“So you, sir, do you really believe all the things you just listed are actually more important than teeth? Don’t make me laugh! Benighted as you are, you can’t possibly realize that the two Germanys, East and West, which were apparently swooning with the desire to unite, are about to split up again, over the question of teeth! So you didn’t know, did you? You’ve got rotten teeth, we can’t live in the same state as people like you! That’s what the Wessies have started to grunt and mumble….”
“Now tell me just where you picked up that piece of nonsense!”
“None of your business. But the story was on the radio and in the papers, too.”
Within a minute the conversation had drifted on to something else and Mark lost the thread of it. His eyes wandered automatically toward the alcove, where the chief of police and the public prosecutor were sitting. When his glance crossed theirs, he imagined — for the briefest instant — that light flashed between them. His foreboding that they would one day put him through interrogation — or that he would interrogate them — was so powerful that it would have seemed quite natural to him if he had stood up, gone straight over to their table, and said, Look, if that’s what you plan to do, why not get on with it right now? We can pull straws to see who goes first…. Mark sincerely felt no apprehension about such a turn of events. It would not have occurred to him to complain to the Human Rights Watch, in Helsinki or in Tirana. He was anxious to find out what the style of the interrogation would be. He didn’t think much had changed in this kind of exercise since Zeus had begun to put Tantalus through questioning. So the police chief could get on with it. But he shouldn’t expect any quarter from Mark, when it would be his turn to do the questioning. An artist can be as cruel as anybody else. If not more so …
At the next table, a new set of customers had taken the places of the previous drinkers. A well-established conversation on the prospects of a war in Kosovo was in train. Hostilities would break out next winter, no doubt about it. This assertion was hammered out with such force that two of the drinkers seemed to shrink under the blow, bearing the signs of a battle that had not yet hit them.
Mark felt he had to get up and leave this evil café. No, no, he thought, I haven’t done anything to deserve that! And it was true that he didn’t deserve to have liberty, for which he had waited with such fervor for so many years, come to him in the form of lunacy.
The cold outside did him good. As he walked toward home, he passed the town hall, past the corner of the building where official death notices were posted. He stopped for a while to read them, one by one, but in an odd way doubting the truth of each. He was convinced that the number of people who for one reason or another have themselves declared dead though they are still alive was on the increase. It was already four years since a friend of his from Tirana, passing through this small town, had told him that he intended to disappear for a while, if he could earn enough money for it. “It’s safer that way. I plan to settle in Canada, or else have myself declared dead.”
Before taking the turn into his own street, he strolled around the empty square that looks onto the park. Zef’s windows seemed lit, though very faintly. Mark took cautious steps, as if he feared that a clumsy footfall might extinguish the light in the window. But that’s what happened a few minutes later — Zef’s light went out. He thought for a moment that it might be coming back on, but it wasn’t a light, properly speaking. It was more like a pale reflection of the lantern of a cart coming down from the highlands. But that glimmer also quickly disappeared.
It was then that he became sure that a new species of human being — able to move from the light to the underworld and back again — was already among us, in large numbers. They had no name for the time being, but they probably soon would. For instance, they could be called the unliving, or else the undead.
Two or three times he recalled the icy gleam in the eyes of the chief of police. You could not dismiss the possibility that the policeman had thought Mark was a member of the new race.
Mark tried to remember with whom he might have discussed the theft of immortality by Tantalus, but it made him laugh at himself. A conversation of that kind would indeed have made the secret policemen of old prick up their ears, because the words immortal and immortality were not often used outside the context of the Supreme Leader. But all that had ceased to be imaginable. Nowadays, the most that Mark could be suspected of was involvement in the holdup of the bank at B——.
COUNTER-CHAPTER 6
THE STRAIT OF OTRANTO … Where all lie in peace …
There are hundreds of us down here. Some called out to the Virgin Mary as we sank; others invoked Allah, Jehovah, or even Buddha. We are Ukrainian, or Chinese, or Moldovan, or Kurdish, or Italian; and some of course are Albanian.
