Arch of Triumph (25 page)

ANDRÉ DURANT WAS
honestly incensed. “There’s no working with you any more,” he declared.

Ravic shrugged his shoulders. He had learned from Veber that Durant was to receive ten thousand francs for the operation. Unless he arranged with him in advance how much he was to get, Durant would send him only two hundred francs. That’s what he had done last time.

“Half an hour before the operation. I would never have thought it of you, Doctor Ravic.”

“Neither would I,” Ravic said.

“You know you can always rely on my generosity. I don’t understand why you are so businesslike now. At the very moment when the patient knows that we have his life in our hands it is painful for me to talk about money.”

“It isn’t for me,” Ravic replied.

Durant looked at him for a while. His wrinkled face with the white goatee expressed dignity and indignation. He adjusted his gold-rimmed pince-nez. “How much were you thinking of?” he asked reluctantly.

“Two thousand francs.”

“What?” Durant looked as though he had been shot and could not yet believe it. “Ridiculous,” he then said briefly.

“All right,” Ravic replied. “You can easily find someone else. Take Binot; he is excellent.”

He reached for his coat and put it on. Durant stared at him. His dignified face labored. “Wait a minute,” he said when Ravic picked up his hat. “You can’t let me down like that! Why didn’t you tell me this yesterday?”

“Yesterday you were in the country and I could not reach you.”

“Two thousand francs! Do you know that even I won’t ask that much? The patient is a friend of mine whom I can only charge for my expenses.”

Durant looked like the Heavenly Father in a child’s book. He was seventy years old, a fairly good diagnostician, but a poor surgeon. His excellent practice had been based mainly on the work of his former assistant, Binot, who, two years ago, had finally succeeded in making himself independent. Since that time Durant had engaged Ravic for his more difficult operations. Ravic was known for making the smallest incisions and working in such a fashion that hardly any scar was left. Durant was an excellent connoisseur of Bordeaux wines, a favorite guest at elegant parties, and his patients came mostly from there.

“If I had known that,” he murmured.

He had always known it. That was why before important operations he remained for one or two days in his house in the country. He wanted to avoid talking about the price before the operation. Afterwards it was simpler—then he could hold out hopes for the next time—and then the next time it was the same thing. This time, to the astonishment of Durant, instead of coming in at the last moment Ravic had arrived half an hour before the
appointed time for the operation and so had got hold of him before the patient was anesthetized. There was no possibility of using this as a reason for breaking off the discussion.

The nurse put her head through the open door. “Shall we begin the anesthetic, professor?”

Durant looked at her. Then imploringly and compassionately at Ravic. Ravic answered his look compassionately but firmly. “What do you think, Doctor Ravic?”

“The decision rests with you, professor.”

“Just a minute, nurse. We do not yet see the procedure quite clearly.” The nurse withdrew. Durant turned toward Ravic. “Now what?” he asked reproachfully.

Ravic put his hands in his pockets. “Postpone the operation until tomorrow—or for an hour and take Binot.”

Binot had performed almost all of Durant’s operations for twenty years and had made no headway because Durant had systematically cut him off from almost all chance of becoming independent and had always characterized him as a better-class underling. He hated Durant and would demand at least five thousand francs, Ravic knew that much. Durant knew it, too.

“Doctor Ravic,” he said. “Our profession shouldn’t be involved in this sort of business discussion.”

“I agree with you.”

“Why don’t you leave it to my discretion to settle this matter? Haven’t you always been satisfied up to now?”

“Never,” Ravic said.

“You never told me that.”

“Because it wouldn’t have done any good. Besides, I wasn’t very much interested. This time I am interested. I need the money.”

The nurse came in again. “The patient is restless, professor.”

Durant stared at Ravic. Ravic stared back. It was difficult to get
money from a Frenchman, that he knew. More difficult than from a Jew. A Jew sees the transaction; a Frenchman only the money he is going to hand out.

“One minute, nurse,” Durant said. “Take the pulse, blood pressure and temperature.”

“I have done that.”

“Then start the anesthetic.”

The nurse left. “All right then,” Durant said, “I’ll give you a thousand.”

“Two thousand,” Ravic corrected him.

Durant did not consent. He stroked his goatee. “Listen, Ravic,” he said then with warmth. “As a refugee who isn’t allowed to practice—”

“I should not perform any operations for you,” Ravic interrupted him calmly. Now he expected to hear the traditional comment that he ought to be grateful to be tolerated in the country.

But Durant forewent that. He could see that he wasn’t getting anywhere and time pressed. “Two thousand,” he said bitterly, as if each word were a bank note fluttering out of his throat. “I’ll have to pay it out of my own pocket. I thought you would remember what I’ve done for you.”

He waited. Strange, Ravic thought, that bloodsuckers like to moralize. This old cheat with the rosette of the Legion of Honor in his buttonhole reproaches me for being exploited by him, instead of being ashamed. And he even believes it.

“Well, two thousand,” Durant said. “Two thousand,” he repeated. It was as if he had said home, love, God, green asparagus, young partridges, old St. Emilion. Gone!—“Well, can we start now?”

The man had a fat potbelly and thin arms and legs. Ravic happened to know who he was. His name was Leval and he was a high official
whose department handled refugee matters. Veber had told him this as a special joke. Leval was a name known to every refugee in the International.

Ravic made the first cut quickly. The skin opened like a book. He clipped it tight and looked at the yellowish fat which popped up. “We’ll take a few pounds off as a free gift. Then he can eat them on again,” he said to Durant.

