The Accident

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 closer 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.

“Look here, Paul. You bend your knees like two bows. You understand? Like two bows.” She looked him straight in the eyes and pronounced the words syllable by syllable. “The poles facing backwards, as far back as possible. To make sure, put your hands on your hips. Like that. Head facing forward, shoulders forward, body bent… Bend a little farther… Like that… The skis next to each other, perfectly parallel… Now go…”

I still have time to stop, Paul thought. I still have time to stop on the spot, I still have time…

The skis set off slowly on their own. Then he suddenly had the sensation that they were no longer on his feet. A wave of snow came sturdily towards him. I’m falling! Something deafening, a thunder clap or a deep silence, covered everything.

He woke up abruptly. He was standing motionless on his skis. Maybe I didn’t go anywhere. Maybe it just seemed that way. He looked around in search of Nora in order to convince himself that in fact he had stayed next to her, and that this whirlpool from which he was emerging breathless was no more than a moment’s vertigo. She called to him from far away, making a sign with her right hand in the air.

“I really did it,” Paul said, measuring the impossible distance with his eyes.

In an instant Nora was beside him.

“Bravo, Paul. I’m delighted for you. I’m proud of you.”

They were on the crest of a wave of snow. Before them lay a new slope, longer but less steep than the previous one.

“Shall we go for it?” Nora asked.

“Let’s go!”

He pushed off without waiting for her to signal their departure. Again he had the sensation that his skis were losing their weight and that he was rushing before them, floating or falling. There was a sensation of intense brightness. Something struck him in the face and blinded him. For a moment he didn’t know whether he was still floating, or whether he had fallen. Then he felt that he was rolling down the valley, his head in the snow, his feet in the air and his skis locked together. When he managed to lift his face out of the snow, Nora was bending towards him, laughing.

“What happened?” he asked, bewildered.

“Nothing more than what you see: you fell.”

“Is it serious?”

“It’s not serious. It’s solemn.”

She helped him get to his feet and brush off the snow.

“You’re laughing at me.”

“No, my dear Paul, you’re talking too seriously. In skiing, after the first fall, nothing is solemn anymore. You learn to ski by falling. From here on in, you’re going to fall dozens of times, hundreds of times. That was your first fall.”

He glanced backwards at the slope he had got only halfway down: he had left behind two parallel trails in the snow, resembling two rails of a train line, interrupted at the point where he had fallen, as though his skis had jumped the track. “I don’t understand why I fell.”

“Because you’re keeping your knees rigid. Because your shoulders are too far back. Because you’re throwing your hands out in front of you.”

“Are there any other reasons?”

“There are.”

For an instant she looked him straight in the eyes, and then she burst out laughing, and suddenly they were both laughing. I haven’t seen that smile before, Nora thought. She would have liked to extend her hand to him, with an affectionate enthusiasm for the young man she had discovered that morning. Yet she stopped herself just in time. “Enough joking. Now let’s get moving.”

She spoke these words, “calling the class to order,” as she might have cracked her pencil on a desk in the classroom to silence her pupils.

He gripped her arm, pinning her in place. “I want to say something to you.”

“I’m listening.”

“You’re a teacher.”

“Yes, I am.”

There was a melancholy smile on her face. “What do your pupils call you at school?”

“I don’t know. Probably ‘Miss French Teacher.’”

“All right, I’m going to call you the same thing. ‘Miss French Teacher.’ My Miss French Teacher.”

“No. You’re going to call me something simpler: Nora. Or, if you wish, my Nora.”

She turned abruptly on her skis and took off down the valley in a cloud of snow.

You’re ridiculous, Nora, you’re ridiculous. Why do you say such stupid things? Why do you let your mouth run away with you? What will that man think of you? Where’s the sporting pact you’ve sealed with him? Where’s your discretion? Where’s your modesty?

