Accident

by Mihail Sebastian

  In their memory of that day, the lilac remained their flower.

  Later, in the winter, Paul stopped with amazement on a January day in front of the window of a flower shop, where he glimpsed a few white lilac branches. He hadn’t realized until then that it was possible to find them in the middle of winter, and the sight behind the frozen window pane struck him as unreal. He stroked it with delicacy, as though afraid that it would come apart beneath his fingers. The white winter lilac didn’t have the violent aroma of the spring variety, but rather a faint, extinguished odour, like breath or smoke.

  When they quarrelled it was their habit to send or receive a lilac branch because in that way, without words or explanations, the rift of several days would come to an end. Both of them regarded the lilac as a superstition that disarmed them, that helped them rediscover each other. He could not suspect then that another Ann would exist, one for whom those flowers would lose all meaning, like an object without a name, without memories.

  The first days of their love had taken place in Sibiu, a city neither of them knew.

  “I don’t care where, my dear. Somewhere where I can be alone with you for a few days. Anyway, after that you’ll leave me.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you don’t love me.”

  He responded neither yes nor no – and, in any event, she did not seem to expect a reply.

  They had chosen Sibiu at the last moment, in the station, because the next departure was for Sibiu.

  Everything delighted her in the Transylvanian city: the broad streets, the shop windows, the German signs, the Saxon dialect, lunch at the restaurant, the menu with types of food she didn’t know and which she chose at random, closing her eyes and placing her finger on the menu: “Let’s see what this is like.”

  In the mornings, when she woke from her slumber, she liked to look out the hotel window at the children walking to school with their satchels on their backs, the gleaming Saxon women who returned from the market with their baskets in their hands and stopped on the street corners in groups of three or four, speaking with passion, the shutters of the shop windows that rose with a rattle ... Everything struck her as honourable and severe.

  “We’re the only people in this city who are in love,” she said.

  Then, as if only in that moment had she realized that she was naked, she rushed back to bed with a shudder of alarm in order to hide and cover herself. She was so white that when she was nude her blonde hair was drained of its colour by the glare of her naked body.

  When they went down to the lobby of this small provincial hotel she was intimidated by the respectful gazes of the service people and the clerks, as though their youth brought with it an aura of mystery, or even of scandal. Everything she saw made her happy. She rode all day on the charming Sibiu tram from the Upper City to the Lower City, she was amused by the peaked caps of the taxi drivers, who looked like Austrian officers in Viennese operas, by the Saxon women’s bulky provincial dresses, cluttered with clasps, flowers and knots. If she’d had her sketch pad with her she would have drawn them, as she found inspiration for pictures everywhere.

  With a single picture everything from Sibiu came back to her. It was a meal on the sidewalk, in front of a restaurant at lunchtime, when the children were just getting out of school. A group of girls passed in front of them, and Ann stopped one of them, asking her what her name was.

  “Ingrid,” she replied, a little frightened, while her classmates added with greater courage: “Ingrid Schreiber.”

  Ingrid was blonde, she had braids down on her back, a blue peaked worn boyishly on her forehead and two slanted eyes, which gave her angelic Saxon face the peculiar grace of a tiny Dobrogean Tartar.

  “Ingrid, has anyone told you that you’re beautiful? Give me paper and a pencil from your satchel. I want to draw you.”

  Ingrid was fearful and proud, while Ann captured in a hasty sketch her air of an astonished child, a sketch which on her return would become a portrait in oils, hung above the bed in Ann’s room, from where she could look farther, with that same bewildered look, at things that she did not understand.

  Where was that Ann of the first days of their love now?

  Then she had been ready at any hour of the day to receive him or visit him, to accept his invitation or his refusal, to pack her bags in a moment when he came to take her away on a trip for several days, or, on the contrary, to unpack them when, unexpectedly and without asking her, he abandoned a departure that they had been planning for ages and which, during this time, had filled her with childlike joy.

  “Do you never ask anything, Ann?”

