Arch of Triumph (35 page)

“Joan,” he called. “What are you doing taking a shower in the middle of the night?”

She opened the door. “I didn’t want to wake you up.”

“That makes no difference. I can always sleep. But why are you up at this hour?”

She had put on a bathing cap and was dripping with water. Her gleaming shoulders were a light brown. She looked like an Amazon with a close-fitting helmet. “I’m not a night owl any more, Ravic. I’m no longer at the Scheherazade.”

“I know that.”

“From whom?”

“Morosow.”

She looked at him searchingly for a second. “Morosow,” she said. “That old babbler. What else did he tell you?”

“Nothing. Is there anything more to tell?”

“Nothing that a night doorman could tell. They are like hat-check girls. Professional gossipers.”

“Leave Morosow alone. Night doormen and doctors are professional pessimists. They get their living from the shadow side of life. But they don’t gossip. They are obliged to be discreet.”

“The shadow side of life,” Joan said. “Who wants that?”

“No one. But most people live in it. Besides Morosow helped you get your job at the Scheherazade.”

“I can’t be eternally and tearfully grateful to him for that. I was no disappointment. I was worth my money, otherwise they wouldn’t have kept me. Besides he did it for you. Not for me.”

Ravic reached for a cigarette. “What have you really got against him?”

“Nothing. I don’t like him. He has a way of looking at you. I wouldn’t trust him. You shouldn’t either.”

“What?”

“You shouldn’t trust him. You know, all doormen in France are stool pigeons for the police.”

“Anything else?” Ravic asked calmly.

“Of course you don’t believe me. Everyone in the Scheherazade knew it. Who knows whether—”

“Joan!” Ravic flung back the blanket and got up. “Don’t talk nonsense. What’s wrong with you?”

“Nothing. What should be wrong with me? I can’t stand him, that’s all. He has a bad influence. And you are constantly with him.”

“I see,” Ravic said. “That’s why.”

Suddenly she laughed. “Yes, that’s why.”

Ravic felt that this was not the only reason. There was something else besides. “What do you want for breakfast?” he asked.

“Are you angry?” she asked in return.

“No.”

She came out of the bathroom and put her arms around his neck. He felt her wet skin through the thin fabric of his pajamas. He felt her body and he felt his blood. “Are you angry because I am jealous of your friends?” she asked.

He shook his head. A helmet, an Amazon. A Naiad, come up out of the ocean, the scent of water and youth still on her smooth skin.

“Let me go,” he said.

She did not answer. The line from the high cheekbones to the chin. The mouth. The too heavy eyelids. The breasts pressing against his bare skin under the open pajama jacket. “Let me go or—”

“Or what?” she asked.

A bee was buzzing outside the window. Ravic followed it with his eyes. Very likely it had been attracted by the carnations of the refugee Wiesenhoff and now was looking for other flowers. It flew inside and alighted on an unwashed calvados glass which stood on the window sill.

“Did you miss me?” Joan asked.

“Yes.”

“Much?”

“Yes.”

The bee flew up. It circled around the glass several times. Then it buzzed through the window back to the sun and the refugee Wiesenhoff’s carnations.

Ravic was lying at Joan’s side. Summer, he thought. Summer,
meadows in the morning, hair full of the scent of hay and skin like clover—the grateful blood silently flowing like a rivulet and desirelessly flooding the sandy places, a smooth surface in which a smiling face was reflected. For a bright moment nothing was dry and dead any longer. Birches and poplars, quiet and a soft murmur that came like an echo from far, lost heavens and beat in one’s veins.

“I’d like to stay here,” Joan said leaning against his shoulder.

“Stay here. Let us sleep. We haven’t slept much.”

“I can’t. I must go.”

“You can’t go anywhere in your evening gown at this time.”

“I brought another dress with me.”

“Where?”

“I had it under my coat. Shoes too. It must be among my things. I have everything with me.”

She did not say where she had to go. Nor why. And Ravic did not ask.

The bee reappeared. It was no longer buzzing around aimlessly. It flew straight toward the glass and sat on its rim. It seemed to know something about calvados. Or about fruit sugar.

“Were you so sure you would stay here?”

“Yes,” Joan said without moving.

Rolande brought a tray with bottles and glasses. “Nothing to drink,” Ravic said.

“Don’t you want some vodka? It is Subrovka.”

