Arch of Triumph (10 page)

Ravic went to the window. It was still raining. Streamers, wet and gray, drifted with the wind around the yellow halos of the street lamps. “Come,” he said, “we’ll have another drink and then you’ll go to bed. This is no weather for walking.”

He picked up the bottle. Suddenly Joan Madou was close at his
side. “Don’t leave me here,” she said quickly and urgently, and he felt her breath. “Don’t leave me here alone, tonight. I don’t know why, but not tonight! Tomorrow I’ll have courage but tonight I can’t be alone, I’m weary and weak and spent, I have no strength left, you shouldn’t have taken me out—not tonight—I can’t be alone now!”

Ravic carefully put the bottle on the table and loosened her hands from his arm. “Child,” he said, “we have to get used to everything sometime.” He glanced at the chaise longue. “I could sleep on that. There is no point in going anywhere else now. I need a few hours’ sleep. I have to operate at nine in the morning. I could sleep here just as well as at my own place. It wouldn’t be my first night watch. Would that do?”

She nodded. She was still standing close beside him.

“I must be out by seven-thirty. Damned early. It will wake you up.”

“That doesn’t matter. I’ll get up and make breakfast for you, everything—”

“Nothing of the sort,” Ravic said. “I’ll have my breakfast in some café like a sensible workingman; coffee with rum and croissants. I can do everything else in the hospital. It will delight me to ask Eugénie for a bath. All right, let’s stay here. Two lost souls in November. You take the bed. If you like I can go down and stay with the old doorman till you’re ready.”

“No,” Joan Madou said.

“I won’t run away. Besides we’ll need some things. Pillows, blankets, and such.”

“I can ring for him.”

“I can do that myself.” Ravic looked for the button. “It’s better if a man does it.”

The doorman came quickly. He had another bottle of cognac in his hand. “You overrate us,” Ravic said. “Many thanks. We belong
to the postwar generation. A blanket, a pillow, and some sheets. I’ve got to sleep here. Too cold and too much rain outside. I had a bad case of pneumonia and it’s only two days since I left bed. Could you arrange that?”

“Naturally, sir. I thought something of the sort myself.”

“All right.” Ravic lit a cigarette. “I’ll go out into the hall. I’ll look at the shoes in front of the doors. That’s an old hobby of mine. I won’t run away,” he said, noticing Joan Madou’s expression. “I’m not Joseph of Egypt. I’ll not leave my coat behind.”

The doorman returned with the things. He stopped abruptly when he saw Ravic standing in the hall. Then his face brightened. “It’s not often one sees anything like that,” he said.

“I rarely do it myself. Only on birthdays and Christmas. Let me have those things. I’ll take them inside. What’s that?”

“A hot-water bottle. Because of your pneumonia.”

“Excellent! But I keep my lungs warm with cognac.” Ravic pulled a few bills out of his pocket.

“I’m sure you have no pajamas, sir. I could get you a pair.”

“Thanks, brother.” Ravic looked at the old man. “They’d certainly be too small for me.”

“On the contrary, they would fit you. They are perfectly new. Confidentially, an American once gave them to me as a gift. He had received them from a lady. I don’t wear such things. I wear nightshirts. They are perfectly new, sir.”

“All right, bring them up. Let’s have a look at them.”

Ravic waited in the hall. Three pairs of shoes stood before the doors. A pair of high boots with stretchable elastic sides. Thunderous snores emerged from the room behind. The others were a pair of brown men’s shoes and a pair of high-buttoned patent
leather shoes. They both stood in front of one door and seemed strangely forlorn although they were together.

The doorman brought the pajamas. They were marvelous pajamas. Blue artificial silk with gold stars on them. Ravic contemplated them for a while, speechless. He understood the American.

“Magnificent, aren’t they?” the doorman asked proudly.

The pajamas were new. They were still in the box of the Grands Magasins du Louvre where they had been bought. “It’s a pity,” Ravic said. “I’d like to have seen the lady who chose them.”

