Arch of Triumph (15 page)

He noticed that she had emptied her glass. “My respects,” he said. “That was a double calvados. Do you want another one?”

“Yes. If you have time.”

Why shouldn’t I have time? he thought. Then it occurred to him that she had seen him with Kate Hegstroem last time. He looked up. Her face didn’t betray anything.

“I have time,” he said. “I have to operate tomorrow at nine, that’s all.”

“Can you do it if you stay up so late?”

“Yes. This has nothing to do with it. It’s habit. Nor do I operate every day.”

The waiter refilled their glasses. He brought a package of cigarettes with the bottle and put it on the table. It was a package of Laurens green. “These are what you had last time, aren’t they?” he asked Ravic triumphantly.

“I have no idea. You know more than I do. I believe you.”

“He’s right,” Joan Madou said. “It was Laurens green.”

“You see! The lady has a better memory than you have, sir.”

“That’s yet to be proved. Anyway, we can use the cigarettes.”

Ravic opened the package and held it out to her. “Do you still live in the same hotel?” he asked.

“Yes. Only I took a larger room.”

A few cabdrivers entered. They sat down at one of the near-by tables and began a loud discussion.

“Would you like to leave?” Ravic asked.

She nodded.

He called the waiter and paid. “Are you sure you don’t have to go back to the Scheherazade?”

“No.”

He took her coat. She did not put it on. She simply hung it around her shoulders. It was an inexpensive mink, possibly an imitation—but it did not look cheap on her. Only what is not worn with assurance is cheap, Ravic thought. He had seen cheap crown-sables.

“Now I’ll take you to your hotel,” he said when they stood outside the entrance in the light drizzle.

She turned toward him slowly. “Aren’t we going to your place?”

Her face was just below his, partly turned up to him. The light from the lamp in front of the door shone full on it. Fine beads of moisture glittered on her hair.

“Yes,” he said.

A taxi approached and stopped. The driver waited awhile. Then he clicked his tongue, the gears grated, and he drove away.

“I’ve been waiting for you. Did you know?” she asked.

“No.”

Her eyes gleamed in the light from the street lamp; one could look through them and see no end. “I’ve seen you today for the first time,” he said. “You are not the same woman as before.”

“No.”

“And all that was before never happened.”

“No. I have forgotten it.”

He felt the light ebb and flow of her breath. Invisibly and tenderly, it was vibrating toward him, without heaviness, ready and full of confidence—a strange life in a strange night. Suddenly he felt his blood. It mounted and mounted and it was more than that: life, a thousand times cursed and welcomed, often lost and rewon—an hour ago still a barren landscape, arid, full of rocks,
and without consolation—and now gushing, gushing as if from many fountains, resounding and close to the mysterious moment in which one had not believed any more—one was the first man again, on the shore of the ocean and out of the waves emerged, white and radiant, question and answer in one, it mounted and mounted, and the storm began above his eyes.

“Hold me,” she said.

He looked down into her face and put his arm around her. Her shoulders came closer to him like a ship coming to anchor in a harbor. “Must one hold you?” he asked.

“Yes.”

Her hands lay close together against his chest. “I’ll hold you,” he said.

She nodded.

Another taxi came to a squeaking stop beside the curb. The driver, unmoved, looked over at them. On his shoulder sat a little dog in a knitted vest. “Taxi?” he croaked from behind a long flaxen mustache.

“Look,” Ravic said. “That man knows nothing. He doesn’t know that wings have touched us. He looks at us and doesn’t see that we have changed. That is the crazy thing about the world: you may turn into an archangel, a fool or a criminal—no one will see it. But when a button is missing—everyone sees that.”

“It is not crazy. It is good so. It leaves us to ourselves.”

Ravic looked at her. Us—he thought—what a word! The most mysterious in the world.

“Taxi?” the driver croaked patiently, but louder, and lit a cigarette.

“Come,” Ravic said. “He won’t let us go. He is experienced in his trade.”

