A Girl in Exile

  ‘You won’t believe it, but she told me that they hadn’t upset her at all, and she even wanted them to question her again.’

  He frowned.

  ‘Are you serious?’

  Migena nodded, deepening the furrows of suspicion on her brow.

  ‘It wasn’t a good sign,’ she said in a muffled voice.

  Again, their eyes did not meet.

  It was not easy to explain. A girl with a rounded character like Linda had still felt unfulfilled. A couple of flirtations or semi-flirtations with boys at school had been disappointing. This was the first time she had, as you might put it, acquired a story.

  ‘What kind of story?’ he butted in. ‘How can something like this be called a story?’

  She begged him not to interrupt her. For Linda it was more than a love story. It was a romance involving Rudian Stefa, the well-known playwright. Linda had been following him for at least two years – reviews in the papers, on the news, television interviews – dreaming of meeting him and getting to know him, while aware that this was impossible. Suddenly she had a direct connection with her adored playwright. The investigators had asked: Have you ever met him? Why did he write ‘a souvenir from the author’? The word ‘souvenir’ implies that something has happened that should be remembered. What are your feelings for him? What are his feelings? What does ‘Linda B.’ mean? You said that it’s a reference to a poem by Migjeni addressed to ‘Miss B.’

  He listened to her gentle voice, his face motionless.

  ‘How can you not understand?’ She broke off. ‘This story was about you! You must see that . . . About you! It was the only way she could get . . . involved with you.’

  ‘Don’t be upset,’ he said. ‘I’m aware of that and I understand it very well. It happens often.’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I’ve heard the stories about fans and how they behave. This was different. Can’t you see that Linda really was different?’

  ‘I do see that,’ he said. ‘Maybe better than you.’

  Offended, she turned to the window. The street and the trees in the small park beyond had never looked so remote.

  ‘Perhaps I can see why you can’t grasp the whole situation,’ she said, turning back. ‘You still don’t know the most important thing.’

  Something else, Rudian said to himself. A wave of anger swelled inside him. In this story he was always the ignorant one. There was no end to it.

  ‘And what might that be?’ he asked icily.

  ‘Don’t look like that. You don’t know that she . . . desired you.’

  ‘We talked about that.’

  ‘No, we didn’t. She wasn’t just an admirer of yours. She loved you in the full sense of the word – do you understand? She wanted to meet you, to touch you, to kiss you, to do everything. Now do you understand?’

  His frown deepened. He shook his head. No, he thought. This was not natural. It was a misunderstanding. His. Hers.

  Migena went on with her story. Linda had been obsessed with him for two years. She made no secret of it. When Migena had brought her the inscribed book, her cup was overflowing. She was totally overcome with emotion.

  Rudian noticed Migena’s pained expression when he interrupted her to say his thoughts aloud.

  She studied him incredulously.

  ‘You don’t like it? How strange . . . Anybody else would be pleased.’

  Oh hell. How to explain to her that this was not a quirk of his? Like most men he was vain enough to feel pleased that women desired him. But not in Linda’s case.

  ‘Not at all,’ he said.

  He was becoming confused. This had been happening more and more frequently. Sometimes his mind would clear only to grow dim again. It was not merely male vanity that discomposed him, but something else mixed in with it. Perhaps he wanted to shirk responsibility for all that had taken place and for the illusion of himself he had recklessly conjured up.

  Feverishly he began talking about these things and found himself repeating familiar phrases. All of this was unnatural. He wished none of it were true, and hoped to persuade Migena so too.

  The girl could barely follow him. At the first opportunity she interrupted and turned the conversation back to his inscribed book. She recalled the warm June evening. How Linda’s hands had trembled when she had received it. Migena had thought she was making her friend happy.

  Her voice faltered with emotion, and he gently touched her hair. The girl did not manage to say that instead of happiness she had brought her tragedy, but Rudian understood. Again, it was my fault, he thought. However you looked at it, he was to blame.

