The Black Obelisk

by Erich Maria Remarque

  3.

  It is Sunday morning. Bells are ringing from all the steeples, and last night's will-o'-the wisps have vanished. The dollar still stands at thirty-six thousand, time holds its breath, the crystal of the sky is as yet unmelted by the warmth of day, everything is clear and infinitely clean—it is the morning hour when even the murderer is forgiven and good and evil are empty words.

  I dress slowly. Cool, sunny air sweeps through the open window. Like distant sawing, the snores of Sergeant Major Knopf reach me from next door. There is the steely flash of swallows darting through the arch. Like the office below it, my room has two windows—one opening on the courtyard, the other on the street. For a moment I lean against the rear window and look into the garden. Suddenly a dreadful scream breaks the stillness and is followed by gasping and groaning. It is Heinrich Kroll, who sleeps in the other wing. He is having his nightmare again. In 1918 he was buried by an explosion, and now, five years later, he still occasionally dreams about it.

  I make coffee on my alcohol stove and pour a little kirsch into it. That's something I learned in France, and despite the inflation I always manage to have schnaps. My salary is never enough for a new suit—I simply can't save up the money for that, it loses its value too fast—but it takes care of the small items and, of course, a bottle of brandy now and then for comfort.

  I have margarine and plum preserve with my bread. The preserve is good; it comes from Mother Kroll's larder. The margarine is rancid, but that doesn't matter; during the war we all ate much worse. I survey my wardrobe. I have two uniforms remodeled into suits. One has been dyed blue, the other black—there wasn't much else to do with the gray-green material. Besides that I still have a suit from the time before I was a soldier. I have outgrown it a little, but it is a genuine civilian garment, not remodeled or adapted, and so I put it on. It goes with the tie that I bought yesterday afternoon, and that I am going to wear today so that Isabelle will see it.

  I walk contentedly through the streets of the city. Werdenbrück is an ancient town of sixty thousand, with wooden buildings and baroque structures interspersed with dreadful new developments. I cross it and go out along an avenue lined with horse chestnuts, then up a little hill to the big park where the insane asylum stands. There it is, in Sabbath peace, with birds twittering in the trees. I go there to play the organ at Sunday mass in the little church attached to the institution. I learned to play it when I was studying to be a teacher, and a year ago I snapped up the post here as a secondary job. I have a number of them. Once a week I give piano lessons to the rowdy children of Karl Brill, the shoe-maker, and in return get my boots resoled and a little money—and twice a week I tutor the idiot son of Bauer, the book-seller, and as a reward I am allowed to read all the new books and am given a discount when I want to make a purchase. Naturally this discount is exploited by the entire membership of the Poets' Club, even by the shameless Eduard Knobloch, who on these occasions suddenly becomes my friend.

  The mass begins at nine o'clock. I sit down at the organ and watch the last inmates coming in. They move forward silently and take their places in the pews. A few attendants and nurses sit between them and on the sides. Everything is done softly, much more silently than in the country churches where I played when I was a schoolmaster. There is no sound except the scuffling of shoes on the stone floor; they scuffle, they do not tramp. These are the footsteps of people whose thoughts are far away.

  In front of the altar the candles have been lit. The radiance from outside falls through the stained-glass window, mixing with the candle glow in a soft red and blue, transfused with gold. In this glow stands the priest in his brocaded vestments, and on the steps of the altar his assistants kneel in their red gowns and white tunics.

  I pull out the stops for flutes and vox humana and begin to play. With a jerk the heads of the inmates in the front rows turn around all at once as though pulled by a string. The pale faces and dark eyes stare expressionlessly upward toward the organ. In the dim golden light they float like bright, flat disks; sometimes in winter when it is dark they look like large consecrated wafers waiting for the Holy Ghost to descend upon them. These people never grow accustomed to the organ; they have no past and no memory. Every Sunday the flutes and violins and basses strike their alienated minds as unexpected and new. Then the priest at the altar begins, and they turn toward him.

  Not all the inmates follow the mass. In the rear rows there are many who do not move. They sit there as though shrouded in nameless sorrow and surrounded by an infinite void—but perhaps that is only the way it seems. Perhaps they are in different worlds where there has been no word of the crucified Saviour; perhaps they are absorbed harmlessly and innocently in a music by contrast with which the organ sounds pale and crude. Or maybe they are thinking of nothing at all, as indifferent as the sea or life or death. Only we give meaning to nature. What it may be in itself, perhaps those heads down there know, but they cannot betray the secret. What they see has made them dumb. They could be the last descendants of the builders of the Tower of Babel. Their tongues have been twisted and they cannot communicate what they have seen from the highest terraces.

