***
2
She caught up tardily with his excitement at kilometer 58 when the car went past her rest area, as though into some uncharted territory although the white fields and bare trees didn’t change. She didn’t realize it until he told her that the car was doing 120. It was the first time she’d ever gone above a safe 70. He pointed out that that at 120 she should shift up to overdrive but that 120 was perhaps a bit fast for a snowy motorway. They didn’t want to go back to the hospital. There was a much better place waiting for them.
She didn’t like having to share her powers of decision behind the wheel but slowed down a little anyhow. He told her it was better not to brake, she should just lift her foot from the accelerator. Even this didn’t prevent her from suddenly yelling above the motor: “Adventure! Adventure!” She felt that her face must be radiant again but didn’t dare check in the mirror for fear of an accident. “Adventure!” she yelled again at the immediate prospect of a shared weekend in the country instead of the usual two days with books and television.
It was almost as if he’d guessed her hidden restrictive meaning. He said: “It’s no adventure, we know exactly where we’re going.” He said it in a sober voice as though ten minutes before he hadn’t suddenly pulled out two ties from the valise. He’d held them like dangling snakes in one hand while with the other hand he cranked down the window. She saw what he was going to do and tried to stop him. He’d need them, she said. It was a mistake to have said that, but all he’d replied was, “On a farm?” and flung them out and stuck his head out to see where they went.
His idea had been to get to the mountains that very morning before the predicted snow. But it was well past noon when they left. He was much better, she decided. She’d convinced him to take one of his pills the night before. Could it have been that? His forehead was cool. He spoke calmly and coherently even if the subject never varied. She found answers to some of his questions. When he asked if there were tools for the kitchen garden she replied that you couldn’t dig in January. The ground was hard as iron. Wouldn’t the saw be rusted? he wanted to know. They’d need a good saw for the dead wood behind the house for fire. It might very well be rusted, she replied. It had been so long ago.
He’d wanted to go before breakfast. But there were things to do and to buy, she told him. The cat had to be entrusted to the neighbor, money taken out of the bank, the debt that had to be settled. His haircut took time too. He throned facing a mirror, she seated behind him, supervising, occasionally commanding the scissors. “You look like a new man,” she said when he arose, hardly rejuvenated, shedding a shower of gray snips from the gown. Then he needed new clothes. To convince him she said that you didn’t wear a jacket and trousers in the country. He could pay her back when things got better. In the clothing shop she cast quick proud glances about her. She was like the other women with their men in tow, clumsy and sheepish among the fitting rooms and full-length mirrors. Like the other women she stood frowning with pursed lips, giving orders to turn round, bend down, lift his arms.
She steered him before a mirror and asked him how he found himself. “I am a new man,” he pronounced finally in the gravest of tones. It was almost true, she thought. In his padded jacket, blue jeans and stout walking shoes plus the new haircut he almost looked like a different person. The glasses were the only thing that hadn’t changed. She’d try to convince him to have another pair made up when they returned: clear lenses for when the sun didn’t shine, to get through to him.
The mirror confirmed her radiant feeling and she decided to dye her hair again but a more reasonable shade, costume-jewelry as well but in moderation.
There were the necessary food purchases. Maybe a restaurant once or twice she said but most of the meals would have to be taken in the car. It started snowing a little as she led him to a supermarket. She bought bread, tomatoes, olives, cold cuts, sliced cheese and two bottles of white wine. With the cold it would all keep in the car trunk for the two days as well as in a fridge. While she bought the food he wandered over to the hardware department and bought a log-saw, a hammer and two handfuls of big nails. When she joined him he was standing still, deaf to her like a statue, staring into the faces of the passing customers.
She hooked her arm in his and steered him outside, praising his purchases and telling him about her own. The snow was coming down harder. Where are we going? he finally said. The bus-stop, she replied. She’d promised a friend she’d pass by that morning and pay back a debt. It wasn’t far. She told him the address. It was a mistake. As they passed by the underground entrance he stopped again, gathering snow, and said it would be faster taking the underground, a direct line, just two stops. She said, no, she suffered from … She tried to remember the word for fear of crowds she’d seen in the book on psychiatry. “From agrophobia,” she said. She hooked her arm in his and feeling his resistance said that the underground reminded her of the vaulted farmhouse cellar where they used to ripen goat cheese. “Goat cheese?” he said, coming with her. All the way on the bus and back she spoke to him about the eighty-three goats back then and he outlined his plans for goats again, chickens too of course and rabbits. She knew he was more or less himself again when, an hour after she’d pronounced the word, he corrected her. It wasn’t “agrophobia” as she’d said but “agorophobia,” “agora” from the Greek, signifying “a place of assembly.” Her word, “Agrophobia,” logically would mean “fear of agriculture.” That hardly could apply to her, could it? “No,” she replied after a pause.
