Accident

by Mihail Sebastian

  “... Now that girl,” – and he indicated the sketch that Paul only now realized was signed by Ann – “has talent, sir, you know she has talent ... I think you know her ... Sure, I saw the two of you together at Balcic ... Big love affair, eh?”

  Paul uttered a bored protest. “No, it’s not what you think. We say hi, we know each other, but it’s nothing ...”

  “Hey, buddy, let it go. Whether she is or whether she isn’t, it all goes with the territory. Where the lamb treads, the wolf follows. You’re not the first and you won’t be the last. Nobody knows anybody in a big crowd.”

  Paul took a long look at the wine glass in his right hand and observed that his hand wasn’t trembling. Far away and deep down, close to his heart, something stopped in its tracks and waited to break or unravel. It was like being under a heavy anaesthetic: he felt the wound, he felt the skin’s resistence to the blade, and the very precise, very exact rending, and yet it didn’t hurt, it didn’t hurt ...

  “Yes, sir, she’s got talent, but what good has it done her? Talent is like money, you find it everywhere; the key is to know what you’re going to do with it. Look, I feel bad about that girl. I liked her at first and she has a fine hand. She doesn’t wear herself out drawing, but when she puts a line on paper you understand something ... Except she needed to work, to wait and above all, she’s afraid, you see? She’s afraid of what she does, and she never knows whether it’s good or bad ... I thought she wanted to be a painter – and she could have been, you know? she could if she’d wanted it – but she wants a career. And, bingo, she’s made it. She’s slapping the paint on in Liège for 5000 lei a day. 5000! Nobody’s ever paid me that kind of money, not even 500, and look, on Saint Anthony’s Day I’ll be forty-nine years old, and she’s not even twenty-five and she’s rushing to get 5000 lei a day, which would be enough to wake up poor old Luchian from the dead in a fit of rage.10 5000 lei a day! Look here, it’s gone from that guild on the cliff they had back in the days of their nobility, their bloodymindedness, that nobody could buy me no-how, and if I didn’t like your mug, I didn’t sell you a painting, I didn’t sell it to you and you went in peace, at least you would have given me ten times as much gold as the next guy made. But you haven’t forgotten that now everything’s gone to the dogs, to the mob, to pushing to get ahead, even to hauling yourself up by the hair? That girl, sir, she’s come into the painting world like a siren, like an actress who runs after the director, the ministry, her cousin, the kept mistress, in order to get a role, and she sleeps with this one and she sleeps with that one, with the director, with the office manager, even with the porter if she has to, but she doesn’t stop until she gets to the top. Well, do the reckoning with your pencil in your hand of how many of them she’s slept with, at every gallery opening, to get every commission, at every opening night, the sun’ll come up tomorrow and we’ll still be making the list. If you ask me, she sleeps with whoever she feels like if she’s in the mood, after all she’s young and, God bless her, she’s not ugly, but – you get what I’m saying? – you don’t mix getting laid with painting, they don’t mix, they’re two different things, yup, all in all two different things ...”

  Paul had tried several times to silence him, but his weak gesture of protest was caught up by the painter’s verbal torrent and drowned in a fresh wave of indignation, exclamations and curses. At several points he would have liked to get up from the table and flee, but a painful pleasure held him still: old doubts, old agonies, all his questions from sleepless nights, all his stupid writhing between belief and disbelief, all that standing guard of the jealous man who sees signs everywhere and certainty nowhere, everything, everything came together that night in an answer.

  He returned home at daybreak, through the awakening, white morning streets, alone, stripped of any memory, of any hope.

  He was on Calea Victoriei one day, in front of the Corso, when he felt that a well-known gaze was searching for him on the opposite sidewalk. He crossed the street, as if to call out, and discovered in a shop window, among numerous portraits of famous women, a photograph of Ann. She probably had it done before she left, he told himself. He stared at it for a very long time, as if he had truly seen her again after their long separation. In the photograph she was wearing a black, long-sleeved sweater that covered her throat. It looked like a tunic, although on the lefthand side, instead of a pocket, was a white initial, not superimposed, but rather worked into the fabric of the pullover: a triangular A, like the initial of a sports club. By contrast with the black sweater and the white thread, her hair looked twice as blonde, as though beneath a powerful morning light. It was the first photograph he had seen of her in which Ann was not smiling. Her lips were very slightly opened in an almost suppressed smile. Her head was tilted to one side in a gesture of attention and interrogation.

  He had left the area with slow steps and had gone aimlessly up the street towards Nestor, stopping out of habit at the windows of the bookstores where he saw nothing, not a book title, not a magazine, but only that tilted blonde head, that A imprinted on the left breast, like a message addressed to him, like a whisper that only he could make out. He told himself that it was not completely impossible that in the rush of her departure Ann had had this photograph taken for him and had left it to be developed, perhaps with the secret thought that he would come across the photo here and would glimpse it, finding again in this photo the Ann of former times, so much did it seem to him that her dejected smile was for him alone. I’m a hopeless idiot. Now I’m even being seduced by photographs in shop windows.

