Arch of Triumph (57 page)

“I wasn’t here for a while.”

“Finally this afternoon she told me you were living here. So I came right away.” Jeannot beamed.

“Is anything wrong with your leg?” Ravic asked.

“Nothing!” Jeannot patted the wooden stump as if he were patting the back of a faithful dog. “Absolutely nothing. Everything is perfect.”

Ravic looked at the stump. “I can see you got what you wanted. How did you get along with the insurance company?”

“Not bad. They allowed me a mechanical leg. I got the money for it from the shop with a discount of fifteen per cent. Everything in order.”

“And your dairy shop?”

“That’s why I am here. We opened the dairy shop. It’s small, but we make out. Mother does the selling. I do the buying and the bookkeeping. We have good sources. Straight from the country.”

Jeannot limped back to the shabby sofa and fetched a tightly tied package in brown wrapping paper. “Here, doctor! It’s for you! I’ve brought you this. It’s nothing special. But all from our shop—bread, butter, cheese, eggs. When you aren’t in the mood to go out it’s quite a nice supper, isn’t it?”

He looked eagerly into Ravic’s eyes. “This is a good supper at any time,” Ravic said.

Jeannot nodded, satisfied. “I hope you’ll like the cheese. It’s Brie and some Pont l’Evêque.”

“That’s my favorite cheese.”

“Wonderful!” Jeannot vehemently patted the stump of his leg with pleasure. “The Pont l’Evêque was mother’s idea. I thought you would prefer the Brie. Brie is more of a man’s cheese.”

“Both are first-rate. You couldn’t have hit on anything better.” Ravic took the package. “Thanks, Jeannot. It doesn’t often happen that patients remember their doctors. Mostly they call on us to haggle about their bills.”

“The rich ones, eh?” Jeannot nodded shrewdly. “Not us. We are indebted to you for everything, aren’t we? If the leg had only been stiff, we would have received hardly any compensation.”

Ravic looked at him. Does he perhaps believe I amputated his leg as an obliging act of service? he thought. “We couldn’t do anything but cut it off, Jeannot,” he said.

“Certainly.” Jeannot winked. “That’s clear.” He pulled his cap lower onto his forehead. “Well, I’ll go now. Mother will be waiting for me. I’ve been away from home for a long time. I got to talk to someone about a new Roquefort too. Adieu, doctor. I hope you’ll like it!”

“Adieu, Jeannot. Thank you. And much luck.”

“We’ll have luck!”

The little figure waved and limped self-confidently out of the hall.

Ravic unpacked the things in his room. He looked for an old spirit-cooker which he had not used for years and found it. He found somewhere else a package of solidified alcohol and a small
pan. He took two squares of the fuel, put it under the boiler, and lit it. The small blue flame flickered. He threw a piece of butter into the pan, broke two eggs, and mixed them. Then he cut the fresh crisp white bread, put the pan on the table, using a few sheets of newspaper as a pad, opened the Brie, got himself a bottle of Vouvray, and began to eat. He hadn’t done this for a long time. He decided to buy more packages of solidified alcohol tomorrow. He could easily take the cooker with him into a camp. It was collapsible.

Ravic ate slowly. He tried the Pont l’Evêque too. Jeannot was right; it was a good supper.

“
THE EXODUS
from Egypt,” said Seidenbaum, the Doctor of Philology and Philosophy, to Ravic and Morosow. “Without Moses.”

He stood, thin and yellow, at the door of the International. Outside, the Stern and Wagner families and the bachelor Stolz were loading their things. They had hired a van together.

In the bright August afternoon a number of pieces of furniture were standing on the street. A gilded sofa with an Aubusson cover, a few gilded chairs to match, and a new Aubusson rug. They belonged to the Stern family. An enormous mahogany table stood there too. Selma Stern, a woman with a faded face and velvet eyes, watched over it as a hen over her chicks.

“Be careful! The top! Don’t scratch it! The top! Take care, take care!”

The table top was waxed and polished. It was one of the sacred objects for which housewives risk their lives. Selma Stern fluttered around the table and the two furniture movers, who with complete indifference carried it out and put it down.

