Arch of Triumph

by Erich Maria Remarque

  “What was that?” Kate Hegstroem asked, frightened.

  “Nothing. A tire bursting.”

  The chauffeur turned around. His face had changed. “That—”

  “Drive on,” Ravic interrupted him. “You can get through now.” The intersection was free as if a gust had swept it bare. “Go on!” Ravic said.

  Screams came from the Rue Cambronne. A second shot was fired. The chauffeur drove on.

  ———

  They were standing on the terrace overlooking the garden. Every place was filled with costumes by then. In the deep dusk of trees roses were in bloom. Candles protected by shades gave a warm flickering light. In a pavilion a small orchestra was playing a minuet. It all looked like a Watteau that had come to life.

  “Lovely?” Kate Hegstroem asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes, Kate. At least from a distance.”

  “Come. Let’s walk through the garden.”

  Under the high old trees an unreal picture unfolded. The uncertain light of the many candles shimmered on silver and gold brocade, on precious faded blue and pink and sea-green velvets, its soft illumination fell on full-bottomed wigs and bare, powdered shoulders around which played the delicate glitter of violins. Couples and groups wandered slowly through the alleys, hilts sparkled, a fountain splashed, and the trimmed boxwood hedges formed a dark stylized background.

  Ravic noticed that even the servants were in costumes. He took for granted then that the detectives would be too. It wouldn’t be bad, he thought, to be arrested by Molière or Racine. Or by a court dwarf, for a change.

  He looked up. A warm heavy raindrop had fallen on his hand. The red sky had darkened. “It’s going to rain, Kate,” he said.

  “No. That’s impossible. The garden—”

  “It is! Come quickly!”

  He took her arm and hurried her to the terrace. Hardly were they there when it began to pour. The water streamed down, the candles went out in their chimneys, after a few seconds the table decorations hung like colorless rags, and panic broke out. Marquises, duchesses, and ladies-in-waiting dashed toward the terrace with upraised brocade gowns; dukes, excellencies, and field marshals tried to protect their wigs and jostled one another in confusion like scared, many-colored chickens. Water poured into collars and décolletages, washing away powder and rouge, and a pale flash of lightning flooded the garden with insubstantial light, followed by the loud rattling of thunder.

  Kate Hegstroem stood motionless under the awning of the terrace, pushed close to Ravic. “This never happened before,” she said, disconcerted. “I have been here often. This has never happened before. Not in any year.”

  “A fine chance to get the emeralds.”

  “Yes. My God—”

  Servants in raincoats were running through the garden with umbrellas. Their satin stockings stuck out strangely from under their coats. They accompanied the last lost wet ladies-in-waiting to the terrace and then they went to look for lost scarves and things. One of them carried a pair of golden shoes. They were graceful and he held them carefully in his large hands. Water poured down on the empty tables. It thundered upon the taut awning as if heaven were beating an unknown reveille with crystal drumsticks.

  “Let’s go inside,” Kate Hegstroem said.

  The rooms in the house were much too small for the number of guests. Apparently no one had reckoned with bad weather. The stifling heat of the day still lay heavy in the rooms. The crowd added to the heat. The ample costumes of the ladies were crumpled. Silk trains had been torn beneath trampling feet. One could barely move.

  Ravic was standing next to the door with Kate Hegstroem. Before him a buxom Marquise de Montespan with wet, plaited hair was catching her breath. Around her neck, which had enlarged pores, hung a necklace of pear-shaped diamonds. Now she looked like a wet grocery woman at a carnival. Beside her a bald-headed man without a chin was coughing. Ravic recognized him. It was Blancher from the Foreign Office in the costume of Colbert. Two beautiful slender women, with profiles like greyhounds, stood before him; at their side a Jewish baron, fat and loud, with a jewel-studded hat, was fondling their shoulders appreciatively. A few South Americans, disguised as pages, watched him attentively and with astonishment. Between them stood the Countess Bellin as La Vallière, with the face of a fallen angel and many rubies. Ravic recalled that he had removed her ovaries two years ago on Durant’s diagnosis. This was altogether Durant’s clientele.

