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.
VII
“WE’VE GOT TICKETS TO BRAŞOV!” Nora shouted from a distance when she saw him getting out of the car.
A porter stopped to take his skis from his hand, and he was ready to give them to him when Nora approached him. “Don’t do that. You carry your skis yourself on your shoulders. Who do you think’s going to carry them up the mountain for you?”
She helped him to put on his backpack and showed him how to carry his skis on one shoulder and his poles on the other, with the points crossed behind.
“We’ve got tickets to Braşov, but nothing need stop us from staying in Predeal, or, if you want to, from going farther, in the direction of the Făgăraş Mountains or Bihor. It’s better not to decide in advance. We’ll figure it out on the way.”
He listened to her without resistance, but also without approval. He hasn’t even said good evening to me, Nora thought. She was determined not to take his moods into account.
“Your backpack has to fall straight down beneath your shoulder blade, not hang over your hips.”
As she was adjusting the straps of his backpack on his shoulders, she met, without wishing to, the cold, almost hostile stare with which he was subjecting himself to her advice.
What an obstinate schoolboy stare! Nora thought. Having taught classes of boys, she recognized this uncooperative stare that sometimes rose towards her in defiance from the desks. Be patient, her teacher’s voice murmured to her. We’re going to soften this rebellious face. For the first time she felt sure of herself alongside this man of few words.