“You don’t know what you’re saying,” he butted in.
Her ears rang with shock. “You think I’m your slave. You think you can do what you want with me.”
“You don’t know what you’re saying,” he repeated, his voice growing colder.
Sensing the approaching danger, she lost control completely. The words poured out of her until he cried, “That’s enough!”
She didn’t know he could be so pitiless. He was totally cynical: “You took this yoke up yourself, and now you blame me.” To cap it all, the line went dead.
Numbly, she waited for him to phone back. Then she gave up hope and called his number herself. His phone was off the hook. Now what have I done, she thought. And then, a moment later: this is horrible.
She racked her brains all night, trying to work out why she was so angry with him. Because she had left her fiancé for him, although he was promising her nothing?
Perhaps, she thought. But she was not sure. Nor was it fear of losing her freedom. Was it because she had fallen into this head first, and now could not get out? It was too early to say.
She reassured herself, saying this could all be sorted out calmly if she tried to love him less. That was the solution.
Three days later, she admitted defeat and phoned him. He answered her stumbling phrases sternly but quietly. Neither of them mentioned the quarrel. Several weeks passed like this, with infrequent phone calls and guarded conversations, until they met again.
The train to Luxembourg crossed the cold European plains. The landscape, dusted with snow, matched her inner numbness perfectly. Was everything the same as before or not? He had given nothing away on the phone. She and her fiancé had behaved quite differently. After making up, they used to have heart-to-hearts, confessing how hurt they had felt and describing their ploys in battle, which reconciliation had made redundant.
Darling, why do you make it so difficult? she thought, as she dozed in her seat.
The further north the train sped, the more terror overcame her. But something within her also resisted this fear, a peculiar, unfamiliar taste, provoked by the thought that she was a young and beautiful woman travelling through a frost-covered Europe towards her lover.
She was still half-dazed when the train arrived.
He waited for her in the hotel room. They embraced as if nothing had happened. For a short while, she rushed round unpacking her things, making only a few comments about the room, then about the bathroom and the white dressing gowns that always struck her as the sign of a good hotel.
When she ran out of words, she made no effort to find new ones. It was nearly four o’clock. The winter dusk was falling. She said, as usual, “Shall I get ready?” and went into the bathroom.
She could not tell how long she should stay there. Usually she seemed either too quick or too slow.
Finally, she wrapped the bath robe round her naked body and came out.
He was waiting.
With head bowed, she moved towards the bed. Her steps did not seem her own. She could not get rid of the strange sensation she had felt during the journey, which was mixed with the feeling that she was less like a girlfriend than a wife going to bed with her husband.
For some reason she tried to contain her cries, and almost succeeded. But afterwards she whispered in his ear, “That was heavenly.” That was how it always seemed to him. But they did not open up to one another. When this didn’t happen at midnight, nor before they parted the next day, she gave up all hope. As her train travelled across those same plains which the torn mask of snow could not totally cover, her heart felt heavy with the same sadness as two days before. It was so hard to deal with that she did not know if sadness was the right name for it.
Her misery was accompanied by a nagging thought that Besfort Y. was dangerous under any circumstances. Life with him was difficult, but without him it was impossible.
With her former fiancé, restoring normality after a quarrel had been a matter of moments, but with Besfort it took months. She sometimes wondered whether this question of freedom had turned into an obsession. Since the fall of communism everything in Albania had gone to extremes: money, luxury, lesbian groups. Everybody was in a hurry to make up for lost time. One afternoon in a café, an actress’s sidelong glance had stirred her to the depths. From the way Besfort responded to this story, she thought she must have put her finger on something.
Then, too, nothing had been the same as before, she thought. But she hadn’t said anything. She hadn’t shouted it to high heaven as he had.
In fact, nothing had ever been the same as before, she thought.
She recalled her first infidelity – only in Albanian did it deserve the name – as a hurried mess, vindictive and without regrets. Kisses amidst music and accented German. Shamelessly groping her partner before he lunged at her. Undressing in the bedroom, the condom, then his accented words:
Ich hatte noch nie schöneren Sex
. That was the best sex I’ve ever had.