She wanted to cry. She had reached the bottom of the ski hill, next to the woods, in a single instant, and she would have liked to hurl herself onto a run that was ten times as risky in order to forget, to flee from herself, to punish herself. She could barely make him out, motionless, at the point where she had left him, lost among skiers who were climbing or descending past him. She supposed that he had followed her blinding descent with his gaze and that he still had his eyes fixed on her, for now he had lifted his peaked cap and, waving it, was signalling to her. From the summit of the mountain the military team was descending in a group towards the chalet, cutting diagonally across the hill like an avalanche. The cloud of snow unleashed by their passage covered him as well, and now he was nowhere to be seen. Nora was seeking him out, paying careful attention to the distant line where she knew him to be, when suddenly she saw him springing up much closer to her, on a rise that he had somehow climbed over from the other side and was now swiftly descending.

“Too fast,” Nora said. “Much too fast!”

She saw him falling and somersaulting towards the valley. But he stood up immediately, white with snow, and set off again without brushing himself down and seemingly without glancing ahead in the direction in which he was going. He collapsed after the first five metres and then Nora looked for him in vain. Groups of skiers cut across his path and hid him from sight.

I should go up ahead and help him, she thought. But he reappeared again, much closer than before, only a few metres away from her. At that speed he’s not going to be able to stop. A step away from her, he let himself fall to the snow.

“How many times did you fall?”

“Five times.”

“How is it?”

“It’s…” He didn’t know how to continue. He looked for a word and didn’t find it. Then, smiling, he said: “I’d like to cry out. I’d like to yell.”

“Yell, then.”

He turned his head towards the woods, ran his hand over his throat and hauled up an extended yell: “Uuuuuu…!” No one replied from the woods, but his yell resounded far away among the fir trees.

“And now,” Nora said, “let’s return to more articulate conversation. Tell me, how is it?”

“I don’t know how to say it. It’s something that surpasses language. It’s something intense. It’s a vast light… I think I’m drunk.”

He threw himself down in the snow with his arms spread and rolled over several times, as though he were rolling in the grass.

A skier came down from the Touring Club chalet and stopped beside them. “Nice weather?”

It was the red-haired Saxon they had met the day before at the SKV chalet. The man with the eyes of the badger, Nora recalled.

“So you found a place to stay at the Touring Club? To tell you the truth, I didn’t think there was much chance that you’d find anything. I didn’t want to make you feel bad, but…”

“We’re not staying at the Touring Club,” Nora said, cutting him off.

“Not at the Touring Club? Then where?”

She made a vague upwards gesture in the direction of the Glade of the Three Maidens. “A cabin up there…”

“Gunther’s cabin?”

Nora didn’t reply, but the man asked again, in disbelief: “Gunther’s cabin?”

There was amazement in his voice, which failed to register in his small, metallic, inexpressive eyes, but which his dense, grizzled eyebrows articulated with an exaggerated arching. “If Old Grodeck had known…,” he said pensively. Then he set off on his skis.

Nora did not have time to ask him either who Old Grodeck was, or what would have happened had he known. What odd things, she thought.

Now they had to climb back up the entire slope. Nora showed Paul how to make broad zigzags from right to left with the edge of the ski pushed obliquely into the snow. “Climb with small steps. Make each stride a step that you’re cutting for yourself in the snow.”

He moved forward, but when he reached either the right or the left edge of the ski hill and had to change direction he was afraid of being caught by the valley and sliding backwards downhill. He was supposed to turn his skis around with a scissor movement that Nora illustrated for him step by step but which, although in theory it struck him as very simple, he couldn’t make. There was a moment when one of the skis had to be lifted into the air, turned quickly and brought alongside the other, everything happening in a single second. Up to this point, things went very well, but in that instant of suspension on a single ski, Paul would lose his balance and fall.

“I give up,” he said, after a few attempts. He hurled himself down into the snow and sat with his arms crossed.

“I, however, am not giving up,” Nora replied. “Please get up and make the turn correctly. We’re not leaving here until you do it.”

They returned to the cabin after one o’clock. Paul was ravenous, exhausted and enthusiastic. “We should have stayed on the ski hill. We would have found something to eat at the Touring Club.”

