Mihail Sebastian

The Accident

I

SHE DIDN’T KNOW HOW MUCH TIME had passed. A few seconds? A few long minutes?

She felt nothing. Around her she heard voices, footsteps, people calling out, but all muted and grey, like a sort of auditory paste, from which occasionally a tram-bell or a shout shook loose with unexpected clarity, only to fade away again into the suffocated commotion.

They’ll say it’s an accident, she thought very calmly, almost with indifference.

The thought made her feel neither alarmed nor hurried. She had a very vague impression that she must be stretched out next to the sidewalk with her head in the snow. But she didn’t try to move.

A stupid, senseless question passed through her mind: What time is it?

She strained to listen to the tick-tock of her wristwatch, but couldn’t hear it. It must have been smashed. Then, in an effort to concentrate, as though immersed in herself, she observed that in fact she heard nothing of her own being; not her pulse, not her heart, not her breath.

I’m…, she reflected. I’m like a clock. And it seemed to her that she was smiling, although she couldn’t feel her lips, for whose outline she searched in vain somewhere in that familiar yet vanished space that was her unfeeling body.

She remembered suddenly the moment of the fall, so suddenly that she had the impression that she was falling again, and she heard again the brief noise, like that of a shattered spring, that she had heard then.

She hadn’t dwelt on it at the time, but now it returned with an absurd precision: the dry sound of a tearing ligament, of a snapping bow. In truth it seemed to her that somewhere in the intimacy of this body that she no longer felt, something had been ripped out of its natural place.

She tried to review her being, with a brisk inward glance, in order to identify, as though on an X-ray screen, the exact spot of the dislocation.

The collar bone? The aorta? The kneecap?

For each word, it seemed to her that she had to find a response in her inert body, which she listened to again, forcing herself to explore it with her hearing down to its most remote fibres.

All right, something’s broken. But what?

Voices rose and fell on the street around her in noisy outbreaks that suddenly became distant. They reached her as though passing through mist or steam.

All at once she overcame the penetrating cold and at the same time she felt her right knee naked against the snow, as though it alone in all her body had awoken her from a powerful anaesthetic. So far away, yet how intensely she felt it! She concentrated her thoughts on this sensation for a moment. This single sensitive point felt extremely strange to her, detached from her swoon like a little island of life.

Then, like a wave of blood, the cold rose above her knees and spread like a fine net through her calf, calling back to life new regions of her flesh. The snow was fluffy, soothing, and it had the softness of chilled bedclothes. She plunged her leg with caution straight into that snow and felt its utter nakedness, her stocking having fallen to her ankle.

In that moment, the tearing sensation of a few seconds earlier flashed through her again. Her mind, which had hesitated until now, located the exact point of the torn piece of her anatomy: her garter. Having broken loose, its metallic spring pressed up against her calf like a small round signet.

I must be half-naked, she thought without panic. She had barely lifted her head when the voices grew clearer, as though the mist had suddenly dispersed.

“Criminals!” an old man shouted. He blustered, suffocated by the violence of his anger, at a tram driver, who stood in dazed silence. “You don’t look in front of you, you don’t look around you, you don’t give a hoot about your passengers, about women or children…”

The tram driver gestured, trying to explain.

“Well, if she’s getting off…”

“So what if she’s getting off? Doesn’t she have the right?”

“She doesn’t have the right because this isn’t a stop,” somebody else said, in a tone of indifference.

From the ground, she tried to see the person who had spoken, but in the darkness she could only make out an expression lacking in curiosity.

“Of course it’s not a stop,” the driver repeated, mildly encouraged.

The elderly gentleman, indignant, refused to back down.

“It’s a damned shame it isn’t. It should be. We pay for this service. You know they take our money, but they don’t lend a hand to build new stops. Criminals, bandits… You’ve got rich on the money from our pockets.”

She became aware of a smile that fluttered in the dark and, without raising her head far enough to receive this smile full in the face, was certain that it belonged to the indifferent voice of a moment earlier.

“… Yes, that’s how they get us, we deserve it, we’re dumb and we don’t respond…”

He was stupid, certainly, but she realized that, sprawled there in the snow, she wasn’t listening to the strident voice of the outraged old man, but rather to the other man’s distant silences.

“… Yes, gentlemen, we fail to respond. Let’s call a police officer and we’ll send you off to see a judge, you lawbreaker…”

Finally she heard again the other man’s voice, that slightly deaf, slightly lazy voice. He was probably speaking to the tram driver.

“Hit the road, lad. Get back into your tram and hit the road.”

“Sure, let him hit the road and leave her there dead in the snow.”

Everyone gazed in her direction. In the heat of the argument she had been forgotten, but now she once again became the central character in the drama.

She felt ridiculous, sprawled out as she was — who knew how long she’d been there? — in the middle of the street amid a group of curious bystanders. She would have liked to get up, but she knew she couldn’t do it alone.

She glanced around in a circle, seeking a familiar figure among those grey faces, and stopped at the man whose lazy voice had caught her attention. She recognized him by his uncaring gaze, which bore a strong resemblance to his voice.

“Rather than having a fight, why don’t you help me get up?”

The man didn’t look at all surprised. Without haste, he took a step towards her, paused, kneeled, placed his hand beneath her right arm and lifted her firmly, if without great deftness.

She was unable to suppress a small cry of pain when, reaching a standing position, she was left with her full weight on her right leg.

“Does it hurt?”

“I don’t know. I’ll see later.”

What should she do now? The circle of curious bystanders tightened around her. Her hat slipped onto the nape of her neck, her right stocking had slid down her leg, her overcoat was covered with snow, her gloves were soaked…

She felt that getting up had been a mistake: she had been more comfortable lying in the snow. For a moment she was tempted to tumble back down on the spot, a thought that made her smile and recover her calm. I’ve got to escape from this, she said to herself, confronting the group’s curiosity with courage.

She returned to the man at her side, who also seemed rather embarrassed by the spectacle.

“Would you like to take a few steps with me?” The suggestion seemed to bore him. She hastened to calm him. “Just a few, as far as the car.”

She didn’t wait for his reply. She took his arm and set out alongside him, treading with care in order not to reawaken the pain of a few moments earlier.

Neither a car nor a taxi could be seen. The young gentleman made no effort to conceal his boredom. He remained stubbornly silent, distracted.

She would have been happy to leave him and continue on her way alone, but she didn’t trust her right leg. Twice she tried to tread with her full weight, and the pain sliced into her ankle like a blade.

He’s been badly brought up, but I need him. She took his arm more firmly, as though she wished to show him that she wasn’t going to allow herself to be intimidated by his bad upbringing and that she wasn’t giving up.

She walked a little behind him, not daring to tell him to take shorter steps. She was able to scowl at him in profile without his noticing. A drab guy, with undefinable features, young-looking, although not of any precise age; his hair looked blond, although it wasn’t of any clearly defined colour. Maybe I’ve seen him before somewhere.

Was he tall? Short? She wouldn’t have known what to say. He looked tall in that loose, grey overcoat with large pockets into which he had thrust his hands with a self-assured air.

He remained silent, in the silence of a long journey, reserved, enduring, expressionless.

It’s as if he were alone. As if I weren’t here by his side. As if he had forgotten that I was by his side. What if he really has forgotten? What if he wakes up and finds us arm-in-arm and asks me what I’m doing here, hanging onto his arm?

She decided to break the silence.

“I don’t know how it happened. I slipped, you see, on the step of the tram. I was trying to get off.”

“While the tram was moving?”

Hearing his voice surprised her. She thought he hadn’t heard her, that he wasn’t going to respond. Her surprise made her animated.

“Yes, while the tram was moving. I always get off when the tram’s moving. Otherwise it doesn’t work. I live near here, on Bulevardul Dacia, and the number 16 tram only stops on Donici or on Vasile Lascăr. It’s too far away. That’s why I get off at the turn, where the tram goes onto Orientul. Not just me. Everybody who lives around here does it. And nothing ever happens. Except for today… I don’t know how it happened.”

They were passing beneath the pulsing of a streetlight. In the light, his face again looked distracted.

What an unpleasant guy! Even so, she summoned the courage to stop.

“Don’t be troubled by what I’m about to ask you. I want you to pull up my stocking. I’m completely frozen.”

She bent over, realizing only now that she was bleeding: her right knee was red, but lower down, towards her ankle, where the scrape was deeper, frozen blood plastered the stocking’s fabric to the wound.

“Is it serious?”

“I don’t know. For the time being it’s not hurting. I should go to the pharmacy. Will you come with me?”

He didn’t reply, but he took her arm and asked with his eyes: Which way?

“It’s not far. Look, over there on the other sidewalk.”

They crossed the street. From afar she found it difficult to recognize herself in the reflection in the pharmacy’s windows next to this man, who looked even stranger in the distant image on the glass. As she approached, she smiled with compassion at her own face. How pathetic I look, poor me! She took off her hat with a brisk motion and stood with it in her hand, dismayed.

“I can’t go into that shop. The pharmacist knows me, he’ll ask, I’ll have to explain… Will you…?”

He accepted unenthusiastically, frowning with his brows.

“What do you need?”

“A little iodine and… I don’t know, a little oxygenated water.”

She was about to open her handbag to give him the money, but, without waiting, he pushed open the door of the pharmacy and went inside.

From outside, she watched him through the pane of the display window: how he entered, how he took off his hat, how he said good evening, how he approached the pharmacist in his white lab jacket. She found it odd to watch him opening his mouth and uttering words that she couldn’t hear. What a peculiar voice he had! A little muffled, a little quashed, and yet with a rough tone. The pharmacist was pouring the tincture of iodine into a bottle.

Why was he taking so long? It must be as hot as a greenhouse inside. The metal scales were still. The heavy liquids, as though drowsy, slept on the shelves in solemn crystal flasks.

The pharmacist was asking him something and he was replying with plenty of enthusiasm. He was more talkative inside in the heat than he had been out here in the cold. And if she were to leave him? If she walked away now, without waiting for him? How astonished he would be at not finding her here, but what a feeling of relief he would have, the saucy devil!

Her knee started to hurt. To sting more than to hurt. She thought again of the lovely warmth on the other side of the display window and closed her eyes. She felt as though she were slipping into a kind of slumber…

“Did I take too long?”

It was his voice. That uncertain voice, which didn’t stress his words and gave her the impression that he was walking at her side without paying attention to her.

She didn’t reply and didn’t open her eyes.

“Are you feeling ill?”

“I’m not ill. But I’d like to get home. I’m freezing.”

“You said it wasn’t far…”

“Don’t worry, it isn’t. Another twenty paces and you’re free.”

She didn’t expect even a polite denial from him. She took his arm, determined not to say anything more to him; she was impatient to be left alone. She forced herself to take ever longer strides, although her right leg was still hurting.

For the first time since that stupid accident had happened, she felt like she wanted to cry.

She finally stopped in front of a multiple-storey building, leaned against the glass front door and extended her hand…

“This is it. You can go now. Thank you.”

He squeezed her hand for a second without holding it, then touched a finger to his hat, sketching a vague half-wave.

She wanted to tell him: You’re the most unpleasant man in the world. But she was too tired to tell him anything. She left him there in front of the building, and went into the bright foyer, where an enervating wave of heat received her.

… She was alone in the elevator. She pressed the button for the top floor, the sixth, then fell onto the bench with a relieved sigh. She promised herself she would cry with all her heart once she got to her apartment. She felt that nothing could be better for her: a good cry followed by a steaming hot bath.

Somewhere between two floors the elevator stopped with a brusque shudder. At first she thought she had arrived, but she realized that in fact she was suspended in the air.

This is the day for accidents. She tried to make a joke in her mind. She pressed for a long time on the alarm button.

She remembered that last summer the old lady from the third floor had spent a whole morning locked in the elevator between two floors. The thought terrified her. She pressed again, with a long, nervous, harsh start of panic, on the red button. In the deep silence, everything was motionless; somewhere far away, as weak as a call from another world, the alarm bell rang without anyone responding to it.

She could no longer hold back her tears. She looked at herself in the elevator’s rectangular mirror and felt pity for the state she was in: dishevelled, ragged, dirty, frozen. The hot tears welled from her eyes, and she received them with a sudden pleasure, as if she had drawn near to a warm hearth.

From below someone, probably the porter, shouted: “Hey, third-floor door. Who opened the third-floor door?”

The third-floor door was closed: the elevator set off noiselessly on its way. She would have liked not to stop again, to travel like that forever, and to be able to cry peacefully to the slow, silent movements of the elevator.

On the top floor the young gentleman in the grey overcoat was waiting for her. She looked at him in astonishment, unable to understand what was going on.

“You?”

“Me. I forgot to give you the iodine tincture and the oxygenated water.”

Indeed, he pulled two bottles out of his pocket enveloped in the pharmacy’s multicoloured paper.

“And how did you get up here?”

“By the stairs.”

“Six floors?”

“Six.”

What an odd guy! she thought, watching him for a moment, intrigued again by his lack of expression. Now, too, he had that far-away, unquestioning gaze, which she had first seen when she had raised her head from the snow.

She remembered that she had been crying. Embarrassed, she lowered her eyes; but it was too late: he had noticed.

“You were crying?”

“No… Well, yes. A little. But it’s not important! It’s never important when I cry…”

She took the key out of her handbag.

“Do you want to come in for a moment?”

He responded by lifting his shoulders.

“Does that mean Yes, or does that mean No?”

“I don’t know what it means. It’s a habitual gesture. Let’s say Yes.”

“So come in.”

Next to the door was a small, metal plate: Nora Munteanu. He asked the question with his eyes and she confirmed: “That’s me.”

The water was boiling. She had thrown a handful of lavender into the pot, and the apartment was full of warm, aromatic vapours.

“Can you smell it over there?”

“What?”

“The lavender.”

“It’s lavender? Yes, I can smell it.”

His voice, even more muffled than usual, came from the adjoining room, through the door that Nora had left ajar in order to be able to speak to him while she ran her bath.

“You’re not bored?”

“No.”

“Are you comfortable?”

“Yes.”

In fact, she had sat him down in an arm chair and set a pile of illustrated magazines in front of him. “Like at the dentist,” he observed meekly, occupying his assigned place.

“Yes, just like at the dentist. I’ll ask you to behave yourself until I’ve finished. Then we can talk.”

The bath was soporifically good. Nora closed her eyes, overcome by the heat that she felt suffusing in a sweet torpor through her entire body. Deep inside her, fine blood vessels, which she thought that the cold had frozen shut, began to open.

Nora felt an access of companionship for this body of hers, well-known, familiar and reliable. It felt like a rediscovered old acquaintance and she caressed it with comradely sympathy. Her hand lingered on her breast, as on a round cheek. She would have liked to fall asleep…

In the adjoining room she heard a chair move.

“Did you want something?”

“No. I was looking at the photograph on your desk. Who is it?”

“Me.”

“In that costume?”

“It’s a ski costume. I was at Predeal. Do you like it?”

He didn’t reply. Maybe he hadn’t heard the question, which she had asked in an offhand tone, her voice dropping. She heard him turning a page: he must be reading.

Nora thought about him and realized with surprise that she had forgotten him. She knew he was in the next room, sunken in her armchair, on the other side of the door she had left ajar, yet she was unable to remember what his face looked like. His features melted into uncertainty under a vague smile, as though under a diffused light.

On the other hand, she remembered clearly the tie he was wearing, a green tie of rough wool, with tiny oblique parallel seams…

It’s a nice tie, but he doesn’t know how to tie it. The knot’s crooked. I’ll have to teach him how to knot a tie like a normal person.

In the next room, the telephone rang loudly.

“What should I do?” her quiet guest asked from the sofa.

“Nothing. Let it ring.”

The ringing continued, ever longer, ever harsher. Nora smiled with fatigue. Only one person would let the phone ring that long.

“Be a good boy and answer.”

He lifted the receiver, said, “Hello,” then, after a pause, replaced it.

“What happened?”

“I don’t know. Nobody answered. And somebody hung up without a word.”

“It must be Grig.”

“Grig?”

“Yes, a friend. He must have been surprised to hear a man’s voice here. He probably thought he’d got a wrong number.”

Nora’s supposition seemed to be correct because the phone rang again.

“Don’t be offended. Please answer it. Tell him that I’m in the bath and that he should call me in five minutes.”

She held her breath and listened with her ear cocked towards the next room so that she could also catch the voice coming from the receiver. She heard it vibrating metallically, as far away as though it came from a minuscule gramophone record.

“Hello. Is that 2-65-80? Are you sure it’s not a wrong number?”

“No, sir. It’s not a wrong number.”

“Then who’s speaking?” the little metallic voice asked.

“Miss Nora asks that you…”

“I’m not interested in what Miss Nora asks. I want to know who’s speaking.”

“Sir, Miss Nora is in the bath and she asks you…”

“I don’t want to know where Miss Nora is. I want to know who you are, buddy.”

A moment’s silence followed, then a brief noise, cut off as the receiver dropped into the cradle somewhere far away, breaking the connection.

“Now what…?” he asked Nora, with a calmness that suggested that the strange conversation hadn’t bothered him.

“Nothing. Go back to your spot in the armchair and wait for me. I’ll be there in a second.”

Nora came in dressed in a white bathrobe that was a little too big for her.

She made straight for his armchair, switched on the small, shaded lamp on the the nearby sofa and slid it close to him, abruptly illumining his face.

“What’s up?”

“Nothing. I want to see you. Imagine that, I’d forgotten what you looked like. The whole time I was in the bath I was racking my brains trying to remember.”

She scrutinized him with great seriousness while he calmly put up with her scrutiny.

“Have you finished?”

“Yes, for the time being. Your face isn’t strongly defined. Difficult to remember.”

He lifted his shoulders. She recognized the gesture.

“I don’t like that lifting of your shoulders.”

He didn’t reply, while she watched him at greater length, tracing his vaguely outlined features, in which she discerned a blend of fatigue and boyishness.

“You’re a murky kind of guy. I bet you came out of the fog.”

On the sofa were the two bottles purchased at the pharmacy. Nora took them and went to the side of the night table in order to dress her “wounds,” as she called them, exaggerating to make a joke.

She pulled aside the bathrobe with a considered modesty and unveiled her right leg up to the knee, only as far as was necessary to put on the bandages. Properly speaking, she wasn’t wounded. They were more like scratches, although very bad ones, since even after her steaming hot bath they were still bleeding slightly.

He followed the operation from the armchair, waiting as if to hear her cry when she pressed the iodine-soaked swab against her bleeding ankle. But her gestures had the polite, objective quality of those of a nurse bending over an unfamiliar patient. Her black hair fell over her forehead in a gesture absent of flirtatiousness.

She continued for some time to run the cotton swab over her ankle, then over her knee, completely absorbed in what she was doing. Finally she interrupted her movements as though she had just remembered a forgotten matter of business. “You weren’t bothered by that phone call just now?”

“No.”

“Just as well. I’m… I’m used to it.”

She took up again her delicate operation, cleaning with oxygenated water then with the iodine tincture a small cut she had not noticed until now.

“Yes, I’m used to it. To that and to other things. Look, Grig… You’d have to meet him.”

“Isn’t he coming here this evening?”

“He was supposed to… But now he won’t be coming. Not this evening and not many other evenings…”

“I’m sorry, believe me.”

“I’m not. I swear I’m not.”

“Do you love him?”

Nora sensed an ironic undertone in his question. She was convinced that he was smiling just as he had smiled on the street, amid that group of bystanders in which he alone had been indifferent.

She raised her head quickly, in order to surprise him, and was astonished on looking at him to see that she had been wrong. He wasn’t smiling.

“No, I don’t love him. I don’t think I love him. He comes here… to this apartment… He comes, he leaves, he phones me, he gets angry, he makes up… That’s him. I think you’d find him amusing.”

“Why?”

“I’m not sure. It seems like he’s the exact opposite of you.”

“And how do you know that?”

“For lots of reasons. Your voice. Your tie.” She got up and came towards him. “Yes, your tie. His is always perfectly tied. Yours is crooked. You don’t know how to tie it. Will you let me?”

She sat down on the low back of the armchair and undid the knot of his tie with fluid, measured movements. He didn’t resist. He waited dutifully for her to finish. The aroma of lavender passed through her porous bathrobe, bearing a wave of heat in which she felt something like a distant beating of her blood, the fine throbbing of her pulse.

When she had finished knotting the tie, Nora stepped away from him and observed him to see how he looked.

“No, it doesn’t work. It’s perfect, but it doesn’t look right on you. It’s too perfect for you.”

And, with that worry, she was compelled to ruin the too-perfect knot in his tie in order to restore his negligent air.

He was ready to leave. He put on his hat. My God, how tall he looks in that hat! He was preparing to bid her good evening.

“Are you really going?”

“It’s late.”

“You haven’t even introduced yourself.”

“Do you need to see my identity papers?”

“There’s no harm in our looking at them.”

He searched with a serious expression in the inside pocket of his coat and pulled out an I.D. card, which he held out to her.

Nora looked it over for a moment, as though she wished to verify the photograph, the personal information, the signature. Then she looked at him in sudden surprise.

“You were born on December 18th?”

“Yes.”

“December 18th? You’re sure?” Without waiting for his reply, she turned her head towards the calendar on the wall. “You did realize that today is your birthday? You realized that you’re turning…” She stopped, opened again the I.D. card in her hand, read his birthdate… “You knew that you were turning thirty today? Exactly today?”

He didn’t look surprised. He looked far more amused by her open stupefaction. She insisted. “Tell me, you did know?”

He lifted his shoulders; again, his indifferent lifting of his shoulders. “No.”

Nora tried not to believe him.

“It’s not true. Isn’t that right — it’s not true? And isn’t somebody waiting for you somewhere this evening? Your wife, your girlfriend. Someone who knows…”

She came to a halt. There was something in his hazy, settled silence that made her suddenly certain that she would not be able to wrest a reply from him.

He took a step towards the door. Nora seized his arm. “Don’t leave yet.”

On a bookshelf, in a glass vase, were three carnations with long stalks. She took a carnation and offered it to him without smiling, almost with gravity.

“For your birthday.” Then, with unexpected enthusiasm, she pressed even closer to him. “Stay here. As you can see, it’s bright, it’s warm. We can call the porter and send him to the grocery store. We’re going to make a big dinner and clink our glasses. That’ll bring us luck.”

“You think so?” he said, distracted.

“I’m sure.”

A boyish sparkle lighted up his eyes. “I accept. But you’ve got to let me go down to the shop.”

“That’s not possible.”

“Why not?”

“Because you won’t come back.”

“Of course I will.”

… And she had no more time to refute him because he had opened the door and disappeared down the stairs in a tempestuous rush.

Nora remained on the threshold, listening to his steps fading away.

She looked restlessly at the clock on her desk: twenty minutes had gone past. He may not come back.

An immense silence filled the entire building. From somewhere on a distant floor came the feeble sound of a song on a gramophone or on the radio:

Goodnight, Mimy,

And sweet dreams

Goodnight, Mimy

And deep sleep…

Nora thought about that Mimy, who no doubt had been sleeping for a long time as a result of the song’s persuasion.

She would have liked to sleep, too. It seemed wrong to have taken off that soft bathrobe in which she had felt so warmly embraced. In this evening dress she had the uncomfortable impression of being a visitor in her own apartment. But she had seen that he took with complete seriousness the “dinner” for which she was preparing, and she thought with pleasure that when he returned he would find a stunning woman… Stunning. She repeated the word in her head and smiled with slight fatigue.

A dull hum cut through the silence of the building. Someone was coming up in the elevator.

Acquainted with the building’s most intimate secrets, Nora’s ear followed the sound as it would have followed the rise of mercury in an oversized thermometer.

First floor, second floor…

As it approached, the hum of the elevator vibrated like the lower chords of a piano, prolonged by the pressure of the pedals. Would it stop on the third floor…? No, it had continued upward.

At each floor there was a brief thunk, like a pulse beating harder.

Nora closed her eyes. She felt the rising of the elevator inside her, as though a secret driving-belt had taken over her blood and nerves.

Fourth… Fifth… Had it stopped?

It seemed as though, within the silence that had existed until now, a new, deeper zone of silence had opened.

Had it stopped?

Yes. It had stopped. The interior lattice work, made of wood, clattered back with a meshing shudder, the door opened and closed mechanically, the hum of the elevator’s chords fell away, dwindled…

It’s pointless to wait for him. He’s not coming back.

Nora got up from the armchair and approached the mirror. She observed herself for a long time. “How absurd you are, my dear girl. How absurd you are!” she said to herself in a loud voice.

She felt pity for her black dress, her bare arms, for those two carnations that she could see in the mirror trembling in the glass vase, too heavy for their slender stalks as though they, too, were tired from waiting.

She lifted the telephone receiver and kept it in her hand for a while, without a thought. Then she put it back, not knowing why she had picked it up.

“No, he’s not coming back.”

She leaned against the wall and looked at her apartment, pausing for a long time over each item, astonished that these objects were at the same time so familiar and so strange.

She glimpsed his I.D. card lying on the desk. She took it in her hand, realizing only now that it was a passport. She hadn’t seen these new passports, with their long outer covers. She opened it.

Stature: medium. Hair: brown. Eyebrows: brown. Eyes: green. Nose: regular. Mouth: regular. Beard: shaven…

The last word made her tremble. In her bathroom, on the little metal shelf over the sink, was Grig’s shaving kit. “I should hide it,” she told herself, thinking that the other man, when he returned, might go into the bathroom and find such an indiscreet object there. But after the first step she thought again… What good was there in hiding it since he wasn’t coming back…

She recited again the “identifying signs” from the passport page. She would have liked to rediscover in each word the features of that uncertain curve of cheek, which was sinking again into the haze from which it had broken free for only a moment.

Hair, brown… Mouth… regular… What bored bureaucrat had lifted his eyes for a second from among his papers and observed him tentatively in order to write under the pertinent rubric the colour of his eyes, the line of his forehead, the shape of his lips?… She’d had him here, in her apartment, in broad daylight, under the full glow of a lamp, and she still wouldn’t have been able to say anything for certain about his face with its indefinite lines.

Mouth: regular… Nora closed her eyes and forced herself to remember that mouth, about which the passport said with indifference that it was regular, as though it weren’t possible to hide an infinity of lines behind that single word. She would have liked to be able to walk her forefinger over his lips and surprise in the slight gap between them that uncertain smile that spilled a thin, weary light over his whole face.

It seemed to her that the passport in her hand contained an unsolved mystery, and that the bureaucratic formulas, official seals and identifying signs made up a life that waited to be understood. She felt alone, horribly alone, in the apartment with all the lights on, holding in her hand a photograph, a name, a few personal details, beneath which she would have been delighted to hear the beating of a heart, a voice.

She was tempted to hold up the little booklet with the white cover to her ear and listen, as though in a conch shell, to the whispering of an unknown life.

The pages “reserved for visas” were full of sundry seals and stamps. Nora read the last row: Visa sous le no. 1464 à la Legation de Belgique à Bucarest pour permettre au titulaire…

Two smaller, rectangular stamps at the bottom of the pages attested to his border crossings, outbound and returning: Hegenrath, 23 juillet 1934. Contrôle des passagers. And later: Hegenrath, 12 août.

“Where was I between July 23 and August 12?” Nora wondered. She saw herself again on the beach at Agigea, under blazing sunlight, thirty days of safety while Grig played cards at the Casino in Eforie by day and they danced in the taproom at night. Some days, when the sea was calm, she could hear the jazz music in her tent in Agigea… At the same time, someone was crossing the border at Hegenrath on a July night, maybe on his way to Brussels, maybe on his way to a small provincial town, maybe alone, maybe with a woman, someone who five months later had picked her up out of the snow on a Bucharest street and looked her in the eyes with an indifferent lift of his shoulders…

She wished she could relive those days, July 23 to August 12, not in her tent at Agigea, but rather somewhere unseen, in the shadow of this unknown man. She would have liked to know what had happened during those nineteen days and see the small train station at the border by night, the customs officer’s manner, the stamp printing with red ink on paper the day that would not return…Hegenrath, 23 juillet. To Nora the words felt mysterious, impenetrable.

She plunged into the armchair, disheartened.

She should have undressed, gone to bed and slept.

But she felt that she would be unable to get to her feet, take off her dress and turn down her bed. She would have preferred to remain still and sleep as she was, as she might be in the waiting room of a train station. Hegenrath station…

The bell rang suddenly and loudly. For a second Nora didn’t realize what was happening. She let it ring for a long time, as though she wished to fill the whole apartment with the sound of its call. Then she headed for the door, forcing herself not to make any assumptions. She opened the door without emotion. He was on the threshold, loaded down with shopping bags.

The cork flew with a resounding bang, and the champagne overflowed the neck of the bottle while Nora looked up to follow the projectile’s trajectory.

“A direct hit!” he shouted victoriously.

Overhead on the ceiling, a coin-shaped white spot marked the point of impact.

“Two more hits like that and the landlord will evict me for causing serious damage,” Nora joked, not without a certain anxiety.

“Two more hits, you say? No, my dear friend. A hundred and one. Yes, a hundred and one sound blows. Like at Epiphany, like on January 24.”1

And, putting aside the empty bottle like a discarded weapon, he took another bottle in his hands. This time the detonation was even louder. They looked at each other in surprise, no longer smiling. On the bookshelf, the two carnations shook, awoken from their slumber. The detonation seemed to radiate through the whole sleeping building from floor to floor.

“A hit!”

On the ceiling, a new white mark had appeared, a very short distance from the first one.

“A dead-eye marksman! What ease! What precision!”

There was a gleam in his eye that Nora saw igniting for the first time. She almost didn’t recognize the silent man who had left her apartment half an hour earlier. Where was his heavy silence, where was that tired, indifferent smile? He was speaking now with a nervous animation that seemed strange in him.

The champagne was bubbling in their glasses. Nora raised hers with a certain gravity. “To your birthday. To your turning thirty.”

She noticed that her voice was trembling. She was ashamed of this childish emotion. He replied casually, joking: “To you. To the number 16 tram. To this evening’s accident.”

How many glasses had they drunk? She had been counting up to the fifth one, but after that she had lost track.

It was probably late. The radio (who had turned it on? when had it been turned on?) was tuned to the British national anthem. “That’s the end of our programming from Droitwich.”

Nora was making efforts to keep her eyes wide open, but she saw the objects in the room through a curtain of smoke.

Overhead on the ceiling, the marks from the direct hits looked too numerous to count.

Across from her, sometimes very close, sometimes immeasurably far away, as though seen through the lens of a field glass, was he. He was speaking, but although Nora heard each word distinctly, she wasn’t understanding anything that he was saying. As always, he was speaking in that suppressed, extinguished voice, with sudden outbreaks of brightness, which vanished in that tone of indifference…

A hit! How strange that brief, triumphant cry sounded in his nonchalant tones. A hit! What had been hit? Hit where? Right in the heart, yes, yes, she had really said the heart.

Nora let her head fall into her hands. She wished she could stop the disorderly succession of thoughts that were passing through her mind, she wished she could stop the pounding in her temples.

Let’s be reasonable, my dear girl, let’s not lose our head. This gentleman… what’s his name…? You see, you’ve forgotten his name… Anyway, whatever his name is, it’s time for him to leave. It’s late and he should leave… Unless… Unless you want him to stay. Do you want him to stay? Tell me, you can tell me… But we’ve only known each other for a few hours… Do you want him to stay?

He had got up from his place and come alongside her. She felt his breath on her back, very close. Abruptly, Nora stood up.

“Wait for me. I’ll be right back.”

She went into the bathroom, avoiding turning on the light out of a fear of surprising in the mirror the crumpled face that came from sleeplessness and wine, a troubled expression that she had been familiar with for a long time now from her rare all-night parties. She turned on the faucet and let cold water run over her cheeks, her eyes. A moment later, she dared to turn on the light; incredulously, she rediscovered her composed, everyday gaze. She looked at herself for a while, wondering what she should do. It would be so easy to go back into the room, tell him that it was late and she was tired and ask him to leave! If only she’d had the courage to say the same thing, in a former time, on a night like this, to Grig… That shaving kit would no longer be here — and a number of other things would be different than the way they were!

She took off her dress with slow, sluggish movements, uncertain until the final moment whether or not she was going to complete the gesture. She stood naked, with her bare feet on the cement floor; the stoney coldness spread through her whole being with a soothing calm. Against the white faience glaze of the walls, brilliant beneath the heat of the lamps, her body looked pallid and sad. She stared at herself with a shake of her head. My poor Nora, how strange you are! A wave of tenderness, and the confusing taste of unshed tears, enveloped her at the thought of her strangeness.

What was the use of resisting? She was going to walk out of here, she was going to turn out the lights, she was going to get into bed and wait for him to undress, she was going to kiss him first, on the lips, and she was going to find out everything about his bitter smile. Maybe he, too… yes, he, too, probably had a few things he wanted to forget…

She put on the white bathrobe and looked at herself again in the mirror since she didn’t want to avoid her own gaze.

She stopped on the threshold, unable to grasp what was happening. There was no one in the apartment. She stared fixedly at the empty armchair, the cigarette that burned abandoned in the ashtray, the overturned glasses. The door of the entrance hall was half open. She went through it, walked out into the corridor and listened incuriously for a moment. It seemed to her that from below, from the first floor, she heard steps going down.

She returned to the apartment and looked again with a kind of stupid attention at each object, as she if she could have asked them questions, as if she could have expected them to reply.

She opened the window. Below, in the street, on the opposite sidewalk, a gentleman in a grey overcoat was vanishing with long strides, his hands thrust in his pockets. Nora remembered the name she had read in the passport. She shouted without realizing what she was doing.

“Paul! Paul!”

Afterwards she stood at the open window, her arms limp at her sides.

II

PAUL HEARD THE SHOUT, but didn’t turn his head. The voice fell from above, frozen and accentless. The whole street was stock-still with silence. It must be very late. In all of Bulevardul Dacia, a single lighted window: her window. He felt it in his back, between his shoulder blades, like a glare. He didn’t stop until he had turned the corner, when he felt that the eye of that light could no longer reach him.

He suddenly felt unburdened. Free and on my own…

How far he was from the apartment he had fled! He had drunk a lot, he had talked endlessly, wishing keenly to be young and merry, but it had taken no more than being left alone for a few moments for all of his animation to collapse. He hadn’t felt the slightest curiosity about the body of the young woman who was undressing in the next room. He had got up from his seat, grabbed his hat and overcoat, and had left, leaving the door open out of a fear of being heard. He had gone down the stairs, taking two steps at a time, then three. Free and on my own…

… He came to his senses stumbling along the sidewalk, right at the edge, with tiny steps, one after the other. His boots sank deep into the snow, leaving clearly delineated prints. When he got to the next street light, he stopped to look around him: under the glow of the lamps, his footprints made a line into the distance, as though drawn on a limitless white page. Then he set off again, with the same careful steps as before.

A taxi passed alongside him, slowing down in invitation to this late-night passerby. Paul met the driver’s intrigued, possibly slightly ironic gaze and shuddered at being caught in his stupid game. He crossed the street to the opposite sidewalk, accelerating his pace as though he had suddenly remembered that he was in a race about which he had forgotten.

And now?

He was embarrassed at the thought of resuming his interrupted game since he had the impression that neither the driver nor he had surprised each other just now. He deliberately walked close to the houses, where the snow was packed down and his steps left no footprints.

He was passing in front of a long fence made of whitewashed wooden planks. Odd or even? He decided on odd and started to count…

“One, two, three, four…”

He stopped occasionally since some of the planks were split in two and he didn’t want to count them twice. He didn’t like to cheat his own superstitions.

The light of the lamps fell from behind him, unfurling his shadow far out over the snow. By now he had decided not to let himself be intimidated and to continue at any price the game he had started.

“Fifteen, sixteen…”

A car came up fast alongside him. Either a private car or an occupied taxi, Paul thought, without interrupting his counting.

“Twenty-eight, twenty-nine, thirty…”

He stopped in front of the plank he had reached, measured it from top to bottom, as though it were a person and murmured a few times: thirty, thirty.

Thirty years! There it was, it was pointless to flee from the only thought that followed him; it was pointless to try to forget it with idiotic little games. From now on he was going to have to look it in the face and accept it: he was thirty years old.

He leaned with his back against the fence and closed his eyes. He would have liked to stay that way, empty of thoughts, empty of memories, in that beneficent numbness. He saw himself as he might have done from the opposite sidewalk, alone on the deserted street, leaning against someone else’s gate in that night in which he had turned thirty years old, thirty years that he didn’t know what to do with.

But, rising from somewhere within his being, he felt a mild haze, a distant taste of sadness, the flavour of cinders. He knew well that memories foolishly quelled, pointlessly repressed imaginings, lay concealed beyond the indifference that he now felt crumbling inside him. Thus, as on misty mornings in the mountains, he waited for the vanished yet present landscape to appear. Beyond that mournful image of his beloved, he glimpsed her name, which he had banished from his mind in vain: Anna.

He repeated the name a few times in a throaty voice, separating those two syllables as though he had dismantled the components of a tiny mechanism in order to find its hidden mainspring.

How many days had passed since he had seen her? Someone replied for him: Twenty-three days. Paul felt a horror-stricken shudder at the mechanical precision of his response. The last few days had been extremely calm. He hadn’t thought about her, he had worked in peace; he thought he had forgotten her. Even so, it seemed that, under cover, an unseen device was clocking up her absence, recording, as though on an interior screen that was waiting to light up at the first request, moment by moment, the time that he had passed without her: twenty-three days, eight hours, twenty-six minutes…

He saw again her blond hair, her too-bright eyes, her expressive hands — and then that serious smile, which sometimes used to interrupt him in unexpected agitation, the smile too heavy for her small eyes, which expanded when she made an effort to pay attention, as though she might have fallen silent on hearing another voice, which had been covered by the words she had spoken until then.

… He crossed the street towards Icoanei Park and failed to recognize, in the small park in winter, the image of the gardens where had so often spent the day. Everything was foreign: the snowy paths, the dark trees, naked in their wooden motionlessness, the sparse park benches, the electric lights that burned pointlessly, as though someone had forgotten to turn them off when leaving.

Somewhere near the left-hand gate must be the bench on which, on an October morning in 1932, he had waited for Ann with a sketchbook in his hand, having come to make some sketches of trees for a publicity project he was working on at the time. He didn’t have the courage to look for that bench and, given how much the park had changed, he might not have found it.

He looked at his watch and realized that it was less late than he had imagined: ten minutes to two. At this time Ann might be at their usual bar on Bulevardul Basarab. She was always going out these days, so why would she have remained at home tonight?

This night can’t pass without Ann, Paul said to himself. The thought that he could meet her, if he wished, thrilled him.

He sees the bar on Basarab, the metallic reflections on its walls, the white lights, the circular dance floor like an illuminated island. Ann must be there, among a group of friends, at their usual table. He walks up to her and, looking her in the eyes, says: “Ann, I’m turning thirty tonight. I didn’t even realize it; I remembered it just now by chance and I’ve come so we can clink a glass together. You know how superstitious I am.”

Smiling, she looks at him. “I was waiting for you, Paul. I knew you would come. This night can’t pass without you.”

It was hallucinatory to see this: he felt the warmth of her words, their heat against his cheek. Everything was so present, so close: her black dress, the small silver brooch over her left breast, the silk handbag radiant on the table, the glass of whisky that she gave him with a nervous gesture, as though she wished that there was nothing to separate him from her.

… He came to with a shudder of panic. How much time had he wasted dreaming? He didn’t dare to look at his watch. He glanced around him and couldn’t figure out where he was. He was no longer in Icoanei Park, the street was unknown to him, the houses alien. Beyond those buildings that he didn’t know was a weak blue halo: that lights of Bulevardul Brătianu. He chose to go in that direction, forcing himself to think about nothing. At the first corner he found a taxi stand. The driver was asleep, the frozen engine started with difficulty — and how far, how unbearably far away, was the bar on Bulevardul Basarab!

He hopped out of the car, flinging the door shut and shouted as he passed the doorman: “Pay him, please.”

“Are there a lot people here?” he asked the coat-check girl as he took off his overcoat, not daring to state more clearly the only question whose answer interested him.

Someone tapped him on the shoulder, and he turned around with an outsized shudder of fright. (I should control myself, he thought.) It was another of the bar’s regulars, a lawyer for an oil company.

“About time I found you, buddy. I’ve been phoning you all day. What’s happening with our hearing tomorrow?”

“What hearing?” Paul asked absent-mindedly, trying to look past the man’s shoulders, towards the interior of the bar, as the curtains at the end of the hall opened.

“What do you mean, what hearing? You know what I’m talking about. Commerce hearing number two, with the Steaua Română refinery. Don’t you know? Number 3623 slash 929. You want to go to trial tomorrow? I say we adjourn. It’s pointless now, just before Christmas. Maybe sometime after the holidays, whenever you’re available. Hey! What do you say?”

Paul gave a vague reply, as he hadn’t been listening and didn’t know what the man was talking about. “Leave it, we’ll see tomorrow

… Excuse me, please, I’m in a hurry, I’m looking for someone…”

“Who are you looking for? There’s nobody in there. I was bored stiff. You should come with me to Zissu’s place.”2

Paul walked away from him, almost without saying goodbye. Nobody, nobody. He repeated the word mechanically, without understanding it. He parted the curtains with a brisk motion. Far away, very far away, it seemed, in the opposite corner of the bar, at a distance that struck him as enormous, impassable, their usual table was empty.

He walked towards it with a mechanical step and forced himself to look fixedly in the direction of that same point with his eyes wide open, as though he wished to retain the image on his retina and prevent himself from transmitting the horrible news towards other centres of pain.

Everything occurred without accident. He dropped, exhausted, into his seat with the air of a man who was worn out yet still controlling his movements.

The piano-player gave him a wave of recognition. “Haven’t seen you around here much lately.”

He replied with a lift of his shoulders, a vague, tired motion that replied to something else, something completely different.

The bar was dimly lit, like a sleeping car at night. He always rediscovered here the atmosphere of a journey, a departure. The city seemed to drift away, losing itself. Ann had drawn up the decoration plans out of friendship for the owner, formerly the manager at the Colonnade Hotel. With childlike enthusiasm she had sketched each detail, so absorbed she was in every new discovery!

“It has to be superb, my dear Paul. Superb, you understand? And look here” — her pencil stopped on the page, indicating a given point — “this will be our table, yours and mine.”

What farcical trick of his memory had reminded him of her forgotten words precisely at this moment, as though the point of her pencil had signalled, months in advance, the exact spot where on a future night, on this very night, he would have to wait for the shadow that no longer came?

And what if, even so, she came even now?

Paul rejected this hope, which he knew to be false. He didn’t want to harbour new vain hopes. Yet the alluring thought persisted: It’s not impossible that she still might come.

No, it wasn’t impossible, he had to recognize that. So many times before, towards morning, when the lights were being turned out, when the jazz music was yawning into silence, when the metal instruments were returning to their cloth bags and only the piano continued to play for the dancers who were washing off their makeup and the coat-check girls or a client who had delayed his departure, so many times, opening the curtains at the end of the hall, pale, wide-awake, dazzling, with her decisive step and her morning smile, Ann had come in.

Paul raised his head, as though to call out to this apparition. But the curtains at the opposite end of the room were motionless; with their heavy folds, their reddish old-copper tone, they separated one world from another.

Even so, he couldn’t tear his gaze away from that point where, from one moment to the next, she might appear. He had the feeling that a nub of pain had moved over there, like a second soul released from within him and dispatched to watch and wait for her.

Sometimes the curtains moved, a hand appeared. Then Paul, seemingly unable to bear a new level of tension, felt an abrupt tremolo of awareness that permitted him to observe without crying out, with a resigned stupefaction, as the curtains opened to let a dancer, a coat-check girl or a flower-girl pass. Even harder to bear was when a hand appeared for an instant then withdrew without opening the curtains and without allowing him to see who precisely was behind it, since then nobody would be able to convince Paul that Ann wasn’t there, that she had not come as far as the threshold of the bar only so that at the last minute (because it was too late or because there weren’t very many people) she could have second thoughts and leave. He would have liked to run after her, catch up to her just as she was going out the door and be able to say to her: Stay! But he saw himself returning alone between the lines of dancers, between the tables full of clients intrigued by his comings and goings. He didn’t feel in any condition to put up with indiscreet looks, so many hinting gestures, so many whispers…

A waiter was turning out the shaded lamps at the tables that had remained empty. From the next table, the piano-player, who was talking with one of the establishment’s dancers, turned towards Paul. “Drink sales are pathetic. It’s a bad sign. They’re starting to save money on the lighting.”

Only in the middle of the room had the dance floor remained illuminated, like a silver planet sailing through the white space of the cigarette smoke.

The owner approached Paul’s table and asked to sit down next to him. It was the hour for confessions, as the bar personnel and the regular clients fell into informal conversation.

“I don’t know what else I can do,” the owner moaned. “I think I’m going to have to sell up. It’s just not working any more. Three whole nights with one whisky and two lemon squashes. I’m not superstitious, but since Miss Ann stopped coming here things have got worse and worse. You don’t know what’s got into her? Why she might be angry? I wanted to ask her tonight, but…”

“She was here?”

“Yes. Around one o’clock.”

“Alone?”

“I think she was alone. Unless someone was waiting for her in the car. She didn’t even want to come in. ‘Aren’t you staying, Miss Ann?’ ‘No, I’m looking for someone.’ And she left.”

Paul looked at the man in front of him without seeing him, heard him without understanding what he was saying.

Ann came here to look for me. The thought was of a simplicity that did not admit a reply. She was here and she looked for me.

No, in fact, she had been unable to let midnight pass without meeting him. She had looked for him at home, she had called him at the office, she had come here… And while she had been running after him all over town in order to put an end to this stupid separation, while she had been racing to bring him her welcome-back kiss, her reconciliation kiss, he had allowed himself to get dragged into that stupid street accident.

Paul paid for his glass of whisky, which only now he realized he had not drunk. He consoled the owner: “Don’t worry, it’ll work out. Bars like this are like women: you never know where they come from or why they leave you.” He tossed a wave at the piano-player, skirted the dance floor with an indolent stride, with the lazy gestures that suit so well the client of a bar at the approach of daybreak. No one was going to read the glowing impatience, the unseen light, on his pale face…

He stopped in front of the telephone and looked with feeling at the black funnel in which a moment from now Ann’s voice would vibrate, her voice aroused from sleep, troubled at first, then made lucid by surprise.

His hand shuddered as he rotated the phone’s disk to compose her number, that number he had sworn to forbid himself from dialling, and which, nonetheless, he had mimed hundreds of times on imaginary disks, mechanically, while standing at the window, working at the office or leaning over his files. The telephone rang several times without a reply. Probably a wrong number, Paul thought. It wasn’t surprising, given his state of impatience.

He took up the operation from the beginning again, dialling the number digit by digit, slowly, carefully, like a beginner, with the attentive care recommended by the instructions on the wall of the telephone booth. The ring repeated its regular call and, as though a light had come on at the other end of the line, Paul saw with closed eyes the telephone close to Ann’s bed and the familiar surrounding objects: the small silver elephant, the ashtray of burnt wood (Guyannese teak, he thought, pointlessly remembering the wood’s name), the portrait of Ingrid on the wall, the red armchair, the carpet — the entire apartment in which the ring sounded without meaning or response.

“Is it broken?” the wardrobe girl, who was waiting to hand him his overcoat, asked on seeing him standing for such a long time with the receiver in his hand without speaking.

“No, it’s not broken. She’s not home,” he replied, without knowing why, without noticing to whom he was speaking.

He tried to lift his shoulders, but couldn’t manage it. Not even his oldest gestures came to his aid.

The taxi went down Griviţei Street towards the city. In front of the Găra de Nord, Paul motioned for the driver to stop. “Do you know if any trains leave at this time?”

The driver turned his head towards his strange passenger.

“Why?”

“I asked if any trains were leaving.”

“At this time, no. The first train’s at 5:40 AM. The slow train to Timişoara.”

Paul saw himself collapsed in a compartment in a third-class carriage, rocking to the noise of the wheels, dizzy, travelling aimlessly all day and all night, then another day, then another night, getting off at some nameless station in the middle of the countryside, filthy, black with soot, wrecked by sleeplessness, lying down on the frozen earth to sleep and to forget.

The driver set off again, without asking for directions. He was used to picking up passengers whom he found alone on street corners at night, hesitating between hailing a taxi and putting a bullet in their heads. Paul didn’t even notice that they had headed off again. Turning his head, he caught sight, as if through a screen of shadow, of the building housing the National Theatre through the window where a moment earlier the Găra de Nord building had been visible.

The taxi raced down Calea Regală, but when they reached Bulevardul Brătianu it was the driver’s turn to stop, not knowing in which direction to take him.

“Should I take you home?”

“What home?”

“How do I know? Maybe somebody’s waiting for you.”

Paul shuddered. Maybe somebody’s waiting. It seemed he had already heard these same words tonight. It’s someone who knows, it’s someone who’s waiting.

The thought was ridiculous, and Paul felt he really didn’t have the energy to deal with it any more. In the ashes of his resignation, there was no place for this new expectation, this new useless hope. He would have liked to stop it short somewhere beyond awareness, in the dark room of memory, but the dazzling word, having been uttered, had developed into an image swifter and more vivid than his desire to forget: Upstairs, in my room, Ann is waiting.

He was ashamed of believing this, yet he couldn’t do otherwise. He told the driver the address, slowly, in an embarrassed whisper

— and even so, with what impatience! The taxi flew down the deserted boulevard towards a miracle that with each passing second became more plausible, more heated, more convincing. Ann was at his place and was waiting for him.

So many times, yes, so many times, although he had broken up with her only a few times before, he had found her sleeping in his bed, in one of his pairs of pyjamas that were too long for her, in which she looked as lost as a child. So many times he had found her in his study reading a novel selected at random from among his books, or, when it wasn’t a novel, a book on commercial law, a legal journal, in which she was completely immersed. He remembered, he couldn’t prevent himself from remembering, that forgotten November evening in 1932 when, after he had stayed at home for two days to study the files for a trial, she had rung his doorbell at night. She had appeared on the threshold with a small overnight bag, in which she had a nightshirt, her toothbrush, a pair of stockings: “I’ve come to sleep at your place. They’re repairing the tramline on my street and the noise is deafening. You don’t mind, do you?”