“Not today. You may give me some coffee. Strong coffee.”

“All right.”

He put the microscope aside. Then he lit a cigarette and went to the window. The plane trees had put on their fresh full foliage. The last time he was here they had still been bare.

Rolande brought the coffee. “You have more girls now than before,” Ravic said.

“Twenty more.”

“Is business so good? Now in June?”

Rolande sat down with him. “We don’t understand either why business is so good. The people seem to have gone crazy. It starts even in the afternoon. But then in the evening—”

“Maybe it’s the weather.”

“It isn’t the weather. I know how it is in May and June. But this is some kind of madness. You wouldn’t believe how well the bar is doing. Can you imagine Frenchmen ordering champagne?”

“No.”

“Foreigners, certainly. We carry it for them. But Frenchmen! Even Parisians! Champagne! And they pay for it too! Instead of Dubonnet or Pernod or beer or a fine. Can you believe it?”

“Only when I see it.”

Rolande poured the coffee for him. “And the activity!” she said. “It deafens you. You’ll see for yourself when you come down. Even at this time of day! No longer just the cautious experts waiting for your visits. A whole crowd are sitting there already! What has got into these people, Ravic?”

Ravic shrugged his shoulders. “There is a story of an ocean liner sinking—”

“But nothing is sinking with us! Business is wonderful.”

The door was opened. Ninette, twenty-one years old, slim as a boy in her short pink silk panties, entered. She had the face of a saint and was one of the best whores in the place. At the moment she carried a tray with bread, butter, and two pots of jam. “Madame learned that the doctor was drinking coffee,” she declared in a hoarse bass. “She sends you some jam to taste. Homemade.” Suddenly Ninette grinned. The angelic countenance broke into a
gamin’s grimace. She shoved the tray onto the table and skipped out of the room.

“There you see,” Rolande sighed. “They get fresh the minute they know we need them.”

“Quite right,” Ravic said. “When else should they be fresh? What does this jam mean?”

“Madame’s pride. She made it herself. On her estate on the Riviera. It is really good. Will you try it?”

“I hate jam. Particularly when made by millionaires.”

Rolande unscrewed the glass top, took out several spoonfuls of jam, smeared them on a sheet of thick paper, put a piece of butter and a few pieces of toast with it, wrapped it all up tightly and handed it to Ravic. “Throw it away afterwards,” she said. “Do it as a favor to her. She checks on whether you have eaten or not. The last pride of an aging and disillusioned woman. Do it out of politeness.”

“All right.” Ravic got up and opened the door. He heard voices from downstairs, music, laughter, and shouting. “Quite a pandemonium,” he said. “Are those all Frenchmen?”

“Not those. They are mostly foreigners.”

“Americans?”

“No, that’s the strange thing. They are mostly Germans. We have never had so many Germans here before.”

“That’s not strange.”

“Most of them speak French very well. Not at all the way the Germans used to speak a few years ago.”

“I thought so. Aren’t there a good many poilus here too? Recruits and colonial soldiers?”

“They are always around.”

Ravic nodded. “And the Germans spend a lot of money, don’t they?”

Rolande laughed. “They do. They treat everyone who wants to drink with them.”

“Especially soldiers, I imagine. And Germany has a currency embargo and has closed the frontiers. One can get out only by permission of the authorities. And one can’t take more than ten marks with him. Odd, these merry Germans with plenty of money and speaking French so well, eh?”

Rolande shrugged her shoulders. “For all I care—as long as their money is good—”

It was after eight when he got home. “Has anyone called me up?” he asked the porter.

“No.”

“Nor in the afternoon?”

“No. Not the whole day.”

“Has anyone been here inquiring for me?”

The porter shook his head. “Nobody.”

Ravic went upstairs. On the first floor he heard the Goldberg couple quarreling. On the second floor a child was crying. It was the French citizen Lucien Silbermann, one year and two months old. He was an object of veneration and high hope to his parents, the coffee dealer Siegfried Silbermann and his wife Nelly,
née
Levi, from Frankfort on the Main. He was born in France and they hoped to get French passports two years earlier because of him. As a result Lucien had developed into a family tyrant with the intelligence of the one-year-old. A phonograph was playing on the third floor. It belonged to the refugee Wohlmeier, formerly of the Oranienburg concentration camp, who played German folk songs on it. The corridor smelled of cabbage and dusk.

