The Black Obelisk

by Erich Maria Remarque

  "That's a good reason. But why take the long way around?"

  Riesenfeld grins. "It's my demon. The double nature of man. Never heard of it, eh?"

  "Haven't I though? I am the living prototype."

  Riesenfeld laughs insultingly, just like Wernicke this morning. "You?"

  "The same sort of thing exists on a somewhat more intellectual level," I explain.

  Riesenfeld takes a swallow and sighs. "Reality and imagination! Eternal youth and eternal discord! Or—" recovering himself he adds, ironically— "in your case, as a poet, natural yearning and fulfillment, God and the flesh, cosmos and locus—"

  Fortunately the trumpets begin again. Georg comes back to the table with Lisa. She is a vision in apricot-colored crepe de Chine^ After Riesenfeld found out about her plebeian background, he demanded from us as restitution that we all be his guests at the Red Mill. Now he bows in front of Lisa. "A tango, gnädige Frau. Would you—" Lisa is a head taller than Riesenfeld and we expect an interesting performance. But to our amazement the Granite King proves himself a magnificent master of the tango. He is not only an adept in the Argentinian, but also in the Brazilian and apparently several other varieties. Like an expert skater he pirouettes around the dance floor with the disconcerted Lisa. "How are you feeling?" I ask Georg. "Don't take it too hard. Mammon versus love! A short while ago I got several lessons in that subject myself. Even from you, piquantly enough. How did Lisa escape from your room this morning?"

  "It was difficult. Riesenfeld wanted to take over the office as an observation post. He planned to keep his eye on her window. I thought I could scare him off by revealing to hira who Lisa is. That did no good. He bore it like a man. Finally I succeeded in dragging him into the kitchen for a few minutes for coffee. That was the moment for Lisa. When Riesenfeld went back to spying from the office, she was smiling graciously at him out of her own window."

  "In the kimono with the storks?"

  "In one with windmills."

  I look at him. He nods. "Traded for a small headstone. It was necessary. Anyway Riesenfeld, bowing and scraping, shouted an invitation for this evening."

  "He wouldn't have dared to when she was still called 'de la Tour.'"

  "He did it respectfully. Lisa accepted because she thought it would help us in our business."

  "And you believe that?"

  "Yes," Georg replies happily.

  Riesenfeld and Lisa come back from the dance floor. Riesenfeld is sweating. Lisa is as cool as an Easter lily. To my immense astonishment I suddenly see another figure appear among the toy balloons behind the bar. It is Otto Bambuss. He stands there, lost in confusion and about as incongruous as Bodendiek would be. Then Willy's red head bobs up beside him, and from somewhere I *hear Renée de la Tour's commanding tones: "Bodmer, at ease!"

  I come to. "Otto," I say to Bambuss, "what brought you here?"

  "I did," Willy answers. "I wanted to do something for German literature. Otto must soon return to his village. There he will have time to grind out poems about the sinfulness of the world. At the moment, however, it is his duty to observe."

  Otto smiles gently. His shortsighted eyes blink. Perspiration stands on his forehead. Willy sits down with him and Renée at the table next to ours. Between Lisa and Renée there has been a second-long, point-blank duel of eyes. Both turn back to their tables, unbeaten, confident, and smiling.

  Otto leans over to me. "I have completed the 'Tigress' cycle," he whispers. "Finished it last night. I'm already at work on a new series: The Scarlet Woman.' Or perhaps I'll call it "The Great Beast of the Apocalypse' and write it in free verse. It's magnificent. The spirit has descended on me!"

  "Good! But what do you expect to find here?"

  "Everything," Otto replies, beaming with happiness. "I always expect everything in a place where I've never been before. I hear you really do know a circus lady!"

  "The ladies I know are not for beginners to practice on," I say. "You don't seem to know anything at all, you feebleminded camel, otherwise you wouldn't behave like such a thickhead! So, pay attention to rule number one: hands off other people's women—you haven't the right physique for it."

  Otto coughs. "Aha," he says then. "Bourgeois prejudice! I wasn't talking about wives."

  "Neither was I, you simpleton. With wives the rules are not so strict. But why are you so sure that I know a circus lady? I have already told you she was a ticket seller in a flea circus."

  "Willy told me that wasn't true. She is a circus acrobat."

  "So that's it. Willy!" I see his red head bobbing above the dancers like a buoy on the ocean. "Listen to me, Otto," I say. "It's entirely the other way around. Willy's girl is from the circus. The one with the blue hat. And she loves literature. So now's your chance! Go to it!"

  Bambuss looks at me distrustfully. "I'm talking honestly to you, you half-witted idealist!" I say.

  Riesenfeld is dancing with Lisa again. "What's wrong with us, Georg?" I ask. "Over there a business friend of yours is trying to cut you out with a woman, and now I have just been requested to lend Gerda in the interests of German poetry. Are we sheep, or are our ladies so desirable?"

