Arch of Triumph (29 page)

“Not bad,” Ravic said. “You are a child with deliberation. Wait till I put the top up.”

“Leave it down! My coat will keep me warm enough. Let’s drive slowly. Past all the cafés where the people who have nothing to do but be happy sit and have no arguments.”

She slid onto the seat beside him and kissed him. “This is the first time I’ve been on the Riviera, Ravic,” she said. “Don’t be hard on me! This is the first time I’ve really been with you and the nights aren’t cold any more and I am happy.”

He drove the car out of the heavy traffic to the road past the Hôtel Carlton and then in the direction of Juan-les-Pins. “The first time,” she repeated. “The first time, Ravic, and I know everything you could answer, and it has nothing to do with it.” She leaned close to him and put her head on his shoulder. “Forget what happened today! Don’t think about it. You are a wonderful driver, Ravic, do you know that? What you did just now was beautiful. The idiots were saying the same thing. Yesterday they saw what you could do with a car. You are uncanny. You have no past. One doesn’t know anything about you. I know a hundred times more
about the life of those idiots by now than about yours. Do you think that I could get some calvados somewhere? I need some after all the excitement tonight. It is difficult to live with you.”

The car swept over the road like a low-flying bird. “Too fast?” Ravic asked.

“No! Drive faster! So that it blows through us like wind through a tree. How the night rushes past! I am penetrated through and through by love. One can look through me because of my love. I love you so much that my heart spreads out like a woman in a cornfield before a man who looks at her. My heart wants to lie down on the ground. In a meadow. It wants to lie and to fly. It is mad. It loves you when you drive a car. Let’s never go back to Paris. Let’s steal a trunk full of jewelry or rob a bank and take this car and never come back.”

Ravic stopped in front of a little bar. The hum of the motor died and softly from afar came suddenly the deep breathing of the sea. “Come,” he said. “We’ll get your calvados here. How much have you had already?”

“Too much. Because of you. Besides, all of a sudden I couldn’t listen to the babbling of those idiots any longer.”

“Then why didn’t you come to me?”

“I have come to you.”

“Yes. When you thought I would leave. Have you had anything to eat?”

“Not much. I’m hungry. Did you win?”

“Yes.”

“Then let’s drive to the most expensive restaurant and eat caviar and drink champagne and let’s be as our parents were before all these wars, carefree and sentimental and without fear, uninhibited and full of bad taste, with tears, the moon, oleanders, violins, the ocean, and love. And I want to believe that we’ll have children and a garden and a house and you’ll have a passport and a future, and I
have given up a great career for your sake and we still love each other after twenty years and are jealous and you still think me beautiful and I cannot sleep when you aren’t home for a night, and …”

He saw tears streaming down her face. She smiled. “That is all part of it, beloved—all part of that bad taste.…”

“Come,” he said, “we’ll drive to the Château Madrid. That’s in the mountains and they have Russian gypsies there and you shall have anything you want.”

It was early in the morning. The sea below was gray and without waves. The sky had neither clouds nor colors. Only on the horizon a small streak of silver emerged from the water. It was so still that they heard each other breathing. They were the last guests up there. The gypsies had driven past them in an old Ford down the serpentine road. The waiter in a Citroën. The cook, to get supplies, in a six-passenger 1929 Delahaye.

“Daybreak,” Ravic said. “Now the night is somewhere on the other side of the earth. There will be aeroplanes some time with which one will be able to overtake it. They will go as fast as the earth turns. Then if you tell me again at four o’clock in the morning that you love me we can let it be four o’clock forever; we will simply fly around the earth with time and the hours will stand still.”

Joan leaned against him. “I can’t help it. It is beautiful! It is heartbreakingly beautiful. You may laugh—”

“It is beautiful, Joan.”

She looked at him. “Where is the plane of which you spoke? We’ll be old, beloved, when your plane is invented. And I don’t want to get old. Do you?”

“Yes.”

“Really?”

“As old as possible.”

“Why?”

“I want to see what becomes of this planet.”

“I don’t want to get old.”

“You won’t get old. Life will pass over your face, that will be all, and it will become more beautiful. One is old only when one no longer feels.”

“No. When one no longer loves.”

Ravic did not answer. To leave you, he thought. To leave you! What was I thinking a few hours ago in Cannes?

She stirred in his arms. “Now the party is over and I am going home with you and we are going to sleep together. How beautiful it all is! How beautiful it is when one lives completely and not with just a part of oneself. When one is full to the rim and calm because there is nothing more to get in. Come, let’s drive home. To our borrowed home, to that white hotel that looks like a country house.”

The car slid down the serpentine road almost without aid of the motor. The day was slowly becoming brighter. The earth smelled of dew. Ravic turned off the headlights. When they were passing the Corniche they met vans with vegetables and flowers. They were on the road to Nice. Later they passed a company of spahis. They heard the trotting of the horses through the droning of the motor. It sounded clear and almost artificial on the macadam road. The riders’ faces were dark under their burnooses.

Ravic looked at Joan. She smiled at him. Her face was pale and tired and more fragile than before. In its soft fatigue it seemed to him more beautiful than ever on this magic, dark, still morning whose yesterday was sunk in the distance and which had not as yet any hour; which still floated timelessly—full of quietude, without fear or question.

The bay of Antibes came toward them in a great circle. The dawn was steadily growing lighter. Iron-gray shadows of four men-of-war, three destroyers and a cruiser, stood against the brightening day. They must have come into the harbor during the night. Low and menacing and silent they stood against the receding sky. Ravic looked down at Joan. She had fallen asleep on his shoulder.

