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.
Hidden under the coat of paint, the scribble seemed much more threatening, and as she returned to the classroom she felt her knees give way.
He promised that this mystery would pass and that next time they met everything would be clear.
“You always put off everything until next time,” she complained. “Do you really expect a summons? Is nothing really the same as before? At least tell me that.”
He did not reply at once. He touched her hair, and strands fell over her eyes like a veil. In a clear voice he said that this was the truth.
Chapter Five
All the reports claimed that Besfort was in Tirana thirty-three weeks before the accident. The few opulent skyscrapers belligerently reflected the summer light off one another. As he walked through the once forbidden neighbourhood, unable to decide upon a cafe, it seemed to Besfort Y. that the very glass of the buildings expressed the city’s malice and its troubled conscience, as vented every morning by the newspapers. Lawsuits, grudges, debts, unsettled feuds that bided their time – they were all there.
He stopped hesitantly outside the Cafe Manhattan, weighed up its neighbour and, without further thought, entered the Sky Tower.
The view from the enclosed terrace on the sixteenth floor was beautiful at any time of year. From this height,