“You know we can’t do that. Gunther is waiting for us.”

Gunther was not waiting for them. Hagen told them that the boy couldn’t come down for lunch and had asked them to eat without him. “He’s tired. He didn’t sleep all night. He needs rest.”

Nora was about to go up to his room in the tower to see him, but Hagen asked her not to. “It’s nothing serious. Let’s leave him to sleep. If he gets some rest, he’ll come down in the evening.”

“Odd things happen in this house,” Nora said over lunch.

“Odd?” Paul asked. “I don’t see it like that.”

“Then you don’t see anything, my dear.”

“You’re right. I’m giddy, I’m drunk.” Before his eyes he saw only the white stretch of the snow and himself flying over it. He closed his eyes and tried to abolish all thought, as he did in the lightning sensation of soaring, flying, falling. What he couldn’t imagine, couldn’t conjure up, was the deep silence that invaded him in that moment.

“Fortunately, it doesn’t last,” he said suddenly in a loud voice.

“What?” Nora asked, surprised.

“I don’t know how to express it. The falling. The flying. The impact. All in a single second. If it were two, I might die.”

Nora regarded him with a soothing smile. She, too, knew this delirium of the first day of skiing, and she knew it was going to pass. But it made her happy to see that outbreak of brightness on his tired face. It pleased her to listen childishly to his elation.

“It’s dizzying, Nora. Nothing in the world, not wine, not music, not love… no, not love, nothing, nothing brings me so much light. I wonder whether it’s possible, I wonder whether this is me, I wonder whether this miracle is happening to me.”

How young he is, Nora thought. His excessive happiness, his messy delight, frightened her a little. Next to him, she felt too rational, too settled. Maybe too old, she thought, with her teacher’s smile.

Paul wanted to leave right after lunch. He could hardly wait to get back to the ski hill.

“Let’s hurry while it’s still light. It gets dark at four.” He slid forward on his skis with long strides. From behind, Nora corrected his posture, making the same observations again and again: “Arms closer together… Head up… Don’t look at the skis… Look straight ahead…”

On all sides, the horizon was closed off by a white screen of clouds. Nora stopped short.

“What’s the matter?” Paul asked, surprised to no longer hear her teacher’s voice.

“Nothing. Listen.”

It was snowing all over the Burzenland, over the whole Timiş Valley; tons and tons of snow were falling every minute in the endless silence.

“I’ve always been terrified by the thought that I could die by drowning,” Nora said. “I think the Flood must have been disgusting. The whole world dying of drowning. I can hear them gurgling, struggling in the muck, in the putrefaction. But I’d like a snow-flood. To die, to fall asleep in the snow, nothing could be more pure and beautiful. That’s the death I’d choose.”

“Maybe,” Paul said. “But I’m choosing life. Yesterday I’d gladly have died. I think I even suggested it to you. Today, though, I want to live.”

“Me, too,” Nora laughed.

They looked at each other earnestly, as though making a pledge, or taking a significant joint-decision.

When they got back to the Touring Club, Paul immediately wanted to start over on his route from that morning; but Nora stopped him. “We have to set up an instruction program. I’ve been toying with you up to now, but now it’s time for you to learn.”

Paul’s enthusiasm plummeted again. “What do you want me to learn? I can get by with what I know.”

He spoke these words in an almost blustering way. Nora saw in him a kind of lazy pupil’s ill will that she knew too well from school to be afraid of it or to get angry. She preferred to ski away, as though she hadn’t noticed. “We’ll start by practising the snowplow. You use the snowplow to brake. It helps you to reduce your speed, of course, and, if you’re not going too fast, to stop. The movement is very simple. Instead of skiing with your skis parallel, you open them up at an angle, meeting at a point in the front. Watch carefully how I do it, then we’ll try it together.”

Nora set off in her downhill posture, which she had shown him in the morning, but, when she began to gather speed, she bent her knees more deeply and separated her skis behind her, bringing them closer together at the front. With the tips together, the skis opened like the blades of a pair of scissors, while her forward progress slowed automatically, halted by her braking movement.

