The night in Lisbon

by Erich Maria Remarque

  " 'Here it's the dummies that have the guns.'

  "Helen fished into her basket and produced a pâté. 'From the patron,' she said. 'With best greetings and a message: Merde a la guerre. It's pâté de volatile. I've got forks and a knife. I say it again: Vive la civilisation!'

  "Suddenly I felt gay. Helen was there; nothing was lost. There was still no fighting, and maybe it was true that we would soon be released.

  "The following afternoon we heard that we were going to be separated. I would be sent to the transit camp in Colombes, Helen to La Petite Roquette prison. Even if they had believed we were married, it wouldn't have helped. Married couples were separated, too.

  "We sat up all night in the cellar with the permission of a kindhearted guard. Someone had brought a few candles. Some of our number had already been shipped out; there were still about a hundred of us left. Quite a few Spanish refugees, too. There was something ironical about the thoroughness with which antifascists were being rounded up in an antifascist country. It made you think of Germany.

  " 'Why do they want to separate us?' Helen asked.

  " 'I don't know. It's not cruelty, just stupidity.'

  " 'If they put men and women in the same camp,' said a little old Spaniard, 'there'd be nothing but jealousy and fights. That's why you're being separated. C'est la guerre!'

  "Helen slept beside me in her leopard coat. There were a few comfortable padded benches, but they had been set aside for some elderly women. One of them offered Helen her bench to sleep on from three to five; she refused. 'I'll have plenty of time to sleep alone later on,' she said.

  "It was a weird night. The voices gradually died down. The old women stopped whimpering; now and then one of them would wake up sobbing, but soon drift off into sleep as though smothered, in black wool. The candles went out one by one. Helen slept on my shoulder. She put her arms around me in her sleep, and when she woke up, she whispered to me. Sometimes she spoke like a child and sometimes like a woman in love—words that people don't say in the daytime, or even at night under normal circumstances—words of suffering and parting, words of the body, which rebels against parting, words of the skin, of the blood, words of plaint, the oldest plaint in the world: why can't we stay together, why must one always go first, why is death forever tugging us by the hand, making us move on, even when we are tired, even when we are trying, for one short hour, to keep up the illusion of eternity? Later her head slid slowly down my shoulder to my knees. I held her head in my hands and saw her breathing in the light of the last candle. I heard men stand up and grope their way among the piles of coal, looking for a place to urinate. The feeble light flickered and enormous shadows danced about. Then the last light went out, and there was nothing but stuffy snoring darkness. Once she started up with a short high-pitched cry. I'm here,' I whispered. 'Don't be frightened. Everything is all right.'

  "She lay back and kissed my hands. 'Yes, you're here,' she murmured. 'Stay with me always.'

  " 'I'll always be with you,' I whispered. 'Even if we're separated for a little while, I'll always find you.'

  " 'You'll find me?' she murmured, slipping into sleep.

  " 'I'll always find you. Always! Wherever you are. Same as I found you last time.'

  " 'That's good,' she sighed, and turned her face so that it rested in my hands as in a bowl. I didn't sleep. From time to time I felt her lips on my fingers, and once I thought I felt tears; but I said nothing. I loved her very much, and it seemed to me that I had never loved her more, even when possessing her, than in this sordid night full of snoring, punctured by the strange hissing sound of urine falling on coal. I was very still, my self was extinguished by love. Then came the morning, the pale early grayness that steals every color away and discloses the skeleton under the skin. Suddenly it seemed to me that Helen was dying and that I must wake her to keep her alive. She awoke and opened an eye. 'Do you think we could get some coffee and croissants?' she asked.

  "I was filled with happiness. Til try to bribe one of the guards,' I said.

  "Helen opened her other eye and looked at me. 'What has happened?' she asked. 'You look as if you'd won first prize in the lottery. Are we going to be released?'

  " 'No,' I said. 'I've released myself.'

  "She moved her head sleepily in my hands. 'Can't you give yourself any peace?'

  " 'Yes,' I said. 'I'll have to, in fact. For quite a while, I'm afraid. I won't have much chance to make my own decisions. It's a comfort if you look at it that way.'

  " 'Everything's a comfort,' said Helen with a yawn. 'As long as we live, everything is comforting, didn't you know that? Do you think they will shoot us as spies?'

  "'No. They'll lock us up.'

  " 'Will they lock up the refugees they don't regard as spies?'

  " 'Yes, they'll arrest everyone they lay hands on. They've arrested the men already.'

  "Helen half raised herself. 'What's the difference then?'

  " 'Maybe the others will be let out sooner.'

  " 'You never can tell. Maybe we'll get better treatment just because they take us for spies.'

  " 'That's nonsense, Helen.'

  "She shook her head. 'It's not nonsense. It's experience. Don't you know that in this century innocence is the worst crime and that the innocent are always punished the most severely? It seems to me you'd know that after being arrested in two countries. You and your dreams of justice! Is there any more cognac?'

  " 'Cognac and pâté.'

  " 'Give me both,' said Helen. 'It's an odd breakfast, but I'm afraid we have an adventurous life ahead of us.'

