The Accident

VIII

THEY CLIMBED UP TO POIANA BRAŞOV in the “caterpillar,” a truck whose wheels were ringed with chains so that it didn’t bog down in the snow.

“I think Poiana is the best spot,” Nora said. “I should have thought of it from the start. It’s open, it’s wide, it has gentle slopes. Have you never been here? You don’t know the Braşov area?”

“Of course,” Paul replied, “but only the part around the Seven Towns. I spent a vacation there a long time ago. In Cernatu, in Satu-Lung…”

And he fell silent with a vague stare that revealed something uncertain beyond the woods, like a lost sense of direction. He would have liked to lift his shoulders with his customary gesture of indifference and distaste, but the weight of his backpack prevented him from completing the movement.

“See how good that pack is?” Nora said. “Wear it on your back for ten days and you’ll lose that habit of making apathetic gestures.”

Only after she had uttered these words did she realize how intimately she had spoken to him. (Last night, when we were leaving, I was still more formal with him.) It was as if the night on the train had made him into an old acquaintance, that night during which, never the less, she had not heard him speak two consecutive sentences. She fell silent, embarrassed by this familiarity, which seemed to be pushing things too quickly. She glanced at her watch and made a rapid calculation: I’ve known him for thirty-one hours. She was alone with him in this open truck that was carrying them through the morning woods, she was alone with him and she didn’t even know if she had the right to lean on his arm.

“In fact, I think Poiana is a good choice. You’ll see. I hope we can make a skier out of you.”

She repeated in her mind the sentence she had just spoken, congratulating herself on the solution she had found: “we can make a skier out of you” was so intentionally ceremonious that it lightened their intimacy with a joking tone. “Yes, I promise you that in three days at most we’ll be skiing all the way down to Râşnov. It’s a good straight trail without too many turns.”

She tried to arouse sporting ambitions in him, a taste for competition, a certain determination. He’s too much of a child for that, she thought, watching him.

There wasn’t a single room available at the Saxon hotel.

“Try in Turcu, try in Cercetaşi, but don’t count on it. Since we got the big snowfall, all of Poiana has been full.”

“Stay here, Paul. I’ll go look. We have to be able to find something.”

She put on her skis, stamped the snow a few times and set off with long strides, propelled by her poles, which she thrust into the snow with regular, oar-like movements. Due to the morning frost, the snow had a thin crust of ice and the skis slid without softness, with a harsh sound, leaving a glassy powder in their wake.

In the big chalets there wasn’t a single place left, while the little villages hadn’t yet woken from their slumber. Even so, Nora knocked on their shuttered windows; but sleepy voices told her to go away.

“You’re tiring yourself out for nothing, Miss,” a man who was shovelling snow said to her from his yard. “You’re tiring yourself out for nothing. We’ve even got people sleeping in the garage.”

Annoyed, she returned to the Saxons’ hotel, not knowing what to do. She could no longer hope to find free spaces downhill in the Prahova Valley if there were so many people here in Poiana, which was more difficult to reach. The only thing to do, maybe, was to go back down to Braşov and take a train from there in the direction of the Făgăraş Mountains. It was more likely that they would find lodging in Bâlea, in Muntele Mic, but she didn’t know the area and didn’t know how long it would take to get there. She could get down to Braşov in half an hour on her skis, but Paul would need at least a week of training in order to do this kind of trail. One didn’t put on skis for the first time to do a six-kilometre downhill race. As for the caterpillar, it would make the return run only in the afternoon and then they risked being caught by nightfall in a train once again. I don’t know if he’ll put up with it, Nora thought, pondering his lack of conviction.

She found him at the Saxons’, in the dining hall, facing a poster pinned to the wall. The Black Church, December 23, 1934. 8 PM. Religious concert. The “Christmas Oratory,” by J.S. Bach. He turned towards her with a glimmer of curiosity, indicating the poster. “Interesting, no?”

