Gunther didn’t let her finish.
“No, no. It’s late now. No one else is coming.”
The return of winter, after several days of sunshine, caught Gunther unprepared, without defences or resistance. The brief spring had given him a nervous enthusiasm that left him vulnerable. He watched in silence as Nora and Paul prepared for their departure, stuffing their belongings into their backpacks in order to be ready the next morning. His cheeks were sunburned, but his face had become pale again. Deep pouches of exhaustion and fever made his fair eyes even bluer.
“Do you have to go?”
He asked the question in a careless tone, trying to hide his agony at seeing them leave.
“We might not have to,” Paul said, rendered pensive by Gunther’s question. “We might not have to. If we were braver than we are… If we understood that nothing’s calling us back to the city
… If we had decided to stay here forever…”
Nora continued to organize her belongings and place them in her backpack. She, too, had entertained for a moment the childish thought of staying at the cabin, but she dismissed it with a decisive gesture. Someone in this house has to not be a dreamer. “The two of you are forgetting that I’m a teacher. You’re forgetting that my vacation is over. On January 8th, at eight o’clock in the morning, I have to be in class.”
In her mind she said different, cold, rather bitter words to hold back her tears.
Hagen accompanied them as far as Ruia. For a while Faffner, too, followed them, but the snow was too deep for him and, before reaching the SKV chalet, the dog stopped.
“Hey, Faffner, go home. And stop giving us those sad eyes. Aren’t you ashamed? You’re an adult.”
The dog stood unmoving with an amazed stare that didn’t grasp what was happening.
Hagen was silent the whole way. He skied behind them with his dark cape flapping in the wind. At Ruia he let them go on alone. “I’d guide you to Braşov, but I don’t want to leave the boy on his own.”
At the last minute he took a small metal object out of his pocket and gave it to Nora with an abrupt, unprepared motion. “Please hold onto it as a keepsake of Gunther.”
It was a medallion with a portrait of Young Mrs. Grodeck, a small, round portrait that resembled the one in the cabin, although it seemed to be much older.
Nora didn’t know how to respond. Even the gesture with which he had offered her this unexpected gift contained a harshness that discouraged any word of friendship.
“I’ll never forget Gunther. Nor you, Hagen.”
His blue eyes were hard and chilly, betraying neither a smile nor sadness. Nora waited to read in them a sign of understanding, but there was no flicker of light in his dark face.
“Have a safe journey,” Hagen said.
They knew the trails and no longer needed to stop at the junctions to look for signs to give them directions. The trail to Crucur unfurled without any accidental difficulties. The route was deceptively simple and looked at first glance as though it demanded little effort. Paul let himself go, and his skis ran faster and faster. He didn’t even try to brake. Only on the turns did he slip into a very weak snowplow, which closed up naturally in the seconds following the turn with a brisk skid from which his skis emerged lighter and moving even faster.
At the beginning his backpack weighed him down, but after a while it lost its heaviness, as though, at full speed, someone had taken it off his shoulders. He felt only his cheeks, ablaze with the frost. A bitter wind was blowing, raising whirls of snow and flinging them in his face. For a few seconds he no longer saw anything before his eyes, but his skis rushed on in their freedom.
They reached Crucur without realizing how or when. The first time, the trail had been longer and slower. Maybe we’ve made a mistake. Maybe we’re going in the wrong direction.
Yet he recognized the clearing and, above all, he recognized the forest ranger’s cabin where they had stopped the first time. They found it just as abandoned, with the door open and the same extinguished coals in the fireplace… Recent ski tracks, passing in front of the cabin, were the only sign of life in the whole blizzard-battered clearing.
They set out along those tracks, which disappeared into the fir trees. The white-and-yellow rectangles on the trees were covered with snow and hardly visible. The route between the trees was full of obstacles since the steepness of the trail’s slope changed countless times. The whole run consisted of sudden changes of speed. Now the snow was frozen hard, now it was mysteriously fluffy, and always his skis were being wrestled into a sideways skid. Nora, who was ahead of him, announced the obstacles in a loud voice and gave him commands to turn or brake, which Paul carried out with reflex-like swiftness. Sometimes his protective gestures came a second too late, and his skis pounced out of their tracks, pitching him to the ground. He would get up, blinded by the snow but without having felt the blow. All of his attention remained fixed straight ahead, towards a moving point that his skis were chasing without reaching it, so that he didn’t notice his halts and falls. He was powerless to hold the skis in a snowplow for very long. After a few instants of tension, a skid would jar him out of this braking posture like a sudden throb and dash him forward in freefall. In these moments he experienced a lightning-quick loss of consciousness, after which he awoke again on his skis going full tilt, floating as though between two dreams.
They entered Braşov before noon, as though reaching a shelter. The blizzard was less ferocious in the streets. The winds seemed to have stopped at the city limits.
They were completely white. There was snow on their eyebrows, their temples, their foreheads. Even their eyes had lost their colour beneath their snow-whitened eyelashes.
“We made very good time,” Nora said. “Two hours and eight minutes.”
“Is that all?” Paul said, feeling surprised and not understanding why.
Two hours and eight minutes struck him as both a lot and very little. He had the impression that they had left the cabin not several hours, but several days ago, and that the mountains and the people living there were far behind them. But at the same time he had a sensation that the whole downhill run had lasted only a minute, that it had gone by in a blur, and that the entire journey had been a single, dizzying fall.
Skiing, for him, suspended the ability to measure time.
XX
ON THAT LAST DAy OF THE VACATIONS, Braşov was as lively and crowded as it had been at the beginning. The streets filled with skiers looked like immense platforms on which the hurried, restless, talkative throng awaited the arrival and departure of trains. The downtown travel agencies were besieged by people impatient to make reservations, buy tickets and ask for information. The human tide that had rolled down from the cabins in the surrounding mountains, or had come in from farther away — from the Făgăraş, from Bihor — after their skiing holidays, was gathering again in Braşov, where so many roads met. Sunburned faces smiled at each other on the street as if they had recognized old friends.
“Is it possible, Nora, that all these people are returning to their former lives? Is it really possible that after having been in the mountains they still believe in the things they left down below? Which they’ve got away from? Which they wanted to forget?”
“He who has been in the mountains is a free man,” Nora replied.
A free man. A free man. Paul repeated her words in silence. He felt that he was still very young, that he was coming back from a long, sunny vacation, and that all roads were open to him.