Mass is over. The Mother Superior gives me my honorarium. It is not worth keeping, but I cannot refuse it, for that would offend her. “1 have sent you a bottle of wine for breakfast,” she says. “We have nothing else to give you. But we pray for you.”
“Thank you,” I reply. “But how do you happen to have this excellent wine? It must be expensive.”
A smile spreads over the Mother Superior’s wrinkled, ivory-tinted face; she has the bloodless skin of those who live in cloisters, penitentiaries, and hospitals, and those who work in mines. “It’s given to us. There’s a devout wine dealer in the city. His wife was here for a long time. Now he sends us several cases each year.”
I do not pause to ask why he sends them. I have remembered that Bodendiek, that warrior of God, also has breakfast after mass, and I rush off to rescue some of the wine.
The bottle is, of course, already half empty. Wernicke is there too, but he is only drinking coffee. “The bottle, out of which you have so generously helped yourself,” I say to Bodendiek, “was sent to me personally by the Mother Superior as a part of my salary.”
“I know,” the vicar replies. “But aren’t you the apostle of tolerance, you cheerful atheist? Don’t begrudge your friends a drop or two. A whole bottle at breakfast would be very bad for you.”
I make no reply. The churchman takes this for weakness and instantly moves to the attack. “How’s your fear of life doing?” he asks, taking a hearty swallow.
“What?”
“The fear of life that oozes out of all your bones like—”
“Like ectoplasm,” Wernicke throws in helpfully.
“Like sweat,” says Bodendiek, who does not trust the man of science.
“If I were afraid of life, I would be a devout Catholic,” I answer, pulling the bottle toward me.
“Nonsense! If you were a devout Catholic, you would have no fear of life.”
“That is the famous hair-splitting of the Church fathers.”
Bodendiek laughs. “What do you know about the exquisite intellectuality of our Church fathers, you young barbarian?”
“Enough to have stopped reading when I came to their argument over whether Adam and Eve had navels. The fight lasted for years.”
Wernicke grins. Bodendiek makes a disgusted face. “Cheap ignorance, joining hands as usual with crass materialism,” he says to us both.
“You oughtn’t to be so contemptuous of science,” I reply. “What would you do if you had acute appendicitis and the only surgeon within reach was an atheist? Would you pray or let the heathen operate?”
“Both, you novice at dialectic; it would give the heathen an opportunity to gain merit in the sight of God.”
“You really oughtn’t to let a doctor treat you at all,” I say. “If it is God’s will, then you should just die and not try to change it.”
Bodendiek waves this aside. “Now we’ll soon come to the question of free will and the omnipotence of God. Ingenious sophomores think they can use that to refute the whole teaching of the Church.”
He gets up benevolently. His face is glowing with health. Wernicke and I look peaked by comparison with this blooming believer. “A benediction on our meal!” he says. “Now I must go to my other parishioners.”
No one comments on the word “other.” He rustles out. “Have you ever noticed that priests and generals usually attain a good old age?” I ask Wernicke. “The tooth of doubt and care does not gnaw at them. They are in the open air a great deal, hold their jobs for life, and are not obliged to think. The one has his catechism, the other his army manual. That keeps them young. Besides, both enjoy great respect. One is in God’s court, the other in the Kaiser’s.”
Wernicke lights a cigarette. “Have you noticed, too, what an advantage the vicar has in argument?” I ask. “We have to respect bis faith, he doesn’t have to respect our lack of it.”
Wernicke blows smoke at me. “He makes you angry—you don’t disturb him.”
“That’s it!” I say. “That’s what enrages me so!”
“He knows it. That’s what makes him so confident.”
I pour out the rest of the wine. My share has been a bare glass and a half—the rest was consumed by God’s warrior—a Foster Jesuitengarten 1915, a wine which should only be drunk in the evening in the company of a woman. “And you?” I ask.
“None of this touches me at all,” Wernicke says. “I’m a sort of traffic policeman of the soul. I try to keep order at this particular intersection—but I am not responsible for the traffic.”
“I continually feel myself responsible for everything in the world. Does that mean I’m a psychopath too?”
Wernicke bursts into insulting laughter. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you? But it’s not so simple! You’re completely uninteresting—a wholly normal run-of-the-mill adolescent!”
I come to Grossestrasse. A protest parade is slowly pushing its way toward me from the market place. Like sea gulls fluttering before a dark cloud, the brightly clad Sunday picnickers, with their children, lunch baskets, bicycles, and colorful knickknacks, scatter before it—then it is here and blocks the street.
It is a procession of war maimed, protesting against their inadequate pensions. First, on a little go-cart, comes the stump of a body with a head. Arms and legs are missing. It’s no longer possible to see whether the stump was once a tall man or a short man. That cannot be estimated even from the shoulders, because the arms were amputated so high up there was no place for prostheses. The man has a round head, lively brown eyes, and a mustache. Someone must look after him every day—he is shaven, his hair and mustache have been trimmed. The little cart, which is really only a board on rollers, is being pulled by a one-armed man. The amputee sits on it very straight and attentive. After him come the wheel chairs with the legless, three abreast. The chairs have rubber-tired wheels big enough to be moved by hand. The leather aprons that cover the space where legs should be, and are usually closed, are open today. The stumps can be seen. The trousers have been carefully folded over them.
Next come the amputees on crutches. These are the strangely distorted silhouettes one sees so often—the straight crutches, with the twisted bodies hanging between them. Then follow the blind and the one-eyed. You can hear the white canes tapping the pavement and see the yellow bands with three circles on their arms. The sightless are identified by the three black circles that mark one-way streets and blind alleys—and mean “Keep Out.” Many of the wounded carry placards with legends. Some of the blind do too, even though they cannot read them. “Is This the Gratitude of Our Fatherland?” one of them asks. “We Are Starving,” says another.
The man on the little wagon has a stick with a sign on it thrust into his jacket. The inscription reads: “My Month’s Pension Is Worth One Gold Mark.” Between two other carts flutters a white banner: “Our Children Have No Milk, No Meat, No Butter. Is This What We Fought For?”
These are the saddest victims of the inflation. Their pensions are so worthless practically nothing can be done with them. From time to time the government grants them an increase—much too late, for on the day the increase is granted, it is already far too low. The dollar has gone wild; it no longer leaps by thousands and ten thousands, but by hundreds of thousands daily. Day before yesterday it stood at 1,200,000, yesterday at 1,400,000. Tomorrow it is expected to reach two million—and by the end of the month ten. Workmen are given their pay twice a day now—in the morning and in the afternoon, with a recess of a half-hour each time so that they can rush out and buy things—for if they waited a few hours the value of their money would drop so far that their children would not get half enough food to feel satisfied. Satisfied—not nourished. Satisfied with anything that can be stuffed into their stomachs, not with what the body needs.