We stare at the sunset. The train goes puffing toward it, black and lost, like a funeral coach. It’s strange, I think, all of us have seen so many dead in the war and we know that over two million of us fell uselessly—why, then, are we so excited about a single man, when we have practically forgotten the two million already? But probably the reason is that one dead man is death—and two million are only a statistic.
Chapter Nine
“A mausoleum!” Frau Niebuhr says. “A mausoleum or nothing!”
“All right,” I reply. “Let it be a mausoleum.”
In the short time since Niebuhr’s death the timid little woman has changed remarkably. Now she is caustic, talkative, and quarrelsome and has really become pretty much of a pest. I have been dickering with her for two weeks about a memorial for the baker, and each day I think less harshly of the departed. Many people are brave and kind as long as things go badly with them and become intolerable when things improve, especially in our beloved fatherland; the most timid and obsequious recruits here often become the worst-tempered noncoms.
“You haven’t any on display,” Frau Niebuhr says pointedly.
“Mausoleums,” I explain, “are not put on display. They are made to order like the ball dresses of queens. We have a few drawings of them here and perhaps we’ll have to make one especially for you.”
“Of course! It must be something quite special. Otherwise I shall go to Hollmann and Klotz.”
“I hope you have been there already. We like our clients to visit the competition. In mausoleums quality is the thing of paramount importance.”
I know that she has been there long since. The traveler for Hollmann and Klotz, Weeping Oskar, has told me about it. We ran into him a short time ago and tried to bribe him away. He is still undecided, but we have offered him a higher percentage than Hollmann and Klotz pay, and to show us that he is well disposed during this period of reflection he is temporarily working for us as a spy. “Show me your drawings!” Frau Niebuhr commands like a duchess.
We have none, but I get out a few renderings of war memorials. They are effective, forty-five inches high, drawn with charcoal and colored chalk and embellished with appropriate backgrounds.
“A lion,” Frau Niebuhr says. “He was a lion! But a leaping lion, not a dying one. It must be a leaping lion.”
“How would a leaping horse do?” I ask. “A few years ago our sculptor won the Berlin-Teplitz challenge trophy with that subject”
She shakes her head. “An eagle,” she says thoughtfully.
“A true mausoleum should be a kind of chapel,” I explain. “Stained glass like a church, a marble sarcophagus with bronze laurel wreaths, a marble bench for your repose and silent prayer, around the outside flowers, cypresses, gravel paths, perhaps a bird bath for our feathered songsters, an enclosure for the plot of short granite columns with bronze chains, a massive iron door with the monogram, the family coat of arms, or the hallmark of the Bakers’ Guild—”
Frau Niebuhr listens as though Moritz Rosenthal were playing a Chopin nocturne. “Sounds all right,” she says then. “But haven’t you anything original?”
I stare at her angrily. She stares back coldly—the prototype of the eternal rich client.
“There are original things, to be sure,” I reply softly and venomously. “For example, like those in the Campo Santo in Genoa. Our sculptor worked there for years. One of the showpieces is by him—the figure of a weeping woman bending over a coffin, in the background the risen dead, being led heavenward by an angel. The angel is looking backward and with his free hand blesses the mourning widow. All this in white Carrara marble, the angel with wings either folded or spread—”
“Very nice. What else is there?”
“Very often the vocation of the departed is represented. For example, one could have a statue of a master baker kneading bread. Behind him stands death, tapping him on the shoulder. Death can be represented with or without a scythe, either wearing a pall or naked, that is as a skeleton, a very difficult undertaking, for a sculptor, especially in the matter of the ribs, which have to be chiseled out separately and very carefully so that they won’t break.”
Frau Niebuhr is silent as though waiting for more. “Of course the family can be added too,” I continue. “Praying at one side or cowering in terror before death. These, naturally, are objects that will run into the billions and will require a year or two of work. A big advance and consultation fees would be absolutely necessary.”
Suddenly I fear she will accept one of my proposals. A twisted angel is the height of Kurt Bach’s attainments; his art does not go beyond that. Nevertheless, at need we could give the sculpture to a subcontractor.
“And then?” Frau Niebuhr asks inexorably.
I wonder whether to tell this heartless devil something about the tomb in the form of a sarcophagus with the lid pushed a little to one side and a skeleton hand reaching out—but I decide against it. Our positions are unequal; she is the buyer and I am the seller; she can torment me, but not the other way about—and perhaps she will buy something after all.
“That’s all for the present.”
Frau Niebuhr waits a moment longer. “If you have nothing more, I must go to Hollmann and Klotz.”
She looks at me with June bug eyes. She has thrown her mourning veil back over her black hat. Now she is waiting for me to make a desperate plea. I do not do it. Instead, I explain coldly, “That will please us very much. It is our principle to draw in the competition so that people can see how capable our firm is. In commissions involving so much sculpture the artist is, of course, extremely important, otherwise you may suddenly have, as happened recently in the case of one of our competitors whose name I should prefer not to mention, an angel with two left feet. Squinting madonnas have turned up, too, and a Christ with eleven fingers. When it was noticed it was already too late.”
Frau Niebuhr brings down her veil like a theater curtain. “I’ll be on my guard!”
I am convinced she will be. She is a greedy connoisseur of her own mourning, drinking it in full draughts. It will be a long time before she places her order; for until she makes up her mind she can torment all the monument builders—but afterward only one, the one on whom she has settled. Now she is something like a footloose bachelor of sorrow—later she will be like a married man who must remain faithful.
Wilke, the coffinmaker, comes out of his workroom. There are wood shavings hanging in his mustache. In his hand he has a box of appetizing smoked sprats which he is eating with relish.
“What do you think about life?” I ask him.
He pauses. “One way in the morning and another in the evening, one way in winter and another in summer, one way before eating and another afterward, and probably one way in youth and another in age.”
“Right. Finally a sensible answer!”
“All right, if you know the answer why go on asking?”
“Asking is educational. Besides, I ask one way in the morning and another in the evening, one way in winter and another in summer, and one way before intercourse and another afterward.”
“After intercourse,” Wilke says thoughtfully. “Right you are, everything is different then! I had completely forgotten about that.”
I bow before him as though before an abbot. “Congratulations on your asceticism! You have conquered the prick of the flesh already! I wish I were as far advanced!”