The Accident

VI

IT WAS A SMALL, NARROW ROOM with a smoke-blackened ceiling and wooden benches, and a door that was constantly opening and shutting. Nervous figures would appear in the doorway, toss a hurried glance inside and disappear. If it hadn’t been for the magistrates and the court clerk in their black robes, Nora wouldn’t have believed that she was actually in a courtroom.

All kinds of people sat on the benches: anxious girls with tired eyes, and a mixture of bewilderment and indifference. There was the incessant sound of whispering, muffled hisses, shuffling paper. From time to time a bell sounded, rung out of habit and without conviction by the presiding judge. There was a moment’s silence, and then nothing more was heard but the voice of the lawyer who was speaking.

Nora found a seat at the back of the room, next to the window. Outside it was snowing softly. Senate Square looked white, like a postcard of winter.

Paul was right at the front, in the first row of benches, bent over what looked like a file. In order to see him, Nora had to stand up, and then she saw only his back, with his shoulders bent forward in the direction of the desk facing him. As long as he doesn’t turn his head, she thought, chilled by the thought that he might see her. She pressed against the window, hiding as well as she was able.

Paul got up from his seat. Nora had the impression that he had seen her and was coming towards her. She remained stock-still, like the pupil who feels that the teacher has seen her copying from his desk, and is waiting for the inevitable scandal to break.

No. She was losing her nerve foolishly, for no good reason. Paul hadn’t seen her and in any event was not looking her way. He had merely gone to the court clerk’s desk, picked up a file and now, with the file in his hand, was speaking.

Nora heard only parts of the sentence, of which she understood nothing. She repeated his words in her mind and was surprised that Paul could speak with such conviction. His voice from the previous evening was unrecognizable: this was a firm, certain voice, with maybe a certain deep-seated indifference, but not the sleepy, drawling indifference with which Nora was familiar.

“… The simple deposition of the reasons for appealing this case not only is insufficient, but is null and void… The court will be obliged to consider this appeal as lacking due cause… A single valid cause… indicated by Article 98 of the law governing circuit court judges… Implied and without having been specified by prior documentation… Procedurally speaking, this appeal does not exist… It is in direct contradiction of Article 69 of the civil code, section D, clause 2…”

Nora strained to listen. She would have liked to understand the question under discussion. Above all, she would have liked to be able to look Paul in the eyes while he was speaking. The things he was talking about appeared to enthrall him. Now and then he turned his head towards a lawyer on the opposing bench, who was interrupting him, and then Nora read in his uncaring eyes a sparkle of conviction, maybe even of combativeness.

She glanced at her watch: twenty past four. Yesterday at this time we hadn’t met yet. Everything that had happened since seemed remote and incomprehensible. That man speaking in an unfamiliar voice and whose appearance she couldn’t remember if she closed her eyes, that man was her “lover.” This was still a word that, even at her age, Nora was unable to contemplate without terror. Long ago, in her hometown in the provinces, “lover” was a word that was spoken in a whisper.

The presiding judge uttered a few words, which were inaudible at the back of the courtroom, and wrote something in the register. The court clerk called another case, while Paul bundled up his books and papers and, with an unhurried motion, slid them into his briefcase.

Nora was going to let him leave the courtroom, she was going to remain here a little longer to be sure of not running into him, and then she, too, was going to leave. A guy you slept with one night by chance and who, after that, you never saw again. The horrible thoughts, which appalled her, and which she nevertheless tried to think with out caring, went around in her head.

“Are you staying here?”

He was wearing a black-patterned red tie with a badly tied knot. It was first thing Nora noticed. Why doesn’t this man know how to tie his tie?

Paul took her arm and led her to the door. She followed him without looking at him. How nice it was there next to the window. How did he spot me? Why did he come in my direction? She was afraid of him; she would have liked to be alone, she would have liked with all her heart to be alone.

