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 round 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, bf\S,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.
Chapter Seven
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.