said that the ability to endure suffering was a gift, especially the high-class suffering of beautiful women.
Grateful for this respite, I smiled at him and said, “Are you encouraging me to suffer?” And, looking him knowingly in the eye, I added, “Perhaps you don’t have to…”
I need no encouragement. I will suffer for you. That’s what I wanted to say, but I lapsed into silence.
He kept his eyes lowered, and I sensed that he had taken these words for what they were: an open declaration of love.
Before we parted, in a relaxed and almost boisterous tone, he said that if I were willing he could take me on a three-day trip to a Central European city. Half in fun and half in earnest, we played for a while with this idea, which would have been lunacy even a short a time ago in Albania, but now, after the fall of communism, was perfectly realistic. As we parted, he looked me in the eye for a long time before saying, “I’m serious. Just don’t say no in a hurry.”
I said nothing. I lowered my eyes in shame, and the night and the whole world misted over.
Two weeks later, what had seemed the most impossible thing in the world became reality.
On that day heavy with mist and rain, the Tirana-Vienna flight seemed barely able to move forward. Rovena felt totally numb… The journey seemed endless… At one point she wanted to leave her seat and sit next to him, so that they would at least be together before they crashed…
That is how she told the story later. But in fact she had been alone on that aircraft – not with Besfort at all. The truth was that during the flight she had longed to be with him so much that her mind had gradually performed the necessary changes, to make credible to herself, and later to others, the altered account of the journey.
Its essence remained unchanged. She was going to meet Besfort Y. in Vienna, and during the flight, as the aircraft lurched, she often imagined herself with her head resting on his shoulder. Next to her sat not Besfort Y. but a woman, an activist in the same NGO where Rovena worked. The truth was that she had not hurried to the Cafe Europa to collect the ticket from him, and he had not suggested they travel together. On the contrary, she herself, after learning of his business in Brussels, had said that she too was going on a trip, to Vienna. “Really? Vienna?” He often passed through Vienna. They might meet. And so, casually, as if playing a game, they had exchanged phone numbers.
In Vienna, after they arrived at the hotel, her travelling companion’s eyes had widened when she announced quite calmly, “I have a lover here. He’s coming to fetch me in an hour.”
And in front of the woman’s very eyes, quite unconcernedly, she started to apply her make-up.
Chapter Three
She shivered, as if a stranger had entered the room. Then she calmed down. It was no one, and Besfort was still not back. The pressure on her temples told her how tired that pretence of sleep had made her.
He is mad, she thought.
Moving towards the bathroom, she did not know why she had thought this. It was something they said to each other so often that it had come to sound like affection.
Under the jet of the shower, the phrase “nothing is the same as before” glittered like a false diamond. It seemed to hang there, as if rinsed by the water.
She was losing the grip on her thoughts of a few minutes before. They were vague at the edges, and even pretending to be asleep had given everything a certain haziness.
The handle of the shower seemed stuck. She thought of what had happened after she came back from Vienna. She was sure that her body had changed, as if her pallor had been absorbed deep beneath her skin and her small breasts, smoothed by desire, no longer belonged to this world. She had felt sure that they had grown since she had first met him. Her feeling of a miracle having happened was mixed with the anxiety that he would not phone and they would part without him seeing them. She imagined him phoning on one of those March afternoons, and then her hurrying to meet him, quickly undressing. Then his admiration, his asking if she had been taking hormones, and her answer that it was nothing like that. “It is you and you alone.”
Under his incredulous gaze her words would cover every fault line of fear like mist. It is you and you alone. My fear of you. My crazy, inhuman desire to please you. A mute entreaty. A prayer, as if before an altar.
Perhaps he would remain unmoved, not be as thrilled as he should be, and for all his fine words about marble and the divine, he might still seem to be elsewhere.
She did not want to come down to earth, and so found excuses for him. You have set me free. Other thoughts swarmed or froze in her mind. Would anybody else notice the change? Of course, and very soon. Starting with her fiance. She had not slept with him since she came back from abroad. She made every kind of excuse. Finally, she met him.
“Do you think I have changed?” she asked.
He looked at her in wonder, touching her fearfully.
She added carelessly, “You don’t think I’ve had plastic surgery!”
“Why not? It’s the fashion now. I don’t know what else to make of your trip abroad. It was the first thing I thought of when I saw your breasts.”
“How can you be so simple? Don’t you see there’s no scar! Couldn’t you think of any other reason? For instance that I might have fallen in love?”
He stared at her in shock, as if hearing something very unusual.
It seemed that nobody believed in love any longer. There were three or four men who still drifted through her memory like shadows. The gypsy woman’s advice long ago had been, “Men are different from one another, and what one man’s tool won’t do, another man’s will!”, and so she had gone with these men once or twice. Now, as she brought them to mind, she wondered if she would want to show this change to any of them. The first, who had taken her virginity, had gone off on a boat to Italy. The next was apparently in prison, and the third had ended up a deputy minister. The last had been a foreign diplomat.
Besfort was still in Strasbourg. The afternoons were harder to endure than the evenings. Staring fixedly at the windowpanes, she would ask why. Why did she want to do this at any cost? Was she still spurred on by what Zara had said, “Be generous. We’ll all be in the grave one day,” or was there some other reason? Sometimes she seemed to be saying farewell to the world before shutting herself away in a convent.
The pitiless afternoons dragged on. On one of them, she went for a coffee in the Rogner Hotel with the foreign diplomat. His conversation, which she used to listen to with such interest, was boring. He mentioned the only time they had met in his apartment. “How wonderful that was,” he said. He said it again, but these words saddened rather than excited her. They brought no thrill. In the end, with a serious look, he admitted that he was “bi”. Fortunately Albania was changing and it was nothing awful now to be “bi”. At this point she thought she dimly understood something. When they parted, he said that he hoped they would meet again. He looked serious again and said something about “new experiences” and “wonderful”. She nodded in agreement, but thought to herself, no way.
Walking home, she remembered that the gypsy woman’s house must be nearby. There were all kinds of new buildings in the neighbourhood, but she recognised the dilapidated door from the persimmon in the yard.
With an anxious heart, she pushed open the gate. Had the gypsy returned from her internment? Did she bear a grudge? As she was about to push open the house door, she noticed the familiar smell of long ago, a kind of sourness of straw mixed with smoke.
The gypsy woman was there. The same close eyes among the wrinkles looked her up and down.
“Zara, it’s Rovena. Do you remember me?”
The wrinkles moved slowly. “Rovena… of course I remember you. I remember all of you little angels, my only joy.”
Rovena had expected her to say: “You little whores, who betrayed me.” But the woman had said nothing of the sort.
Rovena could not find the right words. Did you suffer a lot, where they sent you? Did you blame us? Perhaps nobody had betrayed her. Maybe the harm had been done in all innocence.
Zara’s eyes softened a little.
“You are the first one to visit…” That was all she said, but her words suggested she had been waiting. “I knew you would. I put my hopes in you. More than in the others.”
Rovena wanted to fall to her knees, to beg forgiveness.
The wrinkles slowly melted away, leaving the eyes clear, like long ago. Oh God, thought Rovena, she’s turning
