Arch of Triumph (46 page)

Before he could begin to read, the telephone rang. He did not lift the receiver. It rang for a long time. A few minutes later when it was silent again he lifted the receiver and asked the concierge who had called. “She did not mention her name,” the man declared. Ravic could hear that he was eating.

“Was it a woman?”

“Yes.”

“With an accent?”

“That I don’t know.” The man continued to eat. Ravic called up Veber’s hospital. No one had called him from there. Nor from
Durant’s hospital. He called the Hôtel Lancaster as well. He was told by the switchboard girl that no one had called his number from there. So it must have been Joan. Probably she had telephoned from the Scheherazade.

After an hour the telephone rang again. Ravic put his book aside. He rose and went to the window. He propped up his elbows on the window sill and waited. The soft wind brought up the scent of lilies. The refugee Wiesenhoff had replaced the withered carnations in front of his window with them. Now the house smelled like a funeral chapel or a cloister garden on warm nights. Ravic did not know whether Wiesenhoff had done it as an act of piety for old Goldberg, or merely because lilies grew well in wooden boxes. The telephone was silent. Tonight perhaps I’ll sleep, he thought, and went back to bed.

Joan came while he was asleep. She turned on the ceiling light at once and remained standing in the doorway. He opened his eyes. “Are you alone?” she asked.

“No. Turn off the light and go.”

She hesitated for a moment. Then she went to the bathroom and opened the door. “A fraud,” she said and smiled.

“Go to the devil. I’m tired.”

“Tired? What from?”

“Tired. Adieu.”

She came closer. “You’ve just come home. I’ve called up every ten minutes.”

She glanced at him. He did not say that she was lying. She had changed her dress. She has slept with that fellow, sent him home, and now she has come to surprise me and to show Kate Hegstroem, whom she believed to be here, that I am a damned whoremaster on whom women drop in at night and whom one had
better avoid, he thought. He smiled against his will. Perfect action unfortunately compelled his admiration, even when it was directed against himself.

“Why are you laughing?” Joan asked sharply.

“I’m laughing. That’s all. Turn out the light. You look ghastly in it. And go.”

She paid no attention. “Who was the whore you were with?”

Ravic half straightened up. “Get out of here or I’ll throw something at you.”

“Oh I see—” She studied him. “So that’s it! It has gone that far—”

Ravic reached for a cigarette. “Don’t make yourself ridiculous. You are living with another man and here you put on an act as if you were jealous. Go back to your actor and leave me alone!”

“That’s something entirely different.”

“Of course.”

“Of course it is something different!” she burst out suddenly. “You know very well it is something different. It is something for which I am not responsible. I’m not happy about it. It has happened, I don’t know how—”

“It always happens, one doesn’t know how—”

She stared at him. “You—you were so sure all the time. You were so smug it drove one crazy! There was nothing that could make you lose your self-assurance! I hated your superiority! How often I hated it! I need enthusiasm! I need someone who is mad about me! I need someone who cannot live without me! You can live without me. You always could! You did not need me. You are cold! You are empty! You don’t know anything about love! You were never altogether with me! I told you a lie before when I said it happened this way because you were gone for two months! It would have happened this way even if you had stayed! Don’t laugh! I know the difference, I know all about it, I know that the
other one is not intelligent and not like you, but he gives himself to me, nothing except me is important to him, he doesn’t think of anything except me and doesn’t want anything except me and doesn’t know anything except me, and that’s what I need!”

She stood before his bed, breathing heavily. Ravic reached for a bottle of calvados. “Then why are you here?” he asked.

She did not answer at once. “You know,” she said then in a low voice. “Why do you ask?”

He filled a glass and held it out to her. “I don’t want to drink,” she declared. “What woman was that?”

“A patient.” Ravic was not in the mood to lie. “A woman who is very sick.”

“That’s not true. Find a better lie. A sick woman is in the hospital. Not in a night club.”

Ravic put back the glass. Truth often seemed so improbable. “It is true,” he said.

“Do you love her?”

