“No, no. I would ask for anything but that.”
“In fact, that’s not exactly what I wanted to say … what I really wanted to ask was … In the hotel, when you fell asleep, I couldn’t put these questions out of my mind …”
Hurriedly, as if fearful that her courage would desert her, she blurted out all of her suspicions. He looked stern, and she thought her worst fears were realised. Who are you to interrogate me like this? You’re a call girl, that’s all.
You’ve no right to call me that. Yes, you’ve turned me into a high-class whore, but once you were my husband.
These words went unspoken, but she caught her breath in shock.
She was frightened as always, but less of him than of the truth.
He thought carefully before replying. “Yes, those were photographs of murdered children. But not what you might have imagined. They were Serbian children, victims of the NATO bombing.”
Rovena listened, nonplussed. She bit her lips and repeated twice or three times, “I’m sorry.”
She had nothing to apologise for. It would be terrible to find photographs like that in any bag. She had every right to think what she liked. She could even suspect that he, Besfort, was a murderer of children. In fact, the photographs had been sent to him for that very purpose, to mark him as a murderer.
Fearfully, she clasped his hand. His fingers looked longer and thinner. He talked as if she were not there. What was happening was difficult to describe. It was a macabre photograph competition: pictures of Serbian children torn apart by bombs and of Albanian children ripped open by knives were distributed by each side to departments, commissions and committees. Grotesque slanging matches followed. Was there or was there not a scale of horror in death? Some insisted that every child’s death was a tragedy that could not be compared to any other, and they could not be ranked in order. Others took a different view: the death of a child in a road accident was not the same as the death of a child in an air raid, and both were quite different from the murder of a baby, slit open by a knife wielded by a human hand. Eight hundred Albanian infants butchered like lambs, often before their mothers’ eyes. It could drive you insane. It was apocalyptic.
The candles on the table danced gently in the breath of his speech. She hoped they would distract his attention.
After dinner, in the late-night bar, she mentioned her tattoos, and the tattooist’s question of why she wanted them: as a memento of somebody, a promise or for some other reason.
This time, unlike on previous occasions, he did not want to hear anything more about the other man who had touched her body. He seemed to be thinking about their conversation in the restaurant.
Rovena found it difficult to talk about anything else until she had unburdened her mind. She thought about the photographs and the macabre contest, and she asked why, if he did not feel guilty, he still seemed to have something on his conscience.
He gave a chill smile.
“Because I am a citizen, meaning that everything to do with the civitas affects me.”
Rovena did not understand what he meant, but did not say so.
As if aware of this, he went on to explain gently that quite apart from what he had said about the Albanian children he also felt grief over the Serbian children. But unfortunately that’s not what happens in the Balkans. In the restaurant, she had asked why they had come here to The Hague in secret, like two criminals. She should realise that he had not been served any summons, except once or twice in his dreams. And even if he were summoned, he would not obey the court order, but only his own conscience. Every person should come to The Hague, as though it were an agency of Hades. Each for the sake of his own soul. In silence and semi-secretly.
Rovena thought of the Austrian’s beard and his dull eyes, as he sat in the café among its Albanian customers.
As he spoke, Besfort looked round for the waiter, to order his second and final whisky.
It was after midnight, in bed before they made love, that he remembered the tattooist. Was he polite, handsome, a lecher? A little bit of all those things, she replied. And he made the mistake every man makes these days: as soon as he discovered that the tattoo was for a lover, he interpreted the woman’s yielding as if it was to himself.
As so often, Rovena’s story was left incomplete. While she was in the bathroom, he switched on the television and surfed the channels. Most were in Dutch. On one, he thought he heard Albania mentioned. He found the news in English.
“The queen has died,” he said to Rovena, as she returned to the bedroom.
She lifted her eyebrows in surprise. “But that was months ago, don’t you remember? We were in that motel, in Durrës.”
“Of course I remember. But this is another queen. The king’s wife, not his mother.”
“I see, how extraordinary,” she said.
On the screen, the black motorcade slowly approached the cathedral in Tirana.
Covering her bare shoulders, Besfort also expressed surprise. “How very … For a small country, once Stalinist, to have two queens die … In such a short time.”
Trembling, she held him tightly.
Chapter Thirteen
The last seven days.
It was hard to tell if either of them felt any foreboding one week before the accident.
Rovena, taking shelter from the torrential rain in a café, thought about her lover’s arrival. At precisely that moment, one thousand kilometres away, Besfort’s thoughts, as he watched the television news, wandered to Rovena’s white belly and the possibility that she might be pregnant. On the screen, Pope John Paul II looked feebler than ever, but nobody could hope for any concession from him on sexual relations between men and women. Everything would have to be the same as a thousand, four thousand, forty thousand years ago. Besfort counted the remaining days until he would see Rovena, and they seemed to him too many. In the café, Rovena dialled the code for Switzerland, but suddenly recalled that phone calls cost more at peak hours, and decided to talk to her friend later.
