She saw herself again on the beach at Agigea, under blazing sunlight, thirty days of safety while Grig played cards at the Casino in Eforie by day and they danced in the taproom at night. Some days, when the sea was calm, she could hear the jazz music in her tent in Agigea ... At the same time, someone was crossing the border at Hegenrath on a July night, maybe on his way to Brussels, maybe on his way to a small provincial town, maybe alone, maybe with a woman, someone who five months later had picked her up out of the snow on a Bucharest street and looked her in the eyes with an indifferent lift of his shoulders ...

She wished she could relive those days, July 23 to August 12, not in her tent at Agigea, but rather somewhere unseen, in the shadow of this unknown man. She would have liked to know what had happened during those nineteen days and see the small train station at the border by night, the customs officer’s manner, the stamp printing with red ink on paper the day that would not return ...Hegenrath, 23 juillet. To Nora the words felt mysterious, impenetrable.

She plunged into the armchair, disheartened.

She should have undressed, gone to bed and slept.

But she felt that she would be unable to get to her feet, take off her dress and turn down her bed. She would have preferred to remain still and sleep as she was, as she might be in the waiting room of a train station. Hegenrath station ...

The bell rang suddenly and loudly. For a second Nora didn’t realize what was happening. She let it ring for a long time, as though she wished to fill the whole apartment with the sound of its call. Then she headed for the door, forcing herself not to make any assumptions. She opened the door without emotion. He was on the threshold, loaded down with shopping bags.

 

 

The cork flew with a resounding bang, and the champagne overflowed the neck of the bottle while Nora looked up to follow the projectile’s trajectory.

“A direct hit!” he shouted victoriously.

Overhead on the ceiling, a coin-shaped white spot marked the point of impact.

“Two more hits like that and the landlord will evict me for causing serious damage,” Nora joked, not without a certain anxiety.

“Two more hits, you say? No, my dear friend. A hundred and one. Yes, a hundred and one sound blows. Like at Epiphany, like on January 24.”1

And, putting aside the empty bottle like a discarded weapon, he took another bottle in his hands. This time the detonation was even louder. They looked at each other in surprise, no longer smiling. On the bookshelf, the two carnations shook, awoken from their slumber. The detonation seemed to radiate through the whole sleeping building from floor to floor.

“A hit!”

On the ceiling, a new white mark had appeared, a very short distance from the first one.

“A dead-eye marksman! What ease! What precision!”

There was a gleam in his eye that Nora saw igniting for the first time. She almost didn’t recognize the silent man who had left her apartment half an hour earlier. Where was his heavy silence, where was that tired, indifferent smile? He was speaking now with a nervous animation that seemed strange in him.

The champagne was bubbling in their glasses. Nora raised hers with a certain gravity. “To your birthday. To your turning thirty.”

She noticed that her voice was trembling. She was ashamed of this childish emotion. He replied casually, joking: “To you. To the number 16 tram. To this evening’s accident.”

How many glasses had they drunk? She had been counting up to the fifth one, but after that she had lost track.

It was probably late. The radio (who had turned it on? when had it been turned on?) was tuned to the British national anthem. “That’s the end of our programming from Droitwich.”

Nora was making efforts to keep her eyes wide open, but she saw the objects in the room through a curtain of smoke.

Overhead on the ceiling, the marks from the direct hits looked too numerous to count.

Across from her, sometimes very close, sometimes immeasurably far away, as though seen through the lens of a field glass, was he.