He pushed himself through the crowd letting out from a movie, hastily, searching every face he passed; he peered beneath hats, he met irritated and astonished looks, he went on, on, other faces, other hats, gray, black, blue, he passed them, he turned back, he stared at them—
He stopped at the intersection of the Avenue Kléber. He suddenly remembered, a woman, a woman with a poodle—and immediately behind her he had seen that man.
He had long since passed the woman with the poodle. Quickly he walked back. Seeing the woman with the dog from a distance, he stopped at the curb. He clenched his fists in his pockets, and he painstakingly watched every passer-by. The poodle stopped at a lamppost, sniffed, and lifted its hind leg with infinite deliberation. Then he ceremoniously scratched the pavement and ran on. Ravic suddenly felt his neck wet with perspiration. He waited another few minutes—the face did not appear. He looked into the parked cars. No one was in them. He turned back again and walked quickly to the subway at the Avenue Kléber. He ran down into the entrance, bought a ticket, and walked along the platform. There were a good many people there. Before he got through searching, a train thundered in, stopped, and disappeared in the tunnel. The platform was empty.
Slowly he walked back to the bistro. He sat down at the table at which he had been sitting. The glass half full of calvados was still there. It seemed strange that it was still standing there.
The waiter shuffled toward Ravic. “Excuse me, sir, I didn’t know—”
“Never mind!” Ravic said. “Bring me another calvados.”
“Another?” The waiter looked at the half-filled glass on the table. “Don’t you want to drink that first?”
“No. Bring me another.”
The waiter lifted the glass and smelled it. “Isn’t it good?”
“It’s all right, only I want another.”
“Very well, sir.”
I was mistaken, Ravic thought. This rain-swept window, partly blurred—how could anything be positively recognized? He stared through the window. He stared attentively, like a hunter lying in wait, he watched every person passing by—but, at the same time, gray and sharp, a moving picture flashed shadowlike across it, a shred of memory …
Berlin. A summer evening in 1933. The house of the Gestapo. Blood; a bare room without windows; the sharp light of naked electric bulbs; a red-stained table with binding straps; the night-tortured clarity of his brain that had been startled out of unconsciousness a dozen times by being half choked in a pail of water; his kidneys so beaten they no longer ached; the distorted, helpless face of Sybil before him; a couple of torturers in uniform holding her—and a smiling face and a voice explaining in a friendly way what would happen to Sybil if a confession were not forthcoming—Sybil who three days later was reported to have been found hanged.…
The waiter appeared and put the glass on the table. “This is another brand, sir. Didier from Caen, older.”
“All right. Thanks.”
Ravic emptied his glass. He got a package of cigarettes out of his pocket, took one out and lit it. His hands were not yet steady. He flung the match on the floor and ordered another calvados. That face, that smiling face which he thought he had just seen again—he must have been mistaken. It was impossible that Haake was in Paris. Impossible! He shook off the memories. It was senseless to drive oneself mad about it as long as one couldn’t do anything. The time for that would come when everything back there collapsed and one could return. Till then …
He called the waiter and paid. But he could not help searching every face on the streets.
———
He was sitting with Morosow in the Catacombs.
“Do you think it was he?” Morosow asked.
“No. But he looked it. A cursed sort of resemblance. Or my memory is no longer to be trusted.”
“Bad luck that you were in the bistro.”
“Yes.”
Morosow remained silent awhile. “Makes one damn jumpy, doesn’t it?” he said then.
“No. Why?”
“Because one doesn’t know.”
“I know.”
Morosow did not reply.
“Ghosts,” Ravic said. “I thought I’d be over that by now.”
“One never is. I went through the same thing. Especially at the beginning. During the first five or six years. I’m still waiting for three of them who are in Russia. There were seven. Four have died. Two of them were shot by their own party. I’ve been waiting now for more than twenty years. Since 1917. One of the three who is still alive must be seventy by now. The other two, about forty or fifty. They’re the ones I still hope I’ll get. They are for my father.”
