After leaving the doctor, she vented half her anger on the phone, right there in the street. “I’ve changed now, understand? You’re no longer what you were to me. You aren’t my master any more, understand? Nor as frightening as I used to think, not any more.”
Nothing was the same as before . . . She had once said to Besfort these same words that now, from him, wounded her so deeply. Perhaps it was now his turn.
Take your revenge then. What are you waiting for? The deafening noise did not allow her to calm down. But the thought occurred to her that he was not the sort of person to take revenge by giving as good as he got.
As long as he has not made the same switch, she thought. The Council of Europe was said to be swarming with gays.
The silence after she switched off the hairdryer was twice as deep as after the shower.
Just . . . as long as he . . . has not . . . meanwhile . . . made the same switch.
Her final words fell slowly like the last leaves after a storm has abated.
In the silence she felt defenceless again. Her eyes darted to her cosmetics, spread out below the mirror. First she reached for her lipstick. She lifted it to her mouth, but in her nervous haste allowed the tube to slip to one side. The red smudge goaded her into daubing herself even more crudely, instead of taking proper care.
I can be a murderer too, she said to herself . . . Like you, my lord and master.
The noise of the door brought her up short. He’s back, she cried to herself, and half her rage evaporated instantly.
Hurriedly, as if destroying the evidence, she wiped the lipstick from her face.
She grew calmer as she started on her eyelashes. The ritual of make-up always cleared her mind more than anything else.
She thought she could muster a smile, but her face still did not obey.
She felt safe with the idea that the more beautiful she made herself, the more easily she could extract his secret. A mask always gives you an advantage over an opponent.
The same day. Both together.
Just as she had expected, he looked admiringly when he saw her.
“Now I know why you’re so late.”
“Have you been waiting a long time?”
He looked at his watch. “About twenty minutes.”
“Really?”
He had drunk a coffee downstairs and returned while she was in the shower.
“It’s beautiful out on the balcony. But what’s the matter?”
She raised her hands to her cheeks. “I don’t know, but I felt . . . I remembered for some reason that old gypsy woman. Do you remember her? I told you about her. She was interned because of us.”
“Of course I remember her. Perhaps it was my fault. I promised to do something for her. There were compensation schemes and special pensions for these cases. Give me her name and address. I won’t forget this time.”
“If she’s still alive,” she said. “She was called Zara Zyberi.” She knew the name of her street, Him Kolli, but not the number. She remembered only a persimmon tree in the yard.
She watched his hand writing this down and could barely hold back her tears.
After breakfast they went out for a walk, following their daily routine. Finding a suitable café was so much easier in Vienna than anywhere else.
Outside the cathedral, the old-fashioned carriages waited for passing tourists. Seven years before, they too had taken one. It had been midwinter. Under the dusting of snow the statues had seemed to make tentative signs of welcome. She thought she had never seen so many hotels and streets with “prince” or “crown” in their names. It was her last hope that he would think of marriage, but instead he started talking about the overthrow of the Habsburgs, the only dynasty to fall without bloodshed.
In the café, they watched each other’s hand movements and fell silent. The small ruby of her ring sparkled like frost.
For some reason he recalled the posters of the last city elections in Tirana, and the Piazza restaurant where an Italian– Albanian priest had suddenly struck up the song “There by the village stream, the last Jorgo fell”.
He wanted to tell her about the extraordinary insults the candidates had thrown at one another, and especially about that unknown villager Jorgo, who was mentioned in the song as if he belonged to some dynasty, as Jorgo III or XIV. But at that moment any connection between the memories of the posters and the drunk priest evaporated, the warm glow had vanished from her face and a veil of sadness had descended. Also, he had not had time to tell her the dream about Stalin.
She did not hide her sudden change of mood. After nine years together, and all she had given to this man, he had no grounds to upbraid her over such things. Nor did he have any right to torment her with ambiguous remarks.
He knew that this was a most inadvisable time to say, “What’s the matter with you?” But the words burst out of him.
She smiled wanly. “You should ask yourself that.” He had said that nothing was the same as before, and she had a right to know what this meant. She had waited a whole night to find out.
He bit his lower lip. Rovena stared at him.
“You’re right,” he said. “But believe me, it’s not easy for me to say.”
The chill descended again at once.
Then don’t say it, she wanted to cry, but her lips did not obey her.
“Is there someone else?” she blurted out.
