The vacuum cleaner has stopped whining. Suddenly it is very quiet. The cool smell of damp earth rises from the flower beds. A bird calls in the chestnut trees, always the same call. The evening is suddenly a scale with an equal weight of the world on both sides. I feel as though it were balanced weightlessly on my breast. Nothing can happen to me, I think, as long as I go on breathing quietly.
“Are you afraid of me?” Isabelle whispers.
No, I think, shaking my head; you are the one human being I am not afraid of. Not even in words. In your presence they are never too big and they are never ridiculous. You always understand them, for you still live in a world where words and feelings and lies and vision are one and the same thing.
“Why don’t you say something?” she asks.
I shrug my shoulders. “Sometimes you can’t say anything, Isabelle. And often it is hard to let go.” “Let go of what?”
“One’s self. There are many obstacles.” “A knife can’t cut itself, Rudolf. Why are you afraid?” She is perched on the bench, beautiful and confiding and completely strange. “It can only grow dull,” she says, “if you don’t use it. Is that what you want?” “I don’t know, Isabelle.”
“Don’t wait too long, darling. Otherwise it will be too late. One needs words,” she murmurs.
I make no reply. “Against fear, Rudolf,” she says. “They are like lamps. They help. Do you see how gray everything is getting? Blood is not red any more. Why don’t you help me?”
I stop resisting. “You sweet, strange, and beloved heart,” I say. “If only I could help you!”
She bends forward and puts her arms around my shoulders. “Come with me! Help me! They are calling!”
“Who is calling?”
“Can’t you hear them? The voices. They are always calling!”
“No one is calling, Isabelle. Only your heart. But what is it calling?”
I feel her breath brushing my face. “Love me, then it won’t call any more,” she says.
“I love you.”
She lets herself sink down beside me. Now her eyes are closed. It grows darker and I see the glass man once more slowly strutting past. A nurse is bringing in a few old people who have been sitting on the benches, bent and motionless, like dark bundles of woe. “It’s time,” she says in our direction.
I nod and stay where I am. “They’re calling,” Isabelle whispers. “You can never find them. Who has so many tears?”
“No one,” I say. “No one in the world, beloved heart.”
“She makes no reply. She is breathing like a tired child at my side. Then I pick her up and carry her along the allée to the pavilion where she lives.
As I set her down she wavers and clings to me. She murmurs something I cannot understand and lets me lead her indoors. The entry is bright with a shadowless, milky light. I put her in a cane chair in the hall. She lies there with closed eyes as though she had been taken down from an invisible cross. Two nuns in black come by. They are on their way to chapel. For a moment they seem to be coming to remove Isabelle and bury her. Then the attendant in white arrives and leads her off.
The Mother Superior has sent us a second bottle of Moselle. Nevertheless, Bodendiek, to my amazement, left directly after the meal. Wernicke is still at table. The weather is calm and the patients are as quiet as they ever are.
“Why aren’t the completely hopeless cases killed?” I ask.
“Would you kill them?” Wernicke asks in return.
“I don’t know. It’s the same as when someone is dying slowly and hopelessly and you know he is suffering. Would you give him an injection to save him days of pain?”
Wernicke makes no reply.
“Fortunately Bodendiek is not here,” I say. “So we don’t have to indulge in a moral and religious discussion. I had a comrade whose belly was ripped open like a butcher shop. He pleaded with us to shoot him. We took him to the field hospital. There he screamed for three days, then he died. Three days is a long time when you’re roaring with pain. I have seen many people perish. Not die—perish. All of them would have been helped by an injection. My mother among them.”
Wernicke remains silent
“All right,” I say. “I know: to put an end to life in any creature is always like murder. Since my war experience I don’t even like to kill a fly. Nevertheless, my portion of veal tasted fine tonight, and yet a calf had to be killed so that we could have it. Those are the old paradoxes, the incomplete logic. Life is a miracle, even in a calf or a fly. Particularly in a fly, that acrobat with its thousand-faceted eyes. It is always a miracle. But it always comes to an end. Why in time of peace do we kill a sick dog and not a suffering human being? And yet we murder millions in useless wars.”
Wernicke still makes no reply. A big June bug is buzzing around the lamp. It strikes the bulb, falls, scrambles up, and flies once more, circling the light afresh. Experience has taught it nothing.
“Bodendiek, that son of the Church, naturally has an answer for everything,” I say. “Animals have no soul; human beings do. But what becomes of that bit of soul when some convolution in the brain is injured? Where is it when someone becomes an idiot? Is it already in heaven? Or is it waiting somewhere for the twisted remnant that still causes a human body to slaver, eat, and defecate? I’ve seen some of your cases in the closed wards—animals are gods by comparison. What has become of the soul of an idiot? Is it divisible? Or is it hanging like an invisible balloon over the poor, muttering skull?”
Wernicke makes a gesture as though brushing away an insect.
“All right,” I say. “That’s a question for Bodendiek, who will answer it with the greatest ease. Bodendiek can solve everything with the great unknown God, with heaven and hell, the reward for suffering and the punishment for wickedness. No one has ever had any proof—faith alone makes one blessed, according to Bodendiek. But then why have we been given reason, the critical faculty, and the yearning for proof? Just in order not to use them? That’s a strange game for the great Unknown to play! And what is reverence for life? Fear of death? Fear, always fear! Why? And why can we ask questions when there are no answers?”
“Finished?” Wernicke asks.
“No—but I’m not going to ask you anything more.”
“Good. I couldn’t answer anyway. You know that at least, don’t you?”
“Of course. Why should it be just you who could when all the libraries in the world have only speculations for answer?”
The June bug has come to grief on its second flight. It scrambles to its legs again and begins a third. Its wings are like polished blue steel. It is a beautiful utilitarian machine; but faced by light it is like an alcoholic with a bottle of schnaps.
Wernicke pours the remainder of the Moselle into our glasses. “How long were you in the war?”
“Three years.”
“Remarkable!”
I make no reply. I can guess what he is thinking and I have no desire to go into all that again. Instead he asks: “Do you believe that reason is a part of the soul?”
“I don’t know. But do you believe that the debased creatures creeping about and soiling themselves in the closed wards still have souls?”
Wernicke reaches for his glass. “All that is simple for me,” he says. “I’m a scientist. I don’t believe in anything at all. I simply observe. Bodendiek, on the other hand, believes a priori! Between the two you flutter about in uncertainty. Do you see that June bug?”
The June bug is engaged in its fifth attack. He will go on doing it until he dies. Wernicke turns off the lamp. “There, that will help.”
The night comes in, big and blue, through the open window, bringing with it the smell of earth, of flowers, and the sparkling of the stars. Everything I have said immediately seems to me dreadfully silly. The June bug makes one more buzzing circuit and then steers safely through the window.