Otto smiles gently. His shortsighted eyes blink. Perspiration stands on his forehead. Willy sits down with him and Renée at the table next to ours. Between Lisa and Renée there has been a second-long, point-blank duel of eyes. Both turn back to their tables, unbeaten, confident, and smiling.
Otto leans over to me. “I have completed the ‘Tigress’ cycle,” he whispers. “Finished it last night. I’m already at work on a new series: ‘The Scarlet Woman.’ Or perhaps I’ll call it “The Great Beast of the Apocalypse’ and write it in free verse. It’s magnificent. The spirit has descended on me!”
“Good! But what do you expect to find here?”
“Everything,” Otto replies, beaming with happiness. “I always expect everything in a place where I’ve never been before. I hear you really do know a circus lady!”
“The ladies I know are not for beginners to practice on,” I say. “You don’t seem to know anything at all, you feebleminded camel, otherwise you wouldn’t behave like such a thickhead! So, pay attention to rule number one: hands off other people’s women—you haven’t the right physique for it.”
Otto coughs. “Aha,” he says then. “Bourgeois prejudice! I wasn’t talking about wives.”
“Neither was I, you simpleton. With wives the rules are not so strict. But why are you so sure that I know a circus lady? I have already told you she was a ticket seller in a flea circus.”
“Willy told me that wasn’t true. She is a circus acrobat.”
“So that’s it. Willy!” I see his red head bobbing above the dancers like a buoy on the ocean. “Listen to me, Otto,” I say. “It’s entirely the other way around. Willy’s girl is from the circus. The one with the blue hat. And she loves literature. So now’s your chance! Go to it!”
Bambuss looks at me distrustfully. “I’m talking honestly to you, you half-witted idealist!” I say.
Riesenfeld is dancing with Lisa again. “What’s wrong with us, Georg?” I ask. “Over there a business friend of yours is trying to cut you out with a woman, and now I have just been requested to lend Gerda in the interests of German poetry. Are we sheep, or are our ladies so desirable?”
“Both. Besides, someone else’s “woman is always five times as desirable as one that’s unattached. It’s an old moral law. But in a few minutes Lisa will come down with a bad headache. She will go out to the dressing room to get aspirin, and then she will send a waiter with the news that she has had to go home and that we are to go on having a good time.”
“A blow for Riesenfeld. Then he won’t sell us anything tomorrow.”
“He will sell us all the more. You ought to know that. For that very reason. Where is Gerda?”
“Her engagement doesn’t begin for three days. I hope she is in the Altstädter Hof. But I am afraid she’s in the Walhalla with Eduard. She calls that economizing on dinner. I can’t do much about it. She has such excellent reasons that I would have to be thirty years older to answer them. But you just keep your eye on Lisa. Perhaps she won’t get a headache after all and can help us in our business even more.”
Otto Bambuss leans over to me again. Behind his spectacles his eyes are those of a terrified herring. “Manège would be a good title for a volume of circus poems, wouldn’t it? With reproductions of pictures by Toulouse-Lautrec.”
“Why not by Rembrandt, Dürer, and Michelangelo?”
“Did they make circus drawings?” Otto asks, seriously interested.
I give him up. “Drink, my boy,” I say in fatherly tones. “And enjoy your brief life, for someday soon you will be murdered. Out of jealousy, you moon-calf!”
Flattered, he drinks to me and then looks thoughtfully over at Renée, whose kingfisher-blue hat is bobbing on her blond ringlets. She looks like an animal trainer on Sunday.
Lisa and Riesenfeld come back. “I don’t know what’s the matter,” Lisa says. “Suddenly I have a terrible headache. I’ll just go and get an aspirin—”
Before Riesenfeld can spring to his feet, she has left the table. Georg looks at me with abominable self-satisfaction and reaches for a cigar.
Chapter Sixteen
“The sweet light,” Isabelle says. “Why is it growing weaker? Because we are tired? We lose it every night. When we are asleep the world goes away. Where are we then? Does the world always come back, Rudolf?”
We are standing at the edge of the garden looking through the trellised gate at the landscape beyond. The early evening lies on ripening fields that extend down to the woods on either side of the chestnut allée.
“It always comes back,” I say, and add carefully: “Always, Isabelle.”
“And we? Do we too?”
We? I think. Who knows? Every hour gives and takes and alters. But I don’t say it. I don’t wish to be led into a conversation that will suddenly end in an abyss.
The inmates who have been working in the fields are coming back. They return like weary peasants, and on their shoulders lies the first red of sunset.
“We too,” I say. “Always, Isabelle. Nothing that exists can ever be lost. Not ever.”
“Do you believe that?”
“We have no choice but to believe it.”
She turns around to me. She looks very beautiful on this early evening with the first clear gold of autumn in the air. “Are we lost otherwise?” she whispers.
I stare at her. “I don’t know,” I say finally. “Lost—that can mean so much—almost anything!”
“Are we lost otherwise, Rudolf?”
I am silent, irresolute. “Yes,” I say then. “But that is when life begins, Isabelle.”
“What life?”
“Our own. That’s where everything begins—courage, com-
passion, humanity, love, and the tragic rainbow of beauty. When we realize that nothing remains.”
I look at her face, illuminated by the dying light. For a moment time stands still. “You and I, don’t we remain either?” she asks.
“No, we don’t remain either,” I reply, and look past her at the landscape full of blue and red and remoteness and gold.
“Not even if we love each other?”
“Not even if we love each other,” I say, and add hesitantly and cautiously: “I think that’s why people love each other. Otherwise one could not love. Love is perhaps the desire to hand on something which one cannot keep.”
“Hand on what?”
I lift my shoulders. “There are many names for it. One’s self perhaps, in order to rescue it. Or one’s heart. Let us say our heart. Or our yearning. Our heart.”
The people from the fields are arriving at the gate. The guards open it. Suddenly a man rushes past us, pushes his way through the fleldworkers, and races off. He must have been hiding behind a tree. One of the guards sees him and starts trotting in pursuit; the other stays in his place and lets the inmates through. Below us I can see the escaped man running. He is much faster than the guard. “Do you think your colleague will catch up with him at that rate?” I ask the second guard.
“He’ll come back with him all right.”
“It doesn’t look that way.”
The guard shrugs his shoulders. “It’s Guido Timpe. He tries to escape at least once each month. Always runs to the Forsthaus Restaurant. Drinks a couple of beers. We always find him there. Never runs farther and never anywhere else. Just for the two or three beers. He likes dark beer.” He winks at me. “That’s why my colleague isn’t hurrying. He just wants to keep him in sight in case of an accident. We always give Timpe time to quench his thirst. Why not? Afterward he comes back like a lamb.”
Isabelle has not been listening. “Where does he want to go?” she asks now.