Women

Chapter I

Chapter IIt is not yet eight o’clock. Ştefan Valeriu can tell this by the rays of the sun, which have only just reached the end of his deck chair. He can feel the sun traversing the wooden slats in the frame, enfolding his fingers, hands, arms, like a warm shawl… Some time will pass – five minutes, an hour, an eternity – and his closed eyes will quietly fill with a blue pulsation, streaked faintly with silver. It will then be eight o’clock and he will tell himself without conviction that he should get up. Just like yesterday, and the day before. But he will remain there, fixed in his place, silently congratulating himself for creating this sundial on the first day he arrived, out of a deck chair and the corner of a terrace.

He can feel his hair burning in the sun, coarse as hemp, and decides that, after all, it’s not the end of the world that he had forgotten to bring his bottle of Pétrole Hahn pomade, his sole, yet essential luxury, from his room on Rue Lhomond in Paris. He likes to run his fingers through his unruly hair which the comb had failed to tame this morning even after three futile attempts, to feel its sun-bleached roughness against his skin.

It is probably very late. He can hear voices coming from the alley. Someone is calling out from the direction of the lake, a woman’s voice, perhaps the English girl from yesterday who watched his vigorous front crawl and admired his victory over the water, complaining that she only knew breaststroke.

Stretching his leg from the deck chair, Ştefan’s naked foot searches the grass for a cooler patch. He knows of a place towards the left, not far off, towards the thicket, where the dew lingers right until the middle of the day. This was it – his somnolent body burning in the sun… that chilled freshness of the grass…

Monday evening, having hurriedly changed his shirt after his long train journey, he had gone down to the dining room of his small hotel for the first time, and the garrulous Serbian at the table at the back had remarked loudly, for everyone to hear: “Tiens, un nouveau jeune homme.”1

Ştefan had been doubly grateful. Both for the “nouveau” and also for the “jeune homme”.

Last week, while finishing his final medical exams, he had felt like an old man. Worn out, though not yet old. The exhaustion of the sleepless nights, the early mornings at the hospital followed by long afternoons at the library, the two-hour-long exam taken in a dingy room monitored by a deaf professor, the heavy winter clothes, the perpetually dirty collar…

And then, the name of this alpine lake, discovered by chance on a map in a bookshop, the ticket bought in the first travel agency he passed, the race through some department stores (a white pullover, grey flannel trousers, a summer shirt), and finally, his departure – an escape.

Un nouveau jeune homme.

He didn’t know anyone there. Occasionally, someone had thrown a word his way, but he responded evasively. Ştefan was self-conscious about his accent and didn’t want to give himself away as a foreigner on the first day. After lunch, he would hurry past the diners at their tables, abstracted, frowning. The others probably thought him surly. He was merely lazy.

Towards the back of the terrace, the forest begins, rising above them. It starts with a small patch of tall grass, dense and elastic. The weight of his body crushes it as he sleeps there through the afternoon, yet by the following morning it has rebounded, blade by blade, intact. He surrenders himself there, his arms spread out, his legs stretched out, his head buried in the grass, defeated by a force which he feels powerless to resist.

A squirrel is skipping from one hazel tree to another. How do you say “squirrel” in French?

There is an immense silence… No. Not an immense silence. That’s just what they would say in a novel. Rather, there is an immense clutter of sounds, a zoological uproar, crickets chirping, locusts rustling, beetles darting up against the sky, beating their wings wildly and then dropping with a dense, leaden sound. Amongst all these, Ştefan Valeriu’s breathing is a mere detail, a derisory sign of life, as derisory and fundamental as the breath of the squirrel that jumps or the pulse of the locust which rests on the tip of his boot, mistaking it for a rock. It’s good to find yourself here, an animal, a living thing, an inconsequential beast that sleeps and inhales, exhales, under the same sun as everything else, on a two-square-metre scrap of ground.

If crickets were disposed to think, would they philosophize about eternity? And what if, perhaps, eternity tasted just like this afternoon?

Below, on the terrace of the small hotel, he can see chairs, shawls, white dresses. And further, the blue lake, transparent, idyllic. A picture postcard.

1 “Look, a new young man.”