The night in Lisbon

by Erich Maria Remarque

  "The waiter came back with the bottle. 'We're in Switzerland now.'

  "I paid for the wine and gave him a good tip. 'Keep the wine,' I said. 'I don't need it. I wanted to celebrate something, but I see that the first bottle was too much for me.'

  " 'You were drinking on an empty stomach,' he explained.

  " 'Yes, that's it.' I stood up.

  " 'Is it your birthday?' the waiter asked.

  " 'No,' I said. 'It's my golden wedding day.'

  "The little man in my compartment sat silent for a few minutes; he had stopped perspiring, but it would be no exaggeration to say that his clothes were wringing wet. Then he spoke. 'Are we in Switzerland?'

  " 'Yes,' I said.

  "He fell silent again and looked out the window. We stopped at a station with a Swiss name. A Swiss stationmas-ter waved a flag. Two Swiss policemen stood chatting beside the baggage car. There was a stand selling Swiss chocolate and Swiss sausages. My companion reached out and bought a Swiss newspaper. 'Are we in Switzerland?' he asked the newsboy.

  " 'Of course. Where else would we be? Ten rappen.'

  " 'What?'

  " 'Ten rappen. Ten centimes. For the paper.'

  "The man paid as if he had just won in the lottery. The Swiss money must have convinced him. He hadn't believed me. He opened the newspaper, skimmed through it, and put it down. It was some time before I heard what he was saying. I was so full of my own new freedom that the wheels of the train seemed to be rattling in my head. Then I saw his lips moving and realized that he was speaking.

  " 'At last I'm out,' he said, glaring at me, 'out of your God damned country, Mr. Party Comrade, which you swine have turned into a barracks and a concentration camp. This is Switzerland; it's free; nobody takes any orders from you and your kind. I can say what I please here without having my teeth kicked in. You thieves, you murderers, you executioners, what have you made of Germany!'

  "Small bubbles formed at the corners of his mouth. He stared at me as a hysterical woman might stare at a toad. After what he had heard, he thought I was a member of the party.

  "I listened with unruffled calm. I was only glad to be safe.

  " 'You're a brave man,' I said. 'I'm at least twenty pounds heavier than you and six inches taller. But get it off your chest. It will make you feel better.'

  " 'Don't you dare to make fun of me!' he cried, more furious than ever. 'I won't stand for it. We're not in Nazi land any more. What have you done to my parents? What did my old father do to you? And now! Now you want to set the whole world on fire.'

  " 'Do you think there's going to be a war?' I asked.

  " 'As if you didn't know,' he said. 'What else can you do with your Thousand-Year Reich and your armaments? You murderers! If you don't make war, your phony prosperity will collapse and you with it.'

  " 'I am of the same opinion,' I said, and felt the warm afternoon sun on my face like a caress. 'But what if Germany wins?'

  "The man with the damp clothing stared at me and gulped. "If you win, there's no God,' he said with difficulty.

  " 'I quite agree with you.' I stood up.

  " 'Don't touch me,' he hissed. 'You'll be arrested. I'll pull the emergency brake. I'll report you. You ought to be reported anyway, you spy! I heard what you said.'

  "That's all I need, I thought. 'Switzerland is a free country,' I said. 'You can't get a man arrested just by denouncing him. You've picked up some bad ideas in Germany.'

  "I took my bag and moved to another compartment. I thought it preferable not to explain myself to this hysterical man; but I also preferred not to sit with him. Hate is an acid that corrodes the soul, regardless of whether you or the other fellow does the hating. I had learned that in the course of my wanderings.

  "And so I came to Zurich."

  CHAPTER 9

  The music stopped for a moment. Angry words could be-heard from the dance floor. Then the band started up louder than before, and a woman in a canary-yellow dress, with a. string of false diamonds in her hair, began to sing. The inevitable had happened: a German had collided with an Englishman. Each accused the other of doing it on purpose. The manager and two waiters played League of Nations, trying to mollify the contenders, but no one listened. The band was more clever: it changed rhythms. The fox trot gave way to a tango, and the diplomats had to choose between making themselves ridiculous by standing still or starting to dance again. But the German warrior didn't seem to know the tango, while the Englishman merely kept time, without stirring from the spot. Both began to be jostled by other couples, and the argument disintegrated. Glowering, the diplomats returned to their tables.

  "Why don't the heroes challenge each other to a duel?"" asked Schwarz contemptuously.

  "So you arrived in Zurich," I said.

  He smiled feebly. "Why don't we get out of here?"

  "Where can we go?"

  "There must be some ordinary bar that stays open all night. This place is full of corpses, dancing and playing war."

  He paid and asked the waiter if there were somewhere else we could go. The waiter jotted an address on a slip of paper that he tore off his pad, and told us how to get there.

  We stepped out into a glorious night. The stars were still shining, but on the horizon the sea and the morning met in a first blue embrace. The sky was higher than before, and the smell of salt and flowers still stronger. The day was going to be clear. By day Lisbon has a naïve theatrical quality that enchants and captivates, but by night it is a fairy-tale city, descending over lighted terraces to the sea, like a woman in festive garments going down to meet her dark lover.

