Accident by Mihail Sebastian

here. It’s a little bit of lunacy that I don’t know how to interpret.”
    She opened her left hand again under the light. “Maybe it’s all here. Look closely: maybe somewhere there’s the crossing of lines that shows our meeting.”
    She spoke these words without even smiling, with making a gesture that would diminish their unexpected seriousness.
    â€œHow strange that you say ‘our meeting.’ Is this an affair?”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œThis meeting.”
    â€œAn affair, no. A happening. And a big one. Nothing ever happens to me.”
    The hot water was finished. Nora got up from her spot, signalling to him that he was forbidden to move.
    He heard her wandering around the apartment. How soothing to hear her footsteps! He heard her breathing. It seemed as though she had always been here. He was grateful to her for being in his home. Her presence blocked his thoughts, held his memories at bay.
    And what a good hand she had. He could rest his weary forehead in it.
    Her saw her shadow – now larger, now smaller, according to her distance from the lamp – brushing across the objects in the room. The heavy fabric of the dress she was wearing protected her
body like a mantle. Only occasionally, such as when she straightened her shoulders, could he make out her hip or the line of her breasts.
    She stopped in front of him with the teapot in her hand, leaning over the table, and with close attention poured the boiling water into the cups. He got to his feet and looked at her for a long time. She tolerated his gaze without surprise. A vague whiff of lavender floated between them.

    Paul placed his mouth over her lips, which accepted the kiss serenely and without haste. His right hand was on her left breast. The beating of her heart felt strange, unusual.
    The beating struck him as a distant response to his enormous solitude.

IV
    NORA WOKE IN THE MORNING surprised not to find Paul beside her. All night her dreams had borne the heaviness of his body, an irritable body, receiving without gratitude caresses that it did not return. She still felt in her left breast the weight of his right hand with its fingers spread. She wouldn’t have been surprised, had she pushed aside the covers, to find the marks imprinted on her breast like a tattoo.
    The sound of water running in the basin came from the bathroom. She called his name, but didn’t receive a reply. Could he have left? She jumped out of bed and pulled on a dressing gown that she found on the edge of the bed, shuddering at the chill of the light weave ( He could wear a thicker dressing gown in December ) and went to look.
    Nobody was there. He had forgotten to turn off the tap. On the glass shelf beneath the mirror, the shaving brush was covered in soap. What a hurry he was in to get away! she thought with a shake of her head.
    She turned around and spotted on the desk the piece of paper on which a few words were written, first in red pencil and then in blue pencil – he had probably broken the lead in his rush.
    When you leave, put the key outside under the mat. The cleaning lady’s coming at 11 o’clock.
    When you leave ... He had been so certain that she would leave. And not a word about seeing her again, not a word of friendship ...
    She approached the window and glanced down into the street, trembling at not seeing her usual morning view: the familiar image of Bulevardul Dacia, the major’s backyard across the road, the pharmacy on the corner, the taxi stand. From their stillness she
knew, as she raised the shutter, almost as if they had spoken to her, that since the night before nothing new had happened in the world.
    As though the lens of the spyglass through which she took her first morning glance at the world had changed, she now had her first look at other images, which seemed to have been substituted overnight for the old well-known landscape.
    From where, at a distance to which her eyes