Mihail Sebastian - The Accident

“Please forgive me for looking through your papers on the desk. I flipped through your agenda and I saw that you had to be in court this afternoon. At first I didn’t understand what was written there. Your writing is a mess, but I’m used to all sorts of handwriting… I told you I’m a teacher… I tried to imagine what C.C. II meant. It had to be Commercial Court, Section Two. I didn’t think I’d be able to come. Nor could I have done so. I’m usually in class on Tuesday afternoons from three to five. Today I’m taking a vacation… I started to go home, and, I don’t know how, passing in front of the courthouse, I told myself that I could go in… You don’t know how lost I got wandering through all sorts of rooms and corridors. I didn’t think you’d see me. I would have liked you not to see me…”

They had stopped for a few moments in front of the window of a flower shop on Senate Square. Nora was talking and realized that he wasn’t listening. What could he be looking at with such intensity? In the window there were several sprigs of white lilac, as white as the newly fallen snow. Very tender and very droopy, the sprigs were slender, green, bent beneath the weight of their white bouquets. Paul’s gaze had settled there with its usual air of absence, but with the beginnings of a misty smile, which came with difficulty, from far away.

If I leave now, I don’t think he’ll even notice that I’m not beside him any more , Nora thought. And it might even be the wisest thing she could do. She wasn’t angry, she wasn’t hurt, but she was aware that this man was a stranger to her and that nothing could wrest him from his silence. Whatever I say, whatever I do, that stare is not going to change .

She moved slowly away, attentive to her movements, as though she had just awoken from a deep sleep, and crossed the tramline in the direction of the Senate Bridge.

“Nora!”

He called her name for the first time. He was beside her, holding her arm, and looked her straight in the eyes with a gaze that saw her at last.

“Nora, please forgive me. I’m a fool, I don’t have any manners.”

“No, Paul. You’re neither foolish nor lacking in manners. Maybe you’re unhappy.”

He lifted his shoulders. ( If he gave me the time , Nora thought, I’d make him get rid of that habit .)

“Let’s not talk about unhappiness. It’s a word I don’t like. And I don’t think I am. More like weary… yes… very weary…”

He continued to hold her arm with his heavy hand, with his clenched fingers, in a grip that was overly emphatic but in which she found — at last! — a flicker of intimacy. They were walking up from the quai, along the December Dâmboviţa River, which the twilight, the cold, the winter all made look a little less dirty. The evening’s first streetlights came on, and their shadows on the water were whitish in the light of this uncertain hour.

“You could easily hate me, Nora. People like me don’t have the right to get mixed up in accidents in the street. I shouldn’t have been the one to pick you up out of the snow yesterday evening.”

“People like you… Why are you talking about things that make me afraid? I’m bewildered, you know. What kind of person are you?”

“A person who last night you were able to believe might commit suicide. Isn’t that enough?”

They had crossed the Schitu Măgureanu Bridge: passersby were few, the street was empty.

And why was he silent now? He was capable of silences that seemed as though they would never end. How far away was he? How could she call him back? Only his hand, as heavy as ever, retained its grip on her right arm. But just when she believed that all was lost, his voice returned, its flat, even tone no louder than before, as closed off as the silence from which it broke free.

“I have nothing to say to anyone and I have nothing to learn from anyone. Do you understand, Nora? Do you understand why I wanted to run away last night? This morning I still didn’t think it was too late to run away. And now, look — even now, there’s still time. Why did you come to look for me? You could have just forgotten that we ever met. You could have wiped yesterday out of your memory.”

“And last night?” Nora asked, mainly for herself.

“Yes, and last night. We’re both mature enough not to regard that kind of random occurrence as a tragedy. I don’t want to offend you, believe me, but I’d rather offend you than deceive you. You need some friendship, some intimacy. You’re making a mistake in asking that of me. I have nothing to give anyone.”

He was still looking straight in front of him, without turning his head in her direction for even an instant. His lips were still twisted in an expression of vague bitterness.

With that stare that doesn’t look anywhere, with that muffled voice that neither rises nor falls, he can probably say the most horrible things in the world without even realizing it , Nora thought.

“You say that you looked in my agenda on the desk. No doubt you noticed that all the pages between today and the end of the year are blank. That’s what you call a vacation. For every blank page an empty day… What do you think I should do with them?”

“Try to give them away.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You said just now that you had nothing to give. Even so, you’ve got some free time… You call them empty days… Give them to someone… Maybe you’ll find somebody who’ll receive them and do something with them…”

He stopped in mid-stride, and beneath the throbbing of the streetlight he gazed at Nora, thinking he could read in her eyes all that seemed unclear in her words.

“If that’s an invitation, it’s better that I tell you that I can’t accept it.”

“It’s not an invitation. It’s advice. Get away. You’ll be less alone. Go and forget, maybe…”

“Forget what?”

“I don’t know. Whatever it is you have to forget…”

He lifted his shoulders again, with the same gesture of negation, of doubt, of uselessness.

“Leaving… I’ve thought about that, too. Yesterday I even went to a travel agent to ask for information. I had taken my passport with me in the morning, for the visas. That’s why it was in my pocket last night.”

Nora saw again the blue passport, the photograph, the identifying signs, the visa page, Hegenrath, 23 juillet. Again it seemed to her that in the name of that border crossing, in that forgotten date of July 23, 1934, lay his whole mystery.

“Then I decided not to go. Why bother? I’m too lazy, it’s too complicated and above all, I feel that it’s useless. I think I probably don’t even have enough money.”

They were on the Elefterie Bridge. He had leaned over the parapet and was looking in the direction of the two major streets that opened diagonally in front of them: on the left, Bulevardul Elisabeta, lighted up by distant neon signs and the red eye of the Number 14 tram that ran downhill towards Cotroceni, and, on the right, Splaiul Independenţei, snowbound, silent, almost un-Bucharest-like. On the stone parapet the snow had piled up into a foamy, fragile roundness. Nora reached out with her hands and took snow in each hand, holding it carefully in her open palms as though it were a fine powder.

“Have you ever been in the mountains in the winter?”

Nora’s question brought him back from who-knew-what far-away thought. His response was delayed by an excessively lengthy silence.

“No, never in the winter. I’ve climbed Peşteră and Omul a few times, but never in the winter.”

“What a shame! It’s so beautiful! Look, that’s where you should go. To the mountains.”

He didn’t even bother to reply. With a lift of his shoulders, everything became useless. Nora persisted.