“I don’t understand you.”
“Your own fear,” I said. “The fear that your thought was theirs, wasn’t it really your own? Have you yourself ever wanted to break a taboo of that kind? And did they remind you of this. Is that why you lost control and crashed?”
“I don’t understand. Stop tiring me.”
“Calm down … and then? What happened next? Did they manage to kiss?”
“I’m not sure. I don’t think so. That was the moment of impact. Everything was smashed to pieces in the gully. The light was blinding. Devastating.”
2
Each time the researcher left the taxi driver, he had a feeling that something had been left unsaid. He could hardly wait to return, to try again. Next time, he thought, he would make no mistake. The driver held the answer. He would have to give up all his philosophical speculations about two sorts of love, the old one, dating back millions of years, which operated within the tribe, and the new rebellious one that had broken out of that prison. Let others deal with the rivalry or alliance between these two sorts of love and the hopes each of them nourished of treacherously supplanting the other, when the time came. This was a mystery involving the old devices of the world, which from one millennium to the next, in semi-darkness, had shaped the savagery of tigers and the soul’s lusts, pity, shame or hours of peace. He had nothing to do with these things, or with ballads, ancient or modern. His business was with the driver, who perhaps imagined that he had got off scot-free and was out of his clutches. And he had every right to think this as long as the researcher had still not put the fatal question: was he an accessory to murder or not?
That question will come. It will come, my precious. As soon as he had settled various side issues. Then he could forget all those ballads. Or so he imagined, until a moment came when he was compelled to ask himself why he was so fixated on them.
He could easily imagine the horseman with his bride behind him, and the conversation between the two.
“Where are we going? To … the prison?”
“Of course to the prison, where else?”
“But what will I do there? And does the law allow this?”
“I never thought of that.”
“But why? What did you agree to? Why did they let you go? What did you promise them?”
Drumming hooves filled the silence. Then words again.
“Why do you have to go back? Let’s run away, both of us. We are free.”
“I can’t.”
“Why not? What’s holding you back?”
Silence again, and the hooves raising dust.
“Can’t we rest a bit?”
“No, we’re late. This is my third day of leave. The prison gate closes at nightfall.”
“What is that river there? It looks like the one where we first met by the bridge, remember? Why has it turned against us?”
“We have to hurry. Hold on to me tight.”
“But what are those sheep? Those black oxen? Why all this traffic?”
“We’ve got to hurry. Hold tight.”
“Ago, what are you doing? You’re strangling me …”
“Perhaps we’ll arrive before the gate closes. Airports are strict nowadays. Boarding gates are closing earlier all the time.”
With half-closed eyes the researcher shook his head. He could not believe this. A hunch told him that, before his next meeting with the driver, he should visit Lulu Blumb.
Unlike the first time, at these later meetings with the researcher, Lulu Blumb was extremely careful to advance the suspicion that Besfort Y. was a murderer only at a late stage in the interview and after the utmost deliberation.
This was evidently why Lulu Blumb, before coming to the essential point of her story, which later featured most prominently in the conclusion to the inquiry, carefully explained various profound and subtle issues of the kind that she was better placed to know than anyone else. For instance, apologising to the researcher for putting it bluntly, she said with a good deal of pride that many men may have slept with Rovena, but none of them could claim to know the intimate parts of her body better than she did. The researcher expected a comparison with the piano, which she indeed mentioned in passing, before dwelling on the idea that her fingers had transposed the music of Mozart and Ravel, against whose background they had met and later made love, from the keyboard of the nightclub piano to her body. With a sardonic smile, she added that she did not believe that the tedious and often barbarous statements of the Council of Europe about military intervention, terrorism, bombing and other horrors, which were Besfort’s stock in trade, went very well with lovemaking.
Always along the same lines, and evidently wishing to postpone as long as possible the moment when she pointed the finger of blame, Liza Blumberg dispelled some of the mystery surrounding an aspect of the crime that had baffled many. She was as much tortured by pangs of conscience at not having rescued Rovena from Besfort as by grief at her death.
She kept saying this was the first time she had ever been defeated by a man.
During endless days and nights, Lulu Blumb vainly racked her brains. How had Besfort kept the woman he loved so enchained? How had he so terrorised her? How had he made her so sick?
Usually men behaved like complete fools when they discovered that their rival was a woman. They sniggered or felt relieved that it was not another man that had ousted them. Some were devoured by curiosity, and others hoped to beguile their rival. Later, when they knew the truth, they would beat their heads with their fists and curse the day they had grinned like apes instead of howling in dismay.
Lulu Blumb had waited impatiently for that moment. She waited until it dawned on her that it would never come. Besfort would never grow jealous of her. She would be jealous of him. This was the difference between them, which handed the victory to him instead of to her.
The two rivals knew about each other, but in different ways. When Rovena once mentioned a new experience with Besfort, the pianist had cut her off, saying she did not want to know. Rovena retorted that Besfort was quite the opposite and wanted to know everything. At this moment Lulu Blumb went pale. “What do you mean, the opposite?”