  " 'That's a good way to look at it,' I said, and gave her the cognac.

  " 'It's the only way. Would you rather die of bitterness? Once you discard the idea of justice, it's not so hard to take the whole business as an adventure. Don't you agree?'

  "The glorious smell of the old cognac and the succulent pâté hovered around Helen like an aura of happiness. She ate with gusto. I didn't know it would be so simple for you,' I said.

  " 'Don't worry about me,' she said, taking some white bread from her basket. I'll get by. Justice doesn't mean as much to women as to you.'

  " 'What do women care about?'

  " 'This.' She pointed to the bread and the botde and the pâté. 'Eat, darling. We'll come through all right. In ten years it will be a great adventure, and we'll tell our friends about it until they are bored stiff. Eat, man with the false name. What we eat now we won't have to carry later on.'

  "I won't tell you all the details," said Schwarz. "You know how it was with the refugees. I only spent a few days in the stadium at Colombes. Helen was sent to La Petite Roquette. On the last day, our hotelkeeper turned up in the stadium. I only saw him from a distance; we weren't allowed to speak to visitors. The patron left a small cake and a large bottle of cognac. In the cake I found a note: 'Madame is well and cheerful. She is not in danger. Expects to be sent to a women's camp that is being set up in the Pyrenees. Write via hotel. Madame est formidable!' Folded up inside was a tiny note in Helen's handwriting. 'Don't worry. The danger is past. It's still an adventure. See you soon. Love.'

  "She had succeeded in breaking the blockade—a very sloppy blockade, but still! I couldn't imagine how. She told me about it later. She had carried on about some important papers left behind in her room, and they had sent her to the hotel with a policeman. She had slipped the patron the note and told him in a whisper how to deliver it. The policeman, who had a soft spot for lovers, had closed an eye. She had brought back no papers, but perfume, cognac, and a basket full of food, instead. She loved to eat. I was never able to understand how she managed to stay slim. When in the days of our freedom I woke up and found her place in bed empty, I only had to go to the corner where we kept our food—she would be sitting there with a blissful smile in the moonlight, gnawing at a ham bone or stuffing on some dessert she had saved from dinner. And drinking wine out of the bottle. She was like a cat that gets hungry at night. The patron, she told me, was just ba
king the pâté when she was arrested; she had made the policeman wait till it was done. It was her favorite kind of pâté and she just had to take it along. She flatly refused to go without it. The policeman had grumbled but capitulated. They dislike dragging people to the paddy wagon. Helen even remembered to take a package of paper napkins.

  "Next day we were loaded into cars headed for the Pyrenees. This was the beginning of an epic of terror, comedy, escape, bureaucracy, despair, and love.

  CHAPTER 12

  "Some day, perhaps," said Schwarz, "our time will be known as the age of irony. Not the witty irony of the eighteenth century, but the stupid or malignant irony of a crude age of technological progress and cultural regression. Hitler keeps shouting that he is an apostle of peace and that other countries have forced war upon him; he not only tells the whole world, he believes it himself. Fifty million Germans believe it with him. The fact that they alone have been arming for years, and that no other country was prepared for war doesn't affect their opinion in the least. It was just one more irony that those of us who had escaped the German camps should have landed in French ones. You couldn't even be too indignant about it—a country that's fighting for its life has more important things to worry about than perfect justice for refugees. We weren't tortured, gassed, or shot, just interned; what more could we expect?"

  "When did you see your wife again?" I asked.

  "Not for a long time. Were you at Le Vernet?"

  "No, but I know it was one of the worst of the French camps."

  Schwarz smiled ironically. "That's a question of degree. Do you know the story about the crabs who were thrown into a pot of cold water to be boiled? When the temperature of the water rose to 120 degrees, they screamed that it was unbearable, and moaned for the happy time when it was only 100; when it went up to 140, they moaned for the time when it was only 120, when it was 160, for the time when it was only 140, and so on. Le Vernet was a thousand times better than the best German concentration camp; just as a concentration camp without gas chambers is better than one with gas chambers."

  I nodded. "What happened to you?"

  "Soon the cold weather came on. Naturally we didn't have enough blankets and there was no coal. The usual mismanagement. But unhappiness is harder to bear when you're freezing. I won't bore you with a description of winter in the camp. It's too easy to be ironical. If Helen and I had admitted we were Nazis, we would have fared better—we'd have been sent to a special camp. While we starved and froze and suffered from diarrhea, I saw pictures in the papers of interned German prisoners who were not refugees; they had knives and forks, chairs and tables, beds, blankets, and even their own mess hall. The papers wrote with pride of how well France was treating enemy aliens. There was no need to treat us refugees with kid gloves; we weren't dangerous.

  "I adapted myself. I took Helen's advice and discarded the idea of justice. In the evening after work, I sat on my 'bunk,' a straw pallet, three feet wide and six feet long, and worked on my state of mind. I trained myself to consider this period as a time of transition that had nothing to do with my personal self. Certain things happened in my environment and I learned to react like a clever animal. Heartbreak can kill you as easily as dysentery, and justice was a peacetime luxury."

