“I didn’t mean it that way,” he said. “There you’d better ask your expert.”
“Are you going already?” she asked.
“I have to.”
“Why don’t you stay?”
“I must go back to the hospital.”
She took his hand and looked up at him. “You said before you came that you were through at the hospital.”
He debated whether to tell her he would not come back. But this was enough for today. It was enough for her and for him. Just the same she had prevented that. But it would come. “Stay here, Ravic,” she said.
“I can’t.”
She got up and leaned close against him. That too, he thought. The old cliché. Cheap and well tested. She doesn’t omit anything. But who expects a cat to eat grass? He freed himself. “I must go back. There is a dying man at the hospital.”
“Doctors always have good reasons,” she said slowly and looked at him.
“Like women, Joan. We supervise death and you supervise love. Therein are all the reasons and all the rights in the world.”
She did not answer.
“We have strong stomachs too,” Ravic said. “We need them. We could not do our work otherwise. Where others faint we begin to get interested. Adieu, Joan.”
“You’ll come again, Ravic?”
“Don’t think about it. Take your time. You’ll find out for yourself.”
He walked quickly to the door and did not turn around. She did not follow him. But he knew that she was looking after him. He felt strangely numb—as if he were walking under water.
22
THE SCREAM CAME from the window of the Goldberg family. Ravic listened for a moment. It seemed to him hardly possible that old man Goldberg had flung something at his wife or beaten her. Nor did he hear anything any more. Only the sound of running, then a short excited conversation in the room of the refugee Wiesenhoff and the slamming of doors.
Immediately afterwards there was a knock at his door and the proprietress rushed in. “Quick—quick—Monsieur Goldberg—”
“What?”
“He’s hanged himself. In the window. Quick—”
Ravic threw down his book. “Are the police here?”
“Of course not. Otherwise I wouldn’t have called you. She has just found him.”
Ravic ran downstairs with her. “Have they cut him down?”
“Not yet. They are holding him—”
In the twilit room a dark group was standing by the window. Ruth Goldberg, the refugee Wiesenhoff, and someone else. Ravic turned the light on. Wiesenhoff and Ruth Goldberg held old Goldberg in their arms like a puppet and the third man was nervously trying to loosen the knot of a tie that was fastened to the window bolt.
“Cut him down—”
“We haven’t a knife,” Ruth Goldberg shouted.
Ravic got a pair of scissors out of his bag and began to cut. The tie was made of smooth thick heavy silk and it took a few seconds before it was severed. As he worked Ravic had Goldberg’s face close in front of him. The protruding eyes, the open mouth, the thin gray beard, the thick tongue, the dark-green tie with white dots cutting deep into the scrawny, swollen throat—the body oscillated in Wiesenhoff’s and Ruth Goldberg’s arms as if it were swaying back and forth in a frightful, frozen laughter.
Ruth Goldberg’s face was red and flooded with tears; beside her Wiesenhoff sweated under the burden of the body which was heavier than ever in life. Two wet horrified sobbing faces and above them, silently grinning into the beyond, the gently rolling head which, as Ravic cut the tie, fell against Ruth Goldberg so that she started back screaming, dropped her arms, and the body slid sidewise with sprawling arms and seemed to follow her in a grotesque clownlike movement.
Ravic caught the body and put it on the floor with Wiesenhoff’s help. He loosened the noose and began his examination.
“To the movies,” Ruth Goldberg jabbered. “He sent me to the movies. ‘Ruthy,’ he said, ‘you get so little entertainment, why don’t you go to the Théâtre Courcelles, there is a Garbo picture on, Queen Christine, why don’t you go and see it? Take a good seat, take a fauteuil or a loge, go and see it, two hours away from misery is something after all.’ He said it calmly and kindly and patted my cheeks. ‘And afterwards go and have a chocolate and vanilla ice-cream in front of the café on the Parc Monceau, have a good time for once, Ruthy,’ he said and I went and when I came back, there—”
Ravic got up. Ruth Goldberg stopped talking. “He must have done it right after you left,” he said.
