At a certain point I found myself completely sober and standing behind the window-curtain with Mrs. Moses. I was holding her around the waist, as she rested her head on my shoulder, saying, “Oh darling, what a lovely view!…”
The unexpected informality of her address embarrassed me, and I stared dumbly out the window, thinking all the while about how I might delicately remove my hand from her waist before we were caught. The view really was quite nice. The moon must have already been quite high; the whole valley looked blue under its light, and the nearby mountains appeared to be hanging in the still air. Then I noticed the gray shadow of unhappy Hinkus doubled up on the roof, and muttered, “Poor Hinkus…”
Mrs. Moses pulled away gently and stared up at me.
“Poor?” she asked. “Why poor?”
“He’s sick,” I explained. “He has tuberculosis, and he’s very scared.”
“Of course,” she nodded. “You’ve noticed it too? He seems to always be scared. A suspicious and quite unpleasant individual—hardly one of ours…”
I shook my head heavily and sighed.
“There you go again,” I said. “But there’s nothing to be suspicious of—he’s just a sad and lonely man. Very pathetic. You should have seen how he turned green and started sweating… And then there are all the jokes everyone’s playing on him…”
Suddenly she laughed her charming crystalline laugh.
“Count Greystock was the same way—constantly turning green. It was quite amusing!”
I didn’t know what to say; removing my hand with relief, finally, from her waist, I offered her a cigarette. She declined and began talking about counts, barons, viscounts and princes. Watching her speak, I tried to remember why on earth I’d gone behind the curtain.
Then the curtain parted with a rustle and there was the kid. Without looking at me, it shuffled its feet awkwardly and in a choked voice said, “Permette vous…”
“Bitte, dear boy,” Mrs. Moses said, flashing me another dazzling smile as she glided over the parquet in the kid’s arms.
I exhaled and wiped my forehead with a handkerchief. The table had been cleared by now. The trio of card players continued to deal in the corner. Simone was thrashing away at the billiard balls. Olaf and Kaisa had evaporated. The music was rumbling at half volume, Mrs. Moses and Brun were demonstrating their remarkable skill. I walked carefully past them and into the billiard room.
Simone greeted me with a wave of his cue; without wasting a precious second he offered me a five-ball handicap. I took off my jacket, rolled up my sleeves, and we began. I lost a large number of games, for which I was punished with a large number of jokes. My mood began to improve significantly. I laughed at his jokes, which I didn’t quite understand, since they concerned things like quarks and Schrödinger cats and professors with exotic names; I drank my club soda, paying no attention to the mockery and entreaties of my partner; I moaned dramatically and clutched at my heart when I blundered, acted out my immoderate delight when I scored; I thought up new rules and defended them heatedly—I let myself go so thoroughly that at one point I took off my tie and unbuttoned my collar. I was in fine feather, in my opinion. Simone was too. He made shots at incredible, theoretically impossible angles; he ran around the walls and even, it seemed, along the ceiling; in the pauses between jokes he sang songs about mathematical theories at the top of his voice; he addressed me informally over and over again, and then corrected himself with a “My apologies, old man. It’s this damned democratic education…!”
Through the billiard room’s open door I briefly glimpsed Olaf dancing with the kid, then the owner carrying a tray of drinks to the card players, then a flushed Kaisa. The music blasted, the card players screamed with excitement, laying down spades, collecting hearts, trumping diamonds. Every once in a while a hoarse voice could be heard: “Listen, Drabble… Bandrel… Du…!” and the mad knock of a mug against the table, and the owner’s voice, “Gentlemen, gentlemen! What is money but so much ash…?” and the ringing crystal laughter of Mrs. Moses, “Moses, what are you doing, the spades have been gobbled up already…” Then the clocks struck something-thirty, the chairs were being moved in the dining room, and I saw Moses slap Du Barnstoker on the back with his mug-free hand, and growl, “As you wish, gentlemen, but it’s time for the Moseses to get some sleep. A good game, Barny… Barnbell… you, you’re a crafty adversary. Gentlemen, goodnight! Come, my love…” I remember Simone saying he was out of gas, as he put it. I went into the dining hall for a new bottle of brandy, having decided that it was time for me to replenish my stores of fun and lightheartedness.
The music was still playing but the hall was already empty, except for Du Barnstoker, who was sitting at the card table with his back to me, pensively performing card tricks with a pair of decks. With smooth movements of his slim white fingers, he plucked cards out of the air, made them vanish from his outstretched palms, blew a fan of shimmering cards from one hand into the other, scattered the entire deck into the air in front of him and then sent it to oblivion. He hadn’t noticed me, and I wasn’t going to distract him. I took a bottle from the bar and tiptoed back into the billiard room.
When the bottle was a little less than halfway gone, I took a shot so strong that it caused two balls to jump off the table at the same time, and tore the billiard cloth. Simone was moved to admiration, but I decided I’d had enough.
“That’s it,” I said, setting down my cue. “I need some fresh air.”
I crossed the now-empty dining room, made my way down the hall and went out onto the porch. For some reason I felt sad that the party had come to an end without anything interesting happening; that I had wasted my chance with Mrs. Moses and, if memory served, rattled off some nonsense to the child of Du Barnstoker’s late brother; that the moon was bright, tiny and icy-looking; and that around me for many miles there was nothing but snow and rocks. I had a talk with the St. Bernard, who was making his nightly rounds; he agreed that the night was too quiet and empty, and that solitude, despite its numerous benefits, was really a lousy thing. Still, he refused outright to break the valley’s silence and join me in a howl, or even just a good bark. In response to my request he just shook his head, walked away with a dissatisfied look and lay down by the porch.
I walked back and forth on the clear path in front of the inn, gazing up at the façade, which was bathed in blue moonlight. The kitchen window was glowing yellow, Mrs. Moses’s bedroom window was rose-colored, there was another light coming from Du Barnstoker’s room, and behind the curtains in the dining room; all the other windows were dark, including Olaf’s, which was wide open, as it had been that morning. On the roof, Hinkus the martyr protruded, bundled to his ears in a fur coat, looking as lonely as Lel and I but even less happy under his burden of illness and fear.
“Hinkus!” I called quietly, but he didn’t move. Maybe he was sleeping, or maybe he didn’t hear me through the heavy earmuffs and turned-up collar.
I was freezing, but I felt cheered up by the fact that it was now time to avail myself of a fine old hotel tradition, and drink some hot port.