The Accident

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.

“Six years ago, when we were in Satu-Lung…”

“Six years ago? Are you sure?”

“Yes. 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 women⁵ 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 heads in the direction of this bunch of lunatics, dishevelled barefoot girls, boys without coats or ties…

The hostility between the civilian population of Cernatu and the group from Satu-Lung was open to the point where Paul, when he went out for his evening walk, if he turned left alongside the city hall, had the feeling of stepping into a conflict zone or an enemy territory. The group had the custom of a tennis hour. Their tennis court became famous in the whole region, as far away as Dârste or Noua. White poles, lime rectangles drawn on the earth, the net stretched taut across the centre, the white fence that surrounded the whole court — they had made it all, bringing some of the pieces from Braşov ⁶ and improvising others on the spot, to the secret vanity of Satu-Lung, and to the smouldering envy of Cernatu. Paul liked to stop there, in front of the wire fence, and watch the flurry of rackets, the regular knocking of the ball, the white dresses of the female players. One evening a ball lofted too high went over the fence and came to a stop next to him. He picked it up in order to hand it to the young woman player who had come to look for it.

“Possibly that was you, Ann?”

“Very possibly, my dear. I played more than any of them. I played badly — I’d only just learned — but I played a lot.”

The thought that he had stared at her so many years earlier, before falling in love with her, before he’d even known who she was, the thought that there had once been a moment in which they had looked each other in the eyes, in which they had perhaps spoken — he to hand her the lost tennis ball, she to thank him — this thought exalted him. How many distances had been traversed between the white-clad tennis player bending towards him for a moment with her racket in hand, on an August evening in 1926, and that familiar, painful Ann!

He could still see the municipal train that made the regular run to Satu-Lung, its yellow carriages, its outmoded engine, the disproportionately loud shriek of its whistle in the minuscule stations, a train glistening at night when it got delayed in Braşov and he returned home on the last run on the local line…

On a night like that, the train had been stopped before Noua by the group from Satu-Lung, who blocked its path, sitting down on the rails and waving their illuminated flashlights, their white jerseys, their scarves…The passengers were indignant, the on-board staff, their self-respect wounded (“A train stopped like an ordinary wagon!”), threatened legal action and fines, everybody was clamouring at once, but they seemed not to hear any of it, or maybe really didn’t hear. They were coming from Râşnov, one of the more reasonable ones said, they were dead-tired and couldn’t miss the last departure. They invaded the carriages without being aware of the scandal they had caused.

It was late, the passengers were drowsy, the train was emptying out, with people getting off at Dârste, at Turcheş. The revolt was assuaged… Beyond Turcheş nothing was heard but the silence of that August night, occasionally broken by the locomotive’s whistle. Then they began singing: a romantic song that was in fashion, and was sung by fiddlers in Braşov, but which now, at that hour of the night, in their youthful voices, took on an unexpected melancholy.

Paul, remembering that moment, would have liked to silence all the instruments with a single gesture, like that of an orchestra director, leaving only the soloist’s violin audible; he would have liked to be able to suppress in his memory the voices of all of the others in order to preserve Ann’s voice as it would have been on that August night in 1926.

“Why didn’t I meet you then?” she used to say. “Why did so many years have to pass before I met you? Why didn’t somebody say to me on that evening: ‘See that young gentleman next to the window? One day you’re going to fall in love with that gentleman…’

“Even 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…

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.

“What a surprise! I thought I was the only person I knew on the whole train. Why don’t you come to the restaurant car with me? We can have a tea and chat…”

He had refused out of boredom, giving vague excuses: there were too many people in the restaurant car, he preferred to stay in the compartment, he had reading to do…

At that time he wasn’t sure what her name was.

That she was a painter he didn’t find out until much later, and only by chance.

It was at an official art exhibition (one of the first official exhibitions, organized on the Şosea), to which he had come with a friend. He stopped in front of a group of watercolours in which he was startled by an outburst of blue, a little bit metallic, in indelible pencil. The drawing was uncertain, nervous, tangled by her capricious lines like hurried handwriting, but with an unexpected exactness of detail, as though from time to time her brush had halted to dot an i or insert a comma in a confused sentence. These small touches seemed to be orthographic clues to the meaning of a mysterious writing.

There was a collection of street scenes — houses, trees, carriages

— all seen from above, and what seemed oddest in them was precisely the elevated vantage point from which they were observed. The gaudy aniline blue gave them an early morning air, full of sun, full of light.

“It’s amusing and trivial,” Paul said. “I have the impression, too, that they’re works I’ve seen before.” He thought of certain paintings by Raoul Duffy⁷: race tracks, decorated doorways, images of the same childlike disorder.

He was just preparing to move away when Anna, who happened to be near them, and whom he had greeted in passing, stopped him.

“Forgive me for being indiscreet, but I heard you talking about my paintings and I’d like to know what you thought.”

“What do you mean, your paintings? Do you paint?”

“You didn’t know?”

He tried to make excuses for the double faux pas of having shown her that he knew her so little, to the point of not even knowing that she was a painter, and of having said unpleasant things about her work in a loud voice. He wished he could retract or explain his words, but she didn’t let him finish.

“Please, don’t go on. You made me happy, and now you want to spoil it for me. You’re the first person I’ve heard speaking openly about my work. Here everyone’s kind to me and compliments me. It’s more comfortable for them, but it’s not at all useful to me. Go on, tell me what you really think. Above all, be hard on me. Please be hard on me.”

She was speaking without flirtatiousness, with sincerity and a serious gaze, like a pupil waiting to show him an exercise book that she knew contained an error.

Paul told her again that he wasn’t competent to speak about painting, that anyway he’d liked her paintings, especially that bold blue and her spiritual drawing, which had the daring to be so casually artless.

“That’s very nice and I thank you. But I sense that you’re keeping to yourself some things that you don’t want to say to me. Why? I would have been so grateful to you! Go on, try to be frank.”

At a loss, he looked again at the paintings, trying to find one appropriate word. “All right, since you insist, look: I have the impression that they’re too verbose.”

Ann didn’t understand the word because, certainly, among all the possible objections, only this one could not have been anticipated.

“Don’t ask me to say more,” Paul excused himself. “I don’t think I could. I have the impression that there’s something gesticulating in your paintings. They’re too hearty, too talkative, too familiar at the first glance… But at the end of the day, is that a fault?”

Ann stood thinking for a moment. Afterwards, she barely responded to his questions. “Yes, I think it is, and a very serious one. How can I know whether I’ll ever be able to overcome it? I am talkative, I am frivolous…”

Then she smiled, not without a certain sadness.

They met a few months later, on a Sunday morning in the spring, at Snagov, where Paul had come for a few days, invited to a villa belonging to some friends.

He halted with them in passing at the small monastery at the edge of the lake, and to his surprise found Ann there, alone in the cold church, with a sketch pad in her hand.

“I didn’t know you were so hardworking.”

“I’m not. I ended up here by pure chance. I came to Snagov with a large group of friends, but I left them to the lake and the fishing, and I took a moment to see the monastery again. I don’t know if you know it well. There are some enchanting works.”

She headed towards the exit and from there, from the doorway, turning around to face the interior, she showed him on the wall in front of him, at the entrance to the nave, a fresco in muted colours, but with an admirable group of women. The first woman on the right was turned towards the others with a graceful movement, which caused her garment to fall in soothing folds.

“But that’s not all that I like a lot here. Come this way, please, and I’ll show you something truly miraculous.”

She took him by the hand and led him into the centre of the church, next to the altar, from where she showed him the other fresco, of the descent from the cross, on the opposite wall.

“There are a few mistakes of perspective here that I find moving. And look, in the background there’s an old man stroking his beard with a gesture — how would you describe it? — with a familiar everyday gesture… It’s a secular gesture and I’m so astonished to find it on the wall of a church!”

She was speaking with whole-hearted enthusiasm, with passion, although in a whisper, for meanwhile the church was filling with visitors. A tone of conviction and deep emotion, whose existence Paul never would have suspected until now, ran through her words.

It was late, his friends were in a hurry to go to lunch, and, as he would have liked to spend more time talking to her, he apologized for having to leave.

“Stay,” she insisted. “The boat’s coming to pick me up in twenty minutes and I’ll accompany you back to the villa.”

He was compelled to refuse, but he left with a promise that they would see each other again, a polite promise like any other.

They saw each other again, however, a short time later.

Paul came out of the law courts, having wasted a whole day in a small meeting room at a witness hearing in a boring trial. As when he had been at school, the most horrendous days at court were those that took place in the spring. The tender sunlight that flooded the streets, and which for hours at a time he saw through the window of a meeting room, made him ill; he felt ill at seeing the drab, pale faces stirred by the new colours, worn-out people dozing on park benches in an archive-dusty yellow light. He stopped on the street, drowsy with sunlight, and closed his eyes for a moment. He felt dirty, his clothes were too heavy, his collar had wilted, his tie was twisted. He would have liked to shake himself free, as though of soot after a long train trip. The whiff of the archives accompanied him, and on his lips was a taste of yellowed old papers.

