It was you who told me that love is problematic in itself, she thought. A long time ago he had said: “There are two things in the world that are in doubt: love and God. There is a third thing, death, which we can only know through seeing it happen to other people.”
Two years before, at the height of her affair with Lulu, he had forgiven all her harsh words, because she had seemed to him insane. Now she would do the same for him. He seemed exhausted, and of course his nerves were in a bad way.
In the hotel, after dinner, he had eyed the receptionist suspiciously as he asked, “Is there any message for me?”
“Who are you expecting a message from?” she asked.
He smiled. “I’m expecting a summons. A court summons.”
“Really?” she said, trying to maintain the same tone of mockery.
“I’m not joking. I really do expect a summons. To the Last Judgement, perhaps …”
He avoided her eyes in the elevator mirror.
“They’ll find me in the end,” he said softly.
“You’re tired, Besfort,” she said, leaning her head on his shoulder. “You need to rest, darling.”
In bed she tried to be as loving as she could. She whispered words of endearment, some of them laden with the double meanings that he enjoyed so much before lovemaking, and then, after he sank exhausted beside her, she asked in a very quiet voice: “What was it you said … your ex-wife?”
His reply came in the same breath as his final sigh.
“Sublime,” Rovena repeated to herself.
Increasingly his thoughts reverted to the strange taste of their first meeting after the episode with Liza. He knew that something had happened, but could not tell what, especially not that a woman had come between them.
Under the pale illumination of the lampshade, her face sometimes looked as strange and inscrutable as it had then. The hope of experiencing that feeling again was like waiting to recapture a dream of incommunicable sweetness, of the kind that other, gentler worlds seem to grant only once to a human life, and then purely by chance.
Evidently Liza had been part of the transition that was vital to the creation of this strange zone.
“What did you think?” asked Rovena, about when he interrogated her on the subject of Liza.
He tried to laugh it off, and said, “Nothing,” but she was no longer smiling.
“You’re still hiding something from me,” she said in a weary voice. “Don’t you think you’re going too far?”
“Possibly. But I don’t feel guilty about it.”
He said he didn’t feel guilty because, however secretive a man was, or pretended to be, he would always be an amateur compared to a woman.
“Women are the soul of secrecy and, like it or not, so are you,” he whispered, caressing her below her belly. “Nobody, not even a woman herself, can ever know what is hidden behind that silent entrance. Unless the gypsy woman’s eye can see it.”
As she listened, she suddenly remembered the girls’ lavatory at school, where someone had scrawled, “Rovena, I’m dying for your c—.” Shocked, she had gone back to the classroom, totally unable to guess which of the girls might have written it. Perhaps this one, and then perhaps another. After each suspicion came the same question: how could this other girl know about her private parts? Nobody had ever touched them, or even seen them, apart from her mother. She had hurried to the lavatory again in the next break, but the writing was gone. On the roughly whitewashed door a piece of paper was pinned, “Wet Paint.”
“Don’t think I’m trying to be mysterious,” he said, stroking her hair. She kissed his hand. Oh no. He didn’t need to try, he just was.
Hidden under the coat of paint, the scribble seemed much more threatening, and as she returned to the classroom she felt her knees give way.
He promised that this mystery would pass and that next time they met everything would be clear.
“You always put off everything until next time,” she complained. “Do you really expect a summons? Is nothing really the same as before? At least tell me that.”
He did not reply at once. He touched her hair, and strands fell over her eyes like a veil. In a clear voice he said that this was the truth.
Chapter Five
Thirty-three weeks before. Liza, according to Besfort.
All the reports claimed that Besfort was in Tirana thirty-three weeks before the accident. The few opulent skyscrapers belligerently reflected the summer light off one another. As he walked through the once forbidden neighbourhood, unable to decide upon a café, it seemed to Besfort Y. that the very glass of the buildings expressed the city’s malice and its troubled conscience, as vented every morning by the newspapers. Lawsuits, grudges, debts, unsettled feuds that bided their time – they were all there.
He stopped hesitantly outside the Café Manhattan, weighed up its neighbour and, without further thought, entered the Sky Tower.
The view from the enclosed terrace on the sixteenth floor was beautiful at any time of year. From this height, the journalists’ speculations seemed more credible: the owners of the first four storeys of the Sky Tower, including the café where Besfort was sitting, were fighting a court case with the state. At the foot of the tower were the foundations of another skyscraper, whose builders were in conflict with the landowners, the city council and the Swiss Embassy, on whose land they were accused of encroaching. A little further on was a statue, also a subject of dispute, involving historical symbols and, indeed, indirectly, the clash of civilisations and the attack on the twin towers in New York.
Besfort Y. could not suppress a sigh. Then he heard a mixture of Albanian and German from the next table.
“Albania wears you down,” a friend of his had said, after leaving for Belgium in 1990. “She drives you to despair and sends you round the bend, but there’s no escaping her.”
They both thought the same. The more you insult the place, the more it tightens its grip on you. It’s like the love of a whore, said his friend.
