The Accident

II

PAUL HEARD THE SHOUT, but didn’t turn his head. The voice fell from above, frozen and accentless. The whole street was stock-still with silence. It must be very late. In all of Bulevardul Dacia, a single lighted window: her window. He felt it in his back, between his shoulder blades, like a glare. He didn’t stop until he had turned the corner, when he felt that the eye of that light could no longer reach him.

He suddenly felt unburdened. Free and on my own…

How far he was from the apartment he had fled! He had drunk a lot, he had talked endlessly, wishing keenly to be young and merry, but it had taken no more than being left alone for a few moments for all of his animation to collapse. He hadn’t felt the slightest curiosity about the body of the young woman who was undressing in the next room. He had got up from his seat, grabbed his hat and overcoat, and had left, leaving the door open out of a fear of being heard. He had gone down the stairs, taking two steps at a time, then three. Free and on my own…

… He came to his senses stumbling along the sidewalk, right at the edge, with tiny steps, one after the other. His boots sank deep into the snow, leaving clearly delineated prints. When he got to the next street light, he stopped to look around him: under the glow of the lamps, his footprints made a line into the distance, as though drawn on a limitless white page. Then he set off again, with the same careful steps as before.

A taxi passed alongside him, slowing down in invitation to this late-night passerby. Paul met the driver’s intrigued, possibly slightly ironic gaze and shuddered at being caught in his stupid game. He crossed the street to the opposite sidewalk, accelerating his pace as though he had suddenly remembered that he was in a race about which he had forgotten.

And now?

He was embarrassed at the thought of resuming his interrupted game since he had the impression that neither the driver nor he had surprised each other just now. He deliberately walked close to the houses, where the snow was packed down and his steps left no footprints.

He was passing in front of a long fence made of whitewashed wooden planks. Odd or even? He decided on odd and started to count…

“One, two, three, four…”

He stopped occasionally since some of the planks were split in two and he didn’t want to count them twice. He didn’t like to cheat his own superstitions.

The light of the lamps fell from behind him, unfurling his shadow far out over the snow. By now he had decided not to let himself be intimidated and to continue at any price the game he had started.

“Fifteen, sixteen…”

A car came up fast alongside him. Either a private car or an occupied taxi, Paul thought, without interrupting his counting.

“Twenty-eight, twenty-nine, thirty…”

He stopped in front of the plank he had reached, measured it from top to bottom, as though it were a person and murmured a few times: thirty, thirty.

Thirty years! There it was, it was pointless to flee from the only thought that followed him; it was pointless to try to forget it with idiotic little games. From now on he was going to have to look it in the face and accept it: he was thirty years old.

He leaned with his back against the fence and closed his eyes. He would have liked to stay that way, empty of thoughts, empty of memories, in that beneficent numbness. He saw himself as he might have done from the opposite sidewalk, alone on the deserted street, leaning against someone else’s gate in that night in which he had turned thirty years old, thirty years that he didn’t know what to do with.

But, rising from somewhere within his being, he felt a mild haze, a distant taste of sadness, the flavour of cinders. He knew well that memories foolishly quelled, pointlessly repressed imaginings, lay concealed beyond the indifference that he now felt crumbling inside him. Thus, as on misty mornings in the mountains, he waited for the vanished yet present landscape to appear. Beyond that mournful image of his beloved, he glimpsed her name, which he had banished from his mind in vain: Anna.

He repeated the name a few times in a throaty voice, separating those two syllables as though he had dismantled the components of a tiny mechanism in order to find its hidden mainspring.

How many days had passed since he had seen her? Someone replied for him: Twenty-three days. Paul felt a horror-stricken shudder at the mechanical precision of his response. The last few days had been extremely calm. He hadn’t thought about her, he had worked in peace; he thought he had forgotten her. Even so, it seemed that, under cover, an unseen device was clocking up her absence, recording, as though on an interior screen that was waiting to light up at the first request, moment by moment, the time that he had passed without her: twenty-three days, eight hours, twenty-six minutes…

He saw again her blond hair, her too-bright eyes, her expressive hands — and then that serious smile, which sometimes used to interrupt him in unexpected agitation, the smile too heavy for her small eyes, which expanded when she made an effort to pay attention, as though she might have fallen silent on hearing another voice, which had been covered by the words she had spoken until then.

… He crossed the street towards Icoanei Park and failed to recognize, in the small park in winter, the image of the gardens where had so often spent the day. Everything was foreign: the snowy paths, the dark trees, naked in their wooden motionlessness, the sparse park benches, the electric lights that burned pointlessly, as though someone had forgotten to turn them off when leaving.

