Flotsam

by Erich Maria Remarque

  “Just as you’d expect!” said Waser the Communist.

  “And Bernstein?”

  “Bernstein is in Australia. His father’s in East Africa. Max May has had especial good luck; he has become assistant to a dentist in Bombay. Black, of course. But he has to eat. Loewenstein took all his law examinations over again in English, and now he’s an attorney in Palestine. The actor Hansdorff is at the State Theater in Zürich. Storm hanged himself. Did you know Councilor Binder in Berlin, Edith?”

  “Yes.”

  “He got a divorce. On account of his career. He was married to an Oppenheimer. His wife poisoned herself and their two children.”

  Moritz Rosenthal reflected for a while. “That’s about all I know,” he said. “The others are wandering around as usual. Only there are even more of them now.”

  Marill poured himself a drink of cognac. He used a water glass that bore the inscription Gare de Lyon. It was a souvenir of his first arrest and he always carried it with him. He emptied the glass at one gulp. “An instructive chronicle,” he commented then. “Long live the destruction of the individual! Among the ancient Greeks thought was a distinction. After that it became a pleasure. Later a weakness. Today it is a crime. The history of civilization is the story of the sufferings of those who have created it.”

  Steiner grinned at him. Marill grinned back. At that instant the bells outside began to ring. Steiner looked at the faces around him—the many little destinies blown together here by the Wind of Destiny—and he lifted his glass. “Father Moritz!” he said. “King of the wanderers, last scion of Ahasuerus, eternal emigrant, accept our greetings! The devil knows what this year may bring. Long live the subterranean brigade! So long as we’re here, nothing’s lost.”

  Moritz Rosenthal nodded. He lifted his glass to Steiner and drank. In the background of the room someone laughed. Then there was silence. They all looked at one another with embarrassed faces as though they had been surprised doing something shameful.

  From outside in the street came cries. Fireworks exploded. Taxis rushed by honking. On a balcony of a house opposite a little man in vest and shirt sleeves set off a pan of green fire. The whole façade was lighted up. The green light streamed blindingly into Edith Rosenfeld’s room and made it unreal—as though it were no longer a room in a hotel in Paris, but a cabin in a sunken ship deep under water.

  * * *

  The actress Barbara Klein was sitting at a table in a corner of “the catacombs.” It was late and there were only two electric light bulbs burning, one over each doorway. Her chair stood in front of an arrangement of palms, and whenever she leaned back the leaves touched her hair like stiff hands. She felt it each time and her head jerked; but she no longer had the strength to get up and find a seat elsewhere.

  From the kitchen came the clatter of dishes and the plaintive tones of an accordion over the radio. The Toulouse broadcasting station, thought Barbara Klein. A new year. I am tired. I don’t want to go on living. What did any of them know about how tired a person could be?

  I’m not drunk, she thought. My thoughts have just become slower. As slow as flies in wintertime. Flies in which death is growing. It’s growing in me, too, like a tree. It’s growing like a tree in my veins which are slowly freezing. Someone gave me a glass of cognac. The one called Marill or the other one that went away. He said it would warm me. But I’m not even cold. I just haven’t any feeling at all any more.

  She sat there and saw, as through a glass wall, someone coming toward her. He came nearer and she saw him more clearly now, but there was still glass between them. Now she recognized him; it was the man who had sat beside her in Edith Rosenfeld’s room. He had had a diffident, indistinct face with large eyeglasses and a twisted mouth and restless hands and he limped—but now he limped right through the transparent wall and it closed behind him with soft iridescence like a curtain of liquid glass.

  It was some time before she understood anything of what he was saying. She saw him go away with his halting gait as though he were swimming, and she saw him return and sit down beside her and she drank what he gave her and had no feeling of swallowing. In her ears was subdued roaring and amid it voices, words, useless senseless words from far away, from another shore; and then suddenly it was not a human being any more in front of her, hot, blotched and restless—it was only something pathetic, moving, something maltreated and beseeching. It was only hunted, imploring eyes, just an animal caught in this loneliness of glass and the Toulouse radio station and the alien night.

