“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... N
ora 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.
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