Accident

by Mihail Sebastian

  “What are you thinking about?” he asked Paul, taking the written request from his hand.

  Paul didn’t reply. It was difficult for him to take his eyes off Ann’s signature, in the bottom corner of the canvas, her oblique, fine signature, almost covered by the frame.

  He received the signed form and wondered what he would do with it now: it all struck him as useless, meaningless.

  “Go to the police station. I’ll phone them in the meantime. In half an hour, by the time you get there, your passport will be ready.”

  And as he remained silent, still staring up towards that unexpected Balcic on the wall, the Minister, too, turned his head towards the painting, measured it with his eye with a certain surprise, as though he were looking at it carefully for the first time, then, turning back towards Paul, he smiled. “Sweet girl, eh?”

  There was something bewildering about the whole trip: he crossed countries he didn’t know, he waited for connecting trains in tiny border towns, at night he looked out the open window of the carriage: the endless, desolate countryside of Poland, sad and barren-looking in the middle of summer; he read in passing the names of German stations as he would have read them from the dial of his radio: Beuthen, Gleiwitz, Breslau. Everything flowed past him, half dream-like, uncertain, strange and yet indifferent: somewhere far away, at the end of the road, was Ann.

  He stopped at dawn in a sleeping, deserted Berlin with its broad streets depopulated, with buildings plunged in silence, with pompous statues that seemed somehow unreal in the morning light, like abandoned stage scenery – a city of plaster, a city that seemed to be a life-sized model of itself, where Paul’s steps echoed quietly on the asphalt, one after the other.

  He spent the evening in Cologne, waiting for the last train, which was meant to take him to Liège. He was tired, with his eyes sunken from sleeplessness, unshaven, his clothes in disorder. “I look like a man on the run,” he said to himself, staring at himself in the mirror of the station. He had the impression that he was under suspicion on all sides, while the platforms seemed to be packed with police and military patrols.

  It was July 1934, shortly after the serious upheavals that had taken place all across Germany,11 and, in his current lamentable state, he could easily be taken for a political fugitive. The entire city was sunken in the tense silence of a siege. The assault troops had been on a forced holiday for a few days, during which wearing uniforms was forbidden, and this unarmed Cologne, without army boots, without peaked caps, without flags, seemed to be a city that had surrendered.

  The same atmosphere of deaf panic accompanied him to the border. Muffled voices were audible in the passageways, the door of his compartment opened regularly for interminable checks and inspections, the carriage’s exits were guarded by watchmen. In Aachen, the last stop in Germany, the train was halted before the station and the passengers descended into a double ring of police and customs inspectors. Luminous signs, whistles, curt, harsh commands, collided in the night. Somebody took his passport and examined it in detail, page by page.

  “Why are you going to Liège?”

  The question surprised him.

  Not even he knew well why he was going there. For the first time since his departure this question without an answer was thrown in his face. He lifted his shoulders, at a loss, a gesture which did not respond to the police officer’s question, but rather to his own surprise. But his silence was probably suspect, since the officer abruptly seized the flashlight in his pocket and lifted it towards Paul’s face like the barrel of a revolver. In the glare of the light, Paul met a cold, biting stare that pierced him. I’m lost, he thought. He saw himself being stopped there at the border station, put under escort and sent back to Cologne for further investigation. He had heard that hundreds of arrests were taking place daily at all the border crossings, where the former soldiers of the assault battalions, having escaped the massacre in Munich, were trying to flee in borrowed civilian clothes, with false passports.

  The man continued to hold his dazzling flashlight fixed on Paul’s face.

  I should speak, I should reply, this silence will sink me, Paul thought. But at the same time he felt incapable of uttering a word, of finding an explanation.

  I’m going to Liège to see the woman I love, he thought, but the words remained unspoken, as in that terrible dream in which you feel your throat clenched up, although you want to shout, to call out for help. He was so close to Ann now (58 kilometres from Liège, he reminded himself with a shudder), and yet as far away as ever.