  She was in a kind of ecstasy, Migena continued. She had been the prettiest girl in school, yet the more beautiful she grew, the more people gave her strange looks, as if to say: What’s the point? Where can you go? Then came those two or three hectic weeks that were so difficult, with his inscribed book, her interrogation, the breast scan, and the evening of their farewell ball, one after another.

  ‘Breast scan?’ he interrupted. ‘Did you say breast scan, or didn’t I hear you right?’

  Migena didn’t lift her eyes.

  ‘That’s what I said – breast scan.’

  He listened to her breathing and then his own.

  ‘A breast scan, which women have when there’s a suspicion of—’

  ‘Exactly,’ she said. ‘But not so fast—’

  ‘What do you mean, not so fast? Why not? Do you know what you’re saying?’

  ‘Don’t be offensive.’

  ‘You never mentioned this to me. Why do you hide everything? Why can’t you talk honestly?’

  ‘I talk the way I know. Not everybody is a playwright like you.’

  What a ridiculous thing to say, he thought. He glanced involuntarily at what he had come to think of as his place of punishment – his bookshelves, where last time he’d seized her by the hair. The Cuckoo’s Path was still there. The Bandit’s Grave, the Wedding-Guests’ Ambush and the Dark Ravine. Zelda Fitzgerald’s screams in luxurious asylums.

  His nerves had been frayed and the mention of a breast scan had only increased his distress. But this scan changed everything connected to the suicide. An unfavourable result could have led to suicidal thoughts. Why hadn’t she told him and released him from blame? He stroked her hair and then her neck. She touched his hand with hers.

  ‘It’s true. I’m mixed up,’ she said. ‘Perhaps later when I’m calmer . . .’

  Later, he thought. Of course, naked in his warm bed, everything would be easier.

  Reading his mind she said, ‘We won’t make love, we won’t . . .’

  Rudian acquiesced in silence. He couldn’t tell why, but he sensed that it had to be like this. It was the only way.

  ‘At least not today,’ she went on. He kissed her neck as a sign of understanding before they sat down on the sofa. ‘This story’s not easy for me to explain,’ she said. ‘It’s even more complicated.’

  She asked him to be patient and he gave her his promise.

  Dusk was falling and muffled sounds came from the street.

  So the scan was the reason, he thought. Why hadn’t she said so?

  The lights of the few cars, silent bloodless reptiles, shone on the walls of the apartment.

  ‘It was all about getting to Tirana,’ Migena said vaguely, as if talking to herself.

  She continued in a monotonous voice, as if trying to lull him to sleep. She had never known anyone to love, with such wild intensity, a city they had never seen. It occurred to Rudian that this is how you love cities that you have no hope of visiting, like Dante’s Florence, but he was scared of interrupting.

  Migena had learned from Linda the regulations governing internment: Linda had to report to the police at a certain time every afternoon. There were sanctions for absconding: a statutory punishment for visiting a nearby town; double for cities further away; and much more for the capital city – life imprisonment or execution.

  Migena would sometimes come to Tirana with
her father or uncle. When she returned, Linda would bombard her with endless questions. Were the almond trees in bloom in the park opposite the Dajti Hotel? What first nights had there been at the theatre? What were girls wearing that season? She knew Tirana better than its inhabitants. From documentaries, the television news and hearsay, she knew the squares, cinemas, cafés. Sometimes she would ask impossible questions. How long did it take to walk from the clock tower to Dibra Street, which they called Broadway? And what about the boys who hung around the pavements – had she seen the Broadway lads, as they were known? Between the main boulevard and Elbasan Street there were some side streets with beautiful villas. Had she ever gone that way? What about the advertisements at the main theatre, were they lit up for first nights? What about the atmosphere at the Café Flora? Of course girls went there with their boyfriends, didn’t they? From a distance, could you tell if they were flirting?