He went slowly, with heavy steps, around the back of the courthouse. He felt old, and everyone who passed him seemed young. His briefcase hung heavily, as though made of lead. If he hadn’t been embarrassed to do so, he would have put it down for a moment, like a porter taking a respite from a heavy load.

On Sfinţii Apostoli, past Apolodor, he was surprised to glimpse a completely unexpected event a few steps from him: hanging boyishly from the bars of a wrought-iron door, through which a few tall lilac branches passed, was a girl struggling to break a branch.

Paul stopped on the spot, afraid of startling her, and hid behind a street lamp, from where he could watch without being seen. He might have taken her for a schoolgirl had she not been dressed with the elegance of a lady. She wore a grey suit, a grey hat with a white brim, white antelope pumps. Below, on the door’s stone ledge, a handbag of the same antelope skin as the pumps had been discarded to allow her to keep her hands free.

Paul recognized her without difficulty as Ann, although he found it difficult to believe that it was she. Reaching up on the toes of her pumps on the stone ledge, one hand gripping the bars of the door, with the other she fought to grasp the lilac branch, which was beyond her reach. The skirt of her suit slid up above her knees, a rounded, delicate pair of knees that could have belonged to an adolescent girl. The street was empty, although from one moment to the next someone could come along, even if it weren’t the owner of the property that was being plundered. The branch gave way at last, a large branch with dense, violet bouquets. The girl jumped onto the sidewalk, without hurry, without emotion, shook the sleeves of her jacket down to her wrists, picked up her handbag, looked up the street, then finally, with the lilac branch in her arms, with her blond head concealed among the flowers — although her high forehead poked up above them — she set off boldly up the street with her small, decisive steps.

Paul watched her move away and it seemed to him as if a train of light hung in her wake. He, too, felt younger. The season, about which he had forgotten, came back to him. The girl’s slight craziness had brought a little light into his day. He would have liked to rush after her to thank her, to kiss her hand; but her let her cross unimpeded at the corner and disappear. Even so, he felt the need to send her a word of warm greeting, the first since he had met her. He remembered that nearby, in Piaţa Senatului, there was a florist. He went in and bought all the lilacs he could find, to the astonishment of the sales clerk, who told him, certainly without irony: “If you need any more, we can get them for you.”

Furthermore, they were unexpectedly cheap, and with the few hundred lei he had left, Paul bought the whole garden and sent it to Ann, leaves and all, along with a few words written in haste on the back of his business card: Next time you want lilacs, be more careful. If you need a lawyer (articles 306 and 308 of the penal code: “He who takes in a concealed manner an object belonging to another commits theft. Theft is punished with a prison term of between 15 days and two years…”) I am at your disposal.

“You don’t know how ashamed I am,” Ann said to him two days later, receiving him at her home. “If I’d known you were watching me, I would have died of mortification on the spot, with my hands on the door. You’re a man I’ve always been a little afraid of. I don’t know why: don’t ask me why.”

The apartment was full of lilacs that had been delivered the previous evening. Those that didn’t fit in the flower vases had been placed in jugs of water, in glasses, on the table, on the shelves, in the window.

“I’ll always keep them here. When they wither, I’ll put others in their place. And it’s possible they won’t even wither.”

She wore a simple navy blue dress with a white collar, which gave her the appearance of a schoolgirl.

“Are you really that young?”

“Are you really that old? I’m afraid of you. I’ve always been afraid of you. You’re so gloomy, so absent! When you say hello to me on the street — and you don’t always say hello — I have the impression that you don’t even see me.”

She spoke quickly, seemingly afraid of his silence. She raised her hands to her breast in order to suppress her gesticulations, a tactic which only gave her once more a school-girlish air.

“It’s difficult for me to believe you’re here. I’ve thought so many times that you might possibly come, but I’ve never dared to hope for it. I know so many things about you. I know the books you read. I know who you went to Balcic⁸ with last summer. I know that last Thursday evening you went to the Philharmonic orchestra and left during the intermission. Don’t you want us to be friends? Don’t you want to try? So many times, when I’m painting something, I wonder: would he like it? So many times I read a book and I wonder: what would he think of it? I’d like to see you more often. I don’t like my extravagant gestures, how I don’t sound serious when I talk. I’d like you to think I’m less scatterbrained than even-handed, less superficial… I promise you I’ll be a good girlfriend. I won’t pry, I won’t nag. Come over whenever you want. Or, better yet, let’s set a day for you to come over every week. We’ll try it for a little while. If it works — good; if not, we call it quits.”

In their memory of that day, the lilac remained their flower.

Later, in the winter, Paul stopped with amazement on a January day in front of the window of a flower shop, where he glimpsed a few white lilac branches. He hadn’t realized until then that it was possible to find them in the middle of winter, and the sight behind the frozen window pane struck him as unreal. He stroked it with delicacy, as though afraid that it would come apart beneath his fingers. The white winter lilac didn’t have the violent aroma of the spring variety, but rather a faint, extinguished odour, like breath or smoke.

When they quarrelled it was their habit to send or receive a lilac branch because in that way, without words or explanations, the rift of several days would come to an end. Both of them regarded the lilac as a superstition that disarmed them, that helped them rediscover each other. He could not suspect then that another Ann would exist, one for whom those flowers would lose all meaning, like an object without a name, without memories.

The first days of their love had taken place in Sibiu, a city neither of them knew.

“I don’t care where, my dear. Somewhere where I can be alone with you for a few days. Anyway, after that you’ll leave me.”

“Why?”

“Because you don’t love me.”

He responded neither yes nor no — and, in any event, she did not seem to expect a reply.

They had chosen Sibiu at the last moment, in the station, because the next departure was for Sibiu.

Everything delighted her in the Transylvanian city: the broad streets, the shop windows, the German signs, the Saxon dialect, lunch at the restaurant, the menu with types of food she didn’t know and which she chose at random, closing her eyes and placing her finger on the menu: “Let’s see what this is like.”

In the mornings, when she woke from her slumber, she liked to look out the hotel window at the children walking to school with their satchels on their backs, the gleaming Saxon women who returned from the market with their baskets in their hands and stopped on the street corners in groups of three or four, speaking with passion, the shutters of the shop windows that rose with a rattle… Everything struck her as honourable and severe.

“We’re the only people in this city who are in love,” she said.

Then, as if only in that moment had she realized that she was naked, she rushed back to bed with a shudder of alarm in order to hide and cover herself. She was so white that when she was nude her blonde hair was drained of its colour by the glare of her naked body.

When they went down to the lobby of this small provincial hotel she was intimidated by the respectful gazes of the service people and the clerks, as though their youth brought with it an aura of mystery, or even of scandal. Everything she saw made her happy. She rode all day on the charming Sibiu tram from the Upper City to the Lower City, she was amused by the peaked caps of the taxi drivers, who looked like Austrian officers in Viennese operas, by the Saxon women’s bulky provincial dresses, cluttered with clasps, flowers and knots. If she’d had her sketch pad with her she would have drawn them, as she found inspiration for pictures everywhere.

With a single picture everything from Sibiu came back to her. It was a meal on the sidewalk, in front of a restaurant at lunchtime, when the children were just getting out of school. A group of girls passed in front of them, and Ann stopped one of them, asking her what her name was.

“Ingrid,” she replied, a little frightened, while her classmates added with greater courage: “Ingrid Schreiber.”

Ingrid was blonde, she had braids down on her back, a blue peaked worn boyishly on her forehead and two slanted eyes, which gave her angelic Saxon face the peculiar grace of a tiny Dobrogean Tartar.

“Ingrid, has anyone told you that you’re beautiful? Give me paper and a pencil from your satchel. I want to draw you.”

Ingrid was fearful and proud, while Ann captured in a hasty sketch her air of an astonished child, a sketch which on her return would become a portrait in oils, hung above the bed in Ann’s room, from where she could look farther, with that same bewildered look, at things that she did not understand.

Where was that Ann of the first days of their love now?

Then she had been ready at any hour of the day to receive him or visit him, to accept his invitation or his refusal, to pack her bags in a moment when he came to take her away on a trip for several days, or, on the contrary, to unpack them when, unexpectedly and without asking her, he abandoned a departure that they had been planning for ages and which, during this time, had filled her with childlike joy.

“Do you never ask anything, Ann?”

“Because, my love, I’d only ever have, a single question — ‘Why don’t you love me?’ — and that, you see, is something I don’t want to ask.”

As in any love affair started without effort (since, blonde as she was, without mysteries or secrets, Ann appeared to be the type predestined to have an effortless love affair), the fact of her reaching this stage of suffering was inexplicable to him. Her last smile, her last gesture were familiar to him — yet the day had to come in which each smile was an enigma, each word a secret; the time had to come when the simple fact of glimpsing her became difficult, and often impossible, a time when he spent whole nights scouring restaurant after restaurant, bar after bar, in the hope of finding her at last and of seeing her, if only for a brief instant.

