Arch of Triumph: A Modern Look at Remarque’s Haunting Portrait of Exile and Survival

Walk Through

The Ghost in the Operating Room

Ravic walks through Paris like someone who learned to disappear on purpose. He carries a surgical tray under an overcoat and an identity that isn't his; names get borrowed the way people borrow coats in the rain. The city smells of boiling chestnuts and old rumors — perfect camouflage for a man who must never be asked where he's from. 😶‍🌫️

He works nights, under other doctors’ signatures, stitching strangers back together with hands that remember better things. The hospital corridor is his theatre and his hiding place; bright lights do a bad job of telling secrets. He knows how to make an incision and how to close a lie.

He rarely sleeps more than a few hours at a time. Sleep feels like a risk you can't afford when the police like to ask questions they already know the answers to.
He avoids mirrors. He measures himself by the steadiness of his hands, not by reflection.

There’s a rhythm to his invisibility: arrive early, leave late, never explain, never volunteer. Small routines become armor. He learns the backgrounds of the staff the way others learn recipes — names, habits, who turns a blind eye. It’s method acting with higher stakes.

He keeps his papers in a cigarette box that no one else touches. That could sound cinematic, except he hates anything cinematic that might draw attention. Practicality first; drama later — ideally never.

The only person he trusts fully is his own trained silence.
He had been broken once and learned to fold himself well. He had been broken once and learned to fold himself well.

Once, a bruise was just a bruise. Now it is evidence, a timestamp, a possibility. The memory of torture sits in his left leg like a quiet tenant; it flinches with the wrong smell or the wrong voice. He keeps the story tucked even from himself because stories invite questions.

People assume stoicism is strength. They call it professionalism and nod. He calls it self-preservation.
You do not get to outrun fear; you get very good at keeping it from talking.

A nurse hums an off-key lullaby while changing a dressing and he almost remembers how it feels to be ordinary. He smiles — not a kind smile, a calculation. It works; her attention is practical, not prying. He files the moment away like a clean instrument.

"You're a ghost, aren't you?" she says once, almost a joke.

He returns to motion.
He had to be invisible to stay alive.

A hidden life demands small betrayals every day.

Joan Arrives Like a Problem You Pretend You Can Handle

He meets Joan Madou the way chaotic people tend to enter his life: abruptly, with too much emotion and no safety protocols. She’s shaking in a hallway, mascara smudged like she’d been fighting gravity and losing. Ravic doesn't ask questions; questions slow you down when someone is bleeding inside their own head.

He gets her somewhere quiet, sits her down, checks her pulse like the world isn't collapsing in her eyes. She has the fragile energy of someone who keeps apologizing for things that weren’t her fault.
He recognizes the type instantly.

She mutters something about a man, a night, a mistake. The usual cocktail.
Paris is full of people trying to survive their own evenings.

He should walk away. Really. It would be smart, clean, manageable. But Joan has this tiny, desperate tremor in her voice that sounds like someone saying please without the actual word, and Ravic has always been weak to that kind of quiet.

She clings to his sleeve when she stands. Just a second. Just enough to register.
It’s not romantic — more like drowning etiquette.

He brings her to her hotel, stays long enough to make sure she won’t collapse again, too long to pretend he’s detached. She watches him with a tilted head, like she can’t decide if he’s real or some strange Paris hallucination.

"You’re very calm," she says, almost accusing.

"I’ve had practice."

Her laugh is shaky, but alive.
It hits him where he doesn’t want to feel anything.

He tells himself he’s just making sure she’s alright. He tells himself he’s done this for strangers before. He tells himself it’s nothing.
It stops being nothing in under a week.

Joan returns to him the next day like it’s already a ritual. She talks too fast, apologizes too often, and lights cigarettes she never finishes. Ravic pretends he’s not charmed by the chaos — because charm is dangerous, and chaos is worse.