  “Yes—” she said, “yes—”

  She wanted him to go and leave her alone for only an instant, a few minutes, a little portion of the long eternity that stretched before her—but he was getting up now and standing in front of her and bending over and taking her arm and drawing her to her feet and speaking and taking her away, and she was wading through a mire of glass. And then came the stairway which was ductile and snapped at her legs with its steps, and doors and brightness and a room.

  She sat on her bed and felt she could never get up again. Her joints seemed to fall apart. There was no pain. It was just a noiseless sundering as when overripe fruit in the stillness of autumn falls at night from a motionless tree. She bent forward, she looked at the worn carpet as though she expected to see herself lying there, and then she lifted her head. Someone was looking at her.

  It was strange eyes under soft hair, it was a strange, thin face, bent forward, masklike, and then it was a chilling shudder and a convulsion and an awakening from far away, and she saw that it was her own face that was looking at her out of the mirror.

  She did not move. And then she saw the man kneeling beside her bed in a curiously ridiculous posture, holding her hands.

  She drew her hands away. “What do you want?” she asked sharply. “What do you want of me?”

  The man stared at her. “But you said—you told me I could come with you—”

  She had become weary again. “No—” she said. “No—”

  The words came again. Words of unhappiness and pain and loneliness and suffering, words, words that were much too big—but did small words exist for small beings that were ground down and abased? And that he had to go away tomorrow, and that he had never had a woman, and that it was only fear and his infirmity that paralyzed him and made him ridiculous, a smashed foot, only a foot, and the despair and the hope that just tonight—after all, she had looked at him all evening and he had thought…

  Had she looked at him? She did not know. All she knew was that this was her room and that she would never leave it again, and that everything else was mist and less than mist.

  “It would mean a new life for me!” whispered the man beside her knees. “Everything would be different for me—please understand that! No longer to feel myself an outcast—”

  She understood none of it. She looked in the mirror again. That was Barbara Klein there, bending forward, twenty-eight years old, untouched her whole life long, treasured-up for a dream that had never come, and now without hope and at the end.

  She got up cautiously, still watching the image in the mirror. She looked at it. She smiled at it, and for an instant a flicker of irony and macabre mockery answered her. “Yes,” she said wearily, “yes—all right—”

  The man stopped speaking. He stared at her almost incredulously. She paid no heed. Everything was suddenly too heavy. Her dress weighed on her like armor. She let it fall. She let herself fall, the heavy shoes, the thin, heavy body—and the bed grew and became huge and took her in its arms, a soft white grave.

  She heard a switch snap and the rustling of clothes. With an effort she opened her eyes. It was dark. “Light,” she said into the pillow. “The light must stay on.”

  “One instant! Please, just one instant more!” The man’s voice was embarrassed and hasty. “It’s just that—please understand—”

  “The light must stay on—” she repeated.

  “Yes. Certainly—at once—only …”

  “It w
ill be dark for so long afterward,” she murmured.

  “Yes—yes, certainly—the nights in winter are long—”

  She heard the switch click. The light was once more a soft red twilight on her closed eyelids. Then she felt the other body. For a second everything inside her tightened—then she relaxed. This would pass, like everything.…

  Slowly she opened her eyes again. A person she did not know stood by her bed. She had had a memory of something restless, beseeching, miserable—but what she saw now was a warm, frank face alive with tenderness and happiness.

  She looked at him for an instant. “You must go now,” she said. “Please go—”

  The man made a gesture. Then the words came again. Quick, trembling words. At first she did not understand. It was too sudden and she was too burned-out. All she wanted now was for him to go. Then she understood part of it—that he had been desperate and broken, and that this was no longer so. And that he had regained his courage. Now, at the very moment when he had been ordered out of France—

  She nodded. He must stop speaking. “Please—” she said.

