Everywhere in the world events flow noisily on the surface, while their deep currents pull silently, but nowhere is this contrast so striking as in the Balkans.
Gales sweep the mountains, lashing the tall firs and mighty oaks, and the whole peninsula appears demented.
Yet what happens deep below in the world of rumours and undercover investigations may also be taken for madness, often of an even more serious kind.
Or that is what an external observer might have thought of the two secret services as they zealously followed the trail of this case, which was becoming more like a ghost story.
It was the Serbian agents who showed the first signs of flagging. Their Albanian counterparts, although reluctant to admit it, felt that they had become entangled in this case simply in order not to fall behind their rivals, and could hardly wait to give it up.
It was some time later, when least expected, that a researcher’s careful hand delved once again into the deep recesses of the archives. The delicacy of this hand with its long, thin, elegant fingers drew attention to the many marks left on the arm by anxious nurses struggling to find a vein to take blood. The researcher unearthed not only the files of the two victims but also hundreds of other statements by witnesses, known and unknown. And so, month by month and year by year, an astonishingly variegated mosaic took shape. Where the secret services of two states had failed, this single researcher almost succeeded in solving the riddle of kilometre marker 17. He did this without funds or resources or powers of constraint, indeed without any motivation of duty or profit, but solely under the pressure of a personal concern never revealed to anybody.
Just as a galaxy may, from a distance, appear immobile, but to a close observer reveals the terrible convulsions and explosions of light roaring in its depths, so the file of this researcher, whose name was never divulged, displayed, apparently at random, but in fact in an esoteric order, the myriad tiny fragments making up the mosaic. Of course, all the old data was there, mostly enriched with new details. There were the names of hotels, even the numbers of the rooms in which the couple had slept, the evidence of cleaners and barmen. There were bills of all kinds, charges for phone calls, fitness centres, driving lessons, visits to the doctor and prescription receipts. This was not all. There were Besfort Y.’s two dreams, told directly to Rovena, one with a transparent meaning and the other totally impenetrable. Again there were fragments of letters, diaries, subsequent reconstructions of phone conversations, mostly accompanied by suppositions and deductions that at first seemed contradictory but could later be reconciled, only to diverge and merge again in ever more startling ways.
The woman had grouped together days of happiness with a precision that recalled the weather reports on the evening news, comparing one hotel to another, the intensity of pleasure and the degree of excitement. All these notes were matched to the testimonies of the female staff, who remembered the kind of perfume the young woman wore, the lingerie carelessly discarded at the foot of the bed and the stains on the sheets showing that the couple never took precautions. Equally precise were her records of hours of despondency after angry phone conversations, her complaints and her despair. Between these two states there was a third, perhaps harder to describe, a grey zone, as if shrouded in mist.
She used this very word “zone” in one of the rare letters she had sent to Shpresa in Switzerland.
“Our meetings are now in a new zone. It’s no exaggeration to say a different planet. Ruled by different laws. It has a chilly quality, frightening of course, but still I must admit that it has its strange and attractive side . . . I know that this will surprise you, but I hope to explain when we meet.”
“But as you know we never saw each other again,” said her correspondent.
Another letter, still less coherent, was written two weeks before the accident.
“I feel numb again. He still exerts a hypnotic power over me. The things that at first seemed the most ridiculous to me are now the ones I accept most easily. Last night he said that all this confusion and misunderstanding between us recently was caused by the soul. Now that we have put that aside, we might say we have been saved. It is easier to understand each other through the body. I’m sure you’ll think I’m crazy. I thought so at first. But not later. Anyway, we’ll meet soon and you will see then that I’m right.”
The researcher worked patiently through this maze for hours on end. It was the soul that caused misunderstanding. The meeting before their death, called
post-mortem
. Other abstruse phrases. Each one of them in turn seemed the key to unlocking the truth, or sometimes the key that shut it away for ever.
It was this very meeting, just before their deaths, that was called
post
. Apart from this extraordinary paradox, the final letter or note written by Besfort Y. and found in the young woman’s handbag on the day of the accident, which began disconcertingly with the words, “OK on the same terms as last time?” and was the very message that had prompted the secret services to step up their investigations into him, related to this same last meeting at the Miramax Hotel.
There was a cryptic phone conversation with her friend in Switzerland, which Shpresa had not wanted to talk about at all. She was persuaded to do so after reading what the reports called the “cynical note”, which gave this phone call an intelligible meaning.
“You say I shouldn’t worry. You tell me these things are unimportant compared to the happiness he brings me. But if I tell you he treats me almost like a prostitute?”
“He dares to treat you like a prostitute? Do you understand what this means? What am I supposed to make of it?”
