While we were eating our dessert, the lorry-drivers filed past us. They told us to take it easy. We said we would. The door to the restaurant creaked and then they were outside. I could hear them talking in the car-park, short sentences, no more than phrases, really, lobbed from one man to the other, like a game played with an invisible ball.
‘Are you ready?’ Loots said.
I nodded.
Outside, the wind was blowing hard. The car-park was the first thing I saw that evening. It was almost empty, the men already gone. I looked back towards the restaurant, a white timber building with a row of coloured lights along the roof. Loots buttoned his coat and tucked his chin into his collar. Beyond him there were clouds, high up, all moving at the same speed. A thin moon haunted the corner of the sky.
As soon as we were driving, a man’s face appeared in front of me: it was the President, addressing the nation from his private office in the capital. He’d been criticised in the press for his economic policy, and there’d been rumours of an affair as well. Now he was on TV, to reassure us. He sat at his bureau desk in a a sober dark-blue suit. His grey hair swept neatly over the tops of his ears, and his hands were folded on a rectangle of green leather. Everything about him was scripted, composed — except for his left thumb, that is, which was twitching.
I opened the window. Loots took a deep breath, shifted in his seat. I couldn’t see him, but I could imagine him: he always hunched over the wheel, his shoulders up around his ears.
‘I’m sorry about the tyre, Loots.’
‘That’s all right. Anything on TV?’
‘Only the President.’
We drove northwards, with the leader of our country still on air. He was doing something that politicians often do: he was smiling every fifteen seconds, and his smile never had anything to do with what he was saying. It reminded me of the smile some adults use with children. It means they’ve been confronted by something they’re not familiar with, and might even be frightened of. I found him bearable if I concentrated on his thumb; it was the only part of him that seemed natural, the only part I trusted.
And, suddenly, as I watched, his whole face wobbled, buckled, then slid sideways, like a wax figure melting in a fire.
My turn to smile. The mountains. We were almost in the mountains.
Loots saw the signpost first. Then I saw it: white, and sharpened at one end. Fourteen kilometres to the village. It pointed left, a thin road that wound up from the valley floor.
‘We’re almost out of petrol.’ Loots looked anxious.
‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘There’s bound to be some in the village.’
For a few minutes we drove along the bottom of a gradually ascending gully. Fir trees rose above us on both sides. The smell of woodsmoke found its way into the car. There was a mountain ahead of us and the road swung westwards, around it, clinging to the lower slopes. I could see the snow now, glowing, high above. We were still among the fir trees, though, a forest that turned black when you looked into it. Loots hit a pothole, muttered something. The surface of the road was disintegrating. Probably it was hardly ever used.
Then, without any warning, the trees stepped back, and there was land on either side of us, rough pasture by the look of it, with slabs of rock showing, smooth and rounded in some places, jutting like the fins of fish in others.
We rounded a sharp right-angled bend and suddenly I could smell it. A hot, damp smell. Sulphur. We crept on to a bridge of narrow wooden slats that spanned a stream. I could see the shallow water breaking over beds of stones.
‘We’ll only just make it,’ Loots said.
I was peering through the windscreen. ‘Can you see the hotel?’
‘Yes. There’s someone standing on the porch. A woman.’
‘It must be her,’ I said.
Edith Hekmann was watching us approach. And there was a word in her head, too. I could hear it across the sloping patch of grass that separated us, as clearly as if she’d shouted it: Strangers. The word always meant the same thing to somebody like her. Just one thing. People who are in the wrong place.
Loots parked in front of the hotel. As he shifted into neutral, the engine spluttered and cut out. He turned the key in the ignition. The engine fired, then died again.
‘We’ve run out of petrol.’ Loots was talking through his window to the woman on the porch. He sounded apologetic.
She just watched us. She had grey curls and thick, stockinged ankles, and she wore a shapeless dress with a cardigan over it. One of Loots’ hands rose from the steering-wheel and touched the growth of bristle on his chin.
‘You passing through?’ the woman said.
‘No,’ Loots said. ‘We’re looking for a place to stay.’
‘The petrol station’s down the road,’ the woman said, ‘about a kilometre.’
Loots thanked her.
‘But it’ll be closed now,’ the woman said.
I opened my door and got out. I stretched, then moved round to the back of the car. I was wearing my dark glasses and tapping at the unpaved road with my white stick. I started drawing in the dust with it. I drew a woman’s face. Eyes, nose, mouth — all in the right place. Then, remembering what Karin had said, I added a pair of spectacles. The woman crossed the patch of grass. She stopped beside me and stood with her head at an angle, examining the picture. In the meantime I filled the background in. Behind the face was the hotel. A porch with a chair on it. Steps. Two windows. A stone chimney at the side. I even drew the pump on the front lawn. Though I got the handle wrong, deliberately.
‘Not bad for a blind man,’ the woman said.
I studied her through my dark glasses, as though she was something I might be interested in buying. If the price was right. ‘You must be Mrs Hekmann.’
She grunted.
‘You run the hotel,’ I said, ‘don’t you.’
The cigarette in her fingers had burned down to the filter. One flick of her wrist and it was past me, into the road.
‘The waters are famous,’ I said. ‘I heard about it.’
‘It’s sulphur water. It’s not going to do much for you.’
My head dropped. I moved my white cane on the ground — one way, then the other. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I heard about it, anyway.’
She was still staring at me. It didn’t bother her that she might have offended me, not even remotely. She was simply coming to some decision of her own.
‘We don’t usually get people at this time of year.’ She paused. ‘We don’t usually get people at all.’
‘If you know of somewhere else …’ Blindly, I looked away from her, into the great dark night. Trees breaking like waves on the far side of the road.
‘It’s fifteen each,’ she said, ‘and that includes the pool.’
‘The pool?’
‘The waters. What you came here for.’
What I came here for.
‘What’s the reception like up here?’ I said. ‘The reception?’
‘You know, the reception. On TV.’
‘You mean the picture?’
I nodded.
‘You don’t get much of a picture, not up here,’ she said.
‘Loots?’ I said. ‘Let’s get the cases out.’
I woke in a kind of panic, an orange sky above me and, closer than the sky, the dark arc of a car’s tyre, and I could hear the sirens circling. I lay still, my body hot and damp. I waited until I knew I was in bed. Until I knew which bed it was. The drive north: I remembered it slowly, and in detail — the puncture, the lorry-drivers in the restaurant, some fin-shaped rocks, my sketch of Edith Hekmann. I remembered myself all the way back to where I was, shivering a little as I felt the sweat begin to dry.