Ravic looked at Boris. He was over sixty, but a giant. “You will get them,” he said.
“Yes.” Morosow opened and closed his big hands. “That’s what I’m waiting for. That’s why I live more carefully. I don’t drink so often now. It may take some time yet. And I’ve got to be strong. I don’t want to shoot or knife them.”
“Neither do I.”
They sat for a while. “Shall we play a game of chess?” Morosow asked.
“Yes. But I don’t see any board free.”
“There, the professor is through playing. He played with Levy. As usual he won.”
Ravic went for the board and the chessmen. “You’ve played a long time, professor,” he said. “The whole afternoon.”
The old man nodded. “It distracts you. Chess is more perfect than any game of cards. At cards you have good luck or bad luck. It isn’t sufficiently diverting. Chess is a world in itself. While one is playing, it takes the place of the outside world.” He raised his inflamed eyes. “Which is not so perfect.”
Levy, his partner, suddenly bleated. Then he was silent, turned around, frightened, and followed the professor.
They played two games. Then Morosow got up. “I’ve got to go. To open doors for the cream of humankind. Why don’t you drop in any more at the Scheherazade?”
“I don’t know. Just chance.”
“How about tomorrow night?”
“I can’t tomorrow. I am having dinner at Maxim’s.”
Morosow grinned. “For an illegal refugee you have a lot of nerve to hang out in the most elegant places in Paris.”
“They are the only ones where you are entirely safe, you secure owner of a Nansen passport. One who behaves like a refugee is soon caught. You still should remember that much.”
“All right. With whom are you going then? With the German Ambassador as another protection?”
“With Kate Hegstroem.”
Morosow whistled. “Kate Hegstroem,” he said. “Is she back?”
“She is arriving tomorrow morning. From Vienna.”
“Fine. Then I’ll be seeing you later in the Scheherazade anyway.”
“Maybe not.”
Morosow dismissed the thought. “Impossible! The Scheherazade is Kate Hegstroem’s headquarters when she is in Paris. You know that as well as I do.”
“This time it’s different. She’ll be going into the hospital. To be operated on one of the next few days.”
“That’s just why she will come. You don’t understand women.” Morosow narrowed his eyes. “Or don’t you want her to come?”
“Why not?”
“It just occurs to me that you haven’t been with us since you sent us that woman. Joan Madou. Seems to be not just chance.”
“Nonsense. I don’t even know that she is still with you. Could you use her?”
“Yes. First she was in the chorus. Now she has a short solo number. Two or three songs.”
“Has she got adjusted meanwhile?”
“Naturally. Why not?”
“She was damned desperate. Poor devil.”
“What?” Morosow asked.
“I said poor devil.”
Morosow smiled. “Ravic,” he replied in a fatherly manner with a face in which suddenly there were steppes, space, knowledge, and all the experience in the world, “don’t talk nonse
nse. That woman is quite a bitch.”
“What?” Ravic asked.
“A bitch. No prostitute. A bitch. If you were a Russian you would understand.”
Ravic shook his head. “Then she must have changed a lot. So long, Boris! God bless your eyes!”
7
“WHEN DO I HAVE to be at the hospital, Ravic?” Kate Hegstroem asked.
“Tomorrow night. We’ll operate the day after.”
She stood before him, slim, boyish, self-assured, pretty, and no longer quite young.
“This time I’m afraid,” she said. “I don’t know why. But I’m afraid.”
“You needn’t be. It is a routine matter.”
Ravic had removed her appendix two years before. At that time they had taken a liking to each other and since then had been friends. Sometimes she disappeared for months and then one day she would suddenly return. She was something like a mascot to him. Her appendectomy was the first operation he had performed in Paris. She had brought him luck. Since that time he had continued to work and had had no further difficulties with the police.
