He lit his cigarette. Without glancing at her he knew what Joan looked like now. Pale, her eyes dark, silent, concentrated, almost beseeching, frail—and never to be overcome. That was how she had looked in her apartment that afternoon—like an angel of the annunciation, full of faith and radiant conviction, an angel pretending to save, while she attempted to crucify one slowly so that one would not escape her.
“Yes,” he said. “It is one of our excuses.”
“It is no excuse. One is not happy doing it. One is pitched into it and can’t help it. It is something sinister, a maze of things, a spasm—something you have got to go through. You can’t run away. It comes after you. It catches up with you. You don’t want it. But it is stronger.”
“Why do you think about it? Follow it if it is stronger.”
“That’s what I am doing. I know there is nothing else I can do. But—” Her voice changed. “Ravic, I must not lose you. I don’t know what it is, but I can’t lose you.”
Ravic smoked and did not taste the smoke. You don’t want to lose me, he thought. Nor the other man either. That’s it. That you are able to do such a thing! That’s why I must get away from you. It isn’t the one man—that could be quickly forgotten. You had every excuse for it. But that it has got hold of you so that you can’t get away, that’s the thing. You will get away. But it will happen again. It will happen time and again. It is in you. I too could do that earlier. I can’t do it with you. That’s why I must get away from you. Now I may still be able to do it. Next time—
“You think it is an extraordinary situation,” he said. “It is the commonest in the world. The husband and the lover.”
“That’s not true.”
“It is. It has many variations. Yours is one of them.”
“How can you say anything like that!” She jumped up. “You are anything but that and you never were and you’ll never be. The other one is much more—” She interrupted herself. “No, it isn’t that way either. I can’t explain it.”
“Let’s say security and adventure. It sounds better. It is the same. You want to have the one and don’t want to let go the other.”
She shook her head. “Ravic,” she said, out of the dark, in a voice that moved his heart. “One can use good words for it and bad ones. It doesn’t change anything. I love you and I’ll love you until the end of my life. That I know and that is clear to me. You are the horizon and all my thoughts end in you. Whatever happens is still always within you. It is no deceit. It takes nothing from you. That’s why I come to you again and again and that’s why I can’t regret it and why I can’t feel guilty.”
“There is no guilt in feelings ever, Joan. What made you think of such a thing?”
“I have thought of it. I have thought so much about it, Ravic. About you and about myself. You never wholly wanted me. Perhaps you don’t realize it yourself. There was always something that was closed off from me. I could never get completely into you. I wanted to! How much I wanted to! It was always as if you might go away any minute. I never felt sure. The fact that the police sent you away, that you had to leave—it might just as well have happened in another way—that you would have gone one day, on your own, that you would simply not have been here any more, off somewhere—”
Ravic stared at the face in the uncertain dark before him. There was something right in what she said.
“It was always that way,” she continued. “Always. And then someone came who wanted me, nothing but me, wholly and forever, without any complications. I laughed, I did not want it, I played with it, it seemed so harmless, so easy to push aside again—and then suddenly it became more, a compulsion, also there was something within me that wanted too, I resisted but it did not help, I did not belong there and not everything within me wanted it, a part of me only, but it pushed me, it was like a slow landslide which one laughs at in the beginning and suddenly there is nothing left to hold onto and you can’t resist any longer. But I don’t belong there, Ravic. I belong to you.”
He threw his cigarette out the window. It flew like a glowworm down into the yard. “What has happened has happened, Joan,” he said. “We can’t change it now.”
“I don’t want to change anything. It will pass. I belong to you. Why do I come back again? Why do I stand before your door? Why do I wait for you here and you throw me out and I will come again? I know you won’t believe it and you think I have other reasons. What reasons, then? If this other thing satisfied me, I would not have come back. I’d have forgotten you. You say what I look for with you is security. That’s not true. It is love.”
Words, Ravic thought. Sweet words. Gentle deceptive balm. Help, love, to belong together, to come back again—words, sweet words. Nothing but words. How many words existed for this simple, wild, cruel attraction of two bodies! What a rainbow of imagination, lies, sentiment, and self-deception enclosed it! There he stood on this farewell night, there he stood, calm, in the dark, and he let this rain of sweet words trickle over him, words that meant nothing but farewell, farewell. When one talked about it, it was already lost. The God of Love had a bloodstained forehead. He did not know anything about words. “You must go now, Joan.”
She got up. “I want to stay here. Let me stay here. Only tonight.”
He shook his head. “What do you take me for? I’m not an automaton.”
She leaned against him. He felt her trembling.
“It doesn’t matter. Let me stay here.”
He pushed her gently away. “You shouldn’t start with me just to deceive the other man. He’ll have to suffer enough without that.”
“I can’t go home alone now.”
“You won’t have to be alone for long.”
“I will, I am alone. For days now. He’s away. He isn’t in Paris.”
“So—” Ravic replied calmly. He looked at her. “Well, at least you are candid. One knows where one stands with you.”
“That’s not why I came.”
“Of course not.”
“There was no need for me to tell you.”
“Right.”
