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, Pauclass="underline" 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?”