“Hold me,” she said.
He looked down into her face and put his arm around her. Her shoulders came closer to him like a ship coming to anchor in a harbor. “Must one hold you?” he asked.
“Yes.”
Her hands lay close together against his chest. “I’ll hold you,” he said.
She nodded.
Another taxi came to a squeaking stop beside the curb. The driver, unmoved, looked over at them. On his shoulder sat a little dog in a knitted vest. “Taxi?” he croaked from behind a long flaxen mustache.
“Look,” Ravic said. “That man knows nothing. He doesn’t know that wings have touched us. He looks at us and doesn’t see that we have changed. That is the crazy thing about the world: you may turn into an archangel, a fool or a criminal—no one will see it. But when a button is missing—everyone sees that.”
“It is not crazy. It is good so. It leaves us to ourselves.”
Ravic looked at her. Us—he thought—what a word! The most mysterious in the world.
“Taxi?” the driver croaked patiently, but louder, and lit a cigarette.
“Come,” Ravic said. “He won’t let us go. He is experienced in his trade.”
“I don’t want to ride. Let’s walk.”
“It is beginning to rain.”
“That isn’t rain. That is mist. I don’t want a taxi. I want to walk with you.”
“All right. But I’d like to make that man understand that something has happened here.”
Ravic walked over and spoke to the driver. The man smiled a beautiful smile, greeted Joan with a gesture that Frenchmen alone achieve at such moments, and drove away.
“How did you explain it to him?” she asked when Ravic returned.
“With money. The simplest thing. Like all people who work nights he’s a cynic. He understood immediately. He was benevolent with a touch of amiable contempt.”
She smiled. He put his arm around her shoulders. She leaned against him. He felt something open up in him and spread, warm and soft and wide, something that drew him down as though with many hands, and made it suddenly unbearable that they were standing side by side on their feet, those small platforms, absurdly upright, balancing, instead of forgetting and sinking down, yielding to the call of the skin, the call behind the millenniums when there did not as yet exist brains and thoughts and suffering and doubt, but only the dark happiness of the blood—
“Come,” he said.
They walked along the empty gray street through the light rain, and when they reached its end, the square lay before them again, huge and unbounded and, out of the flowing river, suspended aloft, rose the massive grayness of the Arc.
9
RAVIC RETURNED TO the hotel. Joan Madou had still been sleeping when he had left that morning. He had thought he would be back in an hour. It was now three hours later.
“Hello, doctor,” someone said on the stairs.
Ravic looked at the man. A pale face, a bush of wild black hair, glasses. He did not recognize him.
“Alvarez,” the man said. “Jaime Alvarez. Don’t you remember?”
Ravic shook his head.
The man bent down and pulled up his trouser leg. A long scar ran along his shinbone up to his knee. “Do you remember now?”
“Did I operate on that?”
The man nodded. “On a kitchen table behind the front. In a temporary field hospital before Aranjuez. A little white cottage in an almond grove. Do you remember now?”
Suddenly Ravic scented the heavy aroma of almond blossoms. He smelled it as if it had ascended the dark staircase, sweet, putrid, inextricably mixed with the sweeter and more putrid scent of blood.
“Yes,” he said. “I remember.”
The wounded had been lying on the moonlit terrace, beside one another in rows. A few German and Italian planes had accomplished that. Children, women, peasants, torn by bomb fragments. A child without a face; a pregnant woman torn open up to her breast; an old man who anxiously held the fingers torn off one hand in his other because he thought they could be sewed on. Over all that the heavy night odor and the clear dew falling.
“Is your leg quite all right again?” Ravic asked.
“Just about. I can’t bend it completely.” The man smiled. “But it was good enough to get me across the Pyrenees. Gonzalez is dead.”
Ravic no longer knew who Gonzalez was. But now he recalled a young student who had assisted him. “Do you know what happened to Manolo?”
“Imprisoned. Shot.”
“And Serna? The brigade commander?”
