The night in Lisbon

by Erich Maria Remarque

  "We slept in a small village. I would have liked to abandon the car somewhere and go on by train. But I decided against it. Spain was unsafe; the quickest mode of travel was the best. In some inexplicable way the car became a kind of dark mascot; its technical perfection even dispelled my horror of it. My need of the car made me forget about Georg. He had been a threat hanging over my life too long; now he was gone and I felt little more than relief; I thought of the Smile; he was still alive and perhaps he was trying to locate us by telephone. All countries extradite for murder. It had been self-defense— but I would have had to prove that in the city where the crime was committed.

  "We reached the Portuguese border late the following night. I had obtained visas without difficulty on the way. At the border I left Helen in the car with the engine running. If anything went wrong, she would start up and drive straight at me, I would jump in, and we would break through to the Portuguese side. Nothing much could have happened to us; it was a small station, and before the guards had time to aim and fire in the darkness, we would be gone. What would happen in Portugal was another question.

  "Nothing happened. The uniformed guards stood in the gusty darkness like figures in a Goya painting. They saluted, and we drove to the Portuguese station, where we were admitted just as easily. As we were starting off, one of the guards came running after us, shouting at us to stop. After a moment's hesitation I complied; if I had gone on, the car could easily have been stopped at the next town. I stopped. We barely breathed.

  "The guard came up. 'Your carnet' he said. 'You left it on the desk. You'll need it to come back with.'

  " 'Thank you very much.'

  "Behind me the little boy heaved an enormous sigh of relief. I myself had a sense of weightlessness for a moment 'Now you're in Portugal,' I said to the boy. He slowly took his hands away from his mouth and leaned back for the first time. He had been crouched forward during the whole trip.

  "Villages flew by. Dogs barked. The fire of a blacksmith's shop glowed in the early morning; the blacksmith was shoeing a white horse. It had stopped raining. I waited for the feeling of release that I had been looking forward to for so long; but it did not come. Helen sat silent beside me. I wanted to be happy, but I felt empty.

  "In Lisbon I phoned the American consulate in Marseille. I told them what had happened up to the moment when Georg had appeared. The man on the wire said, well, then I was safe. All I could get out of him was a promise that if a visa were granted, he would forward it to the consulate in Lisbon.

  "The car that had protected us for so long had to be got rid of. 'Sell it,' said Helen.

  " 'Shouldn't I let it roll into the sea someplace?'

  " 'That won't change anything,' she said. 'You need the money. Sell it.'

  "She was right. It was very easy to sell. The purchaser told me he would pay the duty and have the car painted black. He was a dealer. I sold him the car in Georg's name. A week later I saw it with Portuguese plates. There were several like it in Lisbon; I recognized it only by a slight dent in the left fender. I burned Georg's passport."

  Schwarz looked at his watch. "There isn't much more to tell. Once each week I went to the consulate. For a time we stayed at a hotel on the money from the sale of the car. I wanted Helen to enjoy as much comfort as possible. We found a doctor who helped her to get sedatives. I even took her to the casino. I rented a tuxedo for it. Helen still had her evening dress from Paris, and I bought her a pair of golden slippers. I had forgotten her others in Marseille. Do you know the casino?"

  "Yes, unfortunately. I was there last night. It was a mistake."

  "I wanted her to play," said Schwarz. "She won. She had an incredible streak of luck. She threw out chips at random and the numbers came.

  "The last days had little connection with reality. It was as though our life at the castle had begun again. We both put on a bit of an act; but for the first time I had the feeling that she belonged entirely to me, although she was slipping away from me by the hour, into the arms of the most ruthless of lovers. She had not yet surrendered to him; but she had stopped fighting. There were nights and nights of torment, when she wept; but then came almost unearthly moments, when sweetness, sadness, wisdom, and a love without bodily limits attained such an intensity that I scarcely dared to move. 'My darling,' she said to me one night, and it was the only time she ever spoke of it. 'We won't see your Promised Land together.'

  "I had taken her to the doctor's that afternoon. Now suddenly I was overwhelmed by the sense of impotent rebellion that comes to a man who is unable to hold what he loves. "Helen,' I said in a suffocating voice, 'what has become of us?'

  "She said nothing. Then she shook her head and laughed. We did our best,' she said. 'And that's enough.'

  "Then came the day when they told me at the consulate that the unbelievable had happened. The two visas had come. The drunken whim of a chance acquaintance had brought about what no amount of desperate pleas could accomplish. I laughed. It was hysteria. If you're capable of laughing, there's plenty to laugh at in the world today. Don't you agree?"

  "We've got to stop laughing sometime," I said.

  "The strange part of it is that we laughed a good deal in the last days," Schwarz went on. "We seemed to be in a port, sheltered from every wind. The bitterness had run out, there were no tears left, and our grief had become so transparent that it was often indistinguishable from an ironic, melancholy gaiety. We moved into a small apartment. With incredible blindness I went on with my plan of escape to America. For a long time there were no boats, and then finally a sailing was announced. I sold my last Degas drawing and bought the tickets. I was happy. I thought we were saved. In spite of everything! In spite of the doctor!