“Is that hard?” Nora asked.

“No. It looks simple to me.”

Yet it turned out to be harder than it had looked when he was watching, for he fell on his first attempt. In the instant in which he tried to separate his skis, he felt an unexpected resistance in his ankle, as though someone had placed a clamp there. He got up out of the snow without a word and set off again. His skis seemed indescribably light, the snow was soft and deep, the sensation of hurtling down the valley was like a delicious soaring — but Nora’s voice called him to his obligations: “Snowplow! Snowplow!”

He tried again to open his skis, and again he felt the same resistance, which flung him to the ground.

He was beginning to feel spiteful towards Nora, towards the snow and, above all, towards that damned snowplow that didn’t work. “Why did I fall?”

“Because you made a mistake. Things are very simple in skiing: if you make a mistake, you fall.”

She had hoped to extract a smile from him, but he didn’t take it as a joke. With the peak of his cap rammed down over his eyes, his jacket covered in snow, his skis crossed, he was like an infuriated pupil.

“Let’s start again, Paul. Pay more attention. You have to place all of your weight on both skis. Don’t turn your ski on its side when you enter the snowplow: leave it flat with the entire sole on the snow.”

Paul rebelled.

“No, Nora, I don’t want to anymore. It’s too complicated. I don’t want to learn anymore. I know enough to go downhill. I want to fall. Like I did this morning.”

He set off quickly, fearing she might stop him, with his skis parallel, leaning forward over them, and with his arms spread like two wings. After his initial burst of speed, he felt that he was no longer master of his movements, that he could no longer even turn around, nor stop, and that he was caught in a dizzying flight. Again, the same intense white light overwhelmed him. There was no longer anything beyond that light — neither him nor the world. Random images — a tree, another one, a girl, a red pennant — brushed past him at an insane speed and perished behind him as in a dream. He didn’t even realize that he had fallen. For a few seconds it seemed to him that the flight was continuing. There was an enormous light inside him that refused to go out.

Nora was above him, silent, waiting for him to wake up. Laughing, Paul asked her: “Now you’re going to scold me, right?”

“No.” She flung herself down in the snow alongside him and took a friendly grip on his arm. “Listen, Paul. There are two great dangers in skiing: believing that it’s too hard and believing that it’s too easy. Skiing is neither as hard as you thought it was yesterday, nor as easy as you think it is today. What you’re doing isn’t even an act of courage: it’s madness. Skiing doesn’t mean skidding blindly down the valley. You have to be in control of your speed. To be able to stop when you want to. To be able to turn when you want to. If you want to commit suicide, just tell me. I know other methods that work better.”

She spoke in her level, teacher’s voice. Paul listened to her submissively.

“Tell me what you want me to do and I’ll do it.”

“You have to listen to me. It’s indispensable that you listen to me. I want to make a good skier of you. It’s possible that your whole life from now on will depend on this…”

It didn’t strike him as exaggerated to hear her talking like this. In fact, if skiing was this enormous light which in truth he had experienced for only a few seconds, then maybe his whole life could begin again. “Shall we go back to the snowplow?” he asked, resigned.

“Yes, let’s go back. And we’re not going to stop until we know it. Once, ten times, a hundred times. Do you promise?”

“I swear.”

They came back to the cabin late, in the dark. Hagen was waiting for them in front of the house with a lamp that he was swinging between the pine trees in order to show them the trail from a distance. Faffner greeted them with friendly growls.

Inside the house it was warm, the fire was burning and tall flames filled the fireplace. A smell of tea and tobacco gave the warmth a sleepy, aromatic air.

“Where’s Gunther?” Nora asked.

Hagen did not reply to the question, but he passed Nora a piece of paper. “Gunther sent you this.”

Nora unfolded the sheet and read: Hagen said that you asked about me. I thank you. I’m sorry I won’t be able to come downstairs tonight, either. Please stay here. I’m happy that you’re here. I think that tomorrow I’ll be able to see you.