Yet when he found the old Ann again, when she happened to return to him full of love (“You’re an idiot and you’re the only one I love”), when he saw her moving naked around her apartment, dropping things on the floor and forgetting where they were, he would halt her, dishevelled, in one of her comic poses, with her hair falling across her face, with one stocking draped over her arm and the other flung around her shoulders like a scarf and, knowing too well that this lovely, scatterbrained girl was, nevertheless, lost to him, that in two days’ time the suffering would start again, he looked at her for a very long time. “Ann, let me see what a femme fatale looks like.”

There were countless things which at the beginning he had barely noticed, with a kind of casual amusement, but which later — without his knowing exactly when or why — he started to observe with a tormented anxiety. He was annoyed by how many people knew Ann. Their arrival at a restaurant was greeted by dozens of stares that turned towards her with an indiscreet, insistent quality.

“How do you know so many people? Who’s that guy who just went past?”

Her replies were usually vague, evasive. “I don’t know who he is. He came to the exhibition.” Beyond these imprecisions, Paul saw great mysteries waiting to be unravelled.

More wounding were her detailed replies, uttered with indifference.

“I met him three years ago, on the train to Budapest.”

Paul envisaged the sleeping car, the blue lights; Ann, seated next to the window, speaking with her chance travelling companion; he heard her laughing (because, oh! she laughed so easily…) when a more powerful jolt shook him. He imagined the white sheets of the bunks, as seen through windows left open, the colour of the wilderness, her passage from one compartment to another in the middle of the night… He remembered the casualness with which she had yielded to him at the beginning — and his memories scandalized him. He wished she had resisted him more then, so that now he might be able to believe that for her whether or not she went to bed with a man was not a meaningless question.

In each alien glance that was directed towards Ann, in each greeting, he seemed to see a memory and an invitation. He was furious that politeness demanded that he, too, reply to those greetings, signals that went over his head like so many telegrams in code, which he intercepted without being able to read them, for nobody could assure him that each new greeting didn’t bear a message, an allusion or a proposition: “Do you remember?” or “I’m waiting for you.”

Ann’s openings brought new people into the galleries: faces from the bars, faces from the race tracks, faces from show business. Two days later the society section of the newspapers would publish photographs and names from “the most dazzling opening of the year.”

Her paintings sold almost too well, a fact that Paul didn’t notice at first, but which later, when, without wishing to, he became more closely acquainted with the “market” in paintings, struck him as worrying. When a painting by Margareta Sterian or Cornelia Babic sold for 3000 or 4000 lei, when Iorgulescu-Yor, who still had the reputation of “being a good investment,” was selling a 30 by 50 centimetre canvas for 5000 lei, while a 70 by 70 centimetre canvas went for 8000, Ann’s paintings were earning prices that only an Iser or a Petraşcu could ask.⁹ She became famous among artists for a small, blue painting of Balcic, pleasant enough but not extraordinary by comparison with her other works — which she sold for the fabulous sum of 50,000 lei.

When it fell to her to participate in collective exhibitions at the Salon or Our Group, her paintings easily distinguished themselves from those of others by that white cardboard tab that gives prestige and lustre to a painting: sold. Paul was uneasy at the swiftness with which, from the first days, this white cardboard flowered in the corners of her canvases, while other painters had such difficulty placing their paintings that several remained unsold at the end of the exhibition. He would have liked to see Ann show a little discretion in advertizing her satisfaction, a little casualness about her success, but once, when he tried to make her understand this, he attracted from her a crushing reply: “What? You want me to be ashamed that I’m successful?”

It was an even more crushing retort, given that this was precisely what he would have asked of her: that she show a little shame for the successes she enjoyed.

Ann had lost completely her earlier shyness, the doubt with which she started a painting, the school-girl fear with which she awaited others’ reactions. Now she had an unerring gift for placing a painting, for using connections, for sensing in a new acquaintance a potential client. “Client” was the word that recurred most often in their shared language. The word’s double meaning frightened Paul.

“What kind of client?” he asked her once with brutal directness, staring her in the eyes. She shuddered beneath the horrible outrage, as though he had slapped her, and burst into moving, despairing tears, which he barely managed to assuage, begging her forgiveness, full of remorse, yet pleased by such sincere, almost childlike weeping, the refutation of his suspicions and fears.

Some days Ann was unreachable. His insistence on seeing her ran up against a single response, which she uttered slightly sententiously, raising it like a shield: “My painting comes first!” Nothing protected her better, nothing hid her more completely.

“I’m not available this evening. I have a business meeting: a client to whom I’m trying to sell Blue Flowers.”

She had acquired the habit of meeting clients at her home or downtown, at a restaurant, at a table in a bar, and not at the exhibition, where she set foot rarely and only in passing to smoke a cigarette, to exchange a few words, dressed in her street clothes, without taking off her hat, as though just visiting. Paul had tried to persuade her that her prestige as an artist dwindled through this excessive familiarity with the public.

“Try to understand, dear Ann, that I’m not speaking to you as a jealous man, but rather as a concerned friend. An artist doesn’t have the right to make to the public the concessions that you make to your purchasers. She has to be less available, prouder, more vain, more solitary.”

She listened with attention and seemed to agree with everything, to understand everything; but when he moved on from general considerations about the obligations of a “true” artist to concrete proposals (and here the impartial friend could not entirely conceal the jealous lover), and when he asked her to cancel her scheduled meeting by phoning the fan who, if he really intended to buy Blue Flowers, had only to enter the Dalles Gallery two days from now, between eleven AM and noon, she refused to listen to him any longer and cut him short: “What? You want me to destroy my career?”

“To destroy my career” was an expression that was beginning to appear for the first time in Ann’s language. Paul knew this language too well not to be upset by her changes of vocabulary. Where did these new words come from, which had suddenly heaved into sight in their conversations, like so many echoes from a life he wasn’t familiar with and of which he wasn’t aware until she carelessly let the words slip? In the early days, listening to Ann speaking had been a pleasure full of surprises. At first he had thought that she was highly loquacious, but as time went on he had observed that her volubility was composed more of gestures and smiles, alternating with short exclamations and short silences, which lent her conversation an air of perpetual excitement.

“What strange syntax you have, dear girl!” he used to say, amused by the structure of her sentences. Something of his old obsessions from when he was a student of Latin awoke in him to study the grammatical snippets of their conversation.

She spoke in simple sentences, yet complicated them with a shower of interjections and questions — “yes?” “no?” “you see?” “you know?” “you want to?” — like a series of flats and sharps in a scale with variations, which made her simplest stories into thrilling affairs in which her tone rose and fell, the inflection of her voice changed, and her gaze suddenly shifted. There was a surprised, astonished quality to all of her conversation, as though she had struggled with retorts that only she heard, and to which she would have to respond in turn, like a chess player involved in many matches at once. And, like a chess player who was in that confusing situation, she resorted to typical movements, such as waiting — the meaningless shifting of a pawn, moving a rook onto the front lines. She also had a few set phrases, which she repeated almost mechanically, since they said nothing and were at hand, like habitual old gestures that had long ago lost their original intention: “Well and for all that,” “Everything’s possible,” “How am I supposed to know what to think?”

Ann took up with ease words and expressions that she happened to overhear, and which from then on became habitual parts of her speech, initially in jest perhaps, then later because she truly couldn’t stop herself from remembering them, until they established themselves definitively in her personal jargon. In Sibiu she had stopped a passerby one morning to ask him whether the Bruckenthal Museum, where she wanted to go, was far away. “Far, yeah, but no-who knows how,” was the reply — and this type of approximation amused Ann so much that she repeated it for several consecutive days, on all possible occasions. The food was good, “but no-who knows how,” the bathwater was hot, “but no-who knows how,” the night sky was starry, “but no-who knows how.” At first she said this laughing, as though underlining the words, but with time her ironic intention dissolved, even disappeared completely, while that “but no-who knows how,” which for a while had a certain commemorative value (as if she were saying indirectly to Paul: “You remember, in Sibiu…”) became not only one of her more worn phrases, but her preferred way to lend nuance to her opinion, to express her reservations.

At the beginning, in the first days of their love, it had been one of their reciprocal pleasures to discover in each other certain physical or verbal tics, which for other people, who had known them for longer, had become imperceptible from custom or repetition, but which, observed for the first time, had something utterly unexpected.

“How strangely you frown!” Ann had observed in the first days. She had tried to imitate him, leaving her left brow lowered and raising the right, tightly arched, something which at first she did not succeed in doing except by cheating a little and opening wide her right eye with two fingers, as though she wished to fix a monocle in her socket.