“… Honourable gentlemen, an incorrectly introduced motion cannot replace…” From the doorway, Nora heard a few words spoken by a man at the bar, who was waving a file, but the end of the sentence was lost, since in that moment they left the building through a narrow corridor that was more brightly lit than the courtroom.

“An incorrectly introduced motion… an incorrectly introduced motion,” she repeated mechanically, trying to prolong her thoughts in order to postpone the explanation that was approaching.

How long this man is able to remain silent, Nora thought on the street, walking beside Paul. Nothing on his blank face displayed the slightest curiosity or pleasure or worry. She had been afraid that her presence would anger him. Not even that so much, no, not so much. It’s as if I wasn’t here.

Dusk was falling, the snow had stopped, but it was very cold.

“You shouldn’t think I came to look for you.” All of a sudden she started to speak. “I pass by here in front of the courthouse every afternoon. I have a few hours of French in a private school in the neighbourhood. Maybe I didn’t tell you I’m a teacher. We haven’t had time — ”

She stopped in mid-sentence, surprised by her own words. She hadn’t had time to tell him the most basic things about herself — maybe, if her name hadn’t been engraved on the metal plate next to her apartment door, he wouldn’t have remembered that, either — but in a matter of hours she had become his lover. How stupid you are, Nora! She would have liked to fall silent, but now that she had begun to speak and had interrupted herself suddenly, without any reason, remaining silent felt more difficult than before.

“Please forgive me for looking through your papers on the desk. I flipped through your agenda and I saw that you had to be in court this afternoon. At first I didn’t understand what was written there. Your writing is a mess, but I’m used to all sorts of handwriting… I told you I’m a teacher… I tried to imagine what C.C. II meant. It had to be Commercial Court, Section Two. I didn’t think I’d be able to come. Nor could I have done so. I’m usually in class on Tuesday afternoons from three to five. Today I’m taking a vacation… I started to go home, and, I don’t know how, passing in front of the courthouse, I told myself that I could go in… You don’t know how lost I got wandering through all sorts of rooms and corridors. I didn’t think you’d see me. I would have liked you not to see me…”

They had stopped for a few moments in front of the window of a flower shop on Senate Square. Nora was talking and realized that he wasn’t listening. What could he be looking at with such intensity? In the window there were several sprigs of white lilac, as white as the newly fallen snow. Very tender and very droopy, the sprigs were slender, green, bent beneath the weight of their white bouquets. Paul’s gaze had settled there with its usual air of absence, but with the beginnings of a misty smile, which came with difficulty, from far away.

If I leave now, I don’t think he’ll even notice that I’m not beside him any more, Nora thought. And it might even be the wisest thing she could do. She wasn’t angry, she wasn’t hurt, but she was aware that this man was a stranger to her and that nothing could wrest him from his silence. Whatever I say, whatever I do, that stare is not going to change.

She moved slowly away, attentive to her movements, as though she had just awoken from a deep sleep, and crossed the tramline in the direction of the Senate Bridge.

“Nora!”

He called her name for the first time. He was beside her, holding her arm, and looked her straight in the eyes with a gaze that saw her at last.

“Nora, please forgive me. I’m a fool, I don’t have any manners.”

“No, Paul. You’re neither foolish nor lacking in manners. Maybe you’re unhappy.”

He lifted his shoulders. (If he gave me the time, Nora thought, I’d make him get rid of that habit.)

“Let’s not talk about unhappiness. It’s a word I don’t like. And I don’t think I am. More like weary… yes… very weary…”

He continued to hold her arm with his heavy hand, with his clenched fingers, in a grip that was overly emphatic but in which she found — at last! — a flicker of intimacy. They were walking up from the quai, along the December Dâmboviţa River, which the twilight, the cold, the winter all made look a little less dirty. The evening’s first streetlights came on, and their shadows on the water were whitish in the light of this uncertain hour.

“You could easily hate me, Nora. People like me don’t have the right to get mixed up in accidents in the street. I shouldn’t have been the one to pick you up out of the snow yesterday evening.”