  The smell of rain. The deadening, oppressive sultriness mingled with the scent of perfume, of skin, and of wet hair. The faces, washed by rain, were naked under the wigs more than if they had been without costumes. Ravic looked about. He saw much beauty around him; he saw also wit and skeptical shrewdness; but his eyes were trained to recognize as well the least sign of disease and he could not easily be deceived by a perfect surface. He knew that a certain class of society throughout the centuries remained the same; but he also knew what fever and decay were and he knew their symptoms. Lukewarm promiscuity; tolerance of weakness; impotent derision; cleverness without discretion; wit for wit’s sake; blood that was tired out, that had squandered its sparkle in irony, in little adventures, in petty greed, in polished fatalism, and dreary aimlessness. The world would not be saved by these, he thought. But by whom?

  He looked at Kate Hegstroem. “You won’t get anything to drink,” she said. “The servants won’t be able to get through.”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  Gradually they were pushed into the next room. Tables with champagne, quickly brought in and set up, were standing along the wall.

  Somewhere a few chandeliers were on. In their soft glow the lightning from outside flashed, momentarily snatching faces into a livid, ghostlike, instant’s death. Then thunder rolled and drowned out the voices and reigned and threatened until the soft light came back again and with it life and the stifling heat.

  Ravic pointed at the tables with champagne. “Shall I get you some of that?”

  “No. It’s too hot.” Kate Hegstroem looked at him. “Well, this is my party.”

  “Maybe it’ll stop raining soon.”

  “No. And even if it does—it’s spoiled. You know what I’d like? To get away—”

  “So would I. This is like the time before the French Revolution. One expects the sans-culottes any minute.”

  It took them a long time to reach the exit. Afterward Kate Hegstroem’s costume looked as if she had slept in it for hours. Outside, the rain was coming down heavy and straight. The buildings opposite looked as if they were behind the water-flooded window of a florist’s shop.

  The car rolled up. “Where do you want to go?” Ravic asked. “Back to your hotel?”

  “Not yet. But we can’t go anywhere else in these costumes. Let’s drive around for a while.”

  “Good.”

  The car glided slowly through the Paris night. The rain beat upon the top and drowned out almost all other noises. The Arc de Triomphe emerged, gray in the silver downpour, and disappeared. The Champs Elysées with its lighted windows slipped by. The Rond Point smelled of flowers and freshness, a gay-colored wave amid the uproar. Wide as the ocean dawned the Place de la Concorde with its Tritons and sea monsters. The Rue de Rivoli swam closer, with its bright arcades, a fleeting glimpse of Venice, before the Louvre arose, gray and eternal, with its unending courtyard, all its windows dark. Then the quays, the bridges, swaying, unreal, in the gentle rain. Lighters, a towboat with a warm light, as comforting as if it concealed a thousand homes. The Seine, the boulevards, with busses, noise, people, and shops. The iron fences of the Luxembourg, the garden behind them like a poem by Rilke. The Cimetière Montparnasse, silent, forsaken. The narrow old streets, pushed close together, houses, silent squares surprisingly opening themselves, with trees, warped façades, churches, weatherworn monuments. Street lights flickering in the rain, pissoirs rising out of the earth like little forts, the side-streets of hotels where one could rent rooms b
y the hour, and in between the streets of the past, in pure rococo and baroque, the fronts of their buildings smiling down, shadowy doors as in the novels of Proust—

  Kate Hegstroem sat in her corner and was silent. Ravic smoked. He saw the glow of the cigarette, but he did not taste its smoke. It was as if he were smoking an insubstantial cigarette in the dark of the car, and gradually everything seemed to become unreal—this ride, this soundless car in the rain, these streets passing by, in the corner this silent woman in her costume across which reflections flitted, these hands already marked by death and lying motionless on the brocade as if they would never move again—it was a ghostlike ride through a ghostlike Paris, strangely transfused by half-finished thoughts and an unuttered and meaningless farewell.

