“Do you have a berth?”
“Not yet, but perhaps one will be free later. I don’t especially need one; I slept all the way here.” He stroked the dog, who had stayed at Lillian’s side. “You’ll have to go into the baggage car for the time being, Wolf, but we’ll smuggle you out again later.”
“I can take him into my compartment.”
Boris nodded. “Conductors on French trains are always understanding. When we get to Zurich, we’ll consider what you want to do.”
“I want to go back,” Lillian said.
“Back? Where?” Volkov asked cautiously.
She was silent for a moment. “I was on the way back,” she said finally. “Believe it or not.”
“Why shouldn’t I believe it?”
“Why should you?”
“I once did almost exactly what you have done, Dusha. Many years ago. Later I went back, too.”
Lillian shredded a piece of bread on to her plate. “It’s no use if someone tells you, is it?”
“None whatsoever. We have to find out for ourselves. Otherwise we’d always think we had missed the most important thing. Do you have some idea where you want to go from Zurich?”
“To some sanatorium. They won’t take me back at Bella Vista.”
“Of course they’ll take you. But are you certain that you want to go back? You’re exhausted right now and need rest. That can change.”
“I want to go back.”
“On account of Clerfayt?” Volkov asked.
“Clerfayt has nothing to do with it. I was all ready to go back before it happened.”
“Why?”
“For many reasons. I don’t know all of them now. They were so important that I’ve forgotten them.”
“If you want to stay down here—you don’t have to be alone. I can stay, too.”
Lillian shook her head. “No, Boris. I’ve had enough. I want to go back. But perhaps you have the feeling you would like to stay here? It’s been so long since you were out in the world.”
Volkov smiled. “I already know it quite well—”
She nodded. “So I’ve heard. I know it, too, now.”
In Zurich, Volkov telephoned the sanatorium. “Is she still alive?” the Dalai Lama asked grudgingly. “All right, as far as I’m concerned she can return.”
Lillian remained a week at the Hotel Dolder in Zurich. She stayed in bed a good deal. Suddenly she felt very tired. The fever came every evening. Volkov called in a doctor. “She should have gone to the hospital long ago,” the doctor told him. “Leave her here.”
“But she doesn’t want to stay here. She wants to go back to the mountains.”
The doctor shrugged. “As you like. But at least take an ambulance.”
Volkov promised, but he knew that he would not take one. His respect for life did not go so far; he knew only too well that too much solicitude could kill a patient just as easily as too little. To treat Lillian as if she were dying would be worse than to risk the ride by car.
She looked brightly at him when he returned from his talk with the doctor. Since the disease had been manifesting itself more openly, she had grown cheerful—as if the vague feeling of guilt she had felt over Clerfayt’s death were thereby wiped out. Grief for someone else, she thought with a trace of irony, became more bearable when you knew that you yourself did not have long to live. Even her feeling of rebellion against the disease had evaporated since Clerfayt’s death. No one escaped, neither the sick nor the healthy; and that made for a paradoxical compensation. “Poor Boris,” she said. “What did the doctor tell you? That I won’t survive the trip?”
“Nothing of the sort.”
“I will survive it,” Lillian said, with gentle mockery. “Just because he said I wouldn’t.”
Volkov looked at her in surprise. “That’s true, Dusha. I feel that, too.”
“All right. Then give me some vodka,” Lillian said. She held out her glass to him.
“What swindlers we are, Boris, with our little tricks. But what else can we do? Since we have the fear, we may as well make something of it. Fireworks, or a mirage, or some little snowflake of wisdom that soon melts.”
They drove up to the mountains on a very mild, warm day. Halfway up the pass, they met a car on a hairpin turn. It stopped to let them by. “Hollmann!” Lillian cried. “Why, it’s Hollmann!”
The man in the other car looked up from the road. “Lillian! And Boris! But …”
Behind him, an impatient Italian blew his horn; he was driving a little Fiat and imagining that he was the racer Nuvolari. “I’ll park the car,” Hollmann called. “Wait for me.”
He drove on a short distance, let the Italian pass, and came back on foot. “What’s up, Hollmann?” Lillian asked. “Where are you going?”
“I told you I was cured, didn’t I?”
“And the car?”
“Borrowed. It seems so silly to go by train. Now that I’ve been hired again!”
“Hired? By whom?”
“By our old firm. They telephoned me yesterday. They need someone now.” Hollmann was silent for a moment. Then he said, “They have Torriani already, of course; now they want to have a try with me, too. If all goes well, I’ll be driving in the smaller races soon. Then the big ones. Keep your fingers crossed for me! How nice to have seen you again, Lillian!”
Lillian waved to him. They saw him once more, from a higher curve, driving down the road like a blue insect to take Clerfayt’s place, as Clerfayt had taken the place of another, and as another would some day take Hollmann’s. Lillian waved at him. They had not spoken of Clerfayt.
———
She died six weeks later, on a bright summer afternoon so still that the landscape seemed to be holding its breath. She died quickly and surprisingly and alone. Boris had gone down to the village for a short time. When he returned, he found her dead on her bed. Her face was distorted; she had suffocated during a hemorrhage, and her hands were close to her throat; but a short while afterward her features smoothed and her face became more beautiful than Boris had seen it in a long time. He believed also that she had been happy, insofar as any human being can ever be called happy.
To Paulette Goddard Remarque
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.
Erich Maria Remarque, Heaven Has No Favorites
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