  He was silent.

  “You must go now,” she said.

  “Yes—”

  She lay beaten and exhausted under the blanket. Her eyes followed the man as he went to the door. He was the last human being she would see. She lay very quiet in a strange peace—nothing concerned her any more.

  The man paused at the door. He hesitated and waited for a moment. “Tell me one thing more,” he said. “Have you—Did you do that just—out of—more out of pity—or—”

  She looked at him. The last human being. The last link with life. “No—” she said with tremendous effort.

  “Not out of pity?”

  “No.”

  The man at the door stiffened. He was breathless with anticipation. “Then what …?” he asked as softly as though he feared he might fall into an abyss.

  She was still looking at him. She was very calm. The last little bit of life. “Love—” she said.

  The man at the door was silent. He looked like one who had expected a blow from a cudgel and had stumbled into an embrace. He did not move, but he seemed to grow. “My God!” he said.

  Suddenly she was afraid he would come back. “You must go now,” she said. “I am very tired—”

  “Yes—”

  She no longer heard what he was saying. Exhaustion seized her and closed her eyes. Then the door was there again, blank and empty, and she was alone and had forgotten him.

  She remained for a time lying quiet. She saw her face in the mirror and smiled at it—very wearily and tenderly. Her head was quite clear now. Barbara Klein, she thought. Actress. Precisely on New Year’s Day. Actress. But wasn’t one day like another? She looked at her clock on the bedside table. She had wound it that morning. The clock would go on ticking for a whole week. She looked at the letter beside it. The dreadful letter that contained death.

  She took the little razor blade out of the drawer. She held it between her thumb and index finger and drew the covers over her. It didn’t hurt much. The landlady would be furious in the morning. But she had nothing else. She had no veronal. She pressed her face into the pillow. It became darker—then it came again—far away. The Toulouse radio. Nearer and nearer. A faint rumbling. A funnel into which she was slipping. Faster and faster. And then the wind …

  Chapter Nineteen

  MARILL CAME INTO the canteen. “There’s someone outside looking for you, Steiner.”

  “Under what name, Steiner or Huber?”

  “Steiner.”

  “Did you ask him what he wanted?”

  “Of course. As a precaution.” Marill looked at him. “He has a letter for you. From Berlin.”

  Steiner pushed back his chair with a jerk. “Where is he?”

  “Over in the Rumanian Pavilion.”

  “Not a spy or anything like that?”

  “Doesn’t look it.”

  They walked across together. Under the bare trees a man of about fifty was standing. “Are you Steiner?” he asked.

  “No!” Steiner said. “Why?”

  The man looked at him sharply for an instant. “I have a letter for you from your wife.” He took a letter out of his portfolio and showed it to Steiner. “You probably recognize the handwriting.”

  Steiner knew that he was standing still but it took all his strength, for suddenly inside him everything was unsteady and quivering. He could not lift his head; he believed if he tried to it would fly away.

  “What made you think Steiner was in Paris?” Marill asked.

  “The letter reached me from Vienna. Someone took it there from Berlin. When he tried to find you he was told you were in Paris.” The man pointed to a second envelope. Josef Steiner, Paris, was written on it in Lilo’s large handwriting. “He sent it to me along with other letters. I’ve been looking for you for several days. Finally at the Café Maurice they told me I would find you here. You needn’t tell me whether you are Steiner. I know how careful one has to be. All you need do is take the letter. I want to get rid of it.”

  “It’s for me,” Steiner said.

  “Good.”

  The man handed him the letter. Steiner had to force himself to take it. It was different and heavier than any other letter in the world. But once he felt the envelope between his fingers you would have had to cut his hand off to get it away from him.

  “Thanks,” he said to the man. “You’ve been to a lot of trouble.”

  “That’s nothing. When people like us get mail it’s important enough to do a little searching. I’m glad I found you.”

