The Black Obelisk

by Erich Maria Remarque

  Willy rises. He is wearing a new dark green suit of first-rate material in which he looks like a redheaded tree toad. His tie is adorned with a pearl and on the index finger of his right hand he is wearing a heavy seal ring. Five years ago he was assistant to our company cook. He is the same age as I—twenty-five.

  "May I present my friends and former buddies?" Willy asks. "Georg Kroll and Ludwig Bodmer—Mademoiselle Renée de la Tour of the Moulin Rouge in Paris."

  Renée de la Tour nods in a reserved but not unfriendly way. We stare at Willy. Willy stares back proudly. "Sit down, gentlemen," he says. "I assume Eduard is trying to keep you from eating here. The goulash is good, though it could stand a few more onions. Sit down, we're happy to make room for you."

  We arrange ourselves at the table. Willy knows about our war with Eduard and follows it with the interest of a born gambler. "Waiter!" I shout.

  A waiter who is waddling by on flat feet four paces away is suddenly stricken deaf. "Waiter!" I shout again.

  "You're a barbarian," Georg Kroll says. "You're insulting the man with his profession. Why did he take part in the 1918 revolution? Herr Ober!"

  I grin. It is true the German revolution of 1918 was the least bloody there has ever been. The revolutionaries were so terrified by themselves that they at once cried for help from the magnates and the generals of the former government to protect them from their own fit of courage. The others did it. Generously too. A bunch of revolutionaries were executed, the princes and officers received magnificent pensions so that they would have time to plan future riots, the officials received new titles—high-school teachers because academic counselors, school inspectors became educational counselors, waiters were given the right to be addressed as "Ober" or headwaiter, former secretaries of the party became excellencies, the Social Democratic minister of the army, in seventh heaven, was entitled to have real generals under him in his ministry—and the German revolution sank back into red plush, Gemütlichkeit, and a yearning for uniforms and commands.

  "Herr Ober!" Georg repeats.

  The waiter remains deaf. It is one of Eduard's childish tricks; he tries to disconcert us by telling his waiters to ignore us.

  Suddenly the dining room resounds to the thunder of a first-class Prussian barrack-room roar: "Ober! You there, can't you hear?" It has the instant effect of a trumpet call on an old war horse. The waiter stops as though shot in the back, and spins around; two others dash up to the table, somewhere there is the sound of heels clicking, a military-looking man at one of the nearby tables softly exclaims, "Bravo!"— and even Eduard Knobloch, with his dress coat streaming, rushes in to investigate this voice from the higher spheres. He knows that neither Georg nor I could sound so commanding.

  We ourselves look around speechless at Renée de la Tour. She is sitting there, calm and maidenly, wholly uninvolved. But she is the only one who could have shouted—we know Willy's voice.

  The waiter is standing at our table. "What may I do for you, gentlemen?"

  "Noodle soup, goulash, and pie for two," Georg replies.

  "And be quick about it, otherwise well burst your eardrums, you slug."

  Eduard arrives. He can't make out what is happening. He glances under the table. No one is hidden there, and a ghost could hardly roar like that. Nor could we, as he knows. He suspects a trick of some sort. "I must urgently insist," he says finally, "that such an uproar must not occur in my establishment."

  No one replies. We just look at him with empty eyes. Renée de la Tour is powdering her nose. Eduard turns around and departs.

  "Innkeeper! Step over here!" The same thunderous voice suddenly summons him.

  Eduard whirls around and stares at us. We still have the same empty smile on our mugs. He fixes Renée de la Tour with his eye. "Did you just—?"

  Renée closes her compact with a click. "What's that?" she asks in a delicate silvery-clear soprano. "What is it you want?"

  Eduard gapes. He no longer knows what to think. "You haven't been overworking, have you, Herr Knobloch?" Georg asks. "You seem to be suffering from hallucinations."

  "But someone here just—"

  "You're out of your mind, Eduard," I say. "You're not looking well either. Take a vacation. We have no wish to sell your relatives a cheap headstone of imitation Italian marble, and that's certainly all you're worth—"

  Eduard blinks his eyes like an old horned owl. "You seem to be a strange sort of person," says Renée de la Tour in her flutelike soprano. "You hold your guests responsible for the fact that your waiters can't hear." She laughs, an enchanting swirl of bubbling silvery music like a forest brook in fairy tales.

  Eduard clasps his forehead. His last support has collapsed. It cannot have been the young lady either. Anyone who laughs like that can't have a barrack-room voice. "You may go now, Knobloch," Georg remarks casually. "Or did you intend to join in our conversation?"

