Dimiter

  “He’s all right?” the Interrogator asked worriedly.

  The doctor’s gaze flicked up, seeing only a tower and a usual grayness, for he was forced to look out at the world through a film of dust that coated his corneas, a chronic and remarkable affliction diagnosed as “disorder of the soul” that had started on the day he stopped believing that the universe had any meaning. Then suddenly things in the chamber grew vivid (he had learned how to “look around” the dust) and he saw the Interrogator standing across from him with a look of intense concern. For a moment the doctor studied him clinically, marking the fatigue in his scarred, rugged face, and the anger, smothered, but always there; then he sank to the work so quiet beneath him. “I need a new stethoscope,” he muttered, slipping the hearing tubes into his ears in accordance with the rules of the artificial construct that he knew as time and space.

  “Nothing in this world lasts forever,” he added.

  For that part of the rules he was grateful.

  “He’s all right?” Vlora prodded him again.

  “You must be quiet!”

  Fearful of the fist and an empty stomach, the doctor pretended absorption in his work, gravely frowning as he moved the stethoscope sensor around and listened to the unaccustomed sound of someone living. As always, it startled him a little. “Yes, he’s fine,” he replied. “His heart is very strong. He’s just sleeping.”

  The Interrogator blinked, uncomprehending; and then suddenly a fury overwhelmed him, shaking and ripping him loose from his body; but as swiftly as the spasm had struck, it stilled, overwrestled by the powerful sense of the mysterious that hung above the table like the mists of creation, warm and expectant, waiting for breath.

  The Interrogator’s thoughts snaked out at paths: Was the Prisoner conditioned against pain by hypnosis? Had his “gates of pain” been sealed so that the signals of torment could not be channeled to his brain? While the doctor tapped and prodded and muttered, the Interrogator stared intensely at the Prisoner as he tried to account for the puzzling variation in how so many witnesses had described him. Even worse, four villagers questioned independently had sworn, when confronted with his photograph, that they had seen him in a shop in Theti at a time when he was known to be in custody in Shkoder. Nor could they be shaken from their reports. The Prisoner’s face was so utterly ordinary, the Interrogator reflected, a slate so blank that the mind might conceivably project its own images upon it from within. His features were delicate and refined, yet the leader of the hunting force had described him as “blunt-nosed,” “stocky,” and “a brute,” a perception that invaded the realm of the bizarre. The Interrogator’s gaze roamed the Prisoner’s body: it looked quarried from the stuff of Michelangelo’s marbles, hard and chiseled and faintly luminous with an aura of imminent motion silently awaiting the unlocking of a prayer.

  “What is that?”

  The doctor’s eyes squinted up. “What is what?”

  “That scar.”

  “You mean this dimpling? I would guess a tracheotomy.”

  “No, not on the throat. On his arm.”

  The Interrogator pointed.

  “Oh.”

  The doctor’s sight found a path through the dust to a crater on the Prisoner’s upper left arm where the skin was depressed and surrounded by a hairline bloodless circle that measured the width of a carpenter’s thumb. Within the depression the skin was raised and warty.

  “What is it?” the Interrogator asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “A birthmark?”

  The words had been blurted, travelers lacking the passport of thought.

  “No, not a birthmark,” answered the doctor.

  “Perhaps a bullet wound?”

  “Maybe. Could be anything at all. I don’t know.”

  The Interrogator’s stare remained pinned to the scar. Something made him think it had meaning. The instinct was troubling but vague. He dismissed it.

  “If you think it’s important,” sulked the doctor, “ask the specialists. Mine is a very plain practice.” He slipped the stethoscope out of his ears and then folded and returned it to his bag of sharp cures. “As for me, I am finished here now,” he grumbled. He picked up the bag and slouched back to his post, turned around, and announced from the gloom, “He is fit.”

  The torturers regrouped themselves around the table.