The rain grew heavier. Passers-by caught in the downpour ran terrified for shelter. One of them seemed continually to be changing shape as his cape was blown by the wind. After the pope, Arab terrorists appeared on the screen, threatening a kneeling European hostage. Besfort closed his eyes so as not to see the blow. Rovena unthinkingly dialled Switzerland again, but remembered the peak rate. The pedestrian with the billowing cape passed by menacingly, almost clinging to the café window. He appeared spreadeagled against it, until he detached himself and flew away as if whirled by some black tornado. Perhaps that is what Plato’s androgynes would look like, she thought. Besfort had mentioned them in their last phone call. She had been amused at first.
“Awesome,” she said laughing, “a man and a woman in one body. No more she-loves-me, she-loves-me-not.”
“And that was why the gods envied them,” Besfort said, “and out of jealousy divided them. And since that time, says Plato, the two halves have been searching for each other.”
“How sad,” she said. The song about the two lives with the same love flashed into her mind in a garbled form, just as she had once heard it sung by a drunk in the doorway of a bar in Tirana:
If I could live my life anew
I’d never give myself to you.
Rovena nervously dialled the code for Switzerland a third time. A thousand kilometres away, Besfort turned off the television in disgust. The news was all so crazy.
The storm eased slightly, only to grow wilder again, although now there were only dry gusts without rain. Rovena barely managed to reach the entrance to her block. She climbed the stairs to her apartment, closed the window and stood stock still behind the double glazing. The wind howled threateningly and then whined in lamentation, as if begging for mercy. A part of the view lay in darkness, and the rest was bathed in a sickly light in which sheets of cardboard, tar paper and garbage of all kinds were blown in every direction. You could find anything out there, she thought. Empty forms, whose e
ssences had evaporated long ago, spun round in eddies. And she thought of her tattoos, now faded, and perhaps their two halves, his half and hers, so pitilessly divided, looking for each other.
In the evening, on the television news, among the scenes of storm devastation, there was a report on an old provincial theatre whose props had been carried away by the gales. Two particularly valuable capes for Hamlet, one from a production of 1759 and the other from a century later, had been lost, and the theatre promised a reward for their recovery. What a ridiculous news item, thought Besfort as he switched off the television again.
He went to bed just after midnight as usual. Towards morning, he was woken by a dream.
A kind of languid desire he had never experienced before totally sapped his strength. It included grief mixed with despair to such an impossible degree as to create a limitless, immeasurable sweetness.
It was the kind of dream that lingers in the mind. There was a plateau bathed in pale light from an unknown source. In the middle was a structure of plaster and marble, a kind of mausoleum that was also a motel, towards which he was calmly walking.
He was seeing it for the first time, although the structure was not unfamiliar to him. He stood in front of what were not so much its door and windows as the places where they had once been, now covered with oily paint resembling plaster, and barely visible.
He felt that he knew why he was there. He even knew what was locked inside, because he called a name out loud. It was a woman’s name, which, although he uttered it himself, he could not hear or even identify. It emerged falteringly, despairingly from his throat. He was aware merely that the name had three or four syllables. Something like Ix-et-in-a …
He remembered the strange continuation of the dream, and his weakness and longing became unendurable.
He turned on the bedside lamp and looked at his watch. It was half past four. It occurred to him that even dreams that seem unforgettable can later fade away.
First thing in the morning he would phone Rovena and tell her about this. He must.
This thought reassured him, and he fell asleep at once.
Part Three
1
With these two storm-battered capes, the life stories of Besfort Y. and Rovena St. were strangely cut short a week before they actually ended. In an explanatory note, the researcher had repeated his position that, being unable to reproduce the couple’s story in full on the basis of the results of the inquiry, he had concentrated on the last forty weeks of their lives. The ending of the story with the two Hamlet costumes carried away by the gale was accidental, and therefore probably could not be taken as a symbolic closure. Still less could Besfort Y.’s pre-dawn dream, which he related to Rovena on the phone a few hours later, be considered in the same light. But there may have been another reason why, in spite of all promises, the final week – usually the most keenly anticipated in a story of this kind – was omitted.
The more closely the researcher examined this last week, which was at first sight so straightforward, the more significant it became. But he was always thrown back on the problem of its incompleteness. The three last days had detached themselves entirely from the chain of events which death had brought to an end. These were the three days for which Besfort Y. had requested leave from his office at the Council of Europe. Apart from his application for leave, made orally in his final telephone call, there was no tangible evidence of these last three days anywhere. The testimony of the bartenders and receptionists was vaguer than ever. There was no record of any phone calls from their hotel room and both their mobiles were switched off. It was as if these three days were not their own, but were unclaimed stretches of time of the kind that may wander around the universe unattached to any human life, trying to find some temporary lodging. So they floated adrift, bound to nobody, and not understood by anyone, least of all by those in whose lives they took refuge.