  He thought of Haake. He tried to deliberate what he would do. He thought of the woman with the red-golden hair on whom he had operated. He thought of a rainy evening in Rothenburg ob der Tauber with a woman he had forgotten, of the Hotel Eisenhut, and of a violin out of an unknown window. He recalled Romberg who was shot in 1917 during a thunderstorm on a field of poppies in Flanders—a thunderstorm that in ghostlike fashion had roared into the machine-gun fire as though God had become tired of man and had begun to fire upon the earth. He thought of an accordion, wailing and bad and full of unbearable yearning, played by a member of the marine battalion in Houthoulst; Rome in the rain flashed through his mind, a wet road behind Rouen; the endless November rain on the roofs of the barracks in the concentration camp; dead Spanish peasants in whose open mouths water had gathered; Claire’s moist clear face before she died; the way to the university at Heidelberg with the heavy scent of lilacs—a magic lantern of the past, an endless procession of pictures from the past, gliding by him like the streets outside, poison and comfort in one—

  He put out his cigarette and straightened up. Enough. Who looked back too much could easily run into something or fall off a cliff.

  Now the car was climbing up the streets of Montmartre. The rain ceased. Silver clouds floated across the sky, heavily and hastily, like pregnant mothers hurrying to give life to a bit of moon. Kate Hegstroem had the car stop. They got out and walked around the corner and up a few streets.

  Suddenly Paris lay below them. Widespread, flickering, wet, Paris. With streets, squares, night, clouds and moon, Paris. The wreath of the Boulevards, the pale shimmering of the slopes, towers, roofs, darkness thrust against the light, Paris. Wind from the horizons, the sparkling plain, bridges shaped of darkness and light, a downpour of rain far over the Seine fleeing out of sight, the innumerable lights of cars, Paris. Defiantly wrested from the night, a gigantic beehive of buzzing life, built over millions of evil sewers, blossom of light above its subterranean stench, cancer and Mona Lisa, Paris.

  “Just a moment, Kate,” Ravic said. “I’ll get us something.”

  He went into the nearest bistro. A warm smell of fresh blood-sausage and liver-sausage struck him. No one paid any attention to his costume. He got a bottle of cognac and two glasses. The innkeeper opened the bottle and lightly inserted the cork again.

  Kate Hegstroem was standing outside just as he had left her. She was standing there in her costume, a slender figure against the troubled sky—as if she had been left behind by some other century and were not an American girl of Swedish descent from Boston.

  “Here, Kate. The best protection against coolness, rain, and the clamor of too great quiet. Let us drink to the city down there.”

  “Yes.” She took the glass. “It’s good that we have driven up here, Ravic. It’s better than all the parties in the world.”

  She emptied her glass. The moon fell on her shoulders and her dress and her face. “Cognac,” she said. “A good one too.”

  “Right. As long as you recognize that, everything is in order.”

  “Give me another. And then let’s drive down again and I’ll change and you too and we’ll go to the Scheherazade and I’ll plunge into an orgy of sentimentality and feel sorry for myself and take leave of all the wonderful superficialities of life, and from tomorrow on I’ll read philosophers, write my will, and behave as befits my condition.”

  Ravic met the proprietress on the staircase of the hotel. She stopped him. “Have you got a moment?

  “Of course.”

  She led him up to the second floor and opened a room with a passkey. Ravic saw that it was still occupied by someone.

  “What does this mean?” he said. “Why are you breaking in here?”

  “Rosenfeld lives here,” she said. “He intends to move out.”

  “I don’t want to change.”

  “He intends to move out and has not paid for the last three months.”

  “His belongings are still here. You can hold them.”

  The proprietress contemptuously kicked a shabby suitcase that stood open beside the bed. “What is there in it? This has no value. Vulcanized fiber. Shirts frayed. His suit—you can see that from here. He only has two. You wouldn’t get even a hundred francs for the lot.”

  Ravic shrugged his shoulders. “Did he say he intended to leave?”

  “No. But you can see something like that. I told him so to his face. And he admitted it. I’ve made it clear to him that he must pay by tomorrow. I can’t go on like this with tenants who don’t pay.”

  “All right. What have I got to do with it?”