In our unlife, you might think everything was over, that nothing happens anymore. But you would be wrong. There is never an end, just like there never really was a beginning.
Even down here in the murky depths, something is always going on. Children float down and drown; their transparent hair refracts a mysterious light, like the glow of jellyfish. Other bodies inexplicably rise to the surface — maybe because they have lost weight to carnivorous fish — and their mutilated forms bob around on the waves as if beset by doubt.
All about, innumerable inanimate objects and the outlines of animate beings jostle for space: tin crutches, silver neck chains that have slipped off emaciated necks, homosexuals in stunned embrace, glass eyes, candles, dolls, dock-side cats pursued down to the lower depths by ghosts of tigers, crash helmets, a stone from the Berlin Wall inscribed with “A Souvenir of Andy, a refugee,” slimy condoms looking like ordinary mollusks, low-denomination dollar bills, hymn books, taillights from a police car, old boots, detergents, alphabet books, and finally, an unexploded NATO bomb, which will surely spread panic….
So that after you too have passed through the clutter, the whole mess — transparent children, crutches, gays, the stop sign, the tiger ghost, coffins, hymnaries, eels, champagne bottles — reappears in a different order.
A polished silver mirror thrown in from who knows where — maybe by Death herself, whom in our blindness we think invisible, but who walks in our midst.
And so our wailing — simultaneously a plea, a lament, and a curse — fills every part of this watery grave. O Strait of Otranto, may you be dammed and dry up to nothing! Let the sun consume you! And may cartloads of salt and mortal poison be heaped upon you until the end of time!
CHAPTER 7
JUDAS HAD REAPPEARED IN B——. This time, he was alone.
He spent Friday night at the hotel, then, after breakfast, went back up to his ice-cold room. It was rumored that the names of the writers he had denounced, along with those of the refugees who had recently escaped to Germany, would soon be published.
He had been seen the previous Saturday, rucksack on his back, making his way along the road leading out of town. Apparently it was the rucksack that made everyone assume that, like most Germans, whose manners he had adopted, Judas had taken up country rambling at the weekend. It had become a fixture in the town of B——, and Cuf Kertolla had even declared portentously that it was easier to strike a German dead with a single blow than to keep him shut up in town at the weekend.
Others, who had become universally skeptical in recent years, to the point where no proverb or poem could dispel the dark clouds that constantly gathered in their minds, thought it more prudent to drink up their coffee and go see with their own eyes whether this Wanderung was simply an exercise in the German manner or a walk of a different kind.
They came back not long after with a look of triumph on their faces, saying that they had been right: just as they suspected, Judas had made his way to the higher ground, to the place where people believed the deep storage depot of the National Archives was still to be found.
So that’s what was up!
This discovery, which would have sounded quite dramatic only a little while before, was repea
ted around town, only in a tone of mild disappointment. In recent months, so many people had poked around the area where the Secret Archives were supposed to be stashed that the fact that Judas had been up there as well seemed unsurprising, even banal.
Once the first wave of archive hunting subsided, the fever resumed that spring, together with the seasonal improvement in the weather. The movement was set off by a pair of rascals from the nearby village, who had been stalking a couple of tourists, hoping to see them indulging in open-air frolics. They were disappointed: the tourists took some maps out of their backpacks and started walking around in circles like a pair of simpletons. That was all it took to reignite the old obsession and to revive the memory of its now-distant origin — the visit, many years before, of the newly appointed head of state.
Around the place where the archives were supposed to be hidden, all sorts of people could be seen every day, or almost every day, especially on weekends. There were day trippers pretending to be on a picnic; people from Tirana who claimed to want to admire the view of the early autumn snow on the peaks; others claiming to be there for a rendezvous, or members of religious sects, or even geologists. Some of them seemed agitated and jumpy; others looked desperate, as if suffering some inner torment; and yet others wept in silence. There was no way of distinguishing between those who had come to hide something and those there to find something hidden. Smooth-faced, bespectacled tourists would suddenly drop their amiable smiles and reach into their packs for digging tools they had camouflaged in a variety of unsuspected ways — inside boxes of spaghetti, mountain boots, even a violin!
