Arch of Triumph (38 page)

“No,” she replied from the couch.

“All right. Then I’ll bring the cognac.”

“There is some calvados,” she said. “Open the calvados.”

“The cognac will do.”

“Do open the calvados.”

“Some other time.”

“I don’t want cognac. I want calvados. Please, open the bottle.”

Ravic looked into the cabinet once more. To his right, there was the white peppermint for the other man—and to the left, the calvados for him. Everything was so neat and housewifely, it was almost touching. He took the bottle of calvados and opened it. After all, why not? A nice bit of symbolism, their favorite drink sentimentally degraded in an absurd farewell scene. He picked up two glasses and went back to the table. Joan watched him while he poured the apple brandy.

The afternoon was spacious and golden outside the window. The light was more colorful now and the sky had grown lighter. Ravic looked at his watch. It was just after three. He looked at the second hand; he thought his watch had stopped. But the second hand, like a little golden beak, continued to tick off the points of the circle. It was a fact—he had been here only half an hour. Crème de menthe, he thought. What a taste!

Joan was huddled on the blue couch. “Ravic,” she said in a soft voice, tired and wary. “Was that another of your tricks or is it true that you understand?”

“It’s not a trick. It’s true!”

“You understand?”

“Yes.”

“I knew it.” She smiled at him. “I knew it, Ravic.”

“It is quite easy to understand.”

She nodded. “I need time. I can’t do it immediately. He hasn’t done me any harm. I did not know whether you would ever come back! I can’t tell him right away.”

Ravic gulped down his calvados. “Why do we need details?”

“You must know. You must understand. It is—I need time. He would—I don’t know what he would do. He loves me. And he needs me. And all this is not his fault.”

“Of course not. Take all the time in the world, Joan.”

“No. Only a short while. Not right away.” She leaned against the pillow of the couch. “And this apartment, Ravic—it isn’t the way you perhaps think. I earn money myself. More than before. He helped me. He’s an actor. I have small parts in movies. He brought me in.”

“I thought so.”

She did not pay attention. “I’m not very talented,” she said. “I don’t deceive myself. But I wanted to get away from those night clubs. One can’t get ahead there. Here you can. Even without talent.
I want to become independent. You may find all this ridiculous—”

“No,” Ravic said. “It is sensible.”

She looked at him. “Didn’t you come to Paris with that intention in the beginning?” he asked.

“Yes.”

There she sits, he thought, a gently reproachful innocent who has been badly treated by life and by me. She is calm, the first storm has been weathered, she will forgive me, and if I don’t go soon she’ll tell me the story of the last few months in all its details, this steel orchid whom I came here to break with and who has been so adroit I am almost forced to grant she is right.

“Fine, Joan,” he said. “Now you are this far. You’ll get ahead.”

She bent forward. “Do you think so?”

“Certainly.”

“Really, Ravic?”

He got up. Another three minutes and he would be involved in shoptalk about the movies. One must never get into discussions with them, he thought. One always ends up the loser. Logic is like wax in their hands. One should act, and make an end of it.

“I didn’t mean it that way,” he said. “There you’d better ask your expert.”

“Are you going already?” she asked.

“I have to.”

“Why don’t you stay?”

“I must go back to the hospital.”

She took his hand and looked up at him. “You said before you came that you were through at the hospital.”

He debated whether to tell her he would not come back. But this was enough for today. It was enough for her and for him. Just the same she had prevented that. But it would come. “Stay here, Ravic,” she said.

“I can’t.”

She got up and leaned close against him. That too, he thought. The old cliché. Cheap and well tested. She doesn’t omit anything. But who expects a cat to eat grass? He freed himself. “I must go back. There is a dying man at the hospital.”

“Doctors always have good reasons,” she said slowly and looked at him.

“Like women, Joan. We supervise death and you supervise love. Therein are all the reasons and all the rights in the world.”

She did not answer.

“We have strong stomachs too,” Ravic said. “We need them. We could not do our work otherwise. Where others faint we begin to get interested. Adieu, Joan.”