“I don’t want to ride. Let’s walk.”

“It is beginning to rain.”

“That isn’t rain. That is mist. I don’t want a taxi. I want to walk with you.”

“All right. But I’d like to make that man understand that something has happened here.”

Ravic walked over and spoke to the driver. The man smiled a beautiful smile, greeted Joan with a gesture that Frenchmen alone achieve at such moments, and drove away.

“How did you explain it to him?” she asked when Ravic returned.

“With money. The simplest thing. Like all people who work nights he’s a cynic. He understood immediately. He was benevolent with a touch of amiable contempt.”

She smiled. He put his arm around her shoulders. She leaned against him. He felt something open up in him and spread, warm and soft and wide, something that drew him down as though with many hands, and made it suddenly unbearable that they were standing side by side on their feet, those small platforms, absurdly upright, balancing, instead of forgetting and sinking down, yielding to the call of the skin, the call behind the millenniums when there did not as yet exist brains and thoughts and suffering and doubt, but only the dark happiness of the blood—

“Come,” he said.

They walked along the empty gray street through the light rain, and when they reached its end, the square lay before them again, huge and unbounded and, out of the flowing river, suspended aloft, rose the massive grayness of the Arc.

RAVIC RETURNED TO
the hotel. Joan Madou had still been sleeping when he had left that morning. He had thought he would be back in an hour. It was now three hours later.

“Hello, doctor,” someone said on the stairs.

Ravic looked at the man. A pale face, a bush of wild black hair, glasses. He did not recognize him.

“Alvarez,” the man said. “Jaime Alvarez. Don’t you remember?”

Ravic shook his head.

The man bent down and pulled up his trouser leg. A long scar ran along his shinbone up to his knee. “Do you remember now?”

“Did I operate on that?”

The man nodded. “On a kitchen table behind the front. In a temporary field hospital before Aranjuez. A little white cottage in an almond grove. Do you remember now?”

Suddenly Ravic scented the heavy aroma of almond blossoms. He smelled it as if it had ascended the dark staircase, sweet, putrid, inextricably mixed with the sweeter and more putrid scent of blood.

“Yes,” he said. “I remember.”

The wounded had been lying on the moonlit terrace, beside one another in rows. A few German and Italian planes had accomplished that. Children, women, peasants, torn by bomb fragments. A child without a face; a pregnant woman torn open up to her breast; an old man who anxiously held the fingers torn off one hand in his other because he thought they could be sewed on. Over all that the heavy night odor and the clear dew falling.

“Is your leg quite all right again?” Ravic asked.

“Just about. I can’t bend it completely.” The man smiled. “But it was good enough to get me across the Pyrenees. Gonzalez is dead.”

Ravic no longer knew who Gonzalez was. But now he recalled a young student who had assisted him. “Do you know what happened to Manolo?”

“Imprisoned. Shot.”

“And Serna? The brigade commander?”

“Dead. Before Madrid.” The man smiled again. It was a rigid automatic smile that came suddenly and was without emotion. “Mura and La Pena were taken prisoners. Shot.”

Ravic no longer knew who Mura and La Pena were. He had left Spain after six months when the front was broken and the field hospital disbanded.

“Carnero, Orta, and Goldstein are in a concentration camp,” Alvarez said. “In France. Blatzky too is safe. Hidden across the frontier.”

Ravic recalled only Goldstein. There had been too many faces at that time. “Do you live here in the hotel now?” he asked.

“Yes. We moved in yesterday. Over there.” The man pointed at the rooms on the second floor. “We were kept in the camp down at the frontier for a long time. Finally we were released. We still had some money.” He smiled again. “Beds. Real beds. A good hotel. Even pictures of our leaders on the walls.”

“Yes,” Ravic said without irony. “It must be pleasant after all that over there.”

He said goodbye to Alvarez and went to his room.

The room had been cleaned and was empty. Joan had gone. He looked around. She had not left anything behind. He had not expected her to.