Somewhere near the left-hand gate must be the bench on which, on an October morning in 1932, he had waited for Ann with a sketchbook in his hand, having come to make some sketches of trees for a publicity project he was working on at the time. He didn’t have the courage to look for that bench and, given how much the park had changed, he might not have found it.

He looked at his watch and realized that it was less late than he had imagined: ten minutes to two. At this time Ann might be at their usual bar on Bulevardul Basarab. She was always going out these days, so why would she have remained at home tonight?

This night can’t pass without Ann, Paul said to himself. The thought that he could meet her, if he wished, thrilled him.

He sees the bar on Basarab, the metallic reflections on its walls, the white lights, the circular dance floor like an illuminated island. Ann must be there, among a group of friends, at their usual table. He walks up to her and, looking her in the eyes, says: “Ann, I’m turning thirty tonight. I didn’t even realize it; I remembered it just now by chance and I’ve come so we can clink a glass together. You know how superstitious I am.”

Smiling, she looks at him. “I was waiting for you, Paul. I knew you would come. This night can’t pass without you.”

It was hallucinatory to see this: he felt the warmth of her words, their heat against his cheek. Everything was so present, so close: her black dress, the small silver brooch over her left breast, the silk handbag radiant on the table, the glass of whisky that she gave him with a nervous gesture, as though she wished that there was nothing to separate him from her.

… He came to with a shudder of panic. How much time had he wasted dreaming? He didn’t dare to look at his watch. He glanced around him and couldn’t figure out where he was. He was no longer in Icoanei Park, the street was unknown to him, the houses alien. Beyond those buildings that he didn’t know was a weak blue halo: that lights of Bulevardul Brătianu. He chose to go in that direction, forcing himself to think about nothing. At the first corner he found a taxi stand. The driver was asleep, the frozen engine started with difficulty — and how far, how unbearably far away, was the bar on Bulevardul Basarab!

He hopped out of the car, flinging the door shut and shouted as he passed the doorman: “Pay him, please.”

“Are there a lot people here?” he asked the coat-check girl as he took off his overcoat, not daring to state more clearly the only question whose answer interested him.

Someone tapped him on the shoulder, and he turned around with an outsized shudder of fright. (I should control myself, he thought.) It was another of the bar’s regulars, a lawyer for an oil company.

“About time I found you, buddy. I’ve been phoning you all day. What’s happening with our hearing tomorrow?”

“What hearing?” Paul asked absent-mindedly, trying to look past the man’s shoulders, towards the interior of the bar, as the curtains at the end of the hall opened.

“What do you mean, what hearing? You know what I’m talking about. Commerce hearing number two, with the Steaua Română refinery. Don’t you know? Number 3623 slash 929. You want to go to trial tomorrow? I say we adjourn. It’s pointless now, just before Christmas. Maybe sometime after the holidays, whenever you’re available. Hey! What do you say?”

Paul gave a vague reply, as he hadn’t been listening and didn’t know what the man was talking about. “Leave it, we’ll see tomorrow

… Excuse me, please, I’m in a hurry, I’m looking for someone…”

“Who are you looking for? There’s nobody in there. I was bored stiff. You should come with me to Zissu’s place.”²

Paul walked away from him, almost without saying goodbye. Nobody, nobody. He repeated the word mechanically, without understanding it. He parted the curtains with a brisk motion. Far away, very far away, it seemed, in the opposite corner of the bar, at a distance that struck him as enormous, impassable, their usual table was empty.

He walked towards it with a mechanical step and forced himself to look fixedly in the direction of that same point with his eyes wide open, as though he wished to retain the image on his retina and prevent himself from transmitting the horrible news towards other centres of pain.

Everything occurred without accident. He dropped, exhausted, into his seat with the air of a man who was worn out yet still controlling his movements.

The piano-player gave him a wave of recognition. “Haven’t seen you around here much lately.”

He replied with a lift of his shoulders, a vague, tired motion that replied to something else, something completely different.

The bar was dimly lit, like a sleeping car at night. He always rediscovered here the atmosphere of a journey, a departure. The city seemed to drift away, losing itself. Ann had drawn up the decoration plans out of friendship for the owner, formerly the manager at the Colonnade Hotel. With childlike enthusiasm she had sketched each detail, so absorbed she was in every new discovery!

“It has to be superb, my dear Paul. Superb, you understand? And look here” — her pencil stopped on the page, indicating a given point — “this will be our table, yours and mine.”

What farcical trick of his memory had reminded him of her forgotten words precisely at this moment, as though the point of her pencil had signalled, months in advance, the exact spot where on a future night, on this very night, he would have to wait for the shadow that no longer came?

And what if, even so, she came even now?