“Dead. Before Madrid.” The man smiled again. It was a rigid automatic smile that came suddenly and was without emotion. “Mura and La Pena were taken prisoners. Shot.”
Ravic no longer knew who Mura and La Pena were. He had left Spain after six months when the front was broken and the field hospital disbanded.
“Carnero, Orta, and Goldstein are in a concentration camp,” Alvarez said. “In France. Blatzky too is safe. Hidden across the frontier.”
Ravic recalled only Goldstein. There had been too many faces at that time. “Do you live here in the hotel now?” he asked.
“Yes. We moved in yesterday. Over there.” The man pointed at the rooms on the second floor. “We were kept in the camp down at the frontier for a long time. Finally we were released. We still had some money.” He smiled again. “Beds. Real beds. A good hotel. Even pictures of our leaders on the walls.”
“Yes,” Ravic said without irony. “It must be pleasant after all that over there.”
He said goodbye to Alvarez and went to his room.
The room had been cleaned and was empty. Joan had gone. He looked around. She had not left anything behind. He had not expected her to.
He rang. After a while the maid came. “The lady left,” she said before he could ask her.
“I see that myself. How did you know anyone was here?”
“But, Mr. Ravic,” the girl said without adding anything and with an expression as if her honor had been offended.
“Did she have breakfast?”
“No. I haven’t seen her. Otherwise I would have thought of it. I know that from before.”
Ravic looked at her. He did not like the concluding sentence. He pulled a few francs out of his pocket and put them into the girl’s apron pocket. “All right,” he said. “Do the same next time. Bring breakfast only when I explicitly tell you to do so. And don’t come up to clean the room before you know for sure that it is empty.”
The girl smiled understandingly. “Very well, Mr. Ravic.”
He looked after her uneasily. He knew what she thought. She believed Joan was married and did not want to be seen. In former days he would have laughed about it. Now he did not like it. But why not? he thought. He shrugged his shoulders and went to the window. Hotels were hotels. That could not be changed.
He opened the window. A cloudy noon hung above the houses. Sparrows chirped in the eaves. On the floor below two voices squabbled. That would be the Goldberg family. The man was twenty years older than his wife. A wholesale corndealer from Breslau. His wife was having an affair with the refugee Wiesenhoff. She thought no one knew it. The only one who did not know it was Goldberg.
Ravic closed the window. He had operated on a gall bladder that morning. An anonymous gall bladder for Durant. He had cut open for Durant part of an unknown male belly. A fee of two hundred francs. Afterwards he had gone to see Kate Hegstroem. She had a fever. Too much fever. He had been with her for an hour. She had slept restlessly. It was nothing alarming. But it would have been better if there had been no fever.
He stared through the window. The strange empty feeling of afterwards. The bed that no longer had any meaning. The day that mercilessly tore yesterday into pieces like a jackal tearing the hide of an antelope. The woods of the night, miraculously grown in the dark, now endlessly remote again, merely a fata morgana in the wasteland of hours.…
He turned around. On his table he found Lucienne Ma
rtinet’s address. She had been released from the hospital a short time before. She had given them no peace until they released her. Two days ago he had been with her. It was not necessary to look her up again; but he had nothing else to do and decided to go there.
The house was in the Rue Clavel. Downstairs was a butcher’s shop in which a strong woman was swinging a cleaver and selling meat. She was in mourning. Her husband had died two weeks before. Now the woman reigned in the shop, with a helper. Ravic saw her as he passed by. She was apparently about to go calling. She wore a hat with a long black crepe veil and was quickly chopping off a pig’s leg to oblige an acquaintance. The veil waved above the open carcass, the cleaver glittered and came crashing down.
“With one blow,” the widow said in a satisfied tone and flung the leg on the scale.
Lucienne lived in a small room on the top floor. She was not alone. A fellow of about twenty-five slouched on a chair. He wore a bicyclist’s cap and was smoking a homemade cigarette which stuck to his upper lip when he talked. He remained sitting as Ravic entered.
