Arch of Triumph Read online

  “Thanks,” the woman said. “Thanks.”

  Ravic went into the bathroom and turned on the tap. The water gushed into the basin. He undid his tie and stared absent-mindedly at himself in the mirror. Challenging eyes in deep-shadowed sockets; a narrow face, dead tired, only the eyes giving it life; lips too soft for the furrow running from the nose to the mouth—and above the right eye, disappearing into the hair, a long jagged scar—

  The telephone bell cut into his thoughts. “Damn it!” For an instant he had forgotten everything. There were such moments of complete oblivion. And there was still the woman sitting in the other room.

  “I’m coming,” he called.

  “Frightened?” He lifted the receiver. “What? Yes. All right. Yes—naturally—immediately, yes—it will do, yes. Where? All right, I’ll be there at once. Hot strong coffee—yes—”

  He carefully put the receiver down and for a few seconds remained seated on the arm of the sofa. “I’ve got to go,” he said, “right now.”

  The woman rose immediately. She swayed a little and leaned on the chair.

  “No, no—” For a moment Ravic was touched by this obedient readiness. “You can stay here. Go to sleep. I will be gone for an hour or two, I don’t know exactly how long. Do stay here.” He got into his coat. He had a passing thought. And at once forgot it. The woman would not steal. She was not the type. He knew it too well. And there wasn’t much she could steal.

  He was already at the door when the woman asked, “Can’t I go with you?”

  “Impossible. Stay here. Take whatever you need. The bed, if you want. There’s cognac over there. Go to sleep—”

  He turned away. “Leave the light on,” the woman said suddenly and quickly.

  Ravic took his hand from the knob. “Afraid?” he asked.

  She nodded.

  He pointed to the key. “Lock the door behind me. But don’t leave the key in the lock. There’s another key downstairs with which I can get in.”

  She shook her head. “It’s not that. But please leave the light on.”

  “I see!” Ravic looked at her sharply. “I wasn’t going to turn it off anyway. Leave it on. I know that feeling. I’ve gone through such times, too.”

  At the corner of the Rue des Acacias he got a taxi. “Drive to Rue Lauriston. Fast!”

  The driver made a U-turn and drove into the Avenue Carnot and then into the Avenue de la Forge. As he crossed the Avenue de la Grande Armée a small two-seater raced toward them from the right. The two cars would have collided, had not the street been wet and smooth. But when the two-seater’s brake took hold it skidded into the middle of the street just past the radiator of the taxi. The light car whirled like a carrousel. It was a small Renault driven by a man wearing glasses and a black bowler hat. At every turn one saw his white indignant face for a moment. Then the car came to a stop facing the Arc at the end of the street as though facing the huge gates to Hades—a small green insect out of which a pallid fist rose menacingly toward the night sky.

  The cabdriver turned around. “Have you ever seen anything like that?”

  “Yes,” Ravic said.

  “But with such a hat. Why does anyone with such a hat have to drive so fast at night?”

  “It was his right of way. He was on the main road. Why are you cursing?”

  “Of course he was right. That’s just why I am cursing.”

  “What would you have done if he had been wrong?”

  “I would have cursed just the same.”

  “You seem to make life easy for yourself.”

  “I wouldn’t have cursed like that,” the driver explained and turned into the Avenue Foch. “Not so surprised, you understand?”

  “No. Drive slower at intersections.”

  “That’s what I was going to do. That damn oil on the street. But what makes you ask me if you don’t want to listen to an answer?”

  “Because I’m tired,” Ravic replied impatiently. “Because it’s night. Also, if you like, because we are sparks in an unknown wind. Drive on.”

  “That’s something else.” The driver touched his cap with a certain respect. “That I understand.”

  “Listen,” Ravic said with suspicion. “Are you Russian?”

  “No. But I read a lot while waiting for customers.”

  I’m out of luck with Russians today, Ravic thought. He leaned his head back. Coffee, he thought. Very hot black coffee. Let’s hope they have plenty of it. My hands have to be damned steady. If they aren’t—Veber will have to give me a shot. But I’ll be all right. He pulled the window down and slowly and deeply breathed in the moist air.