He stopped the taxi in front of his building, paid the driver and waited for him to leave. He gave himself a few more minutes of hope. Nothing was yet decided, nothing was lost. As long as he remained there in front of the door, his destiny was frozen in place. It was still possible that Ann was upstairs.

He looked up at his third-floor window, as though mulling this over, and trembled: there was a light in the window.

He counted the floors again, he counted the windows — the second one from the right — and wondered whether he wasn’t fooling himself or dreaming. He kept his eyes locked on that eye of light that was awaiting him at the end of this terrible night. So it’s true. So she’s really there.

He felt his eternal fatigue, as though all the pressure he had been under until now had burst in a single instant. For a moment the absurd impulse to leave, to remain alone, ran through his mind. Ann was upstairs, and this fact brought him an unexpected peace that answered all his questions as in a dream. He shook off thoughts of renunciation and set off madly up the stairs with the sudden, desperate need to see her, to hold her in his arms. Ann! Ann! Ann! Her name rushed ahead of him like a shout.

He found the door open and pushed it with his shoulder. On a hook in the entrance hall hung a cloth coat he didn’t recognize.

He stopped in the doorway of his study and took in the room with a single glance. In the study was a young woman with a book open before her. “It’s not Ann,” he whispered to himself, feeling dizzy.

Only then did he recognize Nora.

III

THEY LOOKED AT EACH OTHER IN SILENCE FOR A FEW MOMENTS. “What are you looking for here?”

Nora stood up, leaning towards him, seemingly ready to come to his aid.

As though he needed to examine the strange situation more closely, he repeated the question. “You’re here, at this time of night?”

She didn’t recognize his voice. It was too guttural, too coarse. She didn’t recognize anything in his uncertain face.

How he’s changed! Nora thought. Where was the smile that had protected him so well, like a vizor, yesterday evening? Now his features looked devastated. What disaster had overtaken him, what had befallen him in the hours since their parting, to make him arrive here in this lamentable state?

She waved in the direction of the armchair next to the desk. “Don’t you want to sit down?”

“Hey, you know you’ve got guts!” Paul exclaimed. “I find you at my place at four in the morning — and what for? So that you can offer me a seat?”

She didn’t reply. She continued to regard him with the same surprised look, trying to decipher what had happened from that devastated face. She remained with her hand extended in the unfinished gesture with which she had offered him the chair.

“Please leave,” he said. He crossed to the other side of the study and gripped her arm. “Please leave now. Don’t make me do things I’ll be ashamed of tomorrow. Just leave. I’m tired. I have to be alone.”

But as her silence went on and she continued to look at him with the same expression, which asked no questions, he changed his tone. With an effort at warmth, a voice that he would have liked to be warm and which succeeded only in being muted, he pleaded with her slowly, as if choking: “I know I owe you an explanation. I’ve behaved sickeningly with you. You have the right to ask questions. I have the obligation to reply. But not now. I beg you, not now. I just can’t talk. We’ll meet another time, any time you like, tomorrow if you want, but now leave.”

Nora moved away from his side. “All right, I’m leaving. But not right away. I promise you that five minutes from now I won’t be here. But listen to me for the next five minutes. With your eyes on the clock.”

With a loyal gesture she loosened the watch from her wrist and set it on the desk between them. She raised her glance to look at him. “I’m afraid you may do something stupid… That’s why I came.”

He kept his eyes fixed on the small watch, following the movement of the second hand around the dial and waiting as if nothing mattered to him but the passing of those five minutes.

“I’m afraid you’ll kill yourself.”

“Why?” he asked, with a slight shudder, and without looking up.

“I don’t know why. Your gaze that doesn’t take anything in. Your crushed smile. Your way of lifting your shoulders. And finally you flee… since… you fled. Also, when you leave your apartment you don’t even check that you’ve closed the door. If you only knew what fear you left behind you…”

She stopped for an instant. She had uttered the final words in a murmur, as though speaking to herself. But she returned immediately to her usual clarity of speech.

“At the beginning I didn’t know what was happening. I watched you from my window as you ran away, and everything struck me as ridiculous, like a stupid joke. I think I shouted at you, but I don’t remember. Nor do I remember how long I stood there at the window. Above all, I’d like to think that I wasn’t hurt. I’m thirty-two years old and I have a few memories. Enough for an event like that not to be a disaster… But I felt as though your departure was a step towards death. Four years ago a girlfriend of mine committed suicide. She had your smile. Details like that are a little ridiculous before the event, but they’re unbearable afterwards… I made up my mind to look for you, to find you. I told myself I couldn’t leave you alone on a night like this… I found your address in the telephone book, I came over here almost breathless, and I found the door locked. I decided to go back down to the street and wait downstairs until I saw you return. I don’t know where I got the idea to look under the doormat: that’s where I put the key in the morning when I go out, so that the cleaning lady can find it when she comes to mop and dust. In that at least we’re similar. I opened the door, I entered, I waited for you. I’d made up my mind to wait as long as it took.”

She stopped speaking again and looked at the clock.

“I’ve still got two minutes. Too little for the rest of what I wanted to say. Even so, I’d like to say one more thing to you. You should know that if I came here, if I committed the lunacy of coming here, it wasn’t only for you. It was also a little bit for me.”

She seemed about to say more. She stopped, hesitated, but finally, with a decisive gesture, she picked up her watch from the table and put it back on her left wrist.

“That’s all. Now I’ll leave you.”

She approached him, extended her hand, but in that moment she glimpsed last night’s flower in the buttonhole of his shirt, that pathetic flower, now faded and shrivelled. She removed it with infinite care, with an endless series of precautions, afraid of breaking its overly long stem, and looked around for a vase. But there was only one, too big for a single flower. “Better a glass,” she said, and went into the bathroom in search of water, but the cold water was like ice and the hot water tap didn’t work. (What a mess this apartment is! How obvious it is that he lives alone!) She opened a door which gave onto an office, where she found a bottle of drinking water. She returned to the other room, poured the water, then put the flower in the glass. She placed the glass on a small table next to his bed, kneeling and balancing the glass carefully between her palms, as if to infuse the flower’s pallor with the warmth of her hands.

She stood up and headed towards the entrance hall.

On the threshold she found Paul, his arms spread wide as though to block her passage. He looked as though he wanted to say something to her but was at a loss and didn’t know how.

“Thank you for coming. Now… If it weren’t too late, I’d ask you to stay.”

As if that “too late” referred to the time and not to what had occurred until now, she looked at her watch. “In fact, it is very late. Ten past four. Even so, if you want, we could wait for daybreak together. It won’t be long.”

There was a calendar on the desk. She tore off the sheets for days that had passed and read from the coming day’s page: December 19th. Sunrise: 7:41 AM.

“We have two hours and thirty-nine minutes left.” The torn sheets from the days that were over remained in her hand. She offered them to him, smiling. “You see? It’s over. It was hard, but it’s over.” Then, with unaccustomed gravity: “I don’t think you’ll ever forget me. I’ll always be the woman you met the night you turned thirty.”

They faced each other in semi-darkness. They had turned out all the lights except for the shaded lamp on the desk. He was in the armchair where she, with an authoritarian voice, had ordered him to sit. She was in the corner next to the sofa, where she had piled up some pillows. Between them was the tea table, the hot, white cups like feeble globes of light.

“It’s cold in this apartment,” Nora said, and in a few seconds the water boiled and the apartment filled with the smell of tea, lemon, rum — all of which she had found without asking him. She wandered among his belongings with a light, sure hand, as though she was going through them by instinct or from old habit.

Paul was listening to her speaking without paying much attention to what she was saying. She spoke calmly, slowly, without raising her voice, almost monotonously. It was a serious voice, excessively serious, without marked alterations, without liveliness, almost inexpressive. How relaxing it was to listen to her. He felt he had known her for a long time and that nothing was hidden between them. Not a single mystery. Not a single question to ask. Nothing to find out.

He took her left hand in his and turned it over with the palm facing the light.

“Do you know how to read palms?” Nora asked.

“No, but I like to look at them.”

Hers was a simple hand, with a few regularly curved lines like rivers on a map. Paul looked at it for a while, then closed it like a book he had finished reading.

“Aren’t you going to tell me what you’ve found?”

“There’s nothing to find. It’s your hand. It suits you. A serious hand. Calm… And yet…”

“And yet?”

“Only one thing remains inexplicable: the fact that you came here. It’s a little bit of lunacy that I don’t know how to interpret.”

She opened her left hand again under the light. “Maybe it’s all here. Look closely: maybe somewhere there’s the crossing of lines that shows our meeting.”

She spoke these words without even smiling, with making a gesture that would diminish their unexpected seriousness.

“How strange that you say ‘our meeting.’ Is this an affair?”

“What?”

“This meeting.”

“An affair, no. A happening. And a big one. Nothing ever happens to me.”

The hot water was finished. Nora got up from her spot, signalling to him that he was forbidden to move.

He heard her wandering around the apartment. How soothing to hear her footsteps! He heard her breathing. It seemed as though she had always been here. He was grateful to her for being in his home. Her presence blocked his thoughts, held his memories at bay.

And what a good hand she had. He could rest his weary forehead in it.

Her saw her shadow — now larger, now smaller, according to her distance from the lamp — brushing across the objects in the room. The heavy fabric of the dress she was wearing protected her body like a mantle. Only occasionally, such as when she straightened her shoulders, could he make out her hip or the line of her breasts.

She stopped in front of him with the teapot in her hand, leaning over the table, and with close attention poured the boiling water into the cups. He got to his feet and looked at her for a long time. She tolerated his gaze without surprise. A vague whiff of lavender floated between them.

Paul placed his mouth over her lips, which accepted the kiss serenely and without haste. His right hand was on her left breast. The beating of her heart felt strange, unusual.

The beating struck him as a distant response to his enormous solitude.

IV

NORA WOKE IN THE MORNING surprised not to find Paul beside her. All night her dreams had borne the heaviness of his body, an irritable body, receiving without gratitude caresses that it did not return. She still felt in her left breast the weight of his right hand with its fingers spread. She wouldn’t have been surprised, had she pushed aside the covers, to find the marks imprinted on her breast like a tattoo.

The sound of water running in the basin came from the bathroom. She called his name, but didn’t receive a reply. Could he have left? She jumped out of bed and pulled on a dressing gown that she found on the edge of the bed, shuddering at the chill of the light weave (He could wear a thicker dressing gown in December) and went to look.

Nobody was there. He had forgotten to turn off the tap. On the glass shelf beneath the mirror, the shaving brush was covered in soap. What a hurry he was in to get away! she thought with a shake of her head.

She turned around and spotted on the desk the piece of paper on which a few words were written, first in red pencil and then in blue pencil — he had probably broken the lead in his rush.

When you leave, put the key outside under the mat. The cleaning lady’s coming at 11 o’clock.

When you leave… He had been so certain that she would leave. And not a word about seeing her again, not a word of friendship…

She approached the window and glanced down into the street, trembling at not seeing her usual morning view: the familiar image of Bulevardul Dacia, the major’s backyard across the road, the pharmacy on the corner, the taxi stand. From their stillness she knew, as she raised the shutter, almost as if they had spoken to her, that since the night before nothing new had happened in the world.

As though the lens of the spyglass through which she took her first morning glance at the world had changed, she now had her first look at other images, which seemed to have been substituted overnight for the old well-known landscape.

From where, at a distance to which her eyes weren’t accustomed, had that small unfamiliar world arisen: the circular square below, the white sign of the corner grocery, the gas station with its two red pumps on the edge of the sidewalk like two immense soda-water bottles, the newspaper stand, the chestnut trees with their slender, frozen branches?

Everything was dizzying, in part because of the white gleam of the snow, but above all by virtue of its surprising newness.

Leaning against the window, Nora realized that something in her life had truly changed.

She thought about how downstairs she would not find the usual porter, who greeted her every morning when she went out to school, nor the letter box, towards which in passing she turned her usual incurious glance. She thought about how she wasn’t going to take her usual route, which she followed every day with mechanical steps, to Strada Donici, where she took the number 16 tram in the direction of the school.

So many things were starting differently this morning…

She looked at her watch. If she hurried, she might still get to the school in time for the third and fourth hours of class, her French classes with Grade Eight and Grade Four-B.

She recalled the passage from Bossuet^3 that she had planned to dictate to the girls in Grade Eight before letting them out for the holidays.

But, given the predicament in which she found herself, she didn’t feel ready to leave. It was out of the question for her to go out into the street after dressing in a hurry, with her girdle sloppily buttoned, her hair insufficiently brushed: tiny details that no one else would have noticed, but which would have heightened her intimate feeling of disorder. As a teacher, the only condition she forced herself to impose on her pupils was a meticulous, almost maniacal, care in their dress. Out of a sort of female solidarity with the girls who stared at her in the classroom, she demanded that they each have a neatly ironed pinafore and a white collar. She told herself that later they would have broken hearts to hide beneath their well-tailored dresses. She feared moral disorder, which began with a run in a stocking worn with indifference.

Today more than other days, Nora felt the need to control herself with a disciplined severity.

She lifted the receiver and dialled the number of the school. It was still a few minutes before the ten o’clock recess so she didn’t risk calling the principal. As it happened, the secretary answered. Nora told her that she might arrive at school late (a migraine, a cousin who was ill…) and asked her to take care of grades Four-B and Eight and ensure that they were quiet. The secretary, however, reminded her that it was Tuesday, that the Christmas holidays began in two days’ time, that it wasn’t certain whether she would have any more courses, and that her absence would make the principal furious. She advised her, at the very least, not to miss her last class.

“Yes, you may be right. I’m going to try to arrive for the fourth hour. Tell the Grade Eight girls to work quietly. I’ll go to see them during the last recess to give them their assignments for the holidays.”

She hung up the phone and stood there, distracted. She was missing school for the first time since the beginning of the year and this increased her feeling of uneasiness, not so much out of a sense of rectitude as because the loss of old habits troubled her. She looked down at the unfamiliar dressing gown she was wearing. It was blue with small white polka dots, sleeves that were too long for her, ragged lapels, and a small pocket over the left breast. At the same time, she saw the Grade Eight class where she was expected: the girls in their black pinafores seating themselves with delicate gestures in front of their books, dictionaries and notebooks with red ruler-straight margins, and casting restless glances in the direction of the door through which they awaited the entrance, from one moment to the next, of “Miss French Teacher.”

It seemed to Nora that she herself was waiting fearfully for this apparition, the young teacher who was meant to enter the classroom in that moment, from whom this Nora who had woken up in a strange man’s apartment was impossibly distant. What could she have said to her? How could she have explained it to her?

Yesterday at this time…

Yesterday at this time she was a calm young woman who went to the school every morning, ate lunch every day at a cheap diner on Strada Câmpineanu (amid the uncaring faces of civil servants reading the afternoon papers…), who in the afternoon taught French classes in a private language school and who came home, carrying in her handbag the food for her supper, or, sometimes, a bundle of essays that she enjoyed reading because she recognized each pupil’s handwriting, their laboured sentences and never-changing spelling mistakes.

She felt at home in the apartment on Bulevardul Dacia, in that white sixth-floor room furnished with things she had chosen and bought with the patience of heroic savings. It was true that there was also the money sent by her mother, who was living in Cernăuţi with her second husband, a banker. From time to time her mother sent her listless postcards, or, at Easter or Christmas, small sums of money; but the belongings for which Nora felt more affection were those purchased with her teacher’s wages, her overtime, her exam-marking fees. Above all, she liked the shaded lamp beneath which she took refuge in the evenings to read, a lamp with a tall stand like a small indoor version of street lamp, which cast a white circle of light and left the rest of the apartment in protective shadow.

Only on Thursday evenings did she sometimes go to the Philharmonic orchestra, especially when a famous soloist was playing, or when there was a lot of Beethoven on the program. From her girlhood memories in a family in which at that time children were taught to play the piano, she preserved an optimistic respect for long symphonies in three or five movements. She bought herself a ticket in advance, waiting at Feder’s music store for the ticket office to open in case the tickets in the third-level stalls, the only ones she dared to buy, somehow sold out — not without wondering twice which expenses she would have to cut from the week’s budget in order to cover the money she spent on the concert. And then there were evenings when Grig came with her. They were less and less frequent in recent times, without what was known as a “breakup” (a word which frightened Nora, like all words which allowed for no return) having intervened between them.

He waited for her without impatience, he received her visits, some of them after long absences, without surprise; but between them there were too many shared habits and a sensual accord too long established for her unexpected returns not to please him.

“You’re like a married lover; you’re doomed to be a wife,” Grig joked at times, knowing that there was no risk of her taking him seriously. The question had been decided for good between them in the early days of their liaison. One day, cautiously and remarkably vaguely, he asked her if she would like to be a spouse. Nora, looking him in the eyes, gave him the only reply he expected, a simple and irrevocable, “No, never.”

Yet in the mornings when, going out to school, she left him sleeping, she was happy that, glancing back at him from the doorway, she could tell herself: Well, I’m not an old maid. This was the only fate that scared her in her life as a single woman. Otherwise days, evenings, nights passed calmly and unchangingly among familiar things. Only occasionally, looking out her sixth-floor window, crying serenely and then hastily wiping away these unexpected tears, did she reprimand herself as she would have reprimanded a pupil: What’s going on, Nora? Aren’t you ashamed?

She told herself that some day something would happen to change all this and set her off on the road to a new life. She didn’t know what it would be: a letter, a meeting, some piece of news; but for the time being she was happy to be able to postpone this change for as long as possible and put off these expectations for an uncertain future. She continued her life among familiar things that made her feel protected.

A new life! The word had a certain magic.

But, if in order to attain that new life it had been necessary only to say a word or extend her hand, it was possible that she would not have done it.

“And yet here I am,” she said to herself. Here in the apartment of a man she didn’t know.

The clothes he had been wearing yesterday evening were tossed over a chair, while alongside them, laid out with an exaggerated sense of order, were her things: dress, girdle, shoes. The green tie had fallen onto the carpet. Nora recognized it. It was the only thing she did recognize. Otherwise everything was strange: the desk, the books, the paintings, the small objects, all flung together in a disorder that breathed haste and indifference. Nora stared at them and wondered about them all.

She knew so little about the man who, taking off after a night of love, had left behind him seventeen words written on a scrap of paper! And she herself, she realized, had remained a stranger to him. She felt in her being so many words that had not been spoken, so many resistances that had not yielded…

On his desk was a lawyer’s agenda, a piece of cardboard on which telephone numbers were written and a photograph of a young girl. Nora looked at her for a while. She was blonde and wore a black long-sleeved pullover with an initial high up on the left side like a tiny pocket: an oblique, printed A.

V

PAUL HAD TRIED MANY TIMES TO REMEMBER the circumstances in which he had met Anna. He would have liked to be able to relive the exact moment in which someone had put them face to face, asking them, as one usually does: “What? You don’t know each other?” But his memory had not retained this moment, and it was possible that events had not occurred in this way. Anna was lost in the multitude of hazy faces that he had met “on the street,” “in a train,” “in Sinaia,”4 vague formulas that covered with a mist of uncertainty the initial handshake, the first exchange of words.

Later, he had learned from a word uttered at random that one day they had vacationed together, very close to each other, without yet knowing one another.

“Six years ago, when we were in Satu-Lung…”

“Six years ago? Are you sure?”

“Yes. In 1926. In August.”

Paul suddenly saw again his whole vacation at Cernatu, those four weeks of solitude spent in the small town in the Braşov region, the street corner where, without any transition, Satu-Lung began and where, as though crossing a border, he passed the invisible line between the communities. He saw again the group of young women and men who came down the hill in the morning towards Satu-Lung, disorderly, rowdy, a little threatening, with that feeling of being in a strange town in which nobody knew them and nothing compromised them: they ate pretzels in the middle of the street, shouted at the top of their lungs, raced from one sidewalk to the other, threw stones at the trees at the edge of the road — those charming Cernatu apple trees, with their trunks whitewashed halfway up their height and their luscious green leaves.

Every day their passage along the “promenade,” a wooden bridge laid over the sidewalk, erupted in these noises. Scandalized Saxon women^5 appeared at their windows, intimidated children halted in front of their doors, young women from good families “of the region,” who were reading or studying on the park benches, barely dared to lift their heads in the direction of this bunch of lunatics, dishevelled barefoot girls, boys without coats or ties…

The hostility between the civilian population of Cernatu and the group from Satu-Lung was open to the point where Paul, when he went out for his evening walk, if he turned left alongside the city hall, had the feeling of stepping into a conflict zone or an enemy territory. The group had the custom of a tennis hour. Their tennis court became famous in the whole region, as far away as Dârste or Noua. White poles, lime rectangles drawn on the earth, the net stretched taut across the centre, the white fence that surrounded the whole court — they had made it all, bringing some of the pieces from Braşov 6 and improvising others on the spot, to the secret vanity of Satu-Lung, and to the smouldering envy of Cernatu. Paul liked to stop there, in front of the wire fence, and watch the flurry of rackets, the regular knocking of the ball, the white dresses of the female players. One evening a ball lofted too high went over the fence and came to a stop next to him. He picked it up in order to hand it to the young woman player who had come to look for it.

“Possibly that was you, Ann?”

“Very possibly, my dear. I played more than any of them. I played badly — I’d only just learned — but I played a lot.”

The thought that he had stared at her so many years earlier, before falling in love with her, before he’d even known who she was, the thought that there had once been a moment in which they had looked each other in the eyes, in which they had perhaps spoken — he to hand her the lost tennis ball, she to thank him — this thought exalted him. How many distances had been traversed between the white-clad tennis player bending towards him for a moment with her racket in hand, on an August evening in 1926, and that familiar, painful Ann!

He could still see the municipal train that made the regular run to Satu-Lung, its yellow carriages, its outmoded engine, the disproportionately loud shriek of its whistle in the minuscule stations, a train glistening at night when it got delayed in Braşov and he returned home on the last run on the local line…

On a night like that, the train had been stopped before Noua by the group from Satu-Lung, who blocked its path, sitting down on the rails and waving their illuminated flashlights, their white jerseys, their scarves…The passengers were indignant, the on-board staff, their self-respect wounded (“A train stopped like an ordinary wagon!”), threatened legal action and fines, everybody was clamouring at once, but they seemed not to hear any of it, or maybe really didn’t hear. They were coming from Râşnov, one of the more reasonable ones said, they were dead-tired and couldn’t miss the last departure. They invaded the carriages without being aware of the scandal they had caused.

It was late, the passengers were drowsy, the train was emptying out, with people getting off at Dârste, at Turcheş. The revolt was assuaged… Beyond Turcheş nothing was heard but the silence of that August night, occasionally broken by the locomotive’s whistle. Then they began singing: a romantic song that was in fashion, and was sung by fiddlers in Braşov, but which now, at that hour of the night, in their youthful voices, took on an unexpected melancholy.

Paul, remembering that moment, would have liked to silence all the instruments with a single gesture, like that of an orchestra director, leaving only the soloist’s violin audible; he would have liked to be able to suppress in his memory the voices of all of the others in order to preserve Ann’s voice as it would have been on that August night in 1926.

“Why didn’t I meet you then?” she used to say. “Why did so many years have to pass before I met you? Why didn’t somebody say to me on that evening: ‘See that young gentleman next to the window? One day you’re going to fall in love with that gentleman…’

“Even so, how can I know it wasn’t better that way? I think you wouldn’t have become my lover and I think I would have been too thick and I wouldn’t have liked you. I used to like boys who danced well, and you dance so badly! I don’t know how much I’ve changed since then. I used to wear awful hairdos and short dresses, I was scatterbrained, I was wild, I was… look how I was.”

And taking from the table a charcoal pencil, she drew on the sketch pad a fine outline of a scatterbrained girl with her legs in the air as if leaping, with her arms open, with her hair floating in the wind. In a few seconds the pad was full of images, which repeated the same sketch of the wild girl, seeming to relay the stylish leaps from image to image. From this game emerged, over a few days, an entire series of drawings and watercolours, some of which had been shown that same autumn at the Black and White Gallery, while others, later that winter, came to occupy a whole wall at her one-woman show bearing the same title: August 1926.

Paul watched the birth of these images with astonishment. Her charcoal pencils seemed to revive them, releasing them from her own memory. Nothing was missing: neither the walk from Cernatu, nor the tennis court, nor the municipal train with its yellow carriages, nor the minuscule train stations full of sunlight, where a few young Saxon women sat waiting with their immense hats of yellow straw on their heads and their huge, flat, rural handbags…

For a long time he had known nothing about her, in spite of the greeting on the street, even though they had happened to exchange a few words on a couple of occasions. The mere mention of the short form of her name, that pretentious “Ann,” irritated him, when Anna would have been such a pleasant name.

Now, when their love had become such a grinding agony for him, he tried to locate again in his memory that lost, indifferent Ann of the early days, to pin to small truths from the past the appearance of this young woman whom he had barely known and who, at that time, could do him neither harm nor good. In his mind there were certain calm territories, certain zones of indifference, to which he returned when the image he had today of his lover struck him as intolerable. He took pains to reconstitute each detail of those old events and to return to them with care, as though to a few old photographs that he was afraid to find drained of colour by the years.

He relived with a feeling of long-awaited revenge the day in which they had met in a cinema on the Boulevard. He was at the ticket window when someone tapped him on the shoulder. To his surprise, it was Anna, whom he didn’t know well enough for such a familiar gesture. “Don’t you want to buy me a ticket as well so that I don’t have to stand in the lineup?”

They had entered the cinema together, but he refused, almost impolitely, her request that he come with her to the front row, where she usually sat because of her slight myopia. “Forgive me, but I can’t sit too close to the screen.”

And, leaving her to continue on her way, he sat down in a middle row, happy to have remained alone.

How removed, how restful, how unlikely that event seemed now, when in any cinema he entered the thought that she, too, might be there, possibly accompanied by someone else, tortured him, forcing him to be always on his guard to recognize her in the gloom among the long rows of moviegoers, her blonde head gleaming for a second in the glow of an usher’s flashlight and then slipping away into the darkness of the theatre…

He saw again in the same way the far-off January day in which they had met in a train coming back from Sinaia. He was reading a book when Ann knocked on the windowpane of his compartment.

“What a surprise! I thought I was the only person I knew on the whole train. Why don’t you come to the restaurant car with me? We can have a tea and chat…”

He had refused out of boredom, giving vague excuses: there were too many people in the restaurant car, he preferred to stay in the compartment, he had reading to do…

At that time he wasn’t sure what her name was.

That she was a painter he didn’t find out until much later, and only by chance.

It was at an official art exhibition (one of the first official exhibitions, organized on the Şosea), to which he had come with a friend. He stopped in front of a group of watercolours in which he was startled by an outburst of blue, a little bit metallic, in indelible pencil. The drawing was uncertain, nervous, tangled by her capricious lines like hurried handwriting, but with an unexpected exactness of detail, as though from time to time her brush had halted to dot an i or insert a comma in a confused sentence. These small touches seemed to be orthographic clues to the meaning of a mysterious writing.

There was a collection of street scenes — houses, trees, carriages

— all seen from above, and what seemed oddest in them was precisely the elevated vantage point from which they were observed. The gaudy aniline blue gave them an early morning air, full of sun, full of light.

“It’s amusing and trivial,” Paul said. “I have the impression, too, that they’re works I’ve seen before.” He thought of certain paintings by Raoul Duffy^7: race tracks, decorated doorways, images of the same childlike disorder.

He was just preparing to move away when Anna, who happened to be near them, and whom he had greeted in passing, stopped him.

“Forgive me for being indiscreet, but I heard you talking about my paintings and I’d like to know what you thought.”

“What do you mean, your paintings? Do you paint?”

“You didn’t know?”

He tried to make excuses for the double faux pas of having shown her that he knew her so little, to the point of not even knowing that she was a painter, and of having said unpleasant things about her work in a loud voice. He wished he could retract or explain his words, but she didn’t let him finish.

“Please, don’t go on. You made me happy, and now you want to spoil it for me. You’re the first person I’ve heard speaking openly about my work. Here everyone’s kind to me and compliments me. It’s more comfortable for them, but it’s not at all useful to me. Go on, tell me what you really think. Above all, be hard on me. Please be hard on me.”

She was speaking without flirtatiousness, with sincerity and a serious gaze, like a pupil waiting to show him an exercise book that she knew contained an error.

Paul told her again that he wasn’t competent to speak about painting, that anyway he’d liked her paintings, especially that bold blue and her spiritual drawing, which had the daring to be so casually artless.

“That’s very nice and I thank you. But I sense that you’re keeping to yourself some things that you don’t want to say to me. Why? I would have been so grateful to you! Go on, try to be frank.”

At a loss, he looked again at the paintings, trying to find one appropriate word. “All right, since you insist, look: I have the impression that they’re too verbose.”

Ann didn’t understand the word because, certainly, among all the possible objections, only this one could not have been anticipated.

“Don’t ask me to say more,” Paul excused himself. “I don’t think I could. I have the impression that there’s something gesticulating in your paintings. They’re too hearty, too talkative, too familiar at the first glance… But at the end of the day, is that a fault?”

Ann stood thinking for a moment. Afterwards, she barely responded to his questions. “Yes, I think it is, and a very serious one. How can I know whether I’ll ever be able to overcome it? I am talkative, I am frivolous…”

Then she smiled, not without a certain sadness.

They met a few months later, on a Sunday morning in the spring, at Snagov, where Paul had come for a few days, invited to a villa belonging to some friends.

He halted with them in passing at the small monastery at the edge of the lake, and to his surprise found Ann there, alone in the cold church, with a sketch pad in her hand.

“I didn’t know you were so hardworking.”

“I’m not. I ended up here by pure chance. I came to Snagov with a large group of friends, but I left them to the lake and the fishing, and I took a moment to see the monastery again. I don’t know if you know it well. There are some enchanting works.”

She headed towards the exit and from there, from the doorway, turning around to face the interior, she showed him on the wall in front of him, at the entrance to the nave, a fresco in muted colours, but with an admirable group of women. The first woman on the right was turned towards the others with a graceful movement, which caused her garment to fall in soothing folds.

“But that’s not all that I like a lot here. Come this way, please, and I’ll show you something truly miraculous.”

She took him by the hand and led him into the centre of the church, next to the altar, from where she showed him the other fresco, of the descent from the cross, on the opposite wall.

“There are a few mistakes of perspective here that I find moving. And look, in the background there’s an old man stroking his beard with a gesture — how would you describe it? — with a familiar everyday gesture… It’s a secular gesture and I’m so astonished to find it on the wall of a church!”

She was speaking with whole-hearted enthusiasm, with passion, although in a whisper, for meanwhile the church was filling with visitors. A tone of conviction and deep emotion, whose existence Paul never would have suspected until now, ran through her words.

It was late, his friends were in a hurry to go to lunch, and, as he would have liked to spend more time talking to her, he apologized for having to leave.

“Stay,” she insisted. “The boat’s coming to pick me up in twenty minutes and I’ll accompany you back to the villa.”

He was compelled to refuse, but he left with a promise that they would see each other again, a polite promise like any other.

They saw each other again, however, a short time later.

Paul came out of the law courts, having wasted a whole day in a small meeting room at a witness hearing in a boring trial. As when he had been at school, the most horrendous days at court were those that took place in the spring. The tender sunlight that flooded the streets, and which for hours at a time he saw through the window of a meeting room, made him ill; he felt ill at seeing the drab, pale faces stirred by the new colours, worn-out people dozing on park benches in an archive-dusty yellow light. He stopped on the street, drowsy with sunlight, and closed his eyes for a moment. He felt dirty, his clothes were too heavy, his collar had wilted, his tie was twisted. He would have liked to shake himself free, as though of soot after a long train trip. The whiff of the archives accompanied him, and on his lips was a taste of yellowed old papers.

He went slowly, with heavy steps, around the back of the courthouse. He felt old, and everyone who passed him seemed young. His briefcase hung heavily, as though made of lead. If he hadn’t been embarrassed to do so, he would have put it down for a moment, like a porter taking a respite from a heavy load.

On Sfinţii Apostoli, past Apolodor, he was surprised to glimpse a completely unexpected event a few steps from him: hanging boyishly from the bars of a wrought-iron door, through which a few tall lilac branches passed, was a girl struggling to break a branch.

Paul stopped on the spot, afraid of startling her, and hid behind a street lamp, from where he could watch without being seen. He might have taken her for a schoolgirl had she not been dressed with the elegance of a lady. She wore a grey suit, a grey hat with a white brim, white antelope pumps. Below, on the door’s stone ledge, a handbag of the same antelope skin as the pumps had been discarded to allow her to keep her hands free.

Paul recognized her without difficulty as Ann, although he found it difficult to believe that it was she. Reaching up on the toes of her pumps on the stone ledge, one hand gripping the bars of the door, with the other she fought to grasp the lilac branch, which was beyond her reach. The skirt of her suit slid up above her knees, a rounded, delicate pair of knees that could have belonged to an adolescent girl. The street was empty, although from one moment to the next someone could come along, even if it weren’t the owner of the property that was being plundered. The branch gave way at last, a large branch with dense, violet bouquets. The girl jumped onto the sidewalk, without hurry, without emotion, shook the sleeves of her jacket down to her wrists, picked up her handbag, looked up the street, then finally, with the lilac branch in her arms, with her blond head concealed among the flowers — although her high forehead poked up above them — she set off boldly up the street with her small, decisive steps.

Paul watched her move away and it seemed to him as if a train of light hung in her wake. He, too, felt younger. The season, about which he had forgotten, came back to him. The girl’s slight craziness had brought a little light into his day. He would have liked to rush after her to thank her, to kiss her hand; but her let her cross unimpeded at the corner and disappear. Even so, he felt the need to send her a word of warm greeting, the first since he had met her. He remembered that nearby, in Piaţa Senatului, there was a florist. He went in and bought all the lilacs he could find, to the astonishment of the sales clerk, who told him, certainly without irony: “If you need any more, we can get them for you.”

Furthermore, they were unexpectedly cheap, and with the few hundred lei he had left, Paul bought the whole garden and sent it to Ann, leaves and all, along with a few words written in haste on the back of his business card: Next time you want lilacs, be more careful. If you need a lawyer (articles 306 and 308 of the penal code: “He who takes in a concealed manner an object belonging to another commits theft. Theft is punished with a prison term of between 15 days and two years…”) I am at your disposal.

“You don’t know how ashamed I am,” Ann said to him two days later, receiving him at her home. “If I’d known you were watching me, I would have died of mortification on the spot, with my hands on the door. You’re a man I’ve always been a little afraid of. I don’t know why: don’t ask me why.”

The apartment was full of lilacs that had been delivered the previous evening. Those that didn’t fit in the flower vases had been placed in jugs of water, in glasses, on the table, on the shelves, in the window.

“I’ll always keep them here. When they wither, I’ll put others in their place. And it’s possible they won’t even wither.”

She wore a simple navy blue dress with a white collar, which gave her the appearance of a schoolgirl.

“Are you really that young?”

“Are you really that old? I’m afraid of you. I’ve always been afraid of you. You’re so gloomy, so absent! When you say hello to me on the street — and you don’t always say hello — I have the impression that you don’t even see me.”

She spoke quickly, seemingly afraid of his silence. She raised her hands to her breast in order to suppress her gesticulations, a tactic which only gave her once more a school-girlish air.

“It’s difficult for me to believe you’re here. I’ve thought so many times that you might possibly come, but I’ve never dared to hope for it. I know so many things about you. I know the books you read. I know who you went to Balcic^8 with last summer. I know that last Thursday evening you went to the Philharmonic orchestra and left during the intermission. Don’t you want us to be friends? Don’t you want to try? So many times, when I’m painting something, I wonder: would he like it? So many times I read a book and I wonder: what would he think of it? I’d like to see you more often. I don’t like my extravagant gestures, how I don’t sound serious when I talk. I’d like you to think I’m less scatterbrained than even-handed, less superficial… I promise you I’ll be a good girlfriend. I won’t pry, I won’t nag. Come over whenever you want. Or, better yet, let’s set a day for you to come over every week. We’ll try it for a little while. If it works — good; if not, we call it quits.”

In their memory of that day, the lilac remained their flower.

Later, in the winter, Paul stopped with amazement on a January day in front of the window of a flower shop, where he glimpsed a few white lilac branches. He hadn’t realized until then that it was possible to find them in the middle of winter, and the sight behind the frozen window pane struck him as unreal. He stroked it with delicacy, as though afraid that it would come apart beneath his fingers. The white winter lilac didn’t have the violent aroma of the spring variety, but rather a faint, extinguished odour, like breath or smoke.

When they quarrelled it was their habit to send or receive a lilac branch because in that way, without words or explanations, the rift of several days would come to an end. Both of them regarded the lilac as a superstition that disarmed them, that helped them rediscover each other. He could not suspect then that another Ann would exist, one for whom those flowers would lose all meaning, like an object without a name, without memories.

The first days of their love had taken place in Sibiu, a city neither of them knew.

“I don’t care where, my dear. Somewhere where I can be alone with you for a few days. Anyway, after that you’ll leave me.”

“Why?”

“Because you don’t love me.”

He responded neither yes nor no — and, in any event, she did not seem to expect a reply.

They had chosen Sibiu at the last moment, in the station, because the next departure was for Sibiu.

Everything delighted her in the Transylvanian city: the broad streets, the shop windows, the German signs, the Saxon dialect, lunch at the restaurant, the menu with types of food she didn’t know and which she chose at random, closing her eyes and placing her finger on the menu: “Let’s see what this is like.”

In the mornings, when she woke from her slumber, she liked to look out the hotel window at the children walking to school with their satchels on their backs, the gleaming Saxon women who returned from the market with their baskets in their hands and stopped on the street corners in groups of three or four, speaking with passion, the shutters of the shop windows that rose with a rattle… Everything struck her as honourable and severe.

“We’re the only people in this city who are in love,” she said.

Then, as if only in that moment had she realized that she was naked, she rushed back to bed with a shudder of alarm in order to hide and cover herself. She was so white that when she was nude her blonde hair was drained of its colour by the glare of her naked body.

When they went down to the lobby of this small provincial hotel she was intimidated by the respectful gazes of the service people and the clerks, as though their youth brought with it an aura of mystery, or even of scandal. Everything she saw made her happy. She rode all day on the charming Sibiu tram from the Upper City to the Lower City, she was amused by the peaked caps of the taxi drivers, who looked like Austrian officers in Viennese operas, by the Saxon women’s bulky provincial dresses, cluttered with clasps, flowers and knots. If she’d had her sketch pad with her she would have drawn them, as she found inspiration for pictures everywhere.

With a single picture everything from Sibiu came back to her. It was a meal on the sidewalk, in front of a restaurant at lunchtime, when the children were just getting out of school. A group of girls passed in front of them, and Ann stopped one of them, asking her what her name was.

“Ingrid,” she replied, a little frightened, while her classmates added with greater courage: “Ingrid Schreiber.”

Ingrid was blonde, she had braids down on her back, a blue peaked worn boyishly on her forehead and two slanted eyes, which gave her angelic Saxon face the peculiar grace of a tiny Dobrogean Tartar.

“Ingrid, has anyone told you that you’re beautiful? Give me paper and a pencil from your satchel. I want to draw you.”

Ingrid was fearful and proud, while Ann captured in a hasty sketch her air of an astonished child, a sketch which on her return would become a portrait in oils, hung above the bed in Ann’s room, from where she could look farther, with that same bewildered look, at things that she did not understand.

Where was that Ann of the first days of their love now?

Then she had been ready at any hour of the day to receive him or visit him, to accept his invitation or his refusal, to pack her bags in a moment when he came to take her away on a trip for several days, or, on the contrary, to unpack them when, unexpectedly and without asking her, he abandoned a departure that they had been planning for ages and which, during this time, had filled her with childlike joy.

“Do you never ask anything, Ann?”

“Because, my love, I’d only ever have, a single question — ‘Why don’t you love me?’ — and that, you see, is something I don’t want to ask.”

As in any love affair started without effort (since, blonde as she was, without mysteries or secrets, Ann appeared to be the type predestined to have an effortless love affair), the fact of her reaching this stage of suffering was inexplicable to him. Her last smile, her last gesture were familiar to him — yet the day had to come in which each smile was an enigma, each word a secret; the time had to come when the simple fact of glimpsing her became difficult, and often impossible, a time when he spent whole nights scouring restaurant after restaurant, bar after bar, in the hope of finding her at last and of seeing her, if only for a brief instant.

Yet when he found the old Ann again, when she happened to return to him full of love (“You’re an idiot and you’re the only one I love”), when he saw her moving naked around her apartment, dropping things on the floor and forgetting where they were, he would halt her, dishevelled, in one of her comic poses, with her hair falling across her face, with one stocking draped over her arm and the other flung around her shoulders like a scarf and, knowing too well that this lovely, scatterbrained girl was, nevertheless, lost to him, that in two days’ time the suffering would start again, he looked at her for a very long time. “Ann, let me see what a femme fatale looks like.”

There were countless things which at the beginning he had barely noticed, with a kind of casual amusement, but which later — without his knowing exactly when or why — he started to observe with a tormented anxiety. He was annoyed by how many people knew Ann. Their arrival at a restaurant was greeted by dozens of stares that turned towards her with an indiscreet, insistent quality.

“How do you know so many people? Who’s that guy who just went past?”

Her replies were usually vague, evasive. “I don’t know who he is. He came to the exhibition.” Beyond these imprecisions, Paul saw great mysteries waiting to be unravelled.

More wounding were her detailed replies, uttered with indifference.

“I met him three years ago, on the train to Budapest.”

Paul envisaged the sleeping car, the blue lights; Ann, seated next to the window, speaking with her chance travelling companion; he heard her laughing (because, oh! she laughed so easily…) when a more powerful jolt shook him. He imagined the white sheets of the bunks, as seen through windows left open, the colour of the wilderness, her passage from one compartment to another in the middle of the night… He remembered the casualness with which she had yielded to him at the beginning — and his memories scandalized him. He wished she had resisted him more then, so that now he might be able to believe that for her whether or not she went to bed with a man was not a meaningless question.

In each alien glance that was directed towards Ann, in each greeting, he seemed to see a memory and an invitation. He was furious that politeness demanded that he, too, reply to those greetings, signals that went over his head like so many telegrams in code, which he intercepted without being able to read them, for nobody could assure him that each new greeting didn’t bear a message, an allusion or a proposition: “Do you remember?” or “I’m waiting for you.”

Ann’s openings brought new people into the galleries: faces from the bars, faces from the race tracks, faces from show business. Two days later the society section of the newspapers would publish photographs and names from “the most dazzling opening of the year.”

Her paintings sold almost too well, a fact that Paul didn’t notice at first, but which later, when, without wishing to, he became more closely acquainted with the “market” in paintings, struck him as worrying. When a painting by Margareta Sterian or Cornelia Babic sold for 3000 or 4000 lei, when Iorgulescu-Yor, who still had the reputation of “being a good investment,” was selling a 30 by 50 centimetre canvas for 5000 lei, while a 70 by 70 centimetre canvas went for 8000, Ann’s paintings were earning prices that only an Iser or a Petraşcu could ask.9 She became famous among artists for a small, blue painting of Balcic, pleasant enough but not extraordinary by comparison with her other works — which she sold for the fabulous sum of 50,000 lei.

When it fell to her to participate in collective exhibitions at the Salon or Our Group, her paintings easily distinguished themselves from those of others by that white cardboard tab that gives prestige and lustre to a painting: sold. Paul was uneasy at the swiftness with which, from the first days, this white cardboard flowered in the corners of her canvases, while other painters had such difficulty placing their paintings that several remained unsold at the end of the exhibition. He would have liked to see Ann show a little discretion in advertizing her satisfaction, a little casualness about her success, but once, when he tried to make her understand this, he attracted from her a crushing reply: “What? You want me to be ashamed that I’m successful?”

It was an even more crushing retort, given that this was precisely what he would have asked of her: that she show a little shame for the successes she enjoyed.

Ann had lost completely her earlier shyness, the doubt with which she started a painting, the school-girl fear with which she awaited others’ reactions. Now she had an unerring gift for placing a painting, for using connections, for sensing in a new acquaintance a potential client. “Client” was the word that recurred most often in their shared language. The word’s double meaning frightened Paul.

“What kind of client?” he asked her once with brutal directness, staring her in the eyes. She shuddered beneath the horrible outrage, as though he had slapped her, and burst into moving, despairing tears, which he barely managed to assuage, begging her forgiveness, full of remorse, yet pleased by such sincere, almost childlike weeping, the refutation of his suspicions and fears.

Some days Ann was unreachable. His insistence on seeing her ran up against a single response, which she uttered slightly sententiously, raising it like a shield: “My painting comes first!” Nothing protected her better, nothing hid her more completely.

“I’m not available this evening. I have a business meeting: a client to whom I’m trying to sell Blue Flowers.”

She had acquired the habit of meeting clients at her home or downtown, at a restaurant, at a table in a bar, and not at the exhibition, where she set foot rarely and only in passing to smoke a cigarette, to exchange a few words, dressed in her street clothes, without taking off her hat, as though just visiting. Paul had tried to persuade her that her prestige as an artist dwindled through this excessive familiarity with the public.

“Try to understand, dear Ann, that I’m not speaking to you as a jealous man, but rather as a concerned friend. An artist doesn’t have the right to make to the public the concessions that you make to your purchasers. She has to be less available, prouder, more vain, more solitary.”

She listened with attention and seemed to agree with everything, to understand everything; but when he moved on from general considerations about the obligations of a “true” artist to concrete proposals (and here the impartial friend could not entirely conceal the jealous lover), and when he asked her to cancel her scheduled meeting by phoning the fan who, if he really intended to buy Blue Flowers, had only to enter the Dalles Gallery two days from now, between eleven AM and noon, she refused to listen to him any longer and cut him short: “What? You want me to destroy my career?”

“To destroy my career” was an expression that was beginning to appear for the first time in Ann’s language. Paul knew this language too well not to be upset by her changes of vocabulary. Where did these new words come from, which had suddenly heaved into sight in their conversations, like so many echoes from a life he wasn’t familiar with and of which he wasn’t aware until she carelessly let the words slip? In the early days, listening to Ann speaking had been a pleasure full of surprises. At first he had thought that she was highly loquacious, but as time went on he had observed that her volubility was composed more of gestures and smiles, alternating with short exclamations and short silences, which lent her conversation an air of perpetual excitement.

“What strange syntax you have, dear girl!” he used to say, amused by the structure of her sentences. Something of his old obsessions from when he was a student of Latin awoke in him to study the grammatical snippets of their conversation.

She spoke in simple sentences, yet complicated them with a shower of interjections and questions — “yes?” “no?” “you see?” “you know?” “you want to?” — like a series of flats and sharps in a scale with variations, which made her simplest stories into thrilling affairs in which her tone rose and fell, the inflection of her voice changed, and her gaze suddenly shifted. There was a surprised, astonished quality to all of her conversation, as though she had struggled with retorts that only she heard, and to which she would have to respond in turn, like a chess player involved in many matches at once. And, like a chess player who was in that confusing situation, she resorted to typical movements, such as waiting — the meaningless shifting of a pawn, moving a rook onto the front lines. She also had a few set phrases, which she repeated almost mechanically, since they said nothing and were at hand, like habitual old gestures that had long ago lost their original intention: “Well and for all that,” “Everything’s possible,” “How am I supposed to know what to think?”

Ann took up with ease words and expressions that she happened to overhear, and which from then on became habitual parts of her speech, initially in jest perhaps, then later because she truly couldn’t stop herself from remembering them, until they established themselves definitively in her personal jargon. In Sibiu she had stopped a passerby one morning to ask him whether the Bruckenthal Museum, where she wanted to go, was far away. “Far, yeah, but no-who knows how,” was the reply — and this type of approximation amused Ann so much that she repeated it for several consecutive days, on all possible occasions. The food was good, “but no-who knows how,” the bathwater was hot, “but no-who knows how,” the night sky was starry, “but no-who knows how.” At first she said this laughing, as though underlining the words, but with time her ironic intention dissolved, even disappeared completely, while that “but no-who knows how,” which for a while had a certain commemorative value (as if she were saying indirectly to Paul: “You remember, in Sibiu…”) became not only one of her more worn phrases, but her preferred way to lend nuance to her opinion, to express her reservations.

At the beginning, in the first days of their love, it had been one of their reciprocal pleasures to discover in each other certain physical or verbal tics, which for other people, who had known them for longer, had become imperceptible from custom or repetition, but which, observed for the first time, had something utterly unexpected.

“How strangely you frown!” Ann had observed in the first days. She had tried to imitate him, leaving her left brow lowered and raising the right, tightly arched, something which at first she did not succeed in doing except by cheating a little and opening wide her right eye with two fingers, as though she wished to fix a monocle in her socket.

It was the sum of petty gestures, which at first she had observed jokingly in him, with an ironic tenderness, and which she imitated with laughter, as though she were trying to wean him of them, which, with the passage of time, entered her own habits. Paul watched, initially with indifference, or rather with amusement, but later touched and surprised, this unthinking transmission of words and gestures that he rediscovered in Ann’s language, slightly modified by her movements or pronunciation, as if they had been adapted to her vocal register, like a man’s aria rewritten for a soprano voice. They were the same words, the same gestures, yet they often conserved a strange air, as if they had been pressed onto Ann’s speech with special type, transferred into her sentence like words read in a foreign language, like a proverb in quotation marks, until these last lines of resistence also fell, while the gesture or word that until then had been a kind of neologism for Ann, was permanently incorporated into her current vocabulary. She made Paul aware for the first time of the persistence with which he repeated expressions of affirmation or negation: “Sure, sure,” “Not once, not once,” “Out of the question, absolutely out of the question.”

How little I watched myself, Paul had thought, if I was able to talk that way for years without even being aware of it. It took Ann to come and observe me. Sometimes, in the middle of a sentence, when that double, “Sure, sure,” came back, she underlined the fact with an explosion of laughter.