He learns she’s an actress. One of those drifting ones, talented but unlucky, always one audition away from either a breakthrough or a breakdown. Her grief sits underneath her jokes like a cracked floorboard.

There’s a moment — late, quiet — where she asks if he ever gets scared.
He almost lies.

"Sometimes," he admits.
She looks at him like he’s confessed something sacred.

They orbit each other with this strange intensity neither meant to start. He steadies her storms. She softens his edges. They both pretend it’s casual, the way people pretend knives are decorative.

But at night, whenever she leans her head on his shoulder, he feels something he hates feeling: human.

He knows this is dangerous. He knows he's becoming visible.

People who need each other rarely realize it until it's too late.

The City of People Who Don't Belong Anywhere

Paris, in these months, feels like the world's waiting room. Refugees drift through cafés, cheap hotels, back-alley clinics — all of them exhausted, stateless, pretending they aren't terrified. Ravic moves among them like a veteran of some invisible war. Everywhere he goes, someone's whispering about documents, raids, deportations.

He hates the sound of police boots. They show up in hallways, in doorways, in the space between two breaths. Joan notices the way he stiffens when a uniform passes by, the way his hand twitches toward a nonexistent exit route.

She never comments.
That small mercy becomes its own kind of intimacy.

The refugee community is a strange ecosystem. There’s the man who sells fake passports that fall apart in the rain. The woman who knows which hotels don’t ask questions. The former professor who now washes dishes and quotes poetry between plates. Ravic blends into them easily because invisibility recognizes its own.

Some nights he eats with them at a smoky bistro where the owner pretends not to see who pays in coins and who pays in stories. These dinners feel like group therapy conducted by people who refuse to admit they have trauma.
Jokes are easier than honesty when you’ve lost your country.

Ravic sits quietly, listening. His silence is a whole language. He knows exactly how fear moves through a room — it has a rhythm, a temperature.

Joan drops by sometimes. She doesn’t fully fit there, but she tries, and people like her for the effort. She brings this flicker of warmth, a reminder that life still has color if you squint hard enough. Ravic watches her from the corner, pretending he’s not doing that.

One night, a police sweep happens two streets over. Sirens flash against the windows, everyone freezing mid-sentence. Someone’s fork clinks too loudly. Ravic’s pulse spikes the way it used to in interrogation rooms.
He doesn’t breathe for a full five seconds.

Joan reaches for his hand under the table.
He lets her.

The sirens fade. The room exhales. People make jokes because that’s how you tell fear you’re still alive.
Ravic laughs once — a dry, reluctant sound — and he hates that it feels good.

In the weeks that follow, he develops routines to stay hidden. Certain streets only at certain hours. Certain cafés only when the staff he trusts are working. His life becomes a map of caution. Joan keeps pace surprisingly well, though she occasionally tests the boundaries with the kind of impulsive decisions that give him grey hair.

“Relax,” she says once, dragging him toward the Seine. “You act like the police are around every corner.”

“They are,” he mutters.

She grins without looking back.
For a second, she looks fearless, and it’s contagious.

Her presence makes the city feel almost survivable.

But Ravic knows better than to believe in calm.
There’s always a crack forming somewhere in the distance.

Safety, for people like them, is just a temporary illusion.

The Past Walks Back Into the Room

Ravic spots Haake on a random Paris afternoon, and it hits like an old injury flaring up in the rain. There’s no warning. One moment he’s crossing a street, the next he’s staring at the man who carved fear into his body years ago.
Haake looks exactly the same: tidy, ordinary, forgettable in the worst way.

Ravic freezes so completely he almost feels detached from his own skin.
It’s not dramatic. It’s clinical.
His mind folds into silence the way it did in dark rooms with locked doors.

He steps into a doorway to hide, breath shallow, eyes fixed on the crowd. Haake moves through it with the casual arrogance of someone who’s never been held accountable in his life. Ravic watches him pass, pulse hammering with a cold, controlled fury.

He tells himself it’s just coincidence.
Then he realizes he doesn’t believe in coincidences anymore.