Rovena was back in Graz. She had managed to extend her stay for the third time. “For your sake,” she said on the phone.
He looked out of the corner of his eye at the next table. One of the foreigners might be the “bi”. Besfort stared at his chin and the reddish curls at his temples, considering if this man had really slept with Rovena. My darling, he said to himself. How had she put up with all of that?
A wave of longing gently enveloped him. He must get down to writing that letter he had promised her when they last met.
There was movement at the next table, and heads turned towards the window. Besfort looked in the same direction. The columns of traffic in both directions had been halted on the main boulevard. Someone pointed out a crowd that formed a dark mass on Mother Teresa Square.
“Another demonstration,” said the waiter, removing the ashtray. “They want their property back.”
The placards bobbed white but illegible above the crowd. In front of the prime minister’s office, a second row of helmeted policemen quickly lined up.
Besfort ordered a second coffee.
He had better write that letter soon, he thought. A letter and two or three phone calls would discharge most of the tension. Liza’s name, mentioned so often in Vienna, was a suitable peg on which to hang the broken thread of their dialogue.
“No, it’s not former property owners,” said the waiter, setting down the coffee cup. “They’re Çamëria Albanians, angry at the government.”
“Which government?” asked Besfort. “The Albanian or the Greek one?”
The waiter shrugged his shoulders.
“Perhaps both. Whenever the two reach an agreement, these people take to the streets.”
The demonstration was still too far away to read the placards.
Liza was more than a pretext, he thought. She was perhaps the key to understanding what was happening. It was no coincidence that they had both remembered her again in Vienna, after forgetting about her for so long.
br /> Two years before, after their big quarrel, he had experienced for the first time the taste that comes from making love to a woman you have discovered a second time. It was a mixture of the recollection of the start of the love affair, which was at that moment ending, with the beginning of something else. It was her taste, and yet not hers at all. She was his, but not his. She was a stranger, yet familiar in every nuance. Actual and ineffable. Faithful and elusive.
Ever since their last meeting, his mind had harked back continually to everything to do with that feeling. His dream of resurrection certainly had something to do with it. As a student at the university, he had studied Albanian folklore, with its motifs of rediscovery. Now for the first time he wondered at their mysteriousness. The bridegroom in his marriage bed who recognises by a birthmark that his bride is his sister. Or conversely, the bride who recognises her brother. The father who returns from exile and takes his son for his enemy, or his enemy for his son, and so forth, all these stories of incest which were thought to be fiction, but very probably were not. All these violations of taboos, obscure desires within the tribe, which out of shame or horror were passed on as legends, floated to the surface of his memory.
“You’re no longer my master. I won’t stand your tyranny any longer. I’ve had enough.”
Besfort turned his head to the window, as if Rovena’s voice on the telephone two years ago, racked by sobs, now came to him from outside.
The crowd of demonstrators was now close to the prime minister’s office, and their shouts were clearly audible.
“It’s not about property, or Çamëria,” said the waiter, also looking out of the window.
The placards were mainly pink.
“I think they’re the ‘alternatives’,” said someone at the next table. “That’s what the gays and lesbians are called now.”
Rovena’s voice on the phone was no longer recognisable. Taken aback, he was stuck for words. He interrupted her, “Calm down, listen to me.” But she snapped back, “No, I won’t calm down, I won’t listen to you.”
He hung up in fury, but she called back at once.
“Don’t hang up like you always do. You’re no longer …”
“That’s enough,” he shouted back. “You’re not in your right mind.”
“Really?” she said. “Is that how you think of me? Now listen. Get ready to hear something very serious.”
You aren’t what you were to me any more. I love someone else. Amidst the deafening crackles and abrupt silences of the telephone line, those were the words he expected. But amazingly, something else came down the wire.
“You’ve ruined my sex life.”
“What?”
The thought that her mental health was not good suddenly took priority over everything else. Everything she had said, her insults, even her possible infidelities meant nothing. He tried to handle her gently. “Rovena, my dear, calm down. It must be my fault, no doubt about it, my fault, only mine, are you listening?”
“No, I’m not listening. And I don’t want to. And don’t think that you’re as frightening as you seem.”
“Of course I’m not, and I don’t want to seem frightening.”
“Really?”
“You think I’m trying to scare you? You think I’m like an American Indian, tattooing my face to look fierce?”
Amazingly, she laughed. He even thought he caught the word “darling” smothered by her laughter, as so often when she liked one of his jokes. But she was quiet only for a moment. Her voice rose stridently again, and he thought, oh God, she’s really not well.
The next day she seemed more relaxed on the phone, if a bit tired. She had been to the doctor, who had asked some tactful questions. She explained that she had quarrelled with her lover. The doctor had given her tranquillisers and some advice: most importantly to break off all contact with the source of the trouble, in other words with him. A long silence followed.
“Are you going to ask the same old question, is there anybody between us?”
“No, I’m not,” he answered.