The blizzard had been centered in the region of the capital. By kilometer 120 the fields held no more than scattered patches of snow. They were bluish in the gathering twilight. The headlights of oncoming cars switched on. He advised her to switch hers on too. She’d never driven at night. He had to show her where the controls were.
Fog started rising all about them. She slowed down radically despite what he said about the dangers of excessive slowness in fog. She gripped the steering wheel like a life buoy, leaning forward over it for better vision. Her arm and neck muscles ached. Over and over in the rear-mirror she could see twin smears of yellow slowly focusing into headlights and then the frightening rumble and loom of the truck, the ripping sound of its tires on the wet road, the jump of the car as it powered past, then the spray of dirty water on the windscreen from the rear wheels. Loud music announced her error again. Once more she’d turned the radio on instead of the windscreen wipers.
The steep grades were the worst. He expected her to pass the recent trucks. You’re doing 40. We’ll never get there at this rate. He offered, for perhaps the tenth time, to relieve her at the wheel. Shift down when you pass, he said. In overdrive you’ll never make it.
Her mood of exhilaration had collapsed. Migraine was building up in her left temple. It was like driving-lessons again except this one was going to last all day instead of half an hour and the instructor had no professional patience. Finally, she pulled up to the side of the road (without signaling the maneuver, he pointed out).
“You drive,” she ordered. “I can’t take it any more.” Yes, he agreed, the driving conditions were particularly bad with the fog. He took over, at first calling her attention to the various maneuvers involved in passing until she asked him to please stop.
By kilometer 240 it was already 7:35pm and she vetoed his idea of driving all night. They’d have to find a room. They were hungry. She was anyhow. That didn’t convince him. They could eat while he drove, he said. As for sleeping he wasn’t tired at all. She could sleep in the rear while he drove. Finally she said that at night she’d never be able to guide him to where he wanted to go. It would be hard enough in the daytime, she added. Reluctantly he agreed to a hotel.
The hotel turned out to be another problem. It was strange, she thought. Whatever activity they contemplated, major or minor, it turned into a problem. Her idea was to turn off the awful motorway and explore the countryside for an inn. She imagined a beamed ceiling, a log fi
re, candles on the table. He pointed out that driving off the motorway at night was risky given the weather. An inn would be very hard to find. Anyhow it would cost a fortune. They’d be sure to find something cheap on the motorway. They had better things to do with the money. Whose money? she couldn’t help thinking and then felt guilty at the thought.
The hotel on the motorway was called Happy Dreams. Illuminated signs announced it fifty kilometers in advance and then at intervals of growing urgency. Finally a huge red neon arrow came into sight. It stabbed downward at half-second intervals.
The five-story futuristic building was set back just fifty meters from the motorway. It was windowless. There were no cars in the car park. They saw nobody inside. A machine accepted banknotes, even made change. It delivered a perforated plastic card marked 5. In a narrow first floor corridor where soft music was playing, the card opened the door marked 5.
It was the tiniest of rooms. There was a plastic table with two hinged seats. The table was attached to the wall. There was no other furniture, not even a bed. In one corner was a closet. In another corner, a cabin of frosted glass. The door slid open on a square meter equipped with a toilet and a shower. When you locked the door a mercury tube blinked on and the ventilator started.
From one wall a small streamlined TV peered at them from a flexible tube. It resembled an extraterrestrial’s head. On another wall a window-size rectangle contained an autumnal wood scene with deer. Diffused light behind the color transparency gave it depth. You could almost believe you were looking out through a real window on the trees and alert animals instead of at a wall and beyond the wall the motorway. To one side of the table were two buttons. Beneath one button was a diagram of a table. Beneath the other button was a diagram of a bed.
She pressed the bed button. There was a click and then a chime. The seats tucked away under the table. A section of the wall slowly pivoted, taking with it the table. The wall continued pivoting and presented a folded bed in the place of the table. The bed hummed and slowly unfolded. It was small. It occupied nearly half the surface of the room. She pressed the other button. The bed slowly made way for the table again.
She placed the food and a bottle of white wine on the table. It was to celebrate, she said. It turned out she couldn’t open the bottle. She’d forgotten to buy a corkscrew. He said it didn’t matter. They could drink tap water. It did matter, she said, how could you celebrate on lukewarm chlorinated tap water? She tried picking at the cork with a nail file for ten minutes. The headache was coming back. Celebrate what? He started constructing a sandwich. Can’t you wait a minute? she said.
