“Can I see her?”
“What for?”
“I’ve got to see her once more!” The man pressed both hands against his breast. In his hands he held a light brown Homburg with a silk edge. “Don’t you understand! I must—”
He had tears in his eyes. “Listen,” Ravic said impatiently. “You’d better disappear. The woman is dead, and nothing will change that. Settle this affair with yourself. And go to hell! No one cares whether you get sentenced to a year in prison or dramatically acquitted. Anyhow in a few years you’ll be using it to show off in front of other women to conquer them. Get out, you idiot!”
He gave him a push toward the door. The man hesitated a moment. At the door, he turned around: “You unfeeling beast! Sale boche!”
The streets were full of people. They stood in clusters in front of the big running electric bulletins of the newspapers. Ravic drove to the Jardin de Luxembourg. He wanted to be alone for a few hours before he was arrested.
The garden was empty. It lay in the warm light of the late summer afternoon. The trees showed a first premonition of fall, not of the fall that withers, but of the fall that matures. The light was golden, and the blue was a last silk flag of summer.
Ravic sat there for a long time. He saw the light change and the shadows grow longer. He knew they were the last hours in which he would be free. The proprietress of the International could no longer shield anyone once war was declared. He thought of Rolande. Not Rolande either. No one. If he made an attempt to continue his flight now he would be suspected of being a spy.
He sat there until evening. He was not sad. Faces drifted past him. Faces and years. And then the last unmoving face.
At seven he departed. He was leaving the last remnant of peace, the darkening park, and he knew it. A few steps farther up the street, he saw the extra editions of the newspapers. War had been declared.
He ate in a bistro that had no radio. Then he walked back to the hospital. Veber met him. “Will you perform a Caesarean? Someone has just been brought in.”
“Of course.”
He went to change. On his way he met Eugénie. She was taken aback at seeing him. “Didn’t you expect me any more?” he asked.
“No,” she replied and passed him quickly.
The child squealed. It was being washed. Ravic looked at its red screaming face and the tiny fingers. We don’t come into the world with a smile, he thought. He handed the child to the assistant nurse. It was a boy. “Who knows what sort of war he’s in time for,” he said.
He washed. Veber was washing at his side. “If it should turn out that you are arrested, Ravic, will you let me know right away where you are?”
“Why do you want to get into difficulties? It is better now not to know people of my type.”
“Why? Because you were a German? You are a refugee.”
Ravic smiled sadly. “Don’t you know that refugees are always as stones between stones? To their native country they are traitors. And abroad they are still citizens of their native country.”
“That makes no difference to me. But I want you to get out as quickly as possible. Will you give me as a reference?”
“If you want me to.” Ravic knew that he would not do it.
“It is an abominable thought. What would you do there?”
“For a doctor there is something to do everywhere.” Ravic dried his hands. “Will you do me a favor? Take care of Joan’s funeral? There won’t be enough time for me to do it.”
“Naturally. Is there anything else to look after? Property or anything like that?”
“We can leave that to the police. I don’t know whether she has any relatives. It is of no importance.”
He put on his coat. “Adieu, Veber. It was a good time working with you.”
“Adieu, Ravic. We still have to settle for the Caesarean operation.”
“Let’s count that off against the funeral. It will cost you more anyway. I’d like to leave you money for it.”
“Impossible. Impossible, Ravic. Where do you want her to be buried?”
“I don’t know. In any cemetery. I’ll leave her name and address here.” Ravic wrote it down on a bill pad of the hospital.
Veber put the slip under a crystal paperweight in which a silver sheep was cast.
“All right, Ravic. I think I’ll be gone too in a few days. We would hardly have been able to perform many operations without your being here.” He walked outside with him.
“Adieu, Eugénie,” Ravic said.
“Adieu, Herr Ravic.” She looked at him. “Are you going to your hotel?”
“Yes. Why?”
“Oh, nothing. I only thought—”
It was dark. A truck was standing in front of the hotel. “Ravic,” Morosow said, coming out from a house entrance near the hotel.
“Boris?” Ravic stopped.
“The police are in the place.”
“I thought so.”
“I have Ivan Kluge’s carte d’identité here. You know, the dead Russian. Still valid for eighteen months. Come with me to the Scheherazade. We’ll change the photos. Then you can stay at another hotel as a Russian refugee.”
Ravic shook his head. “Too risky, Boris. One oughtn’t to have forged papers in wartime. Better none at all.”
“Then what will you do?”
“I’ll go into the hotel.”
“Have you thought it over carefully, Ravic?” Morosow asked.
“Yes, carefully.”
“Damn it! Who knows where they will put you.”
“At any rate, they won’t deport me to Germany. That’s over. They won’t even deport me to Switzerland.” Ravic smiled. “For the first time in seven years the police will want to keep us, Boris. It took a war to get that far.”
“It’s rumored they’re going to set up a concentration camp at Longchamp.” Morosow pulled at his beard. “For this you had to flee a German concentration camp—to get into a French one now.”
“Maybe they’ll set us free again soon.”
Morosow did not answer. “Boris,” Ravic said. “Don’t worry about me. Doctors are needed in time of war.”
“What name will you give them when they arrest you?”
“My own. I have only made use of it once here—five years ago.” Ravic was silent for a while. “Boris,” he said then. “Joan is dead. shot by a man. She is lying in Veber’s hospital. She must be buried. Veber has promised to take care of it, but I don’t know whether he’ll be called up before that. Will you look after it? Don’t ask me any questions, say yes and be done with it.”
