The Accident Read Online Free PDF Page B

came near him. Especially to a woman who had slept with him. Apparently he had talked to her about things he should never have mentioned, and had later regretted it.
    “Everybody knows what happens when a violent person has second thoughts: the witness disappears. Rovena St. knew the most appalling things. Any one of them would make your hair stand on end. I can tell you, for example, that she knew the precise hour when Yugoslavia would be bombed, two days in advance. You see why I don’t want to talk about these things?”
    The inquiry dragged on and grew, sending out new tendrils in all kinds of directions. The researcher made visible efforts to dispel the fog, but equally obvious were his attempts to hide behind it.
    Finally, towards the middle of the file, the question arose of why these two protagonists, Besfort Y. and Rovena St., seemed to be trying to cover up their love for each other by pretending to be whore and client.
    Delving deeper, the researcher wondered whether Besfort Y. and his friend were merely two people outside the normal order of things.
    It was in this part of the file that the researcher for the first time drew attention to his own self, like a man who wanders along an uncertain path and takes care to leave behind certain tokens of recognition, pebbles or dropped ash. After the words “But who am I, trying to enter where no one can go?” there came another phrase: “Look for me and you will find me!”
    Apparently certain that another researcher would follow in his footsteps, and another after that, because the lust for know-ledge is as inexhaustible and cyclic as the waves of the ocean of humanity, the author of the inquiry addressed his future counterpart. His words, the more one studied them, resembled the lament of someone who has fallen by his own fault into a trap or a deep dungeon and begs for rescue.

9
    In an appendix to the first part of the inquiry, the researcher returned to what he called the “intrinsic perversity” of the entire story.
    It wasn’t merely the speech, the phrases in the conversations and notes that sounded stilted, in other words it was not just that the linguistic style had stiffened, as if under a sudden blow or toxic attack, but that its inner logic appeared disjointed. Rephrasing the content and turning it into normal language still revealed traces of the unnatural, which showed that the flaw lay deeper, and was more essential.
    The researcher spent years trying to reach the heart of the matter, like a workman going underground to find damaged cables.
    His notes revealed his own agony as much as the suffering of the vanished couple, in a distorting perspective that was at times as intoxicating and liberating as a new vision of the world, and sometimes totally disabling.
    What led the two lovers so willingly into such perverseness?
    The death of love is like an enveloping chill. But it is never experienced equally by both partners. There is always one on whom the burden of suffering weighs most, at least at first.
    However, this was something totally different. The question might be put in another way: were both of them, or only one, to be considered as post mortem ?
    It had to be only one of them. One of them had struck a blow at the other. But which?
    Again and again the researcher came back to the same question. What had made this couple experience as normal a situation that seemed totally out of this world? What did they know, what did they see that others could not? What hidden laws had they uncovered, what different sequence or flow of time? He was so close. He needed only one step to carry him across into a new dimension of thought. But this single step was impossible.
    What was this chain that tethered his mind, like a wild beast, within certain bounds? The suspicion dogged him that these two had been able, if only for an instant, to unleash this animal. They had stepped over the bounds and been lost.
    He sometimes thought that what had happened related