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 s
ent 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 wh
ole 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.
Accident Page 13