  "The sailing was postponed for a few days. Then the day before yesterday I went back to the office of the shipping line. The date had been set for today. I told Helen and went out to buy something or other. When I came back, she was dead. All the mirrors in the room were smashed. Her evening dress lay torn on the floor. She was lying beside it; she was not lying on the bed.

  "My first thought was that she had been murdered by a burglar. Then that she had been killed by a Gestapo agent; but he would have been after me, not her. It was only when I saw that nothing was damaged apart from the mirrors and the dress that I understood. I remembered the poison I had given her, which she claimed to have lost. I stood and stared and then I looked for a letter. There was none. There was nothing. She had gone without a word. Can you understand that?"

  "Yes," I said.

  "You understand?"

  "Yes," I replied. "What could she have written?"

  "Something. Why. Or . . ."

  He fell silent. He was probably thinking of last words, of a last token of love, of something that he might have taken with him into his loneliness. He had shorn off a good many conventional ideas, but apparently not this one. "If she had once begun," I said, "she could never have stopped writing. By not writing she told you more than she could ever have said in words."

  He thought it over. "Did you see the sign in the travel bureau?" he whispered then. "Postponed for twenty-four hours. She would have lived a day longer if she had known."

  "No."

  "She didn't want to go. That's why she did it."

  I shook my head. "She couldn't stand the pain any longer," I said.

  "I can't believe that," he replied. "Why should she have done it just when everything was settled for the trip? Or did she think she wouldn't be admitted to America with her sickness?"

  "Shouldn't we leave it to a dying woman to decide when she's at the end of her rope?" I said. "It seems to me that's the least we can do."

  He stared at me. "She held out as long as she possibly could," I said. "For your sake, can't you see that? For your sake alone. Once she knew you were saved, she gave up."

  "And what if I hadn't been so blind? What if I hadn't insisted on going to America?"

  "Mr. Schwarz," I said, "that would not have cured her."
r />   He moved his head strangely. "She's gone," he whispered," and suddenly it's as if she had never been. I looked at her, and there was no answer. What have I done? Did I kill her or did I make her happy? Did she love me, or was I only a crutch that she leaned on when it suited her? I can't find an answer."

  "Must you have one?"

  "No," he said. "Forgive me. Probably not."

  "There is no answer. There never is—except for the one you give yourself."

  "I've told you the story," he said after a while, "because I have to know. What has my life been? Has it been an empty, meaningless life, the life of a useless cuckold, a murderer. . . ?"

  "I don't know," I said. "But if you prefer, it was also the life of a man who loved, or, if that appeals to you, of a kind of saint. But what good are names? It was your life. Isn't that enough?"

  "It was! But now?"

  "It will live as long as you."

  "It's only we who are keeping it," Schwarz whispered. "You and I; there's no one else." He stared at me. "Don't forget that. Someone has to hold it. It mustn't die. There are only two of us. It's not safe with me. But it mustn't die. It's got to go on living. With you it's safe."

  For all my skepticism a strange feeling came over me. What did this man want? Did he want to bequeath me his past along with his passport? Was he planning to take his life?

  "Why should it die in you?" I asked. "You will go on living, Mr. Schwarz."

  "I am not going to kill myself," Schwarz replied calmly. "Not when I know that the Smile is still alive. But my mind will try to destroy the memory, chew it to bits, reduce it, falsify it, domesticate it, make it into something I can go on living with. Even a few weeks from now, I'd be unable to tell you what I've told you today. That's why I wanted you to listen to me. You won't falsify it because for you it holds no danger. And somewhere it's got to endure." Suddenly he was utterly forlorn. "Somebody has to preserve it intact, at least for a while." He drew two passports from his pocket and set them down in front of me. "Here is Helen's passport, too. The tickets you have already. Now you've got American visas. For two." A shadowy smile passed over his face and he fell silent.

  I gaped at the passports. With an enormous effort I managed to ask: "And you really don't need them any more?"

  "You can give me yours in exchange," he said. "I'll need it only for a day or two. Just for the border."

  I looked at him.

  "In the Foreign Legion they don't ask for passports. I don't have to tell you that they accept refugees. And as long as there are barbarians alive like the Smile, it would be a crime to kill myself, to waste a life that could be spent fighting them."

  I took my passport from my pocket and gave it to him.

  "Thank you," I said. "Thank you with all my heart, Mr. Schwarz."

  "There's some money, too. I won't need much." Schwarz looked at his watch. "Would you do one more thing for me? They'll be coming for her in half an hour. Would you come with me?"

  "Yes."

  Schwarz paid the check. We went out into the screaming morning.

  Outside lay the ship, white and restless on the Tagus.

