The researcher interrupted. “You’re the last person who should complain. I’ve asked you a thousand times why you crashed the taxi after seeing a kiss and you won’t give me an answer.”
They both sat in silence, stupefied with exhaustion. You might just as well ask me why I believed Liza Blumb’s story, and I wouldn’t know how to reply, the researcher reflected. We could all ask questions of each other. What right have we got in this pitch-black night to ask about things that are beyond our powers to see?
He was too tired to relate how years ago, at high school, he had been taken to an exhibition of modern art. The students had laughed at pictures of people with three eyes or displaced breasts, or giraffes in the form of bookcases, in flames. Don’t laugh, somebody had told them. One day you’ll understand that the world is more complicated than it appears.
The researcher calmed down again, and his eyes even recovered their earlier tenderness.
“There are other truths, besides those which we think we see,” he said softly. “We don’t know, don’t want to, or can’t know, or perhaps mustn’t …” His unfortunate friend was saying that something impossible had happened in his taxi. This was perhaps the essence. Nobody knows the rest. “What happened in your taxi was something different from what you saw. They had been together on the back seat, innocent and guilty, a man and perhaps a woman who had been murdered, dolls, replicas, shapes and spirits, sometimes together and sometimes apart, like those flaming giraffes. What you saw and what I imagined are evidently very far from the truth. It was not for nothing that the ancients suspected the gods of denying us human beings their superior knowledge and wisdom. That is why our human eyes were blind, as usual, to what happened.”
The investigator felt drained, as if after an epileptic convulsion.
The entire incident could have been something else. He would not now be surprised if they were to tell him that his inquiry was as far from the truth as a biography of the pope, a file on a bank loan or the life story of a trafficked woman from the former East, recorded in desolate police offices near airports.
“I will ask one more question,” he said gently. “Let it be the last. I want to know if, as you drove towards the airport, you heard a strange noise, which you might at first have taken to be an engine fault, but was in fact something else. A noise quite unexpected on a motorway, like a galloping horse chasing you all.”
He stood up without waiting for the answer.
9
The researcher now felt relief rather than despair at having abandoned any attempt to describe the final week.
His conclusion was that not only the final moments in the taxi but the entire last week were impossible to describe. He felt no guilt at cutting his story short. On the contrary, he felt it would have been wrong to continue.
From every great secret, hints occasionally leak out. It is probably once in seven, ten or seventy millennia that something escapes from that appalling repository where the gods store their superior knowledge that is forbidden to humankind. And in that moment, something that would normally take centuries to be discovered is suddenly revealed to the unseeing human eye, as when the wind accidentally lifts a veil.
In that moment of time, these four, that is, the two passengers, the driver and the mirror, apparently found themselves in an impossible conjunction.
Something impossible happened, the driver had said. In other words, something that was beyond their understanding. It was like a story of souls whose bodies are absent. It was this dissociation of body and soul that evidently led to their sense of disorientation and intoxicating liberation, the uncoupling of form and essence.
The file of the inquiry showed that Rovena and Besfort had mentioned this dissociation several times. They had also probably come to regret it.
He recalled now those few ideas, like rare diamonds, that he had exchanged with the pianist about Besfort’s final dream.
What was Besfort looking for in the tomb–motel? They agreed that he was looking for Rovena. Murdered, according to Lulu Blumb; disfigured, according to himself. Or perhaps something similar, which millions of men search for: the second nature of the woman they love.
For hours he imagined Besfort in front of this plaster structure, waiting for the original Rovena, then in the taxi, beside her fugitive form, experiencing something impossible for anybody in this world.
10
It was a silent Sunday noon when Liza Blumberg phoned again after a long interval. Unlike on previous occasions, her voice was warm and somnolent.
“I’m calling to tell you that I withdraw my suggestion that Besfort murdered my friend Rovena.”
“Why?” he replied. “You were so certain …”
“And now I am certain of the opposite.”
“I see,” he said after a silence.
He waited for Lulu to say something more, or to hang up.
“Rovena is alive,” she went on. “Only she’s changed her hair colour and now she’s called Anevor.”
Late that afternoon, Lulu Blumb arrived to recount what had happened the night before.
She had been playing the piano in the late-night bar, the very place where the two women had first met years before. It was the same bar and the same time, just before midnight, and she was feeling sick at heart, when Rovena appeared before her. Lulu sensed her presence as soon as she came through the door, but an indistinct fear that she might change her mind and turn back would not allow her to lift her head from the piano keyboard.
