Accident

by Mihail Sebastian

  On the third night everything suddenly fell calm, as tempests fall calm on the sea.

  Paul awoke in the darkness and listened.

  “What’s happened?”

  “I’m not sure. Listen for yourself.”

  The nocturnal silence had a rustling quality, as though the forest had been rejuvenated. The cabin seemed to be as light as a ship freed from an ice floe.

  Paul went to the window and opened it. A deep blue sky with moist stars, an incomparably clear, incomparably simple, spring sky, floated over the snowbound forest. Everything in the night was blue – the firs, the snow, the cliffs. An invisible moon, possibly secluded somewhere behind the cabin, gave the distant mountains a weak metallic glow; their silhouettes, too, were blue, but with phosphorescent, snow-white summits.

  Paul remained next to the window with an intoxicated feeling. Nora called him a few times, but he didn’t reply.

  The cold night air was sharp but not freezing. It carried a moist smell, an aroma of roots and damp herbs.

  “It’s like awaking from a dream,” Paul said.

  He bent towards the window to feel the breeze from that impossible spring night on his forehead.

  In full sunlight, Postăvar was unrecognizable. A large amphitheatre encircled its green and white forests. The light was cold, pure, resonant. Even on the most distant lines of mountains, everything stood out with exaggerated precision as though in an infinite display window. Looking between the pine trees from Gunther’s cabin, he could make out minuscule houses, black roofs, narrow paths winding through the bush-like rivers far away in the valley. It was Predeal, a Predeal coloured with expanses of mauve and blue. The Bucegi Mountains no longer had their lunar glow, their night-time transparency. They looked like mountains made out of chalk, meticulously sculpted, with delicate, precise peaks.

  On the opposite slope, the Burzenland unfurled like a relief model. The Făgăraş Mountains and the peaks around Cincu caught the plain, with its towns, trails, forests, tiny yet clearly delineated when seen from high above, within their violet circle, as though viewed through a spyglass that shrank images without distorting them. The most distant silhouettes – houses, trees or cliffs

  – retained their distinctive contours in daylight.

  Nora and Paul spent all of their time on their skis. Their old routes became new and full of surprises. Each spot on the mountain, each hour of the day, opened onto an unknown landscape. The snow itself seemed to change its consistency in the sunlight. It was light, powdery, dry snow, which their skis glided across without any resistence, sensitive to the slightest pressure. Turns and stops happened on their own, almost before they had begun the manoeuvre. Everything worked with delightful ease in that light that lent transparency to even the heaviest objects.

  The harshest sounds, the most distant echoes, became audible in the woods with a kind of musical vibration. The whole mountain was like a tuning fork or a violin. The blows of axe-blades or the squelched falling of trees emanated as though from the depths of the earth, only to grow clearer as they entered the warm morning air. A few times, a barely discernible breeze passed through the forest, and beneath this breath of life the pine trees looked like sailing ships becalmed on the sea. Only at the tops of the ridges was the air sharper; the wind’s gusting raised the snow, spraying it up in small artesian wells. From the summit of Postăvar, the lines of the Bucegi Mountains stood out like silver craters, each crowned by a halo of fine powder.

  They came back to the cabin tired out from too much sunlight, intoxicated from endless runs on their skis. Gunther, who couldn’t do anything more demanding than a light outing, normally waited for them at the SKV chalet, where his appearance always aroused the same whispers and questions. But now the boy accepted with indifference, even with an ironic pleasure, all these stares that peeped out from the windows as soon as he approached the Saxons’ chalet. The sun lent him a feverish, exuberant joy, animated by movement. He walked around bare-headed in his sleeveless summer shirt, open at the neck, and ran through the snow with his arms spread and his face to the sun. Faffner, older and more skeptical, followed him without haste.

  “Don’t you want to awake from the dream?” Gunther asked him, pulling on his ear. “Don’t you see that spring’s come?”