  "Both. Besides, someone else's "woman is always five times as desirable as one that's unattached. It's an old moral law. But in a few minutes Lisa will come down with a bad headache. She will go out to the dressing room to get aspirin, and then she will send a waiter with the news that she has had to go home and that we are to go on having a good time."

  "A blow for Riesenfeld. Then he won't sell us anything tomorrow."

  "He will sell us all the more. You ought to know that. For that very reason. Where is Gerda?"

  "Her engagement doesn't begin for three days. I hope she is in the Altstädter Hof. But I am afraid she's in the Walhalla with Eduard. She calls that economizing on dinner. I can't do much about it. She has such excellent reasons that I would have to be thirty years older to answer them. But you just keep your eye on Lisa. Perhaps she won't get a headache after all and can help us in our business even more."

  Otto Bambuss leans over to me again. Behind his spectacles his eyes are those of a terrified herring. "Manège would be a good title for a volume of circus poems, wouldn't it? With reproductions of pictures by Toulouse-Lautrec."

  "Why not by Rembrandt, Dürer, and Michelangelo?"

  "Did they make circus drawings?" Otto asks, seriously interested.

  I give him up. "Drink, my boy," I say in fatherly tones. "And enjoy your brief life, for someday soon you will be murdered. Out of jealousy, you moon-calf!"

  Flattered, he drinks to me and then looks thoughtfully over at Renée, whose kingfisher-blue hat is bobbing on her blond ringlets. She looks like an animal trainer on Sunday.

  Lisa and Riesenfeld come back. "I don't know what's the matter," Lisa says. "Suddenly I have a terrible headache. I'll just go and get an aspirin—"

  Before Riesenfeld can spring to his feet, she has left the table. Georg looks at me with abominable self-satisfaction and reaches for a cigar.

  16.

  "The sweet light," Isabelle says. "Why is it growing weaker? Because we are tired? We lose it every night. When we are asleep the world goes away. Where are we then? Does the world always come back, Rudolf?"

  We are standing at the edge of the garden looking through the trellised gate at the landscape beyond. The early evening lies on ripening fields that extend down to the woods oo either side of the chestnut allée.

  "It always comes back," I say, and add carefully: "Always, Isabelle."

  "And we? Do we too?"

  We? I think. Who knows? Every hour gives and takes and alters. But I don't say it. I don't wish to be led into a conversation that will suddenly end in an abyss.

  The inmates who have been working in the fields are coming back. They return like weary peasants, and on their shoulders lies the first red of sunset.

  "We too," I say. "Always, Isabelle. Nothing that exists can ever be lost. Not ever."

  "Do you belie
ve that?"

  "We have no choice but to believe it."

  She turns around to me. She looks very beautiful on this early evening with the first clear gold of autumn in the air. "Are we lost otherwise?" she whispers.

  I stare at her. "I don't know," I say finally. "Lost—that can mean so much—almost anything!"

  "Are we lost otherwise, Rudolf?"

  I am silent, irresolute. "Yes," I say then. "But that is when life begins, Isabelle."

  "What life?"

  "Our own. That's where everything begins—courage, com-

  passion, humanity, love, and the tragic rainbow of beauty. When we realize that nothing remains."

  I look at her face, illuminated by the dying light. For a moment time stands still. "You and I, don't we remain either?" she asks.

  "No, we don't remain either," I reply, and look past her at the landscape full of blue and red and remoteness and gold.

  "Not even if we love each other?"

  "Not even if we love each other," I say, and add hesitantly and cautiously: "I think that's why people love each other. Otherwise one could not love. Love is perhaps the desire to hand on something which one cannot keep."

  "Hand on what?"

  I lift my shoulders. "There are many names for it. One's self perhaps, in order to rescue it. Or one's heart. Let us say our heart. Or our yearning. Our heart."

  The people from the fields are arriving at the gate. The guards open it. Suddenly a man rushes past us, pushes his way through the fleldworkers, and races off. He must have been hiding behind a tree. One of the guards sees him and starts trotting in pursuit; the other stays in his place and lets the inmates through. Below us I can see the escaped man running. He is much faster than the guard. "Do you think your colleague will catch up with him at that rate?" I ask the second guard.

  "He'll come back with him all right."

  "It doesn't look that way."

  The guard shrugs his shoulders. "It's Guido Timpe. He tries to escape at least once each month. Always runs to the Forsthaus Restaurant. Drinks a couple of beers. We always find him there. Never runs farther and never anywhere else. Just for the two or three beers. He likes dark beer." He winks at me. "That's why my colleague isn't hurrying. He just wants to keep him in sight in case of an accident. We always give Timpe time to quench his thirst. Why not? Afterward he comes back like a lamb."

  Isabelle has not been listening. "Where does he want to go?" she asks now.

  "He wants to drink beer," I say. "That's all! If everyone could have a goal like that!"

  She doesn't hear me. She is looking at me. "Do you want to run away too?"