That night, Joan talks about a rehearsal gone wrong, her voice full of frustration and hope that keeps flickering. Ravic nods, listens, pretends he’s present. But Haake’s face keeps sliding back into his mind like a shadow that refuses to dissolve.

“Are you even here?” she asks.

“I’m tired,” he says.
It’s not a lie. Just not the whole truth.

Joan studies him with that too-perceptive gaze she gets when she’s worried. She doesn’t push. She sits beside him, close but not demanding, and the quiet between them becomes its own conversation.
He’s grateful for that. Grateful and guilty.

In the following days, Haake becomes a ghost he keeps seeing out of the corner of his eye. Ravic trails him once, just enough to confirm it’s real. The man is living comfortably under his own name, unbothered, untouched by consequence.

Ravic feels something rise in him that he hasn’t felt in years. It’s not rage; rage is loud. This is colder. Sharper.
A calculation waiting for a moment.

He doesn’t tell Joan. She’s already balancing grief, career uncertainty, and the emotional tightrope that is her daily existence. Adding his ghosts to her pile feels unfair, even by their messy standards.

Still, the distance between them widens. Joan notices.
She just assumes it’s her fault.

One night she asks softly, “Did I do something wrong?”

“No,” he says.
He means it. But the word doesn’t fix anything.

Joan pulls her knees to her chest, staring at the ceiling like she’s trying to read her future in the cracks. She’s fragile in ways she tries very hard not to show. He wants to explain. He wants to tell her everything. But the moment passes, and the silence takes over again.

The truth is simple: Haake’s presence has reopened a door Ravic nailed shut years ago.

He starts watching his surroundings differently. He plans routes. He calculates risks. He becomes sharper, quieter, more dangerous. Joan tries to bridge the gap with affection, spontaneous invitations, late-night confessions. He keeps her close, but not close enough to see what’s boiling underneath.

It’s a terrible strategy.
He knows that.

There’s a night when he almost tells her. Words sit in his throat, heavy, ready.
Then he locks them away.

Old wounds don’t stay dormant; they wait for their cue.

Joan Starts Slipping Through Her Own Cracks

Joan's spiral doesn't happen all at once. It's gradual, the way a crack spreads across glass only when the room goes quiet. She still shows up at auditions, still pretends she's fine, still gives those brave little half-smiles that look borrowed from someone steadier. But something in her eyes flickers too often.

Ravic notices every shift. He just pretends he doesn't.

Her acting career feels like a roulette wheel spun by someone with shaky hands. One week she’s full of hope, practicing lines in front of a mirror. The next, she’s lying on the floor of her hotel room, staring at the ceiling like she’s waiting for gravity to answer her questions.

He tries to help, but he does it with the emotional precision of a surgeon who’s terrified of cutting too deep. She reaches for him more, and he pulls back with this quiet, calculated gentleness that hurts more than honesty would.

“You’re slipping away,” she murmurs once.

“I’m right here.”

He says it too quickly, too neatly.
She hears what he’s not saying.

Joan starts drifting into destructive patterns. Drinking too much on the nights she’s scared to go home. Choosing the wrong people to distract herself. Making plans she cancels half an hour later because her emotions change temperature every few minutes.

Ravic tries to keep her steady. But he’s distracted, haunted, split between the present and the dark room of his past. His version of care is showing up silently, fixing practical problems, and avoiding any emotional confrontations that might force him to bleed.

Joan doesn’t want practical. She wants him.

She clings without meaning to. He withdraws without wanting to. The tension turns their conversations into tightropes. She apologizes for everything; he says nothing for too long.

One night, after a bad audition, she shows up at his door with smeared makeup and a shaking voice.
“I think I’m losing it,” she whispers.

“You’re not,” he says.
He sounds calm. He shouldn’t.

She laughs, this fragile little sound. “You make it sound like it’s all manageable.”

“It is.”
It isn’t.