The woman who had entered made her way slowly among the chairs and sat down in the same place as on that fateful evening long ago. She had dyed her hair blonde, to preserve her anonymity, as Lulu realised later. But she walked in the same way, and her eyes, which once you had seen you could never forget, had not changed.
Then they stared at each other, as they had done that first time, but some invisible impediment made Lulu respect the newcomer’s wish not to be recognised.
Meanwhile, her fingers, which had played so naturally on the body of the woman she loved, conveyed to the keyboard all her grief at Rovena’s absence, her emotion at finding her again, her desire and its impediment.
As she finished, exhausted, her head bent, she listened to the whispers of “Bravo!” and waited for her to join her admirers by the piano as she had done before.
She did come, last in line, pale with emotion.
Rovena, my darling, Liza Blumberg cried to herself. But the other woman uttered a different name.
But still she repeated what she had said long ago, and, shortly before the bar closed, the couple found themselves once more in the pianist’s car.
They kissed for a long time in silence. But each time Liza whispered the name Rovena, she failed to respond. They went on kissing and tears moistened the cheeks of both, but it was only in bed after midnight when they were on the verge of sleep that Liza finally said, “You are Rovena. Why are you hiding it?” And the other woman replied, “You’re confusing me with someone else.” After a silence she said it again, “You’re confusing me with someone else,” and added, “but what does it matter?”
Really, what does it matter? thought Lulu Blumb. It was the same love, only in a different shape.
“Did you say a name?” the young woman said. “Did you say the name Rovena?” If she liked it so much, she could use an anagram, as people liked to do these days: Anevor.
Anevor, repeated Lulu Blumb to herself. Like the name of a witch in ancient times. You can dye your hair, change your passport and try a thousand tricks, but nothing in the world will persuade me that you are not Rovena.
As she stroked her chest, she found the scar left by the bullet of his revolver in that scary Albanian motel. She kissed it gently without saying a word.
She had so many questions. How had she managed to escape Besfort? How had she duped him?
With this thought she fell asleep. When she woke next morning Rovena had gone. Lulu would have taken her visit for a dream, but for the n
ote left on the piano:
“I didn’t want to wake you. Thank you for this miracle. Your Anevor.”
“And that was all,” said Liza in a tired voice, after a silence, before she stood up to leave.
As so often before, the investigator’s gaze was caught by the last photograph, which showed Rovena’s dark hair and her delicate arm extended across Besfort’s chest, stretching towards the knot of his tie, as if trying to undo it at the last moment and help release his troubled spirit.
From the window, the researcher watched the woman reach the other side of the crossroads. A distant peal of thunder made him shake his head, but he could not say why, or to whom this negative was directed.
So Lulu Blumb was gone too. She had let him go quietly, as she had done with so many things in this world, and perhaps that distant reverberation was her kind of farewell.
Now he would be left by himself as before, alone with the riddle of the two strangers that nobody had asked him to solve.
11
The researcher had imagined it before, and would do so hundreds of times before his life’s end: the painful progress of the taxi through the traffic on that blustery morning of 17 May, the rain beating against the windows, the long stationary lines, the names of firms and distant cities written on trucks in all the languages of Europe. Dortmund, Euromobil, Hannover, Elsinore, Paradise Travel, The Hague. These names, and their low voices, “What’s this doomsday scenario, we’re going to miss the plane.” – all these things added to their anxiety.
Of course it is late. They want to turn back, even if they do not say so. On both sides, the trap is closing.
“Let’s go back, darling.”
“We can’t.”
They talk in low voices, not knowing if the other can hear. There’s absolutely no way back. The rear-view mirror reflects the eyes of one and then the other. The traffic moves a little. Later it stalls again. Perhaps they’ll hold the plane. Frankfurt Intercontinental, Vienna, Monaco–Hermitage, Kronprinz. Her mind reels. But we’ve stayed in these hotels. (Where we were happy, she whispers fearfully.) Why have they suddenly turned against us? Loreley, Schlosshotel-Lerbach, Excelsior Ernst, Biarritz. He tries to hold her tight.
“Don’t be scared, darling. I think the traffic’s easing. Perhaps the plane will wait.” He puts his arm around her, but the gesture seems distant, as if long-forgotten.
“What are those black oxen?” she says. “That’s all we need.”