It was the sum of petty gestures, which at first she had observed jokingly in him, with an ironic tenderness, and which she imitated with laughter, as though she were trying to wean him of them, which, with the passage of time, entered her own habits. Paul watched, initially with indifference, or rather with amusement, but later touched and surprised, this unthinking transmission of words and gestures that he rediscovered in Ann’s language, slightly modified by her movements or pronunciation, as if they had been adapted to her vocal register, like a man’s aria rewritten for a soprano voice. They were the same words, the same gestures, yet they often conserved a strange air, as if they had been pressed onto Ann’s speech with special type, transferred into her sentence like words read in a foreign language, like a proverb in quotation marks, until these last lines of resistence also fell, while the gesture or word that until then had been a kind of neologism for Ann, was permanently incorporated into her current vocabulary. She made Paul aware for the first time of the persistence with which he repeated expressions of affirmation or negation: “Sure, sure,” “Not once, not once,” “Out of the question, absolutely out of the question.”

How little I watched myself, Paul had thought, if I was able to talk that way for years without even being aware of it. It took Ann to come and observe me. Sometimes, in the middle of a sentence, when that double, “Sure, sure,” came back, she underlined the fact with an explosion of laughter.

“Don’t get angry, dear Paul, that I’m laughing. I told you I’m a bit afraid of you and — what do you want? — when I notice something childish like that, it’s as if I feared you less, as if I felt closer to you. I’d like you to have thousands of small failings, I’d like you not to roll you r’s, I’d like you to be unable to pronounce s, I’d like to be able to laugh at you, my love, do you understand?”

Yet without understanding how, she herself later ended up speaking in his way, and among the things she borrowed from him was precisely his manner of stressing through repetition certain words and exclamations in order to confirm or negate something. Her speech was full of “Sure, sure,” “Don’t even think about it, don’t even think about it,” “Out of the question, out of the question,” which he sometimes uttered in a mechanical way, not paying attention, his aggressive, convinced, intransigent tone highlighting these phrases even more. There were some words that disappeared from his current expressions and which, over time, reappeared, now not in his vocabulary, but rather in hers, just as a mountain spring can slip under the earth and, by way of a long underground channel, return to the surface somewhere completely different. On Ann’s lips, words he had forgotten gained a new life, while in her lively hands, gestures he had abandoned at some point in the past were resurrected with a kind of mechanical faithfulness, which later might survive the end of their love.

Not for anything, not for anything, do I want to see you again, she wrote to him once, after a quarrel, but that double “not for anything” seemed almost to bear its own refutation, since, at a point where Ann was convinced that they were going to separate, her language preserved, like a pledge of faithfulness, that tic of repeating words in which, without her wishing it to be so, Paul’s memory persisted. But other new words and expressions appeared, which he heard for the first time and memorized, startled, wondering where they came from and suspecting that she was concealing from him a whole world of events, adventures, secrets that he longed to decipher. Above all, in recent days, Ann’s vocabulary had undergone innumerable small innovations, and after each longer separation — whether because of a quarrel, because he had to leave for a trial in the provinces, or finally because she was too busy with her work — when they were reunited, he noticed with desolation new changes in her way of conversing, new gestures or new words.

“It’s rolling,” Ann used to say when something struck her as excessively comical, and then she would shake her head, laughing loudly, with her mouth open. And, with her childlike insistence on repeating a new word, because it amused her to hear it, just as it would have amused her to open and close a new cigarette lighter or a new powder case innumerable times, she would say, dozens of times a day, after every event, after every piece of foolishness, “It’s rolling… It’s rolling… It’s rolling…” Each time Paul shuddered as though she had jabbed him since it seemed to him that behind that expression was a man’s gaze: the man from whom Ann had acquired her new favourite word. He was tempted to ask her, as though he had glimpsed a new ring on her finger: “Tell me! Where did it come from? Who gave it to you?”

In her painter’s jargon there was an expression that had charmed him at the beginning, but which later on, through a secret shift in meaning, became unbearable: “I’m going out for the cause.”

To Ann, “to go out for the cause” meant to find again a given spot in which to set up her easel, to relocate a spot determined once before — a tree, a house, a stone — as delimiting “on the ground” the landscape she had begun to paint.

Ann’s “causes” were impenetrable. For some of them, especially in the spring, or at the close of autumn, at the beginning of March or the end of October, when it was too early or too late to head off to Balcic, she pleaded with Paul, but particularly at the beginning of their love, when she had the feeling that she could ask him the biggest favours, she pleaded with him to take off with her to the outskirts of the city, beyond Herăstrău Park, or more frequently, because the spots were less well known, beyond Filaret, beyond the Ciurel mill, in search of “causes.”

“I’ve done all the work I can at home. I want to go off to the country. Come with me, we’ll find something to paint.”

There were long reconnaissance walks beyond the railway line, beyond the last hovels at the edge of Bucharest, through the barely thawed March countryside, or the dirty rust-colour of October. The region looked completely unknown. If there hadn’t been planes taking off and landing in the direction of Băneasa Airport, flying low, close to the earth with their engines throbbing like a factory, he could have believed he was anywhere, a long way from Bucharest. A few acacias growing close together marked the beginning of the woods, water rising from who-knew-where — perhaps from the last melting snows, perhaps from the last autumn rain — looked like a tributary wandering lost across the path. Paul never succeeded in understanding by which hidden logic Ann chose one spot rather than another, why where he saw nothing in particular she would suddenly stop, regarding with a kind of concerned attention a point that for him was invisible, which she signalled with a decisive gesture: “Here.”

“What’s here, Ann?”

“My new cause.”

She returned alone on the days that followed with her working instruments, but towards evening Paul would come to take her home since it was getting dark early. As it would have been too expensive to have a taxi waiting for her in the country all afternoon, they had to return a good part of the way on foot. Their passage through the slums on the edge of the city produced a certain sensation and, as during the days at Cernatu, housewives came out onto their doorsteps and children halted in their play to watch this blonde girl in boyish slacks (since she wore shorts and a sports jersey, or, when it was cold, a blue woollen training suit) who was carrying an easel on her back, a paintbox, a canvas chair, leaving Paul to bring at most a blanket, a thermos containing hot tea or a bag of fruit. Sometimes, because they didn’t find an available taxi on the way — or purely and simply because Ann liked to challenge people and hear scandalized murmurs around her — she convinced Paul to go all the way back downtown by tram or bus, and then, to complete the scandal, to take transfer tickets and wait on the sidewalk at one of the downtown stations — at Carpaţi, at Strada Regală — until the tram came.

“I want to compromise you, I want everyone to know that we’re in love, I never again want to lower my head in public,” Ann used to say when Paul gave her an irritated look, unaccustomed to facing down the curious stares of passersby, which she, on the contrary, put up with defiantly, and even provoked. Yet it was true that later, in a total about-face concerning what was or was not appropriate and thanks to a sudden access of respectability, Ann had completely suppressed such adventures. Not only would it have struck her as being in poor taste to take an easel on a tram, but she also forbade Paul from coming out to the countryside in the evening to bring her home from her work because — she said — in the final analysis it was uncomfortable always to wander through these marginal streets with him, above all because old classmates of hers might see her if they happened to return home from work through this neighbourhood.

In this way, “to go out for the cause” ceased to be, as before, a pleasant opportunity for a meeting; it even became an obstacle, so far removed from their shared life that Ann used to invoke her work, her art, and, as the final argument, her “career.” “I can’t see you tomorrow: I’m going out for the cause,” or “Sorry I wasn’t there yesterday: I was at the cause,” were explanations that admitted no response.

Paul tried to confirm where Ann’s “causes” were now. But she gave him only vague directions (“You know I haven’t decided yet, I’m not sure, we’ll see…”) and even if, out of carelessness or indifference, she told him with precision of the spot where her current cause was located (“Look, towards Filaret, past the yellow house, where I fell last autumn — you remember? — when I tore the buckle off my antelope pumps”), he knew all too well that it would be useless to look for her because he wouldn’t find her there and because two days later she would be sincerely surprised: “What? You went? Oh, how silly you are… I got a headache… I changed my mind at the last minute… I couldn’t go… Didn’t I tell you not to go?”

Ann’s causes had become a pretext and now “to go out for the cause” was the most comfortable way for her to lie to him.

He hadn’t seen her for a week when one morning, glancing at a newspaper, her name, printed in small letters in the news section, jumped out from the page. It was an article on the Romanian pavilion at the 1934 Liège World’s Fair, a sort of official press release to the World’s Fair Organizing Committee through which it was announced that painters and sculptors charged with decorating the interior of the pavilion would be leaving for Brussels in five days: Saturday, May 12 at 9:50 AM. Among the decorators chosen was Ann.

Paul had thought it was a mistake, as he couldn’t imagine that Ann would have left him to find out something so important from the newspapers nor that with such an important departure so close at hand she would have let a whole week go by without seeing him, even if for some stupid reason, they had quarrelled recently.

“Is this true? You’re leaving?” he asked her on the phone, with the newspaper still in his hand and his eyes fixed on the astonishing news.

“Oh, I don’t know,” Ann replied evasively, “it’s not certain yet, it could be, but for the time being nothing’s finalized. If something happens, I’ll tell you. Look, let’s meet tonight… Or no, not tonight, in fact I’m meeting the architect of the pavilion, but call me tomorrow morning, or, better yet, let me call you… I’ll be sure to call you, all right?”

