The woman was still alive. She had been uninjured. As Fallmerayer bent over her she spoke, before he had asked her a question, almost as if she were rather afraid of his question. There was nothing she needed and she thought she could get to her feet. At worst, she had nearly lost her luggage. She could certainly get up. And she at once made as if to do so. Fallmerayer helped her. He took the fur over his left arm, placed his right arm around her shoulders, waited until she was on her feet, laid the fur over her shoulders and his arm over the fur and so they went, without a word, a little way across the tracks and the rubble into the nearby cottage of a pointsman, up a few steps and into the dry, bright warmth.
“You sit quietly here for a few minutes,” said Fallmerayer, “I have work to do out there. I’ll be back soon.”
At the same instant he knew that he was lying, and probably for the first time in his life. Nevertheless, the lie seemed natural to him. Although at that moment he could have wished nothing better than to stay by the woman, it would have seemed terrible to him that she should regard him as someone useless who had nothing better to do while outside a thousand hands were helping and rescuing. So he went out quickly and found, to his own astonishment, that he now had the strength and courage to help, to rescue, to give an order here and advice there. And although he could only think of the woman in the cottage, as he helped, rescued and worked, and although the idea that he might not see her later was gruesome and frightening, he still stayed and worked at the scene of the catastrophe, out of fear that he might leave much too soon and thus expose his uselessness to strangers. And as they followed him with their eyes and stimulated him to greater effort, so he quickly gained confidence in his word and his good sense and revealed himself to be a nimble, clever and courageous helper.
He therefore worked for something like two hours, constantly thinking of the waiting stranger. When the doctor and the nurses had given the necessary first aid to the injured, Fallmerayer turned back towards the pointsman’s cottage. He quickly told the doctor, whom he knew, that over there was yet another casualty of the accident. He studied his battered hands and torn uniform with a certain self-consciousness. He led the doctor into the pointsman’s room and greeted the stranger, who did not seem to have moved from her chair, with the cheerful and intimate smile which one reserves for old and close friends after a long separation.
“Examine the lady!” he said to the doctor, and went to the door. He waited outside for a couple of minutes.
The doctor came and said, “A little shock. Nothing more. It would be best if she stayed here. Have you room in your house?”
“Certainly, certainly!” said Fallmerayer. And between them they led the stranger into the station and up the stairs to the stationmaster’s living quarters.
“In three or four days she’ll be perfectly sound,” said the doctor.
At that moment Fallmerayer wished she needed many more days than that.
III
Fallmerayer turned over his room and his bed to the stranger. The stationmaster’s wife shuttled busily between the invalid and the children. Twice a day Fallmerayer looked in himself. Stringent orders were given to the children to keep quiet.
By the following day the traces of the accident had been dragged to one side, the customary inquiry instituted, Fallmerayer interrogated and the guilty pointsman dismissed from service. Twice a day, as before, express trains tore past Fallmerayer at the station.
The evening after the disaster Fallmerayer learnt the stranger’s name: she was a Countess Walewska, a Russian from the Kiev area, traveling from Vienna to Meran. Part of her luggage turned up and was brought to her; black and brown leather suitcases. They smelt of cuir de Russie and unknown scents. The whole of Fallmerayer’s quarters smelt of them.
Now that he had lent his bed he did not sleep in Frau Fallmerayer’s, but down below in his office. This meant he did not sleep at all. He lay awake. Towards nine in the morning he visited the room in which the strange woman lay. He asked if she had slept well, whether she had breakfasted and if she felt well. He would take fresh violets to the vase on the sideboard on which the old ones had stood before, remove the old ones, put the fresh ones into fresh water and then remain standing at the foot of the bed. Before him lay the strange lady, on her pillow, under her bedclothes. He mumbled something inaudible. On the stationmaster’s pillow, beneath his bedclothes, lay the strange woman with her big dark eyes and white, strong face, as remote as an alien but sweet landscape. “Do sit down,” she said, twice each day. She spoke the hard, alien German of the Russians, in a deep, strange voice. All the splendor of the far off and the unknown was in that voice. Fallmerayer did not sit down.
“Excuse me, but I have a lot to do,” said he, turning about and leaving the room.
So it went on for six days. On the seventh the doctor advised her to continue her journey. Her husband was awaiting her in Meran. So she went on her way, leaving behind her in all the rooms, and particularly in Fallmerayer’s bed, an inextinguishable trace of cuir de Russie and some nameless scent.
IV
This remarkable scent stayed in the house, and in the memory, not to say the heart of Fallmerayer much longer than did the catastrophe. And during the weeks which followed, during which the boring investigation of more precise facts and more detailed origins of the accident pursued their routine course and Fallmerayer was heard a couple of times, he never stopped thinking of the foreigner and gave almost confused answers to plain questions, as if he had been made deaf by the perfume she had left around him and to him. Had his duties not been comparatively simple and he himself not virtually become over the years an almost mechanical part of the service he could not in all conscience have continued in his duties.
Secretly he hoped that each mail would bring news of the stranger. He had no doubt that she would write once, if only to thank him for his hospitality and as a matter of courtesy. And one day a big dark blue envelope did arrive. The Walewska wrote that she traveled further south with her husband. At the moment she was in Rome. She and her husband wanted to go on to Sicily. The following day an elegant basket of fruit arrived for the twins and a bouquet of very delicate and scented white roses for the stationmaster’s wife, from Countess Walewska’s husband. It had been a long while, wrote the Countess, before she had found time to thank her kindly hosts, but after her arrival in Meran she had taken some time to recover from her shock and she had needed to convalesce. Fallmerayer carried home the fruit and flowers at once. Although the letter had arrived a day earlier, the stationmaster nonetheless held onto it rather longer. The scent of fruit and roses from the south was strong, but to Fallmerayer it seemed as if the scent of the Countess’s letter were even stronger. It was a short letter. Fallmerayer knew it by heart. He knew the exact position of each word. Written with big bold strokes in lilac ink, the letters stood out like a lovely host of slender birds in strange plumage, swooping across a dark blue back ground. “Anja Walewska,” ran the signature. He had long been curious about the stranger’s Christian name, as though this name were one of her hidden bodily charms, but he had never dared to ask about it. For a while, now that he did know it, it was as though she had made him a present of a delicious secret. And out of a jealous wish to keep it for himself alone he only made up his mind two days later to show it to his wife. From the moment that he knew the Walewska’s Christian name he became aware that his wife’s name — she was called Klara — was not beautiful. As he saw with what indifferent hands Frau Klara unfolded the stranger’s letter, the hands of the foreigner came back to his mind, just as he had first seen them on her furs; motionless hands, two gleaming, silvery hands. I should have kissed them then, he thought for a moment.