The Black Obelisk

by Erich Maria Remarque

  Gerda is standing in front of her gas ring, making cabbage roulades. She has a pair or worn-down green bedroom slippers on her feet and a red checked kitchen towel draped over her right shoulder. The room smells of cabbage, fat, powder, and perfume; outside, the red leaves of the wild grapevine swing in front of the window, and autumn stares in with blue eyes.

  "It's nice that you came again," Gerda says. "I'm moving out of here tomorrow."

  "You are?"

  She stands unconcernedly in front of the gas ring, confix dent of her own body. "Yes," she says. "Does that interest you?"

  She turns around and looks at me. "It does interest me, Gerda," I reply. "Where are you going?"

  "To the Hotel Walhalla."

  "To Eduard?"

  "Yes, to Eduard."

  She shakes the pan with the cabbage roulades. "Have you anything against that?" she asks presently.

  I look at her. What can I have against it? I think. I wish I did have something against It! For a moment I am tempted to lie, but I know she will see through me. "Aren't you staying on at the Red Mill?" I ask.

  "I finished up there long ago. You didn't bother to find out, did you? No, I'm not going to continue. People starve in our profession. But I'll stay in this city."

  "With Eduard," I say.

  "Yes, with Eduard," she repeats. "He's turning the bar over to me. I'll be the barmaid."

  "And you'll live in the Walhalla?"

  "I'll live in the Walhalla, upstairs under the rafters, and 111 work in the Walhalla. I'm not as young as you think; I have to look for some kind of security before I find myself with no more engagements. Nothing came of the circus either. That was just a last try."

  "You can go on finding engagements for years, Gerda," I say.

  "You don't know anything about that. I know what I'm doing."

  I glance at the red vine leaves swinging in front of the window. For no reason I feel like a shirker. My relationship with Gerda has been no more than that of a soldier on leave, but for one of every pair it is always something different.

  "I wanted to tell you myself," Gerda says.

  "You wanted to tell me it's all over between us?"

  She nods. "I play fair. Eduard is the only one who has offered me something secure—a job—and I know what that's worth. I'm not going to cheat." She laughs suddenly. "Farewell to youth. Come, the cabbage roulades are done."

  She puts the plates on the table. I look at her and am suddenly sad. "Well, how is your heavenly love affair getting on?" she says.

  "It's not, Gerda. Not at all."

  She serves the meal. "The next time you have a small affair," she says, "don't tell the girl anything about your other loves. Do you understand?"

  "Yes," I reply. "I'm sorry, Gerda."

  "For God's sake, shut up and eat!"

  I look at her. She is eating calmly and matter-of-factly, her face is clear and firm, she has been used from childhood on to living independently, she understands her existence and has adjusted herself to it. She has everything I lack, and I wish I were in love with her and that life were clear and foreseeable and one always knew what one needed to know about it—not very much but that little with certainty.

  "You know, I don't want much," Gerda says. "I grew up among blows and then was thrown out. Now I have had enough of my profession and I'm going to settle down. Eduard is not the worst."

  "He is vain and stingy," I declare and am at once angry at myself for having said it.

  "That's better than being slovenly and extravagant, if you're going to marry someone."

  "You're going to get married?" I ask in amazement. "Do you really believe that? He'll exploit you and then marry the daughter of some rich hotel owner."

  "He hasn't promised me anything. I just have a contract for the bar, for three years. In the course of those years he will discover that he can't get along without me."

  "You have changed," I say.

  "Oh, you sheep! I have just made up my mind."

  "Soon you will join Eduard in cursing at us about those coupons."

  "Do you still have some?"

  "Enough for another month and a half."

  Gerda laughs. "I won't curse. Besides, you paid for them properly at the time."

  "It was our one successful financial transaction." I watch Gerda as she clears away the plates. "I'll turn them all over to Georg," I say. "I'll not be coming to the Walhalla any more."

  She turns around. She is smiling, but her eyes are not. "Why not?" she asks.

  "I don't know. It's the way I feel. But perhaps I shall, after all."

  "Of course you'll come! Why shouldn't you?"

  "Yes, why not?" I say dispiritedly.

  From below come the subdued tones of the player piano. I get up and walk to the window. "How fast this year has gone!" I say.

  "Yes," Gerda replies, leaning against me. "Idiotic!" she murmurs, "when once you find someone you like, it has to be somebody like you, somebody who just doesn't fit." She pushes me away. "Now go—go to your divine love—God, what do you know about women?"

  "Not a thing."

  She smiles. "Don't try to either, baby. It's better this way. Now go! Here, take this with you."

  She gets a medal and gives it to me. What's that?" I ask.

  "A man who carries people through the water. He brings luck."

  "Has he brought you luck?"

  "Luck?" Gerda replies. "That can mean many different things. Perhaps. Now go."