She went over to the window and looked out. There lay the courtyard of the Hôtel Lancaster. A huge old chestnut tree stretched its naked arms upward toward the wet sky. “This rain,” she said. “I left Vienna and it was raining. I awoke in Zurich and it was raining. And now here—” She pushed the curtains back. “I don’t know what’s the matter with me. I think I’m growing old.”
“One always thinks that when one isn’t.”
“I should be different. I was divorced two weeks ago. I should be gay. But I am tired. Everything repeats itself, Ravic. Why?”
“Nothing repeats itself. We repeat ourselves, that’s all.”
She smiled and sat down on a sofa that stood beside the artificial fireplace. “It’s good to be back,” she said. “Vienna has become a military barracks. Disconsolate. The Germans have trampled it down. And with them the Austrians. The Austrians too, Ravic. I thought that would be a contradiction of nature: an Austrian Nazi. But I’ve seen them.”
“That is not surprising, Kate. Power is the most contagious disease.”
“Yes. And the most deforming. That’s why I asked for a divorce. This charming idler whom I married two years ago suddenly became a shouting stormtroop leader who made old Professor Bernstein wash the streets while he stood by and laughed. Bernstein who, a year ago, had cured him of an inflammation of the kidneys. Pretending that the fee had been too high.” Kate Hegstroem drew in her lips. “The fee which I’d paid, not he.”
“Be glad you are rid of him.”
“He asked two hundred fifty thousand schillings for the divorce.”
“Cheap,” Ravic said. “Anything you can settle with money is cheap.”
“He got nothing.” Kate Hegstroem raised her oval face, which was flawlessly cut like a gem. “I told him what I thought about him, his party, and his leader—and that from now on I would say this publicly. He threatened me with the Gestapo and the concentration camp. I laughed at him. I am still an American and under the protection of the Embassy. Nothing would happen to me—but to him because he was married to me.” She laughed. “He had not thought of that. He made no trouble from then on.”
Embassy, defense, protection, Ravic thought. That was like something from another life. “I wonder that Bernstein is still able to practice,” he said.
“He no longer can. He examined me secretly when I had the first hemorrhage. Thank God, I can’t have a child. A child by a Nazi—” She shuddered.
Ravic rose. “I must go now. You will be examined once more by Veber in the afternoon. Just for form’s sake.”
“I know. Nevertheless—I am afraid this time.”
“But, Kate—it isn’t the first time. It’s simpler than the removal of your appendix.” Ravic took her lightly around her shoulder. “You were my first operation here. That’s like one’s first love. I’ll take good care of you.”
“Yes,” she said and looked at him.
“All right then. Adieu, Kate. I’ll call for you at eight tonight.”
“Adieu, Ravic. I’m going now to buy an evening dress at Mainbocher. I must get rid of this tiredness. And the feeling of being caught in a spider web. That Vienna,” she said with a bitter smile. “The city of dreams—”
Ravic went down in the elevator and walked through the hall past the bar. A few Americans were sitting there. In the center a huge bunch of red gladioli stood on a table. In the gray diffused light suddenly they had the pale color of old blood and only when he came closer did he notice that they were perfectly fresh. It was merely the light from outside that made them appear so. He looked at them for some time.
There was much commotion on the second floor of the International. A number of rooms stood open, the maids and the valet were running to and fro, and the proprietress was directing all this from the corridor.
Ravic came down the stairs. “What’s going on here?” he asked.
The proprietress was a buxom woman with a huge bosom and a too small head with short black curls. “The Spaniards have left,” she said.
“I know. But why are you tidying up the rooms so late in the night?”
“We need them tomorrow morning.”
“New German refugees?”
“No, Spanish.”
“Spanish?” Ravic asked, for a moment not understanding what she meant. “How is that? Haven’t they just left?”
The landlady looked at him with her bright black eyes and smiled. It was a smile of simplest understanding and simplest irony. “The others are coming back,” she said.
“Which others?”
