Mihail Sebastian - The Accident

“You didn’t forget anything, Paul? You got everything you were looking for? You’re ready to go? Shall we leave?”

She was shaken to see him watching her with that despondent gaze. It was his gaze from the evening they had met, that enervated stare that did not even have the strength to ask for help.

“Aren’t we leaving, Paul? Don’t you want to leave any more?”

He replied with his old shrug of the shoulders, which spoke of his indifference to everything.

How quickly this man has gone back to his old habits! Nora thought.

It was Ann’s car. Paul had walked past without seeing it, then, on the steps of the hotel, he had turned his head, as though towards a passerby who had greeted him, and to whom he hadn’t replied. Yes, it was Ann’s car.

He had gone towards it with an explosion of joy, as though it were a person, a friend. He would have liked to speak to it, to ask it: When did you get here? Is Ann here, too? Yes, of course she was. What a stupid question to ask!

The doors were locked, the windshield was iced up, the whole radiator was covered in snow; the motor was still warm. The car had probably just stopped. It looked as though it had made a difficult drive. In any case, it hadn’t been here yesterday evening, nor earlier this morning. If it had only just arrived, if it had stopped just now, then Ann must be nearby. She had got out for a moment to ask for information, to buy cigarettes, to drink tea. She might be in the hotel lobby, in the restaurant, in the café.

Paul paced back and forth all over the area. Ann was nowhere to be found. The café was full of people, familiar faces were visible at almost every table, but Ann was nowhere to be found.

“Are you looking for someone?” the porter asked.

“No, no…”

He went back out into the street and stopped in front of the blue car again. I have to wait, she has to come back.

He saw her walking through Braşov making chaotic purchases, laughing in all the mirrors that she crossed along the way, stumbling over her tall overshoes as though they were high-heeled boots. How well he knew that Ann of winter days! Last year she had worn an astrakhan bonnet pulled down over her forehead and an overcoat, also of astrakhan, which she succeeded in making into something unpretentious, like a garment she had grabbed off a peg in the hall at the last minute and put on in a rush to get her shopping done in town in a hurry.

He walked around the car several times, looking attentively at each part of it. He wished he could guess from the fenders, the tires, where it had come from. Certainly not from Bucharest, since it was too early in the morning to have made such a long trip. Maybe she had spent the night in Bran or in Satu-Lung, that Satu-Lung that was so full of memories. So many Anns from distant times came to life for him and called him back into the past!

He looked through the side windows of the automobile, that automobile that felt like an inhabited house. On the seat in front of him, next to the steering wheel, was a white plaid blanket, a pile of magazines and an open metal box full of Chesterfield cigarettes. Since when had she smoked Chesterfields? The last time he’d seen her she was smoking unfiltered Bucurestis. Had she switched brands? When? Why? And was this the only thing that had changed in her life?

But they might not be her cigarettes or, in any case, not hers alone. It was ridiculous to think that Ann would be by herself. It was ridiculous to think that a new cigarette case would enter Ann’s life without bringing with it a new man, a lover, a relationship, a fling… He kept his eyes fixed on that metal case, which struck him as both hiding and revealing everything. He felt the old pain reawakening close to his heart.

When Nora asked him whether he still wanted to leave, he didn’t know what to say to her. He could stay, he could leave; it was all the same to him.

Once again they were in the caterpillar that was taking them back to Poiana.

So we have to take it all from the beginning again , Nora thought. In front of her was the same morose man, with the same hazy stare and the same uncaring lift of his shoulders. If only he would at least tell me what happened. If only I could understand.

She was starting to be afraid of this man, who was subject to such profound changes from one minute to the next. It was as though his hair had turned white in an instant. It was as though he had received an announcement of his death. He felt strange to her. Stranger than on the day when she had met that absent gaze for the first time. Since then they had been brought together by several days of shared life, several nights of lovemaking. It was all wiped out.

She felt that he was lost to her, that he had fled from her side. Once again, he had fled from her side. And she could no longer find in herself sufficient strength to stop him.

It’s time to give up, Nora. This man’s not coming back .

She thought of saying to him: “That’s enough, Paul. That’s enough and it’s pointless. You want to leave? Leave. I’m tired out. Realize that something like that can happen to me, too: I can get tired out.”

Then, without knowing why, she thought of his hands. She felt pity for his big hands, too rough and hard for a sad man. She would have liked to feel them on her bare shoulders again, with their indifferent, protective heaviness. You’re beautiful, Nora. You’re pure harmony between yourself and yourself, and that harmony is called beauty. His words ran through her mind again, and once more she was astonished by them. You’re the man who spoke those words to me. No one might ever have said them to me, not once until my death, and he said them. I might have carried that secret inside me without anyone seeing it, and he saw it. And that’s the man I’m losing .

A wise, patient Nora tried to gather her courage again. She promised herself that she would wait, that she would resist, that she wouldn’t give up yet.

They climbed as far as Wolf’s Precipice wearing their skis, but from there on they had to take them off and carry them on their shoulders.

They had been on the move for about two hours without having exchanged a single word in all that time. Only once, by mistake, had their eyes met, but they had turned their heads away in the same instant with a startled, self-protective reflex. “Don’t be afraid, Paul, I have nothing to ask: you’re free to keep your secrets,” Nora would have liked to say to him; but she feared that, after the first word she uttered, the silence between them would grow ever heavier.

She went in front so as not to give him the impression that she was spying on him. A number of times she heard him stopping at one spot or another, but she kept moving forward, even though she sensed in his stopping a hesitation, an impulse to flee. She no longer heard him moving behind her, and yet she didn’t dare look back. Maybe this time he’s left. Maybe he’s really left. She told herself that there was still time to call out to him, that there was still time to turn around. She told herself that she was leaving behind a wounded man, a crushed man, a man who needed her help even if he wasn’t asking for it, even if he didn’t want it. Yet she continued to move forward, looking straight ahead as though she were indifferent to whether or not he went any farther. You’re acting like a woman who’s been jilted, Nora. You’re starting to love him out of pride. She went over in her mind the possible reasons that might convince her to stop and wait for him, but they only deterred her from making this decision. If he’s coming, he should come of his own free will. It’s up to him to choose.

He came without having chosen to do so. He came with exhaustion, with apathy. He came because he had been seized by the idea of coming. If the woman in front of him, who had suddenly become an unknown, nameless woman, had turned her head towards him and called out to him, this act might have awakened in him his last urge to break away and free himself.