Heaven Has No Favorites: A Novel (12 page)

“Thank you,” Lillian said, and walked on.

“Be reasonable, Miss Dunkerque. You don’t understand your situation. You must not leave the mountains now. You would not live out the year.”

“That’s just why I must go.”

Lillian went on. At the bridge tables a few heads turned toward her; otherwise the lobby was deserted. The patients were taking their rest cures. Boris was not there. Hollmann stood at the front door.

“If you’re absolutely determined to leave, at least go by train,” the Crocodile said.

Mutely, Lillian showed the head nurse her fur coat and warm clothes. The Crocodile made a contemptuous gesture. “A lot of good that does. Do you insist on committing suicide?”

“Everyone does that—some faster than others. We will be driving carefully. And not far.”

The front door was very close now. The sun blazed in from outside. A few more steps, Lillian thought, and she would have run this gantlet.

One more step! “You have been warned,” the even cold voice at her side said. “We wash our hands.”

Lillian did not feel in a humorous mood, but she could not help smiling. The Crocodile had saved the situation with a last cliché. “Wash them and sterilize them,” Lillian said. “Good-by! Thanks for everything.”

She was outside. The snow blazed back the light so strongly that she could barely see. “
Au revoir
, Hollmann!”

“
Au revoir
, Lillian. I’ll be following you soon.”

She looked up. He was laughing. Thank God, she thought, at last someone who doesn’t behave like a schoolmaster. Hollmann wrapped her in her woolen stole and her fur coat. “We’ll drive slowly,” Clerfayt said. “When the sun goes down, we’ll close the top. Now the sides protect you against the wind.”

“Yes,” she replied. “Can we go?”

“You haven’t forgotten anything?”

“No.”

“If you have, it can be sent later.”

She had not thought of that. It came as a sudden comfort. She had imagined that all ties would be cut off, once she left. “Yes, that’s true; things can be sent later,” she said.

A small man who looked like a cross between a waiter and a sexton came hurrying across the square. Clerfayt started. “Why, that’s—”

The man passed close by the car as he entered the sanatorium, and Clerfayt recognized him. He was wearing a dark suit, a black hat, and carried a suitcase. It was the man who used to go along with the coffins. He seemed transformed, was no longer seedy and morose looking, but merry and authoritative. He was on the way to Bogotá.

“Who?” Lillian asked.

“Nothing. I thought it was someone I knew. Ready?”

“Yes,” Lillian said. “Ready.”

The car started. Hollmann waved. There was no sign of Boris. The dog ran after the car for a while, then dropped back. Lillian looked around. On the sun terraces, which had been empty a moment before, a long row of people had appeared. The patients who had been resting in their deck chairs, had all stood up. They had learned the news via the sanatorium grapevine and now, hearing the motor, they were standing in a thin row, dark against the stark blue sky, looking down.

“Like the top row in a bullfighting arena,” Clerfayt said.

“Yes,” Lillian replied. “But what are we? The bulls or the matador?”

“Always the bulls. But we think we’re the matadors.”

THE CAR GLIDED SLOWLY
through a white gorge above which the gentian-blue sky flowed like a mirrored brook. They were already over the pass, but the snow was still piled almost six feet high on both sides of the road. They could not yet see over it. Nothing existed but the walls of snow and the blue ribbon of sky. If you leaned back long enough, you no longer knew which was above and which below, the blueness or the whiteness.

Then came the smell of resin and firs, and a village came into view, brown and flat. Clerfayt stopped. “We can take the chains off, I think,” he said. “How is it farther down?” he asked the gas-station attendant.

“Rugged.”

“What?”

Clerfayt looked at the boy. He was wearing a red sweater, a new leather jacket, steel-rimmed glasses, and had acne and protruding ears. “Why, I know you! Herbert or Helmut or—”

“Hubert.”

The boy pointed to a wooden signboard that hung between the pumps:
H. GÖRING, SERVICE STATION AND GARAGE
.

“That sign’s new, isn’t it?” Clerfayt asked.

“Brand new.”

“Why only the first initial?”

“More practical that way. Lots of people think the name’s Hermann.”

“With a family name like that, I should think you’d want to change it, not have it painted big as life.”

