Spring Flowers, Spring Frost

  “That’s how it was, sir.”

  “Then do go on. Try to remember exactly each of the president’s acts and movements.”

  “Well, I’ll try. He took a piece of paper out of his pocket, looked at it, and it was then that he asked to be taken to the notorious Bat Room. All the while I kept my eye on the small crowd that had gathered at the metal barrier door. Then the director took two keys from his pocket, and turned one after the other in the two keyholes in the door. There was a third key — but that was one the president himself brought with him. That key was always kept in Tirana, at the Center. So the president took it out and opened the door.”

  “And then?”

  “He pushed the door open, went into the Bat Room, and closed the door behind him. And after that, nobody can say what went on. Everyone else, including the bodyguards, stayed outside. After a while, the head of state opened the door an inch or two and asked for the director. So the director went in, but came out again after only a couple of minutes. We all just stood there, in silence, at the door.”

  “And then?”

  “And then, nothing. Our visitor spent nearly three hours in the secret room. He was white as a sheet when he came out. He left with his bodyguards without saying a word. It must have been around 3:00 A.M.”

  “So he was white as a sheet when he came out. He came out looking white after spending three hours searching for something. And he left for Tirana immediately. Didn’t that puzzle you? Give you insomnia? Make you want to scream inwardly, ‘This is an enigma! A dark and mysterious enigma!?

  “Well, sure it did. We’re human beings too, you know. The whole thing struck us all, but maybe not as hard as you say, when you call it a dark and mysterious enigma or whatever.”

  “Really? I see! You don’t like things to be ‘mysterious,’ then?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “What was in the secret file? Answer me!”

  “But I have no idea! I’ve never even seen it.”

  “Has anybody seen it? Answer!”

  “No, nobody has seen it.”

  “What do you mean, nobody? Someone must have worked on it. Someone must have brought it to the archive, someone must have filed it, someone must have put in the page numbers. Answer!”

  “Well, yes, someone did work on it.”

  “But you just said nobody had seen it!”

  “All right, all right, there was someone, and his name was Shpend Simahori, but he is no longer of this world. He drowned last year in the Strait of Otranto, when he was trying to get to Italy.”

  “Aha, the Strait of Otranto! You can lose a lot of things in the big wide sea! When you re looking for someone you really have to find, you never have to wait very long for that familiar tune to come on again: He’s down with Davy Jones, at the bottom of the Adriatic Sea! Now listen to me! This is my last question. Look me straight in the eye and answer!”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Did you ever hear of some strange, not to say horrible, photographs in the files stored down in the Bat Room?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Keep your eyes on mine! … Did you ever hear tell of a snapshot of the Politburo, standing over the corpse of one of their present or former colleagues, with guns in their hands, delivering the coup de grâce? Answer!”

  “No, sir”

  “Did you ever see a photograph of the new head of state firing a gun at the lifeless body of a former member of the Politburo?”

  “Oh, no, sir!”

  “And you did not see the selfsame president looking for that photograph in particular, on that night in April, down in the Secret Archives? This is your last chance. Answer!”

  “Oh, God, I would have done far better to drown in the Adriatic!”

  … Mark held his forehead in the palms of his hands. This inquiry was wearing him out like no other inquiry ever had. He looked at the clock. It was 3:00 A.M. There was still some time to go.

  The whole business was like an infinite set of cogs: files within files within files, with no end to it. He stayed for a long while with his head in his hands, without moving. Then, like a diver who fills his lungs before jumping in, he took a deep breath and plunged back into the paperwork on his desk.

  The forgers of the Book of the Blood … The only real exhibit that had been found so far was a copy of a memorandum of agreement with a group of Germans (the very same people were suspected of having manufactured Hitler’s diaries). The Germans, for their part, clung unwaveringly to the explicit content of the memorandum, which was, they said, an understanding about a pipeline project. An inexperienced eye could indeed believe such a story, since the memorandum did seem to refer to the construction of an aqueduct.