RAVIC WAS GOING TO
the hospital. He had been back from the Riviera for a week. Suddenly he stopped. What he saw was like something out of a child’s toy box. The new building shone in the sun as if it had been constructed from a model kit; the scaffolding stood out against the bright sky like filigree—and when a beam with a figure on it began to topple, it looked as if a matchstick with a fly on it were tumbling down. It fell and fell and seemed to fall endlessly—the figure freed itself and now it was like a tiny doll that stretched out its arms and sailed clumsily through space. It was as if the world were frozen and still as death for a moment. Nothing stirred, no breeze, no breath, no sound—only the little figure and the rigid beam fell and fell—

Then suddenly everything was noise and movement. Ravic realized that he had been holding his breath. He ran.

The victim lay on the pavement. A second ago the street had been almost empty. Now it was swarming with people. They came from all directions as if an alarm had sounded. Ravic forced his way through the crowd. He noticed that two workers were attempting
to lift the victim. “Don’t lift him! Leave him where he is!” he shouted.

The people around and in front of him made way. The two workers held the victim half suspended. “Let him down slowly! Careful! Slowly!”

“What are you?” one of the workers asked. “A doctor?”

“Yes.”

“All right.”

The workers laid the victim on the pavement. Ravic knelt beside him and examined him. He carefully opened the sweaty blouse and felt the body. Then he rose. “What?” asked the worker who had spoken to him before. “Unconscious, isn’t he?”

Ravic shook his head. “What?” the worker asked.

“Dead,” Ravic said.

“Dead?”

“Yes.”

“But—” the man said incredulously, “we had just been eating lunch together.”

“Is there a doctor here?” someone asked behind the ring of gaping people.

“What’s the matter?” Ravic said.

“Is there a doctor here? Quick!”

“What’s the matter?”

“That woman—”

“What woman?”

“The beam hit her. She’s bleeding.”

Ravic forced his way out through the crowd. A short woman with a large blue apron lay on a heap of sand beside a lime trough. Her face was wrinkled, very pale, and her eyes were as motionless as lumps of coal. Blood spurted like a little fountain from below her neck. It spurted sideways in a throbbing, oblique ray and gave
a strange impression of disorder. Under her head a dark pool was quickly seeping into the sand.

Ravic pressed his fingers on the artery. He pulled out of his pocket a bandage and the small first-aid kit he always kept with him. “Hold this!” he said to the man next to him.

Four hands grasped for the bag simultaneously. It fell to the sand and opened. He pulled out the scissors and a stick and tore open the bandage.

The woman did not say anything. Not even her eyes moved. She was rigid and every muscle of her body was tense. “Everything will be all right, mother,” Ravic said. “Everything will be all right.”

The beam had struck her shoulder and neck. The shoulder was crushed; her collarbone was broken and the joint smashed. It would remain stiff. “It is your left arm,” Ravic said and carefully examined the neck. The skin was lacerated, but everything else was uninjured. The foot was twisted; he tapped the bone and the leg. Gray stockings, well mended but whole, tied under the knee with a black ribbon—with what detail one always saw all this! Black laced boots, mended, the laces tied with a double knot, the shoes repaired at the toe.

“Has anyone telephoned for an ambulance?” he asked.

Nobody answered. “I think the policeman has,” someone said after a while.

Ravic raised his head. “Policeman? Where is he?”

“Over there—with the other—”

Ravic got up. “Everything has been taken care of then.”

He was about to walk away. At this moment the policeman pushed through the crowd. He was a young man with a notebook in his hand. He excitedly licked his short, blunt pencil.

“One moment,” he said and started to write.

“Everything has been taken care of here,” Ravic said.

“One moment, sir!”

“I’m in a hurry. I have an urgent case.”

“One moment, sir. Are you the physician?”

“I’ve tied off the artery, that’s all. Now all that’s needed is to wait for the ambulance.”

“One moment, doctor! I must put down your name. You are a witness.”

“I didn’t see the accident. I happened to come by afterwards.”

“Nevertheless, I must put down everything. This is a serious accident, doctor!”

“I can see that,” Ravic said.

The policeman tried to learn the woman’s name. The woman could not answer. She only stared at him without seeing him. The policeman bent over her zealously. Ravic looked around. The crowd fenced him in like a wall. He could not get through.

“Listen,” he said to the policeman. “I’m in a great hurry—”

“Very well, doctor. Don’t make it more difficult. I must put everything down in order. The fact that you are a witness is important. The woman may die.”

“She won’t die.”

“No one can tell about that. And then there is the question of compensation.”

“Did you call for an ambulance?”

“My colleague is attending to that. Don’t bother me now or it will take that much longer.”

“The woman is half dead and you want to disappear,” one of the workmen said reproachfully to Ravic.

“She’d be dead by now if I hadn’t been here.”

“Well then,” the workman said without obvious logic. “You’ve got to stay.”

The shutter of a camera clicked. A man wearing a hat turned up
in front, smiled. “Will you just go through that again as if you were applying the bandage?” he asked Ravic.

“No.”

“It’s for the press,” the man said. “Your picture will be in the paper with your address and a caption saying you saved the woman’s life. Good publicity. Please, over here, this way—the light is better here.”

“Go to hell,” Ravic said. “The woman urgently needs an ambulance. The bandage can’t remain like that for long. See that an ambulance is called.”

“One thing after the other, doctor!” the policeman declared. “First I must finish the report.”

“Has the deceased told you his name yet?” asked a half-grown youth.

“Ta gueule!”
The policeman spat in front of the boy’s feet.

“Take another picture from here,” someone said to the photographer.

“Why?”

“So that it will show that the woman was on the closed-off part of the sidewalk. See that—” He pointed at a board that was standing sidewise, with the inscription:
Attention! Danger!
“Take the picture so that one can see it. We need it. Compensation is out of the question here.”