Perhaps all our children will have is my small nose and your thin bones. Helene blew at the leaf, trying to dislodge it from Carl’s shoulder.
I wouldn’t mind. Carl stroked her face with both hands, then covered it. Let’s go home. He put his hand under her summer coat and felt her lowest rib bone. That’s the most beautiful part of you. Helene was afraid he might have mistaken the curving rib for her breast; you could make a mistake under a summer coat, however light it was. She blew at his shoulder again, but the leaf still clung. Now she raised one hand; she didn’t want him to notice the lime leaf, so she stroked his collar and, out of the corner of her eyes, saw the leaf drifting to the ground.
At the Zoo station they took the tram to Nollendorfplatz. Hand in hand, they ran up the stairs to his attic room. He opened the door, hung his hat on the hook and helped her to take off her summer coat, her shoes, her dress. Let’s have a look at you. She revealed herself. He could never have hoped that a woman would ever show herself to him as she did, he had simply had no idea. She laughed as if ashamed, but he knew that she felt no shame. He loved her for the game she was playing. She placed her hand on her belly, as a woman might do to cover herself, but then she moved her hand down to her mount of Venus, her groin, between her thighs. As she did so her gaze grew more concentrated, her nostrils flared and her mouth sketched a smile. Her fingers seemed to know their way. Then she brought her hand to her mouth; it looked as if she were embarrassed and had to bite her nails. Suddenly she turned, looked over her shoulder, where those dimples were tempting him, and asked: What are you waiting for?
He laid her down on the bed and kissed her.
Day was dawning when they finally left each other alone.
Carl got up and opened the window. It was cool; autumn was in the air.
Come here. Helene patted the pillow beside her. Carl lay down with her. He didn’t want a blanket. She liked the sight of him naked. He was exhausted; he had last slept long ago. She had been working all the previous day, he had been studying, they had gone into a little café for a meal, Königsberg meatballs, her favourite, they had gone to the theatre and then stood on the bridge. Later there had been her faint Yes under the lime tree. She was ashamed to think of it. She caressed his chest, circling his navel, from which a long scar ran down. Acute appendicitis, an obstruction of the bowel, which had almost been the end of him. Her clever hand touched every part of his body around his sex, sought his loins, avoided the penis. He knew she was playing with him, he knew how she could grasp him just there on other days. There was no part of his body that she feared. That sometimes seemed strange to him; after all, she said he was the first man she’d made love with. Who cared about being the first? He wanted to be the last, so he had told her: You’re my last woman, do you hear, my sweet, my very last. He laid his hand on her hip.
What I liked best was Lotte Lenya announcing her revenge. That really gets under the skin, you have to admit.
Helene couldn’t believe he was returning to the subject. Poor girl, she said. She let her tone of voice tell Carl that she was keeping her sympathy well within bounds. You let yourself get carried away. Helene shook her head kindly, like a mother humouring her child.
I let that opera-play fire me up, yes. Like a thunderclap.
Crash, bang. Helene blew into his ear.
His hands stroked her belly, his mouth sought her little nipples. They were his, all his. Before Helene gave in to him, she whispered into his shock of hair: I just don’t want you to be blind.
Later, when the sun was falling on their bed, Helene watched over him as he slept. His eyes moved under their lids like small living creatures, a sound came from his throat and made him start in his sleep, then he breathed regularly. Helene whispered something into his ear, hoping that words stealing into his dreams in his sleep, words spoken in her voice, would sink deep into him, into every cell of his being. She herself was too tired to sleep.
You have to separate body and mind, said Leontine, if she didn’t then she couldn’t work.
Separating the affect from the thing it relates to would probably favour the thing. Because an affect without a cause and the thing to which it relates, well, said Carl, filling his small pipe and lighting it, he couldn’t imagine them as separate. His new horn-rimmed glasses disappeared in the smoke; he didn’t yet have an older man’s practised elegance in smoking his pipe. When he spoke in an animated conversation like this, his words came so fast that he swallowed them now and then, and you had to concentrate to work out just what he had said. How could a thing still exist in its own right without anyone looking at it? Even an inanimate object has its appearance, consistency and temperature, and not least a function.
Leontine glanced at Helene, who was lying on the chaise longue and had closed her eyes.
That, I suppose, is the challenge of my own craft: separation. Dissecting the body itself separates single parts from a whole. We can look at the liver, we can look at a tumour on it. We can separate the tumour from the liver and the liver from the body.
But not from a human being, and it will always be that human being’s liver. Removing it from its place, the functional interruption of its symbiosis, robs neither the liver of the human being nor the human being of his liver.
Let’s take the example of a leg. Carl still wasn’t sure whether his ideas agreed with Leontine’s or contradicted them. How many of our fathers’ generation have one of their limbs missing these days? They can live without an arm, without a finger.
Martha groaned ostentatiously. She was getting tired of this conversation between Leontine and Carl; it was some while since she and Leontine had managed to get a day off at the same time like this. It was in the middle of the week, and they were planning to go and visit a couple of friends in Friedenau. Martha put her arm round Leontine’s neck as if to throttle her.
If you two can’t leave each other alone our hosts will have eaten all the cakes before we get there.
Leontine removed Martha’s arm from her neck. The word cognition in itself can undergo a certain change of nature. The husk remains, but what was the cognition of God and his omnipotence yesterday is an incision into the tumour today.
Carl was smoking; he held his head upright — he was careful about the way he carried himself, careful not to shake his head yet, not until he had a clear idea of his train of thought and had found the right words to argue against her.
Meanwhile Leontine used the opportunity to develop her objections. Carl, it’s not just medicine that has added so many new attributes to cognition that we can no longer speak of its having the same character. A glance at the sky, the technology of aviation, the lethal use of poison gas at the end of the war, all those are arguments against God.
No. Carl lowered his head. No, that’s the wrong way to look at it; technology and science are the immediate offspring of divine cognition. It’s only logical for human beings not to separate themselves from the light, the light of cognition. They’re indissoluble. Human beings learn lessons. I don’t know myself whether praying to God does any good. I wouldn’t give God human features, he doesn’t speak in the way the Scriptures suggest, he doesn’t judge. I would deny God’s part in every moral capacity, everything that’s human. God can be better described as a principle, the world principle. Only humans, with their emotional approach, can be accused of believing in God as the metamorphosis of a person. Carl drew on his pipe.
Human beings cause catastrophes today, just look at the war and its heroes. Could we recover from it? And what would be worse, material losses, the loss of human life, or injury to the feelings? Leontine rose and went over to the large samovar, the only object still standing on the long coffee table, and turned the tap. The heroes of the war were different. The water was too hot; she just touched the little glass to her lips without being able to drink. She went on talking over the rim of the hot glass: It’s not ten years ago and see how people have been waiting by the news-stands for days ready to snatch the Vossische Zeitung hot off the press from the vendors. When they devour Remarque’s accounts of the war, they’re looking at their own botched work. We are sufficient unto ourselves.