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

croaked.
    Lillian looked at Eva as if she were a prehistoric animal which had crawled out of a crack in the floor. There had been other discharged patients who had said that they would like to stay—but they had only done so out of consideration for the others, to play down the curious feeling of desertion that often accompanied discharge. But Eva Moser was a different case; she meant what she was saying. She was genuinely in despair. She had become used to the sanatorium, and was afraid of life down below.
    Dolores Palmer brought Lillian a glass of vodka. “That woman!” she said, throwing a look of disgust at Eva Moser. “No self-control! How she’s carrying on! It’s absolutely obscene, isn’t it?”
    “I’m going,” Lillian declared. “I can’t stand it.”
    “Don’t go,” Charles Ney said, leaning toward her. “Beautiful, flickering light in the uncertain darkness, stay a while. The night is full of shadows and platitudes, and we need you and Dolores as figureheads to bear before our tattered sails, lest we be trampled mercilessly under Eva Moser’s dreadful brogans. Sing something, Lillian!”
    “What shall I sing! A lullaby for children who will never be born?”
    “Eva will have children. Heaps of them. You can be sure of that. No, sing the song of the clouds that do not return and of the snow that buries the heart. The song of the exiles of the mountains. Sing it for us. Not for that strapping wench Eva. We need the dark wine of self-glorification tonight. It’s better to wallow in sentimentality than to weep.”
    “Charles got hold of half a bottle of cognac somewhere,” Dolores commented matter-of-factly. She strolled long-leggedly over to the phonograph. “Play the new American records, Schirmer.”
    “That monster,” Charles Ney sighed to her retreating back. “Shelooks like the most poetical being on earth and has a brain like an almanac. I love her as one loves the jungle, and she answers like a vegetable garden. What’s to be done about it?”
    “Suffer and be happy.”
    Lillian stood up. As she did so, the door opened, framing the Crocodile. “Just as I thought! Cigarettes! Alcohol in the room! An orgy! And you here, too, Miss Ruesch!” she snapped at Streptomycin Lilly. “Creeping in here on crutches! And Mr. Schirmer, you, too! You ought to be in bed.”
    “I ought to have been dead long ago,” the graybeard replied cheerfully. “Theoretically, I am.” He switched off the phonograph, pulled the nylon underclothes out of the loudspeaker and waved them in the air. “I’m living on borrowed time. When you do that, you live by special rules.”
    “Is that so? And what are these rules, if I may ask?”
    “To get as much as possible out of what life you have left. How you do that is up to you.”
    “I must request you to go to bed at once. Who brought you here, may I ask?”
    “My good sense.”
    The graybeard got back into his wheelchair. André was chary of taking over the pushing of it. Lillian stepped forward. “Come on, Schirmer. I’ll wheel you back.” She pushed the chair to the door.
    “So it was you who brought him!” the Crocodile said. “I might have guessed it.”
    Lillian pushed the chair out into the corridor. Charles Ney and the others followed, giggling like children caught in mischief. “One moment,” Schirmer said, swiveling his chair so that he was facing the door. The Crocodile stood squarely in the doorway. “Three sick people could lead happy existences on the amount of life you’ve missed,” Schirmer pronounced. “I wish you a blissful night with your wrought-iron conscience.”
    He swiveled the chair again. Charles Ney took over the pushing. He laughed. “What’s the point, Schirmer? She’s only doing her job.”
    “I know. Only she does it with such a damned superior air. But I’ll outlive her! I’ve already outlived her predecessor; she was only forty-four and died in four weeks of cancer. I’ll outlive this bitch—how old is