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.
TRANSLATOR’S AFTERWORD
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.