Arch of Triumph by Erich Maria Remarque Page B

light—and the darkness falls on one like chloroform on a wad of cotton, and one turns on the light again and stares and stares—”
    I must be drunk already, Ravic thought. Earlier than usual today. Or it may be the faint light. Or both. This is not the same insignificant, faded woman any longer. This is someone else. Suddenly there are eyes. There is a face. Something is looking at me. It must be the shadows. The soft fire behind my forehead that is illuminating her. The first glow of drunkenness.
    He did not listen to what Joan Madou said. He knew about all that and no longer wanted to know about it. To be alone—the eternal refrain of life. It wasn’t better or worse than anything else. One talked too much about it. One was always and never alone. Aviolin, suddenly—somewhere out of a twilight—in a garden on the hills around Budapest. The heavy scent of chestnuts. The wind. And dreams crouched on one’s shoulders like young owls, their eyes becoming lighter in the dusk. A night that never became night. The hour when all women were beautiful.
    He looked up. “Thank you,” Joan Madou said.
    “Why?”
    “Because you’ve let me talk without listening. It helped me. I needed it.”
    Ravic nodded. He noticed that her glass was empty again. “All right,” he said. “I’ll leave the bottle here for you.”
    He got up. A room. A woman. Nothing else. A pale face in which there was no longer any radiance. “Do you really want to go?” Joan Madou asked. She looked around as if someone were hidden in the room.
    “Here is Morosow’s address. His name, so that you won’t forget it. Tomorrow night at nine.” Ravic wrote it on a prescription pad. Then he tore the sheet off and put it on the suitcase.
    Joan Madou had got up. She reached for her coat and beret. Ravic looked at her. “You needn’t see me down.”
    “I don’t mean to do that. I just don’t want to stay here. Not now. I want to walk around somewhere.”
    “But you’ll have to come back again later anyhow. The same thing all over again. Why don’t you stay here? Now that you’ve already overcome it.”
    “It will be morning soon. When I come back it will be morning. Then it will be easier.”
    Ravic went to the window. It was still raining. Streamers, wet and gray, drifted with the wind around the yellow halos of the street lamps. “Come,” he said, “we’ll have another drink and then you’ll go to bed. This is no weather for walking.”
    He picked up the bottle. Suddenly Joan Madou was close at hisside. “Don’t leave me here,” she said quickly and urgently, and he felt her breath. “Don’t leave me here alone, tonight. I don’t know why, but not tonight! Tomorrow I’ll have courage but tonight I can’t be alone, I’m weary and weak and spent, I have no strength left, you shouldn’t have taken me out—not tonight—I can’t be alone now!”
    Ravic carefully put the bottle on the table and loosened her hands from his arm. “Child,” he said, “we have to get used to everything sometime.” He glanced at the chaise longue. “I could sleep on that. There is no point in going anywhere else now. I need a few hours’ sleep. I have to operate at nine in the morning. I could sleep here just as well as at my own place. It wouldn’t be my first night watch. Would that do?”
    She nodded. She was still standing close beside him.
    “I must be out by seven-thirty. Damned early. It will wake you up.”
    “That doesn’t matter. I’ll get up and make breakfast for you, everything—”
    “Nothing of the sort,” Ravic said. “I’ll have my breakfast in some café like a sensible workingman; coffee with rum and croissants. I can do everything else in the hospital. It will delight me to ask Eugénie for a bath. All right, let’s stay here. Two lost souls in November. You take the bed. If you like I can go down and stay with the old doorman till you’re ready.”
    “No,” Joan Madou said.
    “I won’t run away. Besides we’ll