  Migena had learned to become observant for Linda’s sake. It was true that between the main boulevard and Elbasan Street there were fine villas from the thirties, with iron railings. After their expropriation, some had become foreign embassies. One of these villas must have belonged to Linda’s family, but this was the kind of sensitive political issue that she never mentioned. As for what you might call ‘society gossip’, Migena had heard talk of a romance between N.F., the most recent Hamlet, and a young actress, not the one who played Ophelia, as people thought at first, but a younger and less famous understudy. She’d also vaguely heard something about a very beautiful young writer, fresh from the provinces.

  ‘Sometimes I would embellish details – add lights, glass doors, tall buildings – so she wouldn’t be disappointed. I knew that she wrote all this in her diary alongside impressions from her reading or from radio plays.’

  Migena took a deep breath. She looked tired.

  ‘Then something happened,’ she said after a silence. ‘You appeared on the stage. Perhaps you remember talking on television before the premiere of your play?’

  During the lunch break at school, Linda had asked if she could come over in the evening to watch an interview with the playwright Rudian Stefa, announced on the radio. ‘She often did this because we had a television and her family didn’t. She came at the agreed time, looking as beautiful and serious as ever, her hair neatly combed, as if going out to a party. She followed carefully every word you said, watched every movement of your fingers, and noticed at one point your barely concealed irritation at the interviewer. The look on her face was almost one of awe, mixed with pain, or rather worry. When the interview was over, her eyes glistened and she said softly: He’s different, in every way. It was not hard to see that her vision of Tirana needed a human being in it. You filled that gap.’

  He managed to interrupt. That was exactly what he’d said to her earlier, about filling a gap. It was a coincidence, and nothing more. First she had yearned for Tirana, and then there was this gap to be filled by someone in the city such as, in this case, himself.

  Migena continued as if she hadn’t heard. Linda made no secret of the fact that she never stopped thinking about him. She dreamed about him, wrote about him in her diary. It was in those last days before graduation, in that atmosphere familiar to everybody: worry about university places, the pain of parting, and words left unsaid. Migena went to and from Tirana more often than ever before. She was almost certain to be accepted at the Art College, but even she shared the general excitement. Linda had nothing to look forward to. It was from one of these trips that Migena brought back his inscribed book. ‘It was this that drove her totally out of her mind. Linda no longer concealed anything. She was not merely in love. She was totally infatuated with you. Her longing for you, for Tirana, her misery at not being able to go, and her pain at parting from me, all multiplied twofold, tenfold. The criticism of your play in the newspapers made everything worse. She dreamed of impossible things, of being close to you and consoling you whenever you were down. Her fever rose to such a pitch that I began to regret what I had done. I’d been so pleased to surprise her in this way, but with every day that passed, I became more convinced that I should never have brought her that book.

  ‘Then came those three or four crazy weeks. My interview at the investigator’s, my father’s anxiety, and her interview, which instead of dampening her fantasies about you had the opposite effect. We never discovered who the spy was who told them about the book and we had little time to speculate. Events came on like a sequence of avalanches: the news of my scholarship to the Art College, but nothing for Linda, and the breast scan, immediately followed by the graduation ball.’

  The shock lifted Rudian Stefa to his feet. He seized her arm, as if his hoarse shout of ‘Wait!’ were not enough.

  Stop, he thought. You won’t get away with it this time.

  In vain the girl struggled to free her arm. She looked at Rudian as if he had gone crazy.

  ‘Wait,’ Rudian said again. ‘This is the second time you’ve mentioned this breast scan without explaining anything.’

  ‘What is there to explain?’ she said in a chill voice.

  ‘Was this a breast scan as I understand it, a suspicion of cancer in the breast, possibly deadly?

  ‘Precisely,’ she replied with the same coldness. ‘For analysis. Possibly fatal.’

