Accident Read Online Free PDF

hadn’t felt the slightest curiosity about the body of the young woman who was undressing in the next room. He had got up from his seat, grabbed his hat and overcoat, and had left, leaving the door open out of a fear of being heard. He had gone down the stairs, taking two steps at a time, then three. Free and on my own ...

    ... He came to his senses stumbling along the sidewalk, right at the edge, with tiny steps, one after the other. His boots sank deep into the snow, leaving clearly delineated prints. When he got to the next street light, he stopped to look around him: under the glow of the lamps, his footprints made a line into the distance, as though drawn on a limitless white page. Then he set off again, with the same careful steps as before.
    A taxi passed alongside him, slowing down in invitation to this late-night passerby. Paul met the driver’s intrigued, possibly slightly
ironic gaze and shuddered at being caught in his stupid game. He crossed the street to the opposite sidewalk, accelerating his pace as though he had suddenly remembered that he was in a race about which he had forgotten.
    And now?
    He was embarrassed at the thought of resuming his interrupted game since he had the impression that neither the driver nor he had surprised each other just now. He deliberately walked close to the houses, where the snow was packed down and his steps left no footprints.
    He was passing in front of a long fence made of whitewashed wooden planks. Odd or even? He decided on odd and started to count ...
    â€œOne, two, three, four ...”
    He stopped occasionally since some of the planks were split in two and he didn’t want to count them twice. He didn’t like to cheat his own superstitions.
    The light of the lamps fell from behind him, unfurling his shadow far out over the snow. By now he had decided not to let himself be intimidated and to continue at any price the game he had started.
    â€œFifteen, sixteen ...”
    A car came up fast alongside him. Either a private car or an occupied taxi , Paul thought, without interrupting his counting.
    â€œTwenty-eight, twenty-nine, thirty ...”
    He stopped in front of the plank he had reached, measured it from top to bottom, as though it were a person and murmured a few times: thirty, thirty.
    Thirty years! There it was, it was pointless to flee from the only thought that followed him; it was pointless to try to forget it with idiotic little games. From now on he was going to have to look it in the face and accept it: he was thirty years old.
    He leaned with his back against the fence and closed his eyes. He would have liked to stay that way, empty of thoughts, empty of memories, in that beneficent numbness. He saw himself as he might have done from the opposite sidewalk, alone on the deserted
street, leaning against someone else’s gate in that night in which he had turned thirty years old, thirty years that he didn’t know what to do with.
    But, rising from somewhere within his being, he felt a mild haze, a distant taste of sadness, the flavour of cinders. He knew well that memories foolishly quelled, pointlessly repressed imaginings, lay concealed beyond the indifference that he now felt crumbling inside him. Thus, as on misty mornings in the mountains, he waited for the vanished yet present landscape to appear. Beyond that mournful image of his beloved, he glimpsed her name, which he had banished from his mind in vain: Anna.
    He repeated the name a few times in a throaty voice, separating those two syllables as though he had dismantled the components of a tiny mechanism in order to find its hidden mainspring.
    How many days had passed since he had seen her? Someone replied for him: Twenty-three days . Paul felt a horror-stricken shudder at the mechanical precision of his response. The last few days had been extremely calm. He hadn’t thought about her, he had worked in peace; he thought he had forgotten her. Even so, it seemed that, under