“Yes,” Morosow said.
“All right. Adieu, Boris. Take any of my belongings you can use. And move into my room. You always wanted my bathroom anyway. I’ll go now. So long.”
“Merde!” Morosow said.
“All right. I’ll meet you after the war at Fouquet’s.”
“Which side? Champs Elysées or George V?”
“George V. We are idiots. Heroic snotty idiots. So long, Boris.”
“Merde!” Morosow said. “We don’t even dare to say goodbye decently. Come here, idiot.”
He kissed Ravic on the right and left cheek. Ravic felt his beard and the smell of pipe tobacco. It was not pleasant. He walked to the hotel.
The refugees were standing in the Catacombs. Like the first Christians, Ravic thought. The first Europeans. A plain-clothes man was sitting at a desk under the artificial palm, writing down the particulars about each person. Two policemen guarded the doors through which no one had any intention of fleeing. “Passport?” the man in plain clothes asked Ravic.
“No.”
“Other papers?”
“No.”
“Illegally here?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“I fled from Germany. It was impossible to obtain papers.”
“Your name?”
“Fresenburg.”
“First name?”
“Ludwig.”
; “Jew?”
“No.”
“Profession?”
“Doctor.”
The man was writing. “Doctor?” he said and held a slip of paper toward him. “Do you know a doctor who calls himself Ravic?”
“No.”
“He is supposed to live here. We received a denunciation of him.”
Ravic looked at him. Eugénie, he thought. She had asked him if he was going to return to his hotel, and she had been so surprised to see him still free.
“I told you that no one of that name lives here,” declared the proprietress, who was standing by the door leading to the kitchen.
“Be quiet,” the man said ill-humouredly. “You’ll be punished anyway because you did not report these people.”
“I’m proud of it. If humaneness is to be punished, then go ahead!”
The man looked as if he wanted to answer; but he stopped himself with a gesture of dismissal. The proprietress stared at him challengingly. She had protection and was not afraid.
“Pack your things,” the man said to Ravic. “Take your underwear with you and something to eat, enough for a day. Also a blanket, if you have one.”
A policeman came upstairs with him. The doors to most rooms stood open. Ravic took his suitcase and blanket.
“Nothing else?” the policeman asked.
“Nothing else.”
“You are leaving the other things here?”
“I’m leaving the other things here.”
“This too?” The policeman pointed to the little wooden Madonna that Joan had sent him at the International after they had first met.
“That too.”
They went downstairs. Clarisse, the Alsatian maid, handed Ravic a package. Ravic noticed that the others had similar packages. “Something to eat,” declared the proprietress. “So that you won’t go hungry. I’m convinced there will be no preparations made where you’re going.”
She stared at the plain-clothes man. “Don’t talk so much,” he said angrily. “I didn’t declare war.”
“Nor did these people.”
“Leave me alone.” He looked at the policemen. “Ready? Take them away.”
The dark crowd began to move. Ravic noticed the man with the woman who had seen the cockroaches. The man supported her with his free arm. Under the other he had a suitcase, and he held another in his hand. The boy also was dragging a suitcase. The man looked at Ravic beseechingly. Ravic nodded. “I have instruments and medicine with me,” he said. “Don’t be afraid.”
They climbed into the truck. The motor roared. The car moved off. The proprietress stood in the doorway and waved. “Where are we going?” someone asked a policeman.
“I don’t know.”
Ravic stood beside Rosenfeld and the false Aaron Goldberg. Rosenfeld carried a roll under his arm. The Cézanne and Gauguin were in it. His face worked. “The Spanish visa,” he said. “Expired before I—” He broke off. “The Bird of Death has gone,” he said then. “Markus Meyer, yesterday to America.”
The truck shook. They all stood tightly pressed against one another. Hardly anyone spoke. They drove around a corner. Ravic noticed the fatalist Seidenbaum. He stood pressed into a corner. “Here we are again,” he said.
Ravic searched for a cigarette. He found none. But he remembered he had packed enough in his bag. “Yes,” he said. “Human beings can stand a great deal.”
The car drove along the Avenue Wagram and turned into the Place de l’Etoile. There was no light anywhere. The square was nothing but darkness. It was so dark that one could not even see the Arc de Triomphe.
BY ERICH MARIA REMARQUE
All Quiet on the Western Front
The Road Back
Three Comrades
Flotsam
Arch of Triumph
Spark of Life
A Time to Love and a Time to Die
The Black Obelisk
Heaven Has No Favorites
The Night in Lisbon
Shadows in Paradise
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ERICH MARIA REMARQUE was born in Germany in 1898, and was drafted into the German army during World War I. Throughout the hazardous years following the war he worked at many occupations—schoolteacher, small-town drama critic, racing driver, and editor of a sports magazine. His first novel, All Quiet on the Western Front, vividly describing the experiences of German soldiers during World War I, was published in Germany in 1928. It was a brilliant success, selling over a million copies, and it was the first of many literary triumphs by Erich Remarque.
When the Nazis came to power, Remarque left Germany for Switzerland. He rejected all attempts to persuade him to return, and as a result he lost his German citizenship, his books were burned, and his films were banned. He went to the United States in 1938 and became a citizen in 1947. He later lived in Switzerland with his second wife, the actress Paulette Goddard. He died in Switzerland in September 1970.
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