Kurt Bach has no patience with all this. A son of nature, he is still a member of the Society of Freethinkers in Berlin, whose motto is: “Live and rejoice while you are here, beyond the grave there’s naught to fear.” It’s strange that, despite this fact, he has become a sculptor of the Beyond, portraying angels, dying lions, and eagles, but that was not his original intention. As a young man he considered himself a kind of nephew to Michelangelo.
The canary is singing. The light keeps it awake. Wilke’s plane makes a hissing sound. Beyond the open windows lies the night. “How are you feeling?” I ask Wilke. “Do you hear the Beyond knocking yet?”
“So-so. It’s only eleven thirty. At this hour I feel as if I were out for a walk in a décolleté gown and a full beard. Uncomfortable.”
“Be a monist,” Kurt Bach urges. “When you don’t believe in anything, you never feel especially bad. Or ridiculous either.”
“Nor good, for that matter,” Wilke says.
“Perhaps. But certainly not as though you had a full beard and were wearing a décolleté” gown. I only feel that way when I look out the window at night and there is the sky with all its stars and the millions of light years and I am supposed to believe that over all this sits a kind of superman who cares what becomes of Kurt Bach.”
The son of nature contentedly cuts himself a piece of sausage and begins to chew. Wilke is growing more nervous. Midnight is near, and at this hour he does not relish such conversation. “Cold, isn’t it?” he says. “Autumn already.”
“Just leave the window open,” I tell him as he is about to close it. “That won’t do you any good; ghosts can go through glass. Instead, take a look at that acacia out there. It’s the Lisa Watzek of acacias. Listen to the wind rustling in it! Like silk petticoats rustling to the music of a waltz. But someday it will be cut down and you will make coffins out of it—”
“Not of acacia wood. Coffins are made of oak or pine with mahogany veneer—”
“All right, all right, Wilke! Is there any schnaps left?”
Kurt Bach hands me the bottle. Wilke suddenly jumps and almost cuts a finger off. “What was that?” he asks in alarm.
A beetle has flown against the electric light. “Just quiet down, Alfred,” I say. “That’s not a messenger from the Beyond. Just a simple drama of the animal world. A dung beetle striving toward the sun—represented for him by a one-hundred-watt bulb in the back house at No. 3 Hackenstrasse.”
By agreement, from shortly before midnight until the end of the ghostly hour we call Wilke by his first name. It makes him feel more secure. After that we become formal again.
“I don’t understand how anyone can live without religion,” Wilke says to Kurt Bach. “What do you do when you wake up at night during a thunderstorm?”
“In the summer?”
“In the summer, of course; there aren’t any thunderstorms in winter.”
“You drink something cold,” Kurt Bach explains, “and then go back to sleep.”
Wilke shakes his head. During the ghostly hour he is not only scared but very religious.
“I used to know a man who went to a bordello during thunderstorms,” I say. “He was absolutely compelled to. At other times he was impotent; thunderstorms changed that. One sight of a thunderhead and he would reach for the telephone and make an appointment with Fritzi. The summer of 1920 was the finest time of his life; there were thunderstorms all the time. Often four or five a day.”
“What’s become of him?” Wilke, the amateur scientist, asks with interest.
“He’s dead,” I say. “Died during the last and biggest thunderstorm, in October 1920.”
The night wind slams a door in the house opposite. Bells ring from the steeples. It is midnight Wilke gulps down a schnaps.
“How about a stroll to the cemetery?” asks the sometimes unfeeling atheist Bach.
Wilke’s mustache quivers with horror in the wind blowing in through the window. “And you call yourselves friends!” he says reproachfully.
Immediately thereafter he is startled again. “What was that?”
“A pair of lovers out there. Stop working for a while, Alfred. Eat! Ghosts stay away from people while they’re eating. Haven’t you any sprats?”
Alfred gives me the look of a dog that has been kicked while answering the call of nature. “Do you have to remind me of that now? Of my unhappy love life and the loneliness of a man in his best years?”
“You’re a victim of your profession,” I say. “Not everyone can say that of himself. Come to souper! That’s what this meal is called in the fashionable world.”
We go to work on the sausage and cheese and we open the bottles of beer. The canary is given a lettuce leaf and breaks into a song of praise, with no thought as to whether it is an atheist or believer. Kurt Bach raises his clay-colored face and sniffs. “It smells of stars,” he exclaims.
“What’s that?” Wilke puts down his bottle among the shavings. “What in the world does that mean?”
“At midnight the world smells of stars.”
“Cut out the jokes! How can anyone even want to go on living when he believes in nothing and yet talks like that?”
“Are you trying to convert me?” Kurt Bach asks. “You celestial inheritance hunter?”
“No, no! Or yes, if you like. Wasn’t that something rustling?”
“Yes,” Kurt says. “Love.”
Outside we hear more cautious footsteps. A second pair of lovers vanishes into the forest of tombstones. The white blur of a girl’s dress can be seen disappearing into the darkness.
“Why do people look so different when they’re dead?” Wilke asks. “Even twins.”
“Because they’re no longer disguised,” Kurt Bach replies.
Wilke stops chewing. “Disguised how?”
“By life,” says the monist
Wilke smooths his mustache and goes on chewing. “At this hour you might at least stop this nonsense! Isn’t anything sacred to you?”
Kurt Bach laughs tonelessly. “You poor vine! You always have to have something to cling to.”
“And you?”
“So do I.” Bach’s eyes in the clay-colored face gleam as though made of glass. The son of nature is usually taciturn, just an unsuccessful sculptor with broken dreams; but sometimes those latent dreams rise again as they did years ago, and then he suddenly becomes a superannuated satyr with visions.
There is a crackling and whispering in the courtyard, and once more stealthy footsteps. “Two weeks ago there was a fight out there,” Wilke says. “A locksmith had forgotten to take his tools out of his pocket, and during the stormy encounter they must have got into so unfortunate a position that the lady was suddenly pricked by a sharp awl. She was up in a flash and grabbed a small bronze wreath. She beat the mechanic over the head with it—didn’t you hear it?” he asks me.
“No.”
“Well, she slams the bronze wreath down over his ears so hard he can’t get it off. I turn on the light and ask what’s going on. The fellow gallops off in terror with the bronze wreath around his skull like a Roman senator—didn’t you notice the bronze wreath was missing?” he asks me.
“No.”
“What a way to run a business! So he runs out as though a swarm of wasps was after him. I go down. The girl is still standing there, looking at her hand. ‘Blood!’ she says. ‘He stabbed me. And at such a moment!’
“I see the awl on the ground and guess what has happened. I pick up the awl. This could give you blood poisoning,’ I say. ‘Very dangerous! You can put a tourniquet on a finger, but not on a buttock. Even so enchanting a one.’ She blushes—”
“How could you tell in the darkness?” Kurt Bach asks.
“There was a moon.”