Finally she went back to the car where he’d left his new hammer. The price tag was still on it. When she came back she told him that the car park was still empty except for their vehicle. They were the only people in the hotel. There must be at least thirty rooms and all of them were empty except this one. Wasn’t that strange? Wasn’t it a little scary? He saw what she’d done to the bottle. He warned her of the danger of perforated intestines from tiny glass fragments in suspension. If she really insisted on drinking it he advised filtering the wine through a handkerchief.
I should have brought candles too, she said. She switched off the light coming from the square of frosted glass in the ceiling. The gloom made the forest and the deer more insistent. He agreed that it was better that way.
They started eating in the pallor of the forest scene, stared at by the deer. She spoke at great length about the food and wine. It was her only independent contribution. She couldn’t enlarge it beyond that. Her attempts to talk about neutral subjects from their past came up against his total rejection of that past. All that interested him was their future. But as her conception of that future was radically different from his – something she couldn’t say outright – all she had to talk about were the incidents of the trip, largely unpleasant.
Finally, he did most of the talking. It was the same subject. He had no other subject. Her role was reduced to answering technical questions about the farm. But didn’t that role confirm her acceptance of his fantastic vision of their future?
So after a while she dared ask him a fundamental question. “Where’s the money going to come from?” On the surface, that question conformed to the rules of the game he’d implicitly laid down. It seemed to be strictly about the future, as he saw it.
It would be hard at first, he allowed. He didn’t want to conceal the fact. But there was a virtue to that. Finally they’d be at grips with basic elemental things: cold, hunger and thirst. They’d have great skies over them in compensation. There’d be the initiation to bare survival in the bleak month or two till spring.
She tried to object that spring didn’t come till May in the mountains, but he went on. Survival, he repeated. First fire. There was the dead wood standing in the forest behind the farmhouse. He’d gather it. He had a new saw for that. Water would come from the well, of course. The well was frozen in January, she said. From the lake, then. The lake was frozen too, even harder, she said almost in triumph. Then they’d melt the snow for water, he said, disposing of the problem. As for food, he’d lay snares for rabbits, she’d show him how. There were chestnuts and berries and nettles for soup as she’d always said. It would be their first meal. There are no nettles in winter, Edmond, she objected in a small hopeless voice and it was far too late for chestnuts and the birds had got the last berries months ago.
In any case, he said, they weren’t reduced in the immediate future to living off the land. They weren’t absolutely penniless. He’d read of survival for months on pennies. Sacks of flour for unleavened bread, sides of salted pork. She must have read about that too. They could scrape by. Later on in the ease and abundance of summertime they’d look back with nostalgia at the hardships of founding-time. Surely she had a little money in the bank to tide them over? Later of course he’d put his flat up for sale.
With the flat, her question about where the money was going to come from, supposedly limited to the future, now took in the past he refused to hear or talk about. But she couldn’t speak of the debts of Ideal and the obvious significance of the changed locks on the door of the apartment, once his.
Frustrated, she began raising objections more explicitly but without daring to get to the heart of the thing. Temporizing seemed the best tactic. You can’t be serious about staying there, she said. We’d die of cold and hunger. If I’m able to locate it we’ll spend a few hours there, reconnoitering. You’ll see what it’s like, what we’re up against in the winter. Then we’ll drive about the mountains, go to an inn like I wanted to instead of a horrible place like this. Then we’ll drive back. Maybe in the spring if you still want to we could move out there.
We will never return, he said.
But you don’t just pull up and go like that, she objected. He asked what was important back there for her. She blinked at the question, thought a little and said that there was her cat, her job, she would have to give notice, there were the three borrowed books that had to be returned to the library by the end of the week, she had a dental appointment on Wednesday, two dresses that had to be picked up at the dry-cleaner’s. She stopped. Wasn’t the plumber coming in for the toilet leak?
Those were all reasons for leaving and for never returning, he said. Leaving for what? where? she thought. She said: “But I want to go back. I didn’t even want to go to the farm in the first place.”
“You used to talk about it all the time.”
“Things have changed. I don’t even think about it any more.”
“If what bothers you is the idea of both of us being there together, naturally our relationship will be regularized.”
She blinked again. As she’d done so often years before, she asked him for a definition. She said she didn’t understand the meaning of “regularize a relationship.”
