The Black Obelisk by Erich Maria Remarque Read Free Book Online Page B

says the attendant.
    Isabelle takes it and lets it hang loose from her hand. The light in her eyes goes out. She turns and goes back to the pavilion. She does not look around.
    It all began one day early in March when Geneviève suddenly came up to me in the park and began to talk to me as though we had known each other for a long time. There was nothing unusual about that—in the asylum you don't need to be introduced; you are beyond formalities here, and people speak to each other when they feel like it, without lengthy preambles. They speak at once about whatever comes into their heads, and it makes no difference if the other does not understand—that's unimportant. One doesn't want to persuade or to explain; one is there and one speaks, and often two people talk to each other splendidly because neither listens to what the other is saying. Pope Gregory Vü, for example, a little man with bandy legs, does not argue. He does not need to persuade anyone that he is pope. He is, and that's the end of it. He is having serious troubles with Henry IV; Canossa is not far off, and sometimes he talks about it It doesn't matter that his interlocutor is a man who believes he is made entirely of glass and begs everyone not to jostle him because he is already cracked—the two talk together, Gregory about the king who must do penance in his shirt, and the glass man about how he cannot stand the sun because it is reflected in him—then Gregory bestows the papal blessing, the glass man for an instant takes off the cloth that protects his transparent head against the sun, and both take leave of each other with the courtesy of past centuries. So I was not surprised when Geneviève came up to me and began to talk; I was only surprised at how beautiful she was, for at that moment she was Isabelle.
    She talked to me for a long time. She was wearing a light cape of blond fur that was worth at least ten or twenty memorial crosses of the best Swedish granite; with it she wore an evening dress and gold sandals. It was eleven o'clock in the morning, and in the world beyond the walls this costume would have been surprising. Here, however, it was simply exciting; as though someone had drifted down in a parachute from some happier planet.
    It was a day of sun, showers, wind, and sudden stillness. They whirled together in confusion; one hour it was March, the next April, and then without transition a day in May or June. Into this confusion came Isabelle from God knows where—from somewhere beyond boundaries, where the light of reason penetrates only in distorted streams, like the aurora borealis, across skies that know neither day nor night, only their own echoing beams and the echoes of those echoes and the pale light of the Beyond and of timeless vastness.
    She confused me from the start, and all the advantages were on her side. I had, to be sure, got rid of many bourgeois concepts in the war, but this had only made me cynical and a little desperate, not superior and free. So I sat there and stared at her as though she were a creature without weight hovering in the air while I stumbled awkwardly after her. Moreover, a strange wisdom often flickered in what she said; it was only displaced and then, astoundingly, it would reveal vistas that made one's heart pound; but when one tried to hold onto it, veils of mist intervened, and Isabelle was already somewhere else.
    She kissed me on the first day, and she did it so naturally that it seemed to mean nothing at all; but that did not keep me from feeling it. I felt it, it excited me, and then it struck like a wave against the barrier reef—I knew she did not mean me at all; she meant someone else, some figure of her fantasy, Rolf or Rudolf; and perhaps she did not mean them either, perhaps they were just names thrown up from dark, subterranean streams, without roots or connections.
    From then on she came into the garden almost every Sunday; when it was raining she came to the chapel. The Mother