Arch of Triumph (34 page)

“I’m not making a scene. I am terribly unhappy.”

“All right. Then we’d better skip all that. Scenes are justifiable when one is moderately unhappy. I knew a man who locked himself in his room and solved chess problems from the minute his wife died until she was buried. People thought him unfeeling, but I know that he loved his wife more than anything in the world. He simply couldn’t act otherwise. Day and night he solved chess problems so he wouldn’t think about it.”

Joan was now standing in the middle of the room. “Is that why you did it?”

“No. I told you that was another man. I was sleeping when you came.”

“Yes, you were asleep! You can sleep!”

Ravic propped himself up. “I knew another man, Joan, who had lost his wife, too. He went to bed and slept for two days. His wife’s mother was beside herself because he did that. She didn’t know that one can do many incongruous things and be disconsolate at the same time. It is strange what etiquette has been built up just for unhappiness! If you had found me blind drunk, everything would have been in good taste. The fact that I played chess and went to sleep is proof that I am crude and unfeeling. Simple, isn’t it?”

A sound of crashing and shattering. Joan had seized a vase and thrown it to the floor. “Fine,” Ravic said. “I couldn’t stand that thing anyway. Just be careful you don’t get splinters in your feet.”

She kicked the pieces aside. “Ravic,” she said. “Why are you doing this?”

“Yes,” he replied. “Why? To give myself courage, Joan. Don’t you see that?”

She turned her face toward him quickly. “It looks that way. But with you one never knows what’s going on.”

She carefully stepped over the scattered pieces and sat down on his bed. He could see her face distinctly now in the early dawn. He was surprised that it was not tired. It was young and clear and intense. She wore a light coat which he had not seen before and a different dress from the one she had worn in the Cloche d’Or.

“I thought you’d never come back again, Ravic,” she said.

“It took a long time. I couldn’t have come any sooner.”

“Why didn’t you write to me?”

“Would it have helped?”

She looked aside. “It would have been better.”

“It would have been better if I hadn’t come back. But there is no longer any other country or any other city for me. Switzerland is too small; everywhere else are the Fascists.”

“But here—won’t the police—”

“The police have just as little chance of catching me as before. That was an unfortunate accident. We don’t need to think about it any more.”

Ravic reached for a pack of cigarettes. They lay on the table beside his bed. It was a comfortable table of medium size with books, cigarettes, and a few other things on it. Ravic hated the night tables and consoles with imitation marble tops that usually stand beside beds.

“Let me have a cigarette, too,” Joan said.

“Do you want something to drink?” he asked.

“Yes. Lie there. I’ll get it.”

She fetched the bottle and filled two glasses. She gave him one, took the other, and emptied it. While she was drinking, her coat slipped from her shoulders. Now in the brightening dawn Ravic recognized the dress she wore. It was the one he had given her as a present for Antibes. Why had she put it on? It was the only dress he had ever given her. He had never thought about things like that. He had never wanted to think about things like that either.

“When I saw you, Ravic—suddenly—” she said, “I couldn’t think at all. Not at all. And when you left—I thought I’d never see you again. I didn’t think so immediately. First I waited for you to come back to the Cloche d’Or. I thought you must come back. Why didn’t you?”

“Why should I have come back?”

“I’d have gone with you.”

Ravic knew that was not true. But he did not want to think about it now. Suddenly he did not want to think about anything. There Joan sat at his side, that was enough for the moment. He had not thought it would be enough. He didn’t know why she had come or what she really wanted—but suddenly, in a strange and deep and disquieting way, it was enough that she was there. What
is it? he thought. Has it already gone that far? Beyond all control? To the point where darkness begins, the uproar of the blood, the compulsion of the imagination and the menace?

“I thought you wanted to leave me,” Joan said. “You did want to. Tell the truth!”

Ravic was silent.

She looked at him. “I knew it! I knew it!” she repeated with deep conviction.

“Give me another glass of calvados.”

“Is it calvados?”

“Yes. Didn’t you notice?”

“No.” She poured it. She rested her arm against his chest while she held the bottle. He felt her touch go through his ribs. She took her glass and drank. “Yes, it is calvados.” Then she looked at him again. “It’s good that I came. I knew it. It’s good that I came!”

It was growing lighter outside. The shutters began a low creaking. The morning wind rose. “Is it good that I’ve come?” she asked.

“I don’t know, Joan.”

She bent over him. “You know. You must know.”

Her face was so close to his that her hair fell over his shoulders. He looked at it. It was a landscape that he knew and did not know, very strange and very familiar, always the same and never the same. He saw that the skin on her forehead was peeling, he saw that the red of her lipstick was caked on her upper lip, he saw that she wasn’t made up quite properly—he saw all that in the face which was now so close above his that in this moment it blotted out all the rest of the world for him—he saw it and he knew that it was only his fantasy which made it mysterious, he knew that there were more beautiful faces, better faces, purer faces—but he knew too that this face, like no other, had power over him. And he himself had given it this power.

“Yes,” he said. “It is good. One way or another.”

“I couldn’t have endured it, Ravic.”

“What?”

“For you to have stayed away. For good.”

“Didn’t you say you thought I would never come back?”

“That’s not the same. It would have been different if you had been living in another country. We would only have been separated. I could have come to you, sometime. Or I’d always have been able to believe that. But here, in the same city—don’t you understand?”

“I do.”

She straightened up and smoothed her hair. “You can’t leave me alone. You are responsible for me.”

“Are you alone?”

“You are responsible for me,” she said and smiled.

He hated her for a second—for her smile and for the way she said it.

“Don’t talk nonsense, Joan.”