  We stood for a while in silence. "Isn't this the way we used to think of life?" said Schwarz finally. "A thousand lights and streets leading into the infinite . . ."

  I did not answer. To me, life was the ship that lay down there on the Tagus, and it didn't lead to the infinite ... it led to America. I had had my fill of adventures; the times had hurled adventures at us like rotten eggs. The only adventure for me was a valid passport, a visa, and a ticket. To a wanderer against his will, a normal life becomes the most romantic of dreams and adventure a torment.

  "That day Zurich looked to me the way this city looks to you tonight," said Schwarz. "It was the beginning of what I thought I had lost. Time—you know that—is diluted death, a poison administered slowly, in harmless doses. At first it stimulates us and even makes us feel immortal—but drop by drop and day by day it grows stronger and destroys our blood. Even if we wanted to buy back our youth at the price of the years that are still ahead of us, we couldn't; the acid of time has changed us, the chemical combination isn't the same any more. It would take a miracle. That miracle happened in Zurich."

  He stood still, looking down at the sparkling city. "This is the most terrible night in my life," he said slowly. "I want to remember it as the happiest. Shouldn't memory be able to do that? It must. A miracle is never perfect when it happens; there are always little disappointments. But once it's gone for good and nothing can change it, memory could make it perfect, and then it would never change. If I can just call it to life now, won't it always stay the same? Won't it stay with me as long as I live?"

  He seemed almost moonstruck as he stood on the stairs, looking into the overpowering advancing dawn, a pitiful forgotten figure out of the night. I felt terribly sorry for him. "It's true," I said, trying to spare his feelings. "How can we be really sure of our happiness until we know how much of it is going to stay with us?"

  "The only way," Schwarz whispered, "is to know that we can't hold it, and stop trying to. We frighten it away with our clumsy hands. But if we can keep our hands off it, won't it go on living fearlessly behind our eyes? Won't it stay there as long as our eyes live?"

  He looked down at the city, where a pine coffin stood and a ship lay at anchor. A look of dead suffering decomposed his features; the mouth was a black hollow, the eyes were stones. Then his face came to life again.

  We continued down the hill toward the harbor. After a tim
e he began to speak. "Who are we?" he said. "Who are you? Who am I? And what about all those other people and those who are gone? Which is real, a man or his reflection in the mirror? A living human being or his memory, his image shorn of grief? Have my dead wife and I become a single person? Can it be that she was never completely mine before and that only the sinister alchemy of death has made her so? Is she completely mine now that she exists only as a phosphorescent shimmer under my skull, now that she can answer only when I want her to and as I want her to? Or, after losing her once, am I losing her a second time, a little more each moment as her memory pales?" He stared at me. "I've got to hold her, don't you see that?"

  We came to a street in which long flights of stairs led down the hill. Some sort of festival must have been held here the day before. Wilted garlands, which made me think of a cemetery, were suspended from iron rods between the rows of houses, and strings of light bulbs punctuated by great tulip-shaped lanterns hung across the street. Higher up, at intervals of fifty or sixty feet, there were five-pointed stars composed of small electric-light bulbs. But the procession, or festival, had passed, and now the decorations lay bare and faded in the dawn. Far below us something seemed to have gone wrong with the electric circuit: only a single star burned with the strangely sharp, pale glow that electric lights take on at dawn and dusk.

  "This is the place," said Schwarz, opening a door. A powerful, sunburned man received us. It was a low-ceilinged room with wine barrels along the wall and a few tables, one of them occupied by a couple. We ordered wine and cold fried fish. There was nothing else to be had.

  "Do you know Zurich?" Schwarz asked.

  "Yes. I've been arrested in Switzerland. Nice jails. Much better than in France. Especially in winter. Unfortunately, they never keep you more than two weeks, though you'd be glad to take a rest. Then they deport you and the border circus starts all over again."

  "My decision to cross the border openly had somehow liberated me," said Schwarz. "I wasn't afraid any more. It no longer paralyzed me to see a policeman in the street; I still felt a shock, but it was mild, just enough to make me appreciate my freedom."

  I nodded. "Danger increases our awareness of life. Perfect as long as the danger doesn't come too close."

  "Do you think so?" Schwarz gave me a strange look. "I think it goes farther," he said. "It goes as far as what we call death, and still farther. Does a city stop existing because you've left it? Wouldn't it still be inside you even if it were destroyed? Who knows what death is? Maybe life is nothing more than a beam of light passing slowly over our changing faces. Maybe we had a face before we were born that will live on after all our perishable faces have passed away?"

  A cat came slinking up to the table. I tossed it a piece of fish. It lifted its tail and turned away. "You met your wife in Zurich" I asked cautiously.

  "I met her at the hotel. The embarrassed temporizing I had sensed in Osnabrück was gone, and gone for good. She was no longer unhappy and offended, making strategic capital of her injury. I met a woman I did not know, a woman I loved. It seemed as though nine years of an uneventful past had knit us together, and yet the past had lost its power to hem her in. For her, too, the poison of time had evaporated when she crossed the border. We were no longer at the mercy of the past; it belonged to us. Usually the past is just a depressing reflection of the years; but our past became a mirror that reflected nothing but us. The decision to break away and the act of breaking away removed us so radically from everything that had gone before that the impossible happened: we were reborn."