She pressed her fists against her mouth. “Is he—”
“We can still try. First artificial respiration. Do you know anything about it?” Ravic asked Wiesenhoff.
“No. Not too much. Something.”
“Look here.”
Ravic took Goldberg’s arms, drew them backward to the floor, then forward pressing them against his chest, and backward and forward again. There was a rattling in Goldberg’s throat. “He’s alive!” the woman screamed.
“No. That’s the compressed windpipe.”
Ravic demonstrated the movement a few more times. “So. Try it now,” he said to Wiesenhoff.
Reluctantly Wiesenhoff knelt behind Goldberg. “Go ahead,” Ravic said impatiently. “Hold him by the wrists. Or better yet by the forearms.”
Wiesenhoff was sweating. “Harder,” Ravic said. “Press all the air out of his lungs.”
He turned toward the proprietress. Meanwhile more people had come into the room. He motioned to the proprietress to leave. “He’s dead,” he said in the corridor. “What’s going on inside is nonsense. A ritual that has to be gone through, nothing else. It would be a miracle if anything helped now.”
“What shall we do?”
“The usual thing.”
“Ambulance? First aid? That means the police ten minutes later.”
“You have to call the police anyhow. Did the Goldbergs have papers?”
“Yes. Valid ones. Passports and cartes d’identité.”
“Wiesenhoff?”
“Permit to stay. Extended visa.”
“Then they are all right. Tell both of them not to mention that I was there. She came home, found him, screamed, Wiesenhoff cut him down and tried artificial respiration until the ambulance came. Can you do that?”
The proprietress looked at him with her birdlike eyes. “Of course. I’ll be there anyhow when the police come. I’ll take good care.”
“Fine.”
They went back. Wiesenhoff was bending over Goldberg and working. For a moment it seemed as if both were doing gymnastics on the floor. The proprietress remained standing at the door. “Mesdames et messieurs,” she said. “I must call the ambulance and the police. I’ll call the ambulance first. The orderly or doctor who comes with it will have to inform the police immediately. They will be here in half an hour at the latest. Any of you who hasn’t papers had better pack his things right away, at least those lying around, carry them to the Catacombs and stay down there. It’s possible that the police will search the rooms or ask for witnesses.”
The room emptied immediately. The proprietress nodded to Ravic that she would instruct Ruth Goldberg and Wiesenhoff. He picked up his bag and the scissors lying on the floor by the cut tie. The tie lay there with the store label showing—“S. Foerder, Berlin.” It was a tie that had cost at least ten marks. From Goldberg’s prosperous days. Ravic knew the firm. He had made purchases there himself.
He quickly put his belongings into a couple of suitcases and took them into Morosow’s room. It was a precaution only. Very likely the police would not bother about anything. But it was better—the memory of Fernand still smarted in Ravic’s mind. He went down to the Catacombs.
A number of people were running about excitedly. They were the refugees without papers. The illegal brigade. Clarisse, the waitress, and Jean, the waiter, were directing the placing of the suitcases in a vaultlike room adjoining the Catacombs. The Catacombs themselves were in
readiness for supper. The tables were set, bread baskets stood here and there, and a smell of fat and fish came from the kitchen.
“Take your time,” Jean said to the nervous refugees. “The police are not so prompt.”
The refugees were taking no chances. They were not used to luck. They bustled hastily into the cellar with their few belongings. The Spaniard Alvarez was among them. The proprietress had sent word through the entire hotel that the police were coming. Alvarez smiled at Ravic almost apologetically. Ravic did not know why.
A thin man placidly approached him. It was Ernst Seidenbaum, Doctor of Philology and Philosophy. “Maneuvers,” he said to Ravic. “Dress rehearsal. Will you stay in the Catacombs?”
“No.”
Seidenbaum, a veteran of the last six years, shrugged his shoulders. “I’ll stay. I’m not in the mood to run away. I don’t think they’ll do more than take down the evidence in the case. Who is interested in an old dead German Jew?”
