I do not immediately understand her. Behind us the garden is already settling itself for the night; but in front, beyond the iron lattice, a wild alchemy flames and seethes. A beginning and an end? I think, and then I comprehend her meaning; it is arrogant to try to isolate and define a tiny existence in this seething and hissing and to make our meaguer consciousness the judge of its own duration, whereas it is at most a snowflake briefly floating on its surface. Beginning and end, invented words for an invented concept of time and the vanity of an amoeba-like consciousness unwilling to be submerged in a greater one.
“Isabelle,” I say. “You sweet, beloved life, I think I have finally felt what love is! It is life, nothing but life, the highest reach of the wave toward the evening sky, toward the paling stars and toward itself—the reach that is always in vain, the mortal reach toward what is immortal—but sometimes Heaven bends down to the wave and they meet for an instant and then it is no longer piracy on the one hand and rejection on the other, no longer lack and superfluity and the falsification of the poets, it is—”
I break off. “I don’t know what I’m saying,” I tell her. “It’s like a rushing stream and perhaps part of it is lies, but if so they are lies because words are deceptive and like cups used to catch a fountain—but you, you will understand me even without words; it is so new for me I can’t express it; I didn’t know that even my breath can love and my nails can love and even my death, and to hell with how long it lasts and whether I can hold on to it or express it—”
“I understand,” Isabelle says.
“You understand?”
She nods with sparkling eyes. “I was worried about you, Rudolf.”
Why should she be worried about me? I wonder. After all, I’m not sick. “Worried?” I say. “Why worry about me?”
“Worried,” she repeats. “But now I’m not any more. Farewell, Rudolf.”
I look at her and hold her hands tight. “Why do you want to go? Have I said something wrong?”
She shakes her head and tries to free her hands. “Yes, I have!” I say. “It was false! It was arrogant, it was words, it was a speech—”
“Don’t spoil it, Rudolf! Why do you always have to spoil the things you want the minute you have them?”
“Yes,” I say. “Why?”
“The fire without smoke or ashes. Don’t spoil it. Farewell, Rudolf.”
What is this? I think. It is like a play, but it cannot be one! Is this farewell? But we have often said farewell, every evening. I hold Isabelle tight. “We’ll stay together,” I say.
She nods and lays her head on my shoulder and I suddenly feel her crying. “Why are you crying?” I ask. “After all, we’re happy!”
“Yes,” she says and kisses me and frees herself. “Good-by, Rudolf.”
“Why are you saying good-by? This is not a leave-taking! I’ll come again tomorrow.”
She looks at me. “Oh, Rudolf,” she says as though again there were something she could not make clear to me. “How is one ever to be able to die when one cannot say good-by?”
“Yes,” I say. “How? I don’t understand that either. Neither the one nor the other.”
We are standing in front of the pavilion where she lives. No one is in the hallway. A bright scarf is lying on one of the cane chairs. “Come,” Isabelle says suddenly.
I hesitate for an instant, but now I cannot say no again and so I follow her upstairs. She walks into her room without looking around. I stand in the doorway. With a quick gesture she kicks off her light gold shoes and lays herself on the bed. “Come, Rudolf!” she says.
I sit down beside her. I do not want to disappoint her again, but I do not know what to do nor what I am to say if a nurse or Wernicke comes in. “Come,” Isabelle says.
I lean back and she lays herself in my arms. “At last,” she murmurs, “Rudolf.” And after a few deep breaths she falls asleep.
The room grows dark. The window is pale in the oncoming night. I hear Isabelle’s breath and now and again murmurs from the next room. Suddenly she wakes with a start. She thrusts me from her and I feel her body go rigid. She holds her breath. “It is I,” I say. “I, Rudolf.”
“Who?”
“I, Rudolf. I have stayed with you.”
“You have slept here?”
Her voice has changed. It is high and breathless. “I have stayed here,” I say.
“Go!” she whispers. “Go at once!”
I do not know whether she recognizes me. “Where is the light?” I ask.
“No light! No light! Go! Go!”
I stand up and feel my way to the door. “Don’t be afraid, Isabelle,” I say.
She twists about on the bed as though trying to pull the blankets over her. “Do go!” she whispers in her high, altered voice. “Otherwise she’ll see you, Ralph! Quick!”
I close the door behind me and go down the stairs. The night nurse is sitting in the hall. She knows I have permission to visit Isabelle. “Is she quiet?” she asks.
I nod and walk across the garden to the gate through which the sick and the well come and go. What was that now? I think. Ralph, who can he be? She has never called me that before. And why did she think I must not be seen? I have often been in her room in the evening.
I walk down toward the city. Love, I think, and my high-flown speeches recur to me. I feel an almost unbearable longing and a faint horror and something like a desire to escape. I walk faster and faster toward the city with its lights, its warmth, its vulgarity, its misery, its commonplaceness, and its healthy revulsion against secrets and chaos, whatever names they may go by....
During the night I am awakened by voices. I open the window and see Sergeant Major Knopf being carried home. It is the first time this has happened; he has always got back under his own power even when schnaps was running out of his eyes. He is groaning loudly. Lights go on in a few windows.
“Damned drunkard!” a voice screeches from one of them. It is the widow Konersmann, who has been lying in wait there. She has nothing to do and is the neighborhood snoop. I have had reason to suspect that she is spying on Georg and Lisa too.
“Shut your trap!” an anonymous hero answers from the dark street.
I don’t know whether he knows the widow Konersmann. In any case, after a few seconds of silent indignation such a deluge of abuse descends upon him, upon Knopf, upon the customs of the city, of the country, and of humanity that the Street re-echoes.
Finally the widow stops. Her last words are that Hindenburg, the bishop, the police, and the employer of the unknown hero will be informed. “Shut your trap, you disgusting old hag!” replies the man, who seems, under cover of darkness, to possess unusual staying power. “Herr Knopf is seriously ill. I wish it was you.”
The widow immediately bursts forth again with redoubled energy, a thing no one would have thought possible. With the aid of a pocket flashlight she is trying to identify the malefactor from her window, hut the beam is too weak. “I know who you are!” she screeches. “You are Heinrich Brüggemann! Imprisonment is what you’ll get for insulting a helpless widow, you murderer! And as for your mother—”
I stop listening. The widow has a good audience. Almost all the windows are open now. Grunts and applause come from them. I go downstairs.
Knopf is just being brought into the courtyard. He is white, perspiration is running down his face, and the Nietzsche mustache hangs moistly over his lips. With a scream he suddenly frees himself, reels forward a few steps, and unexpectedly springs at the obelisk. He embraces it with both arms and legs like a frog, presses himself against the granite and howls.
I look around. Behind me stands Georg in his purple pajamas, behind him old Frau Kroll without her teeth, in a blue bathrobe, with curling papers in her hair, and behind her Heinrich, who, to my astonishment, is in pajamas without either steel helmet or decorations. However, the pajamas are striped in the Prussian colors, black and white.