Heaven Has No Favorites: A Novel by Erich Maria Remarque; Translated by Richard Winston and Clara Winston Read Free Book Online Page B

it was cold and dark and dreary and occupied by the Germans.”
    The nurse laughed. “But that’s over now. It hasn’t been like that for several years. By now it must be just as it was before the war. Wouldn’t you like to go again?”
    “No,” Lillian replied harshly. “Who would want to go to Paris in winter? Are you through?”
    “I will be in a moment. What’s the hurry? There’s nothing in particular to do here.”
    The nurse left at last. Lillian turned off the radio. Yes, she thought, there was nothing in particular to do here. You could only wait. Wait for what? For life to continue to consist of waiting?
    She undid the blue ribbon around the white box. Boris—he had come to terms with the idea of staying up here, she thought. Or at least that was what he said. But could she ever?
    She parted the tissue paper that wrapped the flowers, and instantly let the box drop as if there were a snake inside.
    She stared at the orchids on the floor. She knew those flowers. Coincidence, she thought, a ghastly coincidence; they are other flowers, not the same ones, others like them. But something in her knew, even as she thought this, that such coincidences did not occur. This kind of orchid was not kept in stock in the village. She had tried to buy some, and not found them, and at last had ordered hers from Zurich. She counted the blossoms on the spray. The verysame number. Then she saw that a petal was missing from the lowest blossom. She remembered having noticed that when the package arrived from Zurich. There could no longer be the slightest doubt: the flowers lying on the rug at her feet were the very ones she had placed upon Agnes Somerville’s coffin.
    I am having a fit of nerves, she thought. There must be an explanation for all this; these aren’t ghost flowers that have manifested themselves again. Someone is playing a gruesome joke on me. But why? And how? How could this spray of orchids possibly have come back to me? And what is the meaning of this glove beside them, looking like a dead, blackened hand reaching out in menace, like the symbol of a ghostly mafia?
    She walked around the spray on the floor as though it were really a snake. The blossoms no longer seemed to be flowers; contact with death had made them sinister, and their whiteness was whiter than anything she had ever seen before. Quickly, she opened the glass door to her balcony, warily picked up the tissue paper, and with it the spray of flowers, and threw both over the railing. She sent the box flying after it.
    She listened into the mist. Distant voices and the bells of sleighs wafted through it. She went back into her room and saw the glove on the floor. Now she recognized it, and recalled having worn it in the Palace bar with Clerfayt. Clerfayt, she thought—what had he to do with it? She must find out. At once!
    It was some time before he answered the telephone.
    “Did you send my glove back to me?” she asked.
    “Yes. You forgot it at the bar.”
    “Are the flowers from you, too? The orchids?”
    “Yes. Wasn’t my card along?”
    “Your card?”
    “You didn’t find it?”
    “No.” Lillian swallowed. “Not yet. Where did you get those flowers?”
    “In a flower shop,” Clerfayt replied in a tone of surprise. “Why?”
    “Here in the village?”
    “Yes, but why? Were they stolen?”
    “No. Or perhaps they were. I don’t know—”
    Lillian fell silent.
    “Shall I come up?” Clerfayt asked.
    “Yes.”
    “When?”
    “In an hour—it’s quiet then.”
    “All right, in an hour. At the delivery entrance.”
    “Yes.”
    With a sigh, Lillian set the telephone back on the hook. Thank God, she thought, here was someone you did not have to give explanations to. Someone who simply came, and did not pester you with questions. Someone who did not care about you and was not worrying over you, like Boris.
    Clerfayt stood at the side door. “Can’t you stand orchids?” he said, pointing to the snow.
    There lay the flowers