“Not in him. But in live illegal refugees.”
Seidenbaum adjusted his pince-nez. “It makes no difference to me. Do you know what I did during the last raid? At that time a sergeant even came down into the Catacombs. More than two years ago. I put on one of Jean’s white jackets and served at table. Brandy for the police.”
“Good idea.”
Seidenbaum nodded. “A time comes for everyone when he has had enough of running away.” He calmly strolled into the kitchen to find out what there would be for supper.
Ravic went through the back door of the Catacombs across the yard. A cat ran by, brushed against his feet. The others walked in front of him. They quickly dispersed on the street. Alvarez was limping a little. Maybe that could be remedied by an operation, Ravic thought absent-mindedly.
He was sitting on the Place des Ternes and suddenly he had the feeling that Joan would come this night. He could not say why; he simply knew it suddenly.
He paid for his supper and walked slowly back to the hotel. It was warm and in the narrow streets the signs of the hotels which rent rooms by the hour blazed red in the early night. Slits of light gleamed from behind curtained windows. A group of sailors were following several whores. They were young and loud and hot with wine and summer; they disappeared into one of the hotels. The music of a harmonica was coming from somewhere. A thought like a rocket shot up in Ravic, unfolded, spread above him, and plucked a magic landscape out of the dark: Joan waiting for him at the hotel to tell him that she had put everything behind her and was coming back—
He stood still. What’s the matter with me? he thought. Why am I standing here and why do my hands touch the air as if it were the nape of a neck and a wave of hair? Too late. One can’t summon anything back. No one comes back. Just as the once-lived hour never returns.
He walked on to the hotel, across the yard to the back door of the Catacombs. At the door, he noticed a number of people sitting inside. Seidenbaum was among them. Not as a waiter, as a guest. The danger seemed to be over. He entered.
Morosow was in his room. “I was just going to leave,” he said. “I thought you were off to Switzerland again when I saw your suitcases.”
“Is everything all right?”
“Yes. The police aren’t coming back. They have released the corpse. A simple case. The body is upstairs; they are laying it out now.”
“Good. Then I can move back into my room.”
Morosow laughed. “That Seidenbaum!” he said. “He was there the whole time. With a brief case, containing some papers or other and his pince-nez. He presented himself as a lawyer and representative of the insurance company. He was rather rough with the police. He saved old man Goldberg’s passport. Claimed he would need it; the police were entitled to his carte d’identité only. He got away with it. Has he any papers himself?”
“Not a scrap.”
“Fine,” Morosow declared. “The passport is worth its weight in gold. It’s valid for another year. Someone can live on it. Not in Paris exactly, unless he’s as daring as Seidenbaum. The photograph can easily be changed. There are inexpensive experts who will change the date of birth in case the new Aaron Goldberg should be younger. A modern kind of transmigration of souls—a passport valid for several lives.”
“Then Seidenbaum will be called Goldberg from now on?”
“Not Seidenbaum. He rejected it. It is beneath his dignity. He is the Don Quixote among the world citizens of the underground. He’s too fatalistic and too curious about what will happen to men of his type to want it falsified by a borrowed passport. How about you?”
Ravic shook his head. “Not for me. I’m on Seidenbaum’s side.”
He took his suitcases and walked upstairs. In the corridor where the Goldbergs lived he was passed by an old Jew in a black caftan, with a beard and sidelocks, who had the face of a Biblical patriarch. The old man walked soundlessly as if on rubber soles, and he seemed to float through the dimly lit corridor, vague and wan. He opened Goldberg’s door. For a moment a reddish light as though from candles emanated from inside and Ravic heard a strange, half-suppressed, half-wild, monotonous wailing that was almost melodious. Professional women mourners, he thought. Could something like that still exist? Or was it only Ruth Goldberg?
He opened his door and saw Joan sitting by the window. She jumped up. “There you are! What has happened? Why do you have your suitcases with you? Do you have to leave again?”