  The dog lifted its head for a moment, its eyes narrowing in the morning light, then with its old sleepy indolence, it returned to its winter slumber.

  “Faffner’s wiser than us,” Nora said. “He knows better than to believe in spring too soon.”

  Gunther’s slightly exaggerated delight worried her. The boy seemed to think he’d put the winter behind him. His delight was a kind of victorious satisfaction, as though the aim he had set himself – to make it to the month of March in order to be able to confront the Grodeck family – had been reached and his effort to live until then had been fulfilled.

  Nora wished she could temper that excessive happiness.

  Standing between Paul and Gunther, both raving about the sunlight, she tried to remain calm. She didn’t believe in great, dazzling, miraculous happiness.

  She believed more in soothing, durable, settled feelings.

  “Isn’t that right, Faffner?”

  She sensed in Faffner an ally, a friend, a source of wisdom.

  It was two or three in the afternoon when the sunlight became scorching. Paul no longer wanted to go inside. He lay down on the steps of the cabin with his eyes closed and his arms spread. A warm red light crossed and recrossed his eyelids, bringing back his hours on the beach at Balcic. He had the sensation that he was naked in the sunlight. He could feel his temples throbbing; his ears were deafened by a confused tumult of cowries. He forgot where he was and how long he had been here. It seemed to him as though he had always been wrapped in this luminous torpor and always would be. He had no memories, no thoughts. Not a single image passed before his closed eyes, not even his own image. He barely felt the heat on his arms, his sunburned cheeks; the light seemed to pass through him, through his pores, through the blood in his veins, right to the arteries, right to his heart.

  Nora came alongside him to wake him without raising her voice. He heard her as though she were approaching, felt her as though her light hands were on his face and his hair, but all of these vague sensations remained beyond the boundaries of his intimate circle of light.

  The evenings had the aroma of resin, of tree bark, of tender leaves. The pine trees became translucent beneath the white moon. The day’s bright colours – like violet, white or red tinsel – faded away after a last intense kindling at sunset.

  Against the white background of the snowy Bucegi Mountains, the moon rose in an unreal shade of yellow, a warm powerful yellow that did not seem to be part of this winter evening landscape. Later, when it regained its spectral light, the ridges, enlarged beneath the moonlight, looked as blue as pristine lakes.

  Nora and Paul waited for the sunset up on the summit of Postăvar. They stayed there until late, until the night was black. Scattered lights came on in the Timiş Valley. The automobile headlights advancing along the road to Braşov stood out like points of fire; farther away, like a bracelet of glinting stones, they saw Râşnov. The forests rustled without wind, without bending, with a murmur of new life beneath the snow. The rocks had a welcoming smell of fresh earth.

  They left the summit late, drunk on the view, staggering on their skis. They couldn’t stand to return to the cabin. They couldn’t tear themselves away from this thrilling evening and its vaporous light. Whole hours passed without their speaking to each other. Only now and then, when they stopped at a fork in the trail, did they seek each other out, asking with their eyes which direction they should take – towards Ruia? towards Crucur? – and now, in the pale light of the night, they looked at each other with uncomprehending astonishment, as though they had met in a dream.

  XIX

  THE NIGHT BEFORE EPIPHANY, THE BLIZZARD broke again. The weather changed unexpectedly, and in less than an hour Post
ăvar returned to winter. Braşov was visible for an instant in the evening light, then disappeared into the mist.

  “From here on in, we won’t see it again until the spring,” Hagen said, closing the shutters.

  The last night Nora and Paul had left in the mountains strongly resembled the night of their arrival at the cabin. The wind hurled waves of snow at the windows. Faffner barked at the woods, frozen solid by the frost.

  Next to the fireplace, Nora recited the words that had greeted her on the first night:

  “Mancher auf der Wanderschaft

  Kommt aus Tor auf dunklen Pfaden ...”

  Gunther didn’t let her finish.

  “No, no. It’s late now. No one else is coming.”