  “Because, my love, I’d only ever have, a single question – ‘Why don’t you love me?’ – and that, you see, is something I don’t want to ask.”

  As in any love affair started without effort (since, blonde as she was, without mysteries or secrets, Ann appeared to be the type predestined to have an effortless love affair), the fact of her reaching this stage of suffering was inexplicable to him. Her last smile, her last gesture were familiar to him – yet the day had to come in which each smile was an enigma, each word a secret; the time had to come when the simple fact of glimpsing her became difficult, and often impossible, a time when he spent whole nights scouring restaurant after restaurant, bar after bar, in the hope of finding her at last and of seeing her, if only for a brief instant.

  Yet when he found the old Ann again, when she happened to return to him full of love (“You’re an idiot and you’re the only one I love”), when he saw her moving naked around her apartment, dropping things on the floor and forgetting where they were, he would halt her, dishevelled, in one of her comic poses, with her hair falling across her face, with one stocking draped over her arm and the other flung around her shoulders like a scarf and, knowing too well that this lovely, scatterbrained girl was, nevertheless, lost to him, that in two days’ time the suffering would start again, he looked at her for a very long time. “Ann, let me see what a femme fatale looks like.”

  There were countless things which at the beginning he had barely noticed, with a kind of casual amusement, but which later – without his knowing exactly when or why – he started to observe with a tormented anxiety. He was annoyed by how many people knew Ann. Their arrival at a restaurant was greeted by dozens of stares that turned towards her with an indiscreet, insistent quality.

  “How do you know so many people? Who’s that guy who just went past?”

  Her replies were usually vague, evasive. “I don’t know who he is. He came to the exhibition.” Beyond these imprecisions, Paul saw great mysteries waiting to be unravelled.

  More wounding were her detailed replies, uttered with indifference.

  “I met him three years ago, on the train to Budapest.”

  Paul envisaged the sleeping car, the blue lights; Ann, seated next to the window, speaking with her chance travelling companion; he heard her laughing (because, oh!, she laughed so easily ...) when a more powerful jolt shook him. He imagined the white sheets of the bunks, as seen through windows left open, the colour of the wilderness, her passage from one compartment to another in the middle of the night ... He remembered the casualness with which she had yielded to him at the beginning – and his memories scandalized him. He wished she had resisted him more then, so that now he might be able to believe that for her whether or not she went to bed with a man was not a meaningless question.

  In each alien glance that was directed towards Ann, in each greeting, he seemed to see a memory and an invitation. He was furious that politeness demanded that he, too, reply to those greetings, signals that went over his head like so many telegrams in code, which he intercepted without being able to read them, for nobody could assure him that each new greeting didn’t bear a message, an allusion or a proposition: “Do you remember?” or “I’m waiting for you.”

  Ann’s openings brought new people into the galleries: faces from the bars, faces from the race tracks, faces from show business. Two days l
ater the society section of the newspapers would publish photographs and names from “the most dazzling opening of the year.”

  Her paintings sold almost too well, a fact that Paul didn’t notice at first, but which later, when, without wishing to, he became more closely acquainted with the “market” in paintings, struck him as worrying. When a painting by Margareta Sterian or Cornelia Babic sold for 3000 or 4000 lei, when Iorgulescu-Yor, who still had the reputation of “being a good investment,” was selling a 30 by 50 centimetre canvas for 5000 lei, while a 70 by 70 centimetre canvas went for 8000, Ann’s paintings were earning prices that only an Iser or a Petraşcu could ask.9 She became famous among artists for a small, blue painting of Balcic, pleasant enough but not extraordinary by comparison with her other works – which she sold for the fabulous sum of 50,000 lei.

  When it fell to her to participate in collective exhibitions at the Salon or Our Group, her paintings easily distinguished themselves from those of others by that white cardboard tab that gives prestige and lustre to a painting: sold. Paul was uneasy at the swiftness with which, from the first days, this white cardboard flowered in the corners of her canvases, while other painters had such difficulty placing their paintings that several remained unsold at the end of the exhibition. He would have liked to see Ann show a little discretion in advertizing her satisfaction, a little casualness about her success, but once, when he tried to make her understand this, he attracted from her a crushing reply: “What? You want me to be ashamed that I’m successful?”