“Don’t get angry, dear Paul, that I’m laughing. I told you I’m a bit afraid of you and — what do you want? — when I notice something childish like that, it’s as if I feared you less, as if I felt closer to you. I’d like you to have thousands of small failings, I’d like you not to roll you r’s, I’d like you to be unable to pronounce s, I’d like to be able to laugh at you, my love, do you understand?”

Yet without understanding how, she herself later ended up speaking in his way, and among the things she borrowed from him was precisely his manner of stressing through repetition certain words and exclamations in order to confirm or negate something. Her speech was full of “Sure, sure,” “Don’t even think about it, don’t even think about it,” “Out of the question, out of the question,” which he sometimes uttered in a mechanical way, not paying attention, his aggressive, convinced, intransigent tone highlighting these phrases even more. There were some words that disappeared from his current expressions and which, over time, reappeared, now not in his vocabulary, but rather in hers, just as a mountain spring can slip under the earth and, by way of a long underground channel, return to the surface somewhere completely different. On Ann’s lips, words he had forgotten gained a new life, while in her lively hands, gestures he had abandoned at some point in the past were resurrected with a kind of mechanical faithfulness, which later might survive the end of their love.

Not for anything, not for anything, do I want to see you again, she wrote to him once, after a quarrel, but that double “not for anything” seemed almost to bear its own refutation, since, at a point where Ann was convinced that they were going to separate, her language preserved, like a pledge of faithfulness, that tic of repeating words in which, without her wishing it to be so, Paul’s memory persisted. But other new words and expressions appeared, which he heard for the first time and memorized, startled, wondering where they came from and suspecting that she was concealing from him a whole world of events, adventures, secrets that he longed to decipher. Above all, in recent days, Ann’s vocabulary had undergone innumerable small innovations, and after each longer separation — whether because of a quarrel, because he had to leave for a trial in the provinces, or finally because she was too busy with her work — when they were reunited, he noticed with desolation new changes in her way of conversing, new gestures or new words.

“It’s rolling,” Ann used to say when something struck her as excessively comical, and then she would shake her head, laughing loudly, with her mouth open. And, with her childlike insistence on repeating a new word, because it amused her to hear it, just as it would have amused her to open and close a new cigarette lighter or a new powder case innumerable times, she would say, dozens of times a day, after every event, after every piece of foolishness, “It’s rolling… It’s rolling… It’s rolling…” Each time Paul shuddered as though she had jabbed him since it seemed to him that behind that expression was a man’s gaze: the man from whom Ann had acquired her new favourite word. He was tempted to ask her, as though he had glimpsed a new ring on her finger: “Tell me! Where did it come from? Who gave it to you?”

In her painter’s jargon there was an expression that had charmed him at the beginning, but which later on, through a secret shift in meaning, became unbearable: “I’m going out for the cause.”

To Ann, “to go out for the cause” meant to find again a given spot in which to set up her easel, to relocate a spot determined once before — a tree, a house, a stone — as delimiting “on the ground” the landscape she had begun to paint.

Ann’s “causes” were impenetrable. For some of them, especially in the spring, or at the close of autumn, at the beginning of March or the end of October, when it was too early or too late to head off to Balcic, she pleaded with Paul, but particularly at the beginning of their love, when she had the feeling that she could ask him the biggest favours, she pleaded with him to take off with her to the outskirts of the city, beyond Herăstrău Park, or more frequently, because the spots were less well known, beyond Filaret, beyond the Ciurel mill, in search of “causes.”

“I’ve done all the work I can at home. I want to go off to the country. Come with me, we’ll find something to paint.”

There were long reconnaissance walks beyond the railway line, beyond the last hovels at the edge of Bucharest, through the barely thawed March countryside, or the dirty rust-colour of October. The region looked completely unknown. If there hadn’t been planes taking off and landing in the direction of Băneasa Airport, flying low, close to the earth with their engines throbbing like a factory, he could have believed he was anywhere, a long way from Bucharest. A few acacias growing close together marked the beginning of the woods, water rising from who-knew-where — perhaps from the last melting snows, perhaps from the last autumn rain — looked like a tributary wandering lost across the path. Paul never succeeded in understanding by which hidden logic Ann chose one spot rather than another, why where he saw nothing in particular she would suddenly stop, regarding with a kind of concerned attention a point that for him was invisible, which she signalled with a decisive gesture: “Here.”

“What’s here, Ann?”

“My new cause.”

She returned alone on the days that followed with her working instruments, but towards evening Paul would come to take her home since it was getting dark early. As it would have been too expensive to have a taxi waiting for her in the country all afternoon, they had to return a good part of the way on foot. Their passage through the slums on the edge of the city produced a certain sensation and, as during the days at Cernatu, housewives came out onto their doorsteps and children halted in their play to watch this blonde girl in boyish slacks (since she wore shorts and a sports jersey, or, when it was cold, a blue woollen training suit) who was carrying an easel on her back, a paintbox, a canvas chair, leaving Paul to bring at most a blanket, a thermos containing hot tea or a bag of fruit. Sometimes, because they didn’t find an available taxi on the way — or purely and simply because Ann liked to challenge people and hear scandalized murmurs around her — she convinced Paul to go all the way back downtown by tram or bus, and then, to complete the scandal, to take transfer tickets and wait on the sidewalk at one of the downtown stations — at Carpaţi, at Strada Regală — until the tram came.

“I want to compromise you, I want everyone to know that we’re in love, I never again want to lower my head in public,” Ann used to say when Paul gave her an irritated look, unaccustomed to facing down the curious stares of passersby, which she, on the contrary, put up with defiantly, and even provoked. Yet it was true that later, in a total about-face concerning what was or was not appropriate and thanks to a sudden access of respectability, Ann had completely suppressed such adventures. Not only would it have struck her as being in poor taste to take an easel on a tram, but she also forbade Paul from coming out to the countryside in the evening to bring her home from her work because — she said — in the final analysis it was uncomfortable always to wander through these marginal streets with him, above all because old classmates of hers might see her if they happened to return home from work through this neighbourhood.

In this way, “to go out for the cause” ceased to be, as before, a pleasant opportunity for a meeting; it even became an obstacle, so far removed from their shared life that Ann used to invoke her work, her art, and, as the final argument, her “career.” “I can’t see you tomorrow: I’m going out for the cause,” or “Sorry I wasn’t there yesterday: I was at the cause,” were explanations that admitted no response.

Paul tried to confirm where Ann’s “causes” were now. But she gave him only vague directions (“You know I haven’t decided yet, I’m not sure, we’ll see…”) and even if, out of carelessness or indifference, she told him with precision of the spot where her current cause was located (“Look, towards Filaret, past the yellow house, where I fell last autumn — you remember? — when I tore the buckle off my antelope pumps”), he knew all too well that it would be useless to look for her because he wouldn’t find her there and because two days later she would be sincerely surprised: “What? You went? Oh, how silly you are… I got a headache… I changed my mind at the last minute… I couldn’t go… Didn’t I tell you not to go?”

Ann’s causes had become a pretext and now “to go out for the cause” was the most comfortable way for her to lie to him.

He hadn’t seen her for a week when one morning, glancing at a newspaper, her name, printed in small letters in the news section, jumped out from the page. It was an article on the Romanian pavilion at the 1934 Liège World’s Fair, a sort of official press release to the World’s Fair Organizing Committee through which it was announced that painters and sculptors charged with decorating the interior of the pavilion would be leaving for Brussels in five days: Saturday, May 12 at 9:50 AM. Among the decorators chosen was Ann.

Paul had thought it was a mistake, as he couldn’t imagine that Ann would have left him to find out something so important from the newspapers nor that with such an important departure so close at hand she would have let a whole week go by without seeing him, even if for some stupid reason, they had quarrelled recently.

“Is this true? You’re leaving?” he asked her on the phone, with the newspaper still in his hand and his eyes fixed on the astonishing news.

“Oh, I don’t know,” Ann replied evasively, “it’s not certain yet, it could be, but for the time being nothing’s finalized. If something happens, I’ll tell you. Look, let’s meet tonight… Or no, not tonight, in fact I’m meeting the architect of the pavilion, but call me tomorrow morning, or, better yet, let me call you… I’ll be sure to call you, all right?”

The five days prior to the departure had passed slowly, waiting every second, holding his breath at each footstep on the stairs, each rumble of the elevator, each ring of the telephone, for the question was no longer whether Ann was going to leave for Liège, but rather — more simply, more urgently and more painfully — whether she was going to come to see him, whether she was going to call him, whether she was at least going to send him some word, some sign. He was afraid of leaving home or leaving the office — the only two places where she could phone him — in case her long-awaited call should finally come in his absence, and when in spite of this he was obliged to go out into the city, he drove cab drivers to distraction by telling them to get him home in a hurry, where the same waiting, the same watch, would begin again. Hundreds of times he had lifted the receiver to call Ann, hundreds of times he had started to compose that number that obsessed him like a name, but he never dared to dial it right through to the end. What would she have said to him, this Ann who hid from him, and who prepared her flight like a fugitive?

Yet sometimes the telephone rang, and he couldn’t suppress the nervous shudder of fear and hope that later struck him as ridiculous when it turned out to be a wrong number or some call without importance — everything else was without importance.

It’s absurd and unforgivable, as if I were a schoolboy, as if I were twenty, I need to understand that it’s no longer like that, something has to change… He promised himself that he would be calm, and in fact when the telephone or doorbell rang again, he let it ring for a while before lifting the receiver or opening the door because he wished in that way to prove that he was in control of himself, but also because for a few seconds he could say to himself, in a childish way: it could be she… it might be possible that it’s she…

Even so, sometimes, from superstition, spite or just fear of once again being disillusioned, he let the telephone ring without responding, waiting for the caller to give up. Yet in the moment in which he heard the snap that interrupted communication, in the moment in which the telephone fell silent, the thought that this time it had been Ann, who had not replied to him, and that by doing this he might just have lost what could have been his only opportunity to speak to her and see her, gave him an unbearable feeling of misfortune, like that of a passionate poker player who, having just said, “Pass” out of superstition, is startled by the intolerable thought that the cards he has tossed down without looking at them were precisely the four-of-a-kind or royal flush that would have allowed him to rebound from a night of gambling that had left him ruined.

Ann’s departures! He knew them so well, so many times he had lived through their nervousness, their confusion. The suitcases that opened and closed noisily, the wardrobe with the doors opened wide against the wall, the dresses draped over the armchair, the girdles on the bed, the scarves tossed about wherever they happened to fall, the multicoloured train tickets flipped through with feverish agitation (“Is that all of them? You don’t think I’ve forgotten any?”), the last-minute purchases, the rushed errands in the city, the packages with which she returned home and which she never knew where she had put, where she got them from, what she should do with them…

He saw her heading down the streets, skipping from one taxi to another, stopping in front of shop windows, going into a store, forgetting why she had gone in, scatterbrained, delighted, exhausted, full of worries, curiosity, expectations… It would have been so easy, it would have been normal for her during one of those errands to suddenly remember him with that irritated shudder she had when she remembered something, closing her eyes and, in a childlike gesture, raising her hand to her forehead — “Oh, what a scatterbrain I am!” — and then from the first public telephone (“For goodness’ sake, the city’s full of telephones!”) to call him and to finally say to him: “Wait for me, I’m coming over.”

With each hour that passed and made her departure more threatening, that Saturday, May 12 at 9:50 AM read in the newspaper, which initially had been an abstract date, something distant, shapeless, unlikely, acquired reality and became a fixed point, a sore point, difficult to look in the face. With each hour, each day, a feeling of consternation was added to Paul’s wait, as though confronted by a fact with an absurd outcome and which yet he could see reaching fruition beneath his dumbfounded gaze.

On the morning of her departure he watched on his clock the slow rotation of the minutes, the cogged, mechanistic movement of the seconds — as you waited for precisely midnight to turn out the lights on New Year’s Eve — and when those two hands had been precisely superimposed, showing ten minutes to ten, he picked up the receiver and called the information bureau to ask whether the Simplon had left.

“Yes, it’s left, it just started moving,” a clerk replied.

An absurd calm enveloped him, as though all his feverishness of the last few days had been stirred up only by a doubt as to whether or not on Saturday, May 12 the Simplon train was going to leave at its scheduled time of 9:50; now that what he had wanted to know belonged to the past, he could sleep and forget.

In an afternoon newspaper he saw the photograph taken in the morning on the platform of the Găra de Nord: The group of Romanian artists leaving for Belgium to work on our pavilion in Liège.

Ann wore a tailor-made travel costume and on her head she had a sort of white visored cap, set boyishly askew over her forehead. Paul looked at her calmly for a short while: he felt that he had nothing to say to her, nothing to ask her.

A Bucharest from which Ann was missing became a calm, rather provincial city. It was as if the noise had suddenly retreated, the streets had gone silent. Paul had the impression that he was somewhere in the provinces — in Craiova, in Râmnicu-Sărat, in Roman — one of those small cities where he went sometimes for a trial and where he knew he would find neither surprises nor chance encounters.

Ann’s departure brought him an unexpected peace, a feeling of apathy, of indifference. Everything was colourless, grey and bearable. The respite that came from never waiting in expectation had a certain bitterness, but he greeted it like a welcome slumber. At work letters awaited his answers, at court things remained behind schedule. He returned to these tasks with complete indifference, but determined to let himself get caught up in a mechanical working routine. He composed long business letters, which he typed out himself on the typewriter: he liked to hear the dry noise of the keys, their quick beat. He occasionally saw photographs and reports in the newspapers about the activities in Liège; he read them without curiosity, without discomfort. A few sketches and colour drawings of the Romanian pavilion, which was almost complete, had appeared in an issue of Illustration. On the other hand, the inauguration date was approaching, and Paul, finding the magazine in a restaurant one evening, forgotten on a chair, leafed through it calmly, as if it had nothing to do with Ann.

“Hey, you like what those people do?” an indignant voice said, interrupting his reading.

It was a very well-known painter, who had retreated a few years ago to Iaşi, a professor in the School of Fine Arts there, who showed his paintings less and less frequently in Bucharest, from which he had fled, he claimed, because it was no longer possible to find either good wine or good painting. Paul knew him vaguely from a gallery opening, where his aura of a scowling bear had been greeted by the young painters with a wave of pleasure and fear, for he was known for his penchant for stopping in front of paintings and speaking loudly, almost clamouring, as, red in the face, he hurled either tremendous, unbelievable compliments or, much more frequently, breathtaking curses and abuse.

He sat down at Paul’s table without asking permission, and, taking the magazine in his hand, flipped through it nervously.

“I asked you: do you like it? You tell me, is that painting? You call those canvases? They’ve all gone crazy. They pickup the paintbrush with greed in their hearts and bingo — by nightfall the pavilion’s ready. I’ll tell you, sir, they came to me, too, and asked me: why don’t you come to Liège, Old Man Fănică, and make us a canvas, you’ve ten days, eight metres by six, bingo — here’s the money, bingo — here’s the train ticket… I looked at the money — good money, I don’t have to tell you — I looked at them, and I was dumbfounded. Well then, mister, you guys know what a canvas is, mister? Eight metres by six? Ten days? A hundred days wouldn’t be enough. Give me a year and I’ll do it for you. That’s my difficult task, that’s the subtle task: your head gives in to what’s on the walls right to the end, and not even then would you let it out of your hands, like maybe you’d like to repair it or wipe it away or change it. As those Latins who were our forefathers said: ars longa, old man, ars longa.”

Paul listened to him without curiosity — how alien all this painters’ talk felt! — but with a certain pleasure in hearing a jovial voice that insulted, meted out harsh treatment, became indignant, replied to itself, contradicted itself or expressed approval. It was at least a human being here with him, a human being who looked him in the eyes and urged him to drink. For so many days he hadn’t met anyone, for so many days he hadn’t exchanged a word with anyone. And rather than wandering giddily around the streets, perhaps it was better to sit on this restaurant terrace with empty wine bottles lined up on the gravel beneath the table, with the band playing folk music on violins that occasionally awoke from their torpor, among a few very elegant women in low-cut dresses — it was the beginning of June — which brought to the Bucharest summer night a distant breath of the beach, the sea… The Iaşi painter talked continuously, and each time he emptied a glass his indignation, which grew indolent in between times, went up by half a tone, renewed, setting out for new battles. He kept throwing away the issue of Illustration, then taking it in his hands and opening it again in search of new arguments.

“… Now that girl,” — and he indicated the sketch that Paul only now realized was signed by Ann — “has talent, sir, you know she has talent… I think you know her… Sure, I saw the two of you together at Balcic… Big love affair, eh?”

Paul uttered a bored protest. “No, it’s not what you think. We say hi, we know each other, but it’s nothing…”

“Hey, buddy, let it go. Whether she is or whether she isn’t, it all goes with the territory. Where the lamb treads, the wolf follows. You’re not the first and you won’t be the last. Nobody knows anybody in a big crowd.”

Paul took a long look at the wine glass in his right hand and observed that his hand wasn’t trembling. Far away and deep down, close to his heart, something stopped in its tracks and waited to break or unravel. It was like being under a heavy anaesthetic: he felt the wound, he felt the skin’s resistence to the blade, and the very precise, very exact rending, and yet it didn’t hurt, it didn’t hurt…

“Yes, sir, she’s got talent, but what good has it done her? Talent is like money, you find it everywhere; the key is to know what you’re going to do with it. Look, I feel bad about that girl. I liked her at first and she has a fine hand. She doesn’t wear herself out drawing, but when she puts a line on paper you understand something… Except she needed to work, to wait and above all, she’s afraid, you see? She’s afraid of what she does, and she never knows whether it’s good or bad… I thought she wanted to be a painter — and she could have been, you know? she could if she’d wanted it — but she wants a career. And, bingo, she’s made it. She’s slapping the paint on in Liège for 5000 lei a day. 5000! Nobody’s ever paid me that kind of money, not even 500, and look, on Saint Anthony’s Day I’ll be forty-nine years old, and she’s not even twenty-five and she’s rushing to get 5000 lei a day, which would be enough to wake up poor old Luchian from the dead in a fit of rage.10 5000 lei a day! Look here, it’s gone from that guild on the cliff they had back in the days of their nobility, their bloodymindedness, that nobody could buy me no-how, and if I didn’t like your mug, I didn’t sell you a painting, I didn’t sell it to you and you went in peace, at least you would have given me ten times as much gold as the next guy made. But you haven’t forgotten that now everything’s gone to the dogs, to the mob, to pushing to get ahead, even to hauling yourself up by the hair? That girl, sir, she’s come into the painting world like a siren, like an actress who runs after the director, the ministry, her cousin, the kept mistress, in order to get a role, and she sleeps with this one and she sleeps with that one, with the director, with the office manager, even with the porter if she has to, but she doesn’t stop until she gets to the top. Well, do the reckoning with your pencil in your hand of how many of them she’s slept with, at every gallery opening, to get every commission, at every opening night, the sun’ll come up tomorrow and we’ll still be making the list. If you ask me, she sleeps with whoever she feels like if she’s in the mood, after all she’s young and, God bless her, she’s not ugly, but — you get what I’m saying? — you don’t mix getting laid with painting, they don’t mix, they’re two different things, yup, all in all two different things…”

Paul had tried several times to silence him, but his weak gesture of protest was caught up by the painter’s verbal torrent and drowned in a fresh wave of indignation, exclamations and curses. At several points he would have liked to get up from the table and flee, but a painful pleasure held him still: old doubts, old agonies, all his questions from sleepless nights, all his stupid writhing between belief and disbelief, all that standing guard of the jealous man who sees signs everywhere and certainty nowhere, everything, everything came together that night in an answer.

He returned home at daybreak, through the awakening, white morning streets, alone, stripped of any memory, of any hope.

He was on Calea Victoriei one day, in front of the Corso, when he felt that a well-known gaze was searching for him on the opposite sidewalk. He crossed the street, as if to call out, and discovered in a shop window, among numerous portraits of famous women, a photograph of Ann. She probably had it done before she left, he told himself. He stared at it for a very long time, as if he had truly seen her again after their long separation. In the photograph she was wearing a black, long-sleeved sweater that covered her throat. It looked like a tunic, although on the lefthand side, instead of a pocket, was a white initial, not superimposed, but rather worked into the fabric of the pullover: a triangular A, like the initial of a sports club. By contrast with the black sweater and the white thread, her hair looked twice as blonde, as though beneath a powerful morning light. It was the first photograph he had seen of her in which Ann was not smiling. Her lips were very slightly opened in an almost suppressed smile. Her head was tilted to one side in a gesture of attention and interrogation.

He had left the area with slow steps and had gone aimlessly up the street towards Nestor, stopping out of habit at the windows of the bookstores where he saw nothing, not a book title, not a magazine, but only that tilted blonde head, that A imprinted on the left breast, like a message addressed to him, like a whisper that only he could make out. He told himself that it was not completely impossible that in the rush of her departure Ann had had this photograph taken for him and had left it to be developed, perhaps with the secret thought that he would come across the photo here and would glimpse it, finding again in this photo the Ann of former times, so much did it seem to him that her dejected smile was for him alone. I’m a hopeless idiot. Now I’m even being seduced by photographs in shop windows.

Yet he had returned in the days that followed to see her. Something had changed when he had realized that her photograph was there in the window. He had the feeling of being less alone in this city, which had seemed so deserted until now. In the mornings, going out to work, he took with him that confused feeling of impatience he recalled from the days when they had made a date for an evening out or a long-awaited concert. He passed in front of the window several times a day, sometimes without the courage to toss more than a hurried glance towards Ann’s photograph — for he was afraid his persistence would be noticed, particularly in the evenings when the cafés along the street were full of people, and so many of the tables on the sidewalk were occupied by actors, painters and writers who were his acquaintances — but, at other times, halting, as though he had only that instant discovered her, with the full force of the event, he remained staring at her for a long time. He resorted to all sorts of tricks, which he masked with discomfort, to give his stopping in front of the window a normal, happenstance air, and not one of these tricks struck him as too naive, not the coin he feigned having lost and having stopped to look for, not the notebook pulled out of his pocket to jot down some fact he had just remembered, not the vague look with which he waited on a corner to cross an empty street.

On each occasion he returned with the fear that in the intervening time the photograph would have been removed from the window and replaced with one that was unfamiliar, and it was this fear, this emotion, with which, when Ann was in Bucharest, he had climbed the stairs towards her apartment, wondering whether he would find her at home. The smile in the window called out to him from afar, soothing, unchanging. It was a sad, hazy smile, as though she lacked the courage to open up any more than this. It was the Ann who regarded him with a tired shake of her head, with a despondent lift of her shoulders, as if to say to him: “Why do I even bother to talk to you? You don’t believe any of it, you don’t understand any of it…”

One morning Paul stood frozen on the sidewalk: the photograph was no longer in the window. The previous evening it had still been there — he had seen it — but overnight everything had changed. A new series of photographs had appeared behind the window pane: a few bridal photographs, a young officer in dress uniform, numerous chubby children, every type of unfamiliar face, which exchanged among themselves glances, smiles and greetings. Paul looked at it curiously, embarrassed, with an expression of confused enquiry, of the sort you have when you open the door of a compartment on a train and interrupt with your unexpected entry the family atmosphere which has grown up during hours of shared travel. “There isn’t a free seat,” the hostile silence around you says — and the photographs in the window were saying the same thing to him now, surprised by his insistent gaze. He was almost on the point of excusing himself (“Excuse me, it was a mistake, I was looking for someone”), he was ready to move away from there, although it was so difficult for him to give this up, when to the right of the window, as if it had hidden from him until now, barely containing its laughter, and now would have embraced him with an explosion of joy and tenderness, Ann’s face sprang into sight, a new face of hers, sufficiently different from the one he had left there the previous evening, that it wasn’t surprising that he hadn’t recognized it at first glance.

He used to feel this way often when he came to her apartment and, after ringing the doorbell, the door would open on its own, pulled by an unseen hand; he would cross the threshold, call out to Ann, look for her in every room, and only then would she leap out from the corner where she had been hiding, especially on days when she was wearing a new dress and wanted to surprise him by showing herself off to him in it. Now, too, in the photograph, she wore a new silk print dress in a floral design, while on her head she had an open, almost white straw hat that blended with her blonde hair, a hat with a wide brim for the sunlight in the country. Everything looked youthful, morning-like, but there was something sensual in her white arms, her bare throat, exposed even more by the movement of her head, which was tossed back slightly, as though to laugh in pleasure, for in this new photograph she was laughing, with a free, open laughter.

It was a completely different Ann than that of the evening before, who in her black sweater had looked like a pensive boy. Many times her facility for becoming a new person had troubled Paul. It was enough for her to change her hairdo, or dress in new colours, in order for something deep within her to appear to have changed, right down to the look in her eyes. There were innumerable possible Anns, and each left Paul feeling intimidated for a second, not knowing how to recover in this stranger the girl he loved, from whom he had parted the night before.

He found it difficult to get used to the new photograph in the window. He didn’t like this Ann who laughed and above all he didn’t like her head thrown back, with that recently adopted gesture of hilarity that emerged when she said: “It’s rolling, it’s rolling.” He passed before the window several times a day, as before, and, little by little, he familiarized himself with Ann’s new face, with her dress, with the wide straw hat, and finally with that laugh, which no longer struck him as strange, but even left him with the impression that it stemmed from his oldest memories of their love: Ann’s laughter during their days of happiness in Sibiu.

The photographer’s display window changed each week, and now Paul awaited with disquiet the end of this week, which would mean the departure of the Ann that he had befriended in the meantime. At the same time, he would have to await the new Ann, whom he didn’t yet know and of whose arrival he wasn’t even certain.

On Saturday night he stayed downtown late in order to see her again and, as there were no longer many people on the street other than very rare passersby, since the Corso closed after 2 PM, he was able to stand there at ease, facing the window, to take his leave of this Ann, who two mornings from now would no longer be there. The lights went out, and in the semi-darkness of the window she seemed to be waiting for him and replying to him.

On Sunday morning a new smile, a new dress, a scarf, a hat, a gesture greeted him from the new photograph on display. How many photographs had Ann had taken? And why so many? Paul had never before been aware of her having a passion for having herself photographed, and aside from a few lover’s shots, most of them taken on trips, and a few small identity-card portraits she’d had made for her passport, he did not own a single photograph of her. Surely this was a new passion, a recent caprice, and, maybe to an even greater degree, a stock-taking, a matter of foresight in light of the opportunity of her trip. In fact, Ann had recently become a “figure” in Bucharest life, a “celebrity.” She was seen everywhere: at the theatre, at the race track, at soccer matches; her dresses were commented on, she was talked about and enjoyed having people talk about her.

Leaving Bucharest for an extended period, she risked slipping out of the limelight and losing her minor fashionable notoriety, which she had worked so hard to achieve. It was possible that the photographs she had left behind her had no purpose other than to maintain this notoriety, to prevent people from forgetting her. The display window projected an image that was all the more secure for not being in any way ostentatious; neither shots of current events nor political photographs were ever shown there, of the sort that attracted curious throngs, but rather art photography, portraits that appeared to be exhibited not so much for their subjects’ names, but rather for the quality of the negative and the delicacy of the composition, none of which prevented the most stellar names of Bucharest, whether royal, artistic or the wives of famous industrialists, from appearing.

In that selection of “expressive heads,” Ann took her place with simplicity, with a certain negligence, as if her photographs were so numerous and her appearance in each new display were so assured that Paul wondered with dismay whether there wasn’t something a little histrionic in her insistence on showing herself off and being seen. It sometimes seemed to him that her gestures, preserved in such living form, so talkative in her photographs, became the poses of a minor starlet, and he looked on them then with spite, with hostility — spite that faded away quickly, as he got used to the new photographs and felt a little as if, day by day, the heated intimacy between him and her grew tighter. In other summers he wouldn’t have let a single weekend go by without leaving Bucharest for the beach or the mountains, but now he refused every invitation, since he had the feeling that each Sunday morning he had an appointment he couldn’t miss, and in fact his first walk downtown was to the display window, where he looked — with such fear! with such disquiet! — for the new Ann for the week that was beginning.

Sometimes he came too early, the window wasn’t ready, and the cloth divider was pulled down like a curtain, behind which the new photographs were being arranged. Then Paul walked up and down the sidewalk, with a feeling of mixed impatience and security, as though he were walking in front of Ann’s apartment while she, upstairs in her room, was dressing, having sent him out to wait for her on the street: a feeling of security because he was certain she was going to come and in this respect nothing threatened him, yet also with impatience since he wondered what she would be like when she came downstairs, which dress she was going to wear, how pretty she would look.

One morning the cloth curtain rose in vain: Ann was missing from the window. Paul looked for her patiently, at first untroubled, examining portrait after portrait, at last alarmed, panic-stricken that she could possibly not be there, that he couldn’t find her. He would have liked to believe that it was a mistake or a joke, that she was hiding and was about to suddenly appear before him. He would have liked to say to her, as he had in the old days: “Come here, Ann. Stop it. You’re fooling around too much…”

He stood riveted there with a crumbling feeling; he felt as though he were losing her again, as though he saw her leaving again, perhaps this time for good.

“I have to see her,” he said in a loud voice. “I have to see her, at any cost.”

Three days later he was in Liège. He had left madly within a few hours, with the little money he was able to scrape together, with a passport acquired at the last minute, taking the longest and cheapest route, in third class via Poland and Germany, changing trains several times, waiting in a variety of stations for complicated connections to Berlin, Cologne and Hegenrath and finally arriving in Liège in the middle of the night, his head reeling with sleeplessness and strain. The whole time he told himself that he was acting like a lunatic, that he was making himself ridiculous, that the woman he was seeking was irrevocably lost to him, and that in any case he would now lose her forever by throwing himself at her; yet nothing could stop him from pursuing this absurd path, which he had entered with his eyes closed.

There had been a single moment of hesitation on the morning of his departure. He was at the Ministry of the Interior, in the office of a Subsecretary of State whom he knew, and whom he had come to see to ask him for a passport. On the wall above the desk was one of Ann’s paintings: a sandy Balcic with a few rough, dusty plants, almost whitish and with a single corner of sea, of an intense blue.

Paul sat looking in the direction of the painting. What was it doing in this office? Who had bought it, and why? Still young, the Subsecretary was known to have had romantic liaisons in the theatre world, which people talked about exceedingly openly, and which not even he forced himself to hide very much.

“What are you thinking about?” he asked Paul, taking the written request from his hand.

Paul didn’t reply. It was difficult for him to take his eyes off Ann’s signature, in the bottom corner of the canvas, her oblique, fine signature, almost covered by the frame.

He received the signed form and wondered what he would do with it now: it all struck him as useless, meaningless.

“Go to the police station. I’ll phone them in the meantime. In half an hour, by the time you get there, your passport will be ready.”

And as he remained silent, still staring up towards that unexpected Balcic on the wall, the Minister, too, turned his head towards the painting, measured it with his eye with a certain surprise, as though he were looking at it carefully for the first time, then, turning back towards Paul, he smiled. “Sweet girl, eh?”

There was something bewildering about the whole trip: he crossed countries he didn’t know, he waited for connecting trains in tiny border towns, at night he looked out the open window of the carriage: the endless, desolate countryside of Poland, sad and barren-looking in the middle of summer; he read in passing the names of German stations as he would have read them from the dial of his radio: Beuthen, Gleiwitz, Breslau. Everything flowed past him, half dream-like, uncertain, strange and yet indifferent: somewhere far away, at the end of the road, was Ann.

He stopped at dawn in a sleeping, deserted Berlin with its broad streets depopulated, with buildings plunged in silence, with pompous statues that seemed somehow unreal in the morning light, like abandoned stage scenery — a city of plaster, a city that seemed to be a life-sized model of itself, where Paul’s steps echoed quietly on the asphalt, one after the other.

He spent the evening in Cologne, waiting for the last train, which was meant to take him to Liège. He was tired, with his eyes sunken from sleeplessness, unshaven, his clothes in disorder. “I look like a man on the run,” he said to himself, staring at himself in the mirror of the station. He had the impression that he was under suspicion on all sides, while the platforms seemed to be packed with police and military patrols.

It was July 1934, shortly after the serious upheavals that had taken place all across Germany,11 and, in his current lamentable state, he could easily be taken for a political fugitive. The entire city was sunken in the tense silence of a siege. The assault troops had been on a forced holiday for a few days, during which wearing uniforms was forbidden, and this unarmed Cologne, without army boots, without peaked caps, without flags, seemed to be a city that had surrendered.

The same atmosphere of deaf panic accompanied him to the border. Muffled voices were audible in the passageways, the door of his compartment opened regularly for interminable checks and inspections, the carriage’s exits were guarded by watchmen. In Aachen, the last stop in Germany, the train was halted before the station and the passengers descended into a double ring of police and customs inspectors. Luminous signs, whistles, curt, harsh commands, collided in the night. Somebody took his passport and examined it in detail, page by page.

“Why are you going to Liège?”

The question surprised him.

Not even he knew well why he was going there. For the first time since his departure this question without an answer was thrown in his face. He lifted his shoulders, at a loss, a gesture which did not respond to the police officer’s question, but rather to his own surprise. But his silence was probably suspect, since the officer abruptly seized the flashlight in his pocket and lifted it towards Paul’s face like the barrel of a revolver. In the glare of the light, Paul met a cold, biting stare that pierced him. I’m lost, he thought. He saw himself being stopped there at the border station, put under escort and sent back to Cologne for further investigation. He had heard that hundreds of arrests were taking place daily at all the border crossings, where the former soldiers of the assault battalions, having escaped the massacre in Munich, were trying to flee in borrowed civilian clothes, with false passports.

The man continued to hold his dazzling flashlight fixed on Paul’s face.

I should speak, I should reply, this silence will sink me, Paul thought. But at the same time he felt incapable of uttering a word, of finding an explanation.

I’m going to Liège to see the woman I love, he thought, but the words remained unspoken, as in that terrible dream in which you feel your throat clenched up, although you want to shout, to call out for help. He was so close to Ann now (58 kilometres from Liège, he reminded himself with a shudder), and yet as far away as ever.

“Es geht, schön,”12 the officer muttered, and with a completely unexpected gesture, he turned out the flashlight and returned his passport, moving away.

Only later, when he glimpsed the first peaked cap of a Belgian customs officer and heard the first words of French, did Paul shake loose of the tension of those terrible moments.

From a distance he heard cordial voices, calm, slightly sleepy steps on the platform. I’m in Belgium, he told himself, as though at the end of a nightmare from which he had awoken. He looked for a long time at the rectangle of still-wet red China ink that an official had stamped in his passport:

Hegenrath, 23 juillet 1934. Contrôle des passagers.

Ann wasn’t in Liège. She had left a few days ago, nobody knew where for. At the Romanian pavilion nobody could give him reliable information.

“We inaugurated the pavilion on the 15th and she left on the 16th,” Paul was told by one of Ann’s colleagues, who had remained in Liège to supervise some projects that had got behind schedule. “Where did she go? Who knows. Maybe to Brussels, maybe somewhere on the seaside. She was dead tired. At the end she was working day and night. Anyhow, ask at the hotel.”

Nobody at the hotel knew anything more. Ann had left without a forwarding address.

“I’m sure she’s coming back,” the receptionist assured him. “She asked me to hold onto her mail. Furthermore, she left a suitcase here with a whole box of tubes and colours.”

He didn’t even have enough money to go any farther, to look for her in Brussels, nor did he think it would be possible to find her there, in a large, unknown city, where, on the whole, it was unlikely that she was at the moment. The only wise course was to wait here in Liège, where at least it was certain that she would return and where, while waiting for her, there were so many things to see, in this town where Ann had lived for a few weeks and where many things might preserve innumerable small memories of her. There were streets where she had walked, shop windows where she had stopped, thrilling display windows of the Belgian provinces with vague ambitions towards luxury — Paris wasn’t far away! — but with something honest, clumsy, a little gauche in their lack of whimsy.

Surely on rainy evenings along this tepid Meuse River, which ran through the middle of the town, Ann had walked alone, as she liked to do sometimes in Bucharest, bareheaded in a trenchcoat, with her hands in her pockets.

One day, after a similar rain shower, on a wall where the water was unsticking the posters for the latest shows, Paul caught sight of an older, yellowed, half-torn poster: Salle Communale, 26 juin 1934, Clothilde et Alexandre Sacharoff, grand récital de danse. No doubt Ann had gone to that recital: she, who, indifferent to music, retained by contrast a passion for dance that went well beyond that of a normal spectator, a sort of concealed nostalgia that made her regret that instead of painting she hadn’t had the courage to spend her time dancing. There was something in her that felt the call of the open stage, the limelight, the applause… No doubt Ann had gone to that recital, and Paul stood thoughtfully for a long time in front of the poster, which suddenly opened up the vision of the evening of the show, and not an abstract, uncertain evening, lost among thousands of others, but rather a precise evening, which had a name, a date — Wednesday, June 26, 1934, at 8:30 exactly — an evening that he could detach from the time Ann had spent apart from him and relive after such a long time.

The newsreels that were showing at the Liège cinemas that week were dedicated mainly to the exhibitions, and, above all, to the opening ceremonies. Paul watched each of them several times with eagerness, since Ann appeared briefly in them, caught in passing by the reporter’s camera, appearances that were yet so fleeting that no sooner had he glimpsed Ann than she disappeared, as though she had been lost in the crowd. In one of these newsreels — for Fox, Paramount and Pathé each presented the opening ceremonies differently — Ann’s silhouette held steady, distinctly outlined, in the foreground for a few seconds, but with her head turned away at an angle that made Paul feel tempted to cry out to her, to wave, as though it were possible for her to hear him, suddenly turn her head towards him and see him. From a distance one could see King Leopold and Queen Astrid approaching amid a cluster of long-tailed uniforms, and, as the royal group grew nearer, Ann raising herself up on her tiptoes and turning her head to the right, presumably to see better.

A few days later, and behind schedule, the Eclair newsreel arrived, in which the King and Queen’s visit to the Romanian pavilion was filmed at greater length. Here Ann was clearly visible, leaning against her painting as though ready to provide explanations. Queen Astrid paused in passing before the painting and appeared to smile at Ann: their white dresses, one beside the other, lit up the whole screen. It didn’t take more than a few seconds, but the images were so clear and were taken face-on so that Paul had time to look her right in the eyes.

Ann’s painting covered almost the entire back wall of the pavilion. It was painted straight onto the wall on dry plaster, something which, so far as Paul knew, Ann had never tried until now. There were two landscapes, a landscape of oil wells and a rural landscape, separated by water that flowed down the middle like a boundary line.

“She was lucky,” Paul was told by the painter he met at the pavilion, and who was showing him through the exhibition. “She was incredibly lucky. Painting water on a fresco is sheer lunacy. And look at how she pulled it off. Look at the depths it has, the clarity!”

In fact, everything in Ann’s work was more certain, more decisive than her usual manner. A few landscape details, some wild flowers, a tiny herd of cattle in the distance, still recalled the showy love of detail of her smaller drawings, but the main lines of the canvas, the black oil derricks, the peasant women in the foreground, were depicted robustly, with calm composure.

Paul came to the pavilion every day in the hope of receiving news. There was a reception desk there, a sort of reading room where mail and Romanian newspapers were delivered. One day he recognized Ann’s writing on a postcard: the card was addressed collectively to “the guys” at the pavilion, with greetings from Ostend. We’re passing through, splendid weather, what’s up with you guys? Next to Ann’s signature was another signature, indecipherable but visibly male.

“Who’s that?” Paul asked.

“Dănulescu, the architect. Don’t you know him? She left with him. I thought I told you that. In his car.”

He didn’t have the courage to ask anything more. What did “she left with him” mean? It was a repellent turn of phrase. It seemed to be equivalent to “she’s living with him,” “she’s sleeping with him.”

He didn’t have the courage to ask, and in fact there was nothing more to ask. Everything was clear at last. He now understood her having left Bucharest without a farewell word, he even understood the very fact of her participation in the exhibition at Liège, where she surely would not have been invited and would not have been entrusted with work of such great responsibility — she was too young, too lacking in experience — had she not been “proposed” by Dănulescu the architect, who was in charge of the pavilion’s interior decoration.

Now, looking again, but with different eyes, at the canvas signed by Ann, he realized how it differed from her usual style. The truth was that the restless Ann he knew had not painted this canvas. If the lines were firm and the colours calm it was because a man had intervened there and taken her hasty hand in his powerful one, directing her in a way that was alert to the full stretch of the landscape, as he might have directed the hand of a child, who has the pencil gripped tight between his fingers but doesn’t know how to write, across the page of an exercise book.

And, as if he had needed a final sign of how things stood, Paul found in that reading room, in a Belgian art magazine, in a special issue published on the occasion of the exhibition, an article by Dănulescu on “Mural Painting in Romanian Monasteries,” accompanied by some drawings and reproductions, in which the prime example given was that of the frescoes at Snagov and, in particular, that descent from the cross that Ann had shown him years ago in the little monastery on the shore of the lake. Among the detailed enlargements was a reproduction of the old man in the background who was stroking his beard with that anxious gesture that Ann had referred to as a “secular” gesture and which Dănulescu now referred to with the same word in his article.

It was impossible that this was a coincidence and it was even less possible that it was Ann who had revealed this detail to the architect, an eminent specialist in mural painting. Much more believable was the possibility that he had originally revealed it to her, but in that case Ann and Dănulescu had known each other for a very long time, and their liaison was probably of long standing, of a longer standing than what until now he had believed to be his love with Ann. He felt betrayed, lied to from the beginning, in his very first memories of her. That same day he left Liège for home.

Autumn had come, and the last late arrivals were returning from their summer holidays. People in Bucharest were shivering with anticipation at the beginning of the season, as the theatres, concert halls and art galleries opened in turn. Ann still hadn’t appeared anywhere. She was certainly in Bucharest, especially now that the exhibition in Liège had closed, but Paul never ran into her. It was true that he was going out little, particularly in the evenings, which, tired from days in court, he was spending at home, reading, listening to music, without feeling any enthusiasm for either the books or the music but happy to have the pretext not to leave his apartment or to see anyone. He felt a longing for the life of a teacher in a provincial high school somewhere in a remote market town without a railway station, without newspapers, whose socializing consisted of playing chess with the teacher of physics and chemistry, a sort of bachelorhood rooted in solitude.

One night he had passed in front of Ann’s building and, more out of habit than curiosity, had lifted his gaze towards her windows: the lights were on. She’s at home, Paul thought, but calmly, without emotion, without any desire to see her, as if he had noticed that it was raining or that it was late.

He spent whole days without even thinking of her, without the slightest memory. It all struck him as distant, remote, relegated forever to the depths of his memory. Sometimes at the office, the girl who answered the telephone would tell him: “Somebody asked for you. A woman’s voice. She didn’t leave her name.” He didn’t even bother to put the question to himself: Could it be Ann? Yes, it could be Ann. And then what?

Even so, he sometimes awoke at night from his dreams with her name on his lips, and felt then, like a sharpening pain, the need to see her — not in order to speak to her, since he had nothing to say to her and felt that any return to the past was impossible — but in order to watch her, even without her knowledge, as he might from a window, as though he were a passerby. Once he had received at the office a visit from the head of a film company and, in the midst of a discussion of a fiscal appeal that the man was bringing forward, Paul had suddenly interrupted him, struck in a flash by a thought: “What do you do with old newsreels?”

The man, not understanding what connection this question might have with his lawsuit, replied in amazement: “Some of them we send right away to head office. Most of them stay in storage at our office. After one or two years we destroy them.”

“Could you find me the Eclair newsreel from last summer, from July? The one with the exhibition at Liège? And if you can find it, could you show it for me somewhere, in a projection room?’

“That’s no problem. We have our own projection room. We just have to find the film in storage. If it’s from July, it might be showing somewhere out in the provinces. There are a few market towns where we send newsreels from a few months, or even a year ago, for a pittance…”

Paul thought it over: if the film was in Bucharest, he could see Ann again that very day, but if it had been sent to the provinces, his plan fell apart. He had been so close to bringing it to fruition that now, when he was no longer sure of himself, he had the feeling of missing a long-established appointment with Ann.

“Please check it out,” he said to his client. “Call the storage now and see if they have the film. If it’s there, I’d like to see it today. If it’s in the provinces, then find out in which particular town and which cinema. Excuse me, it’s something I can’t explain, but I have to see that film at all costs, wherever it may be.”

In fact, he was determined to leave for the provinces, wherever the film might be, and in an instant he ran over in his mind the preparations that would be necessary for his departure (a trial that had been adjourned for two days, two letters he would have to dictate hastily to the stenographer…), but within a quarter of an hour he received a phone call that the newsreel that interested him had been found in storage and that he could see it at four o’clock this afternoon.

The projection room was in St. George’s Square, in a small room on the fifth floor, with a low ceiling and the windows blocked up, a real little box, in which the sound of the projector made the outsized din of a factory or an airplane. Paul had first to sit through the end of a film that was being shown for a few provincial cinema owners who had come to Bucharest to contract their movies for the 1934-35 winter season. It was a comedy-adventure, Bolero, with Carole Lombard and George Raft, of which he understood nothing. When the lights came on, those few spectators gave him the suspicious looks they might reserve for a new competitor, and their suspicions became even more acute when, after they were called into the director’s office to discuss contract conditions, he was left there, possibly, they feared, to see a special film, “the hit of the season,” which was being shown only, in total secret, to privileged clients.

Paul remained alone with the projectionist, the lights went out again and, after a few tremors, the images finally coalesced on the screen, and the old newsreel, which he had seen in July in Liège, appeared again before him, looking more pompous than before, as though the print were worn out; the images were blurry and, above all, the screen was much smaller, about half the size of a normal cinema screen. The forgotten scenes of the newsreel appeared one after the other: Sir John Simon, the Foreign Secretary of Great Britain, welcomed Monsieur Louis Barthou, the French Foreign Minister, to a London train station… The San Francisco general strike grew in size. Most of the factories and mills were closed. The total number of strikers had reached 150,000… Ambassador Dogvalevski’s funeral in Paris. The Soviet diplomat’s earthly remains were incinerated at the Père Lachaise crematorium… Chancellor Dolfuss formed a new government, having shuffled his ministers… The opening of the exhibition in Liège… A panning shot of the pavilions, the main gate, the arrival of the royal convoy, they crossed the main street, then suddenly Ann, Ann propped up against her painting, Ann smiling at Queen Astrid, their white dresses, one alongside the other.

Alone in the projection room, very close to the screen, which was no larger than a window, Paul looked Ann in the eyes, yet without emotion. If he had been able to speak to her, if she had been able to hear him, he would have said calmly to her: “I’m going to forget you, Ann, I’m going to forget you, I want to forget you.”

In November, in the Dalles Gallery, an exhibition of Ann’s paintings opened. White posters, soberly typed, but spread around everywhere, announced the opening party well in advance. On every wall, on every public noticeboard, was Ann’s name: November 10 — December 10. Exhibition of new paintings. Oils, watercolours, gouache.

Paul walked past those posters, forcing himself not to see them. Each one seemed to be calling out to him. Before, he used to feel a childish pride in seeing his lover’s name in newspapers, in windows, on walls. Now it struck him as an indiscretion, an abuse — and, in fact, it was possible that never before had there been so much publicity for an exhibition of paintings.

A few days earlier, he had received in the mail, at home, an invitation to the opening party. The typed text announced the party for eleven o’clock, but Ann had added by hand: but it’s not forbidden to come earlier. After several months of silence, they were the first words he had received from her.

He was determined not to go to the launch party, to stay home and review some files, which he had brought back from the office for this purpose. It was a November day, damp, leaden, of the kind that made him feel enervated. The minutes passed slowly, one at a time. He had opened the window and let into the room the damp morning air, the rain, the smell of fallen leaves…

The telephone rang, and Paul let it ring a few times. He had no interest in replying: he wasn’t expecting anyone. He finally lifted the receiver and was dumfounded: it was Ann’s voice.

“Aren’t you coming? Don’t you want to come? Please, please come. I’m stuck here, there are so many people, but I’m waiting for you, Paul, I’m waiting for you, you understand? You’ll bring me luck if you come…”

Paul gave a discouraged lift of his shoulders. Ann was appealing to their old superstitions, a tactic that disarmed him since he was so little prepared to resist it: “You’ll bring me luck if you come…”

At the Dalles, he stopped in the doorway of the front room, looking for Ann. He came in out of the rain wearing his trenchcoat, with his hat in his hand, and shrank from entering: the sound of voices, laughter, exclamations, a rustling of dresses and furs, held him there on the threshold, a little intimidated, a little confused, wondering if it wasn’t already time for him to leave.

Ann, spotting him from the back of the room, waved her hand, signalling to him to wait. She came towards him, making her way with difficulty between the groups of people who blocked her path. She didn’t say sorry to the people she bumped into, and looked steadily in Paul’s direction, with a sparkling intensity in her eyes, as if she wished to cry out to him.

“Why are your hands wet? Did you get caught in the rain? You came here on foot? That’s why you’re late, is it? I didn’t think you’d come. I kept looking at the door. Paul, I was so afraid you wouldn’t come! Could it be, I said, could it be that he won’t come?”

He regarded her without replying: a hard look that asked no questions. She’s here, she’s beside me, he repeated in his mind, surprised that he wasn’t shivering. He would have liked to absorb the news of her return from far away into all his horrible memories, which, although Ann was there beside him, remained alive, like that lost outpost which, although the war has ended, continues to be alert, watchful, because it hasn’t yet received news of the truce.

Ann took him by the arm, leading him into the vestibule.

“Let’s get out of here, Paul. There are too many people. We’ll go far away in the rain. What do you say?”

“You know very well that we can’t, Ann. You’ve got to stay here. It’s your opening.”

“Oh! My opening!” she said, with a casual gesture. “What do you expect me to do here? I want to be with you, with you alone, do you understand?”

She ran out into the rain, bareheaded, as far as the edge of the sidewalk, where she stopped in front of a small blue car with a low-slung body, which she opened with a familiar, irate gesture, struggling to get the keys into the lock in the rain. She shouted to Paul from behind the wheel. He had remained on the stone steps of the entrance, his gaze following her in perplexity.

“Aren’t you coming?”

Inside, through the broad windows of the front rooms of the Dalles, a few observers were watching the scene, intrigued. It’s all too hurtful, Paul thought, imagining what people would say after they left. Within an instant he was at Ann’s side, closing the door behind him.