  “No,” the Interrogator ordered. “ ‘The Cage.’ ”

  His glance caught “Angel’s” gleaming gaze and the slight upward curling of her lips. In “The Cage” it was impossible to stretch out a leg or to turn or to stand; one could only squat. Unendurable torment for even one day, “The Cage,” when protracted, broke the mind. Was “Angel” merely savoring future delights? Yet her smile seemed discordant with the deadness of her stare. He shifted an expressionless glance to his son, whose smile was less ambiguous. His eyes fairly shone with a pleased anticipation and something disturbingly akin to lust. Vlora turned away, disgusted, and quickly strode out of the room. Outside, two guards saluted him smartly, cracking their rifle butts down on the floor, and then one cupped a hand to his mouth and hissed loudly, signaling to guards posted further along that an authorized person was approaching as, boxed within the smoulder of his thoughts, Vlora moodily moved along the shadowy hall amid the eeriness of echoing cracks and hisses.

  Inside the chamber, hell went on.

  The Interrogator’s secretary heard him approaching. Languid and dark of eye, in her thirties, she puffed at a Turkish cigarette while fanning out a match and then placing it into the crease of a book to mark her place before she closed it.

  “Some calls for you, Colonel Vlora.”

  She handed him the message slips, then appraised him without expression as he quickly and distractedly sorted through the stack. The fever was still in his eyes and she saw that his hands held a touch of tremor. She would like to have him now, she thought. “Nothing urgent,” she murmured in a diffident voice. She drew deeply on the cigarette again, held the smoke, and then blew it out gently at a sidewise angle. Vlora handed back the slips without comment, noticing the cigarette butts mounded high in the purple glass ashtray resting on the desk. Stamped on its sides in cracked green letters was a faded inscription: SOUVENIR OF DOBRACI.

  “This habit will kill you, Leda,” he scolded.

  She nodded and cast down her eyes.

  “I know,” she said, stubbing out the cigarette’s glow.

  “It is simply a matter of will,” he persisted.

  The telephone rang. Grateful, Leda answered. “Section Four,” she said crisply. Listening, she lifted her eyes to the Interrogator and saw that he was shaking his head. She nodded, understanding. “Colonel Vlora isn’t in,” she informed the caller in a tone that was vaguely annoyed and chilly, as if in response to some impropriety. It was her tactic for deflecting further questions. “Do you want to leave a message?” she added tersely. The Interrogator turned and walked away. For a moment she stared at his back morosely, then reached to her desk for a fresh cigarette.

  As he entered his office Vlora winced, blinded by the unexpected midday sunlight shafting through the small square windows of the room like the fiery blessings of a troublesome saint. He had been in the darkness of the torture chamber for hours. Striding to an old wooden desk he sat down with his back to the clear and relentless light, for in no other way could he protect his delusions, and so briefly he rested, waiting for peace; then, as if wanting to reassure himself, he slid open a drawer of the desk and looked down at his ribbons and decorations: the Partisan Star, the Order of Skanderbeg, the Order of the National Hero. He gave them grudging recognition, pushed the drawer shut, and examined his hands. He saw that they were still, that at least he was calm. He picked up the telephone receiver on his desk, punched into an unlit station and dialed.

  In accordance with some arbitrary sense of balance that shifted within him from day to day, he adjusted certain objects on his desk: a paper clip tray; a clutch of fresh-cut flo
wers propped in a glass half-filled with water; an in-basket stacked with reports on the Prisoner; and an old framed photo of a melancholy woman, his mother, and a five-year-old boy with green eyes. Beneath the layers of tinting and the graceless touch-up strokes, their smiles seemed dreamy and distant, like wan, blurred greetings from a bygone time. On top of the papers that were resting in the basket lay a crudely formed paperweight heart made of clay and cheerily painted in a swirl of vivid colors, on its back the name “Kiri” engraved in small letters. The flowers and the heart were the room’s only life, and already the flowers had the look of coming death. It was something he had noticed always happened in this building, it seemed. There was something in the air of this place.