“Of course I know what this means. I’ll say it again. He uses the phrase ‘call girl’, not prostitute, but that’s how he treats me, like a whore.”
“And you put up with this?”
“. . . Yes . . .”
“This is beyond me, and to tell the truth you’re driving me crazy more than he is.”
“You’re right. But you don’t understand the whole truth. Perhaps it’s my fault for trying to explain on the phone. I hope, when we meet . . .”
“Listen, Rovena. It’s not hard to understand that if he treats you like a whore, he has his reasons. He wants to humiliate you in every way he can.”
“Of course he does, but still . . .”
“No buts. Humiliation is humiliation.”
“I was trying to say, perhaps it’s more complicated than that. Do you remember that film we talked about,
La Dame aux Camélias
? Where that character genuinely loves the woman but, in a flash of anger, to insult her, he leaves a wad of banknotes under her pillow?”
“Has he gone that far?”
“No . . . but wait . . . this is the sort of thing that happens in love.”
“Rovena, you’re talking nonsense. People in love have quarrels and lose their temper. But as far as I can gather, he does this on purpose, deliberately.”
“It’s true. That’s how he behaves. Why?”
“Why? That’s exactly what I can’t make out. Perhaps he resents you in some way. He wants to get his own back. Perhaps . . . I don’t know what to say.”
“No, he’s not that sort of person. Unlike me. Sometimes I can barely control myself. But he’s not like that.”
“He wants to degrade you. He wants to crush you, destroy you morally. Not to say physically . . . Don’t you see?”
“But why? Why should he need to do that?”
“He alone knows. You told me you’re frightened of him. Perhaps he’s frightened of you.”
“Frightened of what?”
“I don’t know. You’re both frightened of each other. Not just frightened but scared witless . . . never mind. Rovena, darling, think hard about this business. I don’t want you to worry, but look after yourself! I have an uncanny feeling . . .”
It was hard to tell which results of the inquiry the secret services had found useful in building up their portrait of Besfort Y. Sometimes it may have been the names of the hotels, especially when these hotels, or the cities where they were located, were also mentioned in the files on “Albanian terrorists”, as the Yugoslavs called the insurgent leaders when they travelled to these places. However, they had also probably relied on the more ingenious interpretations of Besfort’s behaviour as “psychotic”, based mainly on the evidence of Rovena St.’s conversations with her friends. To one friend, Rovena had recounted Besfort’s dreams of a summons to The Hague. Then there were Shpresa’s parting words on the phone: “look after yourself! I have an uncanny feeling . . .”
Meanwhile, Besfort Y.’s final message, now known as the “cynical note”, was translated into most of the working languages of the Council of Europe, sometimes with cautious annotations: “Is this translation accurate? Do the words ‘conditions’ and ‘OK’ have the same connotations in the Albanian original?” These were quoted alongside the Serbian commentaries which were eager to show that the analyst Besfort Y. was a dangerous schizophrenic, or worse.
On the list of twenty-nine personalities whose comments and reporting, according to the Serbian intelligence services, had succeeded in bamboozling the governments of the West, Besfort Y. was a lesser light when set against stars of the first magnitude such as Bill Clinton, Wesley Clark, Madeleine Albright and the rest. However, when it came to obscure impulses, often of a personal origin, which had turned these leading figures against poor Yugoslavia, then Besfort Y. was the only one whose commitment could be compared to that of the American president. The latter’s affair with Monica Lewinsky was like a harmless idyll when set against the poisonous fury of this Albanian analyst, to whom destroying a state seemed to offer the same satisfaction as possessing, or rather subjugating, a woman. The reported phrase “after Serbia was defeated, you turned on me again” left no doubt that this analyst’s political passions had affected his love life.
The unidentified researcher explained more lucidly than any of his predecessors why the secret services became even more keen after the drama was over. It was true that the curtain had fallen and the Hague Tribunal now had the former Serbian leader on trial, but there was no stemming the flood of Europe’s remorse. The entire conflict was being reassessed, and shouts of “Send them to The Hague!” grew ever more strident, and this time not for the vanquished, but for the victors. As one historian wrote, Serbia hoped to recover her lost Kosovo not by force of arms but with the help of pathos and pity for her ruin.
As if compensating for the obscure and enigmatic parts, this section of the inquiry was of exemplary clarity, with endless names, dates, newspaper headlines, quotations from the news, statements and rebuttals. Personalities with totally contrary opinions jostled together. Alain Ducelier, William Walker, Tony Blair, Günter Grass, Noam Chomsky, André Glucksmann, Harold Pinter, Bernard-Henri Lévy, Paul Garde, Peter Handke, Pascal Bruckner, Mother Teresa, Ibrahim Dominik Rugova, Seamus Heaney, Pope John Paul II, Patrick Besson, Gabriel Keller, Ismail Kadare, Claude Durand, Bernard Kouchner, Régis Debray, Jacques Chirac Pontifex (defender of the bridges of Belgrade), Bogdan Bogdanović Ponticrash (architect and ideolo gist of the destruction of these same bridges), the Dalai Lama, Cardinal Ratzinger, and so on.
