Heaven Has No Favorites: A Novel (7 page)

Clerfayt looked at her in surprise. “That could be true. I probably shouldn’t have come.” He nodded toward the bar. “Do I get on Volkov’s nerves, too?”

“Haven’t you noticed?”

“I suppose so. He certainly doesn’t try to hide it.”

“He’s leaving,” Lillian said.

Clerfayt could see that. “And what about you?” he asked. “Shouldn’t you be in the sanatorium too—rather than here?”

“Who knows? The Dalai Lama? I myself? The Crocodile? God?” She picked up her glass. “And who is responsible? Who?” she asked hopelessly. “Myself? God? And who is responsible for whom? Come, let’s dance.”

Clerfayt remained in his seat.

She stared at him. “Are you worried about me, also? Do you think I shouldn’t—”

“I don’t think anything,” Clerfayt replied. “Only, I cannot dance. One of my legs isn’t up to it any more. But if you want to, we can try.”

They moved to the dance floor. “Agnes Somerville always did what the Dalai Lama told her to—” Lillian said as the noise of the tramping tourists closed around them. “To the letter—”

THE SANATORIUM WAS QUIET
. The patients were taking their rest cure. Silently, they lay in their beds and deck chairs, stretched out like sacrificial victims, the weary air fighting a silent battle with the enemy nibbling at them in the warm darkness of the lungs.

Lillian Dunkerque, in blue slacks, sat curled in the chair on her balcony. The night was far away, forgotten. That was how it always was up here—once the morning was reached, the panic of the night dwindled to a shadow on the horizon and you could hardly understand it any longer. Lillian sat up and stretched in the light of the late afternoon. It was a soft, shimmering curtain that veiled yesterdays and made tomorrows unreal. In front of her, packed around with snow which had blown upon the balcony during the night, was the bottle of vodka Clerfayt had given her.

The telephone rang. She want to it, lifted it. “Yes, Boris—No, of course not—where would we end if we did that?—Let’s not talk about it—Of course you can come up—Yes, I’m alone, naturally—”

She returned to the balcony. For a moment, she considered whether she ought to hide the vodka; but then she went for a glass and uncapped the bottle. The vodka was very cold and very good.

“Good morning, Boris,” she said when she heard the door. “I’m drinking vodka. Would you care for some, too? Then get yourself a glass.”

She stretched out in the deck chair and waited. Volkov came out on the balcony, a glass in his hand. Lillian breathed a sigh of relief. Thank God, no sermon, she thought. Volkov poured himself a glass. She held out hers. He filled it to the brim. “Why, Dusha?” he asked. “X-ray panic?”

She shook her head.

“Fever?”

“Not that either. Subnormal temperature, rather.”

“Has the Dalai Lama said anything about your pictures?”

“No. What would he say? I don’t want to know what he thinks, anyhow.”

“Good,” Volkov replied. “Let’s drink to that.”

He drank his vodka down in one swallow and put the bottle at a distance from him. “Let me have another glass,” Lillian said.

“As much as you like.”

She observed him. She knew that he hated her to drink; but she knew also that he would not say a word to dissuade her from drinking. Not now. He was too diplomatic for that; he knew her moods. “Another?” he asked. “The glasses are small.”

“No.” She set her glass down beside her without having drunk. “Boris,” she said, drawing her legs in their blue slacks up on to the chair, “we understand each other too well.”

“Really?”

“Yes. You understand me too well and I you, and that’s our misery.”

“Especially in föhn weather,” Volkov replied, laughing.

“Not only in föhn weather.”

“Or when there are strangers around.”

“You see,” Lillian said, “you already know the reason. You can
explain everything. I can’t explain anything. You know everything about me in advance. How wearisome that is. Is that the föhn, too?”

“The föhn and springtime.”

Lillian closed her eyes. She felt the oppressive, disturbing air. “Why aren’t you jealous?” she asked.

“I am. All the time.”

She opened her eyes. “Of whom? Of Clerfayt?”

He shook his head.

“I thought not. Then of what?”

Volkov did not answer. Why was she asking? he thought. What did she know about it? Jealousy did not begin with another person, nor end with that. It began with the air that the beloved breathed, and never ended. Not even with the other’s death.

“Of what, Boris?” Lillian asked. “Of Clerfayt, after all?”