  “Es geht, schön,”12 the officer muttered, and with a completely unexpected gesture, he turned out the flashlight and returned his passport, moving away.

  Only later, when he glimpsed the first peaked cap of a Belgian customs officer and heard the first words of French, did Paul shake loose of the tension of those terrible moments.

  From a distance he heard cordial voices, calm, slightly sleepy steps on the platform. I’m in Belgium, he told himself, as though at the end of a nightmare from which he had awoken. He looked for a long time at the rectangle of still-wet red China ink that an official had stamped in his passport:

  Hegenrath, 23 juillet 1934. Contrôle des passagers.

  Ann wasn’t in Liège. She had left a few days ago, nobody knew where for. At the Romanian pavilion nobody could give him reliable information.

  “We inaugurated the pavilion on the 15th and she left on the 16th,” Paul was told by one of Ann’s colleagues, who had remained in Liège to supervise some projects that had got behind schedule. “Where did she go? Who knows. Maybe to Brussels, maybe somewhere on the seaside. She was dead tired. At the end she was working day and night. Anyhow, ask at the hotel.”

  Nobody at the hotel knew anything more. Ann had left without a forwarding address.

  “I’m sure she’s coming back,” the receptionist assured him. “She asked me to hold onto her mail. Furthermore, she left a suitcase here with a whole box of tubes and colours.”

  He didn’t even have enough money to go any farther, to look for her in Brussels, nor did he think it would be possible to find her there, in a large, unknown city, where, on the whole, it was unlikely that she was at the moment. The only wise course was to wait here in Liège, where at least it was certain that she would return and where, while waiting for her, there were so many things to see, in this town where Ann had lived for a few weeks and where many things might preserve innumerable small memories of her. There were streets where she had walked, shop windows where she had stopped, thrilling display windows of the Belgian provinces with vague ambitions towards luxury – Paris wasn’t far away! – but with something honest, clumsy, a little gauche in their lack of whimsy.

  Surely on rainy evenings along this tepid Meuse River, which ran through the middle of the town, Ann had walked alone, as she liked to do sometimes in Bucharest, bareheaded in a trenchcoat, with her hands in her pockets.

  One day, after a similar rain shower, on a wall where the water was unsticking the posters for the latest shows, Paul caught sight of an older, yellowed, half-torn poster: Salle Communale, 26 juin 1934, Clothilde et Alexandre Sacharoff, grand récital de danse. No doubt Ann had gone to that recital: she, who, indifferent to music, retained by contrast a passion for dance that went well beyond that of a normal spectator, a sort of concealed nostalgia that made her regret that instead of painting she hadn’t had the courage to spend her time dancing. There was something in her that felt the call of the open stage, the limelight, the applause ... No doubt Ann had gone to that recital, and Paul stood thoughtfully for a long time in front of the poster, which suddenly opened up the vision of the evening of the show, and not an abstract, uncertain evening, lost among thousands of others, but rather a precise evening, which had a name, a date – Wednesday, June 26, 1934, at 8:30 exactly – an evening that he could detach from the time Ann had spent apart from him and relive after such a long time.

  The newsreels that were showing at the Liège cinemas that week we
re dedicated mainly to the exhibitions, and, above all, to the opening ceremonies. Paul watched each of them several times with eagerness, since Ann appeared briefly in them, caught in passing by the reporter’s camera, appearances that were yet so fleeting that no sooner had he glimpsed Ann than she disappeared, as though she had been lost in the crowd. In one of these newsreels – for Fox, Paramount and Pathé each presented the opening ceremonies differently – Ann’s silhouette held steady, distinctly outlined, in the foreground for a few seconds, but with her head turned away at an angle that made Paul feel tempted to cry out to her, to wave, as though it were possible for her to hear him, suddenly turn her head towards him and see him. From a distance one could see King Leopold and Queen Astrid approaching amid a cluster of long-tailed uniforms, and, as the royal group grew nearer, Ann raising herself up on her tiptoes and turning her head to the right, presumably to see better.

