Arch of Triumph (14 page)

He went into a bistro and took a seat at one of the marble tables at the window. The room was smoky and full of noise. The waiter came. “A Dubonnet and a package of Colonials.”

He opened the package and lighted one of the black cigarettes. At the table next to him some Frenchmen were discussing their corrupt government and the Munich pact. Ravic only half listened.
Everyone knew that the world was apathetically sliding into a new war. No one did anything to stop it—postponement, another year’s postponement—that was all they managed to struggle for. Postponement here too, again and again.

He emptied the glass of Dubonnet. The sweetish dull flavor of the apéritif filled his mouth with a flat distaste. Why had he ordered it? He called the waiter. “A fine.”

He looked through the window and shook his thoughts off. If there was nothing to be done, one shouldn’t drive oneself crazy. He recalled the time when he had learned this lesson. One of the great lessons of his life—

It was in August, 1916, near Ypres. The company had returned from the front the day before. It had been a quiet section in which they were used for the first time since they had been sent into the field. Nothing had happened. Now they were lying in the warm August sun around a small fire, frying potatoes they had found in the fields. A minute later nothing was left. A sudden artillery attack—a shell had hit the middle of the fire—when he came to himself again, whole, uninjured, he found two of his comrades dead—and farther away his friend Messmann, whom he had known from the time when both began to walk, with whom he had played, gone to school, from whom he had been inseparable—lying there with his belly torn open, his intestines coming out—

They carried him on a tent litter to the field hospital, by the nearest path through a cornfield up a slope. Four men carried him, one at each corner, and he was lying in the brown tent litter, his hands pressed against the white, fat, bloody intestines, his mouth open, his eyes uncomprehendingly fixed.…

Two hours later he died. For one of them he had screamed.

Ravic remembered how they had returned. He had sat in the barracks, dull and bewildered. It was the first time he had seen anything like that. Katczinsky had found him there, the group
leader, a shoemaker in private life. “Come,” he had said. “They have beer and whisky in the Bavarian canteen today. Sausages too.” Ravic had stared at him. He could not understand such callousness. Katczinsky had watched him for a while. Then he had said, “You are coming with me. Even if I have to beat you up. Today you’ll eat and get drunk and go to a cat-house.” He had not answered. Katczinsky had sat down beside him. “I know what’s the matter with you. I know too what you think of me now. But I have been here two years and you two weeks. Listen! Can anything still be done for Messmann?”—“No.”—“Don’t you know that we would risk everything if there were a chance to save him?” He had looked up. Yes. He knew that. He knew that about Katczinsky. “Well. He is dead. There is nothing to be done any more. But in two days we’ll have to get out of here for the front. This time it won’t be so quiet there. Crouching here now and thinking of Messmann, the thing eats into you. Ruins your nerves. Makes you jittery. Perhaps just enough to slow you down during the next attack out there. Just half a second late. Then we carry you back as we did Messmann. Whom does it help? Messmann? No. Someone else? No. It kills you, that’s all. Now do you understand?”—“Yes, but I can’t.”—“Shut up, you can! Others could too. You aren’t the first.”

It had become better after that night. He had gone with him; he had learned his first lesson. Help when you can; do everything then—but when you can no longer do anything, forget it! Turn away! Pull yourself together. Compassion is meant for quiet times. Not when life is at stake. Bury the dead and devour life! You’ll still need it. Mourning is one thing, facts are another. One doesn’t mourn less when one sees the facts and accepts them. That is how one survives.

Ravic drank his cognac. The Frenchmen at the next table were still talking about their government. About France’s failure. About England. About Italy. About Chamberlain. Words, words.
The only ones who did something were the others. They were not stronger, only more determined. They were not braver, they only knew that the others wouldn’t fight. Postponement—but what did they do with it? Did they arm themselves, did they make up for lost time, did they pull themselves together? They watched the others going ahead arming themselves—and waited, passively hoping for a new postponement. The story of the herd of seals. Hundreds of them on a beach; among them the hunter killing one after the other with a club. Together they could easily have crushed him—but they lay there, watching him come to murder, and did not move; he was only killing a neighbor—one neighbor after the other. The story of the European seals. The sunset of civilization. Tired shapeless
Götterdämmerung
. The empty banners of human rights. The sell-out of a continent. The onrushing deluge. The haggling for the last prices. The old dance of despair on the volcano. Peoples again slowly being driven into a slaughterhouse. The fleas would save themselves when the sheep were being sacrificed. As always.