It was too late for Rovena to put together a soothing reply … The opposite meant that not only did he not stand in the way of her seeing Lulu, but he even liked to hear … meaning he enjoyed … and he even encouraged her, whenever she quarrelled with Lulu, to make up.
“You slut,” Liza shouted. Rovena, she said, had used their love to excite that bastard’s lust. She had marketed it like some porno film. Like an idiot, she had allowed herself to be used like a doll. Do you understand what I mean? Do you understand German? Do you know what “doll” means? A dummy! That’s how he used you. Like those pimps from your country who put their fiancées on the street. You’ve read the newspapers and heard the radio. But you didn’t stop there. You dragged me into this game. And his lordship, this generous scumbag, gives his permission for you to come to me. In other words, he throws me charity in the shape of yourself. Because that’s what you’ve been reduced to, a dummy. And that’s what I’ve become, a beggar at the church door.
Rovena listened in bewilderment to Liza’s sobbing, which was so much harder to endure than her rage. Besfort wasn’t jealous, because she counted for nothing. To his Balkan male mentality, she, Lulu Blumb, was an object of ridicule, a plaything, a soap bubble, a distraction for Rovena while she remained enslaved to him. She apologised for the word “slut”, and all the other things. She admitted that she could not compete with that monster. She accepted defeat. Perhaps it would be better if they did not meet any more. She had nothing more to say except: God help you!
Rovena wept too. She also begged forgiveness. She told Lulu that she shouldn’t take all these things so much to heart. In the end, he was her husband.
“Husband?” she wailed through her sobs. This was the first she had heard of it … In fact, it was true … They were keeping it secret … At least it was true for Rovena …
“But you were ready to come with me to that little Greek church in the middle of the Ionian Sea to be married …”
“That’s true, but it didn’t really change anything … He was my husband in another sense, I mean, in another dimension …”
3
A secret husband, another dimension. Lulu Blumb said that he alone gave Rovena these ideas. She was totally defenceless against his malign influence. Of course it wasn’t easy. To her horror, even Lulu found herself affected. Her hatred for him gave her no protection.
Her proposal of marriage was the first occasion on which she felt she had successfully challenged him. Rovena’s misery as she walked with Besfort among the churches of Vienna, without entering any of them to be married, gave Lulu the idea that these churches were not theirs and that she herself could take her to a different shrine dedicated to another kind of love.
Was there really some remote chapel somewhere between Greece and Albania where lesbians married, or was all this mere fantasy?
There had been rumours of such a place for a long time, but nobody could pin down the location. There were no pointers to any travel agency or marriage bureau, not a trace on the internet. Of course there were suspicions that trafficking was involved. There was talk of a secret network that procured young women and offered a wedding for three thousand euros, plus three days of bliss with the partner of your heart’s desire, in a fabulous little hotel. The rest was easy to imagine. Greek and Albanian boat owners, who once ferried clandestine migrants, now disembarked these protesting women on deserted coasts, pretending they had lost their way in the storm. There they raped them, put them back on the boat, carried them round in circles and abandoned them again on some remote beach, or worse, drowned them. Or, driven by some incomprehensible fury, the boat owners threw themselves into the sea and perished with the shrieking women.
Rovena knew nothing about this. Lulu Blumb, though terrified by the rumours, still could not give up the idea of this journey.
Sometimes this project seemed to her nothing less than a temptation generated by the vicious imagination of her rival. Besfort Y. was also probably in search of an alternative church for Rovena and himself. A different sort of church, for their extraordinary relationship.
Perhaps he was frightened by the reality of this world and felt estranged from it. This could be why he was in search of another dimension. And, as usual, he had managed to infect Rovena with the same obsession.
A short time before her death, one morning before dawn, Rovena had woken in tears and related to Lulu a dream that she had just had: she had been asking for a ticket at an airport desk, but there had been no room on the plane. She had pleaded and entreated. She needed to go home to Albania, where two queens had died one after another – she was the third one, but she was still abroad. The member of staff had said, “Madam, you’re on the waiting list as an ordinary passenger, not as a queen.” But Rovena insisted that she was a genuine queen. She was expected at the cathedral in Tirana and she had two changes of clothes, because she did not know why she was going there, for her wedding or for her funeral …
Evidently, like so many young women in this world, she was sometimes a slave and sometimes a queen, and could not find her natural place.
The pianist was unable to give clear answers to the researcher’s many questions about the new kind of love that the couple were apparently looking for.
At least that is how she understood it until one day she began to suspect something else. It occurred to Lulu Blumb that these two, in their quest for a still unimagined form of love, were like voluntary patients who agree to test the effects of new and dangerous medicines.
As she had once explained, Besfort, like every difficult personality, felt isolated in the world. Perhaps his quest for a new form of love was connected to this. It was a love that excluded infidelity, yet he also understood that no passionate relationship between a woman and a man can be cemented without the risk of loss. This was evidently the reason why he had willingly exposed their love to this danger, and had divided it into two phases: the first, secure in the past, as if sealed in a bottle, and the second, in which Rovena was no longer his beloved, but simply a call girl.
