Free Heaven Has No Favorites: A Novel by Erich Maria Remarque; Translated by Richard Winston and Clara Winston

Lama?”
    “Nobody. And what if they did! I feel great. I was beginning to think I couldn’t drive the damned buggy any more.”
    “Everyone seems to be feeling great this evening,” Lillian replied bitterly. “What do you think of that?”
    She gestured toward Eva Moser. The girl sat with plump and overheated face, the center of attention for all her sympathetic and gloomily envious friends, who exaggerated their good will because it could not entirely dispel their envy. Eva Moser was like someone who has drawn the grand prize at a lottery and cannot understand why everyone else is so interested in her.
    “Have you taken your temperature?” Lillian asked Hollmann.
    He laughed. “That can wait till tomorrow. I don’t want to think about it today.”
    “Don’t you think you have fever?”
    “I don’t care. And I don’t think so.”
    Why am I asking him? Lillian thought. Am I envious of him? “Isn’t Clerfayt eating with you tonight?” she asked.
    “No. He had an unexpected visitor this afternoon. And why should he be coming up here all the time, anyhow? It must get dull for him.”
    “Then why doesn’t he leave?” Lillian asked with hostility.
    “He is leaving, but not for a few days. Wednesday or Thursday.”
    “This week?”
    “Yes. I suppose he’ll be driving down with his visitor.”
    Lillian did not answer. She did not know for certain whether Hollmann was supplying this information intentionally, and since she did not know, she assumed that it was intentional and therefore did not ask anything further. “Have you anything to drink with you?” she said.
    “Not a drop. I gave the rest of my gin to Charles Ney this afternoon.”
    “Didn’t you buy a bottle of vodka this morning?”
    “I gave that to Dolores Palmer.”
    “Why? Have you decided to become a model patient?”
    “Something like that,” Hollmann replied with a touch of embarrassment.
    “This morning you were anything but.”
    “This morning is a long time ago.”
    Lillian pushed back her plate. “Who will I go out with at night from now on?”
    “There are plenty of others. And Clerfayt is still around for the time being.”
    “All right. But what about afterward?”
    “Isn’t Boris coming tonight?” Hollmann asked.
    “No, not tonight. And you can’t play hooky with Boris. I told him I had a headache.”
    “Do you?”
    “Yes,” Lillian said, and stood up. “I’m even going to make the Crocodile happy tonight, so that there won’t be one unhappy soul in the place. I’m going to sleep. Good night, Hollmann.”
    “Is something the matter, Lillian?”
    “Just the usual thing. The panic of boredom. A sign of goodhealth, the Dalai Lama would say. I hear that when you’re really badly off, there’s no more panic. You’re too weak for it. How kind God is, wouldn’t you say?”
    The night nurse had completed her evening round. Lillian lay on her bed, trying to read. After a while, she dropped the book. Once again the long night stretched before her, the waiting for sleep—sleep and then the sudden starting out of sleep and that weightless moment when you recognized nothing, neither the room nor yourself, when you hung in soughing darkness and nothing but fear, nebulous fear of death, for unending seconds—until the window slowly became familiar again and its frame was no longer a shadowy cross in an unknown cosmos, but once more a window, and the room a room, and the coil of primordial terror and soundless screaming became yourself once more, a being called Lillian Dunkerque for its brief time on earth.
    There was a knock at the door. Charles Ney stood outside in a red bathrobe and slippers. “The coast is clear,” he whispered as he came in. “Come on over to Dolores’ good-by party for Eva Moser.”
    “What for? Why doesn’t she just go? Why does she have to have a good-by party?”
    “We want one, not she.”
    “You’ve already had one in the dining room.”
    “That was only to fool the Crocodile. Come