Arch of Triumph

  The round moon crept under the crossbar of the window. It was no longer a crucified halo—it was a fat, obscene voyeur staring into chambers and beds. Ravic was now wide awake. This had been a comparatively harmless dream. He had known others. But it was a long time since he had dreamed at all. He pondered—it was almost the whole time since he had ceased sleeping alone.

  He groped beside the bed. The bottle was not there. It had not stood there for quite a while. It stood on the table in the corner of the room. He hesitated a moment. It was not necessary to drink. He knew that. It was also not necessary to refrain from drinking. He got up and walked, barefooted, to the table. He found a glass, uncorked the bottle, and drank. It was the remainder of the old calvados. He held the glass up to the window. The moon turned it into an opal. Brandy should not stand in the light, he thought. Neither in the sun, nor in the moon. Wounded soldiers who had lain outside through the night under a full moon were weaker than after other nights. He shook his head and emptied his glass. Then he poured himself another. Glancing up he noticed that Joan had opened her eyes and was looking at him. He stopped. He did not know whether she was awake and really saw him.

  “Ravic,” she said.

  “Yes—”

  She shivered as if she had only just awakened. “Ravic,” she said in an altered voice. “Ravic—what are you doing there?”

  “I’m taking a drink.”

  “But why—” She straightened up. “What’s the matter?” she said dazedly. “What has happened?”

  “Nothing.”

  She smoothed back her hair. “My God,” she said, “how frightened I was!”

  “I didn’t intend that. I thought you would go on sleeping.”

  “Suddenly you were standing there—in the corner—quite changed.”

  “I’m sorry, Joan. I didn’t think you would wake up.”

  “I felt that you were gone. It was cold. Like a wind. A cold fright. And then suddenly you were standing there. Has anything happened?”

  “No, nothing. Nothing at all, Joan. I woke up and wanted a drink.”

  “Let me have a sip.”

  Ravic filled the glass and walked over to the bed. “Now you look like a child,” he said.

  She took the glass with both hands and drank. She drank slowly and looked over the rim of the glass at him. “What made you wake up?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. I think it was the moon.”

  “I hate the moon.”

  “You will not hate it in Antibes.”

  She lowered the glass. “Are we really going?”

  “Yes, we’ll go.”

  “Away from this mist and rain?”

  “Yes—away from this damned mist and rain!”

  “Give me another glass.”

  “Don’t you want to sleep?”

  “No. It’s a pity to sleep. One misses too much life by sleeping. Give me a glass. Is it the good one? Didn’t we want to take it along?”

  “One shouldn’t take anything along.”

  She looked at him. “Never?”

  “Never.”

  Ravic went to the window and drew the curtains. They closed only half way. The moonlight came through the opening in a shaft of light and divided the room into two halves of diffused darkness. “Why don’t you come to bed?” Joan asked.

  Ravic stood by the sofa on the other side of the moonlight. He saw Joan indistinctly, sitting in bed. Her hair hung darkly bright over the nape of her neck. She was naked. Between him and her flowed the cold light as though between two dark shores, flowing nowhere, flowing into itself alone. Into the square of the room, filled with the warm smell of sleep, it flowed from an endless way through the black airless ether, a broken light, rebounding from a remote dead star and magically transformed out of warm sun gleams into leaden cold rivers—it flowed and flowed and yet stood still and never filled the room.

  “Why don’t you come?” Joan asked.

  Ravic walked across the room, through the dark and the light and again through the dark—it was only a few steps, but it seemed far to him.

  “Did you bring the bottle with you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you want the glass? How late is it?”

  Ravic looked at the phosphorescent numbers on the dial of his little watch. “About five o’clock.”

  “Five. It could just as well be three. Or seven. At night time stands still. Only the clocks move.”

  “Yes. And nevertheless everything happens at night. Or because of it.”

  “What?”

  “That which later becomes visible during the day.”

  “Don’t frighten me. You mean it happens beforehand while one sleeps?”

  “Yes.”

