Accident

by Mihail Sebastian

  “I’m going to buy newspapers,” he told Nora, and got up from the table with a certain restlessness.

  He was close to the door, about to step out onto the street, when he heard the shout. He turned his head and looked with surprise at the nearby tables, but didn’t recognize anyone. Then he realized that someone was waving at him from farther back, next to the window.

  “Is that you, Ann?”

  She was alone at the table. In front of her were a few newspapers and magazines, which she seemed to have been reading.

  “Do you mind?” Paul said, leafing through them in a hurry. He looked first at the headlines and the breaking news. He remained on his feet facing Ann, leaning over the table slightly, and in a few instants he had scanned the whole pile of papers.

  “Are you looking for something?” she asked.

  “No. Nothing in particular. I wanted to know whether anything had happened in the world. But I can see that nothing’s happened. Truly nothing ...”

  Only then did he raise his eyes to look at Ann. She was bareheaded and wore a blue scarf knotted around her neck like a tie.

  “Where are you coming from, Paul? Have you been here long? Are you leaving for Bucharest? Someone told me they’d seen you on Christmas Eve, but I didn’t really believe it. I’ve been in Braşov the whole time. I’m staying here. I don’t know how much longer I’ll be here. I came here to work. Don’t you want to sit down? How long has it been since we saw each other? Where did you disappear to?”

  She spoke, as usual, with a multitude of short questions, which she tossed out negligently, without waiting for replies. Paul was still standing in front of her. He watched how she laughed, the gestures she made with her hands, how she spoke. What small eyes she has! Is it possible to have eyes that small?

  Her questions suddenly stopped and she became unexpectedly attentive.

  “What’s going on with you, Paul? Why aren’t you saying anything? Why are you looking at me like that? Something’s happened to you. You’ve changed. I don’t know how, but you’ve changed a lot. Maybe it’s because you’re all in black. Maybe it’s because you’re wearing those clothes ...”

  “Yes, Ann. Maybe.”

  He was leaving without having asked her a single question. He wished he could think of a friendly word for her, but nothing came to mind.

  “You’ve got a pretty scarf,” he said, as they separated.

  Nora was waiting for him at the table in the corner, ready to leave.

  “Who’s that blonde girl who stopped you?” she said, without much curiosity.

  Paul thought for a second, then replied abruptly: “A girl from Bucharest. She’s a painter.”

  There didn’t seem to be much more to say about Ann.

  The train left Braşov with all the carriages full, yet at every station – at Dârste, at Timişul-de-Jos, at Timişul-de-Sus – more groups of skiers were waiting.

  Everyone spoke about the snow and the weather. Those who had come down from Piatra Mare complained of too much mist and frost. Girls and boys coming from Bihor related that in Stâna de Vale it had been sunny the whole time. They were all astoundingly young and, surrounded by them, Paul, too, felt that he was their age. Something’s happened to you, Ann had said. Yes, it had happened. He looked at himself in the window of the carriage as though in a mirror, and he almost didn’t recognize himself. On his face were the tracks of small scratches, his right eye still retained the consequences of his terrible fall at the Touring Club, his lower lip was still slightly cracked, but the sun had passed over all of these wounds and healed them. Nobody in the carriage was darker than he was, nobody was more sunburned. It’s as if I only skied on the ridges, close to the light.

  He felt a kind of childish exultation. He didn’t know exactly what he might want to do now. There were strengths in him with which he wasn’t familiar, impulses that were awaking from a long slumber.

  “Nora, do you think that skiing can save a person? Can it change his life?”

  “Dear Paul, I think that our lives are full of bad habits, compulsions and obsessions. Skiing cleanses us of them. In the end, the important thing is not to let ourselves be defeated again.”

  “No, Nora. Never.”

  He uttered the vow passionately, with exaggerated firmness.

  He made his amends alone, repeating the words more calmly and decisively in his mind: Never. Never.