  She pushes me out and closes the door behind me. I walk down the stairs. In the courtyard two gypsy women meet me. They are on the program at the inn. The lady wrestlers have long since gone. "Your future, young gentleman?" asks the younger of the gypsies. She smells of garlic and onions.

  "No," I say "Not today."

  At Karl Brill's the tension is extreme. A pile of money lies on the table; there must be trillions there. The opposing bettor is a man with a head like a seal and very small hands. He has just tested the nail in the wall and is coming back. "Another two hundred billion," he offers in a clear voice.

  "Done," Karl Brill replies.

  The opponents lay down the money. "Anyone else?" Karl asks.

  No one speaks. The wagers are too high for all of them. Karl is sweating in clear drops, but he is confident. The odds stand at forty to sixty in his favor. He has allowed the seal to give a last tap with the hammer; in return the odds of fifty-fifty have been changed to forty-sixty. "Will you play the 'Bird Song at Evening'?" Karl asks me.

  I sit down at the piano. Presently Frau Beckmann appears in her salmon-colored kimono. She is not so imperturbable as formerly; her mountainous breasts heave as though an earthquake were raging beneath them, and her eyes have a different expression. She does not look at Karl Brill.

  "Clara," Karl says, "you know the gentlemen here except for Herr Schweizer." He makes an elegant gesture. "Herr Schweizer—"

  The seal bows with an astonished and rather worried expression. He glances at the money and then at this foursquare Brünhilde. The nail is wrapped in cotton, and Clara takes up her position. I play the double trill and stop. Everyone is silent.

  Frau Beckmann stands there, calm and concentrated. Then two quivers pass through her body. Suddenly she casts a wild glance at Karl Brill. "Sorry!" she grits through clenched teeth. "It won't go."

  She moves away from the wall and leaves the workroom. "Clara!" Karl screams.

  She does not reply. The seal emits a burst of oily laughter and begins to pick up the money. The drinking companions are as though struck by lightning. Karl Brill groans, rushes over to the nail, and comes back. "Just a minute!" he says to the seal. "Just a minute, we're not through yet! We bet on three tries. These were just the first two!"

  "There were three."

  "You're no judge of that! You're new here. It was two!"

  Sweat is now running down Karl's skull. The drinking companions have found their tongues again. "It was two," they asseverate.

  An argument en
sues. I do not listen. I feel as though I . were sitting on an alien planet. It is a brief, intense, and horrible feeling, and I am happy when I can follow the voices again. The seal has exploited the situation; he will grant a third try if there is a further wager thirty-seventy in his favor. Sweating, Karl agrees to everything. As far as I can see, he had wagered half his workshop, including the soiling machine. "Come here!" he whispers to me. "Come upstairs with me! We must change her mind! She did that on purpose."

  We climb the stairs. Frau Beckmann has been waiting for Karl. She is lying on her bed in the kimono decorated with a phoenix, excited, marvelously beautiful to anyone who likes big women, and ready for battle. "Clara!" Karl whispers. "Why this? You did it on purpose."

  "So?" Frau Beckmann says.

  "Of course you did! I know it! I swear to you—"

  "Don't swear anything! You beast, you slept with the cashier at the Hotel Hohenzollern! You disgusting swine!"

  "I? What a lie! How do you know about it?"

  "You see, you admit it!"

  "I admit it?"

  "You have just admitted it! You asked how I knew. How could I know it, if it isn't true?"

  I look with sympathy at Karl Brill, the breast-stroke expert. He has no fear of water no matter how cold, but here he is out of his depth. On the stairs I have advised him not to get into an argument but simply to plead with Frau Beckmann on his knees and beg her forgiveness, without, of course, admitting anything. Instead, he is now reproaching her with a certain Herr Kletzel. Her answer is a fearful blow in the nose. Karl leaps backwards, feels his snout to see whether it is bleeding, and then with a cry of rage moves forward in a crouch like an experienced fighter to seize Frau Beckmann by the hair, pull her out of bed, place one foot on the back of her neck, and to go to work on her mighty hams with his braces. I give him a fairly stiff kick in the rear. He turns around, ready to attack me too, sees my warning glance, my raised hands, and my silently whispering mouth and awakens from his thirst for blood. Human reason shines once more from his brown eyes. He nods briefly, with blood now gushing from his nose, turns around, and sinks down on his knees beside Frau Beckmann's bed with the cry: "Clara! I have done nothing, but forgive me!"

  "You pig!" she screams. "You double pig! My kimono!"

  She jerks the precious garment aside. Karl is bleeding onto the sheets. "Damned liar!" she trumpets. "And lying still!"

  I notice that Karl, a simple, honorable man, who expected an immediate reward for falling on his knees, is about to get up again in rage. If he starts another boxing match while his nose is bleeding, all is lost. Perhaps Frau Beckmann will forgive him for the cashier at the Hohenzollern, but never for ruining her kimono. I step on his foot from behind, holding him down with one hand on his shoulder, and say: "Frau Beckmann, he is innocent! He sacrificed himself for me."