“We’d be dopes to do that,” the boy explained. “Now that the German cars are coming again! You ought to see the tips I get. No, sir, that name is worth a mint of money.”

Clerfayt looked at the leather jacket. “Has that already come from your tips?”

“Half. But before the season is over, I’ll have a pair of ski boots and a coat out of them, that’s for sure.”

“Maybe you’ve miscalculated. A lot of people won’t give you a tip just because of your name.”

The boy grinned, and tossed the chains into the car. “Those who can afford to come for winter sports will, sir. Besides, I get it coming or going—some give because they’re glad he’s gone, and others because they have pleasant memories, but the tips keep coming. Some funny things have happened since the sign’s been hanging there. Gas, sir?”

“I can use seventeen gallons,” Clerfayt said. “But I’ll not take them from you. I’d rather buy my gas from somebody who’s not as good a businessman as you are, Hubert. It’s time your views were given a bit of a shake, boy.”

An hour later, the snow was behind them. Cataracts leaped from the sides of the slopes along the road; water dripped from the roofs of houses, and the trunks of the trees gleamed with moisture. The sunset was reflected redly from the windows. In the streets of villages,
children were playing. The fields were black and wet, and last year’s grass lay yellow and gray-green upon the meadows. “Shall we stop off somewhere?” Clerfayt asked.

“Not yet.”

“Are you afraid that the snow will catch up to us?”

Lillian nodded. “I never want to see it again.”

“Not before next winter.”

Lillian did not answer. Next winter, she thought—that was as far as Sirius or the Pleiades. She would never see it.

“How about something to drink?” Clerfayt asked. “Coffee with kirsch? We still have a good way to drive.”

“That sounds good,” Lillian said. “When will we be at Lake Maggiore?”

“In a few hours. Late this evening.”

Clerfayt stopped the car in front of a restaurant. They went in. A waitress turned on the lights. On the walls hung prints of stags and heath cocks. “Are you hungry?” Clerfayt asked. “What did you have for lunch?”

“Nothing.”

“I thought as much.” He turned to the waitress. “What do you have in the way of food?”

“Salami,
Landjäger, Schüblig
. The
Schüblig
are hot.”

“Two
Schüblig
and some of that dark bread there. With butter and open wine. Do you have Fendant?”

“Fendant and Valpolicella.”

“Fendant. And what would you like for yourself?”

“A pflümli, if it’s all right with you,” the waitress said.

“It’s all right.”

Lillian sat in the corner next to the window. She listened to the talk between Clerfayt and the waitress. The light of the lamp caught on the bottles of the little bar. Outside the window, the village trees towered blackly into the high, green-tinted evening sky,
and the first lights were on in the houses. Everything was intensely peaceful and normal; here was an evening without fear and rebellion, and she belonged to it, with the same normality and peacefulness. She had escaped into life. The feeling of it almost choked her.

“
Schüblig
are fatty peasant sausages,” Clerfayt said. “They’re very good, but perhaps you don’t like them.”

“I like everything,” Lillian said. “Everything down here!”

Clerfayt regarded her thoughtfully. “I’m afraid that’s true.”

“Why are you afraid?”

He laughed. “Nothing is more dangerous than a woman who likes everything. How is a man to arrange matters so that she likes him alone?”

“By doing nothing.”

“Right.”

The waitress brought the clear, white wine. She poured it into small water glasses. Then she raised her own glass of plum brandy. “Your health!”

They drank. Clerfayt looked around the shabby restaurant.

“This is not yet Paris,” he said, smiling.

“Yes it is,” Lillian replied. “It is the first suburb of Paris. Paris starts from here on.”

At Göschenen they had stars and a clear night sky. Clerfayt drove the car up the ramp to one of the flatcars that stood waiting. Aside from his car, two sedans and a red sports car were taking the tunnel. “Would you rather stay in the car or sit in the train?”

“Won’t we get very dirty if we stay in the car?”

“No. The train is electric. And we’ll close the top.”

The railroad officials placed chocks under the wheels. The other drivers also remained in their cars. In the two sedans, the ceiling
lights were turned on. The train went through a switch and entered the Gotthard tunnel.