“No. Absolutely not interesting. We didn’t come here to listen to oratories. There’s only one interesting thing here.”

And she pointed through the window towards the snow, the fir trees, the white-hooded chalets.

“You’re harsh.”

“I’m harsh because I’ve got big responsibilities.”

She should have been able to say the final words in a joking voice, but looking closely at his eyes, those sad eyes, she thought that she really had taken on a big responsibility. If I leave this man alone, he’s going to run away. She couldn’t have said exactly why, but she felt that any flight might be a disaster for him, and that she was indispensable in preventing it. “Are you in good physical condition, Paul?”

“Really good physical condition?”

“No. Middling.”

“We can give it a try…”

“We have to leave Poiana. There’s not a room here anywhere. For a moment I thought we should go farther, towards the Făgăraş, but it seems to me that it’s simpler to stay right here. Do you know Postăvar?”

“Where is it?”

“There.”

She pointed with her hand to the curtain of clouds that was streaming downhill along the edge of the woods facing them, blanketing the entire horizon.

“Is it high?”

“About 1800 metres. Here we’re at about a thousand. In the summer it’s a three-hour hike. Let’s say we can do it in four. Anyway, we’re not even going all the way to the summit. There are two large chalets on the trail. When there aren’t any clouds, you get an amazing view from there.”

“So, Nora, you’re the girl who falls off the tram in Bucharest, and here you want to cross the Carpathians? Don’t you think that’s a little ambitious? Don’t you think it’s a bit much for those knees of yours, which yesterday you were cleaning with iodine…?”

He stopped for a moment, thinking.

“Strictly speaking, when was that? Yesterday or the day before?”

Nora took his arm, pulling him towards the trail. “Stop counting! We’ll do it another time. It wasn’t yesterday or the day before… It was a month ago, a year ago, many years ago…”

From the doorway they looked again towards the tissue of clouds that was hiding Postăvarul.

“I haven’t seen it for a week,” the porter said. “Since those snows came, I’ve forgotten what the peak looks like. As though it had disappeared completely.”

The trail was blazed with coloured rectangles — one red stripe and two white ones — like so many small flags daubed on the trees and the rocks. They could see them in the woods, in the ins and outs, like the fluttering of a handkerchief. It was as though a travelling companion had gone ahead of them, stopping sometimes to wait for them to follow and to show them the way: over here… over here…

They walked with their skis over their shoulders, crossed behind their backs to maintain their equilibrium. Now and then the point of a ski struck the branch of a fir tree and shook off the snow, with a faint, metallic, rustling spray as if ringing out to all the crystalline snowflakes. There were immense, snow-immured trees, with their branches sagging beneath the burden of the snow, like heavy wings on a spiralling flight. Lonely, one by one, they rose from the rocks, springing up in lines; but their robust trunks, in their white garb, had the unexpected delicacy of the stems of flowers. Everything appeared grandiose, not at all ornamental, as in an immense, decorated park.

Nora turned back towards Paul, who had stopped at a turning point in the path and was taking a long look around him.

“Is it beautiful?”

“It’s too beautiful. A little too beautiful. As if it had been made in advance, prepared beforehand; there are too many trees, there’s too much snow… And the silence, such a colossal silence…”

They both listened, trying to catch from far away, from very far away, a sound, a crackle, a step… But nothing penetrated the vast stillness.

“I can’t get it into my head that it’s real. It’s like I’m in a photograph or a poster. It’s like I’m in that display window last night, with artificial snow…”

Nora remembered the well-equipped skier who had smiled at passersby from the display window. With his new ski suit, a blue scarf around his neck and his skis on his shoulders. Paul was starting to look like a poster boy for skiing. Not even the smile is missing.

“Do you think we’re on the right trail?” Paul asked.

The afternoon passed and the chalet didn’t appear. We should have got there a long time ago, Nora thought. Her boots felt heavy on her feet and she had the impression that their whole weight was pressing down on her ankle. Awaking to a forgotten pain, her left knee began to ache.

