“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 c
loser 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.
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