Nora, lifting her head, directed an enquiring gaze at Hagen. “Is he ill?”

“He’s not ill. He’s tired.”

It was obvious that he didn’t want to say anything more. Nora regarded him with a certain fear. Why did I stay here alone with him? Paul had gone upstairs to change out of his ski clothes, which were damp with melting snow. She heard him moving around in the upstairs room. A stupid but reassuring thought passed through her mind: If I scream, he’ll hear me.

Hagen pulled his cape over his shoulders and remained standing in his heavy black jacket. He has such blue eyes and yet he’s so dark! Nora thought. She was next to the bookshelf, in front of the same delicate portrait of a woman that she had also looked at last night.

“Is that Gunther’s mother?”

“Yes. That’s young Mrs. Grodeck.”

She has Gunther’s eyes, but not his gaze, Nora thought to herself, remembering the expression of tenderness with which the boy had looked at this portrait.

“Doesn’t she come here?”

“Who?”

“Mrs. Grodeck. Young Mrs. Grodeck, as you call her.”

Hagen did not reply. The question appeared to trouble him. “I’m going to see what Gunther is doing,” he said suddenly. “He may need me.”

Nora walked to the window and remained there for a while, plunged in thought. She didn’t even hear Paul when he came down the stairs and approached her. She gave a frightened shudder as he put his hand on her shoulder.

“What’s the matter, Nora? What’s happened?”

“You startled me. I didn’t realize it was you.”

“Who else could it be?”

“No one, of course. But there are so many strange things in this house.”

“What sorts of strange things?”

“I don’t really know. The boy in the tower who doesn’t come down and whom we’re forbidden to see. The man in the dark cape who refuses to answer questions. The portrait nobody’s allowed to ask about…”

Outside, the dog, hearing voices, came through the snow until he was beneath the window and stood up with his paws against the wall, looking at them through the glass with his good, watery eyes. Nora opened the door for him. “Come in, Faffner. Come inside. Maybe you can tell us what’s going on here.”

Sleepy, the dog allowed his bearlike fur and his big muzzle to be stroked. Next to his half-torn right ear, he had a scar that reached his neck. “You’re like a man who’s suffering,” Nora told him, and pulled him towards her armchair, close to the fireplace.

With Faffner next to her, she felt protected without knowing against what. She would have liked to stay in the armchair for hours on end…

The evening meal lasted a long time. Only the two of them ate, served by Hagen, in silence that was interrupted only by the tinkling of the plates and a few of the dog’s growls from in front of the fireplace.

“If you go to bed,” Hagen told them, “there’s no need to put out the small lamp on the bookshelf. It usually stays on all night.”

They heard him closing the shutters on the windows and the doors.

Is it that late? Nora wondered. Do we really have to go to bed?

A discomfort came over her. She remembered that even Paul was a stranger, or at most a friend. Their night of lovemaking, their only night of lovemaking, had been a coincidence, a misunderstanding, a forgotten event to which she did not wish to return. Since their departure she had been united with him, with the best possible goodwill, by a sporting pact, a pact between buddies, and she was determined to keep it that way. Last night they had slept side by side like two soldiers after a long march, felled by exhaustion. But now she was afraid of the coming night, which would find her awake, with her eyes open.

For the first time it struck her as wrong that they hadn’t stayed in the dormitory room at the Touring Club. There, at least, things would be clear, without danger, without temptation…

“It’s late, Nora,” Paul said, coming towards her. “Shall we go to bed?”

He posed the question with simplicity, without anxiety, without impatience. There was something assured in his manner, something conciliatory.

She didn’t know how to reply. She wasn’t hesitating, but neither could she find the word or gesture to match the situation.

“Let’s take things as they come,” he went on. “Let’s leave them to their own rhythm, all right?”

He enclosed her in his arms and kissed her slowly on the eyes, on the cheeks. His kisses were not passionate, but they were deep, warm kisses.