The procession is much slower than any other demonstration. Behind it the cars of the Sunday excursionists are piling up. It is a strange contrast—the gray, almost anonymous mass of the silent victims of war, dragging themselves along—and behind them the congested cars of the war profiteers, muttering and fuming with impatience on the heels of the war widows who, with their children, thin, hungry, woebegone, and careworn make up the end of the procession. In the cars are all the colors of summer in linen and silk—full cheeks, round arms, and round faces, the latter showing some embarrassment at being caught in so disagreeable a situation. The pedestrians on the sidewalks are better off; they simply look away, pulling their children, who would like to stay and ask questions about the maimed men. Everyone who can disappears into the side streets.
The sun is high and hot, and the wounded are beginning to sweat. It is the unhealthy, greasy sweat of the anemic that pours down their faces. Suddenly behind them there is the blast of a horn; someone has not been able to wait; he thinks he can gain a few minutes by driving past them, half on the sidewalk. All the wounded turn around. No one says a word, but they spread out and block the street. The car will have to run over them in order to pass. In it is a young man in a bright suit and straw hat, accompanied by a girl. He makes a few silly, embarrassed gestures and lights a cigarette. Each of the wounded men, as they go by, looks at him. Not in reproof—they are looking at the cigarette whose fragrant smoke drift across the street. It is a very good cigarette; none of the wounded can afford to smoke at all. And so they sniff up as much as they possibly can while they pass.
I follow the procession to St. Mary’s. There stand two National Socialists in uniform, with a big sign; “Come to Us, Comrades! Adolf Hitler Will Help You!” The procession moves around the church. Right and left the cars can now shoot by.
We are sitting in the Red Mill. A bottle of champagne stands in front of us. Its price is two million marks, more than the monthly pension of a legless man and his family. Reisenfeld has ordered it.
He is sitting where he can watch the whole dance floor. “I knew about her all along,” he remarks to me. “I just wanted to watch you try to trick me. Aristocratic ladies do not live across the street from small tombstone firms, and they do not live in houses like that!”
“That’s an astoundingly false conclusion for a man of the world like you,” I reply. “You should know that almost all aristocrats live exactly that way nowadays. The inflation has seen to it. The days of palaces are over, Herr Riesenfeld. And if anyone still has one, he is taking in boarders. Inherited money has disappeared. Imperial highnesses live in furnished rooms, saber-rattling colonels have become embittered insurance agents, countesses—”
“Enough!” Riesenfeld interrupts me. “You’re going to make me cry! Further explanations are unnecessary. But I knew about Frau Watzek from the beginning. It simply amused me to see your silly attempts to deceive me.”
He looks over at Lisa, who is dancing a fox trot with Georg. I forbear to remind the Odenwald Casanova that he classified Lisa as a Frenchwoman with the sinuous walk of a panther—it would result in the immediate breaking-off of our relationship, and we urgently need a shipment of granite.
“However, that doesn’t detract from the total effect in the slightest,” Riesenfeld explains conciliatingly. “On the contrary, it heightens one’s interest! These thoroughbreds produced by the common people! Just look at the way she dances! Like a—a—”
“A sinuous panther,” I help him out
Riesenfeld glances at me. “Sometimes you show some understanding of women,” he growls.
“Learned from you!”
He drinks to me, unsuspiciously flattered.
“There’s one thing I’d like to know about you,” I say. “I have a feeling that at home in Odenwald you’re a respectable citizen and family man—you have already shown me the photographs of your three children and your rose-covered house, in whose walls you used, out of principle, no granite at all, a fact which I as an unsuccessful poet hold greatly to your credit—why, when you are away, do you turn into such a night-club wolf?”
“In order to get greater pleasure at home out of being a citizen and family man,” Riesenfeld replies promptly.
“That’s a good reason. But why take the long way around?”
Riesenfeld grins. “It’s my demon. The double nature of man. Never heard of it, eh?”
“Haven’t I though? I am the living prototype.”
Riesenfeld laughs insultingly, just like Wernicke this morning. “You?”
“The same sort of thing exists on a somewhat more intellectual level,” I explain.
Riesenfeld takes a swallow and sighs. “Reality and imagination! Eternal youth and eternal discord! Or—” recovering himself he adds, ironically—”in your case, as a poet, natural yearning and fulfillment, God and the flesh, cosmos and locus—”
Fortunately the trumpets begin again. Georg comes back to the table with Lisa. She is a vision in apricot-colored crepe de Chine^ After Riesenfeld found out about her plebeian background, he demanded from us as restitution that we all be his guests at the Red Mill. Now he bows in front of Lisa. “A tango, gnädige Frau. Would you—” Lisa is a head taller than Riesenfeld and we expect an interesting performance. But to our amazement the Granite King proves himself a magnificent master of the tango. He is not only an adept in the Argentinian, but also in the Brazilian and apparently several other varieties. Like an expert skater he pirouettes around the dance floor with the disconcerted Lisa. “How are you feeling?” I ask Georg. “Don’t take it too hard. Mammon versus love! A short while ago I got several lessons in that subject myself. Even from you, piquantly enough. How did Lisa escape from your room this morning?”
“It was difficult. Riesenfeld wanted to take over the office as an observation post. He planned to keep his eye on her window. I thought I could scare him off by revealing to him who Lisa is. That did no good. He bore it like a man. Finally I succeeded in dragging him into the kitchen for a few minutes for coffee. That was the moment for Lisa. When Riesenfeld went back to spying from the office, she was smiling graciously at him out of her own window.”
“In the kimono with the storks?”
“In one with windmills.”
I look at him. He nods. “Traded for a small headstone. It was necessary. Anyway Riesenfeld, bowing and scraping, shouted an invitation for this evening.”
“He wouldn’t have dared to when she was still called ‘de la Tour.’”
“He did it respectfully. Lisa accepted because she thought it would help us in our business.”
“And you believe that?”
“Yes,” Georg replies happily.
Riesenfeld and Lisa come back from the dance floor. Riesenfeld is sweating. Lisa is as cool as an Easter lily. To my immense astonishment I suddenly see another figure appear among the toy balloons behind the bar. It is Otto Bambuss. He stands there, lost in confusion and about as incongruous as Bodendiek would be. Then Willy’s red head bobs up beside him, and from somewhere I *hear Renée de la Tour’s commanding tones: “Bodmer, at ease!”
I come to. “Otto,” I say to Bambuss, “what brought you here?”
“I did,” Willy answers. “I wanted to do something for German literature. Otto must soon return to his village. There he will have time to grind out poems about the sinfulness of the world. At the moment, however, it is his duty to observe.”