Accident by Mihail Sebastian Page B

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