He rang. After a while the maid came. “The lady left,” she said before he could ask her.

“I see that myself. How did you know anyone was here?”

“But, Mr. Ravic,” the girl said without adding anything and with an expression as if her honor had been offended.

“Did she have breakfast?”

“No. I haven’t seen her. Otherwise I would have thought of it. I know that from before.”

Ravic looked at her. He did not like the concluding sentence. He pulled a few francs out of his pocket and put them into the girl’s apron pocket. “All right,” he said. “Do the same next time. Bring breakfast only when I explicitly tell you to do so. And don’t come up to clean the room before you know for sure that it is empty.”

The girl smiled understandingly. “Very well, Mr. Ravic.”

He looked after her uneasily. He knew what she thought. She believed Joan was married and did not want to be seen. In former days he would have laughed about it. Now he did not like it. But why not? he thought. He shrugged his shoulders and went to the window. Hotels were hotels. That could not be changed.

He opened the window. A cloudy noon hung above the houses. Sparrows chirped in the eaves. On the floor below two voices squabbled. That would be the Goldberg family. The man was twenty years older than his wife. A wholesale corndealer from Breslau.
His wife was having an affair with the refugee Wiesenhoff. She thought no one knew it. The only one who did not know it was Goldberg.

Ravic closed the window. He had operated on a gall bladder that morning. An anonymous gall bladder for Durant. He had cut open for Durant part of an unknown male belly. A fee of two hundred francs. Afterwards he had gone to see Kate Hegstroem. She had a fever. Too much fever. He had been with her for an hour. She had slept restlessly. It was nothing alarming. But it would have been better if there had been no fever.

He stared through the window. The strange empty feeling of afterwards. The bed that no longer had any meaning. The day that mercilessly tore yesterday into pieces like a jackal tearing the hide of an antelope. The woods of the night, miraculously grown in the dark, now endlessly remote again, merely a fata morgana in the wasteland of hours.…

He turned around. On his table he found Lucienne Martinet’s address. She had been released from the hospital a short time before. She had given them no peace until they released her. Two days ago he had been with her. It was not necessary to look her up again; but he had nothing else to do and decided to go there.

The house was in the Rue Clavel. Downstairs was a butcher’s shop in which a strong woman was swinging a cleaver and selling meat. She was in mourning. Her husband had died two weeks before. Now the woman reigned in the shop, with a helper. Ravic saw her as he passed by. She was apparently about to go calling. She wore a hat with a long black crepe veil and was quickly chopping off a pig’s leg to oblige an acquaintance. The veil waved above the open carcass, the cleaver glittered and came crashing down.

“With one blow,” the widow said in a satisfied tone and flung the leg on the scale.

Lucienne lived in a small room on the top floor. She was not alone. A fellow of about twenty-five slouched on a chair. He wore a bicyclist’s cap and was smoking a homemade cigarette which stuck to his upper lip when he talked. He remained sitting as Ravic entered.

Lucienne lay in bed. She was bewildered and blushed. “Doctor—I didn’t know you would come today.” She looked at the young man. “This is—”

“Someone,” the boy interrupted her gruffly. “It isn’t necessary to toss names around.” He leaned back. “So you are the doctor!”

“How are you, Lucienne?” Ravic asked without taking any notice of him. “You’re wise to stay in bed.”

“She could have been up long ago,” the boy declared. “There’s no longer anything wrong with her. When she doesn’t work it runs up expenses.”

Ravic turned around and looked at him. “Leave us alone,” he said.

“What?”

“Get out. Out of the room. I’m going to examine Lucienne.”

The boy burst out laughing. “You can do that just as well with me here. We aren’t so fine. And why examine? You were here only the day before yesterday. That costs for an extra visit, eh?”

“Brother,” Ravic said calmly, “you don’t look as if you would pay it. Besides, whether it will cost anything is a different matter. And now get out.”