  A few days later, and behind schedule, the Eclair newsreel arrived, in which the King and Queen’s visit to the Romanian pavilion was filmed at greater length. Here Ann was clearly visible, leaning against her painting as though ready to provide explanations. Queen Astrid paused in passing before the painting and appeared to smile at Ann: their white dresses, one beside the other, lit up the whole screen. It didn’t take more than a few seconds, but the images were so clear and were taken face-on so that Paul had time to look her right in the eyes.

  Ann’s painting covered almost the entire back wall of the pavilion. It was painted straight onto the wall on dry plaster, something which, so far as Paul knew, Ann had never tried until now. There were two landscapes, a landscape of oil wells and a rural landscape, separated by water that flowed down the middle like a boundary line.

  “She was lucky,” Paul was told by the painter he met at the pavilion, and who was showing him through the exhibition. “She was incredibly lucky. Painting water on a fresco is sheer lunacy. And look at how she pulled it off. Look at the depths it has, the clarity!”

  In fact, everything in Ann’s work was more certain, more decisive than her usual manner. A few landscape details, some wild flowers, a tiny herd of cattle in the distance, still recalled the showy love of detail of her smaller drawings, but the main lines of the canvas, the black oil derricks, the peasant women in the foreground, were depicted robustly, with calm composure.

  Paul came to the pavilion every day in the hope of receiving news. There was a reception desk there, a sort of reading room where mail and Romanian newspapers were delivered. One day he recognized Ann’s writing on a postcard: the card was addressed collectively to “the guys” at the pavilion, with greetings from Ostend. We’re passing through, splendid weather, what’s up with you guys? Next to Ann’s signature was another signature, indecipherable but visibly male.

  “Who’s that?” Paul asked.

  “Dănulescu, the architect. Don’t you know him? She left with him. I thought I told you that. In his car.”

  He didn’t have the courage to ask anything more. What did “she left with him” mean? It was a repellent turn of phrase. It seemed to be equivalent to “she’s living with him,” “she’s sleeping with him.”

  He didn’t have the courage to ask, and in fact there was nothing more to ask. Everything was clear at last. He now understood her having left Bucharest without a farewell word, he even understood the very fact of her participation in the exhibition at Liège, where she surely would not have been invited and would not have been entrusted with work of such great responsibility – she was too young, too lacking in experience – had she not been “proposed” by Dănulescu the architect, who was in charge of the pavilion’s interior decoration.

  Now, looking again, but with different eyes, at the canvas signed by Ann, he realized how it differed from her usual style. The truth was that the restless Ann he knew had not painted this canvas. If the lines were firm and the colours calm it was because a man had intervened there and taken her hasty hand in his powerful one, directing her in a way that was alert to the full stretch of the landscape, as he might have directed the hand of a child, who has the pencil gripped tight between his fingers but doesn’t know how to write, across the page of an exercise book.

  And, as if he had needed a final sign of how things stood, Paul found in that reading room, in a Belgian art magazine, in a special issue published on the occasion of the exhibition, an article by Dănulescu on “Mural Painting in Romanian Monasteries,” accompanied by some drawings and reproductions, in which the prime example given was that of the frescoes at Snagov and, in particular, that descent from the cross that Ann had shown him years ago in the little monastery on the shore of the lake. Among the detailed enlargements was a reproduction of the old man in the background who was stroking his beard with that anxious gesture that Ann had referred to as a “secular” gesture and which Dănulescu now referred to with the same word in his article.

  It was impossible that this was a coincidence and it was even less possible that it was Ann who had revealed this detail to the architect, an eminent specialist in mural painting. Much more believable was the possibility that he had originally revealed it to her, but in that case Ann and Dănulescu had known each other for a very long time, and their liaison was probably of long standing, of a longer standing than what until now he had believed to be his love with Ann. He felt betrayed, lied to from the beginning, in his very first memories of her. That same day he left Liège for home.