  "And don't eat so much meat," I say. "Perhaps that's what's wrong. Remember what you were saying to us a few minutes ago? According to the most recent scientific investigations—"

  Eduard turns quickly and rushes off. We wait till he is some distance away. Then Willy's great body begins to quiver with soundless laughter. Renée de la Tour smiles gently. Her eyes are sparkling.

  "Willy," I say, "I'm a superficial sort of fellow and therefore this has been one of the finest moments of my young life—but now tell us what's going on!"

  Willy, shaking with silent merriment, points to Renée, "Excusez, Mademoiselle," I say. "Je me —"

  Willy's laughter redoubles at my French. "Tell him, Lotte," he bursts out.

  "What?" Renée asks with a gentle smile in a soft, growling bass.

  We stare at her. "She is an artist," Willy gasps. "A duettist. She sings duets. Do you understand now?"

  "No."

  "She sings duets. But alone. One verse high, one low. One soprano and one bass."

  A great light dawns. "But the bass—?" I ask.

  "Talent!" Willy explains. "And then of course practice. You must hear her sometime when she does a spat between husband and wife. Lotte is fabulous."

  We agree. The goulash appears. Eduard sneaks around at a distance watching our table. His mistake is that he always wants to find out why something happens. That spoils his poetry and makes him distrustful in life. At the moment he is brooding over the mysterious bass voice. He doesn't know what lies ahead of him. Georg Kroll, a cavalier of the old school, has invited Renée de la Tour and Willy to be his guests to celebrate our victory. Later, in payment for our excellent goulash, he will hand the infuriated Eduard four bits of paper whose combined worth today would hardly buy a couple of soup bones.

  It is early evening. I am sitting beside the window in my room over the office. The house is low, angular, and old. Like this Whole part of the street, it once belonged to the church that stands in the square at the foot. Priests and church officials used to live in it; but for sixty years it has belonged to Kroll and Sons. The property consists of two low houses joined by an arched entryway; in the second lives Knopf, the retired sergeant major, with his wife and three daughters. Then comes the beautiful old garden with our array of tombstones, and behind that at the left a kind of two-story wooden coach house on the ground floor of which Kurt Bach, our sculptor, has his workroom. He models mourning lions and mounting eagles for our war memorials and he draws the inscriptions on the tombstones which are later chipped out by the masons. In his free time he plays the guitar and wanders and dreams of the gold medals which at some future date will be awarded to the renowned Kurt Bach. He is thirty-two years old.

  The upper floor of the coach house is rented to the coffin-maker Wilke. Wilke is an emaciated man, and nobody knows whether he has a family or not. Our relations with him are friendly, resting on mutual advantage. When we have a brand-new corpse not yet provided with a coffin, we recommend Wilke or tip him off; he does the same for us when he knows of a body that has not yet been snapped up by our competitors' hyenas; for the bat
tle for the dead is bitter and is fought tooth and nail. Oskar Fuchs, the traveler for Holl-mann and Klotz, even resorts to the use of onions. Before going into a house where there is a corpse, he gets out a couple of cut onions and smells them until his eyes are full of tears—then he marches in, proves his sympathy for the dear departed, and tries to make a sale. For this reason he is called Weeping Oskar. It's a strange fact that if the survivors had only paid half as much attention to many of the departed when they were still alive as they do when it no longer matters, then the corpses would most certainly have foregone the most expensive mausoleum—but that's what mankind is like: they only prize what they no longer possess.

  Silently the street fills with the transparent smoke of twilight. There is already a light in Lisa's room, but this time the curtains are drawn, a sign that the horse butcher is home. Next to her house lies the garden of Holzmann, the wine merchant. Lilacs hang over the wall and from the cellars comes the fresh vinegary smell of the casks. Through the gate of our house marches the retired sergeant major, Knopf. He is a thin man and he wears a cap with a visor and carries a walking stick; despite his profession and although he has never read any book except the drill manual, he looks like Nietzsche. Knopf goes down Hakenstrasse and at the corner swings to the left into Marienstrasse. Toward midnight he will return, this time from the right—that will mean he has completed methodically, as befits an old military man, his circuit through the inns of the city. Knopf drinks nothing but corn schnaps, Werdenbrücker schnaps to be exact, nothing else. But on that subject he is the greatest connoisseur in the world. There are in the city some three or four firms that distill schnaps. To us they all taste more or less alike. Not so to Knopf; he can distinguish them even by smell. Forty years of unwearying application have so refined his taste that when it's a question of the same brand he can tell which inn it comes from. He maintains that there are differences between the inns' cellars and he can tell them apart. Naturally not with bottled schnaps, only with schnaps in the cask. He has won many a bet on it.

