Arch of Triumph (39 page)

He paid for his supper and walked slowly back to the hotel. It was warm and in the narrow streets the signs of the hotels which rent rooms by the hour blazed red in the early night. Slits of light gleamed from behind curtained windows. A group of sailors were following several whores. They were young and loud and hot with wine and summer; they disappeared into one of the hotels. The music of a harmonica was coming from somewhere. A thought like a rocket shot up in Ravic, unfolded, spread above him, and plucked a magic landscape out of the dark: Joan waiting for him at the hotel to tell him that she had put everything behind her and was coming back—

He stood still. What’s the matter with me? he thought. Why am I standing here and why do my hands touch the air as if it were the nape of a neck and a wave of hair? Too late. One can’t summon anything back. No one comes back. Just as the once-lived hour never returns.

He walked on to the hotel, across the yard to the back door of
the Catacombs. At the door, he noticed a number of people sitting inside. Seidenbaum was among them. Not as a waiter, as a guest. The danger seemed to be over. He entered.

Morosow was in his room. “I was just going to leave,” he said. “I thought you were off to Switzerland again when I saw your suitcases.”

“Is everything all right?”

“Yes. The police aren’t coming back. They have released the corpse. A simple case. The body is upstairs; they are laying it out now.”

“Good. Then I can move back into my room.”

Morosow laughed. “That Seidenbaum!” he said. “He was there the whole time. With a brief case, containing some papers or other and his pince-nez. He presented himself as a lawyer and representative of the insurance company. He was rather rough with the police. He saved old man Goldberg’s passport. Claimed he would need it; the police were entitled to his
carte d’identité
only. He got away with it. Has he any papers himself?”

“Not a scrap.”

“Fine,” Morosow declared. “The passport is worth its weight in gold. It’s valid for another year. Someone can live on it. Not in Paris exactly, unless he’s as daring as Seidenbaum. The photograph can easily be changed. There are inexpensive experts who will change the date of birth in case the new Aaron Goldberg should be younger. A modern kind of transmigration of souls—a passport valid for several lives.”

“Then Seidenbaum will be called Goldberg from now on?”

“Not Seidenbaum. He rejected it. It is beneath his dignity. He is the Don Quixote among the world citizens of the underground. He’s too fatalistic and too curious about what will happen to men of his type to want it falsified by a borrowed passport. How about you?”

Ravic shook his head. “Not for me. I’m on Seidenbaum’s side.”

He took his suitcases and walked upstairs. In the corridor where the Goldbergs lived he was passed by an old Jew in a black caftan, with a beard and sidelocks, who had the face of a Biblical patriarch. The old man walked soundlessly as if on rubber soles, and he seemed to float through the dimly lit corridor, vague and wan. He opened Goldberg’s door. For a moment a reddish light as though from candles emanated from inside and Ravic heard a strange, half-suppressed, half-wild, monotonous wailing that was almost melodious. Professional women mourners, he thought. Could something like that still exist? Or was it only Ruth Goldberg?

He opened his door and saw Joan sitting by the window. She jumped up. “There you are! What has happened? Why do you have your suitcases with you? Do you have to leave again?”

Ravic put the suitcases beside the bed. “Nothing is the matter. It was only a precaution. Someone died. The police had to come. Everything is all right again.”

“I called you up. Someone at the telephone said you did not live here any longer.”

“That was our landlady. Cautious and smart as always.”

“I rushed here. The room was open. And empty. Your things weren’t here. I thought—Ravic!” Her voice trembled.

Ravic smiled with an effort. “You see—I am an unreliable creature. Nothing to build on.”

There was a knock at the door. Morosow came in, a couple of bottles in his hand. “Ravic, you forgot your ammunition—”

He noticed Joan standing in the dark and acted as though he did not see her. Ravic did not know whether he had recognized her at all. He handed the bottles to Ravic and left without coming in.

Ravic put the calvados and Vouvray on the table. Through the
open window he heard the voice he had heard in the corridor. The wailing for the dead. It grew louder, ebbed away, and began again. Very likely the windows at Goldberg’s were standing open in the warm night, in which old Aaron’s rigid body was now slowly beginning to disintegrate in the room with the mahogany furniture.