That’s all you’re getting, she said to herself.
In fact, it was a year after Luxembourg that she told him what had happened in that spring of temptation. The little birthday party in her hall of residence, embracing a classmate on the dance floor, pressing first her lips and then her belly to his, then his whispered invitation, “Let’s go to my room.” She had followed him without a word. Besfort knew everything that happened between then and the next day, when half the student group gathered in a late-night bar and Rovena was astonished to find that a miniature love story had already been woven around her. They had found out that the pretty Albanian girl had
finally
slept with their Slovak friend. They gave them special attention, made sure they sat next to each other and treated them as a couple in every respect. She found it amusing and not in the least embarrassing that this engagement business followed her everywhere she went. Somebody said that on the news there had been disturbances in Albania, but she knew nothing about this.
What happened later, you know as well as I do, Rovena had said. In fact, what Besfort knew was not quite the truth. The inaccuracies started in the late-night bar, where Rovena and the Slovak were being treated as a couple. She liked him, in fact she liked him a lot. He tasted different, and had a kind of sweetness that she missed. Somebody said again that there was unrest in Albania. But she still knew nothing.
At two in the morning they noisily departed, arranging to meet the next day in the same bar. At ten in the morning the telephone tore into her sleep and ripped everything apart. It was Besfort. He had phoned her several times during the evening. She could not be irritated again, or use the stale words “You’re preventing me from living.” He was in Vienna, at an OSCE meeting. Things looked bad in Albania, as she may have heard. He was free that evening. For the first time she hesitated.
“Why didn’t you tell me before?” The journey was hard for her . . . the seminar . . . the professor . . .
“As you like.”
The chill in his voice brought back her old fear. “Wait a moment, could you come here?”
“I don’t know,” he replied. He would see what he could do and phone back.
He did not call back for a long time. There was no reply from his mobile. He must be punishing her for hesitating. Tyrant, she thought. Then she turned against herself. See what she’d done. She had risked everything for a night out. As if there hadn’t been enough boring evenings in Graz, she had chosen this one to trawl through the bars with their cheap jokes and laughter, just at a time when he needed her.
Finally the phone rang – a double triumph. He was coming. The address of the hotel? What time?
She strode briskly down the frozen street as if intoxicated. The pang of conscience over the date she had made at the bar increased her exhilaration. Even her hesitation towards Besfort seemed to her a good sign. For the first time in eighteen months she felt, if not the superior, at least the equal of Besfort Y. The issue about being his slave would resolve itself naturally.
Her sense of security, flattered by the luxurious carpet in the long corridor leading to his room, was dashed by the expression on his face.
His frown did not emphasise his tiredness but had the opposite effect, perhaps because of the vacancy in his eyes, that aspect of him that was so impersonal.
They lay on the sofa clasped in a half-embrace. He still suspects nothing. Why not? she thought. Why does he still think he owns me?
That vacancy in his eyes still troubled her.
In the bathroom, as she was getting ready, she noticed a dark bruise at the top of her thigh, a mark left by the Slovak’s teeth.
Secretly, she wanted him to notice this. Does this persuade you that you don’t own me? This is crazy, she thought. Behind the closed door, she heard the phone ring.
When she came out of the bathroom he was still talking.
“What’s going on?” she asked as she lay down beside him.
He stroked her, not answering. They made love, almost without speaking. In the restaurant, as she glanced at the expensive menu, she remembered that by now the others would be meeting in the late-night bar. They would look at her empty seat for ages before realising she wasn’t coming. And even then they would never understand the truth. They would think that she had followed the standard pattern, rejecting the poor student with the soul of an artist, with whom she would share the cost of a pizza, in favour of luxury and a man with power.
They can think what they like. The red wine and the crimson nail varnish of her fingers holding the glass provoked the gentle intoxication that was so delicious before making love. After dinner they sat for a while in the bar.