It was said that the ground around the site was a honeycomb of pits and tunnels, but that was perhaps only the fruit of journalists’ unbridled imaginations. In any case, no one could recall such an invasion of visitors since the time when new chrome ore deposits had been discovered in the area, a moment when, to its great surprise, Albania found itself the world’s third-largest producer. The national daily reported on the excitement gripping the little northern town of B—— by recalling the old diggers’ rush with a pun on the word chrome. Under the headline “Chrome Diggers Become Crime Diggers” the paper pointed out that the ex- ploration fever that had now seized the little town for the second time was spreading to other parts of Albania, more specifically to those other areas where there were reasons for supposing that the Secret. Archives might be tucked away. The article ended with a question: Had there really been a deep storage depot at B——? Was it located some- where else? Did it really exist at all?
Mark was highlighting the last sentence in the paper when he heard a child’s stifled scream coming from behind his chair:
“Sir! Sir!”
He turned around and saw a Gypsy boy, of the kind who regularly came to beg in the café. The lad asked for some small change, which Mark gave him. But the beggar boy didn’t go away. He kept trying to say something with his hands.
“Get lost!” Mark ordered. “Enough’s enough!”
The ragamuffin put his mouth to Mark’s ear and whispered a few words. Mark could make out only a few, and those with some difficulty: a girl… on the corner … looking at the poster …
Mark raised his open hand.
“Are you going to get lost, or do you want this across your face?”
Mark was astounded that the Romany didn’t give the slightest sign of being scared.
“Dont be angry, sir, I’m not a pimp. It’s your girlfriend who’s sent me. She’s waiting for you on the corner.”
Mark jumped up, paid for his coffee, strode across the room, and as soon as he was outside, began to run.
He could see the girl from a long way off. She was indeed waiting at the corner, pretending to look at the film posters.
“I’m sorry to disturb you,” she said before he could get a word in. “I’ve been looking for you all over.”
“What’s happening? Tell me quickly!”
“Nothing of what you might think. Only I really need you now. It’s urgent; I just had to see you right away.”
“So tell me!”
“I can’t speak here. I’ll come to your studio this evening.”
“This evening? In other words, tonight?” Mark said, not without surprise.
They had never spent a night together, even though Mark had often dreamed of it.
She nodded.
“Yes, this evening, and until late, as late as possible.”
Mark couldn’t believe his ears.
“So you’ll spend the night with me?”
She sighed deeply.
“I beg you, please, don’t ask for details!”
She seemed to be finding it hard to express herself. Mark said:
“Okay, okay, I won’t ask any more.”
“Good. Wait for me in the studio until late, maybe even after midnight.”
He could barely stop himself from asking her what this was all about, but he had never seen her looking so forlorn.
They started walking side by side without a word. The street was littered with autumn leaves; oddly enough, the leaves seemed to assuage their fears.
“Now I have to go,” she said. She took two steps, and then turned around. “My darling, believe me, I can’t tell you anything else…. When we meet again, you’ll see I’m right.”
He forced a smile, then watched her as she walked away with a gait that, it seemed to Mark, disguised some guilty secret.
“When we meet again, you’ll see I was right,” he muttered to himself, repeating her words over and over.
He expected to be lost in speculation about the nature of the mystery, but to his great surprise his mind — which usually raced off in excitement at the slightest provocation — found itself utterly calm. For the time being, he was even surprised that the scene that had just taken place had not happened much earlier. There had been so many circumstances that could have led her to say, I am in terrible trouble, wait for me on the stroke of midnight!