  Translator’s Afterword

  Few European writers who lived between the two world wars were more talented and determined than Mihail Sebastian, and fewer still saw their lives and careers scarred by such savage ironies. Sebastian was born Iosif Hechter on October 18, 1907 in an assimilated, secular Jewish family in the provincial town of Brăila, in southeastern Romania, not far from the marshlands of the Danube Delta. Sebastian’s hometown, which looked out over the Danube River a little over a hundred kilometres inland from the Black Sea, was a cultural crossroads. Ethnic Romanians, Gypsies, Jews, Greeks, Bulgarians and Ukrainian-descended Lipoveni all mingled in its streets. Romanian was the only language spoken in the Hechter family home; young Iosif, a brilliant student from his earliest schooldays, soon learned good French and German. He was initially drawn to the theatre. At the age of sixteen he ran away from home after reading in a newspaper that the Parisian theatre troupe of Georges and Ludmila Pitoëff would be performing in the capital. His family was alarmed; when Iosif returned a few days later, his goal of moving to Bucharest, and eventually Paris, was firmly fixed in his mind.

  At eighteen, Iosif Hechter attracted the attention of one of interwar Romania’s most mesmerizing and dangerous intellects. The philosopher and mathematician Nae Ionescu (1890 – 1940), nearly twenty years Hechter’s senior, was a compelling thinker and a galvanizing lecturer and public speaker. His political views, promoting an anti-democratic, Orthodox Christian exaltation of the motherland, shaped a generation of incipiently fascist Romanian intellectuals. Also originally from Brăila, Ionescu examined Hechter’s high school graduation papers and was struck by the quality of the young man’s prose style. Two years later in 1927, while still trapped by poverty in Brăila, Sebastian (having adopted his new name in both public and private life), began to contribute to Cuvântul (The Word), the daily newspaper edited by Ionescu. Under Ionescu’s mentorship, Sebastian soon developed a reputation as an articulate young nationalist journalist, particularly perceptive on literary topics. He was invited to contribute to a variety of literary magazines; but in Cuvântul he learned to praise the “Romanian soul” and sometimes to argue against minority rights. In 1930, at the age of twenty-three, Sebastian realized his dream of going to Paris to continue his legal studies, which he had begun in Romania. He spent the winter of 1930 – 1931 studying law and reading French literature. Having adopted Marcel Proust as his favourite writer, he began to plan his own works of fiction. In 1932, after returning to Romania and settling in Bucharest, Sebastian published a short story collection; his first novel, Femei (Women), followed in 1933.

  Bucharest in the mid – 1930s was both the best and the worst place imaginable for Sebastian to develop as a writer. This was the era when the Romanian capital was praised as “the Paris of the East,” a title that was partly a comment on the Francophilia of the city’s educated classes. (Olivia Manning’s The Balkan Trilogy, though problematic in other aspects of its depiction of Romanian society, conveys a vivid sense of this culture.) The Great Depression had filled the streets of Bucharest with destitute peasants, but the city’s cultural life was energetic and cosmopolitan. The theatres were packed, numerous newspapers and literary journals competed for the attention of the literate public, there was a cultivated classical music scene and the middle classes, when not in the mountains or at the Black Sea beaches, travelled to Paris, Vienna, Munich and Berlin. Never before or after would Romania be home to such a talented group of writers confronted in such acute form by the question of the nation’s identity.

  In 1920 the Treaty of Trianon had ceded Transylva
nia to Romania. This culturally rich region of mountains and hilltop towns, inhabited by a Romanian majority and large Hungarian and German minorities, had been governed by Austria-Hungary until the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s destruction in the First World War. The addition of Transylvania, in the northwest, to Wallachia and Moldavia, the two regions whose union in 1859 had created modern Romania, was matched in the south by the acquisition of the former Bulgarian territory of northern Dobrogea, and in the east by the recovery of largely Romanian-speaking Bessarabia and Bukovina from the defunct Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires respectively. These gains resulted in a Romania that had more than twice the territory and population of the pre-1914 nation. Between 1920 and 1939, for the first – and, as it would turn out, only – time in their history, nearly all Romanians lived together in one country. This unexpected good fortune created a cultural ebullience that inspired a vigorous search for national self-definition. At the same time, 28% of the expanded nation consisted of ethnic minorities, as opposed to 10% before the First World War. The 1923 Constitution, which had guaranteed equal rights for these minorities, came under ferocious attack from the far right. Sebastian’s intellectual and creative growth is inseparable from the debates stirred up by this atmosphere, even though in the end they would destroy him.

