The Accident

XIV

BRAŞOV, IN THE FIRST HOURS OF THAT MORNING, seemed to be preparing for the opening of a country market. From Bran, from Râsnov, from all of the seven towns²⁴, from the whole region, came trucks, buses, sleighs, private cars, bringing in people who had spent the night outside of town. The streets were full of people from Bucharest who greeted each other with cries of surprise, noisily introducing one group to another. Nora and Paul passed by hurriedly, waving, replying to waves, enjoying this influx of Bucharest cheerfulness. When they couldn’t avoid it, they stopped to exchange a few words with an over-enthusiastic acquaintance. Nora introduced him simply, without bashfulness, as, “A skiing buddy.”

They had decided to leave on the 11 AM caterpillar to Poiana, so that they could start the ascent from there before noon. They still had some shopping to do and, to gain time, they divided up the chores.

“You get the cigarettes, magazines and books. I’ll look after the rest,” Nora said.

They arranged to meet at a set time in the lobby of the Coroana, where they had left their skis the night before. Nora wandered from shop window to shop window in search of crampons for hobnailed boots. She was thinking about taking a shortcut on the way back, climbing up Wolf’s Precipice, and she knew that the trail was strewn with rocks and ice. But above all she was drawn by the idea of getting away from Paul and being alone for a few minutes in order to be able to buy in secret a few surprises for the Christmas tree, small trifles which she would take out of her backpack tonight at the lighting of the candles. She returned to the Coroana breathless from running around and afraid that she was late.

“You didn’t forget anything, Paul? You got everything you were looking for? You’re ready to go? Shall we leave?”

She was shaken to see him watching her with that despondent gaze. It was his gaze from the evening they had met, that enervated stare that did not even have the strength to ask for help.

“Aren’t we leaving, Paul? Don’t you want to leave any more?”

He replied with his old shrug of the shoulders, which spoke of his indifference to everything.

How quickly this man has gone back to his old habits! Nora thought.

It was Ann’s car. Paul had walked past without seeing it, then, on the steps of the hotel, he had turned his head, as though towards a passerby who had greeted him, and to whom he hadn’t replied. Yes, it was Ann’s car.

He had gone towards it with an explosion of joy, as though it were a person, a friend. He would have liked to speak to it, to ask it: When did you get here? Is Ann here, too? Yes, of course she was. What a stupid question to ask!

The doors were locked, the windshield was iced up, the whole radiator was covered in snow; the motor was still warm. The car had probably just stopped. It looked as though it had made a difficult drive. In any case, it hadn’t been here yesterday evening, nor earlier this morning. If it had only just arrived, if it had stopped just now, then Ann must be nearby. She had got out for a moment to ask for information, to buy cigarettes, to drink tea. She might be in the hotel lobby, in the restaurant, in the café.

Paul paced back and forth all over the area. Ann was nowhere to be found. The café was full of people, familiar faces were visible at almost every table, but Ann was nowhere to be found.

“Are you looking for someone?” the porter asked.

“No, no…”

He went back out into the street and stopped in front of the blue car again. I have to wait, she has to come back.

He saw her walking through Braşov making chaotic purchases, laughing in all the mirrors that she crossed along the way, stumbling over her tall overshoes as though they were high-heeled boots. How well he knew that Ann of winter days! Last year she had worn an astrakhan bonnet pulled down over her forehead and an overcoat, also of astrakhan, which she succeeded in making into something unpretentious, like a garment she had grabbed off a peg in the hall at the last minute and put on in a rush to get her shopping done in town in a hurry.

He walked around the car several times, looking attentively at each part of it. He wished he could guess from the fenders, the tires, where it had come from. Certainly not from Bucharest, since it was too early in the morning to have made such a long trip. Maybe she had spent the night in Bran or in Satu-Lung, that Satu-Lung that was so full of memories. So many Anns from distant times came to life for him and called him back into the past!

He looked through the side windows of the automobile, that automobile that felt like an inhabited house. On the seat in front of him, next to the steering wheel, was a white plaid blanket, a pile of magazines and an open metal box full of Chesterfield cigarettes. Since when had she smoked Chesterfields? The last time he’d seen her she was smoking unfiltered Bucurestis. Had she switched brands? When? Why? And was this the only thing that had changed in her life?

But they might not be her cigarettes or, in any case, not hers alone. It was ridiculous to think that Ann would be by herself. It was ridiculous to think that a new cigarette case would enter Ann’s life without bringing with it a new man, a lover, a relationship, a fling… He kept his eyes fixed on that metal case, which struck him as both hiding and revealing everything. He felt the old pain reawakening close to his heart.

When Nora asked him whether he still wanted to leave, he didn’t know what to say to her. He could stay, he could leave; it was all the same to him.

Once again they were in the caterpillar that was taking them back to Poiana.

So we have to take it all from the beginning again, Nora thought. In front of her was the same morose man, with the same hazy stare and the same uncaring lift of his shoulders. If only he would at least tell me what happened. If only I could understand.