  But what was the real meaning of Clause 7, which stipulated that “the Albanian side is responsible for drawing up the text, while the German side takes responsibility for technical aspects”? What text?

  “The text” was the wording that was supposed to be put on the commemorative plaques that they planned to erect in places where murders had been committed in disputes over water rights. “You are not unaware, we assume, that water has often given rise to violent conflicts.”

  “Are you a pipeline construction enterprise, or historians of rural life?”

  “Assistant Commissar, sir, aqueducts are often the focus of painful memories.”

  “And Appendix Two? ‘Draft Text, p. 714. The Ballideme family has a blood to claim from the Kryezeze. The Frangaj family has a blood debt to the Hoti. The Prejlocaj family owe an injury to the Shkreli. Gjon Pal Marku has a blood debt. The Berisha and the Nano families have no claim on each other. The Krasniqi clan has blood to claim from the Gurazi…,’ and so on and so forth! How do you account for all that? Do you have the gall to claim that all this is just wording for commemorative plaques?”

  “That is exactly what it is, Deputy Commissioner, sir.”

  “Stop all this rubbish! And tell me honestly what the purpose of this so-called Book of the Blood really is. Who commissioned it from you? To what end? To have the whole of Albania descend into chaos and mayhem? Tell me!”

  … but nobody’s going to speak out, Mark thought. The twenty-six painters who’d helped put Gentian in jail refused to talk, and so had the politicians who were linked to the outlawed gangs, and so had the travelers who’d talked to the Sphinx at the gates of Thebes. Did you see it all with your own eyes, or did fear and terror cause you to see nothing at all? What went on in your mind to turn the political tension that was perceptible all around — that well-known foreboding that is always the prelude to a dictatorship — to turn that tension, in your mind, into a Sphinx? Or perhaps you belonged to a faction eager to put Thebes under a rule of iron? And to favor this plan, were you not yourself involved in provoking the fear and anxiety that in the end created the Sphinx?

  Those are supertough cases to solve, thought Mark. They’ll never be cracked. It would be easier to get to the bottom of the iceberg that sank the Titanic, or of NATO’s C-in-C, or of an avalanche that feels bruised by the cadaver it carries down the mountainside within it.

  “But you at least don’t need to wear me out!” he said in his own mind to his girlfriend, even while asking her for a confession.

  “I don’t understand why you suddenly want to question me on a subject that never seemed to interest you very much — how I lost my virginity, and to whom. Was it our gym teacher, the first man to see us in underwear, when we were twelve or thirteen? Or was it one of my cousins, on some long hot summer afternoon, when we were all lying on the grass, pretending to sleep, but with all our senses on fire? Why are you so anxious to know the answer, Mark? It was one or the other, or maybe both….”

  “What sort of an answer is that? Why so vague? Why?”

  “Because it’s better that way, Mark. Believe me, my darling, it’s better that way.”

  The gym teacher, or a cousin during a heat wave … Incest seemed to be the latest thing!

  A shudder like the
one that had awakened him made him look toward the window. His nostrils flared, as if he had smelled something intoxicating. No more time! he could hear himself screaming, silently.

  He slammed shut the file in front of him, threw on his overcoat, and ran down the stairs just as fast as he had come up.

  In the pale light of dawn, the city seemed quite foreign. He was only walking, but he panted as if he had been racing along. Suddenly his house rose before him, as quickly as if he had run there. He glided up the stairs, opened the door, and fell onto his bed fully dressed, as if he had been felled by lightning. He had just enough lucidity to think that epileptics must crumple like that after they’ve had an attack, and then he fell into a deep, deep sleep.