“You may have them for tonight. You don’t have to buy them, sir.”

“How much do I owe you?”

“Whatever you think.”

Ravic drew his hand from his pocket. “This is too much, sir,” the doorman said.

“Aren’t you a Frenchman?”

“I am. From Saint-Nazaire.”

“Then you’ve been spoiled by the Americans. Besides—nothing is too much for those pajamas.”

“I’m glad you like them. Good night, sir. I’ll call on the lady for them tomorrow.”

“I’ll return them myself tomorrow morning. Wake me at seven-thirty. But knock quietly. I’ll hear you. Good night.”

“Look at that,” Ravic said to Joan Madou, showing her the pajamas. “A costume for Santa Claus. This doorman is a magician. I’ll even put the things on. It takes both courage and unselfconsciousness to be ridiculous.”

He arranged the blankets on the chaise longue. It didn’t matter to him whether he slept in his hotel or here. In the hall he had seen
a passable bathroom and had got a new toothbrush from the doorman. All the other things didn’t matter. The woman was somehow like a patient.

He filled a tumbler with cognac and set it at the bedside with one of the small glasses the doorman had brought. “I think that will be enough for you,” he said. “It’s simpler this way. I won’t need to get up and refill it. I’ll take the bottle and the other glass over here with me.”

“I don’t need the small glass. I can drink from the other.”

“That’s even better.” Ravic arranged himself on the chaise longue. He was glad the woman wasn’t fussing about whether he was comfortable. She had what she wanted—thank God, she wasn’t displaying any superfluous housewifely qualities.

He filled his glass and put the bottle on the floor.
“Salute!”

“Salute!”
Joan Madou said. “And thanks.”

“That’s all right. I wasn’t in the mood for walking in the rain anyway.”

“Is it still raining?”

“Yes.”

The gentle knocking penetrated the quiet on the outside—as though something wanted to come in, gray, cheerless, and formless, something that was sadder than sadness—a remote anonymous memory, an endless wave drifting in toward them and trying to take back and bury what it had once washed up on an island and forgotten—a little bit of humankind and light and thought.

“A good night for drinking—”

“Yes—and a bad night for being alone.”

Ravic remained silent for a while. “We have to get used to it,” he said then. “All that held things together before is now destroyed. Today we have fallen apart like a necklace of glass beads whose string is broken. Nothing is solid any more.” He refilled his
glass. “As a boy I slept in a meadow one night. It was summer and the sky was very clear. Before I fell asleep I saw Orion on the horizon, standing above the woods. Then I woke up in the middle of the night—and suddenly Orion was standing high above me. I have never forgotten that. I had learned that the earth is a planet and rotates; but I had learned it as one learns something from books and does not quite realize. But now, for the first time I felt that it really was like that. I felt that the earth was silently flying through the immensities of space. I felt it so strongly that I almost believed I had to hold onto something in order not to be hurled off. Probably it happened because, emerging from a deep sleep and bereft for a moment of memory and habit, I looked into the huge, displaced sky. Suddenly the earth was no longer firm—and since then it has never become wholly firm again—”

He emptied his glass. “It makes some things more difficult and others easier.” He looked at Joan Madou. “I don’t know how far you’ve gone. When you are tired enough, just don’t answer any more.”

“Not yet. Soon. There’s a spot somewhere that is still awake. Awake and cold.”

Ravic put the bottle down on the floor beside him. From the warmth of the room a brown tiredness trickled slowly into him. The shadows came. The flapping of wings. A strange room, night, and outside like remote drums the monotonous beating of the rain—a hut and a little light on the verge of chaos, a small fire in a meaningless wilderness—an unknown face toward which one spoke—

“Have you ever felt that, too?” he asked.

She remained silent awhile. “Yes. Not exactly. Differently. When for days I had not spoken to anyone and walked for nights—and there were people everywhere who belonged somewhere—who
were going somewhere—who were at home somewhere. Only I wasn’t. Then everything slowly became unreal—as if I were drowned and walking through a strange city under water—”

Outside someone came up the stairs. Keys jingled and a door clicked shut. Immediately afterwards water gushed from a faucet.

