In their presence, something still seemed missing. They threw their arms round your neck, spoke loving words, gave themselves to you, but your thirst remained unslaked. He told himself that nothing was missing. He was asking for more than he should. And yet something still percolated across the dividing line, the caresses, the voluptuous tears.
Even when you thought they were defeated by suffering and that they had become like the rest, it was not true. Some protective avatar came to their aid. You thought that she had really been with you, her moans were still in your ears and her tears damp on your cheeks, but meanwhile she had consigned her true self, her indestructible original, to some distant place. And against this you were powerless. And if this drove you to fury, if her lovely neck, her lips, breasts, hips, and the sex which she gave you, were not enough and you sought to extend your dominion over her invisible self, then the only way to do this was through murder.
When he first saw Rovena perched as casually and lightly as a swallow on the sofa, that is how he had pictured her in some dark region of his imagination, like a small bird targeted by a weapon.
Without doubt, she was “one of those”. This expression is usually used of whores. But her case was different. She had all the marks of beautiful women, that elusive dividing line, and everything else, in an astral conjunction. To himself he said, no. He had never been the kind to chase women, still less now, and he was not going to resort to pitiful clichés about his heart still being young although his youth was over. He thought that the opposite was true of some men: not the body, but the heart aged first. He was one of them.
When he thought back to that after-dinner meeting, he could never remember the turning point at which he allowed himself to be lured.
The pounding of the train’s wheels seemed right for long memories. These events called for that sort of rhythm.
The plain lay half-covered in snow. Which country was he in? The blanket of snow had created a united Europe before the statesmen could shade it on their maps.
The train thrummed monotonously. His cheap little game with Rovena, of the sort played billions of times in this world, lasted much longer than he expected. The young woman suddenly became difficult. In any other case, this resistance would have increased her value, but this time it had the opposite effect. This was how ordinary girls behaved, not “that sort”.
Beautiful women did not resort to stratagems of this kind, because they did not need to. Rovena was losing her special characteristics. This was why he could invite her on the trip so casually and shamelessly.
In the hotel, he was relieved rather than disappointed when he saw her young girl’s breasts. This deficiency seemed sent by the gods to protect him. Pale, delicate, defenceless, she looked less like a dangerous woman than a little martyr.
But this respite was short-lived. A few weeks later, as her breasts bloomed, she had regained everything: the invisible dividing line, the playfulness in her eyes, her mystery. She waited impatiently for him to show his pleasure, but instead he froze. Finally, he produced the word “heavenly”, but he knew that he had wanted to use the word for something else, not her swelling breasts.
There was something back to front about this story.
Moreover, Rovena whispered into his ear that these breasts were because of him. This terrified him. He would have found it a thousand times easier to cope with a pregnancy. But this relationship of a different kind, which seemed to involve the female blood line, what Albanian customary law called “the milk line”, awoke in him only horror.
Now he was the defenceless one, like after that dinner long ago. And just as when on the sofa she had looked like a bird targeted by a weapon, he heard now an inner voice warning him against this relationship.
Of several dreams that he had had, there was one he particularly did not like to think about. Rovena was trying to peer sidelong at a scar that descended from her throat to her white breasts, a lesion that sometimes resembled the sign of the cross and sometimes a mark of strangulation.
Lulled by the familiar sound of the trains as he crisscrossed Europe on his wearisome journeys, he thought of leaving her dozens of times. Next time, he said to himself. Next time would be the last. The Balkans, meanwhile, were in flames, and so he put it off.
“Did you think about our separating even then? Before you told me that nothing was the same as before? Tell me, please. While we went from one hotel to another, and I thought you were happy, were you getting ready to say this?”
It was hard to answer, impossible.
Who in this world knows what he is getting ready for? You set off in one direction and you know it’s wrong, but you pretend to believe you’re on the right path.
He had persuaded himself, and later Rovena, that they had gone to the Loreley to rekindle their passion, but deep down they knew it was for another reason. He had wanted to settle accounts in advance – with jealousy, with the pain of separation, with infidelity. Like a boxer in training to take punches without getting badly hurt, he would grit his teeth and prepare to see her in the arms of another man, before his very eyes.