She was starting to be afraid of this man, who was subject to such profound changes from one minute to the next. It was as though his hair had turned white in an instant. It was as though he had received an announcement of his death. He felt strange to her. Stranger than on the day when she had met that absent gaze for the first time. Since then they had been brought together by several days of shared life, several nights of lovemaking. It was all wiped out.

She felt that he was lost to her, that he had fled from her side. Once again, he had fled from her side. And she could no longer find in herself sufficient strength to stop him.

It’s time to give up, Nora. This man’s not coming back.

She thought of saying to him: “That’s enough, Paul. That’s enough and it’s pointless. You want to leave? Leave. I’m tired out. Realize that something like that can happen to me, too: I can get tired out.”

Then, without knowing why, she thought of his hands. She felt pity for his big hands, too rough and hard for a sad man. She would have liked to feel them on her bare shoulders again, with their indifferent, protective heaviness. You’re beautiful, Nora. You’re pure harmony between yourself and yourself, and that harmony is called beauty. His words ran through her mind again, and once more she was astonished by them. You’re the man who spoke those words to me. No one might ever have said them to me, not once until my death, and he said them. I might have carried that secret inside me without anyone seeing it, and he saw it. And that’s the man I’m losing.

A wise, patient Nora tried to gather her courage again. She promised herself that she would wait, that she would resist, that she wouldn’t give up yet.

They climbed as far as Wolf’s Precipice wearing their skis, but from there on they had to take them off and carry them on their shoulders.

They had been on the move for about two hours without having exchanged a single word in all that time. Only once, by mistake, had their eyes met, but they had turned their heads away in the same instant with a startled, self-protective reflex. “Don’t be afraid, Paul, I have nothing to ask: you’re free to keep your secrets,” Nora would have liked to say to him; but she feared that, after the first word she uttered, the silence between them would grow ever heavier.

She went in front so as not to give him the impression that she was spying on him. A number of times she heard him stopping at one spot or another, but she kept moving forward, even though she sensed in his stopping a hesitation, an impulse to flee. She no longer heard him moving behind her, and yet she didn’t dare look back. Maybe this time he’s left. Maybe he’s really left. She told herself that there was still time to call out to him, that there was still time to turn around. She told herself that she was leaving behind a wounded man, a crushed man, a man who needed her help even if he wasn’t asking for it, even if he didn’t want it. Yet she continued to move forward, looking straight ahead as though she were indifferent to whether or not he went any farther. You’re acting like a woman who’s been jilted, Nora. You’re starting to love him out of pride. She went over in her mind the possible reasons that might convince her to stop and wait for him, but they only deterred her from making this decision. If he’s coming, he should come of his own free will. It’s up to him to choose.

He came without having chosen to do so. He came with exhaustion, with apathy. He came because he had been seized by the idea of coming. If the woman in front of him, who had suddenly become an unknown, nameless woman, had turned her head towards him and called out to him, this act might have awakened in him his last urge to break away and free himself.

But nothing disturbed the resignation of this return through the woods, which resembled so closely a return to slumber.

The climb to Wolf’s Precipice was tough. Deceptive snow covered boulders and dips in the earth, concealing in its depths unseen changes in the terrain. It was as though puddles remained intact in the middle of a river. Beneath their mirrored surface, an invisible chasm pulled them down to the river bed.

They wallowed forward through the snow with the instinctive movements of people who were swimming. Here and there, the depressions fell away like broken steps. There was an unmistakable sinking feeling. The waves of snow seemed to be surrounding and burying them. They struggled with their knees, their arms, in a kind of thrashing-on-the-spot that helped them to remain on the surface, as though they were swimming against the current. Now and then a reef-like frozen outcropping rose up in front of them, and they were able to stop for a minute on this island of ice, in order to gauge how much of the trail now lay behind them.

It’s madness what we’re doing, Nora thought; but, now there was no way back from this madness. Each metre of ground they gained had something irrevocable about it. Their feet could not return to where they had already trodden. The climb was difficult, but a descent from here would have been impossible.

At its upper edge, Wolf’s Precipice opened onto a clearing. The first fir trees were visible on the lip of the cliff above them. They didn’t look like they were far away, but time passed and the distance remained ever the same, as though their journey through the snow had been useless, as though hidden powers, much greater than their futile struggle, were eternally bringing them back to their point of departure.

As long as it’s daylight, everything’s not lost, Nora thought, to steel herself. She was terrified by the possibility that the mist might envelope them before they could reach the top. In the darkness, on the flank of the bluff, they would be unable to take even one step forward. A single false move would suffice for them to fall. Do I really need to tell him this? Nora wondered, not daring to speak to him. She didn’t want to alarm him, but neither could she let him continue with the somnambulistic carelessness with which he was climbing behind her.

From the summit came a stirring, as if of great gales not yet aroused to their full fury. The daylight had a diffuse, whitish quality, as though lacking in transparence.