  In Bucharest, Sebastian studied and practised law and frequented restaurants, night clubs and literary and theatrical events. His status as a well-regarded journalist earned him a government pass that granted him free travel on the nation’s railways, enabling him to retreat to mountain cabins to write. He became sufficiently prosperous to rent a small but well-appointed apartment in the city centre. He had various romantic relationships with women, but did not marry. He began to write for the theatre, and became part of an engrossing literary society that saw Bucharest surpass Iaşi to become Romania’s literary heartland. Here established older writers mingled with the new wave, the “Generation of 1927,” to which Sebastian belonged. The patriarch of Romanian literature, the prolific Moldavian historical novelist Mihail Sadoveanu (1880 – 1961), moved to Bucharest in the mid-1930s, although he soon left after becoming embroiled in a scandal. The Transylvanian Liviu Rebreanu (1885 – 1944), author of the internationally published novels Ion (1920) and The Forest of the Hanged (1922), had also relocated to the capital, where he served two terms as the artistic director of the National Theatre, edited a literary magazine and worked as a high-ranking civil servant in the Ministry of Education. Among the younger writers of the Generation of 1927 was the talented novelist Camil Petrescu (1894 – 1957). A fellow Proust enthusiast, Petrescu became one of Sebastian’s closest friends. Sebastian’s confidantes and intellectual sparring partners included young writers such as the essayist and philosopher Emil Cioran (1911 – 1995), who would become famous in Paris, the novelist and later professor of religious studies Mircea Eliade (1907 – 1986), who also contributed articles to Nae Ionescu’s Cuvântul (and was introduced to his first wife by Sebastian), and the absurdist playwright Eugen Ionescu (1909 – 1994) (who was not related to Nae Ionescu, and, in fact, was partly of Jewish origin).

  Governed by a series of inept, semi-democratic governments that coexisted with a fumbling monarchy while besieged by radicals of the far right who sometimes took to the streets to demonstrate their muscle, interwar Romania was never peaceful. But it was an exciting environment for a talented young writer like Sebastian – until his literary world began to unravel. In 1934, having completed his second novel, De două mii de ani (It’s Been Two Thousand Years), about the condition of being a Romanian of Jewish ancestry, Sebastian asked his mentor to write a preface to his new work. Nae Ionescu agreed, but loaded his essay with refutations of the novel’s claim that Jews’ first allegiance was to their Romanian identity. “It is an assimilationist illusion, it is the illusion of so many Jews who sincerely believe that they are Romanian [...] Are you Iosef Hechter, a human being from Brăila on the Danube? No, you are a Jew from Brăila on the Danube.”

  On receiving this preface, Sebastian decided that the only honest course of action was to publish it. The publication of a novel on the theme of Jewish integration into Romanian life would have been controversial under any circumstances; the addition of Ionescu’s preface made the book incendiary. De două mii de ani caused possibly the most violent scandal in Romanian literary history. The right accused Sebastian of being a Zionist agent, while Jews spurned him as a fascist lapdog. Many of his closest friends abandoned him. Sebastian refused to yield, insisting on his right to regard himself first and foremost as a Romanian: “As for anyone who tells me that I’m not a Romanian ... go talk to the trees, and tell them they’re not trees.” In a letter to a fellow writer in 1936, while the scandal was still raging, Sebastian wrote: “My maternal great-grandfather was a banker in Bucharest in 1802. He contributed money to help the leaders of the 1848 revolution. Both of my parents, born in this country (my father in 1868), speak only Romanian and brought me up as a Romanian.”

  More ominous signs appeared. Cuvântul, Sebastian’s long-time intellectual home, became the official newspaper of the Iron Guard fascist movement. His friend Mircea Eliade campaigned for the Iron Guard in 1937, savaging the government for its “tolerance” of Jews, and boasting that he welcomed having the adjective “Hitlerian” applied to him. Sebastian struggled to sustain his friendships with Eliade, Cioran and Petrescu. The crisis seems only to have spurred his creativity. In 1935 Sebastian collected his ripostes to the attacks against him in a volume entitled Cum am devenit huligan (How I Became a Hooligan) – a book that inspired the contemporary Romanian novelist Norman Manea’s memoir of his return to Bucharest after the fall of communism, The Hooligan’s Return (2003).

