The Black Obelisk

  I don't know what to reply. Something always moves in me when she says things like that—as though there were a deeper wisdom in them than I can recognize—as though they came from beyond the phenomenal world, from the place where there are no names. "Do you feel how cold it's getting?" she asks on my shoulder. "Each night everything dies. The heart too. They saw it to pieces."

  "Nothing dies, Isabelle. Ever."

  "Everything does! The stone face—it cracks into pieces. In the morning it is there again. Oh, it is no face! How we lie with out poor faces! You lie too—"

  "Yes—" I say. "But I don't want to."

  "You must tear away the face until there is nothing there. Only smooth skin, nothing else! But then it will still be there. It grows back. If everything stood still, one would have no pain. Why do they want to saw me away from everything? Why do they want me back? I'm not going to betray anything!"

  "What could you betray?"

  "The thing that blooms. It is full of mud. It comes out of the ducts."

  She trembles again and presses herself against me. "They have stuck my eyes shut. With glue, and then they have run needles through them. But still I cannot look away."

  "Away from what?"

  She pushes me off. "They have sent you too! I will betray nothing! You are a spy. They have bought you! If I told you, they would kill me."

  "I'm not a spy. And why should they kill you if you tell me? It would be much easier for them to do it before. If I know, they will have to kill me too. There would be one more who knew."

  This penetrates. She looks at me again, considering. I keep so quiet that I hardly breathe. I feel that we are standing in front of a door behind which there may be freedom. What Wernicke calls freedom. A return from the maze, to normal streets, houses, and relationships. I don't know whether this will really be better, but I can't speculate about that while I have this tormented creature before me. "If you explain it to me, they will leave you in peace," I say. "And if they don't leave you in peace, I'll get help. From the police, the newspapers. They will become afraid and then you won't need to be."

  She presses her hands together. "It's not just that," she manages to say finally.

  "What is it then?"

  In a second her face becomes hard and closed. The torment and indecision are washed away. Her mouth grows small and thin and the chin protrudes. Now there is something about her of the grim, puritanical, evil old maid. "Drop that!" she says. Her voice, too, has changed.

  "All right, we'll drop it. I don't need to know."

  I wait. Her eyes glitter in the last light like wet slates. All the gray of the evening seems concentrated in them; she looks at me in a superior and mocking way. "You'd like that very much, wouldn't you? Well, you have failed, you spy!"

  For no reason I become furious, although I know that she is sick and that these transitions of consciousness come like lightning. "Go to hell," I say angrily. "What does all that matter to me!"

  I see her face changing again; but I go out quickly, full of an incomprehensible tumult.

  "And?" Wernicke asks.

  "That's all. Why did you send me in to see her? It accomplished nothing. I'm no good as a nurse. You see for yourself—just when I should have spoken carefully to her, I shouted at her and ran away."

  "It was better than you think." Wernicke gets a bottle and two glasses out from behind his books and pours drinks. "Cognac," he says. "There's just one thing I'd like to know— how she senses that her mother is here again."

  "Her mother is here?"

  Wernicke nods. "Since day before yesterday. She hasn't seen her. She couldn't have, even from her window."

  "Why not?"

  "She'd have to hang out too far and have eyes like a telescope." Wernicke inspects the color of his cognac. "But sometimes patients of that sort do sense these things. Or perhaps she just guessed. I have been pushing her in that direction."

  "Why?" I say. "Now she's sicker than I have ever seen her."

  "No," Wernicke replies.

  I put down my glass and glance at the thick books on his shelves. "She's so miserable it makes your stomach turn."

  "Miserable, yes; but not sicker."

  "You ought to have left her in peace—the way she was during the summer. She was happy. Now—it's horrible."

  "Yes, it's horrible," Wernicke says. "It's almost as though what she imagines were really happening."

  "It's as though she were in a torture chamber."

  Wernicke nods. "People outside always think torture chambers don't exist any more. They exist all right. Here. Each one has his own in his skull."

  "Not just here."

  "Not just here," Wernicke agrees with alacrity, taking a swallow of cognac. "But there are many of them here. Do you want to be convinced? Put on a white coat. It's almost time for my evening rounds."

  "No," I say. "I remember the last time."

  "That was the war; it keeps right on raging here. Do you want to see more of the wards?"

  "No. I remember very well."

  "Not all. You only saw some of them."

  "It was enough."