  “The paintings. They belong to him, too. He said they were valuable. He maintains he can pay much more than the rent with them. Now just look at that!”

  Ravic had paid no attention to the walls. He glanced up. In front of him, over the bed, hung an Arles landscape by van Gogh in his best period. He took a step closer. There could be no doubt, the painting was genuine. “Abominable, eh?” the proprietress asked. “These are supposed to be trees, these crooked things! And just look at that!”

  That was hanging over the washstand and was a Gauguin. A naked South Sea girl in front of a tropic landscape. “Those legs!” the proprietress said. “Ankles like an elephant. And that dull face. Just look at the way she is standing there! And then he has another one that has not even been finished.”

  The one that had not even been finished was a portrait of Madame Cézanne by Cézanne. “That mouth! Crooked. And there is color missing on the cheek. With these he wants to cheat me! You saw my pictures—those were pictures! True to nature and genuine and correct. The snow landscape with the deer in the salle à manger. But this trash—as if he had done it himself. Don’t you think so?”

  “Well, approximately.”

  “That’s what I wanted to know. You are an educated man and you understand these things. Not even frames are around them.”

  The three paintings were hung without frames. They shone on the dirty wallpaper like windows into another world. “If only they had good gold frames! Then one could take them. But this! I see that I’ll have to keep this trash and I’ll be taken in again. That’s what happens when you are kind!”

  “I don’t think you’ll have to take the paintings,” Ravic said.

  “What else can I do?”

  “Rosenfeld will get the money for you.”

  “How?” She looked quickly at him. Her face changed. “Are these things worth something? Sometimes just such things are of value!” One could see the thoughts leap behind her yellow forehead. “I could take possession of one of them without more ado, just for the last month! Which do you think? The big one over the bed?”

  “None at all. Wait until Rosenfeld gets back. I’m sure he’ll come with the money.”

  “I’m not. I am a hotel owner.”

  “Then why did you wait so long? You don’t usually.”

  “Promises! The things he promised me! You know how it is here.”

  Suddenly Rosenfeld stood at the door. Silent, short, and calm. Before the proprietress could say anything else he took some money out of his pocket. “Here—and here is my bill. Will you kindly mark it paid?”

  The proprietress looked at the notes in su
rprise. Then she looked at the paintings. Then back at the money. There was much she wanted to say—but she could not utter it. “You get some change back,” she finally declared.

  “I know. Can you give it to me now?”

  “Yes, all right. I don’t have it here. The cashbox is downstairs. I’ll change it.”

  She left as if she had been gravely insulted. Rosenfeld looked at Ravic. “I am sorry,” Ravic said. “The old lady dragged me up here. I had no idea what she had in mind. She wanted to know about the value of your pictures.”

  “Did you tell her?”

  “No.”

  “Good.” Rosenfeld looked at Ravic with a strange smile.

  “How can you have such paintings hanging here?” Ravic said. “Are they insured?”

  “No. But paintings don’t get stolen. At most once every twenty years out of a museum.”

  “This place might burn down.”

  Rosenfeld shrugged his shoulders. “One has to take the risk. The insurance is too expensive for me.”

  Ravic studied the van Gogh. It was worth at least a million francs. Rosenfeld followed his look.

  “I know what you are thinking. Who has this should also have money to insure it. But I haven’t, I’m living on my pictures. I’m slowly selling them. And I don’t like to sell them.”

  Under the Cézanne a spirit-cooker stood on the table. Beside it a box of coffee, some bread, a pot of butter, and a few paper bags. The room was poor and small. But from its walls shone the splendor of the world.

  “I can understand that,” Ravic said.

  “I thought I could manage all right,” Rosenfeld said. “I’ve been able to pay for everything. The railway fare, the ship ticket, everything; only not these three months’ rent. I’ve hardly eaten anything, but I couldn’t manage it. The visa took too long. I had to sell a Monet tonight. A Vertheuil landscape. I thought I would be able to take it with me.”

  “Wouldn’t you have been forced to sell it somewhere else just the same?”

  “Yes. But for dollars. It would have brought twice as much.”

  “Are you going to America?”