It’s not yet eight. Stefan Valeriu can tell by the sunlight, which has crept only as far as the edge of his chaise longue. He can sense it climbing the wooden legs, feel it caressing his fingers, his hand, his naked arm, as warm as a shawl…More time will pass—five minutes, an hour, an eternity—and a flickering blue light with vague silver streaks will appear through his closed eyelids. Then it will be eight and perhaps time to start thinking about getting up. Just like yesterday, and the day before that. But he’ll remain lying there, smiling at the thought of this sundial he constructed on the first day, using a chaise longue and a patch of terrace. He passes his hand over his sun-scorched hair, rough as hemp fiber, and accounts it no great loss in the end that he’s forgotten his bottle of Hahn oil—his sole extravagance, but a precious one—in his room on the rue Lhomond in Paris. He enjoys passing his fingers through tangled hair that received no more than a cursory brushing that morning, and its roughness tells him how blond it has become.
It must be very late. Just now, he heard the sound of voices from the pathway. Somebody, a woman, shouted from down at the lake. Perhaps the Englishwoman from yesterday, the one he’d watched swimming powerfully. He had been surprised by the way she struggled with the water; she seemed to know only the breaststroke.
Stefan swings his leg over the edge of his lounger and feels about the grass with his naked foot for a patch of dampness. He knows that somewhere not too far to the left, toward the hedge, is a place that holds the dew until as late as lunchtime. There it is. His body, baking lazily in the heat, and the feeling of that cold vegetation.
On Monday evening, going downstairs to the guesthouse dining room—he had just arrived at the station after a long journey and had hurriedly changed his shirt—the talkative Serbian woman at the table at the back announced, for all to hear:
—Tiens, un nouveau jeune homme!…
Stefan had been doubly grateful. For the nouveau and for the jeune homme. He had felt old a week earlier, on his way out of his final medical exam, and weary. Tired after the sleepless nights, the mornings at the hospital, long afternoons in the library, and the two-hour exam in a dim hall before a deaf professor who was dressed for winter and whose collar appeared to be dirty…And then the name of this Alpine lake, stumbled upon on a map in a bookshop, the train ticket bought at the first travel agency he’d come across, the trip through big stores to buy a white sweater, gray flannel trousers, and a summer shirt. And then a journey that was like an escape.
Un nouveau jeune homme.
Stefan doesn’t know anybody. He’s been greeted in passing a few times but has not let himself be drawn out. His accent makes him coy; he is not eager to give himself away as foreign on the first day. He passes between the tables after lunch, aloof, with the trace of a frown. Perhaps he seems gruff. But it’s just laziness.
Above, behind the terrace, the forest begins. There’s a small clearing there with dense, long, yielding grass. He crushes it beneath the weight of his sleepy body all afternoon and the next day finds that it has sprung back completely, as though it had never been touched. He throws himself down, arms spread, legs stretched out, his head buried in the vegetation. He succumbs to what is forcing him down, though he wishes he could fight it.
A squirrel has leaped from one hazel to another. How do you say squirrel in French? There’s an immense silence…No. That’s not true. That’s an expression from books. There’s an immense racket going on, an immense animal hubbub, crickets chirping, frantic grasshoppers, and the clink of the carapaces of beetles as they collide in midair and plummet earthward like beads of lead. In all this, the sound of Stefan Valeriu’s own breathing is one more detail, one more little expression of life, no more trivial or essential than a squirrel leaping or that grasshopper perched on the toe of his boot, believing it to be a stone. It’s good to be here, an animal, a creature, a nobody, sleeping and breathing on a two-meter patch of grass under a common sun.
If it felt like thinking, how would a cricket think about eternity? And if that eternity had the savor of this afternoon…Below, on the guesthouse terrace, chairs and shawls and white dresses can be seen. And beyond, the idyllic, clear, blue lake. A postcard.