“What’s with this car?”

“It’s mine. An old heap.”

“Where did you get it?”

Ann turned her head towards him, without losing control of the wheel. She headed in the direction of Piaţa Romana along the boulevard, which was nearly deserted on that grim November Sunday morning.

“Is that your only question? It’s the first one you’ve asked me, Paul.”

“And the last. I have nothing to ask you.”

Ann braked abruptly. The machine came to a rough stop, skating over the damp paving stones. The right mudguard slammed into the edge of the sidewalk. Ann, crestfallen, lifted her hands from the steering wheel. She stared straight ahead through the windshield, where the raindrops were sliding into hurried little streams. For a few minutes nothing was audible between them but the rhythmic sound of the windshield wiper on the glass. At last Ann lifted her eyes towards Paul, with the return of that decisive expression she assumed in serious moments.

“Maybe I made a mistake in phoning you, Paul. Maybe everything’s really finished between us. But since you came, since you’re here, I’d like to ask you to stay and to be quiet. I want to know you’re next to me. Tomorrow, if you want, an hour from now, if you want, we can go our separate ways. But for the moment, be quiet…”

She set off again. A cold, damp wind came shivering in through the open window on the driver’s side, hurling sparse raindrops into Ann’s face; she let them trickle down her cheeks and forehead without wiping them away, without seeming to feel them. Her hands clenched the steering wheel with the exaggerated tension of a long drive. The needles of the gauges on the dashboard oscillated with restless nervousness. The speedometer slid across the dial at between 80 and 90 kilometres an hour. On the right and the left, the bare linden trees that lined the road cast out a smokey mist. Farther along, beyond Băneasa Airport, there was an odour of dishevelled fields, of sodden grass, of earth tilled right down to the roots. The rain was falling more softly here, less rushed, calmer and more patient than in the city. The noise of the engine didn’t completely block out its thin rustling sound, like the approaching voice of the forest.

They left the sleeping airport, with its shuttered hangars, the radio station, the Otopeni forest, the road to Snagov, far behind them. The gleaming road unfolded before them through the open countryside. Whitish haze floated low over the black earth like fallen cloud making a futile attempt to raise itself… On the horizon, the greyness of the November day descended into a smokey, opaque whiteness.

Paul turned his head towards Ann. He had forgotten that she was next to him. This whole drive through the rain had the savour of awaking from a troubled sleep.

Ann bit her lower lip with a strained gesture that Paul didn’t recognize. It’s a recent gesture, he thought, a driving gesture. Her cheek betrayed no tremor: her eyes, slightly dilated with attentiveness, her forehead, tilted forward, lent a feeling of intensity and yet also of absence to her pale face. Only now had he noticed that she didn’t have her overcoat; she was bareheaded, with an open collar, exactly as she had left the exhibition, in a tailored brown suit (Since when does she wear brown?) with a gauzy scarf, wet from the rain, fluttering over her shoulders.

“I’d say it’s time for us to go back, Ann.”

She reduced their speed, uncertain at first, and then she stopped. She laid her forehead against the steering wheel and stayed that way, with her arms drooping, her hair ruffled by the cold wind, which continued to blow with ebbing force now that the car was parked. Paul straightened her up with difficulty, taking her head in his hands to draw her towards him: Ann’s half-closed eyes had a dull look, her lips were blue, her hands cold.

“What’s the matter with you? Are you cold? Are you feeling bad?”

“No,” she whispered. “I’d like to cry.”

“That’s good — cry,” he encouraged her, and he pulled her closer, sheltering her against his chest and covering her with his right arm as though he were wrapping a shawl around her shoulders. “Cry if you want. Go ahead — cry.”

In the small white car, parked alone on the road in the open countryside, Ann shook with childish, hiccuping tears.

In fact, nothing had changed, and Ann’s return was not a return. A caprice, a moment’s folly, maybe even more trivial than that… “She fled on the morning of her opening, like the bride on the wedding night,” the painters would joke among themselves. The truth was that she had left behind her a room full of guests and that her sudden departure gave rise to endless fascinated comments. Two days later, in a society column, it was said that Ann’s absence from her own opening was a delightful whim of the sort that an artist confident of the public’s affection can allow herself, with the result, the columnist added maliciously, that the majority of the works exhibited sold on the spot.

Everything that Ann did now, Paul observed, was destined to become the subject of publicity. And it doesn’t even worry her, he thought with a shake of his head. He had the hideous suspicion that her departure from the opening had been prepared in advance to intrigue the public and arouse curiosity in order to bring an “original note” to the all-too-banal tradition of the opening of an exhibition. Having rediscovered her for an instant, he was losing her again to a thicket of secrets and mysteries that she rushed through with an offhand gesture: “Forget it, I’ll explain.”

She was so distant, so strange had she become to him during their months of separation, that the paintings in her new show looked excessively good to him. Even if it hadn’t been for those four or five portraits, and sketches of portraits, of Dănulescu, ostentatiously exhibited, as if she wished to forestall or confront all that was being said about their liaison (and Paul had been annoyed above all by the title of those portraits in the exhibition catalogue: Portrait of the Architect D., an initial which, rather than being a sign of discretion, seemed like one of intimacy) — even if it hadn’t been for those portraits, everything in Ann’s painting was unknown to him now; it all breathed memories, events, emotions experienced in his absence, far away from him. Most of the landscapes were of Sainte-Maxime, a Belgian fishing village where Ann had loaded her palette with the greys and blues of a cloudy sea. How long she had been in Sainte-Maxime, with whom, what she had been doing there, were questions she invariably deflected by telling him: “Forget it, someday I’ll tell you the whole story.” A day that had become more difficult to pin down the less he saw of her, always in a hurry, always in passing, particularly now that she had this blue car — bought? received as a gift? even she didn’t seem to know for sure — with which she ran innumerable errands, all of them urgent and all of them without explanation. For Paul it was a fresh source of pain to run across that small automobile, which he recognized from a distance by its colour — a light navy blue — heading along the streets only to disappear around a corner or beyond a crossroads — towards what unknown destinations? towards which clandestine encounters?

He happened to come across it with the doors closed and the headlights out, in obscure neighbourhoods, on the corner of an unfamiliar street, parked there who knew how long ago. He would approach it and look in the windows to see that Ann had left her gloves, or a book, or a package. Leaning over with his face against the windowpane, he would gaze for a long time at those forgotten objects. Sometimes they were left next to the car’s front grille. Maybe she’s coming back. She never came. He waited for hours on end, and still she didn’t come.

He looked in detail at the surrounding houses. It was possible she was around here somewhere, for a visit or a romantic rendezvous, possibly behind the curtains in one of those windows where the lights were on, not wishing to come down right now because she had seen him waiting in the street.

One evening in Filipescu Park, on a little semicircular street that ran off Strada Sofia like a sort of interior courtyard, Paul had found the blue car across from a house whose rolling shutters were drawn, but through which strips of light fell. He had passed there by chance, coming from the Saint-Vincent sanatorium, where he had an ill friend, but Ann’s car stopped him in his tracks. For more than two hours he had remained still, leaning over the grille of the car. He had the impression that behind the house’s shutters shadows were moving. He seemed to hear footsteps, whispers, even laughter, which then faded away. It was as though every now and then, about every quarter of an hour, someone was coming to the window to see if he was still there, if he had left yet. After a long time, an absurd thought passed through his head: to ring the doorbell and ask for Ann.

The door opened after a long wait, and after he had rung several times: in the doorway was a greying man, with the entrance behind him, who asked him who he was looking for and obliged him to repeat Ann’s name twice, as though he hadn’t heard it clearly.

“No, sir, you’re mistaken. She doesn’t live here.” And he closed the door, leaving Paul on the stone step, confused, stuttering excuses that no one heard.

That evening he vowed that he would never see her again.

I have to forget you, Ann. I absolutely have to forget you.

VI

IT WAS A SMALL, NARROW ROOM with a smoke-blackened ceiling and wooden benches, and a door that was constantly opening and shutting. Nervous figures would appear in the doorway, toss a hurried glance inside and disappear. If it hadn’t been for the magistrates and the court clerk in their black robes, Nora wouldn’t have believed that she was actually in a courtroom.

All kinds of people sat on the benches: anxious girls with tired eyes, and a mixture of bewilderment and indifference. There was the incessant sound of whispering, muffled hisses, shuffling paper. From time to time a bell sounded, rung out of habit and without conviction by the presiding judge. There was a moment’s silence, and then nothing more was heard but the voice of the lawyer who was speaking.

Nora found a seat at the back of the room, next to the window. Outside it was snowing softly. Senate Square looked white, like a postcard of winter.

Paul was right at the front, in the first row of benches, bent over what looked like a file. In order to see him, Nora had to stand up, and then she saw only his back, with his shoulders bent forward in the direction of the desk facing him. As long as he doesn’t turn his head, she thought, chilled by the thought that he might see her. She pressed against the window, hiding as well as she was able.

Paul got up from his seat. Nora had the impression that he had seen her and was coming towards her. She remained stock-still, like the pupil who feels that the teacher has seen her copying from his desk, and is waiting for the inevitable scandal to break.

No. She was losing her nerve foolishly, for no good reason. Paul hadn’t seen her and in any event was not looking her way. He had merely gone to the court clerk’s desk, picked up a file and now, with the file in his hand, was speaking.

Nora heard only parts of the sentence, of which she understood nothing. She repeated his words in her mind and was surprised that Paul could speak with such conviction. His voice from the previous evening was unrecognizable: this was a firm, certain voice, with maybe a certain deep-seated indifference, but not the sleepy, drawling indifference with which Nora was familiar.

“… The simple deposition of the reasons for appealing this case not only is insufficient, but is null and void… The court will be obliged to consider this appeal as lacking due cause… A single valid cause… indicated by Article 98 of the law governing circuit court judges… Implied and without having been specified by prior documentation… Procedurally speaking, this appeal does not exist… It is in direct contradiction of Article 69 of the civil code, section D, clause 2…”

Nora strained to listen. She would have liked to understand the question under discussion. Above all, she would have liked to be able to look Paul in the eyes while he was speaking. The things he was talking about appeared to enthrall him. Now and then he turned his head towards a lawyer on the opposing bench, who was interrupting him, and then Nora read in his uncaring eyes a sparkle of conviction, maybe even of combativeness.

She glanced at her watch: twenty past four. Yesterday at this time we hadn’t met yet. Everything that had happened since seemed remote and incomprehensible. That man speaking in an unfamiliar voice and whose appearance she couldn’t remember if she closed her eyes, that man was her “lover.” This was still a word that, even at her age, Nora was unable to contemplate without terror. Long ago, in her hometown in the provinces, “lover” was a word that was spoken in a whisper.

The presiding judge uttered a few words, which were inaudible at the back of the courtroom, and wrote something in the register. The court clerk called another case, while Paul bundled up his books and papers and, with an unhurried motion, slid them into his briefcase.

Nora was going to let him leave the courtroom, she was going to remain here a little longer to be sure of not running into him, and then she, too, was going to leave. A guy you slept with one night by chance and who, after that, you never saw again. The horrible thoughts, which appalled her, and which she nevertheless tried to think with out caring, went around in her head.

“Are you staying here?”

He was wearing a black-patterned red tie with a badly tied knot. It was first thing Nora noticed. Why doesn’t this man know how to tie his tie?

Paul took her arm and led her to the door. She followed him without looking at him. How nice it was there next to the window. How did he spot me? Why did he come in my direction? She was afraid of him; she would have liked to be alone, she would have liked with all her heart to be alone.

“… Honourable gentlemen, an incorrectly introduced motion cannot replace…” From the doorway, Nora heard a few words spoken by a man at the bar, who was waving a file, but the end of the sentence was lost, since in that moment they left the building through a narrow corridor that was more brightly lit than the courtroom.

“An incorrectly introduced motion… an incorrectly introduced motion,” she repeated mechanically, trying to prolong her thoughts in order to postpone the explanation that was approaching.

How long this man is able to remain silent, Nora thought on the street, walking beside Paul. Nothing on his blank face displayed the slightest curiosity or pleasure or worry. She had been afraid that her presence would anger him. Not even that so much, no, not so much. It’s as if I wasn’t here.

Dusk was falling, the snow had stopped, but it was very cold.

“You shouldn’t think I came to look for you.” All of a sudden she started to speak. “I pass by here in front of the courthouse every afternoon. I have a few hours of French in a private school in the neighbourhood. Maybe I didn’t tell you I’m a teacher. We haven’t had time — ”

She stopped in mid-sentence, surprised by her own words. She hadn’t had time to tell him the most basic things about herself — maybe, if her name hadn’t been engraved on the metal plate next to her apartment door, he wouldn’t have remembered that, either — but in a matter of hours she had become his lover. How stupid you are, Nora! She would have liked to fall silent, but now that she had begun to speak and had interrupted herself suddenly, without any reason, remaining silent felt more difficult than before.

“Please forgive me for looking through your papers on the desk. I flipped through your agenda and I saw that you had to be in court this afternoon. At first I didn’t understand what was written there. Your writing is a mess, but I’m used to all sorts of handwriting… I told you I’m a teacher… I tried to imagine what C.C. II meant. It had to be Commercial Court, Section Two. I didn’t think I’d be able to come. Nor could I have done so. I’m usually in class on Tuesday afternoons from three to five. Today I’m taking a vacation… I started to go home, and, I don’t know how, passing in front of the courthouse, I told myself that I could go in… You don’t know how lost I got wandering through all sorts of rooms and corridors. I didn’t think you’d see me. I would have liked you not to see me…”

They had stopped for a few moments in front of the window of a flower shop on Senate Square. Nora was talking and realized that he wasn’t listening. What could he be looking at with such intensity? In the window there were several sprigs of white lilac, as white as the newly fallen snow. Very tender and very droopy, the sprigs were slender, green, bent beneath the weight of their white bouquets. Paul’s gaze had settled there with its usual air of absence, but with the beginnings of a misty smile, which came with difficulty, from far away.

If I leave now, I don’t think he’ll even notice that I’m not beside him any more, Nora thought. And it might even be the wisest thing she could do. She wasn’t angry, she wasn’t hurt, but she was aware that this man was a stranger to her and that nothing could wrest him from his silence. Whatever I say, whatever I do, that stare is not going to change.

She moved slowly away, attentive to her movements, as though she had just awoken from a deep sleep, and crossed the tramline in the direction of the Senate Bridge.

“Nora!”

He called her name for the first time. He was beside her, holding her arm, and looked her straight in the eyes with a gaze that saw her at last.

“Nora, please forgive me. I’m a fool, I don’t have any manners.”

“No, Paul. You’re neither foolish nor lacking in manners. Maybe you’re unhappy.”

He lifted his shoulders. (If he gave me the time, Nora thought, I’d make him get rid of that habit.)

“Let’s not talk about unhappiness. It’s a word I don’t like. And I don’t think I am. More like weary… yes… very weary…”

He continued to hold her arm with his heavy hand, with his clenched fingers, in a grip that was overly emphatic but in which she found — at last! — a flicker of intimacy. They were walking up from the quai, along the December Dâmboviţa River, which the twilight, the cold, the winter all made look a little less dirty. The evening’s first streetlights came on, and their shadows on the water were whitish in the light of this uncertain hour.

“You could easily hate me, Nora. People like me don’t have the right to get mixed up in accidents in the street. I shouldn’t have been the one to pick you up out of the snow yesterday evening.”

“People like you… Why are you talking about things that make me afraid? I’m bewildered, you know. What kind of person are you?”

“A person who last night you were able to believe might commit suicide. Isn’t that enough?”

They had crossed the Schitu Măgureanu Bridge: passersby were few, the street was empty.

And why was he silent now? He was capable of silences that seemed as though they would never end. How far away was he? How could she call him back? Only his hand, as heavy as ever, retained its grip on her right arm. But just when she believed that all was lost, his voice returned, its flat, even tone no louder than before, as closed off as the silence from which it broke free.

“I have nothing to say to anyone and I have nothing to learn from anyone. Do you understand, Nora? Do you understand why I wanted to run away last night? This morning I still didn’t think it was too late to run away. And now, look — even now, there’s still time. Why did you come to look for me? You could have just forgotten that we ever met. You could have wiped yesterday out of your memory.”

“And last night?” Nora asked, mainly for herself.

“Yes, and last night. We’re both mature enough not to regard that kind of random occurrence as a tragedy. I don’t want to offend you, believe me, but I’d rather offend you than deceive you. You need some friendship, some intimacy. You’re making a mistake in asking that of me. I have nothing to give anyone.”

He was still looking straight in front of him, without turning his head in her direction for even an instant. His lips were still twisted in an expression of vague bitterness.

With that stare that doesn’t look anywhere, with that muffled voice that neither rises nor falls, he can probably say the most horrible things in the world without even realizing it, Nora thought.

“You say that you looked in my agenda on the desk. No doubt you noticed that all the pages between today and the end of the year are blank. That’s what you call a vacation. For every blank page an empty day… What do you think I should do with them?”

“Try to give them away.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You said just now that you had nothing to give. Even so, you’ve got some free time… You call them empty days… Give them to someone… Maybe you’ll find somebody who’ll receive them and do something with them…”

He stopped in mid-stride, and beneath the throbbing of the streetlight he gazed at Nora, thinking he could read in her eyes all that seemed unclear in her words.

“If that’s an invitation, it’s better that I tell you that I can’t accept it.”

“It’s not an invitation. It’s advice. Get away. You’ll be less alone. Go and forget, maybe…”

“Forget what?”

“I don’t know. Whatever it is you have to forget…”

He lifted his shoulders again, with the same gesture of negation, of doubt, of uselessness.

“Leaving… I’ve thought about that, too. Yesterday I even went to a travel agent to ask for information. I had taken my passport with me in the morning, for the visas. That’s why it was in my pocket last night.”

Nora saw again the blue passport, the photograph, the identifying signs, the visa page, Hegenrath, 23 juillet. Again it seemed to her that in the name of that border crossing, in that forgotten date of July 23, 1934, lay his whole mystery.

“Then I decided not to go. Why bother? I’m too lazy, it’s too complicated and above all, I feel that it’s useless. I think I probably don’t even have enough money.”

They were on the Elefterie Bridge. He had leaned over the parapet and was looking in the direction of the two major streets that opened diagonally in front of them: on the left, Bulevardul Elisabeta, lighted up by distant neon signs and the red eye of the Number 14 tram that ran downhill towards Cotroceni, and, on the right, Splaiul Independenţei, snowbound, silent, almost un-Bucharest-like. On the stone parapet the snow had piled up into a foamy, fragile roundness. Nora reached out with her hands and took snow in each hand, holding it carefully in her open palms as though it were a fine powder.

“Have you ever been in the mountains in the winter?”

Nora’s question brought him back from who-knew-what far-away thought. His response was delayed by an excessively lengthy silence.

“No, never in the winter. I’ve climbed Peşteră and Omul a few times, but never in the winter.”

“What a shame! It’s so beautiful! Look, that’s where you should go. To the mountains.”

He didn’t even bother to reply. With a lift of his shoulders, everything became useless. Nora persisted.

“Have you ever gone skiing?”

“No.”

“You should try it.”

And a moment later, suddenly taking him by the hand and forcing him to turn back towards her, she looked him in the eyes and said: “Come to the mountains with me. We’ll go skiing.”

This time she was staring at him too intently for him to reply with silence. “It’s childishness, Nora.”

“That’s exactly why I’m suggesting it to you: because it’s childish. Listen to me, Paul: give me your vacation. A minute ago, believe me, I wouldn’t have asked you for it, but now I’m asking you for it: give it to me.”

He didn’t respond. At least he hasn’t said no, Nora consoled herself. On the bridge, the evening wind blew, reawakening from the calm that had surrounded them until now. The white chestnut trees shook snow onto the sidewalk like overly fragile flowers.

They followed Bulevardul Elisabeta downtown. The lights, the first shop windows, the world made swift by frost, gave Nora the impression of returning to the city. She continued talking, grateful that his silence was delaying his reply.

“I’ve never really known what to do with my vacation. I only knew I didn’t want to spend it here in Bucharest. I feel really good living up there on Bulevardul Dacia, but not in the holidays, when I have the impression that everybody’s left town and I’m here alone. Worse than alone: abandoned…”

She tried to say the last word in an ironic tone, but her voice didn’t help her. “Abandoned” was a word that gave her childish tears. Fortunately, he was too tired, or too distracted, to notice.

“I’ve been thinking of getting away, too. I’m not sure where… Maybe Predeal, the ski lodge at Onef… If I’d found travelling companions, I would have preferred to go up to a cabin with a small group… In Ialomicioara or Postăvar or Bâlea… Somewhere remote, anyway… Why don’t you want to be my companion? Let’s be clear: what’s happened between us until now…”

Nora hesitated a moment. She would have liked to say “last night,” but the detailed allusion frightened her.

“… it’s erased, it’s forgotten. It’s ‘null and void,’ as you said in court. I’m suggesting this to you as a comrade. Let’s take off with hobnailed boots on our feet and packs on our backs.”

“Take off?” he repeated. “When do we take off?”

“This evening,” Nora said, only then realizing that his question might be an acceptance, even though he had asked it vaguely, with the same eternal lifting of his shoulders. “So it’s true? You accept? You want to leave?”

“No, Nora. Why do you keep asking? It’s useless. Everything’s useless.”

His voice disheartened her. There was something irrevocably crushed, irrevocably broken, in the exhaustion with which he was speaking to her. And yet, for a moment, he had seen leaving as a possibility…

“Why are you so stubborn, Paul? You’re a man who’s lost every game he’s played. Just now you were saying: ‘I have nothing to give, nothing to lose.’ Well then, since in any case you have nothing more to lose, nothing more to put at risk, accept this departure as a game and let me, too, play on your behalf…”

She stopped on purpose in front of a shop window full of sporting goods, on Bulevardul Elisabeta, at the corner of Calea Victoriei. Skis, skates, steel-tipped poles, hobnailed boots, a whole arsenal of wooden and metal instruments in the display window, glimmered on the artificial snow made of cotton wool and white mats. A mannequin dressed as a skier, with the full range of equipment, ready for the trail, smiled with a happy, movie-star smile. Paul looked, practically without seeing them, at all these instruments that struck him as complicated and, above all, uninteresting.

“Please don’t laugh at me, Paul, but when I’m very unhappy…because it does happen to me sometimes…”

She couldn’t finish her sentence. Again, unexpected tears filled her eyes. Abandoned… unhappy… so many words that were difficult to speak! She tried to correct herself: “When things are going badly for me, when everything turns out wrong, when I feel weighed down by bad luck… well, then I buy myself something new… a dress, or, if I don’t have much money, a scarf, a trinket… Not out of frivolousness nor out of shallowness. More out of superstition. In order to change fate. To outwit it. I think that, if I’m dressed differently, it won’t be able to recognize me, it’ll mistake somebody else for me, or go past without seeing me… Since you’re a superstitious man, why don’t you have a superstition about beginning something new? Why don’t you want to try something you’ve never tried until now?”

… He had gone in unconvinced. Nora spoke for him, took the information, examined with attention the items they were shown. It was a bookstore that had been taken over by sporting enthusiasts. The floors that contained books were abandoned; everyone crowded into the sports department. On the eve of the vacations there was a rustling of escape here, a clinking of skates, a perpetual feverishness. Enormous hobnailed boots, with the edges of their soles clamped between metal pincers, smelled of thick, recently cured hides. Black skis, leaned against the walls with the tips pointed up, looked like so many slender fishing boats brought ashore to dry. Everything had a harsh smell of leather, of waxed wood, of waterproof cloth. Brightly coloured jackets and sweaters lent the whole store a festive, decorated air.

A radio was broadcasting the six o’clock sports report: “Predeal, a 46-centimetre base… Sinaia, a 30-centimetre base… Good skiing conditions…” The voice coming from the speaker mingled with the clients’ questions and the sales clerks’ answers.

“Lift your right arm, okay?” Nora asked him.

He submitted with good will, although with a certain awkwardness. He saw himself in the mirror measuring the length of the skis, which were taller than he was. The tip of the ski reached to the palm of his hand. “It has to be at least 40 centimetres taller than the person who’s using it,” she explained to him, absorbed in her work.

Now and then she looked at him with an expression of concern, as though seeking a sign of approval or consent. He’s intimidated, she thought, seeing him standing with the skis in his hand and not knowing what to do with them. “Intimidated” struck her as a sign of progress; it was, at least, something other than indifference.

“What’s that for?” Paul asked her, seeing that she had in her hand several loops of steel, which she was forcing herself to screw to a flat base that resembled the sole of a skate. He seemed to have asked the question with passing interest, in any case with little perplexity. He regarded all these unfamiliar objects as though at a loss, as he might before the dismantled parts of an engine. Nora hastened to provide him with explanations, which he didn’t understand very well.

“There are two types of binding. Diagonal and straight. I have more confidence in a diagonal binding. It’s not very flexible, but it’s firm. It’s a bit of an obstacle if you try to telemark, but you’re not going to start telemarking in your first days of skiing. The main thing is to have your boot tightly interlocked with your ski…”

A sales clerk called Paul into a fitting booth to try on his ski suit and boots.

“Call me when you’re ready,” Nora said. She was afraid of leaving him alone. The feeble glimmer of interest she had started to read in his eyes must not be lost. This was a game he must play to the end. But wasn’t he going to get depressed? Wouldn’t he, who fled so easily, run away again?

The blue ski suit transformed him. How young he is, Nora thought. Behind his fatigue she rediscovered his undefined boyish expression, which she had noticed last night the first time that their glances had crossed.

“I look ridiculous, right?”

“Yes. Do you think there’s anything wrong with that? You, too, should be ridiculous a few times in your life. You can see it does you good.”

Nora didn’t like the garment. It had misshapen sleeves and the buttons needed to be changed.

“We’ll send it to the workshop right away,” the sales clerk said. “He’ll be ready to go in half an hour.”

“And in an hour at the latest,” Nora added, “he has to be home. But no later, please, because we’re leaving this evening.”

She spoke to the sales clerk but in fact, without looking at him, she was directing her words at Paul. Was he going to protest? Was he going to refute her?

“This evening.”

In the final analysis this isn’t going to be the stupidest thing I’ve done in my life, Paul thought, looking at himself in the mirror at home. The blue cloth cap, with the short, round peak resembled the cap from a school uniform. The ski suit’s large exterior pockets had been closed with marshal buttons that reminded him of cadet school. Like a high-school boy, like a cadet on a reduced term of service… He smiled as he rediscovered old memories.

He strolled around the room for the sheer pleasure of hearing the hobnailed boots on the parquet floor, sounding like his old heavy tread during his nights of sentry duty. How good those nights had been: waking alone at dawn in the frozen countryside of Cotroceni without even a thought, not an expectation, scrutinizing the winter nights, through which sometimes, who knew from where, a screech would come from beyond the horizon, maybe from the mountains, maybe from the forests!

He looked at his work clothes, which he had taken off, his overcoat hanging on a peg. If he could, by separating himself from them, separate himself from himself… If he could, by putting on these new clothes, begin a new life…

It was childish, certainly, but it was a childishness he wanted to believe in.

Who was that young man in the mirror, with the peak of the cap over his forehead, with his throat bare, with the suit of rough fabric buttoned up to the neck. I don’t know. It seems to me that I’ve seen him before somewhere, but I don’t know him.

Up until now, Paul thought, I’ve done so many stupidly reasonable things, and they’ve all turned out badly… I’m finally going to do something really stupid, a completely senseless stupidity…Maybe it’ll bring me luck.

He was still intimidated by the skis. He didn’t know how he had held them on his shoulders while those two poles, with their wooden hoops and their metal points, only encumbered him further. He remembered cinema images of tumultuous ski races, skiers flying through clouds of snow. It had all struck him as fantastic, unimaginable. It was difficult for him to understand how those two long black shafts, with their iron bindings, with the complication of their buckles, screws and loops, could move so swiftly, as though floating over the snow. He wished he could look in the mirror once he was on his skis, as though he were in full flight. Nora had shown him a few times how to slip the boot into the binding, how to secure the ski to his feet. But would he try it?

He lined up the two skis on the carpet, with the boot on top, one next to the other (“Absolutely parallel and very close together,” as Nora said). He took pains to place the steel loop of the bindings around the heel of the hobnailed boots, precisely in the deep groove in the heels. The loop was too new and the spring was stiff. His right leg slid into place, but his left was still resistant. On his knees, with the peaked cap pulled peevishly around to the back, embittered by this resistance, Paul wrestled with this excessively short, or excessively stiff, loop.

In the middle of this struggle, he was caught unawares by the sound of the doorbell. Who could it be? Certainly not Nora. They had agreed to meet at the station a quarter of an hour prior to the train’s departure. Who then?

He was furious at not being left in peace to attach his left boot to the ski, furious that now he had to undo the right one. With the ski on his foot, he couldn’t have been able to get into the entrance hall.

From outside, the ringing continued.

“I’m coming, just wait, I’m coming,” Paul shouted, more irate than before since this time, in a much more serious development, the right boot refused to come out of the binding, while the loop seemed to be stuck in the groove for eternity.

This would be amusing, if I wasn’t able to get out of here. He saw himself imprisoned by these wooden shafts, which he was condemned to haul around behind him and which, being more than two metres long, would prevent him from moving about his apartment, as if he had been nailed to chairs, to a desk, to the walls. No one could escape from this mess. Maybe Nora, if I could succeed in dragging myself to the telephone and calling her. But not even Nora, for — he recalled — the key was in the door, and he wouldn’t be able to open it.

Now and then the doorbell stopped ringing (Maybe they’ve left, maybe they’ve gone away), but later it would start again with the insistence of someone who was determined to wait as long as it might take.

Shortly afterward, Paul succeeded in freeing himself. An idea for his rescue crossed his mind. He had only to undo the boot lace and slip his foot out, leaving the boot attached to the ski. I’ll free the boot later, he told himself, pleased with the simplicity of the solution, which he had thought of only when the situation had seemed most humorous and hopeless.

He hobbled towards the entrance hall, with a shoe on one foot and only a sock on the other.

“Stop ringing, I’m coming.”

It was a man from the flower shop, with a bouquet wrapped in white paper.

“Who’s it from?”

“I don’t know. A lady.”

“Did it come with a letter?”

“No.”

He waited until he was alone, closed the door and only then lifted the paper. It was two bows of white lilacs. He looked at them with a long, strange gaze. Where had they come from? Whom had they come from? He held them in his hand with a murky feeling of lateness, of uselessness. Maybe they were a mistake… Maybe they weren’t for him…

He didn’t have the strength to touch them. Their cold, powerless breath felt far away from him. Flowers of the snow. Yet the simple way they bent over the branch beneath the weight of their bouquets had something both stalwart and fragile… He knew that bending like an approaching face, like a backward glance over the shoulder. It was Ann’s questioning motions, it was her shy expectation when confronted with a silence that had gone on too long…

He let the flowers fall from his hand, either on the armchair or on the couch, he wasn’t even sure where. He had the impression that they were demanding a response that he didn’t know how to give.

Everything around him now had the bitter taste of awakening from drunkenness. The room was in a sad mess, as though from a debauched night. What meaning did these things have, tossed down wherever they happened to have fallen: the open cupboard, the dirty laundry ready to be packed up, the backpack flung across an armchair?

Hampered by the two skis, he remained standing diagonally in the middle of the room. He was ashamed of the stubbornness with which, five minutes earlier, he had been fighting with them to put them on and take them off. Now they lay there like broken toys… How stupid, how miserable he must be to have allowed himself for even one moment to be dragged into this ridiculous skiing trip…

Ann was coming back. The flowers she had sent were her way of asking if she could come back.

“I don’t know, Ann, I don’t know. I think you shouldn’t. I think it’s better if you don’t come.” He spoke these words of resistance aloud, yet he felt that something beyond his own will had replied for him and had accepted. He didn’t know what was going to happen further along and he didn’t even try to imagine possibilities. One thing was crystal clear: Ann was coming.

Maybe she was outside in the street waiting for him right now. Maybe she was looking out the side window of her light blue car in the direction of his window in order to see him appearing there. Maybe she was only waiting for a sign to come upstairs in a few seconds’ time…

She was coming at the last minute, but she was coming. He felt no desire at all to meet her, but neither did he have any will to reject her. Somewhere, beyond all his memories, beyond all the available evidence, his childish yet still vibrant belief persisted that his love was not lost, that an absurd succession of errors and coincidences had disillusioned and separated them, but that everything could be explained, everything could be rediscovered. There was still time, there was still time…

He went to pick up the fallen flowers, and only then did he realize that he was limping, with his left foot in the hobnailed boot and the right one barefoot. The peaked cap, the blue ski suit, the long pants tightened around his ankles with an elastic band, all seemed laughable now.

Enough of this disguise, he thought. He turned towards his work clothes, towards his former life. The game had gone on too long.

He was just about to pick the skis up off of the floor in order to hide them in the bathroom or the bedroom when the telephone rang. It was Nora.

“Don’t forget to bring a clasp knife. Preferably one with a drill. It’s great for the mountains. You don’t need a thermos, I’ve got a really big one. And don’t load up your backpack with stuff you aren’t going to use…”

He tried to interrupt her. He wanted to tell her: Nora, I’m not going, I can’t go; but she continued to give him advice.

“… a big sweater and, if you’ve got one, a woollen vest. Nothing to eat, you understand? Absolutely nothing. I went shopping and got everything we need.”

Then, without a transition, in the same hurried voice in which she had given her departure instructions:

“I sent you two lilac bows. I imagine you’ve received them. I wanted to make you happy. When we stopped in front of the flower shop on Senate Square, you seemed to be staring at the lilac in the window with I-don’t-know-what-kind of sad smile. I wasn’t going to tell you that they were from me, but later I changed my mind. I don’t want you to have to deal with unresolved mysteries just before leaving.”

She hung up, after reminding him that the train left at exactly ten minutes after midnight.

Paul stood still, disoriented and dizzy. For the second time, he would have liked to ask: What are you looking for? What do you want? By what instinct, or stroke of luck, had that woman, whom he had known for twenty-four hours, entered the most secret portals of his life? By what rehearsed coincidence had she taken the place of his lost love at precisely the point where he had hoped to rediscover it?

He held his head in his hands and stood for a long time with his mind blank.

VII

“WE’VE GOT TICKETS TO BRAŞOV!” Nora shouted from a distance when she saw him getting out of the car.

A porter stopped to take his skis from his hand, and he was ready to give them to him when Nora approached him. “Don’t do that. You carry your skis yourself on your shoulders. Who do you think’s going to carry them up the mountain for you?”

She helped him to put on his backpack and showed him how to carry his skis on one shoulder and his poles on the other, with the points crossed behind.

“We’ve got tickets to Braşov, but nothing need stop us from staying in Predeal, or, if you want to, from going farther, in the direction of the Făgăraş Mountains or Bihor. It’s better not to decide in advance. We’ll figure it out on the way.”

He listened to her without resistance, but also without approval. He hasn’t even said good evening to me, Nora thought. She was determined not to take his moods into account.

“Your backpack has to fall straight down beneath your shoulder blade, not hang over your hips.”

As she was adjusting the straps of his backpack on his shoulders, she met, without wishing to, the cold, almost hostile stare with which he was subjecting himself to her advice.

What an obstinate schoolboy stare! Nora thought. Having taught classes of boys, she recognized this uncooperative stare that sometimes rose towards her in defiance from the desks. Be patient, her teacher’s voice murmured to her. We’re going to soften this rebellious face. For the first time she felt sure of herself alongside this man of few words.

The platforms hummed with people. Youthful voices of students and soldiers who were leaving for the provinces gave the whole station a sound of the vacations. Groups of skiers hurried towards the platform where the train to Braşov was leaving. Heavy hobnailed boots resounded on the stones with the regular beat of a march. Among the hurried travellers and the baggage-laden carriages, the skiers separated from one another, jostling each other like so many masts.

At the far end of the platform, next to the engine, were two third-class carriages reserved for skiers. “There’s no place here for civilians,” a boy in a blue jacket on the ladder said to a gentleman in an overcoat and a homburg, who was trying to climb up. Paul listened to the words in silence, and smiled. The boy was right: these two wagons really looked like a military train. Girls and boys dressed in the same clothes, as though in uniform, resembled a young company leaving on manoeuvres. On the last carriage’s ladder, a girl stopped to light a cigarette. For the first time, this gesture struck Paul as lacking in femininity. It was a curt, rushed, soldier-like movement.

“Can you let us get past, miss?”

The girl lifted her head in surprise, looking in his direction, and he glimpsed the glow of her lighter, which was still flickering in her hand. They both burst out laughing. Nora, following behind him, smiled at this first victory: she had finally heard him laugh.

It was a slow night train, resembling a convoy more than a train. It had dozens of carriages which could be heard knocking against each other all the way back to the last carriages, lost in the darkness, whenever the train stopped in who-knew-what nameless station in the middle of the countryside.

“Where are we going? When will we arrive?” He was thankful not to know.

He sat alone by the window with his eyes closed, allowing himself to carried away by the noise of the wheels, which he felt passing through him with the regular beat of a pulse. It was deafening and calming. At times he tried to distinguish a single beat within this din and follow it as it passed with a knocking sound from one carriage to the next, like a wave flowing away.

Suddenly, without any transition in his thoughts, he saw himself on a street corner in Bucharest remembering that it was late and time to go home. He struggled against drowsiness with an acute sensation of pain (no! no! no!) and opened his eyes: through the half-iced-up window he caught sight of the winter countryside and a few sparse trees or houses melting smokily into the night. So I’ve left… So I’ve left, he thought several times, following with his gaze a fixed point in the darkness where it seemed that he might still be able to discern some shred of that which he had left behind. He didn’t know anyone in this skiers’ carriage, but he had the impression that he could speak intimately with all of them. They spoke loudly, they called out to each other by name, they were constantly opening their backpacks to show each other all sorts of utensils and provisions.

“Is that sealskin?” somebody near him asked, stroking the glossy sole of his new skis. Paul didn’t know how to reply and, at a loss, shot a glance in Nora’s direction. She replied on his behalf, explaining that she didn’t have a lot of confidence in sealskin and preferred a rough wax for the ascent. The whole theoretical debate about the ascent heated up, drawing in everyone sitting nearby, who passionately defended different opinions.

“It’s heresy. Yes, yes, heresy!” shouted the defender of sealskin.

“Take a look at what Dumény says,” a very young boy, probably in high school or a first-year university student, asserted with even more stubbornness. Ransacking his backpack, he pulled out a book, which he flipped through nervously until he found the page he had mentioned: “Il n’y rien qui puisse remplacer, dans une ascension difficile, l’usage des peaux de phoque. L’incommodité apparente du procédé est largement rachetée par l’assurance et la stabilité acquises.”13

Nora listened with her patient smile to the reading of entire pages. Alone in this group of impassioned skiers, she remained calm and spoke in a measured voice, without excitement. She really is a teacher, Paul thought, watching her. Everything she said was clear, she asked questions with precision, looking the person whom she was addressing in the eyes. She spoke in an unhurried way about matters she knew well.

Paul thought about the night they had spent together. I had that girl naked in my arms. Yet he was unable to remember her body. It all seemed to have happened once upon a time, years ago. He looked attentively at her lips, which he had kissed, and sought in his memory their forgotten taste. Nothing in her manner betrayed the fact that she was his lover. She spoke with a quiet distance, her great tranquillity harbouring a protectiveness, and paid equal attention to each word. She could be a colleague, Paul thought, looking at her tightly zipped coat, the heavy boots on her feet.

He was sorry for all that had happened. He would have liked to wipe away the useless night of lovemaking that lay between them, which had both brought them together and kept them apart.

Nora watched him sleeping. For a long time she had pretended that she was reading, but now, when she knew that she was protected at last by his slumber, she raised her eyes from the book and watched him.

They had passed through Câmpina, maybe even through Cormarnic. Only the blue night lights continued to burn in the carriage. Everyone seemed to be sleeping, with a single regular breathing. Now and then, from a carriage behind them, came the sound of a harmonica, covered up in a second by the noise of the wheels. Nora waited for it to return. At least there’s one other person in this train who’s standing watch… She felt as though she were standing watch in a shelter.

Paul had fallen asleep with his head resting softly on his shoulder and propped up with his temple against the window. How young he is and how tired he looks! Nora thought. From beneath his closed eyelids, she still felt last night’s misty stare. Only the bitter smile had vanished from his lips, almost without a trace. It pleased her to observe the relaxed state of his mouth, which now could neither soothe nor wound.

“You were born to be a nurse on a night shift,” Grig used to tell her. Nora remembered these words, which had probably been an insult. Poor old Grig! He never knew how to offend me. The truth was that Grig had never known about her habit of watching him in his sleep. He would wake up in the middle of the night beneath her attentive gaze, beneath her wide-awake eyes, which were focused on him, and would ask her in a blustering way: “What do you want?” Her reply was always the same: “Nothing. I want you to sleep.”

She might make the same response to the man who was now sleeping in front of her, and whom she had been watching for such a long time. “I want you to sleep, I want you to forget, I want you to sleep.”

In Predeal the two skiers’ carriages were left half-empty. Nora wondered whether they shouldn’t have got off, too. They could have found spots in the bivouac at Onef, or gone on with the sleigh to Timiş, where so many small hotels had opened. But she was afraid he would have been uncomfortable in the bivouac, and Timiş was too expensive. She counted her money in her mind and remembered that Paul owed her 282 lei for their train tickets. We’ll have to make sure we keep our accounts clear.

Coloured posters and signs in the station announced competitions, both slalom and ski jumping, for the days around Christmas. Instead of Predeal at dawn, deserted, its streets empty, paralysed by deep snow, Nora saw the modern Predeal of the days of the championship, full of cars, dress clothes and acquaintances; a Predeal that was beginning to resemble a casino, a dance hall or a reception room.

From the window of the carriage, her gaze turned backwards in the direction of the peak of Mount Omului, lost in the clouds as though in an immense avalanche of snow. She looked in the blackness for the distant point where she knew the cabin must be. She would have liked to ascend there, or maybe somewhere lower down, in the direction of Ialomicioara, in the direction of Bolboci. But from wherever she might have set out, from Buşteni or from Sinaia, the trek would have had to be made in a group and with serious equipment. She looked with a smile at Paul’s new skis, with the varnish intact, the metal bindings gleaming, without a scratch, without a speck of rust. What would he have done with them on Piatra Arsă?

The train, meanwhile, headed off again. A few skiers prepared to get off at Timişul-de-Jos. “Are you climbing Piatra Mare?” Nora asked them. She knew the trail and, so far as she could recall, it was very easy. She had done it in 1929, in the summer, after her last exam at university, and had slept there in a sort of wooden shed where dozens of beds had been lined up on two storeys.

“There’s a new chalet there now,” someone told her.

“But I don’t think there’s a ski trail,” Nora observed. “Piatra Mare is more of a summer mountain. I’d like something wider, more open.” And farther away, she added in her mind.

Daylight was starting to break and she would have liked the day that was beginning to find her far away.

The windows turned a smokey blue. They emerged from the night as though from a long tunnel.

VIII

THEY CLIMBED UP TO POIANA BRAŞOV in the “caterpillar,” a truck whose wheels were ringed with chains so that it didn’t bog down in the snow.

“I think Poiana is the best spot,” Nora said. “I should have thought of it from the start. It’s open, it’s wide, it has gentle slopes. Have you never been here? You don’t know the Braşov area?”

“Of course,” Paul replied, “but only the part around the Seven Towns. I spent a vacation there a long time ago. In Cernatu, in Satu-Lung…”

And he fell silent with a vague stare that revealed something uncertain beyond the woods, like a lost sense of direction. He would have liked to lift his shoulders with his customary gesture of indifference and distaste, but the weight of his backpack prevented him from completing the movement.

“See how good that pack is?” Nora said. “Wear it on your back for ten days and you’ll lose that habit of making apathetic gestures.”

Only after she had uttered these words did she realize how intimately she had spoken to him. (Last night, when we were leaving, I was still more formal with him.) It was as if the night on the train had made him into an old acquaintance, that night during which, never the less, she had not heard him speak two consecutive sentences. She fell silent, embarrassed by this familiarity, which seemed to be pushing things too quickly. She glanced at her watch and made a rapid calculation: I’ve known him for thirty-one hours. She was alone with him in this open truck that was carrying them through the morning woods, she was alone with him and she didn’t even know if she had the right to lean on his arm.

“In fact, I think Poiana is a good choice. You’ll see. I hope we can make a skier out of you.”

She repeated in her mind the sentence she had just spoken, congratulating herself on the solution she had found: “we can make a skier out of you” was so intentionally ceremonious that it lightened their intimacy with a joking tone. “Yes, I promise you that in three days at most we’ll be skiing all the way down to Râşnov. It’s a good straight trail without too many turns.”

She tried to arouse sporting ambitions in him, a taste for competition, a certain determination. He’s too much of a child for that, she thought, watching him.

There wasn’t a single room available at the Saxon hotel.

“Try in Turcu, try in Cercetaşi, but don’t count on it. Since we got the big snowfall, all of Poiana has been full.”

“Stay here, Paul. I’ll go look. We have to be able to find something.”

She put on her skis, stamped the snow a few times and set off with long strides, propelled by her poles, which she thrust into the snow with regular, oar-like movements. Due to the morning frost, the snow had a thin crust of ice and the skis slid without softness, with a harsh sound, leaving a glassy powder in their wake.

In the big chalets there wasn’t a single place left, while the little villages hadn’t yet woken from their slumber. Even so, Nora knocked on their shuttered windows; but sleepy voices told her to go away.

“You’re tiring yourself out for nothing, Miss,” a man who was shovelling snow said to her from his yard. “You’re tiring yourself out for nothing. We’ve even got people sleeping in the garage.”

Annoyed, she returned to the Saxons’ hotel, not knowing what to do. She could no longer hope to find free spaces downhill in the Prahova Valley if there were so many people here in Poiana, which was more difficult to reach. The only thing to do, maybe, was to go back down to Braşov and take a train from there in the direction of the Făgăraş Mountains. It was more likely that they would find lodging in Bâlea, in Muntele Mic, but she didn’t know the area and didn’t know how long it would take to get there. She could get down to Braşov in half an hour on her skis, but Paul would need at least a week of training in order to do this kind of trail. One didn’t put on skis for the first time to do a six-kilometre downhill race. As for the caterpillar, it would make the return run only in the afternoon and then they risked being caught by nightfall in a train once again. I don’t know if he’ll put up with it, Nora thought, pondering his lack of conviction.

She found him at the Saxons’, in the dining hall, facing a poster pinned to the wall. The Black Church, December 23, 1934. 8 PM. Religious concert. The “Christmas Oratory,” by J.S. Bach. He turned towards her with a glimmer of curiosity, indicating the poster. “Interesting, no?”

“No. Absolutely not interesting. We didn’t come here to listen to oratories. There’s only one interesting thing here.”

And she pointed through the window towards the snow, the fir trees, the white-hooded chalets.

“You’re harsh.”

“I’m harsh because I’ve got big responsibilities.”

She should have been able to say the final words in a joking voice, but looking closely at his eyes, those sad eyes, she thought that she really had taken on a big responsibility. If I leave this man alone, he’s going to run away. She couldn’t have said exactly why, but she felt that any flight might be a disaster for him, and that she was indispensable in preventing it. “Are you in good physical condition, Paul?”

“Really good physical condition?”

“No. Middling.”

“We can give it a try…”

“We have to leave Poiana. There’s not a room here anywhere. For a moment I thought we should go farther, towards the Făgăraş, but it seems to me that it’s simpler to stay right here. Do you know Postăvar?”

“Where is it?”

“There.”

She pointed with her hand to the curtain of clouds that was streaming downhill along the edge of the woods facing them, blanketing the entire horizon.

“Is it high?”

“About 1800 metres. Here we’re at about a thousand. In the summer it’s a three-hour hike. Let’s say we can do it in four. Anyway, we’re not even going all the way to the summit. There are two large chalets on the trail. When there aren’t any clouds, you get an amazing view from there.”

“So, Nora, you’re the girl who falls off the tram in Bucharest, and here you want to cross the Carpathians? Don’t you think that’s a little ambitious? Don’t you think it’s a bit much for those knees of yours, which yesterday you were cleaning with iodine…?”

He stopped for a moment, thinking.

“Strictly speaking, when was that? Yesterday or the day before?”

Nora took his arm, pulling him towards the trail. “Stop counting! We’ll do it another time. It wasn’t yesterday or the day before… It was a month ago, a year ago, many years ago…”

From the doorway they looked again towards the tissue of clouds that was hiding Postăvarul.

“I haven’t seen it for a week,” the porter said. “Since those snows came, I’ve forgotten what the peak looks like. As though it had disappeared completely.”

The trail was blazed with coloured rectangles — one red stripe and two white ones — like so many small flags daubed on the trees and the rocks. They could see them in the woods, in the ins and outs, like the fluttering of a handkerchief. It was as though a travelling companion had gone ahead of them, stopping sometimes to wait for them to follow and to show them the way: over here… over here…

They walked with their skis over their shoulders, crossed behind their backs to maintain their equilibrium. Now and then the point of a ski struck the branch of a fir tree and shook off the snow, with a faint, metallic, rustling spray as if ringing out to all the crystalline snowflakes. There were immense, snow-immured trees, with their branches sagging beneath the burden of the snow, like heavy wings on a spiralling flight. Lonely, one by one, they rose from the rocks, springing up in lines; but their robust trunks, in their white garb, had the unexpected delicacy of the stems of flowers. Everything appeared grandiose, not at all ornamental, as in an immense, decorated park.

Nora turned back towards Paul, who had stopped at a turning point in the path and was taking a long look around him.

“Is it beautiful?”

“It’s too beautiful. A little too beautiful. As if it had been made in advance, prepared beforehand; there are too many trees, there’s too much snow… And the silence, such a colossal silence…”

They both listened, trying to catch from far away, from very far away, a sound, a crackle, a step… But nothing penetrated the vast stillness.

