“And if love were perfect so that we blended together, then it would be like death?”
“Perhaps,” I say hesitantly. “But not like annihilation. No one knows what death is, Isabelle. And so it can’t be compared with anything. But we should certainly no longer feel our former selves. We should simply become once more another lonely I.”
“Then love must always be incomplete?”
“It’s complete enough,” I say, cursing myself because in my pedantic schoolmaster’s way I have become too involved again.
Isabelle shakes her head. “Don’t evade me, Rudolf! It must be incomplete, I see that now. If it were complete, there would be a flash of lightning and then another.”
“There would be something left, though—but beyond our powers of perception.”
“Just like death?”
I look at her. “Who knows?” I say cautiously so as not to excite her further. “Perhaps death has a completely wrong name. We can only see it from one side. Perhaps it is perfect love between God and us.”
The wind tosses a shower of rain onto the leaves of the trees and they toss it on with ghostly hands. Isabelle is silent for a time. “Is that why love is so sad?” she asks then.
“It isn’t sad. It only makes us sad because it cannot be fulfilled and cannot be retained.”
Isabelle stops. “Why, Rudolf?” she says, suddenly very emphatic, stamping her foot. “Why must it be so?”
I look into her pale, intent face. “It’s our fate,” I say.
She stares at me. “That is fate?”
I nod.
“It can’t be! It’s misery!”
She throws herself against me and I hold her tight. I feel her sobs against my shoulder. “Don’t cry,” I say. “What’s to become of us if we cry about something like that?”
“What else is there to cry about?”
Yes, what else? I think. Everything else, the wretchedness on this accursed planet, only not about that. “It’s no misfortune, Isabelle,” I say. “It is good fortune. We simply have silly names for it like perfect and imperfect.”
“No, no!” She shakes her head violently and won’t be comforted. She weeps and clings to me and I hold her in my arms and feel that it is not I but she who is right, she who knows no compromises; that in her still burns the first, the only why, which existed before all the accumulated trash of existence, the first question of the awakening self.
“It is no misfortune,” I say nevertheless. “Misfortune is something entirely different, Isabelle.”
“What is it?”
“Misfortune is not the fact that two can never become wholly one. Misfortune is the fact that we must continually abandon each other, every day and every hour. You know
it and you cannot stop it, it runs through your hands and it is the most precious thing there is and yet you cannot hold onto it. There is always one who dies first. Always one who remains behind.”
She looks up. “How can one abandon what one does not have?”
“One can,” I reply bitterly. “Can’t one though! There are many stages of abandonment and being abandoned and each is painful and many are like death.”
Isabelle’s tears have stopped. “How do you know that?” she says. “You are not old enough.”
I am old enough, I think. Part of me has grown old by the time I came back from the war. “I know,” I say. “I found it out.”
I found it out, I think. How often had I had to abandon the day and the hour, and my existence, the tree in the morning light and my hands and my thoughts, and each time it was forever and when I came back I was a different person. One can abandon a great deal and one must always leave everything behind one when one goes to meet death; faced with that one is always naked, and if one finds the way back, one must reacquire everything one left behind.
Isabelle’s face shimmers before me in the rainy night, and I am suddenly overwhelmed by tenderness. I sense again in what loneliness she lives, undismayed, alone with her visions, threatened by them and surrendered to them, with no roof for shelter, without surcease or diversion, exposed to all the winds of the heart, without help from anyone, without complaint and without self-compassion. Beloved fearless heart, I think, untouched and aiming straight as an arrow at the essential alone, even if you do not reach it and go astray—but who does not go astray? And hasn’t almost everyone given up long since? When is the beginning of error, of stupidity, of cowardice, and where the beginning of wisdom and the final courage?
A bell begins to ring. Isabelle gives a start. “It’s time for you to go in,” I say. “They’re waiting for you.”
“Are you coming with me?”
“Yes.”
We walk toward the house. As we step out of the allée, we are greeted by a squall of rain driven around us in short gusts like a wet veil. Isabelle presses against me. I look down the hill toward the city. Nothing is to be seen. Mist and rain have isolated us. Nowhere is there a light; we are entirely alone. Isabelle walks beside me as though she belonged to me forever and as though she had no weight, and once more it seems to me as if she really had none and were like the figures in legends and dreams, obedient to different laws from those of everyday existence.
We there stand in the doorway. “Come with me!” she says.
I shake my head. “I can’t. Not today.”
She is silent, looking at me with straight, clear eyes, without reproach and without disillusionment; but suddenly something seems to have gone out in her. I lower my eyes feeling as though I had struck a child or killed a swallow. “Not today,” I say. “Later. Tomorrow.”
She turns away without a word and walks into the hallway. I see the nurse go up the stairs with her and suddenly I feel as though I had irrevocably lost something one finds but once in a lifetime.
I stand there bewildered. What could I have done? And how did I once more become involved in all this? It wasn’t my intention at all! This accursed rain!
Slowly I walk toward the main building. Wernicke, wearing a white coat and carrying an umbrella, comes out. “Have you taken Fräulein Terhoven back?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Pay a little more attention to her, won’t you? Visit her now and then during the day if you have time.”
“Why?”
“You’ll get no answer to that,” Wernicke replies. “But she is calmer when she has been with you. It’s good for her. Is that enough?”
“She takes me for someone else.”
“That makes no difference. I don’t care about you—only about my patient.” Wernicke squints through the shower. “Bodendiek praised you this evening.”
“What?—He certainly had no cause!”
“He maintains that you are on the road back. To the confessional and communion.”
“What an idea!” I exclaim, genuinely incensed.
“Don’t underestimate the wisdom of the Church! It is the only dictatorship that has not been overthrown in two thousand years.”
I walk down to the city. Mist waves its pennants in the rain. My thoughts are haunted by Isabelle. I have left her in the lurch; that’s what she believes now, I know. I ought not to go there any more, I think. It simply confuses me, and I am confused enough already. But how would it be if she were no longer there? Wouldn’t it be like losing the most important thing, the thing that can never grow old or stale or commonplace because one never possesses it?
I arrive at the house of Karl Brill, the shoemaker. The sounds of a phonograph come from the workroom. I have been invited here tonight for a stag evening. It is one of the famous occasions when Frau Beckmann is to exhibit her acrobatic art. I hesitate for a moment—I really am not in the mood—but then I go in. For that very reason.