Arch of Triumph (16 page)

The boy grinned and sprawled his legs comfortably. He wore tapered patent leather shoes and violet socks.

“Please, Bobo,” Lucienne said. “I’m sure it will only take a moment.”

Bobo did not pay any attention to her. He stared at Ravic. “It suits me fine that you’re here,” he said. “Now I can put you straight right away. My dear man, if you think perhaps you can bleed us for hospital bills, operations, and all that—nothing doing! We didn’t ask to have her sent to the hospital—not to mention the operation—so it’s no go with the money angle. You ought to be glad we don’t ask for compensation! For an unauthorized operation.” He showed a row of stained teeth. “That’s some surprise, isn’t it? Yes, sir, Bobo knows his way around; he can’t be easily gypped.”

The boy looked very much contented. He felt he had got out of that brilliantly. Lucienne became pale. She looked anxiously from Bobo to Ravic.

“You understand?” Bobo asked triumphantly.

“Was he the one?” Ravic asked Lucienne. She did not answer. “So that’s it,” he said and studied Bobo.

A tall thin fellow with a rayon scarf around his skinny throat, in which the Adam’s apple was moving up and down. Drooping shoulders, too long a nose, a degenerate chin—the picture-book conception of a suburb pimp.

“So what’s it?” Bobo asked, challenging.

“I think I’ve told you often enough now to get going. I want to examine her.”

“Merde,”
Bobo replied.

Slowly Ravic walked toward him. He had had enough of Bobo. The boy jumped up, stepped back, and suddenly had a thin rope of about two yards’ length in his hands. Ravic knew what he intended to do with it. When Ravic came closer he was going to jump aside, then get swiftly behind him and slip the rope over his head so that he could strangle him from behind. It would work if the other person did not know about it or attempted to box.

“Bobo,” Lucienne called. “Bobo, don’t!”

“You young scum!” Ravic said. “That miserable old rope trick—don’t you know any better?” He laughed.

Bobo was nonplussed for a moment. His eyes became uncertain. In an instant Ravic had ripped his jacket down over his shoulders with both hands so that he could not lift his arms. “This is one you did not know, eh?” he said, quickly opened the door, and shoved the surprised and helpless fellow roughly out of the room. “If that’s the sort of thing you like, become a soldier, you would-be apache! But don’t molest grown-up people.”

He locked the door from inside. “So, Lucienne,” he said. “Now let’s have a look at you.”

She trembled. “Calm, calm. It’s over.” He took the worn-out cotton quilt and put it on the chair. Then he rolled back the green blanket. “Pajamas. Why that? They’re less comfortable. You should not move much yet, Lucienne.”

She remained silent for a moment. “I only put them on today,” she said.

“Haven’t you got any nightgowns? I can have two of them sent to you from the hospital.”

“No, not because of that. I put them on because I knew—” she looked at the door and whispered “—that he would come. He said I was no longer sick. He wouldn’t wait any longer.”

“What? It’s a pity I didn’t know that before.” Ravic looked at the door angrily. “He’ll wait.”

Lucienne had the very white skin of anemic women. The veins lay blue under the thin epidermis. She was well built, with delicate bones, slender, but nowhere too bony. One of the innumerable girls, Ravic thought, who make one wonder why nature puts on such a show of grace—since one knows what will become of almost all of them—overworked drudges who soon lose their figures through wrong and unhealthy ways of life.

“You will have to stay in bed pretty much for another week, Lucienne. You may get up and walk around here. But be careful; don’t lift anything. And don’t climb any stairs for the next few days. Have you got someone to take care of you? Besides this Bobo?”

“The landlady. But she too has started to grumble.”

“Someone else?”

“No. Before there was Marie. She is dead.”

Ravic took stock of the room. It was poorly furnished and clean. A few fuchsias stood in the window. “And Bobo?” he said. “Well, he appeared again after everything was over—”

Lucienne did not answer.

“Why don’t you throw him out?”

“He isn’t so bad, doctor. Only wild—”

Ravic looked at her. Love, he thought. That too is love. The old miracle. It not only casts a rainbow of dreams against the gray sky of facts—it also sheds romantic light upon a heap of dung—a miracle and a mad mockery. Suddenly he had the strange feeling of having become, in a remote way, an accomplice. “All right, Lucienne,” he said. “Don’t worry about it. First become healthy.”

