The Seventh Candidate (46 page)

They rose in low gear at a snail’s pace in
the blizzard. He should have bought chains. They’d been driving
about for hours. The visibility was limited to a few meters. All
they could see in the white turmoil was roadside shrubbery, a few
meters of white road, occasionally the loom of a mountain shoulder.
Sometimes ruined farmhouses haunted the snowfall with broken
roof-beams and heaps of broken slate tiles. All you see are ruins
here, he said. Where are the people? Even when she was a small girl
it was a dying region, she said. Now it’s practically dead. Ghost
farms were what they used to call them. There were hundreds and
hundreds of them. Whole villages stood deserted. Even when she was
little the young people left the mountain farms and went to the
cities. There were just the old people. And then the old people
died. I wonder if we shouldn’t turn left here?

He drove straight on. He’d long since given
up heeding her directives. By now they’d become anxious
self-queries rather than directives. He gripped the wheel, crouched
over it, his forehead almost against the windscreen. His nostrils
flared as though scenting it out beyond the swirling white curtain
despite the persistent odor of salami and white wine in the
car.

Without warning, he slammed the brakes on.
The car went into a skid which he was able to master. There’s
somebody on the side of the road, he said. He’s lost. He’ll freeze
to death.

He put the car into reverse gear and backed
up dangerously fast in a shrill whine. He stopped the car at the
side of the road. This is no place to get lost, he said. Stay here.
I’ll be back with him in a minute.

He got out of the car and disappeared
instantly behind the swirling curtain of snow.

She waited in the absolute silence for five
minutes and then followed his deep footsteps to where he was
standing in front of a snow-draped scarecrow with outflung
broomstick arms.

It was just this scarecrow, she said,
touching his arm.

No, he was standing by the roadside. We have
to find him. He’ll freeze.

Look, she said, pointing at the blank snow
ahead, and then at the snow behind them. There are just your
footsteps and mine, she said and was able to convince him to return
to the car. He sat behind the wheel for a while and then things
were better. He started the engine and they moved forward slowly in
the worsening blizzard.

Another hour had passed when something big
and ghost-like stumbled across the road just ahead of the car. “A
deer!” he exclaimed. “We’re in wild country, we can’t be far!” She
thought it was a dog but said nothing. “It’s a sign. We’ve
practically arrived,” he muttered. “The other side of this hill,
I’m sure.” It was a hill that he had to take in second gear,
steeper and steeper as though to justify the reward of what lay on
the other side. The wheels whirred at intervals from the faulty
adherence. The car began swerving from side to side. Let’s go back,
Edmond, she implored. He’d already made the prediction of arrival
while mounting other hills.

We’ll never go back, he shouted but seconds
later the wheels started spinning furiously and the motor rose to
hysteria and they did go back, backwards at least, slowly, then
faster down the promised hill. To the furious spin of the wheels
was now added a slow spin of the car itself, ghosts of roadside
bushes wheeling about. Faster, faster, the underbrush much closer
now, then flailing branches, thumps from beneath, bangings, wild
jolts, scratchings, showers of twigs and brambles joining the
snowflakes against the windscreen.

And there, the end to it all, a dark tree
slowly looming. It loomed gigantically and there was a crunch of
metal, a breakage of glass as they were thrown forward. They cried
simultaneously.

“Edmond!” she cried.

“The car!” he cried.

The car settled at a slight angle and the
engine coughed and expired. They sat in pallid gloom. The pine had
dumped a great cowl of snow on the car. They were still braced
against the shock, which had been minimal. She asked him again if
he was all right and he finally said in a dead voice that he wasn’t
hurt. If he didn’t ask about her she supposed that since she’d
asked over and over about him in a panicked but pain-free voice he
must have assumed she was all right too. He was still crouched over
the wheel in much the same attitude as when the car had been on the
road. They hadn’t a scratch. A narrow escape, she said to cheer him
up. And maybe the engine hadn’t suffered.

