The night in Lisbon
Page 25
I often thought of Helen, whom I had only seen dead, and for a time, when I was living alone, I even dreamed of her. The first night at sea, I had thrown the letters Schwarz had given me overboard without reading them. In one of the envelopes I felt a small hard object. I had removed it in the darkness. Later, under the light, I saw that it was a flat piece of amber, in which thousands of years ago a tiny gnat had been captured and petrified. I had kept it—the death struggle of a gnat, preserved in a cage of golden tears, while its fellows had frozen or been eaten, and vanished from the face of the earth.
After the war I went back to Europe. I had some difficulty in establishing my identity, because at that time there were thousands of members of the master race in Germany trying to lose theirs. I gave the Schwarz passport to a Russian who had fled across the border—a new wave of refugees had begun. Heaven only knows what has become of it since. As for Schwarz, I never heard anything more of him. I even went to Osnabrück once and asked about him, though I had forgotten his real name. But the city was in ruins, no one had heard of him, and no one was interested. On the way back to the station I thought I recognized him. I ran after him. But it was a postal clerk, who told me that his name was Jansen and that he had three children.
About the Author
ERICH MARIA REMARQUE, who was born in Germany, was drafted into the German army during World War I. Through the hazardous years following the war he worked at many occupations—schoolteacher, small-town drama critic, racing driver, editor of a sports magazine. His first novel, All Quiet on the Western Front, was published in Germany in 1928. A brilliant success, selling over a million copies, it was the first of many literary triumphs. 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 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 September 1970.