Ravic put the suitcases beside the bed. “Nothing is the matter. It was only a precaution. Someone died. The police had to come. Everything is all right again.”
“I called you up. Someone at the telephone said you did not live here any longer.”
“That was our landlady. Cautious and smart as always.”
“I rushed here. The room was open. And empty. Your things weren’t here. I thought—Ravic!” Her voice trembled.
Ravic smiled with an effort. “You see—I am an unreliable creature. Nothing to build on.”
There was a knock at the door. Morosow came in, a couple of bottles in his hand. “Ravic, you forgot your ammunition—”
He noticed Joan standing in the dark and acted as though he did not see her. Ravic did not know whether he had recognized her at all. He handed the bottles to Ravic and left without coming in.
Ravic put the calvados and Vouvray on the table. Through the open window he heard the voice he had heard in the corridor. The wailing for the dead. It grew louder, ebbed away, and began again. Very likely the windows at Goldberg’s were standing open in the warm night, in which old Aaron’s rigid body was now slowly beginning to disintegrate in the room with the mahogany furniture.
“Ravic,” Joan said. “I’m sad. I don’t know why. I have been all day. Let me stay here.”
He did not answer immediately. He felt taken by surprise. He had expected it otherwise. Not so direct.
“How long?” he asked.
“Until tomorrow.”
“That’s not long enough.”
She sat down on the bed. “Can’t we forget that for once?”
“No, Joan.”
“I don’t want anything. I merely want to sleep at your side. Or let me sleep on the sofa.”
“It won’t do. Besides, I have to leave. For the hospital.”
“That doesn’t matter. I’ll wait for you. I’ve done that often enough.”
He did not answer. He was surprised that he was so calm. The warmth and excitement he had felt on the street had disappeared.
“And you don’t have to go to the hospital,” Joan said.
He remained silent for a moment. He knew if he slept with her he was lost. It was like signing a check for which there were no funds. She would come again and again and stand on what she had gained as on her rights, and she would ask for a little more every time without yielding anything herself until he was completely in her hands and she would finally become bored and leave him then, a victim of his own weakness and his shattered desires, weak and thoroughly corrupt. She did not intend it; she was not
even aware of it; but it would happen that way. It was simple to think that one night would make no difference; but every time one lost part of one’s resistance and part of what should never be corrupted in life. Sins against the Holy Ghost, the Catholic catechism called that, with strange and cautionary dread, and added darkly in contradiction to its entire dogma that they would not be forgiven in this life or in the life to come.
“It is true,” Ravic said. “I do not have to go to the hospital. But I don’t want you to stay here.”
He expected an outbreak. But she only said calmly, “Why not?”
Should he try to explain it to her? Was he able to do it at all? “You no longer belong here,” he said.
“I do belong here.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
How smart she is! he thought. Simply by questioning him she forced explanations. And who explained was already on the defensive.
“You know,” he said. “Don’t ask so foolishly.”
“You no longer want me?”
“No,” he replied and added against his will, “Not this way.”
The monotonous wailing came through the window from Goldberg’s room. The lamentation for the dead. The grief of the shepherds of Lebanon in a Parisian side-street.
“Ravic,” Joan said. “You must help me.”
“I can help you best by leaving you alone. And you me.”
She paid no attention. “You’ve got to help me. I could tell you lies, but I don’t want to any more. Yes, there is someone. But it is different than with you. If it were the same, I wouldn’t be here.”
Ravic took a cigarette out of his pocket. He felt the dry paper. There it was now. Now he knew. It was like a cool knife that did not hurt. Certainty never hurts. Only the before and after.
“It is never the same,” he said. “And it is always the same.”
What cheap stuff I talk, he thought. Newspaper paradoxes. How shabby the truth can become when one articulates it.
Joan straightened up. “Ravic,” she said. “You know it is not true that one can love only one person. There are those who can only do that. They are happy. And there are others who are thrown into confusion. You know that.”