During the night it snowed unremittingly, as though it would never cease. In the morning, with the snow still pelting down, skiing was out of the question. There was no wind. The few people about in the village had to grope their way ahead; the street lamps were of little help. Oscar had walked down from his hotel to call at his favourite café, diagonally opposite the cog-railway station. Here and there he allowed himself to slide a few paces, with one hand hovering over the wooden fence dividing the road from the long practice slope. His life snowed away from him, he felt both detached and exhilarated, a sense of letting himself go and of bereftness, a fluttery agitation, a devil-may-care wish to forget what he knew and what he had done. He had never known such heavy snowfall. The cog-wheel train would soon remain snowbound in the Lauterbrunnen sidings, leaving the village cut off. Which would suit him just fine. Barricades of snow, metres-high ramparts all around. Nobody going out or coming in. The wider world was a bookish notion, not real, far-off, a phantom, an impossibility. If only he could stay here, in the snow, in the impenetrable nowhere of a hidden village. With each step he sank deeper into the white, in a slow, euphoric haze. Nonetheless, his feet led him unerringly to his café.
It was busier than usual, with most of the tables occupied. Just before shutting the draught door behind him he considered turning back again, into the snow. Right by the entrance there was a table, easily overlooked, which had one vacant chair.
She lowered the newspaper-stick with the broadsheet, behind which she had all but disappeared before, and motioned him to the chair. He recognised her at once, even though he had only seen her in profile.
“Not the kind of weather for binoculars today,” he said.
“You ski well for a foreigner.”
How did she know he was a foreigner? He noticed that she spoke an old-fashioned, precise sort of German.
“I saw you arrive yesterday, from my window.”
So she was staying at Hotel Jungfrau.
She had seen him before he saw her. Insignificant detail, incalculable consequences. The faintest impulse can precipitate an avalanche. She had put her book down, she had taken her binoculars and her sunglasses, she had gone down the corridor, then the stairs, she had asked a waiter to bring her tea. Sunshine. The endless view, the mountains zooming up close in her binoculars. He had been seated to the side, her eyes had not lit on him.
Oscar’s thoughts arranged themselves into a semblance of order. Still dazzled by the snow, and by the woman’s nearness, he ordered coffee.
“It won’t be easy finding your way back to the hotel,” he said as she moved to resume reading the newspaper.
“So I realised when I was halfway here,” she said calmly, lowering the paper and glancing outside. “But I couldn’t stop, I couldn’t bear to turn back. A question of narrowed consciousness: all you can do is go forward, your head feels light, you aren’t thinking rationally. There’s nothing but silence, and the crunch under your boots.”
Oscar listened to her voice, not to what she was saying. Heard what had long been forgotten, or repressed. Resonances of something from the distant past, of being carried away, of a girl who took him outside of himself and never delivered him back. Sixteen he had been, and consumed by a wondrous love. He had not told anyone, not even his brother, the brother who was his only friend. Not her either. He would not have known how to tell her he loved her. Love had caused some kind of irreversible shift within him. He had found himself strangely removed from everything that had been perfectly normal only a short time before.
In any case, he would have been incapable of explaining it to her. He had kept her name secret, had never uttered it aloud, for fear of losing her, which had promptly happened. Strange, the way love could also leave you feeling cut off, depleted, making everything meaningless and irrelevant.
The woman regarded him across the table. He saw her eyes for the first time. Only for a second, due to the waiter bringing the coffee and the people squeezing past the back of his chair. Distractions that were not unwelcome. Her eyes were like her voice – challenging. They took him way back, an eternity back, to the ice covering the base of his memory, smooth as glass, and creaking. Treading gingerly on the first ice of the night, over a thinly frozen pond fringed with weeping willows. The girl’s embrace, on the way to school. A fleeting interlude of happiness, forged into a short story years later. No, he did not feel challenged, it was different, nothing to do with pressure or being called to account. Her face and her eyes held him fast, he could not have left even if he had wished to.
