She does not get up. She cowers on the ground, a white lizard, hissing curses at me, insults, a flood of whispered truck drivers’ curses, soldiers’ curses, whores’ curses, curses that even I have never heard, insults that cut like knives and whiplashes, words I never thought she knew, words to which the only reply is a blow.
“Be quiet!” I say.
She laughs. “Be quiet!” she mocks me. “That’s all you know! Be quiet! Go to the devil!” she suddenly hisses at me more loudly. “Go, you whining dishrag, you eunuch—”
“Shut up,” I say furiously. “Or—”
“Or what? Just try it!” She arches herself toward me on the ground, her hands braced behind her in a shameless posture, her mouth open in a contemptuous grimace.
I stare at her. She should be repulsive to me, but she is not. Even in this obscene position there is nothing of the whore about her, in spite of anything she does or says; there is something desperate and wild and innocent in it and in her; I love her; I would like to pick her up and carry her off, but I don’t know where. I lift my hands; they are heavy; I feel bewildered and helpless and conventional and provincial—
“Get away from here!” Isabelle whispers from the ground. “Go! Go! And never come back! Don’t dare come back, you senile man, you church toady, you plebeian, you gelding! Go, you simpleton, you blockhead, you soul of a salesman! Don’t ever dare come back!”
She is looking at me, on her knees now, her mouth has grown small, her eyes are flat and slate-colored and wicked. With a weightless spring she is on her feet, seizes the wide, blue skirt and walks away, quick and swaying; she steps out of the allée into the moonlight on her long legs, a naked dancer, waving the blue skirt like a flag.
I want to run after her and shout to her to put on her clothes, but I stay where I am. I do not know what she would do next—it occurs to me that this is not the first time that someone here has turned up naked at the entrance door. Women in particular do that often.
Slowly I walk back down the allée. I straighten my shirt, feeling guilty, but I do not know why.
Late at night I hear Knopf approaching. His footsteps make me realize that he is quite drunk. I am really not in the mood for it, but for that very reason I move over to the rain pipe. Knopf pauses in the gateway, and like an old soldier first surveys the field. Everything is quiet. Cautiously he approaches the obelisk. I have not expected the retired sergeant major to give up his practices after a single warning. Now he stands in readiness in front of the tombstone and pauses once more. Cautiously his head revolves. Thereupon, like an expert tactician he makes a feigned maneuver; his hand descends, but it is a bluff, he is only listening. Then, as everything continues quiet, he takes up an anticipatory pose, a smile of triumph around the Nietzsche mustache, and lets go.
“Knopf!” I howl in subdued tones through the rain pipe. “You swine, are you there again? Have I not warned you?”
The change in Knopf’s face is not bad. I have always distrusted the description of eyes widened in horror; I thought one always squinted then in order to see better; but Knopf actually widens his eyes like a terrified horse when a heavy shell goes off. He even rolls them. “You are not worthy to be a retired sergeant major in the Sappers and Miners,” I declare hollowly. “I herewith degrade you! I demote you to private, second class, you pisser! Dismissed!”
A hoarse bellow emerges from Knopfs throat. “No! No!” he croaks, trying to recognize the place from which God is speaking. It is the corner between the gate and the wall of his house. There is no window there, no opening; he can’t understand whence the voice comes. “It’s all over with the long saber, the visored cap, and the braid!” I murmur. “All over with the dress uniform! From now on you are a private, second class, Knopf, you louse!”
“No!” Knopf howls, cut to the quick. It is easier for a true Teuton to lose a finger than a title. “No! No!” he whispers, raising his paws in the moonlight.
“Adjust your clothes!” I command. And suddenly I remember all the things Isabelle screamed at me, and I feel my stomach turn, and misery descends on me like a hailstorm.
Knopf has obeyed. “Only not that!” he croaks again, his head thrown back to the little, moonlit clouds above. “Not that, Lord!”
I see him standing there like the middle figure in the Laocoön group, wrestling with the invisible serpents of dishonor and demotion. That’s just about the way I was standing a few hours ago, I reflect, while my stomach begins to writhe again. Unlooked-for sympathy lays hold of me; for Knopf and for myself. I become more humane. “Very well then,” I whisper. “You don’t deserve it, but I will give you one more chance. You will only be demoted to lance corporal on probation. If you piss like a civilized human being until the end of September, you will be repromoted to noncom; at the end of October to sergeant, at the end of November to vice sergeant major; at Christmas you will once more become a permanent company sergeant major, retired. Understand?”
“Yes, certainly, your—your—” Knopf is groping for the right term of address. I am afraid that he is hesitating between your majesty and your divinity, and I interrupt him in time. “This is my last word, Lance Corporal Knopf! And don’t think, you swine, that you can begin again after Christmas! Then it will be cold and you can’t wash away the traces of your misdeeds. They will freeze solid. Stand against that obelisk once more and you will get an electric shock and inflammation of the prostate that will knock you bowlegged! Now off with you, you dung heap with chevrons!”
Knopf disappears with unaccustomed speed into the darkness of his doorway. I hear subdued laughter from the office. Lisa and Georg have witnessed the performance. “Dung heap with chevrons,” Lisa giggles huskily.
A chair turns over, there is a scuffle, and the door to Georg’s meditation room closes. Riesenfeld once presented me with a bottle of Holland Geneva, with the message: “For trying hours.” Now I get it out. The label on the square bottle says: Friesseher Genever van P. Bokma, Leeuwarden. I open it and pour a big glassful. The Geneva is strong and spicy and does not curse at me.
Chapter Seventeen
Wilke, the coffinmaker, looks at the woman in amazement. “Why don’t you take two small ones?” he asks. “They won’t cost much more.” The woman shakes her head. “They must lie together.”
“But after all, you can put them in a single grave,” I say. “Then they will be together.”
“No, that’s not enough.”
Wilke scratches his head. “What do you think?” he asks me.
The woman has lost two children. They died on the same day. Now she wants to have a common grave—she also wants one coffin for both, a kind of double coffin. That’s why I have called Wilke into the office.
“The matter is simple enough for us,” I say. “Tombstones with two inscriptions are used all the time. There are even family tombstones with six or eight inscriptions.”
The woman nods. “That’s how it must be! They must lie together. They were always together.”
Wilke gets a carpenter’s pencil out of his vest pocket. “It would look odd. The coffin would be too wide. Almost square, the children are still very small, aren’t they? How old?”
“Four and a half.”
Wilke draws. “Like a square box,” he concludes. “Wouldn’t you rather—”
“No,” the woman interrupts. “They must remain together. They are twins.”