Read Online Accident by Mihail Sebastian - Free Book Online

on, Nora? Aren’t you ashamed?
    She told herself that some day something would happen to change all this and set her off on the road to a new life. She didn’t know what it would be: a letter, a meeting, some piece of news; but for the time being she was happy to be able to postpone this change for as long as possible and put off these expectations for an uncertain future. She continued her life among familiar things that made her feel protected.

    A new life! The word had a certain magic.
    But, if in order to attain that new life it had been necessary only to say a word or extend her hand, it was possible that she would not have done it.
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    â€œAnd yet here I am,” she said to herself. Here in the apartment of a man she didn’t know.
    The clothes he had been wearing yesterday evening were tossed over a chair, while alongside them, laid out with an exaggerated sense of order, were her things: dress, girdle, shoes. The green tie had fallen onto the carpet. Nora recognized it. It was the only thing she did recognize. Otherwise everything was strange: the desk, the books, the paintings, the small objects, all flung together in a disorder that breathed haste and indifference. Nora stared at them and wondered about them all.
    She knew so little about the man who, taking off after a night of love, had left behind him seventeen words written on a scrap of paper! And she herself, she realized, had remained a stranger to him. She felt in her being so many words that had not been spoken, so many resistances that had not yielded ...
    On his desk was a lawyer’s agenda, a piece of cardboard on which telephone numbers were written and a photograph of a young girl. Nora looked at her for a while. She was blonde and wore a black long-sleeved pullover with an initial high up on the left side like a tiny pocket: an oblique, printed A .

V
    PAUL HAD TRIED MANY TIMES TO REMEMBER the circumstances in which he had met Anna. He would have liked to be able to relive the exact moment in which someone had put them face to face, asking them, as one usually does: “What? You don’t know each other?” But his memory had not retained this moment, and it was possible that events had not occurred in this way. Anna was lost in the multitude of hazy faces that he had met “on the street,” “in a train,” “in Sinaia,” 4 vague formulas that covered with a mist of uncertainty the initial handshake, the first exchange of words.
    Later, he had learned from a word uttered at random that one day they had vacationed together, very close to each other, without yet knowing one another.
    â€œSix years ago, when we were in Satu-Lung ...”
    â€œSix years ago? Are you sure?”
    â€œYes. In 1926. In August.”
    Paul suddenly saw again his whole vacation at Cernatu, those four weeks of solitude spent in the small town in the Braşov region, the street corner where, without any transition, Satu-Lung began and where, as though crossing a border, he passed the invisible line between the communities. He saw again the group of young women and men who came down the hill in the morning towards Satu-Lung, disorderly, rowdy, a little threatening, with that feeling of being in a strange town in which nobody knew them and nothing compromised them: they ate pretzels in the middle of the street, shouted at the top of their lungs, raced from one sidewalk to the other, threw stones at the trees at the edge of
the road – those charming Cernatu apple trees, with their trunks whitewashed halfway up their height and their luscious green leaves.
    Every day their passage along the “promenade,” a wooden bridge laid over the sidewalk, erupted in these noises. Scandalized Saxon women 5 appeared at their windows, intimidated children halted in front of their doors, young women from good families “of the region,” who were reading or studying on the park benches, barely dared to lift their