He replied that the term was self-explanatory. Anyhow, their relationship would have to be regularized after what happened last night.
&n
bsp; She asked him what he meant by that. What had happened last night?
He said that perhaps she could take such an act casually, but he couldn’t. He had old fashioned views on such things. For him what had happened last night was binding.
“Nothing happened last night. Nothing at all.”
“Oh,” he said.
“Anyhow what gave you the idea that I want to … have a regularized relationship with you?”
“From the beginning, from the very first day I hired you, that was obvious. We should have, long ago.”
“You’d have saved on my salary that way.”
“You’re not yourself again, Dorothea. I want you to be yourself, forever, the way you used to be. How can you say what you said?”
“We do nothing but quarrel. We haven’t stopped quarreling since this morning. We’re incon… We don’t get on at all.”
“I haven’t been quarreling with you, Dorothea. ‘Incompatible’ is the word, but we’re not. We are perfectly complementary.”
“Stop telling me about words all the time. I’m not an imbecile. You see how incompatible we are, about everything, even words. Where’s the salt?”
A few minutes later she returned to the subject. There was all her furniture and books and records, you couldn’t just leave them there like that and disappear. It was crazy. She wasn’t even sure she’d be able to find the farm.
“Of course you’ll find the farm. You drew the route in your diary.”
She set the goblet of wine down on the table. After a while she said in a barely audible voice: “You looked at my diary?”
He refilled her goblet out of the jagged-necked bottle. “All of that is the past.”
“You actually looked at my diary?”
“It was lying on the floor that night. Why are we talking about all that?”
“My private locked diary?”
“Certainly it was an indiscretion on my part. I apologize for that.”
Long silence.
“Did you read everything?”
“Certainly not everything. Mainly I saw the map.”
“It’s a… an unforgivable violation of my privacy. I would never have done that to you.”
There was another long silence. He went on eating.
“You must have been shocked,” she said.
He swallowed his chlorinated water, dabbed his lips with the paper napkin and then pursed them, visibly reflecting as he buttered another slice of bread.
“I accept you as you are, Dorothea, with all your qualities but also your shortcomings which are things of the past. Just as, I like to think, you accept me with whatever shortcomings I may have had.”
At that, she burst into laughter, irrepressible and bitter, and was silent for the next quarter of an hour, saying no more than, “Don’t know,” when he asked more of his technical questions. He frowned. They passed each other the salami and cheese with elaborate politeness.
Finally she said: “Just a few shortcomings like leaving me for dead, not a glance, not a phone call after. I could mention others if you really want to know. I filled three sheets.”
She felt depressed, close to tears. She hadn’t imagined it like this, not at all like this. A terrible thought came to her. Maybe I’m not an easy person. Maybe I’ve been living alone too long. Maybe I’m too old for it. Hadn’t he practically proposed to her?
Why are we talking about the past? he said. They’d agreed that the past was dead. After a while he said he’d tried to phone her, over and over, from down there but there’d been no answer.
Yes there had been, she said. He’d rung her up in the middle of the night, three different times. She’d answered. She’d heard him breathing. You were the one who didn’t answer.
Why are we talking about the past? he repeated. After a while, he said that the first time he heard her voice he couldn’t say anything. He’d thought she was dead. It must have been gladness that prevented him from talking. And when he was about to talk she hung up. The two other times he hadn’t dared. He didn’t know why. He hadn’t been well. Then he’d rung her up again. He was going to tell her everything, where she could meet him, which station, which panel, because he still couldn’t leave, but when he phoned a voice said over and over that the number didn’t exist anymore. He’d thought she’d left the capital for the farm without him. But all that was behind him.
His voice was taking on the strained sound of the night before and she said it didn’t matter, he was right, they shouldn’t always be talking about the past. It was dead.
She cleared the table and took everything back to the car.
When she returned he was standing in the doorway, staring at the blank wall of the corridor.
He asked her if she’d heard it too, the voice.
No, she hadn’t heard any voice here outside of his and hers.
A man’s voice. You must have heard it.
We’re all by ourselves here, Edmond, just the two of us. There’s still no other car in the car park.
He said he would look on the other floors. He’d be back in a few minutes.
He started down the corridor. She closed the door and locked it.
After half hour had gone by she unlocked the door. Taking the staircase, she started looking for him, saying his name on every floor, louder and louder. She found him on the top floor, seated with his back against the corridor wall, head bowed. She placed her hand on his shoulder. He started and looked up at her.
“I heard him again. He was saying my name.”
“That was me calling you. Let’s go back. I’m tired. You must be tired too.”
