Mihail Sebastian - The Accident

On the top floor the young gentleman in the grey overcoat was waiting for her. She looked at him in astonishment, unable to understand what was going on.

“You?”

“Me. I forgot to give you the iodine tincture and the oxygenated water.”

Indeed, he pulled two bottles out of his pocket enveloped in the pharmacy’s multicoloured paper.

“And how did you get up here?”

“By the stairs.”

“Six floors?”

“Six.”

What an odd guy! she thought, watching him for a moment, intrigued again by his lack of expression. Now, too, he had that far-away, unquestioning gaze, which she had first seen when she had raised her head from the snow.

She remembered that she had been crying. Embarrassed, she lowered her eyes; but it was too late: he had noticed.

“You were crying?”

“No… Well, yes. A little. But it’s not important! It’s never important when I cry…”

She took the key out of her handbag.

“Do you want to come in for a moment?”

He responded by lifting his shoulders.

“Does that mean Yes, or does that mean No?”

“I don’t know what it means. It’s a habitual gesture. Let’s say Yes.”

“So come in.”

Next to the door was a small, metal plate: Nora Munteanu . He asked the question with his eyes and she confirmed: “That’s me.”

The water was boiling. She had thrown a handful of lavender into the pot, and the apartment was full of warm, aromatic vapours.

“Can you smell it over there?”

“What?”

“The lavender.”

“It’s lavender? Yes, I can smell it.”

His voice, even more muffled than usual, came from the adjoining room, through the door that Nora had left ajar in order to be able to speak to him while she ran her bath.

“You’re not bored?”

“No.”

“Are you comfortable?”

“Yes.”

In fact, she had sat him down in an arm chair and set a pile of illustrated magazines in front of him. “Like at the dentist,” he observed meekly, occupying his assigned place.

“Yes, just like at the dentist. I’ll ask you to behave yourself until I’ve finished. Then we can talk.”

The bath was soporifically good. Nora closed her eyes, overcome by the heat that she felt suffusing in a sweet torpor through her entire body. Deep inside her, fine blood vessels, which she thought that the cold had frozen shut, began to open.

Nora felt an access of companionship for this body of hers, well-known, familiar and reliable. It felt like a rediscovered old acquaintance and she caressed it with comradely sympathy. Her hand lingered on her breast, as on a round cheek. She would have liked to fall asleep…

In the adjoining room she heard a chair move.

“Did you want something?”

“No. I was looking at the photograph on your desk. Who is it?”

“Me.”

“In that costume?”

“It’s a ski costume. I was at Predeal. Do you like it?”

He didn’t reply. Maybe he hadn’t heard the question, which she had asked in an offhand tone, her voice dropping. She heard him turning a page: he must be reading.

Nora thought about him and realized with surprise that she had forgotten him. She knew he was in the next room, sunken in her armchair, on the other side of the door she had left ajar, yet she was unable to remember what his face looked like. His features melted into uncertainty under a vague smile, as though under a diffused light.

On the other hand, she remembered clearly the tie he was wearing, a green tie of rough wool, with tiny oblique parallel seams…

It’s a nice tie, but he doesn’t know how to tie it. The knot’s crooked. I’ll have to teach him how to knot a tie like a normal person.

In the next room, the telephone rang loudly.

“What should I do?” her quiet guest asked from the sofa.

“Nothing. Let it ring.”

The ringing continued, ever longer, ever harsher. Nora smiled with fatigue. Only one person would let the phone ring that long.

“Be a good boy and answer.”

He lifted the receiver, said, “Hello,” then, after a pause, replaced it.

“What happened?”

“I don’t know. Nobody answered. And somebody hung up without a word.”

“It must be Grig.”

“Grig?”

“Yes, a friend. He must have been surprised to hear a man’s voice here. He probably thought he’d got a wrong number.”

Nora’s supposition seemed to be correct because the phone rang again.

“Don’t be offended. Please answer it. Tell him that I’m in the bath and that he should call me in five minutes.”

She held her breath and listened with her ear cocked towards the next room so that she could also catch the voice coming from the receiver. She heard it vibrating metallically, as far away as though it came from a minuscule gramophone record.

“Hello. Is that 2-65-80? Are you sure it’s not a wrong number?”

“No, sir. It’s not a wrong number.”

“Then who’s speaking?” the little metallic voice asked.

“Miss Nora asks that you…”

“I’m not interested in what Miss Nora asks. I want to know who’s speaking.”

“Sir, Miss Nora is in the bath and she asks you…”

“I don’t want to know where Miss Nora is. I want to know who you are, buddy.”

A moment’s silence followed, then a brief noise, cut off as the receiver dropped into the cradle somewhere far away, breaking the connection.

“Now what…?” he asked Nora, with a calmness that suggested that the strange conversation hadn’t bothered him.

“Nothing. Go back to your spot in the armchair and wait for me. I’ll be there in a second.”

Nora came in dressed in a white bathrobe that was a little too big for her.

She made straight for his armchair, switched on the small, shaded lamp on the the nearby sofa and slid it close to him, abruptly illumining his face.

“What’s up?”

“Nothing. I want to see you. Imagine that, I’d forgotten what you looked like. The whole time I was in the bath I was racking my brains trying to remember.”

She scrutinized him with great seriousness while he calmly put up with her scrutiny.

“Have you finished?”

“Yes, for the time being. Your face isn’t strongly defined. Difficult to remember.”

He lifted his shoulders. She recognized the gesture.

“I don’t like that lifting of your shoulders.”

He didn’t reply, while she watched him at greater length, tracing his vaguely outlined features, in which she discerned a blend of fatigue and boyishness.

“You’re a murky kind of guy. I bet you came out of the fog.”

On the sofa were the two bottles purchased at the pharmacy. Nora took them and went to the side of the night table in order to dress her “wounds,” as she called them, exaggerating to make a joke.

She pulled aside the bathrobe with a considered modesty and unveiled her right leg up to the knee, only as far as was necessary to put on the bandages. Properly speaking, she wasn’t wounded. They were more like scratches, although very bad ones, since even after her steaming hot bath they were still bleeding slightly.

He followed the operation from the armchair, waiting as if to hear her cry when she pressed the iodine-soaked swab against her bleeding ankle. But her gestures had the polite, objective quality of those of a nurse bending over an unfamiliar patient. Her black hair fell over her forehead in a gesture absent of flirtatiousness.

She continued for some time to run the cotton swab over her ankle, then over her knee, completely absorbed in what she was doing. Finally she interrupted her movements as though she had just remembered a forgotten matter of business. “You weren’t bothered by that phone call just now?”