  How I Became a Hooligan was only one of two books published by Sebastian in 1935. His third novel, Oraşul cu Salcâmi (The Town of Acacias), also appeared that year. A coming-of-age novel that explores the traditional Romanian theme of the differences between life in the provinces and life in the capital, Oraşul cu Salcâmi remains arguably Sebastian’s most popular novel with Romanian readers. In September of that year, he wrote a series of highly regarded articles on Romanian theatre. He continued to practise law, write the French books column for the magazine Vremea (The Times), and contribute to the French-language Bucharest newspaper L’Indépendence roumaine. In 1938 his first play, the comedy Jocul de-a vacanţa (The Vacation Game), was produced and received a warm reception. In 1939 he published a book-length study of the correspondence of Marcel Proust and in 1940, with Romania at war, The Accident appeared. After this, the walls closed in on Sebastian; he published no more books in his lifetime.

  Sebastian survived the Holocaust, but at a terrible price. Romania remained neutral at the outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939, but, sympathetic to Nazi Germany, found itself under threat from the Soviet Union. Moscow annexed Bessarabia and northern Bukovina and pressured the government in Bucharest to return northern Dobrogea to Bulgaria. On January 2, 1938, in the first of a series of blows that would cripple Sebastian’s ability to earn a living, all Jewish lawyers were expelled from the bar association. As the war advanced, Sebastian lost the right to publish his journalism. He was ejected from the Romanian Academy, membership in which had provided him with a modest stipend. His railway pass was withdrawn, ending, almost forever, his relationship with the mountain landscapes, hiking and ski trails he loved (he made a final trip to the mountains, in a state of deep depression, in December 1944). Anti-Semitic residency laws artificially inflated the rent of his downtown apartment to a price far beyond his means, forcing him to move into a gloomy slum with his mother and one of his brothers. (His other brother lived in France.) In order to pay the humiliating tariffs imposed on Jews in either cash or extensive donations of clothing to the war effort, he had to borrow money from friends, who now pretended not to know him when he passed them on the street. But the most unendurable blow came in 1940 when Nae Ionescu, having been interned in a concentration camp as the anti-Se
mitic Goga-Cuza government tried to subdue the competing right-wing force of the Iron Guard, fell ill and died at the age of forty-nine. Sebastian wept uncontrollably. Long afterwards, Ionescu came to him in dreams to shake his hand.

  The war aged and impoverished Sebastian. He ate poorly and rarely went out. Unlike Bukovina and Bessarabia, where the majority of Romania’s nearly 500,000 Holocaust victims were murdered, in Bucharest anti-Semitic oppression took the form of daily humiliations and sporadic, unpredictable pogroms against Jewish neighbourhoods rather than mass slaughter. Unable to publish, Sebastian devoted much time to the diary he had begun to keep in 1935, taught himself English and read the complete works of Honoré de Balzac. He listened to the radio to follow the progress of the war, practise English and take in the classical music concerts that transported him (only late in the war did it strike him that most of these broadcasts came from German-speaking cities where he would have been killed). He planned and wrote fragments of an epic novel that was to open with a theatre company’s tour of the Romanian provinces. Sebastian used his knowledge of English – a language little studied in Romania at that time – to earn money surreptitiously by doing anonymous translations, notably of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets. The promise that others might sign his work yet allow him to receive the royalties, gave him the energy to write again for the theatre. In 1944, after the fascists were removed from office and Romania nominally joined the Allied Powers, he succeeded in publishing illegally in the newspaper România Liberă (Free Romania). The first of the three plays he had been working on, the Chekhovian Steaua fără nume (The Star Without a Name), now regarded as one of the classics of Romanian theatre, was staged in Bucharest that same year. It was advertized as the work of another writer to circumvent the ban on performing plays by Jewish authors.