  I stood in the room beside Schwarz. The mirror frames were still hanging there—empty. The broken glass had been cleared away. "Ought I to have spent the last night with her?" Schwarz asked.

  "You were with her." The woman lay in the coffin, as dead people do; her face seemed infinitely aloof. Nothing concerned her, neither Schwarz nor I nor herself. It was no longer possible to imagine how she had looked. What lay there was a statue, and Schwarz alone had an image of how she was while she breathed. But Schwarz was now convinced that I shared it. "Some letters . . ." he said. "Only yesterday . . ."

  He took some letters from a drawer. "I haven't read them," he said. "Take them."

  I took the letters and was going to put them into the coffin. Then I thought better of it—now, at last, the dead woman belonged to Schwarz alone, or so he believed. Other people's letters had become irrelevant—he didn't want her to take them with her, but on the other hand he didn't wish to destroy them, because after all they had been hers. "I'll take them," I said and put them in my pocket "They have lost their meaning. They mean less than a small banknote that you spend for a dish of soup."

  "Crutches," he replied. "I know. She once called them crutches that she needed to go on being true to me. Do you understand that? It's absurd. . . ."

  "No," I said, and then very cautiously, with all the compassion I had: "Why can't you at last leave her in peace? She loved you and she stayed with you as long as she could."

  He nodded. Suddenly he looked very frail. "That's what I wanted to know," he murmured.

  It was very hot in the room—the dead woman, the pungent smell, the flies, the spent candles, and the sun outside. Schwarz saw my glance.

  "A woman helped me," he said. "It's hard in a strange country. The doctor. The police. They took her away. Then last night they brought her back. Autopsy. The cause of death." He gave me a helpless look. "They . . . some of her is gone . . . they told me not to uncover her. . . ."

  The pallbearers came. The coffin was closed. Schwarz seemed to be about to faint. "I'll go with you," I said.

  It was not very far. The morning was bright and the wind raced like a sheep dog pursuing a flock of fleecy clouds. At the cemetery Schwarz stood small and forsaken beneath the vast sky.

  "Do you want to go back to your apartment?" I asked him.

  "No."

  He had taken a suitcase with him. "Do you know someone who can fix the passports?" I asked.

  "Gregorius. He got here last week."

  We went to see Gregorius. He quickly arranged my passport for Schwarz; there was no need to be too meticulous. Schwarz had on him a card from a recruiting station for the Foreign Legion. He would only have to cross the border. Once at the Legion post, he could throw my passport away. The Legion wasn't interested in the past.

  "What became of the little boy you brought to Lisbon?" I asked.

  "His uncle hates him; but the boy is happy. He thinks it's better to be hated by a member of his family than by strangers."

  I looked at the man who now bore my name. "I wish you the best of luck," I said, taking care not to call him Schwarz. I could think of nothing else to say.

  "I won't be seeing you again," he said. "It's just as well. I've told you too much to want to see you again."

  I wasn't so sure of that. It seemed possible that he would want to see me later on for that very reason. I alone, he believed, possessed an unfalsified image of his life. But that could make him hate me; perhaps he would feel that I had taken his wife from him, this time irrevocably—if he really believed that his own memory deceived him and only mine remained clear.

  I saw him going down the street, suitcase in hand, a pitiful figure, the eternal cuckold and heroic lover. But had he not possessed the woman he loved more profoundly than all those stupid conquerors? And what do we really possess? Why do we make so much fuss about things which at best are merely lent us for a little while; and why all this talk about degrees of possession, when the illusory word "possess" means merely to embrace the air?

  I had a passport photo of my wife on me; in those days you were always needing photographs for identification papers. Gregorius went right to work. I stayed with him. I was afraid to let the two passports out of my sight.

  By noon they were done. I rushed to the hole we were living in. Ruth was sitting by the window, watching the fishermen's children in the yard. "Did you lose?" she asked when I appeared in the doorway.

  I held up the passports. "We're leaving tomorrow. We'll have other names, each a different one, and we'll have to get married again in America."

  I hardly gave a thought to the fact that I was now bearing the passport of a man who might be wanted for murder. We sailed the following afternoon and reached America without difficulty. But the lovers' passports did not bring us luck: Ruth divorced me six months later. To make it legal we had first to get marri
ed again. Later, Ruth married the rich American who had given Schwarz his affidavit. The whole thing struck him as too funny for words; he was best man at our second wedding. A week later we were divorced in Mexico.

  I spent the rest of the war in America. Strangely enough, I began to take an interest in painting, which previously had meant next to nothing to me—an inheritance, it seemed to me, from the dead and remote original Schwarz. I often thought of the other Schwarz, who was perhaps still alive, and the two of them merged into a hazy ghost, whose presence I sometimes felt. It even seems to influence me, though I know that such notions are pure nonsense. I finally found employment in an art store, and in my room hung several prints of Degas drawings, of which I had grown very fond.