The Black Obelisk

by Erich Maria Remarque

  A pale light darts high above the garden wall and after a time is answered by soft rumbling. Our room seems like a cabin full of light afloat in a night which has become uncanny, as though somewhere captive giants were straining at their chains to leap up and annihilate the race of dwarfs that has for a time confined them. A cabin of light in the darkness, books and three orderly minds in a house like a beehive where the uncanny is locked up in cells and flashes lightning-like in the disturbed brains around us! What if in the next second a flash of recognition should run through them all and they should find their way together in revolt, what if they broke the locks, forced open the bars, and foamed up the stairs like a gray wave to sweep away the lighted room, this cabin of sound, well-grounded reason, into the night and into what stands, nameless and mighty, behind the night?

  I turn around. The man of faith and the man of science are sitting in the full brilliance of the ceiling light. For them the world is not a vague, quivering unrest, it is not a muttering from the depths or a lightning flash in the icy spaces of the void—they are men of faith and of science, they have sounding lines and plummets and scales and measures, each of them a different set but that does not matter, they are sure, they have names to put on everything like labels, they sleep well, they have a goal that contents them, and even horror, the black curtain in front of suicide, has a well-recognized place in their existence, it has a name, it has been classified and thereby rendered harmless. Only what is nameless or has burst its name is deadly.

  "There's lightning," I say.

  The doctor looks up. "Really?"

  He has just been explaining the nature of schizophrenia, Isabelle's ailment. His dark face is slightly flushed with excitement. He describes how patients of this sort leap lightning-like from one personality to another in a matter of seconds and how this may be the reason that in ancient times they were regarded as seers and holy men and in later times as possessed of the devil and were looked upon by the people with superstitious respect. He philosophizes about the causes, and suddenly I wonder how he comes to know all this and why he describes it as a sickness. Could it not equally well be regarded as a particular asset? Doesn't every normal person have a dozen personalities in him too? And isn't the distinction simply that the healthy person suppresses them and the sick one gives them scope? Who then is sick?

  I walk over to the table and empty my glass. Bodendiek watches me benevolently, Wernicke as a doctor might watch a wholly uninteresting case. For the first time I feel the wine; I feel it is good, self-contained, mature, and not unsettled. It no longer has chaos in it, I think. It has transformed chaos, transformed it into harmony. But transformed it, not replaced it. It has not disappeared. Suddenly, for a second's time, I am unreasonably, unspeakably happy. So it can be done, I think. One can transform chaos! It does not have to be one or the other. It can also be one through the other.

  Another pale flash lights the window and expires. The doctor gets up. "Now it's starting. I must go over to the confined cases."

  The confined cases are the patients who never come out. They remain locked up until they die in rooms where the furniture is screwed down, the windows barred, and the doors can only be opened from outside with a key. They are in cages like dangerous beasts and no one likes to talk about them.

  Wernicke looks at me. "What's the matter with your lip?"

  "Nothing. I bit myself in my sleep."

  Bodendiek laughs. The door opens and the little nurse brings in another bottle of wine and three glasses. Wernicke leaves with the nurse. Bodendiek reaches for the bottle and fills his glass. Now I understand why he invited Wernicke to drink with us; the Mother Superior thereupon sent a new bottle. A single one would not have been enough for three men. That sly fellow, I think. He has repeated the miracle of the loaves and fishes. From a single glass for Wernicke he has made a whole bottle for himself. "You probably won't be drinking any more, will you?" he asks.

  "Yes I will" I reply, seating myself. "I've acquired the taste. You taught me. Many thanks."

  Bodendiek draws the bottle out of the ice with a bittersweet smile. He regards the label for a moment before pouring—a quarter glass for me. His own he fills almost to the rim. I calmly take the bottle out of his hand and fill my own glass as full as his. "Herr Vicar," I say, "in many ways we are not so very different."

  Bodendiek suddenly laughs. His face unfolds like a peony. "To health and happiness," he says unctuously.

  The thunder rumbles near and far. The lightning falls like silent saber blows. I am sitting at the window in my room with the scraps of all Erna's letters in front of me in a hollow elephant's foot which the world traveler Hans Ledermann gave me a year ago for a wastebasket.

  I am through with Erna. I have counted up all her unattractive qualities; I have rooted her out of me emotionally and humanly; as dessert I have read a couple of chapters of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. Nevertheless, I should prefer to have a tuxedo, a car, and a chauffeur so that I could now turn up at the Red Mill, accompanied by two or three famous actresses and with several hundred millions in my pocket so that I could deal that serpent the blow of her life. I dream for a time of how it would be if tomorrow morning she should read in the paper that I had won the sweepstakes or had been gravely injured while rescuing children from a burning house. Then I see a light in Lisa's room.

  She opens the window and signals. My room is dark; she cannot see me; therefore I'm not the one. She says something silently, points at her breast and then at our house, and nods. The light goes out.

  I lean out cautiously. It is twelve o'clock, and the windows roiffld about are dark. Only Georg Kroll's is open.

