“What do you want?” she asked, mildly indignant.
“Do you want me to carry you in?” he asked.
“I should say not,” she said, sitting up stiffly, moving her hair out of her eyes. “I don’t know what’s the matter with me. I never fall asleep in cars.”
Isabelle hurried ahead of him into the house.
She would have said something to him, had something on her mind, but thought to go upstairs first to take a bath.
The delay frustrated him. He wanted the ritual of her confession (and his forgiveness) out of the way so that they could get on to something else.
They had barely exchanged a word since he had wakened her, the silence echoing. The unspoken secret rankled.
Terman was conscious of what he did only in the moment of its doing, taunted afterward by the consequences of unremembered actions. The cry of the kettle disconcerted him — he had no sense of having gone into the kitchen to put up water for tea — thought in his distraction that there was a child in the house or an aggrieved cat.
“Tea or coffee?” he called up the stairs. He knew the answer, but he wanted to hear the sound of a voice, something to confirm his presence in the world.
On the way upstairs, he forgot about the boiled water in the kitchen, the question of tea or coffee, the sound of Isabelle’s voice or anyone else’s, and directed himself to his study, the only room he felt at home in. It was not as if he didn’t know what he would find or not find when he pulled open the bottom drawer of the desk. It was merely that he had to see for himself again and again, had to hold illusion only to court disillusion. A quixotic belief in the infinite possibilities of restoration compelled him. Surprises were never a surprise. He found a toy pistol in the very place he had kept the real one, a mock redemption, a menacing joke. He studied the imitation disbelievingly, half-thought that the original gun had been false too — everything on close inspection was false — though he knew that wasn’t the case. It was at that moment he decided that he could not be at ease with himself until Tom returned home.
Close up of a railway timetable. A hand circles 2:07 with a fountain pen. Wipe to a railway clock at two minutes after two. A slow pan reveals a railway station somewhere in Eastern Europe. There are four people waiting without apparent urgency for the train, an old couple, a middleaged woman who looks like a madam, and a studious-looking young man carrying a briefcase.
We see the hand of the clock move to 2:08. We hear a train coming into the station, hear it before we see it. The train slows down as it approaches the station but then as it appears about to stop, picks up speed again. The old man knocks at the side with his walking stick, calling to it to stop. “What’s the meaning of this?” he says to the others. “I demand to know the meaning of this.” “Shhh,” his wife says. The train flashes by leaving a cloud of dust in the air. When the train is gone, we are made aware of a shadowy form on the tracks. The stationmaster comes out after a moment to have a look. In the wake of the train, we discover the body of a young woman lying on the tracks. The four people on the platform pretend not to sec what surely each has glimpsed at some point.
We cut away to the dashboard clock of Henry Berger’s car. It reads 2:04, then 2:05. Henry Berger and Yanna are travelling at high speed along a winding road. A black limousine seems to be following them, though perhaps it is only going in the same direction.
“Are we almost there?” the woman asks with a kind of private irony.
“We are always almost there,” says Berger. “There’s the station up ahead, an idyllic setting isn’t it? Don’t get out of the car until I tell you it’s all right.”
We cut to two stationworkers lifting the body, covered with a blanket, off the tracks. The stationmaster stands behind them waving a red flag. The railway station clock reads 2:07.
We see Berger through the window of the station talking to the station-master. The studious young man, looking in the window, appears to be interested in their conversation.
We see the limousine that had been behind them on the road pull into the station lot in the row just behind Berger’s car. Yanna rolls up the window, locks the door, watches the other car in her rear-view mirror. The oddly dressed woman from the station gets into the other car.
Berger returns to the parking lot on the run, gets into his car. “We have to go to the next station,” he says. “The train was five minutes early and didn’t stop.”
From an overview we see three cars in close proximity — Berger’s in the lead — speeding along a narrow road. The red sportscar shoots past Berger in a dangerous maneuver. As soon as it gets ahead, it slows up, forcing Berger and the black limousine behind him to decrease their pace.
The limousine moves out alongside Berger’s car and we see into it for the first time. There are two heavyset men in front, both wearing dark glasses, and the heavily made-up woman from the station in the back. When the young woman removes her wig — we catch a glimpse of her as the limousine goes by — her appearance is significantly altered. The two cars speed ahead of Berger, concerned for the moment only with each other. At some point the second car moves abreast of the first, neither making an effort to pass or fall back. We perceive them from Berger’s vantage point, losing them momentarily each time the road turns. Yanna hunkers down in her seat, covers her eyes with her hands. The two cars bump one another, each trying to force the other off the road. At some point the driver of the sports car throws something through the window at the other car. There is an explosion, the limousine crashing into a telephone poll. The sports car speeds on. A man in woman’s clothing, his clothes in flames, pulls himself out of the wrecked car. He staggers a few moments, then collapses. Berger and Yanna stop a few yards behind the wreck, get out of their car. The transvestite dies before they can get to him/her. (We recognize the figure as Pietro D’Agostino.) They return to their car and sit at the side of the road, Berger’s arm around Yanna, who is shivering. She kisses him.
Yanna: When I’m frightened I always want to make love.
Berger starts up the car and they move on. Through the rear-view mirror we see the scattered fragments of the wreck, streams of flame illuminating the countryside.
Terman returned to the kitchen and made two cups of Indian tea, using one tea bag for both cups, an uncharacterisic economy. He drank half a cup diluted with milk and poured the rest down the drain. Isabelle’s would be cold when she finished whatever she was doing and he called to her in a tentative voice, tea’s ready, not insisting on it, wanting above all to avoid a fight.
When she came down in jeans and a cashmere sweater, her hair in curlers covered by a red scarf, he asked her if she wanted to go back to sleep. She said, thank you no. A formality had come between them, a delicate caution.
One word, he felt, a wrong word or one readily misconstrued, might precipitate a fight. He was determined to prevent conflict if possible and was all smiles and kindness for a moment or two. “You’re not acting like yourself,” she told him.
Something else was on his mind and though he had resolved not to mention it to Isabelle, obsession overrode constraint.
“I’m thinking of sending Tom back to the states,” he announced.
She got up to make herself a fresh pot of tea. “Are you?” she asked.
He would be able to breathe again, he said, once his son was off his chest. Isabelle said nothing. He repeated his remark.