Accident

by Mihail Sebastian

  Not for anything, not for anything, do I want to see you again, she wrote to him once, after a quarrel, but that double “not for anything” seemed almost to bear its own refutation, since, at a point where Ann was convinced that they were going to separate, her language preserved, like a pledge of faithfulness, that tic of repeating words in which, without her wishing it to be so, Paul’s memory persisted. But other new words and expressions appeared, which he heard for the first time and memorized, startled, wondering where they came from and suspecting that she was concealing from him a whole world of events, adventures, secrets that he longed to decipher. Above all, in recent days, Ann’s vocabulary had undergone innumerable small innovations, and after each longer separation – whether because of a quarrel, because he had to leave for a trial in the provinces, or finally because she was too busy with her work – when they were reunited, he noticed with desolation new changes in her way of conversing, new gestures or new words.

  “It’s rolling,” Ann used to say when something struck her as excessively comical, and then she would shake her head, laughing loudly, with her mouth open. And, with her childlike insistence on repeating a new word, because it amused her to hear it, just as it would have amused her to open and close a new cigarette lighter or a new powder case innumerable times, she would say, dozens of times a day, after every event, after every piece of foolishness, “It’s rolling ... It’s rolling ... It’s rolling ...” Each time Paul shuddered as though she had jabbed him since it seemed to him that behind that expression was a man’s gaze: the man from whom Ann had acquired her new favourite word. He was tempted to ask her, as though he had glimpsed a new ring on her finger: “Tell me! Where did it come from? Who gave it to you?”

  In her painter’s jargon there was an expression that had charmed him at the beginning, but which later on, through a secret shift in meaning, became unbearable: “I’m going out for the cause.”

  To Ann, “to go out for the cause” meant to find again a given spot in which to set up her easel, to relocate a spot determined once before – a tree, a house, a stone – as delimiting “on the ground” the landscape she had begun to paint.

  Ann’s “causes” were impenetrable. For some of them, especially in the spring, or at the close of autumn, at the beginning of March or the end of October, when it was too early or too late to head off to Balcic, she pleaded with Paul, but particularly at the beginning of their love, when she had the feeling that she could ask him the biggest favours, she pleaded with him to take off with her to the outskirts of the city, beyond Herăstrău Park, or more frequently, because the spots were less well known, beyond Filaret, beyond the Ciurel mill, in search of “causes.”

  “I’ve done all the work I can at home. I want to go off to the country. Come with me, we’ll find something to paint.”

  There were long reconnaissance walks beyond the railway line, beyond the last hovels at the edge of Bucharest, through the barely thawed March countryside, or the dirty rust-colour of October. The region looked completely unknown. If there hadn’t been planes taking off and landing in the direction of Băneasa Airport, flying low, close to the earth with their engines throbbing like a factory, he could have believed he was anywhere, a long way from Bucharest. A few acacias growing close together marked the beginning of the woods, water rising from who-knew-where – perhaps from the last melting snows, perhaps from the last autumn rain – looked like a tributary wandering lost across the path. Paul never succeeded in understanding by which hidden logic Ann chose one spot rather than another, why where he saw nothing in particular she would suddenly stop, regarding with a kind of concerned attention a point that for him was invisible, which she signalled with a decisive gesture: “Here.”

  “What’s here, Ann?”

  “My new cause.”

  She returned alone on the days that followed with her working instruments, but towards evening Paul would come to take her home since it was getting dark early. As it would have been too expensive to have a taxi waiting for her in the country all afternoon, they had to return a good part of the way on foot. Their passage through the slums on the edge of the city produced a certain sensation and, as during the days at Cernatu, housewives came out onto their doorsteps and children halted in their play to watch this blonde girl in boyish slacks (since she wore shorts and a sports jersey, or, when it was cold, a blue woollen training suit) who was carrying an easel on her back, a paintbox, a canvas chair, leaving Paul to bring at most a blanket, a thermos containing hot tea or a bag of fruit. Sometimes, because they didn’t find an available taxi on the way – or purely and simply because Ann liked to challenge people and hear scandalized murmurs around her – she convinced Paul to go all the way back downtown by tram or bus, and then, to complete the scandal, to take transfer tickets and wait on the sidewalk at one of the downtown stations – at Carpaţi, at Strada Regală – until the tram came.

