He woke up abruptly. He was standing motionless on his skis. Maybe I didn’t go anywhere. Maybe it just seemed that way. He looked around in search of Nora in order to convince himself that in fact he had stayed next to her, and that this whirlpool from which he was emerging breathless was no more than a moment’s vertigo. She called to him from far away, making a sign with her right hand in the air.
“I really did it,” Paul said, measuring the impossible distance with his eyes.
In an instant Nora was beside him.
“Bravo, Paul. I’m delighted for you. I’m proud of you.”
They were on the crest of a wave of snow. Before them lay a new slope, longer but less steep than the previous one.
“Shall we go for it?” Nora asked.
“Let’s go!”
He pushed off without waiting for her to signal their departure. Again he had the sensation that his skis were losing their weight and that he was rushing before them, floating or falling. There was a sensation of intense brightness. Something struck him in the face and blinded him. For a moment he didn’t know whether he was still floating, or whether he had fallen. Then he felt that he was rolling down the valley, his head in the snow, his feet in the air and his skis locked together. When he managed to lift his face out of the snow, Nora was bending towards him, laughing.
“What happened?” he asked, bewildered.
“Nothing more than what you see: you fell.”
“Is it serious?”
“It’s not serious. It’s solemn.”
She helped him get to his feet and brush off the snow.
“You’re laughing at me.”
“No, my dear Paul, you’re talking too seriously. In skiing, after the first fall, nothing is solemn anymore. You learn to ski by falling. From here on in, you’re going to fall dozens of times, hundreds of times. That was your first fall.”
He glanced backwards at the slope he had got only halfway down: he had left behind two parallel trails in the snow, resembling two rails of a train line, interrupted at the point where he had fallen, as though his skis had jumped the track. “I don’t understand why I fell.”
“Because you’re keeping your knees rigid. Because your shoulders are too far back. Because you’re throwing your hands out in front of you.”
“Are there any other reasons?”
“There are.”
For an instant she looked him straight in the eyes, and then she burst out laughing, and suddenly they were both laughing. I haven’t seen that smile before, Nora thought. She would have liked to extend her hand to him, with an affectionate enthusiasm for the young man she had discovered that morning. Yet she stopped herself just in time. “Enough joking. Now let’s get moving.”
She spoke these words, “calling the class to order,” as she might have cracked her pencil on a desk in the classroom to silence her pupils.
He gripped her arm, pinning her in place. “I want to say something to you.”
“I’m listening.”
“You’re a teacher.”
“Yes, I am.”
There was a melancholy smile on her face. “What do your pupils call you at school?”
“I don’t know. Probably ‘Miss French Teacher.’”
“All right, I’m going to call you the same thing. ‘Miss French Teacher.’ My Miss French Teacher.”
“No. You’re going to call me something simpler: Nora. Or, if you wish, my Nora.”
She turned abruptly on her skis and took off down the valley in a cloud of snow.
You’re ridiculous, Nora, you’re ridiculous. Why do you say such stupid things? Why do you let your mouth run away with you? What will that man think of you? Where’s the sporting pact you’ve sealed with him? Where’s your discretion? Where’s your modesty?
She wanted to cry. She had reached the bottom of the ski hill, next to the woods, in a single instant, and she would have liked to hurl herself onto a run that was ten times as risky in order to forget, to flee from herself, to punish herself. She could barely make him out, motionless, at the point where she had left him, lost among skiers who were climbing or descending past him. She supposed that he had followed her blinding descent with his gaze and that he still had his eyes fixed on her, for now he had lifted his peaked cap and, waving it, was signalling to her. From the summit of the mountain the military team was descending in a group towards the chalet, cutting diagonally across the hill like an avalanche. The cloud of snow unleashed by their passage covered him as well, and now he was nowhere to be seen. Nora was seeking him out, paying careful attention to the distant line where she knew him to be, when suddenly she saw him springing up much closer to her, on a rise that he had somehow climbed over from the other side and was now swiftly descending.
“Too fast,” Nora said. “Much too fast!”
She saw him falling and somersaulting towards the valley. But he stood up immediately, white with snow, and set off again without brushing himself down and seemingly without glancing ahead in the direction in which he was going. He collapsed after the first five metres and then Nora looked for him in vain. Groups of skiers cut across his path and hid him from sight.
I should go up ahead and help him, she thought. But he reappeared again, much closer than before, only a few metres away from her. At that speed he’s not going to be able to stop. A step away from her, he let himself fall to the snow.
“How many times did you fall?”
“Five times.”
“How is it?”
“It’s…” He didn’t know how to continue. He looked for a word and didn’t find it. Then, smiling, he said: “I’d like to cry out. I’d like to yell.”
“Yell, then.”
He turned his head towards the woods, ran his hand over his throat and hauled up an extended yelclass="underline" “Uuuuuu…!” No one replied from the woods, but his yell resounded far away among the fir trees.
“And now,” Nora said, “let’s return to more articulate conversation. Tell me, how is it?”
“I don’t know how to say it. It’s something that surpasses language. It’s something intense. It’s a vast light… I think I’m drunk.”
He threw himself down in the snow with his arms spread and rolled over several times, as though he were rolling in the grass.
A skier came down from the Touring Club chalet and stopped beside them. “Nice weather?”
It was the red-haired Saxon they had met the day before at the SKV chalet. The man with the eyes of the badger, Nora recalled.
“So you found a place to stay at the Touring Club? To tell you the truth, I didn’t think there was much chance that you’d find anything. I didn’t want to make you feel bad, but…”
“We’re not staying at the Touring Club,” Nora said, cutting him off.
“Not at the Touring Club? Then where?”
She made a vague upwards gesture in the direction of the Glade of the Three Maidens. “A cabin up there…”
“Gunther’s cabin?”
Nora didn’t reply, but the man asked again, in disbelief: “Gunther’s cabin?”
There was amazement in his voice, which failed to register in his small, metallic, inexpressive eyes, but which his dense, grizzled eyebrows articulated with an exaggerated arching. “If Old Grodeck had known…,” he said pensively. Then he set off on his skis.
Nora did not have time to ask him either who Old Grodeck was, or what would have happened had he known. What odd things, she thought.
Now they had to climb back up the entire slope. Nora showed Paul how to make broad zigzags from right to left with the edge of the ski pushed obliquely into the snow. “Climb with small steps. Make each stride a step that you’re cutting for yourself in the snow.”