“I’d like to know who realizes it more than we do, except gravediggers and coffinmakers,” I say.
“There you go! All you know about death is its ridiculous aspect,” Gerda suddenly remarks, out of a clear sky. “And that’s why you don’t know more about the seriousness of life.”
We stare at her dumbfounded. That is unmistakably Eduard’s style! I feel I am fighting for a lost cause, but I don’t give up.
“From whom did you hear that?” I ask. “From the sibyl beside the dark abysses of melancholy?”
Gerda laughs. “With you life always gets around to tombstones, the first thing. That doesn’t happen so fast with other people. Eduard, for example, is a nightingale!”
A blush spreads over Eduard’s fat cheeks. “Well, how about the rack of venison?” Gerda asks him.
“Well, all right, why not?”
Eduard disappears. I look at Gerda. “Bravo!” I say. “A first-rate job. What are we to make of it?”
“Don’t look like a husband,” she replies. “Be glad you’re living.”
“What is living?”
“Whatever’s happening at the moment.”
“Bravo!” Georg says. “And my warmest thanks for the invitation. We really love Eduard; he just doesn’t understand us.”
“Do you love him too?” I ask Gerda.
She laughs. “How childish he is,” she says to Georg. “Can’t you open his eyes a little to the fact that not everything always’ belongs to him? Especially when he’s not around?”
“I try constantly to enlighten him,” Georg replies. “The only trouble is he has a lot of internal handicaps which he calls ideals. If he ever happens to notice that they’re euphemistic egoism, he’ll improve.”
“What is euphemistic egoism?”
“Youthful self-importance.”
Gerda laughs so hard the table shakes. “I’m rather fond of that,” she remarks. “But too much of it gets tiring. After all, facts are facts.”
I refrain from asking her whether facts really are facts. She sits there, honest and secure, waiting, knife in hand, for her second portion of venison. Her face is rounder than before: she had already gained weight on Eduard’s food, and she beams at me without a trace of embarrassment. And why should she be embarrassed? What kind of claim do I really have on her? And just now who is betraying whom? “It’s true,” I say. “I am hung with egoistic atavisms like a rock with moss. Mea culpa!”
“Right, my pet,” Gerda replies. “Enjoy your life and only think when you have to.”
“When does one have to?”
“When one needs money or wants to get ahead in the world.”
“Bravo,” Georg says again. At this moment the venison appears and conversation comes to an end. Eduard supervises us like a mother hen with its chicks. This is the first time he has not begrudged us our food. He wears a new smile that puzzles me. He is full of fat superiority, which now and then he communicates to Gerda as though it were a clandestine note exchanged in jail. But Gerda still has her old, completely open smile which, when Eduard is looking the other way, she turns on me as innocently as a child at first communion. She is younger than I am, but I have the feeling that she has at least forty years’ more experience. “Eat, baby,” she says.
I eat with a bad conscience and strong misgivings; the venison, a delicacy of the first order, suddenly has no savor. “Another little piece?” Eduard asks me. “Or a little more bilberry sauce?”
I stare at him, feeling as though my former recruiting sergeant had asked me to kiss him. Even Georg is alarmed. I know that later he will maintain that the reason for Eduard’s incredible openhandedness is that he has slept with Gerda—but this time I know better. She will get rack of venison only as long as she has not allowed that. Once he has had her, the most she can expect is Königsberger meat balls with German gravy. And I am perfectly sure that Gerda knows this too.
Nevertheless, I decide to go away with her after the meal. Trust, to be sure, is trust, but Eduard has too many different kinds of liqueur in the bar.
Silent and star-filled, the night hangs over the city. I am seated at the window of my room waiting for Knopf, for whose benefit I have arranged the rain pipe. It extends straight into my window and thence runs above the entrance gate to Knopf’s house where the short end makes a right-angle turn in the direction of the courtyard. It cannot, however, be seen from the courtyard.
I wait, reading the newspaper. The dollar has clambered up another ten thousand marks. Yesterday there was only one suicide, but to make up for it there were two strikes. After long negotiations the government employees have finally received an increase in pay which, in the meantime, has fallen so far in value that now they can barely get an extra liter of milk a week for it. Very likely no more than a box of matches next week. The number of unemployed has risen by an additional hundred and fifty thousand. Unrest has broken out through the whole Reich. New recipes for the use of garbage in the kitchen are being recommended. The wave of grippe is still on the rise. A pension increase for the aged and infirm has been turned over to a committee for further study. Their report is expected in a few months. Meanwhile, the pensioners and invalids try to keep from starvation by begging or by borrowing from friends and relatives.
Outside, there is the sound of soft footsteps. I peer cautiously out of the window. It is not Knopf; it is a pair of lovers stealing on tiptoe through the courtyard into the garden. The season is now in full swing, and lovers’ necessities are more pressing than ever. Wilke was right: where are they to go to be undisturbed? If they try to slip into their furnished rooms, the landlady lies in wait to drive them out, like an angel with a flaming sword, in the name of morality and envy—in the public parks and gardens, they would be shouted at by the police or arrested—and they haven’t enough money for a hotel room—so where are they to go? In our courtyard they are undisturbed. The larger memorials furnished seclusion from other couples; there they are not seen and can lean against the monuments and in their shadow whisper and embrace. The big memorial crosses are always there for stormy lovers on wet days when they cannot lie on the ground; then the girls hold onto them and are pressed close by their wooers, the rain beats upon their heated faces, mist drifts around them, their breath comes in quick pants, and their heads are held high like those of whinnying horses by their lovers’ hands in their hair. The signs I have put up recently have done no good. Who worries about his toes when his whole being is aflame?
Suddenly I hear Knopfs footsteps in the alley. I look at the clock. It is half-past two; that slave driver of generations of unhappy recruits must be well loaded. I turn out the light Inexorably Knopf steers his course straight for the black obelisk. I seize the end of the rain pipe, press my mouth close to the opening and say: “Knopf!”
It makes a hollow sound at the other end, behind the sergeant major’s back, as though it came from the grave. Knopf looks around; he can’t see where the voice is coming from. “Knopf!” I repeat. “You pig! Aren’t you ashamed of yourself? Did I create you to get drunk and piss on tombstones, you sow?”
Knopf whirls around again. “What?” He stammers. “Who is that?”
“Filthy loafer!” I say, and it sounds ghostly and supernatural. “How dare you ask questions! Is it your place to question your superiors? Stand at attention when I address you!”
Knopf stares at his house, whence the voice comes. All the windows are dark and closed. The door, too, is closed. He cannot see the pipe on the wall. “Stand at attention, you insubordinate scoundrel of a sergeant major!” I say. “Was it for this I bestowed on you braid for your collar and a long saber, so that you could defile monuments destined to stand in God’s acre?” And more sharply in a hissing tone of command: “Heels together, you worthless tombstone wetter!”