Accident by Mihail Sebastian Page B

from one moment to the next, of “Miss French Teacher.”
    It seemed to Nora that she herself was waiting fearfully for this apparition, the young teacher who was meant to enter the classroom in that moment, from whom this Nora who had woken up in a strange man’s apartment was impossibly distant. What could she have said to her? How could she have explained it to her?
    Yesterday at this time ...
    Yesterday at this time she was a calm young woman who went to the school every morning, ate lunch every day at a cheap diner on Strada Câmpineanu (amid the uncaring faces of civil servants reading the afternoon papers ...), who in the afternoon taught French classes in a private language school and who came home, carrying in her handbag the food for her supper, or, sometimes, a bundle of essays that she enjoyed reading because she recognized each pupil’s handwriting, their laboured sentences and never-changing spelling mistakes.
    She felt at home in the apartment on Bulevardul Dacia, in that white sixth-floor room furnished with things she had chosen and bought with the patience of heroic savings. It was true that there was also the money sent by her mother, who was living in CernăuÅ£i with her second husband, a banker. From time to time her mother sent her listless postcards, or, at Easter or Christmas, small sums of money; but the belongings for which Nora felt more affection were those purchased with her teacher’s wages, her overtime, her exam-marking fees. Above all, she liked the shaded lamp beneath which she took refuge in the evenings to read, a lamp with a tall stand like a small indoor version of street lamp, which cast a white circle of light and left the rest of the apartment in protective shadow.
    Only on Thursday evenings did she sometimes go to the Philharmonic orchestra, especially when a famous soloist was playing, or when there was a lot of Beethoven on the program. From her girlhood memories in a family in which at that time children were taught to play the piano, she preserved an optimistic respect for long symphonies in three or five movements. She
bought herself a ticket in advance, waiting at Feder’s music store for the ticket office to open in case the tickets in the third-level stalls, the only ones she dared to buy, somehow sold out – not without wondering twice which expenses she would have to cut from the week’s budget in order to cover the money she spent on the concert. And then there were evenings when Grig came with her. They were less and less frequent in recent times, without what was known as a “breakup” (a word which frightened Nora, like all words which allowed for no return) having intervened between them.
    He waited for her without impatience, he received her visits, some of them after long absences, without surprise; but between them there were too many shared habits and a sensual accord too long established for her unexpected returns not to please him.
    â€œYou’re like a married lover; you’re doomed to be a wife,” Grig joked at times, knowing that there was no risk of her taking him seriously. The question had been decided for good between them in the early days of their liaison. One day, cautiously and remarkably vaguely, he asked her if she would like to be a spouse. Nora, looking him in the eyes, gave him the only reply he expected, a simple and irrevocable, “No, never.”
    Yet in the mornings when, going out to school, she left him sleeping, she was happy that, glancing back at him from the doorway, she could tell herself: Well, I’m not an old maid . This was the only fate that scared her in her life as a single woman. Otherwise days, evenings, nights passed calmly and unchangingly among familiar things. Only occasionally, looking out her sixth-floor window, crying serenely and then hastily wiping away these unexpected tears, did she reprimand herself as she would have reprimanded a pupil: What’s going