“I don’t know. Perhaps of the thing that has come up here with him.”

“What has come up?” Lillian stretched, and closed her eyes again. “You don’t have to be jealous. Clerfayt will drive away again in a few days, and will forget us and we him.”

For a while, she lay still in her deck chair. Volkov sat behind her, reading. The sun advanced until the edge of its shifting rectangle of light reached her eyes, filling them under her closed lids with warm orange and golden light. “Sometimes I would like to do something utterly crazy, Boris,” she said. “Something that would shatter the glass ring here. Let myself go—let the chips fall where they may.”

“Everyone would like to do that.”

“You, too?”

“Me, too.”

“Then why don’t we do it?”

“It would not change anything. We would only feel the glass ring that surrounds us more keenly. Or else shatter it, cut ourselves on its sharp edges, and bleed to death.”

“You, too?”

Boris looked at the thin figure before him. How little she knew about him, for all she thought she understood him! “I have accepted it,” he said, knowing that this was not true. “It’s simpler, Dusha. Before we consume ourselves with pointless hatred of it, we ought to try to see whether we can’t live with it.”

Lillian felt a wave of weariness coming over her. Here they were, at it again, the everlasting discussion in which you entangled yourself as in a spider web. It was all perfectly true, but how did that help you?

“Accepting is resignation,” she murmured after a while. “I’m not yet old enough for that.”

Why doesn’t he go? she thought. And why do I insult him even when I don’t want to? Why should I despise him for being here longer than I have and for having the good fortune to think differently about it? Why does it drive me wild that he is like the man in prison who thanks God for not having been executed—and I like the one who curses God because he isn’t free.

“Don’t mind me, Boris,” she said. “I’m just talking. It’s noon and the vodka and the föhn. And perhaps X-ray panic, too—only I don’t want to admit it. Up here, no news is bad news.”

The bells of the church down in the village began to ring. Volkov stood up and lowered the awning somewhat to shut out the sun. “Eva Moser is being discharged tomorrow,” he said. “Well.”

“I know. She’s been discharged twice before.”

“This time she really is well. The Crocodile told me so.”

Through the fading clangor of the bells, Lillian suddenly heard Giuseppe’s roar. The car sped up the serpentines and stopped. She
wondered why Clerfayt was bringing it up; this was the first time since the day of his arrival.

“I hope he doesn’t intend to go skiing with the car,” Volkov said.

“Certainly not. Why?”

“He’s parked it on the slope behind the fir trees. By the practice field for novices, not in front of the hotel.”

“He must have his reasons. Tell me, why can’t you bear him, really?”

“I don’t know. Perhaps because I was once much like him.”

“You?” Lillian replied sleepily. “That must have been a long time ago.”

“Yes,” Volkov said. “That was long ago.”

Half an hour later, Lillian heard Clerfayt’s car drive off. Boris had already left. She continued to lie for a while, eyes closed, looking at the flickering brightness under her eyelids. Then she stood up and went downstairs.

To her surprise, she saw Clerfayt sitting on a bench in front of the sanatorium. “I thought you drove down just before,” she said, sitting down beside him.

He blinked into the strong light. “That was Hollmann.”

“Hollmann?”

“Yes. I sent him to the village to buy a bottle of vodka.”

“With the car?”

“Yes,” Clerfayt said. “With the car. It was high time for him to be getting his hands on the wheel of that buggy.”

They heard the motor again. Clerfayt stood up and listened. “Now we’ll see what he does—whether he comes right back up here like a good little boy, or whether he tears off in Giuseppe.”

“Tears off? Where?”

“Wherever he likes. There’s plenty of gas in the tank—enough to take him practically to Zurich.”

“What?” Lillian asked. “What’s that you’re saying?”

Clerfayt was listening again. “He’s not coming back. He’s driving along the village street toward the lake and the highway. See, there he is already—beyond the Palace Hotel. Thank God!”

Lillian had sprung to her feet. “Thank God? Are you crazy? You’ve sent him off in an open sports car? To Zurich if he likes? Don’t you realize that he’s sick?”

“That’s just the reason. He already had the idea he’d forgotten how to drive.”

“And suppose he catches cold?”

Clerfayt laughed. “He’s warmly dressed. And cars have the same effect on racing drivers as evening dresses on women—if they’re having fun, they never catch cold in the one or the other.”