Once he had outfaced all these lesser fiends, Rovena herself, when the time came, would pose no danger to him.
He knew it was wrong of him to take the side of this evil pack that included self-interest, duplicity and perfidy, and which could one day be used against him. But this did not frighten him.
His best hope, but the worst for Rovena, was to turn her into a call girl. This was the only way to dethrone the woman he loved. Otherwise, wearing her crown, and in her natural shape, as she had appeared to him one hundred years before, on the sofa after dinner in Tirana, Rovena was impossible to deal with. The years had not diminished her but only made her more dangerous.
This new mask, tawdry as it was, was his last hope, and behind it there remained only . . . only . . . What was it that lay behind the mask and its tawdriness? Perhaps a loss of lustre, a wiping away of steam from the face of the mirror, like an erasure, which itself was a form of escape, and so on, until one reached the bare and brutal thought of something . . . that resembled murder. He was astonished at the appearance of this temptation. It arrived suddenly, quietly, hovering as if above some barren plateau in his mind. There it took shape, inert and motionless, unconnected to measurable time. He thought less of the murder itself than of the ease of committing it. A murder was not difficult in Europe, and was easier in Albania than anywhere else. Everywhere there were little motels, which no one ever noticed, where every trace could be obliterated for two thousand euros.
Besfort Y. shook his head, as when he wanted to shake off a nasty thought.
It couldn’t be true, he said to himself. These thoughts were like the images of sleep that came and went for no cause or reason.
He imagined Rovena dozing, her knees drawn up on the seat in her train carriage, which could as well be the sofa that evening in Tirana, and he longed for her.
The drunk had followed him. Besfort felt his breath before he heard his voice. “These signs with the wrong mileage, and the wrong directions, you don’t need to speak the language to understand them.”
Besfort turned his back to him.
He felt tired and numbed by the noise of the train. The turning wheels beat out Rovena’s pitilessly repeated question: why was he doing this? What was he looking for? He was surely looking for something impossible. Just like him . . . the dictator . . . He was looking for the love of traitors.
The monster, he thought. How could he infect us with this disease?
Twelve weeks before. The other zone.
Three chapters from Don Quixote.
He was the first to call it “the other zone”. Then they both used the phrase as naturally as if it were the eurozone or the Schengen area.
He sent her the plane ticket to come to Albania with a brief note. “This time you’ll see your family. I think this will suit. I really am curious. B.”
He looked lingeringly at the word “curious”, as if it were of archaeological interest, like a stone inscription. Under it lay another stratum, with his earlier phrase, “I really am . . . missing you” now cruelly buried.
She replied in the same style. “Thanks for the ticket. I’m very curious too. R.”
Let happen what may. Just let me see her.
Of course both were curious. For the first time they were in that other region, where everything was different, starting with the way they talked.
In one of their few phone calls before their arrival, she had said, “How amazing that we’ll do this in Tirana.”
The other surprise came when he said to her that they would meet in a motel. Without giving her time to speak, he told her not to worry. This is normal in Albania nowadays.
Late in the afternoon, he collected her in his car from the street outside her house. From a distance he made out her elegant figure on the pavement and groaned inwardly, “Oh God.”
As they sped along the Durrës motorway he looked at her profile out of the corner of his eye. She was white, just as he had expected. Alien, with the frozen expression of a doll, or of Japanese make-up. He had never desired her so much.
The car left the motorway to follow the road beside the beach. The lights of restaurants and hotels shone on both sides. She became animated for the first time as she read their names out loud: Hotel Monte Carlo, Bar Café Vienna, The Z Motel, The Discreet, The New Jersey, The Queen Mother’s Hotel.
“This is unreal,” she said. “When were all these built?”
Their hotel was set back from the road, almost in darkness among pine trees. They registered with false names. The proprietor showed them to their room. The restaurant was on the first floor. If they wished, supper could be brought to them.