“Ravic,” Joan said. “I’m sad. I don’t know why. I have been all day. Let me stay here.”

He did not answer immediately. He felt taken by surprise. He had expected it otherwise. Not so direct.

“How long?” he asked.

“Until tomorrow.”

“That’s not long enough.”

She sat down on the bed. “Can’t we forget that for once?”

“No, Joan.”

“I don’t want anything. I merely want to sleep at your side. Or let me sleep on the sofa.”

“It won’t do. Besides, I have to leave. For the hospital.”

“That doesn’t matter. I’ll wait for you. I’ve done that often enough.”

He did not answer. He was surprised that he was so calm. The warmth and excitement he had felt on the street had disappeared.

“And you don’t have to go to the hospital,” Joan said.

He remained silent for a moment. He knew if he slept with her he was lost. It was like signing a check for which there were no funds. She would come again and again and stand on what she had gained as on her rights, and she would ask for a little more every time without yielding anything herself until he was completely in her hands and she would finally become bored and leave him then, a victim of his own weakness and his shattered desires, weak and thoroughly corrupt. She did not intend it; she was not even aware of it; but it would happen that way. It was simple to think that
one night would make no difference; but every time one lost part of one’s resistance and part of what should never be corrupted in life. Sins against the Holy Ghost, the Catholic catechism called that, with strange and cautionary dread, and added darkly in contradiction to its entire dogma that they would not be forgiven in this life or in the life to come.

“It is true,” Ravic said. “I do not have to go to the hospital. But I don’t want you to stay here.”

He expected an outbreak. But she only said calmly, “Why not?”

Should he try to explain it to her? Was he able to do it at all? “You no longer belong here,” he said.

“I do belong here.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

How smart she is! he thought. Simply by questioning him she forced explanations. And who explained was already on the defensive.

“You know,” he said. “Don’t ask so foolishly.”

“You no longer want me?”

“No,” he replied and added against his will, “Not this way.”

The monotonous wailing came through the window from Goldberg’s room. The lamentation for the dead. The grief of the shepherds of Lebanon in a Parisian side-street.

“Ravic,” Joan said. “You must help me.”

“I can help you best by leaving you alone. And you me.”

She paid no attention. “You’ve got to help me. I could tell you lies, but I don’t want to any more. Yes, there is someone. But it is different than with you. If it were the same, I wouldn’t be here.”

Ravic took a cigarette out of his pocket. He felt the dry paper. There it was now. Now he knew. It was like a cool knife that did not hurt. Certainty never hurts. Only the before and after.

“It is never the same,” he said. “And it is always the same.”

What cheap stuff I talk, he thought. Newspaper paradoxes. How shabby the truth can become when one articulates it.

Joan straightened up. “Ravic,” she said. “You know it is not true that one can love only one person. There are those who can only do that. They are happy. And there are others who are thrown into confusion. You know that.”

He lit his cigarette. Without glancing at her he knew what Joan looked like now. Pale, her eyes dark, silent, concentrated, almost beseeching, frail—and never to be overcome. That was how she had looked in her apartment that afternoon—like an angel of the annunciation, full of faith and radiant conviction, an angel pretending to save, while she attempted to crucify one slowly so that one would not escape her.

“Yes,” he said. “It is one of our excuses.”

“It is no excuse. One is not happy doing it. One is pitched into it and can’t help it. It is something sinister, a maze of things, a spasm—something you have got to go through. You can’t run away. It comes after you. It catches up with you. You don’t want it. But it is stronger.”

“Why do you think about it? Follow it if it is stronger.”

“That’s what I am doing. I know there is nothing else I can do. But—” Her voice changed. “Ravic, I must not lose you. I don’t know what it is, but I can’t lose you.”

