The Black Obelisk

by Erich Maria Remarque

  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.

  There is a crackling and whispering in the courtyard, and once more stealthy footsteps. "Two weeks ago there was a fight out there," Wilke says. "A locksmith had forgotten to take his tools out of his pocket, and during the stormy encounter they must have got into so unfortunate a position that the lady was suddenly pricked by a sharp awl. She was up in a flash and grabbed a small bronze wreath. She beat the mechanic over the head with it—didn't you hear it?" he asks me.

  "No."

  "Well, she slams the bronze wreath down over his ears so hard he can't get it off. I turn on the light and ask what's going on. The fellow gallops off in terror with the bronze wreath around his skull like a Roman senator—didn't you notice the bronze wreath was missing?" he asks me.

  "No."

  "What a way to run a business! So he runs out as though a swarm of wasps was after him. I go down. The girl is still standing there, looking at her hand. 'Blood!' she says. 'He stabbed me. And at such a moment!'

  "I see the awl on the ground and guess what has happened. I pick up the awl. This could give you blood poisoning,' I say. 'Very dangerous! You can put a tourniquet on a finger, but not on a buttock. Even so enchanting a one.' She blushes—"

  "How could you tell in the darkness?" Kurt Bach asks.

  "There was a moon."

  "You can't see a blush in the moonlight. Colors don't show."

  "You feel it," Wilke explains. "So she blushes, but continues to hold up her dress. It's a light dress, and blood makes spots that are hard to get out. 'I have iodine and adhesive plaster,' I say. 'And I'm discreet. Come in!' She comes in and isn't even frightened." Wilke turns to me. "That's the nice thing about your yard," he says enthusiastically. "Anyone who makes love among tombstones isn't afraid of coffins either. So it happened that, after the iodine and adhesive tape and a swallow of blended port wine, the giant's coffin served another purpose."

  "It became a bower of love?" I ask to make sure.

  "A cavalier enjoys his pleasures but says nothing," Wilke replies.

  At this instant the moon comes out from behind the clouds, lighting the white marble and making the crosses glimmer darkly. Scattered among them we see four pairs of lovers, two on marble beds, two on granite. For a moment everyone is
motionless, transfixed by surprise—there are only two courses open to them, to flee or to ignore the altered situation. Flight is not without danger; you can get away in an instant, but you may sustain such a psychic shock that it will lead to impotence. I learned that from a lance corporal who was once taken by surprise by a sergeant major when he was out in the woods with a cook—he was ruined for life, and two years later his wife divorced him.

  The pairs of lovers do the right thing. Like stags scenting danger they lift their heads—then, with eyes directed at the single lighted window, ours, which was lighted before, they remain as they are, as though carved by Kurt Bach. It is a picture of innocence, a trifle ridiculous at most, just like Bach's sculptures. Immediately thereafter the shadow of a cloud obscures that part of the garden, leaving only the obelisk in the light. And who stands there, a glittering fountain? The fearlessly pissing Knopf, like that statue in Brussels which every soldier who has gone on leave in Belgium knows so well.

  He is too far away for me to do anything. Besides, I don't feel like it tonight. Why should I behave like a housewife? I decided this afternoon to leave this place, and therefore life rises to meet me with double strength. I feel it everywhere, in the smell of the shavings and in the moonlight, in the tiptoeing and rustling in the courtyard and in the ineffable word September, in my hand which can move and lay hold of it, and in my eyes without which all the museums of the world would be empty, in ghosts, in spirits, in transitoriness, and in the wild career of the earth past Cassiopeia and the Pleiades, in the anticipation of boundless foreign gardens under foreign stars, of positions on great, foreign newspapers, and of rubies now crystallizing underground into lustrous gems; I feel it and it keeps me from heaving an empty beer bottle in the direction of Knopf, that half-minute fountain—

  At this moment the clock strikes. It is one. The ghostly hour is past; we can speak formally to Wilke again and either go on getting drunk or descend into sleep as into a mine where there are corpses, coal, white salt palaces, and buried diamonds.

  18.

  She is sitting in a corner of her room huddled beside the window. "Isabelle," I say.

  She does not answer. Her eyelids flutter like butterflies that children have impaled alive on pins.

  "Isabelle," I say. "I've come to take you out."

  She gives a start and presses herself against the wall. Her posture is cramped and rigid. "Don't you know me any more?" I ask.

  She remains motionless; only her eyes turn toward me, watchful and very dark. "The one who pretends to be a doctor sent you," she whispers.

