Accident Read Online Free

door. Nora seized his arm. “Don’t leave yet.”
    On a bookshelf, in a glass vase, were three carnations with long stalks. She took a carnation and offered it to him without smiling, almost with gravity.
    â€œFor your birthday.” Then, with unexpected enthusiasm, she pressed even closer to him. “Stay here. As you can see, it’s bright, it’s warm. We can call the porter and send him to the grocery store. We’re going to make a big dinner and clink our glasses. That’ll bring us luck.”
    â€œYou think so?” he said, distracted.
    â€œI’m sure.”
    A boyish sparkle lighted up his eyes. “I accept. But you’ve got to let me go down to the shop.”
    â€œThat’s not possible.”
    â€œWhy not?”
    â€œBecause you won’t come back.”
    â€œOf course I will.”
    ... And she had no more time to refute him because he had opened the door and disappeared down the stairs in a tempestuous rush.
    Nora remained on the threshold, listening to his steps fading away.
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    She looked restlessly at the clock on her desk: twenty minutes had gone past. He may not come back .
    An immense silence filled the entire building. From somewhere on a distant floor came the feeble sound of a song on a gramophone or on the radio:
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    Goodnight, Mimy,
    And sweet dreams
    Goodnight, Mimy
    And deep sleep ...

    Nora thought about that Mimy, who no doubt had been sleeping for a long time as a result of the song’s persuasion.
    She would have liked to sleep, too. It seemed wrong to have taken off that soft bathrobe in which she had felt so warmly embraced. In this evening dress she had the uncomfortable impression of being a visitor in her own apartment. But she had seen that he took with complete seriousness the “dinner” for which she was preparing, and she thought with pleasure that when he returned he would find a stunning woman ... Stunning . She repeated the word in her head and smiled with slight fatigue.
    A dull hum cut through the silence of the building. Someone was coming up in the elevator.
    Acquainted with the building’s most intimate secrets, Nora’s ear followed the sound as it would have followed the rise of mercury in an oversized thermometer.
    First floor, second floor ...
    As it approached, the hum of the elevator vibrated like the lower chords of a piano, prolonged by the pressure of the pedals. Would it stop on the third floor ...? No, it had continued upward.
    At each floor there was a brief thunk, like a pulse beating harder.
    Nora closed her eyes. She felt the rising of the elevator inside her, as though a secret driving-belt had taken over her blood and nerves.
    Fourth ... Fifth ... Had it stopped?
    It seemed as though, within the silence that had existed until now, a new, deeper zone of silence had opened.
    Had it stopped?
    Yes. It had stopped. The interior lattice work, made of wood, clattered back with a meshing shudder, the door opened and closed mechanically, the hum of the elevator’s chords fell away, dwindled ...
    It’s pointless to wait for him. He’s not coming back.
    Nora got up from the armchair and approached the mirror. She observed herself for a long time. “How absurd you are, my dear girl. How absurd you are!” she said to herself in a loud voice.
    She felt pity for her black dress, her bare arms, for those two
carnations that she could see in the mirror trembling in the glass vase, too heavy for their slender stalks as though they, too, were tired from waiting.
    She lifted the telephone receiver and kept it in her hand for a while, without a thought. Then she put it back, not knowing why she had picked it up.
    â€œNo, he’s not coming back.”
    She leaned against the wall and looked at her apartment, pausing for a long time over each item, astonished that these objects were at the same time so familiar and so strange.
    She glimpsed his I.D. card lying on the desk. She