The Black Obelisk (36 page)

Riesenfeld snorts aloud. "God in Heaven, what breasts! You could easily put a half-liter stein on them with no danger of its falling!"

"That's an idea," I say.

Riesenfeld's eyes sparkle. "Does Frau Watzek do that all the time?"

"She's pretty casual. No one can see her—except us over here, of course."

"Man alive!" Riesenfeld says. "And you want to give up a position like this, you total idiot?"

"Yes," I say, and am silent while Riesenfeld steals to the window like a Würtemberg Indian, his glass in one hand, the bottle of schnaps in the other.

Lisa is combing her hair. "Once I wanted to be a sculptor," Reisenfeld says without removing his eyes from her. "With a model like that it would have been worthwhile! Damn it, the chances a man neglects!"

"Did you plan to work in granite?"

"What's that got to do with it?"

"When you use granite the models grow old before the work of art is finished," I say. "It's so hard. With a temperament like yours you should have chosen clay. Otherwise you'd have left nothing but unfinished works."

Riesenfeld groans. Lisa has taken off her skirt but has then turned out the light and gone into the next room. The head of the Odenwald Works clings to the window for a while longer, then turns around. "It's easy for you!" he growls. "You have no demon sitting on your neck. A suckling calf at most."

"
Merci
"
I say. "It's not a demon in your case either; it's a billy goat. Anything else?"

"A letter," Riesenfeld announces. "Will you deliver a letter for me?"

"To whom?"

"Frau Watzek! Who else?"

I am silent.

"I'll look around for a job for you," Riesenfeld says.

I continue to be silent, watching the perspiring, disappointed sculptor. I intend to keep faith with Georg, even if it costs me my future.

"I'd have done it anyway," Riesenfeld explains hypocritically.

"I know you would," I say. "But why write? Letters never do any good. Besides, you're leaving tonight. Postpone the whole thing till you come back."

Riesenfeld finishes his schnaps. "It may seem odd to you, but one is extremely disinclined to postpone matters of this sort."

At this moment Lisa comes out of her front door. She is wearing a black tailor-made dress and the highest heels I have ever seen. Riesenfeld spies her at the same instant I do. He snatches his hat from the table and rushes out. "This is the moment!"

I watch him shoot down the street. Hat in hand, he respectfully strolls up beside Lisa, who has looked around twice. Then the two disappear around the comer. I wonder what will come of it. Georg Kroll will be certain to let me know. Quite possibly the lucky fellow will get a second Swedish-granite monument out of the business without losing Lisa.

Wilke, the coffinmaker, is coming across the courtyard. "How about a meeting tonight?" he shouts through the window. I nod. I have been expecting him to propose it. "Is Bach coming?" I ask.

"Yes. I've just been getting cigarettes for him."

We are sitting in Wilke's workshop surrounded by shavings, coffins, potted geraniums, and pots of glue. There is a smell of resin and fresh-cut pine wood. Wilke is planing down the cover for the twins' coffin. He has decided to include a garland of flowers, gratis, and to embellish it with artificial gold leaf. When his interest is aroused, he cares nothing about profit. And now it is aroused.

Kurt Bach is sitting on a black lacquered coffin with fittings of imitation bronze; I on a showpiece of natural oak in a dull finish. We have beer, sausage, bread, and cheese before us and have decided to keep Wilke company during the ghostly hour. Between twelve and one at night, the coffinmaker usually grows melancholy, sleepy, and rather scared. It is his weak hour. One wouldn't believe it, but at that time he is afraid of ghosts, and the canary that hangs over his workbench in a parrot cage is not company enough for him. It is then that he becomes discouraged, talks about the pointlessness of existence, and takes to drink. We have often found him next morning snoring on a bed of shavings in his largest coffin, the one he was so badly cheated on four years ago. The coffin was built for the giant of the Bleichfeld Circus, which was playing for a time in Werdenbrück. After a dinner of Limburger cheese, hard-boild eggs, bologna, army bread, and schnaps, he died—apparently died, that is, for while Wilke was slaving through the night, in defiance of all ghosts, to complete the giant's coffin, the latter suddenly rose with a start from his deathbed, and, instead of informing Wilke on the spot, as a decent person would have done, finished up a half-bottle of schnaps that was left over and went to sleep. Next morning, he maintained he had no money and, besides, had not ordered a coffin for himself, an objection to which there was no answer. The circus moved on, and since no one would admit to having ordered the coffin, Wilke was left with it on his hands, and thereby acquired for a time a somewhat embittered view of the world. He was particularly incensed at young Dr. Wullmann, whom he considered responsible for the whole thing. Wullmann had been an army doctor and had seen two years' service; as a result he had grown venturesome. By treating so many half-dead and three-quarters-dead soldiers in the field hospital without being answerable to anyone for their deaths or misset bones, he had picked up a lot of interesting experience. For this reason he slipped in at night to have one more look at the giant and gave him an injection of some sort. He had often seen dead men come to life in the field hospital. The giant, too, promptly responded. Since that time, Wilke has had a certain prejudice against Wullmann, which the latter has not been able to eradicate despite the fact that he has recently behaved more sensibly and has sent families of his ex-patients to Wilke. For Wilke, the giant coffin has been a permanent warning against credulity, and I believe it was also what prompted him to go home with the twins' mother—he wanted to assure himself that the dead were not galloping around on hobbyhorses. It would have been too much for Wilke's self-respect to have been left with a square, twins' coffin, in addition to the unsalable giant coffin, and thus to have become a kind of Barnum of the cof-finmaker's guild. The thing that angered him most about the Wullmann business was that he had no chance for private conversation with the giant. He would have forgiven anything for an interview about the Beyond. After all, the giant had been as good as dead for several hours, and Wilke, as amateur scientist and dreader of ghosts, would have given a great deal to get information about existence on the other side.