  I get up and look around my room. The ceiling is low and slanting and there is not much space, but I have what I need —a bed, a shelf of books, a table, a couple of chairs, and aa old piano. Five years ago, when I was a soldier in the trenches, I never thought I would be so well off again. At that time we were in Flanders; it was the big attack on Kemmel-berg, and we lost three-quarters of our company. On the second day, Georg Kroll was taken to the hospital with a stomach wound, but almost three weeks passed before I was knocked out by a shot in the knee. Then came the collapse, and I finally became a schoolmaster as my sick mother had wished and as I had promised her before she died. She was sick so often that she thought if I had an official position with life tenure nothing bad could happen to me any more. She died in the last months of the war, but I took my examinations just the same and was sent to a village on the heath, where I stayed till I grew sick of dinning into children things I did not believe myself and being buried alive amid memories I wanted to forget.

  I try to read, but it is no weather for reading. Spring makes you restless, and in the twilight it is easy to lose yourself. There are no boundaries then and you feel breathless and confused. I turn on the light and at once feel more secure. On the table lies a yellow portfolio with the poems I have pecked out in triplicate on the Erika typewriter. From time to time I send a few of these to the newspapers. They either come back or there is no answer; then I peck out new copies and try again. I have only twice succeeded in publishing anything in our local newspaper, and then, to be sure, with Georg's help, for he knows the editor. Nevertheless, that was enough for me to be made a member of the Werdenbrück Poets' Club, which meets each week at Eduard Knobloch's in the Old German Room. Eduard recently tried to have me expelled because of the coupons, alleging moral turpitude; but the club declared, in opposition to Eduard, that I had behaved most honorably, just as the business and industrial leaders of our beloved fatherland had been doing for years—and, besides, art had nothing to do with morals.

  I push the poems aside. They suddenly seem to me flat and childish, typical of the attempts almost every young man makes at one time or another. I began to write during the war, but then it made some sense—for minutes at a time it took me away from what I was seeing. It was like a little hut of protest and of belief that something else existed beyond destruction and death. But that was a long time ago; today I know that there exists a great deal more besides and I even know that both can exist simultaneously. I no longer need my poems for that; in the books on my shelf it has all been said much better and more convincingly. But what would become of us if that were a reason for giving something up? Where should we all be? So I go on writing, though what I write often seems gray and wooden in comparison with the evening sky which is now growing spacious and apple green above the roofs while twilight fills the streets with a drift of violet-colored ashes.

  I go downstairs, past the darkened office and into the garden. The Knopfs' door is open, and inside the three daughters of the family sit around the lamp as though in a fiery cage, busy at their sewing machines. The machines whir. I glance at the window next to the office. It is dark; so Georg has already disappeared somewhere. Heinrich, too, has gone to the reassuring haven of his customary restaurant. I take a turn around the garden. Someone has been sprinkling it; the earth is damp and smells very strong. Wilke's coffin shop is empty, and there is no sound from Kurt Bach. His windows are open; a half-finished, mourning lion cowers on the floor as though it had a toothache, and beside it stand peacefully two empty beer bottles.

  Suddenly a bird begins to sing. It is a thrush perched on top of the memorial cross that Heinrich Kroll has bartered away. Its voice is much too big for that little black ball with its yellow beak. It rejoices and mourns and moves my heart. For a moment I reflect that its song, which for me means life and future and dreams and everything undefined, strange, and new, no doubt means to the worms that are working their way up through the damp garden soil around the monument nothing but the dreadful signal of lacerating death from a murderous beak. Nevertheless, I cannot help myself; it carries me away, releasing everything within me; all at once I stand there helpless and lost, amazed that I am not torn apart or that I do not rise like a balloon into the evening sky—until finally I pull myself together and stumble back through the garden and the nocturnal fragrance, up the stairs to my piano, where I pound and caress the keys, trying to be something like the thrush and to pour out what I feel. But nothing much comes of it and in the end it is only a flood of arpeggios and shreds of sentimental ditties and folk songs and bits from the Rosenkavalier and Tristan, a hopeless medley till finally someone on the street shouts up: "Hey, you, why don't you learn to play?"

  I stop abruptly and steal to the window. A dark figure is disappearing into the night; it is already too far away to bit. And why, after all? He is right. I cannot really play. Either at the piano or at life; never, never have I been able to. I have always been too hasty, too impatient; something always intervenes and breaks it up. But who really knows how to play, and if he does know, what good is it to him? Is the great dark less dark for that, are the unanswerable questions less inscrutable, does the pain of despair at eternal inadequacy burn less fiercely, and can life ever be explained and seized and ridden like a tamed horse or is it always a mighty sail that carries us in the storm and, when we try to seize it, sweeps us into the deep? Sometimes there is a hole in me that seems to extend to the center of the earth. What could fill it? Yearning? Despair? Happiness? What happiness? Fatigue? Resignation? Death? What am I alive for? Yes, for what am I alive?