Paul rejected this hope, which he knew to be false. He didn’t want to harbour new vain hopes. Yet the alluring thought persisted: It’s not impossible that she still might come.

No, it wasn’t impossible, he had to recognize that. So many times before, towards morning, when the lights were being turned out, when the jazz music was yawning into silence, when the metal instruments were returning to their cloth bags and only the piano continued to play for the dancers who were washing off their makeup and the coat-check girls or a client who had delayed his departure, so many times, opening the curtains at the end of the hall, pale, wide-awake, dazzling, with her decisive step and her morning smile, Ann had come in.

Paul raised his head, as though to call out to this apparition. But the curtains at the opposite end of the room were motionless; with their heavy folds, their reddish old-copper tone, they separated one world from another.

Even so, he couldn’t tear his gaze away from that point where, from one moment to the next, she might appear. He had the feeling that a nub of pain had moved over there, like a second soul released from within him and dispatched to watch and wait for her.

Sometimes the curtains moved, a hand appeared. Then Paul, seemingly unable to bear a new level of tension, felt an abrupt tremolo of awareness that permitted him to observe without crying out, with a resigned stupefaction, as the curtains opened to let a dancer, a coat-check girl or a flower-girl pass. Even harder to bear was when a hand appeared for an instant then withdrew without opening the curtains and without allowing him to see who precisely was behind it, since then nobody would be able to convince Paul that Ann wasn’t there, that she had not come as far as the threshold of the bar only so that at the last minute (because it was too late or because there weren’t very many people) she could have second thoughts and leave. He would have liked to run after her, catch up to her just as she was going out the door and be able to say to her: Stay! But he saw himself returning alone between the lines of dancers, between the tables full of clients intrigued by his comings and goings. He didn’t feel in any condition to put up with indiscreet looks, so many hinting gestures, so many whispers…

A waiter was turning out the shaded lamps at the tables that had remained empty. From the next table, the piano-player, who was talking with one of the establishment’s dancers, turned towards Paul. “Drink sales are pathetic. It’s a bad sign. They’re starting to save money on the lighting.”

Only in the middle of the room had the dance floor remained illuminated, like a silver planet sailing through the white space of the cigarette smoke.

The owner approached Paul’s table and asked to sit down next to him. It was the hour for confessions, as the bar personnel and the regular clients fell into informal conversation.

“I don’t know what else I can do,” the owner moaned. “I think I’m going to have to sell up. It’s just not working any more. Three whole nights with one whisky and two lemon squashes. I’m not superstitious, but since Miss Ann stopped coming here things have got worse and worse. You don’t know what’s got into her? Why she might be angry? I wanted to ask her tonight, but…”

“She was here?”

“Yes. Around one o’clock.”

“Alone?”

“I think she was alone. Unless someone was waiting for her in the car. She didn’t even want to come in. ‘Aren’t you staying, Miss Ann?’ ‘No, I’m looking for someone.’ And she left.”

Paul looked at the man in front of him without seeing him, heard him without understanding what he was saying.

Ann came here to look for me. The thought was of a simplicity that did not admit a reply. She was here and she looked for me.

No, in fact, she had been unable to let midnight pass without meeting him. She had looked for him at home, she had called him at the office, she had come here… And while she had been running after him all over town in order to put an end to this stupid separation, while she had been racing to bring him her welcome-back kiss, her reconciliation kiss, he had allowed himself to get dragged into that stupid street accident.

Paul paid for his glass of whisky, which only now he realized he had not drunk. He consoled the owner: “Don’t worry, it’ll work out. Bars like this are like women: you never know where they come from or why they leave you.” He tossed a wave at the piano-player, skirted the dance floor with an indolent stride, with the lazy gestures that suit so well the client of a bar at the approach of daybreak. No one was going to read the glowing impatience, the unseen light, on his pale face…

He stopped in front of the telephone and looked with feeling at the black funnel in which a moment from now Ann’s voice would vibrate, her voice aroused from sleep, troubled at first, then made lucid by surprise.

His hand shuddered as he rotated the phone’s disk to compose her number, that number he had sworn to forbid himself from dialling, and which, nonetheless, he had mimed hundreds of times on imaginary disks, mechanically, while standing at the window, working at the office or leaning over his files. The telephone rang several times without a reply. Probably a wrong number, Paul thought. It wasn’t surprising, given his state of impatience.

He took up the operation from the beginning again, dialling the number digit by digit, slowly, carefully, like a beginner, with the attentive care recommended by the instructions on the wall of the telephone booth. The ring repeated its regular call and, as though a light had come on at the other end of the line, Paul saw with closed eyes the telephone close to Ann’s bed and the familiar surrounding objects: the small silver elephant, the ashtray of burnt wood (Guyannese teak, he thought, pointlessly remembering the wood’s name), the portrait of Ingrid on the wall, the red armchair, the carpet — the entire apartment in which the ring sounded without meaning or response.