The researcher himself had told her that they had used the expression post mortem for this second phase. Both had used the phrase, but in fact she was post mortem while he was not. With the introduction of this phrase, she began to die. The project of her murder was contained in essence, if unconsciously, inside it.
It was natural that Besfort should come to this idea. Tyrannical natures prefer radical solutions. He had used every means to accustom himself to the idea of her infidelity. When he saw that none of them preserved him from the anguish of loss, he decided to do what thousands of people in this world do: get rid of his beloved.
Lulu Blumb had detected his inclination to murder before the intelligence agencies started talking about it. His terror of a summons by The Hague Tribunal, the photos of the murdered children in his bag, and Rovena’s tattoos, which were only reflections of his own desires – all these things were sure indications. His passion for destruction was obvious whenever anything stood in his way: an idea, a state, such as Yugoslavia, a cause, a religion, a woman and maybe even his own people.
Rovena had come up against him when she was only twenty-three, and he could not fail to kill her.
They racked their brains to understand why he had virtually turned her into a prostitute. They thought they had found the reason, and pretended as much, but they hadn’t. Gangsters and pimps who whored out their fiancées for dollars were easier to understand than Besfort. Lulu herself had produced some very complicated rationalisations. What if it was very simple, and turning her into a call girl was merely a prelude to murder? After all, in this world, when women are killed, prostitution is the first thing you think of.
She did not want to expand it any further. She was not going to analyse the famous dream with the plaster mausoleum, which was quite obviously a typical murderer’s dream.
If the researcher, for his own or professional reasons, was averse to psychological subtleties, he could forget everything she had said so far and listen only to one thing, the basic explanation which she had given long ago, that Besfort Y. murdered his girlfriend because she had found out his secret depths …
4
The pianist drew a deep breath. She knew that moment at concerts when, after a long silence, the listeners simultaneously breathe again.
These secrets were spine-chilling, she continued. They involved NATO, and internal rifts that could have divided the entire West. If the investigators were scared, what about herself, a defenceless musician?
She talked about this fear, but her interrogator interrupted her gently. Miss Blumb, he said, you have mentioned two quite distinct motives for murder. You called the first psychotic, and this one might be considered political. May I ask you, which one do you believe yourself?
The pianist carefully considered her reply: she believed both of them, but the psychotic motive was probably decisive. The second was a pretext found by Besfort to justify the murder to himself.
Liza lowered her voice, but he kept listening. He had to steer his mind away from the trap into which all the other investigators had fallen. If Rovena St. was no longer alive on the morning of 17 May, another woman must have been beside Besfort in the taxi going to the airport.
You said that the murder took place earlier, he whispered. But what about the body? Why wasn’t it found?
According to her, it was up to the police to find the body. They themselves were talking about a quite different matter. It was vital that he should believe her. She pleaded with him. He must believe that she had been murdered. She almost fell to her knees. Don’t insult her memory by refusing to believe this … She had been murdered, for sure, but she could not say exactly where …
He could barely follow her. Finally, he grasped the thread of her argument, but it was so thin and frail. If he did not believe i
n the murder, it meant he did not believe in their love. Because, as they now knew, their love and the murder were testimonies to each other, and if there was proof of their love there were no grounds to doubt the murder.
The interrogator’s incredulous smile was enough to make Lulu Blumb lose her way.
Breaking a final silence, the longest of all, she admitted that it was natural for a researcher like himself to misinterpret her insistence that Rovena St. and Besfort Y. had not been together on that fatal taxi ride on the morning of 17 May. He might see it as a final attempt on the part of the pianist, who had tried to separate them in life, to divide them in death. He had every right to think this way, but she would be honest with him to the end. To convince him that there had been a murder, she would tell him her greatest secret, something that she had never confessed to anybody and had been sure she would carry with her to the grave. She too, Liza Blumberg, had plotted to murder Rovena …
Her terrible plan involved the remote chapel by the Ionian Sea. She knew of the atrocities that took place there, the women thrown into the sea while the insane boatmen howled with laughter. But she had not been afraid. Until the very end, she had dreamed of a journey from which neither she nor Rovena would ever return. If the boatmen did not throw her into the sea, she herself would have thrown her arms around her lover’s neck and dragged her down into the deep … But apparently what should have happened at sea was fated to happen on land, in a taxi. As always, Lulu Blumb was too late. After this confession, she was sure that her interrogator would understand that her anger at Besfort Y., like any anger against a fellow murderer, could only be of the feeblest sort. She hoped that when the time came for her soul to seek rest, she would pray for him with the same tenderness as for herself.
5
The researcher was sure that Lulu Blumb would never talk to him again after her shocking confession. There had been something conclusive about her story, like the closing of a door, that dashed any hopes of a sequel.
The Accident Page 16
