St. Nicholas Day

St. Nicholas Day is the calendar reference that most clearly reveals how ordinary time has become unreliable inside the mountain house. The narrator first identifies the date as December 7, then immediately doubts whether it is still December 6, remembering that the previous day was St. Nicholas Day and that even Esther had failed to think of it. The festive marker, normally associated with a shared family observance, instead becomes evidence of temporal confusion, repetition, and the family’s estrangement from the world outside the house.

Calendar Marker and Temporal Uncertainty

St. Nicholas Day appears within the narrator’s notebook as he tries to establish when the latest escape attempt is taking place. He writes December 7, then asks whether it may still be the sixth, adding that St. Nicholas Day was yesterday. The correction does not resolve the uncertainty. It makes the date itself unstable, because the narrator cannot determine whether midnight has passed. The calendar remains visible as a system of names and numbered days, but it no longer performs its ordinary function of placing experience in a continuous sequence.

The uncertainty is especially significant because the narrator remembers that even Esther did not think of St. Nicholas Day. A child’s failure to notice or celebrate a familiar seasonal occasion marks the household’s detachment from customary time. The date is not simply forgotten; it is displaced by the crisis inside the house, where immediate survival and the search for an exit have overwhelmed the rituals that ordinarily organize family life.

The Feast Day Within the Mountain House

The reference to St. Nicholas Day occurs while the narrator and Esther are attempting to leave by walking backward. He has unplugged the device playing the film, taken Esther’s hand, and prepared to move toward the door without turning around. The date therefore accompanies a deliberate reversal of ordinary behavior: instead of walking normally, they retreat backward through the house in the hope that the altered movement might help them escape. St. Nicholas Day belongs to the familiar calendar, while the backward walk belongs to the house’s impossible rules; their proximity shows the collision between everyday life and an environment in which ordinary logic no longer guarantees safety.

The house initially appears as a modern, architect-designed building rather than a musty Alpine hut, with two stories, a narrow upper balcony, and a large living-room window. Its attractive, orderly appearance contrasts with the temporal disorder that later emerges inside it. The date is one of the last surviving pieces of ordinary orientation, yet even this modest certainty begins to dissolve as the narrator questions whether the day has changed.

Repetition, Escape, and Return

The date’s instability is reinforced by the repeated structure of the escape attempt. The narrator and Esther reach the hall, pass a half-open door that seems not to have existed before, and encounter an empty room containing a bare lightbulb and a wooden chair missing a leg. The narrator feels an unusually strong desire to enter but resists and pulls Esther onward. Their progress is therefore both physical and interpretive: each new opening may be an exit, but it may also be another invitation into the house’s altered geometry.

The apparent escape culminates in a devastating return. Outside, the woods begin to brighten, tree trunks become visible, and the narrator believes that they have made it. Carrying Esther, whose weight leaves his arm muscles trembling, he moves toward a lit house. At first he hopes the building is only similar to the one they left, but the pointed roof, wide front door, empty parking area, illuminated window, long table, kitchen, and open hall door prove that it is the same house. The return converts the date from a neutral measure of progress into another sign that forward movement and chronological progress may be illusory.

Separation and Narrative Significance

St. Nicholas Day also stands against the later separation of the family. When Susanna drives away with Esther, the narrator sees Esther’s pale face in the rear window before the car disappears around the bend. Susanna and Esther return to the road and to a world that appears to permit departure, while the narrator remains with the house. The ordinary calendar thus divides into two incompatible experiences: for them, leaving may restore sequence and distance; for him, the house continues to absorb time, space, and identity.

As a narrative device, St. Nicholas Day turns a familiar seasonal occasion into a measure of loss. It recalls the family’s place within ordinary domestic life while emphasizing that this life has become inaccessible. The narrator’s uncertainty over December 6 and December 7 is not a minor bookkeeping error. It gives temporal form to the larger catastrophe: the household can no longer rely on shared rituals, the house can no longer be treated as a stable location, and the narrator can no longer be certain that an attempted departure leads anywhere beyond the house’s reach.