The five days prior to the departure had passed slowly, waiting every second, holding his breath at each footstep on the stairs, each rumble of the elevator, each ring of the telephone, for the question was no longer whether Ann was going to leave for Liège, but rather — more simply, more urgently and more painfully — whether she was going to come to see him, whether she was going to call him, whether she was at least going to send him some word, some sign. He was afraid of leaving home or leaving the office — the only two places where she could phone him — in case her long-awaited call should finally come in his absence, and when in spite of this he was obliged to go out into the city, he drove cab drivers to distraction by telling them to get him home in a hurry, where the same waiting, the same watch, would begin again. Hundreds of times he had lifted the receiver to call Ann, hundreds of times he had started to compose that number that obsessed him like a name, but he never dared to dial it right through to the end. What would she have said to him, this Ann who hid from him, and who prepared her flight like a fugitive?

Yet sometimes the telephone rang, and he couldn’t suppress the nervous shudder of fear and hope that later struck him as ridiculous when it turned out to be a wrong number or some call without importance — everything else was without importance.

It’s absurd and unforgivable, as if I were a schoolboy, as if I were twenty, I need to understand that it’s no longer like that, something has to change… He promised himself that he would be calm, and in fact when the telephone or doorbell rang again, he let it ring for a while before lifting the receiver or opening the door because he wished in that way to prove that he was in control of himself, but also because for a few seconds he could say to himself, in a childish way: it could be she… it might be possible that it’s she…

Even so, sometimes, from superstition, spite or just fear of once again being disillusioned, he let the telephone ring without responding, waiting for the caller to give up. Yet in the moment in which he heard the snap that interrupted communication, in the moment in which the telephone fell silent, the thought that this time it had been Ann, who had not replied to him, and that by doing this he might just have lost what could have been his only opportunity to speak to her and see her, gave him an unbearable feeling of misfortune, like that of a passionate poker player who, having just said, “Pass” out of superstition, is startled by the intolerable thought that the cards he has tossed down without looking at them were precisely the four-of-a-kind or royal flush that would have allowed him to rebound from a night of gambling that had left him ruined.

Ann’s departures! He knew them so well, so many times he had lived through their nervousness, their confusion. The suitcases that opened and closed noisily, the wardrobe with the doors opened wide against the wall, the dresses draped over the armchair, the girdles on the bed, the scarves tossed about wherever they happened to fall, the multicoloured train tickets flipped through with feverish agitation (“Is that all of them? You don’t think I’ve forgotten any?”), the last-minute purchases, the rushed errands in the city, the packages with which she returned home and which she never knew where she had put, where she got them from, what she should do with them…

He saw her heading down the streets, skipping from one taxi to another, stopping in front of shop windows, going into a store, forgetting why she had gone in, scatterbrained, delighted, exhausted, full of worries, curiosity, expectations… It would have been so easy, it would have been normal for her during one of those errands to suddenly remember him with that irritated shudder she had when she remembered something, closing her eyes and, in a childlike gesture, raising her hand to her forehead — “Oh, what a scatterbrain I am!” — and then from the first public telephone (“For goodness’ sake, the city’s full of telephones!”) to call him and to finally say to him: “Wait for me, I’m coming over.”

With each hour that passed and made her departure more threatening, that Saturday, May 12 at 9:50 AM read in the newspaper, which initially had been an abstract date, something distant, shapeless, unlikely, acquired reality and became a fixed point, a sore point, difficult to look in the face. With each hour, each day, a feeling of consternation was added to Paul’s wait, as though confronted by a fact with an absurd outcome and which yet he could see reaching fruition beneath his dumbfounded gaze.

On the morning of her departure he watched on his clock the slow rotation of the minutes, the cogged, mechanistic movement of the seconds — as you waited for precisely midnight to turn out the lights on New Year’s Eve — and when those two hands had been precisely superimposed, showing ten minutes to ten, he picked up the receiver and called the information bureau to ask whether the Simplon had left.

“Yes, it’s left, it just started moving,” a clerk replied.

An absurd calm enveloped him, as though all his feverishness of the last few days had been stirred up only by a doubt as to whether or not on Saturday, May 12 the Simplon train was going to leave at its scheduled time of 9:50; now that what he had wanted to know belonged to the past, he could sleep and forget.

In an afternoon newspaper he saw the photograph taken in the morning on the platform of the Găra de Nord: The group of Romanian artists leaving for Belgium to work on our pavilion in Liège.

Ann wore a tailor-made travel costume and on her head she had a sort of white visored cap, set boyishly askew over her forehead. Paul looked at her calmly for a short while: he felt that he had nothing to say to her, nothing to ask her.

A Bucharest from which Ann was missing became a calm, rather provincial city. It was as if the noise had suddenly retreated, the streets had gone silent. Paul had the impression that he was somewhere in the provinces — in Craiova, in Râmnicu-Sărat, in Roman — one of those small cities where he went sometimes for a trial and where he knew he would find neither surprises nor chance encounters.

Ann’s departure brought him an unexpected peace, a feeling of apathy, of indifference. Everything was colourless, grey and bearable. The respite that came from never waiting in expectation had a certain bitterness, but he greeted it like a welcome slumber. At work letters awaited his answers, at court things remained behind schedule. He returned to these tasks with complete indifference, but determined to let himself get caught up in a mechanical working routine. He composed long business letters, which he typed out himself on the typewriter: he liked to hear the dry noise of the keys, their quick beat. He occasionally saw photographs and reports in the newspapers about the activities in Liège; he read them without curiosity, without discomfort. A few sketches and colour drawings of the Romanian pavilion, which was almost complete, had appeared in an issue of Illustration. On the other hand, the inauguration date was approaching, and Paul, finding the magazine in a restaurant one evening, forgotten on a chair, leafed through it calmly, as if it had nothing to do with Ann.

“Hey, you like what those people do?” an indignant voice said, interrupting his reading.

It was a very well-known painter, who had retreated a few years ago to Iaşi, a professor in the School of Fine Arts there, who showed his paintings less and less frequently in Bucharest, from which he had fled, he claimed, because it was no longer possible to find either good wine or good painting. Paul knew him vaguely from a gallery opening, where his aura of a scowling bear had been greeted by the young painters with a wave of pleasure and fear, for he was known for his penchant for stopping in front of paintings and speaking loudly, almost clamouring, as, red in the face, he hurled either tremendous, unbelievable compliments or, much more frequently, breathtaking curses and abuse.

He sat down at Paul’s table without asking permission, and, taking the magazine in his hand, flipped through it nervously.

“I asked you: do you like it? You tell me, is that painting? You call those canvases? They’ve all gone crazy. They pickup the paintbrush with greed in their hearts and bingo — by nightfall the pavilion’s ready. I’ll tell you, sir, they came to me, too, and asked me: why don’t you come to Liège, Old Man Fănică, and make us a canvas, you’ve ten days, eight metres by six, bingo — here’s the money, bingo — here’s the train ticket… I looked at the money — good money, I don’t have to tell you — I looked at them, and I was dumbfounded. Well then, mister, you guys know what a canvas is, mister? Eight metres by six? Ten days? A hundred days wouldn’t be enough. Give me a year and I’ll do it for you. That’s my difficult task, that’s the subtle task: your head gives in to what’s on the walls right to the end, and not even then would you let it out of your hands, like maybe you’d like to repair it or wipe it away or change it. As those Latins who were our forefathers said: ars longa, old man, ars longa.”

Paul listened to him without curiosity — how alien all this painters’ talk felt! — but with a certain pleasure in hearing a jovial voice that insulted, meted out harsh treatment, became indignant, replied to itself, contradicted itself or expressed approval. It was at least a human being here with him, a human being who looked him in the eyes and urged him to drink. For so many days he hadn’t met anyone, for so many days he hadn’t exchanged a word with anyone. And rather than wandering giddily around the streets, perhaps it was better to sit on this restaurant terrace with empty wine bottles lined up on the gravel beneath the table, with the band playing folk music on violins that occasionally awoke from their torpor, among a few very elegant women in low-cut dresses — it was the beginning of June — which brought to the Bucharest summer night a distant breath of the beach, the sea… The Iaşi painter talked continuously, and each time he emptied a glass his indignation, which grew indolent in between times, went up by half a tone, renewed, setting out for new battles. He kept throwing away the issue of Illustration, then taking it in his hands and opening it again in search of new arguments.

“… Now that girl,” — and he indicated the sketch that Paul only now realized was signed by Ann — “has talent, sir, you know she has talent… I think you know her… Sure, I saw the two of you together at Balcic… Big love affair, eh?”

Paul uttered a bored protest. “No, it’s not what you think. We say hi, we know each other, but it’s nothing…”

“Hey, buddy, let it go. Whether she is or whether she isn’t, it all goes with the territory. Where the lamb treads, the wolf follows. You’re not the first and you won’t be the last. Nobody knows anybody in a big crowd.”

