“We would like to have a devotion at least on Sunday evenings,” says the Mother Superior. “I mean a formal one with organ music and the Te Deum. There are simple prayers every evening for the nuns as it is.”
I reflect. Sunday evenings are tiresome in the city, and the devotion lasts barely an hour. “We can pay you very little,” the Mother Superior explains. “The same as for the mass. That’s probably not much now, is it?”
“No,” I say. “It’s not much now. We have an inflation outside.”
“I know.” She stands there undecided. “The Church’s way of dealing with requests is unfortunately not adapted to these times. The Church thinks in centuries. We must accept that. After all, one works for God and not for money. Don’t you agree?”
“One can work for both,” I reply. “That’s a particularly happy situation.”
She sighs. “We are bound by the decisions of the Church authorities. They are taken once a year, no oftener.”
“For the salaries of the pastors, the cathedral chaplains, and the bishop too?” I ask.
“I don’t know about that,” she says, flushing a little. “But I think so.”
Meanwhile, I have made up my mind. “This evening I haven’t time,” I explain. “We have an important business meeting.”
“But today is still April. Now, next Sunday—or if you can’t do it on Sundays perhaps some day of the week. After all, it would be nice to have proper May devotions. The Divine Mother will certainly reward you.”
“Unquestionably. Then there is only the problem of supper. Eight o’clock is just in between. Afterward is too late and beforehand it would be a scramble.”
“Oh, as far as that is concerned, of course you could eat here if you liked. His Reverence always eats here too. Perhaps that’s a solution.”
It is exactly the solution I wanted. The food here is almost as good as at Eduard’s, and if I eat in company with the priest there is certain to be a bottle of wine as well. Since Eduard refuses to accept tickets on Sunday, this is indeed a splendid solution.
“All right,” I say. “I’ll try to do it. We don’t need to say any more about the money.”
The Mother Superior sighs with relief. “God will reward you.”
I walk back. The garden paths are empty. For a time I wait for the yellow sail of shantung silk. Then the bells of the city ring for midday, and I know it’s time for Isabelle’s nap and after that the doctor; there is nothing more to be done until four o’clock. I walk through the big gate and down the hill.
Beneath me lies the city with its steeples green with verdigris and its smoking chimneys. On both sides of the allée, beyond the horse chestnut trees, stretch the fields where on weekdays the nondangerous inmates work. The institution is part public, part private. The private patients, of course, do not have to work. Beyond the fields are woods, streams, ponds, and clearings. When I was a boy I used to fish there and catch salamanders and butterflies. That was only ten years ago, but it seems to belong to a different life—to a vanished time in which existence proceeded in orderly organic sequence and everything belonged together, from childhood on. The war changed that; since 1914 we live scraps of one life and then scraps of a second and a third; they do not belong together and we are not able to put them together. For this reason it is really not so hard for me to understand Isabelle and her different lives. Only she is almost better off in this respect than we are; when she is in one, she forgets all the others. With us they are hopelessly confused—childhood, cut short by the war, the time of hunger and fraud, of trenches and lust for life—something of all these has been left over and remains with us even now, making us restless. You cannot simply push it away. It keeps bobbing back disconcertingly, and then you are confronted by irreconcilable contrast: the skies of childhood and the science of killing, lost youth and the cynicism of knowledge gained too young.
Chapter Four
We are sitting in the office waiting for Riesenfeld. For supper we had pea soup so thick a spoon would stand up in it; in addition, we ate the meat cooked in the soup—pigs’ feet, pigs’ ears, and a very fat piece of side meat for each of us. We need the fat to coat our stomachs against alcohol; we must not on any account get drunk before Riesenfeld does. And so Frau Kroll has done the cooking for us herself and as dessert has forced on us a helping of fat Dutch cheese. The future of the firm is at stake. We must wring a shipment of granite out of Riesenfeld even if we have to crawl home in front of him on our hands and knees to do it. Marble, shell lime, and sandstone we still have, but we are in bitter need of granite, the caviar of sorrow.
Heinrich Kroll has been removed from the scene. Wilke, the coffinmaker, has done us this service. We gave him two bottles of schnaps and he invited Heinrich to a game of skat with free drinks before dinner. Heinrich was taken in; he can never resist getting something for nothing, and on such occasions he drinks as fast as he can; moreover, like every nationalist, he considers himself a very clearheaded drinker. In reality he can’t stand anything at all, and drink overtakes him suddenly. One moment he is ready to drive the Social Democratic party out of the Reichstag single-handed and the next he is snoring openmouthed, not even to be aroused by the command On your feet, forward march! This is particularly true when he has been drinking on an empty stomach, as we have arranged for him to do. Now he is innocently sleeping in Wilke’s workshop in an oak coffin, comfortably bedded down on wood shavings. In our concern about waking him, we did not carry him back to his own bed. Wilke is now in the ground-floor studio of our sculptor, Kurt Bach, playing dominoes with him, a game both love because it gives them so much time for thought. They are engaged in drinking up the bottle and a quarter of schnaps left over from Heinrich’s defeat and claimed by Wilke as an honorarium.
The shipment of granite we want to extract from Riesenfeld is something we cannot, of course, pay for in advance. We never have that much money at one time and it would be madness to try to accumulate it in the bank—it would melt away like snow in June. Therefore we want to give Riesenfeld a promissory note payable in three months. That means we want to pay practically nothing.
Naturally, Riesenfeld must not lose on the transaction. That shark in the ocean of human tears needs to make a profit like every honest businessman. And so on the day he receives the note from us he must take it to his bank or ours and have it discounted. The bank ascertains that both Riesenfeld and we are good for its face value, deducts a few per cent for discounting the note, and pays out the money. We pay back to Riesenfeld the amount of the bank’s commission. Thus, he receives full payment for the shipment just as though we had paid in advance. Nor does the bank lose. It immediately sends the note to the Reichsbank, which in turn pays just as the bank paid Riesenfeld. And there in the Reichsbank it remains until, on the expiration date, it is presented for payment. What it will be worth then is easy to imagine.
We have only known about all this since 1922. Before then we tried to transact business in the same way as Heinrich Kroll and almost went broke doing it. We had sold out almost our entire inventory and, to our amazement, had nothing to show for it except a worthless bank account and a few suitcases full of currency not even good enough to paper our walls with. We tried at first to sell and then buy again as quickly as possible—but the inflation easily overtook us. The lag before we got paid was too long; while we waited, the value of money fell so fast that even our most profitable sale turned into a loss. Only after we began to pay with promissory notes could we maintain our position. Even so, we are making no real profit now, but at least we can live. Since every enterprise in Germany is financed in this fashion, the Reichsbank naturally has to keep on printing unsecured currency and so the mark falls faster and faster. The government apparently doesn’t care; all it loses in this way is the national debt. Those who are ruined are the people who cannot pay with notes, the people who have property they are forced to sell, small shopkeepers, day laborers, people with small incomes who see their private savings and their bank accounts melting away, and government officials and employees who have to survive on salaries that no longer allow them to buy so much as a new pair of shoes. The ones who profit are the exchange kings, the profiteers, the foreigners who buy what they like with a few dollars, kronen, or zlotys, and the big entrepreneurs, the manufacturers, and the speculators on the exchange whose property and stocks increase without limit. For them practically everything is free. It is the great sellout of thrift, honest effort, and respectability. The vultures flock from all sides, and the only ones who come out on top are those who accumulate debts. The debts disappear of themselves.