“People like you… Why are you talking about things that make me afraid? I’m bewildered, you know. What kind of person are you?”

“A person who last night you were able to believe might commit suicide. Isn’t that enough?”

They had crossed the Schitu Măgureanu Bridge: passersby were few, the street was empty.

And why was he silent now? He was capable of silences that seemed as though they would never end. How far away was he? How could she call him back? Only his hand, as heavy as ever, retained its grip on her right arm. But just when she believed that all was lost, his voice returned, its flat, even tone no louder than before, as closed off as the silence from which it broke free.

“I have nothing to say to anyone and I have nothing to learn from anyone. Do you understand, Nora? Do you understand why I wanted to run away last night? This morning I still didn’t think it was too late to run away. And now, look — even now, there’s still time. Why did you come to look for me? You could have just forgotten that we ever met. You could have wiped yesterday out of your memory.”

“And last night?” Nora asked, mainly for herself.

“Yes, and last night. We’re both mature enough not to regard that kind of random occurrence as a tragedy. I don’t want to offend you, believe me, but I’d rather offend you than deceive you. You need some friendship, some intimacy. You’re making a mistake in asking that of me. I have nothing to give anyone.”

He was still looking straight in front of him, without turning his head in her direction for even an instant. His lips were still twisted in an expression of vague bitterness.

With that stare that doesn’t look anywhere, with that muffled voice that neither rises nor falls, he can probably say the most horrible things in the world without even realizing it, Nora thought.

“You say that you looked in my agenda on the desk. No doubt you noticed that all the pages between today and the end of the year are blank. That’s what you call a vacation. For every blank page an empty day… What do you think I should do with them?”

“Try to give them away.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You said just now that you had nothing to give. Even so, you’ve got some free time… You call them empty days… Give them to someone… Maybe you’ll find somebody who’ll receive them and do something with them…”

He stopped in mid-stride, and beneath the throbbing of the streetlight he gazed at Nora, thinking he could read in her eyes all that seemed unclear in her words.

“If that’s an invitation, it’s better that I tell you that I can’t accept it.”

“It’s not an invitation. It’s advice. Get away. You’ll be less alone. Go and forget, maybe…”

“Forget what?”

“I don’t know. Whatever it is you have to forget…”

He lifted his shoulders again, with the same gesture of negation, of doubt, of uselessness.

“Leaving… I’ve thought about that, too. Yesterday I even went to a travel agent to ask for information. I had taken my passport with me in the morning, for the visas. That’s why it was in my pocket last night.”

Nora saw again the blue passport, the photograph, the identifying signs, the visa page, Hegenrath, 23 juillet. Again it seemed to her that in the name of that border crossing, in that forgotten date of July 23, 1934, lay his whole mystery.

“Then I decided not to go. Why bother? I’m too lazy, it’s too complicated and above all, I feel that it’s useless. I think I probably don’t even have enough money.”

They were on the Elefterie Bridge. He had leaned over the parapet and was looking in the direction of the two major streets that opened diagonally in front of them: on the left, Bulevardul Elisabeta, lighted up by distant neon signs and the red eye of the Number 14 tram that ran downhill towards Cotroceni, and, on the right, Splaiul Independenţei, snowbound, silent, almost un-Bucharest-like. On the stone parapet the snow had piled up into a foamy, fragile roundness. Nora reached out with her hands and took snow in each hand, holding it carefully in her open palms as though it were a fine powder.

“Have you ever been in the mountains in the winter?”

Nora’s question brought him back from who-knew-what far-away thought. His response was delayed by an excessively lengthy silence.

“No, never in the winter. I’ve climbed Peşteră and Omul a few times, but never in the winter.”

“What a shame! It’s so beautiful! Look, that’s where you should go. To the mountains.”

He didn’t even bother to reply. With a lift of his shoulders, everything became useless. Nora persisted.

“Have you ever gone skiing?”

“No.”

“You should try it.”