  Schwarz looked at me and again that strange expression passed over his face. "It stayed that way. It was Helen who kept it up. I couldn't—especially toward the end. But it was enough that she was able to carry it off. That was what mattered. Don't you agree? But now I've got to do it myself, just this once; that's why I am talking to you. Yes, that's the reason."

  "Did you stay in Zurich?" I asked.

  "We stayed for a week," said Schwarz, in a more normal tone. "We lived in that city and that country, the only one in Europe where the world hadn't begun to reel. We had money enough for a few months. Helen had brought some jewelry we could sell, and. in France I still had the late Schwarz's drawings.

  "That summer of 1939! It was as though God had wished to show the world one last time what peace can be and what it was going to lose. The days were brimful of carefree summer, and they became thoroughly unreal when we left Zurich for Lake Maggiore in the south.

  "Helen had received letters and phone calls from her family. She had left word that she was leaving for Zurich to see her doctor. It was easy for her family to find out where she was; the Swiss registration system is very efficient. They left her no peace with their questions and reproaches. She could still go back. We had to decide.

  "We lived in the same hotel, but not together. We were married, but our passports carried different names; it's pieces of paper that govern our lives at such times; we couldn't really live together. It was a strange situation, but it strengthened our feeling that time had been turned back for us. According to one law we were man and wife, according to another we were not. The new surroundings, the long separation, and especially the change that had come' over Helen in Switzerland—all that created a strange state: everything seemed vague, but at the same time intensely real. And over this strange world of ours hovered the last vanishing mists of a dream we could hardly remember. At the time I didn't know what had produced this blessed state—I took it as an unexpected gift, as though a god were allowing me to repeat a stretch of existence that I had bungled the first time and to transform it into perfect life. The, mole who had burrowed his way under borders without a passport became a bird who knew no frontiers.

  * * *

  "One morning when I called for Helen, I found her talking to a Mr. Krause, whom she introduced as a gentleman from the German consulate. She spoke to me in French when I came in and addressed me as Monsieur Lenoir. Krause misunderstood her and asked me in bad French if I were the famous painter's son. Helen laughed. 'Mr. Lenoir is from Geneva,' she said. 'But he speaks German. He's a great admirer of Renoir, though.'

  " 'You like Impressionist painting?' Krause asked me.

  " 'He even has a collection,' said Helen.

  " 'I have a few drawings,' I said. To convert my inheritance from the late Schwarz into a collection seemed to be one of Helen's new caprices. But since one of her caprices had kept me out of a concentration camp, I played along.

  " 'Do you know Oskar Reinhart's collection in Winterthur?' Krause asked me amiably.

  "I nodded. 'Reinhart has a Van Gogh that I'd give a month of my life for.'

  " 'Which month?' Helen asked.

  " 'Which Van Gogh?' asked Krause.

  " 'The Garden of the Insane Asylum.'

  "Krause smiled. 'A magnificent painting.'

  "He began to speak of painting, and when he got around to the Louvre, I was able to join in, thanks to the education I had received from the late Schwarz. I understood Helen's tactics now; she was trying to prevent Krause from recognizing me as her husband or as a refugee. The German consulates were not above reporting people to the Swiss police. I sensed that Krause was trying to ferret out my relationship to Helen, as she had known from the start. Now she dreamed up a wife for me—Lucienne—and two children, the elder being a girl who played the piano splendidly.

  "Krause's eyes darted from one to the other. He took advantage of our common interest in art to suggest another meeting—why wouldn't we have lunch in one of the little restaurants on the lake, where the fish is so good?—it's so unusual to meet someone who really knows anything about painting.

  "I agreed with equal enthusiasm—I'd be delighted to on my return to Switzerland. That would be in four to six weeks. He was surprised; didn't I live in Geneva? I told him I was a Genevan, but lived in Belfort. Since Belfort is in France, it would be harder for him to make inquiries there. On leaving, he couldn't resist the temptation to ask one last quest
ion: where had Helen and I met? Two such congenial people—it was unusual.

  "Helen looked at me. 'At the doctor's, Mr. Krause. Sick people are often more congenial than'—this with a malicious smile—'people who are so healthy they have muscles instead of nerves, even in their heads.'

  "Krause took Helen's gibe with a shrewd smile. 'I understand, Madame.'

  "Not to be outdone by Helen, I asked: 'Don't the Germans nowadays regard Renoir as degenerate art? Van Gogh, for sure.'

  " 'Not the connoisseurs among us,' said Krause, with another shrewd look, and slipped through the door.

  " 'What did he want?' I asked Helen.

  " 'To spy. I tried to warn you not to come, but you were already on your way. My brother sent him. How I hate all that!'

  "The shadowy arm of the Gestapo had reached across the border to remind us that we were not entirely free. Krause had asked Helen to drop in at the consulate at her convenience. Nothing urgent, but her passport would have to have a new stamp. A kind of exit visa. That had been forgotten.