  She took the glass from his hand and drank. She was very beautiful and he felt he loved her. She was not beautiful as a statue or a picture is beautiful; she was beautiful as a meadow across which the wind blows. It was life that pulsed in her and that had formed her into what she was, formed her mysteriously through the meeting of two cells, out of nothingness in a womb. It was the same incomprehensible enigma that in one tiny seed was contained the entire tree, petrified, microscopic, but there, predestined already, crown and fruit and the showering blossoms of all April mornings—and that out of a night of love and the meeting of a bit of slime there came a face, shoulders, and eyes, just these eyes and these shoulders, and that they had been somewhere, among millions of people somewhere in the world, and then one stood on a November night on the Pont de l’Alma in Paris, and they came toward one—

  “Why at night?” Joan asked.

  “Because—come close to me, beloved, given back to me from the abyss of sleep, returned from the moon meadows of chance—because night and sleep are betrayers. Do you remember how we fell asleep tonight, one close to the other, we were so close to each other, as close as humans can be. Our foreheads, our skins, our thoughts, our breath touched each other, mixed—and then sleep gradually began to seep between us, gray, colorless, first a few spots only, then more, it came upon our thoughts like a scab, into our blood, it dropped and dropped the blindness of unconsciousness into us—and then suddenly each of us was alone, we drifted lonely somewhere along dark canals, delivered to unknown powers and every shapeless menace. When I awoke I saw you. You slept. You were still far away. You had entirely slipped away from me. You no longer knew anything of me. You were somewhere I could never follow you.” He kissed her hair. “How can love be perfect when I every night lose you in sleep?”

  “I lay close to you. At your side. In your arm.”

  “You were in an unknown land. You were at my side, but you were farther away than if you had been on Sirius. When you are away during the day, it doesn’t matter—I am aware of everything during the day. But who is aware of anything during the night?”

  “I was with you.”

  “You were not with me. You just lay at my side. Whoever knows how he’ll come back from that land where one is without controls? Transformed without knowing it.”

  “You too.”

  “Yes, I too,” Ravic said. “And now give me the glass again. While I talk nonsense, you’re drinking.”

  She handed him the glass. “It’s good you woke up, Ravic. Blessed be the moon. Without it we would have slept and known nothing of each other. Or, in one of us, the seed of leave-taking might have been sown while we were defenseless. And, gradually and invisibly, it would grow and grow until it came to light one day.”

  She laughed softly. Ravic looked at her. “You don’t take it very seriously, do you?”

  “No. And you?”

  “No. But there is something to it. That’s why we don’t take it seriously. Therein man is great.”

  She laughed again. “I’m not afraid of it. I trust our bodies. They know better what they want than the thoughts that haunt our brains at night.”

  Ravic emptied his glass. “All right,” he said. “And quite right too.”

  “Don’t let’s go to sleep any m
ore tonight.”

  Ravic held the bottle against the silver shaft of the moonlight. It was still one third full. “Not much left,” he said. “But we can try.”

  He put it on the table by the bed. Then he turned around and looked at Joan. “You look like all desires of a man and one more of which he was not aware.”

  “Good,” she said. “We should wake up every night, Ravic. At night you’re different from what you are during the day.”

  “Better?”

  “Different. Nights you’re surprising. You are always coming from somewhere, somewhere about which one knows nothing.”

  “Not during the day?”

  “Not always. Sometimes.”

  “Lovely confidences,” Ravic said. “You wouldn’t have told me that a few weeks ago.”

  “No. Then I knew you less well.”

  He glanced up. There was not a shadow of ambiguity in her face. She simply meant it this way and found it quite natural. She neither wanted to hurt him, nor to say anything important. “That’s going to be just fine,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “In a few more weeks you’ll know me even better and I’ll be still less surprising to you.”

  “Just like me,” Joan said and laughed.

  “Not you.”

  “Why not?”

  “That has its reason in fifty thousand years of biology. Love makes the woman keen-sighted and confuses the man.”

  “Do you love me?”

  “Yes.”

  “You don’t say it often enough.” She stretched herself. Like a satisfied cat, Ravic thought. Like a satisfied cat sure of its victim. “Sometimes I could throw you out of the window,” he said.

