He spent the entire summer in a lethargic depression of the kind that can land you in hospital.
Determined to keep going in spite of every danger, he thought he would try a new approach, using his research data to reconstruct, day by day and month by month, the story of what might have passed on earth between Rovena St. and Besfort Y. during the last forty weeks of their lives. Like Plato, he knew that this story could only be a pale reflection of its eternal form, yet he clung to the hope of finding the essence by starting from the appearance, however misleading this might be.
It would not be an easy task to tell the story of their last forty weeks, and maybe it would turn out to be impossible. The torrent of events surged ahead, and could not be controlled.
Perhaps he could tame it if he divided it into days and months, or acts or cantos, like an ancient epic.
He had heard that The Iliad took four days to tell. Would this be enough for his story too? Like every story, it would have three phases: the first purely imagined, the second clothed in words and the third finally told to others.
He had a presentiment that he would only be able to manage the first.
And so, one night in late summer, he started to imagine their story. But this effort of imagination was so strenuous, and consumed so much passion and empathy, that it drained his entire life-blood away.
Part Two
Chapter One
Forty weeks before. A hotel. Morning.
As so often in hotels, wakefulness crept up on him from the window. He stared at the curtains for a moment, trying to work out from them which hotel he was in. They told him nothing, not even the city. But he could still recall precisely his dream of a few moments before.
He turned his head. Rovena’s hair, spilt over the pillow, made her face and bare shoulder look even more fragile than usual.
Besfort Y. had always thought that women’s smooth necks and graceful arms were the sort of things that could be used as tactical weapons in war, as decoys by opposing armies.
Fragile, as if he could break her in his arms and master her easily: that is how Rovena had looked twelve years ago, when, for the first time, she had come out of the bath to lie beside him and conquer him. Her breasts were small, like a teenager’s, and strategically important in the battle. After them came her belly, the next snare. Below this, dark, threatening, marked by the dark triangle, lurked the final hurdle. And here he was defeated.
Carefully, so as not to wake her, he lifted the quilt and, as he had done dozens of times before, looked at her belly and the site of his surrender. It was surely the only place in the world where happiness could be found only in defeat.
He covered her up again with the same gentleness and looked at his watch. It was nearly time for her to wake up. Perhaps he still had time to tell her his dream before it faded irretrievably.
How many times, he said to himself, had they repeated all this in one hotel or another, without being entirely sure what “all this” was.
In his dream he had been eating lunch with Stalin. This seemed entirely normal, and it even made no particular impression on him when Stalin’s face alternated with that of a high-school classmate, a certain Thanas Rexha.
“My right hand has gone numb. It’s been like this for four days,” Stalin said to him. “You sign these two treaties for me.”
While he was signing the first treaty, he wanted to ask what it was about. But the second was quickly put in front of him. “It’s secret, but take a look at it if you like.” He felt no eagerness to read the text, but still, more out of a desire to please than out of curiosity, he glanced through the second treaty. It was extremely complicated, with knotty passages that apparently contradicted each other. He remembered again Thanas Rexha, who had given up high school after twice failing the history exam about the German–Soviet Nonaggression Pact on the eve of World War II.
What a crazy dream, he thought. It had continued, but he could not remember how. His eyes wandered from the curtains back to Rovena’s face. Her eyelids were still closed in sleep, but fluttered slightly like a swallow in distress. Normally he got up before her, and whenever he studied her sleeping face, he thought that a woman who is loved opens her eyes in a different way to others.
But Rovena did not wake, and he got up and went to the window in the anteroom, a long way from the bed. He drew aside the curtain slightly and looked stonily at the street, where yellow leaves were falling.
Abstractedly, he listed the names of hotels where they had slept: Plaza, Intercontinental, Palace, Don Pepe, Sacher, Marriott. Their lights glittered palely, blue, orange, crimson. Why was he calling these hotels to mind as if looking for help? And why did they hurry past?
He felt a chill round his shoulders and turned to enter the bathroom. That same soft light glowed below the mirror. It came from her toiletries, her perfume, comb, creams, which had no doubt acquired something special over the years from contact with her face.
Among their sweetest moments had been the times when she had sat on the little white throne next to the bath and washed herself. Under the surface of the water, the patch of her bush would continually change shape, grow fuzzy, ambiguous.
“What are you thinking about?” she would ask him, lifting her eyes from her own body to look at him. “Will you go out for a bit while I get ready?”
He would lie on the bed waiting, and listen as she sang familiar tunes softly to herself.
The night before, they had repeated this ritual almost exactly. But this had not prevented him from thinking again what he had said to her on the street: “Something is not the same as before.”
Rovena was still asleep when he emerged from the shower, without even that clear expression on her face that generally preceded her awakening. Her cheeks and forehead were dull. He remembered when she first arrived, years before. She had sat down, after a sleepless night, as she explained to him later, with the glitter that was fashionable at the time clinging to her cheeks, like the crumbs of dreams. She had looked him straight in the eye to tell him what she had been thinking about on the way: the words of a French song, J’ai tant rêvé de toi.