  I wait and see Lisa's door move. She steps out, looks quickly in both directions, and runs across the street. She is wearing a light, bfS,M.Y colored dress and is carrying her shoes in her hand so as not te make any noise. At the same time I hear the door of our house being opened cautiously. It must be Georg. The door has a bell above it and in order to open it without making a noise you have to get on a chair, hold the clapper, press down on the latch with your foot, and draw the door open, an acrobatic feat for which you have to be sober. Tonight I know that Georg is sober.

  There is the sound of murmuring; the click of high heels. Lisa, that vain creature, has put on her shoes again to appear more seductive. The door of Georg's room sighs softly. Well, well! Who would have thought it? Still waters!

  The storm returns. The thunder grows louder, and suddenly, like a cascade of silver coins, the rain pours down upon the pavement. It rebounds in dusty fountains and a breath of coolness ascends from it. I lean out the window and look into the watery tumult. The rain is already running off through the rain pipes, lightning flares, and in its intermittent flashes I see Lisa's bare arm reaching out of Georg's window into the rain, then I see her head and hear her husky voice. I do not see Georg's bald dome. He is no nature lover.

  The gate to the courtyard opens under the blow of a fist. Soaking wet, Sergeant Major Knopf staggers in. Water is dripping from his cap. Thank God, I think, in weather like this I won't have to follow up his misdemeanors with a pail of water! But Knopf disappoints me. He doesn't pay any attention to his victim, the black obelisk. Cursing and slapping at the raindrops as though they were mosquitos he flees into the house. Water is his great enemy.

  I pick up the elephant's foot and empty its contents into the street. The rain quickly washes away Erna's protestations of love. Money has won, I think, as always, though it is worth nothing. I go to the other window and look into the garden. The great festival of the rain is in full swing, a green nuptial orgy, shameless and innocent. In the flare of the lightning I see the plaque for the suicide. It has been put to one side; the inscription has been carved and gleams with gold. I shut the window and turn on the light. Below, Georg and Lisa are murmuring. My room suddenly seems horribly empty. I open the window again and listen to the anonymous rushing and decide to request from Bauer, the bookseller, as honorarium for my last week's
tutoring, a book on yoga, renunciation and self-sufficiency. Adepts are said to achieve fabulous results through simple breathing exercises.

  Before I go to sleep I pass a mirror. I stop and look into it. What is there really? I think. Whence comes the perspective which is not a perspective, the deceptive depth, the space which is a plane? And who is that who peers out questioningly and is not there?

  I look at my lip swollen and crusted with blood. I touch it and someone opposite me touches his ghostly lip which is not there. I grin and the not-I grins back. I shake my head and the not-I shakes his not-head. Which of us is which? And in front? Or something else, something behind both? I feel a shudder and turn out the light.

  7.

  Riesenfeld had kept his word. The courtyard is full of monuments and pedestals. The ones polished on all sides are in crates and wrapped in sacking. They are the prima donnas among tombstones and must be handled with extreme care to avoid damaging their edges.

  The whole crew are in the courtyard to help and to watch. Even old Frau Kroll is wandering around, examining the blackness and quality of the granite and now and again casting a melancholy glance at the obelisk beside the door— the single remaining item of her late husband's purchases.

  Kurt Bach is directing the moving of a huge sandstone block into his workroom. A dying lion is to be created out of it, but this time not one bowed with toothache but roaring a last defiance, a broken spear in his flank. It is to be a war memorial for the village of Wüstringen where there is a particularly belligerent veteran's organization under the command of Major Wolkenstein, retired. The sorrowing lion was too much like a washrag for Wolkenstein. What he would really like is one with four heads spewing fire from all mouths.

  A shipment from the Württemberg Metal works, which arrived at the same time, is also being unpacked. Four eagles taking flight have been arranged in a row on the ground, two of bronze and two of cast iron. They are to become the crowning decorations for other war memorials to inspire the youth of the land to a new war—for, as Major Wolkenstein has so persuasively declared: "We must win sometime, and then woe to the vanquished!" For the moment, to be sure, the eagles look like nothing so much as giant roosters trying to lay eggs—but this will be quite different once they are enthroned on the monuments. Even generals without their uniforms are likely to look like grocers' apprentices, and Wolkenstein himself in civilian clothes would be taken for a fat athletic director. Costume and perspective are important in our beloved fatherland.

  As advertising director I supervise the arrangement of the monuments. They are not to be placed haphazardly in rows but artistically located about the garden in intimate groups. Heinrich Kroll is against this. He would like to see the stones placed like soldiers in formation; anything else seems to him effeminate. Fortunately he is outvoted. Even his mother is against him. Indeed, she is always against him. Even now she cannot understand why Heinrich belongs to her and not to the wife of Major Wolkenstein, retired.

