Mihail Sebastian - The Accident

“Too fast,” Nora said. “Much too fast!”

She saw him falling and somersaulting towards the valley. But he stood up immediately, white with snow, and set off again without brushing himself down and seemingly without glancing ahead in the direction in which he was going. He collapsed after the first five metres and then Nora looked for him in vain. Groups of skiers cut across his path and hid him from sight.

I should go up ahead and help him , she thought. But he reappeared again, much closer than before, only a few metres away from her. At that speed he’s not going to be able to stop . A step away from her, he let himself fall to the snow.

“How many times did you fall?”

“Five times.”

“How is it?”

“It’s…” He didn’t know how to continue. He looked for a word and didn’t find it. Then, smiling, he said: “I’d like to cry out. I’d like to yell.”

“Yell, then.”

He turned his head towards the woods, ran his hand over his throat and hauled up an extended yell: “Uuuuuu…!” No one replied from the woods, but his yell resounded far away among the fir trees.

“And now,” Nora said, “let’s return to more articulate conversation. Tell me, how is it?”

“I don’t know how to say it. It’s something that surpasses language. It’s something intense. It’s a vast light… I think I’m drunk.”

He threw himself down in the snow with his arms spread and rolled over several times, as though he were rolling in the grass.

A skier came down from the Touring Club chalet and stopped beside them. “Nice weather?”

It was the red-haired Saxon they had met the day before at the SKV chalet. The man with the eyes of the badger , Nora recalled.

“So you found a place to stay at the Touring Club? To tell you the truth, I didn’t think there was much chance that you’d find anything. I didn’t want to make you feel bad, but…”

“We’re not staying at the Touring Club,” Nora said, cutting him off.

“Not at the Touring Club? Then where?”

She made a vague upwards gesture in the direction of the Glade of the Three Maidens. “A cabin up there…”

“Gunther’s cabin?”

Nora didn’t reply, but the man asked again, in disbelief: “Gunther’s cabin?”

There was amazement in his voice, which failed to register in his small, metallic, inexpressive eyes, but which his dense, grizzled eyebrows articulated with an exaggerated arching. “If Old Grodeck had known…,” he said pensively. Then he set off on his skis.

Nora did not have time to ask him either who Old Grodeck was, or what would have happened had he known. What odd things , she thought.

Now they had to climb back up the entire slope. Nora showed Paul how to make broad zigzags from right to left with the edge of the ski pushed obliquely into the snow. “Climb with small steps. Make each stride a step that you’re cutting for yourself in the snow.”

He moved forward, but when he reached either the right or the left edge of the ski hill and had to change direction he was afraid of being caught by the valley and sliding backwards downhill. He was supposed to turn his skis around with a scissor movement that Nora illustrated for him step by step but which, although in theory it struck him as very simple, he couldn’t make. There was a moment when one of the skis had to be lifted into the air, turned quickly and brought alongside the other, everything happening in a single second. Up to this point, things went very well, but in that instant of suspension on a single ski, Paul would lose his balance and fall.

“I give up,” he said, after a few attempts. He hurled himself down into the snow and sat with his arms crossed.

“I, however, am not giving up,” Nora replied. “Please get up and make the turn correctly. We’re not leaving here until you do it.”

They returned to the cabin after one o’clock. Paul was ravenous, exhausted and enthusiastic. “We should have stayed on the ski hill. We would have found something to eat at the Touring Club.”

“You know we can’t do that. Gunther is waiting for us.”

Gunther was not waiting for them. Hagen told them that the boy couldn’t come down for lunch and had asked them to eat without him. “He’s tired. He didn’t sleep all night. He needs rest.”

Nora was about to go up to his room in the tower to see him, but Hagen asked her not to. “It’s nothing serious. Let’s leave him to sleep. If he gets some rest, he’ll come down in the evening.”

“Odd things happen in this house,” Nora said over lunch.

“Odd?” Paul asked. “I don’t see it like that.”

“Then you don’t see anything, my dear.”

“You’re right. I’m giddy, I’m drunk.” Before his eyes he saw only the white stretch of the snow and himself flying over it. He closed his eyes and tried to abolish all thought, as he did in the lightning sensation of soaring, flying, falling. What he couldn’t imagine, couldn’t conjure up, was the deep silence that invaded him in that moment.

“Fortunately, it doesn’t last,” he said suddenly in a loud voice.

“What?” Nora asked, surprised.

“I don’t know how to express it. The falling. The flying. The impact. All in a single second. If it were two, I might die.”

Nora regarded him with a soothing smile. She, too, knew this delirium of the first day of skiing, and she knew it was going to pass. But it made her happy to see that outbreak of brightness on his tired face. It pleased her to listen childishly to his elation.

“It’s dizzying, Nora. Nothing in the world, not wine, not music, not love… no, not love, nothing, nothing brings me so much light. I wonder whether it’s possible, I wonder whether this is me, I wonder whether this miracle is happening to me .”

How young he is , Nora thought. His excessive happiness, his messy delight, frightened her a little. Next to him, she felt too rational, too settled. Maybe too old , she thought, with her teacher’s smile.

Paul wanted to leave right after lunch. He could hardly wait to get back to the ski hill.

“Let’s hurry while it’s still light. It gets dark at four.” He slid forward on his skis with long strides. From behind, Nora corrected his posture, making the same observations again and again: “Arms closer together… Head up… Don’t look at the skis… Look straight ahead…”

On all sides, the horizon was closed off by a white screen of clouds. Nora stopped short.

“What’s the matter?” Paul asked, surprised to no longer hear her teacher’s voice.

“Nothing. Listen.”

It was snowing all over the Burzenland, over the whole Timiş Valley; tons and tons of snow were falling every minute in the endless silence.

“I’ve always been terrified by the thought that I could die by drowning,” Nora said. “I think the Flood must have been disgusting. The whole world dying of drowning. I can hear them gurgling, struggling in the muck, in the putrefaction. But I’d like a snow-flood. To die, to fall asleep in the snow, nothing could be more pure and beautiful. That’s the death I’d choose.”

“Maybe,” Paul said. “But I’m choosing life. Yesterday I’d gladly have died. I think I even suggested it to you. Today, though, I want to live.”

“Me, too,” Nora laughed.

They looked at each other earnestly, as though making a pledge, or taking a significant joint-decision.

When they got back to the Touring Club, Paul immediately wanted to start over on his route from that morning; but Nora stopped him. “We have to set up an instruction program. I’ve been toying with you up to now, but now it’s time for you to learn.”

Paul’s enthusiasm plummeted again. “What do you want me to learn? I can get by with what I know.”