  It was an even more crushing retort, given that this was precisely what he would have asked of her: that she show a little shame for the successes she enjoyed.

  Ann had lost completely her earlier shyness, the doubt with which she started a painting, the school-girl fear with which she awaited others’ reactions. Now she had an unerring gift for placing a painting, for using connections, for sensing in a new acquaintance a potential client. “Client” was the word that recurred most often in their shared language. The word’s double meaning frightened Paul.

  “What kind of client?” he asked her once with brutal directness, staring her in the eyes. She shuddered beneath the horrible outrage, as though he had slapped her, and burst into moving, despairing tears, which he barely managed to assuage, begging her forgiveness, full of remorse, yet pleased by such sincere, almost childlike weeping, the refutation of his suspicions and fears.

  Some days Ann was unreachable. His insistence on seeing her ran up against a single response, which she uttered slightly sententiously, raising it like a shield: “My painting comes first!” Nothing protected her better, nothing hid her more completely.

  “I’m not available this evening. I have a business meeting: a client to whom I’m trying to sell Blue Flowers.”

  She had acquired the habit of meeting clients at her home or downtown, at a restaurant, at a table in a bar, and not at the exhibition, where she set foot rarely and only in passing to smoke a cigarette, to exchange a few words, dressed in her street clothes, without taking off her hat, as though just visiting. Paul had tried to persuade her that her prestige as an artist dwindled through this excessive familiarity with the public.

  “Try to understand, dear Ann, that I’m not speaking to you as a jealous man, but rather as a concerned friend. An artist doesn’t have the right to make to the public the concessions that you make to your purchasers. She has to be less available, prouder, more vain, more solitary.”

  She listened with attention and seemed to agree with everything, to understand everything; but when he moved on from general considerations about the obligations of a “true” artist to concrete proposals (and here the impartial friend could not entirely conceal the jealous lover), and when he asked her to cancel her scheduled meeting by phoning the fan who, if he really intended to buy Blue Flowers, had only to enter the Dalles Gallery two days from now, between eleven AM and noon, she refused to listen to him any longer and cut him short: “What? You want me to destroy my career?”

  “To destroy my career” was an expression that was beginning to appear for the first time in Ann’s language. Paul knew this language too well not to be upset by her changes of vocabulary. Where did these new words come from, which had suddenly heaved into sight in their conversations, like so many echoes from a life he wasn’t familiar with and of which he wasn’t aware until she carelessly let the words slip? In the early days, listening to Ann speaking had been a pleasure full of surprises. At first he had thought that she was highly loquacious, but as time went on he had observed that her volubility was composed more of gestures and smiles, alternating with short exclamations and short silences, which lent her conversation an air of perpetual excitement.

  “What strange syntax you have, dear girl!” he used to say, amused by the structure of her sentences. Something of his old obsessions from when he was a student of Latin awoke in him to study the grammatical snippets of their conversation.

  She spoke in simple sentences, yet complicated them with a shower of interjections and questions – “yes?” “no?” “you see?” “you know?” “you want to?” – like a series of flats and sharps in a scale with variations, which made her simplest stories into thrilling affairs in which her tone rose and fell, the inflection of her voice changed, and her gaze suddenly shifted. There was a surprised, astonished quality to all of her conversation, as though she had struggled with retorts that only she heard, and to which she would have to respond in turn, like a chess player involved in many matches at once. And, like a chess player who was in that confusing situation, she resorted to typical movements, such as waiting – the meaningless shifting of a pawn, moving a rook onto the front lines. She also had a few set phrases, which she repeated almost mechanically, since they said nothing and were at hand, like habitual old gestures that had long ago lost their original intention: “Well and for all that,” “Everything’s possible,” “How am I supposed to know what to think?”