  I shake my head.

  "There's nothing to run away for, Rudolf," she says. "And

  no place to go. All doors are the same. And beyond them—"

  She hesitates. "What's beyond them, Isabelle?" I ask,

  "Nothing. They are just doors. They are always just doors and there is nothing beyond."

  The guard locks the gate and lights his pipe. The sharp smell of cheap tobacco strikes me and conjures up a picture: A simple life, without problems, with an honest calling, an honest wife, honest children, honest rewards, and an honest death—all accepted as a matter of course, the day, the evening's leisure, and the night, without asking what lies beyond. For an instant I am filled with yearning, and a little envy. Then I look at Isabelle. She is standing at the gate, her hands grasping the iron bars, her head pressed against them, looking out. She stands thus for a while. The light grows fuller and redder and more golden, the woods lose their blue shadows and turn black, and the sky above us is apple-green and full of sailboats touched with rosy beams.

  Finally she turns around. In this light her eyes look almost violet. "Come," she says, taking my arm.

  We walk back. She leans against me. "You must never abandon me," she says.

  "I will never abandon you."

  "Never," she says. "Never is so short."

  Incense eddies from the silver censers. Bodendiek turns, the monstrance in his hands. The nuns in their black habits are kneeling in the pews like little dark heaps of submissive-ness; their heads are bowed, their hands tap their covered breasts, which must never become breasts; the candles burn; and God is in the host, surrounded by golden rays, there in the room. A woman gets up, walks down the middle aisle to the communion bench, and throws herself on the floor. Most of the patients stare motionless at the golden miracle. Isabelle is not present. She has refused to go to church. She used to go, but, for the past few days, she has not. She has explained it to me. She says she doesn't want to see the Bloody One any more.

  Two nuns raise the sick woman, who has been throwing herself about and beating on the floor with her hands. I play theTantum Ergo. The white faces of the inmates turn with a jerk toward the organ. I pull out the stops for the bass viols and the violins. The nuns sing.

  The white spirals of incense eddy upward. Bodendiek puts the monstrance back in the tabernacle. The light of the candles flickers on the brocade of his vestments, where a large cross is embroidered, and is borne upward in the smoke to the great cross on which the bloodstained Saviour has been hanging for nearly two thousand years. I go on playing mechanically, thinking of Isabelle and what she has said. Then I think of the pre-Christian religions I was reading about last night. In those days the gods of Greece were merry, wandering from cloud to cloud, inclined to rascality, and always as faithless and changeable as the men to whom they belonged. They were incarnations and exaggerations of life in its fullness and cruelty and thoughtlessness and beauty. Isabelle is right: the pale man above me, with his beard and his bloody limbs, is not that. Two thousand years, think, two thousand years and through all that time life with its lights, its cries of passion, its deaths, and its ecstasies has eddied around the stone structures' where stand the likenesses of this pale, dying man, dim, bloody, surrounded by millions of Bodendieks—and the leaden-colored shadow of the Church has reached out over the nations, smothering the joy of life, transforming Eros, the merry, into a secret, dirty, sinful bedroom incident, and forgiving nothing despite all the sermons on love and forgiveness—for true forgiveness means to accept someone as he is and not to demand expiation and obedience and submissiveness before the ego te absolvo is pronounced.

  Isabelle is waiting outside. Wernicke has given her permission to stay in the garden in the evenings when someone is with her. "What were you doing in there?" she asks hostilely. "Helping to cover everything up?"

  "I was playing music."

  "Music covers things up too. More than words."

  "There's a kind of music that tears things open," I say. "The music of drums and trumpets. It has caused a great deal of unhappiness all over the world."

  Isabelle turns around. "And your heart? Isn't that a drum too?"

  Yes, I think, a slow, soft drum, but it will make noise enough and bring unhappiness enough, and perhaps some day it will deafen me to the sweet, anonymous cry of life that is vouchsafed those who do not oppose a pompous self to life and do not demand explanations, as though they were righteous believers instead of what they are—brief wanderers who leave no track.

  "Feel mine," Isabelle says taking my hand and laying it on her thin blouse below her breast. "Do you feel it?"

  "Yes, Isabelle."

  I withdraw my hand, but it is as though I had not done so. We walked around a little fountain, lamenting in the evening stillness as though it had been forgotten. Isabelle plunges her hands into the basin and throws the water into the air. "What becomes of dreams during the day, Rudolf?" she asks.

  I look at her. "Perhaps they go to sleep," I say cautiously, for I know where such questions can lead.

  She plunges her arms into the basin and lets them rest there. They shimmer silvery, covered with little air bubbles under the water as though they were made of some strange metal. "How can they go to sleep?" she says. "After all, they are living sleep. You only see them when you are asleep. What becomes of them during the day?"


  "Perhaps they hang like bats in great, subterranean caves —or like young owls in deep holes in the trees, waiting for the night."