Accident Read Online Free Page B

armchair, disheartened.
    She should have undressed, gone to bed and slept.
    But she felt that she would be unable to get to her feet, take off her dress and turn down her bed. She would have preferred to remain still and sleep as she was, as she might be in the waiting room of a train station. Hegenrath station ...
    The bell rang suddenly and loudly. For a second Nora didn’t realize what was happening. She let it ring for a long time, as though she wished to fill the whole apartment with the sound of its call. Then she headed for the door, forcing herself not to make any assumptions. She opened the door without emotion. He was on the threshold, loaded down with shopping bags.
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    The cork flew with a resounding bang, and the champagne overflowed the neck of the bottle while Nora looked up to follow the projectile’s trajectory.
    â€œA direct hit!” he shouted victoriously.
    Overhead on the ceiling, a coin-shaped white spot marked the point of impact.
    â€œTwo more hits like that and the landlord will evict me for causing serious damage,” Nora joked, not without a certain anxiety.
    â€œTwo more hits, you say? No, my dear friend. A hundred and one. Yes, a hundred and one sound blows. Like at Epiphany, like on January 24.” 1
    And, putting aside the empty bottle like a discarded weapon, he took another bottle in his hands. This time the detonation was even louder. They looked at each other in surprise, no longer smiling. On the bookshelf, the two carnations shook, awoken from their slumber. The detonation seemed to radiate through the whole sleeping building from floor to floor.
    â€œA hit!”

    On the ceiling, a new white mark had appeared, a very short distance from the first one.
    â€œA dead-eye marksman! What ease! What precision!”
    There was a gleam in his eye that Nora saw igniting for the first time. She almost didn’t recognize the silent man who had left her apartment half an hour earlier. Where was his heavy silence, where was that tired, indifferent smile? He was speaking now with a nervous animation that seemed strange in him.
    The champagne was bubbling in their glasses. Nora raised hers with a certain gravity. “To your birthday. To your turning thirty.”
    She noticed that her voice was trembling. She was ashamed of this childish emotion. He replied casually, joking: “To you. To the number 16 tram. To this evening’s accident.”
    How many glasses had they drunk? She had been counting up to the fifth one, but after that she had lost track.
    It was probably late. The radio (who had turned it on? when had it been turned on?) was tuned to the British national anthem. “ That’s the end of our programming from Droitwich .”
    Nora was making efforts to keep her eyes wide open, but she saw the objects in the room through a curtain of smoke.
    Overhead on the ceiling, the marks from the direct hits looked too numerous to count.
    Across from her, sometimes very close, sometimes immeasurably far away, as though seen through the lens of a field glass, was he. He was speaking, but although Nora heard each word distinctly, she wasn’t understanding anything that he was saying. As always, he was speaking in that suppressed, extinguished voice, with sudden outbreaks of brightness, which vanished in that tone of indifference ...
    A hit! How strange that brief, triumphant cry sounded in his nonchalant tones. A hit! What had been hit? Hit where? Right in the heart, yes, yes, she had really said the heart.
    Nora let her head fall into her hands. She wished she could stop the disorderly succession of thoughts that were passing through her mind, she wished she could stop the pounding in her temples.
    Let’s be reasonable, my dear girl, let’s not lose our head. This gentleman ... what’s his name ...? You see, you’ve forgotten his name
... Anyway, whatever his name is, it’s time for him to leave. It’s late and he should