The Seventh Candidate (47 page)

This wasn’t her real face, hadn’t been her
real face, it was a disguise too, she said. But he started kissing
her face and neck. How drunk you must be, she thought but let him
go on. How drunk I am, she thought, and let him in those last
moments before a reputedly painless death. It gave warmth but then
it was colder after. But they were both tired and started drowsing
off as they said you did in the books describing that sort of
going. The wind rocked the car. All of the windows and the
windscreen were covered by white.

They were found in time. Huddled together at
an angle in the rear-seat of the car, slightly embarrassed because
of survival after such a farewell, they still clasped each other
for warmth as the tow truck started jolting them to the nearby
town.

It had stopped snowing. As they swung onto
the main road five hundred meters from where the accident had
occurred, the sun came out in the disguise of a shivery pale disk.
They were in the outskirts of a small town. There were used car
lots on both sides with big decorated Christmas trees not yet taken
down. Huge billboards jerked past. He caught a glimpse of a circus
advertisement with lions, a spangled trapezist, clowns, then
Pilsober Beer’s naked lovers. There was a cluster of new prefab
houses with a small forest of TV antennas, still holding lines of
snow.

As the landscape jerked past he assured
her that they’d find the farm, it existed, maybe not hers, surely
not hers but it was there, hardly in ruins, much deeper in the
mountains than they’d gone. The problem was they hadn’t gone deep
enough. They would the next time. He would put his apartment up for
sale for the money. And as for running a farm successfully, even if
neither of them had any knowledge of the thing, he remembered
having seen an encyclopedia in a second hand book shop
window,
The
Agricultural Encyclopedia
, small for an encyclopedia, no more than four or five
volumes, and maybe a little dated, but it was a start, he’d start
studying it methodically and then they’d begin the search in the
spring. They had new drugs for hay fever, it appeared. Had he never
told her that he suffered from hay fever?

She said she had a phobia about spiders. Did
they have drugs for that? Maybe it was something that wore off.

The tow truck stopped before a railroad
crossing. Brick-red wagons heaped with rusty iron rumbled past
interminably. Looking elsewhere out of the window he thought he saw
a flash of blue over the white roadside bushes. He was alarmed for
his fragile optic nerve but then it was repeated, the flash of blue
– a bird? – gone now. No, back again, unmistakably a bird. He
tugged at her arm and said, look, a blue bird. She leaned over and
stared through the window, frowning with attention. “Are you sure?”
she said.

End