. Willy and I lost our virginity half a year later in an
estaminet
in Houthoulst in Flanders. On that occasion Willy got a dose, was taken to the field hospital, and thus escaped the Battle of Flanders in which the seventeen virgins fell. This proved, as we could see even at that time, that virtue is not always rewarded.

We wander through the mild summer night. Otto Bambuss sticks to me as the only one who admits to knowing the cat house. The others have been there too, but act innocent, and the only one who brags that he has been an almost daily guest there, the dramatist and author of the monograph "Adam," Paul Schneeweiss, is lying: he has never been there.

Otto's hands are sweating. He expects priestesses of lust, bacchantes, and demonic beasts of prey and is not quite sure but that he will be driven back in Eduard's Opel car with his liver torn out or at least without testicles. I comfort him. "People don't get mangled in the bordello more than once or twice a week at most, Otto! And the injuries are usually not too serious. Day before yesterday Fritzi tore off a guest's ear; but so far as I know you can have an ear sewn on again or replaced by a very natural-looking celluloid one."