Paul took a long look at the wine glass in his right hand and observed that his hand wasn’t trembling. Far away and deep down, close to his heart, something stopped in its tracks and waited to break or unravel. It was like being under a heavy anaesthetic: he felt the wound, he felt the skin’s resistence to the blade, and the very precise, very exact rending, and yet it didn’t hurt, it didn’t hurt…

“Yes, sir, she’s got talent, but what good has it done her? Talent is like money, you find it everywhere; the key is to know what you’re going to do with it. Look, I feel bad about that girl. I liked her at first and she has a fine hand. She doesn’t wear herself out drawing, but when she puts a line on paper you understand something… Except she needed to work, to wait and above all, she’s afraid, you see? She’s afraid of what she does, and she never knows whether it’s good or bad… I thought she wanted to be a painter — and she could have been, you know? she could if she’d wanted it — but she wants a career. And, bingo, she’s made it. She’s slapping the paint on in Liège for 5000 lei a day. 5000! Nobody’s ever paid me that kind of money, not even 500, and look, on Saint Anthony’s Day I’ll be forty-nine years old, and she’s not even twenty-five and she’s rushing to get 5000 lei a day, which would be enough to wake up poor old Luchian from the dead in a fit of rage.¹⁰ 5000 lei a day! Look here, it’s gone from that guild on the cliff they had back in the days of their nobility, their bloodymindedness, that nobody could buy me no-how, and if I didn’t like your mug, I didn’t sell you a painting, I didn’t sell it to you and you went in peace, at least you would have given me ten times as much gold as the next guy made. But you haven’t forgotten that now everything’s gone to the dogs, to the mob, to pushing to get ahead, even to hauling yourself up by the hair? That girl, sir, she’s come into the painting world like a siren, like an actress who runs after the director, the ministry, her cousin, the kept mistress, in order to get a role, and she sleeps with this one and she sleeps with that one, with the director, with the office manager, even with the porter if she has to, but she doesn’t stop until she gets to the top. Well, do the reckoning with your pencil in your hand of how many of them she’s slept with, at every gallery opening, to get every commission, at every opening night, the sun’ll come up tomorrow and we’ll still be making the list. If you ask me, she sleeps with whoever she feels like if she’s in the mood, after all she’s young and, God bless her, she’s not ugly, but — you get what I’m saying? — you don’t mix getting laid with painting, they don’t mix, they’re two different things, yup, all in all two different things…”

Paul had tried several times to silence him, but his weak gesture of protest was caught up by the painter’s verbal torrent and drowned in a fresh wave of indignation, exclamations and curses. At several points he would have liked to get up from the table and flee, but a painful pleasure held him still: old doubts, old agonies, all his questions from sleepless nights, all his stupid writhing between belief and disbelief, all that standing guard of the jealous man who sees signs everywhere and certainty nowhere, everything, everything came together that night in an answer.

He returned home at daybreak, through the awakening, white morning streets, alone, stripped of any memory, of any hope.

He was on Calea Victoriei one day, in front of the Corso, when he felt that a well-known gaze was searching for him on the opposite sidewalk. He crossed the street, as if to call out, and discovered in a shop window, among numerous portraits of famous women, a photograph of Ann. She probably had it done before she left, he told himself. He stared at it for a very long time, as if he had truly seen her again after their long separation. In the photograph she was wearing a black, long-sleeved sweater that covered her throat. It looked like a tunic, although on the lefthand side, instead of a pocket, was a white initial, not superimposed, but rather worked into the fabric of the pullover: a triangular A, like the initial of a sports club. By contrast with the black sweater and the white thread, her hair looked twice as blonde, as though beneath a powerful morning light. It was the first photograph he had seen of her in which Ann was not smiling. Her lips were very slightly opened in an almost suppressed smile. Her head was tilted to one side in a gesture of attention and interrogation.

He had left the area with slow steps and had gone aimlessly up the street towards Nestor, stopping out of habit at the windows of the bookstores where he saw nothing, not a book title, not a magazine, but only that tilted blonde head, that A imprinted on the left breast, like a message addressed to him, like a whisper that only he could make out. He told himself that it was not completely impossible that in the rush of her departure Ann had had this photograph taken for him and had left it to be developed, perhaps with the secret thought that he would come across the photo here and would glimpse it, finding again in this photo the Ann of former times, so much did it seem to him that her dejected smile was for him alone. I’m a hopeless idiot. Now I’m even being seduced by photographs in shop windows.

Yet he had returned in the days that followed to see her. Something had changed when he had realized that her photograph was there in the window. He had the feeling of being less alone in this city, which had seemed so deserted until now. In the mornings, going out to work, he took with him that confused feeling of impatience he recalled from the days when they had made a date for an evening out or a long-awaited concert. He passed in front of the window several times a day, sometimes without the courage to toss more than a hurried glance towards Ann’s photograph — for he was afraid his persistence would be noticed, particularly in the evenings when the cafés along the street were full of people, and so many of the tables on the sidewalk were occupied by actors, painters and writers who were his acquaintances — but, at other times, halting, as though he had only that instant discovered her, with the full force of the event, he remained staring at her for a long time. He resorted to all sorts of tricks, which he masked with discomfort, to give his stopping in front of the window a normal, happenstance air, and not one of these tricks struck him as too naive, not the coin he feigned having lost and having stopped to look for, not the notebook pulled out of his pocket to jot down some fact he had just remembered, not the vague look with which he waited on a corner to cross an empty street.

On each occasion he returned with the fear that in the intervening time the photograph would have been removed from the window and replaced with one that was unfamiliar, and it was this fear, this emotion, with which, when Ann was in Bucharest, he had climbed the stairs towards her apartment, wondering whether he would find her at home. The smile in the window called out to him from afar, soothing, unchanging. It was a sad, hazy smile, as though she lacked the courage to open up any more than this. It was the Ann who regarded him with a tired shake of her head, with a despondent lift of her shoulders, as if to say to him: “Why do I even bother to talk to you? You don’t believe any of it, you don’t understand any of it…”

One morning Paul stood frozen on the sidewalk: the photograph was no longer in the window. The previous evening it had still been there — he had seen it — but overnight everything had changed. A new series of photographs had appeared behind the window pane: a few bridal photographs, a young officer in dress uniform, numerous chubby children, every type of unfamiliar face, which exchanged among themselves glances, smiles and greetings. Paul looked at it curiously, embarrassed, with an expression of confused enquiry, of the sort you have when you open the door of a compartment on a train and interrupt with your unexpected entry the family atmosphere which has grown up during hours of shared travel. “There isn’t a free seat,” the hostile silence around you says — and the photographs in the window were saying the same thing to him now, surprised by his insistent gaze. He was almost on the point of excusing himself (“Excuse me, it was a mistake, I was looking for someone”), he was ready to move away from there, although it was so difficult for him to give this up, when to the right of the window, as if it had hidden from him until now, barely containing its laughter, and now would have embraced him with an explosion of joy and tenderness, Ann’s face sprang into sight, a new face of hers, sufficiently different from the one he had left there the previous evening, that it wasn’t surprising that he hadn’t recognized it at first glance.

He used to feel this way often when he came to her apartment and, after ringing the doorbell, the door would open on its own, pulled by an unseen hand; he would cross the threshold, call out to Ann, look for her in every room, and only then would she leap out from the corner where she had been hiding, especially on days when she was wearing a new dress and wanted to surprise him by showing herself off to him in it. Now, too, in the photograph, she wore a new silk print dress in a floral design, while on her head she had an open, almost white straw hat that blended with her blonde hair, a hat with a wide brim for the sunlight in the country. Everything looked youthful, morning-like, but there was something sensual in her white arms, her bare throat, exposed even more by the movement of her head, which was tossed back slightly, as though to laugh in pleasure, for in this new photograph she was laughing, with a free, open laughter.

It was a completely different Ann than that of the evening before, who in her black sweater had looked like a pensive boy. Many times her facility for becoming a new person had troubled Paul. It was enough for her to change her hairdo, or dress in new colours, in order for something deep within her to appear to have changed, right down to the look in her eyes. There were innumerable possible Anns, and each left Paul feeling intimidated for a second, not knowing how to recover in this stranger the girl he loved, from whom he had parted the night before.

He found it difficult to get used to the new photograph in the window. He didn’t like this Ann who laughed and above all he didn’t like her head thrown back, with that recently adopted gesture of hilarity that emerged when she said: “It’s rolling, it’s rolling.” He passed before the window several times a day, as before, and, little by little, he familiarized himself with Ann’s new face, with her dress, with the wide straw hat, and finally with that laugh, which no longer struck him as strange, but even left him with the impression that it stemmed from his oldest memories of their love: Ann’s laughter during their days of happiness in Sibiu.

The photographer’s display window changed each week, and now Paul awaited with disquiet the end of this week, which would mean the departure of the Ann that he had befriended in the meantime. At the same time, he would have to await the new Ann, whom he didn’t yet know and of whose arrival he wasn’t even certain.