  The day is blue and beautiful. Over the city the sky hangs like a giant silken tent. The cool of morning still lingers in the crowns of the trees. Birds are twittering as though nothing existed except early summer, their nests, and their young. It doesn't matter to them that the dollar, like an ugly, spongy toadstool, has puffed itself up to fifty thousand. Nor that, the morning paper contains the notices of three suicides—all people of small independent means, all committed in the favorite fashion of the poor by an open gas jet. Frau Kubalke was found in her living room with her head in the gas heater; the pensioned government clerk Hopf, freshly shaved, in his last, faultlessly brushed, much-mended suit, grasping in his hand four worthless red-seal thousand-mark notes like tickets to heaven; and the widow Glass on the floor of her kitchen, her bankbook, showing deposits of fifty thousand marks, torn in two beside her. Hopf's red-seal thousand-mark notes were his last banner of hope; for a long time there has been a belief that they would sometime or other be redeemed at full value. Whence this rumor came no one knows. They were never officially payable in gold, and even if they have been, the State, that immune betrayer, which embezzles billions and jails anyone who defrauds it of as much as five marks, would find some pretext for not paying. Only day before yesterday there was a notice in the paper that these notes would not receive preferential treatment. That's the reason Hopf's death notice is in the paper today.

  From the workroom of Wilke, the coffinmaker, come the sounds of hammering, as though a giant, cheerful woodpecker lived there. Wilke's business is booming; everyone needs a coffin sooner or later, even a suicide—the time of mass graves and burial in canvas bags has passed with the war. Now once more one decays fittingly in slowly moldering wood, in shroud or backless frock coat or in a burial dress of white crepe de Chine. Niebuhr, the banker, even in all the glory of his orders and fraternal insignia; his wife insisted on it. In addition, he had been provided with a facsimile of the Harmony Singing Club's flag. He was their second tenor, and every Saturday roared his way through "Schweigen im Walde" and "Stolz weht die Flagge Schwarzweissrot," drank almost enough beer to burst, and then went home to beat his wife—an upright man, as the pastor said at his funeral.

  Fortunately at ten o'clock Heinrich Rroll disappears with his bicycle and his striped pants to visit the villages. All this new granite makes his salesman's soul restless; he has to be on his way to let the sorrowing survivors know about it.

  Now we can become more expansive. First of all we give ourselves a recess and are served liverwurst sandwiches and coffee by Frau Kroll. Lisa appears in the gateway. She is wearing a blazing red silk dress. Old Frau Kroll scares her away with a glance. She can't stand Lisa, although she is no prude herself. "That dirty tramp," she exclaims with emphasis.

  Georg promptly falls into the trap. "Dirty? What do you mean dirty?"

  "Can't you see she's dirty? Unwashed under all that finery."

  I see Georg involuntarily grow thoughtful. Dirt is not something you like to think of in connection with your beloved—unless you're a decadent. For an instant there is a kind of flash of triumph in his mother's eyes; then she changes the subject. I look at her in admiration; she is a general of mobile units—she strikes swiftly, and when her opponent gets ready to defend himself she is already somewhere else. Lisa may be a tramp; she is certainly not obviously dirty.

  The three daughters of Sergeant Major Knopf come flitting out of the house. They are seamstresses like their mother, small, roly-poly, and nimble. Their machines whir all day long. Now they dart off, carrying bundles of exorbitantly costly silk shirts for profiteers. Knopf, the old soldier, does not hand over one pfennig of his pension for household expenses; that's something for the four women to see to.

  Cautiously we unpack the two black war memorials. They really ought to stand at the entrance to make an impressive effect, and in winter we would place them there; but it is May and, strange though it may seem, our courtyard is an arena for cats and lovers. The cats begin to scream from the monuments in February and chase each other behind the cement grave borders; the lovers, however, put in their appearance as soon as it is warm enough to make love in the open— and when is it too cold for that? Hackenstrasse is a quiet, remote street, our gate is inviting, and our garden old and large. The somewhat macabre display does not disturb the lovers; on the contrary, it seems to stir them to particular frenzy. Only two weeks ago, a chaplain from the village of Halle, who like all men of God was accustomed to rise with the roosters, came to see us at seven in the morning to order four of the smallest headstones for the graves of four charitable nuns who had died during the preceding year. As I, drunk with sleep, was leading him into the garden I was able to remove, just in time, a rose-colored stocking of artificial silk that was floating like a flag from our last memorial cross, left there by some enthusiastic nocturnal pair. Unquestionably there is something conciliatory, in the broad, poetic sense, about sowing life in a place of death, and Otto Bambuss, the poet schoolmaster of our club, when I told him about it, promp
tly stole my idea and worked it up into an elegy with cosmic humor—on the other hand it can be rather disturbing, especially when an empty brandy bottle stands there too, gleaming in the morning sun.

  I supervise the display. It makes a pleasant effect, as far as one can say that of tombstones. The two crosses stand on their pedestals shimmering in the sunlight, symbols of eternity, hewn fragments of a once-glowing earth, now cooled, polished, and ready to preserve forever the name of some successful businessman or rich profiteer—for even a scoundrel does not like to depart from this planet without leaving some trace behind.

  "Georg," I say, "we'll have to take care your brother doesn't sell our Werdenbrück Golgotha to some miserable farmer who won't pay until after the harvest. On this lovely day, amid the song of birds and the aroma of coffee, let us take a holy oath not to sell these two crosses except for cash on the line!"