“Do you think we’re on the right trail?” Paul asked.

“All trails are good around here,” she replied vaguely.

She wasn’t worried, but she realized that they had strayed from the trail. She knew well enough that it was impossible to get lost in these mountains with their easy trails, and she told herself that whichever way they went they would end up at the chalet. As long as we keep climbing, keep moving upward. They hadn’t seen a sign for a while. The little red-and-white flags had become less frequent, and now they had vanished completely.

“Maybe the snow has covered them.”

“Yes, maybe…”

The light had grown lower. The snow had lost its lustre, and was more ashen than white.

“It’s still too early to stop for the night,” Nora said.

It was a gloomy light that spread over things like a metallic film. The trees were extinguished by leaden shadow that fell over them without a glimmer.

“Do you hear that?”

Paul had stopped short, laying his hand on her shoulder. From somewhere above them came a metallic rustling, a murmuring of branches, a hurried fluttering of metallic wings. Heavy unseen strides or woods ripped away from their roots descended, striking against the branches.

“Could it be an avalanche?”

“Impossible,” Nora said.

She was pale and strained to listen. She felt Paul’s hand on her right shoulder. If only he would leave it there.

The light slid lower. It was almost dark, and yet objects remained visible with an absurd precision. Stoney fir trees stood stock-still around them, as though in a grotto. For a moment everything seemed to be frozen in place, detached from time and shifted into another world…

“We’re on another planet,” Paul whispered. He pulled Nora against him. “Are you afraid, Nora?”

“No. I don’t think so. I’m cold. I’d like to get there.” She spoke in a low, serious, intense voice. He felt the heat of her face.

“Get there? Don’t you want to stay here? Never leave here, never arrive anywhere again… Just stop… just stop…”

Shivering, Nora turned her head towards him. There was something feeble, muted yet warm in his voice. She had just enough time to think, This man wants to die, when a sudden sense of peace enveloped her, as though in a single instant she had grasped all of his thoughts down to their roots. She hugged him and closed her eyes with a drowning sensation.

Somewhere in the air above them, huge waves slammed together and the sound radiated downwards, as though reaching the bottom of the sea. Cold, damp, hazy mist streamed between the fir trees. Unmoving branches resounded with a noise like the clashing of weapons.

“The clouds are coming down from the summit,” Nora whispered.

On her lips, her eyelids, she felt snow sliding over her like smoke.

Paul shook her by the shoulders. She opened her eyes with difficulty. Without a word, he pointed out to her with his hand an object that was only a few steps away, but which she could barely discern, as though in a dream: on the bark of a tree, a white-red-white rectangle.

The SKV¹⁴ chalet was still smoking between the fir trees, as though after a recently extinguished fire. Clouds flowed down towards Poiana like buoyant lava. Isolated puffs of mist lingered, hanging from the cliffs and the trees… Nora and Paul emerged from the clouds, as though from a different winter. From the direction of the chalet they heard voices, a workhorse’s bell, the sound of a saw. Someone shouted out the window: “Gertrude! Gertrude!”

Nora thought of the hot tea that awaited her above and looked for her backpack, thinking of the bottle of French rum she had bought before leaving. It was a heavy, intoxicating aroma. I have to sleep… I have to sleep…

“Are guests welcome?”

“Welcome, except there’s nowhere to stay.”

Nora gave the man who had spoken to her a long, silent look. He was a red-haired Saxon with a small, pointed, slightly fiendish beard, and a cold stare, devoid of hostility but also of kindness. He seemed rough, perhaps as a result of the accent with which he spoke, in correct Romanian, giving a short stress to the first syllable.

“All the rooms are full. There’s not even a free bed. Try up above at the Touring Club. You’ll find something there.”

