He was still smiling. He spoke calmly and without discomfort. After a moment’s silence, he added: “The beating of my heart.”
Nora thought of his pallor, his nervous trembling, the sudden changes of light and shadow on his childlike face. She tried to take this lightly, not to insist, to brush it off. “You’re joking, Gunther.”
He replied with laughter, a laugh in which nothing was forced, nothing constrained.
“Of course it’s a joke. Much more than a joke: a farce. It’s the most terrible farce I could play on the Grodeck family.” He seemed to find the thought sincerely amusing. “Look, a painter in the Grodeck family would have been shameful. A cardiac patient in the Grodeck family is a scandal. This is the first time this has happened since there have been Grodecks on the earth. Their hearts have always beaten strongly. Their hearts have been true.” The word amused him. He noticed it and took pleasure in repeating it. “Yes, yes, true hearts. Hearts that have beaten like clocks. Never too fast, never too slow. Hearts that beat for one century, two centuries, three centuries and don’t ask anybody anything. Grodeck hearts are guaranteed. Solid and discreet. Nobody hears them.”
He unfurled the cardiogram again and showed her the two white lines that went up and down. He followed their delicate course, their rhythmic fall, with his finger. “You see, here the angles are tight and even. But when you look more closely, you can see that sometimes the line darts up and then it drops a little lower down. It’s not a lot. A tenth of a millimetre, maybe not even that… But it’s enough. Enough to be audible.”
All at once he lifted his head from the cardiogram and stared fixedly at Nora. “Don’t you hear it? I do. Especially in the evening, especially at night. It’s like a little hidden motor. In the middle of the night, when everything’s still, I feel like it’s audible all over the house. A Grodeck heart that’s audible… It’s unbelievable. The Grodeck fortune has been made with everything you can name, but not with the heart…”
He rolled up the scroll as it had been before and placed it carefully back in the drawer. Then he returned to the fireplace and leaned there with his arms at his sides, a posture that helped him breathe.
Nora sensed that the boy expected neither compassion nor support. He was very calm, and his blue eyes resembled lights. “What are you thinking of doing?” she asked.
“I want to turn twenty-one.”
“You’ll do it,” Nora said.
He was shaken by the soft conviction of her words. Suddenly, his gaze became intense, pleading, full of doubts and uneasiness. “Do you think so? Tell me, do you really think so?”
“I’m certain, Gunther. Absolutely certain.”
Hagen returned late, in the dark. All three of them waited for him, taking turns looking out the window in the tower for his lantern to appear in the distance through the woods. Faffner had disappeared while it was still daylight, heading off down the valley.
“He feels him coming,” Gunther said. “Whenever he returns from Braşov the dog goes down to Ruia and waits for him there. One evening, Hagen took a different route and returned by way of Wolf’s Precipice. Faffner spent the whole night in Ruia, howling…”
Now they saw the two of them coming through the deep snow: the man and the dog. Hagen dragged the flat wooden sleigh, full of packages, behind him. They opened them all around the table, curious to discover what lay inside. They were objects that smelled of the city, of winter display windows, of holidays. Gunther regarded them with boyish pleasure, he weighed them in his hand, and observed them under the light. He liked best the coloured glass balls, red candles and sparklers for the Christmas tree.
Faffner circled the table, smelling the objects, sniffing them.
Only Hagen’s brow remained dark…
That man knows, Nora thought.
XII
EVENINGS IN THE CABIN WERE LONG, in spite of the fact that at ten o’clock they extinguished the lights, closed the shutters and all went to bed. But the evenings started early, when darkness fell, and passed slowly. The twilights were white from the snow, which continued to shimmer for a while after the sun set. Finally this sheen, too, disappeared. Sometimes the mist continued to smoulder from the summit. The clouds piled up closer to the cabin. The fir trees turned black. The darkness was deep and dense.
The mountains, which roared all day with the sounds of shouts and cries, returned to their stoney silence. Not a whimper or a crackle from anywhere. Far away in the distance, they heard a muted inrush, like a slamming on the earth, like the falling of a tree. They all poked their heads up to listen. The silence seemed to stretch to the ends of the earth.
Gunther was playing chess with Paul. Nora, sitting in the armchair, read next to the fireplace with Faffner lying at her feet. Only Hagen was restless. Sometimes, unexpectedly, he tossed the ash-coloured cape over his shoulders, lifted the hood and went out into the night with the lighted lantern.
“He’s going to look for her,” Gunther would say.
Faffner trembled, got up from his spot and went to the window, to the door, scratching at the threshold, waiting.
As evening fell, Nora became silent. There are two Noras, Paul thought. The daytime Nora and the nighttime Nora. Curled up in the armchair next to the fireplace, lost in the book she wasn’t even reading, she seemed to be waiting, inviting him.
“Are you tired, Nora?”
It was something other than tiredness. It was a kind of capitulation. Everything in her being was setting out for the night. Only when Hagen extinguished the lights, when Gunther said goodnight, did she open her eyes.
“You’re going already? Is it that late? Have you finished your game of chess?”
She climbed the stairs, leaning on Paul’s arm. Sometimes, in bed, she lay her head on his right shoulder. It wasn’t a gesture of tenderness: it was a gesture of disbelief, of anticipation.
She undressed slowly, with lazy movements, lost in her thoughts and still silent. She had a stern, alert expression; not dreamy but turned inward towards her own thoughts.
“You’re beautiful, Nora.”
Only after thinking this over did she reply. She took seriously the things that were said to her.
“I’m thirty-two years old, my love. And I’m dark. I don’t know if I can still be beautiful… Maybe I was at twenty, at twenty-two… It’s a flash that passes and leaves something else in its place…”
Her body was strong, with a slight heaviness in its long, firm lines. Nothing adolescent here, Paul thought, watching her. Nothing was uncertain, everything was filled out. Broad, serene knees, foreign to uneasiness. Long thighs, full hips.
“You’re beautiful, Nora. You’re pure harmony between yourself and yourself, and that harmony is called beauty.”
She stood in front of the mirror and brushed her hair, which fell over her shoulders. She stopped, with the brush in her hands, and turned towards Paul. She was naked and at peace.
“I’m afraid I have to complain.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re telling me something that was one of my secrets. Something I always hoped, with a tiny anxiousness, that someone would understand and tell me.”
She had tears in her eyes.
Her embrace withheld nothing. In the most intense moments she kept her eyes open, with a deep, attentive gaze, as though she were listening. She remained for a long time with her head on his right arm, in an endless silence.