According to the unnamed researcher, both the Serbs’ gratitude to their defenders and their hatred for their destroyers, which Balkan custom suggested would persist for centuries, had unexpectedly begun to fade. The new geopolitics of the peninsula, the Stability Pact for South Eastern Europe and the queue at the gates of Europe as these stubborn states, whether allies or enemies yesterday, waited together to join the family of their dreams, had achieved the impossible. Their vows of revenge, their rage and whining of the past were now recalled with more curiosity than pain.
Certain rumours at the time were slower to fade, such as the persistent claim that Mother Teresa had been the moving spirit behind the bombing of Yugoslavia, with her midnight phone call to the American president, “My son, do something for my Albanians, punish Serbia,” while a song about the punitive president went round the bars:
Take Monica away
And the Serbs will pay.
If you miss getting laid
Give it to Belgrade . . .
Now the researcher himself, always detached and impartial, suddenly seemed to be in a hurry to set aside this epic conclusion of events, and to follow an entirely different track.
The inquiry now resembled a plane which, after flying across a clear sky, re-enters a patch of turbulence. Dark surmises, grave suspicions, ambiguous phrases, obscure scraps of dialogue drawn from half-remembered phone conversations loomed out of the fog and vanished again. Besfort had written: “In your last letter you mentioned defeating me. Did you really dream of such a thing, even for a moment? Don’t you realise that I might be more dangerous in defeat?” Her reply: “Believe me, this misunderstanding between us has worn me down.” His answer: “Don’t worry about a thing like that. This sort of anxiety comes from the body, not the soul.”
Then Rovena talked to her friend Shpresa.
“He told me yesterday that I should keep to the pact between us.”
“What pact? This is the first time you’ve mentioned such a thing.”
“Really?”
“If I’m really your friend, you must be more honest.”
“I know, but do you think this is easy for me?”
“This story just gets more obscure.”
“Have you heard of Empedocles?”
“Hm, I think I’ve heard the name, but I’m not sure.”
“He was new to me too. He’s an ancient philosopher. Out of curiosity to see what no human eye had seen before, he threw himself into the crater of Etna.”
“So? What’s he got to do with you?”
“Not me, the two of us.”
“I still don’t understand.”
“Well, one day he said to me that we would try something totally unfamiliar, and he mentioned this famous man Empedocles.”
“Rovena, I don’t understand you. Are you going to throw yourself off a cliff because some crazy character did so five thousand years ago?”
“Slow down. I’m not as far gone as that. It was just a comparison. What we were taught at school to call a metaphor. But still, just imagining it makes me scared.”
“Of course it’s scary. Just your talking about it makes my skin crawl. Someone jumping into the lava out of curiosity . . . a funny sort of curiosity!”
“Is that how you imagined the crater? Active?”
“What?”
“I was asking if you imagined the crater with molten lava or not?”
“Is that important? When you mentioned a volcano, I thought of lava.”
“But I imagined it extinct, black, desolate. And like that it’s twice as frightening. Wait, he said that this was what falling into a black hole would be like, coming out into another dimension . . .”
“Listen, Rova, and don’t misunderstand me. It would be good if you came here as soon as you can. Take a few days’ rest. This Alpine air will do you good. We’ll have a good time together, like in the old days. We’ll remember all those jokes from university. Remember that doggerel by the guy from Durrës in the other seminar group?
Rova is an antibiotic
Short for Rovamycin
But Rovena is hypnotic
Elegant and enticing.
The researcher used the young woman’s words “I’m scared”, repeated over and over again, as the starting point for his questioning of the taxi driver.
“She said, ‘I’m scared, but I don’t know why. I pretend not to be frightened of him. He also pretends not to frighten me any more. But none of this is true.’ Why were you so shaken by what you saw, or thought you saw, in the mirror?”
This question, although lifted from the written record, had lost none of its ominous weight.
“Did it remind you of anything? Even dimly, or indirectly? Some kind of obstacle, a taboo, something that should never happen?”
“I don’t know what to say. I’m not sure.”
“Were you scared?”
“Yes.”
Everybody in this story was scared, with or without reason. They were scared of one other, of themselves or of someone, no one could tell who.
Some part of this fear had been conveyed through the mirror in the taxi. But where had the rest come from?
The researcher finally succeeded in meeting Lulu Blumb, getting her to talk and ensuring her continued cooperation. Her suspicion of murder was difficult to dismiss, but also hard to confirm.