They sit side by side on his bed. She leans into him, waiting for something — comfort, confession, warmth. Ravic wraps an arm around her because that’s the easiest gesture. But he keeps his heart barricaded behind memories she doesn’t know exist.

He loves her more than he admits.
He loves her less than she needs.

Days pass like that. Joan flares, dims, flares again. Ravic keeps trying to anchor her without letting her see the storm in him. This imbalance becomes its own gravitational pull, dragging both of them toward some quiet implosion.

She tries to talk about the future once.
He changes the subject.

She tries again.
He goes silent.

Silence is its own answer, and she hears it clearly.

The hardest heartbreaks happen before anything officially ends.

The Arrest That Knocks the Floor Out

It happens on a grey morning that was supposed to be ordinary. Ravic leaves a clinic through the back door, coat collar up, head down, rehearsing the usual precautions. Then a police van turns the corner too fast, and the street suddenly has more uniforms than pedestrians.
He doesn’t run — running is an admission.

A hand lands on his shoulder.
That’s all it takes.

The officer asks for papers. Ravic replies in the calm, flat tone of someone who has practiced lying to survive. But today the lie doesn’t land. The officer’s expression barely shifts; he’s already decided the ending.

Joan is the first person he thinks of.
He hates that instinct because it makes him human.

The sweep happens fast. Ravic is packed into the van with a dozen other stateless strangers, all of them wearing the same expression: not fear, not shock, just that tired resignation of people who’ve been waiting for something like this. No one speaks. Words have consequences in moments like these.

He keeps his breathing steady. He knows what panic feels like; he refuses to give it room.

At the camp, he’s processed like an object. Questions, forms, stares. They treat everyone the same, which somehow makes it worse. Ravic answers mechanically. He becomes the version of himself designed for survival: minimal, silent, efficient.

The days blur into a grey routine. Lines, rations, cold air, boredom that borders on madness. He keeps his hands busy — fixing small injuries, helping older men who can’t walk well, pretending he’s still a doctor and not just someone wasting time behind a fence.

Nights are harder.
Nights are where the memories get loud.

He tries not to think about Joan, but of course he does.
He imagines her pacing in her room, lighting cigarettes she won’t finish, asking questions no one will answer. She doesn’t have the stability for this kind of absence. She barely stayed upright when he was beside her.

The guilt sits on his chest like another inmate.
It keeps him awake more nights than he admits.

Weeks pass. Then months. Time loses shape. Refugees come and go. New rumors of war replace old ones. Ravic listens to every whisper, calculating when he might get out. He knows the system is arbitrary. Freedom might come from chance, a signature, a bored official in a decent mood.

Every morning he expects Joan’s name in a letter that never arrives.
He tries not to picture her unraveling.

One day a guard tells him he’s being released. Just like that. No explanation. No apology. Bureaucracy giveth, bureaucracy taketh.
He packs his things in under a minute.

Walking out of the gates feels wrong. Like stepping out of a fog only to realize the fog is inside you now.

He doesn’t celebrate.
He thinks of Joan, and dread settles in his stomach.

He survived, but he can already tell something in his life didn’t.

Paris waits for him, colder than he remembers.
He heads toward the city with the slow, deliberate stride of someone preparing to face the consequences of being gone too long.

Sometimes freedom arrives exactly when you’re not ready for it.

The Return to a Life Already in Pieces

When Ravic gets back to Paris, the city feels different. Maybe it is the same old streets, same smoky cafés, same worn stone, but he walks through it like a man who has been away for years instead of months. The distance is inside him now. He carries it like extra weight in his spine.

He goes to Joan’s hotel first. He tells himself it is the logical place to start.
It is not logic.
It is longing mixed with dread.

The concierge gives him a look that is too familiar. Pity with a polite mask. Ravic feels his stomach tighten even before he hears the words. Joan has moved rooms. Joan has trouble sleeping. Joan comes and goes at strange hours. Joan is not well.