  Ann took up with ease words and expressions that she happened to overhear, and which from then on became habitual parts of her speech, initially in jest perhaps, then later because she truly couldn’t stop herself from remembering them, until they established themselves definitively in her personal jargon. In Sibiu she had stopped a passerby one morning to ask him whether the Bruckenthal Museum, where she wanted to go, was far away. “Far, yeah, but no-who knows how,” was the reply – and this type of approximation amused Ann so much that she repeated it for several consecutive days, on all possible occasions. The food was good, “but no-who knows how,” the bathwater was hot, “but no-who knows how,” the night sky was starry, “but no-who knows how.” At first she said this laughing, as though underlining the words, but with time her ironic intention dissolved, even disappeared completely, while that “but no-who knows how,” which for a while had a certain commemorative value (as if she were saying indirectly to Paul: “You remember, in Sibiu ...”) became not only one of her more worn phrases, but her preferred way to lend nuance to her opinion, to express her reservations.

  At the beginning, in the first days of their love, it had been one of their reciprocal pleasures to discover in each other certain physical or verbal tics, which for other people, who had known them for longer, had become imperceptible from custom or repetition, but which, observed for the first time, had something utterly unexpected.

  “How strangely you frown!” Ann had observed in the first days. She had tried to imitate him, leaving her left brow lowered and raising the right, tightly arched, something which at first she did not succeed in doing except by cheating a little and opening wide her right eye with two fingers, as though she wished to fix a monocle in her socket.

  It was the sum of petty gestures, which at first she had observed jokingly in him, with an ironic tenderness, and which she imitated with laughter, as though she were trying to wean him of them, which, with the passage of time, entered her own habits. Paul watched, initially with indifference, or rather with amusement, but later
touched and surprised, this unthinking transmission of words and gestures that he rediscovered in Ann’s language, slightly modified by her movements or pronunciation, as if they had been adapted to her vocal register, like a man’s aria rewritten for a soprano voice. They were the same words, the same gestures, yet they often conserved a strange air, as if they had been pressed onto Ann’s speech with special type, transferred into her sentence like words read in a foreign language, like a proverb in quotation marks, until these last lines of resistence also fell, while the gesture or word that until then had been a kind of neologism for Ann, was permanently incorporated into her current vocabulary. She made Paul aware for the first time of the persistence with which he repeated expressions of affirmation or negation: “Sure, sure,” “Not once, not once,” “Out of the question, absolutely out of the question.”

  How little I watched myself, Paul had thought, if I was able to talk that way for years without even being aware of it. It took Ann to come and observe me. Sometimes, in the middle of a sentence, when that double, “Sure, sure,” came back, she underlined the fact with an explosion of laughter.

  “Don’t get angry, dear Paul, that I’m laughing. I told you I’m a bit afraid of you and – what do you want? – when I notice something childish like that, it’s as if I feared you less, as if I felt closer to you. I’d like you to have thousands of small failings, I’d like you not to roll you r’s, I’d like you to be unable to pronounce s, I’d like to be able to laugh at you, my love, do you understand?”

  Yet without understanding how, she herself later ended up speaking in his way, and among the things she borrowed from him was precisely his manner of stressing through repetition certain words and exclamations in order to confirm or negate something. Her speech was full of “Sure, sure,” “Don’t even think about it, don’t even think about it,” “Out of the question, out of the question,” which he sometimes uttered in a mechanical way, not paying attention, his aggressive, convinced, intransigent tone highlighting these phrases even more. There were some words that disappeared from his current expressions and which, over time, reappeared, now not in his vocabulary, but rather in hers, just as a mountain spring can slip under the earth and, by way of a long underground channel, return to the surface somewhere completely different. On Ann’s lips, words he had forgotten gained a new life, while in her lively hands, gestures he had abandoned at some point in the past were resurrected with a kind of mechanical faithfulness, which later might survive the end of their love.