Arch of Triumph by Erich Maria Remarque Read Free Book Online Page A

gasoline—quick, fluctuating life. How sweet it could taste in passing! He looked up at the hotel front. A few lighted windows. Behind one of them the woman was sitting now and staring straight ahead. He took the slip with her name out of his pocket, tore it up, and threw it away. Forget. What a word, he thought. Full of horror, comfort, and apparitions! Who could live without forgetting? But who could forget enough? The ashes of memory that ground one’s heart. Only when one had nothing more to live for, was one free.
    He went to the Place de l’Etoile. A great crowd filled the square. Searchlights had been placed behind the Arc de Triomphe. They illuminated the tomb of the Unknown Soldier. A huge blue-white-red flag waved in the wind in front of it. It was the celebration of the twentieth anniversary of the 1918 Armistice. The sky was overcast and the beam of the searchlights threw the shadow of the flag against the floating clouds, dull and blurred and torn. It looked like a ragged flag which gradually melted into the slowly darkening sky. Somewhere a military band was playing. It sounded weak and thin. There was no singing. The crowd stood silent. “Armistice,” an old woman said at Ravic’s side. “I lost my husband in the last war. Now it’s my son’s turn. Armistice. Who knows what next year will bring.…”

4

    THE FEVER CHART over the bed was new and clean. Only the name was on it. Lucienne Martinet. Buttes-Chaumont. Rue Clavel.
    The girl’s face on the pillow was gray. She had been operated on the night before. Ravic carefully listened to her heart. Then he straightened up. “Better,” he said. “The blood transfusion worked a minor miracle. If she lasts one more day she has a chance.”
    “Fine,” Veber said. “Congratulations. It didn’t look as if she had. A pulse of a hundred forty and a blood pressure of eighty; caffeine, coramine—that was damn close.”
    Ravic shrugged his shoulders. “That’s nothing to be congratulated for. She came earlier than the other girl. The one with the gold chain around her ankle. That was all.”
    He covered the girl up. “This is the second case within a week. If it goes on you’ll have a hospital for mishandled abortions from the Buttes-Chaumont. Wasn’t the other girl from there, too?”
    Veber nodded. “Yes. And from the Rue Clavel. They probably knew each other and went to the same midwife. She even came about the same time in the evening as the other girl. It’s a goodthing I was able to get hold of you at the hotel. I was afraid you wouldn’t be in.”
    Ravic looked at him. “When one lives in a hotel one usually isn’t in at night, Veber. Hotel rooms in November aren’t particularly cheerful.”
    “I can imagine that. But then why do you go on living in a hotel?”
    “It’s a comfortable and impersonal way of living. One’s alone and one isn’t alone.”
    “Is that what you want?”
    “Yes.”
    “You could have all that in another way too. If you’d rent a small apartment, it would be just the same.”
    “Maybe.” Ravic bent over the girl again.
    “Don’t you think so, too, Eugénie?” Veber asked.
    The nurse glanced up. “Mr. Ravic will never do it,” she said coldly.
    “Doctor Ravic, Eugénie,” Veber corrected. “I’ve told you a hundred times. He was chief surgeon in a great hospital in Germany. Far more important than I am.”
    “Here—” the nurse began and straightened her glasses.
    Veber quickly stopped her. “All right! All right! We know all that. This country doesn’t recognize foreign degrees. Idiotic at that! But what makes you so sure he won’t take an apartment?”
    “Mr. Ravic is a lost man. He will never build a home for himself.”
    “What?” Veber asked in astonishment. “What’s that you are saying?”
    “There is no longer anything sacred to Mr. Ravic. That’s the reason.”
    “Bravo,” Ravic said from the girl’s bedside.
    “I have never heard anything like it!” Veber stared at