Lucienne lay in bed. She was bewildered and blushed. “Doctor—I didn’t know you would come today.” She looked at the young man. “This is—”
“Someone,” the boy interrupted her gruffly. “It isn’t necessary to toss names around.” He leaned back. “So you are the doctor!”
“How are you, Lucienne?” Ravic asked without taking any notice of him. “You’re wise to stay in bed.”
“She could have been up long ago,” the boy declared. “There’s no longer anything wrong with her. When she doesn’t work it runs up expenses.”
Ravic turned around and looked at him. “Leave us alone,” he said.
“What?”
“Get out. Out of the room. I’m going to examine Lucienne.”
The boy burst out laughing. “You can do that just as well with me here. We aren’t so fine. And why examine? You were here only the day before yesterday. That costs for an extra visit, eh?”
“Brother,” Ravic said calmly, “you don’t look as if you would pay it. Besides, whether it will cost anything is a different matter. And now get out.”
The boy grinned and sprawled his legs comfortably. He wore tapered patent leather shoes and violet socks.
“Please, Bobo,” Lucienne said. “I’m sure it will only take a moment.”
Bobo did not pay any attention to her. He stared at Ravic. “It suits me fine that you’re here,” he said. “Now I can put you straight right away. My dear man, if you think perhaps you can bleed us for hospital bills, operations, and all that—nothing doing! We didn’t ask to have her sent to the hospital—not to mention the operation—so it’s no go with the money angle. You ought to be glad we don’t ask for compensation! For an unauthorized operation.” He showed a row of stained teeth. “That’s some surprise, isn’t it? Yes, sir, Bobo knows his way around; he can’t be easily gypped.”
The boy looked very much contented. He felt he had got out of that brilliantly. Lucienne became pale. She looked anxiously from Bobo to Ravic.
“You understand?” Bobo asked triumphantly.
“Was he the one?” Ravic asked Lucienne. She did not answer. “So that’s it,” he said and studied Bobo.
A tall thin fellow with a rayon scarf around his skinny throat, in which the Adam’s apple was moving up and down. Drooping shoulders, too long a nose, a degenerate chin—the picture-book conception of a suburb pimp.
“So what’s it?” Bobo asked, challenging.
“I think I’ve told you often enough now to get going. I want to examine her.”
“Merde,” Bobo replied.
Slowly Ravic walked toward him. He had had enough of Bobo. The boy jumped up, stepped back, and suddenly had a thin rope of about two yards’ length in his hands. Ravic knew what he intended to do with it. When Ravic came closer he was going to jump aside, then get swiftly behind him and slip the rope over his head so that he could strangle him from behind. It would work if the other person did not know about it or attempted to box.
“Bobo,” Lucienne called. “Bobo, don’t!”
“You young scum!” Ravic said. “That miserable old rope trick—don’t you know any better?” He laughed.
Bobo was nonplussed for a moment. His eyes became uncertain. In an instant Ravic had ripped his jacket down over his shoulders with both hands so that he could not lift his arms. “This is one you did not know, eh?” he said, quickly opened the door, and shoved the surprised and helpless fellow roughly out of the room. “If that’s the sort of thing you like, become a soldier, you would-be apache! But don’t molest grown-up people.”
He locked the door from inside. “So, Lucienne,” he said. “Now let’s have a look at you.”
She trembled. “Calm, calm. It’s over.” He took the worn-out cotton quilt and put it on the chair. Then he rolled back the green blanket. “Pajamas. Why that? They’re less comfortable. You should not move much yet, Lucienne.”
She remained silent for a moment. “I only put them on today,” she said.
“Haven’t you got any nightgowns? I can have two of them sent to you from the hospital.”
“No, not because of that. I put them on because I knew—” she looked at the door and whispered “—that he would come. He said I was no longer sick. He wouldn’t wait any longer.”
“What? It’s a pity I didn’t know that before.” Ravic looked at the door angrily. “He’ll wait.”