The walls of the tunnel were damp. Signal lights flew by. After a few moments, Lillian had the feeling that she was riding down a shaft into the center of the earth. The air was stale and old. The noise of the train was re-echoed a thousandfold. In front of her, Lillian saw the two illuminated sedans rocking like two cabins in a boat on the way to Hades. “Will this ever end?” she said.

“In fifteen minutes. The Gotthard is one of the longest tunnels in Europe.” Clerfayt handed her his flask, which he had had refilled in the restaurant. “It’s a good idea to get used to tunnels,” he said. “Judging by the way things are going, we’ll all be living like this soon, in air-raid shelters and underground cities.”

“Where do we come out?”

“At Airolo. There the South begins.”

Lillian had feared the first night. She had expected memories and regrets to come creeping at her out of the darkness like rats. But now the noisy ride through the stone bowels of the earth routed all other thoughts. The remote fear of every creature that lives upon the ground and not in it, the fear of being buried alive, made her wait so passionately for light and sky that everything else was wiped out. The whole thing’s going almost too fast, she thought. A few hours ago, I was stuck on the peaks of the mountains and wanted to come down; now I’m rushing through the earth and want to go up again.

A piece of paper fluttered out of one of the sedans and slapped into the windshield. There it remained stuck, pressed flat, like a crushed pigeon. “There are characters who have to eat always and everywhere,” Clerfayt said. “They would take sandwiches with them to hell itself.” He reached around to the outside of the windshield and pulled the paper away.

A second piece of wax paper flew through the center of the earth. Lillian laughed. A missile followed, slamming into the windshield frame. Lillian laughed. “A roll,” Clerfayt said. “The good people in front of us are now eating only the sandwich meat, not the bread. A small bourgeois pandemonium in the bowels of the earth.”

Lillian stretched. The tunnel seemed to strip her free of all the elements of the past which had been fluttering around her. It seemed as if the sharp bristles of the noise were brushing her clean of everything. The old planet on which the sanatorium stood remained behind her forever; she could not go back, any more than you could cross the Styx twice. She would rise from the depths to a new planet, cast out upon the earth, falling and at the same time hurled forward, clinging only to a single thought: to come out of this and to breathe. It seemed to her that she was being pulled at the last moment through a narrow trench whose walls were collapsing close behind her; she was being dragged toward the light which rose like a milky monstrance in front of her, and raced toward her, and she was there.

The Acheronian roars became a normal rattling, and then ceased altogether. The train stopped in a soft ambiance of gray and gold and mild air. It was the air of life after the vault-like, cold, dead air of the tunnel. It took Lillian a while before she realized that it was raining. She listened to the drops that pattered gently down upon the top of the car; she breathed the soft air, and held her hand out into the rain. Saved, she thought. Cast across the Styx and saved.

“It ought to be the other way round,” Clerfayt said. “It should have been raining over there, and on this side we should have clear skies. Are you disappointed?”

She shook her head. “I haven’t seen rain since last October.”

“And you haven’t been down below for four years? It must seem almost like being reborn. Reborn with memories.”

Clerfayt drove to the gasoline station by the road, to fill the tank. “I could envy you,” he said. “You’re beginning from the beginning again. With the passionateness of youth, but without the weakness of youth.”

The train rode off, its red lights vanishing in the rain. The gas-station attendant brought back the car key. The car rolled backward onto the road. Clerfayt stopped it, to turn. For a moment, by the quiet light of the instrument board, he saw Lillian in the small compartment under the top, while outside the rain shimmered and chattered. There was something different about her; he had never before seen her looking quite like this. Her face was illuminated by the glow of the speedometer, the clock and the other instruments for measuring times and speeds. In contrast to these, her face seemed, for the span of a heartbeat, utterly timeless and untouched by all that—timeless, Clerfayt felt, as Death, with whom that face was beginning a race beside which all automobile races were childish sports. I will set her down in Paris and lose her, he thought. No, I must try to hold her. I would be an idiot if I did not try.

“Have you any idea what you will do in Paris?” he asked.

“I have an uncle there. He’s in charge of my money. Up to now, he has sent it to me in monthly installments. I’m going to get it all away from him. It will be something of a drama. He still thinks I’m fourteen years old.”