“I’m not. You are. From that time on. Without you—”

“All right. I am responsible for the occupation of Czechoslovakia too. And now stop it. It’s getting light. Soon you must go.”

“What?” She stared at him. “You don’t want me to stay here?”

“No.”

“So—” she said in a low voice, suddenly very angry. “You don’t love me any more.”

“Good Heavens!” Ravic said. “That too! What idiots have you been with the last few months?”

“They weren’t idiots. What else could I have done? Sit in the Hôtel de Milan and stare at the walls and go mad?”

Ravic half straightened up. “No confessions!” he said. “I do not want any confessions! I merely wanted to raise the level of our conversation a bit.”

She looked at him. Her mouth and her eyes were flat. “Why do you always criticize me? Other people don’t criticize me. With you every little thing immediately becomes a problem.”

“All right.” Ravic took a big gulp hastily and let himself sink back.

“It is true!” she said. “One never knows what to make of you. You force me to say things I never intended to say. And then you attack me.”

Ravic breathed deeply. What was it that he had just before been thinking about? Darkness of love, power of imagination—how fast that could be changed! They did it themselves, incessantly, themselves. They were the most avid destroyers of dreams. But was it their fault? Was it really their fault? Beautiful forlorn driven creatures—a huge magnet somewhere deep in the earth, and above it the multitudinous figures who thought they had their own wills and their own fates—was it their fault? Wasn’t he himself one of them? Did he not cling suspiciously to a bit of tiresome caution and cheap sarcasm—at bottom already knowing what would inevitably happen?

Joan was huddled at the foot of the bed. She looked like a beautiful angry scrubwoman and at the same time like something that had flown down from the moon and did not know where it was.

The dawn had turned into the first red of morning and shone on them. The early day blew its pure breath from afar, across all the dirty backyards and the smoky roofs, into the window, and there was still the breath of woods and plains in it.

“Joan,” Ravic said. “Why have you come?”

“Why do you ask?”

“Yes—why do I ask?”

“Why do you always ask? I am here. Isn’t that enough?”

“Yes, Joan. You are right. It is enough.”

She raised her head. “At last! But first you have to take away all the joy!”

Joy, Ravic thought. She calls that joy! To be driven by multiple dark propellers, in a gust of breathless desire for repossession—joy? Outside there is a moment of joy, the dew at the window, the ten minutes of silence before the day stretches out its claws. But what the devil was all this about? Wasn’t she right? Wasn’t she right as the dew and the sparrows and the wind and the blood were right? Why did he ask? What did he want to know? She was here, she had flown here, unthinkingly, a night butterfly, a privet hawk moth, a peacock butterfly, quickly—and now he was lying, counting the eyes and small cuts in its wings and staring at the slightly faded blending of its colors. Why all this pretense? And why this hide-and-seek? She has come and I am thus stupidly superior only because she has come, he thought. If she had not come I should be lying here and brooding and heroically trying to deceive myself and wishing secretly that she would come.

He flung the blankets aside, swung his feet over the edge of the bed, and stepped into his slippers. “What are you going to do?” Joan asked, surprised. “Are you going to throw me out?”

“No. I’m going to kiss you. I should have done it long before! I’m an idiot, Joan. I have been talking nonsense. It’s wonderful that you have come!”

A radiance lit up her eyes. “You needn’t get up to kiss me,” she said.

The red of morning stood high behind the houses. The sky above was a faint blue. A few clouds floated there like sleeping flamingos. “Look at that, Joan! What a day! Do you remember how it used to rain?”

“Yes. It was always raining, darling. It was gray and it rained.”

“It was still raining when I left. You were desperate about all that rain. And now—”

“Yes,” she said. “And now—”

She was lying close beside him. “Now we have everything,” he said. “Everything. Even a garden. The carnations on the window sill of the refugee Wiesenhoff. And the birds down there in the chestnut tree.”

He saw that she was crying.

“Why don’t you ask me, Ravic?” she said.

“I’ve asked too much already. Didn’t you say so yourself?”

“That’s different.”

“There isn’t anything to ask.”

“About what happened in between.”

“Nothing happened.”

She shook her head.

“My God, what do you think I am, Joan?” he said. “Look at that outside. The red and gold and blue. Ask it whether it rained yesterday. Whether there was a war in China or Spain. Whether a thousand men are dying or a thousand men are being born at this moment. It exists, it raises, that’s all there is to it. And you want me to ask you! Your shoulders are bronze in this light, and I am to question you? Your eyes in this red glow are like the sea of the Greeks, violet and wine-colored, and I am to inquire about something that is done with? You’ve come back and I am to be a fool and rummage about among the withered leaves of the past? What do you take me for, Joan?”

Her tears had ceased. “I haven’t heard that for a long time,” she said.

“Then you have been among blockheads. Women should be adored or abandoned. Nothing in between.”

She slept clinging to him as if she didn’t ever want to let him
go. She slept deeply and he felt her regular light breath on his chest. He lay awake for a while. The noises of the morning began in the hotel. Water gurgled, doors were slammed, and below old Aaron Goldberg went through his morning routine of coughing at the open window. He felt Joan’s shoulders on his arm, he felt her warm slumbering skin, and turning his head he could see her completely relaxed face given up to sleep, a face that was as pure as innocence itself. Adore or abandon, he thought. Big words. Who could do that! But who really wanted to?

HE AWOKE. JOAN WAS
no longer lying beside him. He heard the water in the bathroom running and sat up. He was immediately fully awake. This was something he had learned again in the last few months. Whoever wakes instantly may sometimes still escape. He looked at his watch. It was ten o’clock in the morning. Joan’s evening gown was lying on the floor together with her coat. Her brocade shoes stood by the window. One of them had fallen on its side.