  “I want to compromise you, I want everyone to know that we’re in love, I never again want to lower my head in public,” Ann used to say when Paul gave her an irritated look, unaccustomed to facing down the curious stares of passersby, which she, on the contrary, put up with defiantly, and even provoked. Yet it was true that later, in a total about-face concerning what was or was not appropriate and thanks to a sudden access of respectability, Ann had completely suppressed such adventures. Not only would it have struck her as being in poor taste to take an easel on a tram, but she also forbade Paul from coming out to the countryside in the evening to bring her home from her work because – she said – in the final analysis it was uncomfortable always to wander through these marginal streets with him, above all because old classmates of hers might see her if they happened to return home from work through this neighbourhood.

  In this way, “to go out for the cause” ceased to be, as before, a pleasant opportunity for a meeting; it even became an obstacle, so far removed from their shared life that Ann used to invoke her work, her art, and, as the final argument, her “career.” “I can’t see you tomorrow: I’m going out for the cause,” or “Sorry I wasn’t there yesterday: I was at the cause,” were explanations that admitted no response.

  Paul tried to confirm where Ann’s “causes” were now. But she gave him only vague directions (“You know I haven’t decided yet, I’m not sure, we’ll see ...”) and even if, out of carelessness or indifference, she told him with precision of the spot where her current cause was located (“Look, towards Filaret, past the yellow house, where I fell last autumn – you remember? – when I tore the buckle off my antelope pumps”), he knew all too well that it would be useless to look for her because he wouldn’t find her there and because two days later she would be sincerely surprised: “What? You went? Oh, how silly you are ... I got a headache ... I changed my mind at the last minute ... I couldn’t go ... Didn’t I tell you not to go?”

  Ann’s causes had become a pretext and now “to go out for the cause” was the most comfortable way for her to lie to him.

  He hadn’t seen her for a week when one morning, glancing at a newspaper, her name, printed in small letters in the news section, jumped out from the page. It was an article on the Romanian pavilion at the 1934 Liège World’s Fair, a sort of official press release to the World’s Fair Organizing Committee through which it was announced that painters and sculptors charged with decorating the interior of the pavilion would be leaving for Brussels in five days: Saturday, May 12 at 9:50 AM. Among the decorators chosen was Ann.

  Paul had thought it was a mistake, as he couldn’t imagine that Ann would have left him to find out something so important from the newspapers nor that with such an important departure so close at hand she would have let a whole week go by without seeing him, even if for some stupid reason, they had quarrelled recently.

  “Is this true? You’re leaving?” he asked her on the phone, with the newspaper still in his hand and his eyes fixed on the astonishing news.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Ann replied evasively, “it’s
not certain yet, it could be, but for the time being nothing’s finalized. If something happens, I’ll tell you. Look, let’s meet tonight ... Or no, not tonight, in fact I’m meeting the architect of the pavilion, but call me tomorrow morning, or, better yet, let me call you ... I’ll be sure to call you, all right?”

  The five days prior to the departure had passed slowly, waiting every second, holding his breath at each footstep on the stairs, each rumble of the elevator, each ring of the telephone, for the question was no longer whether Ann was going to leave for Liège, but rather – more simply, more urgently and more painfully – whether she was going to come to see him, whether she was going to call him, whether she was at least going to send him some word, some sign. He was afraid of leaving home or leaving the office – the only two places where she could phone him – in case her long-awaited call should finally come in his absence, and when in spite of this he was obliged to go out into the city, he drove cab drivers to distraction by telling them to get him home in a hurry, where the same waiting, the same watch, would begin again. Hundreds of times he had lifted the receiver to call Ann, hundreds of times he had started to compose that number that obsessed him like a name, but he never dared to dial it right through to the end. What would she have said to him, this Ann who hid from him, and who prepared her flight like a fugitive?