“I can’t get it into my head that it’s real. It’s like I’m in a photograph or a poster. It’s like I’m in that display window last night, with artificial snow…”

Nora remembered the well-equipped skier who had smiled at passersby from the display window. With his new ski suit, a blue scarf around his neck and his skis on his shoulders. Paul was starting to look like a poster boy for skiing. Not even the smile is missing.

“Do you think we’re on the right trail?” Paul asked.

The afternoon passed and the chalet didn’t appear. We should have got there a long time ago, Nora thought. Her boots felt heavy on her feet and she had the impression that their whole weight was pressing down on her ankle. Awaking to a forgotten pain, her left knee began to ache.

“Do you think we’re on the right trail?” Paul asked.

“All trails are good around here,” she replied vaguely.

She wasn’t worried, but she realized that they had strayed from the trail. She knew well enough that it was impossible to get lost in these mountains with their easy trails, and she told herself that whichever way they went they would end up at the chalet. As long as we keep climbing, keep moving upward. They hadn’t seen a sign for a while. The little red-and-white flags had become less frequent, and now they had vanished completely.

“Maybe the snow has covered them.”

“Yes, maybe…”

The light had grown lower. The snow had lost its lustre, and was more ashen than white.

“It’s still too early to stop for the night,” Nora said.

It was a gloomy light that spread over things like a metallic film. The trees were extinguished by leaden shadow that fell over them without a glimmer.

“Do you hear that?”

Paul had stopped short, laying his hand on her shoulder. From somewhere above them came a metallic rustling, a murmuring of branches, a hurried fluttering of metallic wings. Heavy unseen strides or woods ripped away from their roots descended, striking against the branches.

“Could it be an avalanche?”

“Impossible,” Nora said.

She was pale and strained to listen. She felt Paul’s hand on her right shoulder. If only he would leave it there.

The light slid lower. It was almost dark, and yet objects remained visible with an absurd precision. Stoney fir trees stood stock-still around them, as though in a grotto. For a moment everything seemed to be frozen in place, detached from time and shifted into another world…

“We’re on another planet,” Paul whispered. He pulled Nora against him. “Are you afraid, Nora?”

“No. I don’t think so. I’m cold. I’d like to get there.” She spoke in a low, serious, intense voice. He felt the heat of her face.

“Get there? Don’t you want to stay here? Never leave here, never arrive anywhere again… Just stop… just stop…”

Shivering, Nora turned her head towards him. There was something feeble, muted yet warm in his voice. She had just enough time to think, This man wants to die, when a sudden sense of peace enveloped her, as though in a single instant she had grasped all of his thoughts down to their roots. She hugged him and closed her eyes with a drowning sensation.

Somewhere in the air above them, huge waves slammed together and the sound radiated downwards, as though reaching the bottom of the sea. Cold, damp, hazy mist streamed between the fir trees. Unmoving branches resounded with a noise like the clashing of weapons.

“The clouds are coming down from the summit,” Nora whispered.

On her lips, her eyelids, she felt snow sliding over her like smoke.

Paul shook her by the shoulders. She opened her eyes with difficulty. Without a word, he pointed out to her with his hand an object that was only a few steps away, but which she could barely discern, as though in a dream: on the bark of a tree, a white-red-white rectangle.

The SKV^14 chalet was still smoking between the fir trees, as though after a recently extinguished fire. Clouds flowed down towards Poiana like buoyant lava. Isolated puffs of mist lingered, hanging from the cliffs and the trees… Nora and Paul emerged from the clouds, as though from a different winter. From the direction of the chalet they heard voices, a workhorse’s bell, the sound of a saw. Someone shouted out the window: “Gertrude! Gertrude!”

Nora thought of the hot tea that awaited her above and looked for her backpack, thinking of the bottle of French rum she had bought before leaving. It was a heavy, intoxicating aroma. I have to sleep… I have to sleep…

“Are guests welcome?”

“Welcome, except there’s nowhere to stay.”

Nora gave the man who had spoken to her a long, silent look. He was a red-haired Saxon with a small, pointed, slightly fiendish beard, and a cold stare, devoid of hostility but also of kindness. He seemed rough, perhaps as a result of the accent with which he spoke, in correct Romanian, giving a short stress to the first syllable.

“All the rooms are full. There’s not even a free bed. Try up above at the Touring Club. You’ll find something there.”

He had small green eyes, like two slivers of a bottle, beneath bushy, pale brows. Nora regarded him with attention, telling her-self: He has the eyes of a badger! She thought of the stuffed badger she had once found on the teacher’s desk, left behind by the natural science class. She would have liked to say to the man in the doorway, “We know each other, we’ve seen each other before”; but she felt at once the pressure of her backpack bearing down on her shoulders, like a pain awakened from sleep. Her clothes were heavy, damp. Her hobnailed boots felt as though they were made of iron.

“I’m not going any farther. Let’s go in… Let’s rest…”

There was a large dining room with wooden tables and many windows, an immense wood stove built into the wall around which ageless Saxon women, tall, blonde, possibly young, were crocheting. At one table chess was being played; at the other, cards. From an adjoining room came the sound of a game of Ping-Pong. Upstairs on the next floor someone was shouting at intervals the same name to no response: “Gertrude… Gertrude…” Next to the window, a few young boys were waxing their skis, as though polishing weapons. Outside on the deck hobnailed boots could be heard climbing or descending the stairs. Now and then the door opened, and at the appearance of the new arrival guffaws of laughter and shouts of recognition — “Hans!” “Willy!” “Otto!” — rang out.

Nora and Paul’s entrance was greeted with a moment of silence, after which the dining room’s hubbub continued undisturbed and without taking them into account. Next to the wall, the small wooden grandfather clock showed five o’clock.

Nora thought for a moment, trying to remember which five o’clock. Was it morning? Or evening? She came to believe that she had lost several hours in the woods and the clouds.

Someone brought her a large white cup of tea.

“You know, Paul, we should hurry up. We don’t want night to overtake us on the trail.”

She showed him the map pinned to the wall: the trail up from Poiana was drawn with a thick, white line, meandering like a river.

“You see? We’re at 1510 metres. The Touring Club chalet is at 1700. The hard part’s behind us.”

Paul glanced incuriously at the map, which he didn’t understand very well.

“Personally, it’s all the same to me. I’ll go wherever you want, as far as you want…”

Nora gave him a stealthy look from over her teacup. There were light lines on his forehead, which the snow had drawn more deeply. His ski mitts, which he had set on the table, looked like two big bear paws. There was something peaceful, conciliatory, in his eyes, as though in a dream. She seemed to hear him whispering once again: “Never leave here, never arrive anywhere again…”

It was pitch black when they reached the Touring Club chalet. They had done the final part of the trail with their pocket flashlights, guiding themselves more by the shouts they heard from the summit of the mountain than by the signs on the trees, which they could no longer see in the darkness.

The only free places were in the dormitory room.

“If you stay longer, then after the holidays we’ll be able to give you a room with two single beds,” said the man who was showing them around. They followed him in silent resignation.

The “dormitory room” was a long lumber room of wooden beams. An acetylene gas lamp was burning in the middle of the room.

“Is there no fireplace?” Nora asked with indifference.

“Not here. If you want to warm up, come upstairs to the big room. Dinner is also served there. You’ll hear the bell when it rings.”

The beds were lined up in two rows, as in a barracks. Chilly, threadbare beds covered in bed clothes of lumpy, ashen cloth.

Nora took off her backpack and put it on the floor next to her bed.

“Bed number 16,” she said, reading the number painted on the wall. Paul had lain down fully dressed, with his pack at the head of his bed rather than at the foot.

“Do you want to wash?”

“No.”

“Do you want to eat?”

“No.”

“Are you angry?”

“I’m happy.”

It’s not fair, she thought. Maybe he wants to see me complaining. Maybe he wants to get his revenge.

As though he had guessed her thoughts, he caught hold of her hand and drew it towards him.

“I’m not joking, Nora. I really am happy. I’ve been waiting my whole life for this bed, this exhaustion, this night. I want it to be a long night. Promise me it’s going to be a long night.”

He spoke slowly, quietly, with his eyes wide open. Nora caressed his forehead.

“Paul, I think you’ve got a fever.”

She walked towards her bed and looked in her pack for the tube of aspirins, but then she had second thoughts. It’s better to let him sleep. He’s tired.

The dormitory had a smell of damp boots, wet straw, rotten wood, but more penetrating than any of these — like a deep voice, covering all other sound — was a pungent smell of burnt acetylene.

“Isn’t it possible to turn off that lamp?” she asked to no one in particular.

A voice from the end of the room replied in a grumble: “It goes off at eleven o’clock.”

Eleven o’clock, eleven o’clock. Nora repeated the words in her mind without understanding them. It seemed to her that this night didn’t have hours and that the eyes of those iced-up windows would never fill with daylight.

Somebody brushed by close to her and an electric flashlight ambled past their beds and immediately went out.

“New people, new people.”

Now and then the door opened and another shadow entered or left. Shadows, only shadows, Nora thought. She didn’t succeed in making out a single face. Even the voices had something indistinct and monotonous about them, as if they had been a single voice speaking from different distances.

Maybe I’ve been sleeping. In any case, for a while she had not smelt the odour of acetylene, and now she was smelling it again. The lamp sputtered slowly, with the feeble movement of a swing. It wasn’t yet eleven o’clock, since the lights were still on. The voices at the end of the room had fallen silent. They must have gone to eat, or else they’ve fallen asleep.

She coughed. She felt the acetylene like a bitter powder, right down to the bottom of her throat. Everything smelled of acetylene: the blanket, the pillow, her clothes. She put the handkerchief over her mouth as a buffer, but the odour penetrated the fabric in a damp, acrid cloud.

Dizzy, she got up from her spot and stumbled between the beds. She heard hobnailed boots clumping over the floorboards and thought: I shouldn’t make so much noise; but at each step she felt like she was falling and couldn’t stop herself. Next to the door, she groped for her skis and poles.

Outside, she stood on the threshold for a few moments, her mind vacant. She felt the night air on her forehead and temples like a light snow.

She put on her skis and set off slowly, not knowing where she was going. From the big chalet she heard voices, the sound of glasses, laughter. She passed beneath lighted windows, then finally turned towards the right, between the pine trees. The chalet’s dogs got out of her way, snarling as though about to bark. She caressed them on their furry coats and big ears in passing.

Everything slipped away as though into a veil of slumber — both the voices and the lights.

The skis slid roughly, rustling like dry leaves. Nora felt the snow’s resistence locking her knees. She had no idea how long she had been skiing. She had a scratch on her right temple that was bleeding. I must have run into something. But when? Where?

Her flashlight, attached to the top pocket on the left side of her coat, was alight like a lighthouse. Over my heart, Nora thought. She couldn’t remember when she had turned it on, nor when she had clipped it to the buttons of her pocket. She followed the white streak of the snow through the trees. It seemed to her as if there were a tiny creature that was moving up ahead of her and urging her on. It capered like a squirrel. A white squirrel.

At the turns, the edges of her skis scraped the frozen snow like the blade of a penknife. It was a piercing sound, like a short shout. I should stop. I should figure out where I’m going. She didn’t know where she was going; she just knew she didn’t want to turn around. She still felt that horrible acetylene lamp flickering behind her and waiting for “eleven o’clock,” which was never going to come.

She stopped and tried to gather her thoughts. On the opposite slope of the mountain there should be a trail that descended towards Timiş. At this time of night, Nora? Are you crazy?

She seemed to remember having seen somewhere on the map or on a chart giving directions a trail marked in yellow and blue rhomboids… She turned the flashlight towards the tree next to which she was standing and lighted it from bottom to top. Not a sign, not a single one… Maybe I’m asleep, Nora thought. Maybe the sign I’m looking for is one I’m seeking in a dream. Yet she felt the rough bark of the trees beneath her frozen fingers. She had the impression of being on the outskirts of a dream that she was struggling to leave.

Later she found herself again sliding on her skis — and she didn’t know whether this sliding was carrying her back into her slumber or restoring her to wakefulness. The white streak of light preceded her more rapidly than before, ever more swiftly. Her skis suddenly lost their heaviness and soared silently, unimpeded, over the snow. I should slow down, she thought, but her knees didn’t hear her. She was on an open slope that fell towards the shadows of pine trees, barely discernible in the darkness. If I don’t stop, I’m lost, Nora thought, but the voice seemed to come from another Nora, who had remained outside the dream and was observing from there, as though through a window, events that she could not understand. She tried to pull off to the right with a twisting movement, which never the less received no response: her shoulders and knees were like bells without a clapper. The skis, their points close together, pursued the white streak of light at a speed that lifted her off the snows. Nora closed her eyes and was hurled forward with her arms spread, her head landing in the snow. She sensed that in the final moment something had pushed her from behind. She turned a series of downhill somersaults with her skis lodged across each other. Snow scraped her forehead, her hands. The hot taste of blood dampened her lips.

Now she really felt as though she had awakened from slumber. From slumber or from a faint. She saw herself sprawled on the street next to the sidewalk in the middle of a group of curious bystanders. She heard their voices and felt the stare of a man locked on her, a stare she knew. So everything, absolutely everything, was a dream… So we return again to that tram accident, which still hasn’t ended… So I still haven’t succeeded in getting up from there and walking away…

She lifted herself up on her elbow and looked around her. Images that had mingled in confusion for a moment, like a dream within a dream, melted together in the darkness. She didn’t a hear a voice, not a twitch. Nora searched for the flashlight she had lost when she fell, but she didn’t find it.

If I had the flashlight, I’d go back to the chalet.

She was powerless to find it. She was in a broad, open clearing shaped like a horseshoe. I came from up above, she thought, trying to remember the path. She would have had to pull herself, tree by tree, to the upper end of the clearing, and shout from there. Maybe it wasn’t too far, maybe they would hear her… More than anything else, she realized that she couldn’t stay here. A kind of sweet languor was tugging her towards the snow, and she knew that this sleepiness was deceptive.

Both of her skis remained attached to her hobnailed boots, but she had lost her poles in the fall. She pulled herself to her feet by grabbing a tree with her hands. Only then did she realize that she was right on the edge of the woods. A second later would have been too late. And yet, and yet, maybe it would have been a good death, with her temple crushed by a tree. Better than this night without end that stretched before her and which she no longer had the strength to get through.

Let’s keep our eyes open, Nora, and let’s get going. As far as we can. To wherever we can get to.

She felt nothing but the bleeding of the wound in her temple. It was the only sensation that persisted amid the heavy sleepiness against which she struggled: and yet I’m moving, I know very well that I’m moving, I realize that I’m moving. Her knees, her hands, occasionally collided with the trees, but they were blows that didn’t hurt, that left no marks. She no longer felt the skis on her legs. Maybe I’ve lost them; but she couldn’t imagine when.

She seemed to hear, from somewhere, the barking of a dog. She had enough strength to smile. Don’t delude yourself, Nora. Don’t believe it, Nora.

Yet there was light between the trees. Could I have reached the chalet? She didn’t recognize it. It was a small house, with only two lighted windows. A sheepdog, as big as a bear, was on the threshold.

Why isn’t he running towards me? None of this can be real. He should be running towards me.

Someone had come out of the house, hit the dog on the nape of the neck and, taking him by the ears, soothed now, came towards Nora. He had a lantern in his hands, which he held up in front of her face. He looked at her for a while. The light blinded her. Then he lowered the lamp and returned to the house without a word, without asking a question.

“All this can’t be real,” Nora said. It was the same absurd dream, which still hadn’t ended.

Voices were audible inside and then a great silence.

The door opened again and, from the doorway, the man with the lamp signalled for her to enter.

IX

NORA STOOD IN THE DOORWAY for a few minutes, hesitating to go inside. It was lighted, it was warm. She lifted her hand to her throat to touch her woollen scarf and didn’t find it. I probably lost it on the trail.

Next to the window was a table and a lamp with a round white glass cover. Someone was sitting in an armchair and watching her, while the man with the lantern stood in the shadows. He should have extinguished it, Nora thought, looking towards that still-burning light. On the table was a knife, a book with a yellowing cover and a clock showing an impossible time: ten minutes after nine. She looked at each object attentively.

“That clock has stopped,” she said and pointed at it with her finger, without knowing to whom she was speaking.

Then she went to pieces, realizing that she was going to pieces and still having time to think: I shouldn’t fall, I shouldn’t cry. She cried in a loud sob, with her head in her hands, her tears boiling, burning her frozen cheeks, her stiffened fingers.

She heard steps approaching, voices that dwelt above her. Someone stroked her snow-laden hair. A youthful voice whispered half-chanted words as though they were a poem.

“Wanderer tritt still herein;

Schmerz, versteinerte die Schwelle”

She stifled her crying for a moment in order to hear better and to understand, but the tears, held back for an instant, burst forth as though she were falling again.

Two powerful arms lifted her to her feet. Someone pulled an armchair towards the fireplace.

As though through a mist, she discerned big logs reduced to embers burning silently in the mouth of the fireplace. Confident, attentive hands pulled off her snow-dampened coat and slid a heavy, velvety jacket — a hunting jacket — which smelled vaguely of tobacco, over her shoulders.

Nora opened her eyes. At her feet a young man watched her in silence as though he had been looking at her for a long time.

“Sie haben wahrscheinlich den Weg verloren. Wohin waren Sie denn unterwegs? Von wo kommen sie?”15

Nora didn’t reply. The young man had wide blue eyes, a high, sad forehead, illuminated by the light of the fire and a slightly ironic smile. He’s a child, she thought, and turned her head to look for someone else in this strange house, someone of whom she could ask forgiveness for all that had happened. But there was no one, not even the man with the lamp.

“Don’t be afraid. You’ve found shelter here. You need to rest. If you want, you can sleep.”

This time he spoke in Romanian, with a Saxon accent, but without haste, with a kind of ponderousness that separated the syllables one from another.

He stood up. Now that he was beyond the range of the flickering of the fire, his forehead was pale, but his eyes became cheerful in their childlike blueness. Nora remembered that from the doorway she had seen a clock, but she couldn’t recall where to look for it.

“What time is it?”

“Nine-thirty.”

She repeated the words without understanding them. Nine-thirty… What sort of nine-thirty…? Her troubled gaze was awaiting a reply, asking for help.

He leaned towards her again and looked her in the eyes, speak-ing slowly and shaking her shoulders gently, as though he wished to awake her from a dream.

“It’s nine-thirty in the evening. You understand? Today is Thursday, December 20, 1934, it’s night, and it’s nine-thirty.”

Nora lifted her hands to her temples as if to gather her thoughts. “It’s unbelievable. I had the impression that I’d lost whole hours. I thought it must be very late, that the night must be almost over…”

She halted with a dizzy, puzzled motion… The youth was still listening to her. Nora continued with some difficulty, in a voice she herself didn’t recognize. “I came from the Touring Club chalet. There are a lot of people there. I went out for some exercise, some fresh air, to be alone… When I tried to return, I couldn’t find the trail. My skis slipped, I fell. I had a flashlight with me, but it broke or maybe I lost it… After that, I don’t know what happened. I kept going and going…”

She was silent for a moment, then asked, with a certain uneasiness: “Is it far away?”

“What?”

“The Touring Club chalet.”

“A few hundred metres.”

“Could someone accompany me back there, or show me the trail?”

“Naturally, but don’t you think it would be better to stay here? At least until tomorrow morning?”

Nora read a certain anxiety in his stare, although his relaxed, ironic smile persisted. My God, the state I must be in!

“I don’t wish to upset you, but I think you need rest. There’s a free room upstairs. I’ve told them to light the fire.”

Nora ran her right hand slowly across her face, her cheeks. “Do you have a mirror?”

“I said I didn’t wish to upset you and now I’ve upset you. It’s nothing serious. A scratch on your right temple and another one here, on your forehead. There’s a little blood. Let’s find some cotton wool and rubbing alcohol.”

“I have some in my backpack. Up at the Touring Club chalet.”

“We’ll send someone to bring it.”

Nora remained doubtful for a moment, on the verge of accepting the offer; but then she refused it. “No, I can’t stay.”

“Why not?”

“Because I’m not alone. I left without saying that I was leaving. I have to go back. He may have realized that I’m missing, he may be looking for me…”

“Your husband?”

Nora looked at him, surprised by this word, which had never crossed her mind, and which now rendered any reply impossible. Can I tell this child, can I tell him that…?

He didn’t let her finish her thought.

“Please forgive my stupid question. But whoever it may be, he should come here.”

He had an unexpected self-assurance. He dealt with the uncomfortable moment with the discretion of an old man. Only a slight flush in his until-now pale face betrayed his adolescence. What grade is he in? Nora wondered. He wore a long-sleeved red pullover, and a woollen scarf, also red, but of a dark red that was almost black. His blond hair, cut short in the German style at the back and sides, fell over his forehead in front. He must look good in his school uniform.

In that moment the man with the lamp came in the door. Nora recognized him by his gigantic stature. In his arms he carried logs for the fire. He was dressed in a hunter’s sack coat, buttoned up to the neck like a minister’s vestments. His legs were garbed in high boots, while on his shoulders he wore a long cape of an ash-coloured fabric with the hood falling behind him. The blond boy spoke to him in a language Nora didn’t understand. The vowels were heavy and muted. It sounded like Dutch, or a Flemish dialect

… He laughed at this suggestion.

“O nein! Est is nur Sächsisch! Wir beide reden immer Sächsisch miteinander.”16

But the man with the lamp understood Romanian, he even spoke it with a certain difficulty, although he pronounced it clearly. Nora explained to him where he would find her backpack and what he should say to the gentleman who was sleeping at the Touring Club in bed number 15.

I should write him a note, she thought. He may not want to come.

But the man with the ash-coloured cape had pulled on his hood and left. The sound of his boots outside remained audible.

“My name is Gunther Grodeck,” said the blond boy, who had remained alone. “I’m twenty-one years old. Or, to tell the truth, I haven’t turned twenty-one yet.” He fell silent for a moment, with an unexpected darkening of his mood, and whispered: “Unfortunately, not yet.” Then he shook himself out of this sadness and added abruptly, with bitterness, as though someone had threatened him: “But I will soon!”

Nora smiled. “When?”

“In March. At the end of March.”

“We should always be patient. What’s the hurry? Is it urgent?”

A translucent pallor crossed his face without, however, blurring the clarity of his eyes.

“You must be hungry,” he said, with an obvious desire to change the subject. “Please forgive me for not having asked you until now. I’ll go see what I can find.”

She would have liked to stop him (“No, I’m not hungry, I was hungry but it’s passed”), but he had stepped out of the room, leaving her alone.

It was a large room with white, illuminated walls and smokey black beams. On one wall was a red rug and two old carbines. The armchairs and the couch were made of a brightly coloured, flower-patterned cretonne and the curtains on the windows were of the same cretonne. It was a peasant home, with the big open fireplace looking as though it were the entrance to another room. The whole room resembled at once a hunter’s lodge and an entrance hall. On a shelf were a few books in German and a portrait of a woman drawn in pencil. The drawing was delicate and indistinct, as though it had been blurred by time.

Gunther, returning to the room, found Nora in front of the portrait.

“That’s Mama,” he said.

“Does she live here?”

The boy fell silent for a moment. Then, as though returning from distant thoughts, he said: “Nobody lives here but Hagen and me.”

“Hagen?” Nora asked, not knowing who he was talking about.

“Hagen is the man who let you in. The man with the black cape. You should be familiar with the name. Don’t you remember? From the The Ring of the Niebelung? From The Götterdämmerung? Dark Hagen!”

“That’s his name?”

“That’s the name I’ve given him. I think it suits him. Please don’t call him anything else. Here on the mountain everybody knows him by that name.”

“Here on the mountain…,” Nora repeated pensively. “Strictly speaking, I don’t where I am. I only knew of the two chalets on the whole mountain. No one’s ever spoken to me about this house.”

“Because hardly anybody knows about it. We built it this autumn. It wasn’t even ready for the first snowfall in November. Even now, we haven’t got everything ready. At night, in the dark, it’s not so evident, but in the morning you’ll see that many things are missing. We may finish it in the spring, if we still need it. Yes, maybe…”

A bitter expression came over his face again, like a threat addressed to someone who wasn’t present. Then his ironic smile brought some peace to his troubled child’s face.

“You should know that nobody comes in here. Faffner wouldn’t let them.”

“Faffner?”

“Faffner is my dog. You may have seen him outside just now. He’s a big sheep dog. I wonder why he didn’t attack you.”

“Does it seem wrong to you that he didn’t?”

“No. I have faith in him. In our family, in the Grodeck family, Faffner and I have the same dislikes. Faffner hates the people I hate.”

Beneath his childish pallor, there were short, intense outbursts of rage, which lasted only a second and then died out into a great sadness. “It’s been three whole days,” Gunther said, “in which I’ve neither heard a stranger’s voice nor seen a person I didn’t know.”

“Even so, you said that you’re not far from the Touring Club chalet.”

“Not far, but well hidden. Do you know Dreimädlerweise?”

“The Glade of the Three Maidens?”

“If you prefer… I call it by its Saxon name. That’s what I’m used to. Well, my chalet is a little above that, towards the north, the northwest.”

“It’s not possible!” Nora exclaimed.

“Why isn’t it possible?”

“Because I don’t understand anything any more… I thought I was on a completely different part of the mountain, on the other slope. When I left, I know I took the trail towards the summit, with the idea of looking for the trail that goes down to Timiş. I don’t understand how I ended up here.”

“By getting lost.”

Nora repeated his words. “Yes… By getting lost…”

Gunther took a pencil and a notepad and approached Nora. “It seems it’s not all clear to you yet. Here you go! Let’s say that the SKV chalet is here, the TCR chalet is here, Dreimädlerweise is here…”

His pencil drew a thin line on the paper. Nora followed his small improvised map with attention.

“Well, if we join these three points with a line we have a triangle, and sort of in the middle of this triangle, right here, is our cabin.”

Outside, beneath the window, the dog snarled.

“Hagen’s coming back,” Gunther said.

“Alone?” Nora asked, with a fear she could not hide.

“No. If he were alone, Faffner wouldn’t have woken up. There’s someone with him.”

They both listened in silence to the approaching footsteps. Gunther was leaning against the fireplace with his arms spread. He looked towards the door and, in a whispered voice that Nora remembered having already heard that night, said:

“Mancher auf der Wanderschaft

Kommt aus Tor auf dunklen Pfaden…”17

Auf dunklen Pfaden. By dark paths… In fact, Nora thought, looking at Paul, who was coming in the door; in fact, no one has passed through a darker night, by way of darker paths, than that man.

She went towards him to greet him.

“If only you knew all that’s happened!”

It seemed as though she hadn’t seen him in a long time, that she had found him again after a lengthy separation. She wished she could do something for him — make a sign of tenderness or recognition, show mutual understanding — but his silence deterred her. She took his arm to introduce him to Gunther; the young man, however, had exited from the cabin without a word, leaving them alone.

“Come here next to the fire, Paul.”

She made him sit down in the armchair.

“How tired you are! You must hate me! I lead you through the woods for hours, through the snow. How many hours did we hike uphill? It seems like days and nights have passed since we left. Come on, you hate me, don’t you?”

He kept his eyes fixed on the flames in the fireplace.

“No, Nora. I’d like to preserve this trip forever. I wish we never had to go back home.” He extended his right hand towards the blaze as though he would have liked to seize it between his open fingers. “There’s only one thing I’m afraid of: that it’s not real… that we haven’t left… that all this has happened in a dream… the woods, the mountains, the night… that it’s all nothing but a dream from which I could awaken.”

He was speaking in a whisper, as though he feared that his own words might disturb this dream.

“Look at that fire burning there… Does it resemble a real fire? Where, other than in a dream, have you seen a fire so white, so bright…? Look, I pass my fingers through it, and it doesn’t burn them.”

With a swift movement, Nora gripped his hand and stopped him in time. “Paul, you’ve got a fever. You don’t know what you’re saying. You need to go to bed, to sleep.”

He seemed not to hear her and continued speaking in the same muffled voice. “When that man in the black cape came and hit me on the shoulder and told me to come with him, I didn’t ask him anything because again it seemed to me that everything was happening in a dream.”

He lifted his eyes towards her. “And you, Nora, aren’t you with me, too, in the same dream? Where did that wound on your temple come from? And the blood on your face,” he said, “are you sure we’re not fooling ourselves? Are you sure it’s real?”

“Do you want it to be real?” she asked him in a whisper.

“I want it to last. I don’t want it to end. I don’t want to go back.”

“Back where?”

He made a vague motion with his hand, pointing somewhere beyond the window, somewhere beyond the night…

The three of them sat at the table in silence. Only Hagen’s footsteps could be heard, as he brought them bread and wine. A log that had been reduced to embers collapsed in the fireplace with a dull thud. They all turned their heads towards it: the flames, leaping up for a moment, subsided softly into the burning heap of hot coals and ash.

Outside, beneath the window, heavy breathing, like that of a bear, was audible.

“It’s Faffner,” Gunther said. “He can’t sleep. He senses that something unusual is happening.”

The table was between Nora and Paul. He looked from one person to another with a serious expression that caused his blue eyes to lose their smile.

“In fact, it would be difficult for me to tell you just how unusual your arrival here is… how unusual for the three of us, for Hagen, for Faffner, for me…”

He got up from the table, walked towards the window and stood there for a while with his forehead pressed against the glass, looking out into the night. His voice changing, he whispered, as if to himself, as though it were a spell:

“Wanderer tritt still herein;

Schmerz versteinerte die Schwelle

Da erglanzt in reiner Helle

Auf dem Tische Brot und Wein”18

Then he let the silence grow deeper, after which Nora, still whispering, asked: “What’s that?”

“A poem. It was written a long time ago by a young Austrian who died in the war.19 It’s called Ein Winterabend… A Winter Evening…” And, turning towards them again, he asked: “Don’t you think it resembles this one?”

X

THE MORNING WAS CLOUDY, BUT THERE WAS NO FOG. It was snowing softly. The overnight snow had blotted out last night’s footprints and trails.

Paul found Nora outside, talking with Hagen. Faffner was lying at their feet. When he saw him, he slowly stood up, with the majestic indolence of a drowsy lion. Hagen spoke a word to him in an incomprehensible language and the dog lay down on the spot, with its muzzle in front of its paws.

“You slept for eleven hours,” Nora said to Paul.

“That’s all?” In reality he had the impression that he had slept several nights in a single night: a slumber as long as the winter.

Nora motioned to him to speak quietly. “Gunther’s sleeping.” She pointed to a small tower with a window, isolated from the rest of the cabin, where the boy’s room was located.

The cabin was built of stone and wooden beams, with green shutters and red roof tiles, but the two colours were dark: a green of dark pines and a burnt, extinguished red. Only the cretonne curtains brought a touch of light to the windows, with their patterns of bowls of flowers.

Their skis were ready for the trail. Hagen had looked for Nora’s skis in the woods as soon as daylight broke, and had found them far away, in a clearing, with the tips run up against a juniper tree. Her poles remained lost. Using a clasp knife, Hagen had made Nora new poles out of two branches of a pine tree, and had taken the trouble to attach two small loops of hazel fibre at the tops.

“By tomorrow I think you’ll be able to put them to use. Tomorrow I’m going to Braşov to do shopping and I’ll buy you some more.” Hagen still looked dark in the morning light. He wore the same cape of ashen fabric on his shoulders, with the hood hanging down his back.

He resembles a woodsman and a priest at the same time, Nora thought, not daring to look him in the eyes. He spoke quietly, heavily, with a certain awkwardness. His face was pale, framed by a prickly, badly groomed, black beard.

“It’s better if you put on your skis right here,” he said. “You won’t be able to move on foot. The snow’s too deep.”

On his skis, Paul felt as though he were on a narrow bridge, which he was crossing on tiptoe.

“Not like that, Paul,” Nora called out. “Press down on the skis with your full weight. Have faith in them.”

She came alongside him and grabbed him by the shoulders, hauling him downwards. “Let your weight fall on the heels and the soles. You shouldn’t be staggering.”

She showed him how to make his first progress across the snow, taking slow, step-by-step movements.

“We’re on even ground here. So sliding and falling are out of the question. Take it easy and above all place your feet firmly. First push the right ski ahead with the knee bent and the left leg stretched. Like that! Now, pull the left ski even with the other one… good…! And push forward on it… Perfect.”

“That’s all?”

“For the time being,” Nora said, laughing.

Yet Paul was puzzled. “What do I do with the poles?”

“You support yourself on them, but not too much. You help yourself more when you drag your back leg forward. Take a few steps as I’ve shown you, and check that your movements suit you in a natural way. Let’s go.”

Paul felt the teacher’s eyes on him. As long as I don’t make a mistake, he thought, looking straight at the tip of his right ski. He was like a pupil who was failing the class.

He set out slowly, paying careful attention. The snow was soft, spongy, and at first he had the impression that the skis were sinking, but then he felt them sliding noiselessly forward, meeting no resistence. Nora came behind him, checking his movements.

“Your arms are too far apart. Hold them closer to your body, almost stuck to it… Yes, that’s better, but now they’re too stiff… Move more freely, more simply…”

Hagen accompanied them for a while to show them the trail. Then, after leading them out of a small glade, he stopped.

“I’m turning around here. Pay attention to where you’re going so that you’ll know how to get back here. Gunther usually eats at one o’clock. If you’re late, he’ll have to wait for you.”

He stood there with Faffner and watched them for a few moments as they left.

“You know that man frightens me?” Nora asked Paul in a whisper.

“I know. It’s his dark cape.”

“No. The eyes. His blue eyes.” And then, after another silence, surprised by the resemblance that she had only just discovered, she added: “He almost has Gunther’s eyes. It’s the same blue.”

They both turned their heads. Hagen, unmoving, was in the same spot. With the dark cape on his shoulders he looked, from a distance, like the trunk of a burnt tree.

The ski run in front of the Touring Club chalet was full of people. Saxons from the SKV Club had also arrived in rowdy groups. On the biggest slope, which descended from immediately below the mountain’s summit, a military team was training for the competitions in Predeal. From a distance they looked like black stars that had fallen on a sky of snow. The entire landscape was undulating with huge white drifts that rose towards the sky and stopped short in movements that had frozen while in flux.

Nora and Paul stopped at the crest of the wave.

“Here you have to go down, Paul.”

“You think so?”

“I’m sure.”

Flustered, he glanced at the slope that opened in front of him. Right away it looked threatening. I’m going to fall, he said to himself. He would have liked to ask for a respite, an adjournment. Wasn’t this slope too hard for a beginner? Wouldn’t it have been more appropriate to start with something simple? He raised his eyes towards Nora, but he didn’t dare say anything to her. In her face he read the pitilessness of the teacher who has asked a question and now expects a reply.

“Look here, Paul. You bend your knees like two bows. You understand? Like two bows.” She looked him straight in the eyes and pronounced the words syllable by syllable. “The poles facing backwards, as far back as possible. To make sure, put your hands on your hips. Like that. Head facing forward, shoulders forward, body bent… Bend a little farther… Like that… The skis next to each other, perfectly parallel… Now go…”

I still have time to stop, Paul thought. I still have time to stop on the spot, I still have time…

The skis set off slowly on their own. Then he suddenly had the sensation that they were no longer on his feet. A wave of snow came sturdily towards him. I’m falling! Something deafening, a thunder clap or a deep silence, covered everything.

He woke up abruptly. He was standing motionless on his skis. Maybe I didn’t go anywhere. Maybe it just seemed that way. He looked around in search of Nora in order to convince himself that in fact he had stayed next to her, and that this whirlpool from which he was emerging breathless was no more than a moment’s vertigo. She called to him from far away, making a sign with her right hand in the air.

“I really did it,” Paul said, measuring the impossible distance with his eyes.

In an instant Nora was beside him.

“Bravo, Paul. I’m delighted for you. I’m proud of you.”

They were on the crest of a wave of snow. Before them lay a new slope, longer but less steep than the previous one.

“Shall we go for it?” Nora asked.

“Let’s go!”

He pushed off without waiting for her to signal their departure. Again he had the sensation that his skis were losing their weight and that he was rushing before them, floating or falling. There was a sensation of intense brightness. Something struck him in the face and blinded him. For a moment he didn’t know whether he was still floating, or whether he had fallen. Then he felt that he was rolling down the valley, his head in the snow, his feet in the air and his skis locked together. When he managed to lift his face out of the snow, Nora was bending towards him, laughing.

“What happened?” he asked, bewildered.

“Nothing more than what you see: you fell.”

“Is it serious?”

“It’s not serious. It’s solemn.”

She helped him get to his feet and brush off the snow.

“You’re laughing at me.”

“No, my dear Paul, you’re talking too seriously. In skiing, after the first fall, nothing is solemn anymore. You learn to ski by falling. From here on in, you’re going to fall dozens of times, hundreds of times. That was your first fall.”

He glanced backwards at the slope he had got only halfway down: he had left behind two parallel trails in the snow, resembling two rails of a train line, interrupted at the point where he had fallen, as though his skis had jumped the track. “I don’t understand why I fell.”

“Because you’re keeping your knees rigid. Because your shoulders are too far back. Because you’re throwing your hands out in front of you.”

“Are there any other reasons?”

“There are.”

For an instant she looked him straight in the eyes, and then she burst out laughing, and suddenly they were both laughing. I haven’t seen that smile before, Nora thought. She would have liked to extend her hand to him, with an affectionate enthusiasm for the young man she had discovered that morning. Yet she stopped herself just in time. “Enough joking. Now let’s get moving.”

She spoke these words, “calling the class to order,” as she might have cracked her pencil on a desk in the classroom to silence her pupils.

He gripped her arm, pinning her in place. “I want to say something to you.”

“I’m listening.”

“You’re a teacher.”

“Yes, I am.”

There was a melancholy smile on her face. “What do your pupils call you at school?”

“I don’t know. Probably ‘Miss French Teacher.’”

“All right, I’m going to call you the same thing. ‘Miss French Teacher.’ My Miss French Teacher.”

“No. You’re going to call me something simpler: Nora. Or, if you wish, my Nora.”

She turned abruptly on her skis and took off down the valley in a cloud of snow.

You’re ridiculous, Nora, you’re ridiculous. Why do you say such stupid things? Why do you let your mouth run away with you? What will that man think of you? Where’s the sporting pact you’ve sealed with him? Where’s your discretion? Where’s your modesty?

She wanted to cry. She had reached the bottom of the ski hill, next to the woods, in a single instant, and she would have liked to hurl herself onto a run that was ten times as risky in order to forget, to flee from herself, to punish herself. She could barely make him out, motionless, at the point where she had left him, lost among skiers who were climbing or descending past him. She supposed that he had followed her blinding descent with his gaze and that he still had his eyes fixed on her, for now he had lifted his peaked cap and, waving it, was signalling to her. From the summit of the mountain the military team was descending in a group towards the chalet, cutting diagonally across the hill like an avalanche. The cloud of snow unleashed by their passage covered him as well, and now he was nowhere to be seen. Nora was seeking him out, paying careful attention to the distant line where she knew him to be, when suddenly she saw him springing up much closer to her, on a rise that he had somehow climbed over from the other side and was now swiftly descending.

“Too fast,” Nora said. “Much too fast!”

She saw him falling and somersaulting towards the valley. But he stood up immediately, white with snow, and set off again without brushing himself down and seemingly without glancing ahead in the direction in which he was going. He collapsed after the first five metres and then Nora looked for him in vain. Groups of skiers cut across his path and hid him from sight.

I should go up ahead and help him, she thought. But he reappeared again, much closer than before, only a few metres away from her. At that speed he’s not going to be able to stop. A step away from her, he let himself fall to the snow.

“How many times did you fall?”

“Five times.”

“How is it?”

“It’s…” He didn’t know how to continue. He looked for a word and didn’t find it. Then, smiling, he said: “I’d like to cry out. I’d like to yell.”

“Yell, then.”

He turned his head towards the woods, ran his hand over his throat and hauled up an extended yell: “Uuuuuu…!” No one replied from the woods, but his yell resounded far away among the fir trees.

“And now,” Nora said, “let’s return to more articulate conversation. Tell me, how is it?”

“I don’t know how to say it. It’s something that surpasses language. It’s something intense. It’s a vast light… I think I’m drunk.”

He threw himself down in the snow with his arms spread and rolled over several times, as though he were rolling in the grass.

A skier came down from the Touring Club chalet and stopped beside them. “Nice weather?”

It was the red-haired Saxon they had met the day before at the SKV chalet. The man with the eyes of the badger, Nora recalled.

“So you found a place to stay at the Touring Club? To tell you the truth, I didn’t think there was much chance that you’d find anything. I didn’t want to make you feel bad, but…”

“We’re not staying at the Touring Club,” Nora said, cutting him off.

“Not at the Touring Club? Then where?”

She made a vague upwards gesture in the direction of the Glade of the Three Maidens. “A cabin up there…”

“Gunther’s cabin?”

Nora didn’t reply, but the man asked again, in disbelief: “Gunther’s cabin?”

There was amazement in his voice, which failed to register in his small, metallic, inexpressive eyes, but which his dense, grizzled eyebrows articulated with an exaggerated arching. “If Old Grodeck had known…,” he said pensively. Then he set off on his skis.

Nora did not have time to ask him either who Old Grodeck was, or what would have happened had he known. What odd things, she thought.

Now they had to climb back up the entire slope. Nora showed Paul how to make broad zigzags from right to left with the edge of the ski pushed obliquely into the snow. “Climb with small steps. Make each stride a step that you’re cutting for yourself in the snow.”

He moved forward, but when he reached either the right or the left edge of the ski hill and had to change direction he was afraid of being caught by the valley and sliding backwards downhill. He was supposed to turn his skis around with a scissor movement that Nora illustrated for him step by step but which, although in theory it struck him as very simple, he couldn’t make. There was a moment when one of the skis had to be lifted into the air, turned quickly and brought alongside the other, everything happening in a single second. Up to this point, things went very well, but in that instant of suspension on a single ski, Paul would lose his balance and fall.

“I give up,” he said, after a few attempts. He hurled himself down into the snow and sat with his arms crossed.

“I, however, am not giving up,” Nora replied. “Please get up and make the turn correctly. We’re not leaving here until you do it.”

They returned to the cabin after one o’clock. Paul was ravenous, exhausted and enthusiastic. “We should have stayed on the ski hill. We would have found something to eat at the Touring Club.”

“You know we can’t do that. Gunther is waiting for us.”

Gunther was not waiting for them. Hagen told them that the boy couldn’t come down for lunch and had asked them to eat without him. “He’s tired. He didn’t sleep all night. He needs rest.”

Nora was about to go up to his room in the tower to see him, but Hagen asked her not to. “It’s nothing serious. Let’s leave him to sleep. If he gets some rest, he’ll come down in the evening.”

“Odd things happen in this house,” Nora said over lunch.

“Odd?” Paul asked. “I don’t see it like that.”

“Then you don’t see anything, my dear.”

“You’re right. I’m giddy, I’m drunk.” Before his eyes he saw only the white stretch of the snow and himself flying over it. He closed his eyes and tried to abolish all thought, as he did in the lightning sensation of soaring, flying, falling. What he couldn’t imagine, couldn’t conjure up, was the deep silence that invaded him in that moment.

“Fortunately, it doesn’t last,” he said suddenly in a loud voice.

“What?” Nora asked, surprised.

“I don’t know how to express it. The falling. The flying. The impact. All in a single second. If it were two, I might die.”

Nora regarded him with a soothing smile. She, too, knew this delirium of the first day of skiing, and she knew it was going to pass. But it made her happy to see that outbreak of brightness on his tired face. It pleased her to listen childishly to his elation.

“It’s dizzying, Nora. Nothing in the world, not wine, not music, not love… no, not love, nothing, nothing brings me so much light. I wonder whether it’s possible, I wonder whether this is me, I wonder whether this miracle is happening to me.”

How young he is, Nora thought. His excessive happiness, his messy delight, frightened her a little. Next to him, she felt too rational, too settled. Maybe too old, she thought, with her teacher’s smile.

Paul wanted to leave right after lunch. He could hardly wait to get back to the ski hill.

“Let’s hurry while it’s still light. It gets dark at four.” He slid forward on his skis with long strides. From behind, Nora corrected his posture, making the same observations again and again: “Arms closer together… Head up… Don’t look at the skis… Look straight ahead…”

On all sides, the horizon was closed off by a white screen of clouds. Nora stopped short.

“What’s the matter?” Paul asked, surprised to no longer hear her teacher’s voice.

“Nothing. Listen.”

It was snowing all over the Burzenland, over the whole Timiş Valley; tons and tons of snow were falling every minute in the endless silence.

“I’ve always been terrified by the thought that I could die by drowning,” Nora said. “I think the Flood must have been disgusting. The whole world dying of drowning. I can hear them gurgling, struggling in the muck, in the putrefaction. But I’d like a snow-flood. To die, to fall asleep in the snow, nothing could be more pure and beautiful. That’s the death I’d choose.”

“Maybe,” Paul said. “But I’m choosing life. Yesterday I’d gladly have died. I think I even suggested it to you. Today, though, I want to live.”

“Me, too,” Nora laughed.

They looked at each other earnestly, as though making a pledge, or taking a significant joint-decision.

When they got back to the Touring Club, Paul immediately wanted to start over on his route from that morning; but Nora stopped him. “We have to set up an instruction program. I’ve been toying with you up to now, but now it’s time for you to learn.”

Paul’s enthusiasm plummeted again. “What do you want me to learn? I can get by with what I know.”

He spoke these words in an almost blustering way. Nora saw in him a kind of lazy pupil’s ill will that she knew too well from school to be afraid of it or to get angry. She preferred to ski away, as though she hadn’t noticed. “We’ll start by practising the snowplow. You use the snowplow to brake. It helps you to reduce your speed, of course, and, if you’re not going too fast, to stop. The movement is very simple. Instead of skiing with your skis parallel, you open them up at an angle, meeting at a point in the front. Watch carefully how I do it, then we’ll try it together.”

Nora set off in her downhill posture, which she had shown him in the morning, but, when she began to gather speed, she bent her knees more deeply and separated her skis behind her, bringing them closer together at the front. With the tips together, the skis opened like the blades of a pair of scissors, while her forward progress slowed automatically, halted by her braking movement.

“Is that hard?” Nora asked.

“No. It looks simple to me.”

Yet it turned out to be harder than it had looked when he was watching, for he fell on his first attempt. In the instant in which he tried to separate his skis, he felt an unexpected resistance in his ankle, as though someone had placed a clamp there. He got up out of the snow without a word and set off again. His skis seemed indescribably light, the snow was soft and deep, the sensation of hurtling down the valley was like a delicious soaring — but Nora’s voice called him to his obligations: “Snowplow! Snowplow!”

He tried again to open his skis, and again he felt the same resistance, which flung him to the ground.

He was beginning to feel spiteful towards Nora, towards the snow and, above all, towards that damned snowplow that didn’t work. “Why did I fall?”

“Because you made a mistake. Things are very simple in skiing: if you make a mistake, you fall.”

She had hoped to extract a smile from him, but he didn’t take it as a joke. With the peak of his cap rammed down over his eyes, his jacket covered in snow, his skis crossed, he was like an infuriated pupil.

“Let’s start again, Paul. Pay more attention. You have to place all of your weight on both skis. Don’t turn your ski on its side when you enter the snowplow: leave it flat with the entire sole on the snow.”

Paul rebelled.

“No, Nora, I don’t want to anymore. It’s too complicated. I don’t want to learn anymore. I know enough to go downhill. I want to fall. Like I did this morning.”

He set off quickly, fearing she might stop him, with his skis parallel, leaning forward over them, and with his arms spread like two wings. After his initial burst of speed, he felt that he was no longer master of his movements, that he could no longer even turn around, nor stop, and that he was caught in a dizzying flight. Again, the same intense white light overwhelmed him. There was no longer anything beyond that light — neither him nor the world. Random images — a tree, another one, a girl, a red pennant — brushed past him at an insane speed and perished behind him as in a dream. He didn’t even realize that he had fallen. For a few seconds it seemed to him that the flight was continuing. There was an enormous light inside him that refused to go out.

Nora was above him, silent, waiting for him to wake up. Laughing, Paul asked her: “Now you’re going to scold me, right?”

“No.” She flung herself down in the snow alongside him and took a friendly grip on his arm. “Listen, Paul. There are two great dangers in skiing: believing that it’s too hard and believing that it’s too easy. Skiing is neither as hard as you thought it was yesterday, nor as easy as you think it is today. What you’re doing isn’t even an act of courage: it’s madness. Skiing doesn’t mean skidding blindly down the valley. You have to be in control of your speed. To be able to stop when you want to. To be able to turn when you want to. If you want to commit suicide, just tell me. I know other methods that work better.”

She spoke in her level, teacher’s voice. Paul listened to her submissively.

“Tell me what you want me to do and I’ll do it.”

“You have to listen to me. It’s indispensable that you listen to me. I want to make a good skier of you. It’s possible that your whole life from now on will depend on this…”

It didn’t strike him as exaggerated to hear her talking like this. In fact, if skiing was this enormous light which in truth he had experienced for only a few seconds, then maybe his whole life could begin again. “Shall we go back to the snowplow?” he asked, resigned.

“Yes, let’s go back. And we’re not going to stop until we know it. Once, ten times, a hundred times. Do you promise?”

“I swear.”

They came back to the cabin late, in the dark. Hagen was waiting for them in front of the house with a lamp that he was swinging between the pine trees in order to show them the trail from a distance. Faffner greeted them with friendly growls.

Inside the house it was warm, the fire was burning and tall flames filled the fireplace. A smell of tea and tobacco gave the warmth a sleepy, aromatic air.

“Where’s Gunther?” Nora asked.

Hagen did not reply to the question, but he passed Nora a piece of paper. “Gunther sent you this.”

Nora unfolded the sheet and read: Hagen said that you asked about me. I thank you. I’m sorry I won’t be able to come downstairs tonight, either. Please stay here. I’m happy that you’re here. I think that tomorrow I’ll be able to see you.

Nora, lifting her head, directed an enquiring gaze at Hagen. “Is he ill?”

“He’s not ill. He’s tired.”

It was obvious that he didn’t want to say anything more. Nora regarded him with a certain fear. Why did I stay here alone with him? Paul had gone upstairs to change out of his ski clothes, which were damp with melting snow. She heard him moving around in the upstairs room. A stupid but reassuring thought passed through her mind: If I scream, he’ll hear me.

