“What, again?” Riesenfeld pushed his chair around so he can see Lisa’s window.
“Seriously this time.”
“Back to schoolteaching?”
“No,” I say. “I’m no longer inexperienced enough for that. Or conceited enough either. Do you know of anything I could get? You get around a lot.”
“What sort of thing?” Riesenfeld asks uninterestedly.
“Anything at all in a big city. Copy boy on a newspaper perhaps.”
“Stay here,” Riesenfeld says. “You fit in here. I’d miss you. Why do you want to leave?”
“I can’t exactly explain. If I could, it wouldn’t be so necessary. Sometimes I don’t even know myself; only once in a while, but then I know damn well.”
“And you know now?”
“I know now.”
“My God!” Riesenfeld says. “You’ll wish you were back!”
“Absolutely, that’s why I intend to go.”
Suddenly Riesenfeld jumps as though he had laid hold of an electric wire with a wet paw. Lisa has turned on the light in her room and has stepped to the window. She appears not to see us in the half-darkened office and she slowly takes off her blouse. She is wearing nothing under it.
Riesenfeld snorts aloud. “God in Heaven, what breasts! You could easily put a half-liter stein on them with no danger of its falling!”
“That’s an idea,” I say.
Riesenfeld’s eyes sparkle. “Does Frau Watzek do that all the time?”
“She’s pretty casual. No one can see her—except us over here, of course.”
“Man alive!” Riesenfeld says. “And you want to give up a position like this, you total idiot?”
“Yes,” I say, and am silent while Riesenfeld steals to the window like a Württemberg Indian, his glass in one hand, the bottle of schnaps in the other.
Lisa is combing her hair. “Once I wanted to be a sculptor,” Reisenfeld says without removing his eyes from her. “With a model like that it would have been worthwhile! Damn it, the chances a man neglects!”
“Did you plan to work in granite?”
“What’s that got to do with it?”
“When you use granite the models grow old before the work of art is finished,” I say. “It’s so hard. With a temperament like yours you should have chosen clay. Otherwise you’d have left nothing but unfinished works.”
Riesenfeld groans. Lisa has taken off her skirt but has then turned out the light and gone into the next room. The head of the Odenwald Works clings to the window for a while longer, then turns around. “It’s easy for you!” he growls. “You have no demon sitting on your neck. A suckling calf at most.”
“Merci” I say. “It’s not a demon in your case either; it’s a billy goat. Anything else?”
“A letter,” Riesenfeld announces. “Will you deliver a letter for me?”
“To whom?”
“Frau Watzek! Who else?”
I am silent.
“I’ll look around for a job for you,” Riesenfeld says.
I continue to be silent, watching the perspiring, disappointed sculptor. I intend to keep faith with Georg, even if it costs me my future.
“I’d have done it anyway,” Riesenfeld explains hypocritically.
“I know you would,” I say. “But why write? Letters never do any good. Besides, you’re leaving tonight. Postpone the whole thing till you come back.”
Riesenfeld finishes his schnaps. “It may seem odd to you, but one is extremely disinclined to postpone matters of this sort.”
At this moment Lisa comes out of her front door. She is wearing a black tailor-made dress and the highest heels I have ever seen. Riesenfeld spies her at the same instant I do. He snatches his hat from the table and rushes out. “This is the moment!”
I watch him shoot down the street. Hat in hand, he respectfully strolls up beside Lisa, who has looked around twice. Then the two disappear around the comer. I wonder what will come of it. Georg Kroll will be certain to let me know. Quite possibly the lucky fellow will get a second Swedish-granite monument out of the business without losing Lisa.
Wilke, the coffinmaker, is coming across the courtyard. “How about a meeting tonight?” he shouts through the window. I nod. I have been expecting him to propose it. “Is Bach coming?” I ask.
“Yes. I’ve just been getting cigarettes for him.”
We are sitting in Wilke’s workshop surrounded by shavings, coffins, potted geraniums, and pots of glue. There is a smell of resin and fresh-cut pine wood. Wilke is planing down the cover for the twins’ coffin. He has decided to include a garland of flowers, gratis, and to embellish it with artificial gold leaf. When his interest is aroused, he cares nothing about profit. And now it is aroused.
Kurt Bach is sitting on a black lacquered coffin with fittings of imitation bronze; I on a showpiece of natural oak in a dull finish. We have beer, sausage, bread, and cheese before us and have decided to keep Wilke company during the ghostly hour. Between twelve and one at night, the coffinmaker usually grows melancholy, sleepy, and rather scared. It is his weak hour. One wouldn’t believe it, but at that time he is afraid of ghosts, and the canary that hangs over his workbench in a parrot cage is not company enough for him. It is then that he becomes discouraged, talks about the pointlessness of existence, and takes to drink. We have often found him next morning snoring on a bed of shavings in his largest coffin, the one he was so badly cheated on four years ago. The coffin was built for the giant of the Bleichfeld Circus, which was playing for a time in Werdenbrück. After a dinner of Limburger cheese, hard-boiled eggs, bologna, army bread, and schnaps, he died—apparently died, that is, for while Wilke was slaving through the night, in defiance of all ghosts, to complete the giant’s coffin, the latter suddenly rose with a start from his deathbed, and, instead of informing Wilke on the spot, as a decent person would have done, finished up a half-bottle of schnaps that was left over and went to sleep. Next morning, he maintained he had no money and, besides, had not ordered a coffin for himself, an objection to which there was no answer. The circus moved on, and since no one would admit to having ordered the coffin, Wilke was left with it on his hands, and thereby acquired for a time a somewhat embittered view of the world. He was particularly incensed at young Dr. Wullmann, whom he considered responsible for the whole thing. Wullmann had been an army doctor and had seen two years’ service; as a result he had grown venturesome. By treating so many half-dead and three-quarters-dead soldiers in the field hospital without being answerable to anyone for their deaths or misset bones, he had picked up a lot of interesting experience. For this reason he slipped in at night to have one more look at the giant and gave him an injection of some sort. He had often seen dead men come to life in the field hospital. The giant, too, promptly responded. Since that time, Wilke has had a certain prejudice against Wullmann, which the latter has not been able to eradicate despite the fact that he has recently behaved more sensibly and has sent families of his ex-patients to Wilke. For Wilke, the giant coffin has been a permanent warning against credulity, and I believe it was also what prompted him to go home with the twins’ mother—he wanted to assure himself that the dead were not galloping around on hobbyhorses. It would have been too much for Wilke’s self-respect to have been left with a square, twins’ coffin, in addition to the unsalable giant coffin, and thus to have become a kind of Barnum of the coffinmaker’s guild. The thing that angered him most about the Wullmann business was that he had no chance for private conversation with the giant. He would have forgiven anything for an interview about the Beyond. After all, the giant had been as good as dead for several hours, and Wilke, as amateur scientist and dreader of ghosts, would have given a great deal to get information about existence on the other side.