“Don’t even think about it,” she said to him, caressing his hand. And when he asked about what, she continued, “You know what. The bad news, down there.”
The phone rang again after midnight. How dreadful, she groaned, not surfacing enough from sleep to realise what time it was. Two in the morning. Was he crazy? He was talking. Whoever it was calling him at that hour must be out of their mind. In vain, she buried her head in the pillow. She could hear everything. “I think it’s a communist uprising . . . Yes, I’m sure . . . reclaiming power by force . . . Of course it’s terrible . . .”
Despite her annoyance, she was curious to listen. She understood only half of what he said. “Intervention is the only solution. Immediately. Couldn’t it be seen as an invasion? . . . By whom? . . . Aha . . . at one time it would have been, but not now . . .”
When he put down the phone, she sat up, leaning on her elbow. “Brussels?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said. He added, “There’s been a coup in Albania.”
“That’s what I thought.” For a while the only sound was their breathing. “Would you support military intervention?”
He nodded, “I don’t think I’m wrong.”
“In the old days that would have been called treason,” she said. “They talked about nothing else at school.”
“I know.”
She stroked his hair. “Don’t worry, darling. It’s past two o’clock.”
In the bar they were now surely wishing one another goodnight. They would guess at all kinds of reasons for her absence, but never imagine that she was in bed with a man who had been talking on the phone about things that would hit the front pages of the papers tomorrow.
Tomorrow she too might find it hard to believe. It was easy to say that she had exchanged poverty with its pizzas for a life of luxury. But it was something else. He had made her more complicated. He had turned her into a beautiful, mysterious woman, the kind she had dreamed about as a schoolgirl.
An unfamiliar kind of lassitude clung to her body. She embraced him gently, murmuring loving words into his ear. Don’t think about what’s going on down there. She had a feeling everything would be all right. Nobody would call it an invasion. She was ready to die for him. Come, darling.
Afterwards, in that lightning-scorched clarity of mind that only follows sexual release, she was stabbed by an unaccustomed pang of regret that he was not her husband. As she fell asleep, the cavernous sense of irreversible loss abated, and it seemed natural to think that, quite apart from what the law stated, he was in truth her husband.
After breakfast she told him that she would go to her seminar, to put in an appearance, and come back as soon as possible.
It was more annoying than she expected to be pestered by questions about where she had spent the previous evening.
“We looked for you everywhere, we expected you. You might have let me know,” said the Slovak.
“I couldn’t,” she said. “Somebody arrived unexpectedly from Albania. There’s been a coup there.”
“Oh, so that’s what’s on your mind,” he continued.
“Of course.”
He shrugged his shoulders. Since he had left, he hadn’t given a thought to Slovakia. He never wanted to hear the place mentioned again.
She knew this. A lot of Albanians talked like this.
An hour later, as she almost ran to the hotel, the March wind did all it could to draw out her tears. The two receptionists gave her a strange look. One of them handed her a small envelope.
“My darling, I’ve had to leave suddenly. You can imagine why. xxx B.”
The tears finally poured from her.
With a sudden movement, as if finding the lever to stem the flow of her memories, Rovena turned off the shower.
The silence was worse. She was sure that he had still not come back to the room. To fill the emptiness she picked up the hairdryer. A wild blast of air replaced the rush of the shower, a suitable accompaniment to her fury.
You’re finally going to tell me what it is that isn’t the same as before, she thought angrily.
They had been together so many years and yet she had never said those words to him. Not during the nightmare of The Hague, on the threshold of the great trial. Not even during the worst storms at the time of her relationship with Lulu.
Throughout that winter, the cold eyes of the psychiatrist had looked at her, sometimes to the right and sometimes to the left of the mirror. “This sort of crisis is not common, but it is well documented. You are making a passage, undergoing a transition. Because this experience is over, you think you have accomplished it painlessly. You forget that even moving house is a form of stress, let alone what you’re going through now. It’s like being transported to another planet.”