“Ravic, I don’t want to go home alone.”
“Then I’ll take you home.”
She slowly took one step backward. “You don’t love me any more—” she said softly and almost threateningly.
“Did you come to find that out?”
“Yes—that too. Not only that—but that was part of it.”
“My God, Joan,” Ravic replied impatiently. “Then you have just heard one of the most candid confessions of love.”
She did not answer. She looked at him. “Do you think that otherwise I would mind keeping you here, no matter who you’re living with?” he said.
Slowly she began to smile. It wasn’t really a smile—it was a radiance from within as if someone had lit a lamp in her and the glow was gradually mounting to her eyes. “Thank you, Ravic,” she said. And after a while warily, still looking at him, “You won’t leave me?”
“Why do you ask?”
“You’ll wait? You won’t leave me?”
“I think there is not much danger. To judge by my experience with you.”
“Thank you.” She was changed. How quickly she consoles herself, he thought. But why shouldn’t she? She thought she had gained what she wanted even without staying there. She kissed him. “I knew you would be this way, Ravic. You had to be this way. Now I’ll go. Don’t take me home. Now I can go alone.”
She stood by the door. “Don’t come again,” he said. “And don’t think about anything. You won’t perish.”
“No. Good night, Ravic.”
“Good night, Joan.”
He went to the wall and turned on the light. You have to be this way—he shook himself slightly. They are made of clay and gold, he thought. Of lies and infatuation. Of deception and shameless truth. He sat down by the window. From below still came the low, monotonous wailing. A woman who had deceived her husband and was bewailing him because he was dead. But perhaps only because her
religion prescribed it. Ravic wondered that he was not more unhappy.
23
“YES, I’M BACK, RAVIC,” Kate Hegstroem said.
She was sitting in her room in the Hôtel Lancaster. She had become thinner. The flesh under her skin appeared sunken, as if it had been hollowed out from inside with fine instruments. Her features stood out more sharply and her skin was like silk that would tear easily.
“I thought you were still in Florence—or in Cannes—or America by now.”
“I was in Florence the whole time. In Fiesole. Until I couldn’t stand it any more. Do you remember how I tried to persuade you to come with me? Books, a fireplace, evenings, peace? The books were there—the fireplace too—but the peace! Ravic, even the town of Francis of Assisi has become loud. Loud and disquieting like everything else there. Where he preached love to the birds, there are now files of men in uniform marching hither and yon, growing drunk on boasts, big words, and groundless hate.”
“But it was always that way, Kate.”
“Not this way. A few years ago my major-domo was still a friendly man in Manchester trousers and bast shoes. Now he is a hero in high boots and black shirt, complete with daggers, and he delivers speeches saying that the Mediterranean Sea must become Italian, that England must be destroyed, and that Nice, Corsica, and Savoy must be returned to Italy. Ravic, this amiable nation that hasn’t won a war for ages has gone mad since she was allowed to win in Ethiopia and Spain. Friends of mine who were reasonable even a few years ago seriously believe today that they can conquer England within three months. The country is boiling. What’s going on? I fled from the brutality of brown shirts in Vienna; now I have left Italy because of the madness of black ones; somewhere else there are said to be green ones, in America silver ones, of course—is the world in the midst of a shirt delirium?”
“Apparently. But that will change soon. The single color will be red.”
“Red?”
“Yes. Red like blood.”
Kate Hegstroem looked down into the yard. The late afternoon light filtered soft and green through the foliage of the chestnut trees. “One can’t believe it,” she said. “Two wars within twenty years—that’s too much. We are still too tired from the first.”
“Only the victors. Not the vanquished. To be victorious makes one careless.”
“Yes, maybe.” She looked at him. “Then there isn’t much time left, is there?”
“Not too much now, I’m afraid.”
“Do you think there will be enough for me?”
“Why not?” Ravic glanced up. She did not avoid his eyes. “Did you see Fiola?” he asked.
“Yes, once or twice. He was one of the few who had not yet been infected with the black pest.”
Ravic did not answer. He waited.
Kate Hegstroem took a string of pearls from the table and let them glide through her hands. Between her long thin fingers they were like a costly rosary. “I almost feel like the Wandering Jew,” she said. “In search of a little peace. But I seem to have set out at the wrong time. It is no longer anywhere. Only here—here there is still a remnant of it.”
Ravic looked at the pearls. They were formed by shapeless gray mollusks irritated by a foreign substance, a grain of sand between their shells. Such softly gleaming beauty arose from an accidental irritation. One should make a note of that, he thought. “Didn’t you intend to go to America, Kate? Anyone who can leave Europe should do so. It is too late for anything else.”
“Do you want to send me away?”
“No. But didn’t you say last time that you intended to settle your affairs and return to America?”
“Yes. But now I no longer want to. Not yet. I’ll stay on here for some time.”
“Paris is hot and unpleasant in summer.”
She put her pearls aside. “Not if it is the last summer, Ravic.”
“The last?”
“Yes. The last before I go back.”
Ravic was silent. How much does she know? he wondered. What has Fiola told her?