Ravic smoked and did not taste the smoke. You don’t want to lose me, he thought. Nor the other man either. That’s it. That you are able to do such a thing! That’s why I must get away from you. It isn’t the one man—that could be quickly forgotten. You had every excuse for it. But that it has got hold of you so that you can’t get away, that’s the thing. You will get away. But it will happen again. It will happen time and again. It is in you. I too could do
that earlier. I can’t do it with you. That’s why I must get away from you. Now I may still be able to do it. Next time—

“You think it is an extraordinary situation,” he said. “It is the commonest in the world. The husband and the lover.”

“That’s not true.”

“It is. It has many variations. Yours is one of them.”

“How can you say anything like that!” She jumped up. “You are anything but that and you never were and you’ll never be. The other one is much more—” She interrupted herself. “No, it isn’t that way either. I can’t explain it.”

“Let’s say security and adventure. It sounds better. It is the same. You want to have the one and don’t want to let go the other.”

She shook her head. “Ravic,” she said, out of the dark, in a voice that moved his heart. “One can use good words for it and bad ones. It doesn’t change anything. I love you and I’ll love you until the end of my life. That I know and that is clear to me. You are the horizon and all my thoughts end in you. Whatever happens is still always within you. It is no deceit. It takes nothing from you. That’s why I come to you again and again and that’s why I can’t regret it and why I can’t feel guilty.”

“There is no guilt in feelings ever, Joan. What made you think of such a thing?”

“I have thought of it. I have thought so much about it, Ravic. About you and about myself. You never wholly wanted me. Perhaps you don’t realize it yourself. There was always something that was closed off from me. I could never get completely into you. I wanted to! How much I wanted to! It was always as if you might go away any minute. I never felt sure. The fact that the police sent you away, that you had to leave—it might just as well have happened in another way—that you would have gone one day, on your
own, that you would simply not have been here any more, off somewhere—”

Ravic stared at the face in the uncertain dark before him. There was something right in what she said.

“It was always that way,” she continued. “Always. And then someone came who wanted me, nothing but me, wholly and forever, without any complications. I laughed, I did not want it, I played with it, it seemed so harmless, so easy to push aside again—and then suddenly it became more, a compulsion, also there was something within me that wanted too, I resisted but it did not help, I did not belong there and not everything within me wanted it, a part of me only, but it pushed me, it was like a slow landslide which one laughs at in the beginning and suddenly there is nothing left to hold onto and you can’t resist any longer. But I don’t belong there, Ravic. I belong to you.”

He threw his cigarette out the window. It flew like a glowworm down into the yard. “What has happened has happened, Joan,” he said. “We can’t change it now.”

“I don’t want to change anything. It will pass. I belong to you. Why do I come back again? Why do I stand before your door? Why do I wait for you here and you throw me out and I will come again? I know you won’t believe it and you think I have other reasons. What reasons, then? If this other thing satisfied me, I would not have come back. I’d have forgotten you. You say what I look for with you is security. That’s not true. It is love.”

Words, Ravic thought. Sweet words. Gentle deceptive balm. Help, love, to belong together, to come back again—words, sweet words. Nothing but words. How many words existed for this simple, wild, cruel attraction of two bodies! What a rainbow of imagination, lies, sentiment, and self-deception enclosed it! There he stood on this farewell night, there he stood, calm, in the dark, and he let this rain of sweet words trickle over him, words that meant
nothing but farewell, farewell. When one talked about it, it was already lost. The God of Love had a bloodstained forehead. He did not know anything about words. “You must go now, Joan.”

She got up. “I want to stay here. Let me stay here. Only tonight.”

He shook his head. “What do you take me for? I’m not an automaton.”

She leaned against him. He felt her trembling.

“It doesn’t matter. Let me stay here.”

He pushed her gently away. “You shouldn’t start with me just to deceive the other man. He’ll have to suffer enough without that.”

“I can’t go home alone now.”

“You won’t have to be alone for long.”

“I will, I am alone. For days now. He’s away. He isn’t in Paris.”

“So—” Ravic replied calmly. He looked at her. “Well, at least you are candid. One knows where one stands with you.”

“That’s not why I came.”

“Of course not.”

“There was no need for me to tell you.”

“Right.”

“Ravic, I don’t want to go home alone.”