She guided him to the elevator and then to their room. She pressed the button. They were melodiously warned. The bed replaced the table.
In the night he drew close to her back, timidly touched her shoulder and then a breast. She moved slightly out of his hand saying she was sick. At that word instead of persistence or reluctant relinquishing, there was the old familiar recoil and she said he shouldn’t worry, it wasn’t catching unless he changed his sex. In a few years she’d be beyond it and children. She started talking about children, the ages and names she preferred. She asked him which age he preferred and without waiting for an answer started weeping. She said it was the wine. She came with flowers for me in the hospital, she said. I couldn’t understand half she said. I don’t know what language it was in. I couldn’t give her the money. It would have been like buying the flowers. She stroked my head and cried and cried.
He said nothing for a minute. Then he said he’d dig a flower garden for her. They’d plant rosebushes. She liked roses, didn’t she? She’d show him how to dig the holes and he’d do it for her.
Sometime in the middle of the night she awoke and saw in the pallor of the wood-scene (he’d asked her if she minded leaving it lit) how he was staring up at the ceiling. She saw his eyes and drew close to him. Go to sleep, she said. She said it over and over and went to sleep herself.
When she woke up, he was puttering about in the room. In the pallor of the wood-scene she could see that he was dressed. He was placing clothing in his valise. He couldn’t leave without her, she said. Even if he had a car he’d never be able to find the farm without her. Don’t leave me here all alone in this horrible place. There was no question of leaving her, he said. He’d intended waking her up, of course. No, they couldn’t stay in this horrible place. She should get up and dress.
Instinctively she looked at the window-like space to see the state of the sky. It was the same golden noon as hours ago. Her watch said 6:37am. The real sky outside must still be dark.
They stopped for petrol at eight. They were the only customers. There was a little yellowish light gathering low in the overcast sky. The rare capital-bound trucks still had their headlights on. There was no traffic at all on their side. In the shop she bought a corkscrew and while she was at it another bottle of white wine. He bought a detailed map of the region and they consulted it. Twenty kilometers ahea
d on both sides of the motorway they could see patches of green with scattered towns and villages: hill country. South of it, the mountains. When he asked her to locate it exactly she made a gesture toward a particular part of the mountains, a gesture that encompassed a good fifty square kilometers. She’d never been able to read maps, she said. Once they were in the mountains she’d know, she assured him.
They looked at the near green with longing. She said they should turn off at the next exit. He noted that it was over a hundred kilometers from the turn-off she’d marked in her diary map but he didn’t dare refer to that again. There must be a number of possible routes. He just asked her if she was sure that it was the right road. All roads lead to Rome, she said. He corrected: all roads flee Rome, which she didn’t understand. They had coffee with more of their sandwiches. They had to watch the money, he said. He said that he’d have to drive carefully. They had to hope it wouldn’t snow again. The whole sky was filling with a sullen yellow.
She felt the conflict of distress and relief growing at each sign that announced the impending turn-off into green (green on the map, white in reality now).
Now they were there. He slowed down to quit the motorway. But the turn-off was blocked by police-barriers with no-exit signs. The next exit twenty minutes later was also blocked off. Exit after exit was blocked off. It went on for fifty kilometers. Maybe we won’t be able to turn off, he said with a note of panic that expressed her own. She had to reassure him although she too had had that thought, had imagined them both condemned forever to the empty motorway and the hotel room with the immobile noon deer and a voice that didn’t exist.
Before she had time to come up with a valid reason for the barred exits they heard a siren behind them, then powerful motorcycles. A goggled motorcycle policeman in black leather roared alongside them making imperious signals to get on the slow lane. More black riders on motorcycles powered past, then expensive cars and finally a prodigiously long low black car with more black riders in escort.
In a few seconds the motorway was empty.
Somebody important, she said. Wasn’t he dead? he asked. Wasn’t it a hearse? A dead man wouldn’t be in that much of a hurry, she replied. And why the motorcycle police? Or the blocked exits? Nothing threatened the dead. In any case they’d be able to turn off into the countryside in a few minutes.
But the countryside had disappeared and on both sides there were piles of tarred ties still holding a little dirty snow, rusty heaps of girders, used car lots, the flaming pipes of chemical plants, mountains of garbage with crows and gulls circling above. That went on and on. Finally they took the turn-off she’d marked on her diary map after all. It had already started snowing. From here on you’ll have to guide me, he said.