She almost exploded with rage. “Are you blind, or just pretending? You could tell a mile off that he was the murderous kind. That dream of his, or rather his nightmare, about the Hague Tribunal showed that.”
The researcher wanted to butt in to say that these days a lot of people were scared of The Hague – Serbs, Croats, Albanians, Montenegrins. You might say that the whole Balkans went in fear and trembling. But he restrained himself.
Lulu Blumb went on to say that neither the dream about the court summons nor the second one, which people generally called inexplicable, enigmatic and so forth, held any mystery for her. She said that the researcher no doubt knew about the funereal building, a cross between a mausoleum and a motel, at which a person knocks and looks for someone, who later turns out to be a young woman who is locked inside, turned to stone or murdered by some means.
The inquiry stated that Besfort Y. had had this dream one week before his death. Logically, he should have had this dream later, after killing Rovena. But as the researcher might be aware (and might well know better than she did) such displacements are quite common in dreams. The dream showed most of all that Besfort had already resolved to kill Rovena.
The researcher listened to the pianist with the same calm curiosity, both when he believed her and when he didn’t. This woman had a special talent, perhaps granted to her by music, for evoking the atmosphere of events, especially imagined events. For instance, whenever she described the final dream, she never forgot to mention the building’s midnight glow, which was a reflection of the plaster, or perhaps of despair.
Her description of the other incident on the morning of 17 May caused in the researcher’s mind an intoxicating frisson, whenever she mentioned it, that he could never shake off.
Dozens, hundreds of times, he imagined Besfort Y. walking through the rain and mist, holding the shape of a woman tight against himself – whether real or not, nobody knew.
As if ensnared by this scene, he was scarcely able to move on to ask, “So what happened later, in your opinion?”
Lulu Blumb, also caught in her own trap, seemed unwilling to answer. As he silently rehearsed the questions to himself, he thought he saw her scowl even before he spoke. “Who knows what happened next,” she said aloud. Tell me what happened next, Miss Blumb, he said to himself. “We know that she was accompanying him to the airport, but did not plan to travel herself. So we know that everything that could possibly have happened took place in the taxi between the hotel and the airport terminal. In fact something did happen, but it involved the entire taxi and all of the people inside. It is like imagining, at a time when two countries are at war, some catastrophe striking the entire planet . . . perhaps you think imagining a murder is the same as committing one. Sometimes that is how it seems to me. But this time we are trying to work out the murderer’s plan, even though it was not carried out by him, but by some external force. The possibilities of such a thing happening after they left the hotel are limited. Only if they stopped somewhere along the road, at some small building or secluded place . . . ‘Driver, please stop here. We have to do something at that chapel over there . . .’”
Lulu Blumb sighed, implying that they were thinking on entirely different lines and would never agree on anything.
“But you can still tell me the motive for the murder,” the researcher said aloud, certain that she would merely fold her arms.
The pianist did not get angry, but suddenly drew close to him and said gently that she had wanted to talk about this for a long time, but nobody would listen to her. She had talked about the late-night phone calls, about the Shin Bet, the Israeli secret service, and his terror of the Hague Tribunal. But the investigators did not want to know. Obviously they were scared. Besfort Y. had been a danger to anyone who came near him. Especially to a woman who had slept with him. Apparently he had talked to her about things he should never have mentioned, and had later regretted it.
“Everybody knows what happens when a violent person has second thoughts: the witness disappears. Rovena St. knew the most appalling things. Any one of them would make your hair stand on end. I can tell you, for example, that she knew the precise hour when Yugoslavia would be bombed, two days in advance. You see why I don’t want to talk about these things?”
The inquiry dragged on and grew, sending out new tendrils in all kinds of directions. The researcher made visible efforts to dispel the fog, but equally obvious were his attempts to hide behind it.
Finally, towards the middle of the file, the question arose of why these two protagonists, Besfort Y. and Rovena St., seemed to be trying to cover up their love for each other by pretending to be whore and client.
Delving deeper, the researcher wondered whether Besfort Y. and his friend were merely two people outside the normal order of things.
It was in this part of the file that the researcher for the first time drew attention to his own self, like a man who wanders along an uncertain path and takes care to leave behind certain tokens of recognition, pebbles or dropped ash. After the words “But who am I, trying to enter where no one can go?” there came another phrase: “Look for me and you will find me!”
Apparently certain that another researcher would follow in his footsteps, and another after that, because the lust for know-ledge is as inexhaustible and cyclic as the waves of the ocean of humanity, the author of the inquiry addressed his future counterpart. His words, the more one studied them, resembled the lament of someone who has fallen by his own fault into a trap or a deep dungeon and begs for rescue.