  I peer toward the front rows. On the right side in a flicker of rose and blue I see Isabelle's dark head. She is kneeling in her pew very straight and slim. She did not look around when the organ began. Often she does look around, but today she seems so drawn into herself that she hears nothing. Her narrow head is inclined to one side like a Gothic statue. She is not praying, she is some place whither no one can follow her. I push back the basses and the vox humana and pull out the vox caeiestis. That is the softest and most rapturous of the organ registers. We are approaching the divine transformation. Bread and wine are becoming the flesh and blood of God. It is a miracle like that other one, the creation of man out of dust and clay. Riesenfeld maintains that the third is man's failure to do anything with that miracle except to exploit and kill his fellow man in increasingly wholesale fashion and to crowd into the brief interval between death and death as much egoism as possible—although only one fact is really certain from the start: that he must die. That's what Riesenfeld says, Riesenfeld of the Odenwald Granite Works, one of the sharpest, most enterprising manipulators in the business of death. Agnus Dei qui tollis peccata mundi.

  After mass the nurses of the institution give me breakfast of eggs, cold cuts, bouillon, bread, and honey. That's part of my salary. It takes care of the midday meal, for Eduard's coupons are not good on Sunday. In addition, I receive two thousand marks, a sum just sufficient to pay my streetcar fare there and back, if that's what I wanted to use it for. I have never asked for a raise. Why, I do not know; when it comes to Karl Brill and the tutoring lessons for the son of Bauer, the bookseller, I fight for one like a wild goat.

  After breakfast I go for a walk in the asylum park. It is a handsome, spacious estate with trees, flowers, and benches surrounded by a high wall; one might think he was in a rest home if he did not notice the bars at the windows.

  I love the park because it is quiet and I don't have to talk to anyone about war, politics, or the inflation. I can sit in silence and do such old-fashioned things as listen to the wind and the birds and watch the light filtering through the bright green of the treetops.

  Those of the inmates who are allowed out are strolling by. Most are quiet, a few are talking to themselves, one or two carry on lively discussions with one another or with visitors and attendants, and many sit silent and alone, heads bowed and motionless as though turned to stone in the sun—until they are herded back into their cells.

  It took me some time to get used to this sight—and even now there are moments when I stare at the madmen as I did in the beginning, with a mixture of curiosity, dread, and a nameless third emotion that reminds me of the first time I saw a corpse. I was twelve then, and the body was that of Georg Hellmann; a week before, I had been playing with him, now he lay there amid wreaths and flowers, a thing unspeakably alien, made of yellow wax, a thing that,
in a horrible way, had nothing more to do with us, that had departed for an unthinkable eternity and yet was still there, a speechless, strange, chill threat. Of course, later, in the war, I saw countless dead men and felt scarcely any more emotion than if I had been in a slaughterhouse—but that first one I never forgot, just as one never forgets any first time. He was death. And it is this same death that sometimes peers at me from the extinguished eyes of the madmen, a living death, more bewildering, almost, and more incomprehensible than that other, silent one.

  Only with Isabelle it is different.

  I see her coming toward me along the path from the women's pavilion. A yellow dress billows around her like a bell of shantung silk, and in her hand she is carrying a broad, flat straw hat.

  I get up and go to meet her. Her face is narrow, and one really sees only the eyes and mouth. The eyes are gray and green and very transparent; the mouth is as red as that of a consumptive or as though it were heavily painted. The eyes, however, can suddenly become shallow, slate-colored, and small, and the mouth narrow and bitter like that of an old maid. When she is that way, she is Jennie, a distrustful, unattractive person, discontented with everything you do —otherwise she is Isabelle. Both are illusions, for in reality she is Geneviève Terhoven and is suffering from an illness that has the ugly and rather spectral name of schizophrenia —a division of consciousness, a split personality—and that is the reason she considers herself either Isabelle or Jennie —someone other than she really is. She is one of the youngest patients in the asylum. Her mother is said to live in Alsace and to be quite rich but to pay little attention to her. In any event, I have not seen her here since I have known Geneviève, and that is now six weeks.

  Today she is Isabelle, as I see immediately. At such times she lives in a dream world divorced from reality and seems light and weightless and I would not be surprised if the sulphur butterflies, playing around us, came and settled on her shoulders.

  "There you are again!" she says, smiling. "Where have you been all this time?"

  When she is Isabelle she says du to me. This is no partic ular distinction; at such times she says du to everyone. "Where have you been?" she asks again.

  I make a gesture in the direction of the gate. "Somewhere —out there—"

  She looks at me for an instant inquiringly. "Out there? Why? Are you looking for something?"

  "I guess so—if I only knew what!"

  She comes close to me. "Give it up, Rolf. One never finds anything."