“Is it broken?” the wardrobe girl, who was waiting to hand him his overcoat, asked on seeing him standing for such a long time with the receiver in his hand without speaking.

“No, it’s not broken. She’s not home,” he replied, without knowing why, without noticing to whom he was speaking.

He tried to lift his shoulders, but couldn’t manage it. Not even his oldest gestures came to his aid.

The taxi went down Griviţei Street towards the city. In front of the Găra de Nord, Paul motioned for the driver to stop. “Do you know if any trains leave at this time?”

The driver turned his head towards his strange passenger.

“Why?”

“I asked if any trains were leaving.”

“At this time, no. The first train’s at 5:40 AM. The slow train to Timişoara.”

Paul saw himself collapsed in a compartment in a third-class carriage, rocking to the noise of the wheels, dizzy, travelling aimlessly all day and all night, then another day, then another night, getting off at some nameless station in the middle of the countryside, filthy, black with soot, wrecked by sleeplessness, lying down on the frozen earth to sleep and to forget.

The driver set off again, without asking for directions. He was used to picking up passengers whom he found alone on street corners at night, hesitating between hailing a taxi and putting a bullet in their heads. Paul didn’t even notice that they had headed off again. Turning his head, he caught sight, as if through a screen of shadow, of the building housing the National Theatre through the window where a moment earlier the Găra de Nord building had been visible.

The taxi raced down Calea Regală, but when they reached Bulevardul Brătianu it was the driver’s turn to stop, not knowing in which direction to take him.

“Should I take you home?”

“What home?”

“How do I know? Maybe somebody’s waiting for you.”

Paul shuddered. Maybe somebody’s waiting. It seemed he had already heard these same words tonight. It’s someone who knows, it’s someone who’s waiting.

The thought was ridiculous, and Paul felt he really didn’t have the energy to deal with it any more. In the ashes of his resignation, there was no place for this new expectation, this new useless hope. He would have liked to stop it short somewhere beyond awareness, in the dark room of memory, but the dazzling word, having been uttered, had developed into an image swifter and more vivid than his desire to forget: Upstairs, in my room, Ann is waiting.

He was ashamed of believing this, yet he couldn’t do otherwise. He told the driver the address, slowly, in an embarrassed whisper

— and even so, with what impatience! The taxi flew down the deserted boulevard towards a miracle that with each passing second became more plausible, more heated, more convincing. Ann was at his place and was waiting for him.

So many times, yes, so many times, although he had broken up with her only a few times before, he had found her sleeping in his bed, in one of his pairs of pyjamas that were too long for her, in which she looked as lost as a child. So many times he had found her in his study reading a novel selected at random from among his books, or, when it wasn’t a novel, a book on commercial law, a legal journal, in which she was completely immersed. He remembered, he couldn’t prevent himself from remembering, that forgotten November evening in 1932 when, after he had stayed at home for two days to study the files for a trial, she had rung his doorbell at night. She had appeared on the threshold with a small overnight bag, in which she had a nightshirt, her toothbrush, a pair of stockings: “I’ve come to sleep at your place. They’re repairing the tramline on my street and the noise is deafening. You don’t mind, do you?”

He stopped the taxi in front of his building, paid the driver and waited for him to leave. He gave himself a few more minutes of hope. Nothing was yet decided, nothing was lost. As long as he remained there in front of the door, his destiny was frozen in place. It was still possible that Ann was upstairs.

He looked up at his third-floor window, as though mulling this over, and trembled: there was a light in the window.

He counted the floors again, he counted the windows — the second one from the right — and wondered whether he wasn’t fooling himself or dreaming. He kept his eyes locked on that eye of light that was awaiting him at the end of this terrible night. So it’s true. So she’s really there.

He felt his eternal fatigue, as though all the pressure he had been under until now had burst in a single instant. For a moment the absurd impulse to leave, to remain alone, ran through his mind. Ann was upstairs, and this fact brought him an unexpected peace that answered all his questions as in a dream. He shook off thoughts of renunciation and set off madly up the stairs with the sudden, desperate need to see her, to hold her in his arms. Ann! Ann! Ann! Her name rushed ahead of him like a shout.

He found the door open and pushed it with his shoulder. On a hook in the entrance hall hung a cloth coat he didn’t recognize.

He stopped in the doorway of his study and took in the room with a single glance. In the study was a young woman with a book open before her. “It’s not Ann,” he whispered to himself, feeling dizzy.

Only then did he recognize Nora.