He had small green eyes, like two slivers of a bottle, beneath bushy, pale brows. Nora regarded him with attention, telling her-self: He has the eyes of a badger! She thought of the stuffed badger she had once found on the teacher’s desk, left behind by the natural science class. She would have liked to say to the man in the doorway, “We know each other, we’ve seen each other before”; but she felt at once the pressure of her backpack bearing down on her shoulders, like a pain awakened from sleep. Her clothes were heavy, damp. Her hobnailed boots felt as though they were made of iron.

“I’m not going any farther. Let’s go in… Let’s rest…”

There was a large dining room with wooden tables and many windows, an immense wood stove built into the wall around which ageless Saxon women, tall, blonde, possibly young, were crocheting. At one table chess was being played; at the other, cards. From an adjoining room came the sound of a game of Ping-Pong. Upstairs on the next floor someone was shouting at intervals the same name to no response: “Gertrude… Gertrude…” Next to the window, a few young boys were waxing their skis, as though polishing weapons. Outside on the deck hobnailed boots could be heard climbing or descending the stairs. Now and then the door opened, and at the appearance of the new arrival guffaws of laughter and shouts of recognition — “Hans!” “Willy!” “Otto!” — rang out.

Nora and Paul’s entrance was greeted with a moment of silence, after which the dining room’s hubbub continued undisturbed and without taking them into account. Next to the wall, the small wooden grandfather clock showed five o’clock.

Nora thought for a moment, trying to remember which five o’clock. Was it morning? Or evening? She came to believe that she had lost several hours in the woods and the clouds.

Someone brought her a large white cup of tea.

“You know, Paul, we should hurry up. We don’t want night to overtake us on the trail.”

She showed him the map pinned to the wall: the trail up from Poiana was drawn with a thick, white line, meandering like a river.

“You see? We’re at 1510 metres. The Touring Club chalet is at 1700. The hard part’s behind us.”

Paul glanced incuriously at the map, which he didn’t understand very well.

“Personally, it’s all the same to me. I’ll go wherever you want, as far as you want…”

Nora gave him a stealthy look from over her teacup. There were light lines on his forehead, which the snow had drawn more deeply. His ski mitts, which he had set on the table, looked like two big bear paws. There was something peaceful, conciliatory, in his eyes, as though in a dream. She seemed to hear him whispering once again: “Never leave here, never arrive anywhere again…”

It was pitch black when they reached the Touring Club chalet. They had done the final part of the trail with their pocket flashlights, guiding themselves more by the shouts they heard from the summit of the mountain than by the signs on the trees, which they could no longer see in the darkness.

The only free places were in the dormitory room.

“If you stay longer, then after the holidays we’ll be able to give you a room with two single beds,” said the man who was showing them around. They followed him in silent resignation.

The “dormitory room” was a long lumber room of wooden beams. An acetylene gas lamp was burning in the middle of the room.

“Is there no fireplace?” Nora asked with indifference.

“Not here. If you want to warm up, come upstairs to the big room. Dinner is also served there. You’ll hear the bell when it rings.”

The beds were lined up in two rows, as in a barracks. Chilly, threadbare beds covered in bed clothes of lumpy, ashen cloth.

Nora took off her backpack and put it on the floor next to her bed.

“Bed number 16,” she said, reading the number painted on the wall. Paul had lain down fully dressed, with his pack at the head of his bed rather than at the foot.

“Do you want to wash?”

“No.”

“Do you want to eat?”

“No.”

“Are you angry?”

“I’m happy.”

It’s not fair, she thought. Maybe he wants to see me complaining. Maybe he wants to get his revenge.

As though he had guessed her thoughts, he caught hold of her hand and drew it towards him.

“I’m not joking, Nora. I really am happy. I’ve been waiting my whole life for this bed, this exhaustion, this night. I want it to be a long night. Promise me it’s going to be a long night.”

He spoke slowly, quietly, with his eyes wide open. Nora caressed his forehead.