He finds her later that evening, curled in an armchair with a cigarette burning low between her fingers. She looks up as if waking from the middle of a nightmare that never ended. Her smile is thin, confused, almost embarrassed.

“You were gone forever,” she says quietly.

“I came back.”

He says it simply. She flinches anyway.

There is a pause where both of them stand in the doorway of everything unsaid. Ravic steps forward and she steps back, not far, but enough to tell him the balance has shifted. The time apart has rearranged her. She is still Joan, but dimmer, scattered, brittle around the edges.

He notices the signs instantly. The drinking. The trembling hands. The way her sentences trail off like she forgets what hope is supposed to sound like. It hits him harder than the arrest.

She tries to act normal. She talks about work she never finished, people she should not have trusted, nights she barely slept. It spills out of her in fractured pieces. Ravic listens, guilt twisting through every sentence.

He wants to gather her together. He also knows he is part of why she fell apart.

Later, when they sit in silence, she reaches for his arm with this hesitant touch, like she is afraid he might disappear again.
He wishes he could promise he will not.

But something in him stays guarded. Prison routines do not vanish overnight. Trauma does not evaporate because you missed someone. Joan feels the distance even when she leans against him. She feels it like a cold draft under the door.

She needs him to be gentle, and he feels too hollow to deliver that fully.

He tries anyway. He walks with her more. Takes her to cafés she once loved. Makes sure she eats. Makes sure she speaks in sentences, not fragments. Small repairs, small gestures. But nothing quite brings her back to who she was before his arrest.

Their conversations have a strange rhythm now. Joan veers between affection and fear, hope and panic. Ravic answers with steadiness that feels false even to him. They keep missing each other by emotional inches. Close enough to touch, too far to save each other cleanly.

One night she whispers, “You left me alone.”
He says nothing. The silence admits everything.

Her world has collected too many bruises while he was gone. Now he is trying to hold a version of her that can barely stand upright. Paris pushes in from all sides with its war rumors and restless tension.

Joan is a storm he wants to protect.
He is a shelter that keeps cracking.

Some reunions take more strength than the separation ever did.

The Revenge Thread Pulls Tight

Ravic spots Haake again on a crowded boulevard, and it feels like the universe is tapping him on the shoulder saying, You're up. It's not dramatic. It's not even surprising. It's just a cold click inside him, like a lock turning after years of rust.

For a moment he stands still, letting the noise of Paris wash over him. Haake is alive, comfortable, breathing the same air as everyone else. Ravic watches the man adjust his gloves, glance at a shop window, walk with that familiar smug neatness that once made every interrogation feel like an appointment.

There is no shaking this time.
No flashback pulling him under.
Just clarity.

He follows at a safe distance. The crowd is thick enough to hide him, thin enough to keep Haake in sight. Every step feels strangely easy. He has imagined this for years; reality is quieter, smaller, almost polite. Ravic keeps his breathing even, his thoughts calibrated.

He learns Haake’s habits over the next days. Where he shops. Where he eats. What time he leaves his flat. Haake lives like a man convinced he’s untouchable. That helps. Ravic knows how to work with arrogance.

Meanwhile, Joan senses something shifting again. She’s still fragile, still unsteady, but more aware than Ravic gives her credit for. She asks questions he avoids with practiced ease. She feels the distance widening and tries to pull him back with late-night visits and uneasy laughter.

He can’t tell her what he’s planning.
He can barely admit the truth to himself.

Their relationship becomes a tightrope stretched by two different storms. Joan wants closeness. Ravic wants silence. She wants reassurance. He wants Haake’s face erased from the world. Their mismatched needs rub raw against each other until the smallest spark becomes an argument.

“You’re somewhere else,” she whispers one night.

“I’m here.”

“You’re not.”

She isn’t wrong.

Ravic becomes nocturnal again. He walks the streets alone, running the same calculations he used to perform in interrogation cells: timing, location, escape routes. He is not acting out of passion. He is preparing out of precision.

