He had got up from his place and come alongside her. She felt his breath on her back, very close. Abruptly, Nora stood up.
“Wait for me. I’ll be right back.”
She went into the bathroom, avoiding turning on the light out of a fear of surprising in the mirror the crumpled face that came from sleeplessness and wine, a troubled expression that she had been familiar with for a long time now from her rare all-night parties. She turned on the faucet and let cold water run over her cheeks, her eyes. A moment later, she dared to turn on the light; incredulously, she rediscovered her composed, everyday gaze. She looked at herself for a while, wondering what she should do. It would be so easy to go back into the room, tell him that it was late and she was tired and ask him to leave! If only she’d had the courage to say the same thing, in a former time, on a night like this, to Grig… That shaving kit would no longer be here — and a number of other things would be different than the way they were!
She took off her dress with slow, sluggish movements, uncertain until the final moment whether or not she was going to complete the gesture. She stood naked, with her bare feet on the cement floor; the stoney coldness spread through her whole being with a soothing calm. Against the white faience glaze of the walls, brilliant beneath the heat of the lamps, her body looked pallid and sad. She stared at herself with a shake of her head. My poor Nora, how strange you are! A wave of tenderness, and the confusing taste of unshed tears, enveloped her at the thought of her strangeness.
What was the use of resisting? She was going to walk out of here, she was going to turn out the lights, she was going to get into bed and wait for him to undress, she was going to kiss him first, on the lips, and she was going to find out everything about his bitter smile. Maybe he, too… yes, he, too, probably had a few things he wanted to forget…
She put on the white bathrobe and looked at herself again in the mirror since she didn’t want to avoid her own gaze.
She stopped on the threshold, unable to grasp what was happening. There was no one in the apartment. She stared fixedly at the empty armchair, the cigarette that burned abandoned in the ashtray, the overturned glasses. The door of the entrance hall was half open. She went through it, walked out into the corridor and listened incuriously for a moment. It seemed to her that from below, from the first floor, she heard steps going down.
She returned to the apartment and looked again with a kind of stupid attention at each object, as she if she could have asked them questions, as if she could have expected them to reply.
She opened the window. Below, in the street, on the opposite sidewalk, a gentleman in a grey overcoat was vanishing with long strides, his hands thrust in his pockets. Nora remembered the name she had read in the passport. She shouted without realizing what she was doing.
“Paul! Paul!”
Afterwards she stood at the open window, her arms limp at her sides.
II
PAUL HEARD THE SHOUT, but didn’t turn his head. The voice fell from above, frozen and accentless. The whole street was stock-still with silence. It must be very late. In all of Bulevardul Dacia, a single lighted window: her window. He felt it in his back, between his shoulder blades, like a glare. He didn’t stop until he had turned the corner, when he felt that the eye of that light could no longer reach him.
He suddenly felt unburdened. Free and on my own…
How far he was from the apartment he had fled! He had drunk a lot, he had talked endlessly, wishing keenly to be young and merry, but it had taken no more than being left alone for a few moments for all of his animation to collapse. He hadn’t felt the slightest curiosity about the body of the young woman who was undressing in the next room. He had got up from his seat, grabbed his hat and overcoat, and had left, leaving the door open out of a fear of being heard. He had gone down the stairs, taking two steps at a time, then three. Free and on my own…
… He came to his senses stumbling along the sidewalk, right at the edge, with tiny steps, one after the other. His boots sank deep into the snow, leaving clearly delineated prints. When he got to the next street light, he stopped to look around him: under the glow of the lamps, his footprints made a line into the distance, as though drawn on a limitless white page. Then he set off again, with the same careful steps as before.
A taxi passed alongside him, slowing down in invitation to this late-night passerby. Paul met the driver’s intrigued, possibly slightly ironic gaze and shuddered at being caught in his stupid game. He crossed the street to the opposite sidewalk, accelerating his pace as though he had suddenly remembered that he was in a race about which he had forgotten.
And now?
He was embarrassed at the thought of resuming his interrupted game since he had the impression that neither the driver nor he had surprised each other just now. He deliberately walked close to the houses, where the snow was packed down and his steps left no footprints.
He was passing in front of a long fence made of whitewashed wooden planks. Odd or even? He decided on odd and started to count…
“One, two, three, four…”
He stopped occasionally since some of the planks were split in two and he didn’t want to count them twice. He didn’t like to cheat his own superstitions.
The light of the lamps fell from behind him, unfurling his shadow far out over the snow. By now he had decided not to let himself be intimidated and to continue at any price the game he had started.
“Fifteen, sixteen…”
A car came up fast alongside him. Either a private car or an occupied taxi, Paul thought, without interrupting his counting.
“Twenty-eight, twenty-nine, thirty…”
He stopped in front of the plank he had reached, measured it from top to bottom, as though it were a person and murmured a few times: thirty, thirty.
Thirty years! There it was, it was pointless to flee from the only thought that followed him; it was pointless to try to forget it with idiotic little games. From now on he was going to have to look it in the face and accept it: he was thirty years old.
He leaned with his back against the fence and closed his eyes. He would have liked to stay that way, empty of thoughts, empty of memories, in that beneficent numbness. He saw himself as he might have done from the opposite sidewalk, alone on the deserted street, leaning against someone else’s gate in that night in which he had turned thirty years old, thirty years that he didn’t know what to do with.
But, rising from somewhere within his being, he felt a mild haze, a distant taste of sadness, the flavour of cinders. He knew well that memories foolishly quelled, pointlessly repressed imaginings, lay concealed beyond the indifference that he now felt crumbling inside him. Thus, as on misty mornings in the mountains, he waited for the vanished yet present landscape to appear. Beyond that mournful image of his beloved, he glimpsed her name, which he had banished from his mind in vain: Anna.
He repeated the name a few times in a throaty voice, separating those two syllables as though he had dismantled the components of a tiny mechanism in order to find its hidden mainspring.
How many days had passed since he had seen her? Someone replied for him: Twenty-three days. Paul felt a horror-stricken shudder at the mechanical precision of his response. The last few days had been extremely calm. He hadn’t thought about her, he had worked in peace; he thought he had forgotten her. Even so, it seemed that, under cover, an unseen device was clocking up her absence, recording, as though on an interior screen that was waiting to light up at the first request, moment by moment, the time that he had passed without her: twenty-three days, eight hours, twenty-six minutes…