They were stopped at the Avenue Marceau; a line of trucks was rattling along the Rue Galilée. The hot sun shone through the window. Veber pushed a button on the dashboard. The top of the car moved slowly backward. He looked proudly at Ravic. “I had it put in recently. Automatic. It’s magnificent what people can think of, isn’t it?”
The wind blew through the open top. Ravic nodded. “Yes, magnificent. The latest thing is magnetic mines and torpedoes. I read about them somewhere yesterday. When they miss their target they turn back in a curve until they find it. We are a fabulously constructive race.”
Veber turned his red face toward him. He beamed good nature. “You, with your war, Ravic! We are as far away from that as from the moon. All this talk about it is nothing but pressure politics, nothing else, believe me—”
The skin was bluish mother-of-pearl. The face was ashen. Around it, flaming in the white glare of the operating lights, a wealth of golden-red hair. It flamed around the ash-colored face with such intensity that it seemed almost indecent. It was the only thing alive, sparklingly alive, noisily alive—as if life had already left the body and was now clinging only to the hair.
The young woman lying there was very beautiful. Slim, tall, with a face that even the shadows of deep unconsciousness could not mar—a woman made for luxury and love.
The woman was bleeding only a little. Too little. “You opened the uterus?” Ravic said to Durant.
“Yes.”
“And?”
Durant did not answer. Ravic looked up. Durant stared at him.
“All right,” Ravic said. “We don’t need the nurses just now. We are three doctors, that’s sufficient.”
Durant motioned and nodded. The nurses and the assistant doctor retired.
“And?” Ravic asked after they had gone.
“That you can see for yourself,” Durant replied.
“No.”
Ravic saw; but he wanted Durant to say it in front of Veber. It was safer.
“Pregnancy in the third month. Hemorrhages. Necessity to curette. A curettage. Apparent injury to the inner wall.”
“Apparent?”
“You can see it yourself. All right then, injury to the inner wall.”
“And?” Ravic continued to ask.
He looked at Durant’s face. It was full of impotent hatred. He will always hate me for this, he thought. Particularly because Veber is listening.
“Perforation,” Durant said.
“With the curette?”
“Naturally,” Durant said after a while. “With what else?”
The hemorrhage had ceased completely. Ravic continued his examination in silence. Then he straightened up. “You perforated. You did not notice it. In doing so you dragged a coil of the intestine through the opening. You did not recognize what it was. Apparently you took it for a piece of fetal membrane. You scraped it. You injured it. Is that correct?”
Suddenly Durant’s forehead was covered with sweat. The beard behind the mask worked as if he were chewing too big a mouthful.
“It could be.”
“How long have you been working?”
“Altogether three-quarters of an hour before you came.”
“Internal hemorrhage. Injury to the small intestine. Most acute danger of sepsis. Intestine must be sewn, uterus removed. Immediately.”
“What?” Durant asked.
“You know that yourself,” Ravic said.
Durant’s eyes fluttered. “Yes, I know. I did not get you to tell me this.”
“That’s all I can do. Call your people in and go on working. I advise you to do it quickly.”
Durant chewed. “I’m too much upset. Will you perform the operation for me?”
“No. As you know I’m illegally in France and have no right to perform operations.”
“You—” Durant began and fell silent.
Menials, students who have not yet completed their studies, masseurs, assistants, here all these claim to have been great medical men in Germany—Ravic had not forgotten what Durant had said to Leval. “Monsieur Leval explained it to me,” he said. “Before my deportation.”
He saw Veber raise his head. Durant did not reply. “Doctor Veber can perform the operation for you,” Ravic said.
“You’ve operated for me often enough. If the price—”
“The price makes no difference. I’m not operating any more since my return. Especially not on patients who have not given their consent for this kind of operation.”
Durant stared at him. “You can’t get the patient out of the anesthetic to ask her now.”
“Yes you can. But you risk sepsis.”
Durant’s face was wet. Veber looked at Ravic. Ravic nodded. “Are your nurses reliable?” Veber asked Durant.
“Yes—”
“We won’t need the assistant,” Veber said to Ravic. “We are three doctors and two nurses.”
“Ravic—” Durant grew silent.
“You should have called Binot,” Ravic declared. “Or Mallon. Or Martel. All first-rate surgeons.”
Durant did not answer.
“Will you declare in the presence of Veber that you made a perforation and that you injured a coil of the intestine which you mistook for a fetal membrane?”
It took some time. “Yes,” Durant said then in a hoarse tone.
“Will you also declare that you asked Veber to perform a hysterectomy and an anastomosis with me as his assistant because I happened to be present?”
“Yes.”
“Will you take full responsibility for the operation and its result, as well as for the fact that the patient was not informed about it and had not given her consent?”
“Yes, of course,” Durant croaked.
“All right. Call the nurses. We don’t need your assistant. Explain to him that you gave Veber and me permission to assist you in a complicated special case. An old promise you had given us, or something like it. You may take over the anesthesia yourself. Is it necessary for the sterile nurses to prepare themselves again?”
“It’s not necessary. The adjoining room is sterile.”