“You’ll come again, Ravic?”

“Don’t think about it. Take your time. You’ll find out for yourself.”

He walked quickly to the door and did not turn around. She did not follow him. But he knew that she was looking after him. He felt strangely numb—as if he were walking under water.

THE SCREAM CAME
from the window of the Goldberg family. Ravic listened for a moment. It seemed to him hardly possible that old man Goldberg had flung something at his wife or beaten her. Nor did he hear anything any more. Only the sound of running, then a short excited conversation in the room of the refugee Wiesenhoff and the slamming of doors.

Immediately afterwards there was a knock at his door and the proprietress rushed in. “Quick—quick—Monsieur Goldberg—”

“What?”

“He’s hanged himself. In the window. Quick—”

Ravic threw down his book. “Are the police here?”

“Of course not. Otherwise I wouldn’t have called you. She has just found him.”

Ravic ran downstairs with her. “Have they cut him down?”

“Not yet. They are holding him—”

In the twilit room a dark group was standing by the window. Ruth Goldberg, the refugee Wiesenhoff, and someone else. Ravic turned the light on. Wiesenhoff and Ruth Goldberg held old Goldberg in their arms like a puppet and the third man was nervously
trying to loosen the knot of a tie that was fastened to the window bolt.

“Cut him down—”

“We haven’t a knife,” Ruth Goldberg shouted.

Ravic got a pair of scissors out of his bag and began to cut. The tie was made of smooth thick heavy silk and it took a few seconds before it was severed. As he worked Ravic had Goldberg’s face close in front of him. The protruding eyes, the open mouth, the thin gray beard, the thick tongue, the dark-green tie with white dots cutting deep into the scrawny, swollen throat—the body oscillated in Wiesenhoff’s and Ruth Goldberg’s arms as if it were swaying back and forth in a frightful, frozen laughter.

Ruth Goldberg’s face was red and flooded with tears; beside her Wiesenhoff sweated under the burden of the body which was heavier than ever in life. Two wet horrified sobbing faces and above them, silently grinning into the beyond, the gently rolling head which, as Ravic cut the tie, fell against Ruth Goldberg so that she started back screaming, dropped her arms, and the body slid sidewise with sprawling arms and seemed to follow her in a grotesque clownlike movement.

Ravic caught the body and put it on the floor with Wiesenhoff’s help. He loosened the noose and began his examination.

“To the movies,” Ruth Goldberg jabbered. “He sent me to the movies. ‘Ruthy,’ he said, ‘you get so little entertainment, why don’t you go to the Théâtre Courcelles, there is a Garbo picture on,
Queen Christine
, why don’t you go and see it? Take a good seat, take a fauteuil or a loge, go and see it, two hours away from misery is something after all.’ He said it calmly and kindly and patted my cheeks. ‘And afterwards go and have a chocolate and vanilla ice-cream in front of the café on the Parc Monceau, have a good time for once, Ruthy,’ he said and I went and when I came back, there—”

Ravic got up. Ruth Goldberg stopped talking. “He must have done it right after you left,” he said.

She pressed her fists against her mouth. “Is he—”

“We can still try. First artificial respiration. Do you know anything about it?” Ravic asked Wiesenhoff.

“No. Not too much. Something.”

“Look here.”

Ravic took Goldberg’s arms, drew them backward to the floor, then forward pressing them against his chest, and backward and forward again. There was a rattling in Goldberg’s throat. “He’s alive!” the woman screamed.

“No. That’s the compressed windpipe.”

Ravic demonstrated the movement a few more times. “So. Try it now,” he said to Wiesenhoff.

Reluctantly Wiesenhoff knelt behind Goldberg. “Go ahead,” Ravic said impatiently. “Hold him by the wrists. Or better yet by the forearms.”

Wiesenhoff was sweating. “Harder,” Ravic said. “Press all the air out of his lungs.”