Kurt Bach has no patience with all this. A son of nature, he is still a member of the Society of Freethinkers in Berlin, whose motto is: "Live and rejoice while you are here, beyond the grave there's naught to fear." It's strange that, despite this fact, he has become a sculptor of the Beyond, portraying angels, dying lions, and eagles, but that was not his original intention. As a young man he considered himself a kind of nephew to Michelangelo.

The canary is singing. The light keeps it awake. Wilke's plane makes a hissing sound. Beyond the open windows lies the night. "How are you feeling?" I ask Wilke. "Do you hear the Beyond knocking yet?"

"So-so. It's only eleven thirty. At this hour I feel as if I were out for a walk in a décolleté gown and a full beard. Uncomfortable."

"Be a monist," Kurt Bach urges. "When you don't believe in anything, you never feel especially bad. Or ridiculous either."

"Nor good, for that matter," Wilke says.

"Perhaps. But certainly not as though you had a full beard and were wearing a décolleté" gown. I only feel that way when I look out the window at night and there is the sky with all its stars and the millions of light years and I am supposed to believe that over all this sits a kind of superman who cares what becomes of Kurt Bach."

The son of nature contentedly cuts himself a piece of sausage and begins to chew. Wilke is growing more nervous. Midnight is near, and at this hour he does not relish such conversation. "Cold, isn't it?" he says. "Autumn already."

"Just leave the window open," I tell him as he is about to close it. "That won't do you any good; ghosts can go through glass. Instead, take a look at that acacia out there. It's the Lisa Watzek of acacias. Listen to the wind rustling in it! Like silk petticoats rustling to the music of a waltz. But someday it will be cut down and you will make coffins out of it—"

"Not of acacia wood. Coffins are made of oak or pine with mahogany veneer— "

"All right, all right, Wilke! Is there any schnaps left?"

Kurt Bach hands me the bottle. Wilke suddenly jumps and almost cuts a finger off. "What was that?" he asks in alarm.

A beetle has flown against the electric light. "Just quiet down, Alfred," I say. "That's not a messenger from the Beyond. Just a simple drama of the animal world. A dung beetle striving toward the sun—represented for him by a one-hundred-watt bulb in the back house at No. 3 Hackenstrasse."

By agreement, from shortly before midnight until the end of the ghostly hour we call Wilke by his first name. It makes him feel more secure. After that we become formal again.

"I don't understand how anyone can live without religion," Wilke says to Kurt Bach. "What do you do when you wake up at night during a thunderstorm?"

"In the summer?"

"In the summer, of course; there aren't any thunderstorms in winter."

"You drink something cold," Kurt Bach explains, "and then go back to sleep."

Wilke shakes his head. During the ghostly hour he is not only scared but very religious.

"I used to know a man who went to a bordello during thunderstorms," I say. "He was absolutely compelled to. At other times he was impotent; thunderstorms changed that. One sight of a thunderhead and he would reach for the telephone and make an appointment with Fritzi. The summer of 1920 was the finest time of his life; there were thunderstorms all the time. Often four or five a day."

"What's become of him?" Wilke, the amateur scientist, asks with interest.

"He's dead," I say. "Died during the last and biggest thunderstorm, in October 1920."

The night wind slams a door in the house opposite. Bells ring from the steeples. It is midnight Wilke gulps down a schnaps.

"How about a stroll to the cemetery?" asks the sometimes unfeeling atheist Bach.

Wilke's mustache quivers with horror in the wind blowing in through the window. "And you call yourselves friends!" he says reproachfully.

Immediately thereafter he is startled again. "What was that?"

"A pair of lovers out there. Stop working for a while, Alfred. Eat! Ghosts stay away from people while they're eating. Haven't you any sprats?"

Alfred gives me the look of a dog that has been kicked while answering the call of nature. "Do you have to remind me of that now? Of my unhappy love life and the loneliness of a man in his best years?"

"You're a victim of your profession," I say. "Not every
one can say that of himself. Come to
souper!
That's what this meal is called in the fashionable world."

We go to work on the sausage and cheese and we open the bottles of beer. The canary is given a lettuce leaf and breaks into a song of praise, with no thought as to whether it is an atheist or believer. Kurt Bach raises his clay-colored face and sniffs. "It smells of stars," he exclaims.

"What's that?" Wilke puts down his bottle among the shavings. "What in the world does that mean?"

"At midnight the world smells of stars."

"Cut out the jokes! How can anyone even want to go on living when he believes in nothing and yet talks like that?"

"Are you trying to convert me?" Kurt Bach asks. "You celestial inheritance hunter?"

"No, no! Or yes, if you like. Wasn't that something rustling?"

"Yes," Kurt says. "Love."

Outside we hear more cautious footsteps. A second pair of lovers vanishes into the forest of tombstones. The white blur of a girl's dress can be seen disappearing into the darkness.

"Why do people look so different when they're dead?" Wilke asks. "Even twins."

"Because they're no longer disguised," Kurt Bach replies.

Wilke stops chewing. "Disguised how?"

"By life," says the monist

Wilke smooths his mustache and goes on chewing. "At this hour you might at least stop this nonsense! Isn't anything sacred to you?"

Kurt Bach laughs tonelessly. "You poor vine! You always have to have something to cling to."

"And you?"

"So do I." Bach's eyes in the clay-colored face gleam as though made of glass. The son of nature is usually taciturn, just an unsuccessful sculptor with broken dreams; but sometimes those latent dreams rise again as they did years ago, and then he suddenly becomes a superannuated satyr with visions.