On Saturday night he stayed downtown late in order to see her again and, as there were no longer many people on the street other than very rare passersby, since the Corso closed after 2 PM, he was able to stand there at ease, facing the window, to take his leave of this Ann, who two mornings from now would no longer be there. The lights went out, and in the semi-darkness of the window she seemed to be waiting for him and replying to him.

On Sunday morning a new smile, a new dress, a scarf, a hat, a gesture greeted him from the new photograph on display. How many photographs had Ann had taken? And why so many? Paul had never before been aware of her having a passion for having herself photographed, and aside from a few lover’s shots, most of them taken on trips, and a few small identity-card portraits she’d had made for her passport, he did not own a single photograph of her. Surely this was a new passion, a recent caprice, and, maybe to an even greater degree, a stock-taking, a matter of foresight in light of the opportunity of her trip. In fact, Ann had recently become a “figure” in Bucharest life, a “celebrity.” She was seen everywhere: at the theatre, at the race track, at soccer matches; her dresses were commented on, she was talked about and enjoyed having people talk about her.

Leaving Bucharest for an extended period, she risked slipping out of the limelight and losing her minor fashionable notoriety, which she had worked so hard to achieve. It was possible that the photographs she had left behind her had no purpose other than to maintain this notoriety, to prevent people from forgetting her. The display window projected an image that was all the more secure for not being in any way ostentatious; neither shots of current events nor political photographs were ever shown there, of the sort that attracted curious throngs, but rather art photography, portraits that appeared to be exhibited not so much for their subjects’ names, but rather for the quality of the negative and the delicacy of the composition, none of which prevented the most stellar names of Bucharest, whether royal, artistic or the wives of famous industrialists, from appearing.

In that selection of “expressive heads,” Ann took her place with simplicity, with a certain negligence, as if her photographs were so numerous and her appearance in each new display were so assured that Paul wondered with dismay whether there wasn’t something a little histrionic in her insistence on showing herself off and being seen. It sometimes seemed to him that her gestures, preserved in such living form, so talkative in her photographs, became the poses of a minor starlet, and he looked on them then with spite, with hostility — spite that faded away quickly, as he got used to the new photographs and felt a little as if, day by day, the heated intimacy between him and her grew tighter. In other summers he wouldn’t have let a single weekend go by without leaving Bucharest for the beach or the mountains, but now he refused every invitation, since he had the feeling that each Sunday morning he had an appointment he couldn’t miss, and in fact his first walk downtown was to the display window, where he looked — with such fear! with such disquiet! — for the new Ann for the week that was beginning.

Sometimes he came too early, the window wasn’t ready, and the cloth divider was pulled down like a curtain, behind which the new photographs were being arranged. Then Paul walked up and down the sidewalk, with a feeling of mixed impatience and security, as though he were walking in front of Ann’s apartment while she, upstairs in her room, was dressing, having sent him out to wait for her on the street: a feeling of security because he was certain she was going to come and in this respect nothing threatened him, yet also with impatience since he wondered what she would be like when she came downstairs, which dress she was going to wear, how pretty she would look.

One morning the cloth curtain rose in vain: Ann was missing from the window. Paul looked for her patiently, at first untroubled, examining portrait after portrait, at last alarmed, panic-stricken that she could possibly not be there, that he couldn’t find her. He would have liked to believe that it was a mistake or a joke, that she was hiding and was about to suddenly appear before him. He would have liked to say to her, as he had in the old days: “Come here, Ann. Stop it. You’re fooling around too much…”

He stood riveted there with a crumbling feeling; he felt as though he were losing her again, as though he saw her leaving again, perhaps this time for good.

“I have to see her,” he said in a loud voice. “I have to see her, at any cost.”

Three days later he was in Liège. He had left madly within a few hours, with the little money he was able to scrape together, with a passport acquired at the last minute, taking the longest and cheapest route, in third class via Poland and Germany, changing trains several times, waiting in a variety of stations for complicated connections to Berlin, Cologne and Hegenrath and finally arriving in Liège in the middle of the night, his head reeling with sleeplessness and strain. The whole time he told himself that he was acting like a lunatic, that he was making himself ridiculous, that the woman he was seeking was irrevocably lost to him, and that in any case he would now lose her forever by throwing himself at her; yet nothing could stop him from pursuing this absurd path, which he had entered with his eyes closed.

There had been a single moment of hesitation on the morning of his departure. He was at the Ministry of the Interior, in the office of a Subsecretary of State whom he knew, and whom he had come to see to ask him for a passport. On the wall above the desk was one of Ann’s paintings: a sandy Balcic with a few rough, dusty plants, almost whitish and with a single corner of sea, of an intense blue.

Paul sat looking in the direction of the painting. What was it doing in this office? Who had bought it, and why? Still young, the Subsecretary was known to have had romantic liaisons in the theatre world, which people talked about exceedingly openly, and which not even he forced himself to hide very much.

“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 15^th and she left on the 16^th,” 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 were 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.

Paul remained alone with the projectionist, the lights went out again and, after a few tremors, the images finally coalesced on the screen, and the old newsreel, which he had seen in July in Liège, appeared again before him, looking more pompous than before, as though the print were worn out; the images were blurry and, above all, the screen was much smaller, about half the size of a normal cinema screen. The forgotten scenes of the newsreel appeared one after the other: Sir John Simon, the Foreign Secretary of Great Britain, welcomed Monsieur Louis Barthou, the French Foreign Minister, to a London train station… The San Francisco general strike grew in size. Most of the factories and mills were closed. The total number of strikers had reached 150,000… Ambassador Dogvalevski’s funeral in Paris. The Soviet diplomat’s earthly remains were incinerated at the Père Lachaise crematorium… Chancellor Dolfuss formed a new government, having shuffled his ministers… The opening of the exhibition in Liège… A panning shot of the pavilions, the main gate, the arrival of the royal convoy, they crossed the main street, then suddenly Ann, Ann propped up against her painting, Ann smiling at Queen Astrid, their white dresses, one alongside the other.

Alone in the projection room, very close to the screen, which was no larger than a window, Paul looked Ann in the eyes, yet without emotion. If he had been able to speak to her, if she had been able to hear him, he would have said calmly to her: “I’m going to forget you, Ann, I’m going to forget you, I want to forget you.”

In November, in the Dalles Gallery, an exhibition of Ann’s paintings opened. White posters, soberly typed, but spread around everywhere, announced the opening party well in advance. On every wall, on every public noticeboard, was Ann’s name: November 10 — December 10. Exhibition of new paintings. Oils, watercolours, gouache.

Paul walked past those posters, forcing himself not to see them. Each one seemed to be calling out to him. Before, he used to feel a childish pride in seeing his lover’s name in newspapers, in windows, on walls. Now it struck him as an indiscretion, an abuse — and, in fact, it was possible that never before had there been so much publicity for an exhibition of paintings.

A few days earlier, he had received in the mail, at home, an invitation to the opening party. The typed text announced the party for eleven o’clock, but Ann had added by hand: but it’s not forbidden to come earlier. After several months of silence, they were the first words he had received from her.

He was determined not to go to the launch party, to stay home and review some files, which he had brought back from the office for this purpose. It was a November day, damp, leaden, of the kind that made him feel enervated. The minutes passed slowly, one at a time. He had opened the window and let into the room the damp morning air, the rain, the smell of fallen leaves…

The telephone rang, and Paul let it ring a few times. He had no interest in replying: he wasn’t expecting anyone. He finally lifted the receiver and was dumfounded: it was Ann’s voice.

“Aren’t you coming? Don’t you want to come? Please, please come. I’m stuck here, there are so many people, but I’m waiting for you, Paul, I’m waiting for you, you understand? You’ll bring me luck if you come…”

Paul gave a discouraged lift of his shoulders. Ann was appealing to their old superstitions, a tactic that disarmed him since he was so little prepared to resist it: “You’ll bring me luck if you come…”

At the Dalles, he stopped in the doorway of the front room, looking for Ann. He came in out of the rain wearing his trenchcoat, with his hat in his hand, and shrank from entering: the sound of voices, laughter, exclamations, a rustling of dresses and furs, held him there on the threshold, a little intimidated, a little confused, wondering if it wasn’t already time for him to leave.

Ann, spotting him from the back of the room, waved her hand, signalling to him to wait. She came towards him, making her way with difficulty between the groups of people who blocked her path. She didn’t say sorry to the people she bumped into, and looked steadily in Paul’s direction, with a sparkling intensity in her eyes, as if she wished to cry out to him.

“Why are your hands wet? Did you get caught in the rain? You came here on foot? That’s why you’re late, is it? I didn’t think you’d come. I kept looking at the door. Paul, I was so afraid you wouldn’t come! Could it be, I said, could it be that he won’t come?”