He turned toward the proprietress. Meanwhile more people had come into the room. He motioned to the proprietress to leave. “He’s dead,” he said in the corridor. “What’s going on inside is nonsense. A ritual that has to be gone through, nothing else. It would be a miracle if anything helped now.”

“What shall we do?”

“The usual thing.”

“Ambulance? First aid? That means the police ten minutes later.”

“You have to call the police anyhow. Did the Goldbergs have papers?”

“Yes. Valid ones. Passports and
cartes d’identité
.”

“Wiesenhoff?”

“Permit to stay. Extended visa.”

“Then they are all right. Tell both of them not to mention that I was there. She came home, found him, screamed, Wiesenhoff cut him down and tried artificial respiration until the ambulance came. Can you do that?”

The proprietress looked at him with her birdlike eyes. “Of course. I’ll be there anyhow when the police come. I’ll take good care.”

“Fine.”

They went back. Wiesenhoff was bending over Goldberg and working. For a moment it seemed as if both were doing gymnastics on the floor. The proprietress remained standing at the door.
“Mesdames et messieurs,”
she said. “I must call the ambulance and the police. I’ll call the ambulance first. The orderly or doctor who comes with it will have to inform the police immediately. They will be here in half an hour at the latest. Any of you who hasn’t papers had better pack his things right away, at least those lying around, carry them to the Catacombs and stay down there. It’s possible that the police will search the rooms or ask for witnesses.”

The room emptied immediately. The proprietress nodded to Ravic that she would instruct Ruth Goldberg and Wiesenhoff. He picked up his bag and the scissors lying on the floor by the cut tie. The tie lay there with the store label showing—“S. Foerder, Berlin.” It was a tie that had cost at least ten marks. From Goldberg’s prosperous days. Ravic knew the firm. He had made purchases there himself.

He quickly put his belongings into a couple of suitcases and took them into Morosow’s room. It was a precaution only. Very likely the police would not bother about anything. But it was
better—the memory of Fernand still smarted in Ravic’s mind. He went down to the Catacombs.

A number of people were running about excitedly. They were the refugees without papers. The illegal brigade. Clarisse, the waitress, and Jean, the waiter, were directing the placing of the suitcases in a vaultlike room adjoining the Catacombs. The Catacombs themselves were in readiness for supper. The tables were set, bread baskets stood here and there, and a smell of fat and fish came from the kitchen.

“Take your time,” Jean said to the nervous refugees. “The police are not so prompt.”

The refugees were taking no chances. They were not used to luck. They bustled hastily into the cellar with their few belongings. The Spaniard Alvarez was among them. The proprietress had sent word through the entire hotel that the police were coming. Alvarez smiled at Ravic almost apologetically. Ravic did not know why.

A thin man placidly approached him. It was Ernst Seidenbaum, Doctor of Philology and Philosophy. “Maneuvers,” he said to Ravic. “Dress rehearsal. Will you stay in the Catacombs?”

“No.”

Seidenbaum, a veteran of the last six years, shrugged his shoulders. “I’ll stay. I’m not in the mood to run away. I don’t think they’ll do more than take down the evidence in the case. Who is interested in an old dead German Jew?”

“Not in him. But in live illegal refugees.”

Seidenbaum adjusted his pince-nez. “It makes no difference to me. Do you know what I did during the last raid? At that time a sergeant even came down into the Catacombs. More than two years ago. I put on one of Jean’s white jackets and served at table. Brandy for the police.”

“Good idea.”

Seidenbaum nodded. “A time comes for everyone when he has had enough of running away.” He calmly strolled into the kitchen to find out what there would be for supper.

Ravic went through the back door of the Catacombs across the yard. A cat ran by, brushed against his feet. The others walked in front of him. They quickly dispersed on the street. Alvarez was limping a little. Maybe that could be remedied by an operation, Ravic thought absent-mindedly.

He was sitting on the Place des Ternes and suddenly he had the feeling that Joan would come this night. He could not say why; he simply knew it suddenly.