  I recoil at the name Rolf. Unfortunately, she often calls me that, for just as she takes herself for someone else, so, too, does she me, and not always for the same person. She alternates between Rolf and Rudolf, and once a certain Raoul turned up. Rolf is a boring fellow whom I cannot stand; Raoul seems to be a sort of gay deceiver—what I like best is when she calls me Rudolf, then she is enthusiastic and in love. My real name, Ludwig Bodmer, she ignores. I have told it to her often, but it simply does not make any impression.

  During the first weeks this was all very confusing, but now I am accustomed to it. At that time I had the common conception of mental illnesses: nothing but continuous violence, attempts at murder, and gibbering idiots. They exist, of course, and they are more frequent than the other; but just by contrast Geneviève is all the more surprising. At first I could hardly believe that she was sick at all, so playful seemed her alternations of name and personality, and even now that still sometimes happens to me. Finally I realized, however, that in the silence, behind these fragile structures, was a quivering chaos. It did not quite penetrate, but it was close at hand, and this, combined with the fact that Isabelle was just twenty and, because of her illness, sometimes of an almost tragic beauty, gave her a strange fascination.

  "Come, Rolf," she says, taking my arm.

  I try again to escape the hated name. "I am not Rolf," I explain. "I'm Rudolf."

  "You are not Rudolf."

  "Oh yes, I'm Rudolf. Rudolf, the unicorn."

  She called me that once. But I have no success. She smiles, as one does at a stubborn child. "You're not Rudolf and you are not Rolf. But neither are you what you think you are. Now come, Rolf!"

  I look at her. For a moment I again have the feeling that she is not sick at all and is only pretending. "Don't be boring," she says. "Why do you always want to be the same person?"

  "Yes, why?" I reply in surprise. "You're right! Why does one want to be? What is there so precious about a person? And why does one take oneself so seriously?"

  She nods. "You and the doctor! But in the end the wind blows over^ everything. Why won't you two yield to it?"

  "The doctor too?" I ask.

  "Yes, the man who calls himself that. The things he wants to find out from me! But he knows nothing at all. Not even how the grass looks at night when no one is watching."

  "How can it look? Gray, probably, or black. And silvery when the moon is shining."

  Isabelle shakes her head. "Just as I thought! Just like the doctor!"

  "How does it look then?"

  She stops. A gust of wind blows over us laden with bees and the smell of flowers. The yellow dress billows like a sail. "It isn't there at all," she says.

  We walk on. An old woman in asylum clothes comes past us along the allée. Her face is red and glistening with tears. Two helpless relatives walk beside her. "What is there, then, if the grass isn't?" I ask.

  "Nothing. It's only there while you're watching. Sometimes if you turn around very fast you can still catch it."

  "What? The grass not being there?"

  "No—but the way it scurries back to its place. That's how they all are—the grass and everything that's behind you. Like servants who have gone to a dance. You just have to be very quick in turning around. Then you can catch them —otherwise they're already there, acting as innocent as if they'd never been away."

  "Who, Isabelle?" I ask very cautiously.

  "Things. Everything behind you. They're just waiting for you to turn around so they can disappear!"

  I consider that for a moment. It would be like having an abyss behind you all the time. "Am I not there either when you turn around?" I ask.

  "You aren't there either. Nothing is."

  "Really?" I say somewhat bitterly. "But for me I am always there. No matter how fast I turn around."

  "You turn around in the wrong direction."

  "Are there different directions too?"

  "For you there are, Rolf."

  I recoil once more at the hated name. "And for you? What about you?"

  She looks at me, smiling absently, as though she did not know me. "I? But I'm not here at all!"

  "Really? You certainly are for me." Her expression changes. She knows me again. "Is that true? Why then don't you say it to me more often?"

  "But I say it to you all the time."

  "Not enough." She leans against me. I feel her breath and her breasts under the thin silk. "Never enough," she says with a sigh. "Why doesn't anyone know that? Oh, you statues!"

  Statues, I think. What other role is left for me? I look at her. She is beautiful and exciting, I am aware of her, and every time I am with her it is as if a thousand voices were telephoning through my veins; then suddenly all are cut off as though they had a wrong number, and I find myself helpless and confused. One cannot desire a madwoman. Perhaps some can, not I. It is as though you were to desire a clockwork doll. Or someone hypnotized. But that does not alter the fact that you are aware of her.

  The green shadows of the allée part, and in front of us beds of tulips and narcissuses lie in the full sun. "You must put your hat on, Isabelle," I say. "The doctor wants you to."

  She throws her hat among the flowers. "The doctor! What doesn't he want! He wants to marry me, but his heart is starved. He's a sweating owl."

  I don't think that owls can sweat, but the image is convincing nevertheless. Isabelle steps among the tulips like a dancer and crouches there. "Can you hear them?"

  "Of course," I reply in rel
ief. "Anyone can hear them. They're bells. In F sharp."

  "What is F sharp?"

  "A musical note. The sweetest of all."

  She throws her wide skirt over the flowers. "Are they ringing in me now?"