He regarded her without replying: a hard look that asked no questions. She’s here, she’s beside me, he repeated in his mind, surprised that he wasn’t shivering. He would have liked to absorb the news of her return from far away into all his horrible memories, which, although Ann was there beside him, remained alive, like that lost outpost which, although the war has ended, continues to be alert, watchful, because it hasn’t yet received news of the truce.

Ann took him by the arm, leading him into the vestibule.

“Let’s get out of here, Paul. There are too many people. We’ll go far away in the rain. What do you say?”

“You know very well that we can’t, Ann. You’ve got to stay here. It’s your opening.”

“Oh! My opening!” she said, with a casual gesture. “What do you expect me to do here? I want to be with you, with you alone, do you understand?”

She ran out into the rain, bareheaded, as far as the edge of the sidewalk, where she stopped in front of a small blue car with a low-slung body, which she opened with a familiar, irate gesture, struggling to get the keys into the lock in the rain. She shouted to Paul from behind the wheel. He had remained on the stone steps of the entrance, his gaze following her in perplexity.

“Aren’t you coming?”

Inside, through the broad windows of the front rooms of the Dalles, a few observers were watching the scene, intrigued. It’s all too hurtful, Paul thought, imagining what people would say after they left. Within an instant he was at Ann’s side, closing the door behind him.

“What’s with this car?”

“It’s mine. An old heap.”

“Where did you get it?”

Ann turned her head towards him, without losing control of the wheel. She headed in the direction of Piaţa Romana along the boulevard, which was nearly deserted on that grim November Sunday morning.

“Is that your only question? It’s the first one you’ve asked me, Paul.”

“And the last. I have nothing to ask you.”

Ann braked abruptly. The machine came to a rough stop, skating over the damp paving stones. The right mudguard slammed into the edge of the sidewalk. Ann, crestfallen, lifted her hands from the steering wheel. She stared straight ahead through the windshield, where the raindrops were sliding into hurried little streams. For a few minutes nothing was audible between them but the rhythmic sound of the windshield wiper on the glass. At last Ann lifted her eyes towards Paul, with the return of that decisive expression she assumed in serious moments.

“Maybe I made a mistake in phoning you, Paul. Maybe everything’s really finished between us. But since you came, since you’re here, I’d like to ask you to stay and to be quiet. I want to know you’re next to me. Tomorrow, if you want, an hour from now, if you want, we can go our separate ways. But for the moment, be quiet…”

She set off again. A cold, damp wind came shivering in through the open window on the driver’s side, hurling sparse raindrops into Ann’s face; she let them trickle down her cheeks and forehead without wiping them away, without seeming to feel them. Her hands clenched the steering wheel with the exaggerated tension of a long drive. The needles of the gauges on the dashboard oscillated with restless nervousness. The speedometer slid across the dial at between 80 and 90 kilometres an hour. On the right and the left, the bare linden trees that lined the road cast out a smokey mist. Farther along, beyond Băneasa Airport, there was an odour of dishevelled fields, of sodden grass, of earth tilled right down to the roots. The rain was falling more softly here, less rushed, calmer and more patient than in the city. The noise of the engine didn’t completely block out its thin rustling sound, like the approaching voice of the forest.

They left the sleeping airport, with its shuttered hangars, the radio station, the Otopeni forest, the road to Snagov, far behind them. The gleaming road unfolded before them through the open countryside. Whitish haze floated low over the black earth like fallen cloud making a futile attempt to raise itself… On the horizon, the greyness of the November day descended into a smokey, opaque whiteness.

Paul turned his head towards Ann. He had forgotten that she was next to him. This whole drive through the rain had the savour of awaking from a troubled sleep.

Ann bit her lower lip with a strained gesture that Paul didn’t recognize. It’s a recent gesture, he thought, a driving gesture. Her cheek betrayed no tremor: her eyes, slightly dilated with attentiveness, her forehead, tilted forward, lent a feeling of intensity and yet also of absence to her pale face. Only now had he noticed that she didn’t have her overcoat; she was bareheaded, with an open collar, exactly as she had left the exhibition, in a tailored brown suit (Since when does she wear brown?) with a gauzy scarf, wet from the rain, fluttering over her shoulders.

“I’d say it’s time for us to go back, Ann.”

She reduced their speed, uncertain at first, and then she stopped. She laid her forehead against the steering wheel and stayed that way, with her arms drooping, her hair ruffled by the cold wind, which continued to blow with ebbing force now that the car was parked. Paul straightened her up with difficulty, taking her head in his hands to draw her towards him: Ann’s half-closed eyes had a dull look, her lips were blue, her hands cold.

“What’s the matter with you? Are you cold? Are you feeling bad?”

“No,” she whispered. “I’d like to cry.”

“That’s good — cry,” he encouraged her, and he pulled her closer, sheltering her against his chest and covering her with his right arm as though he were wrapping a shawl around her shoulders. “Cry if you want. Go ahead — cry.”

In the small white car, parked alone on the road in the open countryside, Ann shook with childish, hiccuping tears.

In fact, nothing had changed, and Ann’s return was not a return. A caprice, a moment’s folly, maybe even more trivial than that… “She fled on the morning of her opening, like the bride on the wedding night,” the painters would joke among themselves. The truth was that she had left behind her a room full of guests and that her sudden departure gave rise to endless fascinated comments. Two days later, in a society column, it was said that Ann’s absence from her own opening was a delightful whim of the sort that an artist confident of the public’s affection can allow herself, with the result, the columnist added maliciously, that the majority of the works exhibited sold on the spot.

Everything that Ann did now, Paul observed, was destined to become the subject of publicity. And it doesn’t even worry her, he thought with a shake of his head. He had the hideous suspicion that her departure from the opening had been prepared in advance to intrigue the public and arouse curiosity in order to bring an “original note” to the all-too-banal tradition of the opening of an exhibition. Having rediscovered her for an instant, he was losing her again to a thicket of secrets and mysteries that she rushed through with an offhand gesture: “Forget it, I’ll explain.”

She was so distant, so strange had she become to him during their months of separation, that the paintings in her new show looked excessively good to him. Even if it hadn’t been for those four or five portraits, and sketches of portraits, of Dănulescu, ostentatiously exhibited, as if she wished to forestall or confront all that was being said about their liaison (and Paul had been annoyed above all by the title of those portraits in the exhibition catalogue: Portrait of the Architect D., an initial which, rather than being a sign of discretion, seemed like one of intimacy) — even if it hadn’t been for those portraits, everything in Ann’s painting was unknown to him now; it all breathed memories, events, emotions experienced in his absence, far away from him. Most of the landscapes were of Sainte-Maxime, a Belgian fishing village where Ann had loaded her palette with the greys and blues of a cloudy sea. How long she had been in Sainte-Maxime, with whom, what she had been doing there, were questions she invariably deflected by telling him: “Forget it, someday I’ll tell you the whole story.” A day that had become more difficult to pin down the less he saw of her, always in a hurry, always in passing, particularly now that she had this blue car — bought? received as a gift? even she didn’t seem to know for sure — with which she ran innumerable errands, all of them urgent and all of them without explanation. For Paul it was a fresh source of pain to run across that small automobile, which he recognized from a distance by its colour — a light navy blue — heading along the streets only to disappear around a corner or beyond a crossroads — towards what unknown destinations? towards which clandestine encounters?

He happened to come across it with the doors closed and the headlights out, in obscure neighbourhoods, on the corner of an unfamiliar street, parked there who knew how long ago. He would approach it and look in the windows to see that Ann had left her gloves, or a book, or a package. Leaning over with his face against the windowpane, he would gaze for a long time at those forgotten objects. Sometimes they were left next to the car’s front grille. Maybe she’s coming back. She never came. He waited for hours on end, and still she didn’t come.

He looked in detail at the surrounding houses. It was possible she was around here somewhere, for a visit or a romantic rendezvous, possibly behind the curtains in one of those windows where the lights were on, not wishing to come down right now because she had seen him waiting in the street.

One evening in Filipescu Park, on a little semicircular street that ran off Strada Sofia like a sort of interior courtyard, Paul had found the blue car across from a house whose rolling shutters were drawn, but through which strips of light fell. He had passed there by chance, coming from the Saint-Vincent sanatorium, where he had an ill friend, but Ann’s car stopped him in his tracks. For more than two hours he had remained still, leaning over the grille of the car. He had the impression that behind the house’s shutters shadows were moving. He seemed to hear footsteps, whispers, even laughter, which then faded away. It was as though every now and then, about every quarter of an hour, someone was coming to the window to see if he was still there, if he had left yet. After a long time, an absurd thought passed through his head: to ring the doorbell and ask for Ann.

The door opened after a long wait, and after he had rung several times: in the doorway was a greying man, with the entrance behind him, who asked him who he was looking for and obliged him to repeat Ann’s name twice, as though he hadn’t heard it clearly.

“No, sir, you’re mistaken. She doesn’t live here.” And he closed the door, leaving Paul on the stone step, confused, stuttering excuses that no one heard.

That evening he vowed that he would never see her again.

I have to forget you, Ann. I absolutely have to forget you.