Arch of Triumph by Erich Maria Remarque Page B

good?”
    “It’s all right, only I want another.”
    “Very well, sir.”
    I was mistaken, Ravic thought. This rain-swept window, partlyblurred—how could anything be positively recognized? He stared through the window. He stared attentively, like a hunter lying in wait, he watched every person passing by—but, at the same time, gray and sharp, a moving picture flashed shadowlike across it, a shred of memory …
    Berlin. A summer evening in 1933. The house of the Gestapo. Blood; a bare room without windows; the sharp light of naked electric bulbs; a red-stained table with binding straps; the night-tortured clarity of his brain that had been startled out of unconsciousness a dozen times by being half choked in a pail of water; his kidneys so beaten they no longer ached; the distorted, helpless face of Sybil before him; a couple of torturers in uniform holding her—and a smiling face and a voice explaining in a friendly way what would happen to Sybil if a confession were not forthcoming—Sybil who three days later was reported to have been found hanged.…
    The waiter appeared and put the glass on the table. “This is another brand, sir. Didier from Caen, older.”
    “All right. Thanks.”
    Ravic emptied his glass. He got a package of cigarettes out of his pocket, took one out and lit it. His hands were not yet steady. He flung the match on the floor and ordered another calvados. That face, that smiling face which he thought he had just seen again—he must have been mistaken. It was impossible that Haake was in Paris. Impossible! He shook off the memories. It was senseless to drive oneself mad about it as long as one couldn’t do anything. The time for that would come when everything back there collapsed and one could return. Till then …
    He called the waiter and paid. But he could not help searching every face on the streets.
    ———
    He was sitting with Morosow in the Catacombs.
    “Do you think it was he?” Morosow asked.
    “No. But he looked it. A cursed sort of resemblance. Or my memory is no longer to be trusted.”
    “Bad luck that you were in the bistro.”
    “Yes.”
    Morosow remained silent awhile. “Makes one damn jumpy, doesn’t it?” he said then.
    “No. Why?”
    “Because one doesn’t know.”
    “I know.”
    Morosow did not reply.
    “Ghosts,” Ravic said. “I thought I’d be over that by now.”
    “One never is. I went through the same thing. Especially at the beginning. During the first five or six years. I’m still waiting for three of them who are in Russia. There were seven. Four have died. Two of them were shot by their own party. I’ve been waiting now for more than twenty years. Since 1917. One of the three who is still alive must be seventy by now. The other two, about forty or fifty. They’re the ones I still hope I’ll get. They are for my father.”
    Ravic looked at Boris. He was over sixty, but a giant. “You will get them,” he said.
    “Yes.” Morosow opened and closed his big hands. “That’s what I’m waiting for. That’s why I live more carefully. I don’t drink so often now. It may take some time yet. And I’ve got to be strong. I don’t want to shoot or knife them.”
    “Neither do I.”
    They sat for a while. “Shall we play a game of chess?” Morosow asked.
    “Yes. But I don’t see any board free.”
    “There, the professor is through playing. He played with Levy. As usual he won.”
    Ravic went for the board and the chessmen. “You’ve played a long time, professor,” he said. “The whole afternoon.”
    The old man nodded. “It distracts you. Chess is more perfect than any game of cards. At cards you have good luck or bad luck. It isn’t sufficiently diverting. Chess is a world in itself. While one is playing, it takes the place of the outside world.” He raised his inflamed eyes. “Which is not so perfect.”
    Levy, his partner, suddenly bleated. Then he was silent, turned around, frightened, and followed the professor.
    They