Marcel Moring - In Babylon

She looked at her watch. ‘Eight o’clock?’

‘Sounds about right.’

‘I drove away and then … what d’you call it … walked right back. It can’t … be that late.’

‘It took you almost two and a half hours to get back here.’

She picked up the sleeping bag, which had slid onto the floor, and pulled it around her. ‘Less. First I tried to turn the car round. I revved the engine for at least half an hour, but I couldn’t get it out of the snow.’ She stared straight ahead. Her long hair glowed in the light of the flames. ‘First it moved, but then it got stuck. I sat in the car for a while, with the engine running. To keep warm. And then I got out and headed back. Kept on falling. The whole time. The wind was blowing so hard I had to hold on to the trees. I was scared that if I lost my way I’d freeze to death.’ She took her cigarette and breathed in the smoke as if it were pure oxygen. I could picture the trek over the snow-covered paths, the light slowly turning to dusk, the wall of trees on either side of the path and the icy whirl of the blizzard. If I had had to bet on the outcome of that journey, I would never have put my money on her.

‘And then I got here and practically beat down the door, but you didn’t open it!’

‘I was asleep.’

She shook her head. ‘Could I have another cigarette?’

I felt around in my jacket until I found them. ‘We’ll have to ration them. There are twenty left. That means we can smoke five a day.’

‘I don’t normally smoke, you know.’

‘Normally …’ I handed her a cigarette and lit it for her. We drank and stared into the fire.

‘Five. What do you mean, five? You think we’re going to be here for five days?’

I nodded. ‘Maybe. Three, at least. I heard it on the radio this afternoon. This isn’t just another snowstorm, this is a national disaster. Entire villages are cut off from the civilized world, people are stranded in their cars, in weekend cottages and service stations. The snowploughs won’t get up the Mountain until last. If they ever get here at all. No one knows we’re here. This house has been vacant for five years, more than five years. Why should they even be looking, and why here, of all places?’

‘So …’

‘So we have to improvise. And ration. And plot. And …’

She sighed.

‘As long as we’re here and it stays this cold, we’ll have to keep gathering wood and keep the fires burning.’ I stood up and threw another piece of Louis XV in the hearth. ‘This is going to be the opposite of a holiday.’

‘Why,’ said Nina, ‘do I get the feeling that you don’t mind?’

I shrugged my shoulders, picked up the bottle, and filled our glasses. The fire licked at a gleaming, dark brown chair leg, almost as if it were teasing me about this compulsory iconoclasm, the burning of Uncle Herman’s collection of ‘family heirlooms’. A soft hiss escaped from the fire and the wood began to burn.

‘Let’s make a deal,’ I said, my eyes glued to the dancing flames. ‘You tell me why you took off this afternoon and I’ll read you my version of Uncle Herman’s life.’

She was quiet.

‘Or we could always just not talk to each other for the next few days.’

‘You think I’m here for the fun of it?’

‘No, I don’t think you’re here for the fun of it. You’d much rather be somewhere else.’

I tried to tear my eyes away from the hearth, but couldn’t. At the centre of the flames, a hollow formed. The room around me turned red. A tunnel of black bored through the tinted glow. I peered down the tube and saw, way off in the distance, something glimmering, a fragment, no more than a speck. The walls of the tunnel began moving past me. The red faded, the walls moved faster and faster until they were streaking past and as I stared into the half-light at the end of the tunnel something began to take shape. I squinted and leaned slightly forward. I felt my body moving sideways, as if part of me wanted to fall and part of me didn’t.

When I finally looked up, Nina was staring into space. She sat as still as an alabaster statue. Total serenity, even her eyes had stopped gleaming. She blew out cigarette smoke with the clumsiness of a non-smoker.

‘Regret,’ Zeno had once said, ‘is the most destructive human emotion. You only feel regret when it’s too late. If something can be restored, there’s no question of regret. Remorse, perhaps, or guilt. But regret, what I mean by regret, is mourning for the irreversibility of things.’

I picked up my mug. As I drank, staring into the black mirror of the coffee, the image of the tunnel returned. I put down the mug and took a deep breath. The smell of coffee mingled with my fear of what lay at the end of that tunnel. I reached for the cigarettes and pulled one out of the pack. My hand shook as I brought the tiny match flame up to light it. Nina was watching me. When the match went out, I threw it in the hearth and lit another. I looked at Nina. No, not at her, at what she was.

‘Listen,’ I said. ‘If we want to stay alive, it’s time to gather wood. I’ll go and pull down part of that barricade.’

‘Bar –’ She remembered the pile of furniture at the top of the stairs. ‘I want to get out of here,’ she said.

I was already at the door. ‘You’ll have to wait until the storm clears, Nina, and the way it looks now that could take several days.’

She groaned softly. ‘There’s no phone, the car’s stuck. What do we have?’

‘Nothing. No water, no electricity. We never had gas to begin with. We’re Robinson Crusoe in the wintertime.’

She got up from her chair and started pulling on the socks that were still on the floor. ‘I lost my shoes.’

‘I’ll catch a goat tomorrow and make you a new pair.’

‘Very funny.’

I grinned. ‘Uncle Herman used to have a pair of those indestructible hiking boots. They’re around here somewhere. If you wear two pairs of socks, they should fit you. He didn’t have very big feet.’

‘There’s no light in the hall, is there? Are there any flashlights?’

‘None that I know of.’

‘Why exactly isn’t there any electricity?’

‘I had it disconnected, years ago.’

Nina shook her head. ‘If you’re not here and you don’t use anything, it doesn’t cost anything, either.’

I was silent. Suddenly I thought of the calor gas burner that I had seen in the cellar. It wouldn’t give much light, but certainly more than a candle. Nina could hold it up while I wrenched loose part of the barricade and threw it downstairs.

‘Was there a lamp fixture?’ she asked, when I had explained my plan. She got up from her chair and came walking towards me.

‘A what?’

‘You use that sort of burner when you go camping. If you attach a lamp fixture, you’ve got a lantern.’

‘I don’t know. Didn’t see any.’

Nina picked up a candelabra and followed me. There were four of us in the hall. To our left, against the staircase and the high white walls, huge, misshapen shadows walked along with us. I heard Nina shudder. ‘It really does look like a haunted house,’ she said. ‘All we need now are a couple of burning torches and some creepy organ music.’

‘Or a corpse in a closet.’

‘Hey! Would you stop that?’

‘You don’t have to be scared of the dead,’ I said. ‘The living are much worse.’

‘God. You really know how to put a person at ease, don’t you?’

In the box of gas canisters Nina found a wide glass tube and a burner with a kind of wick. ‘This is it,’ she said. ‘You attach it to the bottle and then …’

‘… there is light.’

She observed me for a while, then smiled.

At the foot of the stairs I attached the lamp to the gas canister. Nina held the candles and gave instructions. I put the canister down on the stairs, turned on the gas, and held up a match. The burner started raging and cast a blinding white light all around us. ‘Isn’t this cosy,’ I said. ‘I suddenly remember why I never liked camping.’ Nina blew out the candles, put the candelabra on the floor, and picked up the lantern we had made. I grabbed the tools, the axe and the sharpened hoe, and we walked upstairs. My shadow glided across the ceiling, the brightly lit staircase, the hole in the barricade. When Nina came and stood next to me, the black figure shot away to the side of the hall.