“Paul, I think you’ve got a fever.”

She walked towards her bed and looked in her pack for the tube of aspirins, but then she had second thoughts. It’s better to let him sleep. He’s tired.

The dormitory had a smell of damp boots, wet straw, rotten wood, but more penetrating than any of these — like a deep voice, covering all other sound — was a pungent smell of burnt acetylene.

“Isn’t it possible to turn off that lamp?” she asked to no one in particular.

A voice from the end of the room replied in a grumble: “It goes off at eleven o’clock.”

Eleven o’clock, eleven o’clock. Nora repeated the words in her mind without understanding them. It seemed to her that this night didn’t have hours and that the eyes of those iced-up windows would never fill with daylight.

Somebody brushed by close to her and an electric flashlight ambled past their beds and immediately went out.

“New people, new people.”

Now and then the door opened and another shadow entered or left. Shadows, only shadows, Nora thought. She didn’t succeed in making out a single face. Even the voices had something indistinct and monotonous about them, as if they had been a single voice speaking from different distances.

Maybe I’ve been sleeping. In any case, for a while she had not smelt the odour of acetylene, and now she was smelling it again. The lamp sputtered slowly, with the feeble movement of a swing. It wasn’t yet eleven o’clock, since the lights were still on. The voices at the end of the room had fallen silent. They must have gone to eat, or else they’ve fallen asleep.

She coughed. She felt the acetylene like a bitter powder, right down to the bottom of her throat. Everything smelled of acetylene: the blanket, the pillow, her clothes. She put the handkerchief over her mouth as a buffer, but the odour penetrated the fabric in a damp, acrid cloud.

Dizzy, she got up from her spot and stumbled between the beds. She heard hobnailed boots clumping over the floorboards and thought: I shouldn’t make so much noise; but at each step she felt like she was falling and couldn’t stop herself. Next to the door, she groped for her skis and poles.

Outside, she stood on the threshold for a few moments, her mind vacant. She felt the night air on her forehead and temples like a light snow.

She put on her skis and set off slowly, not knowing where she was going. From the big chalet she heard voices, the sound of glasses, laughter. She passed beneath lighted windows, then finally turned towards the right, between the pine trees. The chalet’s dogs got out of her way, snarling as though about to bark. She caressed them on their furry coats and big ears in passing.

Everything slipped away as though into a veil of slumber — both the voices and the lights.

The skis slid roughly, rustling like dry leaves. Nora felt the snow’s resistence locking her knees. She had no idea how long she had been skiing. She had a scratch on her right temple that was bleeding. I must have run into something. But when? Where?

Her flashlight, attached to the top pocket on the left side of her coat, was alight like a lighthouse. Over my heart, Nora thought. She couldn’t remember when she had turned it on, nor when she had clipped it to the buttons of her pocket. She followed the white streak of the snow through the trees. It seemed to her as if there were a tiny creature that was moving up ahead of her and urging her on. It capered like a squirrel. A white squirrel.

At the turns, the edges of her skis scraped the frozen snow like the blade of a penknife. It was a piercing sound, like a short shout. I should stop. I should figure out where I’m going. She didn’t know where she was going; she just knew she didn’t want to turn around. She still felt that horrible acetylene lamp flickering behind her and waiting for “eleven o’clock,” which was never going to come.

She stopped and tried to gather her thoughts. On the opposite slope of the mountain there should be a trail that descended towards Timiş. At this time of night, Nora? Are you crazy?

She seemed to remember having seen somewhere on the map or on a chart giving directions a trail marked in yellow and blue rhomboids… She turned the flashlight towards the tree next to which she was standing and lighted it from bottom to top. Not a sign, not a single one… Maybe I’m asleep, Nora thought. Maybe the sign I’m looking for is one I’m seeking in a dream. Yet she felt the rough bark of the trees beneath her frozen fingers. She had the impression of being on the outskirts of a dream that she was struggling to leave.