“You say not, but you’re thinking it. Because you still don’t understand that I’m no longer your slave.”
He let her say her piece. She said he had enslaved her. He had closed every door that opened for her, and not allowed her the slightest freedom. He wanted her entirely for himself, like every tyrant. He had made her seek therapy. He had crippled her, he had ruined her sex life.
He butted in to say that the opposite was true, that he, or rather both of them, as she had said time and again, had refined their sex life to a degree that few others had achieved. But that, she protested, is precisely what should not have happened. He had violated her nature … her psyche.
“Is that the twaddle your German doctor talks?” he interrupted.
“Precisely that,” came her answer.
He imagined her breasts, and the insult and pain he felt at the prospect of never seeing them again made his response unexpectedly quiet. He would leave her in peace, but she should understand one thing, that her description of him was unfair. He had been her liberator, but this was not the first time in history that a liberator had been taken for a tyrant, just as many a tyrant had been taken for a liberator.
That was more or less all he said. Her next telephone call three weeks later came to him as if from a great distance. Her voice was different. Neither of them mentioned the quarrel. She said that she’d been in London with the rest of her course group. That she had taken up sport, mainly swimming. It was as if nothing had happened. Only when she asked, “Are we going to see each other?” a silence fell.
“What do you think?” he asked.
Her reply was unexpected: “I don’t know.”
He almost shouted, “Then what the hell are you calling for? Why ask if we are going to see each other?”
“Listen,” she went on. “I want us to meet, like before, but I don’t want to lie to you … Something has happened …”
So that was it. In the long silence that followed, she seemed to be waiting for the question whose time had finally come. Is there somebody else? But he said nothing. He had asked this question at the wrong time, and now that its hour had struck he kept his silence. Slut, he said to himself. NGO whore. International scholarship tart. But aloud he said, “I don’t want to know.”
Her own reply was also slow in coming. Perhaps she expected something else, or took his answer as a sign he didn’t care. “Really? So you don’t want to know? OK, I’ll give you the whole bitter truth: you are no longer what you were. I belong to someone else.”
“I realise that. I’ve known for some time …”
She wanted to reply: “But you pretend not to care. That’s how you usually behave. You hit back at someone else when you’re on the ropes yourself.” But she did not utter this final retort out loud. Her unspoken words flew round her brain like lost birds that could not find their way out. He listened to her laboured breathing, until finally she said, “If that’s the case, then come here …”
The flight was tiring. The plane listed perpetually to one side, or so it seemed to him. It was literally a lame journey. Drowsily he imagined her in front of the mirror, getting ready for another man. Choosing lingerie. Her armpits, between her legs. An unnatural faintness, at the same time a burning and a weakness, slowed his heartbeat. If it was another man who had caused this estrangement, why should she be so angry with him? The anger should be on his side.
The flight was like a journey in a dream, in which arrival is indefinitely deferred.
He saw her from a distance, waiting in the same place as always. Her paleness made her even more beautiful. She had changed her hairstyle, and lowered her head in a different way as she walked.
They embraced hesitantly in the taxi, as if through glass. She was the same and not the same. Words beginning with “re”–recognition, resurrection – sprung to mind. They would haunt him for days. He had thought that he would never arrive, but now the prospect of going
to bed with her seemed even more remote.
She had booked the hotel. He would try to get his bearings from its layout – the entrance, the lobby and of course the room with its big double bed, or two single beds, like the two graves of former lovers he had once seen in a Japanese cemetery in Kyoto, with a marble headstone on which was carved the couple’s sad tale.
As the bellboy opened the door to the room, his heartbeat slowed again. The room was flooded with tranquil light, and he saw the large bed with its counterpane decorated with drooping chrysanthemums, again like on Japanese vases. She seemed to belong to this kind of world as she padded softly back and forth, unpacking her bag in silence, as if she were painted on a vase. “Will you wait a bit for me?” she said with bowed head as she entered the bathroom, without her playful look that usually augured happiness.
Here was the mystery that had lured him for so long, he thought, as she closed the bathroom door. It seemed impossible that she would ever come out again in the way she used to.
He sat on the corner of the bed, as if in that Kyoto graveyard, waiting for his bride, or like in 1913, or God knew when – a man of the Balkans with the pent-up lust of years of betrothal. Or worse, like a madman who believes his lost bride, abducted by someone else, or by destiny itself, will return to him.
Finally she emerged. Oh heaven, a total stranger, as pale as plaster, just like a real bride under traditional law. With head bowed, she approached the bed and lay down stiffly beside him. It seemed to him that they had forgotten entirely how to move. He bent down over her face. Her lips, like her eyes, looked alien, and he did not kiss them but whispered, “Has anybody else touched these?”
She said yes with a motion of her eyes.
The open bathrobe revealed her breasts, which were perhaps even more complicit in the conspiracy than her lips. He asked his question again, and her reply was the same.
He was not sure his body could withstand the swoon, in which misery was mixed inextricably with desire. And who was the lucky man, he thought.