  2

  THE SMALL OPERATING ROOM was lighted bright as day. It looked like a very hygienic slaughterhouse. Pails with blood-drenched cotton stood here and there, bandages and tampons lay scattered, and the red was a loud and solemn protest against all the white. Veber was sitting at an enameled steel table in the anteroom, making notes; a nurse was boiling the instruments; the water bubbled, the light seemed to hum, and only the body on the table lay quite independent—nothing any longer mattered to it.

  Ravic let the liquid soap run over his hands and began to wash. He did it with a furious sullenness as if he wished to rub off his skin. “Damn!” he muttered. “Damned confounded crap!”

  The nurse looked at him with disgust. Veber glanced up. “Calm down, Nurse Eugénie. All surgeons swear. Particularly if something has gone wrong. You should be used to it.”

  The nurse threw a handful of instruments into the boiling water. “Professor Perrier never swore,” she explained in an offended tone.

  “Professor Perrier was a brain specialist. A most subtle mechanic, Eugénie. We work in the abdomen. That’s something else.” Veber closed his notebook and got up. “You did your best, Ravic. But after all one can’t win against quacks.”

  “Oh yes—sometimes you can.” Ravic dried his hands and lit a cigarette. The nurse opened the window in silent disapproval. “Bravo, Eugénie,” Veber praised her. “Always according to rules.”

  “I have responsibilities. I don’t want to be blown up.”

  “That’s nice, Eugénie. And reassuring.”

  “Some have none. And some don’t want to have any.”

  “That’s meant for you, Ravic.” Veber laughed. “We’d better disappear. Eugénie is always aggressive in the morning. Anyway there’s nothing to be done here.”

  Ravic turned around. He looked at the dutiful nurse. She returned his look fearlessly. The steel-rimmed glasses made her bleak face somehow untouchable. She was a human being like himself, but to him she appeared more alien than a tree. “Pardon me,” he said, “you are right, nurse.”

  Under the white light on the table lay what a few hours before had been hope, breath, pain, and quivering life. Now it was only an insensible cadaver—and the human automaton called Nurse Eugénie, with responsibilities and respect for herself, proud of never having taken a false step, covered it up and rolled it away. These are the ones who live forever, Ravic thought—life does not love them, these souls of wood—therefore it forgets them and lets them live on and on.

  “So long, nurse,” Veber said. “Take a good sleep today.”

  “Goodbye, Doctor Veber. Thank you, doctor.”

  “Goodbye,” Ravic said. “Excuse my swearing.”

  “Good morning,” Eugénie replied icily.

  Veber smiled. “A character of cast iron.”

  ———

  Outside a gray day was dawning. Garbage trucks rattled through the streets. Veber turned up his collar. “Nasty weather! Can I give you a lift, Ravic?”

  “No, thanks, I’d rather walk.”

  “In this weather? I can drop you. It’s not out of my way.”

  Ravic shook his head. “Thank you, Veber.”

  Veber gave him an appraising look. “Strange that you still get worked up when someone dies under the knife. Haven’t you been at it for the last fifteen years? You should be used to it by now!”r />
  “Yes, I am. And I’m not worked up.”

  Veber stood before Ravic, broad and heavy. His big round face shone like a Normandy apple. His black, trimmed mustache, wet with rain, glittered. The Buick standing at the curb also glittered. Presently Veber would drive home comfortably in it—to a rose-colored doll’s house in the suburbs with a neat glittering woman in it and two neat glittering children and a neat glittering life. How could one explain to him something of that breathless tension when the knife began the first cut and the narrow red trace followed the light pressure, when the body, under clips and forceps, opened up like a multiple curtain, when organs which had never seen the light were laid bare, when one followed a track like a hunter in a jungle and suddenly faced the huge wild beast, death, in destroyed tissues, in lumps, in tumors, in scissures—and the fight began, the silent, mad fight during which one could use no other weapon than a thin blade and a needle and a steady hand—how could one explain what it meant when then all at once a dark shadow rushed through the blinding white of stark concentration, a majestic derision that seemed to render the knife dull, the needle brittle, and the hand heavy—and when this invisible, enigmatic pulsing—life—then ebbed away under one’s powerless hands, collapsed, drawn into this ghostly vortex which one could never reach or hold—and when a face that had a moment ago breathed and borne a name turned into a rigid, nameless mask—this senseless, rebellious helplessness: how could one explain it—and what was there to explain?