Relieved, she nodded. “And that about the money,” she blurted out, embarrassed, “that isn’t true. He only said so. I’ll pay everything. Everything. In installments. When will I be able to work again?”

“In about two weeks, if you’re not foolish. And nothing with Bobo! Absolutely nothing, Lucienne! Otherwise you might die, you understand?”

“Yes,” she replied without conviction.

Ravic covered her slender body with the blanket. When he looked up he noticed that she was weeping. “Couldn’t it be sooner?” she said. “I can sit while I work. I must—”

“Perhaps. We’ll see. It depends on how well you take care of yourself. You should tell me the name of the midwife who did the abortion, Lucienne.”

He saw the defense in her eyes. “I won’t go to the police,” he said. “Certainly not. I’ll only try to get the money back you paid her. Then you could be calmer. How much was it?”

“Three hundred francs. You’ll never get it from her.”

“One can try. What’s her name and where does she live? You’ll never need her again, Lucienne. You can no longer have any children. And she can’t do anything to you.”

The girl hesitated. “There in the drawer,” she said then. “At your right in the drawer.”

“This slip here?”

“Yes.”

“All right. I’ll go there one of the next few days. Don’t be afraid.” Ravic put on his coat. “What’s the matter?” he asked. “Why do you want to get up?”

“Bobo. You don’t know him.”

He smiled. “I think I know worse than him. Stay right in bed. To judge by what I have seen we need not be concerned. So long, Lucienne. I’ll drop in on you soon again.”

Ravic turned the key and the latch simultaneously, and quickly opened the door. No one stood in the corridor. Nor had he expected it; he knew Bobo’s type.

Downstairs the assistant was now standing in the butcher’s shop, a man with a sallow face and without the ardor of the proprietress. He was chopping listlessly. Since his master’s death he had become noticeably more tired. His chances of marrying his master’s wife were small. A brushmaker in the bistro opposite announced this in a loud voice and also that she would drive him too into the grave before that happened. The assistant had already lost
much weight, he said. But the widow had blossomed mightily. Ravic drank a cassis and paid. He had expected to find Bobo in the bistro; but Bobo was not there.

Joan Madou quickly left the Scheherazade. She opened the door of the taxi in which Ravic was waiting. “Come,” she said. “Let’s get away from here. Let’s go to your place.”

“Has something happened?”

“No. Nothing. It’s just that I’ve had enough of night-club life.”

“Just a moment.” Ravic called to the woman who stood before the entrance, selling flowers. “Granny,” he said. “Let me have all your roses. How much are they? But don’t be exorbitant.”

“Sixty francs. For you. Because you gave me that prescription for my rheumatism.”

“Did it help?”

“No. How can it, as long as I have to stand in the wet at night?”

“You’re the most sensible patient I ever met in my life.”

He took the roses. “Here is my apology for having left you to wake up alone this morning,” he said to Joan and put the flowers on the floor of the taxi. “Would you like to have a drink somewhere?”

“No. I’d like to go to your place. Put the flowers here on the seat. Not on the floor.”

“They are all right down there. One should love flowers, but not make too much fuss about them.”

She turned her head quickly. “You mean one shouldn’t spoil what one loves?”

“No. I only mean that one shouldn’t dramatize beautiful things. Besides, at the moment it is better if there are no flowers between us.”

Joan looked at him doubtfully for a moment. Then her face
brightened. “Do you know what I did today? I lived. Lived again. I breathed. Breathed again. I existed. Existed again. For the first time. I had hands again. And eyes and a mouth.”

The driver maneuvered the taxi out from among the other cars in the small street. Then he started with a jerk. The jolt threw Joan toward Ravic. He held her in his arms for a moment and felt her closeness. It was like a warm wind as if she were melting away the crust of the day, the strange defensive coolness within him, while she sat there and spoke, carried away by her feelings and by herself.

“The whole day—it threw itself over my neck and against my breast as though to make me grow green and put out leaves and blossoms—it held me and held me and did not let me go—and now here I am—and you—”

Ravic looked at her. She sat leaning forward on the dirty leather seat and her shoulders shone out of her black evening gown. She was open and outspoken and without shame, she said what she felt and he found himself poor and dry in comparison.

