“When we’re going back for lunch, we should make a detour to the Saxons’ chalet. We might find him there.”
“Let’s do it!” Paul accepted.
“But you should realize that it’s not easy. To get there, we’ll have to go down a very fast slope, and the trail is full of people. You’ll run into somebody at every step. I’m only taking you with me if you work hard all morning.”
Paul greeted this fierceness with amenability. I’m going to learn, I’m going to learn, he murmured in his thoughts. He found huge, childish ambitions inside himself. He wished he could amaze Nora, disarm her, surpass her. His snowplow was going very well, especially at slow speeds. Yet at higher speeds it was impossible for him to lift his skis out of their path. He had a clenching sensation in his ankle. He looked with an odd, powerless fascination in the direction of his ski boots, he realized that he was locked into a descent that was accelerating at every second, and yet he was powerless to transmit to his skis the simple pressure that would have made them skid to the right or the left and reduce his speed.
“We have to learn the turns,” Nora said. “Let’s start with the simplest one: the snowplow turn. It’ll be good enough for our lunchtime route. This afternoon or tomorrow, we’ll try something harder.”
Paul found even this one exceedingly hard. The theoretical explanation was always simple (“Let your weight fall on one ski, loosen the other one and the turn happens automatically”), but when he had to apply the elementary things she taught him, he came up against unexpected, and for him, incomprehensible, obstacles. He worked all morning under Nora’s inspection, repeating incessantly the same turns to the right and the left. It was a rigorous, meticulous training, devoid of grace or glory. Where was his heroic enthusiasm of the day before? Where was his cry of freedom, his explosion of ecstacy?
Nora put an acerbic halt to his most timid expressions of delight. “That’s not it. Go back and do it again.”
She obliged him to start the same movements dozens of times. She gave her orders in a dry, curt, persistent voice. Like a fanatical army officer, Paul thought spitefully, though he had decided to accept all of her comments without rebelling.
“In position! That’s not it. Do it again.”
He gave her a furtive look. She was serious, attentive, severe. Nothing in her manner recalled the warm, sensual and slightly sad woman who had slept all night in his arms. There, on the ski hill, this vision even struck him as impossible. It was a troubling, dreamy, idle vision that he had to banish from his mind.
This girl in the blue jacket, with her confident movements and firm voice, was a wise person.
Paul stopped in the middle of an exercise he had started, approached Nora and clapped her on the shoulders in a boyish way.
“What’s going on?” she asked, surprised.
“Nothing. I just wanted to tell you that you’re a good comrade.”
Nora remained a little puzzled, since the unexpectedness of his gesture did not fit with the seriousness of her thoughts. At last she replied with simplicity: “I know.”
Paul fell countless times on the way to SKV chalet. Nothing that he had learned on the hill served him now. Things that he had succeeded in doing perfectly correctly up at the Touring Club now became impossible again.
Groups of skiers were coming down from the summit along the same narrow trail marked with yellow triangles. He heard shrieks behind him, far off in the distance, and because he couldn’t get out of their way in time, he threw himself into the snow at the edge of the trail, and let them pass. He reached the SKV chalet white from head to foot, exhausted by too many falls, yet delighted that he had completed the trail.
“Don’t say anything to me, Nora. I know, I know: I made thousands of mistakes. I promise you I won’t make them next time.”
The man with the eyes of a badger was in the yard in front of the chalet with an axe in his hand. He was splitting large oak logs for firewood.
“Aren’t you staying with Gunther any more?” he asked, catching sight of them.
“Of course,” Paul replied. “But we’ve come here to warm up. Why don’t you come inside with us and drink a glass of mulled wine?”
The three of them entered the chalet, the same chalet that had initially struck them as being so hostile. Even the man with the eyes of a badger was friendlier now.
“So how’s our painter doing?” he asked.
“What painter?”
“Gunther.”
“He’s a painter?”
The man burst out laughing. He had an odd laugh, which wrinkled his whole face but left his eyes expressionless, like two tiny balls of glass. “That’s what he says: that he’s a painter.” Then he became serious for a moment and said, shaking his head: “That lad is the disgrace of the Grodeck family.”
“Do you know the family?” Nora asked.
“Who doesn’t know them? The Grodeck family!” He spoke these three words with solemnity, with respect, as though cowed by their importance: the Grodeck family. “Think carefully. It’s impossible not to have heard of them. Grodeck factories. Grodeck mills. Grodeck forests.” He was pensive for a moment, as though pondering it all. “Their fortune is huge.” He made this statement with boundless respect, with a sort of stunned terror. “I don’t know what’ll happen to the Grodeck family and all of their fortune if it ends up in Gunther’s hands. That lad’ll lay waste to it.”
“Is it his fortune?”
“Well, I don’t know the answer to that. No one does. When the Grodeck family wants to keep quiet, nobody gets a word out of them. Still, they say the fortune is coming to the boy. Look, when young Mrs. Grodeck died…”
“Gunther’s mother?”
“Yes.”
“She’s dead?”
“Yes. Last summer.”
Nora saw again in her mind the portrait on the bookshelf and remembered the boy’s intense stare. “Does she live here?” she had asked him. Now the question made her cringe. She would have liked to wipe it out of her memory and beg for forgiveness.
The man in front of her continued to tell his tale. It was obvious that the subject of the Grodecks fascinated him.
“When, as I was saying, young Mrs. Grodeck died, Gunther was in Munich. They say he was studying painting. They brought him home, but shortly after the funeral he left again. He fled. The family would have liked to keep him here and make an engineer out of him… The Grodeck family needs an engineer. A fortune like that doesn’t look after itself. But I’ll tell you, the boy’s crazy. He went up into the mountains to build the cabin you’re familiar with in the woods. From then on, nobody saw him. He didn’t receive visitors. That’s why I was so surprised when you told me you were staying there. I couldn’t believe it. If you’d known Old Grodeck…”
“Who’s Old Grodeck?”
“Gunther’s father.”
“Why do you call him ‘Old Grodeck’ and his wife ‘young Mrs. Grodeck?”
The question surprised him, and he became thoughtful for a moment. “You’re right. I’ve never thought about that. But they’ve always been called that in German. Der Alte Grodeck and Die Junge Frau Grodeck. I don’t know why. To tell you the truth, she wasn’t really very young and he wasn’t excessively old. They were first cousins who got hitched. All the Grodecks called her, ‘Miss.’ The fortune was hers, which is why people say it’s going to Gunther. For the time being, there’s no danger. As long as the lad’s a minor, Old Grodeck can do whatever he wants… After that it’s going to be more difficult, yes, after that…”
He blinked his small eyes and carefully rubbed his red beard.
“But what’s up with Hagen?” Nora asked, going straight to the point.
The man laughed again, with his odd laugh. “Did I say something was up with Hagen? Have you heard anything about him? Hah, lots of things have been said, but who’s to believe them…” He laughed fiendishly, the thick brows above his small eyes raised into a meaningful arch.
He took the axe, which he had propped up against the chair, and got up.
“I’m going to chop wood. I’ve talked plenty for today.”