“What’s going on at the Scheherazade?” she asked.
“I haven’t been there for a long time. Morosow says it is overcrowded every night. As all other places are.”
“In summer?”
“Yes, in summer when most of them used to be closed. Are you surprised at that?”
“No. Everyone is grasping whatever he can before the end.”
“Yes,” Ravic said.
“Will you take me there some time?”
“Of course, Kate. Whenever you like. I thought you didn’t want to go there again.”
“I thought so, too. I’ve changed my mind. I too intend to grasp whatever I still can.”
He looked at her. “All right, Kate,” he said then. “Whenever you like.”
He got up. She went to the door with him. She leaned against the doorframe, slender, with her dry, silken skin that looked as though it would rustle if one touched it. Her eyes were very clear and larger than before. She gave him her hand. It was hot and dry. “Why didn’t you tell me what was wrong with me?” she asked lightly as if she were asking about the weather.
He stared at her and did not answer.
“I could have stood it,” she said and the ghost of an ironical smile with no reproach in it flitted across her face. “Adieu, Ravic!”
The man without the stomach was dead. He had moaned for three days and by that time morphine was of little help. Ravic and Veber had known that he would die. They could have spared him these three last days. They had not done it because there was a religion that preached love of one’s neighbor and prohibited the shortening of his sufferings. And there was a law to back it up.
“Did you send a wire to his family?” Ravic asked.
“He has none,” Veber said.
“Or to any other of his connections?”
“There is nobody.”
“Nobody?”
“Nobody. The concierge from his apartment house was here. He never received any letters, except catalogues from mail-order houses and pamphlets about alcoholism, tuberculosis, venereal disease, and the like. He never had visitors. He had paid in advance for the operation and four weeks of hospitalization. Two weeks of hospitalization too much. The concierge claims he promised her everything he possessed because she had taken care of him. She demanded a refund for the two weeks. She had been like a mother to him. You should have seen that mother. She said she had been put to all kinds of expenses for him. She had paid out the money for his rent. I told her that he had paid here in advance; there was no good reason why he shouldn’t have done it for his apartment as well. Besides, all that was a matter for the police. Whereupon she cursed me.”
“Money,” Ravic said. “How inventive it makes one!”
Veber laughed. “We’ll inform the authorities. They can take care of it. And the funeral as well.”
Ravic cast one more look at the man without relatives and stomach. There he lay and his face was changing during this hour as it had never changed during the thirty-five years of his life. Out of the frozen spasm of his last breath was gradually emerging the stark face of death. The accidental in it was melting away, the marks of dying were being washed out, and from this twisted, ordinary face was being formed, austere and silent, the eternal mask.
Ravic went out. He met the night nurse in the corridor. She had just arrived. “The man in twelve is dead,” he said. “He died half an hour ago. You don’t have to sit up any more.” And when he saw her face, “Did he leave you anything?”
She hesitated. “No. He was a very cool person. And he hardly spoke at all in the last days.”
“No, he didn’t.”
The nurse looked at Ravic in a housewifely manner. “He had a wonderful dressing case. All silver. In fact, rather too dainty for a man. More for a lady.”
“Didn’t you tell him?”
“We did speak about it once. Tuesday night; at that time he was calmer. But he said that silver was all right for a man
too. And the brushes were so good. They were no longer to be had nowadays. Otherwise he spoke little.”
“The silver will go to the authorities now. He had no relatives.”
The nurse nodded understandingly. “It’s a pity! It’ll get black. And brushes deteriorate if they aren’t new and don’t get used. They should be washed first.”
“Yes, it’s a pity,” Ravic said. “It would have been better if you had got them. Then, at least, someone would have enjoyed them.”
The nurse smiled gratefully. “It doesn’t matter. I didn’t expect anything. Dying people rarely give anything away. Only those who are recuperating. Dying people don’t want to believe that they must die. That’s why they don’t do it. Then too, some don’t do it out of spite. You wouldn’t believe it, doctor, how terrible dying people can be! What they say sometimes before they die!”
Her red-cheeked childish face was open and clear. She did not pay any attention to what happened around her if it did not affect her small world. Dying people were naughty or helpless children. One took care of them until they were dead, and then new ones came, some of them became healthy and were grateful, others were not, and some just died. That’s how it was. Nothing to disquiet one. It was much more important whether the prices at the sale at Bon Marché were reduced, or Cousin Jean was to marry Anne Couturier.
It actually was more important, Ravic thought. The small circle that protected one from chaos. Otherwise where would one be?
He was sitting in front of the Café Triomphe. The night was pallid and cloudy. It was warm, and somewhere lightning flashed noiselessly. Life crept more densely along the sidewalks. A woman with a blue satin hat sat down at his table.
“Will you buy me a vermouth?” she asked.
“Yes. But leave me alone. I’m waiting for someone.”
“We can wait together.”
“Better not. I’m waiting for a woman wrestler from the Palais du Sport.”
The woman smiled. She was so thickly painted that one saw the smile only on her lips. Everything else was a white mask. “Come with me,” she said. “I have a sweet apartment. And I am good.”