Ravic pressed out his cigarette. He looked around. What did it all mean? Hadn’t the evening been like a dove before, like a soft gray dove? Bury the dead and devour life. Time is short. To survive was everything. A time would come when one was needed. One should keep oneself whole and ready for that. He called the waiter and paid.

The lights in the Scheherazade were lowered when he entered. The gypsies were playing and the spotlight flooded the table beside the orchestra where Joan Madou sat.

Ravic stopped inside the door. One of the waiters approached him and moved a table into position. But Ravic remained standing and looked at Joan Madou.

“Vodka?” the waiter asked.

“Yes. A carafe.”

Ravic sat down. He poured vodka into his glass and drank it quickly. He wanted to get rid of the thoughts he had had outside. The grimace of the past and the grimace of death—a belly torn open by shells and one eaten up by cancer. He noticed that he was sitting at the same table where he had sat with Kate Hegstroem two days before. Another table was vacated beside him. He did not move there. It made no difference. Whether he was sitting at this table or at the next—it did not help Kate Hegstroem. What had Veber said once? Why do you get upset when an operation is hopeless? You do what you can and you go home, otherwise where would it lead? Yes, where would it lead? He heard Joan Madou’s voice coming from the orchestra. Kate Hegstroem was right—it was an agitating voice. He reached for the carafe with the limpid brandy. One of those moments when colors fade and life turns gray under powerless hands. The mystic ebb. The silent caesura between breaths. The bite of time slowly consuming one’s heart.
Santa Lucia Luntana
, sang the voice by the orchestra. It came to him as though across an ocean—from a forgotten far shore where something bloomed.

“How do you like her?”

“Whom?” Ravic glanced up. The manager stood at his side. He motioned to Joan Madou. “Much. Very much.”

“She isn’t exactly a sensation. But quite good between the other numbers.”

The manager moved along. For a moment his pointed beard stood out black against the white light. Then he disappeared in the darkness.

The spotlight died away. The orchestra began to play a tango. The illuminated table plates emerged again and above them the
blurred faces. Joan Madou rose and made her way among the tables. She had to stop several times because couples were going to the dance floor. Ravic looked at her and she looked at him. Her face betrayed no surprise. She came straight toward him. He got up and pushed the table aside. A waiter came to his aid. “Thanks,” he said. “I’ll do it myself. All we need is another glass.”

He moved the table back again and filled the glass which the waiter had brought. “Here, this is vodka,” he said. “I don’t know whether you drink that.”

“Yes. We have drunk it before. In the Belle Aurore.”

“That’s right.”

We were here before too, he thought. Ages ago. Three weeks ago. Then you were sitting here in your raincoat, huddled, nothing but a bit of misery and defeat in the half-dark. Now—
“Salute,”
he said.

A gleam crossed her face. She did not smile; only her face became brighter. “I haven’t heard that for a long time,” she said.
“Salute.”

He emptied his glass and looked at her. The high brows, the wide-set eyes, the mouth—all that had formerly been blurred and separate, without context, now combined to shape a bright, mysterious face—a face whose openness was its secret. It neither hid nor revealed anything. It promised nothing and thereby everything. Odd, I haven’t seen this before, he thought. But perhaps it was not there. Perhaps it was then completely filled with confusion and fear.

“Have you a cigarette?” Joan Madou asked.

“Only the Algerians. Those with the strong black tobacco.”

Ravic was about to call the waiter. “They are not too strong,” Joan Madou said. “Once you gave me one. On the Pont de l’Alma.”

“That’s true.”

It is true and it isn’t true, he thought. That was a pale, hunted
creature, not you. There were many other things as well between us and suddenly none of them is true any longer. “I was here once before,” he said. “Day before yesterday.”

“I know. I saw you.”