They rose in low gear at a snail’s pace in the blizzard. He should have bought chains. They’d been driving about for hours. The visibility was limited to a few meters. All they could see in the white turmoil was roadside shrubbery, a few meters of white road, occasionally the loom of a mountain shoulder. Sometimes ruined farmhouses haunted the snowfall with broken roof-beams and heaps of broken slate tiles. All you see are ruins here, he said. Where are the people? Even when she was a small girl it was a dying region, she said. Now it’s practically dead. Ghost farms were what they used to call them. There were hundreds and hundreds of them. Whole villages stood deserted. Even when she was little the young people left the mountain farms and went to the cities. There were just the old people. And then the old people died. I wonder if we shouldn’t turn left here?
He drove straight on. He’d long since given up heeding her directives. By now they’d become anxious self-queries rather than directives. He gripped the wheel, crouched over it, his forehead almost against the windscreen. His nostrils flared as though scenting it out beyond the swirling white curtain despite the persistent odor of salami and white wine in the car.
Without warning, he slammed the brakes on. The car went into a skid which he was able to master. There’s somebody on the side of the road, he said. He’s lost. He’ll freeze to death.
He put the car into reverse gear and backed up dangerously fast in a shrill whine. He stopped the car at the side of the road. This is no place to get lost, he said. Stay here. I’ll be back with him in a minute.
He got out of the car and disappeared instantly behind the swirling curtain of snow.
She waited in the absolute silence for five minutes and then followed his deep footsteps to where he was standing in front of a snow-draped scarecrow with outflung broomstick arms.
It was just this scarecrow, she said, touching his arm.
No, he was standing by the roadside. We have to find him. He’ll freeze.
Look, she said, pointing at the blank snow ahead, and then at the snow behind them. There are just your footsteps and mine, she said and was able to convince him to return to the car. He sat behind the wheel for a while and then things were better. He started the engine and they moved forward slowly in the worsening blizzard.
Another hour had passed when something big and ghost-like stumbled across the road just ahead of the car. “A deer!” he exclaimed. “We’re in wild country, we can’t be far!” She thought it was a dog but said nothing. “It’s a sign. We’ve practically arrived,” he muttered. “The other side of this hill, I’m sure.” It was a hill that he had to take in second gear, steeper and steeper as though to justify the reward of what lay on the other side. The wheels whirred at intervals from the faulty adherence. The car began swerving from side to side. Let’s go back, Edmond, she implored. He’d already made the prediction of arrival while mounting other hills.
We’ll never go back, he shouted but seconds later the wheels started spinning furiously and the motor rose to hysteria and they did go back, backwards at least, slowly, then faster down the promised hill. To the furious spin of the wheels was now added a slow spin of the car itself, ghosts of roadside bushes wheeling about. Faster, faster, the underbrush much closer now, then flailing branches, thumps from beneath, bangings, wild jolts, scratchings, showers of twigs and brambles joining the snowflakes against the windscreen.
And there, the end to it all, a dark tree slowly looming. It loomed gigantically and there was a crunch of metal, a breakage of glass as they were thrown forward. They cried simultaneously.
“Edmond!” she cried.
“The car!” he cried.
The car settled at a slight angle and the engine coughed and expired. They sat in pallid gloom. The pine had dumped a great cowl of snow on the car. They were still braced against the shock, which had been minimal. She asked him again if he was all right and he finally said in a dead voice that he wasn’t hurt. If he didn’t ask about her she supposed that since she’d asked over and over about him in a panicked but pain-free voice he must have assumed she was all right too. He was still crouched over the wheel in much the same attitude as when the car had been on the road. They hadn’t a scratch. A narrow escape, she said to cheer him up. And maybe the engine hadn’t suffered.
He turned the key and the engine confirmed that it too was all right. The sound revived him. He scrambled out and inspected the damage. Nothing essential had been affected, he reported: a headlight smashed, a fender crunched, the bumper twisted, the hood bent a little. They could try the hill again, but first they had to get the car back on the road. Luckily there was no ditch.
My car, she thought as he shifted from first into reverse and back again rapidly, dosing the power. The car responded to these fast skilful movements by moving gently forward and back a few centimeters in a wild whirl of the rear wheels. He pushed out of the car. Forgetting the log-saw he’d bought he tried to break off branches from the pine with his bare hands. He shoved what he managed to gather under the rear wheels. He deputized her to the driver’s seat and pushed the car all the while yelling instructions. She wasn’t letting out the clutch smoothly enough. He received spurts of snow and twigs from the rear wheels. There was a strong smell of burned rubber
. He returned to the car and collapsed into the driver’s seat, breathing heavily. His hands were bleeding.