Later she found herself again sliding on her skis — and she didn’t know whether this sliding was carrying her back into her slumber or restoring her to wakefulness. The white streak of light preceded her more rapidly than before, ever more swiftly. Her skis suddenly lost their heaviness and soared silently, unimpeded, over the snow. I should slow down, she thought, but her knees didn’t hear her. She was on an open slope that fell towards the shadows of pine trees, barely discernible in the darkness. If I don’t stop, I’m lost, Nora thought, but the voice seemed to come from another Nora, who had remained outside the dream and was observing from there, as though through a window, events that she could not understand. She tried to pull off to the right with a twisting movement, which never the less received no response: her shoulders and knees were like bells without a clapper. The skis, their points close together, pursued the white streak of light at a speed that lifted her off the snows. Nora closed her eyes and was hurled forward with her arms spread, her head landing in the snow. She sensed that in the final moment something had pushed her from behind. She turned a series of downhill somersaults with her skis lodged across each other. Snow scraped her forehead, her hands. The hot taste of blood dampened her lips.

Now she really felt as though she had awakened from slumber. From slumber or from a faint. She saw herself sprawled on the street next to the sidewalk in the middle of a group of curious bystanders. She heard their voices and felt the stare of a man locked on her, a stare she knew. So everything, absolutely everything, was a dream… So we return again to that tram accident, which still hasn’t ended… So I still haven’t succeeded in getting up from there and walking away…

She lifted herself up on her elbow and looked around her. Images that had mingled in confusion for a moment, like a dream within a dream, melted together in the darkness. She didn’t a hear a voice, not a twitch. Nora searched for the flashlight she had lost when she fell, but she didn’t find it.

If I had the flashlight, I’d go back to the chalet.

She was powerless to find it. She was in a broad, open clearing shaped like a horseshoe. I came from up above, she thought, trying to remember the path. She would have had to pull herself, tree by tree, to the upper end of the clearing, and shout from there. Maybe it wasn’t too far, maybe they would hear her… More than anything else, she realized that she couldn’t stay here. A kind of sweet languor was tugging her towards the snow, and she knew that this sleepiness was deceptive.

Both of her skis remained attached to her hobnailed boots, but she had lost her poles in the fall. She pulled herself to her feet by grabbing a tree with her hands. Only then did she realize that she was right on the edge of the woods. A second later would have been too late. And yet, and yet, maybe it would have been a good death, with her temple crushed by a tree. Better than this night without end that stretched before her and which she no longer had the strength to get through.

Let’s keep our eyes open, Nora, and let’s get going. As far as we can. To wherever we can get to.

She felt nothing but the bleeding of the wound in her temple. It was the only sensation that persisted amid the heavy sleepiness against which she struggled: and yet I’m moving, I know very well that I’m moving, I realize that I’m moving. Her knees, her hands, occasionally collided with the trees, but they were blows that didn’t hurt, that left no marks. She no longer felt the skis on her legs. Maybe I’ve lost them; but she couldn’t imagine when.

She seemed to hear, from somewhere, the barking of a dog. She had enough strength to smile. Don’t delude yourself, Nora. Don’t believe it, Nora.

Yet there was light between the trees. Could I have reached the chalet? She didn’t recognize it. It was a small house, with only two lighted windows. A sheepdog, as big as a bear, was on the threshold.

Why isn’t he running towards me? None of this can be real. He should be running towards me.

Someone had come out of the house, hit the dog on the nape of the neck and, taking him by the ears, soothed now, came towards Nora. He had a lantern in his hands, which he held up in front of her face. He looked at her for a while. The light blinded her. Then he lowered the lamp and returned to the house without a word, without asking a question.

“All this can’t be real,” Nora said. It was the same absurd dream, which still hadn’t ended.

Voices were audible inside and then a great silence.

The door opened again and, from the doorway, the man with the lamp signalled for her to enter.