The room was warm, with a burgundy carpet and provocative pictures on the walls. In the bathroom, by the side of the tub, was a bas-relief with three naked female figures.
“How amazing . . .” She said no more as she opened the curtains to look at the pine trees and the sea behind them, now dim in the dusk. He leant against the bedhead watching her wander about the room like a shadow.
“Shall I get ready?”
He nodded. He felt a compression in his chest, as he lay in a trance of happiness. How would she “get ready” this time? Differently from before, he was sure . . . The lamps glowed softly. His heartbeat slowed as he imagined her undressing. Of course it would be different from before, and she would take longer to prepare herself.
He thought that she would never come out. How long she’s taking, he thought. He could no longer hear the slight noises to which his ears had been accustomed for years.
He got up from the bed and slowly moved to the bathroom, as if sleepwalking. The door was half open. He pushed it and entered. “Rovena,” he said aloud. She was not there.
Her toiletries, comb, perfume bottle, lipstick were all there, beneath the mirror. A pair of silk panties lay beside the bath, delicate, pale blue, as if part of the porcelain decoration. “Rovena,” he said again, faintly now. How could she have vanished like this? Unnoticed, without even a creak of the door.
He looked at her things again in the mirror, and at his own face, now grown unfamiliar. She was yours and you lost her, he said to himself reproachfully. You let her slip though your fingers.
He turned abruptly, thinking she had suddenly appeared. But it was not Rovena herself. It was her image. One of the figures on the bas-relief strangely resembled her. How had he failed to notice this? So there’s the plaster you wanted, he said to himself. It was no mere simulacrum. This was Rovena herself. Apparently, she had found her form and taken shelter in it. That was her very neck, her breasts, her marble belly, all distant, on the other side, just as in his folly he had dreamed. Crazy, he said to himself. Lunatic.
He sat on the side of the bath and held his head in his hands. He wanted to weep. Nothing like this had ever happened before. He thought he would sit there for ever, until he felt a hand touch his hair. He didn’t open his eyes, terrified of seeing the marble arm stretching out from the bas-relief and stroking him. He heard her voice, “Besfort, are you asleep?” and he shivered.
She was standing beside the bed, with the white hotel bathrobe half open about her.
“I don’t know what happened to me,” he said. “I dozed off.”
Here were the same breasts, the same marble waist that he had seen a few moments ago as he slept.
He drew her to him hurriedly and eagerly, as if to prove that this was warm flesh and blood, and she responded. Her neck and armpits were warm and soft, but her lips were still imprisoned in the marble. Fiercely, like a storm accompanied by claps of thunder, their lips brushed against each other, but without daring to violate the eternal pact between a whore and her client: no kissing.
He kissed her belly and groaned as he moved lower, to the dark cavern, where the rules were different and so was the pact.
As his panting subsided, without waiting for the usual question, how was it?, she said softly into his ear, “Heavenly.”
He stroked her hair.
Outside, darkness must have fallen.
He suggested a walk beside the sea before dinner. The darkness was sinister. The iron railings round the villas stood black and forlorn.
She leant against his shoulder, their conversation barely audible against the booming of the waves. She asked if those pale lights in the distance were from King Zog’s villa. Besfort thought they might be. The heir to the throne and his court had recently returned to Albania, along with Queen Geraldine. The newspapers reported that she was close to death.
“Incredible,” she said after a pause. He wanted to know what she found incredible, and she tried to answer, but her words were partly obliterated by the sound of the sea. The restaurants along the road with their Hollywood names were incredible, and so were the villas with their private swimming pools, the former communists turning into oligarchs, the former middle classes turning into God knows what and the glimmering lights of the Royal Court with their tug of nostalgia.
For some reason she wanted to burst into tears. Besfort and his madness were stranger than all these things – and so was she herself as she followed him through that darkness.
They could hardly find their way back. Don’t turn down your coat collar, he said, when they were close to the motel. She wanted to ask why, but remembered the false names and said nothing. They ordered supper in their room. There were all kinds of specialities and expensive wines on the menu. The proprietor recommended game, just delivered, and Italian Gaja wine, the prime minister’s favourite. A likely story, said Besfort. But he made no objection.