  I recall those creatures, standing in cramped postures in the corner, motionless for weeks at a time, or continually running against the walls, clambering over beds, or groaning and shrieking, white-eyed, in strait jackets. The inaudible thunders of chaos beat down on them, and pre-exist-ence, worm, claw, scale, writhing, footless, and slimy, the creeping things before thought, the carion existences, reach upward from below to seize their bowels and testicles and spines, to draw them down into the gray confusion of the beginning, back to scaly bodies and eyeless retchings—apd, shrieking like panic-stricken monkeys, they seek refuge on the last bare branches of the brain, chattering, hypnotized by the ever-rising coils, in the final horrible dread, not of the brain, worse, the cells' dread of destruction, the scream above all screams, the fear of fears, the death fear, not of the individual, but of the veins, the blood, the subconscious entelechy that silently control liver, glands, the pulse of the blood, and the fire at the base of the skull.

  "All right," Wernicke says. "Then drink your cognac, give up your excursions into the unconscious and praise life."

  "Why? Because everything in it is so wonderfully ranged? Because one eats the other and then himself?"

  "Because you're alive, you harmless hair-splitter! You're much too young to deal with the problem of pity, and too inexperienced. When you're old enough, you'll see it doesn't exist."

  "I've had a certain amount of experience."

  Wernicke dismisses the idea. "Don't be so self-important, you veteran of the wars! What you know has nothing to do with the metaphysical problem of pity—it's part of the universal idiocy of the human race. Great pity begins elsewhere—and ends elsewhere too—beyond weeping willows like you and also beyond the peddlers of comfort like Bo-dendiek—"

  "All right, superman," I say. "Does that give you the right to let hell loose in the minds of your patients whenever you feel like it, or the fires of the stake or slimy death?"

  "The right—" Wernicke replies with abysmal contempt. "How agreeable an honest murderer is in comparison with a lawyer like you! What do you know about right? Even less than about pity, you scholastic sentimentalist!"

  He raises his glass, grinning, then glances contentedly into the night. The artificial light in the room falls ever more goldenly on the brown and gilt spines of the books. Light never seems so precious or so symbolic as up here where the polar night of the mind reigns. "Neither one was foreseen in the design of the universe," I say. "But I cannot reconcile myself, and if that means human inadequacy to you, I'll be glad to remain inadequate as long as I live."

  Wernicke gets up, takes his hat from the hook, puts it on, then bows to me, removes it, hangs it on the hook, and sits down again. "Long live the beautiful and good!" he says. "That's what I meant. And now out with you! It's time for my evening rounds."

  "Can't you give Geneviève Terhoven a sleeping pill?"
I ask.

  "I can, but it won't cure her."

  "Why don't you let her have some peace today?"

  "I am giving her peace. And I'll give her a sleeping pill too." He winks at me. "You were better for her today than a whole college of doctors. Many thanks."

  I look at him uncertainly. To hell with his errands, I think. To hell with his cognac! And to hell with his god-like speeches! "A strong sleeping pill," I say.

  "The best there is. Were you ever in the Orient? In China?"

  "How could I have been in China?"

  "I was there," Wernicke says. "Before the war. At the time of the floods and the famine."

  "Yes," I say. "I can imagine what's coming now and I don't want to hear it. I've read it. Will you go to Geneviève Terhoven right away? First of all?"

  "First of all. And I'll leave her in peace," Wernicke smiles. "But to even things up I'll destroy some of her mother's peace."

  "What do you want, Otto?" I ask. "I'm not interested in discussing the form of the ode today! Go and find Eduard!"

  We are sitting in the assembly room of the Poets' Club. I have come here in order not to think about Isabelle, but suddenly everything about the place repels me. What's the purpose of these jingles when the world reeks of fear and blood? I know this is a cheap conclusion and, in addition, a false one—but I am weary of continually catching myself in dramatized banalities. "Well, what's up?" I ask.

  Otto Bambuss looks at me like an owl fed on buttermilk. "I was there," he says reproachfully. "Again. First you drive me there and then you don't even want to hear about it!"

  "That's life for you. Where were you?"

  "In Bahnstrasse, in the bordello."

  "What's new about that?" I ask, without really hearing him. "We were all there together, we paid for you, and you ran away. You want us to put up a statue to you for that?"

  "I went again," Otto says. "Alone. Please listen to me, won't you?"

  "When?"

  "After the evening in the Red Mill."

  "So what?" I ask without interest. "Did you run away from the facts of life again?"

  "No," Otto explains. "Not this time."

  "My respects! Was it the Iron Horse?"

  Bambuss blushes. "That doesn't matter."

  "All right," I say. "Why are you talking about it then? It's not exactly a unique experience. A good many people in the world sleep with women."

  "You don't understand. It's the consequences."

  "What consequences? I'm sure the Iron Horse isn't sick. People always imagine that sort of thing, especially at first"

  Otto has a tormented expression. "That's not what I mean! You know why I did it. Everything was going fine with both my cycles, especially with The Scarlet Woman,' but I thought I needed even more inspiration. I wanted to end that cycle before I had to go back to the village. That's why I went to Bahnstrasse again. Properly, this time. And, just imagine, since then nothing! Nothing! Not a line! It's as though it had been cut short! The opposite should have happened!"

