Chapter Four
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 cafe 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 cafe, 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.
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.