  Yet sometimes the telephone rang, and he couldn’t suppress the nervous shudder of fear and hope that later struck him as ridiculous when it turned out to be a wrong number or some call without importance – everything else was without importance.

  It’s absurd and unforgivable, as if I were a schoolboy, as if I were twenty, I need to understand that it’s no longer like that, something has to change ... He promised himself that he would be calm, and in fact when the telephone or doorbell rang again, he let it ring for a while before lifting the receiver or opening the door because he wished in that way to prove that he was in control of himself, but also because for a few seconds he could say to himself, in a childish way: it could be she ... it might be possible that it’s she ...

  Even so, sometimes, from superstition, spite or just fear of once again being disillusioned, he let the telephone ring without responding, waiting for the caller to give up. Yet in the moment in which he heard the snap that interrupted communication, in the moment in which the telephone fell silent, the thought that this time it had been Ann, who had not replied to him, and that by doing this he might just have lost what could have been his only opportunity to speak to her and see her, gave him an unbearable feeling of misfortune, like that of a passionate poker player who, having just said, “Pass” out of superstition, is startled by the intolerable thought that the cards he has tossed down without looking at them were precisely the four-of-a-kind or royal flush that would have allowed him to rebound from a night of gambling that had left him ruined.

  Ann’s departures! He knew them so well, so many times he had lived through their nervousness, their confusion. The suitcases that opened and closed noisily, the wardrobe with the doors opened wide against the wall, the dresses draped over the armchair, the girdles on the bed, the scarves tossed about wherever they happened to fall, the multicoloured train tickets flipped through with feverish agitation (“Is that all of them? You don’t think I’ve forgotten any?”), the last-minute purchases, the rushed errands in the city, the packages with which she returned home and which she never knew where she had put, where she got them from, what she should do with them ...

  He saw her heading down the streets, skipping from one taxi to another, stopping in front of shop windows, going into a store, forgetting why she had gone in, scatterbrained, delighted, exhausted, full of worries, curiosity, expectations ... It would have been so easy, it would have been normal for her during one of those errands to suddenly remember him with that irritated shudder she had when she remembered something, closing her eyes and, in a childlike gesture, raising her hand to her forehead – “Oh, what a scatterbrain I am!” – and then from the first public telephone (“For goodness’ sake, the city’s full of telephones!”) to call him and to finally say to him: “Wait for me, I’m coming over.”

  With each hour that passed and made her departure more threatening, that Saturday, May 12 at 9:50 AM read in the newspaper, which initially had been an abstract date, something distant, shapeless, unlikely, acquired reality and became a fixed point, a sore point, difficult to look in the face. With each hour, each day, a feeling of consternation was added to Paul’s wait, as though confronted by a fact with an absurd outcome and which yet he could see reaching fruition beneath his dumbfounded gaze.

  On the morning of her departure he watched on his clock the slow rotation of the minutes, the cogged, mechanistic movement of the seconds – as you waited for precisely midnight to turn out the lights on New Year’s Eve – and when those two hands had been precisely superimposed, showing ten minutes to ten, he picked up the receiver and called the information bureau to ask whether the Simplon had left.

  “Yes, it’s left, it just started moving,” a clerk replied.

  An absurd calm enveloped him, as though all his feverishness of the last few days had been stirred up only by a doubt as to whether or not on Saturday, May 12 the Simplon train was going to leave at its scheduled time of 9:50; now that what he had wanted to know belonged to the past, he could sleep and forget.

  In an afternoon newspaper he saw the photograph taken in the morning on the platform of the Găra de Nord: The group of Romanian artists leaving for Belgium to work on our pavilion in Liège.

  Ann wore a tailor-made travel costume and on her head she had a sort of white visored cap, set boyishly askew over her forehead. Paul looked at her calmly for a short while: he felt that he had nothing to say to her, nothing to ask her.