She didn’t dare interrupt the silence. He was surely devising other means of getting the car back on the road. Finally he exclaimed triumphantly: “But this close we don’t need a car at all.” He forced the door open against the snow and wind. “You’re not to move from the car, Dorothea. I’ll be back soon. Not to move! This is wild country, Dorothea. There may even be bears.”
He wasn’t well acquainted with mountains. To imagine what it was like beyond the white swirling curtain of snow he summoned up art museum memories of late eighteenth century pre-romantic landscapes: mineral chaos, crags, clefts, abysses, dashing cataracts, etc. He added snow to the recalled scenes and also what he was seeking. He moved knee-deep toward it.
“Come back,” she cried. He was doing exactly the wrong thing. She’d often read that in such emergencies the very worst thing you could do was to leave the car and go for help. The nearest village must be twenty kilometers away. You had to wait until help came. She pushed against her jammed door. By the time she forced it open he was gone. She cried out his name. The wind swept it away. The driving snow had a metallic taste. But there’d be no problem catching up with him on the road. The wind whipped the snow in her face. Half-blinded, she stumbled over concealed branches and boulders.
On the blank whiteness of the road there was just the long disorder of their skid. She bent down, peered hard. His shoes would have left prints. There was nothing. She returned to the car and saw his footprints – leg prints – striking out in a direction opposite to the road.
Understanding now, she shouted into the shifting curtain of white: Edmond! Edmond! It’s not there, Edmond, come back! It’s not here at all! She stumbled forward, repeating the message: Come back! I’ll tell you where it is! It’s not here at all! She must have floundered round and round in the deep snow for her footprints multiplied. Lost in that labyrinth of her own making, she didn’t know which of the footprints led back to the car.
She heard him calling her name beneath the hiss of the wind in the pines. She let herself be guided by his alarmed voice. The car materialized in the whiteness and he too alongside it.
They got inside. I told you not to leave the car, he said sternly. I told you of the dangers. I heard you shouting. I thought it was a bear or a boar. There are certainly boars here. He prepared to leave again. She repeated what she’d shouted into the storm. It’s not here at all. Don’t go out there again. I’ll tell you where it is. It’s not here at all. She worked the cork free from the bottle of wine and poured what was left into the two waxed goblets.
“Not here?”
“No. Don’t leave the car. Drink more wine, you’re shivering.”
“Show me where, then.”
“You’re soaked.”
“Where? Show me.”
“Wait.”
She got out and managed to open the badly jammed trunk. She dragged out the two valises and made him get into the rear of the car. The driver’s seat was drenched. She gave him his towel and his dark trousers. She turned her back and changed into her best skirt meant for the inn. When she had finished he asked her again. She didn’t answer. He reached for the detailed road map. First something to drink to warm them up, she said. She couldn’t see straight for the cold.
She went out again and got the two bottles of wine, two waxed goblets and the corkscrew. To give him something else to think of she asked him to uncork the bottle. He tried. His hands were trembling so badly that she did it herself, expertly. He started to open the car door.
It’s no use going out in the blizzard to find the farm. You’ll never find it here. She held onto him, she wouldn’t let him go again. He started unfolding the road map. Here or anywhere on the map, she added.
So, the dashbord clock marking ten past two, the snow crowding in on all sides and the fuel-gauge needle deep in the red zone, she finally said she didn’t know.
When he asked her again to show him where it was on the map she repeated that she didn’t know. The one place she knew it was was inside her head, had been for twenty years, she went there when things became too hard, didn’t need a map for that, she said. The doctor said lots of people had a farm in their head, something like a farm. They both had had it in their heads. It was gone from hers, now it would be gone from his. He didn’t understand and she had to say it in three different ways. She urged the wine on him and he drank it dazed.
“You’re not telling the truth,” he said.
“This time I am. Here, give me your cup.”
“But I saw the map in the diary.”
“All in the head like all of the rest. Don’t spill it.”
“Everything? All the other things?”
“All in the head, like the farm,” she said. “Come on, drink.”
He sat still for a long time. She heard his slow difficult breathing. Everything must be collapsing inside. She slipped her arm about his shoulders. The engine coughed twice and died. The fuel-gauge needle was below the red zone. The blower still distributed heat.
She waited for him to ask her why she’d invented all that. She’d answer that the specialist had been trying to make her find out. Then he (Edmond) would say that she must have been very unhappy to have to do that.
