She stood up and headed towards the entrance hall.
On the threshold she found Paul, his arms spread wide as though to block her passage. He looked as though he wanted to say something to her but was at a loss and didn’t know how.
“Thank you for coming. Now… If it weren’t too late, I’d ask you to stay.”
As if that “too late” referred to the time and not to what had occurred until now, she looked at her watch. “In fact, it is very late. Ten past four. Even so, if you want, we could wait for daybreak together. It won’t be long.”
There was a calendar on the desk. She tore off the sheets for days that had passed and read from the coming day’s page: December 19th. Sunrise: 7:41 AM.
“We have two hours and thirty-nine minutes left.” The torn sheets from the days that were over remained in her hand. She offered them to him, smiling. “You see? It’s over. It was hard, but it’s over.” Then, with unaccustomed gravity: “I don’t think you’ll ever forget me. I’ll always be the woman you met the night you turned thirty.”
They faced each other in semi-darkness. They had turned out all the lights except for the shaded lamp on the desk. He was in the armchair where she, with an authoritarian voice, had ordered him to sit. She was in the corner next to the sofa, where she had piled up some pillows. Between them was the tea table, the hot, white cups like feeble globes of light.
“It’s cold in this apartment,” Nora said, and in a few seconds the water boiled and the apartment filled with the smell of tea, lemon, rum — all of which she had found without asking him. She wandered among his belongings with a light, sure hand, as though she was going through them by instinct or from old habit.
Paul was listening to her speaking without paying much attention to what she was saying. She spoke calmly, slowly, without raising her voice, almost monotonously. It was a serious voice, excessively serious, without marked alterations, without liveliness, almost inexpressive. How relaxing it was to listen to her. He felt he had known her for a long time and that nothing was hidden between them. Not a single mystery. Not a single question to ask. Nothing to find out.
He took her left hand in his and turned it over with the palm facing the light.
“Do you know how to read palms?” Nora asked.
“No, but I like to look at them.”
Hers was a simple hand, with a few regularly curved lines like rivers on a map. Paul looked at it for a while, then closed it like a book he had finished reading.
“Aren’t you going to tell me what you’ve found?”
“There’s nothing to find. It’s your hand. It suits you. A serious hand. Calm… And yet…”
“And yet?”
“Only one thing remains inexplicable: the fact that you came here. It’s a little bit of lunacy that I don’t know how to interpret.”
She opened her left hand again under the light. “Maybe it’s all here. Look closely: maybe somewhere there’s the crossing of lines that shows our meeting.”
She spoke these words without even smiling, with making a gesture that would diminish their unexpected seriousness.
“How strange that you say ‘our meeting.’ Is this an affair?”
“What?”
“This meeting.”
“An affair, no. A happening. And a big one. Nothing ever happens to me.”
The hot water was finished. Nora got up from her spot, signalling to him that he was forbidden to move.
He heard her wandering around the apartment. How soothing to hear her footsteps! He heard her breathing. It seemed as though she had always been here. He was grateful to her for being in his home. Her presence blocked his thoughts, held his memories at bay.
And what a good hand she had. He could rest his weary forehead in it.
Her saw her shadow — now larger, now smaller, according to her distance from the lamp — brushing across the objects in the room. The heavy fabric of the dress she was wearing protected her body like a mantle. Only occasionally, such as when she straightened her shoulders, could he make out her hip or the line of her breasts.
She stopped in front of him with the teapot in her hand, leaning over the table, and with close attention poured the boiling water into the cups. He got to his feet and looked at her for a long time. She tolerated his gaze without surprise. A vague whiff of lavender floated between them.
Paul placed his mouth over her lips, which accepted the kiss serenely and without haste. His right hand was on her left breast. The beating of her heart felt strange, unusual.
The beating struck him as a distant response to his enormous solitude.
IV
NORA WOKE IN THE MORNING surprised not to find Paul beside her. All night her dreams had borne the heaviness of his body, an irritable body, receiving without gratitude caresses that it did not return. She still felt in her left breast the weight of his right hand with its fingers spread. She wouldn’t have been surprised, had she pushed aside the covers, to find the marks imprinted on her breast like a tattoo.
The sound of water running in the basin came from the bathroom. She called his name, but didn’t receive a reply. Could he have left? She jumped out of bed and pulled on a dressing gown that she found on the edge of the bed, shuddering at the chill of the light weave (He could wear a thicker dressing gown in December) and went to look.
Nobody was there. He had forgotten to turn off the tap. On the glass shelf beneath the mirror, the shaving brush was covered in soap. What a hurry he was in to get away! she thought with a shake of her head.
She turned around and spotted on the desk the piece of paper on which a few words were written, first in red pencil and then in blue pencil — he had probably broken the lead in his rush.
When you leave, put the key outside under the mat. The cleaning lady’s coming at 11 o’clock.
When you leave… He had been so certain that she would leave. And not a word about seeing her again, not a word of friendship…
She approached the window and glanced down into the street, trembling at not seeing her usual morning view: the familiar image of Bulevardul Dacia, the major’s backyard across the road, the pharmacy on the corner, the taxi stand. From their stillness she knew, as she raised the shutter, almost as if they had spoken to her, that since the night before nothing new had happened in the world.
As though the lens of the spyglass through which she took her first morning glance at the world had changed, she now had her first look at other images, which seemed to have been substituted overnight for the old well-known landscape.
From where, at a distance to which her eyes weren’t accustomed, had that small unfamiliar world arisen: the circular square below, the white sign of the corner grocery, the gas station with its two red pumps on the edge of the sidewalk like two immense soda-water bottles, the newspaper stand, the chestnut trees with their slender, frozen branches?