Ravic went into his room to read. He had once bought several volumes of world history and now he took them out. It was not
particularly cheerful to read them. The only thing one gained by it was a strangely depressing satisfaction that what was happening today was not new. Everything had happened before dozens of times. The lies, the breaches of faith, the murders, the St. Bartholomew massacres, the corruption through the lust for power, the unbroken chain of wars—the history of mankind was written in blood and tears, and among the thousands of bloodstained statues of the past, only a few wore the silver halo of kindness. The demagogues, the cheats, the parricides, the murderers, the egoists inebriated with power, the fanatic prophets who preached love with the sword, it was the same time and again—and time and again patient peoples allowed themselves to be driven against one another in a senseless slaughter for kaisers, kings, religions, and madmen—there was no end to it.

He put the books aside again. Voices came through the open window from below. He recognized them—they were Wiesenhoff’s and Mrs. Goldberg’s. “Not now,” Ruth Goldberg said. “He’ll be back soon. In an hour at the latest.”

“An hour is an hour.”

“He may possibly come sooner.”

“Where did he go?”

“To the American Embassy. He does it every night. Stands outside and looks at it. Nothing else. Then he comes back.”

Wiesenhoff said something that Ravic could not understand. “Naturally,” Ruth Goldberg replied in a quarrelsome tone. “Who isn’t crazy? That he is old I know too.”

“Don’t do that,” she said after a while. “I’m not interested. Not in the mood.”

Wiesenhoff made some reply.

“It’s easy for you to talk,” she said. “He has the money. I haven’t a centime. And you—”

Ravic got up. He looked at the telephone and hesitated. It was
almost ten o’clock. He had not heard from Joan since she had left him that morning. He had not asked her if she would come in the evening. He had been sure she would. Now he wasn’t sure any longer.

“For you it’s simple! You only want to have your pleasure—nothing else,” Mrs. Goldberg said.

Ravic went to look for Morosow. His room was locked. He walked downstairs to the Catacombs. “In case anyone calls, I’ll be downstairs,” he said to the concierge.

Morosow was there. He was playing chess with a red-headed man. A few women were still sitting in the corners. They were knitting or reading with sorrowful faces.

Ravic watched the game for a while. The red-headed man was good at it. He played quickly and with complete indifference, and Morosow was losing. “See what’s happening to me,” he said.

Ravic shrugged his shoulders. The red-headed man looked up. “This is Mr. Finkenstein,” Morosow said. “Just out of Germany.”

Ravic nodded. “How is it there now?” he asked without interest just in order to say something.

The red-headed man moved his shoulders and did not say anything. Nor had Ravic expected him to. That had happened during the first years only: the hasty questions, the expectation, the feverish waiting for news of a collapse. Everyone knew by now that only war could bring it about. And everyone with any wit knew as well that a government which solves its unemployment problem by building an armament industry has only two possibilities: war or a domestic catastrophe. Therefore war.

“Check and mate,” Finkenstein said without enthusiasm and got up. He looked at Ravic. “What can one do to get some sleep? I can’t sleep here. I fall asleep and wake up again right away.”

“Drink,” Morosow said. “Burgundy. Much Burgundy or beer.”

“I don’t drink. I’ve walked through the streets for hours until I thought I was dead tired. It doesn’t help. I can’t sleep.”

“I’ll give you a few tablets,” Ravic said. “Come up with me.”

“Come back, Ravic,” Morosow called after him. “Don’t leave me here alone, brother!”

A few women glanced up. Then they continued to knit and to read as if their lives depended on it. Ravic went with Finkenstein to his room. When he opened the door the night air streamed through the window toward him like a dark cool wave. He breathed deeply and, turning on the light, he looked around the room quickly. No one was there. He gave Finkenstein several sleeping tablets.

“Thank you,” Finkenstein said without moving a muscle of his face and left like a shadow.

Suddenly Ravic knew that Joan would not come. He also knew that he had foreseen it that morning. He only had not wanted to believe it. He turned around as though someone had said something behind him. All of a sudden everything was quite clear and simple. She had gained what she wanted, and now she was taking her time. What else had he expected? That she would throw away everything because of him? That she would return as she had done before? What foolishness! Of course there was someone else, and not only someone else but also another life that she did not want to give up!