“Bravo! Very good,” he heard Nora shouting from behind him. He didn’t have time to reply to her, nor to recover his breath. Ahead of him were several metres of straight downhill after which, ominously, there was another turn, this time to the right. He made his turn a little less slowly, a little less raggedly, than the first time.
He felt himself coming out of the curve at greater speed. Let’s not go overboard, he thought. He clutched the poles’ handgrips, determined to resist. He let his weight fall on both skis and opened his snowplow wider. He went into the next turn with all the resistance he could muster. His arms, his knees, his ankles, strained to stop, to brake, his onward motion. The skis stalled for a moment in the middle of the turn, as if they had been locked into place, but then they pulled out of it and, in a moment of release, set off downhill.
His speed increased. Paul opened his snowplow wider. The tips of his skis almost knocked against each other, while their back ends slid apart until they spanned the breadth of the track. Yet he felt the wind beating more sharply against his cheeks. He didn’t understand what was going on. The snowplow no longer helped him at all. It was like a leaking brake that no longer transmitted the driver’s commands. The curves became more and more frequent, and even faster. He came out of the turns now in a kind of automatic twisting of his body. Paul felt himself jerked now to the right, now to the left. At each new curve he had the impression that he was about to be hurled onto the packed snow of the trail, but at the last moment an unexpected strength would lift him out of the fall and set him upright again on his skis. Not a single thought was in his head: his whole being was in a tumult, overridden, as if by a shout, by the will to stay on his feet.
In front of him, at a distance he couldn’t judge — was it far away? close up? — a tree branch heaved into sight, blocking his path. He crouched down on his skis, closed his eyes and plunged forward without paying attention, even in that same second, to whether he had struck it, whether he had fallen. His skis dashed ahead now — as though on their own, detached from his body — into a new curve that pitched him to the right, but by a miracle in that instant the trail came out of the woods and widened into a great expanse of white. He didn’t realize what was happening. He had the feeling that he was flying over a level surface. The wind, which until now had been gusting violently into his face, seemed to subside. The edges of his skis no longer cut obliquely into the snow, but rather settled, as if floating, with the length of their undersides flat against the snow.
Once again Paul tried to recover his lost movements. To his amazement, his skis responded to him. The snowplow opened with ease, and, during a final turn to the right, the two skis had stopped, unresisting, one alongside the other.
“We’re in Ruia,” Nora shouted from far away.
She came towards him, swinging easily on her skis, as though she were skating.
“It went really well, Paul. If we keep going like that all the way down, we’ll reach Braşov in daylight.”
“If we keep going like that all the way down, I’ll end up flat on the trail, hanging from a tree or falling over a precipice.”
Nora thought he was joking. He tried to explain to her the sensation of nothingness from which he had just emerged. He felt as though he were on the outer edges of human life.
“Well, the trail back is very short,” Nora laughed. “Do you know how long it took us to get here from up there? Four minutes.”
He couldn’t believe it. As in those fleeting dreams that make us traverse the entire space of a life in a few seconds, Paul had the feeling that he was going around and around in an endless race.
“I assure you that you’re exaggerating, Paul. Everything went really well. I followed you the whole time. Your turns were steady, your speed was under control. A little fast sometimes, but under control.”
“Under whose control? I felt like I was in a whirlpool, a chaos. I couldn’t see anything.”
“Because the light was too strong. Skiing is an enormous light; you said it yourself. Your eyes have to get used to it.”
They didn’t have much time to spend in Ruia. They hadn’t foreseen this break. Before leaving, however, they took a look in the direction of the broad clearing, which they had just crossed without observing it. Gripped on all sides by woods, Ruia, with its pristine snows, was as white as a frozen alpine lake.
Gunther’s map showed the trail winding more from here on. The little blue-and-white signs sprang up at regular intervals, spaced at equal distances, like coloured windows cut into the bark of the fir trees. The trail descended in a gentle slope devoid of sudden changes of direction. The curves were wide and visible from far away. Paul waited for them with the same attentive concentration. He threw his whole body into braking his speed, as though a single movement had passed through him from his shoulders to his ankles. Then, in the instant in which the skis slipped out of the braking posture, he had a sudden sensation of release.
Now and then he dared to close his eyes. Only for a few seconds. He felt weightless, without memory, without a past…
Sometimes Nora went first. He saw her heading away at high speed with her knees barely bent, her poles held behind her and lifted a short distance above the snow like two oars frozen for a second in midair. He would find her farther down the trail, waiting for him. They didn’t speak to each other. He would pass close to her with a salute or a look. They understood one another very well with their eyes. Both knew that there were no words for what they wished to say to each other.
They made a brief stop at the point indicated by Gunther on the map, more to check their itinerary than to rest. On their left they passed a trail marked with red rectangles that went to Poiana, while on the right, a bit farther along, a trail marked with a red cross inside a blue square ran downhill towards Timişul-de-Jos. Not one of these trails had the gentle, restful slope of their trail. It unfurled before them, white between the pine trees, with barely perceptible undulations.
“I’m afraid of falling asleep on my skis,” he told Nora before heading out again.
“Why?”
“I don’t know how to describe it. I feel myself soaring. It’s a kind of bliss.”
They reached Crucur at four o’clock. More sprawling than Ruia, the clearing looked wilder, more abandoned. It might also have been an effect of the light, which was beginning to weaken. The fir trees in Ruia had been green: a vivid green. Here their green had begun to shade towards black.
The lead-grey mist sometimes faded away with evening, which wasn’t far away.
They went into the forest ranger’s cabin to ask about the weather. The door was open, but they didn’t find anyone inside. It seemed to be more a mirage than a house. Only a few extinguished coals in the fireplace — who knew how long they’d been there? — showed that human steps had once passed this way.
“I wouldn’t want dusk to overtake us on the trail,” Nora said.
They opened the map, measuring the length of the trail that remained before them. The itinerary Gunther had established for them made long detours and went to Braşov, by way of the foot of Tâmpa Hill.
“It’s too much. We should try something else.”
From Crucur a trail blazed with yellow-and-blue signs set out downhill to the right through the woods. It wasn’t, properly speaking, a traiclass="underline" more a path, likely the route to a natural spring now vanished beneath the snow.