Erich Remarque - The Black Obelisk

Her mother was with her in church. I’ve seen them and I’ve seen Bodendiek, and Wernicke as well, visibly exuding pride at his success. I have walked around the garden and already given up hope; now all at once Isabelle is walking toward me alone between the lines of almost leafless trees. I stop. She approaches, slender and light and elegant, and suddenly all my yearning returns, heaven and the surging of the blood. I cannot speak. Wernicke has told me she is well, that the shadows have dispersed, and I realize that myself; all at once she is here, changed, but wholly here; no trace of sickness any longer stands between us; love in all its power springs from my hands and eyes, and dizziness rises like a silent whirlwind through my veins into my brain. She looks at me. “Isabelle,” I say.

She looks at me again, a small crease between her eyebrows. “Yes?” she says.

I do not understand right away. I think I must remind her. “Isabelle,” I repeat. “Don’t you know me? I am Rudolf—”

“Rudolf?” she repeats. “Rudolf—what is it, please?”

I stare at her. “We have often talked to each other,” I say then.

She nods. “Yes, I have been here a long time. But I have forgotten a great deal, please forgive me. Have you been here a long time too?”

“I? I’ve never been here! I only come to play the organ! And then—”

“Oh yes, the organ,” Geneviève Terhoven replies politely. “In the chapel. Yes, I remember now. Excuse me for letting it slip my mind. You play very well. Many thanks.”

I stand there like an idiot. I don’t know why I do not leave. Obviously Geneviève doesn’t know either. “Excuse me,” she says. “I still have a lot to do; I’m leaving soon.”

“You’re leaving soon?”

“Yes,” she replies in surprise.

“And you don’t remember anything? Not even the names that are shed at night and the flowers that have voices?”

Isabelle raises her shoulders in bewilderment. “Poems,” she exclaims presently, smiling. “I’ve always loved them. But there are so many! You can’t remember them all.”

I give up. My foreboding has come true! She is cured, and I have slipped out of her mind like a newspaper dropping from the hands of a sleepy woman. She remembers nothing any more. It is as though she has awakened from an anesthetic. The time up here has been wiped from her memory. She has forgotten everything. She is Geneviève Terhoven and she no longer knows who Isabelle was. She is not lying, I can see that. I have lost her, not as I feared I would, not because she comes from a different social world and is going back to it, but far more completely and irrevocably. She has died. She is alive and breathing and beautiful, but at the moment when the strangeness of her sickness was removed she died, drowned forever. Isabelle, whose heart flew and blossomed, is drowned in Geneviève Terhoven, a well-brought-up young lady of good family who someday will unquestionably marry a rich man and will no doubt become a good mother.

“I must go,” she says. “Many thanks again for the organ music.”

“Well?” Wernicke asks. “What have you to say?”

“To what?”

“Don’t act so dumb. Fräulein Terhoven. You must admit that in the three weeks since you last saw her she has become a quite different person. Complete success!”

“Is that what you call success?”

“What would you call it? She is going back into life, everything is in order, that earlier time has disappeared like a bad dream, she has become a human being again—what more do you want? You’ve seen her, haven’t you? Well then?”

“Yes,” I say. “Well then?”

A nurse with a red peasant face brings in a bottle and glasses. “Are we to have the additional pleasure of seeing His Reverence Vicar Bodendiek?” I ask. “I don’t know whether Fräulein Terhoven was baptized a Catholic, but since she comes from Alsace I assume so—His Reverence, too, will, then, be full of joy at having retrieved a lamb for his flock from the great chaos.”

Wernicke grins. “His Reverence has already expressed his satisfaction. Fraulein Terhoven has been attending mass daily for the past week.”

Isabelle, I think. Once she knew that God still hangs on the cross and that it was not just the unbelievers who crucified Him. “Has she been to confession too?” I ask.

“I don’t know. It’s possible. But is it necessary for someone to confess what he has done while mentally ill? That’s an interesting question for an unenlightened Protestant like me.”

“It depends on what you mean by mentally ill,” I say bitterly, watching that plumber of souls drain a glass of Schloss Reinhartshausener. “No doubt we have different views on the subject. Besides, how can one confess what he has forgotten? No doubt Fraulein Terhoven has suddenly forgotten a good deal.”

Wernicke fills his glass again. “Let’s finish this before His Reverence arrives. The smell of incense may be holy, but it ruins the bouquet of a wine like this.” He takes a sip, rolling his eyes, and says: “Suddenly forgotten? Was it so sudden? There were signs long ago.”

He is right. I, too, noticed it earlier. There were moments when Isabelle seemed not to recognize me. I remember the last occasion and drain my glass angrily. Today the wine has no flavor for me.

“It’s like an earthquake,” Wernicke explains contentedly, beaming with self-satisfaction. “A seaquake. Islands, even continents, that formerly existed disappear and others emerge.”

“What about a second seaquake? Does that have the reverse effect?”

“That, too, happens sometimes. But almost always in cases of a different kind; those associated with increasing hebetude. You’ve seen examples here. Is that what you’d like for Fraulein Terhoven?”

“I want the best for her,” I say.

“Well then!”

Wernicke pours the rest of the wine. I remember the hopelessly sick, standing or lying in the corners, with spittle dribbling from their mouths, soiling themselves. “Of course I hope she will never be sick again,” I say.

“It is to be assumed that she will not. Hers was one of those cases that will be cured once the causes are eliminated. Everything went very well. Mother and daughter now feel, as sometimes happens in such instances when a death occurs, that in some vague way they have been betrayed—and so they are like orphans and thereby brought closer together than before.”

I stare at Wernicke. I have never heard him speak so poetically. But he doesn’t mean it altogether seriously. “You’ll have a chance to see for yourself at noon,” he remarks. “Mother and daughter are coming to lunch.”

I want to leave, but something compels me to stay. Anyone given to self-torture does not readily miss a chance for it. Bodendiek appears and is surprisingly human. Then mother and daughter come in, and a commonplace, civilized conversation begins. The older woman is about forty-five, a trifle stout, inconsequentially pretty, and full of light, polished phrases which she scatters effortlessly. She has an unreflective answer for everything.

I watch Geneviève. Sometimes, fleetingly, I think I perceive in her features that other beloved, wild, and disturbed countenance, rising toward the surface like the face of, a drowning woman; but it is instantly submerged in the ripples of the conversation about the modern facilities of the sanitarium—neither lady calls it anything else—the pretty view, the old city, various uncles and aunts in Strasbourg and in Holland, the difficulty of the times, the necessity of faith, the merits of Lothringian wines, and the beauty of Alsace. Not a word of what so overwhelmed and excited me. It is gone as though it had never existed.

Soon I take my leave. “Good-by, Fräulein Terhoven,” I say. “I hear you are leaving this week.”