Hagen pulled his cape over his shoulders and remained standing in his heavy black jacket. He has such blue eyes and yet he’s so dark! Nora thought. She was next to the bookshelf, in front of the same delicate portrait of a woman that she had also looked at last night.

“Is that Gunther’s mother?”

“Yes. That’s young Mrs. Grodeck.”

She has Gunther’s eyes, but not his gaze, Nora thought to herself, remembering the expression of tenderness with which the boy had looked at this portrait.

“Doesn’t she come here?”

“Who?”

“Mrs. Grodeck. Young Mrs. Grodeck, as you call her.”

Hagen did not reply. The question appeared to trouble him. “I’m going to see what Gunther is doing,” he said suddenly. “He may need me.”

Nora walked to the window and remained there for a while, plunged in thought. She didn’t even hear Paul when he came down the stairs and approached her. She gave a frightened shudder as he put his hand on her shoulder.

“What’s the matter, Nora? What’s happened?”

“You startled me. I didn’t realize it was you.”

“Who else could it be?”

“No one, of course. But there are so many strange things in this house.”

“What sorts of strange things?”

“I don’t really know. The boy in the tower who doesn’t come down and whom we’re forbidden to see. The man in the dark cape who refuses to answer questions. The portrait nobody’s allowed to ask about…”

Outside, the dog, hearing voices, came through the snow until he was beneath the window and stood up with his paws against the wall, looking at them through the glass with his good, watery eyes. Nora opened the door for him. “Come in, Faffner. Come inside. Maybe you can tell us what’s going on here.”

Sleepy, the dog allowed his bearlike fur and his big muzzle to be stroked. Next to his half-torn right ear, he had a scar that reached his neck. “You’re like a man who’s suffering,” Nora told him, and pulled him towards her armchair, close to the fireplace.

With Faffner next to her, she felt protected without knowing against what. She would have liked to stay in the armchair for hours on end…

The evening meal lasted a long time. Only the two of them ate, served by Hagen, in silence that was interrupted only by the tinkling of the plates and a few of the dog’s growls from in front of the fireplace.

“If you go to bed,” Hagen told them, “there’s no need to put out the small lamp on the bookshelf. It usually stays on all night.”

They heard him closing the shutters on the windows and the doors.

Is it that late? Nora wondered. Do we really have to go to bed?

A discomfort came over her. She remembered that even Paul was a stranger, or at most a friend. Their night of lovemaking, their only night of lovemaking, had been a coincidence, a misunderstanding, a forgotten event to which she did not wish to return. Since their departure she had been united with him, with the best possible goodwill, by a sporting pact, a pact between buddies, and she was determined to keep it that way. Last night they had slept side by side like two soldiers after a long march, felled by exhaustion. But now she was afraid of the coming night, which would find her awake, with her eyes open.

For the first time it struck her as wrong that they hadn’t stayed in the dormitory room at the Touring Club. There, at least, things would be clear, without danger, without temptation…

“It’s late, Nora,” Paul said, coming towards her. “Shall we go to bed?”

He posed the question with simplicity, without anxiety, without impatience. There was something assured in his manner, something conciliatory.

She didn’t know how to reply. She wasn’t hesitating, but neither could she find the word or gesture to match the situation.

“Let’s take things as they come,” he went on. “Let’s leave them to their own rhythm, all right?”

He enclosed her in his arms and kissed her slowly on the eyes, on the cheeks. His kisses were not passionate, but they were deep, warm kisses.

XI

TWO DAYS LATER, NORA LOOKED FOR the red-haired Saxon from the SKV chalet at the Touring Club. She was determined to talk to him and ask him about the “Grodeck mystery.”

But the man was nowhere to be found. There were dozens of skiers on the hill — many more even than the day before — and it would have been difficult to make out the man with the eyes of a badger among the crowd. She didn’t even know his name.

“When we’re going back for lunch, we should make a detour to the Saxons’ chalet. We might find him there.”

“Let’s do it!” Paul accepted.

“But you should realize that it’s not easy. To get there, we’ll have to go down a very fast slope, and the trail is full of people. You’ll run into somebody at every step. I’m only taking you with me if you work hard all morning.”

Paul greeted this fierceness with amenability. I’m going to learn, I’m going to learn, he murmured in his thoughts. He found huge, childish ambitions inside himself. He wished he could amaze Nora, disarm her, surpass her. His snowplow was going very well, especially at slow speeds. Yet at higher speeds it was impossible for him to lift his skis out of their path. He had a clenching sensation in his ankle. He looked with an odd, powerless fascination in the direction of his ski boots, he realized that he was locked into a descent that was accelerating at every second, and yet he was powerless to transmit to his skis the simple pressure that would have made them skid to the right or the left and reduce his speed.

“We have to learn the turns,” Nora said. “Let’s start with the simplest one: the snowplow turn. It’ll be good enough for our lunchtime route. This afternoon or tomorrow, we’ll try something harder.”

Paul found even this one exceedingly hard. The theoretical explanation was always simple (“Let your weight fall on one ski, loosen the other one and the turn happens automatically”), but when he had to apply the elementary things she taught him, he came up against unexpected, and for him, incomprehensible, obstacles. He worked all morning under Nora’s inspection, repeating incessantly the same turns to the right and the left. It was a rigorous, meticulous training, devoid of grace or glory. Where was his heroic enthusiasm of the day before? Where was his cry of freedom, his explosion of ecstacy?

Nora put an acerbic halt to his most timid expressions of delight. “That’s not it. Go back and do it again.”

She obliged him to start the same movements dozens of times. She gave her orders in a dry, curt, persistent voice. Like a fanatical army officer, Paul thought spitefully, though he had decided to accept all of her comments without rebelling.

“In position! That’s not it. Do it again.”

He gave her a furtive look. She was serious, attentive, severe. Nothing in her manner recalled the warm, sensual and slightly sad woman who had slept all night in his arms. There, on the ski hill, this vision even struck him as impossible. It was a troubling, dreamy, idle vision that he had to banish from his mind.

This girl in the blue jacket, with her confident movements and firm voice, was a wise person.

Paul stopped in the middle of an exercise he had started, approached Nora and clapped her on the shoulders in a boyish way.

“What’s going on?” she asked, surprised.

“Nothing. I just wanted to tell you that you’re a good comrade.”

Nora remained a little puzzled, since the unexpectedness of his gesture did not fit with the seriousness of her thoughts. At last she replied with simplicity: “I know.”

Paul fell countless times on the way to SKV chalet. Nothing that he had learned on the hill served him now. Things that he had succeeded in doing perfectly correctly up at the Touring Club now became impossible again.

Groups of skiers were coming down from the summit along the same narrow trail marked with yellow triangles. He heard shrieks behind him, far off in the distance, and because he couldn’t get out of their way in time, he threw himself into the snow at the edge of the trail, and let them pass. He reached the SKV chalet white from head to foot, exhausted by too many falls, yet delighted that he had completed the trail.

“Don’t say anything to me, Nora. I know, I know: I made thousands of mistakes. I promise you I won’t make them next time.”

The man with the eyes of a badger was in the yard in front of the chalet with an axe in his hand. He was splitting large oak logs for firewood.

“Aren’t you staying with Gunther any more?” he asked, catching sight of them.

“Of course,” Paul replied. “But we’ve come here to warm up. Why don’t you come inside with us and drink a glass of mulled wine?”

The three of them entered the chalet, the same chalet that had initially struck them as being so hostile. Even the man with the eyes of a badger was friendlier now.

“So how’s our painter doing?” he asked.

“What painter?”

“Gunther.”

“He’s a painter?”

The man burst out laughing. He had an odd laugh, which wrinkled his whole face but left his eyes expressionless, like two tiny balls of glass. “That’s what he says: that he’s a painter.” Then he became serious for a moment and said, shaking his head: “That lad is the disgrace of the Grodeck family.”

“Do you know the family?” Nora asked.

“Who doesn’t know them? The Grodeck family!” He spoke these three words with solemnity, with respect, as though cowed by their importance: the Grodeck family. “Think carefully. It’s impossible not to have heard of them. Grodeck factories. Grodeck mills. Grodeck forests.” He was pensive for a moment, as though pondering it all. “Their fortune is huge.” He made this statement with boundless respect, with a sort of stunned terror. “I don’t know what’ll happen to the Grodeck family and all of their fortune if it ends up in Gunther’s hands. That lad’ll lay waste to it.”

“Is it his fortune?”

“Well, I don’t know the answer to that. No one does. When the Grodeck family wants to keep quiet, nobody gets a word out of them. Still, they say the fortune is coming to the boy. Look, when young Mrs. Grodeck died…”

“Gunther’s mother?”

“Yes.”

“She’s dead?”

“Yes. Last summer.”

Nora saw again in her mind the portrait on the bookshelf and remembered the boy’s intense stare. “Does she live here?” she had asked him. Now the question made her cringe. She would have liked to wipe it out of her memory and beg for forgiveness.

The man in front of her continued to tell his tale. It was obvious that the subject of the Grodecks fascinated him.

“When, as I was saying, young Mrs. Grodeck died, Gunther was in Munich. They say he was studying painting. They brought him home, but shortly after the funeral he left again. He fled. The family would have liked to keep him here and make an engineer out of him… The Grodeck family needs an engineer. A fortune like that doesn’t look after itself. But I’ll tell you, the boy’s crazy. He went up into the mountains to build the cabin you’re familiar with in the woods. From then on, nobody saw him. He didn’t receive visitors. That’s why I was so surprised when you told me you were staying there. I couldn’t believe it. If you’d known Old Grodeck…”

“Who’s Old Grodeck?”

“Gunther’s father.”

“Why do you call him ‘Old Grodeck’ and his wife ‘young Mrs. Grodeck?”

The question surprised him, and he became thoughtful for a moment. “You’re right. I’ve never thought about that. But they’ve always been called that in German. Der Alte Grodeck and Die Junge Frau Grodeck. I don’t know why. To tell you the truth, she wasn’t really very young and he wasn’t excessively old. They were first cousins who got hitched. All the Grodecks called her, ‘Miss.’ The fortune was hers, which is why people say it’s going to Gunther. For the time being, there’s no danger. As long as the lad’s a minor, Old Grodeck can do whatever he wants… After that it’s going to be more difficult, yes, after that…”

He blinked his small eyes and carefully rubbed his red beard.

“But what’s up with Hagen?” Nora asked, going straight to the point.

The man laughed again, with his odd laugh. “Did I say something was up with Hagen? Have you heard anything about him? Hah, lots of things have been said, but who’s to believe them…” He laughed fiendishly, the thick brows above his small eyes raised into a meaningful arch.

He took the axe, which he had propped up against the chair, and got up.

“I’m going to chop wood. I’ve talked plenty for today.”

From the SKV chalet a lateral trail opened through the woods towards the Glade of the Three Maidens, a smooth, even trail with benches along the edges like a path in a park. Snow had covered everything, burying the rocks and the benches. The wild, uncharted trail’s course through the pine trees could barely be discerned.

The slope was gentle, scarcely noticeable. Skiers headed out with a silky glide. There was no need either for braking or exertion. Nora and Paul descended at a short distance from one another, in silence. The curtain of clouds was falling lower on one side and the other, ashen, dense, stretching down to the ground like a wall. Braşov, Râşnov, all of the Burzenland, were on their right, covered in mist, vanishing into clouds.

In the morning they had left the cabin going north and now they had returned from the south. They almost didn’t recognize the cabin. Viewed from behind, it was bolstered by ramparts of snow, like a small fortress. Faffner barked, surprised to hear sounds coming from the deserted forest. Nora called out to him, and the dog recognized her. He came towards them, swimming through the snow, his muzzle poking up above the white drifts, struggling as though he were about to be submerged. Gunther, too, came out to meet them. He was pale and looked tired, but his eyes conserved a youthful twinkle that lighted up his whole face.

“If you’ve been ill, why are you going bareheaded in the cold?” Nora asked him. “Do you want me to scold you?”

“It’s not cold at all. But you can scold me. I like it. Nobody ever scolds me.”

His smile was luminous, childlike. Then it became dejected. He had these unexpected alterations of expression, from the greatest exuberance to silence.

“I have to ask your forgiveness for my behaviour. I’m acting like a badly brought-up host. But yesterday I couldn’t come downstairs. Thank you for staying here. I was uneasy all morning. I was afraid you’d left and that you weren’t coming back. I wanted to come after you, look for you, and ask you to come back. I don’t know where Hagen hid my skis… He always hides them on me… Without skis, in such deep snow, you’re stuck…”

He was dressed in a grey ski suit with large pockets. He’s too young for his clothes, Nora thought. She tried again to imagine him in a high-school uniform. It would have fit better with his childlike face, and the blond hair falling over his forehead that he kept brushing back with a gesture of boyish impatience.

“You’ll have to help me set the table,” he said. “Hagen is in Braşov. He went shopping. This evening you’ll have newspapers and cigarettes.”

“I’ll look after the table,” Nora said decisively. “You two behave yourselves and just stay where you are.”

She’s such a woman! Paul reflected. In a single instant, with adroitness and intimacy, she had become “the mistress of the house.” She seemed to know all these strange things, and acted as if they, too, were acquainted with her. She sliced bread with a domestic air, as though from familiar habit.

“Why didn’t you tell us that you were a painter?” Nora asked, as they were eating.

“Because I’m not.” The boy’s reply was almost a shout. A wave of blood rose into his pale forehead. His whole being trembled with rage, with resistance. Then, with the same change of expression, his face lighted up again in an ironic smile. “No, I’m not. I was. I wanted to be.”

There was silence. A heavy silence, that lasted for several long seconds, and which they didn’t know how to break.

Faffner arrived just in time to save them.

“Poor thing, he’s hungry. We have to give him food.”

In the afternoon, Nora remained alone with Gunther. Paul put on his skis and practised his turns close to the cabin. He took Faffner along to keep him company.

Gunther, in his armchair next to the fireplace, was scribbling on a notepad.

“I think I’ve made you angry,” Nora told him. “Please excuse me. They were silly questions that upset you and I didn’t even know why.”

The boy was calm. Without paying much attention, he was sketching a woman’s profile, which he left undefined. He started again in the other corner of the sheet. His smile was now devoid of sadness or irony. “I have to tell you something,” he said, “but promise me that you won’t be frightened.”

“I can’t promise, but I’ll try,” Nora joked.

“The other night when you arrived, do you know why I opened the door? Do you know why I let you in?” His voice was soft, almost a whisper. He asked the question with an intense look. “I thought you were Mama. You understand? Mama.”

He pointed to the portrait on the bookshelf without even turning his head in that direction. Nora came closer to him. She wanted to console him.

“I knew you wouldn’t be frightened. Do you believe in ghosts? I do. You see, since Mama’s death, I’ve been waiting for her. Sometimes I go to the window, sometimes I open the door… I wonder why she doesn’t come…”

“Maybe she’s here…” Nora said simply, without lowering her voice. She grasped that after hearing such things she must speak with familiarity and without mystery.

“Yes…” Gunther said. “In a certain way, she is here. Here with us: Hagen, Faffner, me… She loved all three of us… She’s here but I don’t see her. I’d like to see her, I feel I should be able to see her… I’ve told you that I believe in ghosts. I think about her long dresses, I think about her blonde hair, which she wore in an old-fashioned hairdo, even though she was so young…”

Nora walked towards the bookshelf and picked up the portrait. She observed it closely, with great attention. The lips were poorly drawn, the high, sad forehead resembled that of the boy, there was a light wave in the hair on her temples. In the corner was written in pencil: Mittwoch, den 5 Mai 1932.20 Gunther.

“It was a very sunny day,” Gunther said. “I remember it very clearly. She was wearing a white dress, her first white dress of that summer. As a joke, I’d made a lot of meaningless sketches. I wanted to throw them out. She took them all and asked me to sign this one. She liked to see me drawing. She thought…she thought I had talent. She thought I was going to be a painter.”

“And you no longer want to be one?”

“I can’t.”

“Even so, if she believed… Maybe you should, in her memory…”

Gunther got up from the armchair, barely restraining a fresh outburst of anger.

Again Nora had tugged on gnarled ropes, knocked at locked doors.

The rapidity with which this blond boy could pass from one expression to another, from one mood to another, was amazing. One moment his nerves were choking him, the next he rediscovered his glowing ironic smile. “Do you know what a cardiogram is?”

Nora hadn’t understood the question and didn’t know to reply. “Wait and see,” Gunther said.

He opened a drawer, hunted through notebooks and sketch pads and pulled out a small scroll of paper, which he unfurled in front of her. It was a thick, glossy paper of photograph quality, containing black rectangles crossed by two thin lines that went up and down in zigzags at tight angles. It looked like the inscription of seismograph readings, such as she remembered having seen in geology books at school. “You see those white lines? They’re heartbeats.”

He was still smiling. He spoke calmly and without discomfort. After a moment’s silence, he added: “The beating of my heart.”

Nora thought of his pallor, his nervous trembling, the sudden changes of light and shadow on his childlike face. She tried to take this lightly, not to insist, to brush it off. “You’re joking, Gunther.”

He replied with laughter, a laugh in which nothing was forced, nothing constrained.

“Of course it’s a joke. Much more than a joke: a farce. It’s the most terrible farce I could play on the Grodeck family.” He seemed to find the thought sincerely amusing. “Look, a painter in the Grodeck family would have been shameful. A cardiac patient in the Grodeck family is a scandal. This is the first time this has happened since there have been Grodecks on the earth. Their hearts have always beaten strongly. Their hearts have been true.” The word amused him. He noticed it and took pleasure in repeating it. “Yes, yes, true hearts. Hearts that have beaten like clocks. Never too fast, never too slow. Hearts that beat for one century, two centuries, three centuries and don’t ask anybody anything. Grodeck hearts are guaranteed. Solid and discreet. Nobody hears them.”

He unfurled the cardiogram again and showed her the two white lines that went up and down. He followed their delicate course, their rhythmic fall, with his finger. “You see, here the angles are tight and even. But when you look more closely, you can see that sometimes the line darts up and then it drops a little lower down. It’s not a lot. A tenth of a millimetre, maybe not even that… But it’s enough. Enough to be audible.”

All at once he lifted his head from the cardiogram and stared fixedly at Nora. “Don’t you hear it? I do. Especially in the evening, especially at night. It’s like a little hidden motor. In the middle of the night, when everything’s still, I feel like it’s audible all over the house. A Grodeck heart that’s audible… It’s unbelievable. The Grodeck fortune has been made with everything you can name, but not with the heart…”

He rolled up the scroll as it had been before and placed it carefully back in the drawer. Then he returned to the fireplace and leaned there with his arms at his sides, a posture that helped him breathe.

Nora sensed that the boy expected neither compassion nor support. He was very calm, and his blue eyes resembled lights. “What are you thinking of doing?” she asked.

“I want to turn twenty-one.”

“You’ll do it,” Nora said.

He was shaken by the soft conviction of her words. Suddenly, his gaze became intense, pleading, full of doubts and uneasiness. “Do you think so? Tell me, do you really think so?”

“I’m certain, Gunther. Absolutely certain.”

Hagen returned late, in the dark. All three of them waited for him, taking turns looking out the window in the tower for his lantern to appear in the distance through the woods. Faffner had disappeared while it was still daylight, heading off down the valley.

“He feels him coming,” Gunther said. “Whenever he returns from Braşov the dog goes down to Ruia and waits for him there. One evening, Hagen took a different route and returned by way of Wolf’s Precipice. Faffner spent the whole night in Ruia, howling…”

Now they saw the two of them coming through the deep snow: the man and the dog. Hagen dragged the flat wooden sleigh, full of packages, behind him. They opened them all around the table, curious to discover what lay inside. They were objects that smelled of the city, of winter display windows, of holidays. Gunther regarded them with boyish pleasure, he weighed them in his hand, and observed them under the light. He liked best the coloured glass balls, red candles and sparklers for the Christmas tree.

Faffner circled the table, smelling the objects, sniffing them.

Only Hagen’s brow remained dark…

That man knows, Nora thought.

XII

EVENINGS IN THE CABIN WERE LONG, in spite of the fact that at ten o’clock they extinguished the lights, closed the shutters and all went to bed. But the evenings started early, when darkness fell, and passed slowly. The twilights were white from the snow, which continued to shimmer for a while after the sun set. Finally this sheen, too, disappeared. Sometimes the mist continued to smoulder from the summit. The clouds piled up closer to the cabin. The fir trees turned black. The darkness was deep and dense.

The mountains, which roared all day with the sounds of shouts and cries, returned to their stoney silence. Not a whimper or a crackle from anywhere. Far away in the distance, they heard a muted inrush, like a slamming on the earth, like the falling of a tree. They all poked their heads up to listen. The silence seemed to stretch to the ends of the earth.

Gunther was playing chess with Paul. Nora, sitting in the armchair, read next to the fireplace with Faffner lying at her feet. Only Hagen was restless. Sometimes, unexpectedly, he tossed the ash-coloured cape over his shoulders, lifted the hood and went out into the night with the lighted lantern.

“He’s going to look for her,” Gunther would say.

Faffner trembled, got up from his spot and went to the window, to the door, scratching at the threshold, waiting.

As evening fell, Nora became silent. There are two Noras, Paul thought. The daytime Nora and the nighttime Nora. Curled up in the armchair next to the fireplace, lost in the book she wasn’t even reading, she seemed to be waiting, inviting him.

“Are you tired, Nora?”

It was something other than tiredness. It was a kind of capitulation. Everything in her being was setting out for the night. Only when Hagen extinguished the lights, when Gunther said goodnight, did she open her eyes.

“You’re going already? Is it that late? Have you finished your game of chess?”

She climbed the stairs, leaning on Paul’s arm. Sometimes, in bed, she lay her head on his right shoulder. It wasn’t a gesture of tenderness: it was a gesture of disbelief, of anticipation.

She undressed slowly, with lazy movements, lost in her thoughts and still silent. She had a stern, alert expression; not dreamy but turned inward towards her own thoughts.

“You’re beautiful, Nora.”

Only after thinking this over did she reply. She took seriously the things that were said to her.

“I’m thirty-two years old, my love. And I’m dark. I don’t know if I can still be beautiful… Maybe I was at twenty, at twenty-two… It’s a flash that passes and leaves something else in its place…”

Her body was strong, with a slight heaviness in its long, firm lines. Nothing adolescent here, Paul thought, watching her. Nothing was uncertain, everything was filled out. Broad, serene knees, foreign to uneasiness. Long thighs, full hips.

“You’re beautiful, Nora. You’re pure harmony between yourself and yourself, and that harmony is called beauty.”

She stood in front of the mirror and brushed her hair, which fell over her shoulders. She stopped, with the brush in her hands, and turned towards Paul. She was naked and at peace.

“I’m afraid I have to complain.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re telling me something that was one of my secrets. Something I always hoped, with a tiny anxiousness, that someone would understand and tell me.”

She had tears in her eyes.

Her embrace withheld nothing. In the most intense moments she kept her eyes open, with a deep, attentive gaze, as though she were listening. She remained for a long time with her head on his right arm, in an endless silence.

“I like your hands, Paul. They’re big, heavy, rough. I like to feel them on my shoulders, on my hips. They don’t know how to caress or they don’t want to caress. But I like their weight.”

She took a long look at those boney hands which, even in their present domesticated state, retained a certain hardness. She kissed them. She poured her whole female sensual gravity into this act. Paul was unable to suppress a twinge of embarrassment.

“No, Nora.”

She didn’t understand. “How stupid men can be, Paul! So many superstitions, so much fear… You’re afraid of the simplest things. Only a woman knows how to really kiss hands, my love, and make it into something beautiful.”

She approached him with her eyes closed. She showed neither hysterical haste nor bashful modesty. Every movement of her body spoke of authenticity and conciliation.

Morning revealed again the sharp, alert Nora, ready for the trail. In her blue jacket with her peaked cap pulled over her forehead she was, like him, a skier.

No troubled feelings lingered between them from the night, which had passed without leaving behind a trace.

XIII

IT WASN’T SNOWING. The light was like cinders, but the clouds seemed to be farther away and the horizon more open.

They left their skis at the Touring Club, stuck into the snow with the tips facing up, and climbed to the summit of the mountain.

“Maybe we’ll see Braşov,” somebody said.

They couldn’t see anything. Postăvar floated alone amid an ocean of clouds. The pine forests that covered the opposite slope in the direction of Timiş melted after a few hundred metres into a whitish fog.

“Down below us is the Timiş Valley. Over there is Piatra Mare. To the left is Braşov.” Nora pointed out with her hand places that were lost in the mist, enveloped in nothingness. “You know what’s happening in Braşov tonight?” she asked suddenly. Still smiling, she replied: “They’re performing the Christmas Oratory at the Black Church.”

“Is it the twenty-third already?” Paul said, surprised.

“Yes.”

He remained still for a time with his gaze trained in the direction of Braşov, invisible behind the mist. The haze seemed to soften the distances. “What do you say? Would it be madness if we went down to Braşov this evening?”

“It might not be madness,” Nora said, “but it would certainly be daring.”

“Is it that hard?”

“Hard, no. It’s long.”

“And you don’t want us to try it?”

“Of course, Paul. If we do a morning of serious training beforehand.”

He accepted all of her conditions. After the long run that lay before them, the evening’s concert would be a reward.

Gunther received without pleasure the news of their departure.

“We’ll be back tomorrow,” Nora assured him.

All through lunch, the boy continued to frown. Only towards the end of the meal did he brighten up. “I’ve sung in the Christmas Oratory, too. In a choir, of course. I was in grade seven and we were asked by the school to perform. I think I still remember a few things today.”

He thought for a moment and finally, turning his gaze towards the window, as though he were seeking someone there, he began to sing:

“Brich an, du schönes Morgenlicht,

Und lass den Himmel tagen.

Du, Hirtenvolk, erschrecke nicht

Weil dir die Engel sagen…”21

He pitched his voice too high and the final note, although clear, made his cheeks turn red.

“Mama was down in the church. I can see her now, next to the third window on the right. She was smiling. She was the only person in the whole Black Church who was smiling. I felt that she was listening to me. I felt that she was answering me.”

He kept looking towards the window. Finally, he averted his gaze from there and spoke again with the grim tone that they had heard on other occasions. “A real Grodeck doesn’t smile. Watch them carefully this evening. The whole clan will be gathering there. Dozens, hundreds of members of the Grodeck family. Not one of them smiles.”

Nora tried to soothe him, to bring some peace to his tormented child’s forehead. “Tell us the truth, Gunther. Do you want us to stay?” “No. But I want you to come back.”

“Understood. Tomorrow evening we’ll be here to light the Christmas tree together.”

Before they left, Gunther drew them a map of the trail. From the SKV chalet they would go down the leisure run, which would take them as far as the centre of Braşov. It was a groomed trail, with a gentle slope (the Saxons called it the Familienweg^22), well marked with blue-and-white signs right to the end, but from which several smaller trails branched off towards Timişul-de-Jos, Noua and Honterus.

“But if you pay attention, you can’t get lost.”

The map he had drawn was clear and detailed. In the margins were all the landmarks that they might meet along the way and which he recommended they watch out for. In addition, he gave Paul a compass and showed him how to use it. Nora would have to carry bandages, cotton and vials of pills in her backpack.

Their departure for Braşov was becoming a real expedition. “Is it that dangerous?” Paul asked.

“In winter in the mountains you never know what’s going to happen.”

They had barely set out when Hagen overtook them from behind.

“Gunther wonders where you’re thinking of sleeping in Braşov this evening.”

“In a hotel, of course.”

“He doesn’t think you’ll find a room. He told you to give me this.”

It was an envelope on which Paul read a woman’s name — Frau Adelle Bund — and an unknown street: Strada Prundului, 26.

“It’s my house,” Hagen said. “I wouldn’t advise you to go there. It’s an old house and it’s far away. But if you can’t find a room anywhere, don’t sleep in the street.”

He spoke with ill will. It was clear that this turn of events did not please him.

Nora made an effort to placate him. “We thank you, but I think we’ll leave Frau Adelle in peace. It can’t not be possible to find a room in town.”

He didn’t look entirely placated. “Have a good trip,” he said.

He looked after them for a long time as they headed off.

They made a quick stop at the SKV chalet to consult the map. From there, they set off on a trail that was unknown to both of them. The run started behind the chalet. Gunther had drawn it in a meandering blue line that descended towards a circle that was coloured green. Inside this circle he had written in small block letters: Ruia.

Nora let Paul go ahead in a snowplow.

“Don’t leave the snowplow for even a second,” she told him.

“Whatever you do, if you’re not going at high speed, nothing serious will happen.”

Paul set off in a strained silence. He clutched the poles’ handgrips with closed fists. He had the impression that his whole effort was concentrated there, in the joints of his hands. His knees were bent as though he were preparing for a jump. His skis slid ahead of him, made heavier by his braking.

He held his breath as he waited for the first turn. His head was bowed between his shoulders, but his attention was locked on the point ahead of him, coming closer every second, where the trail turned to the left. He felt his temples throbbing. Now, now, now… He pushed the tip of his right ski ahead of the other one, then leaned with all of his weight towards the left. The snowplow opened to a enormously wide angle. The turn was completed gradually, like the gliding wheeling of a bird on unmoving wings. The left ski, which for a second supported his entire weight, skidded around with a harsh scraping sound, then, in the next second, his equilibrium returned.

“Bravo! Very good,” he heard Nora shouting from behind him. He didn’t have time to reply to her, nor to recover his breath. Ahead of him were several metres of straight downhill after which, ominously, there was another turn, this time to the right. He made his turn a little less slowly, a little less raggedly, than the first time.

He felt himself coming out of the curve at greater speed. Let’s not go overboard, he thought. He clutched the poles’ handgrips, determined to resist. He let his weight fall on both skis and opened his snowplow wider. He went into the next turn with all the resistance he could muster. His arms, his knees, his ankles, strained to stop, to brake, his onward motion. The skis stalled for a moment in the middle of the turn, as if they had been locked into place, but then they pulled out of it and, in a moment of release, set off downhill.

His speed increased. Paul opened his snowplow wider. The tips of his skis almost knocked against each other, while their back ends slid apart until they spanned the breadth of the track. Yet he felt the wind beating more sharply against his cheeks. He didn’t understand what was going on. The snowplow no longer helped him at all. It was like a leaking brake that no longer transmitted the driver’s commands. The curves became more and more frequent, and even faster. He came out of the turns now in a kind of automatic twisting of his body. Paul felt himself jerked now to the right, now to the left. At each new curve he had the impression that he was about to be hurled onto the packed snow of the trail, but at the last moment an unexpected strength would lift him out of the fall and set him upright again on his skis. Not a single thought was in his head: his whole being was in a tumult, overridden, as if by a shout, by the will to stay on his feet.

In front of him, at a distance he couldn’t judge — was it far away? close up? — a tree branch heaved into sight, blocking his path. He crouched down on his skis, closed his eyes and plunged forward without paying attention, even in that same second, to whether he had struck it, whether he had fallen. His skis dashed ahead now — as though on their own, detached from his body — into a new curve that pitched him to the right, but by a miracle in that instant the trail came out of the woods and widened into a great expanse of white. He didn’t realize what was happening. He had the feeling that he was flying over a level surface. The wind, which until now had been gusting violently into his face, seemed to subside. The edges of his skis no longer cut obliquely into the snow, but rather settled, as if floating, with the length of their undersides flat against the snow.

Once again Paul tried to recover his lost movements. To his amazement, his skis responded to him. The snowplow opened with ease, and, during a final turn to the right, the two skis had stopped, unresisting, one alongside the other.

“We’re in Ruia,” Nora shouted from far away.

She came towards him, swinging easily on her skis, as though she were skating.

“It went really well, Paul. If we keep going like that all the way down, we’ll reach Braşov in daylight.”

“If we keep going like that all the way down, I’ll end up flat on the trail, hanging from a tree or falling over a precipice.”

Nora thought he was joking. He tried to explain to her the sensation of nothingness from which he had just emerged. He felt as though he were on the outer edges of human life.

“Well, the trail back is very short,” Nora laughed. “Do you know how long it took us to get here from up there? Four minutes.”

He couldn’t believe it. As in those fleeting dreams that make us traverse the entire space of a life in a few seconds, Paul had the feeling that he was going around and around in an endless race.

“I assure you that you’re exaggerating, Paul. Everything went really well. I followed you the whole time. Your turns were steady, your speed was under control. A little fast sometimes, but under control.”

“Under whose control? I felt like I was in a whirlpool, a chaos. I couldn’t see anything.”

“Because the light was too strong. Skiing is an enormous light; you said it yourself. Your eyes have to get used to it.”

They didn’t have much time to spend in Ruia. They hadn’t foreseen this break. Before leaving, however, they took a look in the direction of the broad clearing, which they had just crossed without observing it. Gripped on all sides by woods, Ruia, with its pristine snows, was as white as a frozen alpine lake.

Gunther’s map showed the trail winding more from here on. The little blue-and-white signs sprang up at regular intervals, spaced at equal distances, like coloured windows cut into the bark of the fir trees. The trail descended in a gentle slope devoid of sudden changes of direction. The curves were wide and visible from far away. Paul waited for them with the same attentive concentration. He threw his whole body into braking his speed, as though a single movement had passed through him from his shoulders to his ankles. Then, in the instant in which the skis slipped out of the braking posture, he had a sudden sensation of release.

Now and then he dared to close his eyes. Only for a few seconds. He felt weightless, without memory, without a past…

Sometimes Nora went first. He saw her heading away at high speed with her knees barely bent, her poles held behind her and lifted a short distance above the snow like two oars frozen for a second in midair. He would find her farther down the trail, waiting for him. They didn’t speak to each other. He would pass close to her with a salute or a look. They understood one another very well with their eyes. Both knew that there were no words for what they wished to say to each other.

They made a brief stop at the point indicated by Gunther on the map, more to check their itinerary than to rest. On their left they passed a trail marked with red rectangles that went to Poiana, while on the right, a bit farther along, a trail marked with a red cross inside a blue square ran downhill towards Timişul-de-Jos. Not one of these trails had the gentle, restful slope of their trail. It unfurled before them, white between the pine trees, with barely perceptible undulations.

“I’m afraid of falling asleep on my skis,” he told Nora before heading out again.

“Why?”

“I don’t know how to describe it. I feel myself soaring. It’s a kind of bliss.”

They reached Crucur at four o’clock. More sprawling than Ruia, the clearing looked wilder, more abandoned. It might also have been an effect of the light, which was beginning to weaken. The fir trees in Ruia had been green: a vivid green. Here their green had begun to shade towards black.

The lead-grey mist sometimes faded away with evening, which wasn’t far away.

They went into the forest ranger’s cabin to ask about the weather. The door was open, but they didn’t find anyone inside. It seemed to be more a mirage than a house. Only a few extinguished coals in the fireplace — who knew how long they’d been there? — showed that human steps had once passed this way.

“I wouldn’t want dusk to overtake us on the trail,” Nora said.

They opened the map, measuring the length of the trail that remained before them. The itinerary Gunther had established for them made long detours and went to Braşov, by way of the foot of Tâmpa Hill.

“It’s too much. We should try something else.”

From Crucur a trail blazed with yellow-and-blue signs set out downhill to the right through the woods. It wasn’t, properly speaking, a trail: more a path, likely the route to a natural spring now vanished beneath the snow.

“Are you ready for adventure, Paul?”

“Ready.”

In response, she set out ahead of him, shouting now and then to tell him that the trail was clear and that he could follow. His poor old snowplow collapsed at the point of departure. His skis skidded incessantly. There was no way to collect himself, to stop the skid. For a distance of several hundred metres the trail wound between the pine trees with tight, unexpected curves. Paul didn’t succeed in taking a single curve on his feet. At each one he was hurled into the snow, falling, rolling over. At regular intervals he heard Nora’s shout and replied to her.

“Are you coming?”

“I’m coming.”

In fact, he was coming. He couldn’t do anything else but keep coming. Sometimes he got snagged on a pine tree or a rock, but the skis carried him forward.

“It’s been hellish,” he told Nora, when he finally caught up with her. His forehead and cheeks were scratched, his breath shook with effort. “It’s been hellish,” he repeated, “but we’re moving faster.” He knew there was no room to choose or turn back. They were in the middle of the forest and, whatever the price, they had to get out of there. Dusk was nipping at their heels.

Now the trail ran straight downhill without any detours, cutting crossways through the forest. The slope was much steeper than it had been until now, but at least there were no violent changes of direction. The rustling of the skis on the snow became progressively harsher as, at sunset, an icy crust formed on the surface. They stopped at the junction of two trails where a board put up by the Touring Club, half covered in snow, pointed out to the left a path marked with yellow crosses in red squares: To Poiana.

“If you want,” Nora suggested, “we can take it to Poiana. There we can pick up the caterpillar to take us to Braşov.”

“And if it’s not there?”

“Then there’s nothing we can do.”

Paul thought for an instant, then rejected this idea. “No, Nora, we’ve started a game. I want to play it to the end. I want to enter Braşov on skis. On my skis.” He wasn’t even joking. He was grim and intent. “Shall we go?”

One could say that only there did their run truly begin. They travelled at a short distance from each other, crouched over their skis with their foreheads thrust forward, their shoulders slightly raised, as though they were on the verge of spreading their wings. Their ski boots danced on the snow in small leaps and lifted the powder, which the wind flung in their eyes. Nora continued to maintain the lead, bareheaded, with her hair tossed about around her temples. Now and then she shot a quick glance in his direction to check that he was following her. Their eyes met for a second, or even less. Paul leaned ever farther forward, bent his knees ever more deeply. There were moguls that shook him, as though they were going to fling him over backwards. He received the impact in his chest and crouched lower over his skis.

He didn’t know how long they had been following this trail nor how much more lay ahead of them. He had fallen a number of times, but each time he got up immediately and set off again, feeling that if he delayed he would no longer have the courage to get up. The light of the cloudy dusk dwindled without a glimmer. The fir trees were wrapped in their evening mist, as though in smoke.

Up ahead, Nora shouted something. It sounded like a cry for help, but he didn’t hear it clearly: it seemed to reach him from a great distance.

Paul hurled himself to the right and slid through the snow for a few seconds. He hit his elbow and knees, but somehow managed to bring himself to a halt. He got up, dizzy, staggering on his skis. “What happened?”

Nora pointed between the pine bows in the direction of nearby lights. “We’ve arrived. We’re at the edge of Braşov.”

On the streets of the town they stopped in front of shop windows, they ran into pedestrians, they watched buses, cars and sleds passing in front of them, they read cinema billboards, they listened to the shouts of newsboys selling the evening newspapers — and yet they didn’t come to their senses, ambling along confused and deaf. The silence of the woods lingered in him like the extended note of an organ.

He went in to buy their concert tickets, chose their seats, received his change, asked questions, replied — all in an absent, mechanical way.

“What’s wrong with you, Paul? Don’t you want to wake up?”

“Of course, but I can’t.”

Braşov, with its evening lights, its streets thronged with people, its glowing shop windows, its whole Christmas Eve bustle, was unreal to him.

“You know how I feel, Nora? Like a wolf that’s come down from the woods to the edge of town… And now I don’t dare go any farther.”

There wasn’t a single free spot at the Coroana. The hotel was full, while in the lobby people who had come in on the last train waited without hope, their baggage not yet unpacked. They left their skis there and went to ask at the smaller hotels and holiday villas in the vicinity.

“You’re wasting your time,” someone told them. “There’s not a bed to be had in the whole city. People are sleeping wherever they can: in restaurants, in cafés, at the train station…”

Braşov had the appearance of a town taken over by a training camp. Entire regiments of skiers seemed to have occupied the citadel. Blue peaked caps were everywhere.

“Did so many people come here to listen to the Christmas Oratory?” Nora said in surprise, laughing.

Above all, people had come for the skiing competitions at Predeal, which started in two days’ time. The teams of competitors, who until now had been training in the mountains throughout the region were beginning to gather down in the town

On the boulevard, across the street from the post office, the municipal train, with its stubby railway engine and little yellow carriages looked like a toy stuck in the snow. The engine’s whistling, calling late passengers, could be heard from far away. Many people were going to look for shelter for the night in Dârste, Cernatu and Satu-Lung.

“If we don’t find anything anywhere else,” Nora said, “and if there’s still time before the concert, it might not be a bad idea for us to go to Satu-Lung too, on the last run.”

“No, not Satu-Lung,” Paul refused.

“Why not?”

“It’s too far… It’s too late.” For a moment he considered telling her frankly: There are too many memories there that I don’t want to get close to. Then he realized that this wasn’t even true. It seemed to him that he could stare those memories, which felt healed now, straight in the eyes, without danger or apprehension. No, that train was not going in the direction of his past…

“The line’s blocked on the other side of Dârste,” someone shouted from the window of a carriage.

Yes, it’s blocked, Paul repeated in his mind. It seemed to him as though there really were broken connections in his memory, blocked lines, roads that had closed forever. With an effort, the train set itself in motion with a noise of frozen old fetters. The engine fought to break out of the ice, to push through the snow.

The passengers were singing out the windows, waving their ski caps, shouting, greeting those who were staying behind with exaggerated gestures. At the back of the train, a few skiers were straining with mock effort to push it out of the snow.

“Skiing turns everyone into a child,” Paul said.

It wasn’t only skiing. It was that whole Christmas Eve, with its holiday mood, its deep snows, its vacation bustle.

Hagen had told the truth. The address he had given them was far away, while the house really did look very old. The wooden door in a grey wall, locked with large iron bars like the door of a fortress, was deaf to all of their knocking. One might have thought that no one had come here since time immemorial.

Frau Adelle Bund was not home, or did not wish to reply.

All along the street astonished faces appeared at the windows, not knowing what was going on. From across the street the neighbours’ little girl asked them who they were looking for.

“Doesn’t anybody live here?” Paul asked.

“Of course, but…”

The little girl didn’t finish her reply and sped home, probably in order to spread the news about the incredible goings-on that were happening at number 26.

Yet the door had opened at last, although only half-way. On the threshold an old woman dressed in black prevented them from entering with a bitter glare that right from the start said: No! Paul offered her Hagen’s envelope, and she opened it, continuing to oblige them to stay outside, facing the door. From time to time she raised a suspicious glare in their direction, as though she were comparing them with what was written in the letter.

“It would be better if you found somewhere else to sleep,” she said in conclusion, never the less deciding to receive them indoors.

They went forward, entering first an interior courtyard lined with several shuttered windows, then a long, dark corridor. The house felt uninhabited. Neither a noise nor a whisper could be heard anywhere. The woman stopped in front of a door and tried a few keys in the darkness until she succeeded in opening it. It was a small, frozen room with rustic furniture covered in dust. When was the last time they opened the windows in here, Nora wondered.

Frau Adelle Bund seemed to understand the visitor’s thoughts. “I have to air it out and make a fire. I didn’t know you were coming. Nobody comes here.”

The shutters, like the front door, were closed with iron bars.

“We’ll leave our backpacks and go,” Nora said. “If you give us the key to the front door, you won’t have to wait up for us. We’ll be coming back late.”

She wanted to get out of there as quickly as possible, to find herself outdoors again, on the other side of these chilly walls.

The Black Church was full of light.

“The Grodeck clan is gathering,” Nora said.

She saw them coming in from all corners of the town in family groups, sombre, silent, in heavy fur overcoats, moving with measured strides. They entered without haste and greeted each other without joy, making ceremonious salutations. On arrival they scattered to the left and the right, moving towards seats that must have been theirs, always the same, for years and years.

“Do you think they’ll let us in?”

The man who tore their tickets at the entrance looked a little surprised by their clothes. But there were a few other skiers who had come from Poiana and Timiş. The blue jackets and cloth blouses were soon lost to sight among the frock coats and fur.

The violins were tuning up in the shadow of the great organ, which dominated everything by its silence. The church was filled with the bated-breath hubbub of the orchestra, testing their instruments in the final moments before the concert began. A flute or a horn lifted its voice for a second, then disappeared, covered by that generalized, “Yes,” transmitted like an appeal by the violins and cellos.

Silence fell at last. They felt the sound of the invisible director, who had raised his baton.

First the flute and then the oboe entered timidly into the game, with something questioning in their sound; but after the first notes the violins fell silent and, almost in the same instant, they heard the trumpets — unexpected, triumphant trumpets. The musical phrasing was powerful, self-assured, tightly integrated into a piece that from the beginning announced victory and light. The flute and the oboe ran a subterranean course beneath this line that was barely audible in the moments of breathing space between the dominant motifs. When the violins and brasses fell silent, their silence was protective: only with their indulgence were the fragile flute, the pensive oboe, able to rise again.

The game didn’t last long. The strings, woodwinds and trumpets were covered as the choir burst out: “Jauchzet, frolocket auf, preiset die Tage!”23

The song was simple, but the holiday began with those words. It was a great cry of joy which, in a second, flung the orchestra into the background. The whole choir was but the voice of a single herald. It seemed to lift the vaulted ceiling, to open the windows, to create light.

Nora sought out Paul’s eyes. She wished to know that she wasn’t alone before this annunciation. He placed his hand — his heavy hand — on her shoulder, but did not turn his head. The gesture spoke to her without words: yes, Nora, I’m here, I’ve heard, I’ve understood…

The violins and the brasses, at first overwhelmed, found each other again. The trumpets spread the news announced by the choir. The flutes and oboes hurried on, with their finer sound, between that of the chords and that of the brasses. The solitary organ was neither surprised nor rushed. Its low tones seemed to support the entire oratory like a living cathedral. The violins and the voices grew out of it, as though out of rich earth. The organ bore them on without a smile, without harshness, with a dash of sadness, because it alone knew their destination.

Paul listened with his eyes closed. He was still in the forest, still alone. For him, the organ’s deep voice perpetuated the silences that continued to vibrate in its ever lower chords. The orchestra and the choir, brought together in a single musical phrase, now climbed as one to the final step: the doors of the Oratory were open.

A tenor voice was thrown into relief by the ensuing silence. Without melody, it recounted the departure from Galilee. Simple, slightly monotone scales swung like ivy on the central sound of the organ. The tale was then taken up by a woman’s voice, with the same narrative monotony, until the oboe and the violin persuaded her to sing. The transition from the recitation to the aria was marked, over several chords, by the harpsichord, which seemed to demand that they listen to it. On a few occasions, as though the harpsichord’s sound had been too feeble to maintain the bridge between the choral song and the aria, the whole orchestra came to its assistance.

Never, it seemed to Paul, had he heard such clear violins. Maybe it was because of that evening, which for him was unlike any other from his past. Maybe it was because of the forest through which he had come, the solitude in which he had descended… Never had he heard purer, more effortless, more transparent violins. The symphonic sections of the Oratory did not feel at all liturgical. When the orchestra played together, everything seemed to contract into a luminous ring of intimacy. Even the organ, tamed, fell silent in order to listen.

The second part of the Oratory opened with the symphony, from which, after a brief recitative by the tenor, a choral song, which Nora and Paul received with the same surprised motion, broke out.

“Brich an, du schönes Morgenlicht,

Und lass den Himmel tagen.

Du, Hirtenvolk, erschrecke nicht

Weil dir die Engel sagen…”

The whole choir, the whole orchestra, could not cover the distant sound of Gunther’s voice.

“Do you hear him?” Nora asked in a whisper. In the same moment she looked towards the third window on the right, where young Mrs. Grodeck should have been, smiling at her son. But there wasn’t a single young woman beneath the third window and in the whole Black Church not one person was smiling.

Watch them carefully this evening, Gunther had said. The whole clan will be gathering there. Dozens, hundreds of members of the Grodeck family. Not one of them smiles.

And, in fact, not one of them did. They all sat on their benches, intent, stoney-still, without a tremor, without brightness, possibly deaf, possibly absent, possibly dead, while the music of the Christmas Oratory flowed past without touching or awakening them.

As they came out of the church, they found a still nocturnal Braşov with the lights out and the streets deserted. Saxons who had emerged from the concert walked home in silent groups. The city regained its air of a provincial outpost with the Black Church, in the centre, resembling an immense organ.

On Strada Prundului a double-surprise awaited them: an improved Frau Adelle and a welcoming house, each of which had undergone a miraculous change in a matter of hours. The fire had been burning in the fireplace for a long time when they arrived, and it was possible that this alone had succeeded in softening the woman’s heart and tempering the forbidding surroundings. Nora had not looked carefully at the large pieces of dull oak furniture which at first glance had struck her as being, like their hostess, hostile. Only now did she discover them, still severe in appearance, yet amiable. Books and carpets were everywhere. In a corner were a piano and books of sheet music. She leafed through them with surprise: Schumann, Brahms, Schubert.

“Who plays the piano?” she asked Frau Adelle.

“Since young Mrs. Grodeck died, no one plays it any more,” the woman said.

“She used to come here?”

“Who?”

“Young Mrs. Grodeck.”

At once the woman’s gaze became suspicious again. “Yes, she came.”

Nora realized that the question had been a mistake. She must not give the impression that she had prior knowledge. “I have to say, dear Frau Adelle, that at the beginning you frightened us.”

“And you me. When I heard the knocking on the door, I didn’t know who it could be. Nobody comes here, and nobody has to knock on the door. Mr. Klaus, when he comes, lets himself in. He has his own key.”

“Who’s Mr. Klaus?”

“What do you mean, who is he? Didn’t he send you here? Didn’t you have a letter from him?”

“Of course, of course,” Paul said soothingly. “Only we didn’t know that his name was Klaus. We call him Hagen.”

“She called him that, too…”

She pointed to the wall over the piano, where there was an aged-looking photograph of young Mrs. Grodeck.

“Maybe you didn’t meet her. Maybe you didn’t know how pretty she was.”

The photograph resembled the portrait Gunther had sketched, but it looked less sad. It was probably an enlargement of a shot taken with an instant camera. The young woman seemed to have been heading through the woods and to have stopped for a moment to gather her hair. The photograph had caught her in the midst of that movement, which had opened her arms and lifted her forehead towards the sunlight.

Frau Adelle said goodnight and left them alone.

Nora was at the piano, with her hands on the keys, those soundless keys that she didn’t dare to rouse from their silence.

