Mihail Sebastian - The Accident

“I look ridiculous, right?”

“Yes. Do you think there’s anything wrong with that? You, too, should be ridiculous a few times in your life. You can see it does you good.”

Nora didn’t like the garment. It had misshapen sleeves and the buttons needed to be changed.

“We’ll send it to the workshop right away,” the sales clerk said. “He’ll be ready to go in half an hour.”

“And in an hour at the latest,” Nora added, “he has to be home. But no later, please, because we’re leaving this evening.”

She spoke to the sales clerk but in fact, without looking at him, she was directing her words at Paul. Was he going to protest? Was he going to refute her?

“This evening.”

In the final analysis this isn’t going to be the stupidest thing I’ve done in my life , Paul thought, looking at himself in the mirror at home. The blue cloth cap, with the short, round peak resembled the cap from a school uniform. The ski suit’s large exterior pockets had been closed with marshal buttons that reminded him of cadet school. Like a high-school boy, like a cadet on a reduced term of service … He smiled as he rediscovered old memories.

He strolled around the room for the sheer pleasure of hearing the hobnailed boots on the parquet floor, sounding like his old heavy tread during his nights of sentry duty. How good those nights had been: waking alone at dawn in the frozen countryside of Cotroceni without even a thought, not an expectation, scrutinizing the winter nights, through which sometimes, who knew from where, a screech would come from beyond the horizon, maybe from the mountains, maybe from the forests!

He looked at his work clothes, which he had taken off, his overcoat hanging on a peg. If he could, by separating himself from them, separate himself from himself… If he could, by putting on these new clothes, begin a new life…

It was childish, certainly, but it was a childishness he wanted to believe in.

Who was that young man in the mirror, with the peak of the cap over his forehead, with his throat bare, with the suit of rough fabric buttoned up to the neck. I don’t know. It seems to me that I’ve seen him before somewhere, but I don’t know him.

Up until now , Paul thought, I’ve done so many stupidly reasonable things, and they’ve all turned out badly… I’m finally going to do something really stupid, a completely senseless stupidity…Maybe it’ll bring me luck.

He was still intimidated by the skis. He didn’t know how he had held them on his shoulders while those two poles, with their wooden hoops and their metal points, only encumbered him further. He remembered cinema images of tumultuous ski races, skiers flying through clouds of snow. It had all struck him as fantastic, unimaginable. It was difficult for him to understand how those two long black shafts, with their iron bindings, with the complication of their buckles, screws and loops, could move so swiftly, as though floating over the snow. He wished he could look in the mirror once he was on his skis, as though he were in full flight. Nora had shown him a few times how to slip the boot into the binding, how to secure the ski to his feet. But would he try it?

He lined up the two skis on the carpet, with the boot on top, one next to the other (“Absolutely parallel and very close together,” as Nora said). He took pains to place the steel loop of the bindings around the heel of the hobnailed boots, precisely in the deep groove in the heels. The loop was too new and the spring was stiff. His right leg slid into place, but his left was still resistant. On his knees, with the peaked cap pulled peevishly around to the back, embittered by this resistance, Paul wrestled with this excessively short, or excessively stiff, loop.

In the middle of this struggle, he was caught unawares by the sound of the doorbell. Who could it be? Certainly not Nora. They had agreed to meet at the station a quarter of an hour prior to the train’s departure. Who then?

He was furious at not being left in peace to attach his left boot to the ski, furious that now he had to undo the right one. With the ski on his foot, he couldn’t have been able to get into the entrance hall.

From outside, the ringing continued.

“I’m coming, just wait, I’m coming,” Paul shouted, more irate than before since this time, in a much more serious development, the right boot refused to come out of the binding, while the loop seemed to be stuck in the groove for eternity.

This would be amusing, if I wasn’t able to get out of here . He saw himself imprisoned by these wooden shafts, which he was condemned to haul around behind him and which, being more than two metres long, would prevent him from moving about his apartment, as if he had been nailed to chairs, to a desk, to the walls. No one could escape from this mess. Maybe Nora, if I could succeed in dragging myself to the telephone and calling her . But not even Nora, for — he recalled — the key was in the door, and he wouldn’t be able to open it.

Now and then the doorbell stopped ringing ( Maybe they’ve left, maybe they’ve gone away ), but later it would start again with the insistence of someone who was determined to wait as long as it might take.

Shortly afterward, Paul succeeded in freeing himself. An idea for his rescue crossed his mind. He had only to undo the boot lace and slip his foot out, leaving the boot attached to the ski. I’ll free the boot later , he told himself, pleased with the simplicity of the solution, which he had thought of only when the situation had seemed most humorous and hopeless.

He hobbled towards the entrance hall, with a shoe on one foot and only a sock on the other.

“Stop ringing, I’m coming.”

It was a man from the flower shop, with a bouquet wrapped in white paper.

“Who’s it from?”

“I don’t know. A lady.”

“Did it come with a letter?”

“No.”

He waited until he was alone, closed the door and only then lifted the paper. It was two bows of white lilacs. He looked at them with a long, strange gaze. Where had they come from? Whom had they come from? He held them in his hand with a murky feeling of lateness, of uselessness. Maybe they were a mistake… Maybe they weren’t for him…

He didn’t have the strength to touch them. Their cold, powerless breath felt far away from him. Flowers of the snow. Yet the simple way they bent over the branch beneath the weight of their bouquets had something both stalwart and fragile… He knew that bending like an approaching face, like a backward glance over the shoulder. It was Ann’s questioning motions, it was her shy expectation when confronted with a silence that had gone on too long…

He let the flowers fall from his hand, either on the armchair or on the couch, he wasn’t even sure where. He had the impression that they were demanding a response that he didn’t know how to give.

Everything around him now had the bitter taste of awakening from drunkenness. The room was in a sad mess, as though from a debauched night. What meaning did these things have, tossed down wherever they happened to have fallen: the open cupboard, the dirty laundry ready to be packed up, the backpack flung across an armchair?

Hampered by the two skis, he remained standing diagonally in the middle of the room. He was ashamed of the stubbornness with which, five minutes earlier, he had been fighting with them to put them on and take them off. Now they lay there like broken toys… How stupid, how miserable he must be to have allowed himself for even one moment to be dragged into this ridiculous skiing trip…

Ann was coming back. The flowers she had sent were her way of asking if she could come back.