Georg smiles undismayed. "It's not as dangerous as that We have to redeem our note in three weeks. As long as we get the money before that we are ahead of the game—even if we sell at cost."
"Ahead of the game!" I reply. "And illusion until the next dollar quotation."
"Sometimes you're too commercial." Georg meticulously lights a cigar worth five thousand marks. "Instead of complaining, you should rather regard the inflation as a reversed symbol of life. At the end of each day your life has one day's duration less. We live our life on capital, not income. Each day the dollar rises, but each night your life is quoted at one day less. There you have the subject for a sonnet."
"That's a theme for Eduard Knoblach." I look at the self satisfied Socrates of Hackenstrasse. Small beads of sweat adorn his bald head like pearls on a bright dress. "It's amazing how philosophical a fellow can be when he has not slept by himself," I say.
Georg does not move an eyelash. "What would you expect?" he asks me calmly. "Philosophy out to be serene, not tormented. To mix it up with metaphysical speculation is just like mixing sensual pleasure with what the members of your Poets' Club call ideal love. It makes an intolerable mishmash.
"Mishmash?" I say, somehow hurt. "Hold on a minute, you bourgeois adventurer! You butterfly collector, trying to impale everything on needles! Don't you know that without what you call mishmash you're as good as dead?"
"Absolutely not. I just keep things separate." Georg blows cigar smoke into my face. "I prefer to endure the transitoriness of life with dignified philosophic melancholy rather than commit the vulgar error of confusing some Minna or Anna with the chilly secret of existence and of assuming that the world would come to an end if Minna or Anna preferred some other Karl or Josef. Or if an Erna preferred some overgrown infant in English tweeds."
He grins. I stare coldly into his disloyal eye. "A cheap crack, worthy of Heinrich!" I say. "You simple connoisseur of what's available! Will you please tell me then why you read so much passion the magazines that are crammed full of unattainable sirens, scandals of high society, great ladies of the theater, and movie queens?"
Georg once more blows three hundred marks' worth of smoke into my eyes. "I do that for purposes of fantasy. Have you never heard of heavenly and earthly love? Only a short time ago you were trying to combine them in your Erna and learned a sound lesson, you simple-minded delicatessen dealer in love, trying to keep sauerkraut and caviar on the same shelf! haven't you found out yet that then the sauerkraut will never taste like caviar but the caviar will always taste like sauerkraut? I keep them carefully separated. Now come, let's go and torment Eduard Knoblach. Today he's serving beef stew with noodles."
I nod and go without a word to get my hat. Inadvertently Georg has dealt me a heavy face blow—but I'm damned if I'm going to let him know it.
When I return Gerda Schneider is sitting in the office. She is wearing a green sweater, a short dress, and big earrings with artificial stones. On the left side of her sweater she has pinned one of the roses from Riesenfeld's bouquet, which must be extraordinary durable. Pointing at it, she says: "Merci! Everyone was envious. That was a bush for a prima donna."
I look at her and think: very likely there sits exactly what Georg means by earthly love—clear, determined, young and without affectation. I sent her flowers, and she has come, and that's all there is to it. She has interpreted the flowers as any intelligent person should. Instead of acting a tedious part, here she is. She has accepted, and there is really nothing more to talk about.
"What are you doing this afternoon?" she asks.
"I'm working until five. Then I'm going to give a tutoring lesson to an idiot."
"What in? Idiocy?"
I grin. "Come to think of it, yes."
"That would be until six. Come to the Alstädter Hof afterward. I exercise there."
"All right," I say without pausing to consider.
Gerda gets up. "Well then—"
She hold up her face to me. I am surprised. I hadn't expected so much from my gift of flowers. But why not, really? Very likely Georg is right: one oughtn't to combat the pains of love with philosophy—only with another woman. Cautiously I kiss Gerda on the cheek. "Dummkopf!" she says and kisses me warmly on the mouth. "Traveling artistes don't have time for foolery. In two weeks I must be off. Well then, till tonight."
She walks out, erect, with her firm, strong legs and strong shoulders. On her head she has a red Basque beret. She seems to love color. Outside she stops beside the obelisk and glances at our Golgotha. "That's our inventory," I say.
She nods, "Does it bring you any income?"
"So-so—in these times—"
"And you're employed here?"
"Yes. Funny, isn't it?"
"Nothing's funny," Gerda says. "What about me spending my time in the Red Mill sticking my head backward between my legs? Do you think God had that in mind when he made me? Well, till six."
Old Frau Kroll comes out of the garden with a sprinkling can in her hand. "That's a respectable girl," she says, glancing after Gerda. "What is she?"
"She's an acrobat."
"Well, an acrobat. She can do saltos, handstands, and dislocations like a human serpent."
"You seem to know quite a lot about her. Did she want to buy something?"
"Not yet."
She laughs. Her spectacles glitter. "My dear Ludwig," she says, "you can't imagine how silly your present way of life will seem to you some day when you're seventy."
"I'm not so very sure about that," I tell her. "It seems pretty silly to me right now. What, by the way, is your opinion of love?"
