Accident (22 page)

Outside, beneath the window, heavy breathing, like that of a bear, was audible.

“It's Faffner,” Gunther said. “He can't sleep. He senses that something unusual is happening.”

The table was between Nora and Paul. He looked from one person to another with a serious expression that caused his blue eyes to lose their smile.

“In fact, it would be difficult for me to tell you just how unusual your arrival here is ... how unusual for the three of us, for Hagen, for Faffner, for me ...”

He got up from the table, walked towards the window and stood there for a while with his forehead pressed against the glass,
looking out into the night. His voice changing, he whispered, as if to himself, as though it were a spell:

 

“
Wanderer tritt still herein;

 

Then he let the silence grow deeper, after which Nora, still whispering, asked: “What's that?”

“A poem. It was written a long time ago by a young Austrian who died in the war.
¹⁹
It's called
Ein Winterabend
...
A Winter Evening
...” And, turning towards them again, he asked: “Don't you think it resembles this one?”

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?”