In another note, the researcher strove to explain what he called the strange “crabwise” progress of the days and weeks. Mourning customs everywhere mark seven days and forty days after a death, but here were periods of seven and forty days calculated before their deaths. These in his view were intended to convey an impression of the reverse order of time experienced by the two lovers, if that is what they could be called.
As he approached the zero hour, which in this looking-glass world could have been the end, the beginning or both, or neither of these, the researcher probably felt a rising panic. Finally, confronted with a knot he could not unravel, he stood to one side at the most unexpected moment.
It was obvious from the file containing the relevant evidence that this dereliction of duty when faced with the final week caused the researcher great pain. Here, totally jumbled and impossibly crammed together, were fragmentary statements and testimonies, documents, protocols; a twice-repeated request for an autopsy of Rovena’s body rejected out of hand by her parents; an application for Besfort’s exhumation in Tirana, which had been granted; an allegation made by Liza Blumberg that Rovena was murdered not by intelligence agencies but by Besfort Y. on the night before 17 May; a photocopy of the weather report for the fateful morning from the newspaper Kurier, which was relevant to this allegation; and finally the permission for three days’ leave, issued in response to Besfort’s last request in this life.
The researcher kept coming back to this document in the hope that it might yield more information. He could not forget what a colleague had said a long time ago, when he had first mentioned the inquiry to him. In such cases of law, the English refer to remote history, Muslims to the Qur’an and emergent African states to the Encyclopedia Britannica, but in the Balkans they find every precedent with little effort in their ballads. Three days’ leave to carry out a duty, normally something left undone? There will certainly be a well-known paradigm for this.
It was in fact a cliché. Half the ballads of the Balkans included such requests. Every character seemed eager to negotiate an extended deadline. Some bargained with death; others at a later date in history, and thus on a less epic scale, asked for leave from prison. And so on until the present day, when Besfort Y. had asked for leave from his office at the Council of Europe. The cases were very different, but in essence they all shared something in common: a secret contract, from which there was no escape.
The researcher was dumbfounded. According to the experts, Besfort had asked for three days’ leave from the Crisis Department in Brussels, just like Ago Ymeri had done from a medieval prison.
The researcher imagined Ago Ymeri on horseback, galloping to the church where his betrothed was about to marry another man … He had never heard such an inconsistent story: why had he been given leave, and why, after its expiry, was he bound to return to prison? The meaning must be encoded.
The researcher felt a sickening pang in the pit of his stomach. What help were all these shadows and shapes that so resembled each other? He thought about the taxi driver and his rear-view mirror, in which the mystery had surely been revealed, if only for an instant of time.
Latterly his researches had focused entirely on this question. “What did you see in this mirror? What was that fatal shock? Have you ever lost someone you can’t ever forget? Who is so lost to you that they won’t come back, even in your dreams?”
So began one of their many conversations, all so similar to each other.
“Who won’t come back, even in my dreams? I don’t know what to say,” the man replied.
“You have a daughter of about the same age as that unknown young woman who got into your taxi. Have you ever had problems with her? For any private reason of the sort you would never reveal to a soul? That will go with you to the grave? I think you will have heard this expression, but probably without thinking hard about it. Imagine what it means to be in the grave, in this narrow chamber not just for a few days or weeks or years but for centuries, millennia, hundreds and thousands of millennia. Just you two, you and the grave. The grave and you. Narrator and audience. The stories we t
ell on earth are mere fragments, crumbs of the great narrative of the dead. For thousands of years, in hundreds of languages, the dead have been weaving their story. But it will remain in the grave for ever and ever. For all eternity, never heard by a living soul. Your final confidence, between you and the grave. Between the grave and you. Think of yourself there, with no advocate, no witness, afraid of nothing, because you yourself are nothing. Think of yourself like that and give me the tiniest hint, a smidgen of what you will tell to the grave. This is what I am asking you to do as a human being, a taxi driver. Do me this honour. Think of me for a moment as your brother. As your grave.”
“I don’t understand you. I’m tired. I’m so tired. I don’t know what you want.”
“Have you ever thought of impossible things? Taboos, we call them in this world. Who knows what they call them in the next. It’s a tough question, but I won’t apologise. The grave does not apologise.”
“I’m tired. Leave me in peace. The doctor says these long sessions aren’t good for me.”
“You’re right. Calm down. Let me ask you just two simple questions about the last moments before the accident. How did her face look? And his?”
“They were both cold. Or that’s how they looked to me. Like wax, as one might say.”
“Was it this that scared you, I mean confused you?”
“Perhaps.”
“What else? What else happened?”
“Nothing. It went silent, like in church. Except that from outside there was a sort of dazzling light. I think that’s why I couldn’t see the road. The taxi seemed propelled through the air.”
“You said that at that moment they were trying to kiss. I’m sorry for asking the same question as everybody else. Did this really startle you? Even scare you?”
“It seemed … but they seemed scared themselves. At least I saw that in the woman’s eyes. In the mirror, I saw fear.”
“You saw their fear in the mirror … But your own fear, where did you see that?”