  The return of winter, after several days of sunshine, caught Gunther unprepared, without defences or resistance. The brief spring had given him a nervous enthusiasm that left him vulnerable. He watched in silence as Nora and Paul prepared for their departure, stuffing their belongings into their backpacks in order to be ready the next morning. His cheeks were sunburned, but his face had become pale again. Deep pouches of exhaustion and fever made his fair eyes even bluer.

  “Do you have to go?”

  He asked the question in a careless tone, trying to hide his agony at seeing them leave.

  “We might not have to,” Paul said, rendered pensive by Gunther’s question. “We might not have to. If we were braver than we are ... If we understood that nothing’s calling us back to the city

  ... If we had decided to stay here forever ...”

  Nora continued to organize her belongings and place them in her backpack. She, too, had entertained for a moment the childish thought of staying at the cabin, but she dismissed it with a decisive gesture. Someone in this house has to not be a dreamer. “The two of you are forgetting that I’m a teacher. You’re forgetting that my vacation is over. On January 8th, at eight o’clock in the morning, I have to be in class.”

  In her mind she said different, cold, rather bitter words to hold back her tears.

  Hagen accompanied them as far as Ruia. For a while Faffner, too, followed them, but the snow was too deep for him and, before reaching the SKV chalet, the dog stopped.

  “Hey, Faffner, go home. And stop giving us those sad eyes. Aren’t you ashamed? You’re an adult.”

  The dog stood unmoving with an amazed stare that didn’t grasp what was happening.

  Hagen was silent the whole way. He skied behind them with his dark cape flapping in the wind. At Ruia he let them go on alone. “I’d guide you to Braşov, but I don’t want to leave the boy on his own.”

  At the last minute he took a small metal object out of his pocket and gave it to Nora with an abrupt, unprepared motion. “Please hold onto it as a keepsake of Gunther.”

  It was a medallion with a portrait of Young Mrs. Grodeck, a small, round portrait that resembled the one in the cabin, although it seemed to be much older.

  Nora didn’t know how to respond. Even the gesture with which he had offered her this unexpected gift contained a harshness that discouraged any word of friendship.

  “I’ll never forget Gunther. Nor you, Hagen.”

  His blue eyes were hard and chilly, betraying neither a smile nor sadness. Nora waited to read in them a sign of understanding, but there was no flicker of light in his dark face.

  “Have a safe journey,” Hagen said.

  They knew the trails and no longer needed to stop at the junctions to look for signs to give them directions. The trail to Crucur unfurled without any accidental difficulties. The route was deceptively simple and looked at first glance as though it demanded little effort. Paul let himself go, and his skis ran faster and faster. He didn’t even try to brake. Only on the turns did he slip into a very weak snowplow, which closed up naturally in the seconds following the turn with a brisk skid from which his skis emerged lighter and moving even faster.

  At the beginning his backpack weighed him down, but after a while it lost its heaviness, as though, at full speed, someone had taken it off his shoulders. He felt only his cheeks, ablaze with the frost. A bitter wind was blowing, raising whirls of snow and flinging them in his face. For a few seconds he no longer saw anything before his eyes, but his skis rushed on in their freedom.

  They reached Crucur without realizing how or when. The first time, the trail had been longer and slower. Maybe we’ve made a mistake. Maybe we’re going in the wrong direction.

  Yet he recognized the clearing and, above all, he recognized the forest ranger’s cabin where they had stopped the first time. They found it just as abandoned, with the door open and the same extinguished coals in the fireplace ... Recent ski tracks, passing in front of the cabin, were the only sign of life in the whole blizzard-battered clearing.