“All the better.”
The abdominal cavity lay open. Slowly and with utmost care Ravic drew the coil of the intestine out of the hole in the uterus and wrapped it, bit by bit, in sterile dressings to keep it away from the peritoneum till the injured spot was free. Then he completely covered the uterus with dressings. “Extra-uterine, ectopic pregnancy,” he murmured in Veber’s direction. “See this—half in the uterus, half in the tube. One can’t even blame him too much. A rather rare case. Nevertheless—”
“What?” Durant asked from behind the shield at the head of the table. “What did you say?”
“Nothing.”
Ravic cut open the intestine and made the resection. Then he quickly began to sew the open ends. Side to side he opened the outer layers again, turned them, and sewed them together on the other side.
He felt the intensity of the operation. He forgot Durant. He tied off the tube and the blood supply and cut off the end of the tube. Then he began to remove the uterus. Why doesn’t this bleed much more? he thought. Why doesn’t something like this bleed more than the heart? When one cuts out the miracle of life and the ability to pass it on.
The beautiful person lying here was dead. She could live on, but she was dead. A dead branch on the tree of the generations. In bloom, but without the secret of the fruit. Out of woods that had since become coal, huge apelike men had fought their way through thousands of generations, Egyptians had built temples, Hellas had flourished; mysteriously the blood had continued to run upward, upward, finally to create this human being who now was barren as an empty ear of corn, and would not pass her blood on to a son or a daughter. The chain was broken through Durant’s clumsy hand. But had not thousands of generations worked on Durant too, had not Hellas and the Renaissance bloomed to produce his musty pointed beard?
“Revolting,” Ravic said.
“What?” Veber a
sked.
“All sorts of things.”
Ravic straightened up. “Finished.” He looked into the lovely pale face with the radiant hair behind the anesthesia shield. He looked into the pail in which lay the blood-smeared thing that had made her face so beautiful. Then he looked at Durant. “Finished,” he repeated.
Durant stopped the anesthesia. He did not look at Ravic. He waited for the nurses to push the cart outside. Then he followed them without saying anything.
“Tomorrow he’ll explain to her that he saved her life,” said Ravic. “And ask five thousand francs more.”
“He doesn’t look like it at the moment.”
“A day is a long time. And repentance is short. Particularly when it can be turned into business.”
Ravic washed. Through the window by the white washstand opposite him he saw a window sill on which there were red geraniums in bloom. A gray cat was sitting under the blossoms.
He called up Durant’s hospital at one o’clock that night. He telephoned from the Scheherazade. The night nurse told him that the woman was sleeping. She had become restless two hours before. Veber had been there and had given her a light sedative. Everything seemed in order.
Ravic opened the telephone booth. A strong scent of perfume struck him. A woman with bleached yellow hair rustled proudly and challengingly into the ladies’ room. The hair of the woman in the hospital had been a genuine blond. Radiant reddish-blond! He lit a cigarette and went back into the Scheherazade. The eternal Russian chorus was singing the eternal “Dark Eyes.” Tragedy for twenty long years ran the risk of being ridiculous, Ravic thought. Tragedy had to be short.
“Sorry,” he said to Kate Hegstroem, “but I had to telephone.”
“Is everything all right?”
“So far it is.”
Why does she ask? he thought, irritated. With her everything is certainly not all right. “Have you what you want here?” He pointed at the carafe of vodka.
“No.”
“No?”
Kate Hegstroem shook her head.
“It’s the summer,” Ravic said. “One shouldn’t sit in night clubs in summer. In summer one should sit on the street. Near a tree, however consumptive, with an iron fence around it if need be.”
He glanced up and looked into Joan’s eyes. She must have come in while he had been telephoning. Earlier she had not been there. She was sitting in the opposite corner.
“Do you want to go somewhere else?” he asked Kate Hegstroem.
She shook her head. “No, do you? To some consumptive tree?”
“At such places the vodka is usually consumptive too. This one is good.”
The chorus stopped singing and the music changed. The orchestra began a blues. Joan rose and went to the dance floor. Ravic could not see her very well. Nor with whom she was. Only every time the spotlight brushed the dance floor with a pale blue, she emerged into the light and then disappeared again in the half-dark.
“Did you perform an operation today?” Kate Hegstroem asked.
“Yes—”
“What’s it like to sit in a night club afterward in the evening? Is it as if you had returned to a city from a battle? Or from sickness to life?”
“Not always. Sometimes you are simply empty.”
Joan’s eyes were translucent in the pale beam of light. She was looking toward him. It is not the heart that stirs, Ravic thought. It’s the stomach. A shock in the solar plexus. Thousands of poems have been written about it. And this shock does not come from you, you slightly perspiring, beautiful, dancing piece of flesh—it comes out of the dark rooms of my brain—it’s only an accidental, loose contact that makes it sharper whenever you glide through that streak of light.
“Isn’t that the woman who used to sing here?” Kate Hegstroem asked.
“Yes.”
“Doesn’t she sing here any more?”
“I don’t think so.”
“She’s beautiful.”
“Is she?”