"Of what?"
"Love. Heavenly and earthly love."
Frau Kroll laughs heartily. "That's something I've forgotten long since, thank God!"
I am Arthur Bauer's bookstore. This is payday for the tutor. Arthur Jr. has seized the opportunity to put a few tacks on my chair by way of greeting. I wanted to stick his sheep's head in the goldfish bowl that decorates their plush-upholstered living room, but I had to control myself—otherwise Arthur, Sr. would not have paid, and Arthur, Jr. knows this.
"So it's yoga," says Arthur, Sr., jovially pushing toward me a stack of books. "I've put aside all we have. Yoga, Buddhism, asceticism, omphaloskepsis—do you plan to become a fakir?"
I look at him disapprovingly. He is a little man with a pointed beard and nimble eyes. Another shot, I think, aimed at my beleaguered heart! But I'll get the best of you, you cheap mockingbird; you're no Georg! I say to him sharply: "What's the meaning of life, Herr Bauer?"
Arthur looks at me as expectantly as a poodle. "We'll?"
"Well what?"
"What's the point? You're making a joke, aren't you?"
"No," I reply cooly. "That's a test question for the salvation of my young soul. I'm putting it to a lot of people, especially those who ought to know."
Arthur plucks at his beard as though it were a harp. "So you seriously ask a nonsensical question like that on a Monday afternoon at the busiest time in this shop and expect an answer too?"
"Yes, I do," I say. "But admit it at once! You don't know either! Despite all your books!"
Arthur relinquishes his beard to run his hands through his hair. "Good God, the things people think of to worry about! Take the matter up in your poetry club!"
"In the poetry club there's nothing but poetical evasion. What I want is the truth. Otherwise why am I alive and not a worm?"
"The truth?" Arthur bleats. "That's something for Pontius Pilate! It has nothing to do with me. I am bookseller, husband, and father; that's enough for me."
I look at the bookseller, husband, and father. He has a mole on the right side of his face beside his nose. "So that's enough," I say cuttingly.
"That's enough." Arthur replies firmly. "Indeed, sometimes it's too much."
"Was it enough when you were twenty-five?"
Arthur opens his blue eyes wide as he can. "When I was twenty-five? No. I still wanted to become it at that
time."
"What?" I ask hopefully. "A human being?"
"Owner of this bookstore, husband, and father. A human being I am anyway. But not yet a fakir."
He waddles quickly away after this harmless second shot to wait on a lady with a copious, drooping bosom who is looking for a novel by Rudolf Herzog. I quickly leaf through the books about the happiness of renunciation and promptly lay the aside. During the day one is considerably less receptive to this sort of thing than at night when one is alone and there is nothing else available.
I walk over to the shelves that contain the works on religion and philosophy. They are Arthur Bauer's pride. Here he has, collected in one place, pretty much everything that humanity has thought in a couple of thousand years about the meaning of life, and so it should be possible for a couple of hundred thousand marks to become adequately informed on the subject—for even less really, let us say for twenty to thirty thousand marks; for if the meaning of life were knowable, a single book should suffice. But where is it? I glance up and down the rows. The section is very extensive, and this suddenly makes me distrustful. It seems to me that with truth and the meaning of life the situation is the same as with hair tonics—each firm praises its own as the only satisfactory one, and yet Georg Kroll, who has tried them all, still has a bald head just as he should have known from the beginning he would have. If there were a hair tonic that really grew hair, there would be only that one and all the others would long ago have gone out of business.
Bauer comes back. "Well, found something?"
"No."
He looks at the volumes I have pushed aside. "So then, there's no point in being a fakir, eh?"
I do not directly contradict the silly joker. Instead I say: "There's no point in any books at all. If you look at everything that is written here and then at the way things are in the world, all you'll want to read is the menu in the Wal-halla and the family notes in the daily paper."
"What's that?" asks the bookseller, husband, and father in quick alarm. "Reading is education! Everyone knows that."
"Really?"
"Of course! Otherwise what would become of us booksellers?"
Arthur rushes off again. A man with a closely trimmed mustache is asking for a work entitled Undefeated in the Field. It is the great success of the postwar period. In it an unemployed general proves that the German army was victorious in battle to the end.
Arthur sells him the gift edition in leather with gold edges. Gratified by the sale he returns. "How would you like something classical? Second hand of course!"
I shake my head and point silently at a book I have found in the meantime on the display table. It is called The Man of the World, a Breviary of Good Manners for All Walks of Life. Patiently I wait for the inescapable, shallow jokes about fakir-cavaliers and the like. But Arthur cracks no jokes. "A useful book nowadays," he tells me earnestly. "It should come out in a large, cheap edition. Well then, we're quits, eh?"
"Not quite. You still owe me something." I lift a thin volume—Plato's Symposium. "I'll take this too."
Arthur does some mental arithmetic. "It doesn't quite come out, but all right. We'll call the Symposium second hand."