“What does that matter to you?”

“Do you love her?”

“What does it really matter to you, Joan?”

“It does! As long as you do not love anyone—” She hesitated.

“You called the woman a whore before. How could there be any question of love?”

“I only said that. I could see right away that she wasn’t. That’s why I said it. I wouldn’t have come because of a whore. Do you love her?”

“Turn off the light and go.”

She came closer. “I knew it. I saw it.”

“Go to hell,” Ravic said. “I’m tired. Go to hell with your cheap charade which you think is something that has never happened before—one man for intoxication, sudden love, or your career—and the other whom you declare you love more deeply and differently,
as a haven for the times between, if that ass puts up with it. Go to hell; you have too many kinds of love.”

“It isn’t true, not the way you put it. It’s different. It’s not true. I want to come back to you. I’m going to come back to you.”

Ravic refilled his glass. “It’s possible that you would like to. But it is only an illusion. An illusion which you have produced to make things easier for yourself. You will never come back.”

“I will!”

“No. At best for a short while. Then someone else would come along again who doesn’t want anything but you, only you, and it would go on this way. A wonderful future for me.”

“No, no! I’ll stay with you.”

Ravic laughed. “Joan,” he said almost tenderly, “you won’t stay with me. One can’t lock up the wind. Nor the water. If one does, they spoil. Imprisoned wind becomes stale air. You are not made to stay anywhere.”

“Neither are you.”

“I?” Ravic emptied his glass. The woman with the red-golden hair at morning; then Kate Hegstroem with death in her belly and her skin like brittle silk; and now this one, inconsiderate, filled with greed for life, still alien to herself and yet more familiar with herself than any man could ever be, naïve and shrewd, faithful in a strange sense and as faithless as her mother, Nature, drifting and being driven, wanting to hold fast and leaving at the same time—“I?” Ravic repeated. “What do you know about me? What do you know about love that comes into a life in which everything has become questionable? What is your cheap intoxication compared to that? When falling and falling suddenly changes, when the endless Why becomes the final You, when like a fata morgana above the desert of silence feeling suddenly arises, takes shape, and inexorably the delusion of the blood becomes a landscape compared with which all dreams are pale and commonplace? A landscape
of silver, a city of filigree and rose quartz, shining like the bright reflection of blooming blood—what do you know about it? Do you think that one can talk about it so easily? That a glib tongue can quickly press it into a cliché of words or even of feelings? What do you know about graves that open and how one stands in dread of the many colorless empty nights of yesterday—yet they open and no skeletons now lie bleaching there, only earth is there, earth, fertile seeds, and already the first green. What do you know about that? You love the intoxication, the conquest, the Other You that wants to die in you and that will never die, you love the stormy deceit of the blood, but your heart will remain empty—because one cannot keep anything that does not grow from within oneself. And not much can grow in a storm. It is in the empty nights of loneliness that it grows, if one does not despair. What do you know about it?”

He had spoken slowly, without looking at Joan, as though he had forgotten her. Now he looked at her. “What am I talking about?” he said. “Old stupid things. I’ve drunk too much today. Come, have a drink too, and then go.”

She sat down on the bed and took the glass. “I have understood,” she said. Her face had changed. Like a mirror, he thought. Time and again it reflected whatever one held before it. Now it was composed and beautiful. “I understood,” she said. “And sometimes I have felt the same way. But Ravic, you have often forgotten me for your love of love and of life. I was a point of departure; and then you went into your cities of silver and you thought very little about me any more.”

He looked at her for a long time. “Maybe,” he said.

“You were occupied with yourself so much, you discovered so much in yourself that I remained on the fringes of your life.”

“Maybe. But you are not the person on whom to build, Joan. You know that, too.”

“Did you want to build?”

“No,” Ravic said after some deliberation. Then he smiled. “When you are a refugee from everything that is permanent, you get into strange situations sometimes. And you do strange things. No, of course I did not want that. But who has only one lamb sometimes wants to do so many things with it.”