Lillian stared at him. “And suppose he does catch cold just the same? Do you know what that means up here? Water on the lungs, adhesions, dangerous relapses. Up here a cold can mean the end of you.”

Clerfayt looked at her. He thought her considerably more attractive than she had seemed last night. “You ought to keep that in mind when you play hooky and go to the Palace bar at night, instead of staying in bed,” he said. “In a skimpy evening dress and satin shoes.”

“That has nothing to do with Hollmann!”

“Of course not. But I believe in the therapy of the forbidden. I thought you did, too.”

Lillian was perplexed for a moment. Then she said: “Not for others.”

“Good. Most people believe in it only for others.” Clerfayt looked down toward the lake. “There he is. See him? Just listen to
the way he’s taking the curves. He hasn’t forgotten how to shift yet. Tonight he’ll be a different man.”

“Where? In Zurich?”

“Anywhere. Here too.”

“Tonight he’ll be in bed with a fever.”

“I don’t think so. And even so! Better a little fever than for him to go skulking around the car and thinking he’s a cripple.”

Lillian turned sharply. It was as though he had slapped her. Cripple, she thought. Because Hollmann is sick? How dare he, this ignorant lout! Did he by any chance think of her as a cripple, too? She recalled the first evening in the Palace bar when he had talked on the telephone with Monte Carlo. Hadn’t he also spoke of cripples then? “Up here a little fever can quickly turn into fatal pneumonia,” she said angrily. “But I suppose that wouldn’t bother you. All you’d say was that Hollmann was lucky to die after having sat in a sports car once more and imagined he was a great racing driver.”

At once she was sorry she had said that. She did not understand why she was so furious.

“You have a good memory,” Clerfayt said, amused. “I’ve noticed that before. But calm down; the car isn’t as fast as it sounds. With chains on the wheels, you can’t exactly drive at racing speeds.”

He put his arm around her shoulders. She did not speak or move. She saw Giuseppe emerge from the woods behind the lake, small and black. Compact as a buzzing bumblebee, it shot through the white glare that hung above the snow, in the sunlight. She heard the pounding of the motor and the echo tossed back by the mountains. The car headed for the road that led over the pass to the other side of the mountains, and suddenly she knew what it was that had so excited her. She saw the car vanish behind a curve. Only the sound of the motor remained, a furious, imperative drumbeat that
called to some unknown departure and that she felt as deeper than mere noise.

“I hope he really isn’t skipping out,” Clerfayt said.

Lillian did not reply at once. Her lips were dry. “Why should he skip out?” she said with an effort. “He’s almost cured, you know. Why should he risk everything?”

“That’s the time people often do take risks.”

“Would you risk it if you were in his place?”

“I don’t know.”

Lillian took a deep breath. “Would you do it if you knew you would never get well again?” she asked.

“Instead of staying here?”

“Instead of vegetating here for a few months longer.”

Clerfayt smiled. He knew other kinds of vegetating. “It depends on what you mean by that,” he said.

“Living cautiously,” Lillian replied quickly.

He laughed. “That’s hardly the sort of thing you ask a racing driver.”

“Would you do it?”

“I have no idea. One never knows what one will do beforehand. Perhaps I would—to make one last effort to seize hold of everything that means life, without considering time. But I might also live by the clock and scrimp on every day and every hour. One never knows. I’ve experienced some odd reactions.”

Lillian drew her shoulder away from under Clerfayt’s arm.” Don’t you have to settle that with yourself before every race?”

“It seems more dramatic than it is. I don’t drive for romantic reasons. I drive for money and because I can’t do anything else—not because I’m so adventurous. I’ve had enough adventures in this damned age of ours without wanting any more. Probably you have, too.”

“Yes,” Lillian replied. “But not the right ones.”

They suddenly heard the motor again. “He’s coming back,” Clerfayt said.

“Yes,” she repeated, taking a deep breath. “He’s coming back. Are you disappointed?”

“No. I only wanted him to have a chance to drive the car. The last time he was in it, he had his first hemorrhage.”

Lillian saw Giuseppe zooming toward them on the highway. All at once she could not endure the prospect of seeing Hollmann’s radiant face. “I have to go in,” she said hastily. “The Crocodile is already looking for me.” She turned toward the entrance. “And when are you driving over the pass?” she asked.