  A Bucharest from which Ann was missing became a calm, rather provincial city. It was as if the noise had suddenly retreated, the streets had gone silent. Paul had the impression that he was somewhere in the provinces – in Craiova, in Râmnicu-Sărat, in Roman – one of those small cities where he went sometimes for a trial and where he knew he would find neither surprises nor chance encounters.

  Ann’s departure brought him an unexpected peace, a feeling of apathy, of indifference. Everything was colourless, grey and bearable. The respite that came from never waiting in expectation had a certain bitterness, but he greeted it like a welcome slumber. At work letters awaited his answers, at court things remained behind schedule. He returned to these tasks with complete indifference, but determined to let himself get caught up in a mechanical working routine. He composed long business letters, which he typed out himself on the typewriter: he liked to hear the dry noise of the keys, their quick beat. He occasionally saw photographs and reports in the newspapers about the activities in Liège; he read them without curiosity, without discomfort. A few sketches and colour drawings of the Romanian pavilion, which was almost complete, had appeared in an issue of Illustration. On the other hand, the inauguration date was approaching, and Paul, finding the magazine in a restaurant one evening, forgotten on a chair, leafed through it calmly, as if it had nothing to do with Ann.

  “Hey, you like what those people do?” an indignant voice said, interrupting his reading.

  It was a very well-known painter, who had retreated a few years ago to Iaşi, a professor in the School of Fine Arts there, who showed his paintings less and less frequently in Bucharest, from which he had fled, he claimed, because it was no longer possible to find either good wine or good painting. Paul knew him vaguely from a gallery opening, where his aura of a scowling bear had been greeted by the young painters with a wave of pleasure and fear, for he was known for his penchant for stopping in front of paintings and speaking loudly, almost clamouring, as, red in the face, he hurled either tremendous, unbelievable compliments or, much more frequently, breathtaking curses and abuse.

  He sat down at Paul’s table without asking permission, and, taking the magazine in his hand, flipped through it nervously.<
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  “I asked you: do you like it? You tell me, is that painting? You call those canvases? They’ve all gone crazy. They pickup the paintbrush with greed in their hearts and bingo – by nightfall the pavilion’s ready. I’ll tell you, sir, they came to me, too, and asked me: why don’t you come to Liège, Old Man Fănică, and make us a canvas, you’ve ten days, eight metres by six, bingo – here’s the money, bingo – here’s the train ticket ... I looked at the money – good money, I don’t have to tell you – I looked at them, and I was dumbfounded. Well then, mister, you guys know what a canvas is, mister? Eight metres by six? Ten days? A hundred days wouldn’t be enough. Give me a year and I’ll do it for you. That’s my difficult task, that’s the subtle task: your head gives in to what’s on the walls right to the end, and not even then would you let it out of your hands, like maybe you’d like to repair it or wipe it away or change it. As those Latins who were our forefathers said: ars longa, old man, ars longa.”

  Paul listened to him without curiosity – how alien all this painters’ talk felt! – but with a certain pleasure in hearing a jovial voice that insulted, meted out harsh treatment, became indignant, replied to itself, contradicted itself or expressed approval. It was at least a human being here with him, a human being who looked him in the eyes and urged him to drink. For so many days he hadn’t met anyone, for so many days he hadn’t exchanged a word with anyone. And rather than wandering giddily around the streets, perhaps it was better to sit on this restaurant terrace with empty wine bottles lined up on the gravel beneath the table, with the band playing folk music on violins that occasionally awoke from their torpor, among a few very elegant women in low-cut dresses – it was the beginning of June – which brought to the Bucharest summer night a distant breath of the beach, the sea ... The Iaşi painter talked continuously, and each time he emptied a glass his indignation, which grew indolent in between times, went up by half a tone, renewed, setting out for new battles. He kept throwing away the issue of Illustration, then taking it in his hands and opening it again in search of new arguments.