  Yet he had returned in the days that followed to see her. Something had changed when he had realized that her photograph was there in the window. He had the feeling of being less alone in this city, which had seemed so deserted until now. In the mornings, going out to work, he took with him that confused feeling of impatience he recalled from the days when they had made a date for an evening out or a long-awaited concert. He passed in front of the window several times a day, sometimes without the courage to toss more than a hurried glance towards Ann’s photograph – for he was afraid his persistence would be noticed, particularly in the evenings when the cafés along the street were full of people, and so many of the tables on the sidewalk were occupied by actors, painters and writers who were his acquaintances – but, at other times, halting, as though he had only that instant discovered her, with the full force of the event, he remained staring at her for a long time. He resorted to all sorts of tricks, which he masked with discomfort, to give his stopping in front of the window a normal, happenstance air, and not one of these tricks struck him as too naive, not the coin he feigned having lost and having stopped to look for, not the notebook pulled out of his pocket to jot down some fact he had just remembered, not the vague look with which he waited on a corner to cross an empty street.

  On each occasion he returned with the fear that in the intervening time the photograph would have been removed from the window and replaced with one that was unfamiliar, and it was this fear, this emotion, with which, when Ann was in Bucharest, he had climbed the stairs towards her apartment, wondering whether he would find her at home. The smile in the window called out to him from afar, soothing, unchanging. It was a sad, hazy smile, as though she lacked the courage to open up any more than this. It was the Ann who regarded him with a tired shake of her head, with a despondent lift of her shoulders, as if to say to him: “Why do I even bother to talk to you? You don’t believe any of it, you don’t understand any of it ...”

  One morning Paul stood frozen on the sidewalk: the photograph was no longer in the window. The previous evening it had still been there – he had seen it – but overnight everything had changed. A new series of photographs had appeared behind the window pane: a few bridal photographs, a young officer in dress uniform, numerous chubby children, every type of unfamiliar face, which exchanged among themselves glances, smiles and greetings. Paul looked at it curiously, embarrassed, with an expression of confused enquiry, of
the sort you have when you open the door of a compartment on a train and interrupt with your unexpected entry the family atmosphere which has grown up during hours of shared travel. “There isn’t a free seat,” the hostile silence around you says – and the photographs in the window were saying the same thing to him now, surprised by his insistent gaze. He was almost on the point of excusing himself (“Excuse me, it was a mistake, I was looking for someone”), he was ready to move away from there, although it was so difficult for him to give this up, when to the right of the window, as if it had hidden from him until now, barely containing its laughter, and now would have embraced him with an explosion of joy and tenderness, Ann’s face sprang into sight, a new face of hers, sufficiently different from the one he had left there the previous evening, that it wasn’t surprising that he hadn’t recognized it at first glance.

  He used to feel this way often when he came to her apartment and, after ringing the doorbell, the door would open on its own, pulled by an unseen hand; he would cross the threshold, call out to Ann, look for her in every room, and only then would she leap out from the corner where she had been hiding, especially on days when she was wearing a new dress and wanted to surprise him by showing herself off to him in it. Now, too, in the photograph, she wore a new silk print dress in a floral design, while on her head she had an open, almost white straw hat that blended with her blonde hair, a hat with a wide brim for the sunlight in the country. Everything looked youthful, morning-like, but there was something sensual in her white arms, her bare throat, exposed even more by the movement of her head, which was tossed back slightly, as though to laugh in pleasure, for in this new photograph she was laughing, with a free, open laughter.

  It was a completely different Ann than that of the evening before, who in her black sweater had looked like a pensive boy. Many times her facility for becoming a new person had troubled Paul. It was enough for her to change her hairdo, or dress in new colours, in order for something deep within her to appear to have changed, right down to the look in her eyes. There were innumerable possible Anns, and each left Paul feeling intimidated for a second, not knowing how to recover in this stranger the girl he loved, from whom he had parted the night before.

  He found it difficult to get used to the new photograph in the window. He didn’t like this Ann who laughed and above all he didn’t like her head thrown back, with that recently adopted gesture of hilarity that emerged when she said: “It’s rolling, it’s rolling.” He passed before the window several times a day, as before, and, little by little, he familiarized himself with Ann’s new face, with her dress, with the wide straw hat, and finally with that laugh, which no longer struck him as strange, but even left him with the impression that it stemmed from his oldest memories of their love: Ann’s laughter during their days of happiness in Sibiu.

  The photographer’s display window changed each week, and now Paul awaited with disquiet the end of this week, which would mean the departure of the Ann that he had befriended in the meantime. At the same time, he would have to await the new Ann, whom he didn’t yet know and of whose arrival he wasn’t even certain.