Lucienne had the very white skin of anemic women. The veins lay blue under the thin epidermis. She was well built, with delicate bones, slender, but nowhere too bony. One of the innumerable girls, Ravic thought, who make one wonder why nature puts on such a show of grace—since one knows what will become of almost all of them—overworked drudges who soon lose their figures through wrong and unhealthy ways of life.
“You will have to stay in bed pretty much for another week, Lucienne. You may get up and walk around here. But be careful; don’t lift anything. And don’t climb any stairs for the next few days. Have you got someone to take care of you? Besides this Bobo?”
“The landlady. But she too has started to grumble.”
“Someone else?”
“No. Before there was Marie. She is dead.”
Ravic took stock of the room. It was poorly furnished and clean. A few fuchsias stood in the window. “And Bobo?” he said. “Well, he appeared again after everything was over—”
Lucienne did not answer.
“Why don’t you throw him out?”
“He isn’t so bad, doctor. Only wild—”
Ravic looked at her. Love, he thought. That too is love. The old miracle. It not only casts a rainbow of dreams against the gray sky of facts—it also sheds romantic light upon a heap of dung—a miracle and a mad mockery. Suddenly he had the strange feeling of having become, in a remote way, an accomplice. “All right, Lucienne,” he said. “Don’t worry about it. First become healthy.”
Relieved, she nodded. “And that about the money,” she blurted out, embarrassed, “that isn’t true. He only said so. I’ll pay everything. Everything. In installments. When will I be able to work again?”
“In about two weeks, if you’re not foolish. And nothing with Bobo! Absolutely nothing, Lucienne! Otherwise you might die, you understand?”
“Yes,” she replied without conviction.
Ravic covered her slender body with the blanket. When he looked up he noticed that she was weeping. “Couldn’t it be sooner?” she said. “I can sit while I work. I must—”
“Perhaps. We’ll see. It depends on how well you take care of yourself. You should tell me the name of the midwife who did the abortion, Lucienne.”
He saw the defense in her eyes. “I won’t go to the police,” he said. “Certainly not. I’ll only try to get the money back you paid her. Then you could be calmer. How much was it?”
“Three hundred francs. You’ll never get it from her.”
“One can try. What’s her name and wher
e does she live? You’ll never need her again, Lucienne. You can no longer have any children. And she can’t do anything to you.”
The girl hesitated. “There in the drawer,” she said then. “At your right in the drawer.”
“This slip here?”
“Yes.”
“All right. I’ll go there one of the next few days. Don’t be afraid.” Ravic put on his coat. “What’s the matter?” he asked. “Why do you want to get up?”
“Bobo. You don’t know him.”
He smiled. “I think I know worse than him. Stay right in bed. To judge by what I have seen we need not be concerned. So long, Lucienne. I’ll drop in on you soon again.”
Ravic turned the key and the latch simultaneously, and quickly opened the door. No one stood in the corridor. Nor had he expected it; he knew Bobo’s type.
Downstairs the assistant was now standing in the butcher’s shop, a man with a sallow face and without the ardor of the proprietress. He was chopping listlessly. Since his master’s death he had become noticeably more tired. His chances of marrying his master’s wife were small. A brushmaker in the bistro opposite announced this in a loud voice and also that she would drive him too into the grave before that happened. The assistant had already lost much weight, he said. But the widow had blossomed mightily. Ravic drank a cassis and paid. He had expected to find Bobo in the bistro; but Bobo was not there.
Joan Madou quickly left the Scheherazade. She opened the door of the taxi in which Ravic was waiting. “Come,” she said. “Let’s get away from here. Let’s go to your place.”
“Has something happened?”
“No. Nothing. It’s just that I’ve had enough of night-club life.”
“Just a moment.” Ravic called to the woman who stood before the entrance, selling flowers. “Granny,” he said. “Let me have all your roses. How much are they? But don’t be exorbitant.”
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