He turned the key and the engine confirmed
that it too was all right. The sound revived him. He scrambled out
and inspected the damage. Nothing essential had been affected, he
reported: a headlight smashed, a fender crunched, the bumper
twisted, the hood bent a little. They could try the hill again, but
first they had to get the car back on the road. Luckily there was
no ditch.

My car, she thought as he shifted from first
into reverse and back again rapidly, dosing the power. The car
responded to these fast skilful movements by moving gently forward
and back a few centimeters in a wild whirl of the rear wheels. He
pushed out of the car. Forgetting the log-saw he’d bought he tried
to break off branches from the pine with his bare hands. He shoved
what he managed to gather under the rear wheels. He deputized her
to the driver’s seat and pushed the car all the while yelling
instructions. She wasn’t letting out the clutch smoothly enough. He
received spurts of snow and twigs from the rear wheels. There was a
strong smell of burned rubber. He returned to the car and collapsed
into the driver’s seat, breathing heavily. His hands were
bleeding.

She didn’t dare interrupt the silence. He
was surely devising other means of getting the car back on the
road. Finally he exclaimed triumphantly: “But this close we don’t
need a car at all.” He forced the door open against the snow and
wind. “You’re not to move from the car, Dorothea. I’ll be back
soon. Not to move! This is wild country, Dorothea. There may even
be bears.”

He wasn’t well acquainted with mountains. To
imagine what it was like beyond the white swirling curtain of snow
he summoned up art museum memories of late eighteenth century
pre-romantic landscapes: mineral chaos, crags, clefts, abysses,
dashing cataracts, etc. He added snow to the recalled scenes and
also what he was seeking. He moved knee-deep toward it.

“Come back,” she cried. He was doing exactly
the wrong thing. She’d often read that in such emergencies the very
worst thing you could do was to leave the car and go for help. The
nearest village must be twenty kilometers away. You had to wait
until help came. She pushed against her jammed door. By the time
she forced it open he was gone. She cried out his name. The wind
swept it away. The driving snow had a metallic taste. But there’d
be no problem catching up with him on the road. The wind whipped
the snow in her face. Half-blinded, she stumbled over concealed
branches and boulders.

On the blank whiteness of the road there was
just the long disorder of their skid. She bent down, peered hard.
His shoes would have left prints. There was nothing. She returned
to the car and saw his footprints – leg prints – striking out in a
direction opposite to the road.

Understanding now, she shouted into the
shifting curtain of white: Edmond! Edmond! It’s not there, Edmond,
come back! It’s not here at all! She stumbled forward, repeating
the message: Come back! I’ll tell you where it is! It’s not here at
all! She must have floundered round and round in the deep snow for
her footprints multiplied. Lost in that labyrinth of her own
making, she didn’t know which of the footprints led back to the
car.

She heard him calling her name beneath the
hiss of the wind in the pines. She let herself be guided by his
alarmed voice. The car materialized in the whiteness and he too
alongside it.

They got inside. I told you not to leave the
car, he said sternly. I told you of the dangers. I heard you
shouting. I thought it was a bear or a boar. There are certainly
boars here. He prepared to leave again. She repeated what she’d
shouted into the storm. It’s not here at all. Don’t go out there
again. I’ll tell you where it is. It’s not here at all. She worked
the cork free from the bottle of wine and poured what was left into
the two waxed goblets.

“Not here?”

“No. Don’t leave the car. Drink more wine,
you’re shivering.”

“Show me where, then.”

“You’re soaked.”

“Where? Show me.”

“Wait.”

She got out and managed to open the badly
jammed trunk. She dragged out the two valises and made him get into
the rear of the car. The driver’s seat was drenched. She gave him
his towel and his dark trousers. She turned her back and changed
into her best skirt meant for the inn. When she had finished he
asked her again. She didn’t answer. He reached for the detailed
road map. First something to drink to warm them up, she said. She
couldn’t see straight for the cold.

She went out again and got the two bottles
of wine, two waxed goblets and the corkscrew. To give him something
else to think of she asked him to uncork the bottle. He tried. His
hands were trembling so badly that she did it herself, expertly. He
started to open the car door.