  CHAPTER 6

  MARK SPENT ALL OF SUNDAY MORNING at his easel. He couldn’t recall another occasion when he had taken such pains to mix a color. He paused to look at the stains his oils had made on his hands and sleeves, and all over his smock as well. What he was trying to get was a particular shade of white, as cold and transparent as possible. Without that white he would never be able to represent the sunken part of the iceberg on a canvas. In one corner he had inscribed, “A History of the Void,” and beneath it, “Eight Views of the Iceberg that Sank the Titanic”

  He looked once more at the paint stains on his smock. They seemed so cold that he imagined he was covered in sleet, and shivered at the thought of it. That was a good sign. But even so, he wasn’t really satisfied.

  To figure the submerged part, the part of the iceberg that had to look blurred and immaterial, like a waking dream, but which was also the most tragic and sinister part: that was what he found desperately difficult to do.

  He couldn’t say on what day or at what time he’d had the idea of painting the curriculum vitae, so to speak, of the nameless iceberg that had caused so much sorrow, through eight different views of it. What had intrigued him about the tragedy of Marian Shkreli, or so it seemed, had been its well-spring, its root cause. In his mind, as if in a hall of mirrors, it had appeared first as a shroud of fog; then as black propaganda; then as a cause that was not what it seemed; then as age-old nonsense and stupidity; then, finally, as pure contingency, which, like a tiny snowball, had been quite enough to set off an avalanche. His mind easily made the jump from avalanche to iceberg: both came from far away — from the high peaks or from the Arctic wilderness; both required subzero temperatures; both were never named; both brought random death (an avalanche can bury a village, an iceberg can sink a liner); and, to clinch the equivalence, both disappeared without leaving a trace, save for human pain and fear.

  Mark’s first sketches showed the uncle’s lonely walk down the mountain, the naked body of the girl at the heart of the tragedy, the distraught features of the brother chosen to carry out the execution. But he put these aside and transferred all the human features of the story to the iceberg. He saw it as a bull, the leader of a herd, with ice-calves in its train alongside the female floes of the clan. The long trek to the North Atlantic, a fruitless drifting that would bring it face-to-face with an immense floating palace of light and music. Blindly, it locked its horns on the ship. When the deed was done, nobody gave a further thought to the old bull. It was still there, standing erect in the water whence the frozen corpses were fished up, but it occurred to nobody to mark it in any way — with a branding iron, for example, as criminals were marked in the Middle Ages, or if not by such a weal, then at least with some other sign, like a half-raised flag, a black sheet, or just a cross.

  The iceberg went the way it had come: namelessly, just a bull in a herd of cattle, with nothing more to say about it. Perhaps it drifted northward again with a great gash in its side, like a war wound from its one single adventure in the world of human beings. The rest of its life among fellow bergs must have been as dull and colorless as it had been before the southern excursion, just like everything else that you could say about it. In old age it would have begun to shrink, and in the end it would have merged with the ice cap, to universal indifference, while some of its younger clansmen would be setting off for far horizons, toward the very place where it had once brought death and destruction.

  Mark thought someone had knocked at his door. It was his girlfriend, but he had been so buried in his painting that, for the first time in his life, he hadn’t heard her footsteps coming up the stairs.

  He kissed her ebulliently; she responded in kind. They had not seen each other for three weeks. He whispered sweet nothings in her ear, but couldn’t stop himself from confessing what he had resolved not to say to her at all: that after all that had happened, he had been afraid that she would never come back to him. Then, since she asked him what he had been doing, he tried to explain it all as best he could. So, my brother looks like an iceberg? she said, trying to make it sound like a joke. No, not your brother, but your uncle, and actually, less your real uncle than the Kanun itself, or to be more precise, the essence of the Kanun, which is really ineffable … He realized that the more he tried to explain what he was doing, the less sense it made.

  “I just can’t explain it!” he burst out in the end, with a laugh. “To do that, I would have to be as logical as ice…. But hang on, it’s getting rather chilly in here. I’ll just light the stove.”

  When the stove was roaring nicely, Mark opened the lid and moved the bed over toward it.