  Autumn had come, and the last late arrivals were returning from their summer holidays. People in Bucharest were shivering with anticipation at the beginning of the season, as the theatres, concert halls and art galleries opened in turn. Ann still hadn’t appeared anywhere. She was certainly in Bucharest, especially now that the exhibition in Liège had closed, but Paul never ran into her. It was true that he was going out little, particularly in the evenings, which, tired from days in court, he was spending at home, reading, listening to music, without feeling any enthusiasm for either the books or the music but happy to have the pretext not to leave his apartment or to see anyone. He felt a longing for the life of a teacher in a provincial high school somewhere in a remote market town without a railway station, without newspapers, whose socializing consisted of playing chess with the teacher of physics and chemistry, a sort of bachelorhood rooted in solitude.

  One night he had passed in front of Ann’s building and, more out of habit than curiosity, had lifted his gaze towards her windows: the lights were on. She’s at home, Paul thought, but calmly, without emotion, without any desire to see her, as if he had noticed that it was raining or that it was late.

  He spent whole days without even thinking of her, without the slightest memory. It all struck him as distant, remote, relegated forever to the depths of his memory. Sometimes at the office, the girl who answered the telephone would tell him: “Somebody asked for you. A woman’s voice. She didn’t leave her name.” He didn’t even bother to put the question to himself: Could it be Ann? Yes, it could be Ann. And then what?

  Even so, he sometimes awoke at night from his dreams with her name on his lips, and felt then, like a sharpening pain, the need to see her – not in order to speak to her, since he had nothing to say to her and felt that any return to the past was impossible – but in order to watch her, even without her knowledge, as he might from a window, as though he were a passerby. Once he had received at the office a visit from the head of a film company and, in the midst of a discussion of a fiscal appeal that the man was bringing forward, Paul had suddenly interrupted him, struck in a flash by a thought: “What do you do with old newsreels?”

  The man, not understanding what connection this question might have with his lawsuit, replied in amazement: “Some of them we send right away to head office. Most of them stay in storage at our office. After one or two years we destroy them.”

  “Could you find me the Eclair newsreel from last summer, from July? The one with the exhibition at Liège? And if you can find it, could you show it for me somewhere, in a
projection room?’

  “That’s no problem. We have our own projection room. We just have to find the film in storage. If it’s from July, it might be showing somewhere out in the provinces. There are a few market towns where we send newsreels from a few months, or even a year ago, for a pittance ...”

  Paul thought it over: if the film was in Bucharest, he could see Ann again that very day, but if it had been sent to the provinces, his plan fell apart. He had been so close to bringing it to fruition that now, when he was no longer sure of himself, he had the feeling of missing a long-established appointment with Ann.

  “Please check it out,” he said to his client. “Call the storage now and see if they have the film. If it’s there, I’d like to see it today. If it’s in the provinces, then find out in which particular town and which cinema. Excuse me, it’s something I can’t explain, but I have to see that film at all costs, wherever it may be.”

  In fact, he was determined to leave for the provinces, wherever the film might be, and in an instant he ran over in his mind the preparations that would be necessary for his departure (a trial that had been adjourned for two days, two letters he would have to dictate hastily to the stenographer ...), but within a quarter of an hour he received a phone call that the newsreel that interested him had been found in storage and that he could see it at four o’clock this afternoon.

  The projection room was in St. George’s Square, in a small room on the fifth floor, with a low ceiling and the windows blocked up, a real little box, in which the sound of the projector made the outsized din of a factory or an airplane. Paul had first to sit through the end of a film that was being shown for a few provincial cinema owners who had come to Bucharest to contract their movies for the 1934-35 winter season. It was a comedy-adventure, Bolero, with Carole Lombard and George Raft, of which he understood nothing. When the lights came on, those few spectators gave him the suspicious looks they might reserve for a new competitor, and their suspicions became even more acute when, after they were called into the director’s office to discuss contract conditions, he was left there, possibly, they feared, to see a special film, “the hit of the season,” which was being shown only, in total secret, to privileged clients.