Yes, horribly unhappy, she said to his silent profile as though he’d said all that. He had no idea how unhappy, she said. She started weeping. It was the wine, she gasped between sobs. She was sure that at any moment he’d reach over and touch her shoulder or more and ask her if she couldn’t tell him about it. He sat there like a statue. “I’ll never be able to tell anybody who really cares,” she brought out. “I used to think: some day if I meet someone who cares maybe I will. I have to pay someone to care.” She sniffed and blew her nose and drank more wine.
The temperature in the car was dropping. The snow hadn’t let up. Half of the windscreen was white. His face was set in an intensity of thought as though he were grappling with the most arduous of problems. Finally he said: “How can you possibly help cure me, Dorothea? It was supposed to be that way. But you’re just as unwell as I am. How can anyone be as unwell as me?”
He said it in genuine wonder, not plaintively and without the outrage that the notion would have produced earlier. He even touched her arm briefly. She’d had so much to offer him: a new life. Now in despair he remembered all of those images that had saved him down among the graffitied posters. Now the three blue peaks, the orchard, the woods had shrunk to posters themselves composed of hundreds of thousands of miniscule colored dots bordered with dirty tiles.
The blower blew more feebly and filled the car with frigid air. She reached over unsteadily and managed to turn it off. By three o’clock the idea had taken possession of their minds that they wouldn’t survive there in such wild country, perhaps twenty kilometers from the nearest inhabited farmhouse. They clasped each other for warmth on the rear seat. Drowsily she suggested that they clear the snow on the road and build a fire with dead branches, nothing burns like old pine. It would keep them warm and maybe attract help. Yes, we might do that, he said, not moving. She told him the way to do it, something she’d read, she said, but had never done: you ball up paper and build a kind of wigwam of twigs over it. Then you build a second wigwam over the first but branches. Yes, we could do that he said, his lips close to her ear. In a minute he would get up and do it. “Maybe we’d better,” she said after a while. “Yes. Give me a pack of matches.”
“I have no matches.”
“A lighter, then.”
“I have no lighter.”
“You have to have matches or a lighter. You smoke.” He said it with no alarm or urgency, simply to establish the facts.
“I stopped smoking, I never really liked it.” She apologized for that although she knew he’d disliked her smoking.
He said she’d done well to have stopped, also the perfume and the make up, she was far prettier, far more re
al with her real face.
This wasn’t her real face, hadn’t been her real face, it was a disguise too, she said. But he started kissing her face and neck. How drunk you must be, she thought but let him go on. How drunk I am, she thought, and let him in those last moments before a reputedly painless death. It gave warmth but then it was colder after. But they were both tired and started drowsing off as they said you did in the books describing that sort of going. The wind rocked the car. All of the windows and the windscreen were covered by white.
They were found in time. Huddled together at an angle in the rear-seat of the car, slightly embarrassed because of survival after such a farewell, they still clasped each other for warmth as the tow truck started jolting them to the nearby town.
It had stopped snowing. As they swung onto the main road five hundred meters from where the accident had occurred, the sun came out in the disguise of a shivery pale disk. They were in the outskirts of a small town. There were used car lots on both sides with big decorated Christmas trees not yet taken down. Huge billboards jerked past. He caught a glimpse of a circus advertisement with lions, a spangled trapezist, clowns, then Pilsober Beer’s naked lovers. There was a cluster of new prefab houses with a small forest of TV antennas, still holding lines of snow.
As the landscape jerked past he assured her that they’d find the farm, it existed, maybe not hers, surely not hers but it was there, hardly in ruins, much deeper in the mountains than they’d gone. The problem was they hadn’t gone deep enough. They would the next time. He would put his apartment up for sale for the money. And as for running a farm successfully, even if neither of them had any knowledge of the thing, he remembered having seen an encyclopedia in a second hand book shop window, The Agricultural Encyclopedia, small for an encyclopedia, no more than four or five volumes, and maybe a little dated, but it was a start, he’d start studying it methodically and then they’d begin the search in the spring. They had new drugs for hay fever, it appeared. Had he never told her that he suffered from hay fever?
She said she had a phobia about spiders. Did they have drugs for that? Maybe it was something that wore off.
The tow truck stopped before a railroad crossing. Brick-red wagons heaped with rusty iron rumbled past interminably. Looking elsewhere out of the window he thought he saw a flash of blue over the white roadside bushes. He was alarmed for his fragile optic nerve but then it was repeated, the flash of blue – a bird? – gone now. No, back again, unmistakably a bird. He tugged at her arm and said, look, a blue bird. She leaned over and stared through the window, frowning with attention. “Are you sure?” she said.
End
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