The love story of the racer Clerfe and the girl Lilian suffering from tuberculosis, their reasoning about life and death, about what every new day is worth for those who are healthy and for those who are terminally ill — this is exactly the kind of prose that you want to reread again and again .
“They called from Cannes. From the hospital in Cannes. One of my friends died. For him, this is, one might say, happiness.
— Happiness?
— Yes. He crashed while racing and would have been left crippled.
Lillian glared at him.
“Don’t you think that cripples also want to live?” she asked.
Clerfe didn’t answer right away.
“It all depends on the point of view,” he said. This man was madly in love with a woman who cheated him with all the mechanics. He was a passionate racer but would never go beyond mediocrity. He wanted nothing in life but winning races and this woman. And he died without knowing the truth. He died without suspecting that his beloved did not want to see him when his leg was taken away. He died happy.
— You think? Or maybe he wanted to live, no matter what.
«I don’t know,» Clerfe replied, suddenly bewildered. “But I have seen more unfortunate dying. You are not?
- What is love?
«Yes,» said Lillian stubbornly. “But they would all like to live on.
“No one can escape fate,” he said impatiently. “And no one knows when she will overtake you. What’s the point of bargaining with time? And what exactly is long life? Long past. Our future each time only lasts until the next breath. Nobody knows what will happen next. Each of us lives only for a minute. Everything that awaits us after this minute is only hopes and illusions.
He continued.
“Once, in order to escape, I had to put on the clothes of a person who had just been killed. It was absolutely necessary, otherwise I would not have left, and if I had not left, I would have been killed. To this day I remember how disgusting it was. And the most disgusting thing is that the clothes were still warm. I expected it to be cold, but the dead man did not have time to cool down. I had to wear everything, even his underwear. The dead man lent me his warmth, and it almost ended with me losing the ability to move. Fortunately, I accidentally cut my finger with a dead man’s knife, which infuriated me and I pulled myself together. We shouldn’t be afraid of the dead,” he said as the sled rolled down the winding road.
“We owe them a lot,” Lillian muttered.
Clerfe saw that she was still very excited.
“Dressed in the clothes of a dead man, I lay hidden by the river for several hours, waiting for the night,” he said. — I still felt a terrible disgust; but suddenly I realized that the clothes that I wore as a soldier probably also belonged to the dead … And so, putting on the clothes of a dead man in order to return to life again, I realized that everything in which we consider ourselves superior to animals is our happiness , more personal and more multifaceted, our deeper knowledge and more cruel soul, our ability to compassion and even our idea of God — all this was bought at one price: we knew what, according to the understanding of people, is inaccessible to animals, we knew the inevitability of death . It was a strange night. I didn’t want to think about running away, so as not to lose heart, I thought about death, and this brought me consolation.
For more details, see E. M. Remarque “Life on loan” (Astrel. 2012).