Accident (18 page)

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

“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.

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.