Oh God, came the lacerating thought through his mind. This old phrase, rising from the grave. It wasn’t Rovena who had used it long ago, but himself.
He remembered the scene. As vividly as the election posters, the dilapidated telephone box outside the post office, the filthy rain and her silence down the phone.
“What’s the matter with you?” he had asked, and Rovena had said nothing. And then he had almost shrieked, “Is there someone else?”
They were still using the same words, as if they had no right to any others. “Is there someone else? I’m giving you an answer. There isn’t.”
The tension suddenly eased, and she closed her eyes. She wanted to rest her head on his shoulder. His words came to her as if through a soothing mist. There was no other woman. It was something else. She translated this into German as if to grasp its meaning better.
Es ist anders
.
Let it be anything, she thought, but not that.
“It’s more complicated,” he went on.
“You don’t love me in the way you used to? You’re tired of me?”
It’s not about me. It’s to do with both of us. It’s about the freedom that she often complained about . . . He had decided to tell her, but now he found he couldn’t. Something was missing. A lot of things. Next time he would manage it. If not, he would try to put it in a letter.
“Perhaps it’s not true? Perhaps it only seems that way to you? Just as it seemed to me?”
“What did it seem to you?”
“Well, that things aren’t the same as before. I mean that there is something that isn’t like it was, and so it seems to you that everything has changed.”
“That’s not it,” he replied.
His voice seemed to echo as if from a church belfry.
She thought that she had grasped his meaning, but it evaporated in an instant. Was it that he felt tied, in the same way as she had, and wanted to break free? She had once shouted at him: “Tyrant, slave-owner!” All this time, had he too been chafing in silence at the enslaving chains?
As always, she felt that she was too late.
He felt tired. His head ached. On the street, the illuminated signs above the hotels and shops glittered menacingly.
He recollected not the lunch with Stalin, but her first letter. Icy, sub-zero Tirana finally seemed to be getting serious. That’s what she wrote. And as for the place below her belly, since he asked for news of it, it was horribly dark down there.
He remembered other parts of her letter, in which she wrote about her waiting, about her coffee with the gypsy woman, who had said some things that she could not put on paper, and again about the sub-zero temperatures in which all these things were taking place.
Smiling wanly like the winter sun, they both recollected almost the entire letter. In his reply from Brussels he had written that this was without doubt the most beautiful letter to have reached the north that year, from the remotest part of the continent – the Western Balkans, which was so keen to join Europe.
Later, when they met, he was eager to hear what the gypsy woman had said. There was another form of desire, he said, which came from a mysterious, remote epoch.
She wanted to weep. Remembering old love letters was not a good sign.
He had wanted her to tell him about the gypsy woman when they were in bed, before they made love. She told him in a low voice, as if whispering a prayer. He wanted to know if the gypsy woman had asked to see between her legs, and she replied that she hadn’t needed to because she had opened them herself, she could not tell why, she just did it, like the other time . . . oh no, she didn’t seem lesbian. Or rather, in the fug of that house, lesbianism might be mixed with other things . . . you really are psychic . . .
After lunch, they both wanted to rest. When they went out again, dusk had fallen. The royal crowns above the hotel entrances, which in other countries had all been effaced, still wearily clung on in their niches.
They found themselves outside St. Stephen’s Cathedral again, at the end of the boulevard. In the dusk, its windows cast assorted reflections, as if trying on different masks. They looked like the dead, sometimes coming back to life, and sometimes vanishing again.
Bending over her shoulder, he whispered loving words which now sounded incredible to her ears, so rare had they become. First he had stopped saying them. Then she had given up too.
Like forgotten music, they returned, but they seemed somehow unreal. We have lost our feeling for each other, he said in an even sweeter voice. Astonishingly, these words did not sound frightening to her, although they should have done. Nor did the word “marriage” when he uttered it. It seemed untrue, like in a dream. They had been in Vienna seven years before, and she had waited for that word in vain. Now it had arrived after so long, but in an unexpected form.
“Will you agree to be my ex-wife?”
She wanted to cut him short. Was he crazy? But she thought it was better to wait. This was not the first time that he had been obscure. During one of their arguments on the phone, she had said to him: “You tell me to look for a therapist, but you need one more than I do.”
“Your ex-wife?” she finally interrupted. “Is that what you said, or did I mishear you?”
Gently he kissed her and told her not to take it the wrong way. It had to do with their conversation a while ago.
Aha, so we’re back on that subject.