And a moment later, suddenly taking him by the hand and forcing him to turn back towards her, she looked him in the eyes and said: “Come to the mountains with me. We’ll go skiing.”

This time she was staring at him too intently for him to reply with silence. “It’s childishness, Nora.”

“That’s exactly why I’m suggesting it to you: because it’s childish. Listen to me, Paul: give me your vacation. A minute ago, believe me, I wouldn’t have asked you for it, but now I’m asking you for it: give it to me.”

He didn’t respond. At least he hasn’t said no, Nora consoled herself. On the bridge, the evening wind blew, reawakening from the calm that had surrounded them until now. The white chestnut trees shook snow onto the sidewalk like overly fragile flowers.

They followed Bulevardul Elisabeta downtown. The lights, the first shop windows, the world made swift by frost, gave Nora the impression of returning to the city. She continued talking, grateful that his silence was delaying his reply.

“I’ve never really known what to do with my vacation. I only knew I didn’t want to spend it here in Bucharest. I feel really good living up there on Bulevardul Dacia, but not in the holidays, when I have the impression that everybody’s left town and I’m here alone. Worse than alone: abandoned…”

She tried to say the last word in an ironic tone, but her voice didn’t help her. “Abandoned” was a word that gave her childish tears. Fortunately, he was too tired, or too distracted, to notice.

“I’ve been thinking of getting away, too. I’m not sure where… Maybe Predeal, the ski lodge at Onef… If I’d found travelling companions, I would have preferred to go up to a cabin with a small group… In Ialomicioara or Postăvar or Bâlea… Somewhere remote, anyway… Why don’t you want to be my companion? Let’s be clear: what’s happened between us until now…”

Nora hesitated a moment. She would have liked to say “last night,” but the detailed allusion frightened her.

“… it’s erased, it’s forgotten. It’s ‘null and void,’ as you said in court. I’m suggesting this to you as a comrade. Let’s take off with hobnailed boots on our feet and packs on our backs.”

“Take off?” he repeated. “When do we take off?”

“This evening,” Nora said, only then realizing that his question might be an acceptance, even though he had asked it vaguely, with the same eternal lifting of his shoulders. “So it’s true? You accept? You want to leave?”

“No, Nora. Why do you keep asking? It’s useless. Everything’s useless.”

His voice disheartened her. There was something irrevocably crushed, irrevocably broken, in the exhaustion with which he was speaking to her. And yet, for a moment, he had seen leaving as a possibility…

“Why are you so stubborn, Paul? You’re a man who’s lost every game he’s played. Just now you were saying: ‘I have nothing to give, nothing to lose.’ Well then, since in any case you have nothing more to lose, nothing more to put at risk, accept this departure as a game and let me, too, play on your behalf…”

She stopped on purpose in front of a shop window full of sporting goods, on Bulevardul Elisabeta, at the corner of Calea Victoriei. Skis, skates, steel-tipped poles, hobnailed boots, a whole arsenal of wooden and metal instruments in the display window, glimmered on the artificial snow made of cotton wool and white mats. A mannequin dressed as a skier, with the full range of equipment, ready for the trail, smiled with a happy, movie-star smile. Paul looked, practically without seeing them, at all these instruments that struck him as complicated and, above all, uninteresting.

“Please don’t laugh at me, Paul, but when I’m very unhappy…because it does happen to me sometimes…”

She couldn’t finish her sentence. Again, unexpected tears filled her eyes. Abandoned… unhappy… so many words that were difficult to speak! She tried to correct herself: “When things are going badly for me, when everything turns out wrong, when I feel weighed down by bad luck… well, then I buy myself something new… a dress, or, if I don’t have much money, a scarf, a trinket… Not out of frivolousness nor out of shallowness. More out of superstition. In order to change fate. To outwit it. I think that, if I’m dressed differently, it won’t be able to recognize me, it’ll mistake somebody else for me, or go past without seeing me… Since you’re a superstitious man, why don’t you have a superstition about beginning something new? Why don’t you want to try something you’ve never tried until now?”