  On Saturday night he stayed downtown late in order to see her again and, as there were no longer many people on the street other than very rare passersby, since the Corso closed after 2 PM, he was able to stand there at ease, facing the window, to take his leave of this Ann, who two mornings from now would no longer be there. The lights went out, and in the semi-darkness of the window she seemed to be waiting for him and replying to him.

  On Sunday morning a new smile, a new dress, a scarf, a hat, a gesture greeted him from the new photograph on display. How many photographs had Ann had taken? And why so many? Paul had never before been aware of her having a passion for having herself photographed, and aside from a few lover’s shots, most of them taken on trips, and a few small identity-card portraits she’d had made for her passport, he did not own a single photograph of her. Surely this was a new passion, a recent caprice, and, maybe to an even greater degree, a stock-taking, a matter of foresight in light of the opportunity of her trip. In fact, Ann had recently become a “figure” in Bucharest life, a “celebrity.” She was seen everywhere: at the theatre, at the race track, at soccer matches; her dresses were commented on, she was talked about and enjoyed having people talk about her.

  Leaving Bucharest for an extended period, she risked slipping out of the limelight and losing her minor fashionable notoriety, which she had worked so hard to achieve. It was possible that the photographs she had left behind her had no purpose other than to maintain this notoriety, to prevent people from forgetting her. The display window projected an image that was all the more secure for not being in any way ostentatious; neither shots of current events nor political photographs were ever shown there, of the sort that attracted curious throngs, but rather art photography, portraits that appeared to be exhibited not so much for their subjects’ names, but rather for the quality of the negative and the delicacy of the composition, none of which prevented the most stellar names of Bucharest, whether royal, artistic or the wives of famous industrialists, from appearing.

  In that selection of “expressive heads,” Ann took her place with simplicity, with a certain negligence, as if her photographs were so numerous and her appearance in each new display were so assured that Paul wondered with dismay whether there wasn’t something a little histrionic in her insistence on showing herself off and being seen. It sometimes seemed to him that her gestures, preserved in such living form, so talkative in her photographs, became the poses of a minor starlet, and he looked on them then with spite, with hostility – spite that faded away quickly, as he got used to the new photographs and felt a little as if, day by day, the heated intimacy between him and her grew tighter. In other summers he wouldn’t have let a single weekend go by without leaving Bucharest for the beach or the mountains, but now he refused every invitation, since he had the feeling that each Sunday morning he had an appointment he couldn’t miss, and in fact his first walk downtown was to the display window, where he looked – with such fear! with such disquiet! – for the new Ann for the week that was beginning.

  Sometimes he came too early, the window wasn’t ready, and the cloth divider was pulled down like a curtain, behind which the new photographs were being arranged. Then Paul walked up and down the sidewalk, with a feeling of mixed impatience and security, as though he were walking in front of Ann’s apartment while she, upstairs in her room, was dressing, having sent him out to wait for her on the street: a feeling of security because he was certain she was going to come and in this respect nothing threatened him, yet also with impatience since he wondered what she would be like when she came downstairs, which dress she was going to wear, how pretty she would look.

  One morning the cloth curtain rose in vain: Ann was missing from the window. Paul looked for her patiently, at first untroubled, examining portrait after portrait, at last alarmed, panic-stricken that she could possibly not be there, that he couldn’t find her. He would have liked to believe that it was a mistake or a joke, that she was hiding and was about to suddenly appear before him. He would have liked to say to her, as he had in the old days: “Come here, Ann. Stop it. You’re fooling around too much ...”

  He stood riveted there with a crumbling feeling; he felt as though he were losing her again, as though he saw her leaving again, perhaps this time for good.

  “I have to see her,” he said in a loud voice. “I have to see her, at any cost.”

  Three days later he was in Liège. He had left madly within a few hours, with the little money he was able to scrape together, with a passport acquired at the last minute, taking the longest and cheapest route, in third class via Poland and Germany, changing trains several times, waiting in a variety of stations for complicated connections to Berlin, Cologne and Hegenrath and finally arriving in Liège in the middle of the night, his head reeling with sleeplessness and strain. The whole time he told himself that he was acting like a lunatic
, that he was making himself ridiculous, that the woman he was seeking was irrevocably lost to him, and that in any case he would now lose her forever by throwing himself at her; yet nothing could stop him from pursuing this absurd path, which he had entered with his eyes closed.

  There had been a single moment of hesitation on the morning of his departure. He was at the Ministry of the Interior, in the office of a Subsecretary of State whom he knew, and whom he had come to see to ask him for a passport. On the wall above the desk was one of Ann’s paintings: a sandy Balcic with a few rough, dusty plants, almost whitish and with a single corner of sea, of an intense blue.

  Paul sat looking in the direction of the painting. What was it doing in this office? Who had bought it, and why? Still young, the Subsecretary was known to have had romantic liaisons in the theatre world, which people talked about exceedingly openly, and which not even he forced himself to hide very much.