She leaned against the wall and looked at her apartment, pausing for a long time over each item, astonished that these objects were at the same time so familiar and so strange.
She glimpsed his I.D. card lying on the desk. She took it in her hand, realizing only now that it was a passport. She hadn’t seen these new passports, with their long outer covers. She opened it.
Stature: medium. Hair: brown. Eyebrows: brown. Eyes: green. Nose: regular. Mouth: regular. Beard: shaven…
The last word made her tremble. In her bathroom, on the little metal shelf over the sink, was Grig’s shaving kit. “I should hide it,” she told herself, thinking that the other man, when he returned, might go into the bathroom and find such an indiscreet object there. But after the first step she thought again… What good was there in hiding it since he wasn’t coming back…
She recited again the “identifying signs” from the passport page. She would have liked to rediscover in each word the features of that uncertain curve of cheek, which was sinking again into the haze from which it had broken free for only a moment.
Hair, brown… Mouth… regular… What bored bureaucrat had lifted his eyes for a second from among his papers and observed him tentatively in order to write under the pertinent rubric the colour of his eyes, the line of his forehead, the shape of his lips?… She’d had him here, in her apartment, in broad daylight, under the full glow of a lamp, and she still wouldn’t have been able to say anything for certain about his face with its indefinite lines.
Mouth: regular… Nora closed her eyes and forced herself to remember that mouth, about which the passport said with indifference that it was regular, as though it weren’t possible to hide an infinity of lines behind that single word. She would have liked to be able to walk her forefinger over his lips and surprise in the slight gap between them that uncertain smile that spilled a thin, weary light over his whole face.
It seemed to her that the passport in her hand contained an unsolved mystery, and that the bureaucratic formulas, official seals and identifying signs made up a life that waited to be understood. She felt alone, horribly alone, in the apartment with all the lights on, holding in her hand a photograph, a name, a few personal details, beneath which she would have been delighted to hear the beating of a heart, a voice.
She was tempted to hold up the little booklet with the white cover to her ear and listen, as though in a conch shell, to the whispering of an unknown life.
The pages “reserved for visas” were full of sundry seals and stamps. Nora read the last row: Visa sous le no. 1464 à la Legation de Belgique à Bucarest pour permettre au titulaire…
Two smaller, rectangular stamps at the bottom of the pages attested to his border crossings, outbound and returning: Hegenrath, 23 juillet 1934. Contrôle des passagers. And later: Hegenrath, 12 août.
“Where was I between July 23 and August 12?” Nora wondered. She saw herself again on the beach at Agigea, under blazing sunlight, thirty days of safety while Grig played cards at the Casino in Eforie by day and they danced in the taproom at night. Some days, when the sea was calm, she could hear the jazz music in her tent in Agigea… At the same time, someone was crossing the border at Hegenrath on a July night, maybe on his way to Brussels, maybe on his way to a small provincial town, maybe alone, maybe with a woman, someone who five months later had picked her up out of the snow on a Bucharest street and looked her in the eyes with an indifferent lift of his shoulders…
She wished she could relive those days, July 23 to August 12, not in her tent at Agigea, but rather somewhere unseen, in the shadow of this unknown man. She would have liked to know what had happened during those nineteen days and see the small train station at the border by night, the customs officer’s manner, the stamp printing with red ink on paper the day that would not return…Hegenrath, 23 juillet. To Nora the words felt mysterious, impenetrable.
She plunged into the armchair, disheartened.
She should have undressed, gone to bed and slept.
But she felt that she would be unable to get to her feet, take off her dress and turn down her bed. She would have preferred to remain still and sleep as she was, as she might be in the waiting room of a train station. Hegenrath station…
The bell rang suddenly and loudly. For a second Nora didn’t realize what was happening. She let it ring for a long time, as though she wished to fill the whole apartment with the sound of its call. Then she headed for the door, forcing herself not to make any assumptions. She opened the door without emotion. He was on the threshold, loaded down with shopping bags.
The cork flew with a resounding bang, and the champagne overflowed the neck of the bottle while Nora looked up to follow the projectile’s trajectory.
“A direct hit!” he shouted victoriously.
Overhead on the ceiling, a coin-shaped white spot marked the point of impact.
“Two more hits like that and the landlord will evict me for causing serious damage,” Nora joked, not without a certain anxiety.
“Two more hits, you say? No, my dear friend. A hundred and one. Yes, a hundred and one sound blows. Like at Epiphany, like on January 24.”1
And, putting aside the empty bottle like a discarded weapon, he took another bottle in his hands. This time the detonation was even louder. They looked at each other in surprise, no longer smiling. On the bookshelf, the two carnations shook, awoken from their slumber. The detonation seemed to radiate through the whole sleeping building from floor to floor.
“A hit!”
On the ceiling, a new white mark had appeared, a very short distance from the first one.
“A dead-eye marksman! What ease! What precision!”
There was a gleam in his eye that Nora saw igniting for the first time. She almost didn’t recognize the silent man who had left her apartment half an hour earlier. Where was his heavy silence, where was that tired, indifferent smile? He was speaking now with a nervous animation that seemed strange in him.
The champagne was bubbling in their glasses. Nora raised hers with a certain gravity. “To your birthday. To your turning thirty.”
She noticed that her voice was trembling. She was ashamed of this childish emotion. He replied casually, joking: “To you. To the number 16 tram. To this evening’s accident.”
How many glasses had they drunk? She had been counting up to the fifth one, but after that she had lost track.
It was probably late. The radio (who had turned it on? when had it been turned on?) was tuned to the British national anthem. “That’s the end of our programming from Droitwich.”
Nora was making efforts to keep her eyes wide open, but she saw the objects in the room through a curtain of smoke.
Overhead on the ceiling, the marks from the direct hits looked too numerous to count.
Across from her, sometimes very close, sometimes immeasurably far away, as though seen through the lens of a field glass, was he. He was speaking, but although Nora heard each word distinctly, she wasn’t understanding anything that he was saying. As always, he was speaking in that suppressed, extinguished voice, with sudden outbreaks of brightness, which vanished in that tone of indifference…
A hit! How strange that brief, triumphant cry sounded in his nonchalant tones. A hit! What had been hit? Hit where? Right in the heart, yes, yes, she had really said the heart.
Nora let her head fall into her hands. She wished she could stop the disorderly succession of thoughts that were passing through her mind, she wished she could stop the pounding in her temples.
Let’s be reasonable, my dear girl, let’s not lose our head. This gentleman… what’s his name…? You see, you’ve forgotten his name… Anyway, whatever his name is, it’s time for him to leave. It’s late and he should leave… Unless… Unless you want him to stay. Do you want him to stay? Tell me, you can tell me… But we’ve only known each other for a few hours… Do you want him to stay?