… He had gone in unconvinced. Nora spoke for him, took the information, examined with attention the items they were shown. It was a bookstore that had been taken over by sporting enthusiasts. The floors that contained books were abandoned; everyone crowded into the sports department. On the eve of the vacations there was a rustling of escape here, a clinking of skates, a perpetual feverishness. Enormous hobnailed boots, with the edges of their soles clamped between metal pincers, smelled of thick, recently cured hides. Black skis, leaned against the walls with the tips pointed up, looked like so many slender fishing boats brought ashore to dry. Everything had a harsh smell of leather, of waxed wood, of waterproof cloth. Brightly coloured jackets and sweaters lent the whole store a festive, decorated air.

A radio was broadcasting the six o’clock sports report: “Predeal, a 46-centimetre base… Sinaia, a 30-centimetre base… Good skiing conditions…” The voice coming from the speaker mingled with the clients’ questions and the sales clerks’ answers.

“Lift your right arm, okay?” Nora asked him.

He submitted with good will, although with a certain awkwardness. He saw himself in the mirror measuring the length of the skis, which were taller than he was. The tip of the ski reached to the palm of his hand. “It has to be at least 40 centimetres taller than the person who’s using it,” she explained to him, absorbed in her work.

Now and then she looked at him with an expression of concern, as though seeking a sign of approval or consent. He’s intimidated, she thought, seeing him standing with the skis in his hand and not knowing what to do with them. “Intimidated” struck her as a sign of progress; it was, at least, something other than indifference.

“What’s that for?” Paul asked her, seeing that she had in her hand several loops of steel, which she was forcing herself to screw to a flat base that resembled the sole of a skate. He seemed to have asked the question with passing interest, in any case with little perplexity. He regarded all these unfamiliar objects as though at a loss, as he might before the dismantled parts of an engine. Nora hastened to provide him with explanations, which he didn’t understand very well.

“There are two types of binding. Diagonal and straight. I have more confidence in a diagonal binding. It’s not very flexible, but it’s firm. It’s a bit of an obstacle if you try to telemark, but you’re not going to start telemarking in your first days of skiing. The main thing is to have your boot tightly interlocked with your ski…”

A sales clerk called Paul into a fitting booth to try on his ski suit and boots.

“Call me when you’re ready,” Nora said. She was afraid of leaving him alone. The feeble glimmer of interest she had started to read in his eyes must not be lost. This was a game he must play to the end. But wasn’t he going to get depressed? Wouldn’t he, who fled so easily, run away again?

The blue ski suit transformed him. How young he is, Nora thought. Behind his fatigue she rediscovered his undefined boyish expression, which she had noticed last night the first time that their glances had crossed.

“I look ridiculous, right?”

“Yes. Do you think there’s anything wrong with that? You, too, should be ridiculous a few times in your life. You can see it does you good.”

Nora didn’t like the garment. It had misshapen sleeves and the buttons needed to be changed.

“We’ll send it to the workshop right away,” the sales clerk said. “He’ll be ready to go in half an hour.”

“And in an hour at the latest,” Nora added, “he has to be home. But no later, please, because we’re leaving this evening.”

She spoke to the sales clerk but in fact, without looking at him, she was directing her words at Paul. Was he going to protest? Was he going to refute her?

“This evening.”

In the final analysis this isn’t going to be the stupidest thing I’ve done in my life, Paul thought, looking at himself in the mirror at home. The blue cloth cap, with the short, round peak resembled the cap from a school uniform. The ski suit’s large exterior pockets had been closed with marshal buttons that reminded him of cadet school. Like a high-school boy, like a cadet on a reduced term of service… He smiled as he rediscovered old memories.