“Do you think he loved her?”

Paul didn’t reply. He had been asking himself the same question. They were both looking up at the portrait on the wall.

“I don’t know if he loved her,” Nora went on. “But she was here. I’m starting to understand why that door opened so slowly. It was the door that should have protected her, should have concealed her… She was here. Like Gunther, I’m starting to believe in ghosts.”

Nora’s fingers sought in the keys the opening notes of this evening’s song: “Brich an, du schönes Morgenlicht — Young Mrs. Grodeck, you knew that song. I’m singing it for you. Maybe you can hear it, maybe you’ll be happy to hear it.”

XIV

BRAŞOV, IN THE FIRST HOURS OF THAT MORNING, seemed to be preparing for the opening of a country market. From Bran, from Râsnov, from all of the seven towns^24, from the whole region, came trucks, buses, sleighs, private cars, bringing in people who had spent the night outside of town. The streets were full of people from Bucharest who greeted each other with cries of surprise, noisily introducing one group to another. Nora and Paul passed by hurriedly, waving, replying to waves, enjoying this influx of Bucharest cheerfulness. When they couldn’t avoid it, they stopped to exchange a few words with an over-enthusiastic acquaintance. Nora introduced him simply, without bashfulness, as, “A skiing buddy.”

They had decided to leave on the 11 AM caterpillar to Poiana, so that they could start the ascent from there before noon. They still had some shopping to do and, to gain time, they divided up the chores.

“You get the cigarettes, magazines and books. I’ll look after the rest,” Nora said.

They arranged to meet at a set time in the lobby of the Coroana, where they had left their skis the night before. Nora wandered from shop window to shop window in search of crampons for hobnailed boots. She was thinking about taking a shortcut on the way back, climbing up Wolf’s Precipice, and she knew that the trail was strewn with rocks and ice. But above all she was drawn by the idea of getting away from Paul and being alone for a few minutes in order to be able to buy in secret a few surprises for the Christmas tree, small trifles which she would take out of her backpack tonight at the lighting of the candles. She returned to the Coroana breathless from running around and afraid that she was late.

“You didn’t forget anything, Paul? You got everything you were looking for? You’re ready to go? Shall we leave?”

She was shaken to see him watching her with that despondent gaze. It was his gaze from the evening they had met, that enervated stare that did not even have the strength to ask for help.

“Aren’t we leaving, Paul? Don’t you want to leave any more?”

He replied with his old shrug of the shoulders, which spoke of his indifference to everything.

How quickly this man has gone back to his old habits! Nora thought.

It was Ann’s car. Paul had walked past without seeing it, then, on the steps of the hotel, he had turned his head, as though towards a passerby who had greeted him, and to whom he hadn’t replied. Yes, it was Ann’s car.

He had gone towards it with an explosion of joy, as though it were a person, a friend. He would have liked to speak to it, to ask it: When did you get here? Is Ann here, too? Yes, of course she was. What a stupid question to ask!

The doors were locked, the windshield was iced up, the whole radiator was covered in snow; the motor was still warm. The car had probably just stopped. It looked as though it had made a difficult drive. In any case, it hadn’t been here yesterday evening, nor earlier this morning. If it had only just arrived, if it had stopped just now, then Ann must be nearby. She had got out for a moment to ask for information, to buy cigarettes, to drink tea. She might be in the hotel lobby, in the restaurant, in the café.

Paul paced back and forth all over the area. Ann was nowhere to be found. The café was full of people, familiar faces were visible at almost every table, but Ann was nowhere to be found.

“Are you looking for someone?” the porter asked.

“No, no…”

He went back out into the street and stopped in front of the blue car again. I have to wait, she has to come back.

He saw her walking through Braşov making chaotic purchases, laughing in all the mirrors that she crossed along the way, stumbling over her tall overshoes as though they were high-heeled boots. How well he knew that Ann of winter days! Last year she had worn an astrakhan bonnet pulled down over her forehead and an overcoat, also of astrakhan, which she succeeded in making into something unpretentious, like a garment she had grabbed off a peg in the hall at the last minute and put on in a rush to get her shopping done in town in a hurry.

He walked around the car several times, looking attentively at each part of it. He wished he could guess from the fenders, the tires, where it had come from. Certainly not from Bucharest, since it was too early in the morning to have made such a long trip. Maybe she had spent the night in Bran or in Satu-Lung, that Satu-Lung that was so full of memories. So many Anns from distant times came to life for him and called him back into the past!

He looked through the side windows of the automobile, that automobile that felt like an inhabited house. On the seat in front of him, next to the steering wheel, was a white plaid blanket, a pile of magazines and an open metal box full of Chesterfield cigarettes. Since when had she smoked Chesterfields? The last time he’d seen her she was smoking unfiltered Bucurestis. Had she switched brands? When? Why? And was this the only thing that had changed in her life?

But they might not be her cigarettes or, in any case, not hers alone. It was ridiculous to think that Ann would be by herself. It was ridiculous to think that a new cigarette case would enter Ann’s life without bringing with it a new man, a lover, a relationship, a fling… He kept his eyes fixed on that metal case, which struck him as both hiding and revealing everything. He felt the old pain reawakening close to his heart.

When Nora asked him whether he still wanted to leave, he didn’t know what to say to her. He could stay, he could leave; it was all the same to him.

Once again they were in the caterpillar that was taking them back to Poiana.

So we have to take it all from the beginning again, Nora thought. In front of her was the same morose man, with the same hazy stare and the same uncaring lift of his shoulders. If only he would at least tell me what happened. If only I could understand.

She was starting to be afraid of this man, who was subject to such profound changes from one minute to the next. It was as though his hair had turned white in an instant. It was as though he had received an announcement of his death. He felt strange to her. Stranger than on the day when she had met that absent gaze for the first time. Since then they had been brought together by several days of shared life, several nights of lovemaking. It was all wiped out.

She felt that he was lost to her, that he had fled from her side. Once again, he had fled from her side. And she could no longer find in herself sufficient strength to stop him.

It’s time to give up, Nora. This man’s not coming back.

She thought of saying to him: “That’s enough, Paul. That’s enough and it’s pointless. You want to leave? Leave. I’m tired out. Realize that something like that can happen to me, too: I can get tired out.”

Then, without knowing why, she thought of his hands. She felt pity for his big hands, too rough and hard for a sad man. She would have liked to feel them on her bare shoulders again, with their indifferent, protective heaviness. You’re beautiful, Nora. You’re pure harmony between yourself and yourself, and that harmony is called beauty. His words ran through her mind again, and once more she was astonished by them. You’re the man who spoke those words to me. No one might ever have said them to me, not once until my death, and he said them. I might have carried that secret inside me without anyone seeing it, and he saw it. And that’s the man I’m losing.

A wise, patient Nora tried to gather her courage again. She promised herself that she would wait, that she would resist, that she wouldn’t give up yet.

They climbed as far as Wolf’s Precipice wearing their skis, but from there on they had to take them off and carry them on their shoulders.

They had been on the move for about two hours without having exchanged a single word in all that time. Only once, by mistake, had their eyes met, but they had turned their heads away in the same instant with a startled, self-protective reflex. “Don’t be afraid, Paul, I have nothing to ask: you’re free to keep your secrets,” Nora would have liked to say to him; but she feared that, after the first word she uttered, the silence between them would grow ever heavier.

She went in front so as not to give him the impression that she was spying on him. A number of times she heard him stopping at one spot or another, but she kept moving forward, even though she sensed in his stopping a hesitation, an impulse to flee. She no longer heard him moving behind her, and yet she didn’t dare look back. Maybe this time he’s left. Maybe he’s really left. She told herself that there was still time to call out to him, that there was still time to turn around. She told herself that she was leaving behind a wounded man, a crushed man, a man who needed her help even if he wasn’t asking for it, even if he didn’t want it. Yet she continued to move forward, looking straight ahead as though she were indifferent to whether or not he went any farther. You’re acting like a woman who’s been jilted, Nora. You’re starting to love him out of pride. She went over in her mind the possible reasons that might convince her to stop and wait for him, but they only deterred her from making this decision. If he’s coming, he should come of his own free will. It’s up to him to choose.

He came without having chosen to do so. He came with exhaustion, with apathy. He came because he had been seized by the idea of coming. If the woman in front of him, who had suddenly become an unknown, nameless woman, had turned her head towards him and called out to him, this act might have awakened in him his last urge to break away and free himself.

But nothing disturbed the resignation of this return through the woods, which resembled so closely a return to slumber.

The climb to Wolf’s Precipice was tough. Deceptive snow covered boulders and dips in the earth, concealing in its depths unseen changes in the terrain. It was as though puddles remained intact in the middle of a river. Beneath their mirrored surface, an invisible chasm pulled them down to the river bed.

They wallowed forward through the snow with the instinctive movements of people who were swimming. Here and there, the depressions fell away like broken steps. There was an unmistakable sinking feeling. The waves of snow seemed to be surrounding and burying them. They struggled with their knees, their arms, in a kind of thrashing-on-the-spot that helped them to remain on the surface, as though they were swimming against the current. Now and then a reef-like frozen outcropping rose up in front of them, and they were able to stop for a minute on this island of ice, in order to gauge how much of the trail now lay behind them.

It’s madness what we’re doing, Nora thought; but, now there was no way back from this madness. Each metre of ground they gained had something irrevocable about it. Their feet could not return to where they had already trodden. The climb was difficult, but a descent from here would have been impossible.

At its upper edge, Wolf’s Precipice opened onto a clearing. The first fir trees were visible on the lip of the cliff above them. They didn’t look like they were far away, but time passed and the distance remained ever the same, as though their journey through the snow had been useless, as though hidden powers, much greater than their futile struggle, were eternally bringing them back to their point of departure.

As long as it’s daylight, everything’s not lost, Nora thought, to steel herself. She was terrified by the possibility that the mist might envelope them before they could reach the top. In the darkness, on the flank of the bluff, they would be unable to take even one step forward. A single false move would suffice for them to fall. Do I really need to tell him this? Nora wondered, not daring to speak to him. She didn’t want to alarm him, but neither could she let him continue with the somnambulistic carelessness with which he was climbing behind her.

From the summit came a stirring, as if of great gales not yet aroused to their full fury. The daylight had a diffuse, whitish quality, as though lacking in transparence.

“Listen, Paul!” Nora suddenly made up her mind to speak to him. “In half an hour at the most we’ll be at the top. If darkness or mist catch us here, we’re lost. I don’t know what’s going on with you and I’m not going to ask. But now I want to ask you to wake up. When we get to the top you can do what you like.”

Everything suggested that a blizzard was on the way. Gusts of wind not yet at full force whistled over the snows, raising it into small eddies of powder. The trees became heavy against a leaden grey-white background.

Paul was the first to reach the head of the trail. The final metres of the ascent were the hardest to complete. The lip of the precipice was a nearly vertical frozen parapet. The crampons on their boots gripped like claws to prevent them from sliding. A fall remained a danger until the last moment. In that final moment, their entire struggle was revealed as futile. Wolf’s Precipice, glimpsed from these final infernal steps, had a sombre indifference that awaited the fulfillment of luck.

Having escaped from danger, Paul watched helplessly as Nora took her final steps. He could do nothing for her: offer neither an extended hand nor a word of support. They were only a few paces apart, yet they were on two different coasts, each alone. He watched how she struggled with the snow, the ice, stunned by exhaustion yet with a kind of intent despair. When she reached his side, she threw down her skis from her shoulders, took off her backpack. Only then, uncovering her head, did she run her hand over her face in a gesture that signalled her return to life. They were both pale, with their eyebrows and temples whitened by snow, their stares not yet freed from the intense concentration that had been carrying them forward until now.

“You’re a brave girl, Nora. I want to thank you.”

“What for?”

“For your courage. If I were able to love, I’d love you.”

“I’m not asking you for that, Paul. All I ask is that you be a little less unhappy. That’s enough for me.”

Once again he gave a disillusioned shrug of his shoulders.

“I also ask,” Nora added, “that you stop making that gesture of a guy who’s finished. Is it really so hard?”

“I don’t know. I think you’re wasting your time with me.”

“Yet when we left here yesterday you were a man who’d been cured.”

“I thought I was. But it’s enough for a shadow to step out in front of me on the street for everything to fall to pieces.”

“Are memories that hard to forget?”

“I don’t even know if they’re memories. It’s a terrible tiredness. An enormous repulsion. And a deep disgust.”

“Deeper than Wolf’s Precipice?”

They both turned again in the direction of the precipice that opened in front of them.

“Look how deep it is,” Nora said, “and yet you climbed the whole thing. Don’t you want to try it again some day?”

They arrived at the cabin at nightfall. Gunther, paler than before, was waiting for them at the window. Hagen, who had gone out to meet them on the other trail, wasn’t back yet.

“We have to put on the light in the tower to give him the news that you’ve returned. Why did you come back so late? I’ve been waiting all day. I thought you weren’t coming. I thought I’d lost you.”

He spoke quickly, in broken sentences, with a strange nervous agitation beneath his great pallor. His eyes gleamed feverishly, too intensely to smile. Faffner sniffed their clothes, lay down at their feet, tossed off a curious snarl of pleasure and rediscovery, which, at the same time, was almost despairing. With an effort, Nora succeeded in calming him and making him lie down in front of the hearth with his snout on his paws; but even from there the dog regarded her with his gaze of animal restlessness.

“Faffner knows where you’re coming from,” Gunther said. “You’ve been in the house on Strada Prundului and you’re carrying odours he recognizes…”

Hagen returned later and didn’t speak a word as he came in the door. His cape and hood were white with snow. He stopped in the entrance and, at first, white as he was, with his big boots, his hood pulled down over his forehead, he resembled a Santa Claus who was hiding his face. After he had brushed off the snow and had revealed his sad face and, above all, that cold, white recluse’s gaze, the congenial initial image was extinguished, banished, and in its place stood the severe man with whom they were familiar.

Nora thought of going up to him and telling him: “Relax. We’ve left everything in the house exactly as you like it. Nothing has budged from its place. The door is bolted, the windows are locked. Nobody’s going to cross that threshold and not even a shadow will leave the place.”

But Hagen’s silence asked no questions and invited no friendly words.

The three men fell silent, and Nora felt very alone among them. She looked at each of them in turn, and each seemed to her to have disappeared into his own thoughts. She opened her backpack and took out without pleasure the gifts she had bought them in Braşov. Now they struck her as useless, too childish for men who were so despondent. Next to the window, the fir tree decorated for the modest Christmas celebrations waited to be lit up. Nora hung her presents from its drooping boughs, and then lit the candles one by one. Tapered flames began to play over the insides of the balls of coloured glass.

Gunther was the first to approach the tree. He’s still enough of a child that it makes him happy, Nora thought. She saw a flicker of curiosity return to his pallid cheeks. His eyes recovered their beautiful ironic clarity.

“Won’t you come and stand next to our Christmas tree, Paul?” Nora risked asking.

Over the lighted tree, she saw his old hazy expression of indifference betray a timidity, an insecurity.

Hagen joined them with more difficulty, not even approaching the tree. He stood a few steps away from it, as dark and severe as ever.

They gathered around the fir tree as if gathering around a campfire in the woods.

XV

ON THE MORNING OF THE FIRST DAY OF CHRISTMAS, the ski run resembled a peasant festival. Some devoted skiers were setting out through the morning light for Predeal, descending the slope from Timiş to watch the official competitions. Many more, however, had stayed put, while groups of boys and girls who struggled against the blizzard to reach the top of the hill continued to arrive from Braşov. The forest resounded with the din of people as though it were a holiday town. At the Touring Club, a committee that had been improvised overnight was organizing a few “trials” for downhill racing and the slalom. It was only a game, but they all agreed to play it seriously. Distances were measured, blue pennants were set out, contestants were given numbers, a system of points and classification was established. The judges and site commissioners, with armbands and whistles, walked back and forth among the skiers to give orders and get the teams into formation. A young doctor was setting up a medical station and, to complete the scene, someone had made a small white flag with a red cross that fluttered in the wind. In front of the chalet a rostrum of wooden planks had been hastily constructed for the public and a long table for the jury. The “trophies,” crowns of pine boughs, tin cups, a few bottles of wine and beer, an electric flashlight with batteries and — the first prize! — an alarm clock, had been lined up on the table.

The entire competition was organized half-jokingly, as a parody of the real competitions in Predeal, but it was a joke which drew everyone in with excessive conviction. Above all, the Saxons from the SKV, who arrived in a compact group, were as grave and resolute as if they were preparing for a great battle. They had put together a five-man team and had sent a written challenge to the students from the Touring Club, stating that the upcoming downhill race would be the “final test” of the day, the culmination of the struggle between the SKV and Touring Club. The whole mountain echoed with shouts and songs. When the wind dropped, the noise carried as far as Gunther’s cabin. Hagen, who had returned from his customary morning walk in the woods, told them all that was happening.

“Let’s go, too!” Nora suggested.

Paul, as grey-faced as the previous evening, neither accepted nor refused. He couldn’t care less whether they went or not. For him, the night had passed in a kind of numbed peace, as though he were under anaesthetic.

More difficult to persuade was Gunther, who didn’t want to leave the cabin at any price. “There are too many people. I don’t want to see them. I don’t want them to see me. I know them too well.”

Even so, Nora prepared his skis, which the boy hadn’t yet put on this winter. She was certain that he would resist this temptation. I have to get them outside, she thought, looking at the two men.

Hagen, who was alone in the cabin, whispered worriedly to Nora: “Be careful. Gunther doesn’t have the will or the energy to go fast.”

“Don’t worry. I’ll be right beside him.”

The program hadn’t yet started at the Touring Club. They were still doing maintenance work on the ski run, especially on the mound for the ski jump, where several volunteers were digging with shovels. All the accordion players from the two chalets were brought together with their instruments into a kind of village orchestra that was set up next to the jurors’ table to play “Long Live the Winner!” in Romanian and German when the prizes were handed out. Meanwhile, to soothe the audience’s impatience, they played various hymns and “ouvert-ures.”

Gunther’s arrival caused astonishment among the Saxons on the rostrum. The news passed from person to person by way of signs and whispers:”Der junge Grodeck, der junge Grodeck…”25 Intrigued stares turned from him to his companions. For a moment, all attention was diverted from what was happening on the ski run. Gunther became the highlight of the show, like a crown prince who makes an appearance on the balcony at a concert. Nora felt herself to be the object of dozens of questions. Gunther, invigorated by the cold morning air, held her arm and made lively conversation with her.

“Tomorrow the whole Grodeck family will know that we came out together. They’ll open an inquiry to find out who you are, where you’re from and what your intentions are. A young woman in the Grodeck family is an affront. The Grodecks don’t tolerate young women. There was one once, and they never forgave her, even after her death.”

Nora enjoyed facing the wave of surprise and curiosity that rose up around them. Only Paul remained indifferent to the pointing and the stares, not even noticing them.

The first event was the relay race. The route went from the Touring Club to the SKV chalet and, from there, through the Glade of the Three Maidens back to the Touring Club. The starting signal was given amid a general silence blasted by the report of a pistol that resounded through the mountains. The rostrum broke out in applause, while the teams, bearing large numbers on their backs, visible from the start, set off; friends and supporters shouted out their names. Gunther, too, took sides openly in the battle and began passionately shouting out the number of one of the pack of racers. “Two-oh-three! Two-oh-three!”

“Why two-oh-three?” Nora asked in surprise.

“I don’t know. I chose it by accident, like in roulette.”

He looked up with a bright face, a child once again, while he clung to her left arm with all his force.

“What number are you betting on, Paul?” Nora asked. She turned her head to the right, where he had been walking silently beside her, but she didn’t find him.

Had he left? It was certainly possible. The whole time she had felt him there on her right, locked in his oppressive silence like a piece of stone. She didn’t know at what point he might have slipped away without telling her.

So he’s left without a word, she thought bitterly.

Paul’s first thought, on leaving the scene, was to return to the cabin. He wanted to be alone. The throng of noisy people made him ill. Nora was irritating him with her exaggerated insistence on including him in a game that had no charm for him this morning. Standing between Gunther and him, attentive to all of their movements, Nora gave the impression of being a governess who was supervising two convalescents. He felt oppressed by her fixed gaze, even when it wasn’t directed at him. In the second’s swirl of confusion produced by the firing of the starting pistol, he had found the opportunity to break away unnoticed.

Everybody’s a patient for her, he thought as he walked away. I’m wrong, I’m being unfair to her, he added in his customarily intimate voice of a reasonable man, without being able to feel the slightest penitence. Words, thoughts, passed through him bleakly. He felt like an instrument with snapped chords, lacking warmth or resonance. Nothing elicited a response in him, neither thoughts nor memories.

He knew one name that in the past had made him feel nervous aches, unavoidable reflexes: Ann. He spoke it now in a loud voice, out of curiosity, as if pushing a button to see whether there was a response: “Ann, Ann, Ann.” The name fell from his lips, as inert as a stone.

He stared in the face images that even yesterday would have struck him as unbearable: Ann undressing with her untidy immodesty at the same time that whatever man she was with regarded her while smoking a cigarette or leafing through a book. For a long time he had felt tortured by the tale of a journey Ann had made to Greece with one of her first lovers, long before meeting him. “It was so hot,” she said, “that we spent the whole day naked together in the boat’s cabin and only in the evening did I get dressed to go out on deck.” Ann in her entirety pursued him in that image, which tormented him with lethal precision. It wasn’t the thought that Ann had slept or was sleeping with other men that was unbearable, but rather the certain, irrefutable physical details, the movements with which she unrolled her stockings or pulled her blouse over her head.

Now he watched all these formerly painful images with open eyes and found them incredibly stupid.

He saw Ann down in Braşov in a hotel room with Dănulescu or another man, he saw her naked in his arms, he followed her without horror, without revulsion, in her most secret motions, he heard her excited laughter, her sensual sigh, and it all flowed through him with deathly indifference.

At first he had set out for the cabin, but now he let his skis take him wherever they wished. A cutting wind struck him in the face and temples. If the trail to the SKV chalet hadn’t been taken over by that ridiculous competition, he would have allowed himself to be carried downhill by the slope, all the way to Poiana, to Braşov, to the national capital…

The Touring Club program was about to finish. During the wait for the downhill finals, the crowd on the rostrum followed the final ski jumps with guffaws of laughter. The competitors fell, one after another, as if someone were pulling the snow out from under their feet. Only very rarely did one of them succeed in staying on his skis and pulling to a stop in front of the rostrum to receive volleys of applause. Gunther followed each new jump with enthusiasm or indignation. His sympathies shifted unpredictably from one competitor to another. He shouted encouragement in the moment the competitor took off or called out reprimands when they fell. Nora was afraid that all this excitement would wear him out, and now and then she laid her hands lightly on his shoulders to calm him.

The space on her right was still empty. Paul hadn’t returned, and Nora wondered whether he was ever going to come back. It didn’t seem impossible to her that he might have left for good. Maybe a note would be waiting for her in the cabin, one of those short, curt notes which that idle men knew so well how to leave on a corner of the table just before fleeing…

The ski jump competition ended. The trail was cleared for the last downhill race. The judges shouted their instructions through cardboard bullhorns that were audible from one side of the ski run to the other. The crowd returned to the rostrum. In a second, the entire ski run was vacant and strained silence muffled the noise of a moment earlier.

The two five-man teams, from the SKV and the Touring Club, were going to descend the slope beneath the mountain peak in a straight line that would end in front of the rostrum. The regulations called this Schuss, a dash. The distance wasn’t long, not even 600 metres, but the slope was precipitous and any kind of stop — snowplow, stem-christi or telemark — was forbidden. The scene surrounding the competition contributed to the generally emotional atmosphere: pennants waved in silence, accordions that had been playing the whole time now stopped at a sign from the judges. At the base of the cliffs below the peak of Postăvar, the two teams could be seen lined up like black spheres on the white snow.

The report of the starting pistol opened the competition.

In the first seconds all that could be seen was a cloud of snow that billowed like an avalanche as it rolled down the slope. Then, one after another, the racers broke out of the blur, a tiny distance separating each one from the next. They were impossible to recognize or follow. Fans of both teams fell silent with the same troubled intensity. It was like a game played in the dark: nobody knew who was leading, who was winning, who was losing.

A cry went up from the rostrum: one of the racers had fallen. He fell head-first, rolling over down the slope, with his skis jammed across each other. His team was lost. The rules eliminated from the competition any team all of whose members didn’t cross the finish line. People rushed across the rostrum to the judges’ table seeking explanations and asking questions: “Who? Who? Who?”

The man continued to roll down the slope while the other racers swept past close by him, heading downhill.

The arrival of the competitors took place amid a general uproar. Each team member who reached the finish line was mobbed by the crowd, who recognized him and called out his name. There were five from the SKV, but only four from the Touring Club… The Touring Club was eliminated from the competition! But no! There were also five racers from the Touring Club. In the crush of people, they had counted wrong. All ten racers had completed the course. The results would be decided by the stopwatch.

Who, then, was the fallen racer? Who was that eleventh, unregistered competitor who now lay in the snow halfway down the run? The first-aid team headed towards the site of the accident. Nora could not prevent an absurd thought from entering her head.

“Please wait for me here,” she said to Gunther. “I’ll be right back.”

Paul had set out towards the mountain’s summit without any clear thought in his mind. He wanted only to get away from the Touring Club and that rowdy crowd. On the slope from Timiş the mountainside was silent and deserted. The forest took on the savagery of a forgotten time. He stood for a few moments on the frozen rocks of the summit, white like huge blocks of ice. The Timiş, Valley, invisible and covered by clouds, vibrated far below with the rustling sound of running water. The horizon was blotted out by the same dense mist, as though between walls of smoke.

He didn’t know how long he had been there. Minutes or hours flowed by him with a taste of slumber. He had dropped down a few steps to make a detour around some icy boulders that blocked the way to the Timiş slope, and had found among the pine trees a wide path set like a saddle on the neck of the mountain. His skis were gliding forward on their own at an easy pace, when suddenly they twisted violently to the right. In the same instant they stopped him with a reflexive shudder that made him feel a lunge in his chest, as though someone behind him had pulled a secret brake lever.

In front of him the almost vertical path opened like a clear drop, at the bottom of which he could see the rostrum of the Touring Club. Coloured pennants were flying over the ski run and as their shapes changed they exchanged incomprehensible waves. The sound of voices came from below, but then suddenly nothing was audible, as though the Touring Club chalet with its rostrum and people had vanished into the distance.

He set out downhill with his eyes open. If I want, I can still stop, he thought. For the first few seconds the skis were sliding with difficulty over the frozen snow. Yes, I can still stop. The weapon’s report broke the silence. Only then did he realize that he wasn’t alone. Silhouettes rushed past very close to him one after another, lifting the curtain of snow that covered everything. Finally it got lighter, a torrent of white solar light through which he himself passed luminously, like a lighted torch. His eyes remained wide open, but the sun was too strong to allow him to see anything.

The fall struck him like a deflection into flight. He had the violent sensation of being swept off his intended trajectory and hurled in another direction, like a ricocheting projectile…

He was brought to the rostrum on a stretcher made out of pine bows.

“I think you don’t even think you have a fracture, but it’s better for us not to tire you out,” the young doctor said, taking seriously his role as the head of the first-aid team.

Paul had initially lost consciousness, but then he had opened his eyes, unaware of what was going on. Above him were several unfamiliar faces, including Nora’s: the severe, sad Nora at whom he would have liked to smile.

He had received a blow in the right eye, his lower lip was bleeding, his forehead and cheeks were raw with scratches.

“That’s not the important thing,” the doctor said. “If there’s no fracture, nor an internal hemorrhage, we’re home-free.”

Nothing was hurting. He just felt that he couldn’t get up. Nora was rubbing him with her handkerchief.

“It’s your turn to get me up out of the snow,” he said. “Now you don’t owe me anything: an accident for an accident.”

She bent over him even farther and whispered in his ear, so that no one would hear: “Why did you do that, Paul? Why?”

“I don’t know, Nora. I don’t remember.”

There was something radiant in his gaze, an expression of great calm.

“I’ve forgotten everything, absolutely everything. And here in the snow beneath your eyes, Nora, I’m a man without memories, a free man — you hear me? A free man…”

XVI

OLD GRODECK ARRIVED AT THE CABIN THE MORNING AFTER Christmas. Nobody expected him, but even before his arrival, Faffner showed signs of uneasiness. He roamed about snarling and rooting around in the snow with his snout as though searching for an invisible trail of blood.

“That dog is ill,” Nora said, trying to quiet him down; but no one could get close to him.

Faffner threw himself on Old Grodeck as soon as he saw him. Until they came out of the cabin to help him, the man was sprawled in the snow howling in panic. He got up white with fear, his jacket torn across the right shoulder where the dog had sunk in his fangs. By a miracle, the wound wasn’t deep. It was his good fortune to be very heavily dressed and wearing a fur coat which it was difficult for the dog’s fangs to penetrate, but through which they had reached the skin, leaving a bloody ring like a red brand.

Faffner no longer recognized Hagen, Gunther or Paul. He writhed in their hands with a wild desperation. All three of them had to hold him down, wrestling with him, until Old Grodeck, led away by Nora, finally succeeded in entering the cabin.

They had no sooner released him than Faffner pounced at the door and the windows with a frantic howl of impotence.

“We can’t leave him like that,” Hagen said. “We’d better chain him up.”

They all entered the house, where for a moment they remained silent, listening with a clutch in their heart to the howls of the tortured being who seemed to be asking for their help.

Old Grodeck wasn’t actually old. He didn’t look more than fifty, and he wore those fifty years very lightly on his still-vigorous shoulders.

He recovered quickly from the fright he had received. He shook the snow off his clothes without looking embarrassed at what had happened. Faffner’s howls, which continued to sound outside as the dog strained against the chain, didn’t seem to bother him.

“I’ve always said that animal’s disturbed.”

His unusual entrance into the cabin made introductions difficult. He hadn’t said hello on arriving, nor had he offered anyone his hand — and now it was too late for these formalities, since they were all looking as though they were unaccustomed to them. He was dressed in city clothes and wore mourning, presumably for his wife. The black ribbon on his left arm had come loose during his fall, and now he adjusted it again with great care. It was a very proper form of mourning, that of a scrupulous man who knew his duties and respected them. A certain chilly dignity persisted in his bearing even now, after being mauled in his fight with the dog.

That morning Gunther was wearing his red sweater and a pair of light grey flannel slacks. Next to him, Old Grodeck’s black clothes were like a silent reprimand, as though he alone cherished the dead woman’s memory. He walked between the people and objects in the room with a cold gaze that asked no questions but disapproved of everything. He seemed to be waiting to be alone with his son in order to tell him what had brought him to the cabin, but Hagen, who usually found work he had to do outside, remained still this time, with a visible resolution not to move from the spot.

“Please stay here,” Gunther whispered to Nora and Paul, who were getting ready to leave.

Beneath his customary ironic smile was a challenging expression directed at the unexpected guest in black, but also a fear of remaining alone with him.

The silence became even more oppressive during lunch. Only Faffner’s intermittent barking outside was audible. Old Grodeck ate sparingly, yet seriously and with a kind of meticulous attention. Once in a long while he uttered a word or two about people who Gunther must know. The name Aunt Augusta recurred frequently in his conversation, spoken with reverence, as though referring to a higher authority. This Aunt Augusta must occupy a significant place in the Grodeck hierarchy. Yet Gunther made no reply of any sort, and Old Grodeck did not seem to expect one.

Hagen had not sat down at the table. His powerful silence defended from afar the more nervous, uncertain silence of the boy. He remained riveted to his spot next to the door without once allowing his gaze to stray from what was happening at the table. The old man seemed to have no problem in putting up with this leaden, strained silence. Leaning his immense shoulders over the table, he could have borne far heavier weights without feeling them. His mourning tie and black suit gave him a solemn, pensive air. As the end of the meal approached, he still hadn’t spoken a word. When he finished eating, he suddenly addressed Gunther: “I’ve come to ask if you want to return home.”

The boy didn’t reply at first. Such a direct question hadn’t been expected; nothing had prepared him for it. Then he replied curtly with an unflinching expression: “No.”

Old Grodeck accepted the reply, looking him in the face without a tremor. “I knew it. It was my duty to ask you, but I knew it.”

“In that case,” Gunther said, “you shouldn’t have tired yourself out coming all the way up here. I’m sorry you had to make such a long trip.”

“Anybody could make that trip. Whether you stay here or whether you leave, we have a few things to talk about. It might be better if the two of us talked about them alone.”

“I don’t have any secrets,” Gunther said, bewildered by the thought that he might be left alone and shooting a pleading glance in the direction of Nora, Paul and Hagen.

“They’re not secrets, they’re business issues… I want to talk to you about the Bihor forest.”

Until now he had been speaking in Romanian, but in that moment, before finishing his sentence, he started to speak German, as though in a kind of instinctive self-defence against the strangers in front of him. His speech took on a nervous haste that hadn’t been evident before. The calm he had shown until now was due in part to the fact that he had to choose his words with care when speaking Romanian.

They were talking about a railway line for logging that the Grodeck enterprises were building in their forest in Bihor. As unforeseen developments had occurred, which would prolong the project by another year, he sought from Gunther an agreement in principle that on reaching the age of majority the boy would not block the scheme’s unfolding evolution. The issue was important, and Old Grodeck presented it in detail, with figures, technical explanations, diagrams and blueprints, which he had brought with him and now spread over the table.

Gunther listened without a sign of approval, or even of understanding. A moment later he got to his feet.

“I can’t even give you an answer. For the time being, these matters don’t concern me. In March I’m going to go down to Braşov. I’ll see then what needs to be done.”

For the first time, Old Grodeck lost his patience. “I don’t have time to wait until March.”

“I’m surprised,” Gunther said. “A Grodeck always has time to wait. That’s the only thing I learned from all of you. Didn’t you wait twenty years until Mama died? You can wait a little longer for me.”

“Let’s not talk about this any more,” Old Grodeck said. “Whatever may have happened, your mama’s memory is sacred to us both. I have forgotten everything.”

“In that you’re generous,” Gunther laughed. “But I’ve forgotten nothing. You understand? Nothing at all.”

He had lost the ironic self-control he had shown until now. There were cold, blue flames in his eyes that burned with desperation in his childlike face. Old Grodeck tried to maintain his emotional balance beneath that burning gaze. If it hadn’t been for his guttural voice, altered by his barely concealed rage, as if he had unexpectedly become hoarse, nothing would have betrayed him. In this he was assisted by the rigid dignity of his black mourning clothes.

“There are certain things,” he said, “that a father cannot discuss with his son. And whatever else may be said, you are still my son.”

As he spoke the final words, he raised his head, looked towards Hagen and stared him in the eyes for the first time, confronting the stoney silence that the other man had conserved during the lunch. Then he addressed the boy again with the same guttural voice stifled by anger.

“I came here today to arrange business matters that can’t be delayed. You have to be reasonable and listen to me. I’m sure your mama, if she were alive, would agree with me.”

On hearing these words, Gunther broke into a harsh laugh. “I’d always wondered why you killed her. Now I finally know: so that she can say that you’re right. When you people kill someone you make it sound as though they were on your side. But even if Mama’s dead she’s still with me, and if you’ve come to take me away, you’ve come in vain. I’m not going to let you kill her a second time.”

He was exceptionally pale, and his exasperated laughter was full of tears. He suddenly left the room, slamming the door behind him. They could hear his steps fleeing up the stairs to the room in the tower.

Hagen left at almost the same time, heading after him. Grodeck remained alone with Nora and Paul. He adjusted his tie with great care, an activity that seemed to bring him a sort of peace, as if with this motion he had put his life in order and compensated for the harsh words that had been hurled at him in front of strangers.

“You mustn’t pay attention to Gunther’s talk,” he said. “He has a high-strung nature, and I made the mistake of bringing him up with too much freedom. In that regard, his late mother has part of the blame. She kept him too close to her coattails and made him into a spoiled child. I don’t know what you’ve been told about her, either here or in Braşov — I heard you spent the night in a house which she, too, had the possibly reprehensible recklessness to enter once in a while. I don’t know what you’ve been told, but I can assure you that my late wife was an utterly respectable woman and that no reproach can be made to her memory. But she did have a high-strung nature, and that tendency had an influence on Gunther’s upbringing. I’m committed to telling you these things myself, especially since you had the misfortune to witness that scene a moment ago.”

He crossed the room with measured strides, stopped in front of various objects and stared at them with disapproval.

“The boy is ill,” Nora said. “Too much emotional strain could make him collapse. You could have left him in peace for a bit.”

“Ill!” Old Grodeck spoke the word with irritation and incredulity. “That’s another of the romantic ideas he’s inherited from his mother. If he’s really ill, why doesn’t he come home? Why does he stay in this wilderness, without a doctor, without medicine?”

“I think he feels good here. Hagen looks after him and brings him everything he needs.”

Old Grodeck frowned. “He isn’t called Hagen. He’s called Klaus Schmidt.”

“Here we call him Hagen.”

“Well, try to call him Schmidt,” he blustered. “I never could get used to my wife calling him that: Schmidt. It all could have happened differently…”

He stopped in front of the portrait on the bookshelf and gazed at it intolerantly. The young woman’s smile seemed to disappear beneath the weight of his stare.

For whole hours after Old Grodeck’s departure from the cabin, Faffner continued to fret and root around. They unleashed him, but he kept tossing about as if he were tied up. At first he had headed off into the woods on the tracks of the man who had left, but after a while he returned, dejected. It was too late to find him again, and the tracks had vanished into the mist.

He didn’t want to eat anything, nor did he accept being stroked. In fact, he was ill; his eyes burned with fever, and whenever someone tried to lay a hand on him, pulling on his ear — a gesture that normally soothed him — the dog bawled in pain, as though he had been touched on a raw wound.

“It hurts him,” Gunther said. “After such a long time, it still hurts him… It’s five years ago now. It was in September, I think… Yes, in September… I was coming back from town with Mama. We found Faffner in the yard in a pool of blood. He’d shot him with his rifle and then left him there, thinking he was dead. You understand? With his rifle…”

“Why?” Nora asked.

“Because Mama loved him. He’s never tolerated beings that Mama loved, or those who loved her. He would have murdered them all, with his rifle or some other way… The Grodecks sometimes know how to kill without using rifles… They kill discreetly and then they wear their mourning clothes with dignity.”

Faffner, as if he had understood that they were talking about him, moved closer to the fireplace.

XVII

NEW YEAR’S EVE WAS CELEBRATED IN THE MOUNTAINS with bonfires and shouts. From the Touring Club and the Saxons’ chalet cries came echoing through the woods, covered only by the metallic whizzing of the wind. A blizzard raged all day, but later on the storm began to subside. A heavy, dense mist descended peacefully over the rocks and the fir trees.

As soon as evening fell, a gigantic bonfire was set on the summit of the mountain and drew people from both chalets to gather around it. Figures with pitch-torches in their hands were visible climbing up the slope; their voices and laughter were audible from far away. When they reached the top they fell silent and approached the fire with sincere, earnest faces.

“If it weren’t for the mist, we’d be able to see the fire on Piatra Mare,” someone said.

Wherever there was a cabin, a bonfire was lighted that night, and silent people assembled around it in the final hours of the year. Big fires burned on all the ridges of the Bucegi Mountains, like so many signals seeking each other in the night; but the mist covered everything.

“You’re like the bonfire on Piatra Mare, Paul. I know you’re there somewhere in the mist, but I can’t see you.”

“Why do you say that, Nora? Am I not right beside you? Aren’t we here together?”

“Together, yet alone.”

“We’re all alone, Nora. Look carefully at everyone here and tell me if there’s one of them who’s not alone.”

In the light of that evening’s flames there were only sad people, serious faces, gazes that crossed without meeting. The same expression of attention arrested and then brought back into focus floated on all the girls’ faces as though on the surface of a bottomless pond. The bonfire made everyone reflective. Immense beech logs burned to embers but continued to cohere in their incandescence. People kept hurling branches onto the fire. At first the fire sputtered, but then the flames roared up powerfully like the sound of a burning house. The junipers and smaller firs became luminous in a second, flaming up, as enchanting as phosphorescent plants. Quick sparks flitted upwards with the delicate noise of metallic rain, then everything melted together into the embers that glowed like golden lava.

Paul had stopped a few steps from the fire, as though he didn’t dare to move closer. He took off his peaked cap with a humble gesture and stood there bareheaded.

“It’s time to go,” Nora said.

“Not yet,” he objected.

He couldn’t bring himself to break away from there. It seemed to him that this fire needed him to keep burning. It seemed to him that, without people surrounding it, it would go out.

Gunther was waiting impatiently for them in the cabin. In the three days that had passed since Old Grodeck’s departure, he had fallen ill. That evening he came down from his room for the first time.

“Do you still have a fever?”

“Not this evening. I don’t want to have a fever on New Year’s Eve.” He was still very pale, but his eyes had regained their former glow. “Do you like what I did while you were away?”

The house was decorated with wreaths of coloured paper. Gunther was very proud of his work. On a large piece of white cardboard, inscribed, as though in an American movie, with pretty patterned letters, were the English words: Happy New Year 1935.

“If we had champagne and music, it would be a real réveillon,” he said with a mischievous air.

“We don’t have champagne, but we do have wine. As for music, if we keep still, we can hear the music from the Touring Club very clearly.”

In fact, a distant accordion tune was audible. Then the nocturnal rustle of the forest covered it. For the first time, Nora took off her ski costume. She had a black dress in her backpack that she hadn’t put on until now because she felt better in the cabin in a ski vest and long trousers. She liked walking in her hobnailed boots and felt that her heavy step gave her more security in the presence of these three men.

But tonight the hobnailed boots tired her and the ski vest was too heavy. Her heavy woollen stockings scratched her. She took them off as though at the end of a long march and then, after so many days of rough clothing, she put on silk stockings, the only pair she’d brought with her from Bucharest, and felt their chill on her legs like a caress.

I’ve been a boy for too long, Nora thought, looking at herself in the mirror. Since donning her ski costume, she had been wearing her hair up, pinned in place beneath her peaked cap. Now she undid it and let it fall to her shoulders. Her black dress had a red leather belt and a narrow white collar that showed no cleavage. It seemed wrong that the dress had long sleeves. She would have liked to wear an evening dress that left her arms bare, a dress that could be heard shimmying as she walked, as though at a dance. But even in that modest black dress, Nora felt herself becoming a woman again. Her high-heeled shoes made her taller. Her hair, loose on her shoulders, liberated her forehead, and in its deep, dark brown depths her whole face became whiter and more luminous than before.

She felt free and easy and rushed downstairs — she who usually walked without haste or noise. She stopped only on the final stair, surprising herself with this unexpected change. What’s with you, Nora? It’s as if you’re drunk, she scolded herself.

Gunther came towards her and took her hand, regarding her with an expression of childlike astonishment. “How beautiful you are! I didn’t know you were so beautiful. Where did this come from? What happened?”

“I’m not beautiful, Gunther. But this evening I’m trying, I’d like to be beautiful. For the year ahead. We have to greet it with friendship, with some courage, above all with confidence. We have to have confidence in it and the things it brings us.”

Paul approached Nora. “Gunther’s right. You really are beautiful. Skiing made you look like a boy as long as we were dressing boyishly. But look now, you’re intimidating us. We’d like to kiss your hand and we don’t know how. We’ve taught ourselves to let you fall in the snow without stopping to check on you. You always manage on your own, and we go on ahead. We’ve taught ourselves to answer you with grunts, or sometimes not to answer at all. You’re patience, Nora. You’re obedience. You’re simplicity. We receive it all with indifference, as if it we were owed it, as if we had an ancestral right to it. But tonight you’ve suddenly reminded us that you’re beautiful, and your beauty is a gift too great for us. You disarm us, you give us the jitters, you make us babble all sorts of nonsense.”

“Really, Paul — only nonsense?” She had never heard him speaking with such unpretentious, untroubled emotion. Never had she discerned in his gaze the twinkle of tenderness with which he now approached her. If we were alone, I think I’d kiss him. “Babble nothing but nonsense, my dear. What’s happened to you? What will these people think of us?”

She was thinking less of Gunther, who had taken all this as a game from the beginning, and more of Hagen who, standing in motionless silence, had not budged from his spot next to the window. This evening his hard blue eyes had what might be the beginnings of dreamy tolerance…

It was still long before midnight when Faffner, who until now had been lying next to the fire, suddenly got up as though from a dream with a tremor of attention and uneasiness. He listened for a while, with his snout raised in the air and his ear cocked in the direction of who-knew-what distant noise, then walked puffing and snarling towards the door.

“What is it, Faffner?”

The dog stood up with his paws against the door, trying to open it by himself, yet when Hagen opened it and motioned for him to go outside he stayed on the threshold as though not daring to go any farther. He barked in the direction of the woods, more with uneasiness than anger.

“Are you afraid, Faffner?”

He would not go back inside but neither would he consent to leaving the cabin completely. He had an unusual bark, as though someone had asked him a question to which he didn’t want to reply.

“Let’s go see what it is,” Hagen said.

He put his cape over his shoulders, lighted his lantern, then took one of the two carbines down from the pegs overhead. They saw him armed for the first time, a sight that surprised them even more because until now they had believed that those two guns hanging on the wall were more decorations than actual old weapons. This man is really a hunter, Nora thought. The gun in his hand seemed to complete him. He looked less strange now. His ash-coloured cape, like his high boots, looked normal.

“Come, Faffner,” Hagen said, and set off. The dog followed behind with his muzzle in the snow, seeking the scent…

They came back half an hour later. Time had passed slowly in the cabin, in a strained expectation that intensified the silence. Gunther didn’t separate himself from the window for a moment. Not a single cry or call was audible from the forest. Only from time to time did they hear noise — growing ever fainter — from the parties at the Touring Club and the SKV chalet. Paul wanted to go looking for the two who had left.

“Maybe they need help. There’s still one carbine here.”

“We have it here, and it’s good for it to stay here,” Nora said to stop him from leaving.

The wait was so difficult, filled with so many presentiments and unasked questions, that at first not even Hagen’s return laid them all to rest.

“I’m bringing you a bear cub,” he said, as he entered.

In fact, he was carrying on his arm a frozen baby bear, its pelt white with snow, its eyes half-shut with cold or exhaustion, its front paws tucked beneath its coffee-coloured muzzle, as though it were trying to warm itself up on its own.

“It must have left its mother’s lair in daylight and then not been able to find its way back. I’m going to try to find it for him, but I’ve brought him here first so that you can see him.”

“Are there bears around here?” Nora asked, astonished.

“Only in one spot, down towards the sheep-run. I think there aren’t very many of them. This summer the shepherds were talking about a she-bear, a single one, who would come out at night now and then at the sheep-run.”

Hagen had set down the bear cub on the carpet. They all gathered around to look at it. Only Faffner had to be kept away, since he was barking incessantly and showing his fangs as if he wanted to tear the cub open.

“He smells of the wilderness,” Hagen said.

Nora remained puzzled. Long ago she had learned at school that bears hibernated in total lethargy. She didn’t understand by what miracle this cub had reached their hands alive in the depths of winter.

“But that’s not true at all,” Hagen said. “You can’t even talk about total lethargy. It’s a kind of slumber, a kind of drowsiness, from which the bear awakes now and then, and — but of course usually not when there’s a blizzard — sometimes goes outside into the daylight. Especially when he’s restless, like this little brute.”

He spoke about these matters with a certain passion. For the first time since she had met him, his speech, normally harsh and cold, began to have a friendly air. He remained bent over the sleeping little brute with the attentive gaze of a man tamed.

Midnight found them silent and watchful around the bear cub who had entered the house with the new year.

It might be a sign, Nora thought.

He brought with him a smell of forest and earth. He looked ridiculous and dishevelled when he started to stretch and they all stared at him with amazement. He came from a mysterious life, hidden beneath the ice, beneath the snows. The stillness of the forest preserved roots and beasts. Everything appeared dead, yet underneath it was alive.

“Life’s always starting over,” Nora whispered, looking at the little beast, which she had bent over in order to caress its snow-damp muzzle. She wasn’t certain to whom or for whom she was speaking these words. For Paul, who had struggled so long to escape from his memories, as though they were a winter. For Gunther, who still had his eyes turned back in the direction of his vanished mother. For Hagen, who tried to conserve the image of the woman he had loved in a house with closed shutters. And for you, my poor old Nora, who’s believed so often that she has nothing more to expect from anyone.

“It’s midnight,” she said in a loud voice, and went to extinguish the lamp. Only the wood burning in the fireplace continued to toss its feeble reddish light over their faces, which took on more serious expressions in the darkness.

In the distance, on the summit of the mountain, they heard gunshots. Rifles were being fired off in honour of New Year. Faffner, who had been snarling the whole time, fell silent and listened.

When they had put the lights back on, they looked at each other for a few seconds without speaking.

“Life’s always starting over,” Nora said, mainly for herself. These words pleased her. She thought it was good that they were the first ones she had spoken in the new year.

“It’s time to go home,” Hagen said to the bear cub.

He got up and went into the woods again, carrying it on his arm. The dog followed calmly behind him. Nora, standing between Paul and Gunther, watched him leave from the doorway. The three of them stayed there for a long time. The night was peaceful and misty. They could still see Hagen’s lantern among the fir trees. His dark cape passed over the snow like a shadow.

XVIII

“THE CLOUDS ARE BREAKING UP!”

From the SKV chalet to the Touring Club, the news rushed through the woods like a yell: “The clouds are breaking up! The mist’s lifting!”

The morning was grey, the horizon was closed off, and the light still lacked the spark of brightness. The summit of Postăvar looked foreshortened beneath a damp, opaque sky that had fallen too low.

Yet from the Saxons’ chalet came shouts that announced sun and light.

“You can see Braşov! You can see Râşnov!” people coming down from the chalet recounted with astonishment. Groups of skiers rushed downhill towards the SKV chalet to ascertain that this miracle had actually happened.

Nora and Paul arrived too late.

“We had sun until a minute ago,” the man with the eyes of a badger said as he greeted them. He blinked repeatedly, as if he had been blinded by the light. The curtain of clouds, having lifted for a moment, had once again fallen towards the invisible world of the valley.