Durant did not answer. Ravic removed the layers of fat in order to get close to the muscles. There he lies now, the little god of the refugees, he thought. The man who holds hundreds of little fates in his hand, in this whitish swollen hand which lies here now lifeless. The man who had ordered the deportation of old Professor Meyer who hadn’t enough strength left to walk once more the road to Calvary and who had simply hanged himself in a closet of the Hôtel International the day before his deportation. In the closet, because there was no hook elsewhere. He could do it; he was so emaciated that a clothes hook was strong enough to hold him. Not much more than a bundle of clothes with a bit of strangled life inside—that was what the maid had found in the morning. If this potbelly had had mercy, Meyer would still be alive. “Clips,” he said. “Tampon.”

He continued to cut. The precision of the sharp knife. The sensation of a clean incision. The abdominal cavity. The white coils of the intestines. The man who lay there with his belly opened up had his moral principles, too. He had felt human compassion for Meyer; but he had also felt something that he called his patriotic duty. There was always a screen behind which one could hide—a superior who in turn had his superior—orders, instructions, duties, commands—and finally the many-headed monster, morale, necessity, hard reality, responsibility, or whatever it was called—there was always a screen behind which to evade the simple law of humanity.

There was the gall bladder. Rotten and sick. Hundreds of
tournedos Rossini
have done this to him, a tripe
à la mode de Caen
, of heavy canards pressés, pheasants, young chickens, fat sauces, together with bad temper and with thousands of pints of good Bordeaux wines. Professor Meyer had had no such worries. If one should blunder now, cut too far, cut too deep—then in a week would a better man sit in that stuffy room that smelled of files and moths, where trembling refugees awaited their life or death sentences? A better one—but maybe someone worse. This unconscious sixty-year-old body here on the table under the bright lights undoubtedly considered himself humane. Surely he was a kind husband, a good father—but the minute he entered his office he was transformed into a tyrant hiding behind the phrases, “We can’t do that”—and “Where would it get us if”—and so on. France would not have perished if Meyer had continued to eat his meager meals—if the widow Rosenthal had been allowed to go on waiting for her dead son in a maid’s room in the International—if the tubercular drygoods dealer, Stallman, had not been imprisoned for six months because of illegal entry, to be released only to die before he could be shipped across the border.

Fine, the incision was fine. Not too deep. Not too wide. Catgut. The knot. The gall bladder. He showed it to Durant. It shone greasily in the white light. He threw it into the pail. Let’s go on. Why did they sew with reverdin in France? Out with the clip! The warm belly of an average official with a salary of thirty or forty thousand francs a year. How could he pay ten thousand for this operation? Where did he earn the rest? This potbelly had played marbles too. That was a good stitch. Stitch after stitch. Two thousand francs was still written across Durant’s face although his pointed beard was hidden. It was in his eyes. A thousand francs in each eye. Love spoils one’s character. Would I otherwise have
squeezed this rentier and shaken his faith in the divinely appointed world order of exploitation? Tomorrow he’ll sit unctuously at this potbelly’s bedside and accept grateful speeches for his work. Careful, there was one more clip. The potbelly means one week at Antibes for Joan and me. A week of light in the rain of ashes of our times. A blue piece of sky before the thunderstorm. Now the seam of the peritoneum. Especially fine for the two thousand francs. I should sew it up with a pair of scissors inside in memory of Meyer. The humming white light. Why does one think so disconnectedly? Newspapers, probably. Radio. The incessant rattling of liars and cowards. The lack of concentration through avalanches of words. Confused brains. Exposed to all the demagogic trash. No longer used to chewing the hard bread of knowledge. Toothless brains. Nonsense. So that’s done now. There’s still the flabby skin. In a few weeks he can again deport trembling refugees. If he doesn’t die. But he won’t. People like him die at eighty, honored, self-respecting, and with proud grandchildren. That’s done with. The end. Take him away!

Ravic drew the gloves from his hands and the mask from his face. The high official glided out of the operating room on soundless wheels. Ravic gazed after him. Leval, he thought, if you only knew! That your thoroughly legal gall bladder had provided me, an illegal refugee, with a few highly illegal days on the Riviera!

He began to wash. Beside him Durant washed his hands slowly and methodically. The hands of an old man with high blood pressure. While carefully rubbing his fingers he rhythmically chewed with his lower jaw, slowly and as if grinding corn. When he stopped rubbing he also stopped chewing. As soon as he started again, the chewing began, too. This time he washed particularly slowly and deliberately. He wants to keep the two thousand francs a few minutes longer, Ravic thought.

“What are you still waiting for?” Durant asked after a while. “For your check.”

“I’ll send you the money as soon as the patient pays. That will be a few weeks after he is released from the hospital.”

Durant began to dry his hands. Then he seized a bottle of Eau de Cologne d’Orsay and rubbed it on. “You have that much confidence in me, haven’t you?” he asked.

Cheat, Ravic thought. Still wants to squeeze out a little humiliation. “You said the patient was a friend of yours who would only pay the expenses.”

“Yes,” Durant replied unobligingly.

“Well—the expenses amount to a few francs for the materials and the nurses. You own the hospital. If you charge a hundred francs for everything—you may deduct that and let me have it later.”

“The expenses, Doctor Ravic,” Durant declared, straightening up, “are, I’m sorry to say, considerably higher than I had thought. The two thousand francs for you are part of them. Therefore I must also charge the patient for that.” He sniffed the Eau de Cologne on his hands. “You see—”

He smiled. His yellow teeth formed a lively contrast to his snow-white beard. As if someone had made water in the snow, Ravic thought. Nevertheless he’ll pay. Veber will give me the money on the strength of it. I won’t do this old goat the favor of begging him for it now.

“All right,” he said. “If it is so difficult for you, then send it later.”

“It is not difficult for me. Although your demand came suddenly and as a surprise. It’s for the sake of order.”

“All right, then we’ll do it for the sake of order; it’s all the same.”

“It’s absolutely not the same.”