Read Online Accident by Mihail Sebastian - Free Book Online Page B

gentleman next to the window? One day you’re going to fall in love with that gentleman ...’
    â€œEven so, how can I know it wasn’t better that way? I think you wouldn’t have become my lover and I think I would have been too thick and I wouldn’t have liked you. I used to like boys who danced well, and you dance so badly! I don’t know how much I’ve changed since then. I used to wear awful hairdos and short dresses, I was scatterbrained, I was wild, I was ... look how I was.”
    And taking from the table a charcoal pencil, she drew on the sketch pad a fine outline of a scatterbrained girl with her legs in the air as if leaping, with her arms open, with her hair floating in the wind. In a few seconds the pad was full of images, which repeated the same sketch of the wild girl, seeming to relay the stylish leaps from image to image. From this game emerged, over a few days, an entire series of drawings and watercolours, some of which had been shown that same autumn at the Black and White Gallery, while others, later that winter, came to occupy a whole wall at her one-woman show bearing the same title: August 1926 .
    Paul watched the birth of these images with astonishment. Her charcoal pencils seemed to revive them, releasing them from her own memory. Nothing was missing: neither the walk from Cernatu, nor the tennis court, nor the municipal train with its yellow carriages, nor the minuscule train stations full of sunlight, where a few young Saxon women sat waiting with their immense hats of yellow straw on their heads and their huge, flat, rural handbags ...
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    For a long time he had known nothing about her, in spite of the greeting on the street, even though they had happened to exchange a few words on a couple of occasions. The mere mention of the short form of her name, that pretentious “Ann,” irritated him, when Anna would have been such a pleasant name.
    Now, when their love had become such a grinding agony for him, he tried to locate again in his memory that lost, indifferent Ann of the early days, to pin to small truths from the past the appearance of this young woman whom he had barely known and
who, at that time, could do him neither harm nor good. In his mind there were certain calm territories, certain zones of indifference, to which he returned when the image he had today of his lover struck him as intolerable. He took pains to reconstitute each detail of those old events and to return to them with care, as though to a few old photographs that he was afraid to find drained of colour by the years.
    He relived with a feeling of long-awaited revenge the day in which they had met in a cinema on the Boulevard. He was at the ticket window when someone tapped him on the shoulder. To his surprise, it was Anna, whom he didn’t know well enough for such a familiar gesture. “Don’t you want to buy me a ticket as well so that I don’t have to stand in the lineup?”
    They had entered the cinema together, but he refused, almost impolitely, her request that he come with her to the front row, where she usually sat because of her slight myopia. “Forgive me, but I can’t sit too close to the screen.”
    And, leaving her to continue on her way, he sat down in a middle row, happy to have remained alone.
    How removed, how restful, how unlikely that event seemed now, when in any cinema he entered the thought that she, too, might be there, possibly accompanied by someone else, tortured him, forcing him to be always on his guard to recognize her in the gloom among the long rows of moviegoers, her blonde head gleaming for a second in the glow of an usher’s flashlight and then slipping away into the darkness of the theatre ...
    He saw again in the same way the far-off January day in which they had met in a train coming back from Sinaia. He was reading a book when Ann knocked on the windowpane of his compartment.
    â€œWhat a surprise! I thought I