“The opposition. But that’s always so.” She called a few words to the girl who was doing the cleaning. “We are an old hotel,” she said then with a certain pride. “Our guests like to return to us. They wait for their old rooms. Naturally a number of them have been killed meanwhile. But the others have waited in Biarritz and Saint-Jean-de-Luz until rooms were vacant.”
Ravic looked at the landlady, astonished. “When were they here before?” he asked.
“But Mr. Ravic!” She was surprised that he did not understand right away. “Of course during that time when Primo de Rivera was dictator in Spain. They had to escape then and they lived here. When Spain became republican they went back and the monarchists and Fascists came here. Now the latter have gone back and the republicans are returning. Those that are still left. A merry-go-round.”
“Yes, indeed,” Ravic said. “A merry-go-round.”
The landlady looked into one of the rooms. A colored print of the former King Alfonso hung over the bed. “Take that down, Jeanne,” she called.
The girl brought the picture. “Here. Put it over here.” The landlady leaned the picture against the wall to her right and walked on. In the next room hung a picture of Generalissimo Franco. “This one too. Put it with the others.”
“Why didn’t these Gomez people take their pictures with them?” Ravic asked.
“Refugees rarely take pictures with them when they go back,” the landlady declared. “Pictures are a comfort in a foreign land. When one returns one no longer needs them. Also the frames are too inconvenient to travel with and the glass breaks easily. Pictures are almost always left in hotels.”
She put two other portraits of the fat generalissimo, one of Alfonso, and a smaller one of Queipo de Llano with the others in the corridor. “The holy pictures can be left inside,” she decided when she discovered a Madonna in glaring colors. “Saints are neutral.”
“Not always,” Ravic said.
“In difficult periods God always has a chance. I have even seen atheists praying here.” With an energetic movement the landlady adjusted her left breast. “Haven’t you ever prayed when the water was up to your neck?”
“Naturally. But I’m not an atheist. I am only a reluctant believer.”
The valet came up the stairs. He carried a pile of pictures across the corridor. “Are you going to redecorate?�
�� Ravic asked.
“Of course. One must have much tact in the hotel business. That’s what really gives a house a good reputation. Particularly with our kind of customers who, I can actually say, are very sensitive about these things. One hardly expects someone to enjoy a room in which his archenemy looks down on him proudly in bright colors and sometimes even out of a gold frame. Am I not right?”
“One hundred per cent.”
The landlady turned toward the valet. “Put these pictures here, Adolphe. No, you’d better put them in the light against the wall, one next to the other, so that we can see them.”
The man growled and bent down to prepare the exhibition. “What will you hang in there now?” Ravic asked, interested. “Deer and landscapes and eruptions of Vesuvius and the like?”
“Only if there aren’t enough. Otherwise I’ll put back the old pictures.”
“Which old ones?”
“Those from before. Those the gentlemen left here when they took over the government. Here they are.”
She pointed at the left wall of the corridor. The valet had set up the new pictures in a row opposite those which had been taken out of the rooms. There were two of Marx, three of Lenin with the half of one pasted over with paper, a picture of Trotzky, and a few black and white prints of Negrin and other republican leaders of Spain, in smaller frames. They were less conspicuous and none of them was so resplendent with color and decorations and emblems as the pompous row of Alfonsos, Primos, and Francos which stood opposite them on the right. It was a strange sight: those two rows of opposed philosophies silently staring at each other in the dimly lit corridor and between them the French landlady with the tact, experience, and the ironic wisdom of her race.
“I saved these things at that time,” she said, “when those gentlemen checked out. Governments don’t last long these days. You see I was right—now they come in handy. One has to be farsighted in the hotel business.”
She gave orders where to hang the pictures. She sent back the picture of Trotzky. She was not sure about him. Ravic examined the print of Lenin with the half pasted over. He scratched off part of the paper along the line of Lenin’s head—and from under the piece of paper emerged another head, Trotzky’s, smiling at Lenin. Very likely a follower of Stalin had pasted it over. “Here,” Ravic said. “Another hidden Trotzky. From the good old days of friendship and fraternity.”
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