Mihail Sebastian - The Accident

But nothing disturbed the resignation of this return through the woods, which resembled so closely a return to slumber.

The climb to Wolf’s Precipice was tough. Deceptive snow covered boulders and dips in the earth, concealing in its depths unseen changes in the terrain. It was as though puddles remained intact in the middle of a river. Beneath their mirrored surface, an invisible chasm pulled them down to the river bed.

They wallowed forward through the snow with the instinctive movements of people who were swimming. Here and there, the depressions fell away like broken steps. There was an unmistakable sinking feeling. The waves of snow seemed to be surrounding and burying them. They struggled with their knees, their arms, in a kind of thrashing-on-the-spot that helped them to remain on the surface, as though they were swimming against the current. Now and then a reef-like frozen outcropping rose up in front of them, and they were able to stop for a minute on this island of ice, in order to gauge how much of the trail now lay behind them.

It’s madness what we’re doing , Nora thought; but, now there was no way back from this madness. Each metre of ground they gained had something irrevocable about it. Their feet could not return to where they had already trodden. The climb was difficult, but a descent from here would have been impossible.

At its upper edge, Wolf’s Precipice opened onto a clearing. The first fir trees were visible on the lip of the cliff above them. They didn’t look like they were far away, but time passed and the distance remained ever the same, as though their journey through the snow had been useless, as though hidden powers, much greater than their futile struggle, were eternally bringing them back to their point of departure.

As long as it’s daylight, everything’s not lost , Nora thought, to steel herself. She was terrified by the possibility that the mist might envelope them before they could reach the top. In the darkness, on the flank of the bluff, they would be unable to take even one step forward. A single false move would suffice for them to fall. Do I really need to tell him this? Nora wondered, not daring to speak to him. She didn’t want to alarm him, but neither could she let him continue with the somnambulistic carelessness with which he was climbing behind her.

From the summit came a stirring, as if of great gales not yet aroused to their full fury. The daylight had a diffuse, whitish quality, as though lacking in transparence.

“Listen, Paul!” Nora suddenly made up her mind to speak to him. “In half an hour at the most we’ll be at the top. If darkness or mist catch us here, we’re lost. I don’t know what’s going on with you and I’m not going to ask. But now I want to ask you to wake up. When we get to the top you can do what you like.”

Everything suggested that a blizzard was on the way. Gusts of wind not yet at full force whistled over the snows, raising it into small eddies of powder. The trees became heavy against a leaden grey-white background.

Paul was the first to reach the head of the trail. The final metres of the ascent were the hardest to complete. The lip of the precipice was a nearly vertical frozen parapet. The crampons on their boots gripped like claws to prevent them from sliding. A fall remained a danger until the last moment. In that final moment, their entire struggle was revealed as futile. Wolf’s Precipice, glimpsed from these final infernal steps, had a sombre indifference that awaited the fulfillment of luck.

Having escaped from danger, Paul watched helplessly as Nora took her final steps. He could do nothing for her: offer neither an extended hand nor a word of support. They were only a few paces apart, yet they were on two different coasts, each alone. He watched how she struggled with the snow, the ice, stunned by exhaustion yet with a kind of intent despair. When she reached his side, she threw down her skis from her shoulders, took off her backpack. Only then, uncovering her head, did she run her hand over her face in a gesture that signalled her return to life. They were both pale, with their eyebrows and temples whitened by snow, their stares not yet freed from the intense concentration that had been carrying them forward until now.

“You’re a brave girl, Nora. I want to thank you.”

“What for?”

“For your courage. If I were able to love, I’d love you.”

“I’m not asking you for that, Paul. All I ask is that you be a little less unhappy. That’s enough for me.”

Once again he gave a disillusioned shrug of his shoulders.

“I also ask,” Nora added, “that you stop making that gesture of a guy who’s finished. Is it really so hard?”

“I don’t know. I think you’re wasting your time with me.”

“Yet when we left here yesterday you were a man who’d been cured.”

“I thought I was. But it’s enough for a shadow to step out in front of me on the street for everything to fall to pieces.”

“Are memories that hard to forget?”

“I don’t even know if they’re memories. It’s a terrible tiredness. An enormous repulsion. And a deep disgust.”

“Deeper than Wolf’s Precipice?”

They both turned again in the direction of the precipice that opened in front of them.

“Look how deep it is,” Nora said, “and yet you climbed the whole thing. Don’t you want to try it again some day?”

They arrived at the cabin at nightfall. Gunther, paler than before, was waiting for them at the window. Hagen, who had gone out to meet them on the other trail, wasn’t back yet.

“We have to put on the light in the tower to give him the news that you’ve returned. Why did you come back so late? I’ve been waiting all day. I thought you weren’t coming. I thought I’d lost you.”

He spoke quickly, in broken sentences, with a strange nervous agitation beneath his great pallor. His eyes gleamed feverishly, too intensely to smile. Faffner sniffed their clothes, lay down at their feet, tossed off a curious snarl of pleasure and rediscovery, which, at the same time, was almost despairing. With an effort, Nora succeeded in calming him and making him lie down in front of the hearth with his snout on his paws; but even from there the dog regarded her with his gaze of animal restlessness.

“Faffner knows where you’re coming from,” Gunther said. “You’ve been in the house on Strada Prundului and you’re carrying odours he recognizes…”

Hagen returned later and didn’t speak a word as he came in the door. His cape and hood were white with snow. He stopped in the entrance and, at first, white as he was, with his big boots, his hood pulled down over his forehead, he resembled a Santa Claus who was hiding his face. After he had brushed off the snow and had revealed his sad face and, above all, that cold, white recluse’s gaze, the congenial initial image was extinguished, banished, and in its place stood the severe man with whom they were familiar.

Nora thought of going up to him and telling him: “Relax. We’ve left everything in the house exactly as you like it. Nothing has budged from its place. The door is bolted, the windows are locked. Nobody’s going to cross that threshold and not even a shadow will leave the place.”

But Hagen’s silence asked no questions and invited no friendly words.

The three men fell silent, and Nora felt very alone among them. She looked at each of them in turn, and each seemed to her to have disappeared into his own thoughts. She opened her backpack and took out without pleasure the gifts she had bought them in Braşov. Now they struck her as useless, too childish for men who were so despondent. Next to the window, the fir tree decorated for the modest Christmas celebrations waited to be lit up. Nora hung her presents from its drooping boughs, and then lit the candles one by one. Tapered flames began to play over the insides of the balls of coloured glass.