Gunther, returning to the room, found Nora in front of the portrait.
“That’s Mama,” he said.
“Does she live here?”
The boy fell silent for a moment. Then, as though returning from distant thoughts, he said: “Nobody lives here but Hagen and me.”
“Hagen?” Nora asked, not knowing who he was talking about.
“Hagen is the man who let you in. The man with the black cape. You should be familiar with the name. Don’t you remember? From the The Ring of the Niebelung? From The Götterdämmerung? Dark Hagen!”
“That’s his name?”
“That’s the name I’ve given him. I think it suits him. Please don’t call him anything else. Here on the mountain everybody knows him by that name.”
“Here on the mountain…,” Nora repeated pensively. “Strictly speaking, I don’t where I am. I only knew of the two chalets on the whole mountain. No one’s ever spoken to me about this house.”
“Because hardly anybody knows about it. We built it this autumn. It wasn’t even ready for the first snowfall in November. Even now, we haven’t got everything ready. At night, in the dark, it’s not so evident, but in the morning you’ll see that many things are missing. We may finish it in the spring, if we still need it. Yes, maybe…”
A bitter expression came over his face again, like a threat addressed to someone who wasn’t present. Then his ironic smile brought some peace to his troubled child’s face.
“You should know that nobody comes in here. Faffner wouldn’t let them.”
“Faffner?”
“Faffner is my dog. You may have seen him outside just now. He’s a big sheep dog. I wonder why he didn’t attack you.”
“Does it seem wrong to you that he didn’t?”
“No. I have faith in him. In our family, in the Grodeck family, Faffner and I have the same dislikes. Faffner hates the people I hate.”
Beneath his childish pallor, there were short, intense outbursts of rage, which lasted only a second and then died out into a great sadness. “It’s been three whole days,” Gunther said, “in which I’ve neither heard a stranger’s voice nor seen a person I didn’t know.”
“Even so, you said that you’re not far from the Touring Club chalet.”
“Not far, but well hidden. Do you know Dreimädlerweise?”
“The Glade of the Three Maidens?”
“If you prefer… I call it by its Saxon name. That’s what I’m used to. Well, my chalet is a little above that, towards the north, the northwest.”
“It’s not possible!” Nora exclaimed.
“Why isn’t it possible?”
“Because I don’t understand anything any more… I thought I was on a completely different part of the mountain, on the other slope. When I left, I know I took the trail towards the summit, with the idea of looking for the trail that goes down to Timiş. I don’t understand how I ended up here.”
“By getting lost.”
Nora repeated his words. “Yes… By getting lost…”
Gunther took a pencil and a notepad and approached Nora. “It seems it’s not all clear to you yet. Here you go! Let’s say that the SKV chalet is here, the TCR chalet is here, Dreimädlerweise is here…”
His pencil drew a thin line on the paper. Nora followed his small improvised map with attention.
“Well, if we join these three points with a line we have a triangle, and sort of in the middle of this triangle, right here, is our cabin.”
Outside, beneath the window, the dog snarled.
“Hagen’s coming back,” Gunther said.
“Alone?” Nora asked, with a fear she could not hide.
“No. If he were alone, Faffner wouldn’t have woken up. There’s someone with him.”
They both listened in silence to the approaching footsteps. Gunther was leaning against the fireplace with his arms spread. He looked towards the door and, in a whispered voice that Nora remembered having already heard that night, said:
“Mancher auf der Wanderschaft
Kommt aus Tor auf dunklen Pfaden…”17
Auf dunklen Pfaden. By dark paths… In fact, Nora thought, looking at Paul, who was coming in the door; in fact, no one has passed through a darker night, by way of darker paths, than that man.
She went towards him to greet him.
“If only you knew all that’s happened!”
It seemed as though she hadn’t seen him in a long time, that she had found him again after a lengthy separation. She wished she could do something for him — make a sign of tenderness or recognition, show mutual understanding — but his silence deterred her. She took his arm to introduce him to Gunther; the young man, however, had exited from the cabin without a word, leaving them alone.
“Come here next to the fire, Paul.”
She made him sit down in the armchair.
“How tired you are! You must hate me! I lead you through the woods for hours, through the snow. How many hours did we hike uphill? It seems like days and nights have passed since we left. Come on, you hate me, don’t you?”
He kept his eyes fixed on the flames in the fireplace.
“No, Nora. I’d like to preserve this trip forever. I wish we never had to go back home.” He extended his right hand towards the blaze as though he would have liked to seize it between his open fingers. “There’s only one thing I’m afraid of: that it’s not real… that we haven’t left… that all this has happened in a dream… the woods, the mountains, the night… that it’s all nothing but a dream from which I could awaken.”
He was speaking in a whisper, as though he feared that his own words might disturb this dream.
“Look at that fire burning there… Does it resemble a real fire? Where, other than in a dream, have you seen a fire so white, so bright…? Look, I pass my fingers through it, and it doesn’t burn them.”
With a swift movement, Nora gripped his hand and stopped him in time. “Paul, you’ve got a fever. You don’t know what you’re saying. You need to go to bed, to sleep.”
He seemed not to hear her and continued speaking in the same muffled voice. “When that man in the black cape came and hit me on the shoulder and told me to come with him, I didn’t ask him anything because again it seemed to me that everything was happening in a dream.”
He lifted his eyes towards her. “And you, Nora, aren’t you with me, too, in the same dream? Where did that wound on your temple come from? And the blood on your face,” he said, “are you sure we’re not fooling ourselves? Are you sure it’s real?”
“Do you want it to be real?” she asked him in a whisper.
“I want it to last. I don’t want it to end. I don’t want to go back.”
“Back where?”
He made a vague motion with his hand, pointing somewhere beyond the window, somewhere beyond the night…
The three of them sat at the table in silence. Only Hagen’s footsteps could be heard, as he brought them bread and wine. A log that had been reduced to embers collapsed in the fireplace with a dull thud. They all turned their heads towards it: the flames, leaping up for a moment, subsided softly into the burning heap of hot coals and ash.
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.