Arch of Triumph Read Free Page B

fifteen years? You should be used to it by now!”
    “Yes, I am. And I’m not worked up.”
    Veber stood before Ravic, broad and heavy. His big round face shone like a Normandy apple. His black, trimmed mustache, wet with rain, glittered. The Buick standing at the curb also glittered. Presently Veber would drive home comfortably in it—to a rose-colored doll’s house in the suburbs with a neat glittering woman in it and two neat glittering children and a neat glittering life. How could one explain to him something of that breathless tension when the knife began the first cut and the narrow red trace followed the light pressure, when the body, under clips and forceps, opened up like a multiple curtain, when organs which had never seen the light were laid bare, when one followed a track like a hunter in a jungle and suddenly faced the huge wild beast, death, in destroyed tissues, in lumps, in tumors, in scissures—and the fight began, the silent, mad fight during which one could use no other weapon than a thin blade and a needle and a steady hand—how could one explain what it meant when then all at once a dark shadow rushed through the blinding white of stark concentration, a majestic derision that seemed to render the knife dull, the needle brittle, and the hand heavy—and when this invisible, enigmatic pulsing—life—then ebbed away under one’s powerless hands, collapsed, drawn into this ghostly vortex which one could never reachor hold—and when a face that had a moment ago breathed and borne a name turned into a rigid, nameless mask—this senseless, rebellious helplessness: how could one explain it—and what was there to explain?
    Ravic lit another cigarette. “Twenty-one years old,” he said.
    With his handkerchief Veber wiped the shiny drops from his mustache. “You worked marvelously, Ravic. I couldn’t have done it. That you couldn’t save what a quack had botched up—is something that does not concern you. Where would we be if we thought otherwise?”
    “Yes,” Ravic said. “Where would we be?”
    Veber put his handkerchief back. “After all you have gone through, you should be damned tough by now.”
    Ravic looked at him with a trace of irony. “One is never tough. But one can get used to a lot of things.”
    “That’s what I mean.”
    “Yes, and to some things never. But that is difficult to realize. Let’s take for granted that it was the coffee. Maybe it actually was the coffee that made me so edgy. And we confuse it with excitement.”
    “The coffee was good, wasn’t it?”
    “Very good.”
    “I know how to make coffee. I had an idea you’d need it, that’s why I made it myself. It was different from the black water Eugénie usually produces, wasn’t it?”
    “No comparison. You’re a master at making coffee.”
    Veber stepped into his car. He trod on the starter and leaned out of the window. “Couldn’t I drop you? You must be tired.”
    Like a seal, Ravic thought absent-mindedly. He is like a healthy seal. But what does that mean? Why does it occur to me? Why always these double thoughts? “I’m no longer tired,” he said. “The coffee woke me up. Sleep well, Veber.”
    Veber laughed. His teeth glistened beneath his black mustache. “I won’t go to bed now. I’ll work in my garden. I’ll plant tulips and daffodils.”
    Tulips and daffodils, Ravic thought. In neat, separate beds with neat graveled paths between. Tulips and daffodils—the peach-colored, golden storm of spring. “So long, Veber,” he said. “You will take care of the rest, won’t you?”
    “Naturally. I’ll call you up in the evening. Sorry the fee will be low. Not even worth mentioning. The girl was poor and, as it seems, had no relatives. We’ll see about that.”
    Ravic dismissed it with a gesture.
    “She gave a hundred francs to Eugénie. Apparently that was all she had. That will be twenty-five francs for you.”
    “Never mind,” Ravic said impatiently. “So long, Veber.”
    “So