She didn’t ask about Kate Hegstroem. She sat in the corner, calm and relaxed, and smoked, and was completely absorbed in her smoking. Then she drank, calmly and slowly, and was completely absorbed in her drinking. She seemed to do everything she did wholly, however unimportant it was. At that time she was completely desperate too, Ravic thought—and now she wasn’t at all any more. Suddenly she had warmth and a self-evident, assured placidity. He did not know whether it was due to the fact that nothing moved her life at the moment—he only felt it shine unpremeditatedly upon him.

The carafe of vodka was empty. “Shall we go on drinking the same?”

“What was it you gave me to drink then?”

“When? Here? I think we mixed them all up.”

“No, not here. That first evening.”

Ravic reflected. “I can’t remember any more. Wasn’t it cognac?”

“No. It looked like cognac but it was something else. I tried to get it. But I couldn’t.”

“Why do you want it? Was it so good?”

“Not because of that. It was the warmest thing I ever drank in my life.”

“Where did we drink it?”

“In a small bistro near the Arc. We had to go down a few steps. Cabdrivers and a few girls were there. The waiter had a woman tattooed on his arm.”

“Now I know. It must have been calvados. Apple brandy from Normandy. Have you tried that?”

“I don’t think so.”

Ravic called the waiter. “Have you any calvados?”

“No. Sorry. No one ever asks for it.”

“This place is too elegant for it. It must have been calvados. It’s a shame we can’t find out. The simplest thing would be to go to that place again. But that’s not possible now.”

“Why?”

“Don’t you have to stay here?”

“No. I’m through.”

“Fine. Do you want to go there?”

“Yes.”

Ravic had no trouble finding the bistro. It was fairly empty. The waiter with the woman tattooed on his arm glanced at each of them in turn; then he shuffled out from behind his counter and wiped a table. “This is progress,” Ravic said. “He didn’t do that then.”

“Not this table,” Joan Madou said. “That one, there.”

Ravic smiled. “Are you superstitious?”

“Sometimes.”

The waiter stood beside them. “That’s it,” he said, making the tattooing jump. “That’s where you sat last time.”

“Do you still remember?”

“Perfectly.”

“You should be a general,” Ravic said. “With such a memory.”

“I never forget anything.”

“Then I wonder how you can live. But do you also remember what we drank last time?”

“Calvados,” the waiter said without hesitating.

“Right. We’d like to repeat it now.” Ravic turned to Joan Madou. “How simply problems are solved sometimes. Now we’ll see if it tastes just the same.”

The waiter brought the glasses. “Double. You ordered double calvados then.”

“You’re gradually giving me an uncanny feeling, my good man. Do you also remember how we were dressed?”

“Raincoats. The lady wore a Basque beret.”

“It’s a pity you have to be here. You belong in vaudeville.”

“I used to be,” the waiter replied, astonished. “Circus. I told you that. Did you forget?”

“Yes. It’s disgraceful, but I did.”

“This gentleman has a bad memory,” Joan Madou said to the waiter. “He is an expert in forgetting just as you are an expert in not forgetting.”

Ravic glanced up. She looked at him. He smiled. “Perhaps not, after all,” he said. “And now we’ll taste the calvados.
Salute!
”

“Salute!”

The waiter remained standing. “What one forgets one misses later in life, sir,” he declared. The topic was not yet exhausted as far as he was concerned.

“Correct. And what one doesn’t forget makes one’s life a hell.”

“Not mine. It’s gone. Then how can it make one’s life a hell?”

Ravic glanced up. “Just because of it, brother. But you’re a happy man, not just an artist. Is it the same calvados?” he asked Joan Madou.

“It is better.”

He looked at her. He felt a warmth rising in him. He knew what she meant; but it was disarming that she said it. She did not seem to be concerned with what effect it might have. She sat in this bare-looking place as if she were all by herself. The light from the unshaded electric bulbs was merciless. Under them, two whores sitting a few tables away looked like their own grandmothers. But the glare had no effect on her. What had shone before in the subdued light of the night club held its own here too.
The cool bright face which didn’t ask for anything, which simply existed, waiting—it was an empty face, he thought; a face that could change with any wind of expression. One could dream into it anything. It was like a beautiful empty house waiting for carpets and pictures. It had all possibilities—it could become a palace or a brothel. It depended on the one who filled it. How limited by comparison was all that is already completed and labeled—