The sun shone on the top. Selma Stern bent over it, wiping it with a rag. She polished the corners nervously. The top reflected
her pale face like a dark mirror—as if a thousand-year-old ancestress were looking questioningly at her out of the mirror of time.

The movers appeared with a mahogany buffet. It was also waxed and polished. One of the men turned around too quickly and one of the buffet’s corners grazed the entrance door of the International.

Selma Stern did not scream. She simply stood there, petrified, her hand with the rag raised, her mouth half open, as if she had been turned to stone when about to put the rag into her mouth.

Josef Stern, her husband, short, with glasses, and a drooping lower lip, approached her. “Vell, Selmale—”

She did not see him. She stared into a blank. “The buffet—”

“Vell, Selmale. Ve hev our visas—”

“My mother’s buffet. From my parents—”

“Vell, Selmale, a scretch. So vot, a scretch. The main ting is det ve hev our visas—”

“Det vill stay. You can never get it off any more.”

“Madame,” said the furniture mover, who did not understand them but knew exactly what was going on. “Pack up your stuff yourself. I didn’t make the door so narrow.”

“Sales boches,”
the other man said.

Josef Stern came to life. “Ve are no boches,” he said. “Ve are refugees.”

“Sales réfugiés,”
the man replied.

“Look, Selmale, here ve are,” Stern said. “Vot are ve going to do now? Vot a business you have made over your mahogany! Ve left Coblenz four monts too late on account you couldn’t separate yourself from it. Ve hed to pay eighteen tousand marks more refugee tax! And now ve’re standing here on de street and de ship von’t vait.”

He turned his head and looked at Morosow in distress. “Vot can
ve do?” he said.
“Sales boches! Sales réfugiés!
If I tell him now ve are Jews he would say
sales juifs
, and den everyting is lost.”

“Give him money,” Morosow said.

“Money? He’ll trow it in my face.”

“Not a chance,” Ravic replied. “Anyone who curses that way is always open to bribes.”

“It is against my character. To be insulted and to hev to pay for it on top of it.”

“Real insults don’t begin until they become personal,” Morosow explained. “This was a general insult. Turn the insult against the man by giving him a tip.”

A smile sparkled in Stern’s eyes. “Goot,” he said to Morosow. “Goot.”

He took a few bills out of his pocket and gave them to the men. Both took them contemptuously. Stern contemptuously put his wallet back. The furniture movers looked at each other. Then they began to load the Aubusson chairs into the van. They took the buffet as the last piece, on principle. As they loaded it, they gave it a twist and its right side scraped against the van. Selma Stern quivered, but she did not say anything. Stern did not even notice it. He was checking over his visas and other papers again.

“Nothing looks so depressing as furniture on the street,” Morosow said.

Now the belongings of the Wagner family were standing there. A few chairs, a bed which looked shameless and sad in the middle of the sidewalk. Two suitcases with clothing. Various hotel labels on the suitcases—Viareggio, the Grand Hotel Gardone, the Adlon Berlin. A rotary mirror in a gilded frame reflecting the street. Kitchen utensils—one did not know why such things were being taken to America.

“Relatives,” Léonie Wagner said. “Relatives in Chicago have
done all this for us. They sent us the money. And they got us the visa. It’s only a visitor’s visa. We must go to Mexico after that. Relatives. Relatives of ours.”

She was ashamed. She felt like a deserter as long as she felt the eyes of those who remained behind resting on her. That’s why she wanted to get away quickly. She helped to push her belongings into the furniture van. She would breathe freely as soon as she was around the next corner. And the new anxiety would begin. Whether the ship would leave. Whether she would be permitted to go ashore. Whether they would send her back. It had always been one anxiety after the other. For years.

The bachelor Stolz had little more than books. A suitcase with clothing and his library. First editions, old editions, new books. He was ill-proportioned, red-haired, and reticent.

A number of those remaining behind slowly gathered at the door and in front of the hotel. Most of them were silent. They merely looked at the things and the furniture van.