Revenge, for him, isn’t an outburst.
It’s a form of symmetry.

Joan notices every vanishing hour, every unfinished sentence. She tries to stay close, clinging with a soft desperation that scares even her. He holds her when she cries, but his eyes drift to the window behind her. Paris watches them like a witness.

A week later, Ravic decides the moment has come. It is simple enough. Haake walks alone down a quiet street after dinner. No one is around. The air feels heavy, but steady. Ravic approaches him, steps measured, mind clean.

Haake turns, recognizing nothing but a stranger.
Ravic doesn’t speak.
Words would contaminate the act.

The confrontation is swift, controlled, and stripped of heroics. There are no speeches, no dramatic revelations. Just one man ending the unfinished chapter another man carved into his life. When it’s done, Haake collapses with the same smallness he inflicted on others.

Ravic stands over him for a moment, letting the silence settle. He feels no triumph, no thrill, no release.
Only finality.

He melts back into the night with the ease of someone who has been invisible for too long. Paris swallows him without protest.

Later, he returns to Joan’s hotel. She’s waiting in the hallway, eyes anxious and hopeful in the same breath. He looks at her, and something inside him aches — because she deserves a version of him that isn’t half-shadow.

He steps closer, but not close enough.
She senses the barrier instantly.

“Where were you?” she asks.

He gives her the safest version of the truth. “Out.”

Her heartbreak is soft and quiet, the kind that doesn’t shatter but sinks.

Some victories cost more than the enemy ever took.

The Breaking Point You Can’t Undo

Joan’s unraveling had been steady for months, but now it tilts into something sharper. Ravic sees it the moment he walks into her hotel room and finds her staring at the open window like she forgot whether she meant to breathe or vanish. Her eyes look washed out, unfocused, carrying that dull panic people get when they’re too tired to keep pretending.

He steps toward her carefully. She pulls away in a fast, brittle motion, like touch might snap her in half.
He hates how familiar that feels.

She starts talking about her career with this strange, distant brightness, as if listing accomplishments from a life she doesn’t believe in. He listens, but she’s talking past him. The room feels slightly tilted, every gesture a little too fragile.

“I can’t do this alone,” she says.
It lands like a quiet earthquake.

He crouches beside her, hands still, voice steady. “You’re not alone.”

She looks at him like he’s telling a child-friendly version of the truth. Her laugh is soft and broken. “You were gone, Ravic. You left.”
The words hurt because they’re not meant to accuse. They’re just honest.

He tries to explain, but explanations feel cheap when the absence already carved its mark. Joan’s grief isn’t loud. It’s slow and sinking. She holds herself like someone carrying too many invisible weights.

Nights get worse. She drifts between long silences and sudden confessions. She clings to him with a kind of fear that makes his chest tighten. Ravic tries to stabilize her the only ways he knows: routine, check-ins, quiet gestures of care. But nothing quite holds. Joan’s despair has momentum.

Sometimes she looks at him with this raw longing that scares them both.
She wants a future with him.
He can barely promise a tomorrow.

One evening she shows up shaking outside his door, coat thrown over a nightdress like she forgot how clothing works. Ravic pulls her inside. She collapses on the bed, crying in muffled little bursts that she tries to swallow.

He holds her. She feels small and trembling against him.
The guilt presses into his ribs until he can hardly breathe.

When she finally sleeps, he stays awake beside her. Watching.
Waiting.
Worried.

Days later, she disappears for a night. The hotel clerk shrugs. Someone saw her with a man. Someone else saw her drinking. Ravic searches half the city before finding her on a bridge, staring at the water like it’s whispering something she is dangerously willing to hear.

He gets her home without scolding, but she cries the whole way. She’s ashamed. Lost. Afraid of herself. Ravic helps her inside and sits with her until dawn washes the room in pale, forgiving light.

He knows she’s slipping beyond what his quiet presence can hold.
He knows he is losing her in real time.