His voice sank to a low murmur, like before their first kiss. She should try to understand him. Their time of love, if not over, was approaching its end. Most misunderstandings and dramas happened because people did not want to accept this end. They could easily tell day from night or summer from winter, but they were blind to the end of love. And so they could not face up to it.
“Do you want us to separate? Why not just say so?”
He said that she was using the world’s usual standards. Just like the rabble do. All the world’s ordinary opinions, which unfortunately are the most widespread and claim the authority of laws, come from the rabble. He wanted to get away from that sort of thing, to find some chink through which they could escape.
Rovena made no further effort to understand him. Perhaps it helps him to talk like this, she thought. He said that the two of them were going through a period of transition. Later, the last glimmer of their love, like the final rays of the sun, would fade. Then a different, negative time would begin. This time was ruled by different laws, of a kind that people rebelled against. They fought against them, suffered, hit out at each other, until one day they realised to their horror that their love had turned to ashes.
Go on, she thought. Don’t lose your thread.
Of course, it was already late for them. But he particularly wanted to avoid this kind of end. He did not want to enter that twilit world. He wanted to find another path, while there was still light. Perhaps we should interpret the descent of Orpheus into hell to bring back Eurydice in a different way. It was not Eurydice that died, but their love. And Orpheus, trying to bring her back, made a mistake. He was in too much of a hurry, and he lost her again.
It was you who told me that love is problematic in itself, she thought. A long time ago he had said: “There are two things in the world that are in doubt: love and God. There is a third thing, death, which we can only know through seeing it happen to other people.”
Two years before, at the height of her affair with Lulu, he had forgiven all her harsh words, because she had seemed to him insane. Now she would do the same for him. He seemed exhausted, and of course his nerves were in a bad way.
In the hotel, after dinner, he had eyed the receptionist suspiciously as he asked, “Is there any message for me?”
“Who are you expecting a message from?” she asked.
He smiled. “I’m expecting a summons. A court summons.”
“Really?” she said, trying to maintain the same tone of mockery.
“I’m not joking. I really do expect a summons. To the Last Judgement, perhaps . . .”
He avoided her eyes in the elevator mirror.
“They’ll find me in the end,” he said softly.
“You’re tired, Besfort,” she said, leaning her head on his shoulder. “You need to rest, darling.”
In bed she tried to be as loving as she could. She whispered words of endearment, some of them laden with the double meanings that he enjoyed so much before lovemaking, and then, after he sank exhausted beside her, she asked in a very quiet voice: “What was it you said . . . your ex-wife?”
His reply came in the same breath as his final sigh.
“Sublime,” Rovena repeated to herself.
Increasingly his thoughts reverted to the strange taste of their first meeting after the episode with Liza. He knew that something had happened, but could not tell what, especially not that a woman had come between them.
Under the pale illumination of the lampshade, her face sometimes looked as strange and inscrutable as it had then. The hope of experiencing that feeling again was like waiting to recapture a dream of incommunicable sweetness, of the kind that other, gentler worlds seem to grant only once to a human life, and then purely by chance.
Evidently Liza had been part of the transition that was vital to the creation of this strange zone.
“What did you think?” asked Rovena, about when he interrogated her on the subject of Liza.
He tried to laugh it off, and said, “Nothing,” but she was no longer smiling.
“You’re still hiding something from me,” she said in a weary voice. “Don’t you think you’re going too far?”
“Possibly. But I don’t feel guilty about it.”
He said he didn’t feel guilty because, however secretive a man was, or pretended to be, he would always be an amateur compared to a woman.
“Women are the soul of secrecy and, like it or not, so are you,” he whispered, caressing her below her belly. “Nobody, not even a woman herself, can ever know what is hidden behind that silent entrance. Unless the gypsy woman’s eye can see it.”
As she listened, she suddenly remembered the girls’ lavatory at school, where someone had scrawled, “Rovena, I’m dying for your c—.” Shocked, she had gone back to the classroom, totally unable to guess which of the girls might have written it. Perhaps this one, and then perhaps another. After each suspicion came the same question: how could this other girl know about her private parts? Nobody had ever touched them, or even seen them, apart from her mother. She had hurried to the lavatory again in the next break, but the writing was gone. On the roughly whitewashed door a piece of paper was pinned, “Wet Paint.”
“Don’t think I’m trying to be mysterious,” he said, stroking her hair. She kissed his hand. Oh no. He didn’t need to try, he just was.