He makes no reply, but mutters something about prison doors. He hopes they’ll find them still open, before the sun sets. She is scared again. She wants to ask: where did we go wrong? He tries to draw her close.
“What are you doing? You’re strangling me.”
The taxi speeds forward. The driver’s eyes, as if already caught by something, freeze on the glass of the mirror. Light pours in from both sides, but it is too bright, pitiless. She lays her head against his shoulder. The taxi begins to shake. There is an alien presence inside, prepotent, heedless, with its own powers and menacing laws. What’s happening? Where are we going wrong? Their lips come still closer. We mustn’t. We can’t. There are prohibitive powers and orders everywhere. He says something inaudible. From the movement of his lips, it is a name, but someone else’s, not hers. He repeats it, but again, as in his plaster dream, it cannot be heard. He pleads for the return of the woman he has killed with his own hands. Please come back, be again what you were. But she cannot. No way. Whole minutes, years, centuries pass until there is a great crack, and from out of the encasing plaster the name finally resounds: Eurydice. The tremors suddenly cease. As if the taxi has left the earth. The doors spring open and seem to give the car wings. And so transformed, it flies through the sky, unless it never was a taxi, but something else, and they had failed to notice. But it is too late now. There is no remedy.
Rovena and Besfort Y. are no longer … Anevor …
Dlrow siht ni regnol on era Y. trofseB dna anevoR …
12
More and more often he fell into a drowsy state, from which only the prospect of writing his own will could rouse him. Before drafting it he waited for a final answer from the European Road Safety Institute. Its reply came after a long delay. The Institute accepted his condition. He would deliver to them the results of his inquiry in exchange for the taxi’s rear-view mirror.
In the offices which he visited, they looked at him in surprise, and even with a kind of pity, as if he were sick. At the waste disposal site, he met with a similar reception. It took a long time to find the mirror; he could hardly believe his eyes when at last they handed it to him.
It was not easy to prepare his will. In the course of writing it, he discovered that there was an infinite universe of testaments. Down the ages, history had recorded the most diverse kinds. Testaments had been left in the form of poisons, antique tragedies, storks’ nests, appeals by national minorities or metro projects. The material attachments appended to them were no less surprising, ranging from revolvers and condoms, to oil pipes and the devil knew what. The taxi’s rear-view mirror, buried with the man who had been so preoccupied with it in life, was the first such object of its kind.
He handed over the text of his will for translation into Latin and then into the principal languages of the European Union. He spent weeks sending it to every possible institution he could find on the internet: archaeological institutes, psycho-mystical research units, university departments of geochemistry. A huge and deadly bunker in the United States. Finally, the World Probate Institute.
While dealing with all this, he heard vague pieces of news, some about the long-standing question of whether Besfort Y. had murdered his girlfriend or not. Opinions were as divided as ever. Now there was a third view, that Besfort had indeed committed a murder, but it was impossible to ascertain at what time. In this case the allegation of murder had to be withdrawn, unless it could be shown to have been committed in another dimension in which actions do not take place in time, because time does not exist.
As expected, there were also rumours that Rovena St. (as time passed, some interpreted St. as an abbreviation of “Saint”) was still alive. It was said that Besfort Y. too had been seen, hurrying across a road junction with the collar of his overcoat raised in order not to be recognised. He was even sighted in Tirana, sitting on a sofa after dinner, persuading a young woman to take a trip with him round Europe.
Absorbed in his will, he tried to forget all these things. He returned to the text every day. He would correct words here and there, or remove and replace them, but without altering the essential content.
His will essentially provided for the reopening of his grave, in which, inside his lead coffin, the famous mirror would be buried beside his body.
First, he set a date for his exhumation thirty years hence. Later, he changed this to one hundred, only to erase this and write one thousand years.
He spent what life remained to him imagining what the diggers would find when they opened his grave. He firmly believed that mirrors, into which women looked as they beautified themselves before they were kissed, or murdered, absorbed something of the images they reflected. But nobody in this scornful world had thought of taking an interest in any of this.
He hoped that what happened in the taxi carrying two lovers to an airport, one thousand years ago, would leave some trace, however slight, on the surface of the glass.
There were days when he thought he discerned the outline of this mystery, as if through mist, but there were others when it seemed that the mirror, even after lying for a thousand years next to his skull, opaquely reflected nothing but the infinite void.
Tirana, Mali i Robit, Paris
Winter, 2003–2004
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The Accident Page 18
