Accident (34 page)

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

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

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

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

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

“Have a safe journey,” Hagen said.

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I'm going to buy newspapers,” he told Nora, and got up from the table with a certain restlessness.

He was close to the door, about to step out onto the street, when he heard the shout. He turned his head and looked with surprise at the nearby tables, but didn't recognize anyone. Then he realized that someone was waving at him from farther back, next to the window.

“Is that you, Ann?”

She was alone at the table. In front of her were a few newspapers and magazines, which she seemed to have been reading.

“Do you mind?” Paul said, leafing through them in a hurry. He
looked first at the headlines and the breaking news. He remained on his feet facing Ann, leaning over the table slightly, and in a few instants he had scanned the whole pile of papers.

“Are you looking for something?” she asked.

“No. Nothing in particular. I wanted to know whether anything had happened in the world. But I can see that nothing's happened. Truly nothing ...”

Only then did he raise his eyes to look at Ann. She was bareheaded and wore a blue scarf knotted around her neck like a tie.

“Where are you coming from, Paul? Have you been here long? Are you leaving for Bucharest? Someone told me they'd seen you on Christmas Eve, but I didn't really believe it. I've been in Braşov the whole time. I'm staying here. I don't know how much longer I'll be here. I came here to work. Don't you want to sit down? How long has it been since we saw each other? Where did you disappear to?”

She spoke, as usual, with a multitude of short questions, which she tossed out negligently, without waiting for replies. Paul was still standing in front of her. He watched how she laughed, the gestures she made with her hands, how she spoke.
What small eyes she has! Is it possible to have eyes that small?

Her questions suddenly stopped and she became unexpectedly attentive.

“What's going on with you, Paul? Why aren't you saying anything? Why are you looking at me like that? Something's happened to you. You've changed. I don't know how, but you've changed a lot. Maybe it's because you're all in black. Maybe it's because you're wearing those clothes ...”

“Yes, Ann. Maybe.”

He was leaving without having asked her a single question. He wished he could think of a friendly word for her, but nothing came to mind.

“You've got a pretty scarf,” he said, as they separated.

Nora was waiting for him at the table in the corner, ready to leave.

“Who's that blonde girl who stopped you?” she said, without much curiosity.

Paul thought for a second, then replied abruptly: “A girl from Bucharest. She's a painter.”

There didn't seem to be much more to say about Ann.

 

 

The train left Braşov with all the carriages full, yet at every station – at Dârste, at Timişul-de-Jos, at Timişul-de-Sus – more groups of skiers were waiting.

Everyone spoke about the snow and the weather. Those who had come down from Piatra Mare complained of too much mist and frost. Girls and boys coming from Bihor related that in Stâna de Vale it had been sunny the whole time. They were all astoundingly young and, surrounded by them, Paul, too, felt that he was their age.
Something's happened to you
, Ann had said. Yes, it had happened. He looked at himself in the window of the carriage as though in a mirror, and he almost didn't recognize himself. On his face were the tracks of small scratches, his right eye still retained the consequences of his terrible fall at the Touring Club, his lower lip was still slightly cracked, but the sun had passed over all of these wounds and healed them. Nobody in the carriage was darker than he was, nobody was more sunburned.
It's as if I only skied on the ridges, close to the light.

He felt a kind of childish exultation. He didn't know exactly what he might want to do now. There were strengths in him with which he wasn't familiar, impulses that were awaking from a long slumber.

“Nora, do you think that skiing can save a person? Can it change his life?”

“Dear Paul, I think that our lives are full of bad habits, compulsions and obsessions. Skiing cleanses us of them. In the end, the important thing is not to let ourselves be defeated again.”

“No, Nora. Never.”

He uttered the vow passionately, with exaggerated firmness.

He made his amends alone, repeating the words more calmly and decisively in his mind:
Never
.
Never
.

Few European writers who lived between the two world wars were more talented and determined than Mihail Sebastian, and fewer still saw their lives and careers scarred by such savage ironies. Sebastian was born Iosif Hechter on October 18, 1907 in an assimilated, secular Jewish family in the provincial town of Brăila, in southeastern Romania, not far from the marshlands of the Danube Delta. Sebastian's hometown, which looked out over the Danube River a little over a hundred kilometres inland from the Black Sea, was a cultural crossroads. Ethnic Romanians, Gypsies, Jews, Greeks, Bulgarians and Ukrainian-descended Lipoveni all mingled in its streets. Romanian was the only language spoken in the Hechter family home; young Iosif, a brilliant student from his earliest schooldays, soon learned good French and German. He was initially drawn to the theatre. At the age of sixteen he ran away from home after reading in a newspaper that the Parisian theatre troupe of Georges and Ludmila Pitoëff would be performing in the capital. His family was alarmed; when Iosif returned a few days later, his goal of moving to Bucharest, and eventually Paris, was firmly fixed in his mind.

At eighteen, Iosif Hechter attracted the attention of one of interwar Romania's most mesmerizing and dangerous intellects. The philosopher and mathematician Nae Ionescu (1890 – 1940), nearly twenty years Hechter's senior, was a compelling thinker and a galvanizing lecturer and public speaker. His political views, promoting an anti-democratic, Orthodox Christian exaltation of the motherland, shaped a generation of incipiently fascist Romanian intellectuals. Also originally from Brăila, Ionescu examined Hechter's high school graduation papers and was struck by the
quality of the young man's prose style. Two years later in 1927, while still trapped by poverty in Brăila, Sebastian (having adopted his new name in both public and private life), began to contribute to
Cuvântul
(
The Word
), the daily newspaper edited by Ionescu. Under Ionescu's mentorship, Sebastian soon developed a reputation as an articulate young nationalist journalist, particularly perceptive on literary topics. He was invited to contribute to a variety of literary magazines; but in
Cuvântul
he learned to praise the “Romanian soul” and sometimes to argue against minority rights. In 1930, at the age of twenty-three, Sebastian realized his dream of going to Paris to continue his legal studies, which he had begun in Romania. He spent the winter of 1930 – 1931 studying law and reading French literature. Having adopted Marcel Proust as his favourite writer, he began to plan his own works of fiction. In 1932, after returning to Romania and settling in Bucharest, Sebastian published a short story collection; his first novel,
Femei
(
Women
), followed in 1933.