Suddenly the night was full of peace. It was once more like one of those nights, an eternity ago, when Joan had been lying at his side. The city was far, remote, merely a soft humming on the horizon; the chain of the hours had come apart and time was as silent as if it were standing still. The simplest and the most incredible thing in the world had come true again: two people speaking to each other, each for himself; and sounds, called words, shaped the same images and feelings in that palpitating mass behind the skull, and out of meaningless vibrations of the vocal chords and their unexplainable reactions in the viscous gray convolutions, skies suddenly grew again in which were mirrored clouds, brooks, past times, growth and decay and hard-won wisdom.

“You love me, Ravic—” Joan said, and it was only half a question.

“Yes. But I’ll do everything to break away from you.”

He said it calmly like something that mattered little to either of them. She paid no attention. “I cannot imagine our ever not being together. For a time, yes. But not forever. Not forever,” she repeated and a shudder ran over her skin. “Never is a dreadful word, Ravic. I cannot imagine never being with you any more.”

He did not answer. “Let me stay here,” she said. “I don’t want to go back ever again. Not ever.”

“You would go back tomorrow. You know that.”

“When I’m here I can’t imagine not staying here.”

“That’s the same thing. You know that too.”

The hollow space in the midst of time. The small lighted cabin
of the room, the same as before—and still there too the person whom one loved, and in a strange way it was not the same person any longer, one could touch her if one would stretch out one’s arms and yet one could not ever again reach her—

Ravic put his glass down. “You know you would leave me again—tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, sometime—” he said.

Joan lowered her head. “Yes.”

“And if you returned—you know you would always go again—”

“Yes.” She raised her face. It was flooded with tears. “What is it, Ravic? What is it?”

“I don’t know either.” He smiled fleetingly. “Sometimes love is not very gay, is it?”

“No.” She looked at him. “Why is it this way with us, Ravic?”

He shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t know that either, Joan. Maybe because we have nothing left to hold onto. Before, one had many things—security, background, faith, aims—all of them friendly railings to which we could hold when love shook us. Nowadays we don’t have anything—at best a little despair, a little courage, and otherwise strangeness within and without. Then if love flies in, it is like a torch on dry straw. One doesn’t have anything but love—that makes it different—wilder, more important, and more destructive.” He filled his glass. “One shouldn’t think too much about it. We aren’t in a situation in which we should do much thinking. It just makes you useless. And we don’t want to become useless, do we?”

Joan shook her head. “No. Who was that woman, Ravic?”

“A patient. I was there with her once before. At the time when you were still singing. A hundred years ago. Are you doing anything now?”

“Small parts. I don’t think I’m good. But I earn enough to be independent. I want to be able to leave at any moment. I have no ambitions.”

Her eyes were dry. She emptied her glass of calvados and rose. She looked tired. “Why is all this in us, Ravic? Why? There must be some reason. Otherwise we wouldn’t ask.”

He smiled pensively. “That’s mankind’s oldest question, Joan. Why—the question on which all logic, all philosophy, all science has shattered up to now—”

“I’ll go now,” she said without looking at him. She picked up her things from the bed and walked toward the door.

She was going. She was going. She was at the door. Something snapped inside Ravic. She was going. She was going. He straightened up. Suddenly it was impossible, everything was impossible, just one more night, this one night, once again her sleeping head on his shoulder, tomorrow one could fight, once more her breath beside him, once more in all the falling the tender illusion, the sweet deception; don’t go, don’t go, what else have I? what is my stark courage to me? where are we drifting? you alone are real! brightest dream! the asphodel meadows of oblivion! once more, once more, the spark of eternity! for whom am I saving myself? for what cheerless thing? for what dark uncertainty? Buried, lost, my life has only twelve more days, twelve days and behind it is nothing, twelve days and this one night, shining skin, why did you come on this night, torn from the stars and floating, clouded by old dreams, why did you break through the forts and barricades of this night in which no one is alive but us? “Joan,” he said.

She turned. Her face was suddenly transfused by a wild breathless radiance. She let her things fall and rushed toward him.