The final crack comes on a rainy evening when she tries to talk about their future again, voice thin as paper. Ravic freezes, unable to promise what she needs. The silence between them stretches until she finally nods, accepting the truth he couldn’t speak aloud.

She touches his cheek once, a small trembling gesture.
“You’ll forget me someday,” she says.

“I won’t.”

She doesn’t argue. That hurts more than if she had.

Later that night, something inside Joan gives out. She walks into danger her mind is too clouded to recognize. The city does not slow down for fragile people. Ravic finds out too late. A phone call. A voice telling him to come quickly. A street. Flashing lights. A small crowd.

He pushes through with the calm of someone who has already lived too many catastrophes. He sees her.

Time stutters.

He kneels beside her, hands steady the way they always are in the worst moments. Joan’s breathing is shallow, her skin too pale, eyes flickering like she’s caught between worlds. She looks at him, and there is recognition, then relief, then something softer.

“You came,” she whispers.

“I’m here.”

He holds her hand, feels how light her grip is.
She tries to say more, then doesn’t.

Her last breath is small, almost shy.

Ravic stays beside her long after the medics step back. Someone tells him it’s over. Someone else tries to move him. He doesn’t respond. He looks at her face like he’s memorizing the final version of a story that never learned how to be happy.

Paris keeps raining.
He barely notices.

Some losses carve through you with a blade you never see coming.

he World Finally Tips Into War

The day war breaks out, Paris feels like someone pulled the plug on the city’s heartbeat. People stand in clusters around radios, heads tilted, eyes hollow, as if they’re listening for a verdict on their own futures. Ravic moves through the crowd like a man underwater, everything muted, distant, unreal.

Joan’s absence follows him everywhere.
It’s quieter than grief usually is.

He hears the first official announcement while standing outside a café where he used to sit with her, watching the street traffic she pretended to understand. Now the tables are half-empty, chairs stacked, shutters already being pulled down because fear always knows how to move faster than logic.

France is collapsing into panic.
Ravic watches it with the calm of someone already broken.

Trucks roll past full of soldiers with young faces and borrowed bravery. Women cry at train stations. The air tastes metallic. The whole city has that brittle tension people get before a fistfight. Paris isn’t romantic now. It’s a place holding its breath.

Ravic’s friends — the loose network of refugees, exiles, wanderers — scatter like startled birds. Some flee south. Some vanish without goodbye. Some stay because leaving feels pointless when you don’t have a country to run to in the first place. He understands all of them.

He spends the next days packing up the fragments of the life he almost allowed himself to have. Hotel rooms. Clinic corners. A few clothes. A scalpel wrapped in cloth. Joan’s lighter. He holds it longer than he means to.

Joan should’ve been here.
The thought knocks the air from his lungs.

He walks through the city, and everywhere he turns something reminds him of her: the quiet bridge where she cried; the theatre lobby where she once laughed too loudly; the riverbank where she claimed she could smell the future. Now he walks those places alone, carrying the weight of both their stories.

He feels older, heavier, emptied out in ways he can’t articulate.

War doesn’t allow space for mourning. Sirens replace silence. People push, shout, rush. Ravic blends into the movement because blending is all he’s ever known. But inside, something is cracked open in a way that can’t be stitched shut.

He visits Joan’s grave once more before leaving the city. The flowers are wilted, but he arranges them anyway, hands steady, face unreadable. A small ritual for a life that deserved more than chaos and bad timing.

After that he heads toward the outskirts, where refugees are already forming desperate lines. Someone asks him where he’s going.
He gives the simplest answer: “Forward.”

The roads out of Paris clog with carts and bicycles and people on foot. Ravic joins them, one more displaced body in a tide of uncertainty. He walks with the grim patience of someone who no longer expects anything from the world except movement.

Paris shrinks behind him.
The future is a fog he steps into without hesitation.

Some endings arrive disguised as the next beginning.

