Mihail Sebastian - The Accident

“Is that sealskin?” somebody near him asked, stroking the glossy sole of his new skis. Paul didn’t know how to reply and, at a loss, shot a glance in Nora’s direction. She replied on his behalf, explaining that she didn’t have a lot of confidence in sealskin and preferred a rough wax for the ascent. The whole theoretical debate about the ascent heated up, drawing in everyone sitting nearby, who passionately defended different opinions.

“It’s heresy. Yes, yes, heresy!” shouted the defender of sealskin.

“Take a look at what Dumény says,” a very young boy, probably in high school or a first-year university student, asserted with even more stubbornness. Ransacking his backpack, he pulled out a book, which he flipped through nervously until he found the page he had mentioned: “ Il n’y rien qui puisse remplacer, dans une ascension difficile, l’usage des peaux de phoque. L’incommodité apparente du procédé est largement rachetée par l’assurance et la stabilité acquises .” 13

Nora listened with her patient smile to the reading of entire pages. Alone in this group of impassioned skiers, she remained calm and spoke in a measured voice, without excitement. She really is a teacher , Paul thought, watching her. Everything she said was clear, she asked questions with precision, looking the person whom she was addressing in the eyes. She spoke in an unhurried way about matters she knew well.

Paul thought about the night they had spent together. I had that girl naked in my arms . Yet he was unable to remember her body. It all seemed to have happened once upon a time, years ago. He looked attentively at her lips, which he had kissed, and sought in his memory their forgotten taste. Nothing in her manner betrayed the fact that she was his lover. She spoke with a quiet distance, her great tranquillity harbouring a protectiveness, and paid equal attention to each word. She could be a colleague , Paul thought, looking at her tightly zipped coat, the heavy boots on her feet.

He was sorry for all that had happened. He would have liked to wipe away the useless night of lovemaking that lay between them, which had both brought them together and kept them apart.

Nora watched him sleeping. For a long time she had pretended that she was reading, but now, when she knew that she was protected at last by his slumber, she raised her eyes from the book and watched him.

They had passed through Câmpina, maybe even through Cormarnic. Only the blue night lights continued to burn in the carriage. Everyone seemed to be sleeping, with a single regular breathing. Now and then, from a carriage behind them, came the sound of a harmonica, covered up in a second by the noise of the wheels. Nora waited for it to return. At least there’s one other person in this train who’s standing watch… She felt as though she were standing watch in a shelter.

Paul had fallen asleep with his head resting softly on his shoulder and propped up with his temple against the window. How young he is and how tired he looks! Nora thought. From beneath his closed eyelids, she still felt last night’s misty stare. Only the bitter smile had vanished from his lips, almost without a trace. It pleased her to observe the relaxed state of his mouth, which now could neither soothe nor wound.

“You were born to be a nurse on a night shift,” Grig used to tell her. Nora remembered these words, which had probably been an insult. Poor old Grig! He never knew how to offend me. The truth was that Grig had never known about her habit of watching him in his sleep. He would wake up in the middle of the night beneath her attentive gaze, beneath her wide-awake eyes, which were focused on him, and would ask her in a blustering way: “What do you want?” Her reply was always the same: “Nothing. I want you to sleep.”

She might make the same response to the man who was now sleeping in front of her, and whom she had been watching for such a long time. “I want you to sleep, I want you to forget, I want you to sleep.”

In Predeal the two skiers’ carriages were left half-empty. Nora wondered whether they shouldn’t have got off, too. They could have found spots in the bivouac at Onef, or gone on with the sleigh to Timiş, where so many small hotels had opened. But she was afraid he would have been uncomfortable in the bivouac, and Timiş was too expensive. She counted her money in her mind and remembered that Paul owed her 282 lei for their train tickets. We’ll have to make sure we keep our accounts clear.

Coloured posters and signs in the station announced competitions, both slalom and ski jumping, for the days around Christmas. Instead of Predeal at dawn, deserted, its streets empty, paralysed by deep snow, Nora saw the modern Predeal of the days of the championship, full of cars, dress clothes and acquaintances; a Predeal that was beginning to resemble a casino, a dance hall or a reception room.

From the window of the carriage, her gaze turned backwards in the direction of the peak of Mount Omului, lost in the clouds as though in an immense avalanche of snow. She looked in the blackness for the distant point where she knew the cabin must be. She would have liked to ascend there, or maybe somewhere lower down, in the direction of Ialomicioara, in the direction of Bolboci. But from wherever she might have set out, from Buşteni or from Sinaia, the trek would have had to be made in a group and with serious equipment. She looked with a smile at Paul’s new skis, with the varnish intact, the metal bindings gleaming, without a scratch, without a speck of rust. What would he have done with them on Piatra Arsă?

The train, meanwhile, headed off again. A few skiers prepared to get off at Timişul-de-Jos. “Are you climbing Piatra Mare?” Nora asked them. She knew the trail and, so far as she could recall, it was very easy. She had done it in 1929, in the summer, after her last exam at university, and had slept there in a sort of wooden shed where dozens of beds had been lined up on two storeys.

“There’s a new chalet there now,” someone told her.

“But I don’t think there’s a ski trail,” Nora observed. “Piatra Mare is more of a summer mountain. I’d like something wider, more open.” And farther away , she added in her mind.

Daylight was starting to break and she would have liked the day that was beginning to find her far away.

The windows turned a smokey blue. They emerged from the night as though from a long tunnel.

THEY CLIMBED UP TO POIANA BRAŞOV in the “caterpillar,” a truck whose wheels were ringed with chains so that it didn’t bog down in the snow.

“I think Poiana is the best spot,” Nora said. “I should have thought of it from the start. It’s open, it’s wide, it has gentle slopes. Have you never been here? You don’t know the Braşov area?”

“Of course,” Paul replied, “but only the part around the Seven Towns. I spent a vacation there a long time ago. In Cernatu, in Satu-Lung…”

And he fell silent with a vague stare that revealed something uncertain beyond the woods, like a lost sense of direction. He would have liked to lift his shoulders with his customary gesture of indifference and distaste, but the weight of his backpack prevented him from completing the movement.

“See how good that pack is?” Nora said. “Wear it on your back for ten days and you’ll lose that habit of making apathetic gestures.”

Only after she had uttered these words did she realize how intimately she had spoken to him. ( Last night, when we were leaving, I was still more formal with him .) It was as if the night on the train had made him into an old acquaintance, that night during which, never the less, she had not heard him speak two consecutive sentences. She fell silent, embarrassed by this familiarity, which seemed to be pushing things too quickly. She glanced at her watch and made a rapid calculation: I’ve known him for thirty-one hours . She was alone with him in this open truck that was carrying them through the morning woods, she was alone with him and she didn’t even know if she had the right to lean on his arm.