  He had imagined that the whole highland folk story would have bored her, but in fact it produced the opposite effect. Color came to her cheeks, she couldn’t hide her desire to hear more about it. He stroked her breasts, then, burning with desire, he looked at her hairless underarm. As he got a condom out of the drawer in the bedside cabinet, she held his hand and whispered in his ear, as if it was a great secret:

  “There’s no need. I’m on the pill.”

  * * *

  As usual, after lovemaking they began to talk about what they should properly have discussed beforehand, but which desire had set aside or made seem unimportant. Her brother had been in hiding since the day of the shooting. A kind of muffled calm had descended on her family. The contraceptive pills, well, they’d come from a cousin of hers, who’d got them from Tirana…. Strange to say, the unprecedented circumstances at home had not dulled her sexual desire but had sharpened it. I guess you noticed that, she said, kissing him on the nape of his neck. He let her know he agreed and was ready to have another go…. This time was really sublime, she said. She took the cigarette from Mark’s fingers, drew deeply on it twice, and then realized she needed to wash up.

  She went home before dusk. From the bay window, Mark watched her walking away. He wondered whether a woman’s bearing was different after she’d made love, but found no answer to the question. Without you, he thought a moment later, I have no answer to anything. He tried to imagine her sexual parts changing shape in time with her step. How many times — especially when he was suffering the pangs of desire — had he attempted to draw those private parts, without ever quite being satisfied with his drawings? There was always something missing. And as soon as he tried to get it down on paper, he invariably left out some other trait. He knew it wasn’t a great discovery of his own, but he was convinced that the reason for this was that the invisible part of a woman’s sex — like the unseen part of an iceberg — was the most important. Obviously it was the hidden part that gave it all its value. A street poet whose couplets were circulated by word of mouth had called a woman’s genitalia “a wolf howling in winter under thickly falling snow.”

  Mark shivered with cold as he strode toward the Town Café. He’d noticed there was a special atmosphere in it whenever the chief of police came to have a drink there. On this occasion, he was with the recently appointed prosecutor, and as a result, gossip about the imminent arrest of the bank robbers, as well as more intense recent hopes of capturing Marian Shkreli’s assassin, flew around the barroom from table to table. But though they had these two things very much in their minds, the customers were laughing about something else.
br />   Mark ordered his coffee and tried to stop himself from smiling. That was something he often had to do in this café, when, upon entering, he became aware of inspiring a kind of awe that he thought inappropriate. Sometimes he even felt guilty about coming in and freezing what had been a jolly and relaxed atmosphere in the café. The faces of all these good folk, who till then had been speaking quite freely — telling each other scabrous jokes about parliamentary debates or female buttocks — suddenly stiffened, as if they had been caught in the act. Good God, they imagine I’ve got huge ideas going round in my head, Mark said to himself. Whereas in fact there are only puny little thoughts between my ears, and not even very logical ones…. If his mind ever pulled itself together, it was only thanks to these people.

  As he took small, slow sips of his coffee, he tried but in the end failed to stop his mind from wandering back to his young girlfriend’s body. The outer appearance of the slit between her legs gave no hint of the wild beast screaming in its hidden folds — like a plain-faced and simpleminded guard stationed at the entrance of the treasury. It was even reminiscent of the approach to the deep storage depot (if that was what Mark had seen), with thick bushes hiding the entrance. In any case, what happens inside is inexplicable, Mark thought, and it’s not by chance that Oedipus got lost in that inner darkness.

  “What’s really a priority,” someone at the next table said, “is for people to get their teeth seen to! You may smile, but I’ve been thinking about this for a long time!”

  Mark smiled too, but the speaker continued with his thoughts. “If you want to give a short but serious snapshot of the Communist world as a whole, you couldn’t do better than likening it to a gathering of thousands and thousands of people with bad teeth.”

  “Ah, so you think I should know how to put it all right? Some say start by reestablishing public order, others say stick to the rules laid down by the World Bank, or else start by repairing the roads — but you, you say that the real priority is people’s teeth! Boy, you’ve got some great ideas!”