  He waved to them and left.

  “Marill,” Steiner said, completely beside himself. “From my wife. The first letter. What can it be? She ought not to write me, you know.”

  “Open it—”

  “Yes. Stay here with me. Damn it, what can have gone wrong with her?” He tore open the envelope and began to read. He sat like a stone and read the letter to the end; but his face began to change, it became pale and drawn. The muscles in his cheeks tensed and the veins stood out.

  He let the letter fall and sat for a time silently staring at the floor. Then he glanced at the date. “Ten days—” he said. “She’s in the hospital. Ten days ago she was still alive—”

  Marill looked at him and waited.

  “She says she can’t be saved. That’s why she wrote. She doesn’t tell me what’s wrong. It doesn’t matter now. She writes—you understand—it’s her last letter—”

  “In what hospital is she?” Marill asked. “Did she tell you that?”

  “Yes.”

  “We’ll call up at once. We’ll call the hospital, under some other name.”

  Steiner stood up unsteadily. “I must go there.”

  “Call first. Come, we’ll go to the Verdun.”

  Steiner gave the number. In a half-hour the telephone rang and he went into the booth as though into a dark cavern. When he came out he was dripping with sweat.

  “She’s still alive,” he said.

  “Did you speak to her?” Marill asked.

  “No. To the doctor.”

  “Did you tell him your name?”

  “No. I said I was one of her relatives. There has been an operation and there is no hope for her. Three or four days at most, the doctor says. It was for that reason she wrote. She didn’t think I’d get the letter so quickly. Damn it!” He still had the letter in his hand and he looked around as though he had never before been in the dirty lobby of the Verdun. “Marill, I’m taking the train tonight.”

  Marill stared at him. “Have you lost your mind?” he asked softly.

  “No. I’ll get across the border. I have a passport, you know.”

  “The passport won’t do you any good once you’re over there. You know that perfectly well yourself.”

  “Yes.”

  “You also know what it means once you cross the border?”

  “Yes.”

  “That you�
�re probably done for.”

  “I’m done for if she dies.”

  “That’s not true!” Marill was suddenly very angry. “It may sound tough, Steiner, but I advise you to write her, telegraph her—but stay here.”

  Steiner shook his head absent-mindedly. He had scarcely heard.

  Marill seized him by the shoulder.

  “You can’t help her. Even if you get there.”

  “I can see her.”

  “She will be horrified if you go. If you were to ask her now, she would make every effort to have you stay here.”

  Steiner had been staring into the street without seeing anything. Now he turned around quickly. “Marill,” he said, and his eyes wavered, “she is still all there is for me, she is alive, she breathes, her eyes are still there and her thoughts, I am still there behind those eyes—and in a few days she will be dead; there will be nothing left of her; she will lie there and be nothing but a strange, disintegrating body. But now, now she is still alive for a few days longer, the last days—And I am not to be with her? Try to understand that I must go. There is no other way. Damn it, the world is ending; if I don’t see her I’ll simply break. I’ll die with her.”

  “You won’t die with her. Come, telegraph her, take my money, take Kern’s money, telegraph her every hour, pages, letters, anything—but stay here.”

  “It’s not dangerous for me to go. I have my passport. I’ll get back with it.”

  “Don’t talk nonsense to me. You know it’s dangerous! They have a damned good organization over there.”

  “I’m going,” Steiner said.

  Marill tried to seize him by the arm and lead him away. “Come, we’ll empty a couple of bottles of brandy. Get drunk! I promise you I’ll telephone every couple of hours.”

  Steiner shook him off as though he were a child. “It won’t do, Marill. That won’t fix it. I know what you mean. I understand it, too. I’m not crazy. I know what the stakes are, but if they were a thousand times higher I’d still take that train and nothing could stop me. Can’t you understand that?”

  “Yes,” Marill roared. “Of course I understand it! I’d take the train myself!”