  The Interrogator’s wife came on the line. “Hallo?”

  Vlora shifted his gaze to the drooping flowers, absorbing the sadness that flowed through the line as he reached out a hand to reposition a violet struggling for breath amid a crush of red poppies. “It is I,” he said wearily.

  “Yes.”

  “And how is my little Kiri?”

  “She is better.”

  “And her temperature?”

  “Fine. It’s just a four-day flu.”

  “Tell her ‘Baba’ sends millions of kisses.”

  “I will.”

  “And hugs, too, Moricani.”

  “That, too.”

  The Interrogator stared at the opposite wall while he waited for the pain to speak again. His wife’s voice had grown even more dead and despondent. I must say something kind, he thought. But what? A sudden gloom washed over the wall and he heard a quick spattering of rain on the windows. He reached for the switch on a gooseneck metal lamp that was painted khaki and after a click a bright pool of light spilled onto the desk.

  “That will make her very happy,” the wife said damply.

  The words had the sound of a rebuke.

  The Interrogator twisted the head of the lamp so that it shone on the flowers in the glass like a spotlight. “Good,” he said tersely. His guilt was overcome by angry resentment, and he looked on helplessly, surprised, as the comforting words that he had reached for drifted away like shipwreck survivors in a lifeboat, specks at the edge of a chilling sea.

  “I must go,” he said remotely. He could not control it.

  He thought of the artificial rage of the torturers.

  “No, wait!” she said quickly.

  “Yes, what is it? Moricani?”

  She mentioned an errand.

  “Elez, the new grocer in the Square,” she began.

  The Interrogator stared at the papers in the basket. Absorbed in the Prisoner again, he half-listened. “I know that he’s lying,” he dimly heard; “I can tell: when he lies his left shoulder starts twitching.” Vlora struggled to focus on the rush of her words. It was something to do with canned beans.

  “Did you hear what I’m telling you?” she asked him.

  “Beans.”

  “Yes, the fava beans. He says that he’s out, but he’s lying. There are cans in the back. He wants a bribe. If you go there he will give them to you gladly, he’ll be frightened.”

  “No, I can’t, Moricani.”

  “You can’t?”

  “It isn’t right. I cannot use my position for personal advantage.”

  He listened then to silence and the heaviness of nothing.

  He could not cut her off now. She had to let him go.

  “It’s Kiri’s favorite,” she spoke up mournfully. “The fava beans, cold, with lots of olive oil, lemon juice, and garlic: I was hoping I could fix it for tonight.”

  He had lost.

  “I make no promises,” he wearily warned her. “And I’m not about to tell them who I am.”

  “No, of course not.” Suddenly a lilt had come into her voice. “It’s just that dealing with a man he’ll be different. It’s the women who are lied to all the time. That’s how it is.” She knew that everybody recognized her husband and dreaded him, a fact known to every Albanian but him. How naïve he was in so many ways! she believed: locked deep inside the tower of his ardent ideals he was either a truly good man or just a child. Why, he wanted people treated all alike and to be happy! He should have been a monk in a contemplative order, she thought, glumly smoldering while making perfect cheese. “Keep an eye on his shoulder,” she said. “That’s the key.”

  “I’ll remember that, Mooki.” He had used the affectionate nickname that pleased her. His fond tone of voice had cost him an effort. It was worth it: he was free until her next sad look when he would ask her, ‘ “What is wrong?” and she would lower her eyes and murmur wretchedly, “Nothing. No, nothing at all.”

  “Don’t be late,” she admonished him blithely.

  “I won’t.”

  Vlora hung up with grateful relief, dimly heard Leda answering a call, and was suddenly assailed by a vivid recollection of a lucid dream of the night before, a chronic nightmare of a terrified infant abandoned in a corner of endless night. Then came a new and more dreadful visitation of which he remembered only disparate images: Russians. Ho Chi Minh. A banquet in Tirana. A death.

  What did it mean?