I was performing operations, he thought. I forgot you. I was with Lucienne. I was somewhere in the past. Without you. Then when the evening came a certain warmth came slowly with it. I was not with you. I thought of Kate Hegstroem.

“Joan,” he said and put his hands on her hands, which she had rested on the seat. “We can’t go to my place now, I’ve got to go first to the hospital. Only for a few minutes.”

“Have you got to look after the woman you operated on?”

“Not the one of this morning. Someone else. Would you like to wait somewhere for me?”

“Must you go right away?”

“It would be better. I don’t want to be called later.”

“I can wait for you. Have we enough time to go by your hotel?”

“Yes.”

“Let’s go there first. Then you’ll come later. I can wait for you.”

“All right.” Ravic gave the driver his address. He leaned back and felt the top of the seat against his neck. His hands were still on Joan’s hands. He felt that she was waiting for him to say something. Something about him and her. But he could not. She had already said too much. It was not so much, he thought.

The cab stopped. “You go on,” Joan said. “I’ll manage here all right. I’m not afraid. Just give me your key.”

“The key is in the hotel.”

“I’ll have them give it to me. I’ve got to learn to do that.” She took the flowers from the floor. “With a man who leaves me while I sleep and comes again when I don’t expect it—there are many things I’ll have to learn. Let me start right away.”

“I’ll come up with you. We won’t overdo anything. It’s bad enough to have to leave you alone again immediately.”

She laughed. She looked very young. “Please wait a moment,” Ravic said to the driver.

The man slowly closed one eye. “Even longer.”

“Let me have the key,” Joan said as they walked upstairs.

“Why?”

“Let me have it.”

She opened the door. Then she stopped. “Beautiful,” she said into the dark room into which a bleak moon shone through the clouds outside the window.

“Beautiful? This hole?”

“Yes, beautiful! Everything is beautiful.”

“Maybe right now. Now it’s dark. But—” Ravic reached for the switch.

“Don’t. I’ll do it myself. And now go. And don’t wait till tomorrow noon to come back.”

She stood in the doorway in the dark. The silver light from the window was behind her shoulders and her head. She was indistinct
and exciting and mysterious. Her coat had slipped down; it lay at her feet like a heap of black foam. She leaned against the doorframe and one of her arms caught a long shaft of light from the corridor. “Go and come again,” she said and closed the door.

Kate Hegstroem’s fever had gone down. “Has she been awake?” Ravic asked the drowsy nurse.

“Yes. At eleven. She asked for you. I told her what you instructed me to say.”

“Did she say anything about the bandages?”

“Yes. I told her you had to make an incision. A light operation. You’d explain it to her tomorrow.”

“That was all?”

“Yes. She said everything was all right as long as you considered it right. I was to give you her regards if you came again tonight and tell you that she has confidence in you.”

“So—”

Ravic stood awhile and looked down at the nurse’s parted black hair. “How old are you?” he asked.

She raised her head in astonishment. “Twenty-three.”

“Twenty-three. And how long have you been nursing?”

“For the last two and a half years. In January it was two and a half years.”

“Do you like your profession?”

The nurse smiled all over her apple face. “I like it very much,” she declared chattily. “Of course some of the patients are trying, but most of them are nice. Madame Brissot gave me a beautiful, almost new silk dress as a present yesterday. And last week I got a pair of patent leather shoes from Madame Lerner. The one who later died at home.” She smiled again. “I hardly have to buy any clothing. I almost always get something. If I can’t use it I exchange
it with a friend of mine who has a shop. That’s why I’m well off. Madame Hegstroem too is always very generous. She gives me money. Last time it was a hundred francs. For only twelve days. How long will she be here this time, doctor?”

“Longer. A few weeks.”

The nurse looked happy. Behind her clear unlined forehead she was calculating how much she would get. Ravic bent over Kate Hegstroem once more. She was breathing quietly. The slight odor from the wound mingled with the dry perfume of her hair. Suddenly he could not stand it. She had confidence in him. Confidence. The flat cut-up abdomen in which the beast was feeding. Sewn up without the possibility of doing anything. Confidence.

“Good night, nurse,” he said.

“Good night, doctor.”