Everyone had squeezed onto the balcony as though onto the bridge of a steamship in order to follow the sun’s unexpected return. From that lookout point, when the sky was clear, one could see all of the Burzenland, all the way to the Făgăraş Mountains. It was like a window in the peak of Postăvar, open in the direction of the plain, a window lost in clouds since the onset of winter and through which, for a few seconds that morning, that sunlit vision of Braşov had appeared, only to vanish into nothingness once again.

People looked confused by that too-fleeting vision that had flashed in the distance then been extinguished. The mist settled over the pine forests and the cliffs again, with its hazy light, which snuffed out the last glimmering from the rocks.

“Look!” somebody shouted.

The murk blocking the horizon had divided and a floating ring of blue light had opened like a phantasmagoric town among the clouds. Smokey drapes were pulled aside, walls of mist collapsed. A steel-roofed citadel sparkled in the sun, with spears and shields raised in the light.

It wasn’t Braşov. It was too far away to be Braşov, it was too dazzling.

Avalanches of clouds covered it, tossing it into darkness again, but a second later it sprang up once more in another spot, like a travelling island or a fantastic gulf in that ocean of smoke and mist. Sometimes the visions were sharp, simple, easy to recognize. Someone would point out Râşnov or Zizin, the winding road to Bran, or the glowing factory towers of Zărneşti, through the clouds. But in a single instant everything would disappear. Towns cut loose from their locations were buffeted from one streak of light to another, harbours of light opened and closed, passing mist evaporated in the sunlight…

For two days the weather fluctuated between sunlight and blizzards. The mornings were luxuriant, as though experienced on the doorstep of an immense grotto. The clouds were torn, curving into distant Arcs de la Triomphe, blue vaults, brilliant costumes. From one second to the next, smokey continents took shape then melted over the flat Burzenland plain. Mountain ranges rose and fell in a magical light.

The mist swirled up from the forest like smoke from a great fire. Each fir tree seemed to burn in a cold flame, with a metallic sound. Mountains bucked to shake themselves free of cloud. There was sunlight all over the Burzenland, there was sunlight all over the Prahova Valley; only Postăvar, like a smoky bell, a citadel of blackness, remained enclosed in its winter walls.

In the morning the gates seemed to open and, through the torn tissue of clouds, as though via dozens of moving windows, visions of another world, another season, chased each other through the haze. Yet towards evening, as though the mountains, tiring of this turmoil, had surrendered to the victorious winter, the mist fell again, the clouds became heavy, the forest smoked feebly…

On the third night everything suddenly fell calm, as tempests fall calm on the sea.

Paul awoke in the darkness and listened.

“What’s happened?”

“I’m not sure. Listen for yourself.”

The nocturnal silence had a rustling quality, as though the forest had been rejuvenated. The cabin seemed to be as light as a ship freed from an ice floe.

Paul went to the window and opened it. A deep blue sky with moist stars, an incomparably clear, incomparably simple, spring sky, floated over the snowbound forest. Everything in the night was blue — the firs, the snow, the cliffs. An invisible moon, possibly secluded somewhere behind the cabin, gave the distant mountains a weak metallic glow; their silhouettes, too, were blue, but with phosphorescent, snow-white summits.

Paul remained next to the window with an intoxicated feeling. Nora called him a few times, but he didn’t reply.

The cold night air was sharp but not freezing. It carried a moist smell, an aroma of roots and damp herbs.

“It’s like awaking from a dream,” Paul said.

He bent towards the window to feel the breeze from that impossible spring night on his forehead.

In full sunlight, Postăvar was unrecognizable. A large amphitheatre encircled its green and white forests. The light was cold, pure, resonant. Even on the most distant lines of mountains, everything stood out with exaggerated precision as though in an infinite display window. Looking between the pine trees from Gunther’s cabin, he could make out minuscule houses, black roofs, narrow paths winding through the bush-like rivers far away in the valley. It was Predeal, a Predeal coloured with expanses of mauve and blue. The Bucegi Mountains no longer had their lunar glow, their night-time transparency. They looked like mountains made out of chalk, meticulously sculpted, with delicate, precise peaks.

On the opposite slope, the Burzenland unfurled like a relief model. The Făgăraş Mountains and the peaks around Cincu caught the plain, with its towns, trails, forests, tiny yet clearly delineated when seen from high above, within their violet circle, as though viewed through a spyglass that shrank images without distorting them. The most distant silhouettes — houses, trees or cliffs

— retained their distinctive contours in daylight.

Nora and Paul spent all of their time on their skis. Their old routes became new and full of surprises. Each spot on the mountain, each hour of the day, opened onto an unknown landscape. The snow itself seemed to change its consistency in the sunlight. It was light, powdery, dry snow, which their skis glided across without any resistence, sensitive to the slightest pressure. Turns and stops happened on their own, almost before they had begun the manoeuvre. Everything worked with delightful ease in that light that lent transparency to even the heaviest objects.

The harshest sounds, the most distant echoes, became audible in the woods with a kind of musical vibration. The whole mountain was like a tuning fork or a violin. The blows of axe-blades or the squelched falling of trees emanated as though from the depths of the earth, only to grow clearer as they entered the warm morning air. A few times, a barely discernible breeze passed through the forest, and beneath this breath of life the pine trees looked like sailing ships becalmed on the sea. Only at the tops of the ridges was the air sharper; the wind’s gusting raised the snow, spraying it up in small artesian wells. From the summit of Postăvar, the lines of the Bucegi Mountains stood out like silver craters, each crowned by a halo of fine powder.

They came back to the cabin tired out from too much sunlight, intoxicated from endless runs on their skis. Gunther, who couldn’t do anything more demanding than a light outing, normally waited for them at the SKV chalet, where his appearance always aroused the same whispers and questions. But now the boy accepted with indifference, even with an ironic pleasure, all these stares that peeped out from the windows as soon as he approached the Saxons’ chalet. The sun lent him a feverish, exuberant joy, animated by movement. He walked around bare-headed in his sleeveless summer shirt, open at the neck, and ran through the snow with his arms spread and his face to the sun. Faffner, older and more skeptical, followed him without haste.

“Don’t you want to awake from the dream?” Gunther asked him, pulling on his ear. “Don’t you see that spring’s come?”

The dog lifted its head for a moment, its eyes narrowing in the morning light, then with its old sleepy indolence, it returned to its winter slumber.

“Faffner’s wiser than us,” Nora said. “He knows better than to believe in spring too soon.”

Gunther’s slightly exaggerated delight worried her. The boy seemed to think he’d put the winter behind him. His delight was a kind of victorious satisfaction, as though the aim he had set himself — to make it to the month of March in order to be able to confront the Grodeck family — had been reached and his effort to live until then had been fulfilled.

Nora wished she could temper that excessive happiness.

Standing between Paul and Gunther, both raving about the sunlight, she tried to remain calm. She didn’t believe in great, dazzling, miraculous happiness.

She believed more in soothing, durable, settled feelings.

“Isn’t that right, Faffner?”

She sensed in Faffner an ally, a friend, a source of wisdom.

It was two or three in the afternoon when the sunlight became scorching. Paul no longer wanted to go inside. He lay down on the steps of the cabin with his eyes closed and his arms spread. A warm red light crossed and recrossed his eyelids, bringing back his hours on the beach at Balcic. He had the sensation that he was naked in the sunlight. He could feel his temples throbbing; his ears were deafened by a confused tumult of cowries. He forgot where he was and how long he had been here. It seemed to him as though he had always been wrapped in this luminous torpor and always would be. He had no memories, no thoughts. Not a single image passed before his closed eyes, not even his own image. He barely felt the heat on his arms, his sunburned cheeks; the light seemed to pass through him, through his pores, through the blood in his veins, right to the arteries, right to his heart.

Nora came alongside him to wake him without raising her voice. He heard her as though she were approaching, felt her as though her light hands were on his face and his hair, but all of these vague sensations remained beyond the boundaries of his intimate circle of light.

The evenings had the aroma of resin, of tree bark, of tender leaves. The pine trees became translucent beneath the white moon. The day’s bright colours — like violet, white or red tinsel — faded away after a last intense kindling at sunset.

Against the white background of the snowy Bucegi Mountains, the moon rose in an unreal shade of yellow, a warm powerful yellow that did not seem to be part of this winter evening landscape. Later, when it regained its spectral light, the ridges, enlarged beneath the moonlight, looked as blue as pristine lakes.

Nora and Paul waited for the sunset up on the summit of Postăvar. They stayed there until late, until the night was black. Scattered lights came on in the Timiş Valley. The automobile headlights advancing along the road to Braşov stood out like points of fire; farther away, like a bracelet of glinting stones, they saw Râşnov. The forests rustled without wind, without bending, with a murmur of new life beneath the snow. The rocks had a welcoming smell of fresh earth.

They left the summit late, drunk on the view, staggering on their skis. They couldn’t stand to return to the cabin. They couldn’t tear themselves away from this thrilling evening and its vaporous light. Whole hours passed without their speaking to each other. Only now and then, when they stopped at a fork in the trail, did they seek each other out, asking with their eyes which direction they should take — towards Ruia? towards Crucur? — and now, in the pale light of the night, they looked at each other with uncomprehending astonishment, as though they had met in a dream.

XIX

THE NIGHT BEFORE EPIPHANY, THE BLIZZARD broke again. The weather changed unexpectedly, and in less than an hour Postăvar returned to winter. Braşov was visible for an instant in the evening light, then disappeared into the mist.

“From here on in, we won’t see it again until the spring,” Hagen said, closing the shutters.

The last night Nora and Paul had left in the mountains strongly resembled the night of their arrival at the cabin. The wind hurled waves of snow at the windows. Faffner barked at the woods, frozen solid by the frost.

Next to the fireplace, Nora recited the words that had greeted her on the first night:

“Mancher auf der Wanderschaft

Kommt aus Tor auf dunklen Pfaden…”

Gunther didn’t let her finish.

“No, no. It’s late now. No one else is coming.”

The return of winter, after several days of sunshine, caught Gunther unprepared, without defences or resistance. The brief spring had given him a nervous enthusiasm that left him vulnerable. He watched in silence as Nora and Paul prepared for their departure, stuffing their belongings into their backpacks in order to be ready the next morning. His cheeks were sunburned, but his face had become pale again. Deep pouches of exhaustion and fever made his fair eyes even bluer.

“Do you have to go?”

He asked the question in a careless tone, trying to hide his agony at seeing them leave.

“We might not have to,” Paul said, rendered pensive by Gunther’s question. “We might not have to. If we were braver than we are… If we understood that nothing’s calling us back to the city

… If we had decided to stay here forever…”

Nora continued to organize her belongings and place them in her backpack. She, too, had entertained for a moment the childish thought of staying at the cabin, but she dismissed it with a decisive gesture. Someone in this house has to not be a dreamer. “The two of you are forgetting that I’m a teacher. You’re forgetting that my vacation is over. On January 8th, at eight o’clock in the morning, I have to be in class.”

In her mind she said different, cold, rather bitter words to hold back her tears.

Hagen accompanied them as far as Ruia. For a while Faffner, too, followed them, but the snow was too deep for him and, before reaching the SKV chalet, the dog stopped.

“Hey, Faffner, go home. And stop giving us those sad eyes. Aren’t you ashamed? You’re an adult.”

The dog stood unmoving with an amazed stare that didn’t grasp what was happening.

Hagen was silent the whole way. He skied behind them with his dark cape flapping in the wind. At Ruia he let them go on alone. “I’d guide you to Braşov, but I don’t want to leave the boy on his own.”

At the last minute he took a small metal object out of his pocket and gave it to Nora with an abrupt, unprepared motion. “Please hold onto it as a keepsake of Gunther.”

It was a medallion with a portrait of Young Mrs. Grodeck, a small, round portrait that resembled the one in the cabin, although it seemed to be much older.

Nora didn’t know how to respond. Even the gesture with which he had offered her this unexpected gift contained a harshness that discouraged any word of friendship.

“I’ll never forget Gunther. Nor you, Hagen.”

His blue eyes were hard and chilly, betraying neither a smile nor sadness. Nora waited to read in them a sign of understanding, but there was no flicker of light in his dark face.

“Have a safe journey,” Hagen said.

They knew the trails and no longer needed to stop at the junctions to look for signs to give them directions. The trail to Crucur unfurled without any accidental difficulties. The route was deceptively simple and looked at first glance as though it demanded little effort. Paul let himself go, and his skis ran faster and faster. He didn’t even try to brake. Only on the turns did he slip into a very weak snowplow, which closed up naturally in the seconds following the turn with a brisk skid from which his skis emerged lighter and moving even faster.

At the beginning his backpack weighed him down, but after a while it lost its heaviness, as though, at full speed, someone had taken it off his shoulders. He felt only his cheeks, ablaze with the frost. A bitter wind was blowing, raising whirls of snow and flinging them in his face. For a few seconds he no longer saw anything before his eyes, but his skis rushed on in their freedom.

They reached Crucur without realizing how or when. The first time, the trail had been longer and slower. Maybe we’ve made a mistake. Maybe we’re going in the wrong direction.

Yet he recognized the clearing and, above all, he recognized the forest ranger’s cabin where they had stopped the first time. They found it just as abandoned, with the door open and the same extinguished coals in the fireplace… Recent ski tracks, passing in front of the cabin, were the only sign of life in the whole blizzard-battered clearing.

They set out along those tracks, which disappeared into the fir trees. The white-and-yellow rectangles on the trees were covered with snow and hardly visible. The route between the trees was full of obstacles since the steepness of the trail’s slope changed countless times. The whole run consisted of sudden changes of speed. Now the snow was frozen hard, now it was mysteriously fluffy, and always his skis were being wrestled into a sideways skid. Nora, who was ahead of him, announced the obstacles in a loud voice and gave him commands to turn or brake, which Paul carried out with reflex-like swiftness. Sometimes his protective gestures came a second too late, and his skis pounced out of their tracks, pitching him to the ground. He would get up, blinded by the snow but without having felt the blow. All of his attention remained fixed straight ahead, towards a moving point that his skis were chasing without reaching it, so that he didn’t notice his halts and falls. He was powerless to hold the skis in a snowplow for very long. After a few instants of tension, a skid would jar him out of this braking posture like a sudden throb and dash him forward in freefall. In these moments he experienced a lightning-quick loss of consciousness, after which he awoke again on his skis going full tilt, floating as though between two dreams.

They entered Braşov before noon, as though reaching a shelter. The blizzard was less ferocious in the streets. The winds seemed to have stopped at the city limits.

They were completely white. There was snow on their eyebrows, their temples, their foreheads. Even their eyes had lost their colour beneath their snow-whitened eyelashes.

“We made very good time,” Nora said. “Two hours and eight minutes.”

“Is that all?” Paul said, feeling surprised and not understanding why.

Two hours and eight minutes struck him as both a lot and very little. He had the impression that they had left the cabin not several hours, but several days ago, and that the mountains and the people living there were far behind them. But at the same time he had a sensation that the whole downhill run had lasted only a minute, that it had gone by in a blur, and that the entire journey had been a single, dizzying fall.

Skiing, for him, suspended the ability to measure time.

XX

ON THAT LAST DAy OF THE VACATIONS, Braşov was as lively and crowded as it had been at the beginning. The streets filled with skiers looked like immense platforms on which the hurried, restless, talkative throng awaited the arrival and departure of trains. The downtown travel agencies were besieged by people impatient to make reservations, buy tickets and ask for information. The human tide that had rolled down from the cabins in the surrounding mountains, or had come in from farther away — from the Făgăraş, from Bihor — after their skiing holidays, was gathering again in Braşov, where so many roads met. Sunburned faces smiled at each other on the street as if they had recognized old friends.

“Is it possible, Nora, that all these people are returning to their former lives? Is it really possible that after having been in the mountains they still believe in the things they left down below? Which they’ve got away from? Which they wanted to forget?”

“He who has been in the mountains is a free man,” Nora replied.

A free man. A free man. Paul repeated her words in silence. He felt that he was still very young, that he was coming back from a long, sunny vacation, and that all roads were open to him.

The trains came in from the rest of Transylvania as though from a frozen polar region, with long delays, laden with snow, the engines white like enormous ice-breaking ploughs.

“They’re organizing a skiers’ train this evening. It’s better if you wait for that one. You’ll never find seats in the regular carriages.”

They had a few hours left in Braşov and were thinking of spending them on the streets, particularly in the outlying neighbourhoods where the city preserved its air of an old fortress. But, before setting off on the road again, they went into the Hotel Coroana to leave their skis there and take a rest. In the café there was a motley intersection of city clothes and ski costumes, sullen townspeople and the bright faces of young people who had just come down from the forests.

With some difficulty, they found a free table in a corner where it appeared that the locals took refuge to immerse themselves in reading the afternoon newspapers, angry at the crush of youth that was disturbing their peace and their daily habits. They were all serious, silent, severe, and they all seemed to have the same blunt, resistant, undemonstrative forehead as Old Grodeck. They were reading Braşov’s German- and Hungarian-language newspapers, and they read them with a kind of uniform worried attention.

Paul noticed in passing a front-page headline in large letters: Létrejött Rómában a megegyezés!26

He didn’t know what those words meant, and suddenly it passed through his mind that extraordinary events might have taken place in the world during the two weeks he had spent in the mountains, and that the headline, printed in large letters, might be announcing a crucial event that would change the fate of mankind.

“I’m going to buy newspapers,” he told Nora, and got up from the table with a certain restlessness.

He was close to the door, about to step out onto the street, when he heard the shout. He turned his head and looked with surprise at the nearby tables, but didn’t recognize anyone. Then he realized that someone was waving at him from farther back, next to the window.

“Is that you, Ann?”

She was alone at the table. In front of her were a few newspapers and magazines, which she seemed to have been reading.

“Do you mind?” Paul said, leafing through them in a hurry. He looked first at the headlines and the breaking news. He remained on his feet facing Ann, leaning over the table slightly, and in a few instants he had scanned the whole pile of papers.

“Are you looking for something?” she asked.

“No. Nothing in particular. I wanted to know whether anything had happened in the world. But I can see that nothing’s happened. Truly nothing…”

Only then did he raise his eyes to look at Ann. She was bareheaded and wore a blue scarf knotted around her neck like a tie.

“Where are you coming from, Paul? Have you been here long? Are you leaving for Bucharest? Someone told me they’d seen you on Christmas Eve, but I didn’t really believe it. I’ve been in Braşov the whole time. I’m staying here. I don’t know how much longer I’ll be here. I came here to work. Don’t you want to sit down? How long has it been since we saw each other? Where did you disappear to?”

She spoke, as usual, with a multitude of short questions, which she tossed out negligently, without waiting for replies. Paul was still standing in front of her. He watched how she laughed, the gestures she made with her hands, how she spoke. What small eyes she has! Is it possible to have eyes that small?

Her questions suddenly stopped and she became unexpectedly attentive.

“What’s going on with you, Paul? Why aren’t you saying anything? Why are you looking at me like that? Something’s happened to you. You’ve changed. I don’t know how, but you’ve changed a lot. Maybe it’s because you’re all in black. Maybe it’s because you’re wearing those clothes…”

“Yes, Ann. Maybe.”

He was leaving without having asked her a single question. He wished he could think of a friendly word for her, but nothing came to mind.

“You’ve got a pretty scarf,” he said, as they separated.

Nora was waiting for him at the table in the corner, ready to leave.

“Who’s that blonde girl who stopped you?” she said, without much curiosity.

Paul thought for a second, then replied abruptly: “A girl from Bucharest. She’s a painter.”

There didn’t seem to be much more to say about Ann.

The train left Braşov with all the carriages full, yet at every station — at Dârste, at Timişul-de-Jos, at Timişul-de-Sus — more groups of skiers were waiting.

Everyone spoke about the snow and the weather. Those who had come down from Piatra Mare complained of too much mist and frost. Girls and boys coming from Bihor related that in Stâna de Vale it had been sunny the whole time. They were all astoundingly young and, surrounded by them, Paul, too, felt that he was their age. Something’s happened to you, Ann had said. Yes, it had happened. He looked at himself in the window of the carriage as though in a mirror, and he almost didn’t recognize himself. On his face were the tracks of small scratches, his right eye still retained the consequences of his terrible fall at the Touring Club, his lower lip was still slightly cracked, but the sun had passed over all of these wounds and healed them. Nobody in the carriage was darker than he was, nobody was more sunburned. It’s as if I only skied on the ridges, close to the light.

He felt a kind of childish exultation. He didn’t know exactly what he might want to do now. There were strengths in him with which he wasn’t familiar, impulses that were awaking from a long slumber.

“Nora, do you think that skiing can save a person? Can it change his life?”

“Dear Paul, I think that our lives are full of bad habits, compulsions and obsessions. Skiing cleanses us of them. In the end, the important thing is not to let ourselves be defeated again.”

“No, Nora. Never.”

He uttered the vow passionately, with exaggerated firmness.

He made his amends alone, repeating the words more calmly and decisively in his mind: Never. Never.

TRANSLATOR’S AFTERWORD

Few European writers who lived between the two world wars were more talented and determined than Mihail Sebastian, and fewer still saw their lives and careers scarred by such savage ironies. Sebastian was born Iosif Hechter on October 18, 1907 in an assimilated, secular Jewish family in the provincial town of Brăila, in southeastern Romania, not far from the marshlands of the Danube Delta. Sebastian’s hometown, which looked out over the Danube River a little over a hundred kilometres inland from the Black Sea, was a cultural crossroads. Ethnic Romanians, Gypsies, Jews, Greeks, Bulgarians and Ukrainian-descended Lipoveni all mingled in its streets. Romanian was the only language spoken in the Hechter family home; young Iosif, a brilliant student from his earliest schooldays, soon learned good French and German. He was initially drawn to the theatre. At the age of sixteen he ran away from home after reading in a newspaper that the Parisian theatre troupe of Georges and Ludmila Pitoëff would be performing in the capital. His family was alarmed; when Iosif returned a few days later, his goal of moving to Bucharest, and eventually Paris, was firmly fixed in his mind.

At eighteen, Iosif Hechter attracted the attention of one of interwar Romania’s most mesmerizing and dangerous intellects. The philosopher and mathematician Nae Ionescu (1890–1940), nearly twenty years Hechter’s senior, was a compelling thinker and a galvanizing lecturer and public speaker. His political views, promoting an anti-democratic, Orthodox Christian exaltation of the motherland, shaped a generation of incipiently fascist Romanian intellectuals. Also originally from Brăila, Ionescu examined Hechter’s high school graduation papers and was struck by the quality of the young man’s prose style. Two years later in 1927, while still trapped by poverty in Brăila, Sebastian (having adopted his new name in both public and private life), began to contribute to Cuvântul (The Word), the daily newspaper edited by Ionescu. Under Ionescu’s mentorship, Sebastian soon developed a reputation as an articulate young nationalist journalist, particularly perceptive on literary topics. He was invited to contribute to a variety of literary magazines; but in Cuvântul he learned to praise the “Romanian soul” and sometimes to argue against minority rights. In 1930, at the age of twenty-three, Sebastian realized his dream of going to Paris to continue his legal studies, which he had begun in Romania. He spent the winter of 1930–1931 studying law and reading French literature. Having adopted Marcel Proust as his favourite writer, he began to plan his own works of fiction. In 1932, after returning to Romania and settling in Bucharest, Sebastian published a short story collection; his first novel, Femei (Women), followed in 1933.

Bucharest in the mid — 1930s was both the best and the worst place imaginable for Sebastian to develop as a writer. This was the era when the Romanian capital was praised as “the Paris of the East,” a title that was partly a comment on the Francophilia of the city’s educated classes. (Olivia Manning’s The Balkan Trilogy, though problematic in other aspects of its depiction of Romanian society, conveys a vivid sense of this culture.) The Great Depression had filled the streets of Bucharest with destitute peasants, but the city’s cultural life was energetic and cosmopolitan. The theatres were packed, numerous newspapers and literary journals competed for the attention of the literate public, there was a cultivated classical music scene and the middle classes, when not in the mountains or at the Black Sea beaches, travelled to Paris, Vienna, Munich and Berlin. Never before or after would Romania be home to such a talented group of writers confronted in such acute form by the question of the nation’s identity.

In 1920 the Treaty of Trianon had ceded Transylvania to Romania. This culturally rich region of mountains and hilltop towns, inhabited by a Romanian majority and large Hungarian and German minorities, had been governed by Austria-Hungary until the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s destruction in the First World War. The addition of Transylvania, in the northwest, to Wallachia and Moldavia, the two regions whose union in 1859 had created modern Romania, was matched in the south by the acquisition of the former Bulgarian territory of northern Dobrogea, and in the east by the recovery of largely Romanian-speaking Bessarabia and Bukovina from the defunct Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires respectively. These gains resulted in a Romania that had more than twice the territory and population of the pre-1914 nation. Between 1920 and 1939, for the first — and, as it would turn out, only — time in their history, nearly all Romanians lived together in one country. This unexpected good fortune created a cultural ebullience that inspired a vigorous search for national self-definition. At the same time, 28 % of the expanded nation consisted of ethnic minorities, as opposed to 10 % before the First World War. The 1923 Constitution, which had guaranteed equal rights for these minorities, came under ferocious attack from the far right. Sebastian’s intellectual and creative growth is inseparable from the debates stirred up by this atmosphere, even though in the end they would destroy him.

In Bucharest, Sebastian studied and practised law and frequented restaurants, night clubs and literary and theatrical events. His status as a well-regarded journalist earned him a government pass that granted him free travel on the nation’s railways, enabling him to retreat to mountain cabins to write. He became sufficiently prosperous to rent a small but well-appointed apartment in the city centre. He had various romantic relationships with women, but did not marry. He began to write for the theatre, and became part of an engrossing literary society that saw Bucharest surpass Iaşi to become Romania’s literary heartland. Here established older writers mingled with the new wave, the “Generation of 1927,” to which Sebastian belonged. The patriarch of Romanian literature, the prolific Moldavian historical novelist Mihail Sadoveanu (1880–1961), moved to Bucharest in the mid-1930s, although he soon left after becoming embroiled in a scandal. The Transylvanian Liviu Rebreanu (1885–1944), author of the internationally published novels Ion (1920) and The Forest of the Hanged (1922), had also relocated to the capital, where he served two terms as the artistic director of the National Theatre, edited a literary magazine and worked as a high-ranking civil servant in the Ministry of Education. Among the younger writers of the Generation of 1927 was the talented novelist Camil Petrescu (1894–1957). A fellow Proust enthusiast, Petrescu became one of Sebastian’s closest friends. Sebastian’s confidantes and intellectual sparring partners included young writers such as the essayist and philosopher Emil Cioran (1911–1995), who would become famous in Paris, the novelist and later professor of religious studies Mircea Eliade (1907–1986), who also contributed articles to Nae Ionescu’s Cuvântul (and was introduced to his first wife by Sebastian), and the absurdist playwright Eugen Ionescu (1909–1994) (who was not related to Nae Ionescu, and, in fact, was partly of Jewish origin).

Governed by a series of inept, semi-democratic governments that coexisted with a fumbling monarchy while besieged by radicals of the far right who sometimes took to the streets to demonstrate their muscle, interwar Romania was never peaceful. But it was an exciting environment for a talented young writer like Sebastian — until his literary world began to unravel. In 1934, having completed his second novel, De două mii de ani (It’s Been Two Thousand Years), about the condition of being a Romanian of Jewish ancestry, Sebastian asked his mentor to write a preface to his new work. Nae Ionescu agreed, but loaded his essay with refutations of the novel’s claim that Jews’ first allegiance was to their Romanian identity. “It is an assimilationist illusion, it is the illusion of so many Jews who sincerely believe that they are Romanian […] Are you Iosef Hechter, a human being from Brăila on the Danube? No, you are a Jew from Brăila on the Danube.”

On receiving this preface, Sebastian decided that the only honest course of action was to publish it. The publication of a novel on the theme of Jewish integration into Romanian life would have been controversial under any circumstances; the addition of Ionescu’s preface made the book incendiary. De două mii de ani caused possibly the most violent scandal in Romanian literary history. The right accused Sebastian of being a Zionist agent, while Jews spurned him as a fascist lapdog. Many of his closest friends abandoned him. Sebastian refused to yield, insisting on his right to regard himself first and foremost as a Romanian: “As for anyone who tells me that I’m not a Romanian… go talk to the trees, and tell them they’re not trees.” In a letter to a fellow writer in 1936, while the scandal was still raging, Sebastian wrote: “My maternal great-grandfather was a banker in Bucharest in 1802. He contributed money to help the leaders of the 1848 revolution. Both of my parents, born in this country (my father in 1868), speak only Romanian and brought me up as a Romanian.”

More ominous signs appeared. Cuvântul, Sebastian’s long-time intellectual home, became the official newspaper of the Iron Guard fascist movement. His friend Mircea Eliade campaigned for the Iron Guard in 1937, savaging the government for its “tolerance” of Jews, and boasting that he welcomed having the adjective “Hitlerian” applied to him. Sebastian struggled to sustain his friendships with Eliade, Cioran and Petrescu. The crisis seems only to have spurred his creativity. In 1935 Sebastian collected his ripostes to the attacks against him in a volume entitled Cum am devenit huligan (How I Became a Hooligan) — a book that inspired the contemporary Romanian novelist Norman Manea’s memoir of his return to Bucharest after the fall of communism, The Hooligan’s Return (2003).

How I Became a Hooligan was only one of two books published by Sebastian in 1935. His third novel, Oraşul cu Salcâmi (The Town of Acacias), also appeared that year. A coming-of-age novel that explores the traditional Romanian theme of the differences between life in the provinces and life in the capital, Oraşul cu Salcâmi remains arguably Sebastian’s most popular novel with Romanian readers. In September of that year, he wrote a series of highly regarded articles on Romanian theatre. He continued to practise law, write the French books column for the magazine Vremea (The Times), and contribute to the French-language Bucharest newspaper L’Indépendence roumaine. In 1938 his first play, the comedy Jocul de-a vacanţa (The Vacation Game), was produced and received a warm reception. In 1939 he published a book-length study of the correspondence of Marcel Proust and in 1940, with Romania at war, The Accident appeared. After this, the walls closed in on Sebastian; he published no more books in his lifetime.

Sebastian survived the Holocaust, but at a terrible price. Romania remained neutral at the outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939, but, sympathetic to Nazi Germany, found itself under threat from the Soviet Union. Moscow annexed Bessarabia and northern Bukovina and pressured the government in Bucharest to return northern Dobrogea to Bulgaria. On January 2, 1938, in the first of a series of blows that would cripple Sebastian’s ability to earn a living, all Jewish lawyers were expelled from the bar association. As the war advanced, Sebastian lost the right to publish his journalism. He was ejected from the Romanian Academy, membership in which had provided him with a modest stipend. His railway pass was withdrawn, ending, almost forever, his relationship with the mountain landscapes, hiking and ski trails he loved (he made a final trip to the mountains, in a state of deep depression, in December 1944). Anti-Semitic residency laws artificially inflated the rent of his downtown apartment to a price far beyond his means, forcing him to move into a gloomy slum with his mother and one of his brothers. (His other brother lived in France.) In order to pay the humiliating tariffs imposed on Jews in either cash or extensive donations of clothing to the war effort, he had to borrow money from friends, who now pretended not to know him when he passed them on the street. But the most unendurable blow came in 1940 when Nae Ionescu, having been interned in a concentration camp as the anti-Semitic Goga-Cuza government tried to subdue the competing right-wing force of the Iron Guard, fell ill and died at the age of forty-nine. Sebastian wept uncontrollably. Long afterwards, Ionescu came to him in dreams to shake his hand.

The war aged and impoverished Sebastian. He ate poorly and rarely went out. Unlike Bukovina and Bessarabia, where the majority of Romania’s nearly 500,000 Holocaust victims were murdered, in Bucharest anti-Semitic oppression took the form of daily humiliations and sporadic, unpredictable pogroms against Jewish neighbourhoods rather than mass slaughter. Unable to publish, Sebastian devoted much time to the diary he had begun to keep in 1935, taught himself English and read the complete works of Honoré de Balzac. He listened to the radio to follow the progress of the war, practise English and take in the classical music concerts that transported him (only late in the war did it strike him that most of these broadcasts came from German-speaking cities where he would have been killed). He planned and wrote fragments of an epic novel that was to open with a theatre company’s tour of the Romanian provinces. Sebastian used his knowledge of English — a language little studied in Romania at that time — to earn money surreptitiously by doing anonymous translations, notably of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets. The promise that others might sign his work yet allow him to receive the royalties, gave him the energy to write again for the theatre. In 1944, after the fascists were removed from office and Romania nominally joined the Allied Powers, he succeeded in publishing illegally in the newspaper România Liberă (Free Romania). The first of the three plays he had been working on, the Chekhovian Steaua fără nume (The Star Without a Name), now regarded as one of the classics of Romanian theatre, was staged in Bucharest that same year. It was advertized as the work of another writer to circumvent the ban on performing plays by Jewish authors.

The Mihail Sebastian who emerged from the Second World War was an angry man. During the war, his friends had prospered by professing fascism, while he had been ostracized and consigned to a slum. Cioran had been living in Paris on a scholarship; Eugen Ionescu, in spite of his Jewish ancestry, had succeeded in escaping to France in 1942. Eliade had been rewarded for his collaborationism with plush diplomatic posts in Lisbon and London. Camil Petrescu had been named Director of the National Theatre for the duration of the war years. When the Red Army rolled into Bucharest at the end of August 1944, the collaborators began to greet Sebastian again. Some of the more conspicuous fascist supporters, such as Petrescu, made a public display of their friendship with the man they had not spoken to in five years in the hope of warding off anti-fascist retribution. Other Romanian intellectuals, however, held Sebastian, as a contributor to the notorious Cuvântul, partly responsible for bringing fascism to Romania.

In the rush to dismantle the far-right state apparatus under watchful Soviet eyes, magazines, newspapers and government ministries offered Sebastian opportunities to contribute or work for them, as though his return to public life were perfectly natural, as though these same people had played no part in his oppression. But Sebastian’s vision of his country had changed. In the final pages of his wartime diary, the adjective “Balkan,” wielded as an insult, recurs in his descriptions of Romanians and their culture. He felt foreign to Bucharest intellectual life in a way he never had before; oppression had made him see the world as a Jew, a stance that in the 1930s he would have considered parochial and artificial. In late 1944, he turned down offers of at least half a dozen good jobs out of disgust at the “terrible (morally terrible) jostling, as people hurry to occupy positions, to assert claims, to establish rights.” Finally, he accepted a post as a press officer for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the new pro-Soviet government. He agreed to give a lecture series on the novels of Balzac at the Free Workers’ University. On May 25, 1945, hurrying across Bulevardul Regina Maria to make a class, Sebastian was hit by a truck and killed instantly. He was thirty-seven years old. In 1946 and 1947 the two remaining plays he had completed at the end of the war, Ultima oră (Breaking News) and Insula (The Island) were staged, with the former becoming a smash hit and an indispensable part of the repertoire of Romanian comedy. In 1947, King Michael abdicated under Soviet pressure and fled to Switzerland. Romania began to be absorbed into the Soviet Bloc and the era to which Mihail Sebastian and his work had belonged became part of history.

The Accident, Sebastian’s fourth and last novel, continues to be widely read in Romania today and is available in translation in easily accessible paperback editions in German, French, Spanish and Italian. The present edition, astonishingly, marks the first publication of Sebastian’s fiction in English. The only previous English translation of his creative work was a stilted Cold War-era rendering of Breaking News as Stop News. A Comedy in Three Acts, released by the government publishing house in Bucharest in 1954.

Sebastian’s posthumous reputation maybe summarized by saying that he has flourished as a playwright in Romania, a novelist in the rest of Europe and a diarist in English. With the exception of De două mii de ani, Sebastian’s creative work makes scant reference to Jewish themes, a fact at odds with his reputation in English-speaking countries, where the little that is known about him is that he was a Jewish writer who survived the Holocaust only to be run over by a truck. It is not surprising that the diary, which grapples with the themes of anti-semitism, the Holocaust and the treason of Romania’s intellectual class, should have been the first of his works to appear in English. Smuggled out of Romania by the Israeli Embassy in 1961, Jurnal 1935–1944 was published in Bucharest in 1996. As the critic Aureliu Goci points out, this massive, acutely observed, delicately evocative testimony of a man whose friends

— who happen to be the greatest minds of his country’s 20th century intellectual culture — day by day become fascists, is one of the masterpieces of Romanian literature. Its publication unleashed a polemic almost as furious as that ignited sixty years earlier by De două mii de ani, a sad irony that suggests that some Romanian intellectuals are not yet ready to accept the truth about the actions of many of their heroes during the 1930s. In fairness, intellectuals in Western Europe and North America also failed to hold these writers to account for their collaborationism. Eliade, ensconced in his professorship at the University of Chicago, lived on to be idolized by the counter-culture of the 1960s and 1970s for his expertise on Asian religions; his book The Eternal Return, written in English, sold over 100,000 copies. Yet, as late as 1968, Eliade inserted an admiring reference to Nae Ionescu into his academic work; in 1970, he praised the attitudes of the anti-Semitic Romanian poet Adrian Păunescu after the latter visited him in Chicago. Eliade’s Iron Guard past and “Hitlerian” views, which he never recanted, were so completely ignored that when he died in 1986, the eulogy at his funeral was delivered by Saul Bellow.

Translated by Patrick Camiller, with excellent notes and an introduction by Radu Ioanid, the diary was published in English in 2000. Journal 1935–1944: The Fascist Years made Sebastian’s name much better known in both North America and Great Britain. The book’s success led to a play, The Journals of Mihail Sebastian, that was produced in New York in 2004. In 2006 the German translation of the diary was awarded the Geschwister-Scholl Preis, given annually for a work that supports civil freedom and demonstrates moral courage. The diary is instantly accessible, not only because of its intimacy and immediacy, but also because it belongs to the familiar genre of the Holocaust memoir; yet its unique flavour in this crowded field springs from Sebastian’s acutely tuned sensibility, his lyricism and romanticism. To appreciate these features at full stretch, one must read Sebastian’s novels.

The Accident is often read as a study of an intellectual who has lost touch with his emotions. The protagonist’s family background is never elucidated. A hint that he might be of Jewish ancestry occurs in Chapter II, when a business acquaintance encountered in a night club invites him to the home of the Zionist leader Abraham Zissu. Paul declines, a decision that seems to echo Sebastian’s own preference for avoiding ethnic enclaves. Paul’s obsession with the young painter Ann, which leads to his exhausting journey across Europe — an act that today we might see as an extravagant form of stalking — is inseparable from the lift of his shoulders that signals his indifference. His emotional vacancy feeds his obsessiveness. Even though The Accident is the product of the years of Sebastian’s estrangement from the friends of his youth, the solution to Paul’s conundrum is one which few contributors to Cuvântul would disapprove: a trip to the mountains of Transylvania. The idea for the novel, however, originated in the image of Nora’s accident in the snowy Bucharest streets — an eerie presentiment of the author’s own death. Sebastian spent his twenty-ninth birthday, October 18, 1936, in the company of Mircea Eliade. As he went out to buy champagne, “I suddenly had the picture of a road accident into which I should have liked to be drawn. I could see the first chapter with a wealth of detail so pressing that I thought that, when I got home, I would be unable to do anything other than write, as if under the command of an imperious voice.”

The novel that began in inspiration became an ordeal to finish. In September 1937, during a trip to Paris, Sebastian lost, or was robbed of, the suitcase that contained the only copy of his manuscript. He had to rewrite the first five chapters from memory. Given the stresses he faced as the pillars of his life as a lawyer, novelist, playwright and journalist were demolished, it is a testament to his determination that he completed the book. Much of it was written in resort towns in the mountains where he retreated to take skiing lessons. It is curious to think that as the clamps were being tightened on the country’s Jewish community, the sunburned author was swooping down mountain slopes, then returning to his cabin to compose his romantic love story; but it may have been this separation from the war that spared his creativity. By the time he was writing the novel’s final pages, in January 1940, he was labouring under a military call-up notice (he did military service intermittently during these years) and was aware that, “What is happening to the Jews now in Hitler-occupied Poland is beyond all known horrors.”

The Accident combines interior monologues that display, in a concise way, the influence of Marcel Proust with the crisp, telling dialogue that Sebastian was mastering in his plays. The book’s careful crafting is evident in embedded details such as the old man stroking his beard mentioned by Ann in her impromptu lecture to Paul at Lake Snagov, which later becomes the key to confirming her history of infidelity. In the Transylvanian scenes another pivotal element appears: the protagonist’s lyrical immersion in nature. It is the region’s natural wonders that cure Paul of the over-intellectualized “sickness” of the city. This theme is compatible with much nationalist thinking of the inter-war years, in which the nation’s natural attributes promise an “authentic essence” that acts as an antidote to the ills of a corrupt or decadent civilization. The two female protagonists embody this pattern. While neither is native to the capital, Ann has become a creature of the city, a prisoner of her ambition who subordinates her body to the demands of her career. Her identity as “this blonde girl in boyish slacks” underlines her estrangement from her female essence. By contrast, Nora evokes the motherland, the nation in female form. She is a teacher of French, the language that Romanian intellectuals saw as the bridge to their culture’s ancestral home in the Latin West. From the beginning, in spite of the fact that she has just suffered a fall from a tram, she cares for Paul in a way that is conspicuously maternal. Although sexually emancipated, Nora respects the emotional seriousness of her relationships with men, an attitude that crystallizes in her discomfort at leaving her encounter with Paul as a one-night stand. She is older than he, while Ann is younger. Where Ann’s figure is boyish, Nora’s lines are reassuringly solid. Observing her in their room in Gunther’s cabin, he notes that, “her body was strong, with a slight heaviness in its long, firm lines. Nothing adolescent here, Paul thought, watching her.” The reference to adolescence may be read as a reflection on “boyish” Ann and the immature urban world she represents. Although she is famous, Ann’s surname is not revealed; by contrast, Nora’s last name, Munteanu, contains the word munte, “mountain.” Her mother lives in Cernăuţi, the birthplace of Mihai Eminescu, Romania’s national poet. Cernăuţi — which today is Cernivitsi, Ukraine — was located in Bukovina, whose reunion with the motherland in 1919 was seen by many Romanians as central to the fulfillment of the country’s historic destiny.

If, in spite of the heavy thematic cargo they bear, these women come across as vital, persuasive characters, it is because they were nourished by two of the most important women in Mihail Sebastian’s life. Ann was almost certainly inspired by Lena Caler, an actress revered in her day, with whom Sebastian was besmit-ten: his desire to create roles for her was instrumental in his decision to write for the theatre. Sebastian and Caler had an off-again on-again relationship from the time they met in 1935 until the end of his life. Her countless infidelities drove him to despair, but she was one of the few friends who stood by him during the Second World War. Their sexual liaison appears to have continued, at least intermittently, even after her marriage to the theatre director Scarlat Froda. When The Accident was published, Froda made an emotional phone call to Sebastian, telling him he knew who Ann was based on. Nora, on the other hand, is sometimes seen as a portrait of the painter Zoe Ricci, a supposition that can be only partly correct because Sebastian had been writing The Accident for over a year when he met Ricci and, six months later, became romantically involved with her. The physically slight, Italian-descended Ricci was not a maternal figure like Nora; yet Sebastian himself linked her with his character. He noted of Ricci’s telling him during a romantic moment how nice it was not to be alone: “That’s something Nora could have said. She actually says it in a way. So here is life, a year later, repeating a situation in a novel…” On February 21, 1940, a few days after the novel’s publication, Sebastian, finding that he, Lena Caler and Zoe Ricci were all in Braşov on the same day, wrote: “As in the final chapter of The Accident.” Nora, more of a composite than Ann — who, as Paul Cernat points out, is given Zoe’s profession — is a character to whom Ricci contributed; but she was not inspired by her.

The Transylvanian setting acquires layered meanings. Paul and Nora’s skiing holiday may begin as a recuperative expedition to the mountains that harbour the vigorous natural world exalted by partisans of the “Romanian soul,” but the entrance of the Grodeck family complicates this picture. The counterpoint between the Grodecks and the mountains creates dramatic tensions that express the conflict between Sebastian’s nationalist intellectual roots and his awareness of belonging to an ethnic minority. Closely identified with classical music, the manifestation of German culture that Sebastian adored, Gunther Grodeck rescues Teutonic civilization from the grim images of Hitler’s Germany that appear during Paul’s train odyssey. Even if the portrait is ultimately tragic — the artistic Gunther is doomed to die — it establishes the positive attributes of German culture; at the same time, the Grodecks become a trope for the presence of minority groups within the most traditional precincts of Romanian life. Transylvania appears as a zone of multiplicity and mutual enrichment. The love triangle of Gunther’s parents and Hagen mirrors that of Paul, Nora and Ann: in each, the unhealthy original couple is pried apart by an individual identified with the mountains. While Gunther and Hagen inhabit opposite extremes of cossetted sensitivity and feral toughness, Nora balances civilization with nature; she transmits this lesson to Paul. The novel does not abandon the rhetorical glorification of the mountains: they dominate the final chapters and confirm Paul’s cure from his malaise. But the nationalist overtones, including the allusions to the composer Richard Wagner, a favourite of the Nazis, are reconciled with a panorama that seems to make a desperate, almost paradoxical assertion that “national essence” and ethnic diversity are mutually compatible. Hagen may share his nickname with the most destructive character in Wagner’s Ring Cycle, yet the sympathetic light in which he is eventually seen suggests that different cultures can coexist. In the scene in Chapter XV where Nora parades at the edge of the ski run with Gunther on her left and Paul on her right, she is not only reacquainting two neurotic intellectuals with nature, she is also incarnating the Romanian motherland’s capacity to harmonize the country’s disparate ethnic groups.

The novel’s final scenes, set in Braşov, include references to Romania’s largest minority, the Hungarians (who numbered about 2.5 million at this time, compared to about 700,000 Germans). A headline in untranslated Hungarian (a language few Romanians can read) both makes clear and conceals Sebastian’s ultimate pessimism. Seeing the headline, Paul thinks “that extraordinary events might have taken place in the world during the two weeks he had spent in the mountains, and that the headline, printed in large letters, might be announcing a crucial event that would change the fate of mankind.” Once he finds newspapers he can read, Paul decides that he is mistaken: “nothing’s happened. Truly nothing.” In fact, it is here that he makes an error. The agreement announced by the headline, reached on January 7, 1935, was the Treaty of Rome, in which the government of France made its peace with Benito Mussolini’s Italy. This capitulation of the values of civilization to those of fascism undermines the resolutions made by Paul and Nora at the novel’s close. They begin their new life unaware that the process that will lead to Europe’s destruction has already begun. Sebastian’s decision to insert this dark omen into the novel’s conclusion, yet make it invisible to most readers, is typical of the double-edged vision he conveyed with such delicacy and humanity.

STEPHEN HENIGHAN

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Mihail Sebastian (1907–1945) was one of the major Central European writers of the 1930s. Born in southeastern Romania, he worked in Bucharest as a lawyer, journalist, novelist and playwright until anti-semitic legislation forced him to abandon his public career. His long-lost diary, Journal 1935–1944: The Fascist Years, was published in seven countries between 1996 and 2007, launching an international revival of his work. Sebastian’s novels and plays are available in translation throughout Europe, and also have been published in Chinese, Hindi, Bengali and Hebrew.

The Accident is Sebastian’s first work of fiction to appear in English.

ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR

Stephen Henighan’s books include Lost Province: Adventures in a Moldovan Family, A Grave in the Air, The Streets of Winter and A Report on the Afterlife of Culture. A nominee for the Governor General of Canada’s Literary Award, he teaches at the University of Guelph, Ontario.

NOTES

1

Romanian Orthodox Epiphany, celebrated on 6 January, is the most important religious holiday after Christmas and Easter. January 24, the date on which two of the country’s three constituent regions united in 1859, is also a national holiday.

2

Abraham Zissu was a millionaire Bucharest socialite and leader of the Romanian Zionist movement.

3

Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet (1627–1704): French bishop and royalist preacher.

4

Popular summer and winter mountain resort north of Bucharest.

5

Transylvania, where these scenes are set, had a significant German-speaking minority at this time.

6

Capital city of Transylvania.

7

Raoul Duffy (1877–1953): Popular French painter and decorator.

8

The most popular Black Sea resort in Romania between the two world wars, a favourite of the Romanian Royal Family. Today it is the Bulgarian town of Balchik.

9

The painters named in this passage were all leading avant-garde figures in the Bucharest art world of the 1920s and 1930s.

10

Ştefan Luchian (1868–1917): Romanian painter whose artistic legacy was the subject of controversy in 1930s Bucharest.

11

On June 30, 1934, Adolf Hitler’s SS began to eliminate the rival right-wing paramilitary group, the SA (or Brownshirts), killing dozens, or possibly hundreds, of its members.

12

“All right, okay.”

13

“In a difficult ascent, nothing can replace the use of sealskin. The seeming inconvenience of the procedure is largely compensated for by the greater security and stability obtained.”

14

The Siebenbürgischer Karpaten Verein (literally, “Transylvanian Carpathian Society”) was founded in 1880 to develop the region’s winter sports facilities.

15

“You’ve really lost your way. Where were you going? Where are you coming from?”

16

“Oh no! That’s just Saxon dialect. The two of us always talk to each other in Saxon dialect.”

17

“Many, in their wandering/ Reach the door by dark paths….”

18

“Traveller, enter silently/ Pain studs the threshold/ There shining in clear light/ Are bread and wine on the table.”

19

Georg Trakl (1887–1914).

20

“Wednesday, May 5, 1932.”

21

“Break, lovely morning light/ and let the heavens dawn/ fear not, you shepherds / for the angels speak to you…”

22

“The family path.”

23

“Sing out joyfully, rejoice and praise the days!”

24

Transylvania derives its German name (Siebenbürgen, or “seven towns”) from the seven fortress-towns founded in the region by Saxon settlers in the 12th century.

25

“Young Grodeck, young Grodeck….”

26

Hungarian: “An Agreement Was Reached in Rome!”

Content

Mihail Sebastian
The Accident

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TRANSLATOR’S AFTERWORD

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

NOTES