  It is true. Wernicke did send me. "He did not send me," I say. "I came secretly. No one knows I am here."

  She frees herself slowly from the wall. "You, too, have betrayed me."

  "I have not betrayed you. I could not get to you. You have not come out."

  "I couldn't," she whispers. "They were all standing outside waiting. They wanted to catch me. They managed to find out that I am here."

  "Who?"

  She looks at me but does not answer. How frail she is! I think. How frail and alone in this bare room! She hasn't even her own self. Not even the loneliness of the ego. She has exploded like a grenade into jagged fragments of fear scattered in a strange, threatening landscape of incomprehensible dread. "No one is waiting for you," I say.

  "Yes, they are."

  "How do you know?"

  "The voices. Don't you hear them?"

  "No."

  "The voices know everything. Can't you hear them?"

  "It's the wind, Isabelle."

  "Yes," she says with resignation. "It may be the wind. If only it didn't hurt so!"

  "What hurts?"

  "The sawing. They might at least cut, that would go faster, but this slow, dull sawing! Everything grows together again because they are so slow! Then they begin all over again and so it never stops. They saw through my flesh and the flesh grows together again and it never stops."

  "Who saws?"

  "The voices."

  "Voices can't saw."

  "These can."

  "Where do they saw?"

  Isabelle makes a gesture as though in extreme pain. She presses her hands between her thighs. "They want to saw it out so that I can never have children."

  "Who?"

  "The woman out there. She says she bore me. Now she wants to force me back into herself again. She saws and saws. And he holds me still."

  "Who holds you?"

  She shudders. "He—the one inside her—"

  "Inside her?"

  She groans. "Don't say it—she will kill me—I'm not allowed to know—"

  I walk toward her around an easy chair upholstered in a pale rose pattern, its atmosphere of domesticity strangely inappropriate in this bare room. "What aren't you allowed to know?" I ask.

  "She will kill me. I don't dare go to sleep. Why does no one keep watch with me? I must do everything alone. I am so tired," she laments like a bird. "It burns and I cannot go to sleep and I am so tired. But who can sleep when it burns and no one is keeping watch? You, too, have abandoned me.

  "I have not abandoned you."

  "You have been talking to them. They have bribed you. Why didn't you hold on to me? The blue trees and the silver rain. But you didn't want to. Never! You could have rescued me."

  "When?" I ask, feeling something begin to tremble inside me, and I do not want it to tremble but it goes on just the same, and the room no longer seems solid; it is as though the walls were shaking and did not consist of stone and mortar and plaster but of vibrations, densely concentrated vibrations of billions of fibers that stretch from horizon to horizon and beyond and are here pressed together into a square jail of fragile nooses, hangman's nooses, in which a creature of yearning and fear is struggling helplessly.

  Isabelle turns her face to the wall. "Oh, it's lost and gone —many lifetimes ago."

  Suddenly twilight fills the window, spreading over it a veil of almost invisible gray. Everything is still there as before, the light outside, the green, the yellow of the roads, the two palms in the big majolica pots, the sky with its fields of cloud, the distant gray and red confusion of roofs in the city beyond the woods—and nothing is any longer the same. Twilight has isolated it. It has brushed it with the varnish of impermanence, prepared it like food, as housewives soak beef in vinegar, for the shadow wolves of the night. Only Isabelle is still there, clinging tight to the last thread of light, but she, too, is being drawn by it into the drama of the evening, which is not truly a drama and only seems so because we know it means impermanence. Only since we have known that we must die and only because we know it has the idyl turned into drama, the circle into a lance, and becoming into passing away and outcry and terror and flight and judgment.

  I hold her close in my arms. She is trembling and looking at me and pressing herself against me and I hold her, we hold each other—two strangers who know nothing of one another and cling to one another because each mistakes the other for someone else: strangers who nevertheless derive a fleeting comfort from this misunderstanding which is a double and triple and endless misunderstanding and yet is the only thing that, like a rainbow, holds out the deceptive appearance of a bridge where no bridge can ever be, a reflection between two mirrors thrown onward into even more distant emptiness. "Why don't you love me?" Isabelle murmurs.

  "I love you. Everything in me loves you."

  "Not enough. The others are still here. If it were enough, you would kill them."

  I hold her in my arms and look over her head into the park where now shadows like amethyst waves are running up the fields and roads. Everything in me is clear and sharp, but at the same time I feel as though I were standing on a narrow platform high above a murmurous deep. "You wouldn't be able to stand it if I lived outside you," Isabelle whispers.