  “Why don’t you do it?”

  He looked at her. “Could you do it?” she asked.

  He did not answer. She lay back on the pillow. “Destroy someone because one loves him? Kill him because one loves him too much?”

  Ravic reached for the bottle. “My God,” he said. “What have I done to deserve this? To awake at night and be forced to listen to something like this?”

  “Isn’t it true?”

  “Yes. For third-rate poets and women to whom it doesn’t happen.”

  “For those who do it, too.”

  “All right.”

  “Could you do it?”

  “Joan,” Ravic said. “Stop this servant-girl chatter. I’m not the man for such speculations. I’ve already killed too many people. As an amateur and as a professional. As a soldier and as a surgeon. That gives one contempt, indifference, and respect for life. One does not erase much by killing. Who has killed often would not kill out of love. One ridicules and diminishes death by it. And death is never small, or ridiculous. And it does not concern women; it is a matter for men.” He remained silent for a while. “What are we talking about?” he said then and bent over her. “Aren’t you my unrooted happiness? My happiness in the clouds, my searchlight happiness? Come, let me kiss you. Life was never so precious as today—when it matters so little.”

  16

  THE LIGHT. EVER ANEW it was the light. It came flying from the horizon like white foam between the deep blue of the ocean and the lighter blue of the day, it came flying, breathless and deepest breath at the same time, radiance and reflection in one, the simple, primordial happiness of being so bright, so gleaming, of floating thus without substance.…

  How it stands behind her head, Ravic thought. Like an aureole without color! Space without perspective! How it flows over her shoulders! Milk from Canaan, silk spun from beams! No one can be naked in this light. The skin catches and radiates it, like the rocks and the sea out there, lightfoam, most transparent confusion, thinnest dress of brightest mist.

  “How long have we been here now?” Joan asked.

  “Eight days.”

  “It is like eight years. Don’t you think?”

  “No.” Ravic said. “It is like eight hours. Eight hours and three thousand years. Here where you stand, a young Etruscan woman stood in just the same way three thousand years ago—and the wind came in just this way from Africa and chased the light across the ocean.”

  Joan crouched down beside him on the rock. “When do we have to go back to Paris?”

  “We’ll find out tonight in the Casino.”

  “Have we been winning?”

  “Not enough.”

  “You play as if you were used to playing. Maybe you are. I really don’t know anything about you. Why did the croupier greet you like a rich munitions maker?”

  “He mistook me for a munitions maker.”

  “That’s not true. You recognized him, too.”

  “It was politer to pretend so.”

  “When were you last here?”

  “I don’t know. Once many years ago. How tanned you are! You should always be as brown as that.”

  “Then I would have to live here all the time.”

  “Would you like to?”

  “Not all the time. But I would like to live always the way we live here.” She flung her hair back over her shoulders. “I’m sure you find that very superficial, don’t you?”

  “No,” Ravic said.

  She smiled and turned to him. “I know it’s superficial but, my God, we have had too little superficiality in our wretched lives! We’ve had enough wars, hunger and upheavals and revolutions and inflations—but never a little security and lightness and quiet and time. And now you say there’s another war coming. Really, it was easier for our parents, Ravic.”

  “Yes.”

  “We have only this one short life, and it passes—” She put her hands on the warm rock. “I am not worth much, Ravic. I am not anxious to live in an historical age. I want to be happy and I wish things would not be so burdensome and difficult. That’s all.”

  “Who wouldn’t wish that, Joan?”

  “You too?”

  “Of course.”

  That blue, Ravic thought. That almost colorless blue of the horizon, where the sky plunges into the sea, and then this storm deepening along sea and zenith, up to these eyes which are bluer here than they ever were in Paris!

  “I wish we could,” Joan said.

  “But we do it—for the moment.”

  “Yes, for the moment, for a few days; but then we’ll be going back to Paris again; to that night club in which nothing changes; to that life in a dirty hotel—”

  “You exaggerate. Your hotel isn’t dirty. Mine is pretty dirty—except my room.”