He had never heard such a natural and direct declaration of love.
I will love you all my life. Yours desperately. He had attached words to that first meeting, like the glitter on her cheeks, that he knew had not been spoken or written until later.
Again, as if looking for help, he thought of the late-night bars with their tiny lights and resonant names: Kempinski, Kronprinz, Negresco. “Oh God, how happy I am with you,” she had said. “Only you bring me this happiness.” He thought he had never properly appreciated these words of hers, but reassured himself with the thought that this was what always seemed to happen in this world.
A fresh gust of wind sent the leaves scurrying round the steel lamp posts. Not just something, but nothing is the same as before, he said to himself.
He had said these words to her as they approached the hotel, and her eyes had quivered, as if she had been found out. “Well …” she said. Then suddenly she collected herself. “That’s not true for me,” she hastily replied. “Not at all.”
She repeated what she had said, but her words, instead of reassuring him, pierced his flesh like nails. “Not in my case. Maybe in yours.”
“Not for either of us,” he replied.
He thought she was awake and he turned his head abruptly, suddenly remembering how his dream about Stalin had continued.
There were just the two of them again, this time at the Novodevichy Convent. It was barely possible to walk through the tightly packed cemetery. Stalin held some flowers in his hand, and seemed to have spent a long time searching for his wife’s grave.
He thought, just wait till he orders me, “You lay the flowers. My hand is stiff.” But Stalin was angry. His eyes were icy. At least don’t let me be there when he overturns the headstone and screams, “Traitor, why did you do this to me?”
He could almost read Stalin’s mind. So yo
u complained about my crimes? If you had been truthful, you wouldn’t have left me alone. To create havoc. Alone on these steppes. In this horror.
Chapter Two
The same morning. Rovena.
This was the first time that I had pretended to be asleep. Why? I do not know. It just happened that way, like in childhood, when I thought that keeping my eyes shut might give me an advantage over people who were awake.
I felt him touch my hair, and then move the sheet to see my belly. It was just at this moment, instead of saying to him “Awake, darling?” that I did the opposite: I squeezed my eyelids tighter. And like in childhood, when I secretly eavesdropped on my parents to find out if they were still angry over my bad behaviour of the day before, I studied not so much him as his back. Everything about him conveyed anger, but I had the impression that his irritation had settled especially on his back.
In fact I had first got to know him through his back. I might say that it wasn’t his eyes, his voice or the way he walked that first made an impression on me, as usually happens, but his back.
Anyone hearing this would call me crazy, or a poseur, the sort of person who always wants to seem original. But I am not like that at all.
“You see that person heading for the main gate? That’s Besfort Y. – the one they were talking about yesterday. The one who had that quarrel over Israel? That’s him, and they’ll probably throw him out of the university over it, if not worse.”
I was curious to see him, but he passed through the gate without turning his head, so that only the dark oblong of his back remained in my mind. It seemed to me to be carrying a burden, almost theatrically. I sometimes think that my peculiar attraction towards men with problems started on that day.
Now, so many years later, in front of the hotel window, his back was just as blank and uncomprehending. His hurtful words about nothing being the same as before, which even in the restaurant cut her to the quick, were now, coming from his back, ten times worse.
Rovena slowly stirred in bed. But from her new position she could learn nothing more. His back was the same as before, but darker, because of the light from the window. It was as if their entire story had returned to the beginning.
When Rovena had been upset before, she had tried to think of his endearments and their times of pleasure. But now, strangely, she could only think of their quarrels, which had mainly happened on the phone. These, when Rovena told Shpresa about them, became encrusted with things she had never managed to say but only thought. He rejected her continual complaints about his masterful nature. (“You have made me a slave. You found me when I was young. You treat me as you please.”)
“He says that vain men secretly like to hear this – but he finds it depressing. Making a slave of someone is nothing to boast about. It’s what all the mustachioed men of the Balkans and the East do. It’s so hard to quarrel with him. Sometimes in the middle of a fight you want to embrace him.”
At such moments, try as she might, Rovena could not cope with the tide of her emotion. She kept thinking: he has me in chains. He calls me a princess, but in fact he knows very well that he is the prince and I am only a slave. “I keep telling myself this, but it changes nothing. Do you understand?” Her friend from Berne replied that it was hard to know what she meant.
“I understand you when you say that together you get on wonderfully and then you quarrel on the phone, although, in my case, with the man I have, the opposite happens – we say sweet nothings on the phone and as soon as we see each other we’re at each other’s throats. I understand that bit, darling, but the other things, about slaves and masters, seem way over the top.”
“I know, I know, that’s how other people’s problems always seem.” Sometimes, explaining a quarrel to her girlfriend was more exhausting than the original argument itself. “I’m trying to tell you simply that he’s preventing me from living my life. I’m not saying he does this on purpose, but the truth is that he has me tied hand and foot and he won’t let me go. His life is going downhill. Mine isn’t, and he only drags me after him. He doesn’t think of me, how young I am, the sacrifices I’m making.
