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 walclass="underline" 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?