  ‘Then why not finish the story?’ Rudian cried. ‘This scan explains everything. What do I need all the rest for? Why do I need the graduation ball? And all those fantasies about me? This scan explains why she died.’

  Her eyes absorbed nothing and revealed nothing, as if cataracts had descended on them. Then, an ironic glitter of the kind Rudian could not bear crept into them.

  Migena stood up.

  ‘You won’t let me,’ she said. ‘You’re not helping me, you’re stopping me from talking.’

  ‘Me? Stopping you?’

  ‘Yes, you. Can’t you see I’m not ready? Don’t you understand how hard this is for me?’

  She hid her face in her hands, but her weeping, visible only in the movements of her shoulders, was even harder to endure.

  ‘It’s late. I’m going.’

  ‘No.’

  It seemed to him that time had run backwards to their last meeting in front of the bookshelves, before this horror began.

  ‘What are you hiding from me?’ he cried, as he had done back then.

  He was surrounded by a void, and in this void, before his very eyes, something was happening with which he could not interfere.

  The girl was walking towards the door of his apartment.

  Don’t go. These words ran through his mind, just as he recalled how he had seized her hair and dragged her back to Scott Fitzgerald, the Evil Ambush and Death Rock.

  The clicking of her heels and her final ‘goodnight’ were cut off by the closing door.

  Can’t you see I’m not ready? he repeated to himself. Language of the theatre, he thought, but immediately he felt that he had treated her unfairly.

  10

  IT TOOK HIM a long time to shake off his grogginess. He’d slept in again. He knew it. At least spare him that irritating saying about it being the first sign of psychosis. He banished it from his mind but at a certain cost. Out of the rain and into the hailstorm. It was Wednesday, the day when the Artistic Board met. Couldn’t he start the day with a different thought? But no, there it was, every Wednesday, ten o’clock, the bloody Board meeting. He imagined them taking their places at the long table, blowing on their cold hands, with the stove smoking away.

  He rubbed his eyes and went to the door to fetch the post. An invitation to meet readers at the Porcelain Enterprise. A letter from the Writers’ League: his request to extend his sabbatical had been refused. Electricity and water bills. For the first time in his life he read the figures, with simulated interest. Previous monthly reading: 014154 kW. Water for April to May: 37 leks. Why was he doing this? He set them aside for later.

  He looked at the telephone with a faint hope that it might be broken and ro
ughly lifted the receiver, but was disappointed to hear the dialling tone. Heap of junk. It worked when it shouldn’t. It would have been Migena’s only possible excuse for not calling: I tried so many times, but the line was down. Nothing from her for two days. Today was day three.

  What the hell, he said to himself, his eyes darting round as if in search of something to get angry about.

  He could predict almost word for word what his long-standing enemy R.B. would say: Cutting out that ghost is an absolute must, otherwise I’ll vote against.

  He looked at his watch. Perhaps this hadn’t been said yet. As he shaved, he tried not to think about what the Board members were saying. Perhaps they were still dealing with the smoking stove.

  For a little while he derived a certain pleasure from imagining them coughing and cursing the stove and the damp wood.

  From nowhere, the idea came to him of inserting a Serb in the middle of Act Two. A Serbian villain would do the trick, along the lines of Dušan Mugoša, sent by the Yugoslavs to the Albanian partisans to plot secret murders. As always, inspiration excited him. He got dressed briskly, almost whistling with joy, but his elation subsided as suddenly as it had risen. He had remembered the thin, scratchy voice of the minister of culture. You playwrights, she would say, whenever you get stuck, you shove in an evil Serb to justify some ghastly scene.

  What a witch, he said to himself. Her voice was all he needed on a day like this.

  His psychiatrist had explained one evening that an inclination of the mind to dwell on unpleasant things or bad news is a sign of a pre-depressive state.

  I know that, he had almost said aloud. Couldn’t the doctor say anything else?

  Nevertheless, he went to the phone and dialled the doctor’s number.