Arch of Triumph (22 page)

A room. A hotel room. A few suitcases, a bed, light, the black solitude of night and past outside the window—and here a bright face with gray eyes and high brows and the bold sweep of the hair—life, pliant life, openly turned toward him like an oleander bush toward the light—here it was, here it stood, waiting, silent, calling to him: Take me! Hold me! Had he not said a long time ago: I’ll hold you?

He stood up. “Good night, Joan.”

“Good night, Ravic.”

He was sitting in front of the Café Fouquet. He was sitting at the same table as before. He sat there for hours, buried in the darkness of his past in which only a single feeble light burned: the hope for revenge.

They had arrested him in August, 1933. He had kept two friends of his who were wanted by the Gestapo hidden at his place for two weeks and he had then helped them to escape. One of them had saved his life in 1917 at Bixschoote in Flanders and had brought him back under cover of machine-gun fire when he had been lying in No Man’s Land, slowly bleeding to death. The other was a Jewish writer whom he had known for years. He had been brought up for examination; they wanted to find out in which direction the two had escaped, what papers they had on them and who would be of help to them on the road. Haake had examined him. After he had fainted the first time he had tried to shoot or strike down Haake with his own revolver. He had jumped into a crashing red darkness. It had been a useless attempt against four strong, armed men. For three days out of unconsciousness, slow awakening, out of frantic pain Haake’s cool smiling face emerged. For three days the same questions—for three days the same body, bruised all over, almost incapable of further suffering. And then
on the afternoon of the third day Sybil was brought in. She did not know about anything. He was shown to her to force a confession from her. She was a beautiful, luxury-loving creature who had lived a carefree superficial life. He had expected her to scream and break down. She did not break down. She turned on the torturers. She used deadly words. Deadly for her and she knew it. Haake had ceased smiling. He had cut short the examination. Next day he had explained to Ravic what would happen to her in the concentration camp for women if he did not confess. Ravic had not answered. Haake had explained to him what would happen to her before that. Ravic had not confessed to anything because there was nothing to confess. He had tried to convince Haake that this woman could not know anything. He had told him that he only knew her superficially. That she had meant little more in his life than a beautiful picture. That he could never have confided anything to her. All this had been true. Haake had only smiled. Three days later Sybil was dead. She had hanged herself in the concentration camp for women. A day later one of the fugitives was brought back. It was the Jewish writer. When Ravic saw him he could no longer recognize him, not even by his voice. It took another week before he was finally dead under Haake’s examination. Then came the concentration camp for Ravic. The hospital. The escape from the hospital.

The silver moon stood above the Arc de Triomphe. The street lamps along the Champs Elysées flickered in the wind. The lights of night were reflected in the glasses on the table. Unreal, Ravic thought, unreal the one and the other. Unreal these glasses, this moon, this street, this night, and this hour that touches me with its breath, strange and familiar as if it had been here before, in another life, on another star—unreal these memories of years that are past, submerged, alive and dead at the same time, only phosphorescing now in my brain and petrified into expectation—unreal
this fluid rolling through the darkness of my veins, unresting, 98.6 in temperature, slightly salty in flavor, four liters of secrecy and drive, blood, and the reflection in ganglia, the invisible storehouse in nothingness, called memory. Star after star, rising year after year, one bright, the other bloody as Mars above the Rue de Berri, and many darkly gleaming and full of spots—the sky of memory beneath which the present restlessly carries on its confused life.

The green light of revenge. The city quietly floating in the late moonlight and in the drone of automobile motors. Long rows of houses, stretching endlessly, rows of windows and packed behind them bundles of fate, by the block. The heartbeat of millions of men, the incessant beat as of a millionfold motor, moving slowly, slowly along the street of life, with every throb a tiny millimeter closer to death.

He got up. The Champs Elysées was almost empty. Only a few whores loitered at the corners. He walked down the street, passed the Rue Pierre Charron, the Rue Marbeuf, the Rue Marignan to the Rond Point and back to the Arc de Triomphe. He stepped over the chains and stood before the tomb of the Unknown Soldier. The small blue flame flickered in the shadow. A withering wreath lay in front of it. He crossed the Etoile and went to the bistro where he thought he had first seen Haake. A few taxi drivers were still sitting there. He sat down by the window where he had been sitting before and drank his coffee. The street outside was empty. The drivers were talking about Hitler. They found him ridiculous and prophesied his immediate downfall should he dare to come near the Maginot Line. Ravic stared into the street.

Why am I sitting here? he thought. I could be sitting anywhere in Paris; the chances are the same. He looked at his watch. It was just before three. Too late. Haake—if it had been he—would not be roaming the streets at this time.

Outside he saw a whore strolling around. She looked inside through the window and walked on. If she comes back I’ll go, he thought. The whore came back. He did not go. If she comes once more I’ll certainly go, he decided. Then Haake is not in Paris. The whore returned. She beckoned with her head and passed by. He remained sitting. She returned once more. He did not go.

The waiter put the chairs on the tables. The cabdrivers paid and left the bistro. The waiter turned off the light above the counter. The room was plunged into murky darkness. Ravic looked around. “The check,” he said.

Outside it had become windier and colder. The clouds floated higher and faster. Ravic walked by Joan’s hotel and stopped. All was dark except one window where a lamp shimmered behind curtains. It was Joan’s room. He knew that she hated to enter a dark room by herself. She had left the light on because she was not coming to him today. He looked up and suddenly he no longer understood himself. Why didn’t he want to see her? The memory of the other woman had died long ago; only the memory of her death had remained.