It’s no use going out in the blizzard to
find the farm. You’ll never find it here. She held onto him, she
wouldn’t let him go again. He started unfolding the road map. Here
or anywhere on the map, she added.

So, the dashbord clock marking ten past two,
the snow crowding in on all sides and the fuel-gauge needle deep in
the red zone, she finally said she didn’t know.

When he asked her again to show him where it
was on the map she repeated that she didn’t know. The one place she
knew it was was inside her head, had been for twenty years, she
went there when things became too hard, didn’t need a map for that,
she said. The doctor said lots of people had a farm in their head,
something like a farm. They both had had it in their heads. It was
gone from hers, now it would be gone from his. He didn’t understand
and she had to say it in three different ways. She urged the wine
on him and he drank it dazed.

“You’re not telling the truth,” he said.

“This time I am. Here, give me your
cup.”

“But I saw the map in the diary.”

“All in the head like all of the rest. Don’t
spill it.”

“Everything? All the other things?”

“All in the head, like the farm,” she said.
“Come on, drink.”

He sat still for a long time. She heard his
slow difficult breathing. Everything must be collapsing inside. She
slipped her arm about his shoulders. The engine coughed twice and
died. The fuel-gauge needle was below the red zone. The blower
still distributed heat.

She waited for him to ask her why she’d
invented all that. She’d answer that the specialist had been trying
to make her find out. Then he (Edmond) would say that she must have
been very unhappy to have to do that.

Yes, horribly unhappy, she said to his
silent profile as though he’d said all that. He had no idea how
unhappy, she said. She started weeping. It was the wine, she gasped
between sobs. She was sure that at any moment he’d reach over and
touch her shoulder or more and ask her if she couldn’t tell him
about it. He sat there like a statue. “I’ll never be able to tell
anybody who really cares,” she brought out. “I used to think: some
day if I meet someone who cares maybe I will. I have to pay someone
to care.” She sniffed and blew her nose and drank more wine.

The temperature in the car was dropping. The
snow hadn’t let up. Half of the windscreen was white. His face was
set in an intensity of thought as though he were grappling with the
most arduous of problems. Finally he said: “How can you possibly
help cure me, Dorothea? It was supposed to be that way. But you’re
just as unwell as I am. How can anyone be as unwell as me?”

He said it in genuine wonder, not
plaintively and without the outrage that the notion would have
produced earlier. He even touched her arm briefly. She’d had so
much to offer him: a new life. Now in despair he remembered all of
those images that had saved him down among the graffitied posters.
Now the three blue peaks, the orchard, the woods had shrunk to
posters themselves composed of hundreds of thousands of miniscule
colored dots bordered with dirty tiles.

The blower blew more feebly and filled the
car with frigid air. She reached over unsteadily and managed to
turn it off. By three o’clock the idea had taken possession of
their minds that they wouldn’t survive there in such wild country,
perhaps twenty kilometers from the nearest inhabited farmhouse.
They clasped each other for warmth on the rear seat. Drowsily she
suggested that they clear the snow on the road and build a fire
with dead branches, nothing burns like old pine. It would keep them
warm and maybe attract help. Yes, we might do that, he said, not
moving. She told him the way to do it, something she’d read, she
said, but had never done: you ball up paper and build a kind of
wigwam of twigs over it. Then you build a second wigwam over the
first but branches. Yes, we could do that he said, his lips close
to her ear. In a minute he would get up and do it. “Maybe we’d
better,” she said after a while. “Yes. Give me a pack of
matches.”

“I have no matches.”

“A lighter, then.”

“I have no lighter.”

“You have to have matches or a lighter. You
smoke.” He said it with no alarm or urgency, simply to establish
the facts.

“I stopped smoking, I never really liked
it.” She apologized for that although she knew he’d disliked her
smoking.

He said she’d done well to have stopped,
also the perfume and the make up, she was far prettier, far more
real with her real face.