I have him wrap up the Breviary of Good Manners, for I would not for the world be caught with it. Nevertheless, I determine to study it that very night. A little polish harms no one, and Erna's contemptuous comments still ring in my ears. The war made savages of us, but today one can only afford coarse manners if one has a thick wallet to make up for them. That, however, is something I do not have.
Full of contentment I step out into the street. The uproar of existence greets me instantly. Willy roars by in a fiery red town car, without seeing me. I press the breviary for men of the world firmly under my arm. Forward into life! I think. Here's to earthly love! Away with dreams! Away with ghosts! That goes for Erna as well as for Isabelle. As for my soul, I still have Plato.
The Altstädter Hof is an inn frequented by wandering actors, gypsies, and carters. On the second floor there are a dozen rooms for rent and behind there is a large room with a piano and gymnastic equipment where variety artists can practice their numbers. The chief business, however, is the bar. It not only serves as a meeting place for traveling actors but is frequented by the underworld of the town as well.
I open the door to the back room. Renée de la Tour is standing beside the piano practicing a duet. In the background a man with a bamboo cane is training two white spitzes and a poodle. To the right two muscular women are lying on a mat smoking. And on the trapeze, her feet inserted beneath the bar and between her hands, her back thrust through, Gerda Schneider swings at me like the winged figurehead of a galleon.
The two muscular women are in bathing suits. As they loll about, their muscles play. No doubt they are the lady wrestlers on the program of the Altstädter Hof. Renée roars good evening to me in a first-class drill sergeant's voice and comes over. The dog trainer whistles. The dogs throw somersaults in the air. Gerda whishes smoothly back and forth on the trapeze, reminding me of the moment in the Red Mill when she looked up at me from between her legs. She is wearing black tights and has a red cloth knotted around her hair.
"She's practicing," Renée explains. "She wants to go back to the circus."
"The circus?" I look at Gerda with new interest. "Was she ever in the circus?"
"Of course. She grew up there. But the circus went broke. It couldn't go on paying for the lions' meat."
"Was she in the lion act?"
Renée laughs like a sergeant major and looks at me mockingly. "That would be exciting, wouldn't it? No, she was an acrobat."
Gerda whooshes over us again. She looks at me with staring eyes as though she wanted to hypnotize me. But she is not seeing me at all; her eyes stare from exertion.
"Is Willy really rich?" Renée de la Tour asks.
"I believe he is. What people call rich today. He has various enterprises and a pile of stocks that go up every day. Why?"
"I like men to be rich." Renée gives her soprano laugh. "All women like that," she roars then as though on the drill field.
"I've noticed that," I tell her bitterly. "A rich profiteer is better than a poor but honest employee."
Renée shakes with laughter. "Wealth and honesty don't go together, baby! Not these days! Probably they never did."
"Only if you inherit it or win it in a lottery."
"Not even then. Money ruins character, don't you know that?"
"I know. But then why do you consider it so important?"
"Because I don't care about character," Renée chirps in a prim, old-maid's voice. "I love comfort and security."
Gerda whirls toward us in a perfect salto. She comes to rest half a yard in front of me, rocking back and forth on her toes and laughing. "Renée is lying," she says.
"Did you hear what we were saying?"
"All women lie," Renée says in her angel's voice. "When they don't they're not worth bothering about"
"Amen," the dog trainer replies.
Gerda smooths back her hair. "I'm through here. Wait till I change."
She goes to a door marked Dressing Room. Ren£e looks after her. "She's pretty," she remarks impartially. "Look how she carries herself. She walks properly, and that's the most important thing in a woman. Bottom in, not out. Acrobats learn how."
"I heard that once before," I say. "From a connoisseur of women and granite. How do you walk properly?"
"When you feel as if you were holding a five-mark piece with your tail—and then forget about it."
I try to picture that and fail. It has been too long since I have seen a five-mark piece. But I know a woman who can yank a fair-sized nail out of the wall that way. She is Frau Beckmann, the girl friend of Karl Brill, the shoemaker. She's a powerful woman, made of iron. Karl Brill has won many a bet on her, and I myself have had an opportunity to admire her act. A nail is driven into the workshop wall, not too deep, of course, but deep enough so that it would take a good jerk by hand to
pull it out. Then Karl goes to awaken Frau Beckmann. She appears among the drinkers in the shop wearing a light dressing gown, sober, serious, and matter-of-fact. A little cotton is wound around the head of the nail so she won't hurt herself, then Frau Beckmann takes up her position behind a low screen with her back to the wall, leaning slightly forward, her dressing gown discreetly wrapped around her, her hands resting on the screen. She maneuvers a little to get hold of the nail with her hams, suddenly tenses, straightens up, then relaxes—and the nail falls to the floor. Usually a little chalk trickles after it. Without a word or any sign of triumph Frau Beckmann turns around, disappears up the stairs, and Karl Brill collects the bets from his astounded drinking companions. It is strictly a sporting event; no one looks upon Frau Beckmann's performance from any but a purely professional point of view. And no one ventures a loose word about it. She would beat his head in. She is as strong as a giant; the two lady wrestlers are anemic children by comparison.
The Black Obelisk Page 12