  Ravic lit another cigarette. “Twenty-one years old,” he said.

  With his handkerchief Veber wiped the shiny drops from his mustache. “You worked marvelously, Ravic. I couldn’t have done it. That you couldn’t save what a quack had botched up—is something that does not concern you. Where would we be if we thought otherwise?”

  “Yes,” Ravic said. “Where would we be?”

  Veber put his handkerchief back. “After all you have gone through, you should be damned tough by now.”

  Ravic looked at him with a trace of irony. “One is never tough. But one can get used to a lot of things.”

  “That’s what I mean.”

  “Yes, and to some things never. But that is difficult to realize. Let’s take for granted that it was the coffee. Maybe it actually was the coffee that made me so edgy. And we confuse it with excitement.”

  “The coffee was good, wasn’t it?”

  “Very good.”

  “I know how to make coffee. I had an idea you’d need it, that’s why I made it myself. It was different from the black water Eugénie usually produces, wasn’t it?”

  “No comparison. You’re a master at making coffee.”

  Veber stepped into his car. He trod on the starter and leaned out of the window. “Couldn’t I drop you? You must be tired.”

  Like a seal, Ravic thought absent-mindedly. He is like a healthy seal. But what does that mean? Why does it occur to me? Why always these double thoughts? “I’m no longer tired,” he said. “The coffee woke me up. Sleep well, Veber.”

  Veber laughed. His teeth glistened beneath his black mustache. “I won’t go to bed now. I’ll work in my garden. I’ll plant tulips and daffodils.”

  Tulips and daffodils, Ravic thought. In neat, separate beds with neat graveled paths between. Tulips and daffodils—the peach-colored, golden storm of spring. “So long, Veber,” he said. “You will take care of the rest, won’t you?”

  “Naturally. I’ll call you up in the evening. Sorry the fee will be low. Not even worth mentioning. The girl was poor and, as it seems, had no relatives. We’ll see about that.”

  Ravic dismissed it with a gesture.

  “She gave a hundred francs to Eugénie. Apparently that was all she had. That will be twenty-five francs for you.”

  “Never mind,” Ravic said impatiently. “So long, Veber.”

  “So long. Till tomorrow morning at eight.”

  Ravic walked slowly along the Rue Lauriston. Had it been summer, he would have sat down on a bench in the Bois in the morning sun and, with vacant mind, would have stared into the water and the young woods, until the tension left him. Then he would have driven to the hotel and gone to bed.

  He entered a bistro at the corner of the Rue Boissière. A few workers and truckdrivers stood at the bar. They drank hot, black coffee, dipping brioches into it. Ravic watched them for a time. This was ordinary, simple life, a life to seize hold of, to work with: tiredness in the evening, eating, a woman, and a heavy dreamless sleep.

  “A kirsch,” he said.

  The dying girl had worn a cheap narrow chain of imitation gold around her right ankle—one of those little follies that are possible only when one is young, sentimental, and without taste. A chain with a little plate and an inscription: Toujours Charles, riveted around her ankle so that one could not take it off—a chain that told a story of Sundays in the woods near the Seine, of being in love and of ignorant youth, of a small jeweler somewhere in Neuilly, of nights in September in an attic—and then suddenly the staying away, the waiting, the fear—Toujours Charles who never showed up again, then the girl friend who knew an address, the midwife somewhere, a table covered with oilcloth, piercing pain and blood, blood, a bewildered old woman’s face, arms pushing you quickly into a cab to be rid of you, days of misery and of hiding, and finally the ride to the hospital, the last hundred francs crumpled in the hot moist hand—too late.