When they were left alone, their eyes met tenderly. Usually after a glance of this sort, she would say, “How happy I am with you!” He waited to hear the words, but saw her hesitate. He bowed his head.
Really, nothing was the same as before.
She said something else he could not catch, as if it were in a strange language. “What?” he asked softly. She asked him if she should get changed, wear something more, you know, stylish, for supper.
“Of course,” he replied. Just like a call girl, he thought.
Her black velvet dress accentuated the unbearable whiteness of her décolletage and the exposed sides of her breasts that drove him to distraction. He could not believe that he had slept with her hundreds of times. Or just two hours before.
“Just now, when we were by the sea, we saw the lights of Zog’s villa and I remembered what you told me last time about the bogus conspirators.”
“Really?”
“Don’t be so surprised. I never forget anything you tell me.”
She touched her forehead, as people do when making fun of themselves. “I kept thinking of what you said during those three weeks when I was writing the part of my dissertation about the conspiracies against King Zog.”
“And what were those conspiracies like?”
Finally she laughed. There were pale crimson patches on her cheeks and neck from the wine.
“At least they were real.”
“I’m sure they were. But you’ll tell me later, won’t you.”
From the way they looked at each other, they seemed to be thinking the same thing. That at least the hour after midnight would be the same as before.
“You’ll tell me about the plots against the king, and I’ll tell you something else.”
“Really?” she said. “What fun!”
“Goddess, tell me about the plots against the king, the real ones.”
“We didn’t give real names at the reception,” said Rovena teasingly.
He did not reply. His expression was stony.
She cast playful glances at him, but his face in profile became even more rigid.
“Do you remember the first time we went to the Loreley?” he asked suddenly, coming round.
“The singles club? What made you think of that now?” said Rovena. “That must be four or five years ago.”
He laughed.
“More like four or five centuries.”
With a relaxed smile, she waited for him to sit down beside her again. He held in his hand a small book bound in burgundy.
“Four or five centuries? Did you really mean that?”
“That’s what I said.” Besfort took a deep breath. “Do you remember when we opened the door to the Loreley. I don’t think we were the first couple to feel shocked. It was the fear of breaking a taboo.”
He would never forget that late afternoon when, both hiding their nervousness, they got ready to go there. As they moved round the room, they lowered their voices.
The most hurtful pang was to see her lengthy preparations in the bathroom. He watched her through the half-open door: her concentration in front of the mirror, touching up her eyelashes, giving some last attention to her underarms. This was the first time he had seen her getting ready not just for him, but for all the male sex.
“Of course I remember,” she replied.
Besfort gave her a penetrating look. “Everybody thinks this is a new, modern experience, but it’s been well known down the ages. At least it was described four or five centuries ago in this story.”
Rovena read aloud the title of the little book: “Miguel Cervantes,
The Tale of the Foolish Test of Virtue
. This is part of
Don Quixote
, isn’t it?”
“Exactly. Long before he produced his full translation, Fan Noli published this extract, to whet his readers’ appetites. No doubt about it, this describes an early version of a modern singles club.”
“How extraordinary,” she said.
“And to think that Noli was a long-faced bishop of Albania. And a conspirator, I think. You will know more about it.”
“Not just a conspirator, but the absolute linchpin. He was involved in at least three plots.”
“It’s an uncanny story,” Besfort went on.
He had made notes in the margin while reading, as if interpreting an occult text.
She was leafing though it with curiosity, but Besfort gently took it out of her hands.
“You can have a look at it after supper.”
He raised his glass.
“The wine is delicious, but I think I’ve drunk enough,” Rovena said.
Her cheeks bore the blush that naturally brings love to mind. At the entrance to the Loreley her face had been pale. He now knew for certain that she was attracted to the prospect of transgression, avoid it as she might.
“I’ll take a shower,” said Besfort. “You’ve got time to look through that little book, if you like.”
“I certainly will,” she said. “I can hardly wait.”