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

and the box. “Where did you get them?” Lillian asked.
    “In a small flower shop down below—on the outskirts of the village. Why? Is there something wrong with them?”
    “These flowers—” Lillian said with an effort—“these are the very same flowers I put on my friend’s coffin yesterday. I saw them once again before the coffin was taken away. The sanatorium doesn’t keep any of the flowers. Everything is taken away. I’ve just asked the attendant. Everything was sent to the crematorium. I don’t know how—”
    “To the crematorium?” Clerfayt asked.
    “Yes.”
    “Good Lord! The shop where I bought the flowers is right near the crematorium. It’s a poor little place, and I wondered that they had flowers like these. This explains it.…”
    “What do you mean?”
    “Instead of burning the flowers with the coffin, one of the workers at the crematorium must have kept them out and sold them to the shop.”
    “How could that be?”
    “Couldn’t be anything else. Flowers are flowers, and one spray of orchids looks much like another. Hardly likely that a little trick like that would be found out. Who would count on the crazy coincidence that a rare type of orchid would come back to the very person who sent it.”
    Clerfayt took Lillian’s arm. “What shall we do about it?” he asked. “Shall we be shocked, or shall we laugh at mankind’s deep-seated money-making instinct? I propose we laugh; if we didn’t laugh now and then, we’d die of grief at all the things that happen in this glorious century of ours.”
    Lillian stared at the flowers with abhorrence. “How repulsive,” she said under her breath. “Stealing from a dead woman.”
    “Neither more nor less repulsive than many other things,” Clerfayt replied. “I never would have thought I would search corpses for cigarettes and bread, and yet I did just that. In the war. It’s terrible at first, but you get used to it, especially when you’re hungry and haven’t had a smoke in a long time. Come, let’s go out for a drink.”
    She looked at the flowers. “What shall we do with them?”
    “Leave them there. They have nothing to do with you, with your dead friend, or with me. I’ll send you other flowers tomorrow. From a different shop.”
    He opened the door of the sleigh. As he did so, he noticed thedriver’s face. The man’s eyes were resting upon the orchids with calm interest, and he knew that the driver would be back after the orchids just as soon as he had taken Lillian and himself to the hotel. God only knew what would happen to the orchids then. He thought of trampling on them. But why should he choose to play God? That never worked out well.
    The sleigh stopped. Some planks had been laid down on the wet snow to make a path to the hotel entrance. Lillian got out. She suddenly struck Clerfayt as somehow exotic, as, slender, bending forward a little and holding her coat wrapped close across her chest, she made her way in her evening shoes through the clumping, heavy-shod crowd of winter-sports people, amid all that noisy health strangely radiating the dark fascination of her illness.
    He followed her. What am I letting myself in for? he thought. And with whom? Isn’t she one of those people whose emotions stick out like the legs of a young girl in a much too short dress? Still, she was quite a bit different from Lydia Morelli, with whom he had talked over the telephone an hour ago, Lydia Morelli, who had learned all the tricks and never forgot a single one.
    He caught up to Lillian at the door. “This evening,” he said, “we are going to talk about nothing but the most superficial things in the world.”
    An hour later the bar was packed. Lillian looked toward the door. “Here comes Boris,” she said. “I might have known it.”
    Clerfayt had already seen the Russian pushing his way slowly through the crowd clustered at the bar.
    Boris ignored Clerfayt. “Your sleigh is waiting outside, Lillian,” he said.
    “Send