“Yes. She’s even more than beautiful. That’s a face in which life is written for all to see.”
“Maybe.”
Kate Hegstroem studied Ravic from the corners of her narrowed eyes. She smiled. It was a smile that might have ended in tears. “Give me another glass of vodka and let us go,” she said.
Ravic felt Joan’s eyes as he got up. He took Kate’s arm. It was not necessary; she could have walked alone; but he felt it would do no harm for Joan to see it.
“Will you do me a favor?” Kate Hegstroem asked when they were in her room in the Hôtel Lancaster.
“Certainly, Kate,” Ravic replied, preoccupied. “If I can.”
“Will you come with me to the Monfort ball?”
He looked up. “What’s that? I’ve never heard of it before?”
She took a seat on a chair by the imitation fireplace. The chair seemed much too big for her. She looked very fragile in it, like a Chinese dancing figure. The skin on her cheeks was tauter than ever. “The Monfort ball is the great social event of the summer in Paris,” she said. “It takes place next Friday in Louis Monfort’s house and garden. That means nothing to you, does it?”
“Nothing.”
“Will you go with me?”
“Can I in that case?”
“I’ll get you an invitation.”
Ravic looked at her. “Why, Kate?”
“I’d like to go. And I don’t want to go alone.”
“Would you have to, otherwise?”
“I would. I don’t want to go with any of the people I used to know. I can’t stand them any more. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
She smiled. Even her smile was no longer the same, Ravic thought. It was like a thin glittering net under which the face hardly changed. “It is the last and finest garden party every summer in Paris,” she said. “I have been there every time for the last four years. Will you do it as a favor to me?”
Ravic knew why she wanted to go with him. She would feel safer. He could not refuse.
“All right, Kate,” he said. “You don’t need to have them send me a special invitation. If they know someone is coming with you, that will suffice, I assume.”
She nodded. “Of course. Thank you, Ravic. I’ll call up Sophie Monfort tomorrow.”
He got up. “Then I’ll call for you on Friday. How will you dress?”
She looked up at him. The light was sharply reflected from her tightly combed hair. The head of a lizard, Ravic thought. The slim, dry, firm elegance of fleshless perfection which health can never achieve. “That’s what I’ve not yet told you,” she said after some hesitation. “It’s a costume ball, Ravic. A garden festival at the court of Louis XIV.”
“Great God!” Ravic sat down again.
Kate Hegstroem laughed. Suddenly it was completely free childlike laughter. “Over there is some good old cognac,” she said. “Do you need a drink?”
Ravic shook his head. “What people can think up!”
“Every year they have something similar.”
“That means I have to—”
“I’ll take care of everything,” she quickly interrupted him. “You don’t have to bother about anything. I’ll get you your costume. Something simple. You don’t even have to try it on. Just give me your size.”
“I believe I do need some cognac,” Ravic said.
Kate Hegstroem pushed the bottle toward him. “Don’t say no now.”
He drank the cognac. Twelve more days, he thought. Twelve days until Haake would be back in Paris. Twelve days which had to be got through. Twelve days, his life had no more than twelve days, nor could he think beyond them. Twelve days, beyond them yawned an abyss. It made no difference how he killed the time. A costume festival—after all what was grotesque in these two weeks of uncertainty?
“All right, Kate.”
He went again to Durant’s hospital. The woman with the red-golden hair was sleeping. Thick beads of perspiration stood on her forehead. Her face had color and
her mouth was slightly opened. “Fever?” he asked the nurse.
“One hundred.”
“Good.” He bent closer over the moist face. He could feel her breath. There was no longer ether in it. It was a breath, fresh as thyme. Thyme, he remembered—a mountain meadow in the Black Forest, creeping, breathless under a hot sun, somewhere below the shouting of his pursuers—and the intoxicating scent of thyme. Strange, how one forgot everything, only not the smells. Twenty years from now its smell would still snatch out of the dusty corners of his memory the vision of that day of his escape in the Black Forest. Not in twenty years, he thought—in twelve days.
He walked through the hot city to his hotel. It was almost three o’clock. He climbed up the staircase. A white envelope was lying in front of his door. He picked it up. It bore his name, but it had no stamp on it, nor any postmark. Joan, he thought, and opened it. A check dropped out. It was from Durant. Ravic looked at the figure indifferently. Then he looked at it again. He couldn’t believe it. It was not the usual two hundred francs. It was two thousand. He must have been damned scared, he thought. Two thousand francs, voluntarily from Durant—that was the eighth wonder of the world.
He put the check into his wallet and placed a pile of books on the table by his bed. He had bought them two days before in order to have something to read in case he was not able to sleep. It was a strange thing about books—they were becoming more and more important to him. They were not a substitute for everything, but they reached into a sphere where nothing else could reach. In the first years he had not touched any books; they had been lifeless in comparison with what had happened. But now they had become a wall; if they did not protect, at least one could lean against them. They did not help much; but they kept one from final despair in a time that was racing back into darkness. That was enough. Once thoughts had been thought that were despised and ridiculed today; but they had been thought and they would remain alive and that was enough.
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.
Arch of Triumph Page 35