The Man Who Keeps Walking

Ravic leaves Paris with a small bag, an empty stomach, and a grief that sits so quietly it feels like it's studying him. The road ahead is crowded with people who look just as lost: children clutching blankets, old men muttering to themselves, women dragging suitcases with broken wheels. Everyone moves with that stunned, automatic rhythm of people whose worlds just shifted without permission.

He blends into them easily. He has practice.

The air smells like dust and fear. A few miles out, the city noise fades, replaced by coughing engines and the soft murmur of exhausted conversations. Ravic keeps his hands in his coat pockets, steps steady, eyes forward. He doesn’t look back at the skyline he once memorized.

Looking back feels dangerous.

People around him talk about where they’ll go next. Some mention Spain. Others talk about England as if it’s a promised land. Ravic listens without reacting. Borders have always been traps for him, not destinations. But walking gives him a sense of direction, which is more than he’s had in a long time.

A little boy beside him asks if he is a doctor. Ravic nods once. The boy’s mother pulls him closer, grateful and wary in the same breath. Ravic understands that instinct. Trust is expensive during war.

He helps an old man adjust a bandage on his leg. He doesn’t say his name. They don’t ask. There’s something oddly peaceful about the anonymity of exile. Everyone is too tired to pretend.

Joan’s absence presses against him when the road gets quiet.
It shows up in small flashes — a phrase she used, the sound of a cigarette flick, the way she tilted her head when she was trying not to cry. He tries not to sink into those memories because once he starts, he won’t stop.

He keeps walking.

At dusk, the crowd settles in a field beside the road. People share scraps of food, whispers of news, fragments of hope. Ravic sits alone near a tree, listening to the distant rumble of artillery the way others listen to thunder. He feels the tremor in it, the warning.

He wonders what Joan would have said about the sky being this color. Something dramatic, probably. Something honest underneath. He almost smiles.

Almost.

A man approaches him and asks if he can look at a feverish child. Ravic follows him without hesitation. Routine steadies him the way nothing else does. For a few minutes, he forgets the war, the loss, the isolation. He is just a surgeon again, hands steady, mind clear.

He realizes this is the one part of himself he trusts not to break.

Later, when the field settles into restless sleep, Ravic lies awake staring at a sky with no stars. His body is exhausted, but his mind keeps moving through the last few years — the torture, the surgeries, Joan’s laugh, Joan’s shaking hands, Haake’s face disappearing into the night.

It all feels like someone else’s memories worn thin by repetition.

Morning comes cold and early. People rise and resume the slow procession toward uncertainty. Ravic joins them, steps measured, breath even, heart heavier than he lets on.

He is still a man without papers, without a country, without the person he loved.
But he is moving.
Sometimes that’s the only victory life allows.

He doesn’t know where he’ll end up.
He doesn’t ask.

The future has never promised him anything, and he walks toward it anyway.

Looking Back

Ravic’s journey settles into memory like a bruise that never fully fades. It isn’t a tale of triumph or justice; it’s the quiet aftermath of a man who kept surviving because stopping felt impossible.

He carries pieces of Paris with him. Not the romantic parts, but the shadowed corridors, the whispered warnings, the way hope moved in small, breakable steps.

Some days he remembers Joan’s brightest moments first. Other days it’s the weight she carried.
Both versions matter.

He still walks with that focused steadiness, the kind built from years of hiding and tending to wounds that never belonged to him. Routine remains the only place he feels fully real.

The world around him reshapes, and he reshapes with it. Not gracefully. Not cleanly. Just honestly.

There is a strange comfort in knowing he keeps going even when the road has nothing to offer.
He never needed a destination to start moving.

Sometimes he thinks about what might have been if the world had given them even one safe place to land. The thought is brief. It always is.

Hope still shows up, even when it knows better.

He doesn’t speak her name aloud, but her presence lingers in the way he watches people, in the quiet care he gives strangers who don’t know his history.

He walks forward with a kind of stubborn gentleness, carrying what he lost without letting it freeze him.

That’s the closest he’s ever come to peace.