  "Did you really believe that?" I asked.

  "No," said Schwarz. "I had to keep dinning it into my head. It was the little injustices—the smaller slice of bread, the heavier work load—that were hardest to take. You've got to learn to ignore these daily irritations or your resentment of the little things will black out the big ones."

  "So you lived like a clever animal."

  "Yes, until Helen's first letter came. That was two months later. It was sent by way of our hotel in Paris. I felt as if a window had been opened in a dark stuffy room. Life is still outside, but at least it exists again. Her letters came irregularly; sometimes there was none for weeks. It was strange how they changed and strengthened my image of Helen. She wrote , that she was doing all right, that she had finally been sent to a camp and had been working, first in the kitchen, then in the camp store. Twice she managed to send me a package of food, how, with the help of what dodges and bribes, I can't imagine. I began to see a new face in the letters. How much of that was due to absence, my own desires, the caprices of imagination, I don't know. Everything takes on almost supernatural proportions when you're isolated and reduced to a few letters; you know that. A word dropped at random, that would mean nothing if written in other circumstances, can become a thunderbolt that shatters your existence; and another, just as meaningless as the first, can give you weeks of warmth. You spend whole months mulling over things that the writer forgot the moment the letter was sealed. A photograph came; Helen standing outside her barracks with another woman and a man. They were French members of the camp staff, she wrote."

  Schwarz looked up. "How I studied that man's face! I borrowed a magnifying glass from a watchmaker. I couldn't make out why Helen had sent me the picture. She had probably thought nothing at all when she sent it. Or had she? I don't know. Have you ever felt that way?"

  "Everybody has," I said. "Prisoner's psychosis. There's nothing exceptional about it."

  The bar owner brought us our check. We were the last guests. "Is there some place else we can go?" Schwarz asked.

  He told us of a place. "They've got girls," he said. "Nice and fat. Not expensive."

  "Isn't there anywhere else?"

  "Not that I know of at this time of night." He put on his jacket. "I'll take you there if you want. I've got nothing to do. Those girls are pretty sly. I'll see you don't get cheated."

  "Can't we sit there without the girls?"

  "Without the girls?" The man looked baffled. Then a grin spread over his face. "No girls? Oh, I see. Sure, of course. But that's all they've got, just girls."

  He looked after us as we stepped out into the street. It was a wonderful dawn. The sun wasn't up yet, but the salt smell had grown stronger. Cars crept through the streets; the smell of coffee and sleep was wafted from open windows. The lights were all out. We heard the rumbling of an invisible cart a few streets away; fishing boats blossomed like yellow and red water lilies on the restless Tagus, and below, pale and still and without artificial light, lay the ship, the ark, the last hope. We went toward it down the hill.

  The brothel was pretty dismal. Four or five fat, slovenly women sat smoking and playing cards. After a listless attempt to engage our interest, they left us in peace. I looked at my watch. "It won't be much longer," Schwarz said. "And the consulates don't open until nine."

  I knew that as well as he did. What he didn't seem to know was that telling and listening aren't the same.

  "A year seems like an eternity," said Schwarz. "And then it doesn't seem long at all. I tried to escape in January when we were working outside the camp. I was caught two days later. The notorious Lieutenant G. lashed me across the face with his riding whip, and I was given three weeks in solitary on bread and water. On my second attempt I was caught right away. I gave up. It was just about impossible to move without ration cards and papers. Any gendarme could pick you up. And it was a long way to Helen's camp.

  "Then our situation changed. In May the real war started, and four weeks later it was over. We were in the Unoccupied Zone, but word went around that an Army commission or even the Gestapo was going to inspect the camp. I guess you remember the panic that broke loose?"

  "Yes," I said. "The panic, the suicides, the petitions to release us first, and the bureaucratic incompetence that often prevented this from being done. Not always. Sometimes there was an intelligent camp commander, who released the refugees on his own responsibility. Some of them, it's true, were picked up later in Marseille or at the border."

  "In Marseille! By that time Helen and I had the poison," Schwarz broke in. "Little capsules. They gave you a fatalistic peace of mind. A pharmacist in my camp sold them to me. Two capsules. I don't know exactly what it was, but I believed him when he said that you'
d die quickly and almost painlessly if you took one. He said the poison was enough for two. He sold it to me because he was afraid he'd take it himself some night, in the hour of despair, just before daybreak.

  "We were lined up like clay pigeons. The defeat had come too fast. No one had expected it so soon. We didn't know yet that England would not make peace. All we could see was that everything was lost—" Schwarz made a gesture of weariness—"and even now we can't be sure it isn't. We were pushed back to the coast. Ahead of us there was only the sea."

  The sea, I thought. And ships that still cross it.

  In the doorway appeared the owner of the bar we had just left. He greeted us with a grin and a mock military salute. Then he whispered something to the fat whores. One of them, a woman with an enormous bosom, came up to us. "Tell us how you do it."

  "What?"

  "It must hurt like hell."

  "What?" asked Schwarz absently.

  "The way sailors do it on the high seas!" shouted the bar owner from the doorway, laughing so hard I expected him to spit out his teeth.