  The radio began to blare. A tango, to which a nasal voice sang idiotic words. Ravic caught himself performing the whole operation over again. He checked every move. Maybe, some hours earlier there might have been a chance. Veber had had him called. He had not been in the hotel. So the girl had to die because he had been loafing on the Pont de l’Alma. Veber could not perform such operations himself. The idiocy of chance. The foot with the golden chain, limp, turned inward. “Come into my boat, the moon is shining,” the crooner quavered in falsetto.

  Ravic paid and left. Outside he stopped a taxi. “Drive to the Osiris.”

  The Osiris was a large middle-class brothel with a huge bar in Egyptian style.

  “We’re just closing,” the doorman said. “There is no one inside.”

  “No one?”

  “Only Madame Rolande. The ladies have all gone.”

  “All right.”

  The doorman ill-humoredly stamped on the pavement with his galoshes. “Why don’t you keep the taxi? It won’t be easy to get another one later. We’re closed.”

  “You said that once before. I’ll get another taxi all right.”

  Ravic put a package of cigarettes into the doorman’s breast pocket and walked through the small door past the cloakroom into the big room. The bar was empty; it gave the usual impression of the remains of a bourgeois symposium—pools of spilled wine, a couple of overturned chairs, butts on the floor, and the smell of tobacco, sweet perfume, and flesh.

  “Rolande,” Ravic said.

  She stood in front of a table on which was a pile of pink silk underwear. “Ravic,” she said without surprise. “Late. What do you want—a girl or something to drink? Or both?”

  “Vodka. The Polish.”

  Rolande brought the bottle and a glass. “Help yourself. I still have to sort and list the laundry. The laundry wagon will be here any minute. If one doesn’t keep track of everything that gang will steal like a flock of magpies. The drivers, you understand. As presents for their girls.”

  Ravic nodded. “Turn the music on, Rolande. Loud.”

  “All right.”

  Rolande put the plug in. The sound of drums and brass went thundering through the high empty room like a storm. “Too loud, Ravic?”

  “No.”

  Too loud? What was too loud? Only the quiet. The quiet in which one burst as though in a vacuum.

  “All through.” Rolande came to Ravic’s table. She had a buxom figure, a clear face, and calm black eyes. The black Puritan dress she wore characterized her as the gouvernante; it distinguished her from the almost naked whores.

&n
bsp; “Have a drink with me, Rolande.”

  “All right.”

  Ravic fetched a glass from the bar and poured. Rolande pulled the bottle back when her glass was half filled. “Enough. I won’t drink more.”

  “Half-filled glasses are disgusting. Leave what you don’t drink.”

  “Why? That would be wasteful.”

  Ravic glanced up. He saw the reliable intelligent face and smiled. “Waste! The old French fear. Why save? You are not saved from anything.”

  “This is business. That’s something else.”

  Ravic laughed. “Let’s drink a toast to it! What would the world be without business ethics! A pack of criminals, idealists, and sluggards.”

  “You need a girl,” Rolande said. “I can call up Kiki. She is very good. Twenty-one years old.”

  “So. Twenty-one years too. That’s not for me today.” Ravic refilled his glass. “What do you actually think of, Rolande, before you fall asleep?”

  “Mostly of nothing. I am too tired.”

  “And when you aren’t tired?”

  “Of Tours.”

  “Why?”

  “An aunt of mine owns a house with a shop there. I hold two mortgages on it. When she dies—she is seventy-six—I’ll get the house. Then I’ll make a café out of the shop. Light wallpaper with flower designs, a band, three men, piano, violin, cello, in the rear a bar. Small and fine. The house is situated in a good district. I think I’ll be able to furnish it for nine thousand five hundred francs, even with curtains and lamps. Then I’ll put aside another five thousand for the first few months. And naturally I’ll have the rent from the first and second floors. That’s what I think about.”

  “Were you born in Tours?”

  “Yes. But no one knows where I’ve been since. And if the business prospers, no one will bother about it either. Money covers everything.”

  “Not everything. But a lot.”

  Ravic felt the heaviness behind his eyes that slowed down his voice. “I think I have had enough,” he said and took a few bills out of his pocket. “Will you marry in Tours, Rolande?”