  I laugh, although I'm not in the mood for laughter. "That's just artist's luck!"

  "It's all right for you to laugh," Bambuss says excitedly, "but consider my position! Eleven faultless sonnets, and this misfortune while I'm working on the twelfth! It simply won't move any more! My imagination has gone! It's all over! I'm done for!"

  "It's the curse of fulfillment," says Hungermann, who has come up to us and obviously knows about the matter. "It leaves nothing over. A hungry man dreams of food. A satisfied man is repelled by it."

  "He will get hungry again and his dreams will return," I reply.

  "They will for you, but not for Otto," Hungermann explains with great satisfaction. "You are superficial and normal, Otto is profound. He has replaced one complex by another. Don't laugh—perhaps it's the end of him as a writer. It is, as one might say, a funeral in a house of joy."

  "I'm empty," Otto says despondently. "Emptier than I have ever been. I have ruined myself. Where are my dreams? Fulfillment is the enemy of yearning. I should have known!"

  "Write something about it," I say.

  "Not a bad idea!" Hungermann says, getting out his notebook. "I had it first, as a matter of fact. Besides, it's nothing for Otto; his style isn't hard enough."

  "Then he can write it as an elegy. Or a lament. Cosmic despair, stars dropping like golden tears, God himself sobbing because He has made such a mess of the world, the autumn wind harping a requiem—"

  Hungermann is writing busily. "What a coincidence!" he says as he writes. "I said exactly the same thing in almost the same words a week ago. My wife heard me."

  Otto has pricked up his ears slightly. "Besides all that, I am afraid I may have caught something," he says. "How long does it take before you know?"

  "With a dose three days, with lues four weeks," Hungermann, the married man, replies promptly.

  "You haven't caught anything," I say. "Sonnets don't get lues, but you can take advantage of your state of mind. Put the rudder hard over! If you can't write for, write against! Instead of a hymn to the woman in scarlet and purple, a biting satire. Pus drips from the stars, Job writhes with boils, probably the first syphilitic, amid the shards of the universe, the Janus face of love, smiling sweetly on one side, nose eaten away on the other—" I see Hungermann writing again. "Did you say that to your wife, too, a week ago?" I ask.

  He nods beaming.

  "Why are you writing it down then?"

  "Because I'd already forgotten it. I often forget these small inspirations."

  "It's easy for you to make fun of me," Bambuss says, offended. "I can't write against anything. I am a hymn writer."

  "Then write hymns to virtue, purity, the monastic life, loneliness, absorption in the nearest and farthest thing there is, one's self."

  Otto listens for a moment with his head on one side like a hunting dog. "I've already done that," he says, cast down. "Besides, it's not altogether my style."

  "To hell with your style! Don't make so many demands!"

  I get up and go into the next room. Valentin Busch is sitting there. "Come and drink a bottle of Johannisberger with me," he says. "That will annoy Eduard."

  "I don't want to annoy anyone today," I reply, leaving him.

  As I come out into the street, Otto Bambuss is standing there, staring dejectedly at the plaster Valkyries that adorn the entrance to the Walhalla. "What a misfortune!" he says aimlessly.

  "Don't cry," I tell him in order to get rid of him. "Apparently you belong among those who reach their peak early, Kleist, Burger, Rimbaud, Buchner, the finest stars in the firmament of poets—so don't take it to heart."

  "But they all died young!"

  "You can still do that too if you like. Besides, Rimbaud lived for many years after he had stopped writing. As an adventurer in Abyssinia. What about that?"

  Otto looks at me like a doe with three legs. Then he stares once more at the thick bottoms and busts of the plaster Valkyries. "Listen," I say impatiently. "Write another cycle: The Temptations of Saint Anthony! There you have both lust and renunciation, and a lot of other things as well."

  Otto's face lights up. A moment later he is concentrating as much as is possible for an astral sheep with sensual desires. Apparently for the moment German literature has been saved, for I am clearly much less important to him already. Absently he waves to me and hurries down the street toward his writing desk. I look after him enviously.

  The office is dark and empty. I switch on the light and find a note: "Riesenfeld gone. You have tonight off. Use the time to polish your buttons, improve your mind, cut your fingernails, and pray for Kaiser and Reich. Signed Kroll, Sergeant Major and human being. P.S. He who sleeps sins too."

  I go up to my room. The piano shows its white teeth at me. Books by dead men stare down coldly from the shelves. I toss off a succession of sevenths. Lisa's window opens. She stands in the warm light; her dressing gown hangs open, and she is holding up a wagon wheel of flowers. "From Riesenfeld," she sh
outs. "What an idiot! Have you any use for these vegetables?"