  "What?"

  "For me," I repeat "That happens often among old war comrades—"

  "What? You and your damned war camaraderie, you liars and cheaters—and you expect me to believe something like that!"

  "Sacrificed himself!" I say. "He introduced me to the cashier, that was all."

  Frau Beckmann straightens up with flaming eyes. "You want me to believe that a young man like you would hanker after an old worn-out bag like that cadaver at the Hohenzollern!"

  "Not hanker after, gnadige Frau," I say. "But when needs must, the devil eats flies. If loneliness has you by the throat—"

  "A young man like you could surely do better!"

  "Young, but poor," I reply. "Nowadays women want to be taken to expensive bars. And while we're speaking about it, you'll have to admit that if you doubt that a bachelor like me living alone and caught in the storm of the inflation could be interested in the cashier, it would be completely absurd to suspect anything of the sort of Karl Brill, who enjoys the favors of the most beautiful and interesting woman in all of Werdenbrück—undeservedly, I admit—"

  This last makes an impression. "He's a beast!" Frau Beckmann says. "And undeservedly is right."

  Karl takes a hand. "Clara, you are my life!" he moans hollowly from the bloody sheets.

  "I'm your bank account, you cold-blooded devil!" Frau Beckmann turns back to me. "And what about that half-dead she donkey at the Hohenzollern?"

  I dismiss the creature. "Nothing, not a thing! It came to nothing at all! She turned my stomach."

  "I could have told you that in advance!" she declares with deep satisfaction.

  The battle had been decided. We are now engaged in a rear-guard action. Karl promises Clara a sea-green kimono with lotus blossoms, and swansdown slippers. Then he goes to bathe his nose in cold water and Frau Beckmann gets up. "How high are the bets?" she asks.

  "High," I reply. "Trillions."

  "Karl!" she shouts. "Cut Herr Bodmer in for two hundred and fifty billion."

  "Of course, Clara!"

  We stride down the stairs. Below sits the seal, guarded by Karl's friends. We find out that he has tried to cheat while we were away, but Karl's drinking companions tore the hammer away in time. Frau Beckmann smiles haughtily, and thirty seconds later the nail lies on the floor. Majestically she stalks out to the accompanying strains of "Alpine Sunset,"

  "A friend in need is a friend indeed," Karl says to me emotionally later on.

  "Question of honor! But what's all this about the cashier?"

  "What's a man to do?" Karl replies. "You know how you feel sometimes in the evenings! But to think the bitch talked! I'm going to withdraw my patronage from those people. But you, dear friend—choose whatever you like!" He points to his array of leathers. "A first-class pair of shoes made to order as a gift—whatever you like: black buckskin, brown, yellow, patent leather, doeskin—I'll make them for you myself—"

  "Patent leather," I say.

  As I come home I see a dark figure in the courtyard. It is actually old Knopf, who has arrived just before me and, just as though he had not already been pronounced dead, is making ready to desecrate the obelisk. "Sergeant Major," I say, taking him by the arm, "now you have a headstone of your own for your childish necessities. Make use of it!"

  I lead him over to the stone he has bought, and wait at the door so that he can't return to the obelisk.

  Knopf stares at me. "You mean my own headstone? Are you crazy? What's it worth now?"

  "According to the latest exchange, nine billion."

  "And you want me to piss on that?"

  Knopf's eye wanders about for a few seconds, then he reels muttering into his house. What no one has been able to achieve has been accomplished by the simple concept of property! The sergeant major is making use of his own toilet. Let them talk about communism! It is possessions that produce a feeling for order!

  I stand for a while, reflecting on the fact that it has taken nature millions of years, from the amoeba up through fish, frog, vertebrates, and monkeys, to achieve old Knopf, a creature compound of physical and chemical marvels, with a circulatory system that is a work of genius, a heart mechanism one can only regard with awe, a liver and two kidneys by contrast with which the I.G. Farben factories are ridiculous journeyman workshops—and all this, this perfect miracle carefully elaborated over millions of years, called during his short time on earth full Sergeant Major Knopf, simply for the purpose of making life miserable for young recruits and afterward, on a moderate pension from the state, of giving itself up to drink! Truly God sometimes takes a great deal of trouble for nothing!

  Shaking my head I turn on the light in my room and stare into the mirror. There I see another miracle of nature that hasn't been able to make much of itself. I turn the light off and undress in the dark.

  22.

  A young lady comes toward me through the allée of chestnut trees. It is Sunday morning; I saw her earlier in church. She is wearing a light gray, beautifully tailored suit, a small gray hat, and gray suede shoes; her name is Geneviève Terhoven and she is a complete stranger to me.