Arch of Triumph (13 page)

“You can deceive yourself with truth too. That’s an even more dangerous dream.”

The orchestra started to play. In the beginning there were the cymbals only. The soft muted hammers plucked a melody out of the darkness, low, almost inaudible, threw it high into a soft glissando and passed it hesitantly on to the violins.

The gypsy approached their table slowly across the dance floor. He stood there, smiling, the violin at his shoulder, with bold eyes and an ardently greedy face. Without his violin he might have been
a cattle dealer—with it he was a messenger of the steppes, of spacious evenings, of horizons, and of all that never becomes reality.

Kate Hegstroem felt the melody like fountain water in April on her skin. Suddenly she was full of echoes; but there was no one who called her. Scattered voices murmured, vague shreds of memory fluttered, sometimes there was a shimmering like brocade, but they all whirled away and there was no one who called her. No one called.

The gypsy bowed. From under the table Ravic slipped a bill into his hand. Kate Hegstroem moved in her corner. “Have you ever been happy, Ravic?”

“Often.”

“I don’t mean that. I mean really happy, breathlessly, unthinkingly, with everything you have.”

Ravic looked into the agitated small face before him that knew only one interpretation of happiness, the most vacillating of all, love, and none of the others. “Often, Kate,” he said and meant something quite different and knew it was not that either.

“You don’t want to understand me. Or to talk about it. Who is that now singing with the orchestra?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t been here for a long time.”

“You can’t see the woman from here. She is not with the gypsies. She must be sitting somewhere at a table.”

“Then very likely it’s a guest. That happens often here.”

“A strange voice,” Kate Hegstroem said. “At once sad and rebellious.”

“That’s the songs.”

“Or I am it. Suddenly. Do you understand what she is singing?”

“
Ja vass lovbill
—I love you. It’s a song by Pushkin.”

“Do you know Russian?”

“Only as much as Morosow has taught me. Mostly curses. Russian is an excellent language for curses.”

“You don’t like to talk about yourself, do you?”

“I don’t even like to think about myself.”

She sat awhile. “Sometimes I think the old life has gone,” she said then. “The freeness from care, the expectation—all that was before.”

Ravic smiled. “It’s never gone, Kate. Life is much too great a thing to be gone before we stop breathing.”

She did not listen to what he said. “There is a fear often,” she said. “A sudden unexplainable fear. As if the world outside may suddenly have collapsed when we leave here. Do you know that, too?”

Yes, Kate. Everyone knows that. It is a European disease. For the last twenty years.”

She fell silent. “But that is no longer Russian,” she said then and listened to the music.

“No. That is Italian.
Santa Lucia Luntana
.”

The spotlight moved from the violinist to the table beside the orchestra. Now Ravic saw the woman who was singing. It was Joan Madou. She was sitting alone, with one elbow resting on the table, looking straight ahead as if she were in thought and no one else there beside her. Her face was very pale in the white light. It no longer had anything of the flat, blurred look that he knew. Suddenly it was of an exciting forlorn beauty and he remembered having seen it once, fleetingly, like that—the night in her room—but then he had thought it was the soft deception of drunkenness and also it had faded away immediately thereafter and disappeared. Now it was there, wholly, and even more.

“What’s the matter, Ravic?” Kate Hegstroem asked.

He turned around. “Nothing. I know that song. A Neapolitan heart-wringer?”

“Memories?”

“No. I have no memories.”

He said it more vehemently than he had intended. Kate Hegstroem looked at him. “Sometimes I really wish I knew what is the matter with you, Ravic.”

He made a defensive motion. “Nothing more than with anyone else. Today the world is full of involuntary adventures. Every refugee hotel is crowded with them. And everyone’s story would have been a sensation for Alexandre Dumas or Victor Hugo; now we begin to yawn even before he starts to tell it. Here is another vodka for you, Kate. Nowadays the greatest adventure is a simple life.”