“Why do you stay in Paris if you don’t know anyone?” Ravic asked. He felt that he was getting very sleepy.

“I don’t know. Where else shall I go?”

“Haven’t you any place to go back to?”

“No. One cannot go back.”

The wind chased a shower of drops across the window. “Why did you come to Paris?” Ravic asked.

Joan Madou did not answer. He thought she had already fallen asleep. “Raszinsky and I came to Paris because we wanted to separate,” she said then.

Ravic heard it without surprise. There were hours when nothing surprised one. In the room opposite, the man who had just come in began to vomit. They heard his muffled gasps through the door. “Then why were you so desperate?” Ravic asked.

“Because he was dead! Dead! Suddenly he was no more! Never to be called back again! Dead! No chance to make things right! Don’t you understand?” Joan Madou sat up in bed and stared at Ravic.

“Yes,” he said and thought: It is not true. Not because he was dead. Because he left you before you could leave him. Because he left you alone before you were ready.

“I—I should have been different to him—I was—”

“Forget it. Regret is the most useless thing in the world. One cannot recall anything. And one cannot rectify anything. Otherwise we would all be saints. Life did not intend to make us perfect. Whoever is perfect belongs in a museum.”

Joan Madou did not answer. Ravic watched her drink and lie
back on her pillow. There was still something—but he was too tired to think about it. Besides, it made no difference to him. He wanted to sleep. Tomorrow he had to operate. All this no longer concerned him. He put the empty glass on the floor next to the bottle. Strange where one sometimes gets oneself, he thought.

LUCIENNE MARTINET WAS
sitting by the window when Ravic came in. “How does it feel,” he asked, “to be out of bed for the first time?”

The girl looked at him and then out at the gray afternoon and back at Ravic. “Not very good weather today,” he said.

“It is,” she replied. “For me it is.”

“Why?”

“Because I don’t have to go out.”

She sat crouched in her chair, a cheap cotton kimono with poppies on it drawn around her shoulders, a slender insignificant being with poor teeth—but to Ravic she was for the moment more beautiful than Helen of Troy. She was a piece of life he had rescued with his own hands. It was nothing to be particularly proud of; one he had lost shortly before; the next he might lose, too; and in the end one lost all of them and oneself too. But this girl, for the moment, was saved.

“It’s no fun to drag around hats in weather like this,” Lucienne said.

“Did you deliver hats?”

“Yes. For Madame Lanvert. That shop in the Avenue Matignon. We had to work until five. Then I had to deliver hatboxes to the customers. Now it is five-thirty. By this time I would be on my way.” She looked out of the window. “Too bad it isn’t raining harder. It was better yesterday. It poured. Now someone else has to go through it.”

Ravic sat down opposite her on a seat by the window. Strange, he thought. One always expects people to be unreservedly happy after escaping death. They hardly ever are. Nor is this one. A minor miracle happened to her and the only thing that interests her about it is that she doesn’t have to walk through the rain. “How did you happen to come to just this hospital, Lucienne?” he asked.

She looked at him warily. “Someone told me about it.”

“Who?”

“An acquaintance.”

“What acquaintance?”

The girl hesitated. “An acquaintance who was here, too. I brought her here. Up to the door. That’s why I knew about it.”

“When was that?”

“A week before I came.”

“Was it the one who died during the operation?”

“Yes.”

“And nevertheless you came here?”

“Yes,” Lucienne said indifferently. “Why not?”

Ravic did not say what he had intended to say. He looked into the small cold face that had once been soft and that life had so quickly made hard. “Did you go to the same midwife, too?” he asked.

Lucienne did not answer. “Or to the same doctor? You needn’t be afraid of telling me. After all I don’t know who it was.”

“Mary went there first. A week earlier. Ten days earlier.”