“Then
auf Wiedersehen,”
Léonie Wagner said nervously. They had finished loading. “Or goodbye.” She laughed in vexation. “Or adieu. Nowadays one no longer knows what to say.”

She began to shake hands with a few people. “Relatives,” she said. “Relatives over there. Naturally, we alone would never have been able—”

She soon stopped. Dr. Ernst Seidenbaum tapped her on the shoulder. “Never mind. Some are lucky, others not.”

“Most of us not,” the refugee Wiesenhoff said. “Never mind. Have a nice trip.”

Josef Stern said goodbye to Ravic and Morosow and some of the others. He smiled like someone who had perpetrated a fraud. “Who knows vot is vaiting for us? Maybe ve’ll vish ve vere beck et de International.”

Selma Stern was already sitting in the car. The bachelor Stolz
did not say goodbye. He was not going to America. He had only papers for Portugal. He thought that too insignificant for a farewell scene. He simply waved his hand briefly as the car rattled away.

Those remaining stood around like wet chickens. “Come,” Morosow said to Ravic. “Let’s go! To the Catacombs! This calls for calvados!”

They had hardly taken their seats when the others came in. They drifted in like autumn leaves before a wind. Two rabbis, pale, with thin beards; Wiesenhoff, Ruth Goldberg, the chess automaton Finkenstein, the fatalist Seidenbaum, a few couples; half a dozen children; Rosenfeld, the owner of the Impressionists, who had not got away after all; a few half-grown youngsters and several very old people.

It was still too early for supper, but it seemed that none of them wanted to go up to the solitude of his room. They clung together. They were silent, almost resigned. They had all had so much misfortune, it hardly mattered any longer.

“The aristocracy has departed,” Seidenbaum said. “Now those sentenced to death or to life imprisonment are meeting here. The chosen people! Jehovah’s favorites! Especially for pogroms. Long live life!”

“There is still Spain,” Finkenstein replied. He had the chessboard in front of him and the chess problem from the
Matin
.

“Spain. Naturally. The Fascists will kiss the Jews when they arrive.”

The buxom Alsatian waitress brought the calvados. Seidenbaum put on his pince-nez. “Not even that is possible for most of us,” he declared. “To get thoroughly drunk. To be free of one night of misery. Not even that. Ahasuerus’ descendants. Even he, the old wanderer, would despair nowadays—he wouldn’t get far now without papers.”

“Have a drink with us,” Morosow said. “The calvados is good. Thank God the landlady doesn’t yet know it. Otherwise she’d raise the price.”

Seidenbaum shook his head. “I don’t drink.”

Ravic looked at a man who was unshaven and kept taking out a mirror every few minutes eying himself in it, then studying a passport, and in a little while starting the performance over again. “Who is he?” he asked Seidenbaum. “I’ve never seen him here before.”

Seidenbaum drew in his lips. “That is the new Aaron Goldberg.”

“How is that? Has the woman married again so soon?”

“No. She sold him the passport of the dead Goldberg. Two thousand francs. Old Goldberg had a gray beard; that’s why the new one is growing a beard too. Because of the photograph on the passport. See how he pulls and pulls. He doesn’t dare use the passport before he has a similar beard. It is a race against time.”

Ravic studied the man, who was plucking nervously at his scrubby beard comparing it with that on the passport. “He could always say that his beard was burned off.”

“A good idea. I’ll explain it to him.” Seidenbaum took off his pince-nez and swung it to and fro. “Macabre affair.” He smiled. “It was mere business two weeks ago. Now Wiesenhoff is beginning to be jealous and Ruth Goldberg is confused. The demonic effect of papers. According to the paper he is her husband.”

He got up and went over to the new Aaron Goldberg.

“I like ‘demonic effect of papers.’ ” Morosow turned to Ravic. “What are you doing tonight?”

“Kate Hegstroem is leaving on the
Normandie
this evening. I’ll take her to Cherbourg. She has her car. I’ll drive it back and deliver it to the garage. She has sold it to the proprietor.”

“Is she able to travel?”

“Naturally. It makes no difference what she does. The ship has a good doctor. In New York—” He shrugged his shoulders and emptied his glass.