The orchestra began to play a blues. They played dance music rather badly. A few guests started dancing. Joan Madou rose and walked toward the exit. She walked as if the place were empty. Ravic suddenly recalled what Morosow had said about her. She passed quite close to Ravic’s table. It seemed to him that she saw him, but her eyes at once swept on indifferently beyond him, and she left the room.

“Do you know that woman?” asked Kate Hegstroem, who had been watching him.

“No.”

“
DO YOU SEE THAT
, Veber?” Ravic asked. “Here—and here—and here—”

Veber bent over the clamped-open incision. “Yes.”

“These small nodules here—and here—that’s not a swelling nor is it an adhesion—”

“No—”

Ravic straightened up. “Cancer,” he said. “A clear, unmistakable case of cancer! This is the damnedest operation I’ve performed in years. The speculum doesn’t show anything, the pelvic examination an insignificant softness at one side only, a slight swelling, the possibility of a cyst or of a fibroma, nothing of importance, but we have to make an abdominal approach, so we cut and suddenly find a carcinoma.”

Veber looked at him. “What do you want to do?”

“We can make a frozen section. To get a microscopic report. Is Boisson still in the laboratory?”

“Certainly.”

Veber gave an order to the infirmière to call up the laboratory. She went out quickly on noiseless rubber soles.

“We should go on cutting,” Ravic said. “Do a hysterectomy. There’s no point in doing anything else. The damnedest part of it is that she doesn’t know. How’s the pulse?” he asked the anesthetist.

“Regular. Ninety.”

“Blood pressure?”

“One hundred twenty.”

“All right.” Ravic looked at Kate Hegstroem’s body which, head low, lay on the operating table in the Trendelenburg position.

“She should know beforehand. She should give her consent. We simply can’t just go ahead like this. Or can we?”

“Not according to the law. On the other hand—we have already begun.”

“That we had to do. We could not do the abortion without an abdominal approach. This is quite another operation. To remove the uterus is different from an abortion.”

“I believe she trusts you, Ravic.”

“I don’t know. Maybe. But would she agree—” He adjusted the rubber apron under the white coat with his elbow. “Nevertheless—first I could try to explore further. Then we can still decide whether to do the hysterectomy. Knife, Eugénie.”

He lengthened the incision to the navel and clamped the smaller blood vessels. Then he stopped the larger ones with double knots, took another knife, and cut through the yellow fascia. He fixed the muscles underneath with the back of the knife, then he pulled up the peritoneum, opened and clipped it. “The retractor.”

The assistant nurse held it ready. She threw the weighted chain between Kate Hegstroem’s legs and hooked on the bladder plate.

“Dressings!”

He pressed in the damp warm dressing, laid open the abdominal cavity and carefully applied the grasping forceps. Then he glanced up. “Look here, Veber—and here—the broad ligament.
This thick hard mass. Impossible to apply the Kocher forceps. It has gone too far.”

Veber stared at the spot which Ravic pointed out. “Look at that,” Ravic said. “We cannot clamp the arteries. Brittle. It’s spreading here too. Hopeless—”

He carefully snipped off a small piece. “Is Boisson in the laboratory?”

“Yes,” the infirmière said. “I have telephoned. He is waiting.”

“All right. Have this sent to him. We can wait for the report. It won’t take more than ten minutes.”

“Tell him to telephone,” Veber said. “Immediately. We’ll suspend the operation.”

Ravic straightened up. “How is the pulse?”

“Ninety-five.”

“Blood pressure?”

“One hundred fifteen.”

“All right. Veber, we don’t need to decide whether to operate with or without consent. There’s nothing more we can do.”

Veber nodded.

“We’ll have to sew her up,” Ravic said. “Remove the fetus, that’s all. Sew her up and say nothing.”

He stood there for a moment and looked at the open body beneath the white sheets. The piercing light made the sheets appear even whiter, like new-fallen snow, under which yawned the red crater of the gaping wound. Kate Hegstroem, thirty-four years old, capricious, slender, tanned, filled with the will to live—sentenced to death by this nebulous invisible touch that was destroying her tissues.

