The Black Obelisk by Erich Maria Remarque

Author:Erich Maria Remarque
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Literary, General, Fiction
ISBN: 9781931541909
Publisher: Simon Publications, Incorporated
Published: 2014-03-27T15:02:48.520240+00:00

13.

The traveling salesman Oskar Fuchs, called Weeping Oskar, is sitting in the office. "What's new, Herr Fuchs?" I ask. "How is the grippe progressing in the villages?"

"Pretty harmless. The farmers are well fed. In the city it's different. I have two cases where Hollmann and Klotz are on the point of closing. A red granite monument, polished on one side, with two bossed socles, a yard and a half high, two million two hundred thousand marks—and a small one, forty inches high, one million three hundred thousand. Good prices. If you ask a hundred thousand less you'll get them. My commission is twenty per cent."

"Fifteen," I reply automatically.

"Twenty," Weeping Oskar declares. "I get fifteen from Hollmann and Klotz as it is. So why the betrayal?"

He is lying. Hollmann and Klotz, for whom he travels, pay him ten per cent and expenses. He gets expenses anyway; so he would be doing business with us for ten per cent extra.

"Payment in cash?"

"You'll have to see to that for yourselves. The people are well off."

"Herr Fuchs," I say. "Why don't you join us? We'd pay better than Hollmann and Klotz and we can use a first-class traveler."

Fuchs winks. "It's more fun for me this way. I'm an emotional type. When I get angry at old Hollmann I throw a job your way as revenge. If I worked for you at the time I'd get angry at you too."

"There's something in that," I say.

"What I mean is, then I would betray you to Hollmann and Klotz. Traveling in tombstones is so boring you have to do something to cheer yourself up."

"Boring? For a person who puts on such an artistic performance every time?"

Fuchs smiles like Gaston Munch of the city theater after playing the role of Karl Heinz in Alt Heidelberg. "One does the best one can," he concedes with colossal modesty.

"They say you have developed splendidly. Without artificial aids. Simply through intuition. Is that right?"

Oskar, who formerly had recourse to slices of raw red onions before entering a house of mourning, now maintains he can produce tears freely like a great actor. Naturally that is an enormous improvement. Now he does not have to enter a house weeping, as he did when he used the onion technique, nor, if the business lasts some time, do his tears dry up—for of course he could not use the onions while he was sitting with the mourners—on the contrary, he can now go in with dry eyes and during conversation about the departed break into natural tears, which of course produces a much stronger effect. It is like the difference between genuine and artificial pearls. Oskar maintains he is so convincing that he is often comforted and cosseted by the survivors.

Georg Kroll comes out of his room. The smoke from a streaked Havana wreathes his face and he is the picture of satisfaction. "Herr Fuchs," he says, "is it true you can weep at will, or is that just a piece of dirty propaganda on the part of our competitors to scare us?"

Instead of answering Oskar stares at him.

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