  He didn’t know.

  He turned his gaze to reports in a wire basket and lifted them out. They made an ambiguous rustling sound, the kind in which sometimes in the quiet of dawn one imagines one’s name has just been whispered. Carefully, he placed them before him on the desk. The answer was here, he felt, in these papers, though he’d pondered their contents so often before. Staring at the redness of a thing hid its greenness, he knew; he must look from the right point of view. On top of the stack lay a white identity card that was soiled and battered from handling. The emblem of the eagle and the cornstalk on the cover had faded to a bloodless apparition of itself. The Interrogator picked it up gently and unfolded it, then scanned its twin columns of data: . . . father’s name . . . mother’s name . . . residence . . . profession . . . eyes . . . mouth . . . distinguishing marks. His pensive stare slipped down to the photo glued at the bottom of the left-hand column where the Prisoner’s eyes stared back with the trust of a simple heart.

  Trussed up in a jacket, shirt, and tie, his head and shoulders were drawn up affectedly in that pleased and prideful bearing so typical of peasants when posing for this photo, and the too-tight jacket, buttoned and tugging, had the look of something borrowed or rented for this day. Was he smiling? Yes, a little bit, decided the Interrogator. The effect was of a childlike innocence that he found to be oddly touching. How could the Prisoner have feigned such a look? He found himself thinking of The Brothers Karamazov and the deathbed speech of little Rusha: “Father, don’t cry, and when I die get a good boy, another one. Choose one of my friends, a good one, call him Ilusha and love him instead of me.” There were times when reading it caused him to weep. Why had he thought of it now? he wondered. What could be the triggering association? He put the identity card aside and then labored at the papers for hours in silence, polishing and burnishing each fact, every riddle, and then turning them end over end and around before holding them up to the light of sense; but still no insight gleamed, no hidden fact cried out its secret name, and at the end was the taunting fog of the beginning.

  And that certain touch of fear.

  Vlora put away the papers and listened to the reassurring patter of the rain. Was there nothing amiss after all? he wondered. Were his worries imagined? Danger’s dream? From behind him he heard thunder rumbling faintly high in the mountains of Selca Decani, and abruptly a keening wind leaped up, slamming rain against the windows in bursts. Mysterious flashes danced on his spectacles, far lightning, memory of suns; then suddenly the wind trailed away to a hush that once again softly bedded a steady light rain. Vlora listened and for moments he did not move, his gaze fixed upon a deep bottom drawer of his desk. Then he slid the drawer open, reached in, and lifted out a yellowing cardboard shoebox that he carefully placed atop the desk as if it contained some priceless relic. Thick rubber bands stretched a gua
rd around the box. For a moment Vlora pensively rubbed a thumb back and forth atop a knot where one of the bands had snapped and been retied. Then he slipped off the bands, removed the shoebox lid, and peered down at the items in the whiteness of the box: the stub of a pencil; a packet of matches; a worn brown wallet made of cheap, cracking leather; fifty-seven leks in paper and coins; a small frayed ledger logging sales of cheese in a cramped and tiny hand; a snapshot of a woman; and a personal letter that seemed written in a hurried but stately script: these were the contents of the Prisoner’s pockets that were found by his captors in the village of Quelleza.

  Vlora stared at the photo of the woman. Worn and faded, its borders were ragged, as if it had been scissored from a larger scene. The woman looked young, in her twenties, though her features were clouded from the softness of the focus, and, through a veil, from a place where the air was all tears, glowed great dark chestnut eyes filled with anger. Vlora put down the photo, resting it close to the paperweight heart; and then his hand dipped gingerly into the box, pinched a corner of the letter with his thumb and forefinger, and then slowly and soundlessly lifted it out like a miniature crane in a penny arcade. Folded over several times, it was a single small sheet found tucked between the pages of the ledger. With the back of his hand Vlora nudged the box aside and bent the lamp head lower, adjusted its beam, very carefully unfolded the letter, and read it.