He bent over the body again. “We still have to—”

The child. A groping life, blind, still grew in this disintegrating body. Doomed with it. Still feeding, sucking, eager, only a drive toward growth, something that would one day want to play
in gardens, that would want to become somebody, an engineer, a priest, a soldier, a murderer, a human being, something that would want to live, to suffer, to be happy and to go to pieces—the instrument carefully slid along the invisible wall, found the resistance, broke it cautiously, removed it—ended it. Ended the unconscious struggles, ended the unbreathed breath, the unlived joyousness, lamentations, growth. Nothing now but a bit of dead pallid flesh and dripping blood.

“Any report from Boisson yet?”

“Not yet. It should be here any minute now.”

“We can wait another few minutes.”

Ravic stepped back. “Pulse?”

He glanced over the shield into Kate Hegstroem’s eyes. They were open and she looked at him—not with a glazed expression, but as if she saw him and knew everything. For a moment he thought she was conscious. He took a step forward and halted. Impossible. What was he thinking of? It was an accident: the light. The pupils had reacted to light during the narcosis. “How is her pulse?”

“One hundred. Blood pressure, one hundred twelve. It’s going down!”

“Time’s getting short,” Ravic said. “Boisson should be ready by now.”

There was the subdued ringing of the telephone downstairs. Veber turned toward the door. Ravic did not look up. He waited. He heard the door being opened. The nurse entered. “Yes,” Veber said. “Carcinoma.”

Ravic nodded and went back to work. He lifted the forceps and the clips. He removed the retractor; the dressings. Eugénie, at his side, mechanically counted the instruments.

He began stitching. Lightly, methodically, painstakingly, completely
concentrated and without a single thought. The grave closed, the layers of flesh were drawn together to the last, outermost one; he put on the clips for the skin and straightened up. “Finished.”

Eugénie stepped on the lever bringing the operating table to a horizontal position and covered Kate Hegstroem. Scheherazade, Ravic thought, the day before yesterday, a dress from Mainbocher, have you ever been happy, often, I am afraid, a routine matter, let the gypsies play. He looked at the clock above the door. Twelve o’clock. Noon. Outside, office and factory doors were opening now and healthy people streaming out. Lunch time. The two nurses rolled the level stretcher out of the operating room. Ravic tore the rubber gloves from his hands, went into the washroom, and began to wash.

“Your cigarette,” Veber said, washing himself at the other basin. “You’ll burn your lips.”

“Yes, thanks. Who will tell her, Veber?”

“You will,” Veber declared unhesitatingly.

“We’ll have to explain to her why we had to operate. She expected us to do it from the inside. We can’t tell her what it really was.”

“Something will occur to you,” Veber said confidently.

“You think so?”

“Of course. After all, you’ve got until tonight.”

“And you?”

“She wouldn’t believe anything I’d say. She knows that you operated and she’ll want to hear about it from you. She would only be suspicious if I told her.”

“That’s right.”

“I still don’t understand it,” Veber said. “How it could develop in such a short time.”

“It can. I wish I knew what to tell her.”

“You’ll think of something, Ravic. A cyst of some sort or a fibroma.”

“Yes,” Ravic said. “Some sort of cyst or fibroma.”

At night he went to the hospital again. Kate Hegstroem was sleeping. She had awakened in the evening, had vomited, spent a restless hour, and had then fallen asleep again.

“Did she ask anything?”

“No,” said the red-cheeked nurse. “She was still drowsy and asked no questions.”

“I think she’ll sleep until morning. In case she wakes up and asks questions, tell her everything went well. She’s to go back to sleep. Give her something if necessary. If she should become restless, call Doctor Veber or me. I’ll leave word at the hotel where to find me.”

He stood in the street like someone who had for once escaped. A few hours’ grace before he had to lie to a trusting face. Suddenly the night seemed warm and shimmering. The gray scab of life was once again mercifully covered over by a few borrowed hours which flew up like doves. They too were lies—one had to pay for everything—they were a postponement only; but what wasn’t? Was not everything postponement, merciful postponement, a bright flag which covered the remote, black, inexorably nearing gate?