He strolled around the room for the sheer pleasure of hearing the hobnailed boots on the parquet floor, sounding like his old heavy tread during his nights of sentry duty. How good those nights had been: waking alone at dawn in the frozen countryside of Cotroceni without even a thought, not an expectation, scrutinizing the winter nights, through which sometimes, who knew from where, a screech would come from beyond the horizon, maybe from the mountains, maybe from the forests!

He looked at his work clothes, which he had taken off, his overcoat hanging on a peg. If he could, by separating himself from them, separate himself from himself… If he could, by putting on these new clothes, begin a new life…

It was childish, certainly, but it was a childishness he wanted to believe in.

Who was that young man in the mirror, with the peak of the cap over his forehead, with his throat bare, with the suit of rough fabric buttoned up to the neck. I don’t know. It seems to me that I’ve seen him before somewhere, but I don’t know him.

Up until now, Paul thought, I’ve done so many stupidly reasonable things, and they’ve all turned out badly… I’m finally going to do something really stupid, a completely senseless stupidity…Maybe it’ll bring me luck.

He was still intimidated by the skis. He didn’t know how he had held them on his shoulders while those two poles, with their wooden hoops and their metal points, only encumbered him further. He remembered cinema images of tumultuous ski races, skiers flying through clouds of snow. It had all struck him as fantastic, unimaginable. It was difficult for him to understand how those two long black shafts, with their iron bindings, with the complication of their buckles, screws and loops, could move so swiftly, as though floating over the snow. He wished he could look in the mirror once he was on his skis, as though he were in full flight. Nora had shown him a few times how to slip the boot into the binding, how to secure the ski to his feet. But would he try it?

He lined up the two skis on the carpet, with the boot on top, one next to the other (“Absolutely parallel and very close together,” as Nora said). He took pains to place the steel loop of the bindings around the heel of the hobnailed boots, precisely in the deep groove in the heels. The loop was too new and the spring was stiff. His right leg slid into place, but his left was still resistant. On his knees, with the peaked cap pulled peevishly around to the back, embittered by this resistance, Paul wrestled with this excessively short, or excessively stiff, loop.

In the middle of this struggle, he was caught unawares by the sound of the doorbell. Who could it be? Certainly not Nora. They had agreed to meet at the station a quarter of an hour prior to the train’s departure. Who then?

He was furious at not being left in peace to attach his left boot to the ski, furious that now he had to undo the right one. With the ski on his foot, he couldn’t have been able to get into the entrance hall.

From outside, the ringing continued.

“I’m coming, just wait, I’m coming,” Paul shouted, more irate than before since this time, in a much more serious development, the right boot refused to come out of the binding, while the loop seemed to be stuck in the groove for eternity.

This would be amusing, if I wasn’t able to get out of here. He saw himself imprisoned by these wooden shafts, which he was condemned to haul around behind him and which, being more than two metres long, would prevent him from moving about his apartment, as if he had been nailed to chairs, to a desk, to the walls. No one could escape from this mess. Maybe Nora, if I could succeed in dragging myself to the telephone and calling her. But not even Nora, for — he recalled — the key was in the door, and he wouldn’t be able to open it.

Now and then the doorbell stopped ringing (Maybe they’ve left, maybe they’ve gone away), but later it would start again with the insistence of someone who was determined to wait as long as it might take.

Shortly afterward, Paul succeeded in freeing himself. An idea for his rescue crossed his mind. He had only to undo the boot lace and slip his foot out, leaving the boot attached to the ski. I’ll free the boot later, he told himself, pleased with the simplicity of the solution, which he had thought of only when the situation had seemed most humorous and hopeless.

He hobbled towards the entrance hall, with a shoe on one foot and only a sock on the other.

“Stop ringing, I’m coming.”

It was a man from the flower shop, with a bouquet wrapped in white paper.

“Who’s it from?”

“I don’t know. A lady.”

“Did it come with a letter?”

“No.”