“Listen, Paul!” Nora suddenly made up her mind to speak to him. “In half an hour at the most we’ll be at the top. If darkness or mist catch us here, we’re lost. I don’t know what’s going on with you and I’m not going to ask. But now I want to ask you to wake up. When we get to the top you can do what you like.”

Everything suggested that a blizzard was on the way. Gusts of wind not yet at full force whistled over the snows, raising it into small eddies of powder. The trees became heavy against a leaden grey-white background.

Paul was the first to reach the head of the trail. The final metres of the ascent were the hardest to complete. The lip of the precipice was a nearly vertical frozen parapet. The crampons on their boots gripped like claws to prevent them from sliding. A fall remained a danger until the last moment. In that final moment, their entire struggle was revealed as futile. Wolf’s Precipice, glimpsed from these final infernal steps, had a sombre indifference that awaited the fulfillment of luck.

Having escaped from danger, Paul watched helplessly as Nora took her final steps. He could do nothing for her: offer neither an extended hand nor a word of support. They were only a few paces apart, yet they were on two different coasts, each alone. He watched how she struggled with the snow, the ice, stunned by exhaustion yet with a kind of intent despair. When she reached his side, she threw down her skis from her shoulders, took off her backpack. Only then, uncovering her head, did she run her hand over her face in a gesture that signalled her return to life. They were both pale, with their eyebrows and temples whitened by snow, their stares not yet freed from the intense concentration that had been carrying them forward until now.

“You’re a brave girl, Nora. I want to thank you.”

“What for?”

“For your courage. If I were able to love, I’d love you.”

“I’m not asking you for that, Paul. All I ask is that you be a little less unhappy. That’s enough for me.”

Once again he gave a disillusioned shrug of his shoulders.

“I also ask,” Nora added, “that you stop making that gesture of a guy who’s finished. Is it really so hard?”

“I don’t know. I think you’re wasting your time with me.”

“Yet when we left here yesterday you were a man who’d been cured.”

“I thought I was. But it’s enough for a shadow to step out in front of me on the street for everything to fall to pieces.”

“Are memories that hard to forget?”

“I don’t even know if they’re memories. It’s a terrible tiredness. An enormous repulsion. And a deep disgust.”

“Deeper than Wolf’s Precipice?”

They both turned again in the direction of the precipice that opened in front of them.

“Look how deep it is,” Nora said, “and yet you climbed the whole thing. Don’t you want to try it again some day?”

They arrived at the cabin at nightfall. Gunther, paler than before, was waiting for them at the window. Hagen, who had gone out to meet them on the other trail, wasn’t back yet.

“We have to put on the light in the tower to give him the news that you’ve returned. Why did you come back so late? I’ve been waiting all day. I thought you weren’t coming. I thought I’d lost you.”

He spoke quickly, in broken sentences, with a strange nervous agitation beneath his great pallor. His eyes gleamed feverishly, too intensely to smile. Faffner sniffed their clothes, lay down at their feet, tossed off a curious snarl of pleasure and rediscovery, which, at the same time, was almost despairing. With an effort, Nora succeeded in calming him and making him lie down in front of the hearth with his snout on his paws; but even from there the dog regarded her with his gaze of animal restlessness.

“Faffner knows where you’re coming from,” Gunther said. “You’ve been in the house on Strada Prundului and you’re carrying odours he recognizes…”

Hagen returned later and didn’t speak a word as he came in the door. His cape and hood were white with snow. He stopped in the entrance and, at first, white as he was, with his big boots, his hood pulled down over his forehead, he resembled a Santa Claus who was hiding his face. After he had brushed off the snow and had revealed his sad face and, above all, that cold, white recluse’s gaze, the congenial initial image was extinguished, banished, and in its place stood the severe man with whom they were familiar.

Nora thought of going up to him and telling him: “Relax. We’ve left everything in the house exactly as you like it. Nothing has budged from its place. The door is bolted, the windows are locked. Nobody’s going to cross that threshold and not even a shadow will leave the place.”

But Hagen’s silence asked no questions and invited no friendly words.

The three men fell silent, and Nora felt very alone among them. She looked at each of them in turn, and each seemed to her to have disappeared into his own thoughts. She opened her backpack and took out without pleasure the gifts she had bought them in Braşov. Now they struck her as useless, too childish for men who were so despondent. Next to the window, the fir tree decorated for the modest Christmas celebrations waited to be lit up. Nora hung her presents from its drooping boughs, and then lit the candles one by one. Tapered flames began to play over the insides of the balls of coloured glass.

Gunther was the first to approach the tree. He’s still enough of a child that it makes him happy, Nora thought. She saw a flicker of curiosity return to his pallid cheeks. His eyes recovered their beautiful ironic clarity.

“Won’t you come and stand next to our Christmas tree, Paul?” Nora risked asking.

Over the lighted tree, she saw his old hazy expression of indifference betray a timidity, an insecurity.

Hagen joined them with more difficulty, not even approaching the tree. He stood a few steps away from it, as dark and severe as ever.

They gathered around the fir tree as if gathering around a campfire in the woods.