Mihail Sebastian - The Accident

Paul felt the teacher’s eyes on him. As long as I don’t make a mistake , he thought, looking straight at the tip of his right ski. He was like a pupil who was failing the class.

He set out slowly, paying careful attention. The snow was soft, spongy, and at first he had the impression that the skis were sinking, but then he felt them sliding noiselessly forward, meeting no resistence. Nora came behind him, checking his movements.

“Your arms are too far apart. Hold them closer to your body, almost stuck to it… Yes, that’s better, but now they’re too stiff… Move more freely, more simply…”

Hagen accompanied them for a while to show them the trail. Then, after leading them out of a small glade, he stopped.

“I’m turning around here. Pay attention to where you’re going so that you’ll know how to get back here. Gunther usually eats at one o’clock. If you’re late, he’ll have to wait for you.”

He stood there with Faffner and watched them for a few moments as they left.

“You know that man frightens me?” Nora asked Paul in a whisper.

“I know. It’s his dark cape.”

“No. The eyes. His blue eyes.” And then, after another silence, surprised by the resemblance that she had only just discovered, she added: “He almost has Gunther’s eyes. It’s the same blue.”

They both turned their heads. Hagen, unmoving, was in the same spot. With the dark cape on his shoulders he looked, from a distance, like the trunk of a burnt tree.

The ski run in front of the Touring Club chalet was full of people. Saxons from the SKV Club had also arrived in rowdy groups. On the biggest slope, which descended from immediately below the mountain’s summit, a military team was training for the competitions in Predeal. From a distance they looked like black stars that had fallen on a sky of snow. The entire landscape was undulating with huge white drifts that rose towards the sky and stopped short in movements that had frozen while in flux.

Nora and Paul stopped at the crest of the wave.

“Here you have to go down, Paul.”

“You think so?”

“I’m sure.”

Flustered, he glanced at the slope that opened in front of him. Right away it looked threatening. I’m going to fall , he said to himself. He would have liked to ask for a respite, an adjournment. Wasn’t this slope too hard for a beginner? Wouldn’t it have been more appropriate to start with something simple? He raised his eyes towards Nora, but he didn’t dare say anything to her. In her face he read the pitilessness of the teacher who has asked a question and now expects a reply.

“Look here, Paul. You bend your knees like two bows. You understand? Like two bows.” She looked him straight in the eyes and pronounced the words syllable by syllable. “The poles facing backwards, as far back as possible. To make sure, put your hands on your hips. Like that. Head facing forward, shoulders forward, body bent… Bend a little farther… Like that… The skis next to each other, perfectly parallel… Now go…”

I still have time to stop , Paul thought. I still have time to stop on the spot, I still have time…

The skis set off slowly on their own. Then he suddenly had the sensation that they were no longer on his feet. A wave of snow came sturdily towards him. I’m falling! Something deafening, a thunder clap or a deep silence, covered everything.

He woke up abruptly. He was standing motionless on his skis. Maybe I didn’t go anywhere. Maybe it just seemed that way . He looked around in search of Nora in order to convince himself that in fact he had stayed next to her, and that this whirlpool from which he was emerging breathless was no more than a moment’s vertigo. She called to him from far away, making a sign with her right hand in the air.

“I really did it,” Paul said, measuring the impossible distance with his eyes.

In an instant Nora was beside him.

“Bravo, Paul. I’m delighted for you. I’m proud of you.”

They were on the crest of a wave of snow. Before them lay a new slope, longer but less steep than the previous one.

“Shall we go for it?” Nora asked.

“Let’s go!”

He pushed off without waiting for her to signal their departure. Again he had the sensation that his skis were losing their weight and that he was rushing before them, floating or falling. There was a sensation of intense brightness. Something struck him in the face and blinded him. For a moment he didn’t know whether he was still floating, or whether he had fallen. Then he felt that he was rolling down the valley, his head in the snow, his feet in the air and his skis locked together. When he managed to lift his face out of the snow, Nora was bending towards him, laughing.

“What happened?” he asked, bewildered.

“Nothing more than what you see: you fell.”

“Is it serious?”

“It’s not serious. It’s solemn.”

She helped him get to his feet and brush off the snow.

“You’re laughing at me.”

“No, my dear Paul, you’re talking too seriously. In skiing, after the first fall, nothing is solemn anymore. You learn to ski by falling. From here on in, you’re going to fall dozens of times, hundreds of times. That was your first fall.”

He glanced backwards at the slope he had got only halfway down: he had left behind two parallel trails in the snow, resembling two rails of a train line, interrupted at the point where he had fallen, as though his skis had jumped the track. “I don’t understand why I fell.”

“Because you’re keeping your knees rigid. Because your shoulders are too far back. Because you’re throwing your hands out in front of you.”

“Are there any other reasons?”

“There are.”

For an instant she looked him straight in the eyes, and then she burst out laughing, and suddenly they were both laughing. I haven’t seen that smile before , Nora thought. She would have liked to extend her hand to him, with an affectionate enthusiasm for the young man she had discovered that morning. Yet she stopped herself just in time. “Enough joking. Now let’s get moving.”

She spoke these words, “calling the class to order,” as she might have cracked her pencil on a desk in the classroom to silence her pupils.

He gripped her arm, pinning her in place. “I want to say something to you.”

“I’m listening.”

“You’re a teacher.”

“Yes, I am.”

There was a melancholy smile on her face. “What do your pupils call you at school?”

“I don’t know. Probably ‘Miss French Teacher.’”

“All right, I’m going to call you the same thing. ‘Miss French Teacher.’ My Miss French Teacher.”

“No. You’re going to call me something simpler: Nora. Or, if you wish, my Nora.”

She turned abruptly on her skis and took off down the valley in a cloud of snow.

You’re ridiculous, Nora, you’re ridiculous. Why do you say such stupid things? Why do you let your mouth run away with you? What will that man think of you? Where’s the sporting pact you’ve sealed with him? Where’s your discretion? Where’s your modesty?

She wanted to cry. She had reached the bottom of the ski hill, next to the woods, in a single instant, and she would have liked to hurl herself onto a run that was ten times as risky in order to forget, to flee from herself, to punish herself. She could barely make him out, motionless, at the point where she had left him, lost among skiers who were climbing or descending past him. She supposed that he had followed her blinding descent with his gaze and that he still had his eyes fixed on her, for now he had lifted his peaked cap and, waving it, was signalling to her. From the summit of the mountain the military team was descending in a group towards the chalet, cutting diagonally across the hill like an avalanche. The cloud of snow unleashed by their passage covered him as well, and now he was nowhere to be seen. Nora was seeking him out, paying careful attention to the distant line where she knew him to be, when suddenly she saw him springing up much closer to her, on a rise that he had somehow climbed over from the other side and was now swiftly descending.