He waited until he was alone, closed the door and only then lifted the paper. It was two bows of white lilacs. He looked at them with a long, strange gaze. Where had they come from? Whom had they come from? He held them in his hand with a murky feeling of lateness, of uselessness. Maybe they were a mistake… Maybe they weren’t for him…

He didn’t have the strength to touch them. Their cold, powerless breath felt far away from him. Flowers of the snow. Yet the simple way they bent over the branch beneath the weight of their bouquets had something both stalwart and fragile… He knew that bending like an approaching face, like a backward glance over the shoulder. It was Ann’s questioning motions, it was her shy expectation when confronted with a silence that had gone on too long…

He let the flowers fall from his hand, either on the armchair or on the couch, he wasn’t even sure where. He had the impression that they were demanding a response that he didn’t know how to give.

Everything around him now had the bitter taste of awakening from drunkenness. The room was in a sad mess, as though from a debauched night. What meaning did these things have, tossed down wherever they happened to have fallen: the open cupboard, the dirty laundry ready to be packed up, the backpack flung across an armchair?

Hampered by the two skis, he remained standing diagonally in the middle of the room. He was ashamed of the stubbornness with which, five minutes earlier, he had been fighting with them to put them on and take them off. Now they lay there like broken toys… How stupid, how miserable he must be to have allowed himself for even one moment to be dragged into this ridiculous skiing trip…

Ann was coming back. The flowers she had sent were her way of asking if she could come back.

“I don’t know, Ann, I don’t know. I think you shouldn’t. I think it’s better if you don’t come.” He spoke these words of resistance aloud, yet he felt that something beyond his own will had replied for him and had accepted. He didn’t know what was going to happen further along and he didn’t even try to imagine possibilities. One thing was crystal clear: Ann was coming.

Maybe she was outside in the street waiting for him right now. Maybe she was looking out the side window of her light blue car in the direction of his window in order to see him appearing there. Maybe she was only waiting for a sign to come upstairs in a few seconds’ time…

She was coming at the last minute, but she was coming. He felt no desire at all to meet her, but neither did he have any will to reject her. Somewhere, beyond all his memories, beyond all the available evidence, his childish yet still vibrant belief persisted that his love was not lost, that an absurd succession of errors and coincidences had disillusioned and separated them, but that everything could be explained, everything could be rediscovered. There was still time, there was still time…

He went to pick up the fallen flowers, and only then did he realize that he was limping, with his left foot in the hobnailed boot and the right one barefoot. The peaked cap, the blue ski suit, the long pants tightened around his ankles with an elastic band, all seemed laughable now.

Enough of this disguise, he thought. He turned towards his work clothes, towards his former life. The game had gone on too long.

He was just about to pick the skis up off of the floor in order to hide them in the bathroom or the bedroom when the telephone rang. It was Nora.

“Don’t forget to bring a clasp knife. Preferably one with a drill. It’s great for the mountains. You don’t need a thermos, I’ve got a really big one. And don’t load up your backpack with stuff you aren’t going to use…”

He tried to interrupt her. He wanted to tell her: Nora, I’m not going, I can’t go; but she continued to give him advice.

“… a big sweater and, if you’ve got one, a woollen vest. Nothing to eat, you understand? Absolutely nothing. I went shopping and got everything we need.”

Then, without a transition, in the same hurried voice in which she had given her departure instructions:

“I sent you two lilac bows. I imagine you’ve received them. I wanted to make you happy. When we stopped in front of the flower shop on Senate Square, you seemed to be staring at the lilac in the window with I-don’t-know-what-kind of sad smile. I wasn’t going to tell you that they were from me, but later I changed my mind. I don’t want you to have to deal with unresolved mysteries just before leaving.”

She hung up, after reminding him that the train left at exactly ten minutes after midnight.

Paul stood still, disoriented and dizzy. For the second time, he would have liked to ask: What are you looking for? What do you want? By what instinct, or stroke of luck, had that woman, whom he had known for twenty-four hours, entered the most secret portals of his life? By what rehearsed coincidence had she taken the place of his lost love at precisely the point where he had hoped to rediscover it?

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