“As I said before, the problem is that it’s hard to quarrel with him, and still harder to win. Once I sobbed out that I had given him my entire youth and asked nothing in return and he replied coldly that he had also given me the best part of his life.” That was how their arguments usually ended. After them he would move on, confident that she would follow. Because he had known from the start that she would follow him, while she had only realised this later, and, crazy as she was, had not only admitted as much to him, but had also written it in letters. Did she understand now?
“No. I don’t understand you,” was her friend’s reply. “You told me the opposite in your letters. You wrote that you were happy, madly in love. After all, every one of us expects this from life, to fall in love. There’s something unpleasant about this expression, looked at from the outside. Falling in love. A bit like falling into a pit, a trap, a kind of servitude. You have every right to get angry with this man Besfort if he treats you badly. But you have no right to get angry about the things that made you fall in love with him in the first place. You should thank him. And if you decide suddenly that this relationship is a mistake, then that’s your fault and not his. Rovena, darling, I don’t understand these things you say. Maybe there are other things that you’re not telling me. I don’t think you know yourself what you want.”
This was in fact the truth: Rovena did not know what she wanted. His jealousy made her angry, but his indifference infuriated her even more. During one of her outbursts about this infamous obstacle that prevented her from living, after his bitter retort, “Aha, so you’ve got some adventure in mind,” he had uttered the hateful phrase: “Do what you want. We’ve never promised fidelity.”
Really? she said to herself. Is that all I mean to you? Just you wait and see.
For days the sour aftertaste of this phone conversation lingered. You will see, she repeated to herself. The day will come and you’ll throw off your mask.
In the midst of her anger, she wondered what that day would be like and what lay behind this mask – and she longed to find out.
He still stood motionless by the window, or rather his back did.
Rovena made a final effort to sleep, even for a few minutes, in the hope of giving the day a different beginning. Like every day of crisis, it was starting badly. A few happy memories were not enough to put it back on course, as she used to imagine. Her memory of the first morning, for instance, when she had woken up in love with Besfort. No doubt the best part of every love story. Towards dawn, alone, in front of your new master. In other words, the tyrant you have fashioned for yourself. The curtains of the room, and your hair on the pillow, the longing in your breasts, all these things that he took one by one into his custody, were transformed.
She could not summon that day to mind, or rather did not want to. A messed-up day like this one called for different memories, of triumph and the spicy taste of revenge, of Lulu’s soft lips as they first kissed in the car, of the music to which she freely allowed the Slovak student to caress her on the dance floor. The first time in her life that she had kissed a woman, and the first time she had been with another man since she met Besfort.
Some vague fear kept her from concentrating. The direction her memories had taken was not a good omen. They say that memories become more intense before a break-up.
She knew this, but there was nothing she could do. She could not endure this fear, with its threat of emptiness. It was worse than the fear when Lulu had first warned her against him. “Listen, darling, and don’t think I am just jealous. I really am jealous, and I’m not hiding it, but jealousy would never make me warn somebody that they might be murdered. I know you don’t believe me, but from all you say he has all the marks of a murderer. That is what murderers are like these days, all sorts of surprising people. You can be murdered by the last person you expect, your financial advis
er or piano tuner, or the priest who says mass on Sunday. Don’t be misled by his white shirts, his ties and those briefcases with the EU logo. Darling, I’m not paranoid, believe me. I know from experience what they are like. That special whiteness of your skin scares me. It tempts that sort of person.”
Lulu only hinted at what she meant by this, for all Rovena’s questioning. According to her, there was a kind of lustrous pallor which was particularly attractive to unstable minds.
The door creaked and she opened her eyes. He was no longer by the window. He must have gone down to drink a coffee, something he often did lately.
Now that he was gone, her mind seemed able to range more freely.
She imagined him sitting pensively at the corner of the bar, as he had done long ago at the café in the Palace of Culture. She had recognised him from a distance on one of his visits to the university over that problem that seemed to drag on without end, but this was the first time that she had looked at him calmly, as he sat with his coffee cup.
This time it had been Rovena who explained to her girlfriend, with whom she was sitting and eating ice cream, the mystery of this man who had got into trouble over Israel, or rather over a chess tournament that he was not supposed to play, or not supposed to lose, she wasn’t sure. It was a complicated business. Perhaps he wasn’t supposed to win it.
“You’ve got me confused. Is he a chess player? You said he was going to teach international law. What a blank look he has. It must be because of what has happened.”
“No, I don’t think he’s a professional player, but I think there are foreigners in the tournaments. You think he has a blank look? It’s that vacancy that I particularly like.”
“I think he’s got under your skin,” said her friend.
Rovena replied, “I don’t know. Perhaps he has. But it was so impossible.”
“What was impossible?”
“Everything. Starting from his coming to the faculty, where we had all expected him …”
The Accident Page 4