In his mind, several different scenarios jostled each other clumsily: she was running away from home; her brother had threatened suicide; she was pregnant; her fearsome uncle had returned; she wanted him involved in negotiations to patch up the quarrel; she was trying to get hold of a visa (rather than just making an application) so that her brother could seek refuge in Switzerland…. Mark proceeded slowly along the icy street. The sight of the bare poplars was as restful to his eyes as the dead leaves on the ground, if not even more relaxing.
How ghastly! Mark sighed as he stood in front of the bay window of his studio. He’d never before seen time slowing down in the shape of a fat and dawdling mammoth. He’d used all the regular tricks to make time flee faster — walking around town, puttering about with odd jobs he’d been putting off for ages, painting, rolling his own cigarettes, dropping off for a snooze…. Not only did they have no effect on the mammoth, they appeared, for the most part, to produce the opposite result.
When evening came, he made a kind of discovery: daytime waiting was different from waiting at dusk, which in turn was distinct from a nighttime vigil. He still had to experience the most acute form of the latter state, when all his waiting would condense as at the leading edge of a comet: waiting after midnight.
Since he had prepared himself for it, the last stage of waiting turned out to be less dreary than he had imagined. Sheer fatigue numbed his senses somewhat, so that the first minutes after midnight seem to pass quite quickly.
When he heard her coming up the stairs, the first thing that occurred to him was that his girlfriend was not alone. But his brain was in no state to process it, and only when he opened the door and saw the figure standing behind the girl did he almost exclaim, I thought as much!
“My brother Angelin,” she said.
Now he was sure he had guessed correctly. The boy’s thin, badly shaven face matched in every particular the visage he had often imagined. Yes, of course, he had guessed! Just as he had intuited that his girlfriend, like most Albanian women, more than
a wife or a mistress, was first and foremost a sister.
His first thought after closing the door was to go and take down the nude for which she had sat. Though the face was still only sketched in, he felt that the other man would also be able to identify her by her sexual organs. He must be familiar with them. He must have seen his sister. Maybe he had even touched her, some summer afternoon…. That pill she had taken at an unexpected time, when she was in distress about her brother … My God, maybe it wasn’t so much the fear of getting pregnant as the unconscious terror of consanguinity that had pushed her toward the pill?
“Sit down, please,” Mark said to the two of them, thinking inwardly, What a mess we’re in! Then: “You must excuse me, if I seem distracted, but you can understand that…”
“Of course,” the young woman said. “We are too. Angelin and I wanted first of all to ask you to forgive us for disturbing you at such a late —”
“No matter,” said Mark.
He would have liked to add that he thought it quite natural that they should turn to him, but he immediately saw-that if the young man was unaware of their relationship, then there was no reason for Angelin to find it natural
He remembered the bottle of schnapps. It was like a life buoy, and he busied himself for a moment with getting it and some glasses out of the cupboard.
“Mark,” she said, with her eyes steady on him. “We have come about something very important.”
“I was sure you had,” he replied.
She took a deep breath. He quickly realized that only she would speak. The brother and the sister must have gone over the issue many times together, he thought, for hours on end, side by side….
What she said turned out to be a bit of a muddle. Conventional ways of saying things seemed not much use in the context. Rather the opposite: instead of opening up new lines of thought, they seemed to block things off. Her brother had killed, in circumstances that were obscure. Contrary to what many people thought, he had not been pressured into committing the act by some devotee of the ancient Kanun — such as their uncle. It was sheer chance that made their uncle’s four-day stay coincide with the period of deep distress that Angelin had gone through. If they had had a different visitor at that time — say, the leader of a Japanese or Tibetan sect, a collector of weapons for Kosovo, an Irish Republican, or a member of a secret society recruiting suicide bombers to rid the world of dictators — then Angelina fate might also have been quite different. But what came up was the Kanun, and he had been entranced by it. It really was bad luck that news of the Kosovo uprising had been so long in coming, just like the reply from the Association of Young Idealists in Tirana.
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