Accident (13 page)

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.