  They set out along those tracks, which disappeared into the fir trees. The white-and-yellow rectangles on the trees were covered with snow and hardly visible. The route between the trees was full of obstacles since the steepness of the trail’s slope changed countless times. The whole run consisted of sudden changes of speed. Now the snow was frozen hard, now it was mysteriously fluffy, and always his skis were being wrestled into a sideways skid. Nora, who was ahead of him, announced the obstacles in a loud voice and gave him commands to turn or brake, which Paul carried out with reflex-like swiftness. Sometimes his protective gestures came a second too late, and his skis pounced out of their tracks, pitching him to the ground. He would get up, blinded by the snow but without having felt the blow. All of his attention remained fixed straight ahead, towards a moving point that his skis were chasing without reaching it, so that he didn’t notice his halts and falls. He was powerless to hold the skis in a snowplow for very long. After a few instants of tension, a skid would jar him out of this braking posture like a sudden throb and dash him forward in freefall. In these moments he experienced a lightning-quick loss of consciousness, after which he awoke again on his skis going full tilt, floating as though between two dreams.

  They entered Braşov before noon, as though reaching a shelter. The blizzard was less ferocious in the streets. The winds seemed to have stopped at the city limits.

  They were completely white. There was snow on their eyebrows, their temples, their foreheads. Even their eyes had lost their colour beneath their snow-whitened eyelashes.

  “We made very good time,” Nora said. “Two hours and eight minutes.”

  “Is that all?” Paul said, feeling surprised and not understanding why.

  Two hours and eight minutes struck him as both a lot and very little. He had the impression that they had left the cabin not several hours, but several days ago, and that the mountains and the people living there were far behind them. But at the same time he had a sensation that the whole downhill run had lasted only a minute, that it had gone by in a blur, and that the entire journey had been a single, dizzying fall.

  Skiing, for him, suspended the ability to measure time.

  XX

  ON THAT LAST DAy OF THE VACATIONS, Braşov was as lively and crowded as it had been at the beginning. The streets filled with skiers looked like immense platforms on which the hurried, restless, talkative throng awaited the arrival and departure of trains. The downtown travel agencies were besieged by people impatient to make reservations, buy tickets and ask for information. The human tide that had rolled down from the cabins in the surrounding mountains, or had come in from farther away – from the Făgăraş, from Bihor – after their skiing holidays, was gathering again in Braşov, where so many roads met. Sunburned faces smiled at each other on the street as if they had recognized old friends.

  “Is it possible, Nora, that all these people are returning to their former lives? Is it really possible that after having been in the mountains they still believe in the things they left down below? Which they’ve got away from? Which they wanted to forget?”

  “He who has been in the mountains is a free man,” Nora replied.

  A free man. A free man. Paul repeated her word
s in silence. He felt that he was still very young, that he was coming back from a long, sunny vacation, and that all roads were open to him.

  The trains came in from the rest of Transylvania as though from a frozen polar region, with long delays, laden with snow, the engines white like enormous ice-breaking ploughs.

  “They’re organizing a skiers’ train this evening. It’s better if you wait for that one. You’ll never find seats in the regular carriages.”

  They had a few hours left in Braşov and were thinking of spending them on the streets, particularly in the outlying neighbourhoods where the city preserved its air of an old fortress. But, before setting off on the road again, they went into the Hotel Coroana to leave their skis there and take a rest. In the café there was a motley intersection of city clothes and ski costumes, sullen townspeople and the bright faces of young people who had just come down from the forests.

  With some difficulty, they found a free table in a corner where it appeared that the locals took refuge to immerse themselves in reading the afternoon newspapers, angry at the crush of youth that was disturbing their peace and their daily habits. They were all serious, silent, severe, and they all seemed to have the same blunt, resistant, undemonstrative forehead as Old Grodeck. They were reading Braşov’s German- and Hungarian-language newspapers, and they read them with a kind of uniform worried attention.

  Paul noticed in passing a front-page headline in large letters: Létrejött Rómában a megegyezés!26

  He didn’t know what those words meant, and suddenly it passed through his mind that extraordinary events might have taken place in the world during the two weeks he had spent in the mountains, and that the headline, printed in large letters, might be announcing a crucial event that would change the fate of mankind.