And the other thing? What did it have to do with her? What did it still have to do even with himself? Wasn’t he a fool to chase an illusion, the reflex of an entangled, blackened memory, a dark reaction—to begin anew stirring the dross of dead years, stirred up by mere chance, by an accursed resemblance—to allow a piece of the rotted past to break open again, the abscess of a barely healed neurosis—and thereby jeopardize everything he had built up in himself, his own self, that clear bit of life divorced from what he had been, the life he had created for himself and the only person close to him? What had the one to do with the other?
Hadn’t he taught himself that time and again? How else could he have escaped? And where would he be without it?

He felt that the lump of lead in his brain was melting away. He breathed deeply. The wind came along the street with swift blasts. He looked up at the lighted window again. There was someone to whom he meant something, someone to whom he was important, someone whose face changed when she looked at him—and he had been about to sacrifice that to a twisted illusion, to the impatient, disdainful arrogance born of a faint hope for revenge.…

What did he really want? Why did he resist? What was he saving himself for? Life offered itself to him and he raised objections. Not because there was too little—because there was too much. Had the bloody thunderstorm of his past to sweep over him that he could recognize it? He moved his shoulders. Heart, he thought, heart! How it opened itself up! How it throbbed! Window, he thought, lonely window lit at night, reflection of another’s life that had given itself up to him passionately, waiting, open, until he too should open. The flame of love—the Saint Elmo’s fire of tenderness—the bright, swift, sheet lightning of the blood—one knew it, one knew everything about it, one knew so much that one thought this soft golden confusion could never flood one’s brain again—and then suddenly one night one stood in front of a third-rate hotel and it rose like mist out of the asphalt and one felt it as though it had come from the other end of the earth, from blue cocoanut islands, from the warmth of a tropical spring, as though it had filtered through oceans, coral reefs, lava, and darkness and impetuously pierced its way into Paris, into the shabby Rue Poncelet, with the odor of hibiscus and mimosa, in a night filled with revenge and the past, the irresistible, indisputable, enigmatic resurrection of emotion.…

———

The Scheherazade was crowded. Joan was sitting at a table with some people. She saw Ravic at once. He remained standing by the door. The place was full of smoke and music. She said something to the people at her table and came up to him quickly. “Ravic—”

“Are you still needed here?”

“Why?”

“I want to take you with me.”

“But didn’t you say—”

“That’s over. Are you still needed here?”

“No. I’ll just tell them that I’m going.”

“Do it quickly—I’ll wait for you in the taxi outside.”

“Yes.” She remained standing. “Ravic—”

He looked at her. “Did you come because of me?” she asked.

He hesitated a second. “Yes,” he said in a low voice while her face moved close to his. “Yes, Joan. Because of you! Only because of you.”

The taxi drove along the Rue de Liége. “What was the matter, Ravic?”

“Nothing.”

“I was afraid—”

“Forget it. It was nothing—”

She looked at him. “I thought you would never come again.”

He bent over her. He felt her trembling. “Joan,” he said. “Don’t think about anything and don’t ask any questions. Do you see the light of the street lamps and the thousand colored signs out there? We are living in a dying age and this city quivers with life. We are torn from everything and we have nothing left but our hearts. I
was in the land of the moon and I’ve come back, and here you are and you are life. Don’t ask anything more. There are more secrets in your hair than in a thousand questions. Here before us is the night, a few hours and an eternity, until the morning rumbles against the windows. That people love each other is everything; a marvel and the most obvious thing in the world, this is what I felt today when the night melted away into a flowering bush and the wind smelled of strawberries and without love one is only a dead man on furlough, nothing but a scrap of paper with a few dates and a chance name on it and one might as well die—”

The light from the street lamps swept through the window of the taxi like the circling beam of a lighthouse through the darkness of a ship’s cabin. Joan’s eyes were alternately very translucent and very dark in her pale face. “We shall not die,” she whispered in Ravic’s arms.

“No. Not we. Only time. Damned time. It always dies. We live. We always live. When you wake up it is spring and when you go to sleep it is fall and a thousand times in between it is winter and summer, and when we love each other enough we are immortal and indestructible like the heartbeat and the rain and the wind, and that is much. Day by day we are conquerors, beloved, and year by year we are defeated, but who wants to realize that and to whom does it matter? The hour is life, the moment is closest to eternity, your eyes glisten, star dust trickles through infinity, gods can age, but your mouth is young, the enigma trembles between us, the You and Me, Call and Answer, out of evenings, out of dusks, out of the ecstasies of all lovers, pressed from the remotest cries of brutal lust into golden storms, the endless road from the amoeba to Ruth and Esther and Helen and Aspasia, to blue Madonnas in chapels on the road, from jungle and animal to you, to you.…”

She lay in his arms, motionless, her face pale, in such surrender that she almost seemed absent—and he bent over her and spoke and spoke—and at the beginning he felt as though someone were looking over his shoulder, a shadow that talked soundlessly too, with a faint smile, and he bent deeper and felt her move toward him, and it was still there, and then it was gone.…

“
A SCANDAL
,” said the woman with the emeralds who was sitting opposite Kate Hegstroem. Her eyes sparkled. “A wonderful scandal! All Paris is laughing about it. Did you have any idea that Louis was a homosexual? Surely not! None of us knew; he kept it very well covered up. Lina de Newburg was considered his official mistress—and now imagine: a week ago he returned from Rome three days earlier than he had said and went to Nicky’s apartment the same evening, intending to surprise him, and whom did he find there?”

“His wife,” Ravic said.

The woman with the emeralds glanced up. Suddenly she looked as if she had just been told that her husband was bankrupt. “You already know the story?” she asked.